Shadow Covenant

Keeping on with my trip in the world of indie games I had on my Steam account:

Looks amazing, plays like a dream… but (there’s always a but) it’s a “kill-everything-that-moves” platformer… Not my cup of tea, but if you like this sort of games, it’s a galore of cartoon violence that plays extremely well… Not sure if this fits the “indie” label, since it’s an EA game, but still it has an indie feel to it.

Breakout with some twists… It’s a nice game, well executed, pretty to look at, but again, not my cup of tea… My Arkanoid days are for a long time…

Another platformer (half the games in the world are platformers, it seems), in this one you can take “photos” of certain parts of the game area and past them to others; this will enable you to overcome fiendish puzzles. Very pretty, it lacks a certain story-line that I really need for games to suck me in (unless the gameplay is as amazing as “Closure”, for example).

This game was so close to being what I always wanted in a space game it’s almost annoying that I gave up on it after 3 or 4 hours of play.

Space Pirates and Zombies (SPAZ) is a top-down space shooter, with all the RPG elements you might want! Loads of quests, tech-trees, upgrades, mining, etc, etc, etc…

So what’s wrong with it? Well, first of all, the game overwhelms you with information and mechanics very early, which kind of dampens my enthusiasm a bit… but hey, the game seemed so awesome, I powered through it…

The worse part was when I found out that I wasn’t actually having fun in the space battles… the enemy AI is so rudimentary that the combats were just a succession of “follow this ship until you overtake it, then 180 degrees and do it again”, it had a taste of random (not enough feedback on hits to understand what exactly was happening)… but worse, it didn’t FEEL fun… So, space battles became a grind (and that’s the main core of the game), so after a bit I was thinking “Why am I playing this, I ain’t getting any satisfaction from it!”, which was a shame, because everything else seemed awesome… Maybe a bit more “directed” gameplay (through an initial storyline), and a better combat system would have really pulled me in, because I really wanted to like this game(it seemed to be everything I wanted EVE Online to be)… Looking at it, I think that the combats shouldn’t be so fast action oriented, somewhere between the fast pacing it has and the slow drag of EVE… Then, maybe the game could have been a really huge tiem sink for me…

Anyway, try it out, you might find it more fun than I did… there’s thousands of people of that opinion, so it might be that I was expecting something different, since I’ve been thinking about making a game like this for ages now…

I’m playing this one at the moment, so I still don’t have any clear opinion on it… It’s a fluids based puzzle platformer, and it looks very nice… The drawback is that all that fluid calculation takes its toll, and it sometimes runs very slowly on my computer (which isn’t exactly high-end, but it’s not a low-end as well)…

Anyway, give it a whirl… I’m 2 hours in it and still having fun, so I’m guessing it shows the game is good!

Continuing my last post, here’s more “reviews” of games in my Steam collection that I’ve been trying lately…

Before I start, though, I have to say that there’s a awesome thing about most games I’ve tried so far: they startup quickly and I can quick at any time with minimal progress loss… As an adult, this is very important for me, since when I was playing Assassin’s Creed III, I’d leave the console turned on for hours at a time without playing, just because I didn’t want to wait ages for the game to startup and be playing…

But, one complaint (to everyone… indie and AAA): please add a “Save and Exit” option… even if your Exit option always saves, I feel uncomfortable leaving without saving… don’t hide my saves from me, let me know when you’re saving, that way I know how much progress I’ll lose if I quit the game at any one point.

Anyway, on with the “reviews”:

If you like platformers, go no further… this one is an excellent one, although very hard to play without a gamepad (which I don’t have on my PC). Hard platforming, with some silly storyline and excellent level design!

Although I’ve followed Cliff Harris’ blog for ages now, I only played his game now (picked it up on a Humble Bundle sometime ago)… The game is what I expected: you choose your forces up until a certain amount of “points”, position them in the “starting line”, setup tactics, etc, and press go… then you see a battle being played out in front of your eyes, with no intervention from you… While I understand the point of this, I’m not a big fan of the concept, but I admit that it looks gorgeous! Most of the time, I’d just think that I wanted in on that fight… Would totally buy it as a screensaver, though! For more tactical amongst you, it’s a must have in my opinion… It runs as you’d expect, the AI is very good, and your orders pre-battle are decisive to the outcome (so you don’t feel that victory or defeat was just random events). As far as I know, there’s extensive modding support (and lots of people doing it), so it’s awesome value for money!

Pew, pew, pew, kaboom! It’s a schmup, very well executed, very atmospheric and with a good effort done on the story presentation… Not my cup of tea, but if you like shoot’em ups, this is one of the best I’ve seen in the last years!

One of the best of the lot so far, I played this until I finished it (in about 6 hours or so)… Imagine “Shadow Complex” or “Deadlight”, but with a lighter tone and with a gravity-manipulation mechanic. We explore an environment (not so open as “Shadow Complex”) in a typical side-scrolling platformer fashion (with good looking 3d graphics, though), and you can use a weapon to pickup objects and throw them… You can also influence the strength of the gravity in the room you’re in, which is part of many of the puzzles… The game as a bigger focus on “escape-type” puzzles than on enemy confrontation, which I enjoy tremendously – games with focus on action with an extra mechanic besides shooting tend to get themselves lost in between those two worlds, so it’s good to see a game that balances it perfectly!

It’s awesome fun, well presented, interesting (albeit cliché) story and just about the right length…

Seriously, get this one… Now! It’s that good… Don’t know how this one got below my radar, but I never heard about it until I bought it as part of a Indie Humble Bundle (one more reason why these bundles are awesome)… Can’t wait for a sequel!

More to come!