Magnetic By Nature is the latest game from students attending the University of Utah. I know what you’re thinking. “Hey, wait a second. What do people from Utah know about having fun? Didn’t they ban their only form of that in the 40s?” Actually, inappropriate polygamy jokes aside, they know plenty about fun. Atari founder Nolan Bushnell discovered the medium of games as a student at the University of Utah. So in essence, we owe the gaming industry as it exists today to their beautiful, boring, Pac-10 devaluing institution. It makes me happy that the science of creating games is taught there to this day. It would be wrong otherwise, like if Harvard stopped teaching law, or Fresno State stopped teaching binge drinking.
In M-B-N, you play as a robot who has to make his way across levels by using magnetic powers. I played a game with a similar hook last year, the beautiful but frustrating to the point of not being so fun Lumi. Magnetic features more intuitive controls and faster-paced gameplay than that disappointing Dream-Build-Play winner. I actually expected nothing more than a glorified sampler here, because the team behind it is actively using crowd funding to prepare a larger PC release. Combine that with the XBLIG version coming in at 80MSP and featuring the subtitle “Awakening.” Which, by the way, is about as unimaginative a subtitle as you can get. I look forward to the sequel, which will no doubt be called “The Return.” Or, if they’re feeling frisky, “The Revenge.”
Show of hands: who is sick of games with the Limbo/Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet-like silhouette thing? Let’s see, 1, 2, 3, 4..
Anyway, the XBLIG version of Magnetic most definitely does not feel like a sampler, even if the devs say that’s what it is. You’ll get a complete experience that will take about sixty to ninety minutes to complete. Levels range from dexterity-based platforming challenges to physics-based puzzles, the latter of which there aren’t nearly enough of. Mostly, the game centers around precision flinging of the protagonist. And it really is flinging. Even by time the game ended, I had never gotten fully used to the physics, or had a comfortable feel for trajectories and speed. In essence, your character is a guided missile and you’ll often feel a sense of luck rather than accomplishment when clearing a tricky stage. In many games, that would be annoying. In M-B-N, it seems fitting. I had a little magnet play set when I was a kid and I remember how tough it was to push stuff across a table in a straight line using them. I thought of that while playing this game. It gives it an authentic feel. By the way, I had that magnet set for about a week, but then Daddy took it away after I showed him the pretty rainbow I made on the television using it. True story.
But, other control issues rear their ugly head. Movement without the magnets feels too touchy. Sometimes this combines with the magnetic gimmick to cause extra frustration, like a stage with a moving magnet and increasingly narrow rows of spikes that requires you to simultaneously feather the joystick and the magnetic circle. But at least stages like that are manageable. A pair of auto-scrolling stages with a deadly beam of light that I called the Kill You Bar were bungled about as bad as they could have been, simply due to the bar moving too fast. I’m also of the belief that these stages were in the wrong order. The last one of these was a brainless trial-and-error reflex tester. The first auto-scroll stage seemed to combine the best ideas of the game’s physics and had a climatic feel to it. In fact, it probably could have been the final stage of the whole game. Sadly, both these sections (the second one especially), were hampered by frame rate hiccups that seemed to get worse the more times you died. The lag became so bad that it rendered Magnetic By Nature completely broken. Then something weird happened. I found out that if you hit restart and have the game reload the level instead of just respawning after death, the lag becomes tolerable and I was able to finish the stage. It’s still inexcusable to exist like this, but the game is strong enough that you’ll want to finish.
..1,947,685, 1,947,686, 1,947,687, 1,947,688.. you know what, I think they get the picture.
On the bright side, the developers are aware of a couple of the more frustrating issues and are working on fixes. But even before they’re done, Magnetic By Nature is a surprisingly solid game. I’ve played several student projects since starting Indie Gamer Chick, and while some have been decent enough, none have outright impressed me. Magnetic By Nature does. I guess the reason for my surprise was, despite a cool looking trailer, I had low expectations going in. Physics puzzlers on XBLIG are typically disasters. Plus, I’m completely burned out on the whole silhouette-hero in a dark world thing, which is about as common a feature among indie platformers these days as the ability to jump. But I had no need to worry. Magnetic By Nature, despite problems, is genuinely fun and refreshing and you should expect to enjoy it. Bravo University of Utah guys and gals who made this and carry the legacy of the founding fathers of the gaming industry. But please, for God’s sake, stick with making games. Don’t open a chain of arcade-pizzerias with singing rats and shitty food. That’s a legacy you can live without.
Early on in Thomas Was Alone, I really didn’t get the hype for it. “THIS is the game all the cool kids are talking about?” I tweeted, somewhat baffled. I mean, don’t get me wrong. The game was alright. But my fans had been trumpeting this one since it launched on PC last summer, promising me that it was a platformer unlike anything I’ve played before. To a degree, they were right. You just can’t tell right away. Thomas Was Alone is one of those slow-starters that wakes up at seven but doesn’t get out of bed until eight.
At heart, Thomas Was Alone is a minimalist platform-puzzler with the hook being an eccentric storyline that gives personality to the squares and rectangles you control. Again, it’s something that didn’t grab me at first. It came across as artsy-fartsy, bordering on pretentious. But, about a third of the way through, it started to grow on me. Who would have guessed that it was possible to give such distinct traits to fundamental shapes, with no animation sprites or anything resembling humanity? It does it so well that I would think one could consider Thomas a candidate for strongest writing of the year. But I have to disqualify it for that, on account of a couple groan-inducing references to the Cake is a Lie and the Arrow to the Knee. God damn it so much. Is there some kind of code on the indie development scene that I’m not aware of? Like a secret handshake or something? Two guys go up to each other at a developer conference, lock pinkys, touch ring-fingers with the other hand, say “The Cake is a Lie!” and then fall down laughing until it hurts because that will NEVER EVER grow old or stop being funny ever no matter what? Well it’s not funny and it hasn’t been for years. No matter how many ways you guys try to make it work, it never does. You’ve beaten this dead horse into dust, and now you’re just beating your fist on the blood-soaked ground underneath it. STOP IT!!
I think everyone’s favorite character is Claire, the big blue block with delusions of grandeur. I would love to get more of her story.
Anyway, mostly strong writing. However, it ended without giving me a sense of closure for the characters that I had grown fond of, or anything resembling a satisfactory conclusion for the overall story. It just sort of ends. And don’t look for the DLC to provide the comfort of an ending either, because it doesn’t. I guess Thomas Was Alone’s finale is supposed to be open to interpretation or something, but I was left disappointed.
You know what? I don’t play platformers for their stories. If they’re decent or better, that’s just a bonus. For this genre, gameplay is king. In which case, Thomas Was Alone is at best a knight, bordering on a rook. After a mind-numbingly dull start, the level design picks up momentum about one-third of the way in. By time you’ve reached the finish line, you’ll have played some of the most inspired levels seen in platforming in a long while. But, the ratio of slog-to-awesome is not so great. A good portion of levels revolve around stacking your characters in a way to make a staircase for the less jumpy in your squad. A handful of these would have been just fine. But sometimes you’ll have to build the exact same staircase five or more times in a single level. It’s tedious busy-work that needlessly cramps the game’s whimsical style.
When Thomas Was Alone’s level design is good, it’s really good. So good that my ear-to-ear grin was in place because of just how clever a world was designed and not because of the narration. Quite frankly, after a way-too-long tutorial sequence with levels and platforming so basic that it makes Atari-era stuff like Pitfall! look advanced, I wasn’t expecting it to be as good as it was. Then I would be hit with some pretty ingenious stages that involve timing, precision platforming, and thinking outside-the-box. I loved these moments. I’ve always said I’ll take those “ta-da!” moments in puzzlers over the best headshots in shooters or game-winning shots in sports games. Thomas doesn’t provide a lot of those moments, but when it does, it’s special.
My only possible complaint about the controls (outside of the DLC pack) is switching between the characters always felt a bit cumbersome. I’m not sure if the Vita handles this with touch-controls, but if it doesn’t, that would be a good idea.
Don’t worry, puzzle haters. There is nothing here that will bend your brain or make you have to consult GameFAQs. At most, Thomas will ask of you to apply some forward thinking and course plotting. Most of the puzzles revolve around what order you guide the blocks to the goal of each stages. Victory is achieved through having all blocks in their unique exit doors at the same time. Once you have a feel for the abilities and limitations of each block, figuring how to get them to the doors comes naturally. Actually, it almost becomes instinctual. It’s so rare that a puzzle-platformer does that to me that I can’t help but be impressed. It also helps that the controls are smooth and the main game never asks more of a player than can be reasonably expected. I don’t consider myself especially skilled at platformers, but I must be getting better. I figure I died probably around a dozen times over the course of the game’s one-hundred levels. Thomas Was Alone gives a trophy out for dying 100 times, but by time I had finished the game, I still hadn’t earned it. I’m pretty proud of that.
I’m not here to give the game an undeserved blowjob though. There’s plenty of problems with it. I’ve described some above, but the one that gets me the most is the difficulty curve. Or lack thereof. Other critics have noted how perfect the curve is. It makes me wonder if they played the same game as me. Even late in Thomas Was Alone, I encountered stages that offered no challenge at all to finish. The sixth world (really the seventh world, since the world numbering starts in the zeros) especially stands out. I wasn’t timing it, but it probably took between ten to fifteen minutes to complete while possessing the most basic and dull stages since the opening tutorial. Just weird that this would pop-up over half-way through. But stages like this are all over the place. I guess the excuse for these (and the overly long fish-in-barrel stages that start this thing) is they’re there as place-holders to drive the story. Well that’s a shitty excuse. A platformer should never let proper storytelling get in the way of proper pacing. People probably should buy the game for the game. I mean, it’s a pretty good game. So while I enjoyed the story, I almost resent the fact that the vastly superior gameplay was in part sacrificed for it. The result is a curve that appeared to be drawn by someone laying in a hammock during an earthquake.
After finishing the final stage, you’re treated to an extremely brief ending, and then the credits roll. I was disappointed not just by the ending but by the last level. Thomas Was Alone goes out with a whimper instead of a bang, which left me wanting more. After stewing on it overnight, I decided to grab the overpriced DLC pack. My intent was to get my craving for more Thomas out of my system. Mission accomplished, but not in the way I intended.
The DLC levels are so horrible and mismatched with the main body of the game that I actively questioned whether developer Mike Bithell had entered his emo phase in life when he designed them. Thomas Was Alone was a quirky logic-puzzle-platformer. The DLC levels alternate between back-to-basics platforming (that you have to pay extra to suffer through) and punisher-stages designed with nothing else in mind than a huge body count. What a stupid decision on developer’s part. These levels do not remotely have the almost childish innocence the main game does. It’s also the first time the controls didn’t feel right. Benjamin, the star of the DLC, possess a jet pack, but the only use they could come up with for it was navigating narrow corridors of spikes. The controls here are so touchy and the margin for error so low that any possible fun that could be had gives way to frustration and boredom. Benjamin’s Flight has twenty stages, and while the cutesy story is present, I can honestly say that I didn’t find one single stage of this pack to be worth paying any amount of money for. It might be the worst level pack I’ve ever purchased. I just don’t get why the tone changed so much. It would be like announcing that they’re going to make a new Dark Knight movie, only this one will be a buddy comedy and Batman is being recast as Adam Sandler.
Submitted for your consideration: level 11.6 of the DLC. I nominate this for “worst stage in a good game.” It’s repetitive and insanely long for what it offers. Like the rest of the pack, it adds no value to the overall game.
So here’s where I stand: Thomas Was Alone is pretty decent, but it takes a while to get that way. I wish the developer had focused more on ingenuity. When the levels in Thomas are clever, it’s one of the best of its breed to come out in a while. There’s just enough meat here to call it a must-buy. At the same time, the story ultimately left me feeling unsatisfied, and the game only has enough “this is amazing!” moments that it ultimately feels under-realized. You can’t count on the DLC to drown-out those thoughts, because it feels rushed and sort of half-assed. So different from the feel of the main quest that I was a little surprised to learn they came from the same guy who had awed me just yesterday. If I had my way, Thomas Was Alone would be alone, because I would bury that DLC in the desert next to unsold Atari carts.
$7.99 with PlayStation Plus discount (normally priced $9.99) plus $3.49 (Benjamin’s Flight DLC) said “hey now, Red Kryptonite has caused all sorts of problems, so don’t go there” in the making of this review.
Thomas Was Alone is Chick Approved, but for God’s sake, skip the DLC unless it’s free. And even then, you’re not missing anything by ignoring it.
Here’s some quick thoughts on a pair of recent XBLIG titles, Itano Alpha Flight and Heart Breaker.
They suck.
My boyfriend says I’m not allowed to leave it at that, so I guess I’ll explain why. Itano is a third-person air combat/wave-shooter. Enemies appear and try to kill you. You have to kill them first. Well, you don’t have to. Presumably you can do nothing in retaliation, and just peacefully let the enemies shoot at you for all eternity. But that would be a tough selling point for a game. My problem with Itano is that it’s almost impossible to follow exactly what is going on. The screen is cluttered with lock-on boxes, spiky balls, and enemy fire. You can apparently only fire on enemies when you lock-on to them, but the screen is so messy that figuring out what’s an enemy and what’s a projectile shouldn’t be this difficult. I have a TV so large that it has its own gravitational pull and I still couldn’t tell what was going on. By three waves in, Itano completely deteriorates into an incomprehensible mess. I tried for thirty minutes to find some semblance of design here, but it’s too messy. I’ve had people explain quantum physics in less daunting ways.
Next, I tried Heart Breaker. Here, you play as a rogue cupid who tries to break up relationships. Sounds like it would be a cool hook for an adventure game. Instead, it’s a very poorly designed shmup. And, by poorly designed, I mean it looks and plays like a cheaply made, free-to-play flash game. The graphics are terrible, with enemy projectiles being hard to see. You also don’t “blink” when you’re hit, so your life can drain from full health to no health in under a second. For the second time this week, I found myself saying “why do they still make games like this in 2013?” The first time being when I played horrible XBLA/PSN brawler Sacred Citadel. I love that indies strive to pay homage to games of the past. But, I really don’t need to reminisce about the glory days when insurance companies used shitty games in banner ads to shill their products. Really, all Heart Breaker needed was a product to shill and it would have been just that. Probably Facebook, in keeping up with the “break up couples” theme.
PlayStation Mobile is to the Vita what Xbox Live Indie Games is to the Xbox 360. Whether that’s a good thing or not is in the eye of the beholder, I suppose. I wasn’t around for the early stages of XBLIG, but based on what I hear from my buddies Ryan, George, and Justin, the early days were nowhere near the desolate wasteland that PSM is turning into. Looking at the slate of recent releases, nothing really has caught my fancy for it. But then again, nothing really caught my eye on iPhone either. My Vita has been getting a bit dusty though. Nothing like my Wii U, which currently wears the same amount of dust as your average mummy.
Again, nothing looked like an attractive purchase, so I just sort of had to guess what might surprise me. So I bet on Super Brain Eat 3. Probably because it was only 49¢ and I’m like one of those people on their first trip to Vegas who eases into the experience by playing on the wussy tables. You know, the ones typically occupied by silver-haired old ladies who try and fail to mask the stench of looming decomposition by coating their bodies in musk oil? Yea, it was like that. The game was developed by a dude named Thomas Hopper. He’s the most prolific PSM developer, with six titles on the platform. I already reviewed one of his, Super Skull Smash GO! It was a decent little retro platzzle (I got “punisher” into the lexicon, and by gum, I’m going to get “platzzle” in it too), but it had a few problems. I felt perhaps the game was too married to the retro concept, to the detriment of the controls and physics.
Saying Super Brain Eat 3 is a bit ugly is like saying water is a bit wet.
I hadn’t played any of Thomas’ other games. Skull Smash was easily his best looking title, in that it seemed like it would be fun from screen shots, which is really all you have to go off of on the PSM marketplace. But what gave me cause to worry is that he was perhaps too prolific. Like maybe he rushes through development too quickly on titles. Thus, I set my expectations low for Super Brain Eat 3. And who knows, maybe I set them too low, because I really did have a good time with it. It’s a Pac-Man style maze game. Eat brains, avoid ghosts. You can get special potions that allow you to fire at enemies, or grant you the ability to destroy ghosts by coming in contact with them. It also features spikes and various other traps on the floor, plus you have to return to the starting door once you eat all the brains on the stage. Oh, and SBE3 is needlessly gory, with lots of blood splatters as you pick up the brains. I’m guessing the aim of the developer was to invoke a Doom-like atmosphere into a Pac-Man style maze title. Personally, I wish he had gone with a different theme and had a more Namco-like 80s skin on this one. I believe gaming has evolved past the era where gore sells. Retro is in, and on a platform where developers are struggling to sell on the same level that XBLIGs are, developers really need to do everything in their power to make a game stand out. Going off screen-shots (which is all you can do on PSM. No trailers, no demos), Super Brain Eat 3 looks like it would be boring and awful. A potentially devastating first-impression, like beginning a first date by spelling out your name in Morse Code using armpit farts.
Having missed the era where 4/5ths of games attempted to be like Pac-Man, I’m not as burned out on these type of games as some of my readers seem to be. Super Brain Eat 3 is genuinely fun and mostly a well-designed title with lots of great ideas at work here. Sure, the AI is completely brain-dead. Fitting I suppose, since they are ghosts, which means they’re dead-dead. They’re so dumb that it should hurt the game, but because they’re vulnerable to the spikes on the floor, you can manipulate them into killing themselves. I love it. It takes a potentially negative aspect and makes it beneficial, rewarding, and hilarious. Enemies that are somewhere off-screen are marked with indicators on the screen’s edge, and you’ll often see them just randomly die. It never stops being funny. It also explains how they ended up as ghosts in the first place.
You get a pretty decent amount of levels in Super Brain Eat 3, plus there’s actually two free level packs coming soon. I would still give the “best game on PSM” nod to OMG-Zombies! or Cubixx, but I think the best value on the platform firmly belongs to Super Brain Eat 3. It’s only 49 cents. Nobody would have faulted the developer for releasing those level packs as spinoffs, but he’s giving them away! Super Brain Eat 3 is not perfect by any means. The control is a bit on the loose side, which sometimes led to me going a step further than I meant to. My biggest gripe, and it’s so rare for me to harp on this, is the graphics. The game looks bad in screen-shots, and only slightly better in motion. The environments are sterile and there isn’t any variety in the settings. The level packs look like they will ease that a bit, but not by much. There are lots of greys, stark reds, and pale greens. The game itself isn’t boring, but the graphics almost make it feel like it is. The graphic style does occasionally get in the way too. The retractable spikes on the floor, for example, are the same color as the floor is. In a way, it’s heart breaking. It would be like having an amazing script for a movie and then finding out they’ve cast Ashton Kutcher in the lead and all the monster effects will be done using Play-Doh.
It’s ironic that the spikes don’t stick out.
I alternated between thinking the game was rushed or thinking the developer was lazy. Do you know why that sucks? Because it drowned out the thoughts of how talented the developer was. Super Brain Eat 3 is a good game, but it doesn’t look like it will be. I had six friends who own Vitas (I think this represents 8% of all Vita owners world-wide) look at this title in the store. They all agreed it would be a bad game. The trailer did nothing to diminish that thought. It looks sloppy. It looks ugly. It seems to yell “I will be a terrible!” Nothing could be further from the truth. I promise you, Super Brain Eat 3 is worth at least a buck. It’s unquestionably worth $0.49. Which I believe is about double the game’s art budget.
Super Brain Eat 3 is Chick Approved. And no, apparently there is no Super Brain Eat 1 or 2. That’s another bone-headed development decision. I’m guessing it was done to be funny. Instead, it makes it seem like there’s a whole series of games that got no attention, possibly because they were no good. How could a game that is so good not get one thing right artistically? Horrible name. Ugly graphics. Very enjoyable game. You should get it.
If I were to go mad and rechristen Indie Gamer Chick as “XBLIG Zombie Game Chick” with the intent of reviewing games with a zombie theme, there are enough zombie games on XBLIG that I would be able to have a daily review of a different title for over two years. It strikes me as odd that, on a platform like XBLIG, where there’s almost no limitations on how you can theme your project, so many developers choose to regurgitate the same shit day after day. To some gamers, the over-saturation of zombie games (and this is hardly exclusive to XBLIG) is insulting and comes across as almost lazy. “Gamers are sheep. Shoehorn zombies in any game and they’ll line up to buy it.” It’s cynical. Does it generate sales? Yea, maybe. Does it generate respect? Probably not. Now if you put effort into your title and try to make it stand out, you can have both sales and acclaim. Look at The Walking Dead. If your game is just a generic shooter that was rushed through production to capitalize on a fad and generate sales off marketplace confusion, you might just get neither.
Cough.
Anyway, I thought of this while playing Zombie Compound on Xbox Live Indie Games today. It’s a twin-stick wave-shooter with upgradable stats that’s main selling point is “shoot zombies.” There are two notable things I can say about Zombie Compound. #1: The game is moderately fun. #2: Zombie Compound is more than moderately lazy. It could have been so much better than it turned out. I’ve played dozens of TwickS since starting Indie Gamer Chick, and my heart as grown cold towards the vast majority of them. They’re so samey and safe and commonplace, it’s hard to warm up to them. So I was shocked when I immediately started to enjoy Compound. The upgradable stats angle was a good move. It’s too bad that the developer didn’t take it further, giving the game a lifespan that even a mayfly would take pity on.
If my count was accurate, Compound has four enemies. None shoot projectiles, and the most advanced attack any possess is to split into three worms when they die. Of course, once the worms are present, they behave just like a normal zombie. The only way the game ramps up difficulty is by slightly increasing enemy speed and by shoving more and more enemies on screen. This is negated by how easy it is to upgrade your stats. By the tenth round of Compound, I had purchased and fully upgraded a ray gun, which can take out rows of enemies. I had also upgraded how much money I got from each kill, which allowed me to abuse the ammo refills. Any danger of me dying was completely lost before the game was halfway over. Then I bought the rocket launcher, and was clearing out waves of hundreds of dudes in under a minute. The game abruptly ends after wave 25. No ending, no reward, just “You Win!” And that’s where the real problem with Zombie Compound lies. There’s no real point to it. Each level is fighting the same four enemies over and over again with no reward to be found. There’s no high score leaderboards, no variety, no bosses, nothing.
Of course, it ends so quickly that you really don’t have too much time to get bored. You can also play it with up to four-players in local co-op. In this mode, buying upgrades is significantly slowed down, which might add to the challenge a bit more. I don’t know, because I rage quit on the idiots I was playing with. All players share lives here, and if you choose partners who don’t grasp the idea of trying to avoid enemies, it can be frustrating. Otherwise, I guess Zombie Compound is worth a buck. Barely. You’ll play it once, enjoy yourself for a bit, never touch it again, and only vaguely remember it a few days from now. That’s sad because talent was on display here. But the developer had the talent to make a great game and settled for making a tolerable one. I probably shouldn’t let that bug me so much, but I hate seeing the talented show a complete lack of ambition. Aim high, people. It’s better to aim high and miss than aim low and barely hit the target. Just ask this guy.
80 Microsoft Points said “why zombies and not clowns? They’re way scarier and they’re REAL” in the making of this review. No, seriously, I mean that. Why?
Zombie Compound is Chick Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard. But, it could have easily been ranked much, much higher with just a couple more features. Shame.
I wasn’t even sure I was going to get to play Guacamelee! Many readers, aware that I have epilepsy, warned me that the game occasionally vomits flashy, eye-hurting rainbows. However, I was given assurances from readers that such effects only happen when you pick up an upgrade or immediately as you enter a boss battle. They were right, and I was able to play Guacamelee. Hooray for me!
Unfortunately, after a couple very promising opening hours, Guacamelee fell apart. For me at least. I felt the game had issues with padding, humor, and the occasional game-killing bug. Someone who I think is part of the development team assures me a patch is on the way for such bugs, which might be able to bump the game up to a Seal-of-Quality title. Despite all the bitching I’m about to do, there’s a pretty good game somewhere in this mess. A game that at times made me laugh, cheer, and occasional spit on my television.
They should have found someone else to be the hero. Juan slouches. Real heroes don’t slouch.
The idea is you’re a dude who was tragically born with his neck coming out of his chest. The president’s daughter is kidnapped by an evil undead bullfighter person. In the process, you’re murdered, but you come back as a super-powered luchador who must save the girl and the world from being merged with the realm of the dead. I appreciate how the guys behind this took a moldy-old game story and dressed it up with funny dialog and a couple twists along the way. Having said that, I wasn’t a big fan of the whole luchador thing. It seems like it was done more out of a desire to be quirky. The gag seems to be “luchadores are random and weird, get it?” Yea, I got it. I got it years ago when Killer 7 had a luchador in it. I got it when Jack Black played a luchador in a movie. I got it when WB had a Luchador-themed children’s cartoon and an accompanying awful Game Boy Advance game.
The luchador setting only serves a purpose to the game in the combat, which has a wrestling theme to it. You punch, you grapple, you throw, or you buy advanced moves like a suplex or a piledriver. Great. But why wasn’t the theme more incorporated into the plot or the humor? Juan becomes a luchador, and then he’s just a luchador for the rest of the game (except for when he’s a chicken. Don’t ask). They could have made gags or a plot that revolved around him having to avoid losing his mask, since that’s a central theme for luchadores. Or they could have made jokes about how wrestling is staged. Instead, it’s left at “he’s a luchador, and that in and of itself is quirky.” No, it’s not.
Other humor in the game comes in the form of referencing online memes, the joke being “it’s that thing you know of. We also know of it, and we made reference to it in our game!” That’s not a joke. If I go up to a stranger and say “did you ever see that video of a monkey that picks its ass, smells its finger, and then passes out?” that is not me performing stand-up comedy to that person. Guacamelee way over uses this, and that’s sad because there’s some characterizations and bits of dialog that don’t use the referential-humor crutch. Like the slutty demonic chick that hangs out with the bad guys and shakes her ass at you in an attempt to get her way. Which doesn’t work, making her pout. That’s funny. “Hey look, it’s Strong Bad!” or “Hey look, it’s Link!” is not funny. It’s just not. Retro City Rampage had the same problem, where the jokes were mostly “It’s funny because I too have seen the games you played or watched the movies and/or television programs you watched!” Some people enjoy this type of humor. There’s been eleven seasons of Family Guy and five installments of Scary Movie. I personally don’t get it, but I guess there is an audience that just wants assurance that, yes, other people remember the pop culture trivia that you remember.
Why does Juan have a championship belt on? That should have been something you get for beating the game. “He got it for beating death! Get it?” says Brian. I suppose.
Guacamelee is a 2D Metroidvania, something I probably should have mentioned early. I love this genre, and I really wanted to love Guacamelee. At first I did. The graphics are absolutely stunning, and the play controls seems like it will be pretty good. The world of Guacamelee is well designed, with vast dungeons to explore, towns to mingle in, and lots of hidden pathways to open up unlockables. However, I wasn’t thrilled with the combat. Many are considering it to be the game’s greatest attribute, so I think I could probably have trimmed this review down to “play the demo. If you like the combat, you’ll like the whole game.” I really didn’t mind fighting, for the most part. It’s actually fun to string together huge combos, throw enemies into each-other, or see how long you can keep yourself airborne while dishing out damage.
But then the game starts to lock-down for forced arena-style combat. This was presumably done to pad out the length. I came to dread these sections because it kills the pace of the game and makes the combat needlessly feel like busy work. The developers tried to keep it from stagnating by giving enemies shields which require a specific special move to break, or having enemies appear in one dimension and their shadows (which are still capable of causing you damage) in another. This forces you to switch from dimension to dimension (this is a thing you can do, I probably should have mentioned that too) to fight the baddies off. The intentions here were good, but the shields and the phasing-planes combat just adds to the tedium and makes fighting a chore when you’re locked in a single-screen. Worse yet, your dude dramatically flies back, Simon Belmont-style, when you get knocked down. Getting up is slow, and once up, your temporary-invincibility is too brief. Thus, enemies can and will juggle you. I went into a room late in the game with full health, got knocked down once, and never again had a real opening to fight back as multiple guys (some of whom fire projectiles) just endlessly pounded the crap out of me. You do have a dodge attack, but the window to use it is too brief. It also doesn’t help when a room has multiple enemies attacking just out-of-synch enough that, when one attack animation is ending, the other is beginning. Now admittedly, I have no sense of timing, but a quick look at a few YouTube videos confirms that other players are the victims of cheap hits as well.
By the way, most of those videos end with the players talking about how much they love the combat in Guacamelee. I guess some people are just wired to enjoy this type of shit. I really did like the combat, but there’s too many foibles associated with it that I couldn’t get over. Personally, if I wanted to get ganged up on with no opening to fight back, I’d book myself to go on the O’Reilly Factor.
I’m not so sure Juan would make a good wrestler. He spends most of the combat laying on his back.
Controls can be frustrating too. I had trouble hitting just the basic (press circle) headbutt on yellow-shielded enemies, as I would typically do some other form of attack. This became especially true after I opened up the blue “dash-forward” move. In order to throw those headbutts, I had to completely stop moving and set myself, as any forward momentum seemed to cause the wrong attack. This gets kind of difficult when you have multiple enemies ganging up on you and no pure method of blocking. The only way to avoid getting juggled is to move around, but the only way to break an enemy’s shield is to sit still. You can see how this might be a problem. It gets really swear-inducing when enemy shields reappear after you’ve broken them because you didn’t kill them fast enough. This all just makes the game so much more aggravating than it needs to be. Those locked in combat rooms too, only done to pad out the play time. Games don’t need to be long to be amazing or earn critical acclaim. Look at Journey. The average player takes barely three hours to finish it, and it won numerous Game of the Year awards over big-hitting contenders and multimillion dollar AAA titles. So would it have mattered if Guacamelee was an hour shorter and didn’t have those combat rooms? I don’t think it would have hurt its reputation at all.
I didn’t finish Guacamelee. Towards the end, it started to bug out on me. First, I couldn’t complete the training room because every time I got half-way through a combo, the screen would go completely black. I wasn’t sure if this was done intentionally to add challenge, but then I found out that wasn’t the case. Then the stuff with the yellow shields took over the combat and slowed the pace down even more. Finally, I got into one of those combat rooms. This one was especially annoying due to having nearly-out-of-reach bomb/enemy things that you have to kill before a timer ticks down, or they explode and claim a lot of your life. On top of those, there was a large pillar with a spike on top of it that you had to hop back and forth over. The controls were decent, but not so great that such actions could be completed smoothly every time. On top of those, there were projectile-throwing enemies who (along with the bombs) could phase between the two planes of existence. I did suck at the combat, quite frankly, and I had reached that point I sometimes get to where I just want a game to be over with. Well, after failing a couple of times at this room, I finally cleared it out. Only the game glitched out and the doors never unlocked. Thus I would be forced to exit to the title screen and start the room over. But, I don’t want to. I’m done. Seen enough. Satisfied that it’s not going to get better. Don’t want to risk this happening again. Get back to me when you’re patched. It will probably end with the stupid “A Winner Is You” line from Pro Wrestling on the NES anyway.
(spoiler alert, highlight: holy fuck, it does. Jesus Christ, I was fucking joking!)
Hello? Please let me out? Please?
There’s a ton to like about Guacamelee. It has personality. It has charm. It has an incredible map. It’s very beautiful to look at. Most people even like the music. I don’t. Personally, I think Mexican music must have been invented by an atheist to disprove the existence of God. Really, though, your like or dislike of Guacamelee will come down entirely towards whether or not you enjoy the combo-heavy combat of the game, cheapness and all. I liked it but couldn’t get past the cheapness. I would still barely recommend it despite that, but the game has issues with glitches and I really think those need to be cleaned up before I say “okay, now you can get it.” I’m told fixes are on the way, so if you have PlayStation Plus, get it now while it’s on sale and just wait to play it. Just don’t expect a game of the year contender. Expect yourself to say “what were they thinking, making you push this many buttons mid-air just to get across this one room? Were they fucking mad?”
I have to say, I’ve never been a fan of the “being chased by a gigantic monster” action beats in games.
Oh, and in closing, I know this wasn’t my funniest review (was my longest though). To make up for it, here’s a random sampling of games I’ve played and movies I’ve seen. Feel free to bust a gut if you’ve watched/played the same things. Remember, this qualifies as humor: Portal, Final Fantasy, Mario, Sudoku, Parcheesi, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Seven Psychopaths, Se7en, Seven Samurai, Total Recall, Total Recall that sucks, the Zapruder film of Kennedy’s assassination, and a video of a monkey that picks its butt, sniffs its finger, then passes out. Okay, you can stop laughing now. The review is over.
$11.99 ($14.99 for non PlayStation Plus members) said “it’s different when *I* make referential jokes because.. um.. hey look over there!” in the making of this review.
I have an idea for a children’s game. In it, you’ll play as a pre-pubescent lad who will wander the world making animals fight for sport and for fame. You’ll start with one enslaved creature (possibly an adorable mouse-lightning bolt thing, something that just oozes cuteness) and then randomly fight other adorable creatures along the countryside. During a fight, right at the moment before your huggable little animal buddy delivers a merciless death-blow to the creature it just beat into a pulp, you’ll capture the creature in a cage way too small for it to possibly live comfortably in. You’ll then force it to fight creatures that you wish to enslave, with your ultimate aim being to capture one of every creature like some deranged, asexual Noah.
And I’ve just been handed a cease and desist order, as apparently someone else already had this idea and has made billions off it. Huh. You know, I thought I paid a lot of attention to gaming. I’m not sure how that one slipped me by.
Actually, more than one person had this idea. Sort of. A wild XBLIG just appeared before me called Indiemon: Earth Nation. Quick thought: if you remove the word “Indiemon” from that name, would it not sound like a reality show you would expect to see on Discovery Channel? No? Just me? Okay, never mind.
Thank God they used up one of their four marketplace pics for a splash of the game. By the way, unless it looks different in an encounter, I don’t remember ever fighting the monster shown here. Unless it was one of the final two boss monsters the last guy you fight pulled out, both of which I killed in a single hit after about two seconds.
So Indiemon is just like my hypothetical game would have been, except you’re a dude dressed like a knight instead of a baseball cap and parachute pants wearing child. Well, that just saps the whimsy right out of the concept, does it not? I mean, why does a knight need to make animals fight his battles for him? Wouldn’t he have, like, something pointy and deadly? A sword perhaps? A spear? No? So this guy in his fancy armor and sequined cape is making animals fight his battles for him?
What an asshole.
Well, being a friend to animals (I make a point of eating under six a day), I decided I wouldn’t be a jerk about it. Instead, I would only keep one Indiemon, a fuzzy cute little rabbit thing called Bunnidusk in the game and “Peter Cottonmurder” by me. When I engaged in battles with Peter, I decided to forgo any unnecessary violence against those innocent creatures that I so cowardly refused to fight myself. So, instead of going through all the fancy attacks that Peter had acquired through the leveling up process (which happens roughly every three to four minutes), I would just spend every battle selecting attack from the menu, then selecting the most basic attack I had available. Of course, such a brazenly lazy tactic would lead to failure in my hypothetical cockfighting game for children, where battles would be based around a rock-scissors-paper style strategy, probably something incorporating elements or living environments. But, in Indiemon, it worked. I never once had to use any attack except the weakest one I had open to me. I never had to capture a creature. I never came close to dying. I never once had to use any item to save a fight. Eventually, Peter Cottonmurder evolved (totally stolen from my hypothetical cockfighting game for children concept) into a giant, muscular, humanoid rabbit thing, sort of like Bucky O’Hare’s roided up cousin, Stucky O’HGHare. Tougher, stronger, and probably now possessing erectile dysfunction.
That’s him on the left. Who’s a cute little blood thirsty slayer of God’s creatures?
Not that it changed the game much. I could still breeze past any encounter just by mashing the A button until the battle ended with me standing over the bloody, comatose body of some helpless animal. I was amused that the game took time to note that any animal you beat-up is not dead, but rather “unconscious.” Well, that’s a moralistic weight off my shoulder, I can tell you that. Otherwise, you just walk from town-to-town, then go through a cave, and then meet an old dude at a dock, then the game ends, presumably to be continued at some point in the future. Yep, there’s not even a proper ending here. It just ends.
And thank God for that. I sound like a broken record this week, but Indiemon is so awful that I am almost at a loss for words. Thankfully, I have a thesaurus, and shall now list every synonym for awful: abominable, alarming, appalling, atrocious, deplorable, depressing, dire, disgusting, distressing, dreadful, fearful, frightful, ghastly, grody, gross, gruesome, grungy, harrowing, hideous, horrendous, horrible, horrific, horrifying, nasty, offensive, raunchy, repulsive, shocking, stinking, synthetic, tough, ugly, unpleasant, and unsightly. Well, besides raunchy or synthetic, I think all of those work.
Really, the biggest sin of Indiemon is just how fucking dull it is. There’s no original ideas on display here, which gives the game a boredom handicap right out of the starting gate. But once some of the technical flaws of the game begin, it really starts to fall apart. While going through the cave at the end of the game, it took me about five to ten minutes to find the dude who I needed to launch me on a ship in what turned out to be the “wait, that’s it?” ending sequence. Once I got him, I think something in the game must have crapped out, because I got stuck in the cave for over an hour dealing with non-stop “random encounters.” For a while, every single step I took led to a battle. It took me over an hour to make my way to the exit of the cave. Considering that this was the end of the game, I figured this was done intentionally to be the big finale gauntlet. However, I talked to another player of Indiemon who experienced no-such diarrhea of the random encounter. Huh. You ever get the feeling a game was intentionally trolling you? Happens to me all the time.
No, I don’t know why the pictures are cropped this way.
So Indiemon is boring and unoriginal and technically problematic. That’s not even mentioning how loose and busted the movement controls are. Whatever you do, don’t use the analog stick to walk. You’ll zig-zag around like a drunken knight who makes animals fight his battles for him like a total pussy. Character design is, well, I suppose no more lazy or absurd than your average new Pokemon is these days. But, I can’t even recommend Indiemon as the cheap dollar store knock-off that I suppose it has positioned itself to be. It’s just too bland. It actually manages to completely miss the point of what made Pokemon work. Remove all strategy from that series, make the artwork more crude and amateurish, and take away the childlike sense of wonder, and you would have a game ill-suited towards teaching kids the kind of skills needed to be the starting quarterback for the Philadelphia Eagles.
Oopsie. Last night, I meant to download Rise of the Ravager by Gentleman Squid. Instead, I downloaded Seeds of Ralark. The reason for that was I wasn’t 100% sure what the title was, except it had the word “of” in it and the cover art looked a bit generic. You could see how I might make such a mistake.
Could be twins!
Well, I plunked down 80 Mystic Syrup Ponies for Seeds of Ralark, so I figure I might as well play it. Or attempt to at least. Seeds is the type of game where you almost wonder if it’s meant to be played at all. It’s a platformer without jumping. I think the aim of the developer was to be like Bionic Commando, because gameplay revolves around walking around as a gecko, moving from platform to platform by way of a grappling hook. Or, in the case of Seeds, a sticky tongue. Positive thing out-of-the-way first: the graphics are pretty. That’s the only nice thing I can say about Seeds. The play control is atrocious. Aiming the tongue is too loose, and the physics don’t want to cooperate. In a short play time, I even found some little quirks that make me wonder. Like, how come platforms don’t swing back and forth once you’ve moved them? You can use the tongue to grapple onto a platform, but move the platform you’re standing on by using sticky feet. However, when you let go with your tongue, the platform goes back to its starting position and locks into place. That’s just nonsensical.
I can’t really squeeze a full review out of Ralark because I didn’t even finish the tutorial. I put about thirty minutes into trying, but Seeds of Ralark had already become one of the most painful gaming sessions I had ever experienced. I guess this is being passed off as “difficult” by the developers, and I suppose that is the case. Of course, piecing together a broken statue with super glue might also be difficult, but even if you manage it, that doesn’t change the fact that the statue is broken. If Ralark handled better, it might be fun. Might. As it stands now, it’s one of the worst games I’ve ever played.
Seeds of Ralark offended my platforming fandom, and also gave me a desire to dump Geico as my insurance carrier.
How does a game this bad come along, and how does a developer not realize it’s a problem? In the case of Seeds of Ralark, I’m guessing this is a simple case of a developer becoming the best at their own game, not realizing that others are going to find it to be a frustrating, joyless chore to play. After all, they had no problem with the controls. The ones they designed, and know all the stupid quirks of that nobody else in their right mind would take the time to learn. And then you have a game like Rise of the Ravager, where the difficulty spikes so dramatically that any lingering fun is sapped away.
Ravager is a decent concept. A gallery shooter sort of like Galaga, only with the colored-bullets gameplay of something like Ikaruga. Sounds good, and at first, it is. Of course, Ikaruga is insanely difficult with just two colors of bullets. Ravager has four colors to worry about. For the less coordinated of the populace (raises hand), that alone could be enough of a turnoff to make Ravager easily skippable. But, the action was decent enough and showed enough promise that I felt I should continue. This lasted until I encountered the first boss, which was too spongy for its own good. I tried reshuffling my experience points into other categories (by far the smartest move the guys at Gentleman Squid did here) but still struggled. After roughly a dozen attempts, I finally beat it. But, by this point, I was fatigued by this less-than-exciting sequence and was just anxious for the game to be over. I call this Steven Seagal Syndrome, because I feel the same way when watching his movies.
This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but with giant colored heads raining down from the sky. Just like the Mayans predicted.
My boyfriend would like me to note that I’m not this game’s target audience. I try to be as unbiased as possible, but I also generally dislike shmups and have a tough time warming up to them. Having said that, Ravager has problems that extend beyond its genre. The color system requires skills that are typically a cut above what an average gamer possesses. I can handle it up to a certain point, but when you have different-colored enemies coming at you from different sides, with a couple of waves following right behind them, it really can be a bit overwhelming, to the point of being demoralizing. I also thought there were a few flaws in the upgrade system. Some of the upgrades are too expensive. You also get upgrade points by not taking damage on levels. However, to do so often requires utter perfection. If you could go back to previous stages and attempt to earn those points you missed (just the missed points, so as to avoid mindless grinding), this would be a great feature to have. But you can’t go back. Thus, those upgrade points that the majority of the gaming population really could use will be unobtainable.
Put it this way: let’s say you put me in a foot race with Usain Bolt. He would absolutely smoke me the first race. Now let’s say that because he beat me, I have to run the next race with my shoelaces tied together. Hey wait, shouldn’t HE be the one running with his shoelaces tied together? That would make for a closer, more exciting race, and I, the person ill-equipped to do well in such a task, would have a better chance of staying competitive. And that’s what is wrong with Ravager. Those upgrade points are out of reach for those who are in need of them the most. Being able to go back and get those points would take the edge off, but the developers are worried that their game might get too easy. So I guess that’s that. If only gaming was a medium where, and I’m speaking hypothetically here, you could have adjustable difficulty levels to cater to players of all skill levels. I know, there I go again, spouting off pure fanciful crazy talk. I still hold out hope that my insanely absurd “adjustable difficulty” crap will become a reality. Maybe the 720 or PS4 will have the processing power to pull of such a radical space age innovation.
I probably should also put out there that the developer was anxious for Brian and I to experiment with the co-op stuff, so we did. Brian jumped in at level 13. Again, not wanting their game to be “too easy”, the game features what they claim to be “scaling difficulty” that increases with the number of players. Thus, once Brian jumped in, the game suddenly had what seemed like three times the amount of enemies you would normally encounter, and those enemies took more bullets to kill. The dudes at Gentleman Squid based this off Diablo 2. Which you’ll note is a dungeon crawling hack-and-slasher, not a single-screened gallery shooter with limited movement. Scaling difficulty they say? I say the amount of shit two people had to deal with seemed more in line with something meant for four players. I actually shudder how much shit could be in a four player game. This was not well thought out.
Rise of the Ravager didn’t do much for me, besides make me want to go back and watch Legends of the Hidden Temple. I’m partial to the Orange Iguanas myself, although the Silver Snakes were not without charm.
I’m sure there is an audience for Rise of the Ravager. It has decent enough play control, pretty graphics, and a nice hook. The fact that I came close to enjoying it might speak volumes of its quality. But, based on my own subjective opinions, I can’t recommend it. It’s just not for me, in the same way that hiring someone to tie me to a bed and beat me with a bullwhip isn’t for me. Some people are into that kind of shit.
80 Microsoft Points apiece noted that the Leaderboard’s ranked percentage is the lowest now that it’s ever been in the making of this review. Pick it up, guys.
It’s been a little over a year since I reviewed Retro Arcade Adventure, a hack-and-slasher that was sort of like Smash TV for the dark ages. I didn’t really like the game. It was short, repetitive, and boring. You could see potential in the developer, but the experience was tedious. So I was skeptical when I saw that they had decided to remake the title instead of patching the original. Ballsy for sure, since the first wasn’t very good. It would be like burning a steak and trying to correct it by throwing it back on the grill for ten minutes.
Right away, I noticed the game was somewhat improved. Enemies still come out you in boring, mindless waves, but they hack up pretty good. Levels felt shorter, power-ups more plentiful, and boss battles were fun if unspectacular.
And then I encountered this fucking thing.
It could very well be the most boring boss I’ve taken on in an indie game. It very much reminded me of the final boss in Sonic 4. Too spongy, takes too long to open itself up to attack, and made me question whether or not I had died in a horrific traffic accident and had gone to gaming hell. The first time I fought it, I was low on health (I seemed to be taking unaccountable damage in the stage leading up to it), but it took me a full ten minutes to slip up. The second time around, after over 15 minutes hitting presumably the weak spot on the boss, it still wasn’t dead. I was though. I paused the game, casually got up, turned the power off, and decided to go watch some TV. I think it was a documentary on tape worms. Vastly more entertaining than that boss was.
In short, this needs to be fixed. And it will be. The developer assured me of it, under penalty of torture by honey and fire ants. Until then, you can spend your time with the two minigames included. I just realized I never actually played them. Let me give them a shot.
(15 minutes later)
Oh dear God, what horrible shit. I’m not waiting. Break out the honey and fire ants. This developer needs a good torturing.
80 Microsoft Points liked Smash TV years ago but don’t think it’s possible to be good in this day and age so prove me wrong indie developers in the making of this review.
Plague Inc. is a game where the goal is to unleash a deadly disease onto the world and drive humanity to extinction. It’s the feel-good game of the year! I played a game with a similar idea a few months back called Infectonator, but the activities in that title were more hands-on. In Plague Inc., your actions are mostly indirect. You choose a starting country for the disease, then spend the next fifteen or so minutes gradually evolving it. Give it resistance to climates, bacteria, or make it easier to spread. Ultimately though, you have to jack up what it does to humans, to the point that it causes them to die. Victory is achieved only through total human extinction, as I learned when a handful of healthy shitheads in New Guinea survived my first attempt at the game on Brutal difficulty. Fuck them. If I ever visit there, I’m going to walk around coughing on people out of spite.
I’ve been trying to warn people about this for years. Nobody listened.
Let’s get the good out of the way first: Plague Inc. is about as grim a concept as I’ve ever seen in a game, and without cutesy graphics or an over-emphasis on tongue-in-cheek humor (it’s there, but just as garnish), it can be kind of depressing to play. But, I can’t deny how exhilarating it is to watch the final healthy countries finally come down with the plague, or how satisfying it is when you get a pop-up informing you that humanity is going to go extinct and there’s nothing they can do about it. There’s also a variety of scenarios for you to mess around with, each with unique properties. Some plagues might give you less material to evolve the disease with, or it might kill too fast and you have to slow its progress down. Play sessions are short, lasting ten to twenty minutes. It’s not visually pleasing in the slightest bit (and sometimes the sound will cause your ears to bleed) but Plague Inc. is a perfectly good waste of time.
Now, in the immortal words of Marlon Brando circa middle age, here comes the but.
There are seven “stages” in Plague Inc., each representing a different form of disease to spread. The problem is, the strategies for those are all pretty much the same. I found what worked best was starting the virus somewhere in Africa (typically Egypt, which had both sea and air ports, plus after Moses I figured they’re used to this kind of shit), pump up its resistance to heat and cold, add a couple spreading agents, NEVER actually beefing up the plague myself until everyone in the world had it. Once I had this down, the game was almost too easy. Even the later twists and turns like the Bioweapon plague that kills victims too fast was a piece of cake. I never understood why “piece of cake” became the defacto nonchalance word for “easy.” Ever had my Daddy’s fruit cake? Shit will break your teeth.
There’s also some DLC, although there seems to be some confusion as to whether or not it can all be unlocked over the course of the game. I bought two pieces of it: the first was a worm one that I’m fairly certain can be unlocked by beating all the stages on Brutal difficulty. The second, a zombie mode, cost $1.99 and if it can be unlocked through the normal channels of the game, that’s news to me and to the game itself, because no reference was made of it. What’s weird about that mode is the price. The full game of Plague Inc. costs $0.99, yet this one single stage which is not significantly different from the main game (instead of a virus it’s zombies, which you also have to spend attribute points on. Yawn) costs $1.99. The game comes with one starting stage and seven more that can be unlocked, not to mention three “cheat” stages that completely remove all the gameplay (and thus fun) from the game. So for $1.99, you get an extra stage that costs double what the game costs and provides you with 11.1% of the content. I do believe that is one of the worst values I’ve ever seen in gaming. And I own a couple Vita memory cards.
Get used to screens looking like this, because there’s not a whole lot else to see. Except menus. Menus and a world map.
A couple technical aspects to complain about: sometimes the “click here” bubbles that pop up to give you DNA points are right on top of the pull-down menu, making them impossible to click. You have to zoom in and then scoot the map over to click it, and by time you do that, it’s probably gone. Also, some of the scrolling text is just lazy. There is no such country as “East Asia.” Yet, when the population of East Asia is wiped off the planet, the game says “East Asia’s government has fallen.” Okay, which one? All of them? Some of them? The important ones? Would it have been too much to ask that non-country regions in the game have different text? Guess so. But that’s really nit-picky. I do wholeheartedly recommend Plague Inc., even if the DLC left a bad taste in my mouth. It’s fun, and it’s a perfectly acceptable time sink. Maybe not as addictive as some similar titles (this one certainly won’t mess up my week the same way Infectonator did) but it gets the job done. Who knew destroying the world could be so fun? Now I know how congress feels.
Magnetic By Nature was developed by Tripleslash Studios
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