In Turf Raiders, you play as the leader of a horde of blue kitty commandos (they look more like squirrel…bear…things to me, but hey! Still cute!) on a mission to collect energy cubes known as gluons which power your defenses against the diabolical red dog hoards. In order to do this, you and your enemy take turns playing cards that have a variety of abilities, such as summoning units to the grid-like field, moving your own or your opponent’s units, or even getting rid of your opponent’s units! Each part of the grid yields certain items, such as gluons or cash which is essential to being able to play cards at all. In essence, Turf Raiders is a tactical area control game in a vein similar to the classic board game Risk.

Despite its strategic leanings, Turf Raiders is simple and easy to learn. After a few tutorial levels, the player is thrown right into over forty different missions which all feature different field layouts and enemies that get increasingly aggressive. While it’s a free game, there is an in-app currency that allows you to buy ‘Perks’: one-use items such as extra cash or cards to give you an edge over your opponent. I found that I usually had enough of the currency available that I didn’t really need to opt for actually buying more.

Turf Raiders feels like a game that appears simple but actually hides complex and engaging strategy beneath the surface. If only this were true. The game is awkward, teetering on the edge between something casual and light and something deeper, something that I need to sit down and consider. There are elements which are annoyingly slow, such as having to touch the screen every time both my opponent and I draw a new hand.  The cash as the beginning of my turn takes way too long to auto-gather to me. I end up just touching on the little sprites myself to have them available faster. These are, admittedly, minor grievances, but the constant touching for aspects that should be automatic wore down on me. It was tough to continue in this war of attrition, having to convince myself to play the next mission and deal with the weird slowness of it all.

I like cute games with adorable characters, but maybe Turf Raiders was also a little too cute for me. The bouncy music became repetitive, speeding up to a stressful crescendo at odd intervals, leading me to eventually turning it off. Overall, I was saddened that Turf Raiders became an unpleasant, tedious experience for me. Perhaps some tightening up of certain mechanics and a little more variation in music and animations would improve the experience, but for now this is a game I’d rather skip.

Turf Raiders Card Battle is free and available in the Google Play Store. You can find more information on the developer’s website.

Overall Rating: ★★☆☆☆ 

What does this score mean?

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

So the story goes, an organization of scientists, in an effort to expand their knowledge, creates the “Chronova Device”, a tool that would enable them to unlock the universal ‘real-time’ and introduce it to their turn-based world. But, as these experiments often do, everything goes wrong, and a vortex sweeps them up from their world. Now it’s up to you, in your little orange “Nova-111″ starship, to rescue the crew.  Will your harmless research vessel be up to the task?

The player will be faced with a series of obstacles, such as alien enemies and puzzles. Your vessel won’t be completely helpless, as collectible upgrades and abilities will allow it to defend itself and fight back. As you advance, the world will slowly shift from turn-based decisions to making the player react in real-time environments. And gosh, what environments they are. If you’re not already interested, the visuals should definitely hook you. The game simply looks splendid, and the character portraits are to die for, really. The mix of pixel and painterly styles makes the levels truly shine. And the music ain’t too shabby either, apparently being dynamic and suiting itself to your individual play style.

Though no set date has been announced, Nova-111 is supposed to be released some time later this year for Windows, Linux, and Mac. To find out more, visit Funktronic Labs’ website for the game. You can also follow the developers on Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr.

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Khaba at first seems like a simple enough puzzle game. Using statuettes and mirrors, players reflect and direct a beam of light onto a door which leads to the next level. It is a simple and logical concept that would probably become boring after a while if not for all the little tricks and additions Hello There pulls off. There are other doors acting as obstacles in your path that can only be opened by directing light towards certain orbs. Some of these doors remain open, while others close up again if the direction of the light is changed.

A few levels in, another type of light is introduced as well: dark light. The beam of dark light can only be activated if the beam of sunlight continually hits a blue orb. Both of these kinds of light must be used in tandem to reach the final door, but there are a few conditions. There’s only a limited amount of reflecting statuettes and mirrors, and the dark light and sunlight cannot use these objects simultaneously. What at first seems like a simple game ends up offering a satisfyingly cerebral challenge as players have to test out different set ups and figure out in what order to open certain doors and other obstacles. Unfortunately for some, the sheer level of challenge might put them off. Khaba has a few tutorial levels followed by some levels with a fairly reasonable difficulty curve, but then suddenly ramps up the difficulty to a point that might end up causing a lot of frustration. A few levels definitely forced me to walk away for a bit and try to come back later with a different perspective. This isn’t exactly conducive to quick bouts of gaming on the go, but might appeal to someone looking for a hard puzzle when they have a meatier chunk of time available to them.

Besides its difficult and cerebral puzzles, what sets Khaba apart from a lot of mobile puzzle games is that it features a fully voic-acted narrative tied into the puzzle mechanic. Players take the role of Michael, an explorer seeking vast treasures and excitement within the pyramids. Mysteries abound as Michael ventures deeper into the pyramids, and it actually ends up being a neat little story. Besides small “cutscenes”, collectable scarabs are introduced which not only add another element of challenge to the puzzles, but also give up more tidbits of the overall narrative. These aren’t mandatory to collect, but offer an extra reward for players that find interest in the story. Probably my only nitpick story-wise is that Michael’s voice acting is a bit cheesy, but not so much that it really detracts from the game.

However, my biggest issue with the game is its touch controls. I have small hands and I still found myself getting frustrated when the game would misinterpret my finger touches and I would end up moving statuettes entirely when I just wanted to change the direction of the light beams. Certain parts also required an amount of precision that had me re-doing things so many times because objects would move when I lifted my finger up from the screen. This is mainly a problem with playing Khaba on a mobile device with a smaller screen though–playing the game on a tablet was significantly easier. Nevertheless, I found myself wishing there was also a desktop version as the idea of playing this game with a mouse really appeals to me.

So, while not for folks looking for a lighter puzzle game to play on short car rides or on quick breaks in between other obligations, Khaba does provide for folks looking for something with a little more substance in their mobile gaming needs. If you can get past the sometimes frustrating controls, Khaba is a real treat. The game is available for both iOS and Android tablets and mobile devices, and more information about it can be found on the developer’s website.

Overall Rating: ★★★★☆ 

What does this score mean?

An Android review copy of the game was provided by the developer for that purpose.

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Released on Steam as an ‘Early Access’ build last month, Maia started as a Kickstarter and Indiegogo project. Developed by Simon Roth, who previously worked in AAA game development and on Terry Cavanagh’s VVVVVV, Maia is a colony-building and management sim set on a hostile, but habitable planet located about twelve light years away from Earth. Taking inspiration from games like Dungeon Keeper, Dwarf Fortress, and The Sims, the player must work to ensure the colonists survive in their harsh new environment. Build shelters, construct power sources, regulate food production, keep a careful eye on the mental and physical health of your colonists–everything you would expect from a good simulation is there. What’s also neat is that, being on a volatile planet, the colonists are not only subjected to the more routine aspects of survival, but also foreign toxins, alien flora and fauna, dangerous geological events such as volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, and extraplanetary hazards such as solar radiation and meteors of a much more violent nature and frequency than that experienced on Earth.

While the construction of the facilities in which the colonists will live initially starts underground, the player will be able to explore the planet’s surface and conduct research and experiments which will expand their knowledge of the planet and their colonists’ chances of survival. Robots and a first-person mode seem like it’ll make this facet of the game extra interesting, especially considering the look of that mode. Despite the fact that I normally don’t care for first-person perspective in games, I’m actually pretty excited to try this mode out when it’s added to the game. The visual style of it is a total blast and I hope Roth introduces more elements which will emphasize its uniqueness.

Speaking of style, there’s more that will make certain sci-fi fans–me included–salivate at the mouth: Maia also takes a lot of influence from the aesthetic and functionality of 70s science fiction. The technology in the game will be reminiscent of the era in many ways, and the look and music will surely bring folks back to their favourite 70s sci-fi movie. I know when I first heard the haunting sounds of the Kickstarter trailer I was flung back to when I first watched Alien.

Anyway, Maia looks to be a highly ambitious game. The map will be 2km x 2km and procedurally generated. The colonists you manage will all have distinct personalities and skills which you’ll have to pay close attention to in order for the colony to thrive. Like any good game that even mentions terraforming, the player will be able to change the environment and change certain settings which will influence the difficulty and direction of the game. But everything will have its trade-off. Want more minerals? You’ll have to contend with increased geological activity which will put your colonists at risk. Playing around with the amount of light that reaches the planet from its star? Plants will grow faster, sure, but that might also attract more wildlife, and where the prey is, there are predators. This attention to detail is incredibly enticing, and I sincerely hope Roth is able to pull off everything he hopes for in this game. Simulation games are great for creating unique stories, and a story about colonists hashing it out on a hostile planet is too good to pass up.

As mentioned previously, Maia is available on Steam as an ‘Early Access’ title, which means you’ll be able to follow its development first-hand and receive future updates to the game directly through the client. A word of warning, though: Maia is still in very early Alpha, so it’s still got a hardy amount of bugs and is far from polished and feature-full. The developer seems to be consistently putting out updates, however, so if you’re interested in seeing the game grow as you play it, check it out on its Steam page. You can pre-order the game on its official website as well as find out more information about it on there and on its Facebook and Twitter accounts.

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Drone Invaders

Drone Invaders is a shoot ‘em up in the same vein as the original Space Invaders except with a small twist–there’s no ship on-screen. Instead, the game is over when at least one drone reaches the bottom of the screen. It’s a simple change, but it makes the game work effectively on mobile devices and frees up space that would otherwise be occupied by way too many fingers. The only really obtrusive element on display is the ammunition and subsequently the reload button which sometimes obscure incoming drones, making them difficult to parse and hit.

Done for a LudumDare challenge and completed in only 23 days, Drone Invaders has a nice level of polish. The music is catchy and the visuals are decent. The drones are actually pretty cute, especially the bosses. Eventually the player will spot the patterns in drone arrangements, but they never feel monotonous.

Other than that, Drone Invaders has all the regular trappings of a free mobile game. There are missions, daily challenges with bonuses for completing them all in a row, weekly hunts, upgrades that use in-game currency, and real money microtransactions. The bonus in-game content is actually fun to try and beat. The microtransactions luckily remain non-invasive and, if the player so chooses to spend money for in-game coins, actually provide a good enough amount to justify the purchase.

If you’re looking for a free shmup to play every so often, try out Drone Invaders. It’s completely free on the Google Play Store. You can also find out more about the game on the developer’s website.

Overall Rating: ★★★★☆ 

What does this score mean?

© 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Tower of Elements 2 has so many elements smashed up against each other that I’ll be impressed if they all work together seamlessly. The game combines classic city building with real-time strategy combat that mixes together match-3 puzzles and tower defense. All things that sound right up my alley, honestly.

The city building has everything you’d expect from the genre. You choose a continent on which to build your city, with each of the three having its own advantages and disadvantages. From there, you have a variety of building types to choose from, resources to manage, citizens to allocate to different jobs, and policy decisions that affect both your city and your troops on the battlefield.

Actual combat takes the form of match-3 puzzles. Match the runes and elemental bolts blast out from your tower and hit oncoming foes. Other aspects of tower defense games are included, such as building barriers and deploying troops. There will also be a good bunch of challenging bosses to take on, as well as a bestiary from which to view and play around with the various enemy types you encounter. Really, it all looks like a ton of fun.

Having already gone over its goal, Tower of Elements 2 is a safe campaign to pledge towards. $10 is the minimum amount you’ll have to pledge to get a DRM-free copy of the game for PC, Mac, or Linux along with a Steam key if the game is Greenlit. The Kickstarter is getting pretty close to its first stretch goal, which is one that’s actually pretty cool: an alternate board layout. It’d definitely be worth it to unlock this goal as it’d really increase the replayability of the game overall.

Anyway, go on over to the Kickstarter page and pledge towards the game. You can also vote for Tower of Elements 2 on Steam Greenlight, follow its development on Twitter and Facebook, and find out even more on the developer’s website.

© 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

A direct sequel to the original Chibi Knight flash game, Super Chibi Knight is a hack n’ slash adventure with RPG elements. It’s quite traditional in its set-up, hearkening back to Nintendo’s Zelda II. Exploration takes place in a top-down overworld with a village and various other locales to explore such as forests and deserts. Enemies are not random encounters but rather can be seen in the overworld and engaged with. Entering areas or battles switches the game to a side-scrolling 2D perspective.

The hack n’ slash elements are pretty standard. The player can attack, jump, and block, and while completing a particular quest they get access to certain special attacks that use up power. Once a player gains experience, they can choose to level up their armor, their special attack power, or their sword strength. Each armor and sword level has a distinct look, which is really nice, simultaneously being pretty cool and cute. Eventually the player can choose a career path of either a sorcerer (giving you access to spells) or a beastmaster (allowing you to ride giant beasts). I’m always up for riding and fighting alongside big brutes, so that certainly got me excited.

The art style is simple and colourful, and there’s no shortage of quests to complete despite the game being in beta. However, I still eventually felt dragged down by repetitiveness. Experience from battle was in abundance and yet I still had to grind a lot. Many of the quests also involved simply finding objects and returning them to townsfolk. It’s fun for a while, but having returned to many games of my childhood, I find that I have less patience for this than I did as a child and subsequently have less patience for new games that continue this trend.

Despite that, it’s exciting to see kids getting in on the development side of games. What person that played games as a kid didn’t dream of making their own some day? What child didn’t have that perfect game they were going to create and share with others? With a greater abundance of tools at hand, I hope this becomes a possibility for even more children.

Super Chibi Knight is up for voting on Steam Greenlight. You can also follow the developer Pesto Force on Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube, and join the Super Chibi Knight beta at its official website.

© 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

In Cubetractor, you take the role of a little blue robot named Endroi that just wants to have fun. Its builders are none too happy, however, as its idea of fun seems to be destroying the local area’s turrets and generators and other such cube constructs by building its own rival ones. Endroi accomplishes this through the method of “cubetracting”–attracting cubes together which act as the materials that form Endroi’s arsenal. For example, bringing a brown block and a ‘claw’ block together forms a power generator, and so on.

Thus the basic shape of the game comes together. It’s a very simple idea with surprising depth and challenge. This is not a straightforward tower offense game, but rather a mix of elements from that genre with those from bullet-hell, puzzle, and real-time strategy games. The defensive constructs are not on a linear path but strewn about in strategic patterns that must be carefully assessed and are, really, one big puzzle to solve. The player must direct Endroi to not only build its own turrets, defensive blockades, generators, and so on, but must also keep it safe by avoiding the fire of the rival turrets. Heck, little Endroi is also vulnerable to getting hurt by its own blocks if you don’t hurry to move it out of the path of one. Luckily, there are little wrenches around that you can gather to fix it and keep on building.

Don’t be fooled by its charming and simplistic pixel art, Cubetractor is hard. This is one of those games that fits the bill of the old saying, “easy to learn, hard to master”. The controls are incredibly simple, and the tutorial is, as you might expect, a breeze. However, the levels quickly become merciless and it’ll take lots of planning and quick reflexes to make it through them. That’s just the basic story levels too. There are optional levels that are even more difficult. On top of that, there are batteries to collect and a timer that will give you a bronze, silver, or gold rating depending both on how quickly you got through the myriad challenges and how intact Endroi came out of them. This provides plenty of reason to go back to previous levels to try and get a higher rating.

As said before, while very simple, the art is intensely delightful and colourful. It feels like a children’s playground, if that playground was littered with cute little robots and turrets that could kill you. The characters, especially Endroi, all raise the sheer likeability of the game with adorable and occasionally funny dialogue and the music is appropriately upbeat and undistracting. Despite how difficult it is, Cubetractor doesn’t wear out its welcome with seemingly unfair frustration. It is, quite simply, an utter pleasure to be around and play.

Cubetractor is available for Windows and Mac both on Steam and directly from the developer’s website.

Overall Rating: ★★★★☆ 

What does this score mean?

This game was reviewed using a copy provided by the developer for that purpose. This review is based off of the Windows version.

© 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Combat Cats’ story is pretty basic. Kitty Island is a peaceful haven, plentiful with catnip. That is, until one day when all the catnip disappears. Seems the local aquatic life has a bone to pick with catkind, so its up to Kitty Island Homeland Security and its brave fighter pilot squad to defeat this bubbling menace and get back the catnip. Leave it to cats to have a war for drugs.

While Combat Cats is fairly typical, it does change up a few things. For once, it’s a match-four game, not three. Plus, there is far more flexibility in matching than the typical puzzle game. A myriad of shapes are allowed, so long as at least four similar blocks are connected in some way. Everything happens very quickly in each level. While tempting to go full-out with a barrage of weaponry, it’s important to keep track of your health in later levels as things become increasingly harder. The aquatic alliance has a few tricks up its sleeves, including bubbles that will sometimes appear on top of your blocks, obscuring them and keeping them from matching from with others until you pop them.

While primarily a block puzzler, the game has action/rpg elements to it that increase the stakes. Your kitty pilot has a life meter, and all the blocks have different effects, such as repairing your ship (healing you) or dishing out different kinds of damage to your enemy (shooting rockets, poisoning them, etc). There’s even an occasional nuclear bomb block that blows out an entire row of either horizontal or vertical blocks and deals out massive damage to your fishy foes. All of this serves to fight and hold off enemies until you can reach the end of the level, at which point you will be awarded up to three stars depending on how quickly you finished.

The stars are not just a way to rate your play, however. Each subsequent level requires a higher number of stars in order to access it. If you don’t have enough, you’ll have to go back to previous levels and try to do better to earn more stars. While this does give the game a bit of replay value, this is where its mobile trappings become apparent. Besides stars, you get cash and catnip after each level which you can use to upgrade your blocks/health and buy different ships. While not terribly hard to get more currency with which to upgrade, it is slow enough that without dishing out some real world cash, it becomes easy to lose interest after a while unless you’re really dedicated. Luckily, if you don’t mind this, the prices are pretty fair.

Control-wise, the game is satisfyingly smooth. The mobile version features standard one-finger tap controls, while the desktop version only requires a mouse to play. Both are quick and responsive, however I personally found the desktop version easier and visually clearer to play since there’s so much going on during the game.

The pixel-style art is cute. If you like cats, it’ll be quite adorable, and there’s several familiar feline faces to be seen in the bunch. The music itself, is, unfortunately, nothing to write home about. It’s fairly forgettable, but at least in the mobile version it’s always present. A few levels in on the desktop PC version, the music straight up stopped. I eventually had to restart the game to end the eery quiet. Luckily, this is the only performance issue I found while playing.

Overall, though, despite adding a few twists to the traditional block puzzler, Combat Cats is just too typical to really stand out amongst the rest. After playing through it, I asked myself, “Did I have fun?” Well, no, not that much. The smooth controls are really the highlight of an otherwise standard and somewhat bland game. Unless you really really like cats and are in desperate need of another match-three block puzzler, honestly there’s not much of a draw. It’s just okay.

Combat Cats will be available on the Google Play store for Android and the App Store for iOS on September 9th. PC/Mac/Linux versions are still in development, though there is a version for Windows 8 already available. The game is also up for voting on Steam Greenlight.

Overall Rating: ★★★☆☆ 

What does this score mean?

This game was reviewed using a copy provided by the developer for that purpose. The Windows and Android versions were used.

© 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

So here’s a project that’s worth a look. Attack Mountain (also known as ATKMTN) has a Kickstarter campaign running for two games set to be available in one package known as the Attack Pack. Due to their previous campaign for the retro RPG Legend of the Time Star being unsuccessful, the team has scaled back its ambitions, seeking a smaller funding goal and developing smaller games with more flexibility. So what makes up the Attack Pack? Attack Mountain is kicking off their first game pack with SOS and The Grey Man, two games that couldn’t be further opposites from each other.

SOS

In SOS you play as the Agent, a spy with an illustrious career spanning forty years. With an episodic framework, the player weaves the tale of some of the Agent’s most thrilling missions. SOS takes notes from games such as Metal Gear Solid and action movies like Rambo, giving players the opportunity to choose between a more stealthy approach like a classic spy or go in guns a-blazing like a macho man straight out of the eighties. Every decision you make will count–guards WILL notice unconscious or dead bodies left out in the open, will follow trails of bloody footprints, and so on.

The Grey Man

The Grey Man, however, takes a quieter approach. Players take the role of the titular character as it lands on Earth and explores its surroundings. Although things start off peacefully, the Grey Man may make mischief with its powers and catch the attention of the local human life which will inevitably be none too happy with its presence.

Despite their smaller scale, the duo that makes up Attack Mountain still has big plans for their games. While SOS will launch with two episodes, further funding will allow the team to develop additional tales of the Agent. Meanwhile, The Grey Man will receive more content such as new areas in the form of patches. Other stretch goals include voice acting for SOS, comics, and even the addition of a third game to the pack.

I’m really excited for this Kickstarter. Video games could learn a lot from the world of indie comics and zines, and the Attack Pack gives off that comic anthology feel I know and love. Plus, I’ll never let good pixel art and music go unappreciated, and the Attack Pack seems to have that in spades. Especially promising is that the games are already in development and have been for almost a year–the developers just need some help getting them funded and into the hands of you folks, the players. Head on over to the Kickstarter page and check out the video, music previews, and concept art and maybe even make a pledge! Want more Attack Mountain after pledging? Check out their Dev Diary, their official website, and their Facebook page. You can also help the developer out by voting for the Attack Pack on Steam Greenlight.

© 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.