There Was a Caveman

October 14, 2015 by 1 Comment

There Was a Caveman is one of the most remarkable games I’ve played for IGC. That doesn’t necessarily make it a good game. It’s a fairly bland platformer that is sort of a punisher, but kind of too easy to be that as well. There’s very limited genuine “challenge” here, since most things that kill you are of the out-of-nowhere, “ha, GOTCHA!” variety. If dodging an obstacle isn’t reasonable, all you’ve made is really just a tarted up version of Ralph Baer’s 1978 electronic game Simon. Memorize the location of one obstacle, die on the next, memorize the location of two obstacles, die on the next, memorize the location of three obstacles, etc, etc.

Now, for those calling me a Bristol Palin-sized-hypocrite because I made three ultra-hard Mario Maker stages, hey, guilty as charged. But I did have a point to them: it takes no talent or creativity to make such stages. I proved that myself. I did discover one thing when making those stages though: it’s very cathartic to create punisher stages. Like, I felt better about myself for all the times someone made fun of me as a kid. “Oh yea Becky, well let me add a few more fireball-spitting piranha-plants to this stage. NOW WHOSE SWEATER IS UGLY YOU BITCH??”

The problem is, while I had fun making those stages, I’m guessing they weren’t all that fun for most people playing them. Each has under a 2% completion rate (two of them are at under 1%). I also got sent dozens of extra hard stages and I really didn’t feel compelled to beat any of them. Really, if you’ve played one “get revenge on world” based-level, you’ve played them all.

What does any of this have to do with There Was a Caveman? Because what’s here has all the potential to be something better than it is. It looks fairly nice. The caveman theme is eye-catching and fun. But what really stood out to me was how it plays like the role-call of an all-star game of dick moves. Think of just about any unfair, annoying design choice a platformer can have in its level design and chances are it’s probably in here somewhere. Not over-done or anything. Just enough to be remarkable. And it also doesn’t really start to ramp-up until two very dull opening stages (hey, at least it scales!). If there was a dick-move platforming trope drinking game, you would die of alcohol poisoning before game’s end. Here’s some of the highlights.
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Out of place shmup section, though this one moves really slow and doesn’t put up much of a challenge besides staying awake. Take a drink.

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Underwater swimming stages complete with NES Ninja Turtle-like lethal seaweed (or possibly coral in this case). Take a drink.

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Don’t forget the insanely tight squeezes you’re expected to make with the swimming controls. Take a drink.

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Insta-kill acid buffered by spikes that you have to overcome using double jumps or air dashes that control just fine instead of perfect. Just fine sounds fine, but if just one time the controls seem to not respond, the game kind of screws you. A few times I’m almost certain I didn’t get the extra jump that I still should have had. Take a drink.

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Stages in the dark except one little tiny circle showing you and a little bit of the level around you. Take a drink.

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Stages in the dark except one little tiny circle showing you and a little bit of the level around you with an out-of-sight skeleton raining projectiles on you from above that you can’t possibly anticipate or reasonably be expected to dodge on your first attempt. Take a drink.

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Stages in the dark except one little tiny circle showing you and a little bit of the level around you with an out-of-sight skeleton raining projectiles on you from above that you can’t possibly anticipate or reasonably be expected to dodge on your first attempt next to disappearing/reappearing platforms (the blue things in this pic) straight out of Mega Man with insta-kill spikes beneath them you DICK HEAD! Take a drink. Oh and not pictured: at the end of this section there was an enemy hidden in the grass on a platform you couldn’t see when you began the jump that you would inevitable bounce off of the first time and fall back to the start of this section. Dog food manufacturers who specialize in bully sticks don’t make dick moves this large. Take another drink.

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Stages in the dark except one little tiny circle showing you and a little bit of the level around you where you have to make a blind leap-of-faith jump not knowing where a safe landing spot is, with insta-kill slime waiting for you if you miss, which of course you likely will at least once. Take a drink.

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Stages in the dark except one little tiny circle showing you and a little bit of the level around you where you have to make a blind leap-of-faith jump not knowing where a safe landing spot is, with insta-kill slime waiting for you if you miss AND THEN putting the safe zone directly below the starting platform, which nobody in their right mind would ever have anticipated? Okay, now you’re just fucking trolling. Take a drink.

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Stages in the dark except one little tiny circle showing you and a little bit of the level around you where you have to ride a slow-moving platform across an insta-kill river of slime while dodging slimeballs (as in balls made of slime, not lawyers. Sorry Reggie). Take a drink.

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Ice stage. Take a drink.

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Make it two drinks. Fucking ice stages.

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Stage called “GUTS” that doesn’t feature an Aggro-Crag. This is more of a cock tease than a dick move, so no drink.

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Auto-scrolling “falling” stage with very slippery controls and lots of insta-kill spikes scattered about. Take a drink.

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Hard to spot thanks to noisy background projectiles. Can you spot the projectile that causes damage to the player in this screenshot? Look closer.

Fuck this shit

Quick note: in motion, it’s slightly easier to spot the objects when they move. However, telling what is the deadly projectile and what isn’t that easy. I have to admit that I was initially dodging the other debris that turns out was non-lethal. While I appreciate a developer went out of his way to add some nice touches like the crumbling rocks, they look just like the other rocks and come from the same location, making it unclear if they’re to be avoided or not. So take a drink for that, and then take another drink for the other rock (the one that actually does hurt you) not standing out enough.

That’s just a sampling. Really, nothing here is terribly offensive or anything. It’s just boring, samey punisher-type stuff that’s been done to death with nothing particularly original. It looks fine. Better than fine in fact, other than the noisy background causing some visibility issues. And it controls fine. Occasionally clunky but better than average. It certainly stands out too. Again, no game I’ve played represents the kind of level designs that drive people like me nuts quite like There Was a Caveman. I wish I could say everything between the dickery was fun, but it’s really not. I like retro platformers, but this one is too much like a, um.. one of those prehistoric people.. name is escaping me at the moment.

headerThere Was a Caveman was developed by Nauris Amatnieks
Point of Sale: Steam

$6.29 (normally priced $6.99, aka TOO MUCH) said “ugh ugh I’m dying you idiot” in the making of this review. Gotta love me!

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The Beginner’s Guide

October 7, 2015 by 3 Comments

Spoiler Warning. This review is pretty much a giant spoiler since I want to talk about what I got out of The Beginner’s Guide. As strictly a game to be played, I thought it was probably the worst I’ve ever experienced. As something more meaningful? Well, play for yourself and then read below.

The Beginner’s Guide is popular, and despite not remotely liking it, I get why. People like to feel they connect on some kind of philosophical level with a game. I’ve always said this stuff is in the eye of the beholder. I fall into this too. I spent a night with my boyfriend one time trying to spin every possible interpretation of Journey’s meaning, then searching online to see if anyone else came up with the most outlandish ideas I had. When something is left up to interpretation, it’s kind of fun to find out if what you see is what someone else sees. That’s why people stare at clouds looking for shapes. Like, if you see the dog’s head in the cloud that I see, we’ve connected somehow.

A lot of people are connecting in this way with The Beginner’s Guide. Or, at least they think they are. This follow-up by developer Davey Wreden to his hit The Stanley Parable is sort of like a gaming take on the found-footage genre. The idea is Wreden was obsessed with the small, unassuming (and often incomplete) personal projects of someone named Coda. Wreden found deep meaning in this person’s work and narrates for you the insight he extracted from them. The thing is: all these little vignettes presented to you are the most fucking boring, shallow, uninteresting “games” ever made. None of them show anything remotely creative, or even potential for creativity if they had been completed. They’re just bad, with symbolism on par with what you would expect from a thirteen-year-old who fancies him or herself as “deep.” To say that Wreden sees them as something much more meaningful is an understatement.

I was going to make a joke about "the signpost up ahead, your next stop: the Twilight Zone" but really, the Beginner's Guide genuinely is a lot like the Twilight Zone. Like, one of the bad ones from season 4.

I was going to make a joke about “the signpost up ahead, your next stop: the Twilight Zone” but really, the Beginner’s Guide genuinely is a lot like the Twilight Zone. Like, one of the bad ones from season 4.

The Beginner’s Guide is really about how scary some gamers can be with the titles they love. There’s a section in an early stage where Coda had designed a story element that would ask the player to commit self-sacrifice. When you step into this light, the game glitches out and you rise out of the stage and see a view of the world. Just the type of glitch you would expect in games like this. Only Wreden (an exaggerated fictional version of him, at least I hope so) sees it as anything but a glitch. He starts to look for depth, noting that he wasn’t sure exactly what Coda was aiming for with this glitch. Does it reflect the final journey to heaven, or surveying what you’ve accomplished? He never once considers that Coda has no fucking clue how to do anything and the glitch was just a glitch that he couldn’t fix. You know, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

From here, the stages get more and more stupid and pretentious, while Wreden’s take-aways become more and more delusional and raving. As the game draws to an end, Wreden has reached the point that he feels ownership and accomplishment from Coda’s work, which he has absolutely nothing to do with. The Beginner’s Guide is essentially an indictment against the creepiest gaming fans. That some people can become pretty weird, possessive, and clingy with how they view someone else’s work. In my Indie Ego editorial, I wrote about how J.R.R. Tolkien had no allegories at all in mind when he wrote Lord of the Rings and spent his twilight years telling anyone who would listen as such, to no avail. The Beginner’s Guide is saturated with points like this. There’s a door puzzle that repeats constantly through-out the game. Wreden becomes obsessed with the symbolism of this very rudimentary door puzzle, to the point that he comes across like a borderline-dangerous stalker. It never occurs to him that the puzzle keeps repeating because that’s as creative as Coda is capable of being, or that his ability (or will) as a programmer to create anything more complex is non-existent.

The point of the Beginner’s Guide is that Coda was simply screwing around with Source, not really aiming to accomplish anything or tell anything, and then along comes this wide-eyed creeper who sees depth and complexity where none was ever present. For Coda, the meaning of his work was killing time. For Wreden, it was the meaning of life. These two views come into conflict when Coda just wants to keep fucking around and enjoying his own process, while Wreden wants him to keep making stuff for his consumption, so that he can feel better about himself. A sense of entitlement that is fully unearned and unjustified. Developers owe their fans nothing. The Beginner’s Guide is a scathing look at gaming’s sense of entitlement, hardcore fanboys, critics, and the general mindset that there must be meaning to everything. That a cigar is never just a cigar. So, in a way, the Beginner’s Guide is kind of brilliant.

A lot of critics who dislike the Beginner’s Guide feel that the narration forces an interpretation upon you, instead of leaving it up to yourself to figure it out. But, that it’s not up to you how you interpret intent seems to be the point of the game. Which is funny because I’ve read no less than a dozen variations on what exactly the point of it was. I just contributed my theory to this. I think it’s the right one, obviously, but statistically speaking it’s likely not. You know what I really think? I think Davey Wreden is having the last laugh somewhere. I mean, this game fucking sucks and look at the response to it! Maybe the Beginner’s Guide doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it just means cash in the pocket for Davey Wreden at the expense of people who will find depth in his work whether he places it there or not. The fuck if I know.

You said it, bro.

You said it, bro.

The problem is, The Beginner’s Guide is still a game. And, in order to utterly blister the scene like I think it does, it sort of requires the actual gameplay to be bland, uninspired, lacking complexity, and just boring in ways that nobody in their right mind could ever read anything more out of. Where the “depth” is the type of depth that anyone else would laugh at if it was tweeted verbatim by Jaden Smith. That’s both the point of it and the problem with it. Maybe the message has value, but the game itself is so fucking boring. Ninety-minutes of pure, relentlessness boredom to be told “you know, some gamers can be kinda douchey” seems like overkill. The $9.99 price tag to get that message stings quite a bit as well. Even the $7.99 on-sale price feels wrong. This is one of those rare games where I don’t think the developer can justify any price point besides free. It gets people talking, for sure. There’s already dozens of theories about what the point was. Maybe by throwing in my two cents, I’m both a hypocrite and part of the problem. All I know for certain is this: the 90 minutes I spent with The Beginner’s Guide was the most unenjoyable game experience of my life and I would never recommend anyone else go through it. But that’s just one person’s thoughts. Remember, it’s all eye-of-the-beholder. Unless you’re Davey Wreden, in which case it’s money in the bank. And he earned it. Every dime. I salute you, sir.

Beginner's Guide logoThe Beginner’s Guide was developed by Davey Wreden
Point of Sale: Steam

$7.99 (normally priced $9.99) think the name itself is also just awful in the making of this review.

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Adventures of Pip

September 22, 2015 by Leave a comment

A good rule of thumb for making an indie game is “have a gimmick.” Something about it that stands out against the crowded indie field. Especially if you’re a retro-platformer, a genre with roughly the population of China and the GDP of Grenada. Even if your game does stuff that other games have done, you can make it far by dressing that up in different, novel ways. Take today’s game, the Adventures of Pip. There are a lot of games that allow you to switch between characters on the fly, going back to Castlevania III nearly 25 years ago (or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles if you want to count a crappy game). On the indie scene, Trine is probably the most prominent example. It’s been done so many times that it frankly should be a little stale. Pip isn’t stale at all. It’s a perfectly decent platformer that brings nothing new to the table. But it does what it does with so much charm and happy moments that you would swear you’re sitting at an entirely new table.

So the idea is you have a kingdom where the wealthy are fully developed 16-bit characters, the middle class are 8-bit characters, and the poor are single pixels. That whole point is mostly unexplored, though. Probably a good thing, since most games that try in earnest to tackle class-based subject matter do so with subtly on par with that delivered by the Enola Gay. Really, the plot is evil queen kidnaps princess. To Pip’s credit, the writing is sharp and almost immediately laugh-out-loud funny. In fact, it’s so good that I feel the developers sort of blew it in a different way. It’s one of the few traditional platformers where I actually gave half-a-squirt about where they were going with the story direction, but the setting itself never receives enough consideration or a satisfying payoff. It’s not fair to do that. Imagine if other stories were told like Pip’s is.

“And then Dorothy landed in a magical land of Oz, which was populated by magical scarecrows, talking humanoid lions of questionable fortitude, and witches who react to water even more dramatically than your cat does when you try to bathe it.”

“Wow! That sounds exciting! And then what happened next?”

“Um, they walked somewhere. The end.”

Maybe the developers realized that nobody really plays a platformer for plot and just filled it with absurdity for their own laughs. It’s possible. I’m not really prone to cynicism so I would never say something totally baseless like the whole haves-and-have-nots thing was tacked on to give some sense of topical relevance and lure in more delicious Kickstarter money. That would be irresponsible. I’ll just say the writing is funny and the setting has no point and goes nowhere.

That's........... racist? I think it might actually be racist.

That’s……..… racist? I think it might actually be racist.

Pip’s gameplay centers around fairly routine platforming tropes. The hook is switching between the three different forms of Pip, each with unique traits. The single-pixel Pip has a floaty jump, launches higher off springs, and can get under narrow passages. 8-bit Pip is much faster, can swim, and can wall-jump. And by-fucking-God does the game milk that to the point that all that’s left of the wall-jumping cow is dust, blood, and swollen udders. 16-bit Pip can’t wall-jump, can’t swim, can’t jump off the springs, moves slower than shit.. seriously, was this some passive-aggressive retro fan’s way of saying they think the 8-bit era was vastly superior to the 16-bit one? Oh yea? Well, 16-bit Pip breaks blocks with his sword. So that counts for something!

Oh wait, you can later buy the block-breaking ability for 8-bit Pip from the shop, leaving the 16-bit version unique in its ability to push blocks. Ooooh, he can push blocks while the more primitive versions can do more way cool things. At this point I’m surprised the main villains wasn’t named “Queen GeniSnes” or something.

It’s actually all cooler than it sounds on paper, and the way the transition is handled between forms is a little clever and lends itself to some above-average level design. Nothing particularly noteworthy, mostly due to uninspired enemy design and world themes. Come to think of it, that’s another area where the story sort of fails the gameplay. The idea was the Queen has stolen the ability to “de-rez” the population, turning some of the rich 16-bit jerks into pixels. Which, again, if the idea is poor people = hardworking and noble, while rich people = worthless and entitled, shouldn’t that technically mean the evil witch is the hero? Yet, the stages themselves seem like they’re supposed to look 16-bit through-out. It never actually dawned on me while playing the game, but really, how come the stages and enemies themselves didn’t take advantage of the whole classic gaming v 8-bit v 16-bit stuff? For fuck’s sake, the villain’s name is Queen DeRezzia! There’s an old saying: in for a penny, in for a pound. I’m not entirely sure Tic-Toc-Games was all-in with the gimmick. They didn’t even work it in to the boss fights. They could have done it two ways with them: start the bosses at 16-bits and have you beat them back to Atari-like levels of detail before ultimately slaying them. Or, they could have gone the opposite route, with the bosses starting primitive and becoming more sophisticated as you did more damage to them.

The end of the game has an over-reliance on wall-jumping, which is where it starts to feel they ran out of ideas. This is one of the few indies I've played where removing levels would have almost certainly bumped it up the Leaderboard.

The end of the game has an over-reliance on wall-jumping, which is where it starts to feel they ran out of ideas. This is one of the few indies I’ve played where removing levels would have almost certainly bumped it up the Leaderboard. Despite all that, this was probably the easiest time I’ve had earning every available trophy in years.

Yea, I’m sure that would have been a lot of work, but it would have made Adventures of Pip a lot more noteworthy and memorable. And it sort of needed it. Because what’s here, while fairly fun and well executed, is a little bland and generic at times as well. There’s nothing in Pip you haven’t seen in a platformer before. I can’t stress enough, the game plays really well. Good controls, good level design (except a single dick move supreme hidden villager placement worthy of a slap upside the noggin for some smug developer), and good writing. It’s a little long. I think Tic Toc could have safely shaved off ten stages and lost nothing, but otherwise Adventures of Pip is a good game. Fans of platformers will like it. So why does it feel like it’s less than the sum of its parts?

I think it’s because the best thing Pip does that no other game does is purely aesthetic. That it had this idea about a world where three different eras of gaming art lived together, but left it all on the player character. Really, you could have inserted any gimmick besides the 8/16-bit stuff in its place and Pip would have been no different. Change it to Pip is a human (8-bit) who switches between a penguin (single pixel) and, I don’t know, a dragon or something (16-bit) and it’s still the same game. A very good game, just like it is now, but nothing changes. If the environment, the enemies, the stages, the puzzles, and the bosses also continuously shifted between the different resolutions, I guarantee you the game gets more word of mouth than it does now.  It becomes unique and noteworthy. As it is now? It’s just a decent game that has a neat idea that’s under-realized. If the developers hadn’t shown any talent, it wouldn’t bother me so much. I almost never call out a game for being under-ambitious, but I sort of have to here. To not do so would be an injustice to those who made the game, because I think they left something on the table. You guys are way more imaginative than this. I want a sequel that proves me right. Adventures of Pip is fun, but it doesn’t live up to its potential. Which, according to my father, makes it the me of video games. Oh thanks Dad.

headerAdventures of Pip was developed by Tic Toc Games
Point of Sale: PSN, Steam, Wii U eShop, Xbox One

igc_approved1$14.99 brushed her teeth with a bottle of jack in the making of this review.

Adventures of Pip is Chick-Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.

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Gon’ E-Choo!

September 9, 2015 by 1 Comment

Gon’ E-Choo, with characters based on some web comic, is a tribute to the 1982 Nintendo arcade classic Popeye. And by tribute, I mean the type of tribute that usually ends with a star-struck fan appearing in front of a judge and being told not to come within 1,000 yards of their idol. I’ve played a lot of tribute games since starting IGC, and Gon’ E-Choo is by far the closest to the original without resorting directly to plagiarism that I’ve seen. That’s not a bad thing. In fact, if I knew nothing about this game or  Nintendo coin-op history and someone told me that Shigeru Miyamoto and Genyo Takeda had created an unreleased sequel to Popeye with the same core gameplay mechanics, only they lost the Popeye license so they had to use original characters, I would completely buy this as an authentic lost game. That could very well be the highest praise I’ve ever given a game.

No, shut up haters. I'm pretty sure they can't sue over this. Why would they if they could? It gives relevance to a game that has had literally no relevance for twenty-three years now. If anything, Nintendo should license THIS and release it as a first-party game.

No, shut up haters. I’m pretty sure they can’t sue over this. Why would they if they could? It gives relevance to a game that has had literally no relevance for twenty-three years now. If anything, Nintendo should license THIS and release it as a first-party game. Especially since it doesn’t seem likely they’ll pay the licensing fee to put Popeye on Virtual Console anytime soon.

Don’t mistake that for me saying Gon’ E-Choo is an astonishing, must play game. It’s not. Your enjoyment of it will be fully dependent on how nostalgic you are for those early 80s Nintendo games. The graphics and play control are spot-on, with only the sound effects coming very close but not-quite right at the whole mimicry thing. I’m a child of the PlayStation era that only knows Popeye through MAME. I liked it enough, but I wouldn’t exactly pay Virtual Console prices to own it if it ever got released on those platforms. Mechanically, Gon’ E-Choo plays out pretty much exactly like Popeye. Instead of hearts or music notes falling from the sky, paper airplanes do. Instead of being chased by Bluto, you’re being chased by a crocodile. Instead of the seahag throwing whatever at you, little electric sparks (or possibly bees, I couldn’t tell) come out of the sides. Instead of a can of spinach, it‘s a can of soda. The stages are laid out different so as not to totally rip off Popeye, but otherwise, this is so close to the original that it’s creepy. I mean, impressive, don’t get me wrong, but creepy.

This whole virtual interface thing only served to annoy me. Eventually it will include Oculus Rift support, which I'll never be able to use. One of the keys to avoiding seizures if you have epilepsy is having proper distance from the screen, and Oculus Rift is essentially like strapping a monitor to your eyeballs.

This whole virtual interface thing only served to annoy me. Eventually it will include Oculus Rift support, which I’ll never be able to use. One of the keys to avoiding seizures if you have epilepsy is having proper distance from the screen, and Oculus Rift is essentially like strapping a monitor to your eyeballs.

There’s only three stages as far as I can tell, which start to repeat after you beat them. There’s a cabinet that you can look at, which is also sort of Nintendo coinopish, but not quite. There’s also online leaderboards, which is the only thing that offers replay value. My biggest complaint is that Gon’ E-Choo is so married to being a tribute that it didn’t bother to improve the biggest problems of those early 80s Nintendo games, IE having tighter play control and more stages. So what’s here is just alright for me. I can’t really complain too much, because I was not this game’s target audience. But, credit where it’s due, because it achieved what it aimed for, and it did so without burning its name into Miyamoto’s lawn. At least I hope it didn’t.

Gon logoGon’ E-Choo! was developed by Marc Ellis
Point of Sale: Steam

igc_approved1$1.69 (normally $1.99) have a father still bitching four years later that no indie dev has remade the 1978 Atari “classic” Fire Truck in the making of this review. Daddy, I played it. I don’t think it holds up as well as you probably think it will. Let it go.

Gon’ E-Choo! is Chick Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.

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Rocket League

August 27, 2015 by 1 Comment

Rocket League combines cars and soccer. It’s such a simple concept that seems like it would be better suited as Mario Party minigame. Or a sport played by Wuzzles. Funny enough, and this is a true story, one of the first sketches my boyfriend showed me when he got me into Top Gear was soccer with cars. They did it a few times, and I distinctly remember saying “they should make a game out of this.” Which is a risky thing to say, frankly, since I never remember to be more specific and say “they should make a good game out of this.” Somewhere, deep down in the darker parts of my psyche, I still blame myself for not saying “good game” with the Matrix. Damn it.

My bad.

My bad.

Thankfully, the fates were less cruel this time around. In fact, Rocket League is one of the best online indies of all time. When I heard the concept, my initial thought was “it’ll probably control like shit or have massive lag.” I know there are some networking issues, but the overwhelming majority of games I played (and I put a whopping 60 hours into this) ran smoothly. And Rocket League controls really well. Using the turbo boost to pull off air-based strikes and blocks has a learning curve to it, but there’s no complex combos to pull off. The controls are responsive and instinctual.

It’s sort of tough to get more in-depth while reviewing Rocket League, because what’s here is the closest to being perfect as any game I’ve ever reviewed, even though there’s not a lot to it. There are some weird anomalies. Like playing single-player league on easy and watching my AI teammates seem to forget what team they’re on. More than once I saw them take the ball the full length of the field to own-goal themselves. I wasn’t sure if this was just happenstance until I saw the ball start to drift away from my own goal, only for them to casually dribble it back towards it before bumping it in. This happened frequently, perhaps in protest of me being a sissy and picking easy mode. I would have made a joke about it being passive resistance, but my AI teammates physically cleared me out of the way far more often than opponents did. None of this happened on the normal difficulty. I can sum up easy mode by noting that I averaged 20 goals a game during the jump balls, and a couple more a game for when I would miss. Normal difficulty was much more realistic, in the sense that I was eliminated in the semi-finals the first time I played it and won the title despite a losing record the second go-around.

#Splash

#Splash

The biggest problem with Rocket League is out of the hands of the developers: the quality of online players. Now don’t get me wrong, most Rocket League players are awesome. But, just often enough to be annoying, a game would happen where the other team will score the first goal and my two randomly assigned teammates would immediately vote to forfeit the remainder of the game. In about a third of such games, when I refused to vote with them, they either just quit out or they started own-goaling me in an attempt to force my hand, all while bitching at me for wasting their precious time. Rocket League certainly isn’t exceptional in this regard. Anyone who has ever played any team-based online game deals with this. Rocket League is only remarkable in how damn fast people are willing to quit. I had a game where we led 2 to 0, the other team scored a goal, which meant we were still up by one, and a teammate voted to forfeit. I figured there must have been some kind of achievement he was going for based around shutouts, but no such achievement existed.

Eventually I got pretty decent at Rocket League. Not great or anything, but I could hold my own. And, all credit to the quitter brigade, because they led to a couple of the most exhilarating moments I’ve had as IGC. I scored a couple moral victories by preventing shutouts by myself against full teams after I had both teammates quit after just one goal. And then there was the game where we started the game 1 to 0, had the other team tie it up, our teammate voted to forfeit and then quit seconds later, and myself and the random dude I was paired with proceeded to win the game when down a player by a score of 5 to 1. And it wasn’t like our opponents were slouches, which made our blowout so satisfying. Later, I played matches against some of my readers, and it was awesome to get to finally play a game where I could play and interact with so many of them. A couple of them hopped into ranked games with me, where we went on an extended winning streak. Which we immediately followed up with a losing streak that no one in particular was to blame.

It was me

Rocket League’s biggest successes from a design point of view come down to what the game doesn’t include. There’s a large variety of cars, but besides slightly different collision boxes, there’s no differences in performance in them. All unlockables and the DLC are purely superficial changes, which levels the play field. It makes Rocket League one of the most accessible and enjoyable games of its type in recent memory, since newbs can hop right in and not spend the next several weeks grinding up in hopes of competing with early adopters. Yea, I wish the league play had more options (and more stats, since I would have liked to know how many goals I personally scored), but otherwise, isn’t it more important to refine and perfect what you’ve built? I’ve heard it suggested that Rocket League is a glorified minigame. Fine, so be it. Because I’ve seen games ruined by leveling systems. Castlestorm‘s online mode could have solidified it as an all-time classic, but instead I found myself being matched against players 150 levels more advanced than me, with all the upgrades that are earned along the way. While you’ll still need to put time into Rocket League to get good, when you are good you won’t need to grind away an extra fifty hours just to compete. There’s something to be said about that. Restraint is perhaps something more indies need. Rocket League doesn’t do a lot, but what it does is phenomenal. By the way, if this review sounds to lovey-dovey, I should note that the next teammate of mine who bumps me out of the way of an open shot is getting a foot upside the ass, and I have Bob Lanier and his size 22s on retainer.

UPDATE: Actually, the game does keep track of stats in the Extras menu, but this doesn’t improve things. Single player stats are added to online stats, and thus it appears like I’ve scored 685 goals (ha!) when in reality I think roughly 600 of those came in one 27 game easy league season. This is a massive oversight on the developer’s part, and it ought to be changed.

Rocket League logoRocket League was developed by Psyonix
Point of Sale: Steam, PS4
igc_approved1
$19.99 said the “damn women drivers” joke from opposing players NEVER GOT OLD AT ANY POINT OVER THE COURSE OF 60 HOURS YOU CLEVER CLEVER PEOPLE in the making of this review.

Rocket League is Chick-Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.

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Adventure in the Tower of Flight (Steam Review)

August 11, 2015 by Leave a comment

Update: Adventure in the Tower of Flight is now $4.99

Ugh, what an unwieldy name. It flows about as well as a small creek overrun by giant-sized mutant beavers. Which, actually that sounds like a bad ass idea for a game. Perhaps a tower defense title? It’s all yours, indies. I hate harping on names, but Adventure in the Tower of Flight has “in the” and “of” in it. “Adventure” and “Tower” are also gaming staples, making the title that more forgettable. It’s not just a title that rolls off the tongue about as well as a sugar cube (which is both sticky and cube shaped and thus rolls poorly), but it’s generic and bland. And that’s a shame because Tower of Flight is a decent game that doesn’t seem to be finding its audience. I posted screencaps with smart-assed captions on my Twitter feed while I was playing it and was besieged with questions about this nifty looking NES tribute that I was playing. Nobody had heard of it. Everyone wondered how they could have missed it. Maybe it’s because it just sounds like it’ll be a bad game, or boring. I don’t think you can legally speak the title out-loud while operating heavy machinery. Names are important, and indies often seem to give less than top consideration for this. It would be like opening a restaurant and naming the place Spitty’s. Who gives a shit how good the ribs are at a place called Spitty’s?

Classic gaming call-backs are abundant in Tower of Flight. The bats here behave almost exactly like those annoying Medusa heads from Castlevania. Which you'll note is something nobody has ever wanted to see in any game, ever. Why do people paying tribute to these classics insist on using the worst parts of games? Granted, everyone remembers those parts, but still..

Classic gaming call-backs are abundant in Tower of Flight. The bats here behave almost exactly like those annoying Medusa heads from Castlevania. Which you’ll note is something nobody has ever wanted to see in any game, ever. Why do people paying tribute to these classics insist on using the worst parts of games? Granted, everyone remembers those parts, but still..

AitToF (It doesn’t even abbreviate good!) isn’t a bad game at all. I found it to be a decent neo-retro platformer that you’ll get a few hours out of (and more levels are coming soon!) and forget about soon after finishing. They’re enjoyable hours though. Think of Tower of Flight (Christ, even a shorter version of the name sucks) as a linear Zeldavania, with a heavy emphasis on Zelda looks and a Castlevania feel, with a small helping of Kirby mixed in. There’s a thin plot about trying to reach the top of a tower, but it feels tacked on and needless. The hook is instead of a standard 2D jumping mechanic, you have the ability to fly for a short distance. That’s the Kirby part. Think of it as Kirby if the flying mechanic had a limitation to it. You gain a couple special moves along the way, upgrade your sword, gain extra hearts, fight a few bosses, and that’s pretty much it. You certainly don’t want to mistake this for a Metroidvania. Tower of Flight is mostly linear, with few opportunities to deviate from the set path.

This is a tough one for me to review. There’s not a whole lot to talk about, because every aspect of the game is average. Graphics? Very convincing in an 80s sort of way, but average. The level design? Mostly without fault, but average. Enemies? Too limited in variety, and what‘s here is average. Controls? Maybe slightly above average, though I hated having to manually map everything to my Xbox One pad. Maybe that’s what Tower of Flight aimed for. A decent, convincing 80s NES tribute that plays it safe. Hey, kudos for pulling it off. And I’m sure NES fans will like it a lot more than I did. I just wish it had messed with the formula a little more. I guess that Tower of Flight could seamlessly pass for an undiscovered NES game is remarkable enough, but after games like Shovel Knight, Super Win, and Axiom Verge, I’m too spoiled to get too excited by a game that simply feels like a game from a different era.

The only art in the game that made me cringe. This boss looks like the unholy off spring of Kang and or Kodos and a Hungry-Hungry Hippo.

The only art in the game that made me cringe. This boss looks like the unholy offspring of Kang and/or Kodos and a Hungry-Hungry Hippo.

Actually, there’s one thing that bugged me enough to mention. There’s a town section with a fetch quest stuck in the middle of this game that feels insanely out-of-place. Not only does it channel the giant mutant beavers and break the flow of the game, but it’s mechanically a little broken. The game’s engine makes it so that when you go through a door, it locks behind you. Thus, navigating is a tack-like pain in the ass (measured by amount of pain, not by the size of the source of pain). I think the developer’s goal was to make the town a puzzle or maze of sorts, where you had to figure out which doors led to which parts of the town. Both myself and the only other person I talked to who has actually played the game simply kept making loops until we stumbled on the douchebag who completed the fetch quest. It was boring, it was clunky, and it was pointless. I honestly have no idea what the developer was thinking. At least it was short, I guess. But  even admitting that section is short feels like telling a condemned prisoner “It’ll be over with quickly.” Not all that comforting.

Of course, for fans of that era, you really didn’t need this review at all. The only information of relevance I can provide such fans is that the game works fine and is an authentic NES style game. It was made for children of the 80s, not a smart assed millennial. I have no doubt that Adventure of the Tower of Flight hit all the marks it needed to for its target audience to walk away very satisfied. This is a quality game with true craftsmanship displayed. I just hope the developer mixes it up a little next time. Take some risks. I usually try to end reviews with a joke, but for this review, I’ll instead end with a thought: There are a lot of games that can do the “Like an NES game” thing. But only truly inspired can make people say “like an NES game, but..”

tower logoAdventure in the Tower of Flight was developed by Pixel Barrage Entertainment, Inc.
Point of Sale: Steam

igc_approved1$14.99 (probably too much) admits that the indie scene is likely to be picturing a different kind of giant mutant beavers than me in the making of this review.

Adventure in the Tower of Flight is Chick-Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.

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The Vanishing of Ethan Carter

August 8, 2015 by 7 Comments

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter opens with a screen warning that it doesn’t “hold your hand.” So many games make this claim anymore that it’s starting to come across as kind of snotty and condescending. Ethan Carter’s lack of hand holding isn’t in the difficulty sense, like Bloodborne or 1001 Spikes. You can’t die, and there are no real stakes besides extending the delay of the unfolding story. Instead, it doesn’t hold your hands in the sense that you’re given no instructions at all. No tutorial, no hints what the game’s primary mechanics are, or what your end goal is. So, in my first attempt at playing Ethan Carter, I ended up missing the first four of ten “puzzles.” The fifth one is neither a puzzle nor possible to miss (I think). The first one I actually stumbled upon and solved was the sixth one. Of ten. This is the kind of not-hand-holding that a sadistic swimming instructor with a growing body count would believe in.

Ethan Carter is an aimless wandering simulator that occasionally gets interrupted by an interesting plot. I’ve never been into Lovecraftian type of horror, so when I found the story to be good, I was a bit surprised. However, I missed nearly the first half of it, so I decided I would break a personal rule of mine. I try to avoid using walk-throughs when I review games. Now, I had stumbled upon a couple of the puzzles, but I didn’t realize they were puzzles or would unlock the plot. The game doesn’t imply any of that. When I solved the graveyard sequence, I decided to just start over from the beginning and have someone send me a list of the general locations of the puzzles. Just having that list and the knowledge that there were puzzles to complete totally changed my enjoyment of the game. It was okay. Okay is better than “God I’m bored out of my fucking skull.”

Ethan 2

Needs more Grim Grinning Ghosts.

I hate doing this with any game, because it’s 2015 and nobody should give a shit about graphics anymore unless they are mind-blowingly awesome. I don’t know if the Vanishing of Ethan Carter is quite that good, but it’s probably the most gorgeous indie up to this point. To put it in perspective, my mother walked into the room while I was making my way through a forested area and asked what movie we were watching. Movie. Until she said that, I hadn’t stopped to appreciate how damn good-looking Vanishing of Ethan Carter is. Now, that story wouldn’t have happened if I was in many of the areas of the game, especially ones that take place in a mine, or ones where there’s rushing water. The cave section looks like any other cavern level in a first-person game, and rushing water has that creepy uncanny valley effect, slightly life-like but undeniably off. Probably the most off-putting thing about the presentation is you don’t feel even close to a real person. You feel like a camera hovering six above the ground. The lack of humanity in the player-character made it nearly impossible to ever feel immersed. Which is a shame because the world created is photo-realistic at times and that kind of goes to waste.

I’ll go spoiler-free on the plot as much as possible. It’s pretty obvious early on that some kind of twist ending was coming, but Ethan Carter still manged to fool me with it while still feeling like I wasn’t cheated by the context. It wasn’t like Braid’s “deep” twist ending where, spoiler alert on a game eight years old: the main character of Braid was part of the Manhattan Project and felt guilty for creating nuclear weapons, with the world of Braid being his escapism to alleviate his guilt. Yea. I haven’t met a person yet who didn’t blurt out “where in the fuck did that come from?” when they experienced that ending. But Braid is popular and pretentious allegories pulled out of thin air are all the rage in Indieland, so I expected Ethan Carter to end on one. It didn’t. The ending was satisfactory in a Twilight Zone sort of way and felt real. I guess you can’t ask for anything more.

SPOILER WARNING – SKIP THIS PARAGRAPH IF YOU WISH TO AVOID

Not that the story doesn’t occasionally devolve into raving lunacy. The most random happening involved an encounter with an astronaut. I think it was meant to be a jump scare when it first appeared, but it was so random that all I could do was laugh. This eventually led to a section where I was floating through space in a scene I swear was ripped straight from that God awful piece of shit movie Contact. Even after finishing Ethan Carter, I’m not entirely sure what the point of that part was. The studio behind this game is named Astronauts, so maybe this was meant to be an in-joke for them. Another failed attempt at scares occurred in the cave area, where you’re being stalked by a ghost while searching a maze for five dead bodies. I wasn’t aware that this was considered the most terrifying section of the game by most people due to “jump scares” that happen during it. This is because I found all five dead bodies and solved the puzzle in it without ever having the ghost catch me. In fact, I only caught a glimpse of it once and heard it two other times. Given that Ethan Carter’s form of horror is based more on atmosphere and characterization, I’m surprised it would even try to do jump scares. I think I enjoyed the experience more than others did as a result. Jump scares are something anyone can cause with a plastic bag full of air and a floor that doesn’t squeak when you try to sneak up behind someone. Lowbrow and easy. Creeping people out with an unnerving atmosphere takes skill, and Ethan Carter pulls it off.

They should've sent a poet. So beautiful. So beautiful. I had no idea.

They should’ve sent a poet. So beautiful. So beautiful. I had no idea.

END OF SPOILERS

The writing is not bad at all. The cut scenes have pretty decent voice acting. Ethan Carter does almost nothing wrong in terms of plot and storytelling. It’s the method of delivery that I feel doesn’t serve players properly. It goes back to the “hand holding” thing. What is so wrong with pointing players in a direction? Shadow of the Colossus is similar to Ethan Carter in the sense that you have a vast open world with specific areas you need to discover. You’re not told how to discover them, or what to expect when you get there. You hold your sword up and it points the direction, and that’s it. Nobody would accuse that of being an example of hand-holding. So that opening “we don’t hold hands” bit almost feels accusatory against players. “Oh, you didn’t find the stuff we obscurely hid? What, you expect directions? What kind of pussy-whipped casual gamer are you?”

Maybe the Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a glorified tech-demo, as some of my readers on Twitter suggested. While there are a couple creative puzzles, most of them come down to finding items and returning them to their locations. A few times you’ll be required to look at a few different dioramas and place them in sequential order. If the puzzle design had matched the art quality, Ethan Carter would have been something very special. I do reject the notion that Ethan Carter is an “experience” more than a game. It’s a game, and a perfectly fine one. I don’t think it will withstand the test of time, or be particularly memorable. As technology gets better and games that look like this become more common place, its relevance will fade. Ultimately, I did enjoy it when I played it “my way”, with general instructions to the locations of the ten puzzles. Others enjoyed it without those, liking the sense of discovery. Others still got sick aimlessly wandering around without any clue what they were doing and quit. I can’t help but wonder if Ethan Carter would have benefited greatly by giving players two options: to play the game with or without direction. If they had done that, all discussion of the game would have been centered around its merits instead of its abstraction. Ethan Carter can stand on its own merits. It’s a quality game, even if it’s so militantly against holding hands that it comes across like a six-year-old afraid of catching cooties.

Ethan logoThe Vanishing of Ethan Carter was developed by Astronauts
Point of Sale: PlayStation 4, Steam

igc_approved1$19.99 walked away from Ethan Carter feelings like her eyeballs were gently massaged by the graceful hands of God himself in the making of this review.

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is Chick-Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.

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Plague Inc.: Evolved

August 4, 2015 by Leave a comment

It’s been over two years since I tackled Plague Inc. on iPhone. You’ll want to read that review to get my thoughts on the gameplay of Plague Inc, since I won’t be discussing it much in this review. Cliff notes: I quite liked it. Not only was it a fast-paced, fun little simulator, but the look my family had when I would excitedly declare “HOORAH! I JUST KILLED ALL OF HUMANITY!” was priceless. A bit of quiet terror mixed with cautious horror. To compound it, I would triumphantly pump my fist and then make some kind of statement like “I can’t wait to be President someday!” But, I have to admit that while making my parents contemplate whether that one night 26 years ago when their condom failed might someday bring about the end of the world is pretty enjoyable, Plague Inc. didn’t leave a lasting impression on me. It’s not a bad game at all. It’s just so sterile in its presentation and minimalistic in its play mechanics that it didn’t lend itself to “owning” me, like Clicker Heroes or even OMG Zombies did.

Plague Inc. has since “evolved” onto PC, via Steam. It’s a perfectly fine game. Of course it is. It was perfectly fine already. But, like visitors to the Creation Museum in Kentucky, I’m apparently too dense to see any evidence of evolution. There is a free Planet of the Apes tie-in that doesn’t need to be unlocked, but it’s just a barely-modified version of the game’s zombie mode. Otherwise, the same stages and unlockables are present. Maybe the “evolved” part is specific to the graphics. They’re more detailed, sure, but this is one of the few games that really doesn’t benefit at all from a more fancy presentation. Compare the following two screens. Here’s from the iPhone version circa 2013.
Plague 1
And this is from the Steam version, today.
Plague 2
It looks okay. So this should be a really easy review for me, because that’s the only change I could spot.

And that change comes at a cost of $15. That’s $14 more than the mobile version. That’s the most absurd price hike for what you actually get I’ve ever seen in gaming. While it technically meets my criteria to win my seal of approval, I couldn’t possibly recommend it over the cheaper but nearly identical-for-now mobile versions. I can’t even recommend it at this time for the $11.24 I paid for it when it was on sale in June. On the off-chance you don’t own an iOS or Android enabled device, I would still probably recommend waiting for a sale, or until the game exits its current Early Access build. New features that might justify the price hike, such as Multiplayer, still haven’t arrived well over a year after the game released (which could be as much as $6.99, not including future expansions that the game’s FAQ implies will be free to Evolved owners, maybe). All that’s left is scenario creator, which I have to admit, didn’t really hold that much interest to me. Plague Inc. Evolved is fun, make no mistake. But it’ll be equally as fun when it’s out of early access.

I know, I know. I once again didn’t realize I was playing a game in early access and now am bitching that it’s not finished. What can I say? I keep forgetting that early access is only fun when you’re talking about cats and dogs. Because kittens and puppies are awesome and cute. Unfinished indies are just fucking aggravating, and they don’t need to chew up your shoes and piss on your couch to accomplish that. Well, look at the bright side: if I told people I was playing a post apocalyptic bubble popping simulator on my phone, I would be dismissed as a typical “casual” gamer. All hail the PC master race!

headerPlague Inc.: Evolved was developed by Ndemic Creations
Point of Sale: Steam
$11.24 (normal price $14.99) welcomes our new brain worm overlords in the making of this review.

igc_approved1Plague Inc.: Evolved is Chick-Approved, sorta. My rule for earning my seal of approval is to enjoy a game. I did, so it wins it. I’ll give it a more hearty endorsement when the game is finished if the multiplayer is fun. Also, Plague Inc.: Evolved will share a spot on the IGC Leaderboard with its mobile version.

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NOT A HERO

July 29, 2015 by 1 Comment

Two things annoy me about NOT A HERO, this month’s (well, technically last month’s) challenge from Indie Riot. First off is the all-caps name, which implies that you’re supposed to scream it out. “What are you doing, Cathy?” “NOT A HERO!” “What are you screaming?” “NOT A HERO!” “Um, yea Cathy, we sort of figured that out when after you pissed yourself when that spider crawled on the wall ten feet in front of you.” More annoying is NOT A HERO has an insane amount of potential, and although it can be really fun, it’s nowhere near as good as it could be.

NOT A HERO feels a lot like a mid-late 80s coin-op action title. Not any game in particular (though I did get some Elevator Action vibes from it) but one that would blend in mechanically from that era. Of course, it also has the required-for-indieness gratuitous violence that used to be awesome but is now expected and bordering on passé. And I say that both as a fan of violence and a practitioner of it, much to the dismay of my boyfriend, who is sick of having the whip marks washed out with rubbing alcohol. My point is, I think your average gamer is too desensitized by this point. The novelty of a violent 8-bit game wears off faster than a sneeze. And not the kind of sneeze where you have to roll up a piece of tissue into a spear and wiggle it around your nose to make yourself sneeze, because sometimes that takes a quite a while.

I laughed, then I cringed, then I laughed some more.

I laughed, then I cringed, then I laughed some more.

Which is not to say the violence in NOT A HERO isn’t awesome. There’s one point where you have to lead Bunnylord (the rabbit-man thing calling the shots) through a level to meet with a guy who responded to his peace-offering by decapitating the cake he presented him, because quirk. When you get the mayor to him, he starts to beat him in a way that’s funny and satisfying. Then it goes on too long and becomes awkward, like the game is trying too hard. THEN it goes on even longer, to the point that it starts being funny again. I love gags like that when they work, because it’s so rare when one is pulled off correctly. While the humor is hit-and-miss, when it works it’s amusing in a way many games with the retro-paint job often fail to grasp. NOT A HERO misses more than hits, but the hits are genuinely funny.

Nobody can accuse NOT A HERO of lacking personality. Or restraint. The humor can be very funny and the violence can be very spectacular. But, as a game, NOT A HERO struggles quite a bit. First off, the cover-based shooting mechanics quickly become boring. Enemies take cover, poke out and shoot. Getting enough quality shots off slows the pace down far too much. The game has a ton of different weapons, so why does the action feel so samey with every new floor of enemies and every new mission objective? Even worse, I can’t imagine a single player making it through the game without giving up on shoot-outs altogether and using the tackle / finishing-move option to dispatch nearly every enemy. It’s faster paced, relatively easy to pull off, and ultimately more satisfying. There’s probably a blowjob joke in there somewhere but after an hour of trying, I couldn’t find it. Anyway, the action initially sounds fine, but when the best option for dealing with the mechanics is to do the stuff that allows you to clear it as fast as possible, you might want to consider if a mistake was made along the line.

And then you hit the parts where you have to wonder if enough play-testing was done. The absolute worst part of NOT A HERO is jumping out windows, which in later stages becomes essential to clearing stages. Some objectives require puzzle-like planning and strategy, so it gets especially annoying to reach the end of a long stage and die because you intend to hop out a window and crash through the one directly below it only to fall to your death for the fifth mother fucking time. When exiting a window, you’ll often want to go through the window below you, but instead the game will launch you straight forward in a free-fall to the death. Even trying to heel-toe it at the base of a window doesn’t work all that great, because you’ll just end up dashing back into the room you just tried to exit. Mind you, many objectives in the game are based around a tight time limit, so having to fight a control mechanic that succeeds and fails almost seemingly at random takes the joy and fairness out. It was as if NOT A HERO was trying to bring the Hokey Pokey back, only it’s more like the Brokey-Croaky. You try to inch out the window, inch back in, and inch back out, do the brokey-croaky as your character falls, that’s when you start to pout.

Imagine your character doing the Goofy "YAAAAAHOOHOOWEEEE" noise as they fall to their death. At least that makes it somewhat tolerable.

Imagine your character doing the Goofy “YAAAAAHOOHOOWEEEE” noise as they fall to their death. At least that makes it somewhat tolerable.

If you think my hammering on this window thing seems petty and nit-picky, maybe you’re right. Especially when the rest of the play control isn’t that bad. I mean, other niggling little annoyances happen, like trying to slide out of danger but instead getting stuck in an animation where I’m capping someone with my finishing move and taking cheap damage as a result. But the window thing really sticks out to me because it’s such an essential part of the gameplay and there was no excuse for it to not be done better. Crashing through windows is a fun idea. I push my family out windows all the time and envy them as they roll off our roof and into our poison-oak bushes, because it just looks so damn exciting. And I like the concept and mission objectives for NOT A HERO a lot. The way levels are laid out makes some of them feel like surprisingly deep puzzles. I like puzzles, and it’s rare when a satisfying shooter has them. I’ll agree with other critics that the lack of variety in graphic design can be a bit exhausting, but I played NOT A HERO in shorter sessions, so it took the edge off that a little bit.

All those little control issues that pop up, one big one and several much smaller ones, make me think that NOT A HERO really could have used some more honest feedback from playtesters. To be clear, NOT A HERO is a lot of fun. Even exhilarating at times. That’s why I’m so annoyed by it. I hate games that don’t live up to their fullest potential. Clean up the play control and I think you would have the kind of indie that catches on like wildfire and goes down as something other games should aspire to be. Instead, NOT A HERO is simply a solid, fun title that people will enjoy for a few hours and forget about a week later. I could live with that if I was a cynic looking only for a temporary distraction. As someone who dreams of finding games that maximize their talent to the fullest, I really feel I have no choice here but to award NOT A HERO my seal of approval.

And then shoot it in the kneecap.

And then saw off its pinky fingers with a rusty hacksaw.

And then tie its testicles to a car battery and playfully zap it for a few hours.

And then dip cotton swabs in pepper spray and shove them in its ears.

And then take a smoke break because this torture shit is exhausting.

And then do the old thumb and screw method, because that always looked fun in the movies.

And then introduce it to my pet grizzly bear, Fluffy. Watch out, she’s horny.

And then load a buckshot with pellets of uranium 238 and take out the other knee.

And then make it drink Clamato, because fucking gross.

And then see how many times you can vivisection an arm using only a chainsaw.

Oh don’t get pissy with me, NOT A HERO. You started it!

Not a Hero logoNOT A HERO was developed by Roll7
Point of Sale: Steam

igc_approved1$12.99 is exploring the viability of running for office on a platform cleaning up the city using old ladies packing heat in the making of this review.

NOT A HERO is Chick-Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.

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Clicker Heroes

June 12, 2015 by 10 Comments

My name is Catherine, and I’m a Clickaholic.

Clicker Heroes addictionWhat is Clicker Heroes? A game? A waste of time? A Cookie Clicker rip-off with an RPG reskin? A digital designer drug? What do you do? Well, you click the left mouse button. This gives you gold that you spend to help you click more or buy characters that click for you. Click, click, click, click, click. I clicked so much that dolphins showed up at my house expecting to mate with me. Which isn’t as fun as it sounds. It’s like fucking a slip ‘n slide, but that’s a story for my upcoming spin-off blog “Marine Mammal Bestiality Chick.” There’s multiple “heroes” that you have to level up and upgrade. After a certain point, you’re expected to begin “ascending” which is to say start-over from the beginning, only all the heroes you’ve gilded remain gilded (thus increasing their damage by at least 50%) and you get “hero souls” which can be used to buy different kinds of upgrades. Enemies don’t fight back, so basically you just click a whole lot and watch a handful of different enemy types appear to have seizures and die. After a while, I gave up on manually clicking and grabbed an auto-clicker. I guess some Clicker Heroes purists consider this cheating, but it was either use an auto clicker or have my right hand pull an Evil Dead on me. I wasn’t a total scoundrel about it. I set it to perform ten-trillion clicks a second instead of a quadrillion.

After putting out the ensuing fire and buying a new computer, I realized I was playing the game wrong. Among other things, I had my gilded heroes spread out too much. Some of the heroes’ upgrades benefit other heroes instead of themselves. So I started to move gilds around, stacking 200 on Treebeast, which seemed to give a disproportionate amount of damage for the cost. I also started boosting ancients that would allow me to make a lot of progress with minimal clicks. Mostly stuff that gives bonuses for remaining idle. I also increased the percentage of Heroes Souls I yielded and the percentage of bosses that you harvest them from. As always, games that are based on chance tend to stick it to me, so I rarely yielded the amount of souls I should have gotten in any particular run, though your mileage will vary.

At this point, I had no clue what I was doing. I would have been better served lighting the $20 I spent at this point on fire. At least that would have kept me warm for a few minutes.

At this point, I had no clue what I was doing. I would have been better served lighting the $20 I had already spent on fire. At least that would have kept me warm for a few minutes.

I appreciate Clicker Heroes because it doesn’t really tart-up what it is. It’s a time sink. It owns it. It’s a relatively well-done time sink though. It’s genuinely satisfying to watch your stats grow, to make it further each time you ascend, and to unlock new characters. However, Clicker Heroes has too many walls that pop up, forcing multiple-repetition grinding that saps the entertainment value out of it. It always returns to being “fun” for lack of a better term once the wall is overcome, but each subsequent wall gets more and more grindy. Even after a dozen ascensions and pumping up my stats, I’m still getting utterly brick-walled once I get to around level 2,400. I’m leveled-up enough that I can get back to it in about 90 minutes of play-time. A major problem is the time it takes to get back to those sections you’re stuck on. It should be easier to skip the opening levels once you reach a certain point. You can buy the right to skip those levels, but the cost of it is, in my opinion, disproportionately high compared to other upgrades. It makes more sense to me that skipping those stages should be something earned through progress, not something you have to elect to purchase over making upgrades. It would make the game less tedious. Tedium is the absolute last thing you want your game to contain, even if it’s a grind-a-thon time sink.

I don't recommend trying to upgrade all the heroes. Too much effort for no reason. Degild all but the first hero you get and the last 8 you can unlock. Or not. I'm sure fans of the game will scream that I suck at the game and didn't upgrade correctly. They're probably right.

I don’t recommend trying to upgrade all the heroes. Too much effort for no reason. Degild all but the first hero you get and the last 8 you can unlock. Or not. I’m sure fans of the game will scream that I suck at the game and didn’t upgrade correctly. They’re probably right.

Now then, the money. I put $64.96 into Clicker Heroes. My justification being that I buy $59.99 games all the time and never come remotely close to putting a fraction of the time in them I did in Clicker Heroes, so it “earned” my money so to speak. Which is not to say I got value for my money. Some of that is on me and not knowing how to properly use the gems when I first started, so my initial $25 was burned in a wasteful manner. But, once I did know what I was doing, I still felt what you get for the money isn’t enough. The gems eliminate grind, and nothing more. They eliminate significantly less grind the further in you are. I’m at the point now where I could spend 50 gems (which takes several hours to earn if you’re not spending money, even after you’ve fulled upgraded a gem multiplier) to do a ‘quick ascend’ to get all my hero souls without losing my place and it won’t put a dent in the wall I’m at. The final $19.99 I put in was for the sake of experimentation. How much extra progress could I make late in the game if I skipped a bit of grind and ascended a couple of times? The answer turned out to be not a whole lot. Even though I upgraded damage stats, I’m not sure I helped myself at all.

Here’s a thought for Clicker Heroes and any game going the freemium route: VIP subscriptions that give you substance. It can’t be something lame like “Get a bonus 10% damage if you’re a VIP member.” It has to be something that gives you value over what you could get by purchasing the gems in the game. Since freemium games struggle more and more to convert free players to paying ones, it boggles my mind that many never stop to reevaluate why. It’s an industry where achieving 5% conversion rate is considered a major success. Instead of shrugging shoulders and saying “this is the business we’ve chosen” why not say “5% sucks. Let’s figure out what we’re doing wrong.”

Of course, there’s a crowd who simply will never accept freemium games under any circumstance. I’m going to try something foolhardy and appeal to them directly: games like this do matter. They have a place. Over the last three weeks, I’ve been overloaded with work and I’ve been having issues with my epilepsy. Two things that normally keep me from being able to be a gamer. So how did I manage to put in an eye-popping 300 hours into Clicker Heroes? Well, it’s because Clicker Heroes is one of those rare games that you can have fun with even when it doesn’t have your full, undivided attention.

You can grind up gems or you can buy them. Either way, I've reached point where their effect on my progress is practically non-existence.

You can grind up gems or you can buy them. Either way, I’ve reached point where their effect on my progress is practically non-existence.

In fact, I was pretty dang productive while I was playing Clicker Heroes. My friends were (and probably still are) concerned by the sheer time I put into it. But if you look closer, I didn’t really put as much time into it as Steam says I did. My work involves a lot of paperwork. I could sit with it, look up occasionally and pump the stats up of one of my heroes, then return to my work. Or I could throw on a movie, watch it with my boyfriend, and boost my characters every couple of minutes. And finally, at one point I just left the damn thing running for 24 hours with the auto-clicker going, building a multiplier bonus for keeping a click streak alive. Which didn’t really do as much as you might think it would.

Some people say stuff like Clicker Heroes isn’t really a game. I say it’s the type of title that allows us to always be playing games. In the big tent of gaming, why do we as a community say stuff like this, or Cookie Clicker, or Facebook games have to be relegated to the corner, if they’re allowed in at all? What’s the difference between Kerbal Space Program and Clicker Heroes? My non-gaming father has put around 100 hours into Kerbal since last month. My non-gaming mother plows through each new Angry Birds release. My business partners (none of whom are gamers) and I have our weekly prep meetings while playing Sportsfriends. Games come in all shapes and sizes, and none appeal to everyone. Some are so niche that their appeal is limited to most, especially the indie crowd. We have to stop doing this as a community. Labeling what is and isn’t a game. That’s just snobbery run amok. Clicker Heroes is a time sink without shame. But it is a game. It matters.

Clicker LogoClicker Heroes was developed by Playsaurus
Clicker Heroes is Free to Play, available on Steam

igc_approved1$64.96 will 12 step her way to her next game in the making of this review.

Clicker Heroes is Chick Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.

Go Dubs!

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