When I found out about FTL’s confirmed release less than a week before the fateful day, I went out of my way to clamp weary pessimism over my delirious excitement. ‘It’s a Kickstarter-funded indie game,’ I reprimanded myself. ‘Ziggy says there’s an 82% chance of it being rubbish.’ With past disappointments looming at my shoulder, counselling caution, I tentatively launched FTL and discovered with a growing sense of unease that it is exactly what it set out to be.

As someone who read a lot of solo gamebooks back in their heyday, the first comparison for FTL that comes to mind is the Fighting Fantasy series’ Starship Traveller. The game gives you a basic spacecraft and a crew of three. You have some fuel – though not enough – a handful of missiles and a few bits of the scrap that serves as currency in space, and with these meagre reserves you have to flee the advance of the savage rebel forces in order to convey vital strategic information to the beleaguered federation.

Narratively it’s an unusual arrangement; games, like films, generally have us rooting for the underdog. Here we are alone against a huge force, but we are also agents for a still larger force. It’s not even a cut-and-dried, good-versus-evil situation. The federation seems to be not much beloved of the populace, but at the same time the rebels are widely considered pompous and opportunistic. Neither faction is really in the right, and that’s perfectly fine for the game, since you will seldom see the bigger picture until the endgame. For the most part it’s just you and your little ship trying to get across the galaxy, scrimping and saving every missile, every drop of fuel and every fistful of scrap.

The FTL adventure definitely has a sort of Firefly-meets-Star Trek: Voyager feel, in that you often just barely scrape through. Most battles present a credible threat even on the easiest setting, and even outside combat you often find yourself watching tensely as your resources dwindle while all you can do is keep moving and hope you’ll stumble across a cache of fuel.

The most basic battles revolve around targeting parts of the enemy vessel. Target their shield generator to leave them vulnerable, or their weapons room to prevent them firing on you. Take out their engine room if they try to escape, or, if you’re feeling particularly cruel, shoot out their oxygen supply. This alone is a more detailed combat system than most randomly generated adventures, but it’s only the beginning.

You see, FTL is, at its core and as dull as it sounds on paper, all about resource management. Each improvement in your ship’s performance makes combat and sudden disaster less hazardous but also puts more strain on your already limited supplies. Even just buying an upgrade, such as a better engine to improve your ability to evade attacks, isn’t as simple as it sounds. Each upgrade also requires power, so you have to either spend more of your precious scrap upgrading your reactor to generate more power, or you have to shut down other systems and keep re-routing your energy supply as circumstances demand.

It isn’t long before the initially simple combat becomes a frantic scramble to ensure the relevant systems are powered up – shut down the medical bay to divert power to the weapons, then divert it back as your crew sustain injuries and instead take power from the air system, but make sure you finish the fight before everyone suffocates. Once you factor in fires, hull breaches and being boarded by the enemy crew you find yourself wrestling with a surprisingly elaborate strategy game that puts you through a punishing series of short skirmishes.

This is no RTS, though. There’s limited scope for planning. Since you never know what you will face next, you can never really be prepared, and each encounter is a panicked rush to react to the sudden danger. Even space itself is out to get you. Nebulas limit your ability to scan enemy ships, and even go as far as to truncate your internal sensors. Woe betide anyone whose ship catches fire inside a nebula; the only way to locate the blaze is to send someone looking for it – and risk them accidentally stepping right into it.

Solar flares and asteroid fields are worse still. They rob you of the opportunity to carry out repairs after combat, continuing to assault you after the enemy ship is gone and forcing you to quickly jump away to the next system, where the unknown awaits once more. Like Firefly or the modern Battlestar Galactica, your voyage is less a heroic expedition than a febrile stagger from crisis to crisis, throwing together improvised solutions to survive an endless torrent of catastrophes.

That’s the real strength of FTL. ‘Randomised space exploration through the medium of resource management’ might sound as tedious as a sanitation conference, but in practice it’s a tense experience that might grey your hair long before its time. Failure and destruction lurk only moments away at all times, and when you succeed it will usually be by the narrowest of margins. The occasional frustration that results from random chance throwing you into an almost impossible situation is mitigated by the sense of accomplishment when you do manage to limp to the end of your journey with your ship and nerves in tatters, but aglow with hard-won triumph. If you’re anything like me, you will feel like a hero. I felt like Mal Reynolds, or James T Kirk, or Nick Succorso – a grizzled but daring captain whose bold plans and reckless gambits carried him and his devoted crew through the depths of hell on a wave of sheer audacity.

Don’t rest on your laurels too long, though. The itch to campaign through space that FTL imparts isn’t scratched so easily, and there is a lot more to discover. Each journey is different thanks to procedural generation, and there are various different ships and interior layouts to unlock, which make more than a cosmetic difference. While you might soldier on to victory with the default Kestrel, the unlockable Engi vessel’s dependency on drone technology might see you founder in the first few encounters. Each ship demands different skills; even the different layouts for the rooms in the ship will affect how easily you can make repairs and extinguish fires.

The simplest and clearest expression I can give you of my opinion of FTL is this: once I started, I couldn’t stop playing it for days. I repeatedly and unwisely stayed up until 2am in defiance of my day job commitments, simply to continue trying to cross the galaxy with my tiny crew of desperate fugitives.

If any of this makes you think ‘that sounds interesting’, then you will probably enjoy it. FTL has always promised a lot, since its Kickstarter days, and this is one game that actually delivers on all its promises. Just be warned: once FTL boards your life, there’s no escape.

Overall Rating: ★★★★★ 

© 2012 – 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Obsessive Collecting Disorder is a punishment platformer. The elite few who have deduced my taste in games will be aware that I don’t like punishment platformers. I wanted to kick Super Meat Boy in the face, and SMB was far superior to the majority of sadistic perfectionist ordeals. Exceptions to the face-kicking sentiment are rare. N+ on XBLA is one of the few I actually have fun with, mainly thanks to its emphasis on working out how to cleverly snag as many coins as possible rather than just trying to drag your mortally perforated carcass across a psychotically painful room. Obsessive Collecting Disorder has the good grace to align itself with the N+ way of doing things and thereby spare me the necessity of gnawing off my own head in frustration, though it still costs me a finger from time to time.

When I can get the taste of my own devoured extremities out of my mouth, I quite enjoy Disorder (though the inability to abbreviate it to OCD without confusing it with another game is a thorn in my side). The visuals teeter on that uneasy watershed boundary between charmingly minimalist and offputtingly spare, but for the most part they work for me. Again, they remind me of the white/black/yellow simplicity of N+. In a game where the slightest error can result in an unpleasantly soggy-sounding death, it’s important to have visual clarity and avoid cluttering the levels with misleading background objects or befuddling textures.

Your little obsessive collector is ridiculously agile, which is frankly a necessity to feel comfortable tackling any punisher, but is surprisingly often excluded from games that would benefit from it. Gruelling platform slog Aban Hawkins & the 1000 SPIKES insists on having a main character who can barely muster the agility to jump over a sausage roll.

It never feels quite right in Disorder, though. Huge jumps in platformers frequently feel floaty, but there’s no float here. The obsessive collector leaps a mile into the air with the grace of a lunar gymnast, then drops like a sack of depressed potatoes. The upshot is that for a while it’s difficult to time your manoeuvres because the pace and motion of the jumping feels so unintuitive. In the early levels I suffered abrupt deaths less often from poor play than I did from uncomfortable control. Even so, I mostly felt the obstacles in Obsessive Collecting Disorder, while challenging, were seldom unfair. They were always surmountable as long as I could work out the sequence or the timing, and then execute it without making a mess of the whole thing.

I have to add one qualifier at this point: I wussed out. I played on the easiest difficulty setting, which adheres to the punisher convention of offering infinite lives. The standard difficulty setting is a different beast entirely. It gives only a limited supply of lives before you have to start over from scratch. In a game that sometimes saw me suffer a couple of dozen deaths even on its early levels, finite lives are only for the most insanely skilled – and I reiterate, this is the standard setting, the normal difficulty. Obsessive Collecting Order’s default state is an extreme sport and way too much for this mere human reviewer to fight through.

Ultimately, how much you enjoy Obsessive Collecting Disorder will come down to what you want from a game. If you’re one of those people who inexplicably relished the convoluted savagery of Super Meat Boy, large tracts of Disorder might be too simple for you. If you resolutely dislike punishers, this is unlikely to be a revelation that converts you. The game’s real strength, though, is that it’s two games in one. For the relative novice, it’s a challenging platformer that at least has the decency to run you gradually through manageable levels before the truly vicious parts kick in. At the same time, the punisher pro might find the standard, limited lives mode provides a new sort of intense challenge.

Obsessive Collecting Disorder isn’t for everyone, but it’s a generally well made dual punisher with slightly awkward movement controls that certainly mar the experience but never manage to ruin it. Moderate punisher fans might not get enough from either extreme, but as an entry point for newcomers or a new type of gauntlet for veterans, it has plenty to offer.

Overall Rating: ★★★★☆ 

 A copy of Obsessive Collecting Disorder was provided for review by the developer.

© 2012 – 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

The first thing that struck me as I played was the water. As the name might suggest, the game is all about manipulating water, so it’s important that this works in a believable and – crucially – a predictable way. It’s too easy to have a fluid substance like water behave erratically, and since I’m already not the biggest fan of puzzle games a series of failures thanks to unpredictable in-game results could be enough to condemn a game to a grisly verbal execution. The water in Aqualibrium, though, behaves superbly. If you position a block in a certain place and open a certain hatch, the water will consistently flow in a particular way every single time. That was a relief, but what impressed me was the way this mass of little blue rectangles moves approximately like real water. Little trickles running off an imperfectly-placed dam, and a flood will mass above a switch before suddenly gushing forth when the way opens. It’s such a small thing, but it really did make all the difference for me.

Now I’m done gushing (sorry again) about the water effects, let’s get to the meat of the game. Aqualibrium is all about getting water from various reservoirs around the room into a funnel at the bottom. Once you have collected enough water in the funnel, the room is over and you move on. You don’t have to collect all the water available (and more usually continues trickling into the reservoirs in any case) but you will need most of it. This usually involves working out which hatches to open, where to place your limited supply of mobile blocks, and which switches to hit when. There’s a degree of trial and error involved, as you won’t always know what the effect will be of trying a particular approach, but it rarely feels frustrating. If your approach obviously isn’t working out you can restart the level in seconds, and thanks to the water’s consistent behaviour you can rely on getting the same actions getting the same results.

I once heard infamously acerbic reviewer Yahtzee Croshaw refer in his review of Brutal Legend to the old board game Mouse Trap, and the satisfaction of setting up the various components perfectly so that they unfolded to their “perfect crescendo of brightly coloured plastic”. That feeling is present and correct in Aqualibrium, too. When you get a handle on the best way to direct your water supply to the funnel, open the relevant hatches and place the relevant blocks, it can be potently satisfying to open the reservoirs and watch it all come together just as you planned. Those are Aqualibrium’s greatest moments.

Sadly, it has its share of weak moments to balance out the highs. For a start, it’s all quite badly explained. For the first two or three levels I resorted to blocking off passages with my own head because there weren’t any collectable blocks lying around. The tutorial indicates that these blocks must be picked up, and it was a few levels before I realised you usually start off with some in your possession. I know I’m not the only person who has fallen prey to this.

The blocks themselves are a huge inconvenience. They are completely essential for directing the flow of water, but blocks you have already placed will be picked up again and stuffed back into your pocket if you so much as breathe in their direction. This can result in the game’s few frustrating moments, when an otherwise perfect set-up falls apart mid-execution because you passed fractionally too close to a placed block. This could easily have been remedied by assigning ‘pick up block’ to a button.

The levels introduce patrolling enemies very early on, and these aren’t a problem, but it’s not long before automatic turrets start to make an appearance as well. By the time you’re about eight to ten levels in, these turrets are beginning to appear in such a way that you are regularly caught in a devastating crossfire when all you’re trying to do is move across the room to get a look at the water’s route. This would be irritating, but not a deal breaker, if not for the game’s biggest flaw: death.

When your character dies, the game quits to a leaderboard, which you are forced to view for several seconds, then back to the title menu. This means that every time one of these unfairly positioned turret crossfires lands a single hit when you’re trying to make sure your set-up is ready, you have to spend a minute or so waiting before you can get back into the level. How anyone could have thought that was a good design choice is beyond me.

It was that galling drawn-out death feature that ultimately soured me on Aqualibrium. It’s a clever, but not brutally difficult, puzzle game that is easy to learn and satisfying to play. It has its flaws but would still be easy to recommend, if it didn’t sadistically force the player to spend so much time waiting. This seriously harms the game and means that I must taint my recommendation with a cautionary label: for 80 Microsoft points Aqualibrium is a fun and engaging use of a couple of hours, but be prepared to spend as much time staring at the leaderboard as actually playing the game.

Overall Rating: ★★★☆☆ 

© 2012 – 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Though it’s still in the early days, the trailer for Chain bodes well. The character designs are distinctive and Wimbus Studios waste no time in establishing an equally distinctive tone, with a Pale Rider-esque grizzled priest administering blunt force justice to a clown. Whether or not that sight makes you chuckle, it’s clear that Wimbus have a clear idea of where they’re going with this game. Even now, with the game not set to release until next year, the character designs and sense of humour set Chain apart.

Of course, these elements alone don’t make a good game, and the key to it all will be how well Wimbus manage to handle their RPG’s gameplay. Wimbus lay claim to a unique and deep character development system, which could make all the difference in ensuring Chain lives up to its early promise. Regardless, it looks like the core component of any good game is already present and correct here: fun. Whatever else Chain may bring to the table it already has a sense of fun, and that gives it a head start against the competition. If you like your RPGs to have a dose of character, keep your eye on this one. It might be going places.

Wimbus’ Steve Sefchick took some time out from the studio’s busy RPG-creation schedule to field a few of The Indie Mine’s most probing queries.

Chain by Wimbus Studios is planned to release in 2013 on Xbox Live Indie Games. Watch out for updates at Wimbus Studios’ website, and check their YouTube channel for the latest trailer.

© 2012, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

The premise is that four innocents are arrested for unspecified crimes against a corrupt empire and sentenced to live out the rest of their days in a buried cave system known as Avernum. No one knows what is in Avernum, only that it’s where the empire dumps its malcontents, and no one who is sent there ever returns.

These four persecuted citizens form your party of reluctant adventurers. There’s no backstory to any of them, aside from initial allusions to the sort of contrived ‘crimes’ that tend to get people sent to Avernum – primarily annoying an imperial official or expressing a dissenting opinion. As in many older computer RPGs, your characters are irrelevant. They are tools for having an adventure rather than people with personalities and motivations. This could be a good or bad feature, depending on your preferences. Those who like pen and paper RPGs, or who play through even thoroughly plotted RPGs making decisions ‘in character’ might appreciate the blank slates here. Your characters are completely defined by you, from the crime they were convicted of to the way they feel about being in Avernum. On the other hand, all of this is in your head, so if you like your games to give you character development and engaging interaction, Avernum can seem a little flat. Personally I found it a little nostalgic – a throwback to the days when I used to imagine what Link was thinking as he trudged around the NES representation of the Lost Woods.

To its credit, while Avernum plays in a way that initially seems daunting and dense, it’s actually quite simple and accessible. A somewhat clunky interface requires you to periodically open your inventory to see if anything useful is on the ground nearby, but otherwise control is quite simple. You guide your party around as a unit with mouse clicks, but if they catch sight of an enemy (or have a random enemy encounter in the outdoor/world map area) the game switches to battle mode. This battle mode is more or less turn-based and superimposes grid lines on the area to denote the nature of motion in combat. You move each character individually until they have expended their allotment of action points for that turn. Moving across the battle grid, performing attacks, casting spells and fiddling with the inventory all use up action points, so choose your actions carefully. Any enemies will do the same when they get the chance. Thanks to some nasty enemy skills and a tendency to come at you en masse, the combat can be surprisingly difficult, with even routine enemies presenting a credible threat. When you come upon ‘boss’ characters – typically the target of a quest or similar – you really have to pay attention and use all your skills and items wisely. I found the sudden halt of my progress frustrating on more than one occasion, but in the end I always managed to triumph by experimenting with my approach.

While there is a main quest revolving around your reluctance to be in Avernum, more of your time will be spent on side-quests collected from a job board or needy citizens milling around the towns. This whole arrangement had a slightly Morrowind feel to me; the combination of a fungus-based economy and a pretty open world with side-quests aplenty wherever you roam definitely put me in mind of the time I spent in Vvardenfell. The games are otherwise very different though, and Avernum’s setting, while interesting enough, never really comes alive.

From time to time you’ll get the chance to enhance your party’s skills and attributes. It seldom feels like it makes a noticeable difference, and the purposes of some skills are very unclear for a while, but the chance to emphasise your preferred aspects of a character is always welcome. Whilst it’s perfectly adequate, it’s quite a vanilla upgrade system, and certainly nothing you won’t have seen before if you’ve served your time with RPGs. This sense of ‘fine but forgettable’ carries over into the rest of the game.

The gameplay is solid but unremarkable and the same can be said of everything else. The setting is better than the usual generic warring kingdoms or similar, but it doesn’t stray too far from the equally common rebels/evil empire template. Fortunately most of your time will be spent sparing no thought at all for the tyranny that damned you to this hell. Well, in theory it’s a hell; in practice, Avernum itself never lives up to the hype. The in-game text, both dialogue and miscellaneous snippets of narrative, describe the enormous gloomy cavern that comprises Avernum’s world map, the crumbling forts illuminated by the dim glow of fungus, and the eerie echoes of distant nightmare monsters scuttling in the dark. The visuals, though, look like a grey and brown landscape dotted with generic small towns. It’s one thing to require the player to mentally insert their own character arc, but quite another to present them with an clearly depicted environment and ask them to imagine that it’s something else. It’s never a serious problem, but it’s a little jarring to keep seeing perfectly healthy-looking people who are described with a pallid complexion and downcast demeanour, or to read references to the oppressive subterranean gloom while standing amidst miles of what appears to be well lit, if scrubby, moorland.

Pipe down and let me play!

The game’s text is easily the source of most of the flavour and characterisation. Some RPG players level criticism at any game that doesn’t use voice actors, but personally I favour text over a badly acted voice with an accent that sounds foreign to me. Avernum does go a little above and beyond the call of text, however. In plot-central areas or at the culmination of side-quests it’s not unusual to keep being stopped for lengthy paragraphs describing an event or just a sensory experience. There’s an old maxim among writers that it’s best to show rather than tell, and it’s a lesson that Spiderweb Software should take to heart. These passages are adequately written and the setting of the underground realm is engaging enough to make for reasonably enjoyable reading, but at times Avernum begins to feel more like an interrupted book than a game. Make no mistake, these text boxes are the exception rather than the norm, but when they occur they do feel like an interruption and actually thwart immersion rather than encouraging it. When I’ve spent two hours gradually feeling engaged with the grey and brown wilderness of Avernum, it’s awkward to suddenly have a much richer picture painted for my imagination, and then find myself dropped unceremoniously back into the grey and brown again. Perhaps Avernum could follow the Elder Scrolls’ lead here, and make its revelations about the setting through optional text in the form of books or other in-universe features, rather than just wallpapering half a novel across the screen when the player walks along a particular corridor.

It might sound like I didn’t get much pleasure from Avernum: Escape from the Pit, but that’s not the case at all. I’ve enjoyed my time with it, and found that it grows into a more involving adventure with time. If I were to summarise it in one word, though, that word would be ‘dry’. I was drawn into the game because I had made a decision to play it and nothing discouraged me enough to stop. If I had just seen it in passing or heard its name and decided to give it a try, though, I think the experience would be an unappealing one. From the grim grey-brown graphics and samey town design to the walls of text and blank slate characters, Avernum is a type of role playing game that will be very appealing to a certain type of audience, and about as enticing as dry toast and gruel to everyone else. Personally I found its somewhat tactical combat, faintly Morrowind­ian tone and steady stream of optional side-quests engrossing enough to press on with. Maybe that’s enough. Maybe Avernum doesn’t need to appeal to anyone beyond dyed-in-the-wool veteran roleplayers. If you’re curious and want to give it a try, be forewarned that it might need a conscious decision to persist. If you do persist, you might find the challenge and freedom of wandering the caverns of Avernum quite enjoyable in spite of all its efforts to the contrary.

Overall Rating: ★★★☆☆ 

 Avernum: Escape from the Pit is available in full or as a demo on Steam and through Spiderweb Software’s website. A copy of the game was provided for review by the developer.

© 2012 – 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

The Hit Squad introduces a Spinal Tap-esque washed up old rock band, vividly brought to life in luxuriant 8-bit-style animation. While Blundell’s pitch name-checks classics of the decade including Ghostbusters and Beverly Hills Cop as influences, the film’s fundraising page at IndieGoGo.com references Family Guy, and based on the available clips The Hit Squad’s tone is closer to Seth MacFarlane’s  modern acerbic animation than the heyday of Dan Akroyd and Bill Murray. It might hark back to days of yore, but perhaps it can’t entirely shake itself free of its own time.

Whatever its final content will be, there is certainly plenty for the ‘80s connoisseur here. Anyone who has played the likes of Maniac Mansion should feel at home with the clunky blocks used to depict The Hit Squad, and the soundtrack manages to reference the excessively stirring movie scores of yesteryear while simultaneously feeling as though it would be right at home in the background of one of Mega Man’s stages.

In exchange for donation to their project, Blundell’s team offers rewards ranging from DVDs of the finished product (which, depending on your level of donation, could be the most expensive DVDs you’ve ever bought!) to a sort of blocky immortality by means of putting a pixelised likeness of you in a background cameo.

It’s too early to tell how the finished product will turn out; as with all movies, much of it will depend on the quality of the script. It does, however, nail the 1980s gaming aesthetic effortlessly. If The Hit Squad has whetted your retro appetite, you can learn more at its IndieGoGo page.

© 2012, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Experimental Gamer is also boasting a very Final Fantasyesque job system, involving wearing different hats to develop skills from several professions. For all the mentions of Earthbound, it’s the work of Square (now Square-Enix) that seems to play the largest part here. Regardless, the ambition to modernise traditional RPG standards is admirable, and the game’s visual style is detailed and charming.

Boot Hill Heroes may have clear 16-bit console influences, but it doesn’t just trudge along in familiar footsteps. Its setting is far from traditional for an RPG: the American Wild West. This is a setting rich with potential that has barely been used in roleplaying adventures, with only the Wild Arms series touching upon Western styling to some extent. Nor is this just a visual theme here; the characters and plot are also consistent with the setting, revolving around preventing a war between settlers and a native community.

Having been in development since last year, Boot Hill Heroes is intended for an October 2012 release on both Windows and Xbox Live Indie Games. To that end, Experimental Gamer has embraced the current darling of the indie development community, Kickstarter, and set a fundraising goal of $5000. If the promise of a classic RPG adventure with carefully developed mechanics and a Wild West theme isn’t enough of an incentive, Experimental Gamer is offering rewards for donators, including NPC appearances and…cake. If the prospect of confectionary appeals, or you just want to see this intriguing RPG make it to market, you can check out the Boot Hill Heroes Kickstarter page or Experimental Gamer’s site. For those among you who like those new-fangled moving picture contraptions, there’s also a pleasingly Ennio Morricone-laden trailer.

© 2012 – 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

A title like 10 Amazingly Awful Games Volume 2 has to be a marketing ploy. I never played the original 10 Amazingly Awful Games because I had enough faith in its self-assessment to save my time, but I’ve heard that they weren’t actually bad. On that flimsy basis, I thought it was worth taking a chance on the sequel, Volume 2.

The game’s developer said recently that his aim was to parody old low-grade game collections such as the infamous Action 52. I’ll admit I was a little curious as to whether this worked as a parody or merely retrod the same ill-advised path.

As it turned out, the contents of 10 Amazingly Awful Games Volume 2 were quite variable in quality. In the interests of clarity and satisfying my neurotic leanings, here is a blow-by-blow account of what I found lurking within. Buckle up; it’s a rollercoaster ride. One of those rickety old rollercoasters that you find in dilapidated, windswept coastal resorts that are decades past their prime.

In the order that they occur in the menu:

Blobby Blobby is a very basic one-hit-death platformer with clumsy controls, unclear hit detection and bursts of unreasonable difficulty that seem to be designed to catch you out. Platformers live or die by their controls, and Blobby Blobby controls like trying to balance a blancmange on a tennis ball.

Blobby Blobby

Fruit Defender has you pressing the face buttons to pop fruit that approaches from the corresponding four directions. It’s executed perfectly soundly but feels depressingly pointless. There’s just no incentive to keep going.

Grid Warrior is basically a monochrome Space Invaders. A few negligible additions, such as enemy turrets at the sides and the ability to move up and down the screen, fail to enhance the experience.

I Madez a Clone Wiv Zombies Innit is one of the better offerings in this package. It’s a vertically scrolling twin-stick shooter with a few weapon pick-ups. Its title parody of I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MBIES 1N IT!!!1 gave me a chuckle but after that the experience went downhill. It functions adequately, and when I was seven years old this would have seemed like the best game ever. If you’ve ever played a twin-stick shooter before, though, this low-rent, entry-level attempt will just remind you that you could be playing better versions. As a rule, a game that parodies another game has to be either at least as good as the original, or amusing enough to compensate. The gameplay here is very basic at best, and the only humour to be found is in the title. The eye-scouringly horrible visuals don’t help, with primary school character sprites and backgrounds that look like the contents of a dinosaur’s stomach.

I Madez a Clone Wiv Zombies Innit (with uncharacteristically sombre background)

Lame Defenders 2 is a side-scrolling space shooter. You shoot things. It’s more challenging than it seems and, like the zombie/clone game above, could be fun for a child who’s never played anything like it. I had flashbacks to my dad’s Atari 2600, in gameplay style if not in aesthetic. It’s still sinfully ugly though, and your spacecraft moves woodenly enough that it can be needlessly frustrating to manoeuvre.

Nastyroids is the classic Asteroids with weapon power-ups, a larger arena and occasional targets that fight back. If you’re someone who still longs to play Asteroids, you might enjoy this. I never really liked Asteroids that much, but this take on the formula does the job perfectly well. It gave me some simple fun for a little while. The expanded arena helps the classic clunky control scheme (rotate your ship with the left stick, then propel it forward with the right trigger) feel less frustrating, and its basic visuals are an upgrade over the wireframe graphics of its predecessor. Probably the best of the whole batch, by virtue of being a decent enough example of its type.

Seeker is a 2D explorer/shooter. I don’t know if it’s based on an old template like many of the other games here, but the game it reminds me of most is the dreadful Bit Crunch. Fortunately Seeker isn’t that bad. You roam around a randomly generated maze of rooms, dodging obstacles and shooting enemies, looking for keycards and the route to a computer that must be destroyed. Your health (or ‘power’ here) depletes over time as well as when you take hits, so the pressure is on. Seeker actually has some potential to be fun. If it wasn’t for a couple of glaring problems, it could be something I’d choose to play, at least for a little while. Firstly, it’s very easy to get stuck on corners. When leaving a room, I got stuck more often than I didn’t, particularly if I was hastily fleeing a group of enemies. Secondly, you can only shoot left or right, despite the manifest need to at least add up and down to the range of fire. It’s infuriating losing valuable points from my power meter just because an enemy approached from above and I had to manoeuvre across the entire room to be in a position to open fire. I think the lesson here is that the developer should give up on making batches of ten lazy, poorly designed games and focus on making one decent game. If he’d devoted the effort from the other nine games in this collection solely to Seeker, it might have been worth playing.

Stormwheel

Stormwheel is a driving/shooting hybrid that reminds me very much of Action Fighter on the Sega Master System. The objective is to get to the finish line within the time limit while dodging hazards, shooting other cars and making blind jumps that require trial and error. As an Action Fighter clone, it’s fine. It does pretty much what that game did. The problem is that Action Fighter wasn’t much fun 25 years ago, and age hasn’t improved it. It isn’t offensively terrible but there’s really no reason to play it. It’s just not a fun way to spend your free time.

Terror Tunnel is a watered down Missile Command. Use a reticle to direct your fire against falling stuff. Hold the right trigger and move the left stick around. At one point I realised I was daydreaming about walking to the supermarket to buy lunch, but still successfully playing the game. Skip it like a flat rock on a tepid sea.

Viper Wing is a vertically scrolling space shooter. Hold the right trigger while weaving around. So bland that even its own description of itself uses the word ‘generic’. Presumably that’s a chortling display of the art of high parody but, as I said about I Cloned a Clone with Clones In It above, a parody still has to be a good game if you expect anyone to play it, or else be funny enough that people will forgive the mediocre gameplay. Going ‘ho ho, my game is intentionally generic’ at the beginning doesn’t qualify.

Viper Wing

All in all, 10 Amazingly Awful Games Volume 2 neither follows through on the grim threat of its title, nor really works as a fun parody. A couple of the games within are simple fun for brief periods, but there’s nothing here that can’t be found better elsewhere, usually very cheap. Admittedly you’re effectively paying a measly 8 Microsoft points for each game in the collection, but that doesn’t make it right. I wouldn’t forgo my lunchtime BLT in favour of munching down on eight boxes of toothpicks just because the price is the same, and you shouldn’t be tempted to buy ten games that occasionally manage to reach up and tug at the ankles of mediocrity. If you want all these games, it’s worth paying ten times the price for ten better versions.

10 Amazingly Awful Games Volume 2 isn’t amazingly, astonishingly, tourist-enticingly hideous. It’s just bad. I’d take one competent game over ten half-hearted ones any day.

Overall Rating: ★★☆☆☆ 

Reviewed from a copy provided by Boddicker Games for that purpose.

© 2012 – 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

There seem to have been a lot of tower defence games hitting Xbox Live Indie Games recently. Almost without exception, they have potential but are too flawed to be worth recommending. The Indie Mine has already looked at the well presented but otherwise unremarkable Union of Armstrong and the appealing but bug-riddled and barely functional Zombie Crossing. Now we have Spoids, and I wasn’t tremendously optimistic about its chances.

Well, I was wrong. Mostly.

Spoids is easily one of the most professional indie tower defence games I’ve played. It immediately makes a good impression with its outstanding presentation. Though it doesn’t go in for flashy cinematic sequences or pseudo-3D visuals, Spoids feels polished and professional from its opening moments, with a brief voiceover explaining that humanity’s colonised worlds are suddenly being assailed by an alien race dubbed ‘spoids’. It’s not a deep or detailed plot, but it serves its purpose as a justification for the tower defence format, and it’s used throughout to provide reasons for each mission, whether a colony begging for your help or a shady businessman offering to keep you funded in exchange for protection.

Voice acting is present throughout the game, and while this is generally something I’m indifferent to, here it works very well. The briefing for each mission comes in the form of a transmission from your next client, usually imploring you to hold off the spoid assault while they evacuate/retrieve their data/buy their groceries/walk their dog. This has no impact on the way the levels play out, but it’s a nice touch nonetheless, and I couldn’t help being a little less diligent when I was working to defend the shifty opportunist called Mosper while he boosted valuable gear from an abandoned facility.

Your clients also shout out suggestions or recriminations as you carry out your mission. Again this is a welcome touch of polish, and actually helps you notice if some spoids have slipped through the net. Your computer’s comments are far more practical, if less colourful. The types of spoids can be identified by their shape, but I generally can’t remember which ones are which, so having my digital advisor chime in “zoomers approaching” or “faders approaching” gives me a few valuable seconds’ warning to throw down a suitable turret.

This voice acting isn’t fantastic, but it’s leagues ahead of most indie games, and better than many mainstream titles. For the most part it’s at a Gears of War sort of standard – it’s not going to win anyone an Oscar, but it doesn’t feel like a high school drama class either. Some of the accents are a little on the hammy side, but no more so than the average Hollywood representation of non-Americans.

Tower defence games always see you placing turrets to defend against waves of enemies that vastly outnumber you, and Spoids sticks tightly to that formula. It doesn’t offer research options like Zombie Crossing, an ever-shifting attack route like Commander: World One or an open map with divertible assaults like Horn Swaggle Islands. This never feels like a weakness, though. Spoids avoids repetition by introducing a new mechanic, weapon or enemy type after every mission. Even the way this is done is appealing. The information is presented in an Intel directory that is reassuringly similar to Mass Effect’s Codex. This frequent use of the setting before, during and after missions prevents the game feeling like a series of disconnected stand-alone tasks.

Sadly, Spoids does have flaws. Only two as far as I’ve noticed, but one is puzzling and the other is problematic. Firstly, the game’s secondary play mode is hidden. If you perform well enough on a mission to earn a platinum medal you unlock ‘infinite wave’ mode, allowing you to fight off an unending army of spoids for as long as you can. This adds some welcome replayability after completing the main campaign, as you try to perfect your defensive strategy and beat your previous record. Confusingly, there’s no indication as to how to access this mode. It’s not listed in any of the menus or on the title screen, and if you select the mission again it has all the same briefings and objectives as before, including a finite length. In the end I had to ask the developers about it via Twitter, and they told me that if you play a mission for which you’ve unlocked infinite wave mode, it will happen automatically. That’s fine, but continuing to display a time limit for the mission when it doesn’t apply is very confusing, and surely easily remedied.

Secondly, and more importantly, the difficulty curve decided to take the elevator. With new enemies or turrets introduced every mission, the game wastes no time in becoming more complex and more demanding. By level six, you have to manage your turret purchases and placements almost perfectly or you won’t last more than a couple of minutes. Admittedly I’m a mediocre tower defence player at best, but my criticism isn’t that the game is hard – it’s that it shifted from manageably challenging to Battle of Thermopylae hard so suddenly that I got whiplash. Most levels required a few attempts, but I felt like I could see how to improve for the next time. Pretty soon, though, I was hanging on by the skin of my teeth, and then at level six my progress slammed to a halt like someone had erected a concrete wall with ‘no playing beyond this point’ chiselled into it. It took me literally hours of playing this one level over and over before I even got close to succeeding. I’m sure tower defence maestros could overcome this obstacle, but everyone I’ve spoken to had a similar problem at around the same point. This is quite late in the game – the sixth of eight levels – but the change is shockingly sudden. However able you are, the difficulty curve in Spoids is just very badly conceived.

In the end, I give Spoids a recommendation with slight reservations. It would be easy to recommend wholeheartedly on the basis of its professionalism, polish and overall good design if it wasn’t for the bone-shatteringly sharp increase in challenge. Spoids is a good game, and reasonably priced at 240 Microsoft points, but it’s certainly not a game for tower defence novices. By all means play and enjoy it, but be prepared to never finish it.

Overall Rating: ★★★★☆ 

© 2012 – 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Have you ever taken one of those ‘guess the next word in the sequence’ IQ tests? Let’s have one now. Go on, it’ll be fun. Well, relatively.

Here we go.

Watching paint dry; the National Bus Industry Awards qualifying round; _________________

Guantanamo Bay; the Spanish Inquisition; _________________

Compiling the definitive collection of accountancy anecdotes; watching the extended edition DVD quintet of The World’s Least Notable Screensavers: The Belgium Years; _________________

Congratulations if you filled in every blank with Craftimals: Build to the Sun. While the utterly vile Rock Bottom remains the worst game I’ve ever played, Craftimals is simultaneously the most boring and the most grueling thing I have experienced in my life. It genuinely feels like a  real-life torture technique; and this is coming from a man who was actually at the National Bus Industry Awards qualifying round.

Normally I’ll make an attempt to finish a game before reviewing it, only quitting if it’s too difficult, there’s no actual ending, or I just can’t take it anymore. Craftimals falls into the latter category so hard that it punches right through the floor and creates its own basement category that it keeps all to itself.

When you first boot up the game, the title screen looks pleasant. It’s minimalist and largely forgettable, but it has a fabric/felt sort of effect that I found to be easy on the eye. Little did I know that this would be the only thing in Craftimals that is remotely pleasant.

Ignore the other promo pics. This one is the REAL Craftimals. This… for hours…

You choose one of a handful of cute but unsettling square animals – or “Craftimals”, if you really must insist – with your goal being to reach the sun. Perhaps its inferno presents your only hope of escape from the threat of gradual derangement that must accompany the tedious life of a Craftimal, or maybe you just think it’s a cake. Regardless, no objective is given other than ‘build to the sun’ and even that is barely mentioned outside the game’s title. The problem with building to the sun is that it’s a really, really long way off.

At the outset you can carry five blocks, grabbed from the Wheelbarrow of Infinite Masonry standing nearby. You hold X and move the left stick to select an exact location, then release X to place a block. In this way, you must build a rudimentary staircase to ascend into the heavens. It quickly becomes apparent, though, that having to return to the wheelbarrow at ground level every time you use up your five blocks will become irritating.After a couple of minutes you hit a checkpoint that upgrades your capacity to ten blocks. ‘Ah, now I understand’, you think to yourself, ‘each checkpoint upgrades my pockets’. Still finding it quite frustrating to keep making the return trip, you approach the next checkpoint and… unlock a hat. You’re still stuck with ten blocks. Oh well, next time. Approach the next checkpoint and… unlock new shades of block.

Multiplayer Craftimals – For politely alienating friends who you don’t like anymore.

Sound fun? Just in case it does thanks to some bizarre celestial alignment, let me offer you some timings (you know I’m thoroughly entertained when I start timing things).

My block capacity increased to 10 after about 2 minutes.

My block capacity increased again to 20 after 20 minutes.

My block capacity increased a third time to 40 after 35 minutes.

After another two hours, it hasn’t increased again as I’ve barely ascended further. This is because each time you climb back up your staircase and lay down more blocks, you lengthen the journey for the next trip. After a while, even parachuting straight down to the ground lasts an age and climbing back up to the top after restocking becomes a Sisyphean task. The harder you work, the less fun you have.

Here are some more numbers for you.

After slogging away at Craftimals for half an hour, I started timing how long the component parts of my torment were taking me. Laying 20 blocks took me about 25 seconds. When I’d been playing for half an hour, dropping down to the ground to refresh my supply of blocks took 30 seconds – that’s 30 seconds of just falling steadily. It may not sound long, but try counting it while staring at the wall. Climbing back to the top of the ladder took me over 3 minutes, just so I could spend another 25 seconds laying blocks, then fall for another 30 seconds, then climb…

This picture is criminally misleading.

It really is the most tedious thing I’ve experienced in a long, long time. So tedious, in fact, that I don’t want to sell it short with colorful metaphors.

Every aspect of Craftimals gets in on the uninspired action. The pleasant fabric effect doesn’t last beyond the title screen. The Craftimal sprites are inoffensive, but also bland and inanimate. The blocks are just squares of color, and the only other thing you’ll see while climbing is a uniform blue screen of sky with painfully rare fluffy cloud stencils. Even at ground level, a clumsily drawn smudge of green provides the most meager reprieve. Metaphoric grandstanding aside, I found my vision blurring after about an hour as the unchanging, primary colored canvas took its toll on my eyes.

The music only serves to accentuate to repetitive tedium of all the other features. Perhaps a vigorous, chirpy ditty would have injected at least some timid semblance of life into proceedings. Instead we’re stuck with a short loop of flaccid muzak so featureless that even elevators shy away with a grimace.

I don’t know how anyone could call this a “game”. It is meant to be recreation, but it feels like work. It doesn’t even get the little things right. When you delete a misplaced block, it doesn’t go back into your pocket; it just vanishes and leaves you one block short. The auto-jump idiocy that’s present in so many Xbox indie platformers is present here. If you press A for a fraction of a second too long your Craftimal will automatically jump a second time, potentially nudging you off your block and dropping you seconds, or even minutes, of travel backwards down the ladder.

If there is a space region in this game, it lies far beyond the human pain threshold.

The unlocks that the game provides say it all. Most are redundant – hats and new colors – but even the ones that have practical uses just draw attention to the hideousness of the repetitious gameplay. Upgraded block capacity and (eventually) a double jump don’t help to ease the challenge as in many games; they just soften the arduous grind a little. However, isn’t the arduous grind meant to be the gameplay, or indeed the game itself? It’s very telling that the best upgrades in the game are ones that reduce how much time you have to spend playing it.

Craftimals: Build to the Sun is an abomination. The only reason to play Craftimals is if you’re applying for a job at Gitmo and want to have some fresh ideas to bring to the management brainstorming sessions.

Overall Rating: ★☆☆☆☆ 

Words can’t do justice to Craftimals, so I’ve captured a tiny glimpse of the abject misery on video. Feel free to watch it on YouTube. 

© 2012 – 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.