In this quirky indie title, you play as a caveman named Ergaster who must escort these odd creatures called lemmings the habilis to safety. You start alone in a cave with drawings on the walls that tell you which buttons do what, provided you’re playing on an Xbox 360 controller. This game hates keyboards. If you play on a keyboard, you must look up both the keyboard and game pad controls and memorise the corresponding buttons so you know what the walls are telling you, and don’t even think about rebinding the keys while you’re in the option menu. The options menu isn’t for rebinding keys; it’s for switching between a full screen mode that doesn’t work and a windowed mode that doesn’t work.

You can see my wallpaper and task bar peeking through even in full screen mode.

Like most escort missions, walking the habilis through stone-age Afro-Eurasia is more frustrating than hard. Ergaster can smack a habilis to make it sit down, stopping other habilis from walking past it. If you’ve played Lemmings, think of this as the block skill. Unfortunately, timing it is finicky. I’ve had many a habilis walk past their appointed protector and into a wall of spikes as Ergaster’s outstretched palm came down like a hammer upon the savannah grass. It also necessitates more waiting than I like in anything other than a stealth game because you have to wait for a habilis to show up before you can smack it. To make all this worse, there are no checkpoints, which means doing the easy and boring parts of the level over and over again until you make that jump you keep dying on. This increases iteration cycles, which is bad game design.

Despite all this, there is some fun to be had here. There are silex to collect, and it’s a lot of fun air dashing about to collect them all. It’s also surprisingly satisfying to air dash through a wall of prehistoric crates. It’s also interesting to play such a unique platformer. Unfortunately, Ergaster isn’t executed well enough for me to recommend it over other platformers like The Fourth Wall. If the idea of playing Lemmings as a caveman instead of a benevolent god appeals to you, go ahead and check out Ergaster and the Habilis.

Overall Rating: ★★☆☆☆ 

What does this score mean?

This game was reviewed using a copy provided by the developer for that purpose.

I got you here safely. Now get in the giant mouth.

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Mount Your Friends is a game in which you control several half-naked bodybuilders by taking control of their arms and legs individually. When a limb comes into contact with another surface the limb will latch on, affording you an anchor point with which to pivot the rest of your body around. Those familiar with games like QWOP or Surgeon Simulator will easily recognize the mechanics at play here, in which the entertainment stems from the sheer difficulty involved with controlling several appendages at the same time, and the aftermath that usually follows when you inevitably fail to do so.

After the first few matches, manoeuvres will start to become more aggressive as you learn how to manipulate your clingy muscle folk in a way that would make Spiderman blush. Since everything you do is affected by gravity and momentum, it’s possible to swing across large distances using the perfect combination of timing and thrust. Of course, these advanced and hugely rewarding tactics come at the cost of being somewhat risky. One false move or misaligned vault across the chasm of man-thighs could cause you to take a tumble down the beef fortress, sealing your fate in the process. All of this combines to make a dynamic of risk vs. reward play, and the resulting successes or failures are what make each match entertaining.

There are a slew of modes included within the game to keep potential ‘mounters’ busy, but the main draw and indeed the focus of the title itself is the concept of mounting your own friends. Available for both local and online multiplayer, the standard mode will see you battling against your opponents as you clamber on top of one another. Each player takes turns adding to an ever expanding tower of oiled men until it gets to a point where the man-statue is so large that you or your opponent cannot scale it within the 60 second time slot granted per turn.

Other modes are on hand to offer alternative objectives, like sprints across great distances and duels with head-mounted swords, and whilst they are entertaining to try out it’s disappointing to see that most are locked to either single player sessions or local multiplayer. It’s worth noting that whilst the single player modes are entertaining to try out, they soon offer little motivation to play again after the first few sessions. The game is at its best when played against other players, and the sense of collective shambling and limb jiggling just doesn’t manage to translate over to any of the solo game modes.

Mount Your Friends is nothing short of a master class in small scale multiplayer mayhem. It takes full advantage of the sexually suggestive nature created from its own image and name, and it runs with it as a consistently entertaining gag throughout the game. While this humour may not appeal to everyone, the game itself has a solid foundation built upon the intentionally obscure control scheme that creates as many victories as it does failures. However, the game is better experienced when playing in the company of friends, either online or locally. The sense of competitiveness that spurs on each match is sorely lacking within the single player modes and you’re not likely to be playing for long if you don’t find any friends to mount.

Overall Rating: ★★★★☆ 

What does this score mean?

This game was reviewed using a copy provided by the developer for that purpose.

This review was based on the experiences with the PC version of the game.

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Space isn’t a friendly place, and if my years spent consuming sci-fi media has taught me anything then it’s fair to say the chances of you encountering an evil chest bursting Xenomorph is 99.99% assured. Infinity Runner lacks such a creature, but it makes up for this deficit with its own collection of strange denizens and futuristic quirks, like how you spend the entire game naked.

The game is best described as an endless runner akin to popular mobile titles like Temple Run, only with a storyline that’s broken down into several levels. You assume command of an amnesiac unfortunate enough to be at the epicentre of a calamity on a ship where everything is blowing up. A disembodied voice informs you that there’s no time to talk and that you must run for your life. Just when you think things couldn’t get any worse, shortly after escaping you also find out that you’re a werewolf. Yup.

Gameplay consists of an on-the-rails sprint through the bowels of the ship, with you taking control of our naked protagonist’s positioning. As you progress you’ll have to manoeuvre around the oncoming hazards by dodging or jumping over them, and any contact with a danger zone will cause you to fail and kick you back to your last checkpoint. You’re given a set number of lives to use up on each level, and once they’re all gone you have to start from the very beginning of the mission. The checkpoint system alleviates a lot of the stress that comes from an accidental death, and for the most part there are sufficient lives given to get through a level without having to restart much.

That is until you approach the final level, which has you engage in combat with an unsavoury individual. The game handles combat with a series of quick time events which aren’t too intense and can be completed fairly easily. The last fight, however, consists of a string of these sequences one after another. With such a small time frame to hit each key, there’s a good chance you’ll fail. The big issue with this segment is that once you’ve played through your extra lives, the game takes you back to the very beginning of the level, requiring you to sprint through a number of hazards to get back to the boss fight. It was infuriating, even on a normal difficulty level which rendered the rest of the game at a reasonable difficulty.

As a werewolf, you’re undoubtedly going to want to make use of your inhuman speed and strength, and the game is happy to oblige. There are sections dotted around some of the levels which will transform you into your wolf form, making you run much faster along the rails of the level. Whilst this may seem like a good thing, it soon became clear that speeding up your movement in a game that requires you to spot incoming dangers and react to them isn’t necessarily a positive. Hurtling towards a sharp turn already requires a good amount of focus and fast fingers when running in your human form, so when you’re supercharged things become more difficult. The very option of becoming this powerful beast becomes more of a burden than a gift, and as a result it feels like this power up flies in the face of what it was supposed to be.

What’s more, being a werewolf also changes the way the camera moves as you start to run on all fours. Naturally the camera follows the movement of a bounding were-man and bobs up and down to compliment the movement. It’s a nice touch, but the bounding feels excessive, sometimes to the point where you lose vision of any incoming hazards mid bounce. Again this becomes more of a hindrance to the player rather than a boost, making the werewolf form more of a curse than a blessing.

Infinity Runner does a great job in maintaining its momentum as the game progresses, feeding you new hazards regularly to keep you on your toes when you least expect them. There are enough explosions, neon strip lights, and sleek chrome surfaces present to make the futuristic space ship feel authentic despite never hanging around long enough to look at the finer details. The story of werewolves in space is weird enough to work well in the setting. Despite the heavily flawed werewolf controls, the game remains intense enough to keep you engaged throughout the story. However, people with slower reactions or a low tolerance to failure should tread carefully as there’s enough room for error to cause fits of rage worthy of a werewolf.

Overall Rating: ★★★★☆ 

What does this score mean?

This game was reviewed using a copy provided by the developer for that purpose.

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

In an industry where every successful indie title requires a powerful story or a unique art style to achieve media attention equal to that of blockbuster studios, Knightmare Tower is a breath of fresh air. This is a game purely focused on having fun by being incredibly addicting. Knightmare Tower by Juicy Beast brings players back to a time where it was common practice to sneak into the high school library and play on the (likely outdated) computers, and it is absolutely perfect.

It is difficult to describe why Knightmare Tower is so great, but you play as a knight and you get to pummel dragons in the face. The player’s primary goal is to save ten princesses who have been kidnapped and locked in a massive tower. Instead of simply taking the stairs, our hero launches himself from a barrel and gains speed by slaying each monster along the way. Failing to hit a monster results in losing friction, and if you miss too many times, the risk of falling into lava becomes greater.

The simple mechanics are reminiscent of the flash games of yore in a sense that Juicy Beast fixates on the “Less Is More” ideology. It works wonderfully, of course. The music is over the top and the art style is aesthetically similar to that of Behemoth’s Castle Crashers. The developers acknowledge that this is a very silly experience, but the bells and whistles are part of what makes Knightmare Tower so much fun. It all blends together seamlessly, and nothing feels out of place in this gravity-defying adventure.

More importantly, Knightmare Tower is addicting. The player earns gold for each turn, and depending on the performance, a better score means more gold. Gold can purchase any number of items including armor that can take more damage, or boots that increase the player’s overall speed. By the end of the journey, your roughshod knight will look like a valiant warrior. This is not to say that the game is without challenges, however. Knightmare Tower is very easy to pick up but it can be difficult to master. Certain levels of skill and timing are required to beat the game’s later levels, but it is a steady stream of progression that anyone can jump into without feeling overburdened. Not only that, but it is quite rewarding to beat your previous score with each turn.

Knightmare Tower succeeds at everything it attempts. While the journey to the top is not without its fair share of challenges, the smooth gameplay and silly artistic landscape make the climb a much more enjoyable experience. Plus, Knightmare Tower is cheap. It is on Steam for $3.99, and it is available on iOS, Android, and OUYA as well. Juicy Beast gives players a great product at an affordable price, and I can not give it enough of the praise it deserves. The bottom line? Knightmare Tower provides hours of fun and is easily one of the best indie games available right now.

To purchase Knightmare Tower and check out more from Juicy Beast, feel free to check them out here.

Overall Rating: ★★★★★ 

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Our lives are rollercoasters of happiness and tragedy. It’s our own human condition, to be ever swirling in the cycle of good and bad events throughout our time on this earth. Undoubtedly, we’ve all been in a position at some point in our lives where the bad experiences have weighed down on us, and in some cases it can become so bad that self destruction is the only way to cope.  But what if today was the day that you faced these demons head on? To be presented with a situation so drastic that it alters your attitude entirely, alleviating the pain and freeing you from your burdens.

That is what 4PM intends to explain with its cinematic gameplay experience. And I use the word experience deliberately, as this game is more like an interactive short film where you navigate through the various scenarios to uncover the narrative. Since the story is the main event so to speak, I’ll only add that you play as a woman on the path of self destruction, harbouring bad memories and ultimately ignoring the important aspects of her present life. On this fateful day, you’ll be presented with a realisation, and it’s up to you to take the right path towards coming to terms with what has happened in the past.

The experience is presented in first person, and throughout each scene you’ll be able to interact with the various objects dotted around. It doesn’t take long to piece together protagonist Caroline’s unfortunate past, or her current state for that matter, by simply looking at the various artifacts in the first scene. As the game progresses, you’ll navigate a number of other situations from late night raving in clubs – which comes with some of the most hilarious arm flailing animations I’ve seen to date – to sneaking around the office in an effort to avoid your agitated boss. Eventually, events will come to a head and you’ll be asked to make a couple of choices on what to do. When this came about I could see that the choices were obviously meant to be quite meaningful, but the after going through my options it all felt a little too convenient. It was easy to see what options to pick in order to produce the best ‘ending’, and the concluding scene felt somewhat diminished as a result.

As a whole, the game doesn’t stand up well against tests of visual fidelity. The rich colours and presentation of each scene fit with the cinematic ideals of the game itself but there’s a myriad of issues haunting the game’s presentation from start to finish. After five or ten minutes of play you start to notice an odd blurring effect that slightly obscures your vision, making detailed objects like text difficult to read and generally rendering everything as if a child had smudged the colours all over the family walls. It appears in every scene, and it feels like an attempt to make the game more dramatic. Unfortunately it doesn’t work in every situation, as I quickly found out when having to squint really hard to make out the various notes and stickers on the back of a taxi cab driver’s passenger window. It’s an odd issue to have, but since it’s ever present throughout, it may cause some aggravation amongst those wishing to check out all of the finer details in the game.

Then there’s the odd positioning of the player camera, which is often prone to fits of wobbling and awkward angles. You’d be forgiven in thinking that a game that uses camera bobbing to help immerse the player in the experience couldn’t possibly be that difficult to cope with, but you would be wrong. When Caroline was happily throwing her aforementioned crazy arm dance moves around the nightclub, her head was on its own mission, presumably attempting to detach itself to save any embarrassment of association with its host. Whilst Caroline seems to be able to keep her head mostly upright for the remainder of the game, there’s an awful swaying motion that comes with manoeuvring around the environment that could easily be enough to make you nauseous.

I said at the start that I wouldn’t spoil anything, and I will continue to do so. However, it’s worth noting that the game could very easily be broken into two sections. The first fifteen to twenty minutes culminate into an interesting and progressive narrative. We learn minor details about the main character and her past, with every intention to learn more and progress the story to see how events unfold. After that honeymoon period is over, things take a turn for the worse as the second section takes over. The visual issues become much more noticeable when other characters are presented in full, shoving their jarring stick limbs and flat faces into our field of view whilst we sway and stumble around our office desk like we’re perpetually spinning a hula hoop. The story suffers a similar fate, with the game feeding you obvious choices that aren’t hard to predict and eventually devolving into nothing more than a conclusion that doesn’t shock or surprise anybody.

Overall Rating: ★★☆☆☆ 

What does this score mean?

This game was reviewed using a copy provided by the developer for that purpose.

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Truffle Saga puts you in control of a dog named Truffle who must destroy mushrooms by throwing acorns at them. You throw acorns the same way you slingshot fowl in Angry Birds, except you don’t control how hard you throw them. You even get a white dotted line showing the path of your most recent throw. Unlike Angry Birds, which gives you multiple airborne critters to shoot your enemies into green bacon, Truffle Saga only gives you one acorn per level.

With all the weird stuff in this game, it shouldn’t be surprising that acorns are an effective anti-fungal agent.

At first the only obstacles are sticks and leaves, so all you need to make your shot count is good aim. After a few easy levels bouncing nuts off leaves, you’ll have to learn more tricks. There are flowers that eat your acorn and spit it out, bees that act as trampolines, and monsters that swallow your acorn, ending the level. Those of you who want games to make sense are not going to have a good time. These challenges add depth to the game, but unfortunately they also cause it to fall apart. Some of these extra elements require you to use awkward touch controls, especially the bouncy bees. To make matters worse, Truffle Saga suffers from a common AAA game trap and forgets what kind of game it is. There are a few levels that are solved by moving a bouncy bee around the bottom of the screen like in Breakout. Fortunately, you can skip levels by tapping an onion icon in the corner of the screen.

My other major problem with Truffle Saga is that its ads are really annoying. Paid versions on other platforms may not have them, but I played the Android version on my Droid Razr HD. There were many times when a new level had just loaded and I tapped the screen to throw my acorn, only to be thwarted by an ad that popped up just before I touched the screen. I eventually got sick of this and turned off my WiFi, but then the game kindly informed me that it had also fallen into the AAA trap of requiring a constant Internet connection.

Like most mobile games, Truffle Saga has a three-star ranking system to increase its replay value but with an interesting twist. Each level has three gems to collect in addition to the mushrooms, but after finishing the game you’ll be challenged to play each level four times, collecting a different number of gems each time for a crown. It’s a great design choice because avoiding gems is often trickier than collecting them.

Truffle Saga has some interesting puzzles and a clever way to add replay value, but I can’t recommend it because of its awkward controls, intrusive ads, and genre amnesia. If you can live with those things, you can get it on Steam, Google Play or the App Store.

Overall Rating: ★★☆☆☆ 

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

When it comes to fighting monsters, there’s nothing more satisfying than watching your super human avatar carve a swathe through a horde, skilfully dispatching the group as if each slain foe is a giant middle finger to the game’s attempts to stop you. As it turns out, Ascendant ticks off this checkbox with its 2D side scrolling beat ‘em up action gameplay which is as satisfyingly difficult as it is pleasant to watch, as we found out last year.

The game has you assume command of one of several demi-god creatures with the express intent to invade another world and slay its inhabitants. To what purpose or motivation you have isn’t explained, but when you’re a supercharged foe-slaying god that can travel across planes of existence sometimes context just has to stand aside and let you do your business.

Most of your time will be spent traversing the interconnected chambers of each world, with the express goal of finding the boss chamber and slaying whatever random beastie is found within. Each play through is subject to a randomly generated layout, which means you’ll probably never experience the same world composition twice. Entering a chamber locks down all exits, and the only way to continue on your merry way is to dole out a healthy dose of beat-down against the unfortunate souls that stand in your way. Interspersed between the random mob zones and the final boss area are a number of side rooms that can contain chests with new weapons, challenge zones that grant extra health or magic spells, and the occasional shop to spend any tokens you may have gathered after pounding them out of your enemies. Some of these extra zones are more useful than others though, with the shop especially proving to be the biggest waste of time. Items within the shop are incredibly inflated considering the small amount of currency tokens that do decide to drop from fallen enemies.

Luckily these extra zones are more of a distraction than a necessity, with combat taking centre stage and providing the most fun you could have slamming green alien kobold creatures into the closest surface. Every character has access to two attack types, the first being the normal attack which acts as your bread and butter go-to for fighting. This allows you to attack multiple times in quick succession, eventually whittling away your opponent’s health and making them vulnerable to your strong attack. When an enemy is weak enough, you can employ this strong attack as a finishing blow which launches them off in a direction, usually hurtling towards a wall or another enemy. It’s a simple combat flow but by not complicating things too much, there’s plenty of enemy nuance to grab your attention which requires you to think when you’re fighting. Simpler enemies will mostly just stand there and take your punishment, but progress further along and the monsters will start to become wise to your shenanigans, using shields and ranged attacks to thwart any hopes of button mashing you might have. That’s when the counter ability comes into focus. Counters allow you to completely negate an incoming attack and redirect it back towards the source, usually dealing out a powerful killing blow as a result. However, misjudge the timing on your counter and you’ll be left fully exposed to the full force of that incoming attack.

When you do finally make it to the end of a level, one of several boss monsters will greet you with their hulking bodies. Each boss requires you to do something different to take it down, and learning each one’s weakness is key to progressing. The giant monkey king for example, starts by lauding over you in his tower whilst an army of minions try to pound on you below. The tactic here is to weaken his minions and then launch them towards his wooden tower until it slowly tips his lordship out into the open, where you can begin to dole out some sweet sword based justice straight into his simian face. As boss battles go, these tend to be quite simple. The mechanics of each boss are easy to learn, and once you’ve downed the giant centipede ten times it becomes much less dangerous, and as a consequence, much less interesting. Because of the nature of the game and the repeated interaction with these bosses, they start to feel less like epic fight sequences and more like bite-sized encounters.

Ascendant feels like a game that understands what makes combat fun, and when you do get locked into combat fighting against these enemies, it just feels right. There’s a great deal of fluidity to each skirmish, and you’re expected to use every trick in the book to get by because the game won’t hold back when it comes to punishing mistakes. When you do fail – and you will – all of your progress is forever lost to the digital ether, so by incorporating these roguelike tendencies death becomes the ultimate punishment. This is going to aggravate some players, especially if you’re more into your fighting games than your roguelikes, and when you do fall it can be quite exacerbating to know that you have to fight through all of those weaker enemies again to get back to where you were.

As brawlers go, Ascendant is certainly one of the more polished entries I’ve played. The combat is satisfyingly aggressive whilst keeping things simple enough to focus on more engaging aspects like timing and reaction-based play. I would strongly advise anyone considering getting the game to make sure you have a gamepad to play on though as the fast-paced gameplay doesn’t lend itself well to a mouse and keyboard control scheme. With that said, if you enjoy fancy flourishes of sword play and the roguelike mantra of procedurally generated singular playthroughs then Ascendant is right up your alley.

Overall Rating: ★★★★☆ 

What does this score mean?

This game was reviewed using a copy provided by the developer for that purpose.

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Who would have thought that millions of years from now, there might be a galactic space opera where one determined four-headed space lizard would be brokering trade routes and managing the political stage of the solar system.

Fortunately The Last Federation lets you do just that, as you assume control of the last living Hydral. A great war breaks out and you are forced to spend a millennia trapped on a technologically inferior planet. That is until the savage citizens finally manage to produce a spaceship, crafted in part from the designs of your own crashed ship. Being the underhanded quadruple-headed reptile that you are, the opportunity to blast free from the shackles of this world were too great, and so you ‘liberate’ them of their hard work and sail towards the stars. Your journey commences, and first on the ‘to-do’ list is making a unified galactic federation of planets.

After escaping, the game hands the reins over and lets you do your own thing. Do you want to be a peaceful Hydral dignitary, carefully brokering trade deals and negotiating peaceful terms between hive-mind insectoids and subversive boar folk? Perhaps causing a pandemic amongst the owl people is more your style, forcing them to join with you out of desperation for the medicine they sorely need before the space flu wipes them out entirely. The choice is entirely yours, although not everything turns out the way you plan.

Take my first game in which I chose to ally with the bloodthirsty Burlust, a savage war-like race of soldiers and chieftains. After challenging and defeating the head chieftain, I had earned their respect. I was a proven warrior, and the next in line to the Burlust seat of power had come to respect me. They were my allies now, and forever. This was a mistake.

Cast forward one or two space years, and I had put the Burlust to the back of my mind. I had won them over, and it was time to convince the rest of the races to join up with me. My only issue was that every time I tried to make nice with one of the seven races, my dearly beloved Burlust friends would march on in and murder their faces off. This particular game ended with a federation of two races: The Burlust – who numbered into the billions and had spread across the known solar system like an epidemic of axes and hellfire – and one solitude four-headed lizard coated in the dried blood of several races.

The game isn’t just about clicking on menu options and watching the events unfold. Alongside the tactical diplomacy that you manage via the overworld solar map, there will be occasions when talking just won’t cut it. Luckily you still have your nifty stolen spaceship and a complete arsenal of laser beams to point at those you wish to get rid of.

Combat is handled in a semi turn-based fashion. You spawn into a miniature space arena and are given control of a single ship, yours. After picking out your combat stance, ranging from auto attack to direct control over the target, you plot your course and then the actions are carried out in real time. A few seconds pass and you take your next turn, simultaneously with every other unit on the map.

It’s a great addition to help mix things up for a game that heavily focuses on reading through scores of menu dialogue, and for the most part the combat does alleviate the pressure on your eyes. However, a few hours into the game and you’ll start to notice the flaws in the enemy AI. You’re given three bars to control the amount of power going your weapons, your shield, and your engines, and whilst this at first seemed like an interesting way to make the combat more dynamic, I found nearly all situations could be handled by simply forgetting about the engine power and pouring everything into shields and weapons. After two or three turns, the opposing forces were usually dead and my shields would barely have been depleted. Tougher enemies were scarcely seen, and dealing with them was simply a case of turning the engine power to match their speed, then using your long range rounds to pelt them as they foolishly chased you.

The Last Federation is a game with a very specific focus. It doesn’t get lost in a sprawling procedural sandbox world; it doesn’t assume that you want to be trawling across the stars in search of something to do. Instead it gives you one goal, and asks you how you would like to achieve it. Using that as a starting point the game then builds several paths for you to take, each one boasting something unique or interesting.

That’s not to say that everyone will enjoy the game though. There is a heavy focus on tactics and diplomacy, and a general amount of intelligent thought is required throughout if you want to win. If you like blowing things up and soaring through the skies as a top gun maverick, this probably isn’t the game for you. If, however, you enjoy weaving a sordid plan of conspiracy and subterfuge as you set a war-mongering race of savages against a helpless bunch of owl people, then this game is probably going to appeal to your inner politician.

Overall Rating: ★★★★☆ 

What does this score mean?

This game was reviewed using a copy provided by the developer for that purpose.

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Platformines is confused. It doesn’t know what direction it wants to take, and the result is a mash-up of RPG and platforming that never really commits to either genre. Instead what we get is a timid approach to its inspirations, and whilst the combination of an RPG/Platforming hybrid may sound like a game we all want to play, the truth is much more disappointing.

The game starts off with you creating your chiselled action hero. A grizzled veteran that conforms to all 80s super-macho aesthetics, and rightfully so considering you’ll be watching him gun down everything in sight. Once you’ve selected the perfect shade of hot pink for your afro, it’s straight into the fray.

And for the first five or ten minutes things seemed to be looking good. There’s a hint of Spelunky oozing through the 2D cartoon aesthetics and, when combined with the smoothness of controlling your avatar, initial hopes for the game were high. It felt as though there might just be a promising platformer waiting to be unearthed. But that was not the case. Instead what you’re left with is the result of procedurally generated obstacles scattered across your path in the hope that it will make a world worth exploring. Whether it’s a randomly placed buzz-saw blocking off the dead air above you or an automated turret aimlessly shooting two blocks into the floor below it, there are obvious flaws in the design. It doesn’t make for a meaningful experience, and by expecting the game to generate something worthwhile, a lot of the magic that goes into making a challenging platformer is lost.

Platformines’ idea of character progression is naught but a gear grind and not a fun one either.  The idea is by progressing further out from the starting zone, you will encounter tougher enemies who are likely to drop bigger and better guns. Whilst this is the case, the enemies rarely differ between difficulty tiers, instead simply becoming more powerful re-skinned versions of their weaker incarnations. What’s worse, the same can be said for the weapons. Half way through my play session, I stopped caring about the minuscule differences between my current bazooka and the one that had just dropped. They weren’t very interesting and any desire to seek out better loot is all but lost.

The objective for the game is pretty simple; gather a number of coloured cannons that have been scattered around the game world and use them to repair your spacecraft. It’s not an overly complicated scenario to wrap your head around. In fact it’s quite the opposite. It’s too simple. So much so that after the third or fourth cannon has been obtained you’re likely to stop caring about the enemies that litter your journey, choosing instead to rush down each cannon in the hope of finding something new to do. Once all of the cannons have been collected, you’re tasked with rebuilding your ship by shooting the right coloured blocks into the correct positions on a template. Your mission is complete and you’re left with a sense of dissatisfaction as things come to an end.

You can probably tell by now that the game didn’t sit too well with me. In fact, I’m somewhat annoyed with the end result. Mechanically, the game is sound. The animations are smooth and feel responsive enough for the demands of a platformer, and through all of its faults, it’s a well built game. What irks me the most is the lack of focus. The idea seemed to be a combination of RPG progression by way of procedural loot – akin to games like Borderlands – whilst simultaneously providing a lashing of platforming that saw you jumping across tight gaps as you fight off the hordes with your big guns. Instead what we get is a lacklustre adventure through a meaningless world, as two genres collide to make something less than the sum of their parts.

Overall Rating: ★★☆☆☆ 

What does this score mean?

This game was reviewed using a copy provided by the developer for that purpose.

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

The entire premise is, for lack of a better word, ridiculous. The developers even tell us that this is a completely pointless game riddled with bugs and glitches, but that’s okay. Goat Simulator is not a commentary on the videogame industry, nor is it a satire for poor game design. Goat Simulator is an entirely different animal altogether. This is a game which not only tells us that we should wait until it goes on sale, Coffee Stain Studios even admits that we would be better off buying a hula hoop. Many will argue that Goat Simulator is merely exploiting its absurdity and sense of self-deprecation as a selling point. Others might say that this is a chilling reflection on the game development cycle as a whole. The scholars will likely argue about the underlying messages of Goat Simulator for the next three years – all I know is that you are an indestructible goat on a jetpack.

YOLO

There are no objectives in Goat Simulator. You simply move around in a poorly rendered suburbia and cause as much mayhem as possible. There are trampolines in swimming pools, giant slides, an indoor skate park, and a gas station which is just begging to be tampered with. Explosions and greatly exaggerated animations ensure that players are always one hoof away from complete and utter chaos. The small town is a sandbox in which players entertain themselves with whatever tools happen to be at their disposal. In one instance, I dragged an unsuspecting hillbilly to the top of a building and used my jetpack to throw him out of the map. Shortly after that, a gas station exploded and my goat was hit by a truck for no reason in particular.

The physics are a major part of the gameplay as well. With the press of a button, your goat can become a ragdoll, which only increases the sense of absurdity. For those who have played Saints Row, it is basically an even more nonsensical version of Insurance Fraud. For those who have not played Saints Row, think of it as a part of the game where gravity simply ceases to exist for the sake of fun. The more anarchy your four-legged beast can create, the more points you acquire. The points mean nothing of course, but it is nice to feel accomplished.

This is how you climb things because reasons.

Unfortunately, the fun dies out fairly early. The first time you cause an explosion by throwing fruit at a car is great, but there really is not much else to laugh at after the initial gags. Absurdity for the sake of absurdity can only go so far before it becomes stale. The truth is that Goat Simulator is at its best when it is being showed to others. There is a certain joy in watching friends react to the notion that goats can ride jetpacks and headbutt gas pumps, yet like a skit on Saturday Night Live, the joke becomes really old in a short amount of time. Luckily, the Steam Workshop will allow for endless possibilities in the future, but as it stands the base game is very limited in a world that should have no limits.

This is a game that doesn’t just break the fourth wall – it completely destroys the whole house. Coffee Stain Studios is definitely going to create a cult following with any future projects. I would love to dive deeper into Goat Simulator, however there really isn’t much else to say. The game does not take itself seriously whatsoever, and the slapstick comedy is certainly welcome in an industry that is constantly out to prove that games can be art. Goat Simulator is entertaining, but the joke dies so quickly that you are better off taking the developer’s own advice and waiting for it to go on sale.

Overall Rating: ★★★☆☆ 

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© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.