The puzzle element of the game is a genuinely interesting idea and the strong point of the game. Your protagonist must use their imagination to build a bridge, connecting each node with how many corresponding lines are needed depending on the markers on each node. This, however, has two major flaws. Firstly, the controls are fiddly and makes the most taxing affair of the puzzle actually getting between each node and selecting to build or delete the bridge; secondly, and this applies for the game in general, you are left to your own devices to some extent to figure out the mechanics, because the game does a poor job of explaining what needs to be achieved. The second issue coincides with the platforming side of the game and is one of many, many issues that turn a promising indie game into an infuriating experience.

You need to build bridges with your imagination to progress further.

Let’s turn to one of the worst games ever released for a major console; The Wizard of Oz (Snes 1993), which is an abhorrent game that highlights the two big no-no’s you must consider when making a platformer. Firstly, if you have a platform to jump towards and you land on the corner of said platform but fall through to your death – you have a bad platform game; secondly, if you fill the screen with small platforms but fail to tell the player that a number of areas to land on are actually fake traps – you have a bad platform game.

Now to Mega Man 2, which is an example of a good platforming game that highlights how to explain to your player that a potentially lethal trap is coming up ahead. It carefully shows, even with a subtle hint, that a trap is imminent. For example, in stage 3 of Dr Wily’s castle, the player will encounter invisible platforms like the ones found in Sententia, but the first one you fall through is only back to the floor below, meaning the player is not cheated out of a life and they now know to be careful. Now, in Sententia you have unlimited lives, so a cheap first death does not have as many potential issues that exist in Mega Man 2, but that only serves to purpose lazy game design and thus it is inexcusable.

Look easy? It isn’t.

In twenty years or so of playing any of the 2D side scrolling versions of the Super Mario Bros series have you ever felt that you died because of poor controls? It is probably only a handful of times, even if that, because the games give you full control over every jump. So death only comes at the hands of tricky platforming and well thought out game design. Sententia has neither of these things and death usually comes in the form of terrible controls or unfair enemy placement – which brings us onto combat.

There is only one mechanic for combat in the game, which comes in the form of projecting words from the avatar’s mouth towards an enemy, who in return fire back at you. It creates a unique visual that flows along nicely with the art style of the game as a whole, but the mechanic creates a level of annoyance by not giving you the ability to shoot while jumping in the air and the enemy placement at times demands the need for such ability – it just adds to the non-stop frustration. It does not even end there, because even when you kill an enemy the damn thing will respawn almost instantly, utterly defeating the purpose of having any form of combat in the first place. Getting through any screen on the game feels nothing short of a chore.

Ultimately there is small reward to be attained from playing Sententia; which is a shame, because the concept behind it is interesting. The art style is unique, albeit the animation needs refinement, and the puzzle mechanics have potential, but it is all hidden behind a mess of poor game design on even the most basic of levels.

Overall Rating: ★☆☆☆☆ 

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

Additional Sententia coverage:

Review on theXBLIG.com

Review on Clearance Bin Review

Review on Indie Gamer Chick

Review on Indie Theory

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

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.

The Indie Mine: Kris, here at The Indie Mine we became acquainted with your work around the time you were porting Hypership Out of Control! to iOS, but by then you were already a veteran of a few released games on the 360.  Going back even further, how did you get into indie development in the first place?

With my first games, I learned not to let my expectations run wild. There are lots of people making games and only a handful that strike it rich with their first couple titles. I expected too much and I was disappointed.

The Indie Mine: You’re arguably best known for your game Hypership Out of Control! and the Hypership series in general. Where did the inspiration for that game come from?

Kris Steele: I had a game on my graphing calculator in high school where you were a triangle (I think it was supposed to be a car) and you kept going faster and faster as the road you were on curved and progressively got more narrow. It was a very quick, shallow game but I liked the idea. I brought that game to space, added lots of power-ups and collectibles, and a pinch of humor. It worked out pretty well.

Retro space shooter Hypership Out of Control! in all its old-school glory

The Indie Mine: Oddly enough I know the exact game you’re talking about.  Moving on, you’ve become a well-known figure in the XBLIG development scene, but you’ve also received notoriety for your involvement in the Uprising events that indie developers have undertaken to promote XBLIG.  How did you come to be involved and what have you taken away from those events?

Kris Steele: There was an open call to XBLIG developers to submit their titles for the Winter Uprising, which I entered my game Hypership Out of Control! into. I wasn’t really involved in the heavy lifting of that promotion, I just supplied a title and did my best to let me fans know about it. There was occasional talk of another promotion for some months after that but no one really stepped up and made it happen so I decided to take a lead fearing it otherwise may never come to pass. I partnered with Dave Voyles of ArmlessOctopus.com and we collected feedback from other developers, organized voting and promotion dates, and recruited a few others to help out with the website, trailers, and music. It was really a community event.

The Indie Mine: You were recently quoted in a GamaSutra article regarding your dissatisfaction with Microsoft’s dashboard changes and the effect it’s had on XBLIG sales.  You’ve also been outspoken in other venues as well claiming that XBLIG isn’t really the way to go for indie developers to be successful.  Do you still feel this way?  Do you think there’s anything Microsoft or anyone else can do to help the service thrive?

Kris Steele: I still feel the same unfortunately. The tools for making XBLIG are really great and in that regard it’s a fantastic place to learn. But outside some pretty specific genres / game types, sales just aren’t there for most developers. I believe this to be mostly a visibility and a filtering problem. XBLIG has been moved around and push back too much on the Xbox Dashboard. Casual gamers don’t happen across it as often as they used to. Within the channel, there is a high volume of games released but no good way to tell the good from the bad. Apple has done well on the AppStore with their New and Noteworthy list, which includes quality new titles. XBLIG would benefit a lot from a setup like this rather than a straight list of new releasing being the most visible area of the channel. I believe if gamers found more high quality content, they’d come back more often.

The Indie Mine: So I take it this means you intend to steer clear of the platform going forward?  I know you’ve already ported Hypership to iOS.

Kris Steele: For my larger games, the stuff that takes 6 months or a year or more, for sure. It’s too much risk and not enough return to justify those efforts. If there is something I can do in the course of a few weeks that makes sense for the market, I wouldn’t rule it out.

The Indie Mine: What’s up next for you?  Will you be doing more ports, or do you plan to start new games and franchises on other platforms?  Do you already have some ideas in mind?

Kris Steele: Mainly I’m working on a PC port of Volchaos, a lite version of Hypership iOS, and World of Chalk, which we’ve switched from XBLIG to a PC release. When I get some of the ports done, I’d like to do a brand new iOS title next. I’ve also worked some on my next big game, which will be similar to the SNES Legend of Zelda title. But that’s still a long ways off though. 

Volchaos will be making its way from XBLIG to PC soon

The Indie Mine: What’s your end goal as an indie developer?  Do you plan to continue flying relatively solo?  Do you want to someday have a studio?  Or do you want to break into the mainstream at some point?

Kris Steele: I like to have full creative control over what I’m working on which kinda rules out working for someone else. Perhaps some day that does means having some employees if things go really well, but I’m getting by fine so far with contract work for the aspects of game development I can’t do well myself (art and music mostly).

The Indie Mine: Looking back, is there any particular game or moment you’re really proud of or that you especially look back fondly on?

Kris Steele: Hypership iOS was recently nominated for a Pocket Gamer Award for Best Action / Arcade Game (http://www.pocketgamer.co.uk/pgawards2012.asp). Considering how many thousands of mobile games are released yearly and what kind of competition we had for this award, this was huge. We didn’t win, but it was really an honor to be nominated alongside other games like Super Mario 3D Land, GTA3, and eventual winner Jetpack Joyride.

The Indie Mine: Before you go, is there any wisdom you’d like to expound either to fellow indie developers or gamers out there?

Kris Steele: Go out and make something. You’ll learn infinitely more by doing than by sitting on the sidelines. Read a game programming book, read some tutorials. There are lots of free or cheap ways to get into game programing. If you’re passionate about making games, you’ve got no excuses not to start making them right now.

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

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 gaming industry has seen a huge boom thanks to a large growth in the casual market over the last few years.  A large part of this can be attributed to pick-up-and-play, quirky titles with a simple hook.  Games like Angry Birds and Tiny Wings come immediately to mind with their short bursts of engaging entertainment.  They have a simple mechanic that’s easy to understand for casual and hardcore gamers alike.  Cute Things Dying Violently from ApathyWorks fits the same mold.  It’s one part Angry Birds, one part The Incredible Machine, one part plain insanity, and it’s downloadable right now on the Xbox as part of the Indie Games Summer Uprising event.

The game is broken up into individual stages each of which has a simple premise – you must save as many little critters as you can from the literal deathtrap of an environment.  The critters themselves are happy-go-lucky circles with legs and faces that wander aimlessly back and forth through the stage.  You must get as many of them as possible into an elevator located somewhere on each stage which you do by launching them slingshot style.  Standing in your way are various obstacles like spiked pits, fire, bombs, and a variety of physical barriers.  Helping you along the way are springs, bubble blowers, and other items that can be moved or launched just like the critters.  As the game progresses, getting the critters to the elevator becomes more and more of puzzle.  You might have to time button presses correctly to blow a fan or press buttons in a specific sequence to open up a previously-inaccessible area.  There’s a great feeling of accomplishment that comes the moment you finally figure out the trick.

What CTDV really boils down to is that this is a game that rewards you in two ways.  On the one hand you’re trying to successfully save as many of the critters as you can by solving a puzzle.  On the other you’re experimenting with the different ways to get them killed whether it be accidental or not.  Both goals provide a different sense of satisfaction and the great thing is you don’t have to necessarily pick one over the other.

While the controls are simple enough to understand, the execution can be a little difficult at times.  When you attempt to slingshot a critter or item, both the direction and power are controlled by the left analog stick.  It’s difficult to get a sense of how much power is too much power except through trial and error.  It can get a little frustrating at times when you need a slight modification to the power or aim from one missed throw to the next attempt and you end up making the same mistake again.

Mechanics aside, the real draw of the game for me was the attitude.  Your critters are flying around the screen getting sliced into bloody messes, being set on fire, being electrocuted, etc.  It’s hilarious because the critters themselves are harmless, friendly, and squeak in high-pitched voices and here you are serving them up to some grisly end.  The humor is also imbued within the tips spread throughout the game.  Many of them have a mocking nature towards you the player.  Some even have tongue-in-cheek social commentary.  The game gets bonus points for a Flying Spaghetti Monster reference.  Even the stage names themselves are parodies of famous movies, songs, etc.  The sarcasm and satire that pervade the entire game really are the icing on the cake.

While the campaign is deservedly the focus of the game, the developer has seen fit to throw in a few extra modes to extend the longevity of the experience.  There are secret bonus levels to unlock via the campaign.  There’s also a level editor that you can use.  The editor is a well put-together system, but for me it doesn’t have any lasting power unless you can trade the levels with friends.  It’s nice, though, that the developer allows you to build both single-player and multiplayer levels.  Multiplayer is unfortunately limited to local play.  Like the level editing, multiplayer really needs an online component to it.  This really isn’t the kind of game that people make specific plans to get together to play.  I also don’t think local play works in a family situation because this certainly isn’t a title for the wee ones if you’re at all hesitant about blood in your cartoon violence.

The overall package of Cute Things Dying Violently is fantastic.  This is the addictive puzzle game people have been searching for since Angry Birds started getting old.  You have a solid, addictive hook in the mechanics of the game with a layer of wit on top.  I think this game is definitely worth picking up and it wouldn’t surprise me to see it eventually end up on other platforms.  Alex Jordan of ApathyWorks even states within the game that if enough people pick it up, he’ll be able to update it with a wish list of new features. So go try it for yourself.

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