Q-Yo Blaster

August 6, 2019 by 1 Comment

Shmups aren’t normally my thing. Well, I say that at least. Upon reflection, I realize they’re in the same category as tower defense games. I say they do nothing for me and typically don’t seek them out. But, if I find myself playing a good one, I get sucked into the experience as much as any title from a preferred genre of mine. And, let’s face it, if you absolutely need to scratch that white-knuckle action itch but don’t have a lot of time to invest, a shmup is probably the best bet. It’s one of the few genres that can get away with a game that’s done in under thirty-minutes. As it should be. Imagine if Gradius was a ten hour long game. It’d suck. You’d be in physical pain by time it was over. Thirty minutes is perfect. It’s not even enough time for the logic center of your brain to say “just because we see the game from a side-perspective doesn’t mean it’s really taking place on a single line of existence that both the good guys and bad guys agreed to stay glued to with all their bullets traveling along that same line, right? Because wouldn’t it make more sense if a slow moving bullet was coming at you in a bullet-hell to just side-step it, move a little to the left or right, instead of up or down into the path of more bullets? 2D games make no sense, yo!”

Of course, you can say that about any 2D game. Moving on..

The game looks like a fever dream and a bad acid trip made horrible, disgusting love and this was the end result.

A session with Q-Yo Blaster can be finished in around thirty minutes. Knowing that, and seeing its gorgeous cartoonish visuals, you might mistake it for the type of shmup that’s all style and no substance. But this is a deceptively deep shooter. For starters, you have three different character types to choose from: Endurance, Damage, or a balance of both. There’s sixteen total characters to choose from, each with unique stats and an options. Sixteen! And trust me, playing as each feels just barely different enough that replaying the 30-minute quest doesn’t start to get stale. Plus, there’s multiple different play modes, with some items and weapons only available in higher difficulty levels.

Actually, that bit is sort of a dick move. There’s really no reason why weapons like the drone, laser or homing missiles should be excluded from easy mode. It’s like telling a person incapable of playing on higher difficulties that their dripping pussy ass deserves to have less fun. I don’t get it. Presumably a person playing on easy would be more likely to recommend the game to others and help developers sell more copies if they’re not gated off from having as much fun as everyone else. Developers who choose to gate based on difficulty really seem like they forfeit the right to bitch if their game doesn’t sell. Don’t get me wrong, I had a lot of fun with Q-Yo Blaster and it’s going to be an IGC Top 50 game as of this writing. But I’ve never understood why the 2D shooter genre specifically does this type of stuff habitually: stripping out phases or weapons or bosses or ending. Is it because games like Contra III did it back in the day? Is it a way of pandering to hardcore genre fans, saying “look, we don’t want the casuals leeching off our coolness any more than you do, so we’re going to keep them from getting to play with the coolest toys.” I don’t know. I do know that your Cupheads or your Q-Yo Blasters would do better if people of all skill levels felt equally welcome, and they don’t.

See the weird octopus vagina thing in the dead center of the screen behind everything else? The one labeled “blood?” Yea, that’s not a boss. While you shoot at enemies, every bullet that hits fills up another charge meter. When that one fills up, it automatically unleashes some kind of super attack that clears the area and does low-to-moderate damage on bosses. It’s a neat idea, but it’s hard to really harness the potential of it because, being a shmup, there’s already so much shit you have to keep track without having another meter to keep glancing at. I wish the game let you manually use it when the bar fills up instead of auto-firing. About a third of the time, the thing would go off while I was clearing the last enemy on the screen.

Having said all that, Q-Yo Blaster’s thirty-minute quest, even with the cooler weapons gated off, is pretty engrossing. There’s a bonkers story tying all the animated cliches together, but it’s overly long and very poorly translated, with tons of grammar errors. Skip it and just pretend you’re in a game where Roger Rabbit’s Toontown is being invaded by insects. Levels can be very short (the first level barely lasts 30 seconds before you fight the first boss), but the variety rarely lacks and most of the bosses are memorable and fun to do battle with. If this were a basic, no-frills shooter, the setting and character design alone would make it stand out in a crowded field. And then it would disappoint, because nobody should want a bland game just because it’s pretty to look at. Then again, people do accept blandness as long as it’s pleasant on the eyes. It’s how Paul Walker and Jessica Biel became stars.

But Q-Yo adds strategic elements like the ability to collect “pulses.” Activating them turns all the enemy bullets on-screen into collectable energy that you can use to charge your own super weapon. It’s a fun concept that doubles as both a planned attack and an emergency get-out-of-dodge button. Plus, while you can select between using a mega laser or a shield as your super weapon on the character select screen, using the mega laser also will clear any bullets directly in the line of the blast, effectively making it a shield. You’ll need this for certain boss fights, especially on the normal difficulty. You get upgrades between each stage, but I wish those upgrades allowed things like increasing the amount of pulses you can collect. The upgrades all work, but they don’t make you feel like you’re gaining significant power. They’re small edges that you might not even notice are happening, like increasing your own bullet speed. With some characters that increase is so slight that it practically makes no difference. Also, you can choose to get a 1up between each stage, but you get a ton of continues on both easy and normal, so really the 1up is every bit as stupid a choice as taking the potion over an extra heart container from the old lady in the original Legend of Zelda.

While the power shots are visually impressive, I wish they felt more powerful than they actually are. The noise it makes sounds less like unleashing a devastating blast of energy upon your enemies and more like the type of noise a cheesy 70s sci-fi movie would use to signify characters hanging-up on a telecall.

Ignoring the easy/normal crap, the biggest problem with Q-Yo Blaster is the game sorta chugs in terms of performance. It’s hard to explain, really. The best way I can describe it is if you’ve ever tried to put an emulator on a computer or game device not powerful quite enough to run the games for it. Q-Yo Blaster on Switch feels like a Super Nintendo game being emulated at around 90% efficiency. It works, though sometimes the frame-rate stutters (rarely in the middle of action, though it did happen once or twice) and the game never feels smooth. Thankfully, responsiveness doesn’t take a hit. The controls are fine-tuned and apparently compensate for the engine’s short-comings. Still, while Q-Yo Blaster never crashed on me, it always feels like the game is barely holding together and could shit the bed at any moment. I can’t remember the last time I played a game so good that felt so rough. Q-Yo Blaster is a finished, completed game, but it also feels like a proof-of-concept prototype with its short levels and choppy animation. It’s the damnedest thing. It’s so jarring that I wonder if it was done deliberately. Odd stylistic choice if so, but then again there’s people that think girls want to sleep with guys that have a pierced cock. We don’t. Gross.

This is your brain on drugs.

Take all this with a grain of salt because I’m not an expert on this genre by any means, but I had a lot of fun with Q-Yo Blaster. Accessible even to non-fans, quick-enough that it doesn’t leave time to get old, complex enough that genre veterans should still get value out of it, and loaded with enough characters and modes that you get value for your purchase, thirty-minute length or not. This is a very good game. But, I worry about it. It’s been out for a while, yet nobody is really talking about it. It had a successful Kickstarter campaign, but it wasn’t a big campaign so nobody really knows about it anymore. It offers a 50% discount if you own any other game by publisher Forever Entertainment (which, if you’re a Switch owner, is pretty likely. They’re one of those companies that does blow-out $1-or-under deals on their mountain of titles all the time), but you wouldn’t know by going to Nintendo.com because the store page only mentions it when you’re on the actual eShop on your Switch. It’s one of those games that’s destined to win my “You Heartless Bastards Award” in the next few years. Q-Yo needs word of mouth, but I’d never heard of it until the moment I bought it while randomly browsing the eShop. It’s worth checking out and you totally should. Even before I moved up difficulties and discovered easy mode gated out weapons, I was having fun. After that, I was just having fun while being slightly annoyed, like having sex in a room full of house flies.

Q-Yo Blaster was developed by Team Robot Black Hat
Point of Sale: Nintendo Switch, Steam

$4.99 (normally $9.99) wore the black hat in the making of this review.

Q-Yo Blaster is Chick Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard

 

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TORIDAMA: Brave Challenge

February 1, 2019 by Leave a comment

It’s #DiscoverIndies Friday. But, while I’m the creator of the movement, it’s harder than it sounds for me to actually participate. I’m a game critic who purchases all the indies I review. That requires a lot of marketplace browsing. There’s not too many games I’ve missed. So I have to cruise closely towards new releases. And very, very early this morning, I found my hidden gem. It’s called TORIDAMA: Brave Challenge. It’s a cross between WarioWare and Chicken. Not in the bucket of fried sense, but as in, “how close can you come to dying without actually doing it?” I’m a chain smoker, recovering drug addict, and a video gamer that suffers from epilepsy who is currently running through older, flashier titles. Guys, this game was fucking made for me!

This seems slightly like jabbing the hornet’s nest with a stick.

For example, there’s a game literally based on Chicken with a car. There’s a car. There’s a cliff. You have to hit the break to stop the car as close to the cliff as possible without going over. It sums up the concept of Toridama best. Press button to not die, but come close enough to kick the Grim Reaper in the balls. Which probably should have been a game in it now that I think about it. There’s only nineteen total minigames in Toridama, but really, how many variations of this concept can you possibly squeeze out? As it turns out, not even nineteen. There’s an RPG style minigame where you have to stop a meter as close to the center of a bar as possible. Yes, you can choose to run away, but success requires you to keep trying the meter. It sort of betrays the theme, but really all the games are about timing stuff. Probably the one furthest away from the core concept requires you to cook meat using lava by tapping the button to keep yourself as close to the edge of the lava as possible over the course of ten seconds. Yea, you’re still kinda tempting death and testing your courage, but it doesn’t compare to a game based around waiting to open your parachute as close to the ground as possible. I.. uh.. wasn’t so good at that one.

To be clear: it’s a great theme for a game. It’s clever. But Toridama is relatively light on content and what games we do have wear thin quickly. And some of them are extremely fickle about what constitutes a failure or a pass. Each game has a maximum score of 9,999 points. But with some games, there’s apparently so thin a line between scoring in the 5K range, scoring the 10K, or failing that it feels less like skill and more like sheer luck. And that extends to the online leaderboard, which you land on via “Crazy Mode” that requires you to score 9,000K or more or to advance to the next game. The games are thrown at you in random order and I was fucked more than once over 200+ attempts at posting a big score on the board. Filling a Martini glass with “juice” (uh huh, nice way to dodge that T or M rating), getting it right to the lip and still only scoring in the 5K range? Seriously? Who fills that tall away? Alcoholics don’t. It means more booze you have to slurp from the table. Or the carpet.

TORIDAMA is apparently multiplayer-focused, but unless that’s ALL you use it for, you won’t find it fun.

Toridama starts you with a single player mode that fires three random games at players and rates how big or little a chicken you are. Its only purpose really is to unlock all the games and Crazy Mode. You’ll never want to touch it afterwards, since scoring three really good scores in a row is hard enough. You’ll regret not playing Crazy Mode since those can go towards your online score. And there’s a multiplayer mode, but it suffers the same fate so many games do: the person who owns the game will have a significant advantage over friends trying to compete. One that is probably insurmountable. I played against basically everyone in my family and never lost a single match. My family sucks, as evidenced by the fact that I’m part of it, but still, it’s telling that multiplayer is the focus of the package (2 Player mode being the first option in the menu) and yet the actual multiplayer mode really isn’t very fun.

As of this writing I’m #33 on the global leaderboard. While I wish I could brag about this, it really feels like the ordering of games lucked me into this spot. Still, top ranked American. Could be worse.

Now, take this whole review with a heaping spoonful of salt. I love WarioWare and I’m predisposed to enjoying any collection of microgames. And I did have fun with Toridama. But what’s here feels light on content and destined to get old quickly. It’s satisfying to stop a bomb just 0.03 seconds before it detonates. It is fun to let an alligator come this close to eating your face only to back away at the last possible moment. But Toridama is too random and not tightly enough designed to keep anyone focused on it. Which is ironic, since it counts on people with incredible short attention spans to be its audience in the first place. It took me two-and-a-half hours just to finish this last paragraph!

TORIDAMA: Brave Challenge was developed by G-Mode
Point of Sale: Nintendo Switch

$3.50 (normally $5) noted G-Mode found my G-Spot in the making of this review.

TORIDAMA is Chick-Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard

Check out the latest reviews at Indie Gamer Team!

Maize, Haunted Island, 99Vidas

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Sigi: A Fart for Melusina

October 8, 2018 by 2 Comments

Everyone loves a good fart joke. I think it says something about us as a species. That we’ve designated this thing our bodies do that can’t be stopped as being both hilarious and offensive, mostly on the grounds that it comes out of the same hole we shit from. As a mental exercise, imagine if it was some other involuntary bodily function that we decided was “one of the rude ones.” Like blinking. We all blink, even those with most forms of blindness do it. On average, a person blinks every six seconds. Imagine if we decided collectively as a society that blinking was somehow crass but also comedy gold. Would Adam Sandler movies that are bombing with the audience fall back on blinking to get a reaction? Would bad ideas go over “like a blink in church”? These are the things that keep me up at night.

Anyway, the above paragraph was complete filler and totally unnecessary for the purposes of this review, but shit, this game is so simple and so easy that I had to talk about something. Sigi: A Fart for Melusina has the word “Fart” in the title and our hero (who looks exactly like Mario if Mario put on a suit of armor) farts at the end of every stage. Oh and the place you’re going to is called “Mount Stinkup” because “lulz, farts smell.” BUT, that’s the entirety of fart joke in a game that implies it’s going to center around fart jokes. Our hero does NOT use a fart based offense, enemies do NOT fart in retaliation or even when they die. So, like, I don’t get it? What did the fart stuff have to do with anything besides grabbing your attention on the marketplace page? Not that I’m a complaining. Farts are like the ninjas of humor: they strike so fast you barely realize you’ve been hit until it’s too late. That’s what’s funny about them. If you try to stretch that out longer than the length of a fart (my Dad once did one that lasted at least sixteen seconds. I wish I had a stopwatch at the time. It was truly dazzling, even if he walked funny for at least five minutes afterwards), the joke stops being funny. Sigi isn’t really all that funny. The hero sees a mermaid, farts, she flees, and then you give chase, until you rescue her from Hulk Hogan.

Ha, he’s old and racist. That’s somehow hilarious, I guess.

Yes, you read that correct. The last boss is Hulk Hogan. Because “LOL references!” I don’t get the correlation with farts. I mean, he is an old fart, but not famous for farting. I think. I’m not entirely sure if his sex tape is loaded with them. For all I know, maybe he’s dropping more than just N-bombs in it. Frankly, I really don’t care to watch to find out. If I wanted to see a decrepit old person have disgusting sex without knowing they’re being watched, I’ll hide in my parents closet. And I got over that phase a few months ago.

So, Sigi. The Mario in armor thing is fitting because it plays like a combination of Super Mario and Ghosts ‘n Goblins (what is with me and Ghosts ‘n Goblins tributes in 2018?), only without any semblance of difficulty at all. This might be the breeziest wide-release console platformer of the generation. You can use your Sir Arthur-style arsenal to hurl projectiles at enemies, or you can jump on their heads like Mario. You get three hits per a life, but extra lives are so common and the stages so short and easy that you’re likely to finish the game with a fairly large surplus. It’s like baby’s first platformer, only because of the barely existent fart-based humor, it has a T rating that would be discouraging for some prudish parents to let their young children play a game that is pretty much suitable only for them. God forbid Little Johnny learn that people break wind before he starts 1st grade.

There’s only twenty stages, four of which are boss fights, which even someone making no effort at all can finish easily in under 30 minutes. My very first run clocked in at under 24 minutes of total playtime. When I went back to find the S-I-G-I icons and hidden caves in the non-boss stages (each stage has one, except level 17 for some reason), plus four hidden treasures, I still only needed under 35 minutes to achieve a 100% finish with minimal effort and 900 total achievement points. And I realized during that run that Sigi: A Fart for Melusina really just isn’t very fun.

The screen is so shaky they should have called this “Ghosts ‘n Wobblins.”

I don’t know who Sigi was made for. Gaming veterans will find it too easy. Young children might not be allowed to play due to the T rating and the farting humor. There’s no adjustable difficulty, nor is there any option to disable an obnoxiously violent screen-shake that happens when you beat enemies. When I tweeted out a short video of the game, a lot of people questioned whether they’d even be able to play Sigi without getting a headache or motion sickness from it. I have photosensitive epilepsy and I had no issue with it, but not making this optional is an absurd oversight. But I’m not going to take that into consideration at all when making this verdict: Sigi is too easy, too simple, too stripped-down, and just such a nothing of a game. Visually, it looks great, and it’s cheap, and it’s quick. I had to think for quite a while whether I ultimately would give my readers the thumbs-up on it. It’s toeing the line of average, but sadly, I must ultimately conclude it’s toeing it from the wrong side. Sigi is fine, but in a way so unremarkable that I can’t recommended it over anything that aspires higher. On a scale of epic farts, Sigi is one of those tiny ones that someone could easily mistake for a shoe scuff.

Sigi: A Fart for Melusina was developed by Pixel.lu
Point of Sale: Xbox One, Steam, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4

$4.99 asked if they must have used a wrestler for the final boss, why not Andre the Giant? His gas was so legendary that HBO made a documentary about it in the making of this review. Well it was about other things he did, but we all watched for the farts.

Filed under Nintendo Switch Reviews, PC Reviews, PlayStation Reviews, Xbox One Reviews, Xbox Reviews Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Plug Me

July 6, 2018 by 2 Comments

I often imagine the germ of an indie game begins with a simple “what if?” type of question. It’s basically the same way I keep putting myself in the hospital. “What if you tried to cook a steak using only a tesla coil?” The simpler the question, the more gimmicky the game can become. That can be problematic if the gimmick is really just a facade to cover-up that the game really isn’t all that unique or different. Take something like Default Dan, whose germ of an idea was probably “what if Mario took place in opposite land?” So in it, coins kill you and spikes help you. That sounds novel and original, until you really stop and think about it. Isn’t that just a reskin more than an actual new idea? I mean, yea, it’s wacky and my brain kept telling me to grab the coins that were now lethal, but still, all it did was paint the good things bad and the bad things good, but it’s still exactly the same type of game you’ve played before. I think of that more as a novelty rather than something meant to stand on its own. Those have a place in Indieland, but damnit, where’s the gimmicky stuff with an actual gimmick that’s new and weird and actually works?

Oh, hello Plug Me. Aren’t you a breath of fresh air.

It’s one of those rare games where you see the picture and immediately get what it’s aiming for. It’s the anti-Fez in that regard.

I’m guessing the beginnings of Plug Me was a developer asking “what if the timer on fast-paced platformer WAS itself a platform?” That had a lot of potential for suckatude, but instead, it’s really impressive. There’s been games based around short stages and an environment-based ticking clock. Volchaos for example, a game made by one of my best friends. I didn’t really like Volchaos at all, owning mostly to the control issues. But even if Volchaos hadn’t controlled like a lubricated shopping cart, you’ve played games before where there’s an instakill floor that rises up. You’ve never played a game like Plug Me before. This is owed to the level design, which cleverly is built to utilize the time bar, which drains from left to right and is always smack-dab in the middle of the screen. It can’t be jumped through, so all the strategy and puzzling has to be done in sync with the clock. And that’s what blows me away. The clock is ALWAYS the focus of the level design, without it feeling the slightest bit shoehorned. I seriously didn’t expect that at all. It was as unfathomable as my Warriors signing DeMarcus Cousins for peanuts this off-season (excuse me, I need to go play with myself a little more now). EDIT: It turns out, we should have signed Kevin Durant’s achilles tendon to an extension. It ended up playing for the Raptors in the post season.

It’s so damn inspired, never once betraying its concept. It caught me by surprise because I’m so used to concept-based indies running out of ideas before they run out of levels. Plug Me ends the very moment I started to feel like they’ve gotten everything they could out of it. While Plug Me runs the gamut of platforming tropes (spikes, spinning maces, portals, etc), the timer is always the focus. It’s a fresh take on an increasingly tired genre. Even better: Plug Me obviously fancies itself as a punisher, with a fail counter in the upper-right hand corner. But it never really felt like one of those either. And when you die you respawn super quickly, so it never feels like a slog. I died 630 times over the course of playing it, but still completed the whole shebang in under three hours. Actually, with one really, really big exception, Plug Me might be too easy for most experienced punisher fans. On my very first play-through, I never once missed any of the batteries on each-stage. Beating the game unlocks a hard mode that I have no desire to touch, but I can’t help but wonder if that should be available right from the start. I’m not an exceptionally skilled platform player. If I could breeze through Plug Me, I can’t imagine how people who eat Super Meat Boy for lunch would do with it.

I almost quit on this. It took me 141 tries and 3,279 swear words to finish it.

That mostly owes to the controls. If they had been crap, Plug Me’s fast pace and precision-platforming would have been impossible. And again, I’m used to under-the-radar platformers that nobody’s heard of controlling like shit. Plug Me has been out since April and has only 26 user reviews, so I expected the worst. But actually, the control is rock-solid, making it such a joy to play. Well, mostly. The collision-detection is fairly unforgiving and two of the boss fights take a hard left at the corner of Unfairness and Cheapness if you catch my drift. It took me 141 attempts to beat the final-final boss because the developer apparently felt the only way to feel climatic was to spam the screen with so much shit that nobody could reasonably be expected to keep track of it all. When I finally did finish, it felt more like I got lucky than I got good at it. That takes the oomph out of winning. I was so livid during the finale that I almost didn’t award Plug Me my seal of approval. But honestly, with 50 out of 52 stages/boss fights being pretty fun, it’d be hard to justify nullifying that over two crap bosses. In fact, Plug Me exceeded my expectations to such a degree that I want to shake the developer’s hand. And then slap the ever-loving shit out of him for that last boss, but still, he’ll feel the love. And my hand. Across his face.

So yea, that’s Plug Me. I don’t have a ton to say about it. It forgoes being a throw-away novelty experience and instead can stand on its own merits as an original concept. One that works quite well. I can’t imagine what else they could do with the time bar concept. All the stages in Plug Me are single-screened, so I suppose they could add scrolling. Or they could totally phone it in and do ice and fire stages like twats, but honestly, they should walk away while they’re ahead. The real question I have is why does it seem like nobody is playing Plug Me? The graphics are really good. The concept is neat. It has limited faults. I think a big problem is it looks a bit generic and has one of the worst names for a good game I’ve seen in my seven years at IGC. I kept accidentally calling the game “Plug Man” and the main villain looks a lot like Dr. Wily. Names matter, and “Plug Me” is straight up a shit name for a game like this.

Thankfully there’s no “cake is a lie” joke in the portal stages, or else I’d be getting booked for manslaughter right now.

I hope developer Havana24 doesn’t get discouraged if this doesn’t find an audience, but if it doesn’t, maybe next time you should put more than two seconds worth of thought into the name? What does the name have to do with the timer bar gimmick? Because it represents energy and you’re a dude with a plug-in for a head? That’s weak. The whole theme is. Maybe it should have been about a guy busting to take a piss. That would have got attention. But ultimately, you can best sum up how much I liked Plug Me by the fact that I bought it three times. Once for myself, and twice for friends. Including a copy for Volchaos developer Kris Steele. See Kris, THIS is how a timer-based platformer should be!

Plug Me was developed by Havana24
Point of Sale: Steam

$2.99 asked if that’s a socket in your pocket or are you just happy to see me? in the making of this review

Plug Me is Chick Approved with the shiny new Indie Gamer Chick Seal of Approval by Kevin Willingham. Hire him or something so he doesn’t feel like he wasted his time with me.

Oh and it’s ranked on the IGC Leaderboard.

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FOX n FORESTS

May 25, 2018 by 2 Comments

Hi there, Fox n Forests. Take a seat please. We need to have a talk.

First thing’s first: the name. Do you know how many times I accidentally called you Fox & Friends? The name is basically begging for mockery or to be botched when spoken by sloppy wordsmiths such as myself. Also, the name is technically FOX n FORESTS, as if it were being screamed by a narcoleptic that briefly nodded off after the first syllable. What is with that “n” anyway? It’s so clumsy and distracting. You have a gorgeous sixteen-bit era game with magic spells and upgradable weapons and treasure chests that sometimes have traps designed to unfairly screw the player and..

Oh, I get it.

You were trying to dress up like Ghouls ‘N Ghosts huh?

It’s okay, you can tell me.

As far as I can tell, the dialog with the checkpoint critter has no payoff and is just supposed to be an “LOL, this character collects games, just like the majority of Kickstarter backers did judging by the end credits” joke. Also, whoever is the person shown in this picture, I want to thank you oh so much for the nightmares I’ve been having these last few weeks, you fucking monster, you.

Well, that makes things awkward. You see, I’m a child of the 2000s. I’m not nostalgic for the type of game you aspire to be. Oh, I don’t really care if a game is neo-retro or not. Take a look at the two games I hold up as the best two indie games ever developed: Axiom Verge and Shovel Knight. Both of them aspire to invoke the era you dress yourself in. So when people will inevitably say I had it out for you from the start, obviously that’s not the case. Truth be told, I haven’t followed your story at all. I had no idea you raised over $125K USD on Kickstarter. I had never heard of the studio that birthed you. I just said “hey, neat looking game.”

And you are neat looking. Authentic SNES look and feel. Of course, that’s where the issues start. Like having melee and projectile attacks mapped to the same button. Why? Because “back in the day” games had fewer buttons? Well, you see, I don’t really buy that. The SNES had four face buttons, just like the PS4 and Xbox One controllers I used playing you, plus two shoulder buttons, select, and start. Why do you have the same attack mapped to two different face buttons, when ranged attacks and melee cause different damage and are upgraded separately? So, in order to do a melee attack, you must either be in the act of jumping (when you can’t fire your projectiles) or you must be ducking.

Now, I’m not an anthropomorphic fox. Hell, I’m not even foxy. I’m sultry at best. But if I were an anthropomorphic fox, I would think that I would be able to comprehend that if my melee ability caused more damage than my ranged attack and an enemy was within close proximity, it would make more sense to just bonk them with my magical club thing without going through the effort of ducking or jumping to do it. It is so unbelievable that you can’t just swing your weapon while standing still that I kept checking the control screen to make sure I wasn’t missing it. I did this the entire length of the game, because it is that unfathomable.

It’s not even an exaggeration to say, as I uploaded this screenshot, I gave it one final glance over to make extra, extra, EXTRA sure I wasn’t missing something. I’m not.

That was pretty much how I felt about the entire Fox n Hannity experience. For every step forward, you stepped backwards into a cow patty. You have eight levels and five boss fights, one of which isn’t even really a boss fight. Of the eight levels, six of them are platformers and two of them are shmups. I’ve never understood why platform games do that. Oh, don’t worry Fox. I mean, even Nintendo did it with Super Mario Land, a game that came out in the United States exactly three weeks after I was born. Incredibly, in the nearly twenty-nine years since then, nobody has realized mixing these two completely incompatible genres is a combination surpassed in stupidity only by teriyaki-flavored soda.

Anyway, your shmup levels are bad. Like, bad-bad. Like, seriously, go put your nose in the corner for the next ten minutes. What were you thinking? No matter how much effort I put into building my health bar up, everything in those levels is a one-hit death. Even touching floor or ceiling. It’s a jarring, cringey gameplay shift, going from a very slightly above-average platform experience into a very mediocre Gradius-type of one. Cuphead did this too, and while I hated Cuphead, at least those shmup sections felt inspired and not out-of-place. YOUR shooting stages feel so lifeless and generic that they come across more like filler. And given how much you were already dipping your toes in the lake of blandness, that type of filler is like adding sawdust to bread and then chowing down on it. Not good for you, Fox n Forests. Your poop will be all pulpy, now.

See that itty-bitty little orange plant in the bottom right corner? Yea, the tip of my bird’s feet brushed up against it and I died. These stages are brought to you by Valium because you’ll need it to get all the rage you’ll feel playing them under control.

But let’s talk about the platform levels since that’s your bread and butter here. They’re not bad at all. Mostly nice design. Cool variety. The difficulty-scaling is a bit off since I had more issues beating stage 1-2 than I did stage 4-2. That could be because I had upgraded my offense significantly by that point. But otherwise they’re fine. They’re the best part of you. And while you’re not the first game to use the “change the level on the fly” mechanic (represented here by changing the seasons), what’s here mostly works. I mean, it was kind of annoying that there’s a pause every single time the main character raised his weapon up and was frozen while he was doing the “THUNDERCATS, HOOOO” pose every time you change the season but NOT when you change it back. But even then, while it’s not exactly original, it keeps things interesting.

Or, at least, it does the first time you play through a stage. Unfortunately, you relied heavily on forced-replays of levels to pad-out your length. I’ve tried padding myself to make up for my own inadequacies, so I get it. But nobody bought that my boobs had grown four sizes overnight, and nobody is going to believe you’re actually longer than your eight stages no matter how much gauze you stuff into your shorts.

Each of your stages contains five hidden acorns. If you do not find enough of these acorns, you won’t have access to the later stages. And I don’t mean the bonus stages for each game’s world (worlds consisting of two levels and a boss fight) that you unlock by finding all ten acorns in a world. Oh no. I mean actual levels that you need to finish to, you know, beat the game. Well, that fucking sucks.

Even THAT wouldn’t have been so bad if it had been possible to get all the acorns on your first run through each stage. But you had to be a dick and not allow that. Sometimes you won’t be able to access them until you have special arrows that you acquire only from beating bosses. Stages have bullseyes of different colors scattered around them that you must shoot with the matching color arrow to unlock access to different areas of each stage. That sounds fine, but the areas you’re unlocking are teeny-tiny. It might just be an extra platform or two that gives you access to the acorn, and that’s it. So you forced myself and others to fully replay the entire stage to get to these sections, and then finish the stage to keep them. If we were unlocking vast new areas of levels that contained new and innovative gameplay mechanics, maybe this would be justifiable. But we’re not. This is one of the worst instances of forced-level replaying I’ve ever seen. It’s like being forced to sit through a rerun that promises you never-before-seen deleted scenes that are really just 20-seconds long and add fuck-all to the plot. There might be an entire extra section to the game if you get all 40 acorns (it does unlock something), but I would have to care enough to get them all to find out. And I don’t.

Actually, I only enjoyed five of the platforming stages. This vertical level (or was this the vertical non-boss boss-fight?. Meh, both are boring) is hampered by some spotty collision detection and became such a chore that it’s where I declared my status as a wuss and started the game over on easy mode, just to finish it. Which is another issue: no on-the-fly difficulty switching. Fuck that noise. And I REALLY didn’t want to have to replay this one to grab the stuff I missed the first time around. So I didn’t. Because it was boring the first time.

Fox N Forests, you have fine level design, but not so fine that I want to play the exact same fucking levels again and again. There was nothing more agonizing for me than to play a stage for the third time, get to the end of it and STILL have a missing acorn. “WELL FUCK ME” I screamed as I hit the teeter-totter to end the level and then start over AGAIN, this time making sure to push up against every single fucking wall or making blind jumps off every platform, constantly switching between seasons while looking for the hide-and-seek champion of acorns. Yea, this was adding to the game’s run-time, but it long ceased being fun. This was busy work. Fox N Forests, you would have been SO much more enjoyable if finding these things hadn’t been forced upon me and I could just play the levels one time in sequential order and only go back if I wanted to grind up money and resources for better upgrades. An optional grind is always preferable to a forced one. Your parents, Bonus Level Entertainment, apparently never got that memo.

I hated you, Fox N Forests. I really and truly hated you. Mostly because it was frustrating watching you throw away so much potential. There’s a running gag I use about “minimum indie badness” that games must achieve for their indie cred. In your case, it’s like you were worried about not meeting your quota and overcompensated. Your levels are creative (except the shooting stages, which can go fuck themselves), but get boring when you forced me to replay them. Your controls are good, except the nonsensical button-mapping. Your bosses are well designed, except one encounter with a giant spider that is more of a copy of Metroid’s escape-the-shaft finale, only longer and less interesting. Your weapon upgrades are nifty, but I only bought one of the potion-weapons, used it once, never bought another, and was no worse off for it. Plus upgrading the weapons required even more forced replays of stages to find hidden mana-cores and stone wheels, to the point that I never even got all upgrades. Everything you did right is immediately nullified by something you did wrong, to the point that I didn’t like my time with you at all.

And the Children of the Forest approached the First Men and said “on second though, you can cut down SOME of the Weirwood Trees.”

So yea, you’re grounded Fox n Forests. Go to your room. I’m not your parent or anything. But fuck it. Go to your room, think about what you’ve done, and make some DLC that rights all the wrongs you just did. Be the first indie game I’ve ever played where the DLC is better than the main game. Because you have so much potential, and the fact that THIS is what you ended up being? You’re better than this. Way, way better than this.

Even your story was bland and predictable. During the open intro, the framing plot device made the finale so easy to guess that I wrote it down on a piece of paper and sealed it in an envelope. When the final boss battle began, I told Brian he could open the envelope. He shrugged and said “did you expect something better?” Yea, I was completely right, but it wasn’t exactly impressive. Helen Keller could see the big twist coming a mile away, and she’s not even a platforming game fan.

Fox n Forests was developed by Bonus Level Entertainment
Point of Sale: Steam, PlayStation, Xbox (Coming Soon), Switch

$17.99 (normally $19.99) accidentally called the game “Fox & Friends” 8 times for those who were taking bets in the making of this review.

Pre-release review copies were supplied to Cathy by Bonus Level Entertainment. She purchased a copy of Fox n Forests upon the game’s release. All games reviewed at Indie Gamer Chick are paid for by Cathy out of her own pocket. For more on this policy, read the FAQ.

Developers who receive review copy requests from Indie Gamer Chick: make sure you’re really getting them from me and not someone pretending to be me.

Check out Indie Gamer Team’s Obscure Games and Consoles review for an alternate take.

Filed under Nintendo Switch Reviews, PC Reviews, PlayStation Reviews, Xbox One Reviews Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Block Dropper

August 12, 2017 by 2 Comments

I owe Block Dropper this: it made me realize how different I am from the little girl who started this blog. If I had played this in August of 2011, I would have been quite annoyed by it. It’s a horrible game. For lack of a better description, Block Dropper is an arcadey-physics game where you play a block that hops around a platform collecting other blocks. When the blocks land, they’re hypothetically supposed to cause the floor to collapse. I say hypothetically because sometimes it didn’t. It’s sort of a problem when the physics don’t work in a game based entirely around physics. At one point, a stage began and a tree that was on the ground casually fell over as soon as the timer started.

I guess you’re supposed to catch the blocks before they land, but it’s almost impossible to use the shadows to figure out where they’re at or what direction they’re going. The vast majority of blocks I acquired by picking them off the floor.

And that’s how I knew I was a different person now. 2011 Indie Gamer Chick would have flipped her controller in the air and screamed profanities at how she was out a dollar. 2017 Indie Gamer Chick started laughing. I laughed until my vision was blurry with tears and my sides were in pain. I mean, it was just such glorious shit. Nothing was ever consistent. Sometimes levels started and the floor started collapsing immediately. Sometimes I would attempt to collect a block and the game treated it like it was part of the floor, I guess, because I could push myself up against it from every angle and not be able to pick it up. Then, after walking away for a second, I would walk back to it and collect it with no problem, assuring the lulz would continue. This lasted for about fifteen minutes, and ended when the game did. Yep, it takes about fifteen minutes to finish. Did I mention this is normally priced $4.99?

There’s also a local-only (like all Creator’s Collection games, there’s no online play) versus mode that in-theory could go on forever. Whoever collects the most blocks in two minutes wins. Except the game drops clocks that increase the length of the game. So hypothetically, if neither misses any of the clocks, you could be stuck playing this endlessly. It got to the point that my Dad, who likes *everything*, was shouting “STOP GRABBING THE FUCKING CLOCKS!” Mind you, the game had only been going about a minute by that point. I’m not joking.

Given the fact that there was almost no world left every time I finished a stage, I saved the world in the same way Superman saved Metropolis in Man of Steel. I’m still technically a hero though.

So yea, another XBLIG II that feels more like an unfinished proof-of-concept. On the positive side, two of the levels are “boss battles” that actually feel sort of clever. The problem with them was falling off the stage is not grounds for failure. So, for the final boss, I would stand on the target boxes, wait for the boss to fire at me, then casually step off the side of the platform to respawn elsewhere while the damage registered. So yea, even these encounters were dumb and broken, but at least they were interesting. If the developer continues to tinker with this idea, I think a better idea would be to drop (no pun intended) the normal stages and just make eight boss fights. Maybe some would wince at the idea of boss-rush game with poor handling and inconsistent physics. Me? Hell, I liked Shadow of the Colossus, right?

Block Dropper was developed by Tresiris Games
Point of Sale: Microsoft Store

$0.99 (normally $4.99 LOL ) was further amused by pretending the block was Thomas from Thomas Was Alone in the making of this review.

Filed under XBLIG / Creators Collection, Xbox One Reviews Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , ,

Zolg

December 10, 2016 by 2 Comments

All good things must come to an end. Six out of the last seven games covered at Indie Gamer Chick received my seal of approval. Even I was worried I was starting to become one of THOSE critics. You know the ones. The type that wouldn’t commit to calling a game bad if it shot their dog with bullets made out of your mother’s grounded up bones. Well, I need worry no longer. Zolg is a bad game.

Though only barely so. GOD DAMN IT okay, come on Cathy. You can be mean. You used to be. Channel your inner bitch.

So Zolg is a twin-stick, top-down Metroidvania that tries to channel a retro feel using vector-style graphics. It’s not fully convincing but works to make enemies and objectives distinctive. Controls are fully mapable, though I really hate having to set that up manually. The gameplay feels like a cross between Robotron and Berzerk (which is kind of fitting seeing how the former was inspired by the latter) with Metroid-style power-ups that open up the game peppered in. It’s not a horrible concept by any means, and even the execution isn’t terrible.

Except when it is.

Touch the little spiky things and you die. I never understood this in gaming. It makes sense if it's Tales from the Crypt and the blind people are getting revenge against the mean old superintendent of their home, but otherwise, how does simply touching this hurt you?

Touch the little spiky things and you die. I never understood this in gaming. It makes sense if it’s Tales from the Crypt and the blind people are getting revenge against the mean old superintendent of their home, but otherwise, how does simply touching this hurt you?

First off, there’s no map. That’s always annoying for any Metroidvania great or small. The controls are too loose even when you map to an Xbox One controller. Zolg requires the occasional tight squeeze through traps, and without using the D-Pad, I found this to be too sloppy and fickle. The enemies, even basic ones, are far too spongy. This goes out to all makers of shooters: check your enemy sponginess. I promise you won’t have an easier fix for your game in your entire lifetime. Remember, it’s BUSY WORK to have baddies that are no threat but just soak up bullets like Pixel Empire UK soaks up articles that don’t belong to them. I basically only put that line in there in case their feed is automatically set to steal my work again and I think the idea of saying Pixel Empire UK are a bunch of talentless cunts on their own site is kind of hilarious. That being said, please don’t steal my work anymore you talentless cunts.

Do you know who isn’t a talentless cunt? The developer of Zolg. It’s honestly not horrible game. But the final deal breaker for me was you don’t “blink” long enough when you take damage. There are enemies called “Stalkers” that move fast, appear quickly out of thin air, and like your smelly grandparent that you have to deal with once a year, will hug the life out of you. Once they’re on top of you, no matter if you start with full life, you’re pretty much dead. I entered a room full of them and found no method was satisfactory on dealing with them. Including but not limited: trying to heel-toe it through the room so as to only trigger one appearing at time; charging into the room on a virtual suicide mission intent on lighting them up like a Christmas tree; trying not to engage them at all and instead leg it to the next room; turning off the game and taking a masters course in game programming with the intent of deprogramming the fuckers out of Zolg myself. Nothing worked, so I quit. That’s what you should do when a game goes bad and there’s no immediately hope for redemption.

These little fuckers are the Stalkers. How I hated them.

These little fuckers are the Stalkers. How I hated them.

But, I should stress, it’s not hopeless forever. Although this pretty much assures I’m failing at channeling my inner-bitch, I really want developer Robert Alvarez to channel his inner-Betsy Ross and get to work patching up his game. The sponginess and the lack of blinking should be easy fixes that should turn his slightly bad game into a slightly good one. I’ll give any game a second chance here at Indie Gamer Chick, and Zolg has as easy a path as any bad game I’ve ever played has towards redemption. There’s quality in here somewhere. Fun concept, distinct appearance, no horrible pop-culture references (at least from what I’ve played), and it can be a lot of fun. But for every step forward it takes one and one-tenth a step backwards. This makes for both a bad game and for the worst rendition of the Hokey Pokey ever.

headerZolg was developed by Robert Alvarez
Point of Sale: Steam

$0.59 (normally $0.99) isn’t sure if that was proper use of a semicolon in the making of this review.

This article may only be reprinted with my express written consent, which can only be granted if you make the request while riding a unicycle using only your teeth.

Filed under PC Reviews Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

Mystery Castle

June 30, 2016 by 1 Comment

When I started Indie Gamer Chick in July of 2011, I figured I’d be playing a lot of new ideas and experimental concepts. Ha. Silly me. Most of indie games take their inspiration from games of yesteryear. This is fine, especially when those muses are properties that have long since been abandoned. Take the Adventures of Lolo, for example. Here’s a franchise whose last American release came when I was two-years-old. A series popular enough that it had three full releases for the NES, and even more globally, but has gotten no love since. Hell, the Smash Bros series is by HAL, the studio behind Lolo, and yet it can’t even get so much as a trophy in the series. Yea, him and Princess Lala were villains in the Kirby series, but that isn’t much comfort. That would be like Fox saying “yea, we cancelled Firefly, but hey, you can see Captain Mal flipping off Jack Bauer in the background of an episode of 24 so it’s fine!”

Working title: The Adventures of No-lo.

Working title: The Adventures of No-lo.

I hadn’t played Lolo until I found an XBLIG called Aesop’s Garden, and someone said “well it’s just a Lolo clone.” It’s not, though the inspiration is clearly there. Since then, I found another Lolo-inspired indie gem, SpyLeaks, which I liked so much that I included it in my Indie Royale bundle back in 2013. While those games expanded the Lolo concept, people who wanted just a straight re-imagining of franchise might not have liked them. For those unambitious types, Mystery Castle is probably their best bet. It holds the distinction of being the only Ouya game I ever finished. I liked it just fine, but never bothered to review it on account of it, well, being an Ouya game. My reviews of puzzle games here are already as well received as a diagnosis of Gonorrhea, and the double whammy of being on a platform only owned by people who hate money made it seem like a waste of time to write-up. But now it’s on Steam and Xbox One, so here’s what I have to say about it: it’s fine.

I mean, you’re not going to be enthusiastically singing the praises of it to anyone. Mystery Castle’s gameplay is as forgettable as its name (one fan of mine mistook it for a remake of an NES game called Milon’s Secret Castle, which I guess is known for being horrible), but it’s solid. The idea is you’re a gnome. You have to puzzle your way through rooms, collecting diamonds to open up an exit. The formula is somewhat adjusted by having things like warps to push boxes through, lanterns to light invisible paths, or keys that only work on certain doors. The controls are a little too floaty, which is common for the genre because you sort of have to be able to move one-half-space at a time, or else it would be too hard to maneuver blocks into the correct positions. Veterans of Lolo will get used to it quickly.

I do appreciate that the boss fights are still puzzles, as opposed to Lolo 3 where you just basically Care Bear Stare the bosses like a shooter.

I do appreciate that the boss fights are still puzzles, as opposed to Lolo 3 where you just basically Care Bear Stare the bosses like a shooter.

So is it fun? Yea. I probably would have enjoyed it more if I had played it only a couple of stages at a time instead of trying to plow through it as fast as possible. Puzzlers can be exhausting to attempt in one sit-through, something that I’ll fully admit is unfair for game developers since their genre doesn’t lend itself to the review process. Especially when the game has a lot of needless dialog and explanation. Really, the only part I truly hated were the ice stages, which feel closer to a game called Starzzle that I reviewed a week after launching IGC. I’ve given up on developers ever figuring out that most gamers would rather lick rust than play ice stages. But, whatever. There’s enough new ideas to keep things relatively fresh from start-to-finish, enough so I think anyone wanting a game like this will be satisfied. While I still prefer Aesop’s Garden and Spyleaks, Mystery Castle is really good for what it wants to be. Really, this is closest in feel to a direct sequel to Lolo you’ll probably get anytime soon. If you like that series, you’ll enjoy this. If you don’t, you won’t. Easiest. Review. Ever.

Mystery Castle logoMystery Castle was developed by Runestone Games
Point of Sale: Steam, Xbox-One, Ouya

igc_approved1$9.99 (I think, not sure what I paid for the Ouya version) said “Thank you to all my readers for five incredible years of support. Here’s to the next fifty!” in the making of this review.

Mystery Castle is Chick-Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard

Filed under Ouya Review, PC Reviews, Xbox One Reviews Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Volume

November 8, 2015 by 3 Comments

Quick disclosure: I’m buddies with both Volume creator Mike Bithell and actor/critic/celebrity mime Jim Sterling.

Disclosure over. Yea, I didn’t like Volume. But not because it doesn’t stack up against Thomas Was Alone, Mike’s previous game. Anyone who went in expecting something like that is probably being a bit unfair. I should also disclose that I’ve never played the NES Metal Gear, which is what inspired Volume. I’m not quite sure why you would want to mimic a nearly 30–year-old game’s mechanics, especially in a genre like stealth. I’m sure the retro fans will hate me for saying this, but being like something old isn’t necessarily a good thing. Metal Gear isn’t inherently better because it’s older. You only think it’s better because you played it at an age where video game stimuli caused your body to generate higher levels of dopamine than playing games today as an adult does. When you look at one of your childhood favorites, those memories alone could possibly trigger something close to that desired effect but not quite there, which essentially renders the experience the gaming version of chasing the dragon.

By the way, that whole dopamine rant I pulled it out of my ass for comic effect not knowing the science probably backs me up on it. Also, put down the pitchforks, retro fans. Tongue firmly in cheek. I’m not suggesting old school gamers would turn to heroin because they can’t get their copy of River City Ransom to boot up.

Okay, fine, maybe Patrick Scott Patterson would.

The dogs in Volume can alert the guards to your location but can't actually attack you. Oh COME ON, this totalitarian regime couldn't afford a couple angry Dobermans?

The dogs in Volume can alert the guards to your location but can’t actually attack you. Oh COME ON, this totalitarian regime couldn’t afford a couple hungry Dobermans with a taste for human flesh? Because if not I know a guy..

I actually like games inspired by the legendary titles of yore. Inspired being the key word here. Actually being like them is sort of the pits, since gaming has come a long ways. That’s why Volume fails. It’s married too much to being like old school stealth games. You know, the ones where actual stealth wasn’t required. It also wants to be a puzzle game. And an action-arcade game. These three styles really aren’t compatible, and some aspects of them also get in the way of delivering an in-depth story that tries to be a modern take on Robin Hood. The hero’s name is Locksley, while the villain is Guy Gisborne. Also known as the Robin Hood villain nobody gives a shit about. Given the totalitarian regime angle, the bad guy should have been named John Prince. Guy Gisborne sounds like he would be a back-up drummer for Winger.

So why didn’t I like Volume? You can break it down into three parts.

1. I like my stealth games to be sneaky and tension filled.

Volume is neither. The enemies are so fucking brain-dead that I was able to set global record times on dozens of stages just by ignoring the stealth stuff and making a run for it. Right in front of the enemies. Sometimes I would be walking up against a wall, in full view of one of the guard’s line of sight, literally wiggle my body to try to get caught, and nothing happened. I made a mix tape to demonstrate everything I’m talking about. Take a look.

Dimwitted guards operating like they recently had a full frontal lobotomy might have been a staple of gaming’s past, but why not smarten it up today? Wouldn’t that be the best way to pay tribute to those past games, by improving on their original intent? The lack of anything resembling intelligence really takes the oomph out of Volume. There’s no tension at all. That would require a fear of getting caught by the guards. But I often walked into tiny, dead-end rooms from which there was no possible way I could escape, have the guards follow me, peek into the room, and give up the search. If they worked there, surely they would know of the room and know I had no place else to go.

This was also the primary reason why I couldn’t get into the story. The idea is you’re simply running a simulator that’s teaching others how to break into these guarded buildings and loot treasure. I was sort of hoping the big plot twist in the end would be showing Locksley the pile of bodies the dictatorship had racked up due to his horrible advice on thieving. “Surely Locksley you didn’t expect us to hire guards that don’t know the layout of the building they work in you stupid fool!” A+ writing there, by the way. I’m for hire.

2. I like my puzzle games to be brainy.

You can certainly see the logic of Volume’s levels. Some of them might have offered some downright brain-bending moments. They would have, if you had to solve them the way Mike envisioned. But you don’t. I had pretty much figured out how to exploit the guard’s behavior only a few stages into Volume and was able to just plow through stages with total disregard for the elaborate puzzles set up for me. Two guards that I need to whistle for to distract and slowly move away from the diamond sandwiched between them? Yea, I could do that. Or I could just walk up, take the diamond, occasionally hug the wall to restart their aiming mechanic, turn a corner and sprint to the exit. I never repeated any level more than a couple of times. There’s no punishment for being caught by the guards, and because the global leaderboards reward fast times, you’re actually rewarded for ignoring that point of the game. I wasn’t just beating high scores, I was annihilating some of them by thirty seconds or more on my first attempt at those stages.

This cracked me up. Many stages in and the game just alerted me that new, dumber guards were added. As opposed to the guards from before? Ha.

This cracked me up. Many stages in and the game just alerted me that new, dumber guards were added. As opposed to the guards from before? Ha.

3. I like my arcade games to be fast-paced.

Volume’s moderately interesting story is told with a mixture of voice overs and text boxes that are placed in stages. Whereas Thomas Was Alone’s fairy tale-like narration was in perfect sync with the happenings of the game, Volume has a much more complex plot that requires your full attention to process. Then it throws you in a game where your attention will be anywhere but on the plot. When this isn’t happening, you might stumble upon a text-box that pauses the game (and thankfully the timer) so you can get more plot points that my brain processed as gibberish because it had broken my flow of not-giving-a-shit running from guards while cackling the whole time. Really, the text boxes should have more often been envelopes that you could read at your own leisure between the stages. I don’t want my not-a-stealth-or-puzzler-or-arcade game interrupted in the middle of a chase. Do you? Volume probably does a lot better as a fast-paced action/arcade title than it does anything else, but it still feels too slow and dull for that without the story interruptions.

Volume has some neat moments. I like how you’re still getting new items even after 90 stages, and the items are mostly fun to use. The voice acting is mostly fine, even though I can’t pick one British voice apart from another besides Jim’s, who I’d like to think has some sort of dolphin-like ultra-sonic thing going for them. The graphics are okayish. It controls fine. But, Volume just plain isn’t fun. Too dumb to challenge. Too long to say “at least it was quick.” And to those who say I’m not being fair because I didn’t play it the way it was intended to be played, I say this: it’s up to the developer to tighten the game to prevent me from doing that. Look, if you give an asshole a flamethrower and unleash them in the Jiffy Pop factory, I’m sorry but you’re an idiot if you don’t think there’s going to be a mess of popcorn at the end of the night. And in the case of Volume, I was given moronic guards and non-puzzles. I took the path of least resistance and said “fuck this, I could go for some popcorn right about now.”

Volume logoVolume was developed by Mike Bithell
Point of Sale: PSN, Steam
Only the PS4 version was played for this review.

$19.99 pumped up the Volume like it was a Fygar in the making of this review.

Filed under PC Reviews, PlayStation Reviews Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

To the Moon

October 18, 2015 by 4 Comments

I generally don’t like games made with RPG Maker and I really don’t like visual novels. So, it was a bit puzzling to me that To the Moon became one of the most requested reviews I ever had. Not requests from people on the fence about whether they should buy it or not. These are all requests from people who finished and wanted to know what I thought because of one plot element. So, I have to go heavy on the spoilers again. Before I get there, what did I think of To the Moon?

Great concept, good plot, annoying main characters, bad script, boring gameplay. In that order. I don’t recommend it for the same reason I didn’t recommend All the Bad Parts. Because, no matter how interesting or worthwhile a story is, when it’s put in a video game it has to be at least equally as interesting to make it unfold. At least in my books.

Alright, spoiler time.

So, yea, I probably got a lot of requests for this one because I’m autistic. My diagnosis is atypical, or “pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified” or “PDD-NOS.” Which isn’t really used all that much anymore, but I don’t feel like going in for an updated diagnosis. Why bother? I’m at peace with myself and my life. We have a system in place to help me live with autism. It’s something I happen to live with. I do understand why people would be interested in what someone on the spectrum thinks of a game with autism as a central plot point, but really, all the worst parts of To the Moon have nothing to do with it.

They named the lighthouse "Anya" and filled it with bunnies. I have no words.

They named the lighthouse “Anya” and filled it with bunnies. I have no words.

To the Moon is a story about a widower on his death-bed who has paid a company to alter his memories and make his final wish “come true.” The autism thing comes from the fact that River, his wife, had Asperger Syndrome. Unless my memory is failing me, it never outright comes out and says that’s her diagnosis, but it does refer to the writings of Tony Attwood, who is one of the foremost experts on the condition. People who meet me and learn I have autism often assume that’s my diagnosis. It’s not, but PDD-NOS is so broad in an already haphazard diagnostic process that I could very well meet experts today who would call it that.

So the requests for To the Moon mostly come from people wondering if I felt the game depicted autism accurately. The answer to that is yes. River, the old dude’s deceased wife, is shown in flashbacks repeatedly making origami rabbits or having difficulty talking and expressing herself to others. There’s even a scene where John and River go horseback riding as part of her equine therapy. Yes, that’s a real thing. Really, if you’re going to depict someone on the spectrum in a 2D not-a-game game, this is probably as good as you’re going to do.

Well, except this: before the not-a-reveal reveal of River’s condition, there are scenes where John is talking to friends and doctors about what’s wrong with River in hushed, ominous tones. I do my best to keep myself in the dark about story elements or gameplay mechanics at IGC, so I had never heard that one of the subjects of To the Moon was autism. So, before the not-a-reveal reveal where they name dropped Tony Attwood, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what it was River had. It didn’t help that all the characters used the pronoun game. “She has THAT?” “Yea, THAT!” What the fuck was “that?” She was obsessed with origami rabbits and the clocks in the house didn’t tick. That was all I had to go off of. Judging by the way the characters seemed frightened of what she had, I was thinking it was something either terminal or mentally degenerative. A brain tumor. Early-onset Alzheimer’s. Something that would have her friends and loved ones speaking in whispered tones as if they could shit their pants in terror at any moment.

Asperger Syndrome? Really? They were talking about her like they thought John might wake up with his bed on fire because River had Asperger Syndrome? Terrible handling of the plot. I assure you, people with autism don’t light your beds on fire because they have autism. They do it for the same reason anyone does: because it’s fun.

I wasn’t offended by it. Frankly, the writing in To the Moon is just horrible enough at times that nobody should be able to be that offended by it. Though I should point out that a friend of mine with Asperger Syndrome asked me to note that he didn’t like both the way other characters spoke of River’s Asperger Syndrome or the way one of the other characters, written to also be an Aspie, was just part of the “proud asshole with Asperger syndrome” media trope. The male scientist, Dr. Watts, has dialog like someone binge-watched Big Bang Theory and told the script writer “make him like that asshole named Sheldon.” Sheldon is held up as a poster child for Asperger Syndrome by Autism Speaks, but apparently many Aspies say he’s simply a lazy stereotype of the public perception of it. Noted.

This picture should not have been on To the Moon's marketplace page. This isn't even a real battle, nor are there any battles like this in the game. To the Moon is tagged on the Steam page as an RPG. This image implies that there might be traditional RPG battle mechanics in To the Moon, instead of it just being a visual novel. Like a steel-wool tipped dildo, it rubbed me the wrong way.

This picture should not have been on To the Moon’s marketplace page. This isn’t even a real battle, nor are there any battles like this in the game. To the Moon is tagged on the Steam page as an RPG and as an adventure, when it’s really a visual novel. This image implies that there might be traditional RPG battle mechanics in To the Moon, when there’s not. Like a steel-wool tipped dildo, it rubbed me the wrong way.

I wasn’t bothered by either the depiction or the inclusion of autism as a story plot. It wasn’t handled well, but really To the Moon doesn’t handle any story element well. One pivotal scene near the end of the game has Johnny’s twin brother, Joey, get run over by a car. This was supposed to be a heart-wrenching, traumatic moment. Except the writer of To the Moon botched how the character was introduced, and then went so over the top with killing him off that even I was starting to question whether this was a satire or not. It just appears to be a boy that looks kind of like the main character, who is playing soccer on the street when his mom backs over him with a car. But not before the game started doing dramatic cutaways, super-slow-motion started up, and the screen faded to black and white. It was FUCKING HILARIOUS. I started laughing to the point that my eyes became puffy with tears. Given the fact that Joey, Johnny’s twin brother, hadn’t been introduced as a plot element yet, this really should have been something that was heard but not seen.

That’s why To the Moon never fully had me. The concept is incredibly creative. Two people traveling through the psyche of a dying person to alter their memories so that they can die happy? Awesome. There’s an incredible movie or novel in there somewhere. Even the general plot of To the Moon is pretty good. The actual story structure, the unlikable player characters, and the script are where it fails. The scientists speak like stock characters in a bad sitcom. Non-stop sarcasm, pop-culture references, or digs at each-other. Their tone is at odds with a dramatic and urgent setting. Johnny is literally on his death-bed and can die at any moment, yet neither doctor has any sense of propriety or urgency to move forward finishing their work. There’s even cutaways where they’re screaming at each-other at a tense moment when it appears death could happen at any moment. I’ve never seen a game that had me from a concept and a plot point of view but lost me simply because the writing was so poor.

Speaking of steel wool tipped dildos rubbing people the wrong way..

Speaking of steel wool tipped dildos rubbing people the wrong way..

It reminded me of the Phantom Menace, which had a horribly mangled ending that cut between the dramatic final stand of a hero and a three-stooges routine starring a cartoon rabbit. The two tones were not compatible. That’s what the 4 to 6 hour grind of playing To the Moon is like. Where the fundamentals for a good story are all there. You even have a dramatic plot device, the pending death of Johnny, to give it a sense of dread and urgency. It should be great. But instead, the creator inserted two utterly unfunny, unlikable douchebags to shout sitcom quips at each-other for six fucking hours and it totally ruins the entire feel of the game. I hated To the Moon, and I hate that I hate it, because it should be awesome. It’s not. It’s boring and disconnected. I want to see this concept redone with restraint for the characterizations. More emphasis on the nature of memories and how they relate to happiness, and less stock characters who are “funny” because they’re making references to the same shows and movies I have seen. I know the writer has the talent to do that, because 50% of To the Moon is good. The other 50%? I just compared it to the Phantom Menace. That’s never a good thing.

To the Moon logoTo the Moon was developed Freebird Games
Point of Sale: Steam

$2.49 (normally $9.99) wondered if this is really the indie version of Heavy Rain. Think about it. Slow pace. Uneven tone. More visual novel than a game. Child getting run over by a car. Origami everywhere. Slog to make the story progress. Damnit, now I’m pissed that there was no scene where I get to make Watts cut his finger off in the making of this review.

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