N3wton
N3wton is, as you might not be able to guess from the name, a game inspired by Newton's Third Law. However, the classic E&M Pong aside, making a game based on a neat physics property won't always necessarily result in a particularly interesting game. While N3wton is by no means a terrible game, there's nothing about it that makes it really engaging, either.
So, the basic idea behind N3wton is that you control a mobile cannon, and there are various enemy cannons strewn around the stage. (Most of them are stationary, though there are a few moving targets in the last couple of levels.) You fire bullets at the enemies, and they fire back. When you're hit by a bullet, you get knocked backward, and the objective is to knock your enemies off the stage without getting knocked off yourself. You also suffer recoil when you fire a bullet, but your enemies, somewhat unfairly, don't. I constantly found myself forgetting this last fact and firing when too close to the edge, with predictably disastrous results. Gradually, various other elements are introduced -- stabilizing wells which keep you in a certain location, teleporters for yourself and your shots, and switches which have various effects.
Overall, the game falls into kind of an awkward gap. It's got some puzzle elements and some action elements, but neither is quite sufficient to carry the game on its own. There are some tricky shots that you have to figure out occasionally, but they're not terribly difficult; conversely, sometimes you'll find yourself in close combat with an enemy, but it's usually pretty easy to keep your balance. As a result, the game isn't quite satisfying on either level. There is one level which is much more puzzle-ish, but it feels kind of out of place with the rest of the game, and as a result is kind of confusing and awkward (though, if it were by itself, I would think it was pretty clever).
The graphics are pretty basic, as are the sounds. My opinion of the music swings from "interesting" to "really annoying", but, like so many other games, it does get repetitive pretty fast. There's a total of 25 levels, and each one is pretty quick, so it shouldn't take you very long to make it through the game. The game also has a couple of glitches; I found myself being shot through a wall more than once. All in all, N3wton is kind of a cute idea, but there's just not enough of a game surrounding it to make for a really interesting result. It's not an unpleasant game-playing experience, just one which is missing that extra element.
Showing posts with label action. Show all posts
Showing posts with label action. Show all posts
Friday, January 16, 2009
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Thing-Thing 3
Oh joy, it's another Thing-Thing game. If you've read my review of Thing-Thing 2 (here), you can probably guess I'm not terribly enthused about playing Thing-Thing 3. But I'm currently in a period of working through some of Kongregate's older badges, which often means playing games that probably wouldn't meet today's badge standards, so unfortunately there'll probably be some mediocrity in the process.
Anyway, Thing-Thing 3 is not terribly different from its predecessor. You're in a basic platformy environment, enemies constantly assault you from all directions, and you shoot them. They appear able to randomly spawn from any direction, and, in contrast to Thing-Thing 2, they now carry guns, so now dodging them is more a matter of luck than anything else. Especially annoying is when they shoot you from offscreen and you can't hit them back. The levels are much, much larger than in Thing-Thing 2, which is definitely nice, but it's very easy to get lost in them, especially in level 2, where you have to find a keycard which is nearly impossible to find (I finally gave up out of annoyance and looked in the comments to find where it is). A minimap would be incredibly useful. Thankfully, the doors which require a certain number of kills to pass are gone, so that at least makes Thing-Thing 3 less annoying than its predecessor in one respect.
The story mode does finally have an actual story. It's not a particularly interesting story, and mostly it seems to prove that your character is about as intelligent as a box of rocks, but it does actually exist. There's also a survival mode, which operates pretty much as you would expect. The graphics are pretty much as basic as they were in Thing-Thing 2; both you and your enemies are built from a variety of mix and match parts. The sounds are your typical gun sounds, and the background music is so ambient that you'll barely notice it at all.
Overall, Thing-Thing 3 is perhaps slightly better than its predecessor, but it's still simply too flavorless to be really interesting. There's just not enough variation on the basic plan of shooting people to make for a particularly interesting game, and all of the challenge comes from the question of whether the enemies will drop health packs when you need them to. Overall, the game is not particularly long; there's six levels, of which two are boss levels; the last boss is incredibly annoying, since you spend 80% of the time just chasing him across the screen, but not terribly difficult, so it shouldn't take you too long to finish the game, but at least for me, it grew boring and repetitive long before I actually finished.
Oh joy, it's another Thing-Thing game. If you've read my review of Thing-Thing 2 (here), you can probably guess I'm not terribly enthused about playing Thing-Thing 3. But I'm currently in a period of working through some of Kongregate's older badges, which often means playing games that probably wouldn't meet today's badge standards, so unfortunately there'll probably be some mediocrity in the process.
Anyway, Thing-Thing 3 is not terribly different from its predecessor. You're in a basic platformy environment, enemies constantly assault you from all directions, and you shoot them. They appear able to randomly spawn from any direction, and, in contrast to Thing-Thing 2, they now carry guns, so now dodging them is more a matter of luck than anything else. Especially annoying is when they shoot you from offscreen and you can't hit them back. The levels are much, much larger than in Thing-Thing 2, which is definitely nice, but it's very easy to get lost in them, especially in level 2, where you have to find a keycard which is nearly impossible to find (I finally gave up out of annoyance and looked in the comments to find where it is). A minimap would be incredibly useful. Thankfully, the doors which require a certain number of kills to pass are gone, so that at least makes Thing-Thing 3 less annoying than its predecessor in one respect.
The story mode does finally have an actual story. It's not a particularly interesting story, and mostly it seems to prove that your character is about as intelligent as a box of rocks, but it does actually exist. There's also a survival mode, which operates pretty much as you would expect. The graphics are pretty much as basic as they were in Thing-Thing 2; both you and your enemies are built from a variety of mix and match parts. The sounds are your typical gun sounds, and the background music is so ambient that you'll barely notice it at all.
Overall, Thing-Thing 3 is perhaps slightly better than its predecessor, but it's still simply too flavorless to be really interesting. There's just not enough variation on the basic plan of shooting people to make for a particularly interesting game, and all of the challenge comes from the question of whether the enemies will drop health packs when you need them to. Overall, the game is not particularly long; there's six levels, of which two are boss levels; the last boss is incredibly annoying, since you spend 80% of the time just chasing him across the screen, but not terribly difficult, so it shouldn't take you too long to finish the game, but at least for me, it grew boring and repetitive long before I actually finished.
Monday, December 15, 2008
Areas
So, way back in the third week of my writing these reviews, I mentioned that I was skipping Areas because I hadn't yet finished it. Little did I know that it would be more than six months before I finally did finish it. This is, as you can guess, not quite an endorsement of the game. It's a neat idea, but it drags on interminably, and the last several levels are annoyingly difficult, and not in a good way. So I played a bunch of levels, liked it, then got stuck and lost interest, and it was a while before I finally came back.
Part of the charm of Areas is figuring out how the game works, so this review is unfortunately going to be mildly spoilery; I'll try to keep it to a minimum. In fact, the game doesn't have any words at all -- the (minimal) help is entirely visual. Anyway, Areas is a shooter without clicking: your ship fires shots in the direction of the pointer when the pointer is close to the ship, and moves to the pointer when the pointer is far away. You fight in a circular arena, and your enemies are white circles which gradually grow. Shooting the enemy circles will cause them to shrink, and if you're persistent enough, eventually you'll destroy them. If you're crushed between the enemy circles, then you die; the goal for a level is simply to survive for a given amount of time. When an enemy circle is destroyed, it usually leaves behind a circular area (I don't know whether these or the enemy circles themselves are the areas that the title refers to). These have generally beneficial effects; most of them, when you stand inside them, will power up your shot in some way (triple shot, bigger shot, explosive shot, etc.), while some of them you shoot into to trigger some ability (repelling enemy circles, activating a laser, etc.). Needless to say, clever use of these powerups is pretty much critical to beating all but the simplest levels.
Now, the first problem with Areas is that there's 74 levels. That's simply way too long. The game could easily be 30 levels without losing anything except quite a bit of frustration and annoyance. Because the game has such a large number of levels, and because it likes to introduce a new powerup every couple of levels, the powerups, after a while, begin to suffer the same problem as Mega Man enemies: either they become completely ridiculous, or else they're just a slight variation on something that you've already seen before. There's only so much you can do. But what's really aggravating about the later levels is how random they are. The first problem you see right off the bat -- because the later levels get so large, you pretty much have to pick a direction to go in and hope you stumble across an enemy circle. If you happen to pick the wrong direction, then it's easy for an unseen circle to grow so large by the time you discover it that you're already doomed. Even if you happen to pick the right direction, there's often enough randomness in what powerups you can get on a given level (and enough variance in their quality) that if you happen to get a sucky powerup, you're also pretty much screwed. As a result, a fair number of the levels, including the last several, are far more about luck than skill, which is really no fun at all.
The graphics are pretty basic, as you might expect from the given theme, although the game does do a good job of distinguishing the different powerup areas. There's no sound, just kind of creepy background music, which is kind of endearing for a little while but eventually begins to decrease your sanity. The game generally runs smoothly, but often when a lot of the more complicated powerups are on the screen it can lag pretty badly.
Overall, if Areas were 30 levels, I'd be writing about how it's a nice variation on the standard shooter formula and manages to be a very interesting game despite its simplicity. At its current length, though, all those warm feelings generated by the beginning of the game evaporate into annoyance and frustration by the end of the game -- it just adds too much randomness to the basic formula. I suppose, then, I would recommend that you play this, but please, don't try to play the whole way through! It's an odd recommendation, but I think the best one in this case.
So, way back in the third week of my writing these reviews, I mentioned that I was skipping Areas because I hadn't yet finished it. Little did I know that it would be more than six months before I finally did finish it. This is, as you can guess, not quite an endorsement of the game. It's a neat idea, but it drags on interminably, and the last several levels are annoyingly difficult, and not in a good way. So I played a bunch of levels, liked it, then got stuck and lost interest, and it was a while before I finally came back.
Part of the charm of Areas is figuring out how the game works, so this review is unfortunately going to be mildly spoilery; I'll try to keep it to a minimum. In fact, the game doesn't have any words at all -- the (minimal) help is entirely visual. Anyway, Areas is a shooter without clicking: your ship fires shots in the direction of the pointer when the pointer is close to the ship, and moves to the pointer when the pointer is far away. You fight in a circular arena, and your enemies are white circles which gradually grow. Shooting the enemy circles will cause them to shrink, and if you're persistent enough, eventually you'll destroy them. If you're crushed between the enemy circles, then you die; the goal for a level is simply to survive for a given amount of time. When an enemy circle is destroyed, it usually leaves behind a circular area (I don't know whether these or the enemy circles themselves are the areas that the title refers to). These have generally beneficial effects; most of them, when you stand inside them, will power up your shot in some way (triple shot, bigger shot, explosive shot, etc.), while some of them you shoot into to trigger some ability (repelling enemy circles, activating a laser, etc.). Needless to say, clever use of these powerups is pretty much critical to beating all but the simplest levels.
Now, the first problem with Areas is that there's 74 levels. That's simply way too long. The game could easily be 30 levels without losing anything except quite a bit of frustration and annoyance. Because the game has such a large number of levels, and because it likes to introduce a new powerup every couple of levels, the powerups, after a while, begin to suffer the same problem as Mega Man enemies: either they become completely ridiculous, or else they're just a slight variation on something that you've already seen before. There's only so much you can do. But what's really aggravating about the later levels is how random they are. The first problem you see right off the bat -- because the later levels get so large, you pretty much have to pick a direction to go in and hope you stumble across an enemy circle. If you happen to pick the wrong direction, then it's easy for an unseen circle to grow so large by the time you discover it that you're already doomed. Even if you happen to pick the right direction, there's often enough randomness in what powerups you can get on a given level (and enough variance in their quality) that if you happen to get a sucky powerup, you're also pretty much screwed. As a result, a fair number of the levels, including the last several, are far more about luck than skill, which is really no fun at all.
The graphics are pretty basic, as you might expect from the given theme, although the game does do a good job of distinguishing the different powerup areas. There's no sound, just kind of creepy background music, which is kind of endearing for a little while but eventually begins to decrease your sanity. The game generally runs smoothly, but often when a lot of the more complicated powerups are on the screen it can lag pretty badly.
Overall, if Areas were 30 levels, I'd be writing about how it's a nice variation on the standard shooter formula and manages to be a very interesting game despite its simplicity. At its current length, though, all those warm feelings generated by the beginning of the game evaporate into annoyance and frustration by the end of the game -- it just adds too much randomness to the basic formula. I suppose, then, I would recommend that you play this, but please, don't try to play the whole way through! It's an odd recommendation, but I think the best one in this case.
Saturday, December 13, 2008
Sproing!
Sproing is a game from the older days of Kongregate. It's got a cute little concept, but it's not very well polished, and probably today it wouldn't even get a badge. Actually, I'm going to take a minute to talk about this. When I first started playing on Kongregate, it seemed like it was in the middle of a transition. Games still got badges whenever the Kongregate staff got around to adding them, so while there were still the weekly challenges, badges could be added at any time, and the weekly challenges would as often go to a game that already had badges as one that was just getting badges. Furthermore, pretty much any game which was decent and had a functioning API would get badges eventually. Now, however, it seems like new badges are almost always awarded in conjunction with a challenge. So even though the challenges are biweekly now, a game has to be more than just decent to get badges -- there are plenty of good, interesting games which just don't quite manage to beat out the games selected for challenges and never get badges or have to wait a very long time for badges. I'm not sure I like this new system -- obviously, I'm glad for Kongregate's generally higher quality, but it also seems like a lot of interesting but not so well-crafted ideas can get lost in the shuffle, efforts like Buried Treasure Week notwithstanding.
(Of course, in the time between when I started this post and when I finished, Kongregate added badges not associated with a challenge to three more games. They'd done this once since the beginning of November, with Meat Boy, and all of a sudden they do this at precisely the wrong time for my rant. Bah.)
Anyway, so, Sproing. In Sproing, you control a small ball with a larger ball attached to it by a spring, which you can swing around, much like Elastic (review here). The playfield contains green balls, which you are trying to destroy, and non-green balls, which will hurt you on contact. To destroy the green balls, swing your ball into them. It has to be at a relatively high velocity; otherwise, the green ball will bounce off in a different direction. The game contains 30 levels; most of the levels just contain different formations of green balls and enemy balls, but every sixth level is a boss. The bosses shoot at you, and you have to hit them multiple times to destroy them; because you still have to whack them, it's extremely difficult to defeat the bosses without taking some damage in the process. Various helpful items also occasionally drift onto the playfield. You only have one life, but you do get health-replenishment items from time to time.
The graphics are very simple -- just colored circles, basically. The sound effects are OK; the music is, not to put too fine a point on it, awful -- it's terrible and repetitive. The level design is pretty solid; each level has its own little quirks. One peculiar thing is that in order to get the hard badge, you don't have to actually beat the game, just reach level 30. I thought this was a bug when I first got the badge, and so I went ahead and beat the game (which was actually much harder than just reaching level 30, since it's quite difficult), and then I read the badge text more carefully and discovered that, in fact, it was not a bug. Still, I was kind of glad to have beaten the game.
Anyway, Sproing is the kind of game that probably wouldn't get recognized by Kongregate today. It is very simple in its presentation, and it's not a particularly complicated or sophisticated game. Still, it isn't a bad way to spend a few minutes; while I wouldn't call it a great game, it's a solid gameplay idea. While I wouldn't say that everyone should be forced to play the game, it would be nice if there were a way to give games like this a little bit more attention.
Sproing is a game from the older days of Kongregate. It's got a cute little concept, but it's not very well polished, and probably today it wouldn't even get a badge. Actually, I'm going to take a minute to talk about this. When I first started playing on Kongregate, it seemed like it was in the middle of a transition. Games still got badges whenever the Kongregate staff got around to adding them, so while there were still the weekly challenges, badges could be added at any time, and the weekly challenges would as often go to a game that already had badges as one that was just getting badges. Furthermore, pretty much any game which was decent and had a functioning API would get badges eventually. Now, however, it seems like new badges are almost always awarded in conjunction with a challenge. So even though the challenges are biweekly now, a game has to be more than just decent to get badges -- there are plenty of good, interesting games which just don't quite manage to beat out the games selected for challenges and never get badges or have to wait a very long time for badges. I'm not sure I like this new system -- obviously, I'm glad for Kongregate's generally higher quality, but it also seems like a lot of interesting but not so well-crafted ideas can get lost in the shuffle, efforts like Buried Treasure Week notwithstanding.
(Of course, in the time between when I started this post and when I finished, Kongregate added badges not associated with a challenge to three more games. They'd done this once since the beginning of November, with Meat Boy, and all of a sudden they do this at precisely the wrong time for my rant. Bah.)
Anyway, so, Sproing. In Sproing, you control a small ball with a larger ball attached to it by a spring, which you can swing around, much like Elastic (review here). The playfield contains green balls, which you are trying to destroy, and non-green balls, which will hurt you on contact. To destroy the green balls, swing your ball into them. It has to be at a relatively high velocity; otherwise, the green ball will bounce off in a different direction. The game contains 30 levels; most of the levels just contain different formations of green balls and enemy balls, but every sixth level is a boss. The bosses shoot at you, and you have to hit them multiple times to destroy them; because you still have to whack them, it's extremely difficult to defeat the bosses without taking some damage in the process. Various helpful items also occasionally drift onto the playfield. You only have one life, but you do get health-replenishment items from time to time.
The graphics are very simple -- just colored circles, basically. The sound effects are OK; the music is, not to put too fine a point on it, awful -- it's terrible and repetitive. The level design is pretty solid; each level has its own little quirks. One peculiar thing is that in order to get the hard badge, you don't have to actually beat the game, just reach level 30. I thought this was a bug when I first got the badge, and so I went ahead and beat the game (which was actually much harder than just reaching level 30, since it's quite difficult), and then I read the badge text more carefully and discovered that, in fact, it was not a bug. Still, I was kind of glad to have beaten the game.
Anyway, Sproing is the kind of game that probably wouldn't get recognized by Kongregate today. It is very simple in its presentation, and it's not a particularly complicated or sophisticated game. Still, it isn't a bad way to spend a few minutes; while I wouldn't call it a great game, it's a solid gameplay idea. While I wouldn't say that everyone should be forced to play the game, it would be nice if there were a way to give games like this a little bit more attention.
Tuesday, December 09, 2008
Rage 3
Rage 3 is a pretty straightforward stick figure beat-'em-up, which is apparently a pretty popular genre on Kongregate. Fortunately, it's significantly better than the last game of that type that I played, Thing-Thing 2 (review here), but it's still not the world's most exciting formula.
So, you're a stick figure, and you're angry at other stick figures, for some unspecified reason. You go around and beat them up with either a variety of melee weapons (mostly variations on a sword) or a variety of guns (which I ended up almost never using, because I didn't need to). As you beat people up, your rage meter fills; once it reaches 100, you can unleash various rage attacks. That's pretty much it. Defeated enemies drop brightly-colored spheres which can recover your health or increase your XP; as you level up, your rage power gains more abilities.
In Adventure mode, you progress through four different levels, featuring the obligatory keys, locked gates, more weapons to collect, and so forth; at the end of the level, you fight a relatively simple boss. The locks and keys tend to slow down the pace of the game -- the first time through, there's plenty of enemies to beat up, but when you're crossing the level a second time in search of a key (or after having obtained the key), there's not much to do, which makes the level kind of boring. It would be much more interesting if there weren't these dead spots. The game is thoughtful enough to tell you what a key does when you pick it up, so at least you know where to go. However, a truly terrible design element is the presence of gates that you have to be a certain level to pass -- this requires you to do some mindless grinding in order to beat the game, which is not what I'm looking for in a fast-paced beat-'em-up! There's also Arcade mode, which is just a never-ending succession of enemies, which is a good place to level up if you need to but not really exciting beyond that. Oddly, the game doesn't autosave; you have to go back to the main menu and choose to save yourself in order to save your progress, which I'm sure can be quite annoying if you forget (fortunately, I didn't).
The animation is not bad; it's smooth, and there's a fair amount of variation, but pretty simplistic -- for instance, when you're fighting an enemy at close quarters, there's no change in the moves that you use. The graphics are, well, stick figures, though the various maces, swords, and other weapons are lovingly rendered. The sounds are pretty much your standard assortment of hitting noises. The music is not terribly exciting, but it's a good background which adds a bit to the game without being horribly repetitive.
The game is extremely easy -- at least, if you're playing on the easy difficulty level, which is apparently the default, as I discovered halfway through. By then, I didn't really want to bother trying at a higher difficulty, so I finished the game without any major difficulty. I'm not a big fan of games not asking you for the difficulty, so I was a little annoyed by this decision. Overall, Rage 3 isn't a bad game if you're just looking for some mindless bashing/stabbing/shooting action, but don't expect very much more than that. It's good for a few minutes of silly fun, but isn't the kind of game you'll want to play again and again.
Rage 3 is a pretty straightforward stick figure beat-'em-up, which is apparently a pretty popular genre on Kongregate. Fortunately, it's significantly better than the last game of that type that I played, Thing-Thing 2 (review here), but it's still not the world's most exciting formula.
So, you're a stick figure, and you're angry at other stick figures, for some unspecified reason. You go around and beat them up with either a variety of melee weapons (mostly variations on a sword) or a variety of guns (which I ended up almost never using, because I didn't need to). As you beat people up, your rage meter fills; once it reaches 100, you can unleash various rage attacks. That's pretty much it. Defeated enemies drop brightly-colored spheres which can recover your health or increase your XP; as you level up, your rage power gains more abilities.
In Adventure mode, you progress through four different levels, featuring the obligatory keys, locked gates, more weapons to collect, and so forth; at the end of the level, you fight a relatively simple boss. The locks and keys tend to slow down the pace of the game -- the first time through, there's plenty of enemies to beat up, but when you're crossing the level a second time in search of a key (or after having obtained the key), there's not much to do, which makes the level kind of boring. It would be much more interesting if there weren't these dead spots. The game is thoughtful enough to tell you what a key does when you pick it up, so at least you know where to go. However, a truly terrible design element is the presence of gates that you have to be a certain level to pass -- this requires you to do some mindless grinding in order to beat the game, which is not what I'm looking for in a fast-paced beat-'em-up! There's also Arcade mode, which is just a never-ending succession of enemies, which is a good place to level up if you need to but not really exciting beyond that. Oddly, the game doesn't autosave; you have to go back to the main menu and choose to save yourself in order to save your progress, which I'm sure can be quite annoying if you forget (fortunately, I didn't).
The animation is not bad; it's smooth, and there's a fair amount of variation, but pretty simplistic -- for instance, when you're fighting an enemy at close quarters, there's no change in the moves that you use. The graphics are, well, stick figures, though the various maces, swords, and other weapons are lovingly rendered. The sounds are pretty much your standard assortment of hitting noises. The music is not terribly exciting, but it's a good background which adds a bit to the game without being horribly repetitive.
The game is extremely easy -- at least, if you're playing on the easy difficulty level, which is apparently the default, as I discovered halfway through. By then, I didn't really want to bother trying at a higher difficulty, so I finished the game without any major difficulty. I'm not a big fan of games not asking you for the difficulty, so I was a little annoyed by this decision. Overall, Rage 3 isn't a bad game if you're just looking for some mindless bashing/stabbing/shooting action, but don't expect very much more than that. It's good for a few minutes of silly fun, but isn't the kind of game you'll want to play again and again.
Sunday, December 07, 2008
SAVE PUGGOLON: MEAT•HAMMER edition!
Sorry about the shouting, it won't happen again. Anyway, Save Puggolon is the last Shootorial game (hooray!), and this one is the special Greg's Pick. As you might have noticed from Buried Treasure Week, Greg's tastes often run to the eclectic, and Save Puggolon is no exception. As far as the gameplay goes, it's not too much different from the Shootorial (with a few additions), but there's a lot of art happening which makes this a distinctive game.
Anyway, you're fighting to save Puggolon (as was hopefully obvious from the title), which is apparently some kind of pug-filled planet or something. The plot isn't really that well fleshed out. There is an ending, which I appreciate in a game like this, but to be honest I didn't really find it worth the bother to play all the way to the ending, so I can't really comment on it. The gameplay, as I mentioned, is pretty much the basic Shootorial gameplay -- enemies come from the right, you shoot them, there are powerups, they shoot you, you have a finite amount of health, bosses and subbosses come by from time to time. The pace is definitely better set than the basic Shootorial, though. Unlike the basic Shootorial, the game is divided into levels, and sometimes at the end of a level you have a choice of two levels to proceed to for your next.
The art is pretty crazy, as you'll see when you play it, but definitely high quality. The sound effects are pretty poor -- only a small blip when you destroy an enemy, but the music is quite impressive; the game designer apparently created it (as well as the art) himself, which is no mean feat. It's pleasantly hypnotic, although it does get a little repetitive after a while. In a pleasant surprise, everything in the game is correctly spelled and uses correct grammar. The interface makes a baffling decision in the difficulty select screen, though -- even though the "easy" and "hero" areas look like buttons, you actually have to fly your ship there, which is quite counterintuitive. Big arrows saying "fly here for easy difficulty!" would be much more useful. (I didn't really try the hero difficulty, so I didn't get a chance to experience the achievements the game offers.)
Anyway, while the basic gameplay is perhaps somewhat more interesting than the straight-up Shootorial, it's still not really interesting enough to carry the game on its own. The style, though, is pretty impressive. Combining the designer's artistic abilities with a somewhat less played-out gameplay idea could result in some really good games, however.
Sorry about the shouting, it won't happen again. Anyway, Save Puggolon is the last Shootorial game (hooray!), and this one is the special Greg's Pick. As you might have noticed from Buried Treasure Week, Greg's tastes often run to the eclectic, and Save Puggolon is no exception. As far as the gameplay goes, it's not too much different from the Shootorial (with a few additions), but there's a lot of art happening which makes this a distinctive game.
Anyway, you're fighting to save Puggolon (as was hopefully obvious from the title), which is apparently some kind of pug-filled planet or something. The plot isn't really that well fleshed out. There is an ending, which I appreciate in a game like this, but to be honest I didn't really find it worth the bother to play all the way to the ending, so I can't really comment on it. The gameplay, as I mentioned, is pretty much the basic Shootorial gameplay -- enemies come from the right, you shoot them, there are powerups, they shoot you, you have a finite amount of health, bosses and subbosses come by from time to time. The pace is definitely better set than the basic Shootorial, though. Unlike the basic Shootorial, the game is divided into levels, and sometimes at the end of a level you have a choice of two levels to proceed to for your next.
The art is pretty crazy, as you'll see when you play it, but definitely high quality. The sound effects are pretty poor -- only a small blip when you destroy an enemy, but the music is quite impressive; the game designer apparently created it (as well as the art) himself, which is no mean feat. It's pleasantly hypnotic, although it does get a little repetitive after a while. In a pleasant surprise, everything in the game is correctly spelled and uses correct grammar. The interface makes a baffling decision in the difficulty select screen, though -- even though the "easy" and "hero" areas look like buttons, you actually have to fly your ship there, which is quite counterintuitive. Big arrows saying "fly here for easy difficulty!" would be much more useful. (I didn't really try the hero difficulty, so I didn't get a chance to experience the achievements the game offers.)
Anyway, while the basic gameplay is perhaps somewhat more interesting than the straight-up Shootorial, it's still not really interesting enough to carry the game on its own. The style, though, is pretty impressive. Combining the designer's artistic abilities with a somewhat less played-out gameplay idea could result in some really good games, however.
Friday, December 05, 2008
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.
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.
Thursday, December 04, 2008
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.
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.
Wednesday, December 03, 2008
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.
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.
Thursday, November 06, 2008
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.
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.
Friday, October 17, 2008
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.
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.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
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.
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.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
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.
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.
Thursday, October 09, 2008
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.
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.
Saturday, September 20, 2008
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.
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.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
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.)
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.)
Thursday, September 11, 2008
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.
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.
Sunday, September 07, 2008
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.)
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.)
Monday, September 01, 2008
Thing-Thing 2
I was kind of hoping from the name and the promise of beating up lots of enemies that Thing-Thing would kind of be like Xiao Xiao (which, while technically not a game, is undeniably pretty awesome). Sadly, I was disappointed, as Thing-Thing 2 is a relatively straightforward and boring beat-'em-up.
So, there's you, and there's an infinite stream of enemies. You can walk, jump, or punch (pretty ineffectual), or shoot them with one of the wide variety of weapons in the game (point and click). The one thing that makes shooting enemies nontrival is that each weapon has its own recoil, which will pull your cursor away from where you want it to be if you're firing a bunch of shots in quick succession. (It is amazing to read all of the comments complaining about how terrible the aiming is. If you took away this feature, I can't even imagine how pointless the game would be.) Ammo can be annoyingly scarce. Since the enemies don't do very much damage even if you walk amidst their throngs, you might wonder why you need to bother killing them at all. The answer is that there are doors that require you to have killed a certain number of enemies before you can pass through and continue the level.
The game offers a couple of modes. There's the rather-misnamed Story Mode, which offers no story to speak of, but I guess Sequence of Seemingly Unrelated Levels Mode might be a little long to fit. (To be fair, you do gain weapons as you move from level to level, so it's not completely unconnected.) Survival Mode is pretty much what you'd expect.
The graphics are pretty basic -- all of the characters are just built out of spheres, although the game gets credit for making a lot of unique enemies. The sound is pretty much your average boring gun effects, while the music is OK -- it's at least somewhat less boring and repetitive than a lot of Flash games, but it's not great either. However, none of this changes the fact that the fundamental gameplay is simply pretty boring. I didn't really enjoy playing this game all the way through, so I'm glad it was short and I was able to earn the badge in a reasonable amount of time.
I was kind of hoping from the name and the promise of beating up lots of enemies that Thing-Thing would kind of be like Xiao Xiao (which, while technically not a game, is undeniably pretty awesome). Sadly, I was disappointed, as Thing-Thing 2 is a relatively straightforward and boring beat-'em-up.
So, there's you, and there's an infinite stream of enemies. You can walk, jump, or punch (pretty ineffectual), or shoot them with one of the wide variety of weapons in the game (point and click). The one thing that makes shooting enemies nontrival is that each weapon has its own recoil, which will pull your cursor away from where you want it to be if you're firing a bunch of shots in quick succession. (It is amazing to read all of the comments complaining about how terrible the aiming is. If you took away this feature, I can't even imagine how pointless the game would be.) Ammo can be annoyingly scarce. Since the enemies don't do very much damage even if you walk amidst their throngs, you might wonder why you need to bother killing them at all. The answer is that there are doors that require you to have killed a certain number of enemies before you can pass through and continue the level.
The game offers a couple of modes. There's the rather-misnamed Story Mode, which offers no story to speak of, but I guess Sequence of Seemingly Unrelated Levels Mode might be a little long to fit. (To be fair, you do gain weapons as you move from level to level, so it's not completely unconnected.) Survival Mode is pretty much what you'd expect.
The graphics are pretty basic -- all of the characters are just built out of spheres, although the game gets credit for making a lot of unique enemies. The sound is pretty much your average boring gun effects, while the music is OK -- it's at least somewhat less boring and repetitive than a lot of Flash games, but it's not great either. However, none of this changes the fact that the fundamental gameplay is simply pretty boring. I didn't really enjoy playing this game all the way through, so I'm glad it was short and I was able to earn the badge in a reasonable amount of time.
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Scope: First Blood
Scope: First Blood is another assassination-based game, much in the style of the Tactical Assassin series (reviews here and here). The concept is pretty much the same -- find the target, shoot the target with your sniper rifle. There's no upgrades or anything between the levels, just seven missions.
Scope: First Blood has a couple of touches which make it a little nicer than the Tactical Assassin games, in my opinion. First, not all of the missions involve simply shooting your target in the head. (In fact, only two out of the seven missions require you to directly kill your target. The others are more subtle.) The game also has a bit of a sense of humor (albeit a bit sophomoric at times), which is a nice touch. Finally, the missions require somewhat more clever thinking to solve; this is not to say that any of them is particularly complex, but there are at least a couple of steps that you have to work through in most missions.
The graphics are the basic stick-figure style that seems to be standard for this genre. There's not much sound beyond the rifle sound and the computer blips at the end of a mission. The music is not bad, although perhaps a little overdramatic for a stick figure game. The game also includes six achievements, which give it a slight amount of replay value, although the game itself is so short that even replaying it a few times is not going to add up to a lot of time. Overall, it's not a bad game, but there's just not very much substance to it. Still, it's worth a playthrough.
Scope: First Blood is another assassination-based game, much in the style of the Tactical Assassin series (reviews here and here). The concept is pretty much the same -- find the target, shoot the target with your sniper rifle. There's no upgrades or anything between the levels, just seven missions.
Scope: First Blood has a couple of touches which make it a little nicer than the Tactical Assassin games, in my opinion. First, not all of the missions involve simply shooting your target in the head. (In fact, only two out of the seven missions require you to directly kill your target. The others are more subtle.) The game also has a bit of a sense of humor (albeit a bit sophomoric at times), which is a nice touch. Finally, the missions require somewhat more clever thinking to solve; this is not to say that any of them is particularly complex, but there are at least a couple of steps that you have to work through in most missions.
The graphics are the basic stick-figure style that seems to be standard for this genre. There's not much sound beyond the rifle sound and the computer blips at the end of a mission. The music is not bad, although perhaps a little overdramatic for a stick figure game. The game also includes six achievements, which give it a slight amount of replay value, although the game itself is so short that even replaying it a few times is not going to add up to a lot of time. Overall, it's not a bad game, but there's just not very much substance to it. Still, it's worth a playthrough.
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