I honestly have no idea why I have this game. This looks like something I might have picked up a long time ago for a buck or two on sale thinking it might be a few laughs. But it’s been buried in my Steam Backlog without any particular attachment to it for long enough I honestly do not remember.
However when the dice picked it as the next game to play over the 100 Days of Gaming for Extra Life, I shrugged and though “could be fun.” And fun it was, but it was short…. very short… and kinda shows how home-made it is on it’s sleeve. You might say it’s a little bit… buggy? Ok, I’ll see myself out. But you come in if you want to see what the game is about.
Story: You’re home! After a long trip, you just returned home and are immediately hit with the nostalgia bomb: the memories and questioning just what happened to bring you to this point in your…. hey, what’s that buzzing?
As you realize a fly is in the house with you, the rage takes over. You have no swatter, but there is no rule that says ANYTHING within reach doesn’t work to kill that god damned fly with!
This is another game with very little plot to get into it. What is here is basically like the games from the 80s and early 90s: an excuse for what you are doing in the game. And really a game of this type needs little else, but it also means there is nothing special in the story either.
Unfortunately the developer seemed to think the game needed to at least appear deeper for a moment at the end and in doing so, managed to deliver that ending poorly. Spoiler warning right here, though if you are playing this one for the plot, I don’t get it:
“When you finally kill the fly in the castle, the game tells you to “find the answers.” And you do. In the middle of the room “The Answers” in giant yellow letters is waiting for you to collect it. Doing so, your character realizes everything and calms down… until he hears another fly and the game ends.”
I have no issues with ending this game with more of the same since it really is just an excuse to trash the place and the fly, but “the answers” kills me. This was just stupid, even considering what you came here to do and frankly the whole package would have been better if you just skipped to the calming down rather then even attempting to look like there might be more to this fly-killing rampage.
4/10
Graphics: Graphically, Fly in the House doesn’t look half bad, at least at first. The game takes place in first person and you will have 3 environments to play in: an apartment, an office, and a castle. All of these places look decent, if dated. It looks in that odd place where you can see the geometry where curved objects are clearly not, but are bent just enough times that you can see the attempt was made, but if you look at many of the surfaces that make up the same objects, there is a pretty high level of detail in the texture work.
But then you start to break things, and you notice some issues. Depending on the object, you could split it into a couple pieces or it will shatter into shards, and the volume of each as well as what breaks is predetermined. This is fine, but the breakages range from satisfying as hell to weirdly anti-climactic, giving the look of the carnage you wrought on the room a very uneven look at times. Sometimes it’s awe inspiring. Other times, it looks like you pried a few planks of wood from some of it and called it a day.
And I have to be honest. When you look outside, especially after breaking a window, the outdoors looks LAUGHABLY bad, often looking like “baby’s first 3D world.” I understand the developer expects you to look inside where you are playing more then outside, but it actually is so bad that once you notice it takes away from the experience.
The only other thing I can say against this game in this department, however, is a big one. This game has some serious slow-down issues as things break, often bringing the system I was playing with from silky smooth frame-rates to at best 2 FPS when huge combos of furniture and glass were breaking all at once. And then going through it would cause noticeable frame-drops as well. Admittedly, I was not playing on my actual gaming rig (which is a lot more powerful) but the game requires the kind of power I had available back when Windows XP was the latest operating system. This should not be an issue. Still, considering how little it gets in the way of actually ruining that fly’s life (it literally took me half an hour to finish the adventure mode), I can’t complain too much. It’s more of an annoyance then a serious issue.
7/10
Sound: This game, while sounding great, is going to be too limited to really blow you away. In fact most of the game doesn’t even have music. The only music you have is in the adventure mode where your rampages are set to a single, but awesome, metal track that will play in all three levels. Seriously the music sounds great and goes with the carnage well, but then it suddenly ends when you kill the fly, returning to silence until the level ends.
And sound effects themselves are exceptionally few as well. In essence, you have a glass/porcelain crashing sound and one for much more durable objects. But at the same time, you really don’t need more, as this covers all the objects and when several are breaking at once (fairly common to be honest) it sounds amazing.
What doesn’t sound amazing, however is the voice work. There isn’t much, but when you throw things out broken windows, you apparently hit a LOT of people you cant see, as most of the time, you hear a laughably bad scream of whoever you hit (or who found them). It’s actually so bad I found myself doing it during arcade mode cause it was hysterical.
7/10
Gameplay: The goal of the game is very simple. You are in an enclosed area with a fly that has to die. To kill it, you need to pick up random objects and either swing or throw them to hit the fly with either that object or the debris of the wreckage you just caused. You also have a timer ticking away the seconds you have to complete this goal, so you want to be quick. If you don’t kill that bug before the timer reaches zero, you fail to finish the level. But you can also lose if the fly escapes it’s untimely demise. At first this will be impossible, but a smashed window is a potential escape route, adding a tiny bit of strategy to the game.
Controlling the game is a little awkward, however. You move and look around as you would expect with the WASD keys and the mouse, but rather then hold the mouse button to pick things up like you would also expect, it’s a toggle, so until you realize that you are likely going to throw whatever you picked up by pure momentum spinning around to find the fly. And it doesn’t help that your target has almost no pattern in how they fly and bounce around the room. You can expect luck to play a big roll in how tough or easy this game is.
But the game will definitely be short either way, as you have a total of three levels to play in, each made up of a couple of rooms full of stuff to destroy. Frankly the content volume of the game is very anemic. Once you finish you still have an arcade and horror mode to play, though your mileage will definitely very here. Arcade lets you tweak the game for “how long can you go/scoring” purposes stripping it of what little story the game had. But this still leaves you in the same three levels of the adventure game and nowhere else to go.
Horror mode, on the other hand, sticks you exclusively in the 3rd and final level, but now your goal is different. The place is haunted by a ghost fly you must avoid while finding the green haunted items and toss them out the windows. Each time you find them and get them out of there, you survive the night and move on to another night with more objects.
This is the only mode that actually varies gameplay, but I wasn’t all that impressed to be honest. I was done with everything this game had to offer between all three modes in about an hour.
4/10
Bugs: While this game ran well outside of the frame-dips I mentioned in the graphics, I did have four real bugs occur:
- What goes in the roof, stays in the roof: The title says it all. On occasion to try to kill the fly, I threw objects upward… and if they reach the roof, they didn’t always come down. As often as not they passed through, never to be seen again.
- Glass is not always solid: This happened to me twice in the game… both times in the apartment, but I managed to shove a bucket through the window between rooms without opening or breaking it, and that same bucket wound up in the microwave without opening it. I have no idea how this worked.
- Game froze long enough to make me think it broke: This happened in the castle as I killed the last fly. The game froze for a good 40-50 seconds, and I almost closed it thinking it broke before I was running around looking for “the answers”
- The Answer was off center: And then the game got screwy. I don't know if it didn’t like my system’s graphic processor or what, but when the text ran for this last time, it was too big and running off the right-side of the screen. I watched a video after to see what it said for this review, because it was that bad.
Overall: To say Fly in the House isn’t fun would be a lie. It is, but it is also incredibly short and bare of material. In fact it’s damningly so, especially for the $10 they want for the game. Add to that the bugs and performance issues and I don’t legitimately think I can recommend this game to anyone, despite it being fun. If you have to try it for yourself, at least wait till its 80% off or something. At least then, you wont feel ripped off.
Score:
4/10
System Requirements:
- 2.4 Ghz processor
- 512 MB RAM
- Geforce 9800 GT with 512 MB VRAM
- Windows XP or later
- 150 MB of hard drive space
System Specs:
- AMD A8-9600 Radeon R7 APU (3.1 Ghz)
- 16 GB RAM
- Windows 10
Source: Steam
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