Currently Playing: Conduct THIS is Broken Yet Compelling.
CONDUCT THIS!
Conduct This makes me feel stupid.
Very stupid.
It only took a few minutes of playing - by which I mean losing horribly - before I became firmly convinced that I am the most slow-witted, brain-dead, useless, thick person alive today on planet earth. The premise of Conduct This is simple, and easy to grasp: get the passengers to the correspondingly coloured station terminal, by changing the points on the railway lines. It's that straightforward...to understand. To actually do it, however, requires a Einsteinian levels of concentration and focus.
Patience, persistence, optimisation and logic are rewarded, whilst even the most momentary lapse in judgement is severely, almost outlandishly punished. It drives you mad, but only at yourself. Collisions occur often, and in (almost) no cases can you blame the game for being unfair, as they are always of your own making. Your brain soon begins to creak under the effort of tracking the current and future positions of four fast-moving trains as they wind around the map, disappearing in and out of tunnels, dodging road traffic and freight trains and evil black pointy-horned devil trains (curse them) and one another. It's a puzzle and an action game and a nightmare, but its very satisfying when it goes right.
You notice I said "almost" all cases, as Conduct This could do with some serious tinkering under the hood. Though the gameplay is well executed, the app itself, considering it’s creator pedigree, could do with some QA. Text runs off the end of screen, cameras stutter and seven times out of ten a sad blue wasteland appears instead of the map screen. The timer icon clips through itself, buildings judder and flicker under the tension of battling their own physics, and the app crashes frequently. The "Snow Problem" level, though a nice pun, is essentially unplayable, with collisions happening within millisecond of level loading, forcing you to spam the replay button until a playable configuration is available. Conduct This is teetering on the precipice of falling apart completely.
Yet in spite of all this, I didn't want to put it down. The gameplay really is as compelling as it is challenging, drawing deeply from the well of "oh, just one more go." The cheerful and colourful visual style serves to ameliorate and dissipate player frustration, as its hard to be angry with something quite so jolly. Even a quite terrible fuck-up is strangely enjoyable to watch, as train carriages fling themselves all around the map with cartoonish violence. Conduct This is masterfully designed, playing with the player's emotions, sending them careering between the highs of victory and the lows of stupid failing rage in a carefully conducted symphony of play. It's a shame that the technical side of things was not up to as much snuff as the game design side during the time I spent with it, but fun ultimately won out.
