izigame.me

batu ta batu would be a pretty cool matching game, not your typical match-3 variety, but mostly broken controls make it largely unplayable. the store page says keyboard supported (as if it should be a feature in a pc game), but it just means the game sometimes reacts to keypresses somehow.
picture this. there's a 2x2 grid with a yellow, a red, a blue and an orange square (or batu), surrounded by walls (called corners here for some reason) of the same colors. top left is the yellow square, red is top right, red wall to the left, orange wall to the right. select red, push it to the left, so yellow and red switch places, red gets absorbed by the same-colored wall, yellow gets a new square next to it, merging into a yellow rectangle if the new tile is also yellow. small squares can't be moved if a bigger one is in the way, but the bigger can be, to swich place with smaller ones next to it. later on grids get bigger, of course, and movement and matching become trickier and trickier.
another thing to consider is that corners or walls can have multiple colors. only one is active, but they can be switched whether you're stuck for moves or not. sometimes tiles appear with bombs, acquired by pushing said tile towards its own corner, and if you ever want to get rid of a shape, explode it out of the way. depending on the game mode, bombs might keep recharging if you don't make a move, no need to luck into one spawned randomly.
so far so good, but here come the issues. the game doesn't care if you've never seen a controller in real life, let alone have one plugged in, it only provides controller prompts, no rebinding, no way to check what button does what, so I had keep pressing random keys to figure out that left trigger is left ctrl on the keyboard, which is used to switch the color of a wall/corner, pressed together with a direction.
speaking of direction, wasd is used to move the cursor around, arrows to push batus around, and you'd expect menu navigation to work with both, but nope. with wasd I could only go right, not left, up or down, and even the arrows were iffy, sometimes willing to move in the direction I wanted to, sometimes ignoring my commands.
the biggest control issue regards right trigger, no idea how to make it happen reliably. it's for using bombs, so one could say it's relatively important, but methodically pressing every key did nothing. the tutorial can't be skipped, nor anything else be done until it's finished, so I did some less methodical button-mashing and somehow the bomb exploded. I've narrowed it down to right alt, space and enter, and some sort of combination of pressing and/or holding one or more of them, but space and enter mostly do the same thing and right alt might not even be used for anything. needless to say, this is a gamebreaking issue in and of itself.
enter and space are otherwise used for selecting things, but space brings up settings as well, because of course it does. 100% of my triggered bombs happened with the settings in the way, so space is my most likely suspect for right trigger. somehow. bringing up the menu doesn't pause the game, and the developers thought it'd be a capital idea for esc to quit the game immediately, no matter what's going on, potentially losing progress on the current level. but hey, they didn't have to spend precious development time on adding an exit button to the game. how very unacceptably lazy. took me a while to realize backspace is used to go back to the previous menu to select another game mode or something, but I still don't know how the statistics screen can be brought up.
there are 10 game modes, but only endless is unlocked at the start, have to farm coins for the rest. most modes cost 1000 each, for a total of 7500 coins to unlock everything, but other modes give coins as well, and pay better than endless mode, though I'm sure with properly working controls and some skill you could get thousands there easily. replays give coins just like the first time, so farming quick and easy levels is an option.
endless mode is as the name suggests: start with a 3-minute timer, matching adds more time, bombs recharge if you don't move for a while, game over when the time runs out. no idea how coins are calculated though. I wanted to check out everything, but didn't bother with broken controls, so I only have info about a few more modes. less batus than, unlocked with 250 coins, has 10 levels with various grid sizes. the point is to reduce the number of batus from the starting amount to the required one, no bombs here. if you can do it before the timer runs out, good for you, but it doesn't matter much, only a bit more coinage.
remove a color for 500 coins wants you to get rid of a certain amount of certain colors on 10 levels of increasing size, with a recharging bomb if necessary, but color counters also keep recharging if you're not quick enough. full grid for 750 coins needs grids to become a single color on 10 more levels of increasing size, rechargable bomb available. and I assume most, if not all, of the rest involve a timer in a more or less crucial capacity as well, but there's no timer toggle, have to stare at a clock even if it doesn't make too big a difference.
multiplayer is for 2 or 4 players, local or online via steam remote play, but I couldn't try it, the game wouldn't even let me select it. maybe it needs a controller plugged in or something.
the presentation is very nice, absolutely fantastic music with track select and shuffle, separate volume settings, brightness, saturation, contrast, controller vibration, various languages, but no windowed mode toggle and alt+enter only makes a non-resizable window.
it would be a fun game, and it's not like keyboard couldn't work well enough, it's just that the developers were incredibly lazy. with keyboard prompts, rebinding, or at the very least a static image showing what's what, and properly working 'right trigger' and menu navigation, plus other issues fixed, it would be very much recommendable, but a disclaimer on the store page saying 'controller recommended' is always easier than putting effort into your own game. contacted the devs weeks ago, haven't heard back, so they must really care. don't give any money to these hacks.