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!