The Howler
Skip · Strategy · 2014
The verdict
SKIP IT.
The reviews do not carry it. What it costs you is time.
- Length
- 0.9h
- Price
- Free to play
- Reviews
- 78% positive
Minimum on the Steam store: 51 MB of storage. Windows only.
Use gravity, tension, and wind currents to get your hot air balloon to its destination, dropping off cargo on your way, in this ultra-challenging physics-based game. All art used in the Howler was meticulously created by classically-trained experienced painters.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
On value it sits in the top 20 percent of its genre. It is better reviewed than 70 percent of its genre. Among the games that feel like it, The Bridge ($9.99, scores 66) beats it on value, while it beats DETOUR ($1.99, scores 9).
Inside the two-hour refund window, 75 percent of the 840 reviews written there were positive, against 78 percent overall, and those are 49 percent of everything written about it.
What players say
Probably one of the worst. Game uses mic so you can control by screaming in front of your screen like ♥♥♥ or just press button. Yes, control with one button press and try to get balloon into specific zone to make air currents push it in the right direction and land on the platform to finish level. Super slow and boring. Definitely avoid.
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: critic score (Metacritic), achievement curve (Steam global achievements).
Cite this score
Embed the live badge, copy the line, or download the card.
The Howler scores 47/100 on the BANG Score (a skip). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/306040/the-howlerThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 20.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.