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Road Bustle – Review

Road Bustle is the first of two games I recently bought exceptionally cheap from RandomSpin Games. Both games were utterly atrocious but Road Bustle was marginally the better of the two. Here we have Frogger, made in 2020, yet still worse than the original.

The game sees you play as a man with a giant red backpack who moves around between lanes of traffic. Traffic can be lanes of cars or trains on rails and as you waddle forward you can rack up points to unlock trophies in this PS4 exclusive. Everything is basic. The assets make no sense and have no logic to them. The view point is often blocked by buildings in the way as the camera just hovers behind you. The characters movement is woolly and unrefined. The collision detection of being hit by traffic and getting a game over is terrible too. Things just repeat randomly each time you play but nothing new is ever added after the first fifteen seconds of gameplay. It’s the worst version of Frogger I’ve ever played.

Repeated assets that don’t match or make sense for you to clip and get stuck against. Yay.

To make matters even worse, the games trophy system doesn’t even work properly. In order to get the platinum trophy you have to meet the requirements and then exit and restart the game in order for it to even register that you’ve earned it. It is frankly, insulting that this is out and costing money. The game also randomly slows to a crawl and became unresponsive twice during twelve minutes. What a horror show.

Road Bustle is inexcusable. Ratalaika Games get a tough slap for bringing easy platinum trophies to cheap games to make them sell but at least those games have craft, effort and style to them. Some of them are genuinely great games getting a larger audience as a result of the tactic. This is a horrifying cash grab. Avoid. I need to wash myself clean.

Road Bustle
Final Thoughts
The original Frogger still have more spring in its step than this monstrosity. Avoid.
Positives
It is Frogger...?
Negatives
Awful controls.
Collision detection is woeful.
Graphics, sound and random generation all feel borrowed from the cheapest, worst asset collection going.
No attempt to add effort, style, rewarding gameplay or anything of substance.
Trophies require a reboot to even work and that's why you'd likely buy the game in the first place.
1
Horrific
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