Ur'land: The Desert Escape

It doesn’t take much to come up with a great gameplay idea for a video game, but it’s significantly more difficult today than it was two or three decades ago. It’s still doable, on the other hand, at least if you are creative enough to think about something that would make gamers happy. Game jams are a great way to encourage creativity, even if the time limits severely reduces the quality of the entries.

Ur'land: The Desert Escape is a simple jam game with a very interesting idea at its core, although the overall game is not as complicated as it could be. In short, the theme of the jam is “10 seconds”, which means that the gameplay must revolve around this simple idea. In this case, you drive a vehicle that can switch between driving mode and shooting mode, but the switch takes ten seconds to finish.

This means that you have to pay close attention to the environment and anticipate any kind of encounter with enemy forces, otherwise you won’t have time to make the switch. The trick is that you cannot move and shoot at the same time, which means that you are immobile if you decide to activate the cannon and deal some damage to incoming enemies.

The game map is open and quite interesting from a design point of view, especially since it seems to be inspired by the Doctor Who series. Hence some of the structures and enemies look a lot like Daleks, although it may just be a coincidence as well. It doesn’t really matter how they look, on the other hand, because they pack quite the punch if you are not ready to strike back.

The controls are pretty simple, but the camera could use some improvement. While you can look around in every direction, the view is somewhat restricted and claustrophobic in certain situations. Even so, the graphics and the world design are on point, since the designers managed to do a lot with the few resources at their disposal.

In the end, Ur'land: The Desert Escape has a nice set of mechanics going for it at the time, but it obviously needs some polish. Hence, it would be interesting to see how everything would turn out in a fully developed project.