I love it when games are designed well enough that you actually feel like the character you’re controlling.  Only when the immersion is that complete do you forget for a time that you’re playing a game.  DoubleDutch Games recently released SpeedRunner HD for the Xbox 360.  It’s a game that sets you up as a comic book-style superhero trying to thwart a mad bomber’s attempts to destroy the city.  For awhile you’ll feel like a nimble, speedy acrobat capable of death-defying feats.

The crux of SpeedRunner HD is platforming at its most thrilling.  Each stage of the game tasks you with reaching an activated bomb before it’s set to destroy.  You do so with an ever-increasing arsenal of tricks at your disposal.  The game gradually progresses you from jump to doublejump to sliding, swinging with a grappling hook, and wall-hopping as the challenge of the stage layouts grow in difficulty.  Since you’re racing against the timer, ideally you want to be as slick as possible when stringing these moves together in order to not lose all momentum.  Eventually you’ll learn how to correctly time grappling under and back over a floor or to build up enough speed that you can slide under a lengthy stretch of barriers.  Combined with the high-tempo music you’ll really feel like a reskinned Spiderman zipping from one location to the next.

The visual style is an area where the game really shines.  The story melds mediums in a way that’s thoroughly enjoyable.  When playing through the adventure mode, the game sets up like a comic book.  Story sequences are told through the use of comic book-style frames as you encounter the villain of the game, the mad bomber.  Each stage is typically a dark foreground set against a brighter, but inanimate backdrop.  It reminded me a lot of Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet released earlier this summer.  A better comparison might be the art style of Genndy Tartakovsky in his Samurai Jack cartoon series with its oft-used industrial backgrounds.  I feel that we’re not quite yet to the point where this style is overused, and this interpretation still looked fantastic, particularly the red on black color scheme used on a number of the levels.

Developer DoubleDutch advertises that it’s the multiplayer mode where the game really shines, and after playing a few hours worth of it I can safely say it’s no lie.  Multiplayer supports up to four players locally, with the objective being to outrace your friends.  Going so fast you get them to fall of the edge of the screen will take away one life from their counter.  The fun factor really comes into play when you’re screwing your friends over with various items you can pick up like boxes to drop in their paths or hook claws that will shoot forward and pull an opponent back to where you are.  There are about half a dozen maps to choose from, though some work better than others.  One or two of them had areas where if you died, once you restarted you’d immediately die again ad nauseum until you were knocked out of the match.  I honestly don’t have too many other gripes with the game, but the lack of an online multiplayer component is one, albeit minor. I realize that not much beats four buddies getting together on the couches for some competitive gaming, but any multiplayer game with more than a couple of players should support an online mode.  These issues aren’t enough to take away from the pure joy that is competing against your friends.

As good a game as SpeedRunner HD is, the brevity of its single player campaign makes this feel more like an appetizer.  I could easily see this being the start of a series that really fleshes out the comic book aspects of the story along with perhaps adding extra moves and environments.  While I feel justified in the 240 Microsoft points price, not everyone will feel that way.  If you think you’ll be able to make use of the local-only multiplayer, absolutely buy this game.  Otherwise, be forewarned that as much you’ll likely enjoy the game, it will leave you wanting more.

Overall Rating: ★★★★☆ 

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

Things didn’t start off promising for Take Arms by Discord Games.  Originally slated to release in the middle of the Indie Games Summer Uprising event, the game was delayed to fix some last-minute issues.  Indie games,  particularly on the Xbox 360, already face an uphill battle in terms of gaining recognition and support.  The short delay was well worth it as the developer has given us a multiplayer shooter worth recommending to your friends.

There are no frills to Take Arms.  Simply put it’s a 2D shooter with a heavy focus on multiplayer.  A lot of people are calling it a 2D Counterstrike.  There are no introductions, tutorials, or help of any kind which is a bit of a disappointment.  It’s up to you to figure out that the game has three different player classes to choose from, each with their perks and weaknesses in terms of speed, toughness, and weapons.  An explanation of the button layout can be accessed from the menu system.  Even though it’s on you to figure out the nuances of the game, it’s far less imposing than jumping into more mainstream series like Call of Duty or Battlefield.  That’s something a novice like me can both appreciate and commend.

The game does include solo play vs. bots which is a nice way of getting yourself acquainted with the controls and the three available maps.  Movement is controlled with the left analog stick while your aim is controlled with the right.  It can take a little while to get used to running and gunning, or learning how to lob grenades at the proper angle to not get yourself killed.  I found that within an hour of playing, though, I had a pretty good handle on what it took to become a respectable killing machine.  Certain information, like how to switch to a first-person sniper view, was only obtained by going to the developer forums. Even though it helps to have the twitch reflexes of a seasoned gamer, I feel like this is the kind of title that’s accessible to a broader audience than what you’d find with a traditional shooter.

Another element that I love about shooters is stat-tracking.  While Take Arms doesn’t boast the kind of numbers and factoids you’ll find in blockbuster shooters coming from major publishers, anyone interested in their performance will appreciate what Discord Games has provided.  You’ll get standards like kill-to-death ratio and accuracy stats, as well as information on how often you play each player type.  There’s even a leveling system as you earn XP, but I haven’t found any purpose to it so far other than bragging rights and knowing which players are probably going to be tougher to beat.

I was genuinely surprised by Take Arms.  Even though I used to play the occasional fast-paced, short-burst 3D shooters, I wasn’t really expecting to be won over by a title that had trouble even getting out of the gate.  Giving the trial a go showed me that the mechanics were solid and the game ran smoothly.  Playing a few rounds of Capture the Flag with a large group of live people ended up being some of the most pure, frenetic joy that I’ve had in awhile on the 360.  Knowing that the developer intends to support the game with patches and updates only gives me more reason to recommend it.  While I wish that there was some kind of tutorial or help system within the game, it’s only one knock against what’s otherwise a fun new title in the Indie Marketplace. For more information about the game, check out discordgames.com.

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

Brandon:  Well thank you for taking the time to speak with us today.  First, congratulations on having been selected to this year’s Indie Games Summer Uprising event.  How did you find out you made the final cut and what was your reaction?

Alex:  Thanks! It was really thrilling to make the final cut, I think I was doing laps around my apartment when I found out. Basically, I was sitting at my computer on July 18th, feverishly refreshing Twitter, my email, and the Indie Games Summer Uprising site, waiting to see which would update first. I can’t remember which did, but when I finally saw the voting results, it was a huge rush. CTDV grabbed 6th place and wound up only being 2 votes away from missing the cut entirely, so I added a dash of panic to my enthusiasm: “Oh my God, I have about a month to make this the best game ever so that I don’t waste this opportunity.”

Brandon:  How did you actually feel about your game when it came time to release it?  I know that software’s never “done”, but were you satisfied with the job you’d done?

Alex:  I was very pleased with the game when it came time for release. Most of the major gameplay coding had been wrapped up by December, and I’d used the intervening several months to further refine things, so pretty much nothing wound up in the final build that I thought, “This is broken, I’ll have to fix this later.” I have a ton of additional content planned for future patches to the game, but it wouldn’t have made sense to delay release for months on end to get it all added up front. I think it’ll be nice to show appreciation to the people who bought it by continuing to give them new content as I add it.

As for the literal moment of releasing the game, that felt wonderful! I released it from my iPhone while I was out with friends, eating Ethiopian food and drinking way too much honey wine on a work night.

Brandon:  How has the general response been from players?  Everything seems to be very positive via twitter.

Alex: Most of the responses have ranged from good to gushing. Some players are treating it as a fun diversion while others have been blown away by it, which makes me incredibly happy, of course. I’m really not sure how things are going on the word-of-mouth front, but the emails and Tweets that I’ve had directed at me have been overwhelmingly positive. As for the game reviews, those have been mostly good to great as well. The few reviewers that either haven’t liked the game or had significant reservations seemed to be bothered by the controls. Because I have it in my power to address these complaints, my first CTDV patch will add either a way to preview the shot you’re about to make, a “ghost” visualization of your previous shot, or both. I think those additions will retain the core physics/puzzler/platformer gameplay while giving people on the fence about the controls another reason to try or like the game.

Brandon: As gamers it’s always rewarding to know that a developer’s taking our words to heart on where a game could use a tweak here or a correction there.  By now you probably know that we loved the game.  I’m curious, though, to know if there were other games, movies, shows, anything really that you feel inspired either the premise of the game or the brand of humor you used?  Bonus points for the Flying Spaghetti Monster reference.

Alex:  My first inspiration was the nontraditional use of analog sticks in recent sports games, like rotating the analog stick to swing a golf club or what have you. I wanted to make a game with nontraditional controls like that and the flicking mechanic seemed like a neat idea. (In its original inception, instead of letting go of the stick to flick things, you’d push the stick quickly in the complete opposite direction. You could even rotate it to add some spin on your objects, like with a tennis ball. That… that was only a good idea in theory.)

As I’ve said elsewhere, games like Angry Birds, Super Meat Boy, and Lemmings weren’t inspirations. I live in a cave on Mars, so I hadn’t heard of the first two and I’d never played the third when I came up with the concept for CTDV. I like to think of CTDV as a kindred spirit to them, though. On the list of games I actually had heard of and played, I was quite taken with the feel of World of Goo and Worms and adopted a little of their magic.

As for the sense of humor? That’s entirely my own. I’m not sure at what point I consciously decided to make CTDV a funny game… I think I kept coming to points in the design process where I had to write something descriptive for levels or for menus, and I just kept coming up with amusing one-liners to stick in there. Before all was said and done, I was up to my neck in sarcasm, puns, and smartass-ery.

Brandon:  Well I really thought it was the humor that knocked the game out of the park and made it a no-brainer for the Summer Uprising selection process.  How has your experience been with the event?  Was there anything in particular where you can see improvements being made?  And do you feel that Microsoft is doing enough to promote indie developers?

Alex:  My experience with the Uprising has been overwhelmingly positive. I’ve met a ton of cool developers and the whole thing has been an amazing vehicle for spreading word about our games. There’s room for improvement, like with most things, but I’m not quite sure where to begin. Lots of the identified issues, like the severe drop in media coverage during the second week, have subjective responses. Do we bundle all the games together up front in a single week? Do we spread it out more over a month? Do we wait for the perfect period to do an Uprising so that we don’t have to contend with events like DreamBuildPlay and PAX, which preoccupy journalists? I’m not sure.

As for Microsoft, beyond the fact that they’ve given me an amazing opportunity in the form of XNA and XBLIG, they’re doing a lousy job of promoting indie developers. Xbox Live Indie Games is an unregulated market, which is a good thing because it allows pretty much any developer to take advantage of it, but Microsoft hasn’t given anyone the tools to separate the cream from the crop. The clunkiness of the Xbox Dashboard certainly doesn’t help. And Microsoft can hardly ever run promotions because they won’t (and shouldn’t) detract from the attention that Xbox Live Arcade developers and publishers pay good money for. There’s too much tension there for XBLIG to grow beyond its current form.

I guess the moral is that Microsoft is bad about promoting XBLIG developers, but will they be good about turning XBLIG developers into XBLA developers? That’s something I’m interested in seeing a better answer to.

Brandon:  So with this summer’s event over, what can we expect going forward from Alex Jordan?  I know you’ve mentioned some control updates to Cute Things Dying Violently.  Are there specific plans to further support the game?  Is there another game you’re making or would like to make?

Alex:  Although the Uprising is over, I’m just getting started. First I’m going to patch CTDV and add the additional aiming tools, level rebalancing, bug fixes, etc. Since the game seems to be relatively popular, I want to keep supporting it over the next several months. My biggest priority after the first patch is to add a level sharing hub so that the best custom levels can get greater exposure. I also want to start adding new objects and a fluid system to play with. After that, it’ll be time to start thinking about a CTDV sequel, but we’ll see.

I’m not working on any other projects at the moment, but there’s a ton that I have planned. My brother and I will begin work on a 3D platformer in the near future, for one thing. We’ve been working on the design document for that one for quite a bit. I also have grandiose ideas for a horror game and an RPG, but God knows where I’d find the time for those right now. I have a 48 hour imagination stuck in a 24 hour day!

Brandon:  I know exactly what you mean when it comes to a lack of time.  Well before I let you go, is there anything you’d like to say to everyone who hasn’t had a chance to try Cute Things Dying Violently? 

Alex:  I’d find some indirect way of saying, “GIVE ME YOUR DOLLAR.” Something humble and contrite, like, “I’d really like gamers to at least try the demo. There’s a lot of content that might appeal to all sorts of players – challenging puzzles, cartoony gore, a sense of humor, a long singleplayer campaign, fake achievements called Achieve Mints, special challenge levels, local multiplayer, a level editor – so it’s well worth your time to look into it. I hope you like it!”

I’d also add something magnanimous like, “You should also check out the rest of the games in the Summer Uprising promotion, because it’s got a bunch of fantastic titles that have been released by talented developers.” Except I can’t really be sarcastic about that, because it’s got a bunch of fantastic titles that have been released by talented developers. Please check out their stuff and support them!

Thanks!

© 2011, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

The developers have billed this game as a train simulator/landscape modeler.  As to the former, you’re tasked with constructing a railway in any sort of way you see fit.  There are no goals here.  You don’t even have to create a safe and functional railway.  I did find the lack of a tutorial disappointing.  The game throws a tip at you here and there, but it’s really on you to figure out what works and what doesn’t.  It’s only through trial and error that you’ll find out you made a turn too sharp or that the land wasn’t flat enough to sustain high speeds.  Hopefully this is something that can be addressed in a future update.

Once you’ve laid down some track, you can switch modes to pilot the train.  I actually found this quite enjoyable as you have control over the throttle and brake, a forward and reverse setting, and a switch to pick which track to ride on if you have multiple paths at a crossroads.  There are also multiple camera views to switch between including an in-car view.  You can customize the number of train cars behind the engine as well as pick the style.  Nothing creates an epic wreck like a string of half a dozen cars or more.  You can also share your maps with friends.

Ride your train in multiple views including in-cabin

In terms of the landscape modeler, the most impressive feature is that you have control over terrain elevation.  You can select a spot and either raise or lower it.  If there happens to be track already located in the location, it will either rise with the land or automatically create a bridge for you if the ground is removed from beneath it.  It’s fun in a sandbox sort of way.  You have a full toolbox of structures to add as scenery including factories, farms, fences, etc.  I imagine that when you can really spend a lot of time and sink yourself into designing a really fleshed out town it’s really rewarding to sit back and your ride your train through it.

For a game that allows you to spend so much time designing, you’ll probably spend a fair amount of that time fighting the controls.  Without a doubt I would’ve picked the game up if it were on PC and used a mouse and keyboard.  It was far too frustrating using the Xbox controller to move the camera around between areas of the map quickly.  I could never zoom out as far as I would’ve liked to get a more global view of the track.  Very quickly I’d lose track of where my rail line started and hence had issues circling back to it to complete the circuit.  I feel like that the use of a mouse and keyboard would’ve shaved off a good percentage of the track design time by allowing me to place a piece of track exactly where I wanted and at the angle I wanted.  These are all issues you can certainly work around with a bit of practice, but to a new player it’s a bit of a turn off.

As mentioned, these are only impressions from the trial, which I played through about half a dozen times.  I’m not just trying to spin a positive tale when I say I like the promise I see in a game like this.  However, it feels like there’s still more work for the developer to do.  In the end you might not even enjoy the game because it’s really on you the ‘player’ to determine how much you get out of the experience by how much you put in.  Because we’re an indie site and I believe in supporting indie developers, I still feel like everyone should go give the trial a try and see for yourself whether you agree.

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

I’m an old-school gamer at heart.  I grew up playing RPGs in the Dragon Warrior/Dragon Quest series and in recent years I’ve devoured indie versions like Breath of Death VII and Cthulhu Saves the World.  So when I heard about the Xbox Live release of Doom & Destiny as part of the Indie Games Summer Uprising event, I was really excited for another traditional role-playing experience.  While the premise, humor, and style of the game are top-notch, unfortunately a number of poor design choices and a lack of polish keep this out of the upper echelon in the genre.

The game’s premise itself is so promising and rife for humor.  Four friends are meeting up at another friend’s house for a round of D&D only to find that the friend is missing and that there’s a dungeon underneath his house.  From there it gets even more bizarre as the four remaining friends are pulled into another dimension.  This strange world is in need of heroes and its people have randomly pulled these nerds in to help stop the great villain, Unnamed.

There are a few recurring themes throughout the story.  The four ‘Heroes’ are constantly ridiculed by others and each other.  The “You guys suck” motif that occurs with everyone they encounter started wearing on me after awhile.  However, I never got tired of the intra-team conversations.  Each of the four guys has their own personality and quirks and while it’s predictable how they’ll each react in a particular situation, it doesn’t make it any less funny or enjoyable.

Another theme worth mentioning for both its merits and demerits are the number of cultural references in the game.  Everything from Final Fantasy and The Legend of Zelda to the A-Team, Flying Spaghetti Monster, Lord of the Rings and many, many more.  At first it was clever and humorous and rekindled fond memories of the Zeboyd Games titles mentioned earlier.  However, here the developers took it a few steps too far.  There are entire sections of the game that are playing off of other games or movie plots.  I couldn’t help but feel like I was stuck in a Wayans brothers movie.  It never made me want to stop playing the game, but it certainly lost its charm over me.

The dialogue is another mixed bag.  Like I mentioned before, I absolutely love the conversations within the team.  Even a lot of the conversations between the team and other characters are great too.  The personalities really shine through and the use of dialogue ‘asides’ was a nice touch.  However this is also the area where the game shows how unpolished it is.  In an RPG, you expect to find a typo or two in such a massive amount of text.  Here, however, the misspellings, grammatical mistakes, etc. never end and actually seem to get worse the further in you play.  It really takes you out of the mood of the game when a cringe-worthy mistake is spotted and it happens far too often.

The battle system, for the most part, is pretty good.  You play in a traditional RPG turn-based style with random battles.  The stats break down into 4 categories: Strength, Charisma, Grit, and Dexterity.  Each of those categories affects how hard you hit, how effective your spells are, how good you are at evading attacks, etc. Nothing terribly new here.  A nice addition I hadn’t seen before in an RPG was the battle meter at the top that continuously keeps track of the queue of player and enemy turns so you know whose turn it will always be next.  This can help you in a lot of your decision-making.

I was not a fan of the skills system in the game.  Skills are either spells or other abilities you call on during a fight.  As you level up a particular stat category you can equip more and more skills that you usually have to purchase.  Most RPGs I’ve played have you earning skills simply by leveling up.  In this game, it’s much more difficult to keep your players battle-ready with a full arsenal of skills because you’re having to spend your money on equipment or healing aids.  Even when you do have these abilities at your disposal, they use so much mana that you can only call them a few times before you’re out of resources.  You can replenish that mana with supplies, but the enemies so infrequently drop items and towns are so few and far between that you’ll often have your characters relegated to simply doing standard physical attacks.  It was a very poor design decision.

One of the things I really liked about Cthulhu Saves the World is that prior to every boss fight there’s a save area that will automatically max out your hit points and mana and allow you to save the game.  There’s no such luxury here.  In fact, if you don’t remember to save your game frequently you’ll encounter the same frustration I did.  I had a party wipe and lost about an hour’s worth of gametime because the game takes you back to your last save when you die.  I’ll take an experience points loss, gold reduction, or some other penalty every time before I’d use a system like this.  In this game’s defense, however, it does warn you at the beginning to save often.

It’s not too often that a full-fledged RPG comes out in the Xbox Live Indie Games market.  So when one finally does appear, I feel it necessary to forcefully suppress my excitement and dissect it without the use of rose-tinted glasses.  Doom & Destiny does a lot of things well.  It embraces nerd culture even if in a self-deprecating way.  It offers some useful and unique battle mechanics I’d never seen in an XBLIG role-playing game.  However the game is also plagued with a number of minor miscues.  There’s nothing wrong in a game-breaking way, but it’s enough to remind you that this is not a retail release by a development studio with tons of Q.A. resources.  Typically at this point I’d recommend to the reader to go download and play the trial, but I feel I should also mention that the trial is different than most available on the market.  Instead of allowing you to play the first 8-10 minutes of the game, the trial will instead bounce you around various parts of the game.  You can still get a decent feel for the mood, story, and gameplay, but it might be a bit confusing.  With more time to give a game a little more love, I’m curious to see what developer HeartBit Interactive can do next.

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

T.E.C. 3001 from Phoenix Game Studios debuted this past week as part of the Indie Games Summer Uprising event on the Xbox 360.  The premise is quite simple.  You must guide a sprinting robot from start to finish of every level while collecting a minimum number of batteries scattered around.  You must do this while avoiding colliding with any structures or plummeting to your death.  The high level of difficulty combined with a complete absence of story make this game feel very much like an arcade machine from days gone by.

I haven’t played a game with this much of a sense of speed since F-Zero GX on the Nintendo Gamecube.  As soon as a level starts you’re immediately running forward in a 3rd-person view behind the robot.  There’s no way to manually slow yourself down or turn around.  Often you’re left with making split-second decisions on which path to take when the road suddenly forks or an insurmountable wall comes up.  At times you’ll be going so fast you feel like you’re hanging on for dear life waiting desperately for that next checkpoint to appear so you won’t have to repeat a harrowing section over again.  There are the occasional speed up and speed down areas that you can run over to adjust your speed, but it’s up to you to figure out when you need to use them and to make sure you react quickly enough to handle the change.

Ironically the speed of the game is both its greatest strength and biggest flaw.  While it’s exhilarating to eke through a long jump or narrowly avoid a collision with a wall, it can also be frustratingly difficult at times.  While the game often makes it seem like you have the choice of taking one path over another or that the speed up or speed down pads are optional, at times that choice is just an illusion.  It’s only through trial and error that you see that you should’ve made one decision over another, i.e. you needed that spped boost to be able to jump a particularly long gap.  Mind you this is not very often the case and instead the game is usually very open and non-linear, but not always.  I don’t mind a little challenge in my games and I don’t think anyone should expect to complete each level successfully during their first run of it.

I absolutely loved the mechanics of moving in the game.  Aside from running, most often you’ll be using either a standard jump or double-jump.  There’s also a slide that forces the robot very nearly horizontal with the ground to slip under walls that have gaps underneath.  I was reminded a bit of the slide mechanic in Vanquish.  There’s also a dash move that can be used to break through glass panels or in combination with your double-jump for crossing large pits.  It’s really a thrill to link a series of these actions together such as sliding under a wall only to immediately have to double-jump over another.  The robot animates fairly well and I liked that landing on a lower platform will cause the character to land in a roll which can affect your recovery time before being able to jump again.  Other mechanics open up later in the game, but I’d rather not spoil any surprises here.

The experience of playing the game also includes a Tron-like visual landscape complete with dark structures highlighted in bright neon accents.  I actually enjoyed the simplistic style.  Too much eye candy would force you, the player, to lose focus.  For a game that moves this fast, loss of focus almost certainly means you’ll be dying a lot.  There was one aspect, however, that I found to be a bit annoying.  Running through a particular gate type on each level would force the color pallete to switch.  I found that a bit jarring at first but learned to ignore it.  You can also go into the settings at any time and change the pallete manually if the current one is too distracting or otherwise not to your liking.

The game gives you a grade on your performance after you complete each stage.  I don’t know what the exact formula is, but it seems to at least be a combination of how many batteries you’ve collected along with how many objects you were able to smash through.  Being under the pressure to get a review out, I didn’t really find myself going back to better my performance, but I can definitely see how some might be motivated.  It’s a real shame that XBLIG titles can’t have online leaderboards because an arcade-style game like this would be perfect for it.

Up until now, you’ve probably noticed that this review has been a mixed bag of lauding and complaining.  To set the record straight, T.E.C. 3001 is a good game, but it’s not for everybody.  It’s not so much that the learning curve is steep, because the game helps by easing you into new mechanics over time.  It’s more that the game is just plain hard.  Dodging walls and other objects at breakneck speeds is tough enough.  Then the game throws a curveball at you by presenting you with path choices that can either make your journey difficult or even more difficult.  I believe everyone should try the game, but it was really designed for the hardcore crowd with twitch reflexes and a lot of commitment.

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

The inaugural Indie Games Summer Uprising has finally begun and the first entrant, Raventhorne by Milkstone Studios, has come out of the gate a day early.  While most games can take up to 24 hours to get through the review process and go live, this title made it in a mere hour on Sunday and jumped the intended release date of Monday.  No one’s complaining, though, as the excitement has been building up within the indie dev and gaming community for the event to finally start.

Raventhorne is a Norse epic telling the story of a fallen warrior battling his way to the truth behind his demise all while helping to hold off Ragnarok from occurring.  It’s a rather lofty plot for the types of games we typically see on XBLIG.  The introduction to the story is presented to your character through three creatures that appear to inform you of what’s going on and what you must do.  I was a little put off at first when I spotted a typo within the first minute of playing, but aside from that the production quality seems to be right up there with the best in the XBLIG market.  I’m very curious to see how the remained of the story is presented and what it will entail.

Your character, Raventhorne, is drawn and animated well both while moving and during battle.  You have a number of controls at your disposal including both a strong and weak attack, blocking, dodges, stances, and more.  As you progress through the environments, markers are set up that each include a tip on how the controls work or strategies that might help you as you learn the game.

As you battle each foe, your stamina meter slowly decreases.  Letting it drop all the way down will make you vulnerable to damage, represented by your life meter.  In other words, the game is designed such that you shouldn’t waste too many attacks or button mash.  You can slowly build up your special meter through defeating enemies and collecting gems scattered through the game.  Filling up the meter will allow you to activate one of four temporary powers of your choosing that will either give you a buff or hurt the enemies.

Sadly the trial is only long enough to throw a few enemy types at you, but it was enough to get a feel that the combat is solid.  It’s a balance between slipping in attacks while dodging or blocking those from the enemies.  The game will often throw multiple enemies at you from every direction so it’s important that you keep a defensive mindset rather than run in Rambo-style.  In fact, the game even rewards you for your well-timed blocks.

I was impressed with what the trial had to offer: a solid combat system, excellent visuals (not just for an indie game), and an intriguing story.  As always, I recommend you try before you buy, but with the start of the Indie Games Summer Uprising event, this is definitely the time to start trying.

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

Week 1

• Mon Aug 22^nd - Raventhorne
• Tues Aug 23^rd – Battle High: San Bruno
• Wed Aug 24^th - Cute Things Dying Violently
• Thurs Aug 25^th - T.E.C. 3001
• Fri Aug 26^th - Doom and Destiny

Week 2

• Mon Aug 29^th - Take Arms
• Tues Aug 30^th - SpeedRunner HD
• Wed Aug 31^st –Train Frontier Express
• Thurs Sept 1^st - Fan vote #1
• Fri Sept 2^nd – Fan vote #2

Source: Official Announcement

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

Earlier this year I developed an interest in the idea of creating my own indie game which led to me purchasing a license from Microsoft to develop for their platforms.  Ever since then I’ve paid close attention to the issues developers have had with developing for the Xbox Live Indie Marketplace.  A lot of people complain about how little exposure Microsoft gives to those developers, instead choosing to feature only those games released through Xbox Live Arcade.  Others complain about the amount of throw-away titles cluttering up the space, not allowing the best and brightest to shine through.

Different people have come up with different solutions.  Some developers have left and gone to other platforms, while others have chosen to support multiple platforms.  However, not everyone is ready to give up on the Indie Marketplace.  A group of developers have banded together in attempt to garner attention for those titles they feel showcase the best the Marketplace has to offer.

They’re calling the event the Indie Game Summer Uprising.  As as a community they’ve selected eight titles that they’ll promote and release from August 22nd-September 2nd.  They’re also opening up fan voting to select two additional titles.  Voting is scheduled to run from August 1st-16th.  The eight titles selected are showcased in the video below.

On a personal level, I think this is an amazing idea.  It’s a shame that the community has had to step up to perform the duties that I feel Microsoft should, but they’re doing it.  As a game player and reviewer, I find it difficult to pick through the garbage in the Indie Marketplace to find something worth posting about.  I think this will be a great help. I think I’d like it a little better if they gave each game a week’s worth of promotion before moving on to the next, but for me at least this is a good place to start in terms of being able to go straight to a game that’s more than likely worth playing.

It probably goes without saying to stay tuned to The Indie Mine for coverage of all of these games.  The poll for the final two game selections is open to everyone and will be made available through the site’s Facebook page.  Help do your part by spreading the word and checking out these games.

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