A bizarre hybrid of runner and puzzle game from the heyday of the PlayStation with the same strange name. Who is Domino and why would anyone stop him??
Japanese game in all its incomprehensible beauty – how I love it. The story about Mr. Domino, who for some reason no one can stop (although in fact he is stopped and killed by any obstacle on the road), is a game for the sake of a gameplay concept, for which at least some visual justification was invented on top. In addition, the game was also developed by the unsinkable Artdink, known for the A-Train series of economic simulators, as well as the jRPG series Lunatic Dawn.
The gameplay is simple: you are given an isometric perspective, a circular track marked out in a square grid, and you, who need to drive forward and line up dominoes behind you, so that on the second/third/however it turns out, you can fit into a row of them and create a chain reaction. To do this, there are buttons scattered around the location, when pressed, something happens around… Um… Something. The goal is to press all these trigger buttons in the level and not die in the process. Then the player will be allowed into the next stage, where he will have to repeat the same thing, only in different scenery.
Although the game encourages you to https://shufflecasino.uk/ practice creating such chain reactions of falling dominoes that would complete the level with one long combination, no one will stop you from simply activating one by one the buttons that you can press on the current “circle”. For combo master skills No One Can Stop Mr. Domino only rewards you with points, which give you nothing, and – occasionally – unique scenes. In particular, after Mr. Domino’s visit to the house of an ordinary Japanese family, the grandfather will either be crushed by the bell if you simply activate the button, but if you drag the entire combo link to him, it will happen.
But the unstoppable domino dies even from the very fact of its own existence in this world. The authors did not bring an obvious indicator of health, so you can understand the condition of your ward only by the degree of its darkness. Fortunately, there are heals scattered throughout the levels, but you still have to manage to get into them while running. In addition, next to them there is often another collection called Reset, which. Resets level progress to the very beginning and even health does not return to the starting value. But it can be useful if you really want to create the perfect bunch of falling dominoes.
Probably the only serious problem with the game is its not very responsive controls. Although at first it seems that No One Can Stop Mr. Domino runs smoothly, any of your actions occur discretely within each individual cell of the grid field. That is, the game allows you to turn, place dominoes, and so on only with a certain abruptness – in intercellular intervals the control simply will not obey you. In principle, you can get used to the discrete way of life of the game world, but at first even the simplest first level may seem incomprehensible and crooked.
Well, yes, you can also write down the duration as a minus. Only six levels look like a joke. The developers also understood this, so at the last stage they tweaked the domino’s health timers so that even with perfect completion it would last just a drop. If you hesitate somewhere, you can safely forget about the end credits. But lives are limited, and sooner or later the game will throw you back to the very beginning and force you to get to the sadistic last level again. Yes, there is only half an hour of gameplay, but who said it would be easy?? Well, at least thanks to the cool electronic soundtrack for brightening up the hours of constant replaying and memorizing all the meanness and treachery of the game.
In terms of final impressions, No One Can Stop Mr. Domino reminded me of games like Incredible Crisis, where you want to fight through all the gameplay difficulties just to look at the game invented by the developers. Artdink really tried their best, and pressing each button in the level results in a result that ranges from funny to "what the fuck was that just now"?"But this is the minus of the game – on the thousandth attempt to master the final level, the same outcomes of our run through the previous stages will begin to be seriously forgotten, but it is impossible to squander them.
And even though after completing new characters, new characters are revealed, for whom new endings are then shown, I don’t want to dive into the hell of the last level again. In addition, the endings themselves, even by the standards of the wildness of the game, turned out to be very strange, since in them our dominoes take their own lives in one way or another: Mr. Domino throws himself from the roof, Mrs. Domino kills herself against the wall, and so on. What was the message of the script, limited only by the opening and ending videos, I still didn’t understand.