FNaF: Control Z

I waited for the full game to release before writing a review, since when I played the demo I was pretty disappointed but still tried to give the game the benefit of the doubt, yet I have seen no improvements made in the full game.

First off, I admire the effort put in the visuals and presentation. There are lots of effects here and there and the game takes a very cinematic approach in general, and the character models look pretty decent, especially Ennard. With that being said, the effects happen to be very all over the place sometimes. Many times the sprites and effects looked heavily inconsistent in theme and style (as if each comes from a different game).

The environment and minigames suffer from looking barebones as well. Besides the fact that there are no cameras in the game and only your office, there is very little in the room with very simple lighting that emits no emotion whatsoever, and the 8-bit sprites for the minigames don't match; I'm pretty sure you haven't made those sprites yourself, which would be perfectly fine if they were to at least pair together well in terms of style and level of detail.

And now, the gameplay. Repetitive and overstretched to put it simply. Unintuitive controls, a very underdeveloped radar where you need to scan ONLY ONE room, oxygen malfunctions that are only extra busywork, and worst of all, the heavily slow-paced minigame that you have to complete in order to finish the night. There is no depth to any of the decisions that you make, no strategies or anything, you're simply repeating the same few actions on repeat for many minutes, and they only last even longer in the next nights thanks to the required amount of items to catch in the minigame rising.

The post-night minigames? Not any better I'm afraid, you're simply walking through the same path and after every night one or so arbitrary sprites are added on top of the background to memorize. Too little thought has been put on the gameplay and it hurts the entire game.

As much as I hate to be so negative in my comments, I really dislike how all the focus was on the presentation and marketing, while putting the least amount of effort on the game itself. I genuinely believe that if you were to slow down with the marketing and put the same amount of time on working on the game itself, you would come up with something significantly better because I can clearly see that you were aiming for something that tries to stand out in the fangame scene, it just needed far more work in order to show its potential.

With all that said, I hope this game helps you learn a thing or two when it comes to making better games in the future, because I'm sure you are capable of making something actually good if you really put the time and effort in (on the game, not on the trailers).

I'm going to be brutally honest in this review. I have beaten night 3 for reference. I'll go through the issues I have with this game one-by-one.

The Tablet/Camera system is abhorrent. There's a bunch of random gifs floating around the screen which mean absolutely nothing and don't look cool either, it's just visual noise. The game uses WASD controls, and yet to move to different menus of the tablet, you have to use arrow keys for some reason, which is really weird and unintuitive. When it comes to the radar, it doesn't actually do anything until you click on a room, which is not really what you would expect based on the visuals, and then it tells you if something is in that specific room after a few seconds. It takes so long to search for things for little payoff, especially since you can't even do anything about it until the animatronics reach your office. So, it's just a much better and faster strategy to just not use it at all and just flash the halls.

Now, when it comes to the minigame, it makes no sense why this is the win condition when the phone guy seemed to describe it as a bonus task that is different from some kind of "main task." The minigame itself makes no sense thematically anyway, since you're an atari freddy walking outside of a what looks like a chinese restaurant, catching trash bags...? It doesn't match up with the high-tech visuals seen in the tablet, let alone the story and setting of the game.

As a result of all of this, the gameplay is really easy. You just flash the halls, shock fellas in the doorways, and reset vents occasionally while prioritizing catching trash bags in the minigame, which for some reason has a life system even though there can be impossible-to-reach trash bags where you have to take damage.

Lastly, the post-night minigame. You're atari freddy again, walking around... a subway? And you have to play spot-the-difference between nights and say how many differences are in the subway, which are these shadow guys. Getting it wrong, thankfully, does not reset your night, but it doesn't do anything whether you get it right or wrong. Maybe it activates the "true ending," idk. It just feels random.

Overall, the game really feels confused. Can it be improved? For sure, but it needs a lot of improvements to be fun and intuitive in my opinion. Here are my suggestions: Make the tablet use A and D to switch to different modes, make the radar show animatronic locations without needing to click on the rooms (that way it feels fun and rewarding of your time to use), make the minigames have a consistent art style, and honestly either rework or remove the "I'm on Observation Duty" minigames at the end of the night, they're just not fun and make no sense. Hopefully you can take a few pointers from my review to take into account when updating this game and making your future projects.

Here are my thoughts about this new FNaF fangame, knowing this is still just a demo, I will just split my thoughts out, wish you're OK with it.

So, another FNAF fangame with high quality, and even my old PC works well. That's a good point. The menu and the cutscenes seem fine, but do you think the whole gameplay is kind of too empty? Unlike the FNaF games those have cameras, it has less pictures and contents if it only has a radar to detect them, and the point is that you don't even need the radar. For the right door, what I do is just to shock there time to time.

I was making games, too. I always want to make special mechanics, but kind of end up not interesting or weird. If I redo the game, it also costs me a lot of time. Maybe you can try to make the boring mechanics just more interetsing, good for you and spends less time. Don't know if that advice helps?

The graphic is sure not something that normal people can do, great job, and great job♡ Wish you find something special along on your journey making FNaF fangame. Maybe I can add you to my friends? Talking about FNAF fangame developing and such when needed.

I'm going to be completely and brutally honest in my review:

I'll start with the positives: Upon booting up the game, the cinematic opening instantly had me hooked, the voice acting was decent along with the animations and graphics (these features remain consistent throughout the game). The main night segment, while not being anything special, is still decent with the mechanics and the eye-candy being the UI. Also, I LOVE how you added fully fledged 3D human antagonists, this is something I've always wanted from a FNaF fangame, so that's also a big plus for me! There's also plenty of creepy renders (more specifically, the mutilated 8-BIT sprites and "the one who can't breathe" slowly crawling towards you.

Now for the negatives: To put it simply, you did some MAJOR false advertising, you introduced a PLETHORA of: characters, environments, cutscenes, even major lore pieces that were completely vacant from the game. If you're going to promise something, you need to have the game acknowledge it properly to avoid this type of situation from occurring. Also, back to the office gameplay; I get the reason for a radar system rather than cameras, it's still pretty janky, you can only scan one room at a time which takes WAY longer than it should. There also isn't much variety nor cutscenes in this game which is such a shame.

In conclusion, I strongly believe this game really should've had more time in the oven, the game, in it's current state, feels like a shell of what it was meant to be which is something I hoped I didn't have to say. Don't get me wrong, this game isn't bad, but some major improvements could've been applied.