Yet another week of catch-up and still I soldier bravely onward…

There were a few near misses this week that barely dodged hitting either of the extremes. Also a nice surprise that I was all prepared to hate, but ended up really enjoying, in the form of Can You Handle 2 At Once? I also got my first taste of Diego Salazar’s work. When they say “You always remember your first,” it’s totally true. I’ll have the taste of that one lingering in my mouth for quite a while to come. Guh.

But enough talk. Let’s get to the games, shall we?

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Allied Assault Squadron

(Developer: Aeternus Studios – 240 Points)

As you probably gathered from the name and visuals, Allied Assault Squadron is a World War II-themed shmup. It’s also something of a odd duck because it has a lot of things going both for and against it, simultaneously. Allow me to explain.

On the positive side, the game looks very polished and has production values out the wazoo: gorgeous menus, an appropriately driving orchestral score and plenty of planes to pick from. Also, although I was initially put off by it, I quickly grew to appreciate the feeling of weight and pull to your plane. Rather than the usual hyper-twitch sensitivity most shmup controls have, this lent a feeling of realism to things. I was really prepared for this to be a modern take on classics like 1943: The Battle of Midway.

However, on the other side of the coin, things weren’t as upbeat. Your plane’s weaponry is anemic, with your default gun shooting at a slow, fixed rate, leaving you ill-prepared to take on the hordes of incoming enemies. Also, having a targeting reticle for your bombs constantly onscreen proved a very distracting and poor choice. Then there’s the severe lack of feedback, leaving you unsure when/if your shots are actually hitting anything, which doesn’t matter much, as you’ll be dead before you know it anyway.

It’s sad, really. Had the shooting been up to snuff (it is the focus of the genre, after all), this would have been an instant Must Play. But in the state it’s in now, Allied Assault Squadron unfortunately straddles the unpleasant line between gorgeous and almost unplayable. Perhaps it would be better with co-op, but you can’t gimp the single player experience because of that. You just can’t.

Lazy Gamer

(Developer: Silver Dollar Games 3 – 80 Points)

We’ve all been there when we were younger. You’re glued to the couch, engrossed in whatever video game that was currently devouring time you should have been spending on “productive” activities, like homework or chores. You barely move from your position to feed yourself or maintain your essential bodily functions and always, always, always in the background is the insistent nagging of a parent, demanding you turn off “those damned games.” Well for only one dollar, you can (sort of) relive those nostalgic moments.

I say “sort of” because I doubt you had saw blades, floppy diskettes, shuriken and beer kegs flying at your head at the time. Which you do in Lazy Gamer. You need to dodge waves of incoming projectiles while moving your character as little as possible (gotta conserve that valuable energy, after all), with your remaining energy translating into points at the end. Mess up and you’re staring down a fourth-wall breaking (and for some of us, all too familiar) controller-flinging failure. Cute concept. Give it a look.

Pioneerz

(Developer: laurent goethals – 400 Points)

Pioneerz is the sequel to (duh!) Pioneer and since I haven’t played the original, so we’re going to look at this one on its own. Pioneerz is a weird sort of city building/RPG hybrid where you control an individual character that can level up and fight monsters, but your real goal is to assist in the growth of your town. You assist peasants in collecting wood and berries to help build buildings and grow the population, respectively. Wandering monsters and neighboring towns pose a threat, so you can also train warriors to help defend your settlement.

All of this is wrapped up in a very cute 16-bit art style, reminiscent of umpteen classic RPG overworlds. The English is muddy and broken in places, but it’s obviously not the developer’s native language, so it’s not that big of a deal. Just think of it as a bad localization job and it actually almost feels appropriate. The five buck price tag may be a bit hard to swallow for some, but Pioneerz is charming enough that you might actually consider parting with it.

Infinity Danger

(Developer: Milkstone Studios S.L. – 80 Points)

*Must Play*

Infinity Danger pits your spacecraft against a series of boss-like enemies, ever increasing in size and complexity. Controlled with a very bare-bones twin-stick shooter layout (only the analog sticks are involved), I was initially getting kind of bored with this one after around the third or so iteration of my mechanical nemesis. However, on the last couple of levels (only six are playable in the trial) things started to get a little hairy, as the addition of so many new weapon pods on my increasingly screen-filling enemy left me actually having to duck and dodge rather than just blasting merrily away at a near-defenseless mass. The hook was set.

Infinity Danger looks gorgeous, sounds great and is totally worth your buck. Also, for you achievement fans out there, while many Indie Games have flirted with the idea of in-game awards lately, Infinity Danger‘s implementation of the system has a very polished look and feel to it. Sure, they won’t add anything to your real Gamerscore, but you’ll feel that same primal reward impulse go off in your brain when one pops up that you get from a regular Xbox 360 game. Pick this one up. Now.

Strategic Warfare: Conflict

(Developer: Dugrab Studios – 80 Points)

If you’ve played Galcon Fusion, you’ll feel pretty much at home with Strategic Warfare: Conflict. The premise is essentially the same: take over your enemy’s bases by sending numbers of your own troops to knock down the number of troops at said base. Once you overtake their numbers, the base becomes yours. Each base slowly regenerates units, so you have to manage how many to send out against how many to leave home on defense. In the end, however, it’s all about numbers and shuffling them around.

The game is competent, if occasionally annoying. The voice samples will get on your nerves after a bit, though (the most monotone “Die by my blade” ever? Probably). Another downside is that the default stick configuration isn’t switchable in the demo and the regular setup feels very backwards to me (each stick controls a reticle, one to select which tower you’re sending troops from and the one to select where they’re going). Still, you can switch it in the full version, so that’s something, I suppose.

Satellite

(Developer: K73SK – 80 Points)

Satellite feels very much like an old PC game to me. You build and maintain a thriving orbital station by purchasing upgrade modules (housing, power, greenhouses, etc.) to expand the settlement, defense to ward off attacking ships and the like. It took me a full pass through the demo just to read through the tutorial, so it seems like there’s quite a bit under the hood for those who like to micromanage these kind of games.

A couple of bad points distracted me, however. It seems almost impossible to build a landing platform (which creates fighter ships to patrol your airspace) before day 10, which is the first day you get jumped by enemies. The best you can seem to hope for is building a couple of security turrets and pray that they actually attack (sometimes they just don’t seem to care, regardless of enemies being in range or not). Also, the messages that come through your PDA (missions, free gifts, etc.) need some manner of onscreen notification — nobody wants to have to check each and every day, lest they miss a mission or a gift of aid. Still, Satellite is pretty neat, in a very old-school, OCD sort of strategy game way.

AardBloxX

(Developer: Bat Country Entertainment – 80 Points)

Picture Tetris, but viewed from above and in 3D, where you have to clear full layers of instead of mere lines of blocks. AardBloxX (not sure what the aardvark-y mascots have to do with this game, really) is like that game we all know and love, only spun into three dimensions. It’ll take some time to get used to wrapping your brain around rotating a piece on different axes, but eventually it’ll click. Eventually.

Still, much like Tetris, everybody’s going to have that one friend who’s a total savant and can do this blindfolded at rapid speed. For the rest of us, give this a download and check it out.

CTG

(Developer: DeRail Games – 80 Points)

CTG is kind of a strange little game. You’re a cat that tries to juggle a mass of oncoming grannies into swirling yellow vortices, dubbed “Granny Grinders.” Yes, it’s as weird as it sounds. The whole mess takes place in a series of levels that remind me of a 2D version Portal‘s Aperture Science facilities, which makes even more sense, given the nature of the weird weapons the cat wields (they must have figured some way around the whole “no thumbs” issue). You have a charged weapon on your left trigger which launches grannies skyward, at which point you can keep them up there with the use of your RB-mapped blaster, juggling them closer to a bloody demise in the Grinder. You’ll also need to do this with the little yellow faces that you use to eat away at the destructible blocks that separate you from other sections of each board.

However, this is another bad case of Indie devs not bothering to provide a tutorial, instruction page or anything at all resembling help to the player. Not a good move, kids. We know you’re intimately familiar with your own game (given that you created it and all), but none of us are and most people aren’t willing to keep plugging away at something until they figure it out by trial and error. I was about to give up during the first level, which is granny-less until you figure out you have to use the yellow guys to destroy bricks, and even then I was still wondering what the hell I was doing. Also, I’m still unsure what the C in CTG stands for — “Capture” maybe? “Catch” perhaps? I assume “TG” stands for “the Grannies,” but who knows?

Lil’ Demons: Splatter

(Developer: MatthewM – 80 Points)

Shoot different colored little monsters that explode into similarly colored goo in a sterile-looking 3D arena. Collect the colored goo to power up special abilities tied to the four face buttons. Seems pretty simple, but in practice it isn’t too much fun. You spend the whole round backpedaling from the demons as they mob-rush you, your gun holds far too few bullets and the shooting in general just doesn’t feel that good. It’s a shame, really. Looked kinda neat.

CEPINAS

(Developer: PetrosA – 80 Points)

CEPINAS tasks you with capturing planets by flying circles around them while activating your CONQ weapon (because it’s used to “conquer” them — get it? Do ya? *sigh* …anyway) in order to turn them to your ship’s color. Between rounds you can buy orbiting satellites to defend your captured worlds, ship upgrades and the like. It’s a neat concept, but the controls are pretty unforgiving. Maybe that just goes with the very retro vibe the game puts out, but I think CEPINAS would benefit greatly with some less touchy controls. Would likely have ended up a Must Play if that had been the case from the start.

Can You Handle 2 At Once?

(Developer: Stegersaurus Games – 80 Points)

*Must Play*

Based on the cover art alone, I had dreaded playing this one for quite a while. But when I finally did? Wow — who’d have thought it would turn out to be a Must Play? Certainly not I.

Nightmarish cover “models” aside, Can You Handle 2 At Once? is pretty much exactly what it says on the tin. You select two different minigames (or let the game pick randomly for you), which range from a super-simple running/jumping game to shooting incoming enemies from a central turret to trying to avoid things falling from the top of your screen. Each one of these games is mapped to half of your 360 controller and you have to keep both of them going for as long as you can without losing all of your lives. The longer you go, the higher your score. Crazily addictive fun.

And since the “models” appear only on the Game Over screen, just think of them as punishment for when you lose. Take that incentive, hold on to it and pray you never run out of lives. *shudder*

Oozi: Earth Adventure Ep. 1

(Developer: AwesomeGamesStudio – 80 Points)

Intergalactic deliveryman Oozi has crash-landed on Earth and finds himself a bit stuck. How’s he going to find his ship and escape this rock? I’m not sure, but I think it may involve stomping on the heads of dangerous creatures, picking up shiny objects and jumping a whole heck of a lot.

Oozi is a decent platformer. One with very nice visuals, sure, but in the end nothing amazing or spectacular. Don’t let that turn you off playing it, though; it’s got charm to spare. And did I mention those visuals? Very polished and professional they are. It actually reminds me of some of the 2D games that tried to focus on super colorful artwork and solid gameplay during the 32/64-bit era, when everyone else was abandoning sprite-based platformers in favor of 3D. Still, this one feels like it’s missing a little something…

Conquest of the planet earth

(Developer: Diego Salazar – 240 Points)

*Utter Failure*

Ah, Diego Salazar. At last we meet! Well known (and loathed) by usual Indie-Domer Rob Rich for a string of apparently awful 3D military shooters, I have never had the pleasure of sampling his work. Until now, that is.

But while his lack of knowledge of the rules of capitalization continues an unbroken streak, would the game (seemingly his first foray outside military “simulation” and into the realm of… sci-fi?) prove different?

Yeah, not so much, I would think.

From the sluggish controls to a gun that shoots… smoke? (not entirely sure there) to the screen turning solid pinkish-red and displaying the word “DAMAGE” when you get hit, absolutely NOTHING about Conquest of the planet earth is enjoyable in any way. How did this get past peer review? Is it because it didn’t instantly crash when you hit start? What the hell, people?

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*Must Plays*

• Infinity Danger (80 points)
• Can You Handle 2 At Once? (80 points)

*Utter Failures*

• Conquest of the planet earth (240 points)