Glow Arcade Racer

Glow Arcade Racer looks good.  The screenshots and gameplay trailer are likely enough to get anyone excited over it.  I imagined it would be sort of like one of those old school top-down racers like Super Sprint, only with futuristic trappings and lots of power-ups.  How could it possibly go wrong?

Well, you should never judge a book by its cover.  Or a game by its screenshots.  Glow Arcade Racer is fucking horrible.  I’ll start with the controls.  The entire game handles like you’re steering a gas-powered puck across a giant Tron-themed air hockey table.  Fundamental stuff like knowing which way your car is pointed become obscured, leading to weird situations where you’ll go off a jump and by time you land, you’re pointing the other direction while completely unsure how you ended up there.  I felt like an old-timer behind the wheel of a real car, only without the fun of plowing through a farmer’s market.

Ignore the Siren call of this screen shot. The actual game is an uncontrollable nightmare.

Control is a big issue, but it’s the little things that contributed to my firm dislike of Glow Arcade Racer.  For instance, on some levels there’s slowdown.  Not a lot, but the transition from smooth scrolling to a stuttering frame rate is akin to having Ice Capades break out in the middle of the Superbowl.  Meanwhile, the camera is operated by a child that was repeatedly dropped on its head.  It zooms  in and out, always at the least appropriate times in a way guaranteed to fuck you over.  You can zoom out the camera, but it leaves everything microscopic, which only compounds the problem of not knowing which way your car is aimed.  The zoomed out camera also crippled four-player local multiplayer.  They did try to alleviate the controlling issues by offering a control scheme called “simple” where both movement and gas are mapped to the left stick.  It doesn’t work at all, which makes me question if the wording was meant as a kind insult.  As in “forgive us for that control scheme.  That was Jeffery’s idea, and he’s.. well.. simple.”

The AI is kind of bitch too.  There doesn’t seem to be any rubber-banding present here, because on the very first course I was able to lap the 4th place driver.  But when the computer controlled racers get weapons, they fire them with unreasonably perfect accuracy, usually destroying you only a nanosecond before you cross the finish line.  The only way to unlock courses is to finish in first place.  By the second course, I could lead the race for every lap and, just a second away from the goal, I would get hit by a projectile and get knocked back to last.  This happened every time over the course of six straight races, mind you.  And once I actually did clear the level, this type of bullshit continued on every new track that followed.

To the game’s credit, the course designs are imaginative and inviting, and the graphics really are very attractive.  But Glow Arcade Racer is plagued with design problems and some horrible technical issues that keep the brakes fully applied.  Here’s a fun one: I’m driving next to a wall.  An enemy crashes into me and pushes me through the wall.  This happened more than once on the second course in the game.  There was no way for me to return to the track except to drive backwards, which causes you to disintegrate and respawn on the course.  The walls were so problematic that I briefly rejoiced once they were taken away after I reached the set of tracks called “Drift.”  As it turns out, the game is even worse without them.  The courses in Drift seem to be designed in a way that no reasonable person could manage to keep their car on track.  I would end up accidentally cutting far enough out that my car would auto-respawn back on course.  I had already rage quit once after the last-second miracle shots I mentioned earlier.  The quit that happened during Drift was one of disgust.

It was also a permanent one.  I’m not going back to Glow Arcade Racer.  The hour I put into it was total agony.  The horrible controls, crack shot AI, and sometimes quite frankly unfair course design left me more angry than entertained.  It’s such a shame, because it really does look spectacular.  It’s the Megan Fox of XBLIGs.  It looks hot, but if you get too close you realize that it’s.. well.. simple.

Glow Arcade Racer was developed by Polar Blue Games

80 Microsoft Points said “it’s like R.C. Pro-Am if you dropped acid” in the making of this review.  I think my Microsoft Points have a problem.

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Merball Tournament

Fantasy sports: why don’t more developers do this kind of thing?  When I was a kid and I saw the first Harry Potter movie, I couldn’t wait for a Quidditch video game.  And then one came out and it sucked on a cock-flavored jellybean and nobody has breathed word of a better version since.  Sigh.  It also closed the door to other potential fairy tale inspired games, like Centaur Equestrian or Pixie Badminton.

Merball Tournament kind of reminded me of the Halo variation Grifball, only without the axes, swords, explosions, and fun.  You control a team of mermaids who race another team of mermaids through a maze to find a ball and bring it to the other team’s starting base.  If you’re holding the ball, there’s no way to defend yourself from having it stolen.  If someone on the other team gets close to you, they can just take it, at which point you’re left standing still, unable to move, as if your character is saying “bitch, what the fuck?”

Good for you, bitch. What do you want? A fucking medal?

Without any form of defense, you’re left to just leg it, or flipper it or whatever the fuck you call the tail of a mermaid.  Merball Tournament does provide a useful map and radar, but in a way it kind of kills what should be the theoretical thrill of the game.  It’s the Doom principle, where the excitement comes from turning a corner only to run smack-dab into a cluster of enemies.  Merball is a game that’s set in a maze, yet everyone on both teams plus the location of the ball is clearly labeled.  The mazes aren’t randomly generated, so once you have one committed to memory, you should easily be able to figure out the best routes where you will never run into the opposing team.

Of course, any design choice I can complain about is irrelevant if the game is still fun.  Merball could have been, if the controls worked.  They don’t.  I had a sneaking suspicion the play control might be problematic when the trailer sent to me by the developer featured the character repeatedly swimming into walls.  I know I usually save the trailer for the very end of a review, but here I simply have to let you view it now.  Have a look.

It’s unbelievable, isn’t it?  The funny thing is, I handled the controls a lot better than this guy did.  Not significantly so, but I was able to avoid braining myself on the walls for the most part.  Still, your mermaid handles like the sea she lives in is the dumping ground of choice for unsold Jim Beam.  Maneuvering her up and down was also fairly difficult.  I spent most of the time clinging to the ceiling like I had just guzzled down a bottle of Willy Wonka’s Fizzy Lifting Drink.  Later stages have multi-leveled mazes.  Swimming upwards is no problem in these, but swimming down is unresponsive and feels kind of sticky.  Meanwhile, the AI is absolutely fucking brain-dead.  In a dozen or so rounds of Merball, only once did one of my teammates actually steal the ball from the other team.  Most of the time I saw them they were busy swimming into walls.

Overall, Merball Tournament feels like an unfinished prototype.  Perhaps the groundwork for something of merit is here, but the game is so far away from what it needs to be that I can’t in my right mind recommend it to anyone in its present state.  Conceptually, there’s nothing at all wrong with a game about a bunch of passive aggressive mermaids playing the most pussified form of Rugby the world has ever seen.  It just needs a lot of fine tuning.  I also hate to bring back this old chestnut but this was a game that could have really benefited from online multiplayer.  Considering how bad everything turned out here, maybe it’s absence is a blessing in disguise.  Regardless, Merball lacks the polish to be a worthwhile purchase and as far as I’m concerned it can go ahead and dissolve into sea-foam.  Yea, that’s how the Little Mermaid is supposed to end.  Up yours, Disney!

Merball Tournament was developed by Tarh Ik

80 Microsoft Points are up where they walk, up where they run, up where they stay all day in the sun in the making of this review.

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SteamSunk

SteamSunk is a twin-stick shooter, only without the second stick actually firing.  Instead, it aims while you hold the right trigger to fire, which increases the potential for hand cramping about ten fold.  Otherwise, this is a typical TwickS (a word I just invented), with the twist being the maritime setting.  Enemies come at you in waves and you fire on them, watch them crash into the water, grab items, and then shoot some more.  Every five waves a boss will appear, bringing a hoard of baddies with him.  Items are your typical assortment of TwickS standbys, like a flame thrower, rocket launcher, and machine gun.  If this doesn’t sound exciting, my apologies, but I can’t really spruce up the description of something this generic.

So what sets this apart from your average XBLIG TwickS?  Well, badness for one thing.  It’s pretty hard to screw up a twin-stick shooter, so it’s almost admirable how many ways SteamSunk pulls it off.  The absolute biggest issue is slowdown.  When multiple baddies are on-screen at once, the frame rate starts to sputter like a bird just flew into its intake.  This is especially a problem when the later bosses show up.  They tend to bring dozens of enemies with them, all of them clustered together in a way to make your processor wave a flag of surrender.  By around wave twenty, things are chugging so hard that I went from full life to instant death in a matter of moments because I could not keep up due to the skippiness.

There’s a few small problems that also contribute to the downfall of this.  The items aren’t always helpful, especially the rocket launcher.  It’s slow and clunky and every single time I picked it up I gave myself a nice, hearty cussing for being so stupid.  There’s also a super-duper weapon, called the “SuperMortar” that’s almost totally worthless.  When you use it, the game pauses and you line up where you want the bombs from it to drop.  The only thing is, once you use it there’s a delay before it actually begins to drop, and the enemies are usually long gone by time it starts to fall.  I’m sure the intent is to drop the SuperMortar where you think the enemies will be once the move kicks in, but in the later stages the bosses move quickly and randomly enough that it’s not always possible to guess.  So all it’s good for is to bog down the frame rate even more, like it needs your help with that.

Meanwhile, the controls are less than smooth and the enemies are really fickle about where you can shoot them.  The bosses often camp outside of the water and if they die there, you can’t grab the items they drop.  The graphics are boring, the map is dull, and there’s no online leaderboards.  I can’t think of a single reason why you would want to own this one.  The Xbox Live Indie Game scene is full of dozens of games that do the same exact thing, only better.  And why the fuck doesn’t the right stick shoot?  At no point when you’re aiming the gun will you also not want to also be shooting.  Sorry fans, but I can’t resist the easy pun, so here it goes: SteamSunk really SteamStunk.

SteamSunk was developed by Snape

80 Microsoft Points lost out on the Defense of the Dark Arts position in the making of this review.  Damn that Potter!

Hurley, whom I hear swabs the decks one Q-Tip at a time, also covered this for Gear-Fish. 

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Escape The Car

You’ve played this one before.  Trust me.  You might have forgotten about it, but it will all come back just as soon you boot up the demo.  Escape The Car by Afro Ninja has been around as a free internet game for years now.  It’s a point-and-click title where you find various items in a car, use them on various objects, maybe combine them, and try to exit the vehicle.  Well now for $1, you can play the exact same game on your Xbox.  What a, um, deal or something.

Afro Ninja did modernize the graphics, added a smooth music track, and included five meaningless achievements,  but the actual game part is completely unchanged.  The items, the layout of the car, and the solutions all remain from the free game.  There’s no added second quest (besides the option to play the same game with the original graphics), no differences in puzzles, or really any incentive to play this version over the one you can play for free right now.  So why would pay $1 for it?  Hopefully when they bring the rest of the “Escape Series” to XBLIG, they change things up somewhat, because otherwise no dollars will play “Escape the Wallet” to purchase them.

Escape the Car was developed by Afro Ninja

80 Microsoft Points just saved you $1 by giving you this link in the making of this review.

Please donate to Extra Life, a promotional event that shows gaming geeks have heart, and help make a difference in the lives of the next generation of gamers. 

I couldn’t find a trailer, but trust me, you don’t need it.  Just go play the free game.  It’s fun.  

Pixelosity

Pixelosity is an auto-scrolling shooter driven by reflexes and high scores.  There’s really not a lot to say about it, so this review will likely be brief.  You control what looks like a penis head with a rainbow shaft that flies around and shoots bullets, or at least I hope they are bullets, at various ships.  Along the way you can grab power-ups that temporarily boost your bullets, or perhaps a bomb that destroys everything on the screen.  It’s pretty standard wave-shooter stuff that we’ve all played dozens of times before.  Here, the game is skinned in Intellivision-style clothing, but it’s still the same old shit.  If you’re into this style of game, you’ll dig Pixelosity.

I’m fairly neutral on wave/space shooters, and what usually tips the balance for me is how many times the developer fucked up.  Here, there are fuck-ups aplenty.  First off, the background color can sometimes make it hard to spot where the enemy bullets are.  In later stages, the game takes on a bullet-hell twist that can be obscured by the wrong color of graphics.  Second, the enemies can be incredibly cheap.  A wall of four will appear, all shooting quickly enough that its difficult to get in a clean shot on them before they disappear.  The game rewards you with bonus stages if you kill all the enemies, but it’s not always possible.  Third, I hate that the bullet upgrades only last a few seconds.  If you go to a child and hand them an adorable puppy, wait just long enough for them to fall in love with it (8.35 seconds.. not that I’ve done this horrible exercise myself or anything.  I swear I haven’t.  What?  STOP LOOKING AT ME!) and then take it back just to be spiteful, that’s a dick move.  And that’s the vibe I got from Pixelosity.  The game is at it’s most fun when you have more bullets, but those items are few and far between, and when they wear off the game suffers for it.

I still had some fun with Pixelosity, but it’s too generic and too simplistic for its own good.  I might have enjoyed it more if the promised online leaderboards worked, but they didn’t.  I’m told they’re working on a fix for that, but honestly it won’t make that much a difference.  By time the patch is up, Pixelosity will be gathering virtual dust.  It’s not a bad game by any means.  It’s just bland.  Oatmeal without sugar.  Rice without soy sauce.  Teller without Penn.  Michelle Bachman without the raving insanity.  It’s good for thirty minutes and then you’ll wonder why you spent a buck on it.  But if you’re into anything that gives off the appearance of being ancient, party like it’s 1978!  Let’s all drop acid and watch Battlestar Galactica!

Pixelosity was developed by GLHF Games

80 Microsoft Points couldn’t think of anything else that happened in 1978 in the making of this review.

Hurley and Nate, whom I hear drive around in a van solving mysteries together, named Pixelosity the “Catch of the Week” over at Gear Fish.

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Gameplay footage courtesy of Indies.onPause.org

Flight Adventure 2

And now for something completely different.  When I started Indie Gamer Chick, I figured I would be playing all kinds of genres that I wasn’t entirely familiar with.  Instead, I’ve mostly been dealing with platformers and space shooters.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but the Indie scene hasn’t exactly been the beacon of new experiences I thought it would be.  And then along came Flight Adventure 2.

Granted, flight sims are nothing new to gaming, but I never really got into them.  My father was hugely into Microsoft Flight Simulator, which he would often talk me into trying.  I would usually last about five minutes before boredom set in.  I did fair a little bit better with Pilotwings 64 as a kid, and later Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. series, although that’s a true simulation of flight in the same way Splinter Cell is a simulation of espionage.  But I never aspired to be a pilot and I didn’t figure games like this would figure into my life at any point.

When I spotted Flight Adventure 2 on the marketplace, I knew I had to give it a shot.  I mean, it looked damn good, and it was licensed by Boeing.  A licensed Xbox Live Indie Game?  Get the fuck out!  And then I was contacted by the developers of it, who assured me that online play was a major component of their game and provided me with a code to give to someone on my friend’s list, which my BFF Brian eagerly snatched up.  This not being the type of thing I’m into, I figured I would monkey around for an hour, maybe do a race or two, and then type up the most entertaining review of an Xbox Live Indie Game flight simulator you’ve ever seen.

Now, six hours of playtime later, I’m barely able to get through typing this without wanting to go back and play it some more.  Fancy that.

I usually try to get unbranded screenshots but this was the best I could do. My apologies.

Flight Adventure 2 isn’t heavy on options.  There’s only one airplane for you to fly, a P-51 Mustang, and you can’t customize it in any way.  There’s also only one map at your disposal, albeit an insanely huge one that contains multiple different routes for races.  I don’t know how much more or less complex this is than your typical flight sim, but the controls are complicated and you have lots of stuff to pay attention to once you’ve taken off.  So the game isn’t exactly easy to use, but neither is an actual airplane so I guess that’s the point.

If I could think of one word to describe Flight Adventure 2, it would be “relaxing.”  This is a no-pressure game experience.  Once you’ve taken to the friendly skies, cruising around at your leisure is very tranquil.  It helps that the developers focused on eliminating things that would take me out of the experience.  The draw distance is insane, to the point where there is absolutely no pop-up or fogging that would destroy the immersion created.  Meanwhile, you still have to manage things like your pitch and roll, adjusting your flaps and maintaining your speed.  If you go too fast, your plane can break apart, as mine often did.  You can change this in the options menu, which is handy if you plan on doing various stunts with your plane, but why bother?  I actually felt somewhat accomplished when I was able to do a loopty-loop in my Mustang without showering the Earth with broken airplane and body parts.

When you get bored with aimless flying, you can enter a race mode using Xbox Live or via system-linking.  You choose one of six courses where you must fly between what looks like miniature nuclear cooling towers.  I also had fun with this mode, but I should note that in my personal opinion, the towers aren’t spread apart far enough, and I would often clear a gate by crashing straight into it.  Brian said I was just being a crybaby and they were perfectly spread apart.  So basically Brian is an asshole and I’m right about this, because I felt it was just too hard to get between the damn checkpoints.

Then again, I really sucked at this game.  Even after several hours of playtime, I had been unable to land my plane successfully.  Brian tried to walk me through it, but our efforts were fruitless.  About five hours in, I was finally able to land my plane.  Kinda.  I broke off the wheels, but by God my character would have survived if he existed, and that’s okay with me.  I also semi-successfully landed on a hill once, but when it comes to collision-detection the game doesn’t seem to factor in speed.  I held the breaks and gently eased my way down the hill, going maybe a few feet per a minute.  At the bottom of the hill, I lightly tapped a tree with a force equivalent to having a fly land on you.  At this point, both my wings flew off at roughly the speed of light and my cockpit exploded.  I theorized that my pilot was in fact Hans Moleman.

I have to also break my rule that says people who received the free code get no feedback in this review, but I have to do so for a very important reason.  Whenever we were doing races, my friends Brian, Bryce, and Cameron had to bank hard to reach a checkpoint, and they would occasionally accidentally click the left stick, which brings up the map.  This happened often enough that it seems like it might be a problem for other players.  That or all three of them were just thick.  Brian?  Maybe.  Bryce for sure.  I don’t know Cameron all that well though, and the fact that it happened to him too suggests to me that maybe they shouldn’t have mapped the map to the left clicker.  For the record, it never once happened to me, but most of the time I was too busy crashing into trees to be worried about how steep I was banking.

I felt like Indiana Jones. "Fly? Yes. Land? No!"

And since I’m giving someone else feedback in my review, I might as well go in for a penny, in for a pound and also note that Brian thought the absence of fuel was weird.  I’ll admit that a game that takes itself so seriously with realism and accuracy ignoring such a key component of aviation was bizarre, but I was actually glad that I had one less thing to worry about.  Between adjusting my flaps, my thrust, and various other words that sound naughty if taken out of context, worrying about having enough gas in the tank would have been too much for me to handle.

Overall though, I really liked Flight Adventure 2.  It’s one of the few Xbox Live Indie Games that I can safely say I’ll keep playing long after I’ve finished reviewing it.  Despite its complexity, the game offers a leisurely experience that’s high in production value and low in cost.  Hell, I managed to write 1,100 words thus far without whining about how they didn’t include dog fighting in it.  My primitive brain is wired for combat, not for adjusting trim on an ancient airplane.  A flying game without shooting?  Total hogwash, or so I thought.  It should have been impossible for me to have enjoyed Flight Adventure 2, but I did.  I guess I enjoyed it because it made me feel like I was Amelia Earhart.  And by that I mean I was an unskilled pilot with a tendency to crash but, damn, what a ride!

Flight Adventure 2 was developed by CAVOK Games (website outdated)

240 Microsoft Points spent more time in trees than Tarzan in the making of this review.

A review copy of Flight Adventure 2 was provided by CAVOK Games to IndieGamerChick.com in this review.  The copy played by the Chick was purchased by her with her own Microsoft Points.  The review copy was given to a friend with the sole purpose of helping the Chick test online multiplayer.  That person had no limited feedback in this article.  For more information on this policy, please read the Developer Support page here. 

Nate, whom I hear went to the John F. Kennedy Jr. School for Flying, also reviewed this at Gear Fish.  I would like to note that I experienced none of the online issues that he did.

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Avatar Trivia Online

Avatar Trivia Online is no longer for sale.  Instead, it’s been replaced with Avatar Trivia Party.  See that review here. 

Um, let’s see.  Hmmmm.  I’ll take Xbox Live Indie Games.

The question is: what is the latest release by Red Crest Studios, the guys behind the #9 game on the Indie Gamer Chick All-Time Top 10 list, Andromium?

Andromium 2: Andromiumer?

Sorry, no.  The correct answer is Avatar Trivia Online.  Please select a new category.

Ah crap.  Okay, let’s see, how about..

Actually no, you don’t get to choose categories.  We just throw random questions at you.  The next question is, how many players does Avatar Trivia Online support?

Um, zero?

Wow, you are kind of dumb.  The correct answer is 16.

Boy, that’s a lot of players!

Indeed it is.  Next question: in a trivia video game, what is the most efficient way to be able to answer questions?

Well that would be mapping an answer to each of the four face buttons.

Danny, Tin, and Hipster are all legally retarded.

That is correct!  Next question: how are the questions answered in Avatar Trivia Online?

Um, the efficient way?

Oh sorry, you have way too much faith here.  The correct answer is you have to clumsily scroll through a list of the answers.

No way.  They couldn’t have missed something that obvious.

They could have and they did.  Now, would you like to know your score?

Well, I’ve missed a lot of questions already so probably not.

That’s good, because in Avatar Trivia Online, no score is kept.  At all.

…

…

…

…

You’re joking, right?

Nope.

So it’s a trivia game that doesn’t keep score?  It doesn’t even tell you how many questions you yourself have answered correctly?

That is correct.

Why on Earth would anyone want to play that?  If it doesn’t keep score, and it doesn’t offer any different modes of play besides “answer this trivia question”, what does the game offer that couldn’t be accomplished by just randomly asking questions on a message board, or on Twitter or something?

Oh, well, um, being the host and everything, I wasn’t expecting to be asked questions myself.  I suppose for those things you don’t have to pay $1 to have meaningless social trivia.  I guess that’s actually not a good thing, is it?

No.  No it’s not.

Oh oh oh oh oh, wait, I know.  In those things, you don’t get to use your Xbox Avatar!  That’s a big deal!

Dude, I’m so over my avatar.  I see it every time I boot up my Xbox.  And in this type of game, where you don’t even have direct control over it, the only reason for it to even exist is because there’s a lot of especially thick casual gamers out there who make a big deal of seeing a cartoon version of themselves.  It screams “empty cash grab.”

Well, I suppose you’re right.  It also doesn’t help that Avatar Trivia Online isn’t tailored for playing with your friends.  You’re placed in a random room and have to invite them into the game with you midway through a question.  Of course, since the game doesn’t keep score, it’s not like they’re going to miss out on points or anything.

This doesn’t sound like a very good game.  The whole point of online games is they are supposed to be competitive.  Well it’s hard to have a competition if nobody keeps score.  I’m actually not bothered by questions frequently repeating, because that happens in all trivia games besides maybe the recent You Don’t Know Jack.  Still, I think gamers should likely pass on this one.

Kairi, that is correct!  Congratulations, you’ve won the game!

Really?  Oh my God!  This is the greatest moment of my life!  What did I win?

I dunno.  Since there’s really no way to “win” Avatar Trivia Online, I don’t know what kind of prize to give you here.  How about inner peace?

Inner peace?  How am I supposed to shop with that?

Avatar Trivia Online was developed by Red Crest Studios

80 Microsoft Points took Anal Bum Cover for 400 please Alex in the making of this review.

A review copy of Avatar Trivia Online was provided by Red Crest Studios to IndieGamerChick.com in this review.  The copy played by the Chick was purchased by her with her own Microsoft Points.  The review copy was given to a friend with the sole purpose of helping the Chick test online multiplayer.  That person had no feedback in this article.  For more information on this policy, please read the Developer Support page here. 

Please donate to Extra Life, a promotional event that shows gaming geeks have heart, and help make a difference in the lives of the next generation of gamers. 

I couldn’t find a video or trailer for this game.  Check back later and I’ll edit one in if it goes up.

Dark Delve

I hate doing this review.  You know why?  Because I liked Dark Delve.  I don’t have a lot of bad things to say about it.  And when that happens, my reviews are usually boring.  Oh, there are some exceptions.  I really liked Wizorb, and the poor guys at Tribute Games ended up catching my wrath simply because it was years of pent-up Arkanoid frustration being dumped on them.  In the case of Dark Delve, I really don’t have any axes to grind with its style or its genre.  I’m pretty much fucked with this review as a result.

Dark Delve is a dungeon crawler where you take control of a group of up to four people and search a dungeon for treasure and items, fighting enemies and trying to save the world or some such bullshit.  Although the game is fairly linear, you get a lot of customization options.  For added difficulty, you can go in with only one character.  Being the coward that I am, I decided to go in with four chicks.  Thus I created the “Me Quadruplets.”  Fuck Me, Blow Me, Eat Me, and Lick Me.  Yep, I’m that immature.

Exploration in Dark Delve is done from a first person perspective.  You walk around, searching for hidden rooms and occasionally encountering enemies.  The strange thing is the graphics in the dungeon are really, really well done, but all the characters are downright laughable.  These two contrasting visual styles kind of threw me out of the immersion I was initially feeling when I began the game.  The dungeon is so well designed and drawn that it has a foreboding creepiness to it.  And then there are the characters and enemies that look like they were drawn in KidPix by a 6-year-old.

From left to right: Sleepy Knight, Gollum, Accusatory Ghost Thingie, and Bald Pregnant Alien Britney Spears

Combat is typical turn-based stuff, all driven by menus.  You do have a fairly wide option of attacks to choose from, and there’s a skill-upgrade system that adds more.  I will say that the game sure seems to allow your guys to miss their attacks a lot.  I can’t recall an RPG where your characters strike out as much as it happens in Dark Delve.  Even against low-level creatures, I went full rounds where my characters would whiff every time I went to hit them.  It got so annoying early on that I started over and switched the difficulty to easy.  It didn’t help at all.  And I don’t think its tied to the stamina system because it would happen with the first encounter after I spent a night in the inn to recharge all my stats.  Then again, it might just be that I’m the most unlucky RPG player ever, which was previously established in my review of Sequence.

Aside from the combat and crudely drawn characters, the game itself is quite engaging.  The dungeon is large and offers lots of interesting surprises.  I wasn’t in love with the stamina aspect, where you have limited amount of time to wander through the dungeon before you have to retreat to the exit and rest at an inn.  In essence, it’s punishment for wanting to explore the game, and that’s a horrible idea.  It never really added a sense of tension, which is what I think the developer was aiming for.  It just took away from the fun and gave nothing back.  So boo on that.

Funny enough, the main campaign was the low point of Dark Delve.  The storyline is clichéd, there’s too much backtracking involved, and too many items to juggle.  It’s still good, but it’s lacking a sense of restraint that continuously held it back.  I was about to write the whole game off as “good but in need of someone to filter out the bad ideas, of which there were many.”  And then I discovered the extra challenges.  The game has three of them.  All of them are separate quests with characters already created for you and a more clearly defined mission.  There’s no town to retreat to every time your stamina runs low, and the dungeons were all much more clever in design.  By the end of the main campaign, I was fatigued by a quest that had run out of fun long before it had run out of game.  The extra challenges not only renewed my interest in the game, but I was actually disappointed when I ran out of them.  As a general rule of thumb, any game that leaves you wanting more is usually worth it.

Likely not the most exciting screenshot of the dungeon. Choose your pictures more carefully, developers.

I haven’t reviewed a ton of RPGs since I founded Indie Gamer Chick, but Dark Delve is the best one thus far.  The dungeon exploration really is quite wonderful, even when it gets pissy at you for doing it too much.  Honestly, the main quest is such a colossal waste of time that I would play it only long enough to get a feel for the style.  Once you got it, drop the campaign like a hot rock and head to the challenge modes.  This is what the entire game should have been.  Even better, the developer is promising more, via DLC.  At 80MSP, Dark Delve is one of the better deals in terms of content out there, and it’s only going to get better.  Some really iffy design choices might have cost this a shot at the IndieGamerChick.com leaderboard, but it’s still a contender.

I think the stamina thing is part of the whole minimum shittiness quota for Xbox Live Indie Games.  I’m telling you guys, it’s a conspiracy.  Hear me out on this one.  Originally, Indie games were called “Community” games.  Community implies a large group of people, despite the fact that most of these games are made by one person.  Thus the Community thing to me says that it’s part of the New World Order, the secretive society that controls the world.  But the use of “community” was too obvious and so the slick devils behind this conspiracy changed it to “Indie Games.”  Now, I believe that “Indie” is in reality I.N.D.I.E., an acronym for “Illuminati’s New Dystopian Integrated Entertainment” which aims to slowly eradicate fun from this Earth, one small step at a time.  First video games, and then the world.  WAKE UP PEOPLE!

Dark Delve was developed by Checkmark Games

80 Microsoft Points think Kairi is off her meds again in the making of this review.

Hurley, whom I hear likes to sunbathe at night, also covered Dark Delve for Gear Fish.

Please donate to Extra Life, a promotional event that shows gaming geeks have heart, and help make a difference in the lives of the next generation of gamers. 

Kobold’s Quest

Update: Kolbold’s Quest is now 80 Microsoft Points.  It makes my overall opinion of it lean slightly more positive.  With three willing friends, it might be worth a purchase.

There’s nothing more boring than listening to people drone on and on about how adorable their children are.  Maybe after having the little parasite live inside you for nine months you grow attached to it, but to me and most of the world it’s just a little machine that turns food into shit and vomit.  Oh yes, that’s so adorable.  And then they want to show you pictures and talk about how they just cut their first teeth.  Meanwhile, I’m thinking “so you’re excited that your soulless shit’n’puke machine now has a permanent weapon inside it’s mouth?”  It makes me thankful that I long ago learned the value of a good old-fashioned coat hanger.

Naturally my, ahem, dislike for babies should lead to me loving a game where they are killed and eaten by a monster thingie.  Unfortunately, Kobold’s Quest is mired in some pretty horrible design choices that slow down its progress to a greater degree than fetal alcohol syndrome.

Kobold’s Quest is a local-only multiplayer platformer where you have to kidnap a baby and return it to the start of each level.  You’re armed only with a single attack button and the ability to jump.  When you throw more than one player into the mix, you can jump off of each other to reach higher platforms.  In a way, it’s kind of like New Super Mario Bros. Wii, only more sterile and with less things to do.

Kobold’s Quest is flawed right from the get-go.  Despite being a platformer, the focus seems to be on stealth-based gameplay.  You can confront human enemies with an attack button, but their attacks are almost always faster and get the job done in one shot.  Thus you’re encouraged to be a sneak, waiting until they’re walking away from you before progressing forward.  As a result, the game just plain isn’t any fun.  The level design is always Dullsville and even if it’s populated by three other players, having to wait for enemies to walk away before you can inch forward kind of sucks.

It also doesn’t help that the collision detection is way off the mark.  Often you can stand on a completely different platform from an enemy and still get diced up when they swing their weapon at you.  If the enemy was using an 80 inch sword that would embarrass Cloud Strife, that would be fine.  But when it’s a little old lady brandishing a meat cleaver and you’re several feet above her on an entirely different staircase, it gets a bit annoying.  You also barely jump high enough to leap over baddies, and they can easily kill you midair.  There’s no radar so you can’t see where enemies are located, and some of them move very fast and wield some pretty huge swords, leading to tons of cheap deaths.  Plus, there are crows.  Crows are supposed to be creepy things associated with death and evilness.  Why are they so hell-bent on helping the humans save their babies?  Fuck if I know.

Despite the focus on multiplayer, Kobold’s Quest works better as a single player experience.  With three other players, things get too crowded, it slows the pace down even further, and the whole “race to be the one who feeds the baby to the monster” feels way out-of-place given that the enemies are still around and you have stand still and wait for them to go away.  Only now you can’t even attack them because you’re holding the baby.  So it’s a race where you are still expected to be slow.  It’s a really boneheaded design choice, but at this point I’m used to those.

When you’re by yourself, the game works better.  The guys I suckered into playing this with me were quickly losing their patience with the boring levels and cheap enemies.  When I was all alone, I kind of had a bit more fun.  Not enough to recommend Kobold’s Quest.  God no.  It’s a boring, poorly designed mess of a game, but the controls work and the theme really strikes a chord with me since I’m all in favor of mandatory abortions.

This cutscene is the reason why Kobold's Quest cost two dollars more than it should.

I think my biggest gripe is that they charged three bucks for this game.  Granted, their hands were forced because it comes in at a whopping 150MB and thus they had no choice but to charge 240MSP.  But why did it cost that much?  The graphics are nothing special, except for some really elaborate (and well done) cut scenes and tons of well done and often hilarious voice acting.  The question is, are those features worth an extra two bucks?  Not by a long shot.  And it always kind of irks me when a developer spends so much time dolling up the presentation in a way that contributes nothing to the game play, when they should have spent that time focusing on improving level design or making sure the collision detection actually worked.  Don’t get me wrong, somewhere in here is a great game, but SuckerFree Games took the entirely wrong approach when deciding what Kobold’s Quest would be, and as a result it’s about as appealing as Afterbirth flavored Pepsi.

Kobold’s Quest was developed by SuckerFree Games

240 Microsoft Points said Pepsi Afterbirth likely would still taste better than Red Bull in the making of this review.

Nate, whom I hear shaves his own butt every spring, also reviewed this over at Gear Fish. 

Sherbet Thieves

Update: Sherbet Thieves received a Second Chance with the Chick.  Chick here for my continued thoughts on it.

I was bound to get challenged on a twin-stick shooter at some point, and it finally happened in the form of Sherbet Thieves.  There seems to be an undercurrent of bitterness towards these games among the Xbox Live Indie Game community.   If I hate on a game, fanboys and cheerleaders (not the developers mind you) usually fire back with “I suppose you would rather play yet another twin-stick shooter!”  Which is hilarious to me because twin-stick shooters have been on the receiving end of more digital blowjobs among the community than pretty much anything else.

Maybe this is the perfect genre to get your feet wet with.  Maybe they take relatively little skill to put together.  I don’t give a shit what the reason is, because they’re around and I finally have to deal with one.  In Sherbet Thieves, enemies appear and you have to run around and shoot them.  The gimmick here is that there’s multiple suns scattered throughout the stage and you have to guard from enemies that include, and I swear I’m not making this up, “space hippies” that seem to be riding giant bongs that fire smoke rings at you.  Combine this with a spacey-acting farmer dude and I think I can see what the developer is trying to advocate here.

Either way, the game is perfectly competent, if not very exciting.  There’s fourteen stages which should take you about 45 minutes to get through.  You can purchase guns between stages and carry two into a level.  The ordering of the guns seemed kind of baffling.  The most expensive one is almost useless, while the second to last gun, which shoots bullets that bounce off the walls, was way overpowered and easily the best weapon in the game.  It only took me about three levels to save up to get it, and once I had it I had no reason to use any other gun, so the store thing is kind of a pointless distraction.

But, as I said, the game is functional and the gimmick of defending the suns from the enemies does work.  It’s sort of like Defender, because enemies will try to carry the suns to a U.F.O. and you have to keep track of all of them while running and shooting.  If you lose all of them, it’s game over.  You’re given gravity bombs that can suck the Suns towards them, so I went with the strategy of using the bombs right off the bat and centralizing the location of my suns.  Most of the time, it worked.  But then I would get to levels where there was one U.F.O. in the center of the map and suns all around it.  These levels had much more tension to them.  I don’t think the developer went as far as he could have in designing the levels, because the gimmick does lend itself to more creative options than he utilized.

I did enjoy my time with Sherbet Thieves, but it’s nothing special and I’ll likely forget about it as soon as I get done typing this review up.  Bang Zero Bang had a good idea going with this, but its potential is left unrealized.  With some more development time to add levels built around immediate danger, it could have been a real contender.  Sherbet Thieves is without question a game that could have used some more THC.  I mean TLC.  Sigh.

Sherbet Thieves was developed by Bang Zero Bang

80 Microsoft Points declared that winners don’t do drugs in the making of this review.

Hurley, whom I’m told has toenails made of cottage cheese, also covered this over at Gear-Fish.