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First Look at BeatBlasters III

Posted by :Meroka On : March 19, 2014
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Category: Action/Adventure, Indie Gaming, Reviews

You could easily be forgiven for having not caught BeatBlasters 1 and 2. This is mainly because they don’t exist. BeatBlasters III is the first title out of Canadian developer Chainsawesome Games and their choice to lead with a title numbered “three” is a little unconventional, but it definitely seems to set the tone for the game.

pirateBeatBlasters III touts itself as a hybrid of a platforming game and a rhythm game. Whilst it’s certainly true there are elements of these genres in there, the product as a whole is decidedly stranger than the sum of it’s parts. You take on the role of either Joey or Gina, a young boy and girl, both fans of music, who arrive in the town of Acapella only to run into the town’s ruler, The Butcher, who promptly throws them both out on account of the town’s music prohibition laws. From here, it’s up to you to help them return to the city and overthrow the tyrant through a series of colourful and musical challenges.

The kids are armed with three abilities: the eponymous Beat Blaster – a bolt of energy they can fire forwards as a weapon, a magical shield bubble around them and a pair of nifty rocket boots that will offer a limited flight ability. The weapon can be upgraded as you progress through the game, allowing you to perhaps return to earlier levels you had trouble with for a better score.

The game itself plays out as a series of challenging minigames, requiring creative use of these three abilities in varying combinations. The simplest of these, the first level, sees you attempting to save a collection of peanuts from a band of thieves on behalf of a family of bugs. This is about as much context as you get in many levels. There’s no particular rhyme or reason to whatever your current challenge might be, you just have to go along with it.

Other challenges have you escorting a rocket-powered Viking longship full of Eskimo warriors across the snow to invade an ice castle ruled by a pirate, or attempting to traverse an obstacle course with a pile of penguins in order to return the spirit of the scientist Dr Penguinstein, trapped in said penguins, to his physical form. It’s all nonsense of the highest order, but the challenges themselves are well crafted, fun, and satisfying to complete.

cutalotThe rhythm element of the game is used to recharge the three abilities, which otherwise all have a limited amount of power before you can no longer use them. An indicator at the top of the screen bounces along to the beat of the music, and by holding down a charge button and tapping the buttons for the abilities you wish to charge along with the beat you can top up the power.

This recharging will begin slowly at first, increasing faster if you can sustain a combo, hitting the beats correctly for long enough. Multiple abilities can be recharged at a time as part of the same combo, so a good sense of rhythm will see you always having the correct tools for the job, otherwise you could find yourself floundering to recharge in the middle of the action. It is worth noting at this stage, that this is all a little tricky to execute on a keyboard; if you don’t have some manner of gamepad plugged into your computer, you could find yourself struggling more so than otherwise.

For a game that features music as its principal theme, the rhythm elements are fairly weak, serving mainly to add balance and pacing to the challenges themselves. However, I feel like the challenges are good enough to stand on their own. There’s a lot of variety in them and they’re definitely creative, if frequently a little odd. They’ll provide a good challenge too, with 32 levels in total to play through, and by level 10 they will already be testing your skills at multitasking tackling the challenge at hand and maintaining enough power to be able to use your abilities. If you’re finding things too easy, there’s also a unlockable harder difficulty to better test you and you can step down to an easier difficulty if you find yourself stuck on a tough challenge.

Overall, BeatBlasters III is by no means without its flaws, but it’s a fun and innovative little title that you would do well to check out.

BeatBlasters III is out now for PC, Mac and Linux. For more information, please visit www.beatblastersiii.com

Originally posted on The Yorkshire Standard

Love and Other Games

Posted by :Meroka On : September 20, 2012
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Category: Indie Gaming, Rant

Quick, name a recent title whose story has shaped the gaming industry. Okay, done that?

The ones that readily spring to mind, and I suspect some of you may have picked, are Call of Duty’s shocking Modern Warfare stories and Bioware’s Dragon Age and Mass Effect stories with their homosexual romance options.

Call of Duty generated a lot of buzz in the press in MW2 by allowing the player to participate in terror attacks, gunning down civilians and in MW3 by graphically blowing up a small child. While it got people talking about it, it’s really serves as a cycle of oneupsmanship to create the most shocking, and therefore by extension the most “mature” game. Though there’s little that anyone could actually call mature about it; quite the opposite, it’s really pretty puerile.

There are often calls, particularly among the “games as an art” camp, to grow up as an industry. A great majority of games find themselves falling into the categories of “shoot the terr’ists” or “save us, chosen one!”, few are willing to tread the ground of genuinely mature territory, that of “serious issues”. It’s easy enough to see why, it’s a risky move on any level. The big boys are only interested in the mass appeal, big bucks type titles, and on an indie level, your success could well be the difference between eating ramen or living in a box.

Bioware flirts with this in their games’ romance options, openly allowing gay and lesbian relationships. It’s a hell of a step forward, no doubt, and hopefully the herald of better things to come, but it’s still only toying with the issue, it’s always optional and never has any real impact, either emotionally or on the course of the story.

Enter Christine Love, a Canadian game designer. Or Visual Novelist. The distinction’s a pretty grey area in my book. They’re stories told through the interface of what looks a lot like a game. And they’re nonlinear, have options and the occasional puzzle. That’s marking them out as being pretty close to a game to me. Irrespective of what you’d call them, in terms of narrative, Love’s works are strides ahead of the rest of the medium.

Her first title, Digital: A Love Story is set “five minutes into the future of 1988”. The player, having recently acquired their first “Amie” computer, joins a local BBS and finds the poetry of a girl called Emilia. From there it spirals into a world of romance, computer hacking and conspiracy. The entire game is played through the Amie interface, and you can respond to any post on any BBS and send private messages to any other user. You never once get the chance to see what you’ve written, though, only infer it from the responses you get. A lot of developers are given credit for a good silent protagonist, but Samus, Link and Gordon Freeman still all had an appearance and a certain amount of personality. By leaving the protagonist as a complete blank slate, it leaves plenty to the player’s imagination, adding a great deal to the story.

Her second title, Don’t take it personally, babe, it just ain’t your story, sees you take the role of John Rook, a high school English teacher in the year 2027. This being the future, social networking is huge and all your students are on a network called AmieConnect, reminiscent of Facebook. The school has arranged for you to be able to view all of your students’ public and private messages in secret in order to better assist them. this obviously raises very strong issues of online privacy. You’ll frequently be presented with scenarios where you can guide your students through tough situations, but you’ll only be well equipped to deal with them by violating their privacy at regular intervals. Being high school, bullying and LGBT issues are also prevalent.

Her latest title, Analogue: A Hate Story, has you play a similar role to the first game, a faceless, silent protagonist an unknown number of years in the future when mankind has colonised the stars. You are given the job of a salvage operation on the Mugunghwa a deep space generation ship lost thousands of years earlier. You contact the ship’s AI, but system issues mean you can only communicate in binary choice answers and by showing items of discussion to the AI. By trawling through the logs of the final seven years of life on board the ship you can piece together a picture of their civilisation. Primarily viewed from the perspective of a 13-year old girl put into stasis in the hope that future technology would cure her terminal illness, the civilisation has reverted to a deeply misogynistic culture based on that of the patriarchal Joseon Dynasty of medieval Korea. “Men are honored, women are abased” is the cliché the game asks you to keep in mind throughout. In a society where women are perpetually dehumanised, the game tries to show what life would have been like for those women. All the characters deal with differing degrees of tragedy and scandal, some powerful issues and shocking stories, others merely asides. Ultimately, the dehumanising culture, accepted as the norm for all but the young girl, is the root of it all.

Love tackles head-on issues that most people would rather tiptoe around or turn a blind eye to. Sexism, homophobia, suicide, alcoholism, and complex relationships are all expertly dealt with, even if not always the outright theme. The result is stories that are entirely captivating and deeply thought-provoking, and leave a far greater impact than any dime-a-dozen “chosen one” plotline.

I said at the start that there’s a contingent demanding games grow up, and I can get behind that. Christine Love’s work shows that it is possible, and it can work well. We need to sit up and take note. I think Christine Love may very well be one of the most important video game writers to date.

GLHF,

~Meroka

Orcs Must Die! And Explode. And Dissolve. And Burn… 2

Posted by :Meroka On : August 2, 2012
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Category: Action/Adventure, Indie Gaming, Reviews, Strategy

Orcs Must Die! by Robot Entertainment was one of the most successful indie games of 2011, receiving the accolade Game of the Year and being one of the most fun games I’ve personally played in a long time. The anecdote you can oft catch me telling is that I picked it up about three days before PAX East this year and ended up resenting having to leave for Boston just because it meant I had to put Orcs Must Die! down.

Scarcely 8 months later we now have Orcs Must Die! 2. Historically, even the benevolent titans Valve have caught flak for such a fast turnaround on a sequel, so is it up to scratch?

To bring everyone up to speed, Orcs Must Die! is an Action Tower Defence game. You are given resources to buy traps and said traps are instrumental in stopping waves of baddies – in this case the titular orcs – from making it down a gauntlet. That flavour of game gets stale after a while and you end up just resting on the fast-forward button until everything stops, so these days the kids want action. Now you get to run around on foot with a selection of interesting weapons mixing it up in the midst of your carefully lain traps.

Orcs Must Die! tasks you, a War Mage, with the role of defending your world from the barbarism of the orcs. They will break through rifts from the savage orc homelands and charge through a mine or castle or whatever locale the narrative presents you with, intent on breaking forth into your world and wreaking destruction upon it. Armed with arrays of spikes, blades and maces ready to spring forth from the walls, ceilings and floors, as well as jets of acid, ice and flame, a variety of guardian allies and a whole periodic table of elemental fury to throw forth, you’ll get to tackle thousands of the brutes. Performing well earns you skulls which function as currency to buy new weapons and traps and upgrade your existing ones.

There’s no depth to the story, just a host of interestingly shaped rooms and gratuitous violence. One might comfortably argue that you don’t need anything else. And I will. I made the comparison last week talking about Shoot Many Robots: The one thing Orcs Must Die! does better than any other game is that it’s so visceral. When a crowd of oblivious orcs stampedes onto your spike trap while axe blades swing from the wall in unison the sense of satisfaction delivered is unparalleled. It’s a difficult thing to convey using mere words. There’s endless fun to be had setting up combinations of traps and watching the savages blunder into the literal meat grinder. And then the ones that do slip the net you can shoot in the face with a crossbow. It’s good enough to stand alone without anything else to the game.

What the sequel brings to the table over its predecessor is sadly not extensive. The game provides only 15 new levels, 4 new weapons and 6 new traps and could comfortably have been marketed as an expansion were it not for the inclusion of a Co-op Mode. Teaming up with a friend, you can each take control of one of the two different War Mages, one the Apprentice of the first game and one the new Sorceress, the Sorceress having access to more primarily magic based attacks and traps than the more physical Apprentice.

Robot are clearly banking on longevity being derived from wanting to play through the story as both characters on both normal and hard mode, and then probably the new endless mode, too, which as the name suggests pits you against ever tougher waves of foes until you inevitably succumb vying for a place on the high score board and extra bonus skulls to spend upgrading your character. While it’s no bad thing, and there’s plenty of lifespan and fun to be had with the game, the original stood well by itself in a single play-through and I fear this sequel may be found lacking.

If of course you haven’t touched the original then disregard the above. It’ll all be fresh, exciting and above all else unequivocally fun. At the end of the day it’s still quite reasonably priced at £12, which is a hard price point to argue with at any time and I’m certain thrifty gamers will be able to pick it up for less with a little patience. It’s excellent entertainment for the entry fee asked and well worth investing in, even if it isn’t revolutionary.

Orcs Must Die 2! is available for PC on Steam, Gamersgate and Impulse.

Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet.

Posted by :Scribble On : July 20, 2012
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Category: Action/Adventure, Indie Gaming, Puzzle, Reviews, Shooter

Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet is your standard 2D adventure platformer with a lot of bite and a harsh organic style. You’ll traverse, submerge, and blast your way through an infected alien Sun that’s spreading its shadowy organic filth all over the rest of the solar system!

Through the twisted catacombs, lakes, voids, pipes and caves you’ll find may different changes in scenery. All are strikingly coloured and each presenting new obstacles and bosses to thwart. I love the atmosphere between environments. The style mostly boils down to layered silhouetted 2-D gears teeth and lots of spikes. Coupled with impressive visuals, that’s seriously all it needs to be to look fantastic. The spaceship itself is 3-D, which allows for some nice tilting movement while you’re going around corners or dodging incoming projectiles. It makes ITSP look a lot less static than it could have been and doesn’t stick out quite as much as it does in a lot of 2-D / 3-D crossovers.

For its type there’s a surprising amount of gizmos for your space ship to play with. A scanner, lasers, guided missiles, circular saws, shields, grabbing arms, etc. Each is found throughout the adventure and all are necessary to find hidden extra features. The scanner is the key to figuring out what in seven bells you have to do. Given that there’s no text or dialogue in this game either. But mostly you’ll only have to scan new obstacles once to get the hint. After that it’s just a case of using the gizmo or weapon available, or having to come back to that section later once you’ve found said gizmo or weapon. You’ll quickly recognise the task at hand the second time you fly past it. There’s a lot of re-playability in this game. Finding artefacts, concept art, getting all the weapon and shield upgrades, having to track back to access areas previously closed off to you.

I’ve never encountered anything less threatening.

Enemies correspond with their settings, the Organic Zones have plenty of plant-like spore creatures, that sometimes explode.. The Ocean Zone carries plenty of large and dangerous sea life, as expected.. And the Ice Zone which is full of “@$%ing Snowflakes! All are brilliantly designed to mess up your spaceship.. Manoeuvring to avoid or buy time to engage a specifically effective weapon is the only way to evade crashing into a multitude of creatures and environmental hazards.

All Bosses are fixed solidly into their environment, and it’s definitely not a case of blasting every spiky crevice with lasers. Experiments are required to find out how to beat each boss, all the while you looking like a delicious appetizer from some giant toothy gaping maw. Everything needed to finish each battle is within your grasp, knowing what you have to do is half the trick, and sometimes it involves being closer than is comfortable to large and hungry shadow beasts.

The multiplayer feels like more of an after thought to be honest. It’s more of the same takes, only they generate a score and you benefit more from having the extra players to watch your back. However, if multiplayer is your thing, you’re gonna want some physical people to play Local with. Since I’ve seldom encountered another player in the online mode, it’s just not quite captivating enough to hold your attention.

Organic amazingness!

But unfairly, my major gripe with ITSP is its connection to Windows Live. I’m all for signing up to another service if I feel I’m going to get a lot of mileage out of it, however, I’m not personally a Live user. There’s utterly no benefit for me using this service except to link up ITSP’s multiplayer . But I’m more prone to playing these locally with friends than setting up and online match. Which suits me find because there’s seldom anyone else hooked up to the online multiplayer. Not only did I feel reluctant to have to sign up to Live after already purchasing it with Steam, it managed to link up with an Xbox Live account that I’ve never heard of and is certainly not mine. I can only apologise to this user and hope he / she appreciates whatever points I’ve given them while trying to formulate an opinion of the game. To give it credit, I’ve not actually received any junk mail from Windows Live, like I would have anticipated, and it hasn’t actually hindered my experience of the game. It only left me slightly bewildered. I may not be so reluctant to try this again when next encountered.

There may not be a lot original about ITSP, save for its painstakingly animated environments, but that doesn’t diminish its enjoyability. It takes a lot of common features that are fun in their own aspect and gathers them in one place to provide an entertaining, long-lived and challenging gaming experience.

GFG

~ Scribble

Indie Royale June Bug Bundle

Posted by :Meroka On : June 22, 2012
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Category: Action/Adventure, Indie Gaming, Puzzle, Reviews

Tags:, ,

Indie Royale are the guys bravely trying to play catchup to the overwhelming success of the Humble Bundles. The first real imitators on the scene, they’re easily dismissed as a rip-off attempting to cash in on Wolfire’s lucrative model. But that’s enough negativity; what they might lack in originality they make up for in quality. Where Wolfire usually have the bigger-name indie titles, Indie Royale cater more to titles you likely won’t have heard of, but that doesn’t make them any less worth your while.

The current bundle available is the June Bug Bundle, consisting of  PixelJunk Eden, Escape Goat, Noitu Love 2: Devolution, and Auditorium. Thrown in as extras for those prepared to pay a little more than the minimum are the Escape Goat soundtrack and an updated alpha version of Iconoclasts.

The first title, PixelJunk Eden, by Q-Games is only available for Steam (well, you can buy it on PSN but you won’t get that in this bundle) which might be a turn-off for some, but I’d wager the majority of PC gamers have embraced the platform by now. An entertaining and arty title, you play as a small critter called a Grimp, a portmanteau of grip and jump, because those are primarily what it does. Jumping around highly stylised gardens, and gripping to the plants therein, you defeat enemies to earn pollen, which will grow more plants for you to climb in search of items known as Spectra which are described as a “fusion of light and sound”. Collecting these will grow plants in the hub world of Eden unlocking new gardens to explore. If there’s a goal beyond fully exploring all the worlds and growing all the plants, I haven’t found it, but it doesn’t need it. The gameplay is both relaxing and addicting with a techno soundtrack that complements it well. The gardens are a visual treat, vibrantly coloured but usually monochromatic with every level focused on a different colour. The plants too are beautifully styled making exploration very rewarding. It’s not as fleshed out as a bigger title might be, but for a quick casual game I can’t recommend it enough.

Escape Goat makes its début in this bundle. Launching primarily on Desura, one gets the impression its inclusion is there to sell the platform (unsurprising as the guys who run Indie Royale also run Desura) but for those unsold on the platform a DRM-free version for windows is included. A pixel art puzzle platformer, Escape Goat sees a purple goat locked away in a dungeon for the crime of witchcraft. Quickly teaming up with a mouse who is also eager to escape, the dynamic duo set out reclaim their freedom. You find a sheep who informs you that eight of his brethren are also trapped down there and only once all nine are reunited can you all make your escape together. It’s standard jumping, timing and pressing switch puzzles for the most part, with a few extra mechanics thrown in courtesy of your magical mouse friend. The controls default to a Japanese format (zxcv and arrows instead of wasd), which is something that will forever irk me, but that’s a personal gripe and they can be rebound so it’s not worth losing sleep over. All in all, it’s not the most original of concepts (outside the quirky character choices) but still a fun title that will keep you occupied for a while.

Noitu Love 2: Devolution by Joakim Sandberg recently made its début on Steam but Desura and DRM free windows versions are also available in the bundle. It’s a fast-paced, pixel art styled, old-school beat-em-up/platformer. To me, it feels a lot like the old Rocket Knight/Sparkster titles, and that’s no bad thing. You play Xoda Rap, a ponytailed ninja girl in a green hoodie and star of the Peacekeepers League. Your city comes under attack by a robot army and you set off to defeat its leader, Darnicus Damnation. Utilising a variety of ninja abilities you must fight through swathes of enemies, interrupted periodically to fight a boss. The bosses range from robotic dragons to giant armed steam trains to rival ninjas and are all a lot of fun to fight, each requiring different techniques to effectively dispatch. Learning the techniques necessary is half the fun and you’ll routinely get your ass handed to you until you figure out the ropes of each fight. Alas, the game is disappointingly short for a single play through, but harder game modes and scoreboards for each level make for extra replay value for those who want to be challenged or who are more competitive. As part of an extremely affordable bundle though, it’s very hard to find fault with.

Last but not least, Auditorium by Cipher Prime Studios, available for both windows and mac in Steam and DRM free versions as well as a Desura version. A phenomenally simplistic game, you start with a stream of coloured particles, and by placing a few orbs which exert a force on particles passing nearby attempt to direct the particles to the destination of corresponding colour. Each time a particle hits its goal it will play a note. If the goal is hit frequently enough a small looping tune will form. If all the goals are hit enough the full piece of music will be revealed. It’s tremendously pretty, but often frustratingly hard. On more than a few occasions I’ve finished levels by waving the force fields around fast enough, but it does leave one with the feeling of “that was totally not how I was supposed to do that”. A nice casual game, it’s great as part of this bundle, but lacking any real depth I feel it might struggle to stand alone.

As an extra bonus the updated alpha version of Joakim Sandberg’s Iconoclasts has been included. As an alpha, it’s probably pretty unfair to critique it, so I’ll let you enjoy it as the surprise bonus content that it is.

For the asking price (£3.21 minimum at time of writing) this is an astonishingly good value bundle. Noitu Love 2 alone typically retails for £3.99 and would be more than worth it. To add to it a very solid puzzle game and a couple of artistic casual games makes it a must-have. Do yourself a favour and buy the Indie Royale June Bug Bundle.

Spiral Knights: Free to P(l)ay.

Posted by :Scribble On : June 12, 2012
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Category: Action/Adventure, Free2Play, Indie Gaming, Reviews

Following on from Meroka’s encouraging article regarding the stigma surrounding Free-to-Play gaming, here’s why you should be giving Spiral Knights a try!

With a massive rise in Free-to-Play games it’s difficult for individuals to stand out, be long-lived and become profitable for the developers. So what makes a good Free-to-Play game? Accessibility, the chance to earn all content in the game without spending a real life penny. Community, a structure that allows players to interact, socialize and work together. Value, because if you are spending money to enhance you game play experience, it’d best be worth it. And new content, lots and lots of new content. Keeping players interested and involved in-game makes it more likely for the developers to generate more money from their customers. and because doing the same thing over and over again just gets boring.

Spiral Knights has been running as a Free-to-Play MMO for over a year now, and as far as it goes I’ve managed to rack up roughly £50 of spending in it over that time. And I can honestly say I feel like I got my money’s worth. Why spend that much on a Free-to-Play game? Allow me to elaborate over the course of the article, make a cuppa’ if you like.

Boosh and or Ka-kow!

If you’ve not tried your hand at Spiral Knights before, the styling is rather cutesy in an androgynous kinda way. Your custom Knight and a community of others have crash landed on a mysterious construction known as the Clockworks. Stranded, but not the first adventures here, you’re tasked with finding out what happened to Alpha Squad and reach the Core to find the strange power source that could potentially get you and all the other Knights back home.
The aim of the game is to descend down through the Clockworks by way of elevators through twenty-nine levels of increasingly hardened monsters. You fight with various swords, guns and bombs. It’s generally quite a treat.

Your main source of currency are Crowns, you earn Crowns by killing monsters, smashing boxes and by selling minerals and materials. You can then use them to buy recipes and gear from Vendors or try the Auction House and see what other players are selling that might be interesting or useful to you.
Heat is the Spiral Knights equivalent of experience. But instead of levelling up your character, Heat is distributed evenly between all of your current equipment. The more equipment you need to level up, the longer it will take to complete all their levels.
Prestige is a reasonably new feature that ranks you and every other player in the game. The more missions you complete, the higher rank you are. This only really serves to stroke a players ego, but it’s all in good fun.

RAWR!

It’s well-known that a large aspect of every MMO is its community. The nice thing about Spiral Knights is it’s pretty difficult to be a dick, easy to be a beggar, but not so much a dick.. Largely the game isn’t PvP apart from it’s fantastically structured mini-games, so chances of some higher levelled character butchering you while you’re bidding for your favourite accessory is out of the question.
Spiral Knights encourages you to fight alongside other players on your adventures, the enemies might be harder, but mostly you gain more heat and coins by fighting in groups, which is all shared equally. There’s even benefits to reviving your downed team mates by stealing their heat to level up your own equipment.

Where Spiral Knights makes in money is in Energy. Players are given 100 free Mist Energy that fills itself up automatically over 24 hours. Players use can use Energy in several different ways as a secondary currency, mostly by using 10 to travel down each layer of the Clockworks. But it’s also used for unlocking extra sections within levels, reviving yourself if your team mates are unable and it’s also used for crafting, which will advance your equipment up into the next Tier.
On these alone it becomes clear that you’ll eventually need more than 100 Mist Energy to allow you to decend into the harder levels and craft better equipment. This is where Crystal Energy comes in. Wondrous, marvellous Crystal Energy. It can be bought in-game by a handy Trade system where by the players themselves decide how much the energy is worth in Crowns, or you can get your wallet out and buy the energy with your own hard-earned real life cash.

This is a great system because it means you get to decide how much you want to invest into the game play, as well as being massively accessible to anyone who doesn’t want to pay for their Five-Star equipment and get months worth of genuinely great game play.
Until the expansion, Operation Crimson Hammer, it was entirely possible to earn every scrap of content in the game by grafting hard and being smart and restrained with your free Mist Energy. Although it’d take you weeks to be able to afford the crafting recipes and Crystal Energy needed, you won’t have to pay a penny for it and you’ll be able to appreciate a game that actually has a lot of mileage in it. But then there’s always the option to spent a little money, it’s actually pretty reasonable, and give your characters equipment a much needed boost.

I’m just as poor as everyone else, don’t bother asking me for anything ;p

And what do you get for your money besides cool gear? Well, by supporting Three Rings and their developers it gives them the opportunity to regularly put updates into the game. Of course it’s in their best interest to keep the gamers happy so they spend more money. And they do it well. In the last year that I’ve been playing this game, it’s come a long way. There’s been all kinds of costumes, accessories, new quests, events, features, story content and improved functionality. Spiral Knights just gets better as it goes along. And it’s thanks to the customers that it continues to be a successful game.

Operation Crimson Hammer was launched on February 29th of this year as an optional DLC. Being a big fan I had to try it. It came with a five new levels in different difficulties as well as exclusive gear at a price of £3.99. I have to say I wasn’t impressed, the new gear looks nice, I liked the new boss fight. But I don’t believe it was worth launching it as a separate add on at cost to the players. Especially when Spiral Knights have launched similar content in the past for free that I felt was inclusive and useful to alot of players. Not only did this restrict players that were unable to purchase the DLC online, it stopped players who already had the DLC from putting the exclusive items in the Auction House for other Knights to buy. Bad form.
I realize that the cost is trivial to most, but I’d use the same wording to describe the new content in the DLC. Not enough new enemies, no innovative or challenging objectives, just more of the same. It’s just not worth it.

Despite this, to say I got a 395 hours worth of enjoyment out of Spiral Knights over the last year, as apposed to maybe the two or three days I’d get from a big console title. Yes, I’m content with thinking I got my money’s worth, while supporting Three Rings.

Free to Play on Steam here, and by no means buy the DLC here.

GFG

~Scribble

Free2Play Spotlight: Moon Breakers

Posted by :Meroka On : May 30, 2012
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Category: Free2Play, Indie Gaming, Shooter

My last Spotlight showcased Super Monday Night Combat. Uber Entertainment return this time in a publishing role, playing host to Imba Entertainment’s Moon Breakers. A company I’ve been able to find precious little information on, the game shares a number of credits with those of SMNC which, in addition to the naming similarities, leaves me wondering if they aren’t in whole or in part the same guys.

That’s an aside though. Irrespective of who actually made it, it’s available now on Steam and Chrome and it’s free to all who would partake, so that means it’s up to me to poke it with the review stick.

Moon Breakers is a space-based dogfighter with a WWII-era dieselpunk aesthetic. In layman’s terms, you fly in around spaceships that look like old planes shooting each other. In its genre there’s not a great deal to compare it against. Back on the N64 there was a Star Wars game called Rogue Squadron. Aside from its later Gamecube sequels it’s really the only similar game I can think of (I guess there was half of a level in Halo Reach, too). It feels like an apt comparison anyway, because it does feel very similar in terms of gameplay.

Pew Pew!

Your basic ship is armed with laser blasters and missiles. These are both projectile weapons and all your targets will be zipping about in three dimensions so you’ll need to get good at leading your targets with your shots quickly. Games consist of 32 players, 16-a-side with one team representing the government and the other being space pirates. Matches are your standard online multiplayer fare of team deathmatch, capture the flag and the like. Your justification for the conflict is the old SF trope of fighting over Helium-3, which is as good a reason as any.

Moon Breakers is straightforward enough to just jump in and get into the action quickly, but it feels like there’s a lot more to the combat that can only really be learned through experience. Dodging a hail of fire not only from the enemies but also from the numerous mounted cannons on the enemy’s flagship is as tricky a business as hitting things flying through space in the first place. Arenas take the form of an array of interesting asteroid fields, including one looking very much like a shattered moon. Aside from looking impressive these can be used tactically to take shelter from enemy fire or just as cover to try to slip through to the enemy base undetected. These are just my first impressions, too, I’d be quite confident in saying the more experienced players probably know a few more interesting tricks that haven’t even occurred to me.

That's no moon! Okay, I guess it was once.

After a game you will receive ‘creds’ depending on your performance. I’ve received anything up to 3000 creds from a game but a better performance would probably net you more still. This rate of return is good for buying cheap upgrades to your ship but unfortunately saving up for a new, better ship will set you back anywhere from 180,000 to 3,000,000 creds. A bit of quick mental arithmetic and I get an estimate of 15 hours of gameplay, in which I perform well every match, just to unlock the single cheapest ship. By extension, that big one? 250 hours! You can probably see where this is going. Cred boosters can of course be purchased using your real money offering up to 10x return on the payout each game. That valuable He-3 you were fighting over? It turns out that you can just buy it with a credit card. $2 will net you 350 units of He-3 with, as usual, price breaks at higher quantities, and then that He-3 can be used as an alternative currency to buy ships. To put it in perspective, that 3,000,000 cred ship is instead 7500 He-3 and will set you back $38; the cheapest would work out at under $4.

So then how free is it? Technically, there’s nothing in Moon Breakers that is locked to free players. I stress the word ‘technically’ because it is such a colossal grind to unlock anything at all without spending any real money that it may as well be locked. It’s a shame then that after working so closely with the UberEnt guys they didn’t learn anything useful from SMNC’s pricing structure.

Stuck between a rock and... another rock.

As a game, it’s solid. There’s plenty of fun to be had in spaceships, more so taking down enemy flagships, Death Star style. For me it’s a lot more enjoyable played casually, just cruising around not playing for keeps. If you’re determined to be the best of the best though, you will either have a long grind ahead of you or be prepared to open your wallet.

Moon Breakers by Imba Entertainment is available for free now on Steam and Chrome

GLHF

~Meroka

The Dream Machine, Claymation Goodness.

Posted by :Scribble On : May 29, 2012
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Category: Indie Gaming, Point and Click, Puzzle, Reviews

Another arty point and click adventure? Ah, gw’on then.. Last one for a while I swear. Here’s a beaut’ from Cockroach Inc.

The Dream Machine is a clay and cardboard styled piece of animated game cake. Some that played video games in the 90’s will recognise the rare style, familiar with other titles like Neverhood and ClayFighter 63â…“.

Mr. Victor Neff and his hormonal pregnant wife have just moved into their first apartment together, and they’re both having weird dreams. This story explores the realm of the unconscious, specifically the dreams of all the tenants in Victor’s building. And the plot device that facilitates this bizarre story? A sentient machine in the basement that feeds on the dreams of the people around it. Victor must face this machine in its own realm to save his fellow tenants and his wife from becoming comatose, and an easy meal for the machine.

The dreams conjured up in the minds of the tenants are gorgeously crafted in equal parts morbid and magic. Advertising for the game generally makes a big deal about how it’s only made of clay and cardboard, and for good reason. There’s a lot of very skilled craftsmanship involved in the making of smoothly rendered claymation, which is quite likely why there are so few claymation games in existence. But given the nature of indie games, having to create games that stand out from the big sellers, it really brings this game into its own league.

I totally don't feel violated at all..

There’s a lot of dialogue in this game, but no voice acting. Being a fan of great voice acting I feel let down that I have to read such text heavy puzzles. I’m not entirely lazy, but having to read through all the text kinda diminished the games re-playability. Exploring the game for the first time gives you a great opportunity to enquire and learn about the different characters, but I wouldn’t want to have to go through this mountain of text a second time knowing the answer to each puzzle but having to blunder through a lot of reading. Though this is a minor criticism in full view of a great piece of art.

Amazingly though, there’s only two devs working on this game, Anders Gustafsson & Erik Zaring, who between them create the sets & characters and program in the animations & mechanics. With some very generous and credited help, Gustafsson and Zaring have revived a redundant and challenging game format and turned it into a mysterious and sometimes disturbing tale.

Just, awesome..

Currently, only three out of the five chapters of the game have been completed. So for the time being this is a game to invest in. You can buy individual chapters separately, though both chapters one and two come together on Steam. Or you can buy all five as a bundle so that your collection becomes complete as soon as the newest chapters become available, and you save a bit of money.
The first two chapters on their own are regrettably short. But I find this forgivable given that as the rest of the game is still under development and it’s not yet finished. I will hastily point out that the third chapter is significantly improved, both in puzzle mechanics and in style. So once all five chapters become available, you’ll find the game is just as long as any other, but twice as enjoyable for its unique visual perspective. Plus you can be very assured that the quality of game can only get better as new chapters are released.

I’ll be eagerly returning to this game once it’s complete.

Available on Steam here, or if you want to support Cockroach Inc. directly, here. But by all means, there’s a demo on both sites, you don’t need to take my word for how awesome The Dream Machine is.

GFG

~ Scribble

Botanicula, Terry Gilliam would be proud.

Posted by :Scribble On : May 22, 2012
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Category: Action/Adventure, Indie Gaming, Point and Click, Puzzle, Reviews

Tags:, , ,

After reviewing Machinarium a few months back, I felt such an affinity with the style that I was compelled to check out what other works of wonder Amanita Design had previously come up with. And not only did I find a back log of creative gorgeousness, I also prepared myself for their newest release, Botanicula.
But not before trying out the free to play samples on their website. Here I first tried Samorost, a free point and explore game from 2003. From here it’s easy to see where the grass-roots of Machinarium and Botanicula were formed. Even in AD’s early stages as developers, they managed to graft together a scrumptiously unique world. Splicing stock images of organic wood textures, aged gears and valves, overlaid with hand drawn interactables and characters.
Although painfully short and in some areas lacking resolution, Samorost set a nice benchmark for its sequel Samorost 2. You can also play the first chapter of this game for free here, well worth a try.

And now AD pitches its newest characters into a beautifully unforgiving world of tiny point and click adventures. Mr. Lantern, Mr. Twig, Mr. Poppy Head, Mr. Feather and Mrs. Mushroom, a loveable bunch. Set on an adventure to safeguard the last seed of their home tree and to stop the corruption of an evil parasite that’s spreading through their world.

Friend??

I tripped six kinds of balls playing this game. Be prepared for nothing to make any kind of sense, and to be able to make a lot of seemingly wrong and pointless interactions, with amusing sound effects.. Botanicula takes puzzle solving to a new level by making your goals simple, but how to achieve them very difficult to understand. You’ll be asked to find keys, turkeys, conker babies and a host of other bizarre objects, even where to use them becomes very obvious. But how to obtain said objects.. Utterly incomprehensible and very trial and error based.
Unlike Machinarium, you engage more with your surroundings, hovering and dragging some objects as opposed to just clicking and consuming them. And when most of your environment reacts to your cursor, it becomes challenging to know just where to start, so click, drag and hover over EVERYTHING!
Also unlike Machinarium, you’ll not be given any kind of in-game hints to decipher the cryptic tasks at hand. But cleverly, all interactions count for something in the grand scheme. Throughout the game you’ll be presented with cards for every creature you successfully interact with. And with one hundred and twenty-three cards, you can tell there’s an impressive amount of character design gone into this game. And the more you collect, the more prizes you’ll be presented on completion of the game.

I WANT ONE! O_Õ

Botanicula is just so endearing! The seer amount of immersion you can have with this game, coupled with a multitude of strange and wonderful characters really gives Botanicula a charm that quickly dissipates the frustration of not knowing where you should be going or how to find what you should be looking for. And instead flips it into curiosity.
The map feature, coupled with basic symbols that roughly sum up what goes on in each map section will quite easily guide you through the twisting maze of branches, roots and general foliage. Without this it would quickly become confusing navigating from place to place. Becoming accustomed to the set up is very easy, it even gets relaxing to play through once you’ve begun to understand the inner workings and methods of the game.

The critters you’ll meet all through your journey have their own little duties to perform, helpful, hindering or just for their own amusement. Constantly check what unique items you’ve procured on your travels, eggs, beach balls, idols, worms, they’re all useful in one way or another and as a bit of a hint, you’ll only be able to drag them off the tool bar once you’ve entered the right scene you need to use them in.

I just don't understand!

Something I’m very glad AD changed about the game play is the speed at which the characters move. Guiding Josef on his journey through Machinarium was at times frustratingly slow. But these critters move very quickly across the map, allowing you to explore much faster.. Easing the irritation caused by not know where you need to be and what exactly you should be doing.

It has the tell-tale flare of AD’s masterful blending of textures, but with a much brighter and cheery atmosphere than its predecessors. Even after a quick play through you’ll come to appreciate the effort AD’s small team of graphic designers have put into yet another master piece. These games really are an art form, akin to something cooked up in the mind of Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam and his legendary cut-out animations.

With this much raw talent for story telling without conventional verbal means, it’s difficult not to get drawn into the plot. Another game well done.

You can view trailers and buy Botanicula on Steam here, or direct from Amanita Design’s website here.

Look out for Samorost 3!

GFG

~Scribble

Free2Play Spotlight: Super Monday Night Combat

Posted by :Meroka On : May 3, 2012
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Category: Free2Play, Indie Gaming, Shooter, Strategy

I’m not gonna lie, I’ve been back and forth on this, debating whether to review Super Monday Night Combat or not. I’m biased. Well, I feel biased. It’s not like I work for Uber Entertainment, or even that they’re paying us for advertising or sponsorship. I’m not even a prominent enough player to be one of the lucky chosen few to go to PAX as one of Uber’s exhibitors. But goddamn do I love me some Monday Night Combat. So take the following with a pinch, nay an entire shaker of salt.

Monday Night Combat started out as a DOTA-style class-based shooter on the Xbox Live Arcade. Somewhat successful, it was ported across to PC on Steam. As predominantly multiplayer games with smaller marketing budgets – and by extension fanbases – than things like Call of Duty tend to do, the game’s community dwindled. It disappeared off the radar for some time until PAX prime last year with the announcement of Super Monday Night Combat. And that’s what we’re here to throw our free2play spotlight on!

Let’s start at the beginning. I wrote about DOTA not so long ago, so I won’t go into the fundamentals again. It’s a class-based third person shooter. Being a free shooter is relatively new territory to begin with, so kudos for pioneering, there. Whereas the original MNC had 6 classes and they all played to greater or lesser extent like TF2 classes, SMNC ups that to 15 at launch and there’s a lot of crazy stuff going on with them. Notable newcomers include Cheston, the tommy gun-toting gorilla thespian who throws barrels like Donkey Kong; Captain Spark, the superhero raised and trained in martial arts by hyperintelligent electric mer-eels; Karl, a reconnaissance cyborg programmed by his upper class creators to believe he is human, with a monocle and moustache to match; and unveiled at PAX East, Leonardo freaking da Vinci, cloned from the DNA extracted from a fingerprint found on a sketch of a badger-powered military tank (to save on war elephants). Enough said, I suspect.

For anyone still in any doubt, the whole game is just as over the top. Set in the not too distant future in a heavily capitalistic state (MNC implied totalitarian too, though there is less allusion to this in SMNC) you’re fighting primarily for the purpose of televised entertainment. Money acts as experience and money will buy you many advantages, from traps to healing and buffs to additional bots (the DOTA creeps). Bullseye, the MNC mascot will appear periodically and shooting him will make him drop money and prizes. Chickey Cantor, a giant cyborg chicken, will appear later on to fight players and defeating him will reward the entire team with a variety of buffs. Oh, and bacon is the most powerful powerup in the game. The whole affair is tied together with commentary from two charismatic hosts, GG Stack and Chip Valvano. Some lamented the loss of Mickey Cantor from MNC. Oh hell, I lamented the loss of Mickey Cantor, but it didn’t take long for these new personalities to grow on me. Clearly the product of the same excellent writing, the voice acting may be different but the dialogue is just as hilarious as their predecessor’s.

The game’s been in beta for about 7 months now, so testing and balancing has been extensive and it’s come out of it well. Sure, some classes will always be strong against others, but that’s just how class-based games tend to work. There are plenty of moves that will undoubtedly be called “cheap”, but nothing you can’t avoid if you know what to look out for. On the whole combat is considerably less lethal than pretty much all other shooters on the market so tactics and teamwork will give you a much-needed advantage and you can stay alive more if you don’t run in alone. Of course, some classes work better that way but you’re still going to struggle to take on a crowd by yourself.

The one critical question, I suppose is “how free is it?”. Quite free. Out of the 15 pros (characters) 6 or 7 will be available to play for free each week. The others can be unlocked permanently for a fee. Most pros are $1.99 and a few of the pros demanding more skill to play are $7.49. After each match, you’ll be awarded with “combat credits” and if you save up enough of these you can buy pros with these without ever having to open your wallet. Really, the only things you’ll find with only a real money price tag on are cosmetic items, ranging from $1.99 for reskins to $14.99 for the really cool stuff. You can sometimes get these after games in a similar fashion to TF2’s random drops, too. Obviously if you have your heart set on the cool demon wings specifically you could be waiting a while, but hey, you wouldn’t be prepared to pay if it were so easy, right? There’s also combat credit and experience boosters to purchase, but as is fortunately becoming the popular trend, they have no actual impact on games themselves, only serving to help you unlock new stuff faster. Personally I’ve bought a few of my favourite pros and a new outfit for my main, the Assassin. About £20 in all, I reckon and half of that was on cosmetics. But I’ve sunk a lot of time into this game and will continue to do so, so I feel like that’s not an unreasonable price tag for the entertainment.

So that’s Super Monday Night Combat. If you’re looking for something new to play and you’re strapped for cash you could do far worse than SMNC. I’m not sure you could do much better, either. I don’t know why you’re still reading; I mean, it’s free to go and have a look, isn’t it?

Super Monday Night Combat is totally free on Steam on PC.

GLHF,

~Meroka