Warfare: 1917

Ah, the tactical richness of World War I. Should you send your men "over the top", where they will certainly be gunned down in a hail of machine gun fire, if the mines don't get them first? Or should you leave them in their trench until a poison gas attack comes and suffocates them all? Well, with Warfare: 1917, the choice is yours! You, too, can be Douglas Haig, sending millions...well, this game is a little smaller-scale than the whole war, but at least hundreds of brave British soldiers to their doom. Fortunately, the game is a little more forgiving than reality, so you can actually win the war in an afternoon.

Warfare: 1917 is set on a side-scrolling battlefield, with trenches, barbed wires, and mines all throughout. The trenches are, naturally, the focal points of the battlefield; nearly all of your efforts will be focused on capturing or defending them. Troops arrive with a timed release mechanic -- each unit type available to you is on a timer, and more powerful units are on a longer timer. When the timer finishes, you can deploy that unit. However, deploying a unit resets the timers for all units, so you'll often be caught in a tricky choice: should I deploy a rifle unit now, or hold on and wait to get a machine-gun squad? It's a simple, but effective, mechanic. You also have various types of fire support available, which run on their own separate timers (that is, using one type of fire support doesn't reset the timer for others). The objective is, obviously, to capture the whole battlefield. Your units also have a morale bar -- as you might expect, losing units depletes your morale, while killing enemies improves it. If you run out of morale, your side will surrender. In practice, morale doesn't generally play too large a role, but there was one time when I was mounting a victorious but bloody offensive and ran out of morale, which was quite frustrating.

The controls are very simple, and perhaps a little too simple. Units advance until they reach a trench. Once they're in a trench, they will stay there until you order them out to advance again. (You can't change your mind and order them back to the trench -- they'll continue until they either get killed or reach the next trench.) A trench can only hold three squads, so if a unit reaches a trench which is already full, it'll just continue on. You can also lock a trench so that units will just continue on past it, which is useful for trenches in your back lines. One disadvantage of this system, combined with the time-release system, is that it's very hard to mass troops for an attack -- if your front trench is already filled with machine-gunners, then every squad you build after that will simply go forward to attack the enemy, and there's nothing you can do to stop them, which means that your attacks will be pretty ineffectual. (If you have a secondary trench at the back, you can mass troops there and then send them in all at once, which is much more effective.)

The game offers a campaign, in which you start out with only the most basic units and progress through nine levels; over the course of the campaign, more advanced units (snipers, officers, and finally tanks) are gradually introduced. You also gain XP in the campaign which you can use to purchase various upgrades for your units. Unfortunately, the tanks are kind of unbalanced -- once you get them, it's not really worth it to build anything else; just keep sending tanks at the enemy and ultimately you will prevail. You can also play a skirmish mode in which you can choose the parameters of the battlefield and available units.

Warfare: 1917 is by Con Artist, the designer responsible for the Last Stand games, and a few of the gun noises do sound a little familiar. The graphics are very high-quality (ooh, rain, pretty!) and the sounds do a pretty good job of making the action sound like a battlefield, although it's undoubtedly much quieter (and somewhat more repetitive) than a real World War I battlefield. Still, it's a solid gameplay experience. Annoyingly, like so many Armor Games products, the Kongregate version is crippled in that you can only play the British side; you have to visit Armor Games to get the German campaign. This isn't too much of a loss, since the British campaign gave me all the World War I action I felt like, but it's still annoying on principle.

Overall, Warfare: 1917 is a little too simple to make for a really engaging game -- there's just not quite enough strategy to really make the game interesting, especially in the later levels when tanks just roll over everything. Of course, one could claim that this is actually really realistic! I somehow doubt that was the goal, though. Still, it's well-programmed and pretty-looking, so it's worth playing a few missions at least until you get tired of it.

More Bloons

More Bloons is a perfect example of a very simple concept which could very easily be a terrible game, but because of the obvious care and attention put into crafting the levels, it is instead an entertaining challenge. Probably one that will have you tearing your hair out at some points (at least, if you play without unlimited darts), but one that will give you quite a feeling of accomplishment for finishing it.

In More Bloons, you control a dart-throwing monkey. You move the mouse to aim and hold down the mouse button to set your throwing power. There's a number of balloons scattered around the level, and your goal is to pop a certain percentage of them. At the beginning, most of the balloons are your garden-variety ordinary balloons, but as you proceed through the game, you'll see a dazzling array of balloons which do various special things, some helpful (for instance, the dart balloon which sends off eight thumbtacks in all directions), some not-so-helpful (for instance, the ice balloon which freezes nearby balloons, making them unpoppable), and some which are a mixed bag (for instance, the bomb balloon, which blows up everything nearby, including your dart). There's also blocks, including metal blocks, which stop your dart, rubber blocks, which your dart can bounce off of, and wooden blocks, which can be broken by your dart (or other objects) hitting them.

Anyway, as I said, what really makes this game solid is the level design. In each level, you have a very limited number of darts, and the level is constructed so that reaching the necessary percentage to beat the level in the number of darts you have is not an easy task, and often requires a lot of careful thinking and precision aiming. (Actually, this brings up one of the weaknesses of the game. You can also enable unlimited darts mode, which does what the name says, but the game doesn't track whether you've beaten a level with unlimited darts or not. As a result, the final badge for beating all the levels is only a medium, since it is pretty trivial with unlimited darts, although without unlimited darts it is quite a challenge.)

The later levels require quite a few attempts to beat (and I admit that I had to look up strategies for a couple, since I couldn't quite figure them out). You'll often find yourself resetting a level after a botched first shot; it's kind of frustrating that there's no way to do this using the keyboard, since if you're just a little bit off you might not want to have to move your mouse. There are 50 levels in total; each level shouldn't take you too long, but the total time spent does add up if you're trying to beat them without using unlimited darts.

The graphics are pretty simple; the monkey is cute, but the balloons are, well, pretty much just balloons. There isn't any background music, and the sounds are also pretty basic, though the sound of a whole bunch of balloons popping in rapid succession is pretty satisfying.

Overall, there's perhaps a little too much frustration in getting a level right in More Bloons to make it a truly great game. Still, the very fact that the levels are that well-designed makes this game a solid challenge and a game worth playing.

Talesworth Arena: Death Watch

Talesworth Arena is an interesting game. When I first tried it, I thought it was ridiculously simple and not worth playing, but then I kept on playing it (because there was a badge, alas) and discovered that it's actually pretty interesting. The game doesn't end up having quite as much strategy as it would like to you believe, but it keeps things moving along quickly enough that it stays fresh as you battle your way through the ten levels of the Arena.

The battles in Talesworth Arena are not quite like anything I've seen before. You have up to 12 buttons for your various skills on your side of the screen; your opponent also has a set of skills. At the top of the screen are bars showing your current health and your opponent's. Each skill has a casting time (how long it takes to cast) and a cooldown time (how long after it's been cast you have to wait before you can cast it again). Some skills damage your opponent (either immediately, or gradually over time), some protect yourself from damage, some speed you up or slow down your enemy, some stun your enemy, and so forth. The current skill being used is displayed at the top of the screen, so if you notice your enemy doing something particularly nasty, you can use a skill (if it has a shorter casting time) to protect yourself or possibly even interrupt your enemy's skill. Overall, it's kind of like a console RPG in real time, but much faster and with a greater emphasis on tactics.

Winning battles gets you gold, which you can spend in town between battles to acquire more skills (or upgrades of the skills you already have) and improved equipment. There are also a few sidequests which grant you various useful things. (Losing a battle costs you gold and/or XP, so it's just a temporary setback.) After you've accumulated enough XP to gain a level, you have to fight the boss for that level in order to actually level up; if you don't think you're ready, you can continue to fight normal fights to get more gold for equipment and/or skills, but the game nicely discourages you from doing this too much. The boss fights, as you might expect, are pretty tricky, and the goal is to defeat Krax, the level 10 boss and boss of the whole Arena.

You can play as three different classes, each of which has a rather different method of operating -- Psionics fuel their spells with mana, which gradually regenerates over time; Engineers use gas to power their gadgets, which can be regenerated by a skill (but if that skill gets interrupted, you're in trouble). Juggernauts operate somewhat differently -- they have a Power bar which builds up (rather than depletes) as they use their skills, which they can then turn into a new source of damage. In practice, though, the three classes don't play as differently as you might think; since a lot of the skills do more or less the same thing, there's only a few really unique skills to each class, so the strategies you develop for one class don't have to be changed all that much. Similarly, the game makes a big deal about how you have to carefully plan your strategy against each different opponent, but once you have your basic strategy figured out, you don't need to change it that much for different foes; usually all you need to do is notice you opponent's most annoying skill (usually his stun/interrupt one) and then prevent him from using that.

One thing that's worth noting about the game is that the presentation is excellent. The graphics are very pretty, and there's clearly a lot of care put into the various interface elements, the kind of thing that you don't often see in a Flash game. (The writing is also blessedly free of awkward grammar and spelling errors, a sad rarity. Well, there is a typo or two, but it's still way above your typical Flash game.) The sounds are pretty basic, but at least they're nicely varied. The music is excellent -- the battle music adds the right level of action to the proceedings without being distracting or annoying, and the town music is very pretty. (It would probably get repetitive if you spent a lot of time in town, but usually you won't be in town that long.)

Talesworth Arena is not a really difficult game -- you may struggle in the beginning as you get the hang of how your skills work and how to best string them together, but once you've figured out how to use the character you should find yourself winning nearly all of the time, except when you make the occasional careless mistake. Because an individual battle goes by so quickly, it doesn't really feel too tedious, although sometimes in the middle levels the process of just leveling up feels a little repetitive. The last badge for the game requires you to beat it with all three classes, which I feared would be a dreary trudge, but it's actually not too bad; though it's not quite as fun the second or third times through, it still retains a good bit of entertainment value (though once I finished the third class, I felt I was pretty much done with the game).

Overall, I enjoyed Talesworth Arena. It's an interesting battle system, but one that is well-thought-out, has a good assortment of skills, and does a good job making sure that nearly every skill that you have can be useful at some point. It requires you to do at least some thinking on your feet, manages to keep a brisk pace throughout, and is presented in a very nice package. It may require a bit of effort to get started, but once you've figured it out, it's pretty rewarding.

Microbe Kombat

Despite its name, Microbe Kombat is no Mortal Kombat, or indeed even Mortal Pongbat. It's clearly a game where the developer came up with an idea, thought it would make a neat game, and then made a game out of it without actually working out the game mechanics so that it was a neat game.

So, in Microbe Kombat, you're a microbe swimming in some kind of broth (you move with the mouse), and enemy microbes are also about. From time to time, protein randomly appears in the broth. If you eat the protein, your size increases, and you also acquire an item, which you can use to give you various temporary boosts (increased speed or size, for instance). Microbes can eat other microbes smaller than themselves, and the goal is to eat all enemies while avoiding being eaten yourself. Eating an enemy is apparently as simple as running over it when you're bigger than it, except that the eating mechanics are extremely fussy and nine times out of ten you'll end up failing to eat the enemy for no discernible reason. Later levels introduce viruses; if infected by a virus, a microbe slowly gets smaller until it lyses and releases more virus particles; winning while infected is difficult, but possible, if you manage to collect a lot of protein. Still, it's almost always a death sentence. The virus can also infect enemy microbes (in which case all you have to do is survive until they perish), although some types of enemies are immune.

The special feature of the game is that one of the items allows you to divide yourself into two microbes, and the enemy also occasionally fissions into two smaller microbes. (One of the action items also allows you to switch which one of your team you're controlling, if you have more than one microbe on your team.) The problem is that this is strategically totally unbalanced -- it's clearly more advantageous for you to have one microbe that can't be eaten than two microbes that can. Indeed, this becomes very obvious very quickly, since most of the strategy consists of waiting for your enemy (who is usually bigger than you, since they usually start out with a size advantage, which makes it easier for them to grab more protein) to divide, and then eating the two halves. This makes for a rather unsatisfying game experience.

The graphics are pretty nice, although the eating animations look kind of strange. (The title screen clearly is influenced by Juno's lettering style -- it's very similar.) There's not much in the way of sound effects; the background music is kind of creepy -- it's kind of a good complement to the game, but also a little weird. The game is not particularly long; there's only 12 levels in all, and although some of them are rather annoying, it shouldn't take you too much time to make it through them all.

Overall, Microbe Kombat is a pretty average game. The concept of being able to divide your microbe sounds really neat at first blush, but it doesn't really work very well in the framework of the game, and the rest of the gameplay just isn't interesting enough to carry the game. As is so often the case, the game seems to compensate for a poor AI (which, in this case, is one which divides when it has the size advantage, thus giving up the size advantage) by giving the AI lots of advantages, which is almost always really annoying. It's not a terrible experience, but it's not a game I really was thrilled to have played, either.

B29 Assault

If you've ever played a 1942-like top-down shooter, then B29 Assault will immediately look very familiar to you. It's quite faithful to the standard top-down shooter formula -- your one plane has to somehow take out hundreds of enemies, with plenty of fast action, but it's not quite as unforgiving as what I think of as the standard examples of the genre.

The plot is pretty ridiculous -- you have to free the world from a terrorist takeover in your heavily-modified B-29 from the future (and why is it a bomber, anyway? If you're fighting a flotilla of enemies, wouldn't you want a fighter? Of course, this thing is not quite a factory-issue B-29, so maybe it's a moot point). As you kill enemies, you will get various powerups. Some powerups will upgrade your primary weapon -- a given powerup cycles through the three types of primary weapon while it's floating in the air -- while others are for your secondary weapon, of which there are four in total. Collecting a powerup for your current weapor will increase its level, while collecting a powerup for a different weapon will switch your weapon to that weapon. This can be annoying if you accidentally collect the wrong powerup and get switched to a lower level of a weapon you didn't want. The secondary weapons are kind of odd -- some of them require mouse gestures to use, which is unusual; I just stuck to the missiles, which were pretty foolproof.

Unlike, say, 1942, one hit won't destroy your bomber -- you have a pretty generous health bar, and refills are not too hard to come by, so unless you're totally careless, you shouldn't lose too many lives. The game is, somewhat annoyingly, crippleware -- only six levels of the total are available on Kongregate. Those six levels are divided into three cities -- at the end of one level, you turn around and fly the other direction over the same city; apparently the terrorists are able to rebuild all of their defenses during the time you're fighting the boss. None of the levels are particularly long, nor are the bosses particularly difficult; I tended to not use my bombs during the course of a level and just saved them for the boss, which dispatched them quickly.

The graphics are pretty good -- the planes are your typical fare, but the backgrounds are actually pictures of the cities in question, so you can enjoy flying over various landmarks (if you have the chance to pay attention). The sounds are pretty standard shooting and explosion noises. The music is a kind of an uptempo technoish track, which I think works pretty well as a background.

Overall, B29 Assault is not a difficult game -- the fact that you're so much harder to kill means that, despite the large quantity of enemies, you shouldn't have too difficult of a time (indeed, I beat the game my first time through). Nor is there much in the game which isn't part of the very standard formula, so don't go expecting a bunch of new gameplay innovations. Still, it's well-done example of the genre, so while it won't have a lot of replay value, it's fun to play through once.

Straw Hat Samurai

Straw Hat Samurai is an interesting game with a creative gameplay idea at its heart, but it doesn't quite develop that idea enough, instead opting to add a bunch of extraneous elements which kind of take away from the basic gameplay. It would probably benefit from some simplification and focusing on the heart of the game.

In Straw Hat Samurai, you play the titular samurai, and you battle against waves of enemy soldiers. The fighting, though, is accomplished in a very unorthodox way. To attack, just click and drag. This performs a sword slash along the line you've created, taking out all enemies in its path. In between battles, you move along an overworld map; most of the spaces on the map are simple fighting levels, but there are also powerups and some boss battles around the map, too. At the beginning of the game, enemies are easily defeated, and the real challenge is to try to kill a bunch of enemies at once (not too difficult, but since your sword stroke can only be so long, not completely trivial, either) and/or to go for headshots. As the game progresses, though, you encounter enemies with shields, which require a little more careful planning, and archers, which are quite annoying. (You can also acquire a bow of your own, but I never ended up using it except for a few specific cases.)

As the game progresses, it begins to acquire some strategy elements -- in the late game, you engage in an almost Risk-like battle for control of the map. Of course, you can always just take over a space yourself by defeating all of the enemies in the normal fighting, so the strategy ends up not playing terribly much of a role -- you can always just win some more fights even if your strategy is terrible. Dying doesn't cost you anything (except time); you just have to restart whatever level you were on from the beginning.

The graphics are not bad; the characters are well-drawn, though the animation is pretty minimal. The sound effects are pretty standard, while the music is OK. It's kind of stirring, but (as is so often the case) it's not long enough, so you probably will eventually become tired of it.

Overall, Straw Hat Samurai is a little too long -- since the basic gameplay mechanism is so simple, just clicking and dragging over enemies kind of wears out quickly. The additional strategic elements feel kind of misplaced, rather than enhancing the game. It's not a difficult game by any means (except the final boss, where I figured out the strategy quickly but had a very hard time actually executing that strategy -- apparently short strokes are key), but you'll definitely wish it was done with sooner. Really, it could benefit with some variation to the basic gameplay (just as an idea, you have to draw strokes in different shapes to execute different attacks); as it is, it's simply just too repetitive to be a great game.

Meat Boy

Meat Boy is a platformer with some things that I like and some things that I hate. It's also the easiest impossible badge on Kongregate, so if you're looking for (relatively -- it's still not exactly trivial) fast points, give it a try. (I don't mean this as a criticism of either the Kongregate badge-awarding process or the game; after all, some impossible badge has to be the easiest.)

The plot, if it can be called that, is extremely simple. Dr. Fetus has kidnapped Bandaid Girl and you, Meat Boy, must rescue her. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to the weirdness of the characters, but it doesn't affect the game at all. Anyway, the game consists of pretty standard platforming action, with extensive use of wall-jumping, as you fight your way through the various levels. There are three worlds, each with 15 levels in them, but you don't have to finish all of them -- you only need to finish three levels out of every five to advance to the next set. This is nice; if you're completely annoyed by a level (and believe me, this will happen), you can just skip it and try another. (The final level is not skippable, but it's also not particularly rage-inducing.) Each level features a wide variety of you-killing machinery -- sawblades, spikes, flaming pits, you get the idea.

The controls in the game are simple, but frequently irritating, particularly since the game's collision detection is very unforgiving and will zap you if even a pixel of yours comes into contact with something unpleasant. It's especially difficult to accurately control your character in midair; I must have died a thousand deaths by jumping and flying over the space I was trying to jump to into a wall of fire, or a bottomless pit, or something else unpleasant. However, each given level is quite short, so it doesn't feel too oppressive to have to try repeatedly in order to actually pass the level. Some (but not all) of the levels feature band-aids, which can be collected to unlock various secrets (which are just cute little addons, nothing affecting gameplay). Getting these band-aids can often be an exercise in persistence, since they tend to require pixel-perfect jumping.

The graphics are in the low-res, slightly pixelated style that seems to be the fashion these days (although not to quite the extent seen in, say, Dino Run). In my opinion, at least, it's kind of ugly -- it doesn't quite work here in the same way that it does in other games. (Really, this might just be because the main characters are kind of ugly -- the rest of the graphics are fine.) The sound effects are pretty minimal. The background music gets points for at least being different for the three different worlds -- it's pretty catchy at first, but it repeats on too short a loop, and so it gets kind of irritating eventually, alas.

Overall, Meat Boy is a game which is fun and enjoyable at times and annoying and frustrating at other times. It's quick, so even though it takes a while to actually finish the game, you'll never feel hopelessly stuck or anything, and there is a nice feeling of achievement from getting that impossible badge. Still, in the end, I'm not quite sure whether I'd recommend the game or not. Give it a try, I guess -- it won't take you long to decide whether you like it or not, I'm sure.

Ether War

Ether War is a frenetic, hyperkinetic, pyrotechnic, almost epileptic whirlwind of a shooter. It's not a particularly complicated game, but it'll keep all of your senses quite busy.

You have a basic shooter setup -- WASD to move, mouse to shoot -- and your objective is to defend your space station from the enemy Brood Mother, which spawns all sorts of orb-shaped enemies to throw at you. Fortunately, your space station has weaponry of its own, and can also spawn allied ships to help you battle the Brood Mother. At the beginning of the game, you're primarily playing defense. But as you destroy enemies, you collect ether points, which allow you to upgrade your ship and your allies. Eventually, once you've gained enough power, you can start to take the fight back to the Brood Mother and eventually destroy her.

The game is very fast-paced; don't expect too much in the way of precision aiming, it's very much just spray and pray. You don't have any lives; rather, when you get destroyed, you're out of the action for ten seconds while your ship rebuilds. (Your ship is protected by a fast-recharging shield, so the only way to get destroyed is to take a large amount of damage in a short amount of time. This generally doesn't happen much, except when you're mounting the final assault on the Brood Mother, when it'll probably happen a bunch of times.) Because the action is so chaotic (although you can follow the general flow of things on the very useful radar display in the lower corner), it's often hard to tell how things are going. This is especially frustrating when you can't tell how your space station is doing -- the game will occasionally flash an alert when the station is taking heavy damage, but it's often hard to figure out exactly where and how much.

The graphics are very pyrotechnic. Any time an enemy (or friend, for that matter) is destroyed, it fills the area with a shower of brightly-colored sparkles, so although this is presumably set in space, it's actually quite bright most of the time. The bacgkround music is a pleasant techno which matches the feel of the game brightly, and it's long enough and unobtrusive enough that you won't get too sick of it. The sounds are pretty straightforward and add to the fireworks atmosphere of the game, as a ship blowing up sounds like of like fireworks going off.

Overall, Ether War is not a difficult game -- you might fail your first time through, but once you get the hang of it it's pretty easy to win -- but it's got enough action to keep you occupied throughout. It probably wouldn't fare too well if it were much longer, but as it is, it's just the right length to be a satisfying experience.

loops of zen

It is perhaps instructive to compare Loops of Zen with Hexiom Connect (review here). Both are puzzle games built on the basic concept of connecting things, but there the similarities end. Where Hexiom Connect has clever level design, Loops of Zen has no level design. Where Hexiom Connect has a quality interface, Loops of Zen has a terrible interface. And while Hexiom Connect manages to be challenging yet rewarding, Loops of Zen is simply tedious. If there weren't a badge for completing 50 levels, I can't believe anyone would voluntarily do it.

So the basic concept of Loops of Zen is pretty straightforward. You have a bunch of pieces on a rectangular grid. Each piece has either one, two, three, or four free ends leading into its neighbors. Clicking on a piece rotates it; the object is to line up all pieces so that all the ends are properly aligned.

So what's my complaint? Well, the main problem I have is that the quality of a puzzle game is, naturally, dependent on the quality of the puzzles. Most puzzle games, thus, at least try to have clever level design so that the solutions are interesting, clever, and rewarding. Loops of Zen does none of this. Rather, all of the levels are randomly generated. This means that there's never anything particularly interesting or clever; you just rotate pieces until you happen to be done. One thing working against Loops of Zen here is that because you can't move pieces to a different location -- merely rotate them where they stand -- the puzzle tends to be rather local. That is, pieces in one part of the board don't really have any influence on far-away areas of the board. Hence, larger puzzles don't really get much harder, they just get more tedious. And there's plenty of tedium to be had -- the random level generator has no problem cranking out ever-larger puzzles. And if you don't like a level, well, just restart! You'll get a brand-new one. Anyway, the level generator clearly makes no effort to enforce unique solutions (I have no idea if that would be even possible and still have a reasonable puzzle), so there are probably hundreds of ways to solve any given board. With a bit of trial and error, you should have no trouble finding one.

The interface is not particularly useful -- a way to lock a tile, or at least to indicate that you'd like it to remain in its current position, is completely absent. While the game does autosave your progress, it does so in a completely unintuitive way -- when you start the game again, you begin at level 0, and have to hit right-arrow to advance through the levels to the first one you haven't completed -- many of the commenters are apparently unaware a save feature exists at all, which doesn't speak well for the design.

The graphics are extremely spartan -- simply black curves against a white background. There's no sound effects, only some background music which treads the fine line between pleasantly atmospheric and incredibly annoying. It's actually not too bad, but of course, when it's the only thing you have to listen to, it's not going to fare too well.

Loops of Zen is not a difficult game -- a bit of persistence is all you need to get through any given puzzle, and the amount of logic involved is pretty minimal. But I can't understand the purpose of having so many levels when the levels don't have anything particularly interesting. It just makes the whole thing a dreary slog. If the levels were more cleverly designed, or indeed designed at all, it's not hard to imagine this game being much more enjoyable, but as it is, it is simply not a pleasure to play.

Sola Rola - The Gravity Maze

Sola Rola is kind of like Excit -- it's a pretty straightforward puzzle game, and likely you've seen the basic puzzle type before, but it still combines clever level design with a few additions to make it a fun game.

So, in Sola Rola, you have two balls -- well, actually they're spherically-shaped, uh, creatures, named Wiz and Waz. They're placed in a circular maze, and your goal is to get them to their respective destinations by rotating the maze. In nearly every level, this requires some degree of teamwork, as most levels feature colored switches and correspondingly-colored doors; often you'll find yourself needing to maneuver one of the pair onto a switch to open a door for the other. In most levels, the two balls move independently, but in some they're connected with a gravity beam, which basically serves as a rope which can pass through the maze walls. This requires somewhat different tactics, but the basic principle is still the same.

The level design is pretty solid -- the levels are generally not too difficult, but they generally require at least some care, thought, and cleverness. A few of the puzzles do require a bit of dexterity, but generally planning is much more important than quick action. None of the levels gets too complicated, but there are a few which require very careful maneuvering to get through.

The graphics are pretty simple, although Wiz and Waz have a nice amount of personality. (One small complaint I have is that the tutorial information, presented in the form of dialogue between Wiz and Waz, proceeds extremely slowly. A way to speed this up would be much appreciated.) The music is perhaps a bit on the overly cute side, but it actually stands up pretty well to many repeated listens, which is good, since you'll probably be hearing it a lot.

Overall, Sola Rola is not particularly revolutionary, but the game design and the level design are both quality, so this is a game you can easily enjoy. And, as an added bonus, unlike many of the puzzle games on Kongregate, you won't be going insane by the end.

Excit

Excit is a pretty straighforward puzzle game, with a basic principle that you've probably seen before. However, it does a very good job implementing the game, with interesting and tricky puzzles, and a very clever visual aesthetic, which overall make it a pretty solid game.

The basic gameplay is quite simple: you move on a rectangular grid, with some walls scattered around it, and the object is to move to the exit. However, the catch is, once you press the arrow key to start moving in a certain direction, you keep moving in that direction until you hit a wall. (If you should happen to fly off the screen, you fail and have to restart.) Like I said, you probably have seen this mechanic somewhere before, but Excit does a good job making solid puzzles with it. In addition to the basic walls, there's a variety of other elements -- curved blocks, one-way gates, teleporters, locks and keys, and so forth. You might think that you could solve these puzzles by logic, but actually working backwards is pretty unfruitful -- there's just too many possibilities too quickly. So there's a lot of trial and error involved. This can get frustrating in some of the more complicated later levels, especially when you make a fair amount of progress but then make a wrong step and have to start over again without quite remembering what you did. (Also, since many of the levels feature more locks than keys, or things that have to be done in a very specific order, it's relatively easy to get yourself into a corner even if you are careful about not going off the edge.) If just getting to the exit isn't enough of a challenge, you can also collect MIS logos (I thought this was just a reference to the IT feel of the game, but apparently it's the name of the company that makes the game, in a rather amusing coincidence) for an extra bonus; some of these are quite easy, but some are nearly impossible. (Fortunately, you don't have to collect all of them.)

The visual design of the game is very clever -- it looks nearly identical to an Excel spreadsheet, which gives the game a nice feel. The elements are also a little bit dynamic (you bounce a little bit when you hit walls, teleporters shimmer, and so forth), which also makes the game feel a lot better than if it were entirely static. There's no music, and the sounds are very basic indeed.

The game does have one very large flaw, though; if it had come out today, it probably wouldn't get badges because of it. The game doesn't have any intrinsic save ability, but it does give you passwords for each level. However, Kongregate clearly couldn't award you a badge based on that, since you could have gotten the password from somewhere else. Consequently, in order to get the hard badge, you have to play through all 30 levels (and collect 60 MIS logos, which fortunately is not all of them) in one sitting, which is not fun at all. The game would be vastly better with a true save feature so that you don't have to play it all at once. There's also one small additional flaw with being on Kongregate. In its native resolution, you see the full spreadsheet; this means that you can use the row numbers to tell if something is actually on the same row as you (a surprisingly difficult task for things far apart on the board). However, the Kongregate version is slightly clipped, so the row numbers on the left are eliminated. This makes it a little trickier to navigate.

Overall, Excit is a well-designed puzzle game; while it can certainly get frustrating at times, the levels are carefully crafted and challenging without being horribly unfair. Still, that lack of a save feature is a really frustrating omission; even without the consideration badges, a game which can save for itself is much preferable to a game where you have to write down a password all the time.

Kaleidoscope Reef

Kaleidoscope Reef is a simple, but relaxing, game. It's neither a complicated game nor a long game, but it's a clever enough concept to provide some fun action.

So, the basic concept is quite simple. An evil ship has caused your beautiful reef to become polluted. In order to restore it, you have to plant new polyps, and then feed them by dragging plankton to them to get them to bloom into beautiful new coral. Once you've restored enough of the reef, the game proceeds to a new section, until eventually you've eliminated the pollution and restored the whole reef. At the beginning, your polyps are omnivorous, but as the game progresses, you'll need to feed them the correct-colored plankton (and getting the correct plankton is not always easy, either). The environment isn't always friendly, either -- as your reef blooms, fish of all sorts will be attracted; some just look pretty, but others can hamper your progress by eating things that you'd rather remain uneaten. The pollution can also pose a hazard to your burgeoning reef, as well.

That's pretty much all there is to the game. Like I said, it's a simple game. The graphics are vibrant and a bit cartoony, but overall the game is quite pretty. The music and sound are both quiet and peaceful; the music does a good job alternating between different melodies, so you don't get too bored, and in any case, it's unobtrusive enough that it never is particularly annoying.

As far as I can tell, you can't really lose the game -- while you get bonus points for the speed with which you complete the level, there's no actual time limit, so you can take as long as you want. So this is really more of a relaxing, peaceful game than a challenging game. Still, it's a nice change of pace and a game you should find entertaining.

light-Bot

If you read my review of Bot Arena 3 (here), you'd know that I like games where you program robots to do things. And Light-Bot is very much a game where you program a robot to do things. In fact, despite being completely nonviolent, it's much closer to RoboWar, for instance, than Bot Arena 3 is. It is, however, much, much simpler, so don't go expecting any Robot Odyssey action. Rather, it'll provide a fun little diversion and an interesting tutorial on programming in very limited space.

The basic premise of Light-Bot is very simple. (Note: I capitalized the game exactly as it appears in the title of this post, but in the text I'm going to capitalize it more normally.) You have a robot on a tiled grid, which is initially two-dimensional but eventually has tiles that you'll need to jump up onto (or down from). The grid contains some blue tiles, and your goal is to light up all of the blue tiles. To do this, you give your robot instructions in a very simple programming language (move forward, turn left, turn right, jump, or light current tile; all of the programming is done by dragging little instruction icons into your program body, which is quite simple and intuitive but can be annoying when you want to insert an instruction in your current program) and then fire him up and watch him execute your program, hopefully successfully. If not, just reset, tinker as necessary, and try again until you achieve success.

If that were all there is to it, Light-Bot would be a very simple game indeed (and it would get pretty tedious very quickly). What makes Light-Bot intriguing is that your main program is limited to 12 instructions, which is far fewer than you'll need to solve many of the puzzles. Fortunately, in addition to your main program body, you have available two subroutines, so developing reusable chunks that reduce your total number of instructions is absolutely key. At first, this is pretty straightforward, but in the later levels (especially level 10), figuring out how to make reusable code out of segments that seem inevitably different is quite a tricky task. One thing that would help is a visual trace which shows you which instruction the robot is executing as he runs your program, but sadly there is no such feature.

The game features only 12 levels, most of which are quite short but a couple of which may take you a little bit. The graphics are quite spartan, although the robot is kind of cute; there's no sound effects, other than the music, which will drive you batty in nothing flat; in my opinion, it's just not very good, and it's horribly repetitive.

Overall this is a fun game, but it is a little too much on the simplistic side to be terribly engrossing. Still, it's a cute little challenge to try when you're feeling bored and in the mood for tackling some very elementary programming challenges.

Warlords: Heroes

Warlords: Heroes is another game by Ben Olding, which essentially is a combination of two of his previous games: it takes the battle engine of Achilles (review here) and sets it in the world of Warlords: Call to Arms (not reviewed yet). The result is a game which has the satisfying hack-'n'-slash action of Achilles, but with a vastly greater depth, variety, and overall interestingness.

The game is set on the Warlords: Call to Arms map, which has nine different races, each of which controls three or four regions. Unlike Warlords: Call to Arms, though, your goal isn't to conquer the map, but rather traverse it to reach a variety of destinations. (Fortunately, thanks to evil sorcery, all regions that you cross will be hostile to you. How convenient!) There are three main plotlines (or "episodes", as the game calls them), each of which puts you in the shoes of a different character with a different goal. In order to achieve this goal, you usually have to travel to a specific target region, then, when you reach it, you gain information which tells travel somewhere else; this process repeats a few more times. However, the game gives you a great deal of latitude in how to get from one region to another. You can take the shortest path, but sometimes this brings you through some very difficult regions, so you could try to go around then, taking a longer, but hopefully easier path, or possibly retrace your steps to get more money.

When you enter a region, you have to fight your way through it pretty much like in Achilles. You have your main weapon (each main character has his own specific weapon, with its own advantages and disadvantages, which means that they play fairly differently), and also a kick, which stuns enemies and hence is not very useful in regular combat (where the emphasis is killing enemies as quickly as possibly so you don't get swarmed and rapidly killed), but can be very useful in certain situations (for instance, against bosses). The range of enemy units has been expanded widely -- rather than three different enemy types, Warlords: Heroes boasts eighteen enemy types (all, as far as I can tell, borrowed from Warlords: Call to Arms), including mounted units (which were quite the surprise when I first encountered them), and some of them do require a little more subtle tactics than "hack away as fast as possible" to defeat. Each race also has a very distinctive appearance, which adds a nice touch of variety to the game.

Another new feature is that, as you progress across the map, you gain gold (sometimes dropped from defeated enemies, and also a bonus for completing a region) which you can use for a wide variety of purposes: you can buy equipment to protect you, acquire new fighting moves (special moves which you can execute with various special key combinations), replenish lost lives (quite a reasonable investment), or even hire henchmen to help you fight. (I ended up not using this last option very much, since they tended to get killed sooner or later, and usually sooner.) If you're really having trouble with a specific region, then, you can do a few easy regions to get some more equipment or fighting moves to help you out, which is a nice option.

While each of the individual plotlines gets you to explore most of the map as you criss-cross it in search of your goal, the plotlines are constructed so that the three of them intersect at their ends. This is very clever, but it also means that each of the three episodes tends to find you covering pretty much the same ground, so you may find it gets a little bit repetitive if you play all three one after the other. After you've finished all of the first three episodes, you can play the fourth episode, in which you have to (naturally) battle and destroy an ultimate evil, which you can do with any of the first three characters.

In addition to the normal mode, the game offers a survival mode (which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like) and a gladiator mode, which you have to achieve a score of 13 on in order to get the game's impossible badge. The gladiator mode basically involves fighting a series of increasingly difficult bosses, with your health being replenished every fight. In the normal game, it's simplest to just plan to lose a life or two fighting bosses and then replace it afterwards, but the gladiator mode really requires you to hone your tactics sharply -- it's very much like classic NES boss fights, where you need to carefully observe your enemy's patterns and develop a well-executed strategy to attack his weak points. Definitely a good addition. (If you're going to get the impossible badge, you'll probably find the guide linked in the game description to be useful, though I found that the best strategy against the short sword and shield guy, who definitely gave me the most trouble, was to hit him as soon as he came in range, block immediately, and then use my retreating swipe to get out of range again.)

The graphics are simple, but (as mentioned earlier) there is a lot of care in setting up a lot of distinctive enemy looks, which is definitely a good feature of the game. And, of course, there's plenty of blood. The music is not bad, although, as is so often the case, you'll probably get tired of it somewhere around the fifth swarm of enemies you hack through. The sound effects are your standard assortment of clangs, stabbity noises, and so forth.

Overall, the basic action is not too much unchanged from Achilles -- it's simple, but satisfying, although it does get a little repetitive. Still, so much depth has been added to the game that it's considerably more enjoyable than Achilles, and is definitely worth playing. (Oh! One additional improvement from Achilles: bringing up the quick reference screen actually pauses the game, rather than just obstructing your view of the screen while your enemies disembowel you. Definitely a plus. Sorry, I just forgot to mention that earlier.)

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.)