Gravity Master

Today brings us to the next Shootorial contest winner, Gravity Master. Well, actually, Gravity Master wasn't really a winner -- it was disqualified for not being based on the Shootorial (and rightly so; it has pretty much nothing in common), but awarded a special Honorable Mention anyway for being quite a neat game. And indeed, there is an interesting concept there. It needs a little more fleshing out to be a really good game, but this is precisely the kind of game that I hope to see more of in Flash -- a really clever idea, simply and cleanly implemented.

The basic premise of Gravity Master (which more accurately should be called Gravity User, but that sounds considerably less cool) is very simple. You have a ball, and one or more tokens to collect. How do you get the ball to the tokens? Well, you use the mouse to draw shapes which you drop on the ball to nudge it in the correct direction. Naturally, as the game progresses, you have to do more complicated things with your shapes -- you can use them as ramps, bridges, or even drop them onto the other side of a see-saw to launch your ball.

Sounds like a neat idea, right? Well, I'll be honest -- I only completed six out of the 24 levels, because it does get a little frustrating at times. (I know, normally I try to complete the whole game before writing a review. These Shootorial contest games don't have real badges, though, only dinky little 5-point challenges, so the incentive to play the game for much longer isn't really there. And given that none of the Shootorial games is particularly great, that's not much of a loss. This is definitely the best of the bunch, though.) Dropping a shape on the ball is easy enough, but precisely placing shapes to use as ramps is often quite difficult, and getting the ball over even the smallest of bumps can often be an annoyingly tricky task.

The graphics are extremely basic, and there aren't any sound effects, though the background music is pleasantly soothing. Although simple, the interface does offer you everything you would want to do -- destroying shapes and restarting the level (both things you want to do often) are quite easily accomplished. (Though I didn't notice the return to menu button in the corner my first time through -- that could definitely use an improvement to its conspicuousness.) It does seem a little odd that blocks that fall off the bottom of the screen have "fallen into hell", though.

Overall, Gravity Master is a cute little game with a clever idea. It's still not quite ready for prime time, but it definitely has the most promise among games I've seen in this Shootorial contest. A little work on the puzzles (or perhaps the engine) to remove the more annoying parts of the game would make this an excellent puzzle challenge.

First, an announcement: I've added tags to the posts. Each post is tagged with Kongregate, the game name, and then a general tag with the category. Most of the tags should be pretty obvious (e.g. "turn-based strategy"), though a few perhaps require further explanation. I use "survival shooter" to refer to the particular subset of shooters where you have to defend yourself and/or a target from unending waves of enemies, and often have breaks between waves to buy upgrades and various more powerful weapons. I also had a tough time coming up with a good term for games which I could call real-time strategy if that term weren't already used for a much more specific genre -- in the end, I settled on "action strategy", which is not an ideal term, but it was the best I could do. My definition of "puzzle" is also much more restrictive than Kongregate's -- any game which requires a high degree of dexterity (e.g., colorfill) doesn't count as a puzzle game in my classification. I also ended up with "action" as an extremely broad catchall category (including most shooters not classified in the "survival shooter" category) -- maybe I should subdivide it further at some point.

Anyway, on to today's game:

G-Virus: Episode I

G-Virus is the third-place entry in the Shootorial contest, and by this point, I'm getting very glad there are only five winners overall, since I'm getting pretty bored with these games. G-Virus is basically exactly the same game as the Shootorial except with nicer graphics and a few minor gameplay changes, but certainly nothing to make it interesting enough for me to want to play it for any length of time.

So, the biologically problematic premise of G-Virus is that you're a virus fighting your way through a body. But you're a good virus (hence the G, apparently), destroying other viruses and rescuing cells. You shoot at the other viruses, which shoot at you; from time to time there's a really big enemy virus. There's an extremely unintuitive health bar at the top, and you can recover health by picking up red blood cells from destroyed enemy viruses (like I said, biologically problematic). The game doesn't have levels per se, but there is a progress bar indicating your progress through the level, and when it fills your firepower is increased.

Anyway, the game is pretty difficult, so I only got through a level and a half or so (not helped by the enemies that can shoot you from offscreen), but I really didn't see any need to keep playing, because there just wasn't much interesting about the gameplay. The graphics are colorful and cartoony (why do all of the viruses and cells have eyes, exactly?), the sound effects are pretty basic, and the background music is not very good -- it's not even really music so much as background sound effects. The English is also terrible -- clearly this is yet another game written by a non-native English speaker who didn't think it would be a good idea to have a native English speaker at least look at the game before releasing it. This is kind of frustrating.

Overall, G-Virus is simply not an interesting game. I suppose it does a good job on incrementally improving on the Shootorial, but the Shootorial isn't an interesting game (nor is it really designed to be; it's just a way to teach you to use Flash). I was kind of disappointed by the results, but maybe in retrospect I shouldn't have been, since after all the contest was for beginning programmers, and if you're supposed to model your game on a very elementary shooter, you're going to end up with a bunch of elementary shooters.

Elastic

Today brings us to the second-place winner in the Shootorial contest, Elastic. As you can probably guess, Elastic is also a shooter, but unlike River Raid, it introduces a couple of new ideas to the basic shooter formula. The game is not very polished, but I think in this case I'd rather take a somewhat buggy but novel idea. (OK, I know there are bunches of people in the comments pointing out that this idea has been done before. But this is the first that I, and I suspect most of the people who've played the game, have seen of it.)

In Elastic, your vehicle is, well, a little glowing ball. It doesn't actually do anything by itself, though (except get killed and pick up the occasional extra life) -- you also have a large hammer, which swings around your vehicle as you move. (This is kind of tricky to describe, but you'll see what I mean if you give it a try.) You also have two special abilities, one which fires a laser in the current direction from your vehicle to the hammer, and one which holds the hammer in its current position (which is very useful in conjunction with the first ability). There are two types of enemies, one of which can be smashed by the hammer but not lasered, and one which can be lasered but not smashed by the hammer, so you'll have to be constantly changing tactics, which gets kind of annoying. In a given level, you can only let a certain number of enemies go by before you lose, so you do have to engage most targets. I found myself not swinging the hammer very much, but generally just setting it in front of the enemies, locking it there, and then letting the enemies run into it while I lasered the other enemies.

As I said, the game has a few bug issues. The introductory text at the beginning promises that you can play five levels and get a reward (which I assumed was some kind of boss fight), but I reached level 7 without anything particularly interesting happening. There was also one point where the background merrily scrolled itself off the screen, leaving just gray behind (c'mon, that was like one of the first things they covered in the Shootorial!). Still, there aren't any showstoppers that I noticed, and the game's interface, while pretty basic, seems to function fine.

The graphics are pretty basic -- your ship looks kind of pretty, but the bacgkround is quite bland and the explosions are downright ugly. The sounds are nothing special. The background music is kind of peacefully soothing, and is a very nice addition to the game -- it blends nicely enough into the background that you don't mind its being continuously repeated, which is nice.

Overall, Elastic deserves credit for its basic gameplay concept, but it doesn't really add very much to that concept -- once you've gotten through the tutorial, it's just the same thing again and again, except with more enemies. As a result, it doesn't really hold its value very well; I got pretty bored with it after a few levels and didn't really see the need to play very much more. Still, I can easily imagine this idea being turned into a more interesting game. It at least has potential.

River Raid

So a while ago, Kongregate had a very clever idea: have a series of tutorials to teach people how to program Flash. The tutorial featured a very simple shooter (called the "Shootorial"), and the tutorials stepped you through the basics of creating it -- first the simple things, how to make a ship and move it around, and then how to make that ship shoot, and then how to make those shots collide with enemies, and then a few additional features, like power-ups and bosses. Anyway, you get the idea, and like I said, it's very clever, because the more Flash programmers out there, the better for Kongregate.

Accompanying the tutorials was a contest -- you had to make your own game based on the Shootorial (which means, apparently, that it had to be some kind of shooter) and there were various cash prizes for the winners. Which brings us to today's game, River Raid, which captured first place in this contest. To give people an incentive to try out the contest winners, Kongregate created some points challenges (no badges, though), so, being the type of person that responds to incentives like these, I decided to give it a try.

As you might be able to guess from the preceding, River Raid is a pretty basic shooter. It is apparently a remake of an old Atari 2600 game by the same name, and it feels very much like an Atari 2600 game -- very low-resolution graphics, and pretty simple and unvaried gameplay. You control some kind of attack aircraft flying along a river filled with enemy ships, helicopters, and balloons; even though you're flying, leaving the river will cause you to crash. Naturally, your goal is to shoot as many enemies as possible. However, there are also fuel stations along the river, which you don't want to shoot, since your fuel is continually dwindling and you need these to refuel, so, unlike your typical shooter, holding down the shoot button is not recommended.

So, that's pretty much all there is. The game does offer a variety of different play modes and missions, as well as a variety of achievements (not that it'll tell you what they are), but since unlocking the different modes required completing five levels on the normal mode, which is nontrivial, I didn't bother. Oh, one other strange thing worth mentioning -- your shots can be steered even after you fire them; moving left or right also moves your shots, which is kind of unusual. Anyway, as mentioned, the graphics are pretty low-res, and the sounds are also pretty low-quality. The only thing which isn't Atari 2600-like is the background music, which isn't bad to begin with, but which is on way too short of a loop, so you'll get tired of it pretty quickly. The game is also riddled with typos and awkward constructions -- a native English proofreader would really have been a good idea.

Overall, River Raid just doesn't have interesting enough gameplay to be a really good game. For someone just starting out with Flash, it's not a bad effort, but it's just a simple shooter of the sort that has been around since the dawn of videogames, and so there's really no good reason to play this other than curiosity.

Wooden Path

Wooden Path is a well-crafted version of a puzzle you've likely seen before -- a sliding blocks puzzle. There are a few enhancements to the basic formula, but they don't change the gameplay all that much.

The basic concept of Wooden Path is very simple. You have a set of varyingly-sized rectangular blocks. Some of them are wooden bridges, while others are different-colored stone. You have a limited area (set in a river, in this game) in which to move them, and the object is to slide the blocks around so that the wooden bridges make a continuous path from one bank of the river to the other. If you've ever played Rush Hour, for instance, this will seem pretty familiar. Some of the puzzles can get quite difficult, especially when the space is so limited that your possibilities are very tightly constrained. And, as is the hallmark for puzzles of this type, often you'll do a lot of work just to get one block into the right place, and then when it is, the rest of the puzzle kind of falls together.

There are a few additions that you wouldn't see in a physical puzzle, though. Some levels feature switches; they come in sets of two (or occasionally three) of the same color. To activate the switch, you must connect all of them with stones of the same color, which causes some barriers in the level to disappear. Some levels feature gold stones; connecting all of the gold stones to each other will cause them all to disappear. Finally, there are also teleporters. The teleporters can do interesting things -- for instance, they can change the orientation of a block -- but since they usually connect two otherwise-disconnected areas, most of the time they just serve to increase the effective area available in the puzzle. The gold stones and the switches are kind of neat, but they're also a little bit superfluous -- usually, once you trigger the switch or eliminate the gold stones, you've opened up enough space that the rest of the puzzle is pretty easy, so there's still really only one difficult objective.

The graphics are pretty -- while they're just stones, they're nicely textured and the background is nice. The game wisely eschews insanity-inducing background music in favor of some nice woodland sound effects, so you'll hear pleasant bird chirps and so forth. This adds a nice relaxing feeling to the game. The stones move softly, but audibly, so they have a nice heft. One puzzling interface decision is that the stones don't move as you drag them -- rather, you click and drag a stone, but the stone doesn't move until you actually let go of the mouse button. This is rather counterintuitive; while you get used to it eventually, I don't understand why they can't just move the stones normally.

Anyway, Wooden Path is a pleasing game to play, but it is awfully long -- the game features 22 "beginner's levels", which are, as you might expect, easier, but can still be pretty involved, and then 30 "adventurer's levels", which can often get very lengthy indeed. Probably the game could benefit from cutting a few of the levels so it's not quite so tedious to get them all. Still, Wooden Path is quite enjoyable in small doses. If you try to do 20 levels in one sitting, you'll certainly go mad, but a level here and a level there is the perfect way to do this game.

Shore Siege!

Shore Siege is a simple game by Antony Lavelle, the designer behind the SHIFT series of games. While entirely unlike SHIFT, Shore Siege does share several of SHIFT's traits -- it's simple, easy to learn, doesn't take too long, and has enough cleverness to make for an entertaining play.

At first glance, Shore Siege seems to be your typical (side-view) survival shooter game -- your pirate ship is beached on the shore and under attack from a bizarre variety of critters, and you have to kill them to save your ship. However, the mechanics of the gameplay are not your simple "click mouse to shoot zombie" (or whatever else, but let's be honest, it's nearly always zombies) that you see in your ordinary survival shooter game. Rather, you have a truly silly assortment of weaponry, but each weapon in your arsenal is only effective against one or two types of enemy, and each weapon is used differently (some you click and drag onto the enemy, some you just click, some you have to hold over the enemy, etc.) At the end of the day, you can buy the usual array of upgrades to your weapons, and buy repairs for your ship; if you get it repaired enough, you can sail away from the island and win the game.

Anyway, the game is neither overly complicated, overly difficult, or overly long. The balance is not quite right; you'll discover that one of the upgrade strategies is clearly the most powerful, so once you find that out you should be able to win pretty easily and quickly. The graphics are pretty cute; the music is also nice, though (as is pretty much always the case) pretty repetitive. The sound effects are pretty basic, but they get the job done. One complaint is that one of the weapons (the magnet) was not at all intuitive to use; I didn't actually figure it out at all the first time I beat the game, but only when writing this review.

Overall, Shore Siege is a nice little diversion. Like the SHIFT series, it doesn't overstay its welcome; it doesn't bore you with 50 levels of nearly the same thing, but rather gets you through the game in a reasonable amount of time while remaining fun all the way through. It's not a game you feel the need to go back and play again and again, but I definitely enjoyed playing through it.

Zilch

Zilch is a fun little dice game. Like any dice game, there is naturally a large element of luck, but like Yahtzee, it adds enough skill to make you feel like it's not just a mindless exercise. To its credit, though, it is completely unlike Yahtzee (although, perhaps not surprisingly, it is apparently based on a real dice game), giving it a nice, original feel.

The rules for Zilch are pretty straightforward. You roll six dice, and then score some or all of the resulting dice. You can score any number of ones or fives at a time, or three or more of any die; there are also a couple of special combinations (like a 1-6 run or three pairs). After scoring, you can elect to bank or roll again. If you bank, your turn ends, and all the points you have scored that turn are added to your score. (You can only bank, however, if you've already scored at least 300 points.) If you choose to roll again, you can try to score more points. However, you don't reroll dice that you've already used to score. (That is, if on your first roll, you score a single one, you then only roll five dice on your next roll, which obviously decreases your scoring opportunities. If you manage to score with all six dice, then you can reroll all of them.) If you happen to take a reroll and fail to score anything, you zilch! Zilching causes you to lose all of the points that you've accumulated that turn, and, should you be unfortunate to zilch three times in a row, you'll lose 500 points. So, there's a natural balance between wanting to push your luck to eke a few more points out of of your turn and quitting while you're ahead, which makes for a sound tactical foundation for the game. Once one player reaches 10000 points, the other player has one turn to try to beat that, and then a winner is declared.

That's pretty much all there is to the game. The game offers three different AIs (you can also play a hotseat 2-player game) -- Reckless is very aggressive (as you might guess from the name), and so will occasionally pull out huge scores but more often take completely avoidable zilches; Cautious is (again, as you might guess) more conservative, while Realist tries to take the most "human-like" approach. Realist is pretty tough to beat, but even it makes baffling decisions sometimes. The game is well-suited to being a laptop game, since it doesn't demand constant attention, a single round doesn't take very much time, and it can be played entirely with the keyboard. (I should take this moment to mention one poor interface decision, though. When you roll the dice, the scoring options are displayed, and you might think those are your choices. However, in some cases only the highest-scoring option is displayed. For instance, if you roll two ones, only the two ones scoring option will be displayed -- it doesn't appear you can just score a single one, which you might want to do to leave more dice free for your next roll. You can, however, score just the single one by clicking on the die, rather than the scoring option. This parenthetical remark will probably make no sense if you haven't actually played the game, but if you try it you'll see what I'm talking about.)

The graphics are pretty straightforward, but are charmingly carried out, giving the game a pleasing look. There's no music, and the sound effects are basic but well-chosen, making the game pleasant to play. With its default settings, the game does kind of proceed rather slowly, but you can speed it up by reducing some of the dead time.

OK, two rants now. First, a supportive rant. There's an amazing number of comments complaining that the game is rigged (i.e., the CPU somehow magically gets better rolls). These comments could practically serve for a case study in confirmation bias. It's pretty obvious to me that the rolls are fair, but, for instance, when you play Reckless, he occasionally will get phenomenal scores thanks to his aggressiveness. People will look at this and somehow think that the game is rigged, when in fact they're just not noticing all of the zilches that Reckless' recklessness get him, too. There are, of course, times when you will get blown out of the water due to the computer having good luck (I played one game when the computer rolled six ones, an 8000-point roll), but these are balanced out by the times when you get loads of points while the computer struggles. Anyway, my point is, people saying the game is rigged are clearly not paying attention.

Now, an annoyed rant. Zilch features 120 achievements, which is a truly staggering number, and I was terrified that Kongregate would make it an impossible badge to get all of them, which would have been unbelievably tedious. Thankfully, they chose the more sensible route of requiring 100 achivements, and making it only a hard badge. This is because the achievements are simply not well designed. Some of them just require mind-boggling time investments (completing a very large number of games, or scoring a total of a large number of points), or incredible luck (scoring a nearly impossible number of points in a single turn), which is not fun to anyone. Worse, though, is that a lot of the achievements overlap significantly. For instance, there's an achievement for playing a game that lasts 30 turns. There's also one for winning a game that lasts 30 turns. What's the point of the former when you have the latter? I could cite bunches more of examples, but if you play the game you'll see what I mean (you'll also see that, annoyingly, the game doesn't tell you how to get the achievements, which I've ranted about before). This means that the overall achievement count is kind of padded, because of all of the redundancies. Contrast Zilch's achivements with, say, Amorphous+, and you'll see what I mean. Amorphous+ has a lot more oddball, one-off achievements for silly things, so that there's a lot more variety in getting them all. And even though there is some redundancy, the redundant achievements aren't useless -- getting achievements can unlock rewards, which you may find necessary to get the harder achievements anyway. In Zilch, on the other hand, the achievements don't serve any purpose. Overall, I feel that the game probably would be served with fewer achievements, but more judiciously chosen ones.

Anyway, Zilch is a fun game. If you're playing it for the badges, you're probably going to have to play it a little more than ideal -- it's best played in small doses, since the gameplay doesn't change very much, playing ten games in a row can be kind of boring. Still, it's a good design and a good execution, and a fun game to play here and there.

Feudalism II

Feudalism II is -- let's be honest -- a mess of a game. It's a strategy game with not enough strategy; it's an action game with too much action; it's an RPG that doesn't matter. Overall, the different elements of the game simply do not fit together well; while the game certainly is ambitious, it fails to produce a challenging or entertaining result.

So, the basic concept in Feudalism II is pretty simple. You start as one of twelve heroes (there are six nations, each with a male and a female hero), with control of one tiny town in your starting nation and a small army to your name. You travel across the overland map from place to place (occasionally encountering random battles along the way); in a given town or city, you can buy or sell equipment, get quests, or attempt to capture the town. Once you've captured a location, you can recruit troops there to add to your army; naturally, the bigger and more powerful towns have better and more powerful troops, so you need to gradually work your way up the ladder. Once you've conquered one nation, though, conquering the other five is pretty much a cakewalk, since you can now use the best troops available.

Battles are, as you might expect, the most important part in the game, and it's here that the game's shortcomings become rapidly apparent. There is a wealth of things for you to do in battle -- you have a melee weapon and a ranged weapon, and can switch between the two as necessary; for each weapon, you can activate one or more skills which give you various powerful attacks, and you can also have passive skills which increase the power of your army and aura skills which can affect all the units on the battlefield. It's easy to see how this could lead to a variety of interesting tactical options. However, unless the enemy only has like two units, you'll never get to use any of them. With 15 or 20 units on the battlefield, the action is simply far too chaotic for you to be able to do anything productively -- the only useful action you can do the vast majority of the time is to sit in the back and fire arrows, which is hardly exciting. This means that the RPG elements of the game are not terribly useful -- as you gain experience, your character becomes more powerful and acquires more skills, but most of these skills you'll never use anyway (although some of the aura skills are very useful).

The game balance is also not great. The gold, for instance, is way out of whack -- after your first few battles, you'll have more than enough money to last you through the rest of the game. While conquering your first nation is not easy, as I mentioned, once you're done with that, there's not much left. Each nation has its own set of weapons and techniques it specializes in, so in theory, you could take this into account when creating your army, but again, because the action is so chaotic, it's impossible to tell what's going on, so you might as well just build a simple army and go with that rather than trouble to do anything more complicated.

The graphics are about average; the overland map is pretty boring, although there is a nice amount of effort put into giving each nation a distinct appearance, so there is at least a nice variety. There's no music (which is a shame; the game probably could have benefited from some), and the sound effects are quite generic. Where the game really shows poor production values is in the text -- I am (sadly) accustomed to a certain level of errors in your typical Flash game, but Feudalism is completely riddled with typos, misspelled or wrong words, and very strange-sounding sentences; I suspect it was written by a non-native English speaker, but really, you'd think he could have at least asked a native English speaker or two to look over it before releasing it.

Overall, Feudalism II shows flashes of being an interesting game, but the vast majority of time it is not. Fortunately, it's not terribly difficult; since the outcome of battles seems often determined by luck as much as anything else, a couple of retries is usually all you need to get through the tougher battles. So, if you want the badge, it's not too bad, but it's still not a great experience.

Mytheria

Mytheria is, sigh, another card game.

This is going to sound like I'm picking on Mytheria, and I don't mean to, because at least in some ways it's a good game, but I can't help but feel a little frustrated at the current state of Flash gaming. The advantage of Flash gaming is that it's supposed to be this open playing field where all sorts of independent, crazy ideas can flourish. However, it seems like the lion's share of the most popular games on Kongregate currently are either sequels or one of the most popular categories: tower defense, card games, survival shooters, or dodgers. (To be fair, looking at the most recent challenges, this seems somewhat less true than I make it out to be. I think it's just the current profusion of sequels which is dragging me down a bit.)

OK, so Mytheria is a card game. The natural temptation with any card game is to compare it to Magic, and indeed, Mytheria is very much like a stripped-down version of Magic. There's no lands, but otherwise the procedure is very much the same: you use mana (which comes in five different colors) to play creatures, spells which have an instant effect, spells which enchant a creature, or spells which have an effect on the whole battlefield. Those creatures then attack; attacking creatures can be blocked by other creatures, in which case usually one or the other is killed, while unblocked creatures do damage directly to the player, and the objective is to reduce your enemy to 0 life. Some creatures have various special abilities -- some can assist others in blocking, some are unblockable, some can only be used to block, not attack, and so forth. These will probably sound vaguely familiar. There's even a Tim! And your cards have flavor text which often hints at some bigger plotline which is never really revealed.

Anyhow, what makes Mytheria different from Magic? Well, a few things. Perhaps the most obvious and important difference is that Mytheria has far, far fewer cards (83, if my count is correct), and those cards are pretty straightforward -- there aren't any Chaos Orbs lurking, for instance. This makes the game much more streamlined. Also, as mentioned earlier, there's no lands; rather, at the beginning of the turn, you have the choice of increasing your power (which effectively means playing a land) or drawing a card. This removes some of the frustration of never being able to get the land that you want (or, conversely, too many lands), while adding the tactical decision of whether to draw or increase your pool of mana. This sounds like a pretty clever design. However, in practice, it means that all you do is increase your power until you have enough mana to play everything you have lying around, and after that you draw cards, so it ends up being not quite as tactically complex as it first appears. The next difference, which is quite significant, is that you can only play cards at one specific point: during your turn, before attacking. This eliminates huge swaths of the Magic strategy space: no interrupting your opponent with Counterspells or the like, no strategically-timed Giant Growths or Lightning Bolts during the attack phase ... you get the picture. This makes the game vastly simpler (and, undoubtedly, much easier to program). Finally, instead of creatures having a different attack and defense/HP, all of those numbers are rolled into one "Strength" number, which is both a creature's attack power and its HP. When a creature takes damage, it does not immediately recover like in Magic; rather, its Strength recovers 1 point per turn until it reaches its maximum. The observant Magic player will note that this makes wall-type creatures incredibly powerful: not only can they cheaply absorb a lot of damage, but since they do an equal amount of damage in return, they can destroy even the most powerful attackers.

The basic framework of the game is pretty simple -- you have 12 missions, which you play with a fixed deck against various opponents. After completing the sixth mission, you unlock the challenges. In the challenges, you have to build your own deck to defeat a variety of different tasks (you start out with very little health, the enemy starts out with a lot of health, etc.). The main problem is simply that the game is too easy -- the AI is really not very good, and the missions are pretty fair, so you should have no problem rolling through them (I didn't die once my first time through, although I did manage to get killed a couple of times replaying them). Deck design for the challenges is also not hard -- you just need to pick one of the colors and build a good deck. (You might think that the fact that you can freely pick which color to add when you increase your power would encourage multicolor decks. However, the vast majority of the cards require all colored mana to play; not many call for any colorless mana, and only a few call for more than 1, so in practice, single-color decks tend to be the most effective. This is kind of unfortunate design.) Because of the small number of cards (and the fact that the card balance is not so great), building a powerful deck is not a difficult task, so you also shouldn't find the challenges too difficult.

To give credit where it's due, Mytheria is a lovely game. The art is very nice and the backgrounds are beautiful. The music is minimal but a nice touch, and the sound effects are varied enough that they don't become completely boring instantly. The interface is also very nice-looking, but it's awfully slow; I had to turn the message speed up to maximum to make it tolerable, and while creature combat is still annoyingly slow that way, instants often flash by too quickly to notice, which is kind of aggravating. (Another poor interface feature is that when you play a card requiring colorless mana, a dialog box requiring you to pick the color you want to use pops up, even if you only have one color available. Annoying!)

Anyway, if you play Mytheria, you can enjoy the pretty pictures, and it won't take you very long to finish. So if you're just in it for the badge, it's not too bad. Still, it's kind of a disappointment, simply because with more cards, better card design and balance, and more challenges, this could easily be a really good game, but as it is, it's just kind of blah.

Hanna in a Choppa

Hanna in a Choppa is, shockingly, yet another game that I started before it had badges, although unlike Splitter, which is still badgeless as of this writing, it got badges before I had even finished the game, so my early adoption was rewarded. Hooray! Anyway, Hanna in a Choppa is not a particularly original game -- you fly around doing things in a helicopter -- but it is charmingly and deftly executed, and is overall an entertaining little diversion.

As I mentioned, and as you probably could have guessed from the title, you fly around in a helicopter. Your task is, nominally, to reach the flag at the end of the level; sometimes this is simply a matter of navigation, but often times it requires whimsical tasks like cutting hair, herding sheep, or performing a rescue at sea. By themselves, the levels are pretty easy, but the trickier tasks are completing the level "very fast" or "perfect" (which requires that you don't touch any of the walls or floors), which can be quite challenging (and annoying, in some cases). The game, as you might be able to guess from the above tasks, has a pretty light sense of humor, and is quite bright and cheerful throughout. There are a few references to other games -- a World of Goo reference sneaks in, and there is the (sadly seemingly obligatory) cake borrowed from Portal, too.

The default control set is simply "press an arrow key to make the helicopter go in that direction", which occasionally, when executing more demanding maneuvers, can cause the helicopter to pitch annoyingly (you can also rotate the helicopter yourself, but this isn't always reliable). It wasn't until the end of the game that I discovered that you can also activate more realistic controls (namely, up arrow propels you in the direction that the rotor is facing, and to move in a different direction, you have to rotate). Mouse controls also exist, but I couldn't really get them to work well (which is fine; I prefer keyboard anyway); while I appreciate the diversity of control schemes, more notification of their existence would be nice. The interface is clean -- I especially appreciate the little icons in the lower-left corner which illustrate whether you are still eligible for receiving a perfect or very fast, so you know when it's worthwhile to keep trying or give up. One thing that could be clearer -- it is possible to crash the chopper (er, choppa), but it's not clear if this is only caused by very high-impact collisions, or if several lower-velocity impacts could have the same effect, since there's no damage meter or anything available.

The game also has a very distinctive style. Although the graphics themselves are pretty simple, the game uses a black-and-orange color scheme which lends a very bold air to the proceedings, and the graphic design is definitely quality. The sound effects and music are both on the cute side, occasionally tending towards the twee; as is so often the case, the music is pleasant in the background when things are going smoothly but can often drive you crazy if you're stuck on one particular task. The game is also not quite glitch-free -- if you manage to get through the game without getting yourself or an object stuck in (or pulled through) a wall, then you ended up a lot better than me. Still, the game generally runs smoothly.

While there isn't much to the basic game mechanics, the diversity of tasks that you are given adds a nice variety to the game and prevents it from becoming repetitive and tedious. It definitely doesn't overstay its welcome -- it won't take you long at all to do the 21 levels in the game, and even trying to get all of the perfects and very fasts, while certainly not a trivial task, is not the exercise in frustration that it can so easily be in a Flash game. Overall, it's a game you should enjoy playing.

SHIFT 3

If you've read my reviews of SHIFT (here) and SHIFT 2 (here), you know that I would eagerly anticipate the arrival of SHIFT 3. So when I first saw it appear on Armor Games, I was delighted. But I wanted to wait for it to appear on Kongregate, so I could get all of the badges in one place. So I waited. And waited. And waited. I expected I'd have to wait a couple of weeks; instead, it took several months for the game to arrive on Kongregate. Not surprisingly, that kind of wait tends to take the excitement out of a game. It's certainly not the game's fault -- it delivers pretty much exactly what you'd want from a sequel. There are a few interesting improvements to the game, but the core gameplay experience remains unchanged -- mostly it's just more of what you've come to love.

Just to recap for those of you too uninterested to play the first two and too lazy to read my reviews, SHIFT 3 is a pretty straightforward platformer -- your goal is to reach the exit door in a level by jumping on blocks and avoiding spikes. Keys will move barriers around, hopefully to your benefit, and lightbulbs remove checked squares that impede your progress. At the beginning of the game, you are a black figure standing on a white background. However, by pressing Shift, you can shift into the black block you're standing on and become a white figure on a black background. This opens up all sorts of creative puzzle options. There also exist buttons which can rotate the screen 180 degrees (or even 90 degrees) without the need to shift.

Anyway, the biggest change in SHIFT 3 is that the game is no longer completely linear; you don't just do one room after another until you reach the end. Rather, some rooms have multiple exits, and you'll often need to backtrack to a previously-visited room. Keys can also affect barriers in other rooms, meaning that you'll often move to another room, grab a key, and then return to your previous room and take advantage of the change you've just effected. While this definitely adds an interesting new feature, the designer thankfully does not go overboard; the overall layout is not too complicated, and the game thoughtfully provides a map to help you navigate your way through.

As in SHIFT 2, there are two possible endings; to get the better of the two, you need to collect various newspaper clippings strewn throughout the game. These are kind of an effort to give the game a Portal-like hint of a backstory, but there's not really enough to make the plot terribly interesting. These usually require finding various secret doors, but the game isn't too cruel about hiding these -- generally, their presence is pretty well indicated, so you just need to pay attention when looking around to find them. Unfortunately, because what you need to get the good ending is just a series of numbers, it's easy for people to get the good ending without doing any of the work, which I naturally disapprove of.

In addition to the main adventure mode, SHIFT 3 also offers three "player packs", collections of six levels from various sources to give a quick "classic SHIFT" experience. These are quite short, and range in difficulty from quite easy to moderately head-scratching. They're a nice little addition to the main game, but, being only six levels, they're not going to take you too long to get through. The game also has a wide variety of achievements, like SHIFT 2, although it seems to have embraced the annoying trend of not actually telling you how to get the achievements. What is the purpose of this?! All it does is drive people to FAQs. Fortunately, I was able to figure out how to get all of the achievements by myself without too much difficulty, since most of them are pretty sensibly named; still, it's a needless irritation.

The graphics are the same as in the first two; the music has been changed again, although when you play the player packs, you get the original SHIFT music, which I think is still my favorite of the three. The game also includes a level editor, which is a nice addition to the game content. Thankfully, despite being an Armor Games product, the Kongregate version of SHIFT 3 isn't crippled in any way, which is a relief.

Overall, SHIFT 3 is a fun experience. It's not going to offer much you haven't already seen if you've played the first two, but like its two predecessors, it's good, well-designed, entertaining fun which doesn't overstay its welcome.

Splitter

"Whatever happened to the Popular Front, Reg?"
"He's over there."
"SPLITTER!"

Ahem, sorry, just had to get that out of my system. Anyway, Splitter is (with the exception of one issue) pretty much the ideal Flash puzzle game. It's a novel idea, interesting yet simple. Each attempt takes only a few seconds, although a level may take many attempts. The game is challenging without being frustrating, difficult enough that it's not a total cakewalk yet not so difficult that you'll feel that the game is unfair. And it doesn't push it too far -- there are 25 levels, each of which has an interesting concept behind it, rather than overstaying its welcome by throwing in far too many levels.

Anyway, the basic concept of Splitter is, as mentioned before, simple yet elegant. You have a ball, which you want to get to the exit. The ball is usually positioned on some wooden blocks, perhaps held together with some strings. Your job is, given a finite number of cuts, to cut the blocks and/or strings in such a way that the ball makes it to the exit. There's also metal, which can't be cut, but can still move if other objects push it, and brick, which can't be cut and doesn't move. Most of the levels have stars, which are theoretically a bonus element, but on most levels you'll get the star naturally on your way to the exit without having to do anything special, which kind of defeats the purpose. (There are a couple which are a little tricky.)

The music is kind of charming and peaceful, though (really, I should just make a macro for this) it gets kind of repetitive after a while. There's not much in the way of sound effects, except for a little victory sound when you finish a level or get a star, and the graphics are pretty basic.

Now, for my one huge issue. I started playing this game when I noticed people in chat talking about it (which has led me to some pretty bad games, for sure), decided to try it out on a whim, and enjoyed it so much that I kept playing it...despite the fact that there were no badges to be had! As you know, this is quite rare for me. However, I figured that this was a polished enough game that it was probably likely to get badges at some point down the road, so I figured I'd finish the game and then I'd just get the badge when it came out. Unfortunately for me, although the game saved my progress as I progressed through the levels, once I finished, my progress was reset! Needless to say, I was a little annoyed at having to go through the game a second time (although I cleverly didn't do the last level the second time).

Overall, Splitter is an enjoyable experience. There are some levels which will undoubtedly be tricky -- many of the levels demand some very precision cutting, which will take a lot of trial and error -- but it never gets too difficult, so give it a try and you should have a fun ride.

Escape from really boring island 3

I am totally baffled as to why this game has a badge. I mean, not only do I find the game completely pointless, but I can't even see how other people might like this game.

So, EFRBI3 is your basic point-and-click adventure. And I do mean "basic". You're on the titular island, and your object is to perform the titular action. The adventure is completely simplistic, though -- there's no puzzle solving skills required. You have maybe a choice of two things to click on at any given point. If it's not totally obvious which you should click on (and it usually is), just pick one at random; if it's the wrong thing to click on, try the other thing. That's pretty much all there is to the game.

There's no sound or music, which is probably for the better, and all of the graphics are quite crudely-drawn. The spelling and grammar in the game are also horrible, featuring such deathless dialogue as "Where the heck I am?"

Overall, there's no challenge to this game and nothing else that might make it interesting (pretty graphics, engaging story)...it's just a sequence of poorly-drawn events. I suppose I should be glad that at least it's very short, but I really did not see the point in this game at all.

Z-Rox

Z-Rox is another member of a rare category of games: games that I started before they got badges. Actually, I played through Z-Rox not even really expecting it to necessarily get badges, so I was pleasantly surprised when it did get badges (and a little surprised that they had even added a badge for a part of the game that I hadn't tried and wouldn't have ordinarily expected to get a badge). Why did I play it? Because it was a fun little game and a perfect Flash puzzle game: a very simple concept implemented well.

As the creator's note comments, Z-Rox is really a 1-D game. It's a little tricky for me to explain how the game works -- it's probably simplest to just play -- but I'll give it a try. Imagine a letter, and imagine a horizontal line scanning down across the letter. What is displayed on the screen is the intersection of the horizontal line with the letter over time. For instance, for a T, you would see a long line at the beginning (the crossbar), and then you'd see a shorter line which lasted for a longer amount of time (the stem). (If you want to think of it in a slightly geekier way, you could say that the y-axis has been changed into a time axis.) It's an incredibly intuitive concept. The object displays on a continuous loop, so if you don't get it the first time (and, when it gets to the harder ones, you probably won't), you can keep looking at it until it finally clicks.

The game features a total of 100 levels, starting out with easy letters and numbers, moving into punctuation and simple geometric shapes, and then featuring in the later levels quite a dizzying assortment of objects and symbols. You make your guesses by typing in the answer at the bottom of the screen, which is pretty simple for the letters but can occasionally get tricky for the more complicated objects. The game generally does do a good job of providing a wide spectrum of alternate answers, but there were a couple where we figured out what it was but couldn't quite figure out what the game wanted us to call it. That was a little frustrating, but it was by no means the norm. There are also a couple of alternate modes unlocked as you play through the game: Limited View mode only displays an object once; you can redisplay it, but you only have a limited number of redisplays available. In Random Attack mode, you have a limited amount of time to solve some random objects; successfully identifying an object restores some time to the clock.

The graphics are pretty simple -- beyond the objects themselves, there's not very much. The sound effects aren't particularly fancy, but they're well-chosen and add a nice feeling to the game. The music is really quite excellent -- it's beautiful and relaxing without being obtrusive, and is very pleasant to listen to, even when you're completely stumped by one of the puzzles.

Overall, Z-Rox is an excellent little puzzle. It does get pretty tricky in the later levels, so I recommend playing with other people; having a whiteboard or equivalent to draw on can also be very useful. But it's fundamentally an interesting concept, and the implementation is good. 100 levels is maybe a little too many; a few of the later objects are kind of peculiar, but there's nothing totally unfair, and you can always come back to a level later if you're having difficulty -- this is really a good game to play a bit at a time. All in all, it's a fun diversion.

Warlords: Call to Arms

This review is going to be a little awkward, because I really wanted to write it before Warlords: Heroes (review here), which is partially based on this game. However, since I ended up finishing Warlords: Heroes first, this is the order in which you're getting them. Sorry about that.

Anyway, Warlords: Call to Arms is a fast-paced strategy game; you could call it "real-time strategy" if that term didn't already mean something quite specific which this game isn't. You engage your enemy on a battlefield eight rows deep; units are deployed using the same timed-release mechanism as in Warfare: 1917 -- each unit type is on a timer, you can deploy a unit when its timer is full, more powerful units have longer timers, and deploying a unit will reset the timer for all units. Each unit stays in the row in which it is deployed, so you're kind of fighting on eight mini-battlefields. A unit advances until it engages an enemy, or exits off the other side of the screen. When a unit successfully leaves the enemy's side of the screen, the territory bar at the top moves towards that side; if you get the territory bar all the way over to your side, you have conquered the region! There's also a time limit; if you run out of time, then whoever has more control at the moment is declared the victor. This is nice to prevent battles from lasting forever, and also often adds some exciting tension to the final moments ("just need to get one more unit through!"). To encourage you to be aggressive, there's also a charge feature -- for every 20 enemies you kill, you can deploy a charge, using any unit whose timer is currently filled, which places one of that unit in each of the eight rows. As you might expect, a well-timed charge can have quite a significant impact on the battlefield.

If you've played Warlords: Heroes, then the world of Warlords: Call to Arms should look familiar, since it's the same. The world is divided into nine races, each of which controls a few regions on the overall map. Between battles, you can upgrade your units' abilities and unlock new types of units, and then you choose which region to attack and conquer next; not surprisingly, your goal is to conquer the whole world. You can play as eight of the nine races, and each of them has its own unique advantage and disadvantage -- for instance, the Night Elves have superior archery skills but are weak with swords. (The ninth race, the Demons, becomes playable when you win the game with one of the other eight races.) Each region on the map has its own intrinsic difficulty (which seems to be determined by the unit types the enemy in that region has available), so if you're having trouble winning a particular battle, you can always try attacking a different region. However, as you conquer regions, the difficulty of all remaining regions on the map rises accordingly, so the game remains challenging all the way through.

There's an impressive array of units available, and each side has their own special unit, so there's quite a wide variety of strategies available. As I played the game, I experimented with a bunch of them -- trying to get a bunch of archers protected by some stronger units, trying to clear a path with some powerful units and then follow it up with some light units to make some quick gains, etc. Some of them worked well, and some of them didn't work so well. Unfortunately, when it came to the endgame, Warlords: Call to Arms fell prey to the same problem as similar games. For instance, in Epic War or Warfare: 1917, it's pretty much always best to send out your best unit (angels and tanks, respectively). Warlords: Call to Arms is the opposite way around: in the endgame, it's pretty much best to always send out your cheapest unit (in this case, spearmen). If you've played Achilles or Warlords: Heroes, it's easy to figure out why: because of the way the battle mechanics work, one unit, no matter how powerful, is easily overwhelmed by a large pack of units, no matter how weak, so if you can get groups of spearmen for every single unit your enemy deploys, you should win easily.

Anyway, like Warlords: Heroes, the graphical detail in Warlords: Call to Arms is quite impressive. Each race has its own distinctive appearance, and each unit is very detailed; the animations are also high-quality. The backgrounds are a little drab, but they're not terrible, either. The interface is simple but effective, allowing you to get units out quickly with a minimum of bother. The sound effects are your standard slashes and clangs; the music isn't bad, although it does get a little repetitive eventually. Still, it's a nice complement to the battle action.

Overall, Warlords: Call to Arms is not a bad game, but it's a little too long and repetitive, especially if you find yourself just using the same strategy over and over again. If you're willing to try to change up your strategy, it's somewhat more entertaining, except, of course, if your new strategy causes you to lose. It's solidly designed, but ultimately I'm not convinced that the timed-release mechanic in general has enough strategy to it to make for a really good game.

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.