The top-down shooter genre is very saturated these days, but developers Headless Wizard aim to stand out with their unique art style and addictive, fast-paced gameplay. Enter Bloody Streets, a top-down shooter that is chock full of heavy metal and heavy violence toward the undead. 

 In Bloody Streets, you must survive waves of monsters. The objective is to survive until the end of each level and rack up as many points as you can in the progress. The more kills you get in succession the higher the point bonus. Using explosives and the environment are also key ways to boost your points.  More weapons are unlocked as you proceed through the game. Headless Wizard boast that there is “music dynamic rhythm system”, but I didn’t notice any changes based on my actions. The “music dynamic rhythm system” may be something that will be added at a later time.

For the demo I was given the tutorial and first five levels, and it was just enough to get me craving for more. The first level was simple, primarily an extension of the tutorial. The second level is where things started heating up. The difficulty shoots up very quickly as you are forced to think on your feet. Using the environment is essential for survival; the levels are littered with hazards and environmental switches that can work with or against you. As the game progresses I was introduced to new and more aggressive enemies. There are acid-spitting arachnids, exploding zombies and more. They came at me in startling numbers, forcing me to retreat while spraying bullets and lobbing grenades. At one point I lured a giant mob of my pursuers to a giant spinning saw blade and watched the points rack up.

The art-style of Bloody Streets is a cartoony hand-drawn style. This contrast the over the top violence taking place, making the animations satisfying yet humorous.  The animations on the game are  polished, complimenting the tight controls of the game. The characters are nothing special to look at, but masterpiece of blood you can create is spectacular.

The little bit of time I had with Bloody Streets was very enjoyable, I hope the entirety of the game holds up to my expectations. Bloody Streets can be voted for on Steam Greenlight for PC and Linux, and you can find the official website here.

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

How do you put a fresh spin on a 35 year old classic? You’ll be hard pressed to find a way to do it, all while keeping the heart and soul of the game intact. I have to give Industry Entertainment a lot of credit for their game, Astroids: Space Game of The Year. Although they do put the game out there as “NOT ASTEROIDS”, the game looks like a reboot of the 1979 classic. This game is far more than that though, and if you don’t believe me take a closer look at the teaser trailer.

Visually speaking, this game is stunning – no detail has been overlooked in the creation of this game. The result of their in-house 3D engine is outstanding. Every object flows smoothly in the fully 3D space they have created. They were going for best overall visuals and in my opinion, they nailed it. Now the teaser only shows glimpses of the full game experience, but some of the still images show real promise. I’m really interested in how the other aspects of the game will flow into the visually amazing environments that they have crafted.

Based on the teaser trailer, the game play seems to move quite a bit faster than the original, and this itself is a double-edged sword. While you might move faster, so does everything else. Overall, the game feels almost identical to the original. Don’t count Astroids out just yet – it does have a few tricks up its sleeve. Shields could make all the difference in those hairy situations. That’s just a minor addition compared to the others. The weapons available to you will hopefully make for some interesting situations. A few of the clustered asteroids should act very different if hit with a rocket over the standard lasers. The most interesting thing Astroids has to offer is co-op. I’m a big fan of the 1979 version, but I never liked waiting for my turn. Co-op brings new challenges to the table. Not only do you have someone else to watch your back, you have to have to keep an eye out for their destructive collateral. Maybe even having to watch out for friendly fire, this will be something that players shouldn’t take lightly.

Are these few things enough to put Astroids in the space game of the year category? Only time will tell. I feel that Industry Entertainment has done something great with this game. I know that I’ll be looking forward to its release in late 2014 on the PC.

For further information, check out the following links:

http://www.indus3.org/

http://astroids.tv/blog

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Sanatana Mishra from Witch Beam Studios flew all the way from Australia to attend this year’s Eurogamer Expo, so naturally we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to talk about his current twin stick shooter Assault Android Cactus, as well as his experiences with publishing on the next wave of consoles.

For more information on Assault Android Cactus check out their official site here.

© 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

There are a range of classes, each with their own abilities. These are activated by pressing 4 keys, which along with the fast paced combat, makes Risk of Rain similar in ways to a MOBA game. You can win fights through a mix of clever positioning and quick reactions. As you learn your class’s strengths and weaknesses, the game becomes easier and combat feels smoother. As your character levels up, you’ll be able to cope with more difficult enemies. This is good, because the longer you play, the more difficult the game becomes.

Risk of Rain is different from a lot of games with randomly-generated worlds. The pace is much faster and the increasing difficulty means that you’re encouraged to go through the game as quickly as possible. There are times when I wanted to step away from the combat to explore the levels more – but the randomly-appearing enemies make it difficult to explore. Hopefully as the game develops there will be potential for more varied gameplay, and the pace will relent slightly.

Much of the atmosphere in Risk of Rain is created by its soundtrack, which is both eerie and forceful. My fellow Indie Mine reviewer Jennifer Roger has written an excellent article about Risk of Rain’s soundtrack, which you can find here.

Multiplayer co-op has recently been introduced to Risk of Rain. I haven’t had a chance to try it out – because I can’t find a server. As yet there isn’t a fully developed server browser, and the game requires you to connect directly to an IP address to play multiplayer. This will work fine if you know people who have the game, but you won’t be able to jump straight into a game with strangers. Hopefully in the future the game will also feature a full server browser.

Risk of Rain has a lot of potential. At times it feels too combat-heavy, but the randomly generated elements of the game mean that each playthrough offers something different. Risk of Rain is only going to become more varied and interesting, and I hope that the developers allow players to really explore all it has to offer. If you like the look of Risk of Rain, you can purchase a copy here.

© 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

In Pixel, players are challenged on each level to make it from the starting position to an end gate as fast as possible. In order to reach that destination, the platforms and columns around the player must be manipulated using a multi-purpose gun. Shooting some columns with your standard gun ability will cause those cubes to temporarily slide in one direction, giving the player a new path to travel down. Some paths are constantly moving,  but can be slowed down using a special gun attachment. Other areas serve as launch pads that send the player flying through the air towards doom or glory. Certain platforms will only start moving once the player connects two nodes using yet another gun attachment. There’s a lot of variety to what the player can accomplish using their Swiss Army gun, and the game does a great job in terms of pacing when doling out new abilities or platform types. Each of these is introduced just as the previous one has been fully explored. In all, there are a couple dozen levels with the latter ones requiring players to use more than one of the abilities at their disposal.

While playing Pixel I was reminded of my experiences playing T.E.C. 3001 during last year’s Indie Games Uprising even,t or the various titles in the Super Monkey Ball franchise. Even though they are games with completely different themes, all of them challenge players to find the quickest path to the end of the stage. While racing the clock, the urge to keep plowing forward has the ability to lure the player into a bad situation. Sometimes when trying to be fast, the best thing a person can do is slow down and get a better view of what he or she is speeding into. That being said, there’s nothing quite so exhilarating within a platformer as just squeaking past a moving obstacle or nailing an impromptu leap all at breakneck speed. A smart decision by the developer was making sure everyone can get right back into the action when dying by dropping the player back at the start of the level without the need to acknowledge a retry prompt.

Sadly, there are a number of issues that rear their ugly heads throughout the game. Jumping a gap will often look like it’s going to succeed only for you to clip through a column or seemingly bounce off to the side of your intended landing spot. Sometimes firing your cannon at a cube beside you will send you careening off to your death, while performing the same action on an identical formation elsewhere won’t have that undesired effect. Pixel ends up being as much a guessing game as it is a platformer. For players with the patience of a saint, some of the hiccups can be worked around once they’re learned. This repeated trial and error of working through the game’s bugginess isn’t a big deal on the shorter levels. There are a few levels, though, where painstakingly creeping towards the goal only to be undone by one of these issues will likely result in a steady stream of profanities. I know it did for me. It’s a shame because when it does work, it’s actually a really fun game.

The other issue with the game is the camera. The first-person view just doesn’t feel right. Other reviewers have complained about the gun taking up too much of the screen real estate, but my biggest beef with the camera is that it’s just too close to the action. Navigating on small ledges and around tight corners causes undue grief with the camera zoomed in. It’s much harder to tell where the player is going to land when jumping, and that problem is only compounded by the aforementioned clipping issues. I understand that pulling the view out into 3rd-person would make the shooting aspect more difficult, but there has to be some kind of happy medium.

Players may find the first-person camera too close for comfort when navigating levels

It’s a shame that the execution fell through on Pixel, because there were a number of things that were done right. The cel-shaded art style is simplistic, but it fits. Using the gun to trigger changes in the levels is fun to play with, though I wish it had been taken further. The bugs can’t be overlooked, however, because even though this game combines multiple genre elements, it’s platforming that dominates. While changing the camera at this point might be too radical of a change, going forward I would hope that at least the clipping issues get fixed. That would certainly go a long way towards restoring the joy that is supposed to go hand-in-hand with playing a game. Unfortunately, Pixel as it exists right now is an unsatisfying platforming experience for the two to four hours it’ll likely take most players to complete it.

Overall Rating: ★★☆☆☆ 

Additional Pixel coverage:

Review on Clearance Bin Review

Review on theXBLIG.com

Review on Indie Gamer Chick

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

A title like 10 Amazingly Awful Games Volume 2 has to be a marketing ploy. I never played the original 10 Amazingly Awful Games because I had enough faith in its self-assessment to save my time, but I’ve heard that they weren’t actually bad. On that flimsy basis, I thought it was worth taking a chance on the sequel, Volume 2.

The game’s developer said recently that his aim was to parody old low-grade game collections such as the infamous Action 52. I’ll admit I was a little curious as to whether this worked as a parody or merely retrod the same ill-advised path.

As it turned out, the contents of 10 Amazingly Awful Games Volume 2 were quite variable in quality. In the interests of clarity and satisfying my neurotic leanings, here is a blow-by-blow account of what I found lurking within. Buckle up; it’s a rollercoaster ride. One of those rickety old rollercoasters that you find in dilapidated, windswept coastal resorts that are decades past their prime.

In the order that they occur in the menu:

Blobby Blobby is a very basic one-hit-death platformer with clumsy controls, unclear hit detection and bursts of unreasonable difficulty that seem to be designed to catch you out. Platformers live or die by their controls, and Blobby Blobby controls like trying to balance a blancmange on a tennis ball.

Blobby Blobby

Fruit Defender has you pressing the face buttons to pop fruit that approaches from the corresponding four directions. It’s executed perfectly soundly but feels depressingly pointless. There’s just no incentive to keep going.

Grid Warrior is basically a monochrome Space Invaders. A few negligible additions, such as enemy turrets at the sides and the ability to move up and down the screen, fail to enhance the experience.

I Madez a Clone Wiv Zombies Innit is one of the better offerings in this package. It’s a vertically scrolling twin-stick shooter with a few weapon pick-ups. Its title parody of I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MBIES 1N IT!!!1 gave me a chuckle but after that the experience went downhill. It functions adequately, and when I was seven years old this would have seemed like the best game ever. If you’ve ever played a twin-stick shooter before, though, this low-rent, entry-level attempt will just remind you that you could be playing better versions. As a rule, a game that parodies another game has to be either at least as good as the original, or amusing enough to compensate. The gameplay here is very basic at best, and the only humour to be found is in the title. The eye-scouringly horrible visuals don’t help, with primary school character sprites and backgrounds that look like the contents of a dinosaur’s stomach.

I Madez a Clone Wiv Zombies Innit (with uncharacteristically sombre background)

Lame Defenders 2 is a side-scrolling space shooter. You shoot things. It’s more challenging than it seems and, like the zombie/clone game above, could be fun for a child who’s never played anything like it. I had flashbacks to my dad’s Atari 2600, in gameplay style if not in aesthetic. It’s still sinfully ugly though, and your spacecraft moves woodenly enough that it can be needlessly frustrating to manoeuvre.

Nastyroids is the classic Asteroids with weapon power-ups, a larger arena and occasional targets that fight back. If you’re someone who still longs to play Asteroids, you might enjoy this. I never really liked Asteroids that much, but this take on the formula does the job perfectly well. It gave me some simple fun for a little while. The expanded arena helps the classic clunky control scheme (rotate your ship with the left stick, then propel it forward with the right trigger) feel less frustrating, and its basic visuals are an upgrade over the wireframe graphics of its predecessor. Probably the best of the whole batch, by virtue of being a decent enough example of its type.

Seeker is a 2D explorer/shooter. I don’t know if it’s based on an old template like many of the other games here, but the game it reminds me of most is the dreadful Bit Crunch. Fortunately Seeker isn’t that bad. You roam around a randomly generated maze of rooms, dodging obstacles and shooting enemies, looking for keycards and the route to a computer that must be destroyed. Your health (or ‘power’ here) depletes over time as well as when you take hits, so the pressure is on. Seeker actually has some potential to be fun. If it wasn’t for a couple of glaring problems, it could be something I’d choose to play, at least for a little while. Firstly, it’s very easy to get stuck on corners. When leaving a room, I got stuck more often than I didn’t, particularly if I was hastily fleeing a group of enemies. Secondly, you can only shoot left or right, despite the manifest need to at least add up and down to the range of fire. It’s infuriating losing valuable points from my power meter just because an enemy approached from above and I had to manoeuvre across the entire room to be in a position to open fire. I think the lesson here is that the developer should give up on making batches of ten lazy, poorly designed games and focus on making one decent game. If he’d devoted the effort from the other nine games in this collection solely to Seeker, it might have been worth playing.

Stormwheel

Stormwheel is a driving/shooting hybrid that reminds me very much of Action Fighter on the Sega Master System. The objective is to get to the finish line within the time limit while dodging hazards, shooting other cars and making blind jumps that require trial and error. As an Action Fighter clone, it’s fine. It does pretty much what that game did. The problem is that Action Fighter wasn’t much fun 25 years ago, and age hasn’t improved it. It isn’t offensively terrible but there’s really no reason to play it. It’s just not a fun way to spend your free time.

Terror Tunnel is a watered down Missile Command. Use a reticle to direct your fire against falling stuff. Hold the right trigger and move the left stick around. At one point I realised I was daydreaming about walking to the supermarket to buy lunch, but still successfully playing the game. Skip it like a flat rock on a tepid sea.

Viper Wing is a vertically scrolling space shooter. Hold the right trigger while weaving around. So bland that even its own description of itself uses the word ‘generic’. Presumably that’s a chortling display of the art of high parody but, as I said about I Cloned a Clone with Clones In It above, a parody still has to be a good game if you expect anyone to play it, or else be funny enough that people will forgive the mediocre gameplay. Going ‘ho ho, my game is intentionally generic’ at the beginning doesn’t qualify.

Viper Wing

All in all, 10 Amazingly Awful Games Volume 2 neither follows through on the grim threat of its title, nor really works as a fun parody. A couple of the games within are simple fun for brief periods, but there’s nothing here that can’t be found better elsewhere, usually very cheap. Admittedly you’re effectively paying a measly 8 Microsoft points for each game in the collection, but that doesn’t make it right. I wouldn’t forgo my lunchtime BLT in favour of munching down on eight boxes of toothpicks just because the price is the same, and you shouldn’t be tempted to buy ten games that occasionally manage to reach up and tug at the ankles of mediocrity. If you want all these games, it’s worth paying ten times the price for ten better versions.

10 Amazingly Awful Games Volume 2 isn’t amazingly, astonishingly, tourist-enticingly hideous. It’s just bad. I’d take one competent game over ten half-hearted ones any day.

Overall Rating: ★★☆☆☆ 

Reviewed from a copy provided by Boddicker Games for that purpose.

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

U.K-based indie game development studio 1BK has released their debut title, We Are Cubes, through the Xbox Live Indie Games marketplace. The game is described as a “vibrant, fast-paced arcade shooter set in a neon, wireframe world” according to studio members Victor Garcia and Steven Noakes  along with supporting member Andy King.

There are two modes available to play: Arcade and Survival. Both modes also offer single player and multiplayer options. Arcade mode includes 25 waves of enemies, while Survival mode is an endless onslaught that, much as you would infer, challenges you to stay alive as long as possible. A wide variety of power-ups and permanent upgrades are available to aid you in battle.

We Are Cubes is likely to appeal to old school gamers with its vector-style graphics, online high score list, and chip-tune inspired soundtrack. It also promises ” a huge range of awardments and unlockable content” which is sure to make the completionist gamers happy.

Continuing a trend that I personally enjoy, the multiplayer offers a cooperative-competitive experience. Players can choose to work together and use their power-ups more effectively, or they can use them to gain an edge over each other.

We Are Cubes looks to have a lot of polish and is available right now through the Xbox’s Indie Games marketplace for 80 Microsoft Points.

Why should you buy this game?

You can find 1BK on Twitter @OneBeeKay or by checking them out on Facebook.

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