Danmaku? I barely know you.

Any discussion of twin-stick shooters starts with Robotron and ends with Geometry Wars. The formula is very simple, in that you move with one joystick and shoot with the other. Being able to duck off to the side while you’re shooting enemies chasing behind you is one of the most powerful legacies left behind by the coin-operated arcade machine. Other unique controls included twisting paddle knobs on top of the joystick like you had in Ikari Warriors, or the complex thumb buttons and triggers of the original Tron game. But the twin sticks were most easily duplicated with home gaming equipment, and the advent of analog controllers meant more precision without sacrificing the simplicity (or the addictive nature) of the games. Twin stick shooters are easy to learn and remain reliably entertaining today.

These instructions also apply to high school and certain sections of Damascus.

Let’s get the few negative things out of the way first. It’s evident that the writing isn’t being done by a native English speaker, what with all the improper verb tenses and the odd sentence fragments, to say nothing of the story built entirely out of cliche. The music is one long boring Casio-synthesized string crescendo that wouldn’t be out of place at Walt Disney World’s Tomorrowland. Also, some of the graphical features are uninformative or distracting. Why do enemies sometimes change color when I hit them? Do one of the six text boxes in my heads-up display tell me? I can’t read anything anyway through all of the unnecessary flak explosions that are flashing everywhere for hours after somebody dies. There are also a couple of extra game modes that give you side-scrolling and static enemy shooter modes that are fun for exactly as much time as it takes to say “Gradius!” or “Galaga!” before you turn them off and go back to the main campaign mode.

Any astronomy student would be happy to help out with the language and terminology for a case of beer.

But what a campaign mode it is. Defenders of the Last Colony borrows the best feature of Geometry Wars: Galaxies, by structuring play around different levels and different goals. The beta only provides two of these levels, but they successfully convey the variety of challenge that awaits you in the full game. The first level makes you collect resources to move on, which is strange because you’re spending very little time killing things. That worry goes away in the second level, where you have to split your attention between collecting that fuel and fighting off the enemies that threaten your mother ship. It’s a level of tactical thinking that’s not usually present in a twin-stick shooter, and at a certain point the option of having three other players on the same screen starts to make sense. Teamwork can make some of the challenges reasonable, if not any easier.

There’s a lot to like about the original design choices too. Each player’s ship is surrounded by a simple status indicator that shows shields remaining and resources collected. That feature neatly solves the problem of output display meant for multiple players, since everybody will naturally be looking at his or her own ship anyway. One type of ship can use materials to switch weapons, whereas the other can actually build stations and floating weapon platforms as you would in a real-time strategy game. There’s also a cleverly informative radar on top of your ship that indicates the position of the closest enemies, and with multiple players it’s possible to triangulate an off-screen target. That becomes important when the action is zoomed in close, and the camera points away from the mother ship that you’re spending so much time protecting.

If Namco hasn’t sued Gameloft yet, they probably won’t sue you for this either.

Defenders of the Last Colony is a promising first effort from the Knitted Pixels development group. It strikes a competent balance between the familiar and the innovative.

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

Indie developers Box Jellyfish Studios have released a demo for their upcoming platformer Reflexio. The game originally started as a college project and was so well received that the five members decided to make it a full-fledged commercial game. It even took two category wins at the Cornell GDIAC 2011 Showcase.

I took the opportunity to play through the PC demo which includes around a dozen or so levels. The goal of each level is to collect all keys on the stage which will open a door to get to the next level. The game does a good job of slowly walking you through the controls which start as basic directional movements and jumps, but eventually work their way up to manipulating the majority of the stage. The hook of Reflexio is that you can pivot certain types of blocks, keys, and the exit across axes. Each stage has different horizontal, vertical, and diagonal axes that you can swap between in order to shift those objects and yourself towards your goal.

Flip the world on its axis to avoid perilous obstacles

There’s an experimental factor when you combine the jumping platforming elements with the environmental changes that favorably compares to games like Portal or to a lesser extent a strictly environmental physics game like Cut the Rope. While the tutorial stages do a good job of showing you how the mechanics work, there’s still a bit of a learning curve when you mix in timed jumps to the equation. That’s not to say it’s painful. I very much enjoyed the trial-and-error aspect when filling in the gaps the tutorial doesn’t cover. The demo has some clever uses of the mechanics and I’m interested to see whether they extend the bag of tricks throughout the full game.

The presentation in Reflexio trends towards cutesy. Your main character is a koala carrying an umbrella and wearing a diaper. The music is upbeat. warm, and cheery, but that completely belies the difficulty involved in mastering the game. It all works though. Aside from the initial reaction, I never felt like I was playing a children’s game.

I had a lot of fun playing the early build of this puzzle game and I’m anxious to see what the full version has in store. The Reflexio demo is available right now for PC, and that version will release on May 1st through Desura, IndieCity, and directly through the Reflexio website. The release date for the planned Xbox version is still TBD.

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

In the same way that every board game shares a number of default mechanisms, every SRPG has in common a number of gameplay features that make it familiar and welcoming. Servants of God puts you on a square grid map, and by turns your troops and your enemies jockey for position and attack one another. Not every battle is a fight to the death, as different victory goals are stated for each battle. You might be required to hold a particular position, or to escape from a superior force. In between battles there are more traditional RPG game elements, in a mechanism borrowed from Shining Force III that puts a town and a barracks in place of a boring statistical menu. A player can expect dialogue exchanges that impart narrative, or free exploration segments where you meet new characters and discover new quests to complete.

Servants of God has some interesting and unique qualities that set it apart. Rather than a modern military environment (like Nintendo’s Advance Wars) or a western medieval world, the game is set in a fictional middle eastern universe that bravely evokes images of ancient Ottoman and Moorish culture. The detailed dialogue exchanges also imply that there are consequences to the different choices, as it’s possible to be polite or rude to your allies or to the various people you meet. These are the sort of details that indicate a lot of love and effort went into creating the game world, and making a player care about more than just moving soldiers around on a map.

A couple of design choices are a little worrying. Both battles and exploration show all the characters from a literal overhead viewpoint, in that you’re looking straight at the top of everyone’s head. That sometimes makes it hard to distinguish among your troops during a fight, and the lack of detail is only accentuated by the elaborate character portraits you see outside of battle. There also doesn’t seem to be any way to resize the game window or run in full screen, which might be a limitation of the Adobe Air environment used for development. It’s evident from the meaty icons, large fonts and the lack of drop-down menus that the user interface was intended to be ported to touchscreen devices at some point in the future. That means a player has to click the mouse a little more than you might in any other game intended solely for PC. There’s also a small problem with the pathfinding during battle, in that your troop movement limitations are calculated literally rather than relatively. In other words, moving back and forth twice between two spaces on the grid  counts as five units of movement rather than just one, which forces you to reset and try to move your character again. That’s different from the way every other SRPG calculates movement.

But those are minor complaints that are mostly outweighed by the grin-inducing sense of fun you get from playing. Small strategic details like flank attacks and ranged weapon usage are exactly right. The conflict that drives the game is worldly and political, but the main character’s quest is a personal one about family. There’s even an in-game explanation for why you’re able to see the position of every fighter on the battlefield, which is a detail that isn’t usually addressed in an SRPG of any type or setting. What’s most inspiring about the game is the novelty of the setting, which never seems to wear itself out.  The good qualities of the game thoroughly overshadow the issues.

A demo of Telepath RPG: Servants of God is available on the Sinister Games website, and the full game is expected to be released in February with a retail price of $24.95.

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

The setting is the most interesting part of the game, a cel-shaded island paradise that wouldn’t have been out of place on the Nintendo 64 or the Dreamcast. The laid-back cartoon physics of the puzzles are certainly reminiscent of Banjo-Kazooie, and the faux-Caribbean structures and music pleasantly recall Samba de Amigo. These qualities aren’t good enough to distract from the fiddly gameplay, which on the first level is repetitive and more than a little tedious.

Since your flying whales can’t actually interact with the environment, you’re dependent on the other characters to do your dirty work. This generally involves picking them up, and then using their unique gadget to drag something, push something, or flip something over. This is fine when you just need to put weight on a floor switch or move a large obstacle. But when multiple puzzles are nailed together in separate rooms, the game becomes a frustrating marriage of fetch quests and unavoidable backtracking. I have to go over the stream to push the little guy onto the switch using the magic animal flute, then I have to come back over the stream and switch to the grappling plunger so I can rotate the lever that moves the ski lift so I can get the second guy over to the second switch. But wait, the second guy isn’t on the lift yet, so I have to switch back to the flute to push him into the seat and then switch back to the grappler… And now I’m ready to download Daytona. There’s intriguing potential for two simultaneous players to cooperate for puzzle solving, but imprecise control and an annoying crosshair reticule don’t make me anxious to try that feature out.

Will kids warm to this game with no licensed characters and no marketing outside of PSN? That’s for parents to decide. Ten years ago this game would have merited a budget release on a disk for $30. Is it worth $14.99 to download the full game? Let your child try the demo first and see if she asks for more.

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