Daily Flash: Flur

A game created in three weeks by a team of two, Flur is a "progressive casual adventure with engaging and nonthreatening gameplay.” The only controls are to move your mouse for direction, and to click once you've leveled up enough to use collectable power-ups. I've said before that games today add achievements to try to superficially extend game time, like a cripple hooked up to a machine. Lets just say that Flur has 85 achievements to get.

Presentation:
Visually, the game starts out looking pretty nice. The menu displays a beautiful fairy, with the entire game sticking to a greenish-blue hue that brings everything together. Unfortunately, that's all you have to look at for the entire game. The background never changes, and neither does your character. The only other things that exist are green and red glowing orbs, though they do manifest themselves in amusing patterns.
3.5/5

Gameplay:
The only thing that kept me going was my curiosity. Yes, the glowing lights appear in increasingly complex and elaborate configurations, but that's about all you get. After leveling my way up most of the way, I still hadn't gotten any feedback that I was doing better. Make my wings grow, make me glow a different color, make something happen that tells me I'm getting stronger. The 85 achievements are mostly shallow and pointless. The addition of red orbs makes the game partially interesting, but it's a long time until any of them pose any threat.
2/5

Overall:
Nonthreatening? Yes, they did that pretty well since getting hit only means a temporary phasing out of the world. Engaging? Hardly. As I played, I waited for something fun to happen. The game feels like it's unfinished, like there was some goal to reach or other levels to add, but they're all missing. Leveling is pointless, and gathering orbs doesn't give you any rewards except more orbs to gather. Yes, there are 85 achievements, but I don't expect anyone to get close to getting them all.
2.7/5

Play Flur Here!

Daily Flash: Magnet Towers

Sometimes, after a long day, we need something mindless with flashy sounds and lots of points to pick us up. Magnet Towers has a simple concept, roll your mouse over the similarly colored tokens, and avoid tokens of other colors. A fun game, but one fatal flaw puts a huge dent in it's entertainment value.

Presentation:
Two large problems stand out for me with the presentation. The first, and it's mostly just a personal preference, is that the music is a generic techno mix and is ridiculously loud. The second, and here's the big crutch that is holding the game back, is that the colors are too similar. This is a game where quickly distinguishing between colors is important, letting you figure out which tokens are safe to touch, and which aren't. Unfortunately, neon green and neon yellow are just so close together, that it takes a lot of focus to tell them apart. A color-blind option would be nice, or changing one of the colors to pink would work just as well.
2/5

Gameplay:
Don't get me wrong, the game is plenty fun by itself, but it just suffers from the poor color decisions. There's satisfaction in whisking around the level, narrowly avoiding tokens you don't want. But, once again, there are problems that could be easily fixed. There's a problem with the interface hiding tokens in the bottom left and bottom right corners. Several times, I finished off a stack thinking I got every piece just to discover that I missed one sitting perfectly under the Mute button. Increasing the number of colors in later levels would also be nice, instead of only raising the number of tokens on the screen.
3/5

Overall:
DO play this game. Just turn the game on mute, and stick around for a minute or two. It's a prime example of how a game could be so much more, but got lost somewhere in the polish stage. I wish there was more to get out of this game, but as it is, the game is just a shadow of what it could be.
2.5/5

Play Magnet Towers Here!