The Several Journeys of Reemus: Chapter 1

The somewhat-confusingly named The Several Journeys of Reemus: Chapter 1 is, despite the "1" in the title, a sequel to the original The Several Journeys of Reemus (review here); apparently, they've decided to adopt the Half-Life 2 method of naming. (In all fairness, The Several Journeys of Reemus did bill itself as "Prologue", but you still get the feeling that this could have been handled more simply.)

Anyway, there's really not too much to say about Chapter 1, since it's pretty much identical to its predecessor -- it's your standard point-and-click adventure game. The puzzles are clever, but since they're always confined to a single screen, most of their difficulty stems from the struggle in trying to find the objects on that screen which can be manipulated, rather than complex interactions among the various items. This a little frustrating, at times, but the puzzles all make sense when you solve them; there's none of the "and why did that work, anyway?" feeling that you can get when playing poorer examples of the genre.

Unlike its predecessor, Chapter 1 is not big on killing you -- in fact, I don't think there's any point when you can actually manage to get yourself killed -- you just end up stuck until you figure out what you need to do. This is definitely a step forward. Like its predecessor, there are two endings, one of which is a great deal trickier than the other; fortunately, once you've finished the game, you can go back and replay any scene that you want, so you don't have to go through the whole game just to retry the last scene (not that it would take particularly long anyway).

The graphics are still very cartoony, and a little crudely animated, but it's a good, distinctive look (although, like other Zeebarf games, it can get a little graphic with the violence at points). The music varies from scene to scene, which is very nice -- some of the tunes are good, but some will drive you crazy after a little while (especially if you happen to be stuck on the puzzle).

Anyway, overall this is an enjoyable experience, and Zeebarf does do a good job crafting puzzles within the limitations of Flash, but this isn't a game which will leave me breathlessly awaiting Chapter 2. But I will be happy to play it when it does come out.

First, a general announcement. I've been trying to post reviews at the rate of one per day. Now, obviously, I don't actually finish one Kongregate game per day; rather, since I started playing Kongregate before I started writing these, I had a buffer to start with. Now, however, I've caught up, so I'll start writing a review when I finish a game. The advantage is that I can write the reviews quicker, since the game will still be fresh in my mind and I won't have to go back and replay it. The downside is, of course, that I won't be posting these every day. Anyway, on to today's review.

SandStorm Racing

Sandstorm Racing is, as you might be able to guess from the name, a racing game. As you might also be able to guess from the name, you're racing on sand, which means you'll be drifting like crazy. If you're already familiar with racing games which require a lot of drifting, then you'll be in good shape, but if not, you'll probably have a bit of an adjustment period. Sandstorm Racing is no Gran Turismo, though, so even if you're totally unfamiliar with the concept you should be able to win races in very little time. After all, the controls are only the four arrow keys, so that should give you an idea of how simple the game is.

The game features eight courses (plus one tutorial course), and you can play a given race (once it's been unlocked) as much as you want. In each race, you'll race usually two laps against five computer opponents. You get credits based on your finish, and finishing first or second (or possibly third? I don't think I ever finished exactly third) will unlock the next course. Credits can be used to upgrade your car, although it's not a matter of buying specific parts -- you just pay a number of credits and your car gets better, and that's that. Unfortunately, if you win a race on your first try, you won't get enough credits to upgrade your car, so you'll probably get slaughtered if you try the next race, so you'll have to repeat the race to get more credits.

The one particularly frustrating thing about the game is that, while there is a path marked, you don't have to stay on the path. Indeed, cutting corners is a very important strategy for victory. However, it's not really clear just how far you can stray from the path before your progress no longer registers, and even if you do reach this point, it's possible to go a long, long way before you get reset and put back on the track where you left. This can be very annoying -- you can be sailing along and doing great, and then just drift off the path a little bit, and by the time you've recovered, you're suddenly behind everyone.

The graphics are pretty simple, and there's no music (except during the level select screen, where it's exceedingly annoying very quickly), only the screech of tires and the occasional bump when a couple of cars collide. Overall, this is a cute little game, and it's definitely fast-paced enough that you won't have to spend a lot of time to completely beat it, but it just lacks the depth to make it interesting enough so that you'd want to come back to it after finishing.

The Necronomicon

The Necronomicon is a fairly simple card game based, as you might expect, on the works of H.P. Lovecraft. It does an excellent job of making a sufficiently spooky game -- so good that you can even overlook the occasionally annoying mechanics.

The basics of the game are quite straightforward. You have a hand of five cards, and on your turn you play (or, rarely, discard) one and then draw one. Each player has a given amount of life (the starting amount of life is 40 at the beginning, but rises gradually over the course of the game), and the object is to reduce your opponent's to zero before your own does the same. Cards fulfill the general range of functions -- attack your enemy, defend or heal yourself, and so forth. Creatures do exist, but they don't behave like they do in, say, Magic -- if you summon a creature (and you may only have one in play; summoning another will simply replace your existing creature), it won't attack on its own; rather, it will counterattack whenever your enemy does damage to you. (A creature also can absorb damage from your opponent's creature, when it is activated.) This means that creatures are really not that useful overall. There are four other attributes in play. Two are Elder Defense and Arcane Power, which reduce the amount of damage taken and increase the amont of damage done by your spells, respectively. There are a fair number of cards which increase these, but there are also lots of cards which let you zap your opponent's power or defense, so don't get too attached to them. The third is Taint, which acts as poison -- it does its damage every round. Taint can be useful in the early games when characters don't start out with much life, but in the later rounds it doesn't really have enough time to do too much damage. (It also can never finish off a player -- it disappears when a player is reduced to 1 life.) The final, and most intriguing, element is your sanity. Most cards cost sanity to deploy -- in general, the more powerful and arcane the forces you're summoning, the greater the sanity cost. A few sanity-restoring cards exist, and if you discard a card, you recover an amount of sanity equal to its cost. Still, you will generally find your sanity gradually slipping away over the course of the battle. Should your sanity go to zero, you go insane. Going insane brings you one of a variety of delightful effects; these effects will generally hinder your ability to win your struggle, though they certainly do not prevent it. The pool of cards is not particularly large -- there's 36 different cards (not all of which are present at the beginning); it's not clear whether your deck contains these in differing numbers, or if there's just a certain random chance every time, though at least anecdotally some cards seem to come up more frequently than others.

While there is some strategy involved (as evidenced by the fact that the AI isn't very good at it), the game often does boil down to drawing the right card at the right time, which can be frustrating. There are two modes of play: in the main mode, you must defeat 30 enemies of gradually increasing power. Fortunately, as you defeat the enemies, your own power also increases depending on how well you do. As a result, it's often a better strategy to lose rather than eke out a close victory, since the latter will give you very few points and can leave you at a disadvantage in your next battle, while trying again to get a more overwhelming win can give you a chance to go up a rank and maybe even two, giving you an advantage. The challenge mode features 21 different challenges where the rules of the game have been altered, sometimes subtly, often grossly, and always in favor of your opponent. The challenges range from entertainingly challenging to extremely frustrating, and here especially you can see just how much the game depends on random chance. To illustrate how tooth-grinding this can be, in one challenge, you have a stipulation that you lose if you go insane. However, the opponent has in his deck a card which makes you instantly go insane. So, if this card comes up, regardless of how well or poorly you might have been doing, it's an instant loss! This gets pretty tiring pretty quickly.

Atmospherically, though, the game is fantastic. The graphics are excellent, the background music lends just the right air of eeriness to the proceedings, the sound effects, although very understated, also fit in perfectly with the game; even the typography has just the right feel. Alas, the game does have to make a few compromises -- since it can't show all five of the cards in your hand in their lovely detail, for instance, you instead have to click on a card to magnify it and then click on the Necronomicon to actually play it, which gets a little clunky once you've reached the point where you do know what every card does.

Anyway, overall this is a well-crafted game, but unfortunately it's a little bit too long -- you will undoubtedly find yourself frustrated by the randomness more than once during the course of the game (and even more should you attempt all of the challenges, though at least you can get an impossible badge for it). Still, the game environment is good enough that you can still enjoy it, if you don't mind a little bit of creepiness.

Battalion: Nemesis

Battalion: Nemesis is not a game which is particularly coy about its origins. Indeed, the designer is quite upfront that he wanted to design a game which was very much like Advance Wars, and would hopefully improve upon it. I also enjoyed Advance Wars 2 very much, so I went in expecting to enjoy Battalion: Nemesis. While Battalion: Nemesis does deliver the fast-paced turn-based strategy action I expected, it sadly falls a little short of Advance Wars in the final analysis.

If you've played Advance Wars, you should be able to hop right in (with only a few aggravating differences to get used to); if you haven't, here's what to expect. Battalion: Nemesis is a simple turn-based strategy game, where you battle the enemy on land, at sea, and in the air with a variety of units, spanning pretty much what you would expect: some infantry, some tanks, some artillery, subs, battleships, fighters, bombers, and so forth. Most units are direct-fire units, which move next to an enemy and then attack them, after which the enemy (if it still exists) can return fire. Some units are indirect-fire units, which can attack enemies from a distance, but cannot fire and move in the same turn. Scattered across the map are oil refineries, which produce money, and factories, which produce different types of units; only infantry units (which are weak) can capture these properties, so careful coordination is required in a successful attack.

If you have played Advance Wars, you'll notice some differences right off. Many of these are simplifications: for instance, all logistic considerations (fuel and ammo) have been removed. This removes a dimension that many people find annoying, but I think is an important aspect of the game. Air power (possibly to compensate for the preceding) has been severely reduced; bombers especially are no longer close to the map-dominators they are in Advance Wars. (The elimination of fuel, though, is a great help to subs, which can now remain submerged full-time.) The COs have been eliminated, which I think is kind of a disappointment, since they're a nice touch. A bunch of unit types have been eliminated or their functions consolidated into other units, which results in a simplified but awfully sparse unit tree. There's no Fog of War, which I don't mind, since I never really liked it, although in the campaign the enemy will field stealth tanks against you (I guess they got them surplus from the Brotherhood of Nod). Finally, transport has also been simplified -- rather than requiring separate units, you can just summon a sea transport or air transport (at a cost) which will instantly appear to transport your unit. There are only a few things which aren't in Advance Wars -- there exist sea oil refineries, too, which can be captured by a new type of sea unit, there's (finally!) a sea unit which can engage in direct combat with other sea units, and you can repair units in the field rather than retreating to a city (properties don't, in fact, repair units any more). The most frustrating change, though, is that instead of moving a unit and then picking a target to attack (or undoing the move if you desire), as you do in Advance Wars, you move and attack all in one fell swoop. This resulted in a lot of missed moves for me, exacerbated by the fact that you can't undo. Probably this is less of a problem if you're not used to the Advance Wars format.

All of this combines to give the game an Advance Wars-lite feel, and the campaign just doesn't have the same sweep and scale that Advance Wars does. There's only ten missions in the campaign (plus six "boot camp" training missions and one bonus map), and since the first few of these are pretty easy, there's just not a lot of meat. Even in the later missions, the maps are still relatively small and often feel kind of cramped. (They do still take a while, though, especially since the AI runs really slowly on some of the last few missions -- sometimes it would take on the order of several minutes for the computer to move, which was really annoying.) All in all, the units just don't quite work as well together as in Advance Wars -- I found it more difficult to mount a good, large-scale assault. Maybe it's just because I didn't bother to learn the ins and outs of the different unit types as carefully (and there are a lot more things to keep track of), but it just doesn't feel quite as well-balanced as Advance Wars.

The graphics are not bad, employing the same slightly cartoony style as Advance Wars, although there aren't any combat animations -- just a "pow!" and a health bar decreasing, and then the same on the other side. The sound effects are not bad; at least they're nicely varied among the units. The music is decent -- there's not the variety that you see in Advance Wars, but at least you and the enemy have separate snippets to keep you from getting too bored.

In case it wasn't evident, I am a huge fan of Advance Wars, so there's no shame in falling slightly short of the target. And it may be simply a reflection of my familiarity with Advance Wars that I tend to favor it in the areas where it differs from Battalion: Nemesis. I did enjoy Battalion: Nemesis when I played it; it's just that it ends up being not quite as great as Advance Wars.

Vector Runner

Vector Runner is pretty much your classic dodger. You pilot some kind of squarish vehicle through a neverending path filled with pyramids, all rendered with the vector graphics technology that was new and exciting in 1980. Your craft can survive three hits; along the way, you can also pick up various cubes which give you points, temporary invincibility, or a shield recharge.

Um, that's pretty much all there is to say about the gameplay. The graphics are undeniably stylish, and the animation is very smooth, but this comes at a price -- unlike your typical Flash action game which is easier on slower computers, Vector Runner is best played on a faster computer -- on a slower computer, the controls become very mushy and the precision steering you need to survive just isn't attainable. The sounds fit the game well, and the music is excellent -- I especially like the way it shifts when you move into different zones of the track.

While this is a well-executed game, it's still just a dodger with nothing beyond the basic formula, so it didn't really hold my interest for a long time. (Though there was an impossible badge to get, which kept me playing for a while.)

(Since I've gone this far without mentioning a Mac game, I need to rant. How is it that my 8 MHz Mac SE can play Spectre just fine, but my current machine, which is at least three and probably closer to four orders of magnitude more powerful, still slows down in Vector Runner every time it adds a message to the chat window? I mean, OK, Spectre had the full system resources available, while Vector Runner is running as a plugin in a web browser in a very complex operating system, but still!)

Starfighter: Disputed Galaxy

Starfighter: Disputed Galaxy is another game by Ben Olding, creator of Achilles (review here; actually, Starfighter predates Achilles by quite a bit, but that's the order in which I played them), but the two games have essentially nothing in common -- unlike, say, a jmtb02 game, which you can pretty instantly recognize as a jmtb02 game regardless of what the game might actually be about, you'd never tell they were by the same person.

Well, enough about what Starfighter isn't, and perhaps a little more about what it is. Starfighter: Disputed Galaxy is a large-scale top-view 2D space action game, much in the tradition of classic games like Escape Velocity. You start out as a relatively minor participant in the apparently endless war between humans and aliens, flying missions throughout the galaxy and destroying enemies, which earns you money to buy more powerful weapons and ships. But, to be honest, I found myself comparing the game to Escape Velocity a lot of the time, and it definitely suffered from the comparison.

In Starfighter, the galaxy is divided into a 20x20 map of sectors. At the beginning of the game, you pick a faction to be allied with, and you will fight on that side forevermore; the factions are, functionally speaking, pretty much equivalent, so you're not going to be missing out on much regardless of which side you pick. The galaxy is, conveniently, linearly divided: the degree of human control ranges from 1 at the bottom row of the galaxy to 0 at the top row, and vice-versa for the aliens. At the beginning of the game, you'll tend to hang out at the bottom (or top), but as you get more powerful, you'll move closer to the middle. (Spending a prolonged amount of time in enemy territory is difficult, though.) Each sector is pretty sizeable. Some sectors contain friendly space stations where you can buy new weapons and upgrades, or even buy a new ship. Your ship has a certain amount of energy and shields; the former can be used to recharge the latter, and both naturally recharge over time. Combat is pretty straightforward -- you can fire your primary weapon (a laser cannon, which takes your energy) or one of your secondary weapons (how many secondary weapons you can carry depends on your ship). Some secondary weapons have a limited ammunition supply (which replenishes when you cross a sector boundary or dock at a friendly station), while others take energy to fire. Your laser cannon is a dumb weapon, but many secondary weapons have automatic targeting and need to be locked onto a target before firing. Should you die, you respawn somewhere else in your sector with full health and weapons, but minus one life. The game gives you ten lives to start with, and should you manage to lose all of them, your account will be reset. You can always buy more lives at a friendly station, though, so really only extreme carelessness can result in this happening. Overall, I kind of like this mechanic.

While I generally love this genre of game (the Escape Velocity series is one of my favorite series of games of all time), Starfighter has a few flaws that readily become apparent. The first is that the universe is a relatively boring place. All space stations are the same -- they've got some weapons, they've got some missions (which are always randomly generated), and that's about it. There's no flavor to any of the missions or locations. All of the missions are basically the same -- either transport some stuff to another station, kill a number of an enemy ship type, or kill all enemies in a given sector. As you advance along the game, some more types of missions become available, but they're all basically cut from the same cloth. There's no particular overarching plot behind any of the missions, nor do they ever really change. In fact, there's no particular plot at all. You're just a human and you destroy aliens, or vice versa, and that's just the way it is.

The second problem is that getting around is kind of slow. A sector is large, and getting from one end of it to another can take a while, even if there aren't any enemies to slow you down. Getting from sector to sector, then, is even slower, since you have to fly across the entirety of a sector. You can buy hyperspace capability, but it costs a lot of money for a single charge, so it's not really profitable, especially if you're just doing a dinky courier mission anyway. (There does exist an engine upgrade which gives you free hyperspaces, which is very convenient, but it's extremely expensive, and it means you can't buy the other engine upgrades which speed up your intra-sector travel, so it definitely comes at a cost.) So, ultimately, you'll spend a lot of time flying through space with nothing in particular to do.

The third problem is that the combat isn't well-balanced. First of all, there just isn't that much differentiation in ship quality. In Escape Velocity (sorry for repeatedly mentioning EV, but it really is my gold standard here -- I promise this is the last time), when you get a capital ship, you can feel the difference. Here, though, even the supposedly weaker ships can take down the ostensibly most powerful enemies without too much difficulty, given a little bit of skill, patience, and luck. Also, the secondary weapons are not at all equal in power, and the enemies seem to have them randomly, so oftentimes a combat will not be anywhere near as difficult as you thought it was. This just kind of reduces the rewards of getting one of the bigger ships, especially since, as you might expect, the bigger ships are slower, thus exacerbating the second problem.

I would be remiss not to mention the multiplayer, since this is one of the big selling points of Starfighter: Disputed Galaxy. I like the approach to multiplayer very much -- it's very simple and elegant. Certain sectors are multiplayer sectors, where you can enter and fight against enemies played by other players. There are also co-op multiplayer sectors, where your allies are other players but the enemies are still computer players, as normal. This allows people to easily avoid the multiplayer, if they prefer a solitary experience, or seek it out if they want to test their skills, and I like the co-op option as well. Well, at least I do in theory. The one big asterisk is that multiplayer doesn't work with the latest version of Flash, so I didn't actually have a chance to try it out firsthand.

The graphics are OK -- each ship has a very distinctive look, which is definitely a nice feature, but they're all pretty flat and 2D. The sounds are pretty standard, too. There are several different snippets of music, which appear to play on different occasions (returning to a station, getting caught in an ambush, etc.); the music is definitely nice, but it's not continuous, so most of the game you'll be playing in silence (except for weapons firing).

Overall Starfighter is a well-crafted game, and it's clearly the work of a competent programmer (despite its complexity, the game always ran smoothly and glitch-free), but the environment just isn't interesting enough. The fact that the only way to progress in the game is to just go around and kill a lot of enemies, and you don't even get all that much interesting stuff for reaching the various thresholds of killing, means that reaching the requisite 801 kills to receive the badge is kind of a dreary slog. It would be a lot better if there were more of a plot and interesting variety in the galaxy, but as it stands, it's just a game with unrealized potential.

(Footnote: After playing Starfighter and thinking how much better EV was, I realized that I had never actually gotten EV Nova, the third installment in the series, so I went out and bought it and played it. It really was much better.)

Bot Arena 3

Every time I see a game involving battling robots, I secretly hope it'll be something like RoboWar or RoboSport, which are two of my favorite games of that type. And certainly it's not too difficult to envision a vastly-improved version of either. Sadly, Bot Arena 3, while not a bad game, is a bit disappointing, in that it doesn't quite live up to either of those two.

The basic premise of Bot Arena is very simple. In career mode, you build a team of bots -- each bot has a chassis, armor, and a weapon. (Technically the weapon is optional -- you can send out unarmed bots as decoys -- but in practice this is never a useful tactic.) Every armor and weapon has a weight, and every chassis has a certain maximum capacity, so you can't necessarily load up your robot with the best of everything. Once you've built your team, you can enter them in an event. Most events have a weight limit, so you can't just continuously upgrade your robots -- you have to pick and choose how best to build a team within the weight limit. (You can have as many or as few robots as you'd like on your team, as long as you're within the weight limit, but in general you tend to end up with two or three bots.) As you win matches, more parts become available to you, and you can enter the correspondingly higher-level matches. (Not all weapons are weapons; some repair tools are available also, which allows you to, at least theoretically, build a team of robots that works well together.) The shop interface is a little unwieldy at times -- it would be nice if you could just drag and drop parts rather than the somewhat complicated mounting/unmounting system.

Once in the arena, however, the bots are largely out of your hands. They have a very basic AI, which can be very frustrating at times (often, one bot will wander out of the conflict for no apparent reason, leaving the rest of your bots to get pounded on). You can also issue direct orders by either commanding your bot to move to a specific location or to follow a specific bot. However, this task requires pretty much all of your attention for a single bot, so you're leaving the rest of your bots up to the AI, and your bots don't even necessarily follow your orders particularly well. So while there is a fair amount of randomness, and you can slightly improve your odds (in theory) with good ordering, in the vast majority of cases, the outcome of the battle is decided even before it begins, by the outfitting of the bots. And since this is not a particularly difficult task once you get the hang of it, this kind of limits the ceiling of interestingness of the game. The game also offers a challenge mode, in which you and your opponent have preselected teams, and you have to lead your team to victory; this mostly serves to highlight the inadequacy and annoyingness of the in-arena controls.

The graphics are not bad, but they're pretty basic. There's a nice variety of sound effects, which help to give each robot a distinctive feel, but they do get a little tiresome. The music is serviceable, although it's on a very short loop, so you don't want to spend too much time shopping or in the arena.

Overall, much though I like the idea of robot combat, there's just not quite enough in Bot Arena to make this a really interesting game. The career mode is not a bad way to spend a few minutes, and it definitely is fun to work your way up the ladder, but the weight limit actually kind of makes the strategy easier, since it's just a matter of figuring out how best to meet the limit exactly and going from there. The challenge mode is quite frustrating. It's not a terrible game, but it doesn't quite live up to what I hoped it could be.

Seven Deadly Sins

Seven Deadly Sins is a cute little adventure game where your character, an ordinary British fellow in a small Kentfield village, must complete the seven deadly sins within a fortnight (that's two weeks for you less-literary types) to win.

The game works with your basic point-and-click setup; there are also a few action-based minigames interspersed throughout the game. The difficulty of the sins ranges from very easy (I managed to get one sin entirely by accident) up to quite involved (the Lust sin has a very elaborate plotline, which requires quite a bit of effort invested to get a girl into bed with you). None of the puzzles is particularly difficult, but some of them can be tricky simply because things which are usable objects or locations are not always obvious, as is often the case in games of this genre. The game's logic is also very simple, and often ridiculously simplistic (for instance, you can just keep getting haircut after haircut to continuously improve your appearance), but it manages to get things done without tying you up too much in mechanics. The game, as you might expect from the title and goal, has a pretty light-hearted feel and a good sense of humor.

The art is pretty basic, but it has a nice hand-drawn feel. Surprisingly for a game of this simplicity, there is actual voice acting for the dialogue, which is a nice touch. While the music is probably not licensed, it's deployed well and not repetitively in the game, and also adds a nice feel to the game. The sound effects, while basic, are also used well.

Overall, Seven Deadly Sins is neither a particularly long nor a particularly difficult game, and it's by no means perfect, but it's still a fun and funny enough game that you should enjoy playing through it.

Hexiom Connect

Hexiom Connect is a very simple, but very elegant, puzzle game which manages to be very difficult without being unfair. The result is a game that (at least if you solve it honestly, like me) can keep you occupied for quite a long time and still remain interesting.

Hexiom Connect is kind of a successor to Hexiom (which, while I have played, I haven't yet reviewed here, and may never, since it's so difficult), but really the only thing the two have in common is that they're puzzle games played on a grid of hexagonal tiles. In Hexiom Connect, you have a bunch of tiles with colored paths on them, and the object is to place the tiles so that all of the paths link up with each other properly. Some levels have some tiles which are already fixed in place (which serve as a handy starting point for your deductions), but some have no fixed tiles. The game contains 30 levels, all of which are very well-designed, as well as a random level generator which lets you generate endless levels of your chosen size and other specifications.

A lot of the earlier, smaller levels can be done by trial and error, but when you get to the larger and harder levels, trial and error alone will not suffice (unless you're very lucky!). You'll need to use logic, which mostly consists of finding places on the grid where only one (or maybe two) tiles can fit, and then building outward from these known tiles. The interface helps to some degree -- you can use shift-click to lock a tile in place if you know it has to be there -- but I found myself really wishing for a couple of features. First, it would be really nice if there was some way to, say, control-click on a hex and it would show you all of the tiles that could be legally placed on that hex. It would also be nice if you could somehow drag tiles off the board so you could get a better view of what you knew and what you didn't.

The graphics are pretty basic -- the paths brighten up when they're connected properly, which is nice, but it also means that the color of the dimmed paths can occasionally be difficult to distinguish. The tiles also get awfully small on the bigger levels -- I spent a lot of time squinting at my monitor before discovering that you can make the game bigger by increasing the text size on the page (at least in Firefox; I can't speak for other browers). I really love the music; it's very beautiful and has just the right feel for the game. Unfortunately, there is only one track, so even though it's great, you will likely find yourself tiring of it on the longer levels.

Hexiom Connect is not an easy game -- some of the harder levels took me more than an hour and required me to keep a lot of notes about the possibilities and things that I'd already tried, but I was glad to complete it without having to rely on any walkthroughs (although I'm sure if you're lazy, you can easily find solutions -- you'll just have to live with your guilt). Overall, it was a very satisfying and enjoyable experience, so if you're looking for a good puzzle game, give Hexiom Connect a try.

Draw-Play 2

Draw-Play 2 is a clever idea which, unfortunately, is executed with all the skill and cleverness of the maiden voyage of the Titanic. If you're determined to get the badge (as I was), be prepared for quite a bit of frustration. (In Kongregate's defense, you can tell that this is a game from Kongregate's early era, when there were so few games on the site that pretty much anything got badges. There's no way a game this poor would get a badge today.)

So, the basic concept of Draw-Play 2 is really interesting. You have a pretty standard platformer environment, with walls, spikes, turrets, and whatnot, and your object is to get your character from his start point to the flag. But the catch is that there's a lot of things missing. Fortunately, you can draw on the level with your pen, and then your character can walk on what you've drawn, and voila, you're at the flag! What's wrong with Draw-Play 2, then? Probably the simplest way to answer this question is to walk through the first few levels.

"Okay, first level. Let's see, I'll just draw a big ramp. That wasn't too bad. Hmm, second level. OK, there's a wall in the middle, so I'll just draw ramp up to the wall. Now, I'm here, so I'll draw another ramp going back to the left. Wait, I can't jump up onto this new ramp that I just drew? Uh, well, let's draw a new ramp then. Okay, third level. Hmm, there's this really narrow space I have to climb up on. I guess I'll draw a series of platforms. Oops, this platform is a little too low and I can't jump past it. Well, I'll just erase it...wait, erasing erases everything that I've drawn? I guess I haven't lost that much. OK, this time I'll be really careful. Oops, I missed that jump and hit the spikes. Wait, now I can't even jump onto the first platform I drew. I have to restart again? Dammit, now I hit the spikes again! *SMASH SMASH*" And this is just level 3. There are 40 levels.

So, let's go over the sins of the game. As mentioned, there are 40 levels, and nearly every single one of them is frustrating. Also, you can't save, so you have to do this all in one sitting (which did not help my rage levels very much). The lack of selective erasing is incredibly annoying -- one minor mistake in either drawing or maneuvering can easily undo all of your work and force you to start all over from scratch. The collision detection is incredibly poor, so even getting near the spikes will result in your immediate demise. The game doesn't deal well with you being near your drawings, so sometimes you can jump through your lines, sometimes they block you, and sometimes you just get incredibly glitchy behavior. And the level design is consistently irritating -- rather than puzzles which delight you with their cleverness, you get instead spikes, rotating spikes, moving spikes, sideways spikes, and then the same but with the lights turning on and off during the level. It's a miserable experience.

There's no sound (I did manage to get a startling scream once when I managed to glitch my character offscreen, but that's about it), and there are four (unlicensed, I suspect) tracks available for music, none of which is particularly well-suited for the game feeling and all of which will drive you batty in short order. Anyway, you can finish this game, but be prepared to part with a fair amount of sanity if you do so. It's a shame because, like I said, I think there's a very interesting idea lurking underneath the game, but it's just such a bad implementation.

(If you're determined, despite reading this, to give it a try, at least heed these two tips. First, change your pen color from black. This makes it a lot easier to cover over spikes that you're walking on without accidentally getting killed by them. Second, more importantly, if you put your pen at your character's feet and draw upward, your character will move up. This is by far the least frustrating way to move up.)

Epic War

Epic War is a perfect case study in how just a few small features can make the difference between a successful game and an unsuccessful game. While the basic structure of Epic War is extremely similar to Age of War (review here), it gets right a few very important things which Age of War gets wrong, and as a result, while it's still clearly a flawed game, it's a game which is vastly more fun and interesting to play than Age of War.

So, if you've read my review of Age of War, you'll know the basic premise of Epic War. You have a castle at one side, your enemy has a castle at the other side. You build units, which march across the field and engage the enemy units. When you kill enemy units, you get mana which you can use to buy more units (you also gradually get more mana over time), with the ultimate goal of destroying the enemy castle. Epic War doesn't have the multiple-ages conceit of Age of War; rather, it's set in a clearly Tolkien-inspired landscape (as evidenced by the hobbits, dwarves, elves, and orcs, for instance, although it departs somewhat from the Tolkien formula in the higher-end units). At the end of the battle, you can use the XP you got during the battle for killing units to buy upgrades for your units, acquire new traps and features you can add to your castle, and unlock new, more powerful unit types.

What makes Epic War a better game than Age of War, then? Well, the first thing you notice is that it actually gives you something to do during the battle other than simply watch your troops go out and bash the enemy. Epic War places you in control of your castle's crossbow, which, if aimed properly, can be a very effective weapon against enemy troops. Unfortunately, this really only is an interesting challenge in the first couple of levels; as you progress, the enemy density rapidly becomes high enough that you can just keep it aimed at a fixed location, hold down the button(s) to fire arrows, and keep racking up the kills. Still, this is a nice feature to add interest to the first few levels, and it definitely reminds me of why I enjoyed Armor Alley so much -- it wasn't simply the strategy of sending out your troops, but the fact that you could directly influence the action yourself in your helicopter.

(As an aside, you might wonder why I'm always comparing Kong games to classic Mac games. Well, the reasons for this are twofold. First, those Mac games are the ones I remember most fondly from my childhood, so I'm naturally going to compare things tothem. The second, more worrisome, reason is that, while these Flash games undoubtedly have advanced quite a bit in graphics and sound from the Mac games I loved as a kid, the gameplay is rarely any better and is often less polished.)

The other thing that makes Epic War less of a tooth-grinding experience than Age of War is that your units aren't complete idiots. Rather than simply standing in single file and dutifully awaiting their turn to attack or be attacked, they advance sensibly. Shooter units stay behind melee units! Multiple melee units can attack in groups! It's practically a revelation! (Sadly, you can't retreat, even in cases where it would be eminently sensible, but even still, the troop intelligence in Epic War represents a quantum leap forward.)

This is not to say that Epic War is without its flaws, of course. Aside from the crossbow issue mentioned above, the most glaring is that the more advanced creatures are so much more powerful than the lower-level creatures that there's pretty much never any reason to buy the weaker creatures once you've unlocked the better creatures (except for the fact that there's a cooldown timer on buying creatures, so you might have to buy something lower level while waiting for one of your higher-level creatures to become available again). Also, the game isn't quite balanced -- the computer is always able to throw out more creatures, and higher-level creatures, than you can. However, you have the crossbow, as well as a super attack which rains a shower of arrows down on the whole field, so it's not quite as bad as I made it sound.

The graphics are pretty nice, although your units are tiny (well, at least at the beginning -- the highest-level units are pretty huge), and it's often surprisingly difficult to mouse over units on the battlefield to see their status. The sound effects are pretty uninteresting (arrows thunking, weapons clanking, etc.), and the music, while appropriately epic, gets pretty repetitive pretty fast. Overall, this is not a bad game, but I do feel that it dragged a little long -- there are 15 levels, but you've probably figured out pretty much all there is to figure out by level 9 or so. Still, it's engaging enough that you won't find it to be a waste of time to make it through to the end.

Thing-Thing 2

I was kind of hoping from the name and the promise of beating up lots of enemies that Thing-Thing would kind of be like Xiao Xiao (which, while technically not a game, is undeniably pretty awesome). Sadly, I was disappointed, as Thing-Thing 2 is a relatively straightforward and boring beat-'em-up.

So, there's you, and there's an infinite stream of enemies. You can walk, jump, or punch (pretty ineffectual), or shoot them with one of the wide variety of weapons in the game (point and click). The one thing that makes shooting enemies nontrival is that each weapon has its own recoil, which will pull your cursor away from where you want it to be if you're firing a bunch of shots in quick succession. (It is amazing to read all of the comments complaining about how terrible the aiming is. If you took away this feature, I can't even imagine how pointless the game would be.) Ammo can be annoyingly scarce. Since the enemies don't do very much damage even if you walk amidst their throngs, you might wonder why you need to bother killing them at all. The answer is that there are doors that require you to have killed a certain number of enemies before you can pass through and continue the level.

The game offers a couple of modes. There's the rather-misnamed Story Mode, which offers no story to speak of, but I guess Sequence of Seemingly Unrelated Levels Mode might be a little long to fit. (To be fair, you do gain weapons as you move from level to level, so it's not completely unconnected.) Survival Mode is pretty much what you'd expect.

The graphics are pretty basic -- all of the characters are just built out of spheres, although the game gets credit for making a lot of unique enemies. The sound is pretty much your average boring gun effects, while the music is OK -- it's at least somewhat less boring and repetitive than a lot of Flash games, but it's not great either. However, none of this changes the fact that the fundamental gameplay is simply pretty boring. I didn't really enjoy playing this game all the way through, so I'm glad it was short and I was able to earn the badge in a reasonable amount of time.

Scope: First Blood

Scope: First Blood is another assassination-based game, much in the style of the Tactical Assassin series (reviews here and here). The concept is pretty much the same -- find the target, shoot the target with your sniper rifle. There's no upgrades or anything between the levels, just seven missions.

Scope: First Blood has a couple of touches which make it a little nicer than the Tactical Assassin games, in my opinion. First, not all of the missions involve simply shooting your target in the head. (In fact, only two out of the seven missions require you to directly kill your target. The others are more subtle.) The game also has a bit of a sense of humor (albeit a bit sophomoric at times), which is a nice touch. Finally, the missions require somewhat more clever thinking to solve; this is not to say that any of them is particularly complex, but there are at least a couple of steps that you have to work through in most missions.

The graphics are the basic stick-figure style that seems to be standard for this genre. There's not much sound beyond the rifle sound and the computer blips at the end of a mission. The music is not bad, although perhaps a little overdramatic for a stick figure game. The game also includes six achievements, which give it a slight amount of replay value, although the game itself is so short that even replaying it a few times is not going to add up to a lot of time. Overall, it's not a bad game, but there's just not very much substance to it. Still, it's worth a playthrough.

Achilles

Achilles is a very simple beat-'em-up in the classic tradition of such games as Final Fight. You play the titular Greek hero, and move along an endless beach featuring a plentiful quantity of people to stab and slash. You begin armed with a spear, which you can poke at enemies or throw at them; once you've thrown your spear, you start using your sword. You can pick up more spears (only one at a time, though) from fallen spearmen. You can also kick enemies to stun them, and you have a shield which can block most of most blows. A single enemy is generally not much of a threat (although if you give him an opening, he can do a fair amount of damage), but if multiple enemies jump you simultaneously (especially since they can approach from both directions), you can very quickly be overwhelmed.

Your character's attacks are somewhat unpredictable. Pressing forward + attack yields a different attack than simply pressing the attack button, but each has several different possible attacks which can happen seemingly at random, and the damage that these attacks do ranges from minimal to instant decapitation, so there's a lot of randomness in how quickly you can dispatch an opponent, and since this speed is critical to surviving, you'll end up with a fair amount of randomness in your outcomes.

The game offers two modes: in the story mode, you face a finite number of enemies per level; at the end of every stage (each stage contains three levels), there is a boss. In survival mode, you simply face an infinite number of the three basic types of enemies (swordsman, spearman, and archer). Since the basic gameplay is exactly thes same (as you pass through the five levels of story mode, the appearance of the opposing soldiers changes, but that's about it), this doesn't add that much to the game.

The graphics are pretty basic, with lots and lots of blood spurting from your enemies as they are impaled with spears, decapitated, or suffer other gruesome deaths. The sounds are also pretty basic, and the background music (during the levels) is just drums, which gets awfully repetitive and wearying pretty quickly.

Anyway, Achilles is a fun way to enjoy hacking up people for maybe a minute or so, but the repetitive and very limited gameplay coupled with the extreme randomness mean that this just isn't a terribly interesting game in the long run.

Brute Wars

Brute Wars is a tough game to categorize. It's part RPG and part turn-based strategy, I suppose. The result is not a bad game, but it's very simple -- it's much less complex than your typical example of either genre, and consequently you'll find it doesn't have quite enough depth to be able to sustain your interest all the way through.

So, the basic principle of Beast Wars is pretty simple. You move along an overland map consisting of a number of linked circles. Most points are simply combat, but a few circles have item shops (some which offer basic healing items, and some which offer various upgrades), and each screen has one castle fight. Once a combat circle has been cleared, moving back onto it is still not entirely safe -- there's still a chance (although not 100%) that you'll be thrown into another fight if you try to move back through that circle, so you can never move around the map completely freely.

Fights are quite straightforward. You have six creatures arrayed in a three-wide, two-deep formation, and your enemy has the same. Each creature is characterized by five properties -- its HP, its power (the amount of damage it does per attack), its counter (the amount of damage it does to enemies who attack it), the number of actions per turn it has, and its attack range. A creature can either attack or switch places with another creature using an action. Creatures with only one action per turn, then, are less flexible since they can't both move and attack (at the outset of the battle, of course, there'll be plenty of creatures to attack, but as the battle progresses and creatures get knocked out, you'll have to move them around), but their attack power tends to be stronger appropriately to compensate. The attack range is probably the trickiest point -- some can only attack the creature directly ahead of them, others can attack all three creatures in front of them, and some can attack two spaces away (useful for your back row). Some creatures even attack randomly. There's also a magic system -- as the battle progresses, you gain magic points, which you can then later use for spells. Most battles don't even last long enough for you to accumulate enough points to use the most powerful spells (and the points don't keep from battle to battle), so I ended up not using the magic very much (just an occasional heal).

At the end of battle (assuming you win), creatures that survived gain a level, while creatures that got knocked out lose a level. This provides an irritating kind of feedback -- your weak creatures are more likely to get knocked out and stay weak, while your strong creatures get stronger. (Note, however, that "gaining a level" doesn't mean that every level you get more HP or power. You gain HP or power only very gradually. When you reach level 50, which is the maximum, you generally gain another action, which can be extremely powerful.) You then have the opportunity to heal up and revive downed monsters, which requires the items you bought at the item shop, so make sure not to run out when you're far away from the shop, because then you might have to engage in some fights on the way back. Usually you'll want to rearrange your forces back to their starting lineup at this stage; irritatingly, you can't rearrange your creatures before battle, only after, so if you forget you'll have to start out with a suboptimal arrangement.

You can also switch out your creatures, if one of them just isn't working for you. This requires you to buy randomizers from an item shop, which (as the name suggests) replace your creature with another random creature (its level is kept, though). I don't understand the purpose of this mechanic -- it just forces you to keep clicking until you get the creature you want. (I suppose it gives you a chance to look at some creatures you wouldn't otherwise.)

As is so often the case with games of this nature, the beginning is entertainingly challenging -- not only do you want to win a battle, but you want to take as few casualties as possible, and your HP replenishing resources are scarce, so you have to fight carefully. Unfortunately, as time goes on and your creatures become more and more powerful, the battles become easier and easier, so that by the end of the game, its length definitely becomes somewhat of a drag. (Though I should say that Brute Wars is not really terrible as far as length goes -- there are certainly far worse offenders -- but it does drag towards the end.)

The sound is very basic, and the music also has a very generic RPG feel -- it's not great, but it's not terrible, and it does a good job of keeping itself unobtrusive so you're not heartily sick of it by the end of the game. The interface could use a little work -- I often found myself switching creatures and then hitting the "end turn" button instead of the "go back to attacking" button, which was awfully annoying. The game also does not autosave, so you have to remember to save frequently. This is kind of unusual in a Flash game, and it definitely is a minor irritant.

Overall, Beast Wars is an interesting little concept -- there's definitely a lot of fun to be had at the beginning of the game. However, the lack of depth means that you'll probably finish all of the excitement to be had before reaching the end of the game.

The Last Canopy

The Last Canopy is, as you might be able to guess from the pattern so far, the last game in Kongregate's Buried Treasure Week, and it does a much better job of fulfilling the goal of the week than most of the other entrants -- it's got a very kind of indie feeling, and has a couple of interesting game mechanics which are worth looking at.

At its root, The Last Canopy is a standard old-school top-down shooter -- waves of enemies come at you, and you shoot them. In true old-school fashion, there's none of this being able to absorb multiple hits nonsense -- one hit destroys you. You can move with either the keyboard or the mouse, which is a nice touch. However, the one special feature that, in addition to your main ship (which is actually, I believe, a fairy), you also have five brightly colored spheres trailing you. Using your special power, you can absorb the powers of your enemies and store them in your spheres, which will then shoot back at your enemies with their own powers. With clever maneuvering, you can position yourself so that your spheres do the attacking while you stay out of harm's way. However, the charge on a sphere only lasts for a limited amount of time, so you can't just absorb some powerful attacks and then be done with things -- you have to be continuously acquiring new powers. (You can absorb anything -- even boss attacks -- but the more powerful attacks take longer to absorb.)

This is a difficult game -- there are lots of shots to be avoided, and even though the default allotment is 20 lives, you'll find them going pretty quickly. One thing which contributes to the difficulty is that when you die, you lose all of your stored powers, which means that it's very easy to get killed several times in rapid succession when you're weak. The game is not very long overall; there are 4 stages total, and none of them is particularly lengthy, although the obligatory boss fights generally do take a little while.

The game has a rather unique aesthetic -- as I mentioned, you seem to be playing a fairy, which is rather nonstandard for a game in this genre. (The enemies, though, are mostly your standard mechanical assemblies.) The graphics and sound play well into this feeling -- the graphics have kind of a soft pastel feel, and the sound is pleasantly environmental (although this varies in the different levels). The level 3 boss is actively painful, though -- my eyes really hurt after finally making my way through the fight, since it got kind of psychedelic.

Anyway, beating this game is definitely an accomplishment (unless you're playing on a really slow computer, in which case it shouldn't be terribly difficult). Overall, though, I ended up being a little disappointed. While the central mechanic is creative, it doesn't quite flow perfectly into a top-down shooter. I'd say this game is worth a look, but it didn't quite hook me in the way other Kongregate games have.

Jumpcat

Jumpcat is the fourth entry in Kongregate's Buried Treasure week, and sadly, it's another mediocre dodger. You play the titular cat, and as the screen scrolls, a variety of obstacles comes at you, and you have to (surprise!) jump over them. The obstacles include rocks, trees, and a surprising number of low-altitude helicopters.

The game is not at all easy -- you have to hold down the jump key to charge up enough jump power to get over the higher obstacles, which often takes nearly all of the time you have. But you can't just hold down the jump button as soon as you land, either, because some obstacles are on both the top and bottom of the screen, so you have to jump through them. And, as if that weren't hard enough, fairly early in the game, another helicopter will start dropping bombs on you, which have a way of hitting you in places where you can't easily maneuver away from them.

The graphics and sounds are both very basic. The background music is kind of catchy, and I can imagine a lot of games it would be a good addition to, but this game is not one of them -- it seems completely inappropriate for a light game (bombs notwithstanding) like this. One nice feature of the game is that, at the end of the game, it tells you how many points you had at the end of each of your lives. This is kind of a neat way of showing your progress.

Overall, this is an exceedingly frustrating game; despite its short length, you'll still find the ease with which the game can kill you quite annoying. There's neither enough depth nor enough balance to make this a really entertaining game; it definitely ends up in the class of games which stopped being fun before I reached the final badge, which was very tricky to get and required a lot of luck (and some skill, admittedly). I'm not quite sure why this was selected for Buried Treasure Week, other than that it's got a cat -- it really doesn't have anything unique in it.

Parachute Retrospect

Parachute Retrospect is the third entry in Kongregate's Buried Treasure week, and it's another jmtb02 production (man, that guy is prolific); like many other jmtb02 games, there's good graphics, a very silly premise, but one which provides solid gameplay, and not a lot of depth.

The basic premise is very simple: you have a helicopter, and below you, trucks pulling trailers full of hay (or possibly cotton) pass by. When you click, a person drops from the helicopter and hopefully lands in the load of hay. If this reminds you of the Mac classic StuntCopter, then you're not alone -- that was my first thought as well (and I was pleased to see in the comments that I wasn't the only one who recognized that premise, too). However, unlike StuntCopter, which adds difficulty by changing the wagon speed and gravity, Parachute Retrospect adds a much different degree of difficulty -- for every five people you save, a nasty anti-person measure is added; you'll have to deal with (among others) missiles, lasers, and trucks which have inconveniently decided to carry a load of spikes rather than soft hay; by the end of the game, you'll probably be killing more people than you save. Fortunately, the game is quite generous with lives, giving you 99 in all. (Another important difference is that you can drop multiple people at once, which is definitely helpful in the later game to make the most use of the often narrow windows you get. Of course, if you mistime, it's also a very quick way to lose a bunch of people at once.)

After you save 50 people, the game shifts to an entirely different mode -- now you're a helicopter which has to rescue people being dropped out of some...thing. This part of the game really doesn't make much sense, and it kind of feels tacked-on; I can't help but feel that the game would be better without it entirely.

The graphics are pretty simple (and, surprisingly, star-free), and the sounds are quite basic. The music is not bad, and definitely lends an air of excitement to the proceedings, although you'll probably get tired of it after a while. Overall, this is a silly little game, and it can be surprisingly frustrating -- in the later game, it's quite difficult and you'll have to do a lot of waiting for the few moments that the coast is clear. Still, it's short enough that you're going to finish it before you run out of fun.

Intrusion

Intrusion is a difficult game for me to review. There's a lot of things which are good about the game: it's clearly the work of a talented programmer, and it does an excellent job of creating a difficult challenge without being unfair or frustrating. And yet, it feels like there's something missing, like it's not quite the sum of its parts. There's something which is just, for lack of a better word, sterile about the game-playing experience. And the tough part is that I can't quite put my finger on what's missing. (But I do have a few theories.)

Intrusion is a straightforward shoot-'em-up sidescroller in the proud tradition of Contra, though it's a bit more modern in some aspects -- for instance, it uses the "keyboard to move, mouse to shoot" control scheme. Also, one bullet won't kill you; you have a life bar (and the occasional health pod to refill it), and you'll definitely need it. However, there are some old-school features, like save points -- you can always choose to continue at the beginning of any level you've opened, but the levels are long enough that you'll appreciate the need not to have to go all the way back to the beginning every time. You start the game with your pistol, which has infinite ammunition, and as the game progresses you acquire 3 other weapons, each of which has a limited amount of ammunition which you can replenish by looting your defeated enemies. Naturally, there's a number of bosses sprinkled throughout the game, including the particularly lethal final boss.

Anyway, technically the execution is quite solid. The graphics, especially the background graphics, are very high quality, and the game does a good job of creating a variety of interesting environments, from a mountain base to a moving train to a flying missile (not quite as insane as in Contra 2, but still pretty ridiculous). The ragdoll physics is also a step up from what you see in a Flash game, but it's a little loose -- enemies will tend to fly around an unreasonable amount after they've been killed, and they also have a tendency to land doing the splits, which makes them look faintly ridiculous. The sounds are pretty nondescript. There's a number of nice little graphic touches (watch the missile closely when it's taking off, for instance) which also make the game feel more well-crafted. (The graphic quality does come at a price, though; the game noticeably slows down on slower computers.) The comments complain about occasional glitches, but I didn't notice anything major; all I encountered was dropped ammo ending up in inaccessible places sometimes.

As I mentioned earlier, the game is definitely challenging. There are a few very simple puzzles, but they're quite obvious and quickly solved. Mostly the challenge is just in avoiding enemy bullets (and other things that can harm you), and since there's often a lot of them and they can move pretty fast, this is not an easy task. So you'll definitely get a feeling of accomplishment when (or if) you manage to beat the game; while there is a little bit of luck involved, largely this is going to be dependent on your skill. Still, with persistence I managed to beat it, and I certainly don't consider myself particularly good at this genre, so I don't think it's out of reach for anyone, either.

So what's missing from the game? First, it doesn't do a very good job of immersing you in its environment. For starters, there's no background music; I know it sounds shallow, but I think some good music would help draw you into the game more. Also, there's absolutely no plot or backstory -- you just start out arriving at the enemy base with no explanation, just the assumption that you're supposed to kill everything. Finally, the last thing that I noticed is that the pace is a little bit off. In Contra, for instance (sorry to keep going back to Contra, but it's a useful measuring stick, despite its age) there's pretty much always something to do. In Intrusion, though, there's a fair amount of dead time when you're moving from place to place, and this gives the game a kind of empty feel. I think that's what's missing most from the game, but like I said, it's hard to put my finger on it.

Anyway, there's clearly a lot of skill that went into Intrusion, and I think if the creator teamed up with a really good game writer, they could produce a truly excellent game. As it is, while this is a fun and well-crafted game, if you're like me, you'll walk away feeling like there could have been a little bit more.

Cirplosion

Cirplosion, the second entry in Kongregate's Buried Treasure week, is a game which manages to overcome its terrible name and be quite an interesting game, requiring both quick puzzle-solving skills and quite a bit of manual dexterity.

At first glance, Cirplosion looks very similar to filler (review here): you have a playfield with a bunch of orbs bouncing around, you click and hold to cause a circle to expand, and can move while the circle is expanding, but if the circle hits an enemy orb (or, in Cirplosion's case, a wall), it is destroyed. However, what happens after you let go of the mouse button is entirely different from filler -- once you let go of the mouse button, the circle becomes a targeting circle, which you can now move freely over the board; when you click, all orbs within the targeting circle are destroyed. (There are also large orbs, which are blown into three smaller orbs.) So the advantages of trying to get your circle as large as possible should be obvious. Whenever you set off a Cirplosion, orbs outside of the circle's radius are affected, too, in that they are blown with the force of the explosion. If you're careless, this can give orbs very large momentum, which makes them very annoying; however, you can also use it strategically to clear up some open space to give you some more room to operate in.

In each level, you'll have to clear all the orbs given a limited amount of time and total number of Cirplosions. (You don't have any lives, so getting your circle destroyed doesn't cost you anything directly, but it does cost you precious time.) Generally, both of these limits are pretty tight, so you'll need to be sharp in order to destroy all of the enemies without running out of one or more resources. Some levels also have freeze orbs, which will freeze all of the enemy orbs if your circle touches one when expanding (not when you shoot it, confusingly enough), which can be very useful in setting up good shots.

Cirplosion offers three modes: normal mode, which contains 20 levels of the typical frenetic action that you'd expect; challenge mode, which has 12 more puzzle-like levels which require very careful thinking; and finally, cirvival (sigh) mode, which is pretty much what you would expect. Somewhat irritatingly, normal mode doesn't have a save feature, so if you want to beat it, you'll have to do all 20 levels in one go. The challenges do save, so you can beat them piecemeal if you'd like. Neither normal nor challenge mode is easy, but they are quick; a given level may take a lot of tries (and some of the harder levels may get quite frustrating, since there is some element of chance involved), but since a single level only takes 20-30 seconds, you can still play the whole agme in one sitting without too much difficulty.

The graphics are pretty basic -- you have enemy orbs of one color and your circle; there's not much in the way of special effects. The background music is very ambient and lends a nice touch, but (like so many other Flash games) it does get rather repetitive eventually. The sounds are also pretty basic, but they're not bad, either.

Anyway, Cirplosion clearly does a much better job of fulfilling the Buried Treasure ideal -- it's definitely a game that's deserving of a look. It's by no means a perfect game, but it'll provide a half hour or so of interesting gameplay, so give it a try.