Aliens vs. Aliens

As a rule, I try to finish all the games I review for Indie Gamer Chick whether I want to or not.  It’s not always a possibility.  I surrendered to Mr. Gravity because it was too hard and I pussied out on Plague because I couldn’t convince anyone to play it on co-op with me.  And now, in the case of Aliens vs. Aliens, I quit because after an hour of playtime nothing was fucking happening.

Aliens vs. Aliens is in theory a hybrid of third-person shooting and tactical strategy.  You control a squad of four classically designed “Greys” who have gone to war with others in their species over the fate of Earth.  You’re placed in a forest with a group of opposing aliens and attempt to find and shoot them before they find and shoot you.  You move each alien on your team individually, with a limited amount of distance allotted per a turn.  Upon finding an enemy, you must get within range and stop moving, at which point your guy will start to fire automatically for the remaining duration of your movement meter.

So it’s basically Video Hide-and-Seek, and that doesn’t sound too bad, assuming it works.  Which it doesn’t.  The first stage seemed to play fine, mostly because the enemies found me and I had numbers on them.  And then came level two, where I picked off the first of three enemies on my second turn.  This was followed by the most agonizing hour of my life since I sampled the cyanide-flavored ice cream at Baskin-Robbins*.

There’s a radar system that beeps when an enemy is nearby.  The problem is I could not get within range of them.  After you’ve moved your four dudes, the enemies get a turn that’s hidden from view.  Instead of engaging me, they seemed more interested in running away.  I tried everything to lure the damn things out.  I walked my guys as far apart from each-other as physically possible.  I tried marching them in a group.  I even skipped twenty-five consecutive turns.  That’s not exaggeration.  I did not do a anything at all with any of my guys for twenty-five turns.  I was operating under the false hope that the AI would assume I had died of a heart attack with my head slumped on the start button.

Figuring something glitched out, I restarted the mission and again quickly picked off the first enemy.  My radar went into overdrive and I thought “alright, problem solved, let’s fuck these guys up.”  And then the enemy got to move and the radar never fired up again.  Sigh.

If this game actually worked, it would have been a lot of fun.  I really liked the concept here, along with the sharp graphics and spooky techno music.   Instead, I spent over an hour with the niggling feeling that the game was laughing at me.  I’m not sure if I was doing something wrong, and the developers didn’t provide any help.  There’s no tutorial so it’s like being thrown into the deep end of the pool on your first day.  And your first day happens when you’re six-weeks old, premature, and your mother was a heavy drinker.  Maybe there really is no game here.  Maybe Aliens vs. Aliens is just a really fancy boredom simulator.  Yea, that must be it.  Trying to corner the market on Xbox before Minecraft 360 launches.

Aliens vs. Aliens was developed by Fun Factory Entertainment

80 Microsoft Points waited for an anal probe that never arrived in the making of this review.

*Otherwise known as Daiquiri Ice

Send in Jimmy

Send in Jimmy is a first-person shooter that looks like Goldeneye and thus it’s bound to snag a few buys just off the screen shots alone.  And in a lot of ways, some positive, most negative, it serves to remind people of that bygone era known as the late 1990s, back when games were just entering 3D and Duke Nukem Forever was just entering development.

In Jimmy you run around and shoot aliens with a pistol.  Later you get the ability to throw fireballs or upgrade your gun to an Uzi.  Enemies start off only with the ability to run up and flail their arms at you.  Later, they get armed with guns that seem to hit completely at random.  There are also ones that explode when shot, which can be used to set up combinations.  The aiming system works well and head shots do seem to matter.  There’s a handful of missions that carry the playtime to around 90 minutes.

I really would have liked Send in Jimmy if not for some really bad technical issues.  The game is as foggy as Michael Jackson’s mind was around June of 2009, if you catch my drift.  What, too soon?  As a result, when enemies  start firing at you it leaves you looking frantically off into the distance hoping to catch a glimpse of the gun’s muzzle flash.  Later in the game, when you get the ability to throw fireballs quicker, the situation fixes itself.  By then I figure most people will have quit and moved on to something else.  This is the Xbox 360 after all, where the average owner has enough first person shooters to land themselves on the government’s terrorist watch list.

The game also has major issues with skipping.  It seems like every ten feet the game has to pause to load up more terrain.  As a result the game flows like a Parkinson’s patient operating a Rascal scooter.  There’s also an issue of slowdown when too many enemies are on-screen at once.  In the last stage these two problems combined to form a sort of clusterfuck version of Voltron, alternatively making everything skippy and slow.  The Blazing Sword came in the form of invisible walls that seemed to trap my character in them temporarily.  Then, hilariously, the game nearly crashed during the ending that saw dozens of aliens on-screen at once catching fire and dying.

Developer Stamp had something going here, and despite its primitive looks and outdated gameplay, there is an undeniable charm in Send in Jimmy. It’s a little like the Quasimodo of the indie marketplace.  It’s ugly and broken and I certainly wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, but if you do get suckered into buying it you might enjoy it while it wraps its arms around your corpse and dies of starvation.  Yea, that’s how the fucking Hunchback of Notre-Dame is supposed to end.  Up yours, Disney!

Send in Jimmy was developed by Stamp

80 Microsoft Points are like “seriously, they lived happily ever after?  What a load” in the making of this review. 

Bluebones Curse

Before I get to the review proper, I need to bring up a pet peeve of mine. I’ve been doing Indie Gamer Chick for not even a full month now and Bluebones Curse is the second game to quote Simon’s Quest since I started. The first, House of 1000 Demons was so unfunny that it’s badness might have broke through the space-time barrier and killed Sam Kinison. I’m still working to prove that and bring those responsible to justice.

The second, Bluebones Curse, actually doesn’t quote Simon’s Quest directly in the game, but rather on its blurb in the marketplace.

This has got to stop. I feel it’s time to take every XNA developer aside and hold an intervention.  So here it goes: it’s not funny, fellas. It never was. I know you think you’re going to be the talk of the forums every time you name drop some horribly translated, badly worded Japanglish game quote. But it’s just not happening. People are rolling their eyes at you. Oh, it’s a boom for optometrists to be sure. All that eye rolling can cause lots of long-term problems. But those greedy bastards are already hitting our pockets from all the flashy graphics and huge televisions that cause indeterminate damage. Why help them out more?  We should be looking out for each-other.

So, I call for an end to sarcastically quoting bad video games. No more “what a horrible night to have a curse.” No more “all your base are belong to us.” No more “master of unlocking.” Enough. You sound like parrots.

I know the average game developer prides themselves on being terribly clever, no doubt saying right now “sure, all those OTHER people doing this are dumb, but the way I’m doing it totally is original and witty!”  No, it’s not. And thus I’ve made special arrangements to prevent future occurrences of senseless quote dropping.  In the event you sarcastically use a bad video game quote, operatives from Microsoft will kick open your door and shoot your dog.

In the event you do not have a dog, one will be provided for you. You will name her Checkers and she will grow to be your best friend. You’ll take her for walks, groom her, and teach her tricks. She’ll have a litter of seven beautiful little puppies, six of which will survive to adulthood. You’ll form a bond with her the likes of which you never knew possible outside of the realm of Hollywood. At which point, operatives from Microsoft will kick open your door and shoot your dog.

And if you quote Army of Darkness, they’ll shoot you.

I’m sorry it’s come to this, but desperate times and what not.

Alrighty now, Bluebones Curse. It’s a bare-bones (no pun intended) platformer where you play as a pirate who’s turned into a skeleton by a witch. There’s no attack button, so you have to avoid these incredibly creepy skull-spider thingies, activate switches, and find the lost gold.

The platforming mechanics work very well.  The jumping is refined and accurate, with barely any hint of slipperiness.  The level layouts are generic but well done, and the mood set forth by Chounard is awesome. I was really having a great time with this one. Then, after just under thirty minutes I beat it. Huh.

Okay, so it’s only a buck and if the worst thing I can say about a game is it’s too short then I guess I really don’t have anything to complain about at all. Bluebones Curse managed to not overstay its welcome and turned out to be one of the few games that’s almost flawless from start to finish on the indie marketplace. Besides, I’m a girl and thus I’m used to having a guy’s thing climax before I’m ready.

Bluebones Curse was developed by Third Party Ninjas

80 Microsoft Points kicked open your door and shot your dog in the making of this review.

Plague

Parody games are all over the indie market like some kind of horrible sick-inducing thing whose name escapes me.  Some of them, like Breath of Death VII turn out to be quite okay.  Most of them simply exist to compensate for a lack of talent.  Plague falls somewhere in the middle.  Well, the bottom of the middle.  It can easily smell the shit piling up from where it sits is what I’m saying.

Plague is a side-scrolling shooter that borrows heavily from Contra and lampoons everything else.  You play as a group of computer thingies out to stop the spread of a computer virus through various video games.  The story is told tongue in cheek style, which might have been a poor choice because if you hold your tongue in your cheek you could begin to gag a little.  The dialog tries way too hard and the humor seems forced, like when a spoof of Luigi shows up and talks about bitch-slapping the princess.  I guess this is somehow supposed to be funny, but it’s hardly original.  Myself and every other Mario player out there have fantasized about him just chucking her needy ass into a lava pit and hooking up with Bowser.

Oh wait, that was just me?

Once you get rid of all the bad writing you’re left with a functional but bland Contra clone.  You run, you jump, you shoot stuff.  There’s a large variety of weapons, some of them themed from other games.  There’s a gun that shoots stars Kirby style.  There’s a gun that shoots Lemmings.  There’s one that shoots asteroids that break apart into smaller asteroids.  I’m pretty sure that gun was inspired by Pole Position.  Most of the guns function well, and some of them, like the Portal themed one, work really well.  Others, like the freeze gun, are practically worthless.

I had big issues with the difficulty curve.  Around level 3-3, it seemed like every single enemy suddenly had the ability to kill me in a couple of shots.  This, combined with the fact that every part of the stage seemed to be vomiting out green snot that drains your health away meant that I was dying practically before the level loaded.  I almost gave up, then I remembered that I was a girl and that Women’s Lib has been out of vogue for a couple of decades now.  So I embraced my vagina and set the difficulty to easy.  And this did help, a little.  I guess.  Not really actually.  By the next level, which was themed after Warcraft (because by God there’s a game that hasn’t been made fun of enough) I gave up after about ten seconds and legged it for the finish.  A sad moment for me, for sure.  But sadder for the developer, because my strategy worked.

I think most of the levels were designed with co-op in mind, and that’s a problem.  There are way too many enemies for one person to handle most of the time.  There was nobody around when I played Plague so I didn’t experience it using the option.  I’m not sure I could have convinced my friends to give it a try.  It would be a tough sell.  It doesn’t look bad and it doesn’t necessarily play bad.  But Plague manages to be less than the sum of its parts.  Everything about it is good enough to be functional and nothing more.  It’s a Toyota, that’s what it is.  It’ll get you there but you won’t have a good time riding it.  People desperately looking for a modern Contra who already burned through Hard Corps: Uprising might enjoy this one.  Everyone else should avoid it like the oh fuck these jokes just write themselves now don’t they?

Plague was developed by Contagious Games

80 Microsoft Points should have been vaccinated in the making of this review. 

Star Ninja

It’s easy to explain the appeal in Angry Birds, the first true gaming hit for phones and tablets. It’s got colorful graphics and an “anyone can learn it” playability factor. 250,000,000 downloads later and everyone and their creepy uncle is looking to ape its style and have a hit on their own. Most of these knockoffs completely miss the point and play about as good as three-day left-over, unrefrigerated pizza tastes. Which is to say, not very good.

Eric Cosky and his Bounding Box Games studio did what anyone with a lick of sense would do: piggybacked on a the physics-puzzle-aiming genre that Angry Birds popularized. There’s only one difference between them and everyone else: they made a better game.

In Star Ninja you’re a stationary ninja who must throw shurikens at pirates. You have a limited number of shots to knock out all the pirates on the stage. Any star you throw will bounce off the walls at high speeds until it runs out of steam, hits an explosive barrel, or gets stuck in a box. Personally, I wasn’t aware that ninja stars were made of high-density rubber. Video games: fun AND educational.

There are fifty single-screen levels that can be played in four different game modes. I played through “focus mode” which is just your basic “kill all the pirates in X amount of shots” stuff. In each level you have to carefully study the layout and figure out the best angles to throw your stars at. Sometimes it’s easier to simply throw a star directly at a pirate, while other times you’ll want to drop a box or an anchor on their head. I had lots of chuckles when a pirate would stand by all smug only to have a tiny box lightly graze their head, killing them. I can also appreciate any game where I can say the sentence “I’m juggling a pirate corpse” to my boyfriend in a totally deadpan manner and mean it. Even if he did look at me like it was time to call the nice guys with the white coats and nets.

One of the things that I felt ultimately ruined the experience of Angry Birds is the constant addition of new birds, some of whom were as worthless as an editor’s choice award from Gamespot is. There’s none of that crap in Star Ninja. What you see is what you get for all fifty levels. And that’s perfectly fine with me. It took me around two hours to finish the fifty levels, and at no point was I in danger of falling asleep and drowning in my bowl of Fruit Loops that lay in front of me. In fact, I had quite a good time. By time I was done with Focus Mode I really felt no need to play through the game in its three alternative modes, which include being able to use unlimited stars or a campaign mode where points carry over. These might have been a little overkill, but if you’re the type to truly get madly addicted to a game they’ll come in handy. There’s also global leader boards, six of which are occupied by a totally insanely cool niche game critic.

Oh yea, these will TOTALLY last forever.

I do have a couple of complaints. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which boxes are ones stars will bounce off of and which ones the stars will stick in. That can get mildly annoying, like having a fly buzz-bomb you while you try to type a review. But it’s easy enough to just start the room over again so it might not have been worth mentioning at all. Sorry. And also the game can be seemingly fickle about how much force a box requires to kill a pirate. On an unrelated note, you would think guys that survive the brutal discipline and scurvy associated with being a pirate wouldn’t be phased by having a box fall on their toe. Well, I guess it might be ingrown or something. That would hurt a lot. Carry on.

Everyone wants to make the next Angry Birds. Star Ninja is a better Angry Birds. It’s got its own charm, personality, style, and it never gets boring. It’s one of the better games on the indie marketplace and it well worth your 80 Microsoft Points.bIt also finally, once and for all, answered the age-old question of pirates or ninjas. The answer is clearly ninjas. Now let’s move on to the more pressing question: dinosaurs or Batman?

Star Ninja was developed by Bounding Box Games

80 Microsoft Points said dinosaurs because look what they did to the rich, well equipped guy in Jurassic Park in the making of this review.

UPDATE: Star Ninja is now FREE for Windows Phone 7. If you’re an especially cheap bastard and 80 MSP is too much for you, you have no excuse now. Well besides not owning a piece of shit Window Phone. Um, never mind, here’s the link. 

Lair of the Evildoer

I’ve always wondered about the evolution of becoming an evil criminal mastermind.  In order to be  profitable, you need to start early in life.  Get encouragement from your evil parents (it helps if they have evil names like Adolf or Ethel), go to an evil college (I’m thinking Dartmouth), get an evil degree (something like Marine Biology), set up shop in an evil city (anyplace in Florida will do), hire evil henchmen (usually found on Craigslist), come up with an evil scheme (phone hacking seems in these days), get an evil lair (and the prices on those are simply outrageous these days)…

Fuck, if it was me I would barely have enough motivation left after all that to be mischievous, let alone evil.

So I can sympathize with the villain from Lair of the Evildoer.  He goes through all the trouble of becoming evil, getting a lair, and coming up with a scheme and I foiled the whole thing in about three hours.  And to rub salt the wounds, I had a great time doing it.

Lair of the Evildoer is a top-down shooter where you play as some kind of mutant egg-man thingy out to exterminate all the zombies created in this evil office building, complete with evil wood paneling and blue shag carpet.  There’s twenty randomly-generated levels full of assorted baddies.  There’s a mind-blowing twenty-five weapons that can be picked up along the way, with each weapon type having variable stats similar to Diablo or Borderlands.

You move with the left stick and aim with the right one, a set up that works fairly well.  I did die several times while playing Evildoer, which my boyfriend felt might have had something to do with choosing the wrong experience upgrades.  Early on I poured all my level-up points into dexterity, which increases your aiming accuracy.  Once I had a 100% rating in that, I spent most of my points on health upgrading.  Then came the enemies who could only be killed using melee attacks.  With practically no points spent on that, fights with them resembled something out of a MMORPG , with each of us taking turns to thwap each-other until one of us wasn’t thwaping anymore.  But even when I started to accumulate points in melee strength the battles still dragged like a dog with worms and it constantly broke up the flow of the game.  This is one of my only design complaints.

The graphics are of the “looks like it was done on MS Paint” variety.  Clearly in the top-tier of such games, but they have that look none the less.  The sound effects are a bit lacking as well, but the music is cool and trippy.  The whole experience reminded me of Zombies Ate My Neighbors, which was a childhood favorite of mine.  Some people had the raw nerve to call Dead Rising the spiritual modern equivalent to ZAMN.  Such people are mentally ill.  Lair of the Evildoer is as close to Zombies Ate My Neighbors as any game in the last decade has come, and it’s nearly as good.  It’s incredibly imaginative, humorous, and well designed.  And, without wishing to spoil anything, the final boss fight will go down in the annals of gaming as one of the most epic this side of Ocarina of Time.  Make sure you have a bathroom break beforehand.

As for me, being a true top-of-the-heap evildoer is too much work.  I’ll just do my part by continuing to invest in Google.

Lair of the Evildoer was developed by Going Loud Studios

80 Microsoft Points didn’t really think Dartmouth is evil in the making of this review.  Now Yale on the other hand...

The Cannon

UPDATE: This title recieved a Second Chance with the Chick.  Read it for IndieGamerChick.com’s definitive review of The Cannon.

Any of you developers out there looking for definitive proof that the peer-review system of Xbox Live Indie Games doesn’t work, the proof you’ve wanted has finally arrived.  Just point to The Cannon, a game that I couldn’t review because it crashed almost immediately both times I attempted to play it.   And I truly mean crashed, as I couldn’t even use the guide button and had to hold the power button on my Xbox to reboot.  Both times I tried to play the campaign mode and it crashed on the first level, once when I died and once when I beat the first wave of baddies.  I guess the tutorial was nice though.  Not 80 Microsoft Points nice, but nice.  Sort of like a shot of lidocaine before the catheter is inserted.

The Cannon was developed by Elemental Focus

80 Microsoft Points reenacted the 1844 USS Princeton incident (Google it) in the making of this review.

UPDATE: I’m told a fix is in the works and they’ll get back to me.

Tourist Trap

Point-and-click adventure games were staple of PC gaming for over a decade.  Although many hardcore gamers mourned their passing, I couldn’t have possibly cared less.  I always found them to be as dull as a rusty butter knife.  Then again I was around ten-years-old when they died out.  By time I was old enough to appreciate them, I didn’t see the big deal.  The appeal of stuff like Myst, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, or even the beloved Grim Fandango were just completely lost on me.  Sure, the writing was occasionally well above the standard of most games, but getting there meant having to slog through the laziest style of game design this side of Tic-Tac-Toe.  You find objects, click them against other objects, and hope something happens.  How can anybody be shocked that this genre didn’t last?

Well now it’s 2011 and these games are having a mild resurgence.  Mostly this is in the form of hidden object games like Mystery Case Files.  Others rely on text-heavy, logic puzzle based design such as the  mildly enjoyable Sherlock Holmes: Nemesis.  Even if Watson creeped me the fuck out.  And I really, really enjoyed the Professor Layton series on the Nintendo DS.  But I still mostly don’t get these games.  They seem to cater to people who want to “play” a “game” with as minimal game as possible but find the Metal Gear Solid series too involved.

Now that I have my own gaming blog with a handful of loyal readers, I feel obligated to try genres I never particularly cared for.  Thus when I saw Tourist Trap hit the marketplace yesterday I knew I would have to plug my nose and dive in.  It’s a typical item fetching click-a-thon where you’re trapped in a wacky museum.  There you learn about how the moon was colonized and some guy fought a dragon and other loony bullshit.  The museum is haunted by the ghost of a Jackalope who drove the founder of the museum to suicide with insults.

The story is as squirrely as they get.  As for the gameplay, it’s exactly what you would expect.  Pick something up, rub it on something else, rinse and repeat.  Early on you have to take a quiz, so pay close attention to the crazy shit that’s said.  Some of you might require alcohol to make it through this part, and that’s okay.  Late in the game, you catch fire and can die unless you find the right thing to use on yourself to put out the flame.  After that, you light some torches and that’s it.  I tried to light the torches using myself but apparently the game frowns on that.  The whole experience took me about 45 minutes, which is likely the length of its development time as well.

The graphics would fit in with the Nintendo 64, with flat textures and, in my opinion, a poor choice in color schemes.   The shinning design choice here was using public domain songs from the 1930s.  The song choices do give the game a foreboding vibe to it.  But that’s all for naught, as there were no spooky scare moments.  I actually expected to see the Jackalope stalking me, but he never appears unless you make a correct choice with your items.  This was a lost opportunity.  Overall, I didn’t care very much for Tourist Trap but I wasn’t this game’s target audience in the first place.  Having said that, if you’re one of those weirdos who actually likes this type of game then I’m sure you’ll find this too short and shallow, like the deep end of Danny DeVito’s swimming pool.

Tourist Trap was developed by Domain of the Infinite

80 Microsoft Points rubbed themselves against a tube of toothpaste to create liquid nitrogen for a jetpack in the making of this review.

SPOILER WARNING Tourist Trap game solution: Since posting this last week, one of the most popular Google searches that is leading people here is an explanation how to beat this piece of shit.  First off, my condolences to the many Microsoft points lost to this game.

Since the specific question that is searched the most is how to put yourself out when you catch fire, I’ll let you in on that.  But first, you have to promise to read at least two other reviews here and fall madly in love with my wit, grace, humor, and most of all, humility.  Oh, and don’t forget to follow me on Twitter and Facebook.

Deal?  Good.

When you catch fire, quickly make your way to the display shelf by the cash register.  Once there, grab the syrup from it, open your inventory, and choose to use it on yourself.  That’s it, problem solved.  After this all that’s left is to light the six torches that surround the building.  If you’ve made it this far you should know which items is needed to do that.  By the way, if you actually needed help with this game I must say you are a certified retard.

Bird Assassin

I started Indie Gamer Chick with the enthusiastic encouragement of my kinda-sorta boyfriend, Brian. And Brian has really gotten into my new hobby. In fact, he’s acted as my unofficial chief gaming scout. While I concentrate on reviewing new games that just hit the market, Brian cruises Youtube looking for trailers of older stuff that I missed before I discovered Xbox Live Indie Games. I can always tell when he’s found something because he tells me “check this one out, it looks like something you would like.” And when he picks a game like Bird Assassin, I’m not sure what that says about me.

In Bird Assassin, you play as a redneck who’s wheelchair-bound father gets capped gangland-style by an evil ostrich. I can’t believe I just typed that sentence out. You decide to get revenge on the birds and grab your Pa’s hunting rifle. You make your way through nine stages, shooting anything that moves, which is convenient because everything that moves is a bird. Along the way there’s some light platforming and a few traps to jump over. It’s very minimalist and basic, but shockingly it’s a lot of fun too.

Along the nine missions, you’ll earn money that you can use for gun upgrades, bullet upgrades, and armor. Once I saw how quickly I was earning money on the fourth stage, I just replayed it until I have enough dough to purchase the mini-gun. At this point the game was effectively over. Using this, along with the laser sight for the gun, I turned into a one girl poultry holocaust.

It’s not a particularly challenging game. I played on normal difficulty and finished it in roughly a half-hour. But I really enjoyed playing it. It’s the perfect length to not get boring and the humor really is well done, if a bit cringe-worthy. The graphics are distinctive and memorable. The sound effects are good, with really over-the-top hillbilly accents providing some laughs. My only complaint is extremely minor: the default control scheme has your gun firing automatically. You can change this in the options, and make sure you do so. Oh, and you face the same boss three times. That was a kind of weak.

Bird Assassin isn’t a deep gaming experience, but sometimes you don’t need that. Sometimes you just need to unwind with a quick, immature blood-and-guts game. Sometimes you just need to have a couple quick laughs. Sometimes you just really need to piss off PETA.

Bird Assassin was developed by Social Loner Studios

80 Microsoft Points avoided making a Duck Hunt joke in the making of this review. 

Bird Assassin is also available for PC on Desura for $1.99.  This version is unverified by Indie Gamer Chick.  The XBLIG version is Chick Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.

Lootfest

3D Dot Game Heroes was a fucking awesome game.  A loving tribute to the classic 2D entries in the Legend of Zelda series with some new conventions like level upgrading and swords the size of the screen.

On the flip side, Lootfest is a clunky, broken, unfinished piece of shit vomited out by a group of gamers who have about as much shame as a pick-pocket at the Special Olympics.  The only positive thing I can say about it is the graphics do their job, IE, they look like they were lifted right out of the 3D Dot Game Heroes alpha build.  Everything else is unrealized and unfinished.

In Lootfest, you play as a swordsman who must slay three boss monsters.  The world’s map is randomly generated so on the off-off-off-off-off chance you actually find something of value here, you can play it as many times as you want and will have a different map to get bored with every time.  There’s a small handful of enemies types that you can kill with your sword.  They drop money, which you use to buy a bow necessary to defeat bosses.  There’s also sword upgrades and shields.  I found once I had the level 3 sword, which takes about five minutes to get the gold for, everything that followed was a cakewalk.

Since the game is entirely focused on combat, with none of those pesky puzzles or dungeons to explore like a real game, you would hope they at least got that right.  Not so much.  With only a small handful of enemies to deal with, you’ve pretty much seen the whole game after only two minutes.  There are three bosses, but the first two more or less look alike and all of them are defeated in the same way.  Your sword feels a bit on the clunky side, thanks to collision detection being a bit off.  This applies to enemy projectiles too, as sometimes I would dodge a fireball and it would register me being shot anyway.

Finding the three dungeons is actually done in a novel manner.  You purchase a hawk from a store and then release it.  It flies in the direction of the next boss and you have to follow it.  This idea worked, but with everything else being a miserable failure it’s like your child showing you his report card full of Fs with one B in the middle for P.E.  I completed the whole game in about 45 minutes so it’s really short too.

Lootfest is truly a tragedy because they DID have something going here.  While playing the game, I repeatedly told my boyfriend “I think I might recommend this one.”  By game’s end, I realized that doing so would be a sin against gaming.  Lootfest is an unfinished mess.  Enemies get stuck in walls.  Enemies can walk through walls.  The sound effects are straight out of the Atari 2600, and you can literally see that they had plans for stuff but never got around to it.  Upon completion of the game, a sequel is promised.  “See you at Lootfest 2.” 

Um, no you won’t.  You couldn’t bother to debug the game the first time around before you kicked it out onto the marketplace.  Why should I or anyone give you a second chance?  The indie market reminds me of one of those families where the parents count down the days until their kids turn 18 so they can unceremoniously boot them out of the household whether they’re ready for it or not.  Designing video games requires patience.  You can’t just put something out there for sale as soon as you have a playable build working.  Yea, I’m sure it’s exciting to have something that resembles a game that you created all on your own, or in this case thoroughly plagiarized from someone else.  But it doesn’t mean you have to lose focus and put it out there for consumers to get cheated by while you begin work on a sequel.  Stay focused, damn it!  It makes me think every subscription to XNA should come with a free bottle of Ritalin.

Lootfest was developed by Gamefarm

80 Microsoft Points were left unfinished in the