Wow, it was an awfully small Dome this week. Fortunately there’s still a decent amount of awesome and crap to go around: Yet another fantasy-based Avatar game that’s actually pretty good, an ingenious spin on block-pushing puzzle games, and a retro-styled action platformer with a chesty ninja for a main character. Oh, and a Flight Control knock-off with controls that ruin what should otherwise be a fun game. Pick yer poison.
If this is your first time visiting the Dome or you’re an Xbox Live Indie Games developer wanting to know what we do here, check out our handy-dandy Xbox Live Indie-Dome explanation/disclaimer — Click Here.
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Refractor
(Developer: CurbDog Media Inc – 80 points)
Refractor feels sort of like the love child of shape-dropping games like Tetris, hexagonal puzzlers such as Hexic and music-heavy titles similar to Lumines. The idea is to drop clusters of three onto the board and clear spaces by matching three or more of the same color. Occasionally a pulsing hex will be in a cluster. Matching it with two more of the same color will clear all hexes of that color from the screen, but only if you can match it right away; simply placing it on the board for later use will just take away its “specialness.”
So it certainly looks fancy. It sounds fancy, too. I suppose it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that puzzle game enthusiasts who like this kind of thing might enjoy Refractor quite a bit.
Battle for Venga Islands
(Developer: Adam Spragg Games – 80 points)
Battle for Venga Islands is more-or-less a twin-stick arena shooter, like about 80% of the rest of Live’s indie games, but it also takes inspiration from a rather unexpected source: online map-domination games like Chromehounds.
I know it sounds weird, but the basic premise is to capture land for your monarch so that they can eventually take over the islands. These areas are marked with red and blue borders to show what side has claimed what, and apparently the full version uses the power of Live to create an ever-changing dynamic map that will adjust itself as players capture new lands. It’s a nifty concept, and one that doesn’t seem to get much love in most other Live indies.
Of course actually taking these lands is another matter. Simply selecting an area and rolling dice don’t get anything accomplished here. Instead, players will have to dive right in and fight the good fight, the good fight being a lot like a twin-stick shooter with some surprisingly well-done and animated visuals and a base selection of four different spells to swap between. The fireball does the most damage, but its splash damage can also hurt you. Lightning has a very short range, but it can hit multiple targets. Snow/ice doesn’t hurt enemies much, but it slows them down for a bit. Finally, there’s what I think is Earth, which I’m pretty sure involves shooting rocks at everything, working like a typical “gun” would in these kinds of games. However, it looks like poop. I mean that literally. It looks like the mage is shooting fecal matter.
Dingleberries aside, Battle for Venga Islands is a fun little game. Watching the map start to fill-up with the color of your kingdom elicits a Pavlovian response, and it makes putting the controller down somewhat difficult. And I’ve never known of a game where that kind of quality was a bad thing.
UpBot Goes Up
(Developer: IshiEiketsu – 240 points)
*Must Play*
UpBot Goes Up has taken the block-pushing genre and, from what I can tell, turned the whole thing on its ear. It uses an ingenious concept that I can’t believe hasn’t (to my knowledge) been done before. So, as a block-pushing game, you push a block onto a specific tile, clear the level, move on to the next one with a slightly more complicated layout, and so on. What makes things so interesting is the fact that the blocks are robots, and each color is assigned to a face button. It doesn’t sound like anything special unless you really think about it. Or play it; that works, too. But the short version is: the blocks push each other.
I’m going to let that sink in for a moment.
What this means is that there’s no single character/avatar/whatever that’s moving them. Each one is tied to either A, X, Y or B, and when each button in pressed every single robot with a matching color will move in its indicated direction (shown through an arrow on top of it). This mechanic allows the developers to do away with most of the archaic level design of the genre’s past and create open stages that are just as perplexing. Eventually tunnels come into play that can be used to relocate or even change the orientation of the bots, opening up even more possibilities.
There’s really no reason for block puzzle fans to pass this one by. Not only does it offer up clever puzzles (and multiple difficulties), it also looks damn good to boot. So what are you all waiting for?
7 gunfighters
(Developer: Attacker – 80 points)
“Rough around the edges” is pretty much the best way I can describe 7 gunfighters. It’s not very pretty, it’s not animated all that well, and the sound effects are simple and repetitive. Yet, it’s actually a pretty entertaining game at its core.
There are seven different outlaws (get it?) who need to be taken down, and a wandering bounty hunter is the best choice for the job, naturally. So players assume the role of said hunter and go after the gun-toting losers. What ensues is a simple, but oddly fun first-person shooter. It doesn’t amount to much more than wandering through the barren, repeating streets of a blocky town, getting caught on invisible walls when trying to round corners, and looking for any sort of motion so that you can tell where the badguys are going to pop up from. The hit-detection is off sometimes and shots typically end up slightly higher than the sight, but this gets offset a little by enemies that usually miss. Once the bounty is found by way of a rather unhelpful on-screen indicator, a more stationary gunfight begins. Players stick to one spot and start firing at anything that moves, including their target, while ducking behind barrels to avoid damage and reload.
It’s definitely not the prettiest or most ground-breaking (or even slightly ground-breaking) FPS on Live, but it’s simple, campy fun. And I think everyone likes campy fun every now and then.
Plane Traffic
(Developer: need1D – 80 points)
*Utter Failure*
Plane Traffic is a decent attempt at bringing the App Store golden child, Flight Control, to Xbox Live. It looks good, and it’s obvious that attempts have been made to adapt a control scheme better suited for a touch screen to a controller, but those same controls are rather problematic.
Selecting a given craft is done by way of the digital pad or right stick. Once selected, it can be steered toward the runway with a matching colored circle around it with the left stick. It’s something that sounds like a good compromise for the lack of touch controls, but it just doesn’t work that well. Swapping between aircraft is simple when there are only a few on the screen, but once things start to get cluttered it becomes a nightmare. The right stick feels way too sensitive and tends to shoot past the intended target while the digital pad is way too slow, meaning good luck turning a plane in the bottom left corner when the cursor is in the top right and there’s a whole mess of planes between the two.
Again, much like Call of the Underworld in last week’s Dome, if it weren’t for the control issues there wouldn’t be a Poop Stamp here. But there are, so there is. Hopefully it won’t be there forever.
Avatar Legends
(Developer: Barkers Crest – 240 points)
*Must Play*
Much like the surprisingly functional (and well-received) Avatar Adventures Online, Avatar Legends takes the little bastards into the RPG realm. But while AAO sought to create an MMO experience, Avatar Legends aims to provide players with a more story-driven experience coupled with the option for them to create their own content. So in a way it’s like Neverwinter Nights, only with a smaller budget and Avatars.
As a standalone game, it’s a pretty good RPG-lite with cartoon amalgamations of you/your friends. When factoring in the creator tools which allow players to create their own maps, worlds, stories and quests… well then things get much more interesting, don’t they? The editor requires a little experimentation before really digging in and crafting that masterpiece, but it’s still probably one of the most user-friendly RPG makers I’ve used. Not that I use that many.
I’m honestly not entirely sure why someone wouldn’t want to give Avatar Legends a try. Sure it uses Avatars, and most Avatar games are stupid, but not this one. This one is cool. And you should play it. Then make awesome stuff for it to share with everyone else.
Zombie Sausages 2
(Developer: magma2280 – 80 points)
Meh. I know I sang the praises of the original Zombie Sausages a while back, but Zombie Sausages 2 just feels like more of the same. Or rather, like more of the exact same.
There are new environments, but aside from the change of scenery, a two-player mode and a bar on the right-hand side of the screen that rises along with the zombie wiener population (maxing out equals death), it’s the exact same game. Right down to the irritating way the Sniper mini-game boots you back to the title screen as soon as you screw up.
This probably should have been an update to the first game rather than a totally separate release. I’m just saying.
Akane the Kunoichi
(Developer: Haruneko – 80 points)
*Must Play*
Nevermind the ridiculously buxom main character. Forget the music that sounds eerily familiar, like I’ve heard it in another indie game somewhere. Akane the Kunoichi is a good action platformer, plain and simple.
The titular (it works on two levels!) character can cling to walls, jump off of walls, toss kunai and… well that’s pretty much it, actually. The core mechanics of the game are about as simple as can be, with controls to move, jump and attack. There are also special abilities that can be triggered with Y when they’re available, but those don’t come into play as often as the basics.
So why is it a Must Play? I dunno, really. There’s just something about it. Maybe it’s the nostalgic style of gameplay. Maybe using the special abilities in specific circumstances make them feel more like answers to a puzzle, which is kinda cool. Maybe I’m just a sucker for female ninjas. I dunno. But I do know that I like it quite a tit bit.
Why Did I Buy This?
(Developer: Silver Dollar Games 3- 80 points)
*Utter Failure*
Wow. The folks at Silver Dollar Games may churn out titles that run the gamut from awesome to complete crap, but one thing they never do is disappoint.
I’m not entirely sure what the point of Why Did I Buy This? is once it’s been purchased. The entire thing is essentially a multiple choice argument with a fake telemarketer about buying (or not buying) this game. In my playthrough I was able to get the manager on the line, but then ended up shooting myself in the head, apparently.
They do deserve credit for making something “different,” but I think we should file this one in Silver Dollar’s “bad for the sake of being bad” file.
Astro Cluster
(Developer: Scott Lowther – 80 points)
*Must Play*
Okay, I was admittedly surprised by Astro Cluster. This is a good thing.
It’s easy to write it off as another multiplayer twin-stick shooter, and in several ways that’s just about what it is. Thankfully it also features quite a few levels, several different objectives that don’t all involve getting the largest kill count, and one significantly weird (but clever) concept: It’s like Asteroids crossed with Snake.
So the general idea of any game type is to fly around the level, shoot down enemies/other players, grab power-ups and avoid crashing into planets (with their own gravity) and floating space rocks. Where the similarities to Snake come in is in the way that the clusters tend to leave little pieces of themselves behind once destroyed. These pieces can be absorbed into your own cluster, making it a larger target, but also giving it more health and a faster weapon. Good idea, no?
Twin-stick shooter fans, especially those with lots of buddies, can’t go wrong with Astro Cluster.
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*Must Plays*
- UpBot Goes Up (240 points)
- Avatar Legends (240 points)
- Akane the Kunoichi (80 points)
- Astro Cluster (80 points)
*Utter Failures*
- Plane Traffic (80 points)
- Why Did I Buy This? (80 points)
