Magicians and Looters pays homage to old Metroid-esque side-scrollers and does it well. It has a beautiful 2D high-definition pixel artstyle, real time map system, items to discover, and skills to unlock. You play as three apprentice sorcerers aiming to save their mentor from the ominous castle Looter. In Magicians and Looters you switch between  Brent, Nyn and Vienna. Each character has access to the same magic abilities, but also have their own personal abilities. After the epilogue is finished you are able to switch between the three at any save point.

Brent using in-game map

Brent is a classic warrior type, toting a sword and shield. He is the slowest of the three, but can use his shield to block incoming melee and projectile attacks from any direction. He later gains the ability to wall jump, a useful skill for solving puzzles, gaining loot and reaching hidden areas. Brent’s personality is very straightforward. He has good intentions but is very oblivious at times.

Vienna is the sister of Brent, and she’s a headstrong fighter type who specializes in speed and hand-to-hand combat. She is by far the fastest of the three and her only weapons are her fists. She can also equip the most accessories and has more abilities at her disposal than the other two. Vienna is my personal favorite because she has an “in your face” attitude that matches her fighting style. She has abilities like a high jump, wall run and a falcon kick (a likely nod to the Blue Falcon). Nyn and Brent occasionally mention that Vienna may have a screw loose. The fact that she unlocks abilities from her talking cat isn’t helping her case.

Nyn is a hardened ex-child mercenary that doesn’t back down from a fight, and she would be considered the rogue of the group. She can equip two swords, is speedy and has an evasive roll. She later attains the ability to slide, furthering her usefulness in evasion and obstacle clearing. She was my least favorite to play as, but I loved any of the dialog involving her. She is sarcastic, quick-witted and doesn’t pull punches when it comes to her opinions.

While I did find the game’s dialog funny, the actual plot lacked a bit. The story played off the popular cliches of older successes. A majority of the game’s talking has a satirical undertone that I loved, often taking jabs at current games versus the older ones. In one instance, two sorcerers converse about how sorcerers nowadays always use tutorials and teleporting instead of backtracking. I found this hilarious and spot on as today’s games have a tendency to spoon feed players. On random occasions and at save points, the main characters might have a chat with one another. This would at times provide backstory to one or more of the characters in a witty fashion.

King of Looter

Exploration is encouraged and necessary. Rather than grinding to gain levels you must collect a certain number of orbs. These orbs are usually well hidden, and each time you level up the number of orbs required increases. This is a nice reward system for completionists and makes backtracking that much more worthwhile. Orbs aren’t the only things you will discover while exploring; weapons, accessories and even the occasional dungeon wall chicken are out there, ripe for the picking.

The gameplay is easy to get a feel for, and fans of older Castlevania games will feel at home here. For this review I played the PC version and used an Xbox 360 gamepad. The controls are pretty standard with jump, attack and ability buttons. The ability varies depending on the character selected; a block for Brent, back dash for Vienna, and roll/slide for Nyn. Activating the map is done in real time and fills in as you discover new areas. Holding down the right trigger gives you access to any magic abilities that you’ve unlocked including shooting fruit. Yep, in this game rapid fire fruit is a magic spell, attained from defeating the devious Fruit Magician.

I thoroughly enjoyed my time with Magicians and Looters, and I honestly hope that Morgopolis Studios puts out another one. With a $7.99 price tag it’s well worth the money. Magicians and Looters is available for PC and Xbox 360, and you can purchase your copy here.

Overall Rating: ★★★★☆ 

What does this score mean?

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

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

And it’s a shame to start the review off in such a negative way, because the execution works well and offers some level of fun gameplay. The tower defense section is your standard fare, but it’s executed solidly. Problem is, it can all get a little overwhelming when combined with the action shooting sections. If you compare it to something like FTLgame’s Faster Than Light, which blends tactical play with the general housekeeping of your ship, Straco simply doesn’t hold up as well when merging its two separate elements together.

The heads-up display (HUD) in Straco is an explosion of information that would have benefited from being trimmed down. Perhaps it’s just a personal preference, but the cluttered screen during gameplay is just an eyesore. And between the HUD and the chaos of the general gameplay, you have no idea where to look half the time.

Graphically Straco doesn’t stand out, but ironically that is what makes it different from other similar games. Many games on the XBLA Indie Marketplace try to go way above their level, which means either the gameplay suffers or the artwork looks out of place. Here, the sprites are clean and functional and the background is a patchwork of colours that represent sea, ground, forest and so on. The only shame is that the environment has no effect on your movement or abilities, whether you’re on foot or in the giant mechanical machine. This renders the change of colours more or less useless, but at least it’s better than a 100×100 grid of grey.

It’s understandable that games created by small teams, one or two people will multitask between programming, art, and audio. But that doesn’t excuse how poor and misplaced the soundtrack for this game is. It honestly might have been better to avoid using music altogether and take the Desert Strike route – especially with the helicopter sections.

Straco is by no means a bad game, but it just suffers from trying to spin too many plates at once. The minefield that is the tutorials and controls will turn off many players before they even get halfway through the first mission. And with Straco planned as the first of a series of episodic games, it will be difficult to see each episode garnering any new players. Straco has potential, it just needs major fine-tuning to realise any of that potential.

Overall Rating: ★★☆☆☆ 

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

© 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

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.

The first things I noticed before playing were how bright and vivid the graphics were, and how the characters were crisp and animated nicely. The neon-colored characters on a white menu took me aback at first but I quickly adjusted.  While being a multiplayer game meant for excursions with other players, I was happy to see they included bots to take control of slots not occupied by a human player.

After a quick review of the game rules, I picked one of the more colorful levels and began my first bout of Chompy. What followed was a frantic, albeit confusing, rush to chase down my target. The power-ups took a while to get used to, since you sometimes just get a glimpse of what item you picked up and no indication of what you are currently holding. After a few frenetic minutes, the game was over and the scores were tallied. If a level was too short, too long, or too crazy, you have the option of setting your own rules in the custom game settings.

While short, the action was fast and busy. The targets changed every so often which kept everyone on their toes. My few complaints would have to deal with the level design. Each screen has a different look and feel to them, but some just don’t seem a good fit. A few of the levels had long corridors and many “trap corners” where one can simply stay in one area to create a chokepoint. The maps with more turns, and short halls and corners were the most fun to play. It was a tad frustrating to chase someone down a long hall only to end up having to backtrack a few seconds later, so I preferred the maps with small obstacles dotted throughout the map. The bots were simple enough that they provided  suitable opponents, but they just didn’t provide enough thrill for the game. This game is better played with a full party of friends to make the experience more fun. If you cannot wrangle enough friends to play locally you can also jump online to “Chomp” on fellow Xbox Live players.

All in all, Chompy Chomp Chomp was a fun and amusing game. The pace and action kept everything fun but it’s best to bring 3 others friends along if you wish to experience the full potential of this title. A nice buy if you want to have a fun and fast session with friends or family.

Overall Rating: ★★★☆☆ 

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

Editor’s Note: This review was done using the launch version of the game. A subsequent update has recently been released.

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

Nostatic Software, creators of Block Zombies and Kung Fu FIGHT! have announced the release of their latest Xbox Live indie game Quiet, Please.

The adventure game is a genre sorely lacking in Xbox Live’s Indie Games marketplace, so this one’s worth checking out even if only to see if it can fill that gap. You can find out more about this title and others from Nostatic Software by checking out their website. Quiet, Please is available now for 80 MSP.

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

Now I know how school teachers feel. Not because teachers routinely set up chaingun turrets to contain the influx of shambling students (though I’m pretty sure it crossed my metalwork teacher’s mind from time to time) but because it’s very frustrating to watch someone, or something, with real ability fall on its face because it’s too lazy to try.

Zombie Crossing (formally uncapitalised as zombie crossing – not a good start with a pedant like me) is a tower defence game that benefits from some nice ideas but also suffers badly from some awful design choices and an evident lack of any sort of playtesting.

There are far too many zombie-based games on Xbox Live’s indie channel, but this one actually makes good use of the theme. A zombie apocalypse is a logical basis for a tower defence game, involving as it does hordes of mindless enemies advancing stoically against a beleagued defensive line. The presentation is pretty good, particularly for an Xbox indie. It’s not uncommon for games on this service to look like they were drawn in Microsoft Paint, but this one, while not XBLA standard, has real game-like visuals with character models and convincing environments, plus a couple of nice touches like the blood trail that denotes the horde’s route in the first couple of levels.

Upon first playing Zombie Crossing, my impression of it wasn’t great. Its control scheme is an immediate problem. On top of the awkwardness of navigating the in-game menus using the triggers and D-pad, the left stick control is too responsive for the small size of the spots where you can place turrets, meaning that you often twitch back and forth for several seconds trying to get the cursor in the right place. This is inconvenient enough even pre-attack, but reaches a new infuriating low when you’re trying to add new defences in the middle of battle. The issue finally passes through rock bottom and splashes into the sewer when you try to upgrade a turret; the ‘upgrade’ button is so narrow that its almost impossible to hit. I have yet to successfully upgrade even one turret thanks to this miserable design oversight. Having someone playtest the game for more than five minutes would have revealed this problem, but I assume that never happened.

The turrets also don’t face the way you tell them to. You can rotate each one to aim in a particular direction, but more often than not they will ignore your instruction. It doesn’t sound like a serious problem, but turrets take so long to rotate and open fire that you can end up with legions of them never opening fire because they can’t rotate in time.

This lack of playtesting is evident throughout Zombie Crossing, and the problems I’ve detailed above turn out to be the least of them.

The idea behind Zombie Crossing is a pretty good one. You aren’t just defending against a certain number of waves; you’re trying to amass enough money to purchase a nuclear strike, which will bring a final end to that level and move you on to a new map where you start the process over. Advancing from level to level unlocks extra options in the research menu, enabling you to buy barricades, slowing effects and the like.

As I persisted with Zombie Crossing I began to forgive it for its flawed controls. The research side of things is barely explained, but I soon worked out how it works. The objective is also not explained – the game tells you that you should try to buy a nuke, but makes it sound like a friendly suggestion rather than the aim of the whole game. It took me probably 30-40 minutes to realize that nuclear bombardment is how you progress to the next level. I’d been starting to think the game had only one level! This is a problem, but not a crippling one. Besides, maybe I’m just dense.

The first and cheapest upgrade you can buy is the sniper rifle, which gives you a first-person view from a rooftop, from which vantage you can pop high velocity rounds into the shuffling undead. A nice touch, I thought. Sniping one zombie at a time seemed like it probably wouldn’t be much use in the grand scheme, but it would give me something to occupy myself with while the turrets were doing the serious clean-up.

In the event, that’s not quite how it worked out. This is where the problems begin in earnest.

The sniper rifle is traditionally a precise instrument that fires single bullets into carefully chosen targets. Zombie Crossing‘s sniper rifle is more like a rocket launcher. As long as your bullet hits a zombie, there will be an explosion that rips apart any others standing nearby. Plus it’s a one hit kill across its whole area of effect. The game soon ceases to be a tower defence at all, and instead becomes a case of just bombing crowds of zombies with your ‘sniper’ rifle as they bottleneck at their spawn point, and positioning a couple of towers close by to mop up the handful that get through. Even the larger, tougher boss zombie that appears at the end of each wave keels over much more quickly by thumping a few sniper shots into it than by shredding it with a dozen turrets. So the control problems become irrelevant, as do the upgrades, most of the research and the towers themselves. You start the game with a few hundred dollars; the sniper rifle costs you $100 to buy, and $1 to activate.

This problem becomes less pronounced as you gain extra turret types a few levels in, and the tower-based strategy becomes actually practical. But for the first few levels (which could be either a brief period or quite a long time, depending on how you choose to spend your resources) Zombie Crossing is barely even a game. It’s more ‘click on a few points in one area’. You know what else does that? Your desktop. Desktops aren’t known for being the height of entertainment.

That’s not all. The sniper rifle issue is idiocy of design, but perhaps not the most glaring example of zero playtesting. When you unlock the barbed wire barricade on level 2, you must never use it. It crashes the game. Not once, not twice, but 100% every single time I use it, without fail. You can, with some difficulty, play the rest of the game without using the barricade – it isn’t completely essential – but that isn’t the point. The point is the game is fundamentally broken, and clearly even the developers themselves never actually played it or they would have noticed this.

Again, a total and sickening lack of playtesting before release. Or if it was playtested, it by someone who was out of the room at the time. Maybe in another town entirely.

There are some other problems that could easily have been picked up on too, but they’re small potatoes compared to the game-crushingly huge ones. I’ll give one prominent example though.

If you pause while sniping, the crosshairs disappear and you get just a pointer instead. And you will do this a lot thanks to the need for coins. Zombies often drop gold coins that you can only pick up by pressing the Back button, yet that same button also brings up the pause menu. Every time you try to collect currency the game pauses, which would be bad enough by itself but also immediately draws attention to the vanishing crosshairs. How did anyone think this was a good idea, and why did no one who playtested it say “hey guys, this is really really annoying”? Oh wait, I can guess…

It’s moronic to a degree that left me breathless with horror and despair. In any other game, this oversight alone would be enough to turn a recommendation into a warning. Here, it’s not even the worst offender.

It’s a terrible shame. The game looks and sounds good, its atmosphere works, the research idea could have been fun, and it seems to be a decent length (though the levels start repeating after an hour or so). The sniper feature is a nice addition in principle, and even with some flaws the game could have been worth a recommendation. I really tried to enjoy it, and at the times when the menagerie of glitches, bugs and design ineptitude weren’t leaping out to punch my enjoyment in the face, it was pretty fun. I don’t want to emphatically tell you not to buy it. If you’re forewarned, you might have fun with it.

But at the same time, I can’t recommend it, particularly as the Xbox indie scene doesn’t lack good tower defence games. As a retail product, this is unsuitable to be on sale. It’s a first draft. I read, check and edit my reviews repeatedly before they reach the public eye, but Zombie Crossing doesn’t extend the same courtesy. I even tried to contact the developers to give them a chance to patch it before I stuck the boot in, but I couldn’t find any contact details or even a Facebook page. Always be reachable, developers.

Zombie Crossing could have done well for itself if it had been released in a finished and tested state, but as teachers often say, “must try harder”. Or as my metalwork teacher always said, “I am a violent man!” After a missed opportunity like this, he should be.

Overall Rating: ★★☆☆☆ 

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