Blocky

October 28, 2011 by 1 Comment

In some ways, this review is a Second Chance with the Chick.  I first played Blocky a few weeks back when it’s developer challenged me.  And I actually liked what I played.  It’s got an old school reflex-testing vibe to it, with small bits of action and experience upgrades peppered in.  And then it all went to hell with one of the most infuriating boss fights I’ve ever come across.  I was so pissed off I didn’t even bother to write the review.  Instead, I took to e-mail and gave the developer holy hell for it.  But then, being the benevolent goddess that I am, I told them I would hold off on my review until this one little bitty issue was patched up.  See, I’m nice.  Modest too.

Blocky feels like the type of casual game that would be developed by PopCap Games.  Hey, don’t scoff at them until someone buys you for $650,000,000.  You play as a square that has to avoid making contact with various baddies that move randomly around a static play field.  There’s a wide variety of goals present.  In some levels you have no offensive options and just have to try avoiding the enemies.  In some, you have to destroy the enemies using power-ups that spawn in random intervals, or by causing them to get sucked up in whirlpools.  In some levels you’re expected to collect as many coins as possible or gather a high score.  Not all levels are equally as fun.  I personally found the whirlpool levels to be the low point.  In them, you’re supposed to use the magnetic power-ups to repel enemies to their deaths.  However, the magnet power isn’t very strong, nor is it easy to steer the enemies.  Having said that, if you just wait a while the baddies usually end up killing themselves.  Maybe this is the evil spiky circle-block thingie way of committing Seppuku for failure to kill me in thirty seconds or less.  Hell, I don’t know.

Blocky isn’t easy on the eyes, but the enemies are distinctive, even if the backgrounds have this psychedelic quality that can be a bit distracting.  But overall the game is pretty fun, and at times a bit intense.  In later levels, enemies spawn faster than mutant babies in a village full of moonshine-plied hillbillies.  For the most part, you have to simply avoid them.  You do have hope in the form of a handful of power-ups.  I already mentioned the utterly useless magnet, but there’s also a fork that allows you to eat enemies for a few seconds.  There’s a shield that allows you to bump into a single enemy.  There’s a flashing thingie that slows enemies down.  And finally there’s a hammer, which pauses the game to allow you to select a small radius of enemies to destroy, but it’s pretty rare to get.  In fact, up until the boss fight, I had only gotten one via random spawning, but certainly that wouldn’t factor in later, right?

Oh, and there are experience upgrades.  They seem really out-of-place in a game like this, and they’re really not all that helpful either.  One of them increased the radius of the hammer, which again, I had only seen once over the entire length of the game.  Hell, I’ve seen Sasquatch more times in my life.  Another option increases your character’s speed.  I never did this one because it seems like a recipe for disaster.  In a game where dexterity and precision are so important, why on Earth would I want to make my character move faster?  Maybe it does actually work, but I’m going off of nearly 20 years of gaming experience that says the faster anything moves, the harder it is to control.  So I ended up pouring all my points into things that increase the amount of money you collect, and to my character’s gravitational pull for sucking money towards him when I’m too lazy to go grab it myself, in what I call the “Merrill Lynch Effect.”  You can spend the money in a shop between stages to buy extra shields if you’re smart like me, or on stuff like the hammer that will kill one small cluster of enemies that will respawn anyway.  There’s also stuff that slows baddies down or creates an escape portal for you, but I stuck with just the shields because I accept that I’m a total failure who will bounce off more enemies than Tiger Woods parachuting into a monogamy enthusiast convention.

I really did like Blocky.  And then I got to the boss.  There’s actually two bosses that you fight at the same time (later there are even more).  Each has a symbol of a power-up inside of them.  Once you get that symbol, you touch the boss and then mash the A button on them to inflict damage.  Simple enough.  The first boss I took down fairly easily.  The second boss had a hammer symbol on him.  Again, up to this point, I had only gotten one hammer in the entire play-through.  “But surely since this is a boss that requires the hammer, they will appear more often, right?”

The game’s answer was “Fuck you, and don’t call me Shirley.”

TWENTY MINUTES!  That’s how long it took me to get my very first hammer while “fighting” a boss that required a hammer to beat it.  That’s not an exaggeration.  Twenty minutes.  And that hammer did so little damage that I figured it would take several hours to beat the damn thing.  No thanks.  So after thirty minutes of nothingness against a boss that has no attack, in a big room where all I had to do was avoid it, I decided to quit out to the menu and purchase some hammers.  Only once I exited, I found out I would have to play the entire sixth world over again, only without shields I used to get there in the first place.  After all, I had just spent all my money on hammers.  World six was very difficult.  I would have to play it again.

What followed I believe is known as a “conniption.”  I absolutely blew my stack.  I’ve seen a lot of good games with questionable design choices, but this was the absolute worst yet.  First off, the game didn’t need a boss.  Second, WHAT THE PISS GUZZLING HELL WAS THE DEVELOPER THINKING?  So I sent off a calm, completely rational e-mail to him explaining to him that he had murdered fun and was going to jail for it.

This is a picture of the boss fight that drove me crazy and NOT a trip caused by the peyote you just took.

Actually, he took it really well and corrected the problem.  So now if you play it the boss is so easy to beat that it’s laughable.  Not that I’m complaining about that.  Again, I think the entire concept of a boss in this kind of game is dumb.  And it wasn’t difficult in the slightest bit to begin with.  Tedium and difficulty should not be confused, and something that simply takes a long time to complete doesn’t necessarily mean it’s hard to do.  Unless it’s running a marathon.  That actually is long and difficult.  But my point still stands.  Also, I was able to directly enter the boss room this time.  I’m not sure how that happened, but it did.

With the boss issue corrected, Blocky is now an overall pretty good game.  Hell, there were more levels after I beat the boss, and I wanted to keep playing them.  It’s been a bad month for Xbox Live Indie Games, so maybe I’m just all for anything that offers me even the slightest amount of stimulation.  I don’t think that’s the case though.  Blocky has some really good twitchy-gameplay and I genuinely had a fun time playing it.  It’s not mind-blowing by any stretch, and the added “retro” mode where you just go for a high score is useless without online leaderboards, but I do give the game my official seal of approval.  And now that the boss battles are fixed, I won’t even be pinning it to the developer’s chest using a rusty nail and a sledge-hammer.

Blocky was developed by Think Flow Games

80 Microsoft Points actually aren’t sure if it was Sasquatch that they saw or Robin Williams in the making of this review.

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Milie & Telly

October 26, 2011 by 3 Comments

Milie & Telly is one part TwickS, one part shump, and 100% horrible.  I hesitate to call it the worst Xbox Live Indie Game I’ve yet played, because I’ve used that one a couple of times and I don’t want to sound like a person prone to hyperbole.  Still, I put about 90 minutes into Milie & Telly and I’m hard-pressed to think of even the slightest complement to pay towards it.

It’s a shump.  One that, for the most part, only had a couple of enemies on screen at a time.  All of which are total bullet-sponges.  They come in either a red or yellow variety and you have to shoot them with the correct bullet, like Ikaruga.  It’s also a TwickS, so you in theory should have precision aiming.  Instead, your gun fires one or two flimsy bullets at a rate so slow that it makes killing even the basic enemies such a slow process that it will sap your will to live.  It certainly made me contemplate whether I could successfully bludgeon myself to death with my own controller.

The levels are long too, but that’s not a point in the game’s favor.  There is no variety, and there are no power-ups.  Just shoot a couple bullet-sponges, wait for more to appear, and start shooting them.  Oh, and you have shields too.  There are bosses, but I never successfully beat one, even on easy.  I’m really trying here to say something positive about Milie & Telly just so I don’t come across like a negative meanie.  The graphics are wretched, like they were lifted straight out of an animated banner ad from ten years ago, and the sound effects are more invasive to your senses than being skull-fucked by a rusty jack hammer.  You know what, fuck it.  Milie & Telly is weaponized boredom and should be subjected to sanctions under the Geneva Convention.

Milie & Telly was developed by Nitama Naishin

80 Microsoft Points took some Advil and said “no, it’s not possible to bludgeon yourself to death with a controller” in the making of this review. 

Gameplay footage courtesy of http://Indies.onPause.org

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UnBound

October 25, 2011 by 18 Comments

NOTE: If you’re unable to download Xbox Live Indie Games (or any games for that matter) off the marketplace, you’re not alone.  I’m told they are now aware of the problem and it should be corrected shortly. 

UnBound purports to be an “open world adventure game.”  If this were true, all those juvenile delinquents who get ordered by courts to pick up trash on the side of a road should feel extra privileged.  The only adventure offered in UnBound is to pick up various orbs scattered throughout a rocky coastal mountain.  There’s no enemies to be found and the only objective is “find all the crap lying around.”  So the slogan attached to the box art is misleading.

Unbound takes place from a first-person perspective.  As stated above, the game is about finding orbs.  There’s three game modes.  In challenge, there’s five different scenarios for you to complete.  These games play more like connect-the-dots, which you’ll know better as an activity for three-year-olds and NOT an adventure of the open-world variety.  You basically just follow a string of orbs until you’ve collected every one on the map.  The first two “challenges” really offer no challenge at all.  And then you get to one called “Flood”, where the difficulty level curve goes so steep that it might be the world’s first successful space escalator.  In it, you’re still collecting orbs, only this time you can’t touch the continuously rising water.  The problem is it rises too fast, forcing you to hop back and forth to get each Orb.  The jumping is floaty enough that you might over-shoot your target and lose precious milliseconds.  Yes, milliseconds.  That’s how little time you have to react.

I will say this: UnBound would have made a cool Virtual Reality game.

The other modes offer a slightly more pleasurable time.  In adventure mode, you have to find 35 hidden blue orbs on an island.  Here, the connect-the-dots gameplay is significantly toned down and it gives the game a true sense of exploration.  As you collect the hundreds of green orbs lying around, your character becomes faster and can jump higher.  It’s kind of neat, making you feel like a budding superhero.  Unfortunately the land you traverse is lifeless and empty, so there’s not a whole lot for you to see or experience.  It’s like choosing to vacation in death valley.

Finally, there’s Survival mode, where you have a health bar that slowly depletes, forcing you to scramble around the map collecting orbs as quickly as possible to replenish it.  The object is to survive for as many days as possible.  I played through it four times and never made it to the second day, so obviously I’m doing something wrong.  Then again, I could never keep a goldfish alive for longer than a day either so maybe I’m not suited for this type of situation.  I do feel that the developer could have explained exactly how you’re supposed to stay alive longer.

Overall, UnBound feels kind of like a tech demo that would have been used two console generations ago.  It’s not exciting or engaging in the slightest bit, but it is functional and at times a teeny-tiny bit fun, especially when your character has all his stats maxed out and he’s jumping around the tops of mountains like he’s got Flubber on his shoes.  But the thrills are short-lived because the environment is so sterile that it almost feels like it leeches pleasure from your very soul, and that’s not cool.  Everyone knows souls that leak pleasure fetch lower prices in this market.

UnBound was developed by monufrak1

80 Microsoft Points chopped down a mountain with the edge of their hand in the making of this review.

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Dungeon Defenders

October 24, 2011 by 11 Comments

Early on, when conceptualizing Indie Gamer Chick, I intended to review Xbox Live Arcade games, along with Playstation Network titles. That idea got scrapped when I decided that those types of games have no problem getting attention. Of course, I didn’t take into account that many titles on those platforms come from smaller studios working on a shoestring budget and the big gaming sites can’t be bothered to touch them because they’re too busy going gaga over Batman or Uncharted.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m right there with them. Batman is awesome, even if I find it pretty far-fetched as far as video games go. A man dressed like a bat fights an evil clown? The fuck is that about? I would sooner believe in a giant turtle-dragon kidnapping a princess from a group of sentient mushrooms than a man in a bat suit fighting a clown. It’s just not as plausible.

Dungeon Defenders built up decent sized following when it debuted last winter on iOS and Android, but it still has been well under the radar this Fall gaming season for its console debuts on Xbox Live and Playstation Network, while also putting in an appearance on Steam. Thankfully, by total happenstance I caught up on Vintage Video Game TV’s live feed of a play-through of the game and was totally mesmerized by it. I had to play it.

Dungeon Defenders is a co-op-focused game that’s one part tower defense and one part hoard-slasher. You choose one of four character classes: the smart one, the cute one, the quiet one, or the funny one. Each has specific skill sets and attributes. I was Sir. Rimjob, the brave squire who was a hands-on type of dude. Brian became Mr. Fuzzyfat, a wise apprentice wizard who could fire on enemies from a distance and do pretty much squat in the way of damage. Bryce, the indecisive cunt that he is, alternated between using a huntress and a monk that I swear looked like it was ripped right from the Last Airbender. The cartoon, not the crappy movie.

Characters selected, we entered the game world. Naturally the first thing I noticed were the graphics. They were stunning. If someone had handed me a video of this game and told me to guess who developed it, I would have said Rare Ltd. By the way, that’s meant to be a complement. I know good games and Rare have long since parted ways, but the visual style made me think of their Nintendo 64 games from way back when I was a wee one. It reminded me of the line queues at Disneyland, with attention to detail given even towards areas of the game that are off-limits and just for show. I also want to offer a shout-out to the amazing score of the game. Dungeon Defenders is one of my favorite audio-visual experiences this year.

Once you actually get going, the game itself is a total blast. You enter a dungeon that contains an enormous crystal “core” that you have to defend from waves of enemies. Like a hack-and-slasher, you can fight the baddies hand-to-hand if you wish. But you can also set up towers in strategic locations to either directly defend the crystal or turn the hoards into a goblin mixed grill.

For the most part, the playable characters are well-balanced. The squire is good in the thick of battle but is slow in movement and casting time. The apprentice is useless in direct combat but has nifty long-range towers and a swift casting time. The monk is average in most categories but is a well-balanced character.  The huntress.. well.. she’s actually kind of useless, or maybe the dude we designated to use her was. Either way, because of the perfect difficulty curve, we were quickly able to get our shit together and work as a cohesive unit.

Dungeon Defenders is at it’s best when you play with people you know. It does offer random pairing, but both times I tried it were unmitigated disasters. Maybe on Steam or PSN you might get good players. Xbox Live is populated by pit vipers that would shame some of the most obnoxious griefers I encountered when I played Warcraft, and they managed to make my life a living hell. I can’t blame the developers for it, but I figured you should know what to expect when you enter random matchmaking on Xbox Live. As if you didn’t already know what it’s like. Hoarding all the mana needed to cast spells. Picking up all the items and immediately selling them. Tearing down my towers and replacing them with the same towers of their own so they could win MVP each stage. Talking so much empty shit that I muted my TV altogether. Just generally being losers on such an epic scale that if they were imprisoned with the most horny serial rapists on the planet they would still manage to die virgins.

With friends, it works. Coming up with a system of how to tackle each stage is rewarding and engaging. Each level is designed uniquely, offering different challenges in how to apply your towers or where each player should be positioned to directly fight the hoards. The actual combat is pretty simplistic: hit the trigger button to swing your weapon. You can also use more powerful attacks that are mapped to the D-Pad, at least if you’re the squire. I could do a spinning attack with my dude that was not-unlike the spinning move Link does in every Zelda game. Alternatively, I could go into “blood rage” mode, where my squire goes into a mad, blood-fueled rage and tears into everything in sight. That happens to me at least once a month so I can relate.

Okay, so you didn’t come here to read what’s sunshine and lollipops about a game. Despite being in love with Dungeon Defenders, there’s a lot not to like about it. For starters, this is clearly a game that was designed to be interfaced with anything but a game pad. The menus are clunky, the control scheme unintuitive, and the quick-actions mapped to the D-Pad not always helpful. Why can’t I customize what the D-Pad does? As a squire, I was not the character of choice for healing towers in the middle of combat. My dude casts his spells way too slowly, and I’ll be damned if I’m wasting any XP upgrades on making him faster at it. Yet that function is mapped to the D-Pad and I can’t change that. It’s a waste of a button for me. UPDATE: Um, actually you can. It’s really simple too. You just press the D-Pad when the action you want to be quick-loaded is highlighted in the menu. I’m going to fucking kill Bryce. He was like “we don’t need a tutorial.” And I was like “Uh huh!” And he was like “Nuh Uh!’ and I just gave in because we can do that for hours. My bad. Carry on.

I also wasn’t a big fan of the shop system. When you use it, the selection is limited to three weapons, three pieces of armor, and three pets at a time. Well that’s a bucket of lame sauce. Also lame is that the selection doesn’t always logically apply to how much progress you’ve made in the game. The first time I entered the shop, there was a pet that cost over a million mana. I had just started the fucking game, mind you.  Following the first level I had maybe 2,000 mana tops. It was such a tease. Apparently you can lock an item in the shop so that it doesn’t go away, and maybe it will even be a good price for it. I don’t really care what the reason is, but only three possible items per type is total horse shit, and the lack of scaling the prices to fit your current resources is a dick move supreme.

My biggest complaint is that this is a game that absolutely requires four players to proceed. On your own, you might be able to handle a couple of the early stages, but once you delve further and further into the game, you better have a full party or you might as well not show up at all. There are adjustable difficulty levels, but when it’s just you against nearly a thousand enemies, all coming from different directions, you’re hosed. It’s a battle of attrition that you often can’t possibly hope to win, leaving you helpless unless the stars align properly and all your bestest buds have free time at the exact moment you do.

But those complaints are so minor compared to the big picture. Dungeon Defenders is sublime. The main quest offers a decent twenty hours of gameplay, which is pretty good for a $15 arcade game. But that only scratches the surface. There’s tons of side challenges too. Some of them are pretty creative, like one where the core teleports randomly around the map. This isn’t DLC, mind you. This is all in the initial package. There are plans for DLC that will add more characters, maps, and challenges, but I’m still at least fifty hours away from seeing everything the current build has to offer. The amount of content here is staggering. Dungeon Defenders might be the best total package of any Live Arcade game ever made. Hyperbolic? Maybe. Truthful? Absolutely.

If I was one of those twats that gave out a Game of the Year award, this would be an honest contender for it, and that includes stuff like Arkham City, L.A. Noire, and Portal 2. Dungeon Defenders offers more gameplay than pretty much any mainstream game, but at a fraction of the cost. With the right teammates, you’ll keep coming back to this one again and again. In a perfect world, this would be an unprecedented hit. Alas, we’re not in a perfect world. Tibet isn’t free, gas is still expensive, and your mother is still a whore. Trendy Entertainment could not have possibly picked a worse time than this gaming season to release this masterpiece to the masses. In the history of bad timing, it ranks right up there with the Vienna Academy of Art running out of room for new students around 1908.

Dungeon Defenders was developed by Trendy Entertainment

1200 Microsoft Points think charging 50,000 mana to rename your character is criminal extortion in the making of this review.

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

Shortly after I posted this score, my right hand filed for divorce.

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