Continuing with their rampage against wooden doors everywhere, Indie studio Killhouse Games have just updated their Early Access title Door Kickers with a host of extra content.

Players can now utilize the Squad Doctrine Tree, which will allow you to spend promotion points on improving your squad each time you level up. By doing so, the folks at Killhouse Games say that this will help to remove any unnecessary micromanagement as you won’t need to progress each squad member individually, keeping things squarely focused on the team effort.

Modding has also been given a facelift with the inclusion of the Steam Workshop. This will allow any player-created content to be pooled into one localized place, allowing easy management of any custom levels or game features you wish to use. Those looking to create content can also check out this handy ‘how-to’ guide on how to create your content.

For a full list of features, check out the list below:

Features:

• Bigger maps (zoom/scroll enabled for all maps)
• New scenario type: Protect the VIP
• Three new enemy types (Operator Orville, Juggernaut Emil, Assassins)
• Three new maps
• Improved enemy/SWAT AI
• Export replays to video
• Modding support + in-game mods menu
• Steam Workshop support
• Can resume a game anytime during a replay
• Added enemy ghosts for last visible location

Other:

• Added maxFPS and vertical-sync in options.xml
• Improved FPS / loading time
• Game size reduced significantly (due to compressed textures)
• Can now hide the HUD while playing; not yet in replay mode
• Multiple graphics improvements
• Rebalanced armor types
• Rebalanced 9mm and .40 caliber vs .45 caliber pistols
• New sounds
• Game now loads .dds files in addition to .tga and .png
• New door types added – elevator and bus doors

Fixes:

• Can no longer be heard through walls when picking locks
• Fixed a couple of replay-desync bugs
• Fixed some ambient sounds that were too loud

Modding/Structure changes:

• Changed location of single mission and RMG repositories
• The distance at which shots are heard is now specific to each weapon
• The noise distances for stealthily opening a door vs kicking it down are now configured separately.

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

I can’t claim to have ever kicked a door down. It sounds like something only the toughest of grizzled superheroes would do, and if we slip back into reality for a second I’m almost certain it would hurt. Luckily you can supplement any physical pain for virtual satisfaction in Door Kickers, a game that really seems to have a vendetta against doors.

You assume command of a SWAT team, controlling each member simultaneously from a top down perspective. As each level starts, you’ll have the freedom to pick which of your guys you deploy, what gear they use, and where on the map they will spawn. There are a few notable differences on each gear load-out – lock picks and silenced weapons that allow stealth entry and shotgun wielding breach masters to name a few – but for the most part I never really had cause to dive into this feature. Because you’re given a set of predefined soldiers to pick from at the start of each level, I never felt the need to go in and play around with the gear of my pre-existing units. The ones I started with seemed to work just fine, and I would never have any issues coping without my stealth guys for a round of two if they had been killed in a previous mission.

Losing one of your own during an engagement is treated as little more than a minor inconvenience, which dampens the sense of risk as you plan out your path through each level. After a unit dies in a mission, their ‘slot’ is considered out of action for the duration of the next mission before being filled with a randomly generated new squad member. By doing this, the game makes you feel like the units at your disposal become expendable commodities rather than prized members of the team, and by having no incentives to keep your favourite soldiers alive, it becomes too easy to condemn a squad member to die for the sake of an easier outcome.

Controlling your squad is intuitive, and all but the most advanced actions are simple to execute by drawing out a path for each unit to take. To accompany this, the game sports a useful pause mechanic that allows you to freeze the live events of each level, giving you time to assess the situation and draw out your plan before the bullets fly. Along with controlling your positioning, you must also manage each unit’s line of sight, which becomes important in the later levels as a fog of war obscures any parts of the map that aren’t currently in your team’s cone of view. The way Door Kickers handles this is by allowing you to set a focus direction for your units, so they can strafe past corners and doorways whilst still being able to watch for incoming threats. It’s a simple mechanic that adds more depth to the proceedings, as an unaware squad member can easily be reduced to a chalk outline if they aren’t looking in the right direction.

Being a tactical game about putting your foot through various doors, I’d be remised if I didn’t talk about this mechanic. You will encounter a lot of doors, usually with a generous helping of armed thugs just waiting for someone to pay them a visit. When approaching a door you’re offered several options, and whilst I’ve yet to find one that simply lets me open the door with the handle, the choices are all tactically sound. The flash bang, for example, can be used to pacify any goons hiding around in the next room, allowing your guys to rush in and murder them before the tinnitus wears off.

The levels can come in a variety of flavours, from bomb disposal engagements to hostage rescue. It’s a good mix of objectives that you’d imagine the average SWAT team would be handling regularly, but after playing each objective type in succession only the bomb disposal and hostage execution missions seem to have you doing something other than murdering every bad guy in the building.

A good example of this are the hostage rescue missions which have you raid each level in search of a number of vulnerable civilians. Whilst there is an option to secure them and lead them outside to safety, the mission doesn’t end there. It doesn’t stop until you seek out and kill every last armed unit in the building, which just seems petty. Not content with foiling their plans of capturing innocents for ransom money, you then have to return to the house and make sure that they know you won by delivering a final burst of justice to their face.

Door Kickers is an honourable attempt to recapture the spirit of those old tactical squad games, so much so that I would be inclined to describe it as the illicit lovechild of the classic S.W.A.T games and the Commandos series. The controls are easy to grasp and offer the potential to set up an elaborate plan of attack when taking on each mission. Unfortunately, in its current state the individual units hold little worth, and the game doesn’t necessarily punish mistakes as much as it should. The AI does a good job in keeping you on your toes during each level, but there’s little incentive to craft a master plan and then execute it like a well oiled machine.

Note: Door Kickers is an Early Access title, and in its current state it is not feature complete. This review is of the game at the time dated, and both content and quality are subject to change.

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.

Andy: So you’re about to make the leap from $1 mobile apps to fully fledged commercial PC development. Nervous?

Tom: The biggest change is that Battle Chef Brigade will take more than two months to make! There’s a lot involved in a larger game that we got to gloss over with our mobile games. We’ve had to get some help, particularly for art, sound, and music. Those changes come with a lot of challenges, of course, but it’s also really fun to let ourselves run a little wilder. We’re thrilled to be able to make multiple dollars per sale instead of pocket change. So, I’d say we’re both excited and only slightly nervous. We’ve worked on much larger projects before, especially at Wideload/Disney, so we’re not out of our depth yet!

Andy: If nothing else, having money to eat has got to be a bonus.

Tom: Absolutely!

Andy: Prior to starting work on Battle Chef Brigade, you guys published two mobile games – Colour Sheep and Orion’s Forge. Did you learn any valuable lessons from your first attempts at indie development?

Tom: Definitely. We started Trinket after having worked together for years at Wideload, but it still took some time to settle into a good workflow that respects everyone’s distinct styles. Our mobile games let us work through those issues quickly while still releasing games. On top of that, we actually started with the intention of releasing three mobile games. The third was codenamed ‘Accidents’ and ended poorly. We ended up designing ourselves into a corner, namely the Physics-Based Rube Goldberg Puzzle Corner of Doom, which taught us a bunch of lessons. Most importantly, we learned to work towards our strengths, which has gone a long way towards molding Battle Chef Brigade‘s design.

Andy: Something I’ve always wondered when I see developers from big studio teams break off and go ‘indie’. How are you finding all the extra jobs surrounding your own project? Has it been difficult to accommodate for all those extra tasks like social media and marketing now you’re flying solo?

Tom: It’s been both frustrating and educational. Accounting and legal issues are particularly bothersome and nearly always orthogonal to the game’s needs. Marketing, on the other hand, has been primarily enjoyable. Learning to talk about our games and honing our message are great general-purpose skills, for instance. None of us had Twitter accounts before Trinket, so the world of social media was scary at first. Now, however, I love getting to know people all across the globe who are also working hard on great games. Interacting with fans has been especially rewarding. It’s really too bad that development at large studios is kept so far from players.

Andy: Now cooking features pretty heavily in Battle Chef Brigade. I mean the game focuses on making the best meals from what you kill and prepare afterwards, right? It’s not a common theme to frame in a game, and most people are going to instantly think of Cooking Mama as a comparison. Do you think there’s a need to distance yourself from these ‘cooking sim’ games, and if so how do you think you’ll manage to do that?

Tom: We set a goal for ourselves to bring “Fantasy Iron Chef” to life. Iron Chef, along with nearly all cooking shows, focuses on creative cooking. Most cooking games, however, focus on player execution of by-the-book pre-determined recipes. Instead of dictating what dish to make, we want to leave as much as possible up to the player.

Of course, the choices that chefs make, particularly when targeting specific taste and texture combinations, are really complicated and often based on decades of experience. We’ve spent a huge amount of time prototyping different potential solutions to that issue. Fantasy ingredients are part of our solution, since we have more room to specify how they work. At the least, players will have a lot less intuition about dragon tail than pork chops.

Andy: So, don’t hold out any hopes for a Cooking Mama cameo then?

Tom: Probably not. We do love the personalities of real life chefs, though, and hope to incorporate some of their quirks in our chefs. Cooking Mama is pretty quirky, so perhaps we’ll find a way to slip in a joke or two.

Andy: Please tell me there’s going to be a Gordon Ramsey character somewhere…

Tom: We’ll see! He’s definitely one of our favourite chefs.

Andy: Can you walk me through a typical… match? Round? How do you see the game play out? Can we expect a storyline and campaign to push players through a series of culinary challenges to become the best?

Tom: We’re still playing around with the possibilities, but right now a round starts in the Pantry Arena. There you’ll find yourself surrounded by monsters to slay for their ingredients. The monsters, of course, will try to prevent that. The opposing chef is also battling for ingredients.

Once you’ve collected enough ingredients, the next phase is the Kitchen. There you’ll be able to grab ingredients from the ones you’ve collected and start processing them at the various tables available. The default tables include stations for chopping, boiling, sautéing, baking, and plating. Of course, you can use other tools, like bowls, rolling pins, or pasta cutters to transform your dishes further. Those can help you make dough and eventually a pie, for instance. Eventually, you’ll want to have created multiple edible dishes to serve to the judges!

Andy: This format sounds like it would slot very well alongside a multiplayer mode. Is there any notion to look into doing something like this later down the line? I can easily see tense bake-offs happening amongst players.

Tom: It sure does! For now, though, as a team of just three, we’re focusing on single-player format against an AI chef. We see the potential and hopefully either a Kickstarter or big launch will allow us to add multiplayer support. There are other cool options that provide some of that competitive fun, at least, like Spelunky’s daily challenges.

Andy: Are you aiming to fund this project entirely by yourselves, or do you foresee a crowd funding/early access decision to be made later down the line?

Tom: We’ll definitely need additional funding to keep Trinket going as our full-time jobs, so Kickstarter and/or Early Access are very likely. We think BCB is intriguing enough to raise at least some money on Kickstarter. Our original plan was to launch the Kickstarter during PAX East in April, but we decided to postpone it and focus on the demo instead.

It’s clear the guys at Trinket Studios are pouring all of their creative juices into Battle Chef Brigade, and judging by the quality of concept art and ideas being thrown around I’m eager to see how this game evolves. If like me, you want to keep tabs on the development of the game, or if you just want to watch more of these awesome eating gifs, be sure to stalk their dev blog.

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

I love a good challenge. It’s what drives me to finish a game, to gain a sense of accomplishment as I slay that final 10-headed laser boss on my 50^th attempt. FORCED provides such a challenge, where navigating its twisting corridors can lead to a brutal end for even the most prepared champion.

On the surface, FORCED is presented as a tactical arena game with a heavy focus on co-op gameplay. You assume control of an unfortunate tribesman who’s been cast into a sacrificial pit where the odds of survival are not in your favour. As you reach the bottom you’re greeted by a perky ball of light named Balfus who serves as your guide through the trials that await you. From here on you’re given access to a central hub which is separated into four different chambers. Each chamber offers five challenge rooms and a boss room that must be completed before you can move to the next chamber.

Think of this game as a gory take on the old 90’s TV show The Crystal Maze where each room presents a different themed obstacle for the players to overcome. This can range from something as simple as lighting all five torches within a set time frame, all the way to running like hell from an encroaching red mist that will consume you if you fall behind. It’s obvious from the start that the game uses simple goals to present a challenge, but as the game progresses these goals become more and more complex with various factors being added to screw you over just a little bit more each time.

You got a purdy mouth

The difficulty level maintained throughout the game is refreshing. In an environment where the average gamer is coddled and led by the hand, FORCED demands that you earn your victory each time with added bonus objectives up for grabs if you’re feeling brave. Unfortunately, this acts as a double-edged sword in which even the basic level completion tasks can be near impossible for solo play, sometimes even with two players. When all hell breaks loose, it can be difficult for a single player to juggle the various obstacles thrown at them. Some missions require you to take out numerous enemies whilst also micromanaging your spirit guide through several hoops. The co-op centred design is obvious throughout most of the game’s trials and it’s evident that this game was built with multiple players in mind. There is a slight ray of hope for solo play as each mission deviates a little based on how many players are in the game at the time. For instance, less enemies need to be killed or fewer beacons lit when you’re alone.

FORCED truly shines when playing with others so much so that I would consider it a completely different experience to the single player mode. When playing alone you are only accountable for yourself in the arena, but when multiple partners are introduced it becomes something more. You have to play as a unit, a squad working together to accomplish a shared task. This is accomplished by giving each team member control of the spirit guide Balfus. By linking several conditions to Balfus in each trial the game forces your party to communicate in an effort to control him. It’s as if he is another team member, only one that’s too lazy to move and likes to dish out witty one-liners at inappropriate intervals. In some cases, Balfus becomes a safe zone for the players, and those unlucky enough to get caught out of his circle are likely to turn into a juicy red stain on the floor.

No, not the blades! ARGH, THEY’re IN MY EYES!

Of course, this game isn’t just about challenges, and much of the trials will be split evenly between solving puzzles and fighting off hordes of monsters. To do this, you’re given the choice of four character classes, each fulfilling a typical archetype commonly found in most RPGs. The Rogue deals fast bursts of damage to single targets. The warrior deals steady AoE damage. The archer deals high ranged damage. Finally, the protector is able to absorb great amounts of damage and return it back to its source. Each class seems to have their own solution to the game’s trials, however, some are naturally more capable in certain situations based on their skill sets.

As you progress through the trials, you’ll unlock gems which give you a wider pool of skills to pick from, eventually allowing you to take multiple active and passive skills at the same time. The gem system encourages you to return to past trials to finish the bonus objectives in the hopes that you’ll gain the extra crystals to power up your characters. This is a brilliant idea for the multiplayer teams out there, but unfortunately this falls flat for solo players. This all circles back to the issues of difficulty when playing alone. Those who choose to do so will likely find that they are unable to get any of the higher-tiered skills because the bonus objectives are too difficult when playing alone.

The very essence of FORCED caters to a group of friends who are seeking a fulfilling and enjoyable cooperative experience mixed with a satisfying yet simplistic combat system and engaging challenges. Just make sure you bring a friend, otherwise you may just find yourself overwhelmed and unable to complete the trials that await you.

Overall Rating: ★★★★☆ 

What does this score mean?

FORCED is currently available for PC/Mac/Linux with a  WiiU version to follow next year. This review is based on the PC version.

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

© 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.