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.

 Made by Przemyslaw ‘rezoner’ Sikorski in HTML5, QbQbQb tasks the player with matching triplicates of differently coloured blocks around small planets with either the keyboard arrows or a gamepad. Each complete set adds points to the total score, and a new planet is unlocked once one thousand points are achieved. Gameplay starts out slow and fairly easy, matching the initially and similarly smooth, relaxing music. Inevitably as the player succeeds in completing sets and stacking combos, the music and rate of blocks increases. The size and length of the blocks also changes, leaving less space for other blocks. It’s a subtle change, almost unnoticeable until the player starts messing up. Similarly to Tetris Attack (and thusly, the Pokemon Puzzle games), unconnected blocks start adding up, penalizing the player when the stacks break through the planet’s atmosphere (the white halo surrounding the planet). Do this a certain number of times, and it’s game over.

QbQbQb Single-Player Mode

Like many of the games in the genre, QbQbQb is deceptively simple. It’s a pure challenge, addictive both due to its mechanics and aesthetic. I mean, oh boy, it’s a pretty game. The color palette is mild and unsaturated yet blooms and explodes across the screen. The more triplicates a player completes, the more starts happening, with butterflies and fireworks and flourishes like flowers in a strong breeze. The game accomplishes all this while still maintaining a relatively minimalistic art style. In conjunction with the game’s music which transitions from smooth to energetic beats, QbQbQb has simultaneously a calm and frenzied atmosphere. It’s very easy to fall into a trance-like state while playing, simply taking the opportunity to absorb the sights and sounds of it. That fact works great to transform game overs not into an irritation, but rather just another chance to enjoy the scenery all over again.

As a very neat addition, QbQbQb also has a two player mode that can be played with a single keyboard (one player using the WASD keys and the other using the arrow keys) or two gamepads. It’s pretty much the same game with two planets instead of one on the screen. It would be nice to have online play to compete against friends that don’t live locally, but that’s a rather minor complaint. The only other thing I can say disappointed me about the game is that it’s just too short! I would’ve loved even more planets with many more additions.

QbQbQb Two-Player Mode

For four dollars however, QbQbQb is a pretty great value, as the soundtrack containing all the wonderful upbeat electronic music is included with the purchase. The game is available for Windows, OSX, and Linux at rezoner’s website through a Humble Widget and will eventually arrive on Android and iOS. There’s also a playable in-browser demo available on the website.

Overall Rating: ★★★★☆ 

What does this score mean?

This game was reviewed using a copy provided by the developer for that purpose. The review was based on the Windows version.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

© 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

On September 5th, an update rolls out that adds two new difficulty modes: light (easy) and shadow (hard). Each mode will include new graphical styles, soundtracks, and leader boards. Check them out below.

If you haven’t bought it already, PUK definitely deserves your dollars. Grab it on the Google Play Store or for iOS. You can read a little more about the update on Laser Dog’s blog.

© 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Welcome to the world of Valkyrius, a throwback harking back to the days of the arcade and its era of classic gaming. Valkyrius is a PC arcade style shoot-em up created by the one-man studio Iridescent Games. It takes place far in the future where a war between surviving space colonists and rebels has been ravaging space and one which the player piloting the titular “Valkyrius One” must fight to reclaim Earth.

Pretty standard stuff for a shmup if I do say myself. It contains the classic elements of older games such as 1942 and even Gradius and plays like a nice tense bullet-hell. Unlike most bullet-hell games though where you survive by memorizing patterns and using sharp reflexes to bypass them, the enemies in Valkyrius have attacks that will simply overwhelm you and even cover all points of escape and doom your ship. This is where Valkyrius‘ unique teleportation mechanic comes in. Your ship is equipped with the ability to teleport at will. This adds a new dimension to the game as it enables you to make lighting-fast evasions in otherwise impossible-to-survive situations and boy are you ever going to need it if you wish to play for longer than a few minutes. I simply love this feature. Nothing beats the feeling of making precise jumps in order to evade oncoming enemies or even making tactical jumps in order to retrieve that one weapon nearby in order to better take out a persistent foe.

Test your evasion skills using the teleportation mechanic to evade screen-filling attacks

Speaking of tactics, Valkyrius has a surprising amount of depth and strategy in it in the form of obtainable weapons and ship modules. Your score is converted into in-game currency which you can use to purchase different customizations that outfit your ship with a variety of looks and weapons. The weapons include standard machine guns, shotgun-esque spread guns, and missiles. There are also weapons of more powerful and strategic value such as the sword or even the shockwave weapon. The shockwave is a screen-filling weapon that destroys all enemies and even small enemy fire. It’s very powerful but extremely hard to come by. The sword is an energy beam that projects out the front of your ship and can be “swung” around you in a 360 degree arc.

These can be very powerful indeed but nothing changes your play style and strategy more than the modules with which you can outfit your ship once you purchase them. These modules include destroying all enemies on screen once you are killed or making your shield impervious to small enemies and missiles. Among the other modules, my personal favourite by far is the power warp which allows you to damage enemies by warping over them. By choosing different modules you can easily change how you approach the game and how you strategize your attack. Pick the diamond shield and use it to simply plow through smaller enemies and laugh at the missiles they fire at you, or pick the power warp and turn your evasion skills into a formidable offensive weapon. Pick your favourite according to your style of play and dominate the battlefield.

Large, unique bosses will test your fighting skills

As for the game itself I found it an amazingly fun experience. The varied enemies make things challenging, and each stage has a unique end boss which will really test your abilities. Each stage is different and most have interesting and dynamically changing environments. One moment you are fighting over a large sea taking out enemy fleets and the next you are actually giving chase to an enemy submerged underneath the water. A few stages even nix the top-down approach altogether and you are basically doing a free-fall plummet into the heart of an underground enemy fortress. There were many moments where I was simply in awe while I marveled at the changing environment as the soundtrack blared on in a very fitting rock-themed tempo. I loved the soundtrack and each stage has its own track. While all the tracks are different in their own right, they fit in very well with the game and blended well in tune with the game play.

Fight enemies on land, sea, and even space

Do not think for one minute though that the experience is over once you have beaten it. The game comes with a plethora of unlockable goodies including new game modes, harder difficulties, the amazing soundtrack, and even concept art. There are also a large number of medals which you can achieve by beating challenges. These go from easy challenges just for beating certain levels, up to challenging ones like beating the game on the hardest difficulty without using continues or even without firing your weapon. How? I have yet to have the gall to try and attempt them, but I will certainly give it a shot. These challenges will ensure you keep coming back to the game for more fun and chaos.

So yes, it is safe to say I enjoyed this title very much. I had a blast with the challenging game play and the teleportation gives the game a nice twist. The soundtrack is spot-on and the content just keeps you coming back for more. I do have a few minor complaints but these are mainly personal opinions. The weapon pickups can be frustrating at times. If you have a load-out that you are comfortable with it can be ruined by attempting to reload or by accidentally touching a different weapon pickup and replacing a needed weapon. The art is nice and crisp with varied enemies and boss designs, but the story is very cliche and not very original or interesting. The game does have a nice feature which I wished more games came with and that is the ability to turn the story mode off. Simply go into the options at any time and turn off the story to have no more interruptions and get into the midst of the action much faster. The game, while on PC, does have gamepad support and I highly recommend using one as the controls just feel perfect for a gamepad. I played the game with my USB XBox controller and the controls were  tight and very responsive. You will also need a gamepad if you wish to play the local co-op mode that it comes with, so if you want a buddy to join in the fray you will need to acquire a few of them anyway.

As of this writing Valkyrius has not been given a release date or price yet, the game has a page at Steam Greenlight so it can gain a nice wide PC launch but it has been recently announced that it will be published by Green Man Gaming. No other dates or info has been announced but voting is still open on Greenlight and I would advise each and every available person to vote for this great game. I would highly recommend picking up this game once it launches. Iridescent Games have a great and amazing game and I wish them the best of luck at launch.

Visit the Valkyrius Main Page
Vote for the game at its Greenlight page

Overall Rating: ★★★★★ 

What does this score mean?

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

© 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Learning to play takes a total of about ten seconds. The developer, Laser Dog, has designed a game so simple that apart from the title screen not a single line of text exists. To play, you simply fire pucks from the bottom of the screen at big circles on the top of the screen to destroy them. The really big circles might take more than one hit to destroy. (Hmm, sounds familiar.) Often objects will obscure the shot and you will have to bounce off or around them. If your puck finishes bouncing around and fails to hit its target you can shake your device to fling it from its stationary position to try to complete the deed. To complete the stage all this must be done in a matter of seconds, which creates a pace similar to the Wario Ware titles (Side note: it’s too bad Nintendo doesn’t make games for Android or iOS, Wario Ware would kick ass as a phone game).

Some levels prove easy to defeat, others trickier. I have yet to run across any single stage that seemed too difficult, but PUK is not a game about difficulty. It’s about endurance. Sure, completing a stage only takes a few seconds. But PUK boasts 1,000 levels, and you don’t play the levels in the same order every time. To advance you need to be quick, alert, and consistently accurate. I have no idea what happens at the end of 1,000 levels, and I will never know (my average game lasts somewhere between 30 and 50 levels before I screw up and lose), but I don’t think the end game matters. I keep picking the it up and trying to top my old high score – a number that gets harder and harder to beat almost every time I play. But that only makes me more determined.

The minimalist style of PUK perfectly matches the simplicity of its game play. The visuals are sharp and functional. For example, the pucks (puks?) that you sling all have arrows pointing up, which gives you the hint that those things are supposed to move in that general direction. Smart design choices like this help to push this game from an average casual app to something much more polished and special. The sound design also shines. Destroying one of the big circles with your puck results in an oh-so-satisfying crunchy thud noise, and completing a stage rewards you with an organic sounding “bing.” Destroying the last circle on a level is the best, because you get both the slap crunch and the bing all at once. The ambient music fits wonderfully and the tempo increases just enough to make you nervous when your time starts to run out.

PUK is basically the perfect mobile game. It’s simple to learn and play, lends itself wonderfully to short burst gaming sessions, and is fiercely addictive. The minimalist visual style looks great and the sound design shines. With most games I find myself selective with who I recommend them to. If you like puzzle games maybe you should try this, if you like arcade style games maybe you should try that, if you like RPGs maybe you should try this, etc. But not PUK. Everyone should play PUK. Your brother should play PUK. Your sister should play PUK. Your mom should play PUK. Your Grandpa should play PUK. You should play PUK. Now.

Overall Rating: ★★★★★ 

What does this score mean?

PUK is available on Android and iOS for about a dollar. The Android version was used for this review.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

© 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Despite it’s title, Arcadecraft is not yet another Minecraft clone available through the Xbox Live Indies Games market. Instead, it’s a game that puts players in the role of an arcade manager in that scene’s heyday of the early 1980s. Arcadecraft plays on actual history by including events like the video game crash of 1983 and ending with a nod to the release of the NES in 1985. Through it all, it’s up to the player to ensure that their arcade is remaining popular with the crowds and racking in enough money to pay the bills.

Shown from an isometric perspective, the empty arcade is the player’s canvas for creating a gaming hotspot. As the ever-running calendar moves from month to month, game publishers release new arcade cabinets available for purchase by the player. These cabinets vary in initial cost, genre, control method, number of floor spaces occupied, power consumption, and a few other characteristics. Once purchased and placed on the floor, each cabinet will begin drawing in money based on a few factors including the arcade’s current popularity rate and the popularity of the individual machine. The newer a machine is, the quicker it makes money. That money must be repeatedly collected from the machine by the player, otherwise the game stops raking in coins.

I give credit to the developers for trying to add strategic depth through individual game cabinet settings. However, I found that the game suffers from a pacing problem that interferes with the use of that level of customization. The early portion of Arcadecraft speeds by too quickly to really get a grasp of how or when the settings will affect that cabinet’s money-making ability. Early on there’s not much incentive to fiddle with the defaults because of the risk of failure, and later in the game there’s simply too much money-collecting taking place to do anything else. It was only once I hit the final year of the simulation – when no new arcade cabinets are available for purchase – that I really started toying around. There are lessons to be learned from the first full play-through of the game, but it’s doubtful most players are going to go back and repeat the exact same sequence of events using that newly-gained knowledge. I think if the developers had decided to include a controllable speed setting, just like in Smooth Operators: Call Center Chaos, it would give players a chance to run their arcade at a pace that allows for experimentation.

Individual machines can have their pricing and difficulty settings modified.

One of the best aspects of the game has to be the homage to the gaming industry of three decades ago. It’s an interesting look back at the evolution of technology as newer games offer varying cabinet styles and control methods. There’s also a bit of a nostalgia factor as a number of the games in Arcadecraft are parodies of classics like Donkey Kong and Space Invaders. Some of the game publishers even release sequels to their titles ala Pac Man and Ms. Pac Man. If the player manages to hold onto the original and can seat the sequel(s) next to it, each machine gets a popularity boost.

There are a number of other interesting strategical decisions that the player must make during the lifespan of the arcade. Periodically a pro-gamer will stop by and want to try one of the most popular machines. If he manages to beat the high score, a popularity boost will temporarily be placed on that machine. The trade-off is that while he’s hogging the machine it’s not earning any money. From time to time, a vendor will stop by and offer to buy one of the player’s classic gaming arcade cabinets for a high ticket price. However, to keep a machine around long enough for it qualify as a classic generally means its old and far less popular (read: cost-ineffective) than the latest and greatest cabinets.

Succeed by creating a customer-friendly layout and buying a wide variety of cabinets.

As with many simulation games, Arcadecraft suffers in its endgame. Once the player has reached the two-year mark and paid off their debt, most of the challenge is gone. Truth be told, I failed to pay off that debt during my first go-round, but that experience was an education in the keys to winning: start slow and continue to replace old, unpopular machines as soon as you can buy new ones. Once the player figures that lesson out, the challenge changes from mental strategy to menial labor as he/she has to repeatedly run around in a frenzy emptying coin boxes. It becomes tedious very fast, and the ability to hire an automated helper does little to relieve the effort of maintaining a large number of cabinets. At this point, the goal becomes simply trying to collect as much money as possible before the simulation ends. Unfortunately the lather-rinse-repeat process happens earlier in this title than some of the similar games I’ve played on XBLIG. Ultimately I would have liked to have seen a slower-paced game with more to do during that time than collect money and fix broken machines.

Arcadecraft‘s premise and early execution show so much promise that I was doubly disappointed when I became bored by the end. One or two design choices made differently would have been the difference between this being a decent game and a great one. It’s obvious that the developers put a lot of work into the presentation. I fear, though, that the 240 Microsoft Point price tag in a typically 80-Point market may keep even the most curious of players away. I think it’s still worth a look for those who enjoy simulation/strategy games and those who can still remember the golden age of arcades.

Overall Rating: ★★★☆☆ 

What does this score mean?

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

© 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

There are six points of contact on the screen, turning Unstoppable Fist into an evolved form of whack-a-mole. And with a touch of your finger, our nameless protagonist delivers a fistful of patriotism or a punishing kick to the enemy. With the inclusion of a vertical swipe, your arsenal is expansive enough to deal with anything on the screen. There is one major problem with this mechanic though; more than three enemies on the screen reveals the ever-so-slight sluggishness of the controls.  Because of this, the difference in difficulty levels is far too extreme. Also our protagonist has a somewhat limited range, so for a number of enemies several seconds go by as you watch, unable to do anything. If an enemy comes hurtling along from the other side, it is almost impossible not to get hit, which feels cheap. A few tweaks to the range would make the game worth being played several hundred times more.

Our unnamed hero and controls for attack

The pixel-art style is wonderfully crafted, and the animation is crisp, with every punch and kick delivered perfectly. But the smoothness of our protagonist only highlights the blandness of the enemies, whose animation cycles are repetitive and look out of place. But for the purpose they serve in the game, it may just be a minor complaint.

The audio design is the perfect complement to the visual aesthetics. Developers Ragtag Studios know just how good the soundtrack is, as they have released it as a standalone purchase. But it also shows how indie developers are looking at different revenue sources outside of an over-bloated in-app purchase system.

It is hard to complain about the lack of depth to the game, because of its price and that the game knows exactly what it is and what it is trying to do. The menus, options and the game play elements are all designed around simplicity. It does suffer from not having the longevity compared to other games of this style. Unlike Super Crate Box, it doesn’t the ability to be played for a minute on the train or for a half-hour in your house. But still, as a short blast for $0.99 it has enough going for it to be recommended.

Overall Rating: ★★★☆☆ 

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

As video games have evolved from generation to generation, they have taught a sort of language along the way – not just of jargon, but of mechanics and muscle-memory.  Usually, this works to the long-time gamer’s benefit, as new titles build upon the “rules” established by their predecessors.  It’s why you can pick up a side-scrolling platformer and trust your impulse to start moving to the right, or start a bullet-hell shooter and – well, hope, at least – that a safe haven is hiding somewherewithin the screenfull of ammunition.  It’s why you can sit down to a new PC game and find your left hand settling on the WASD keys, or why you can pick up a console shooter and expect the left analog stick to move your character while the right aims your weapon.  Conventions are invented, then refined, then repeated, until they become instinct.

As a result, there is an uneasy tension between gaming’s past and present.  The savvy game designer can take advantage of historical conventions, either to rely upon them or subvert them.  But invoking the past always carries with it certain risks.  A game that stays too close to what has come before comes off as a soulless copy, while a game that changes a historical model too much forces players to fight against their own expectations.

Which brings us, in a roundabout way, to Octopede, a recent title from British developer Orbital Games.

Visually, Octopede is far more active than Snake ever was, thanks to the introduction of an array of enemy viruses that riddle the system.  The enemy AI is very straightforward – some move along set paths, other shoot you from afar, still others chase you across the screen – but such simple adversaries are threatening when thrown at you by the handful.  Fortunately, you’re offered a variety of tricks to use against them, ranging from the ability to shoot in the direction you are moving to traps you can leave in your wake.  There are also special weapons to collect and use, each of which can be counted on for mass destruction when you find yourself in a pinch.  Darting around the screen, trying to collect data packets and ammo while dodging and dogfighting your enemies certainly makes for an exciting, arcade-inspired experience – albeit one that feels more akin to retro shooter like Geometry Wars than a traditional game of Snake.  Clean, pixellated graphics and chiptune music/SFX complement both this gameplay and the framing story, although I found myself wishing the different enemy types were more visually distinct and that the debris effects that occasionally clutter the screen were less invasive.

This experience is enhanced by the game’s central scoring mechanic, which is perhaps its best element.  Whenever you pick up data packets and extend your worm’s length, you are building up your health reserves as well as earning points – you lose segments when your worm’s head is damaged, and you die when you have nothing left to lose.  However, whenever you have more than eight segments trailing you, you can choose to “cache” them, permanently giving up their utility as health in exchange for increasing your score multiplier.   Judicious caching is a must if you want to climb the leaderboards, but it always comes at the cost of permanently ceding part of your safety – a classy implementation of risk versus reward.  Building an arcade game around the tension between survivability and score is a great idea, and Orbital has executed it well.

Yet, perhaps to make room for all these new additions that are demanding part of your screen’s limited real estate, Octopede abandons the defining element of Snake’s gameplay: the idea that colliding with your own tail is fatal.  The potential for self-destruction informs every instinct I have when playing Snake, not to mention popular culture’s most enduring image of the genre – the iconic visuals of Tron’s lightcycle racing.  But, in Octopede, your tail is mostly cosmetic: aside from one enemy that targets the end of your tail, the game would play rather the same without it.  Any Snake veteran will probably find this a little disorienting.  In my case, I found myself constantly fighting my instinctual self-avoidance, and I’m sure I died a few needless deaths that I could have survived had I remembered that my own tail wasn’t lethal.  Taking the game on its own merits, this is a wholly acceptable design choice – indeed, the game would probably be unplayable if you had to avoid your tail and all the other hazards of the mainframe – and I adapted to the change fairly quickly.  But when so much of the game’s backbone is derived from the Snake tradition, I was thrown for a moment when I realized what had been lost along the way.

Less forgivable is the game’s awkward control scheme.  Orbital boasts that Octopede lets you move in eight directions, giving you an edge over the strict up-down-left-right movement of your enemies.   I liked this idea in theory, but in practice Orbital has made it nigh-unworkable.  On the keyboard, cardinal movement is controlled by the directional arrow keys, but diagonal movement is inexplicably assigned to the WASD keys rather than to the more-conventional combinations of the arrow keys.  (In other words, rather than pressing both up and left to move in the up-left diagonal, you press the A key.)  If there is a logic underlying the mapping of diagonals-to-letters then I never found it, and all the while I struggled to master two-handed movement while also trying to trigger weapons and cache excess data.  Frustrated, I switched to using an Xbox controller, only to find a new iteration of the same problem – rather than assigning eight-directional movement to a single analog stick, the game parcels movement across them both.  Granted, you can control everything with a single hand via your keyboard’s numpad, an option that might help those familiar with such a movement array, but unfortunately that’s a gaming language I’ve never learned.

Using both hands to control the worm’s movement was so alien to me that I ultimately abandoned hope.   Rather than struggling further with the eight-directional options with which I was presented, I just trusted my years of four-directional intuition to keep me safe and ignored the diagonals entirely.  I acknowledge that part of the problem here was my own fault, my own inability to adapt.  But when making a game that holds itself out as an evolution of a video game classic, I would have expected Octopede to default to something closer to more conventional, instinctual controls, to let players like me take advantage of behavior honed over decades rather than forcing us to resist our mental conditioning.  Is this irony, then—that Octopede abandoned the Snake tradition of making my body my worst enemy, only to make me fight myself in order to play it?  (Orbital has, to their credit, stated elsewhere that they rejected single-stick control during the design process but that it will be added via the next update.  I may not agree with the former decision, but I commend them for the latter.)

In the end, once I got myself into the mindset of playing a score-driven shooter rather than a direct Snake homage, learned how to best use my offensive and defensive items, and accepted that eight-directional movement was going to remain an unrealized dream for me, I had a good time with Octopede.   The action is fast-paced, the atmosphere is invitingly old-school, and the caching mechanic is surprisingly intelligent – in my opinion, the game’s biggest strength.  Fans of the genre will find a lot to like, and anyone who tries the demo and finds themselves wanting more should find the game well worth the three-dollar cost.  But I can’t help but feel that the game might have been better if Orbital had been a little more confident in their game’s ability to stand on its own, designing and framing it as an independent experience rather than as the “evolution” of a classic.  Invocations of gaming history carry with them a certain amount of baggage; here, the specter of Snake weighs down an otherwise-well-made arcade experience.

Octopede, by Orbital Games, is available via Desura for the PC and will be coming soon to Xbox Live, Steam, and a number of other gaming providers.  Reviewed for 3+ hours, including two successful trips to the system’s core and many adventures along the way—all without moving diagonally. 

Overall Rating: ★★★☆☆ 

© 2011 – 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.