Jump, Dash, Collect! Play solo and with your friends and loved ones! Explore this cute 3D platformer where you play as Boti, a brave and adorable data bot. Join Boti on an adventure to save the cyber-world of Byteland from bugs and viruses!
Released on
Genres
Reviews View More
Full video review: https://youtu.be/g-douiTlGcw
We finally have Astro's Playroom on PC. Or rather, as close as we can get. It is called Boti: Byteland Overclocked and it aims to fill that very specific 3D platforming inside a computer niche.
Gameplay
Boti is a competent 3D platformer that tackles the basics and nothing more. It’s got a bit of platforming, a bit of a puzzle touch to that platforming, and the devs really did a good job with the actual variety of the gameplay. You’ll go from one of those platforming segments, to an area with a puzzle or two, to a giant slide that reminds me of the ones from Battle for Bikini Bottom, and then there’s swinging, cannons, and even some vehicle segments.
It’s all basic stuff, but it’s spread out in such a way that the gameplay never really becomes tedious. The collectibles and bonus objectives add to this too, encouraging you to explore further and occasionally solve the extra puzzle or two.
That said, don’t expect any real challenge here. The boss fights are laughable at best, but when you take into account the target audience here, it’s hard to fault the game for that. It is very forgiving with its checkpoints too. Not a difficult game by any means.
Length and Story
I completed Boti in just over 3 hours, but you could probably squeeze double the time out of it if you go the completionist route. I don’t feel like it was too short either, the gameplay pacing was steady throughout and didn’t feel like it was rushing.
The story is hardly notable because of how little it matters here. It’s more so just a means to link together the different levels and felt like an afterthought if anything. Not that the game needs something more than that though.
Graphics
The aesthetic, for the most part, is pretty good. It makes good use of lighting, coloring, and overall just has a nice vibrant look to it. This is while running on Unreal Engine 5, which shows in some ways - such as the ray tracing - but I cannot deny I was a bit surprised to learn that given that this could have easily passed as a last generation game. Not that that is a bad thing, just that when you look at the big picture, the backgrounds are blocky, the textures are not all that high-res, and the overall geometry is on the simpler side.
Performance / Optimization
This is unfortunately not a really well-optimized game. I am running on an RTX 3080 Ti and was unable to play the game natively at 4k with ray tracing OFF without dips to well below 60 fps. I figured - okay, I will just enable dynamic image scaling to hopefully fix that. And while that did raise my fps to above 100, it was not stable and some areas and scenes still caused dips to below 60fps. Which again, is surprising to see given that the game does not have the graphical fidelity to warrant using 100% of my GPU. So while it is not the worst performance I have seen, it could definitely use a bit more optimization.
Bugs / Lack of Polish
I hate to say it, but in its current state, Boti should not be released and I cannot in good faith recommend it to anyone with the amount of technical issues I ran into. Whether that be audio randomly cutting out in cutscenes, cutscene dialogue just disappearing outright, character models getting stuck in the wrong direction, button prompts getting mixed up and displaying keyboard, Xbox, and PlayStation all at once, objects not loading in when they should, physics going out the window at times, and even soft locks on top of that.
Several times while playing I had to reload the level just to get the game to work correctly. And that is before I even mention the crashes - which I unfortunately also had a couple of. Keep in mind, all of the issues I mentioned here are the ones that WERE NOT already included on the “known issues” list I was provided by the devs.
The game even acknowledges its own lack of polish in a way. There is straight-up an “unstuck” button on the pause menu that you can press to move your character out of terrain when they get stuck. I unfortunately had to make heavy use of this button, especially when playing online co-op. And that co-op is a separate issue entirely. My boyfriend and I managed to get through the first level playing online co-op, but I had to play through the rest of the game by myself because we just kept running into issues, including this weird flickering when standing on certain objects and some areas where the game progresses for one player, but traps the other - forcing a reload.
Overall
Boti is far too buggy to be worth a play in its current state. Numerous soft locks, collision issues, broken co-op, and even crashes prevent the otherwise competent gameplay from being anything more than that. Maybe in the future it will be worth a look, but as of now, I cannot recommend it.
We finally have Astro's Playroom on PC. Or rather, as close as we can get. It is called Boti: Byteland Overclocked and it aims to fill that very specific 3D platforming inside a computer niche.
Gameplay
Boti is a competent 3D platformer that tackles the basics and nothing more. It’s got a bit of platforming, a bit of a puzzle touch to that platforming, and the devs really did a good job with the actual variety of the gameplay. You’ll go from one of those platforming segments, to an area with a puzzle or two, to a giant slide that reminds me of the ones from Battle for Bikini Bottom, and then there’s swinging, cannons, and even some vehicle segments.
It’s all basic stuff, but it’s spread out in such a way that the gameplay never really becomes tedious. The collectibles and bonus objectives add to this too, encouraging you to explore further and occasionally solve the extra puzzle or two.
That said, don’t expect any real challenge here. The boss fights are laughable at best, but when you take into account the target audience here, it’s hard to fault the game for that. It is very forgiving with its checkpoints too. Not a difficult game by any means.
Length and Story
I completed Boti in just over 3 hours, but you could probably squeeze double the time out of it if you go the completionist route. I don’t feel like it was too short either, the gameplay pacing was steady throughout and didn’t feel like it was rushing.
The story is hardly notable because of how little it matters here. It’s more so just a means to link together the different levels and felt like an afterthought if anything. Not that the game needs something more than that though.
Graphics
The aesthetic, for the most part, is pretty good. It makes good use of lighting, coloring, and overall just has a nice vibrant look to it. This is while running on Unreal Engine 5, which shows in some ways - such as the ray tracing - but I cannot deny I was a bit surprised to learn that given that this could have easily passed as a last generation game. Not that that is a bad thing, just that when you look at the big picture, the backgrounds are blocky, the textures are not all that high-res, and the overall geometry is on the simpler side.
Performance / Optimization
This is unfortunately not a really well-optimized game. I am running on an RTX 3080 Ti and was unable to play the game natively at 4k with ray tracing OFF without dips to well below 60 fps. I figured - okay, I will just enable dynamic image scaling to hopefully fix that. And while that did raise my fps to above 100, it was not stable and some areas and scenes still caused dips to below 60fps. Which again, is surprising to see given that the game does not have the graphical fidelity to warrant using 100% of my GPU. So while it is not the worst performance I have seen, it could definitely use a bit more optimization.
Bugs / Lack of Polish
I hate to say it, but in its current state, Boti should not be released and I cannot in good faith recommend it to anyone with the amount of technical issues I ran into. Whether that be audio randomly cutting out in cutscenes, cutscene dialogue just disappearing outright, character models getting stuck in the wrong direction, button prompts getting mixed up and displaying keyboard, Xbox, and PlayStation all at once, objects not loading in when they should, physics going out the window at times, and even soft locks on top of that.
Several times while playing I had to reload the level just to get the game to work correctly. And that is before I even mention the crashes - which I unfortunately also had a couple of. Keep in mind, all of the issues I mentioned here are the ones that WERE NOT already included on the “known issues” list I was provided by the devs.
The game even acknowledges its own lack of polish in a way. There is straight-up an “unstuck” button on the pause menu that you can press to move your character out of terrain when they get stuck. I unfortunately had to make heavy use of this button, especially when playing online co-op. And that co-op is a separate issue entirely. My boyfriend and I managed to get through the first level playing online co-op, but I had to play through the rest of the game by myself because we just kept running into issues, including this weird flickering when standing on certain objects and some areas where the game progresses for one player, but traps the other - forcing a reload.
Overall
Boti is far too buggy to be worth a play in its current state. Numerous soft locks, collision issues, broken co-op, and even crashes prevent the otherwise competent gameplay from being anything more than that. Maybe in the future it will be worth a look, but as of now, I cannot recommend it.
A impressão final é que Boti: Byteland Overclocked tentou muito mais do que cabia em seu disco rígido. Com personagens carismáticos e uma proposta muito legal e colorida de um mundo dentro do computador, existe muito potencial aqui que não é aproveitado. É uma pena que uma execução fraca mecanicamente, com níveis sem muita inspiração (e até repetitivos) e muitos problemas técnicos acabaram tirando o brilho até mesmo de onde o jogo acerta muito bem. Se você tá procurando um jogo de plataforma 3D mediano, a conexão com o mundo de Boti está aberta, mas não espere muito mais do que isso.
mais: https://cosmonerd.com.br/games/critica-games/boti-byteland-overclocked-critica/
mais: https://cosmonerd.com.br/games/critica-games/boti-byteland-overclocked-critica/