Mount Your Friends is a game in which you control several half-naked bodybuilders by taking control of their arms and legs individually. When a limb comes into contact with another surface the limb will latch on, affording you an anchor point with which to pivot the rest of your body around. Those familiar with games like QWOP or Surgeon Simulator will easily recognize the mechanics at play here, in which the entertainment stems from the sheer difficulty involved with controlling several appendages at the same time, and the aftermath that usually follows when you inevitably fail to do so.

After the first few matches, manoeuvres will start to become more aggressive as you learn how to manipulate your clingy muscle folk in a way that would make Spiderman blush. Since everything you do is affected by gravity and momentum, it’s possible to swing across large distances using the perfect combination of timing and thrust. Of course, these advanced and hugely rewarding tactics come at the cost of being somewhat risky. One false move or misaligned vault across the chasm of man-thighs could cause you to take a tumble down the beef fortress, sealing your fate in the process. All of this combines to make a dynamic of risk vs. reward play, and the resulting successes or failures are what make each match entertaining.

There are a slew of modes included within the game to keep potential ‘mounters’ busy, but the main draw and indeed the focus of the title itself is the concept of mounting your own friends. Available for both local and online multiplayer, the standard mode will see you battling against your opponents as you clamber on top of one another. Each player takes turns adding to an ever expanding tower of oiled men until it gets to a point where the man-statue is so large that you or your opponent cannot scale it within the 60 second time slot granted per turn.

Other modes are on hand to offer alternative objectives, like sprints across great distances and duels with head-mounted swords, and whilst they are entertaining to try out it’s disappointing to see that most are locked to either single player sessions or local multiplayer. It’s worth noting that whilst the single player modes are entertaining to try out, they soon offer little motivation to play again after the first few sessions. The game is at its best when played against other players, and the sense of collective shambling and limb jiggling just doesn’t manage to translate over to any of the solo game modes.

Mount Your Friends is nothing short of a master class in small scale multiplayer mayhem. It takes full advantage of the sexually suggestive nature created from its own image and name, and it runs with it as a consistently entertaining gag throughout the game. While this humour may not appeal to everyone, the game itself has a solid foundation built upon the intentionally obscure control scheme that creates as many victories as it does failures. However, the game is better experienced when playing in the company of friends, either online or locally. The sense of competitiveness that spurs on each match is sorely lacking within the single player modes and you’re not likely to be playing for long if you don’t find any friends to mount.

Overall Rating: ★★★★☆ 

What does this score mean?

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

This review was based on the experiences with the PC version of the game.

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Truffle Saga puts you in control of a dog named Truffle who must destroy mushrooms by throwing acorns at them. You throw acorns the same way you slingshot fowl in Angry Birds, except you don’t control how hard you throw them. You even get a white dotted line showing the path of your most recent throw. Unlike Angry Birds, which gives you multiple airborne critters to shoot your enemies into green bacon, Truffle Saga only gives you one acorn per level.

With all the weird stuff in this game, it shouldn’t be surprising that acorns are an effective anti-fungal agent.

At first the only obstacles are sticks and leaves, so all you need to make your shot count is good aim. After a few easy levels bouncing nuts off leaves, you’ll have to learn more tricks. There are flowers that eat your acorn and spit it out, bees that act as trampolines, and monsters that swallow your acorn, ending the level. Those of you who want games to make sense are not going to have a good time. These challenges add depth to the game, but unfortunately they also cause it to fall apart. Some of these extra elements require you to use awkward touch controls, especially the bouncy bees. To make matters worse, Truffle Saga suffers from a common AAA game trap and forgets what kind of game it is. There are a few levels that are solved by moving a bouncy bee around the bottom of the screen like in Breakout. Fortunately, you can skip levels by tapping an onion icon in the corner of the screen.

My other major problem with Truffle Saga is that its ads are really annoying. Paid versions on other platforms may not have them, but I played the Android version on my Droid Razr HD. There were many times when a new level had just loaded and I tapped the screen to throw my acorn, only to be thwarted by an ad that popped up just before I touched the screen. I eventually got sick of this and turned off my WiFi, but then the game kindly informed me that it had also fallen into the AAA trap of requiring a constant Internet connection.

Like most mobile games, Truffle Saga has a three-star ranking system to increase its replay value but with an interesting twist. Each level has three gems to collect in addition to the mushrooms, but after finishing the game you’ll be challenged to play each level four times, collecting a different number of gems each time for a crown. It’s a great design choice because avoiding gems is often trickier than collecting them.

Truffle Saga has some interesting puzzles and a clever way to add replay value, but I can’t recommend it because of its awkward controls, intrusive ads, and genre amnesia. If you can live with those things, you can get it on Steam, Google Play or the App Store.

Overall Rating: ★★☆☆☆ 

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Gravity sucks. Like that annoying kid on the playground who likes to trip you because he thought it would be funny, gravity is always there waiting for its time to strike. A silent guardian of physics, gravity is the cause of every dropped biscuit wasted, every painful trip you’ve taken, and every pen that’s escaped your grasp.  I hate you, gravity.

0RBITALIS is all about gravity, or perhaps more accurately it’s about figuring out how to exploit the forces of gravity to get a small red ball to stay in orbit for as long as possible. If you’ve ever played Angry Birds: Space, you will already have a good idea how the controls work.

Each level presents itself as its own unique puzzle, with large red stars and smaller white asteroids liberally dotted around in their own orbits. Changing the angle and force of your shot can yield wildly different results, and by using the gravitational pull of each celestial body you’re able to pull off some crazy ‘skill-shots’ that leave your projectile soaring through the stars for what seems like a lifetime.

Of course, getting a trajectory that lasts longer than a few seconds isn’t always easy. If you apply too much force on your shot, you’ll end up flying straight off the map and into a world of failure. Shoot too softly, and you’ll be sucked straight towards the closest object. It’s all about finding that sweet spot for each level.

There’s little to dislike about 0RBITALIS. It scratches an itch for physics puzzling without overcomplicating things. The levels are varied enough to keep you occupied for a good while and the leaderboards can help create healthy competition between you and your friends. The game is essentially feature complete despite launching as an Early Access title, and if you’re in the market for a new puzzle game you can’t go wrong with shooting things into space for fun.

0RBITALIS launched on the 16^TH across Steam Greenlight as an Early Access title.

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Toast Time is a physics-based tower defense game for iOS and Android in which you play as a “Toast-ejecting recoil & reload system” or TERRY as he is more affectionately known. It’s your job to save Monday morning from an invasion of inter-dimensional blobs hell-bent on ruining breakfast, using the breaded arsenal you might expect a toaster to have at his disposal.

Controlling Terry is done by shooting your toasted ammunition, and by the magic of Newton’s third law of motion you will in-turn be catapulted in the opposite direction. This maneuverability will come in handy as the goal of each level is to stop an encroaching wave of blob monsters from reaching a clock placed somewhere within each level. Firing off slices of toast at the monsters will take them out, and the aim is to last long enough for the timer on the clock to run down to zero. At its very core, Toast Time is best described as bringing popular physics based precision puzzles to a tower defense setting.

As you progress through the levels, things become a little bit harder with the introduction of jump pads that boost the blobs over great distances or walls that obscure your aim, forcing you to be constantly aware of your positioning so you can still get a good shot off on the marching blobs. When you reach later levels, different enemy types are also introduced to shake things up a bit, ranging from a tougher ‘fat’ blob that takes multiple shots to finish off, to parachuting blobs that attack from the skies.

As you play through the levels, pickups will be introduced via crate drops which have to be shot down to be collected. These crates offer interesting – but limited – ammunition to help turn the tide of battle, with some granting explosive shatter shots or rapid fire toast slices when you need a little extra firepower. If you do especially well and score a x20 multiplier against the blobs there’s a chance for you to slip into ‘COFFEE TIME’, a berserk state that causes the screen to become stylized and ammunition to bounce off of walls for a limited time. My only gripe is that this isn’t as obvious as perhaps it should be as I had completed the game long before I knew what this bonus effect was actually doing.

With 46 levels to play through, there’s plenty to keep you occupied for a few days of casual playing (or perhaps half a day if you’re in to blitzing through content). Once you’re done with the main levels there’s a secondary mode called ‘Survival’ which has you trying to complete as many levels as possible with only one life. Much like the main portion of the game, Survival has you fighting waves until the clock runs down, but things become a lot tenser when you know that one mistake is going to cause you to lose everything.

Toast Time is a charming entry to the mobile market, slathered in the quintessential ‘Britishness’ of its creators.  It’s endearing to see the minor touches like cosmetic customization of Terry, or the witty one-liners that appear on each game-over screen. There’s a decent amount of content for casual players to sink their teeth into, and an enjoyable few hours’ worth for those who like to burn through games as fast as possible. But above all else, the game is just good, clean fun that’s easy to pick up and play when you’ve got a few minutes to kill or a lust to shoot bread at things.

Overall Rating: ★★★★★ 

What does this score mean?

This game was reviewed using a copy provided by the developer for that purpose. It was tested on an iPhone 5 running iOS 7.0.4.

Toast Time is out now on IOS and Android for £1.99/$2.99

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

In the world of Entropy, there’s not much in the way of hand-holding when it comes to figuring out what is supposed to be done and how it’s supposed to be accomplished. Because the story begins with the limited explanation that something ‘strange’ happened, it’s no surprise that the character’s identity, purpose, and abilities are also kept a mystery. The first-person view helps further that mystery by obscuring the view of what sort of entity the player is. I don’t always enjoy games that leave the player to figure out what the hell’s going on, but the dark and mysterious atmosphere made it seem like a good fit in this instance. A shining amoeba-like creature casually draws the player in the direction they must go, but the path is typically blocked. By unlocking the opening to the next area, the game fairly literally leads the player further down the rabbit hole as he/she drops down a shaft to continue. It’s enough to make one feel claustrophobic and there’s no way to tell whether the player is ultimately making their way into or out of the unknown structure.

The puzzles get tougher as you head further down the rabbit hole

In order to gain access to the next area, the solution generally involves powering up energy conduits that line the walls. How this is accomplished is through orbs found throughout the levels. These orbs might be made of water, fire, and other basic elements. The non-lethal variety can be moved by making contact with them. The deadly ones can be moved through use of a gravity bubble gun that pulls all orbs within its reach to the center of the field. Sometimes the conduits are powered up by piling orbs onto a massive scale that measures weight, pH levels, or temperature. In some instances, the player simply has to figure out a way to draw electricity from an active conduit towards one that’s inactive. The most help players will typically get is an occasional image projected onto the walls that gives a subtle hint about which direction to go or if there’s a nearby danger. It’s refreshing to see a game not give away the most basic of  solutions. It’s through experimentation that lessons are learned about the effects when the elemental orbs come into contact with one another. For example, douse a fire orb with enough water orbs and it turns to stone. Where Portal is generally considered a physics sandbox, Entropy combines physics with a dose of chemistry.

Strong enough for a man…

While discovery of both purpose and means is arguably the strongest facet of Entropy, the graphical prowess is also worth a mention. While I’m not a fan of throwing down the “for an XBLIG” caveat, Entropy really does look great for an XBLIG title. While the engine can chug a bit now and then, the dark environments contrast well with the vibrant, elemental orbs with all of it looking sharp. It’s a true rarity to see an Xbox indie studio successfully pull off a great-looking 3D environment, so kudos to Autotivity.

While Entropy does a decent job of introducing new gameplay twists every once in awhile, it’s not the kind of game that’s going to be fun for long play sessions. Many of the puzzles require precision in how you direct the orbs around hazards as well as some timing in instances where you’re suspending them over pits or open space. That level of exactness can wear on the player over time. As with a number of the puzzle games we’ve reviewed, Entropy is best enjoyed in small doses. Thankfully it’s also the kind of game that’s easy to come back to without having to get reacclimated. In fact, I took almost a month off from playing the game and had zero issues jumping right back in.

Entropy is another worthy entry in the lineup of XBLIG puzzle titles. While comparisons to Portal are inescapable, fans of that series are likely to enjoy the physics and chemistry-based fun that’s to be had. Although the game lacks the humor and character of its mainstream brother, the shrouded atmosphere is certainly worthy of a look. The puzzles themselves run the gamut from easy to pretty difficult, and only once or twice did I find myself getting really frustrated. The ever present ability to rewind time is a tool that will get a lot of use and certainly helps keep that irritation level down. Players can even skip levels if they want to. It’s inclusions like these that give the game a bit of polish, elevating it above many of its peers on the XBLIG service. Entropy is currently available in the Xbox Marketplace for 80 MSP ($1).

Overall Rating: ★★★★☆ 

Review on theXBLIG.com

Review on Indie Gamer Chick

Review on Clearance Bin Review

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