Combat Cats’ story is pretty basic. Kitty Island is a peaceful haven, plentiful with catnip. That is, until one day when all the catnip disappears. Seems the local aquatic life has a bone to pick with catkind, so its up to Kitty Island Homeland Security and its brave fighter pilot squad to defeat this bubbling menace and get back the catnip. Leave it to cats to have a war for drugs.

While Combat Cats is fairly typical, it does change up a few things. For once, it’s a match-four game, not three. Plus, there is far more flexibility in matching than the typical puzzle game. A myriad of shapes are allowed, so long as at least four similar blocks are connected in some way. Everything happens very quickly in each level. While tempting to go full-out with a barrage of weaponry, it’s important to keep track of your health in later levels as things become increasingly harder. The aquatic alliance has a few tricks up its sleeves, including bubbles that will sometimes appear on top of your blocks, obscuring them and keeping them from matching from with others until you pop them.

While primarily a block puzzler, the game has action/rpg elements to it that increase the stakes. Your kitty pilot has a life meter, and all the blocks have different effects, such as repairing your ship (healing you) or dishing out different kinds of damage to your enemy (shooting rockets, poisoning them, etc). There’s even an occasional nuclear bomb block that blows out an entire row of either horizontal or vertical blocks and deals out massive damage to your fishy foes. All of this serves to fight and hold off enemies until you can reach the end of the level, at which point you will be awarded up to three stars depending on how quickly you finished.

The stars are not just a way to rate your play, however. Each subsequent level requires a higher number of stars in order to access it. If you don’t have enough, you’ll have to go back to previous levels and try to do better to earn more stars. While this does give the game a bit of replay value, this is where its mobile trappings become apparent. Besides stars, you get cash and catnip after each level which you can use to upgrade your blocks/health and buy different ships. While not terribly hard to get more currency with which to upgrade, it is slow enough that without dishing out some real world cash, it becomes easy to lose interest after a while unless you’re really dedicated. Luckily, if you don’t mind this, the prices are pretty fair.

Control-wise, the game is satisfyingly smooth. The mobile version features standard one-finger tap controls, while the desktop version only requires a mouse to play. Both are quick and responsive, however I personally found the desktop version easier and visually clearer to play since there’s so much going on during the game.

The pixel-style art is cute. If you like cats, it’ll be quite adorable, and there’s several familiar feline faces to be seen in the bunch. The music itself, is, unfortunately, nothing to write home about. It’s fairly forgettable, but at least in the mobile version it’s always present. A few levels in on the desktop PC version, the music straight up stopped. I eventually had to restart the game to end the eery quiet. Luckily, this is the only performance issue I found while playing.

Overall, though, despite adding a few twists to the traditional block puzzler, Combat Cats is just too typical to really stand out amongst the rest. After playing through it, I asked myself, “Did I have fun?” Well, no, not that much. The smooth controls are really the highlight of an otherwise standard and somewhat bland game. Unless you really really like cats and are in desperate need of another match-three block puzzler, honestly there’s not much of a draw. It’s just okay.

Combat Cats will be available on the Google Play store for Android and the App Store for iOS on September 9th. PC/Mac/Linux versions are still in development, though there is a version for Windows 8 already available. The game is also up for voting on Steam Greenlight.

Overall Rating: ★★★☆☆ 

What does this score mean?

This game was reviewed using a copy provided by the developer for that purpose. The Windows and Android versions were used.

© 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

So here’s a project that’s worth a look. Attack Mountain (also known as ATKMTN) has a Kickstarter campaign running for two games set to be available in one package known as the Attack Pack. Due to their previous campaign for the retro RPG Legend of the Time Star being unsuccessful, the team has scaled back its ambitions, seeking a smaller funding goal and developing smaller games with more flexibility. So what makes up the Attack Pack? Attack Mountain is kicking off their first game pack with SOS and The Grey Man, two games that couldn’t be further opposites from each other.

SOS

In SOS you play as the Agent, a spy with an illustrious career spanning forty years. With an episodic framework, the player weaves the tale of some of the Agent’s most thrilling missions. SOS takes notes from games such as Metal Gear Solid and action movies like Rambo, giving players the opportunity to choose between a more stealthy approach like a classic spy or go in guns a-blazing like a macho man straight out of the eighties. Every decision you make will count–guards WILL notice unconscious or dead bodies left out in the open, will follow trails of bloody footprints, and so on.

The Grey Man

The Grey Man, however, takes a quieter approach. Players take the role of the titular character as it lands on Earth and explores its surroundings. Although things start off peacefully, the Grey Man may make mischief with its powers and catch the attention of the local human life which will inevitably be none too happy with its presence.

Despite their smaller scale, the duo that makes up Attack Mountain still has big plans for their games. While SOS will launch with two episodes, further funding will allow the team to develop additional tales of the Agent. Meanwhile, The Grey Man will receive more content such as new areas in the form of patches. Other stretch goals include voice acting for SOS, comics, and even the addition of a third game to the pack.

I’m really excited for this Kickstarter. Video games could learn a lot from the world of indie comics and zines, and the Attack Pack gives off that comic anthology feel I know and love. Plus, I’ll never let good pixel art and music go unappreciated, and the Attack Pack seems to have that in spades. Especially promising is that the games are already in development and have been for almost a year–the developers just need some help getting them funded and into the hands of you folks, the players. Head on over to the Kickstarter page and check out the video, music previews, and concept art and maybe even make a pledge! Want more Attack Mountain after pledging? Check out their Dev Diary, their official website, and their Facebook page. You can also help the developer out by voting for the Attack Pack on Steam Greenlight.

© 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Poltergeist started out as an entry in a Square Enix-run competition called Latin American Game Development Contest 2012. It went on to win first place, and once Glitchy Pixel–comprised of artist Diana Esperanza Pacheco and programmer Italo Felipe Capasso Ballesteros–reattained the rights, the team has sought to polish and develop their game further with your help.

So what is Poltergeist? It’s a puzzle game that places the player in the role of a ghost that is none too happy with all the people moving into his beloved mansion. Your mission is to use all of your supernatural, ghostly powers to scare everyone out of the vicinity through various eras of the mansion’s history. The puzzle elements come in as you must successfully scare all of the fleshy residents out before you have used all your powers. To make this a little harder, there are also people that will be tougher to frighten and will actively try to fight you, such as priests and Ghosthunters (a nice little nod there). This all seems to work towards making the game a cleverly strategic puzzler that will have the player taking their time to consider all of their moves.

If successfully funded, the developers promise updated artwork and music, new powers and mechanics, over sixty levels (a respectable increase from the initial twenty in the original prototype), PC, Mac, and Linux support, and, of course, various backer rewards. Glitchy Pixel is asking for $25,000 to fund their game. There’s less than a month left, so get backing over at their Indiegogo page. Poltergeist: Pixelated Horror is also up for voting on Steam Greenlight. To find out more about the developer and see their previous games, check out Glitchy Pixel’s website.

© 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.