Turtle Casino

I’m actually at a loss for words on where to begin.  Turtle Casino by Spanish developer X25 Entertainment is so broken on so many levels that I’m having difficulty choosing just one point to get us started.

Well, I guess I should get the ball rolling by describing this abomination.  You play as someone who wins big at a casino and gets turned into a turtle as a result.  Maybe this game is based on Darvin Moon.  Hell, I don’t know.  As a turtle, you have to hop around 40 platforming levels.  Yep, this “casino” game is a platformer.  And a damn awful one at that.

Movement physics are 75% of a platform game.  If they suck, nothing else matters.  In Turtle Casino, they are beyond terrible.  Jumping is floaty and landing is slippery.  Your character moves slow, which I suppose is fitting.  In order to run, you have to hold the X button.   This is also used for long jumping.  The problem is there is NEVER a spot in the game where you don’t want to be running.  The normal speed has no value what so ever.  If you want to save your thumbs, do what I did and tape the X-button down.  Damn Spaniards.

Your ghostly avatar always hovers in the background. You will grow to hate your own digital reflection.

The worst offender is the collision detection.  It’s more off than any game I can remember.  A fireball will miss you by two or three character lengths and you will still die.  You’ll miss landing on spikes with plenty of breathing room and still die.  You’ll miss being impaled by other spiky things and still die.  You’ll jump over a bad guy, land five feet directly behind it, and still die.  Who did the mapping for this?  Ray Charles?

Or since these guys are Spaniards, I should say, Andrea Bocelli.

Level design is bland.  Every generic platforming convention is here.  You’ve all done these same type of levels in dozens of games thus far.  Here they’re pretty much the same, only you can’t be within spitting distance of anything that kills you.  There’s a lives system in place for no reason at all.  If you game over you can start again right where you died.  Sometimes a level has a checkpoint and you might miss out starting from it.  But this also doesn’t make a lot of sense because the checkpoints are usually not that far away from the beginning of the level.  And if you game over you retain whatever points and coins you had earned.

Oh yes, and there’s casino stuff in here too.  I only remembered this because when you game over, instead of it highlighting “continue” on the menu, it highlights the casino games.  So even the game itself knows that the platforming sucks and tries to steer you away from it.  There’s only two casino games.  One is Blackjack.  It’s Blackjack.  You’ve played it a million times and it’s pretty much the same here as it is everywhere else.  At least it works, I suppose.  There’s also Roulette.  It’s Roulette.  A wheel spins.  Yippie.  I spun it once and the game didn’t crash, so I’m satisfied that it likely works, but don’t quote me on that.

There is absolutely nothing decent about Turtle Casino.  Everything about it is way less than mediocre.  The graphics, the controls, the level design, and the concept are all flawed beyond repair.  There’s even some fun glitches too, like respawning inside walls and being trapped in them.  Even if they manage to fix any of the major issues, it would still be among the bottom-tier of games on the marketplace.  It’s the worst thing to come from Spain since Torquemada.  Or Mexico.

Turtle Casino was developed by X25 Entertainment

80 Microsoft Points didn’t actually think Mexico is as bad as Torquemada in the making of this review.  Cuba, on the other hand..