Reviews

Get Ye Goode

Townsmen by HandyGames is a medieval city builder that looks like it used to be a browser game. *is nudged by assistant with papers* Ah, I’m being informed it’s a mobile game too. Meh, I can see how that would be a thing. Oh, and the earliest trailer I can find for it is in 2012. So Nintendo thought, ‘how do we want the world to think of our awesome hybrid system and it’s storefront? Well made, new games, maybe a few ports of much beloved titles? Or just emptying Neo-Geo titles older than the average Switch owner, some of our endlessly rereleased NES “classics”, with just a dash of Sudoku, Picross, and 6 year old mobile titles, scattered like chocolate chips through the puddle of vomit one might spew after eating 3 packs of cookies and drinking a litre of apple juice, while baked like a badly made cup of tea?’

The game is slow as hell, and I now wonder if this isn’t deliberate and part of some microtransaction aspect. ‘How slow is it?’ I hear you ask, from the future, after I’ve written and uploaded this review. Well, future reader, I started the tutorial and have been drudging through it for over five hours. Sure, it could be trying to streamline directly into the main game, but it’s hard to tell, and I’m not going to email them to ask.

You start the game (tutorial) as a disgraced Lord, on the run from the royal court after some money went missing, and set yourself up as governor of a rural township. You learn – painfully slowly – how to assign people to tasks, build basic buildings, how stockpiles work, and all the usual stuff that Stronghold did much better, 11 years prior to this bubbling up. As it’s early game, you’ll find many building options locked off, until you progress, but only in the manner you are told. If you work out that you’ll need a baker once the mill is built – because the main mission is to supply the town with food – you’ll have to wait until the mill is built and the miller has ground enough wheat before you can even think about marking the mission complete and being permitted to build a bakery. If you’re making a tutorial this simple, you could at least speed up build times for it. Otherwise, it’s just a waiting game.

While there is much waiting at this time, there is another peril. Your buildings will start to fall into disrepair. So if you leave the game in high speed for slightly too long while trying to skip build time, or work time, you could find an important building will be unusable. Plus, thanks to the rigidity of the tutorial, even if you work out the building you need to make in order to repair that other building, it will be locked until you’re given permission. So… start over, I guess.

As you progress, you can unlock research projects. These will open up things like new units or the ability to upgrade certain actions/buildings. Some of these upgrades will be permenant, while others will only last for the current map. It’s not totally clear which is which from the menu, which is super considerate.

What really confused me was that the section marked ‘tutorial’, under ‘new game’ shows 6 missions total, the last two of which are labelled ‘hard’… but… but why?! It’s a tutorial. Aren’t you just supposed to show me the mechanics so I can get on with the actual game? No? I guess I should just get goode then huh, my liege?

Once you’ve finished the long, boring, and apparently hard mode tutorial, there’s 26 scenario missions and 24 sandbox levels with sizes and difficulties ranging from small and easy to huge and hard (a point I only bring up so that I can write huge and hard, and then let my brain write the penis jokes – this is the most enjoyment the game has managed to provide me with). None of that really matters because I was bored to shite long before I’d seen more than a couple of those. Well done, you got paid and then annoyed me out of any possible value in your game *golf clap*.

I got so bored with Townsmen I actually went back and finished Starlink. Now, much like the game itself, I’m bored of talking about it, so here’s the usual end bits.

Pros:

Clean graphics
Didn’t crash
Probably seemed great on Android in 2012

Cons:

Uninteresting music
Just too many menus
Probably gave me the plague and killed me

Overall Score: 4/10

Starlink: Battle For Fat Cash

I’ve had the chance to sit down with Starlink: Battle for Atlas over the last week or so. It’s the latest toys-to-life game from Ubisoft. This time we’re avoiding big name characters and franchises (bar Starfox if you’re playing on Switch), the building fun of Lego Dimensions, or the whatever the heck Skylanders was about and going into the one place that was previously thought to remain uncorrupted by capitalism.

Turns out Tim Curry was dead wrong.

I was lucky(?) enough to get to play with the physical release on Switch, which comes with a rather nice Arwing model with detachable wings, a couple of weapons (one fire based, one ice), a Fox McCloud pilot figure, another pilot (who I’ve spent so little time playing as, I have no idea what his name is (ok, I looked it up, he’s called Mason. Happy now?)), and a stand to attach it all to my joycons. There’s a poster in there too, but who cares. Want game now! In addition to this, there’s digital versions of a third weapon (kinetic type) and the standard ship that comes in the other format physical editions.

I’ve probably dumped around 20 hours into this so far. Lots of buzzing over planets claiming every ruin, enjoying the beautiful and varied biomes & wildlife, destroying enemy extractors (think fracking/mining if it made clouds of evil that corrupt local fauna… so, fracking), building up a whole host of mining and observation facility-running friends by completing basic tasks (allowing me to get regular cash deliveries and see more of the planets I visit respectively), and crushing the wonders (world bosses).

I’ve been struck how much Starfox content there is in the game, making me feel kinda bad for people on other systems. There’s cutscenes, and bonus missions to be had. PS4 and XB1 players will miss out on this, but I suppose they can rub themselves down with slightly better graphics to feel better, if that’s their bag.

On the subject of missing out, I come to my main problem with the game. As mentioned earlier, the physical version comes with two physical weapons, covering fire and ice elements, plus a digital weapon that’s kinetic. As far as I’ve seen, kinetic weapons can’t open anything particularly special, they just do non-elemental damage. However, elemental weapons do act as keys for specific doors/chests. At this point, I ask myself: “do I miss whatever this is and move on, or buy more bits to unlock it?” and looking at my cool Arwing model and go, “this is yet more plastic tat that will sit on my shelf after a week and never be looked at again, meanwhile, the actual game I want to play is gating content”. Often, you will find canisters with the required element that you can throw at these elemental locks, but sometimes you have to go well out of your way to find the right one.

See, the thing is, once you’ve got the game going, you don’t actually need the models attached to the controller, as you can just use the menu to change them digitally. This takes unnecessary weight off and makes long term play more comfortable. As such, after the initial hour or so of “hey, this is fun to take the wings off on the fly, or attach them all on one side and make the ship really wonky” turns into “ah, that enemy is resistant to cold damage, I’ll hit the menu and swap that out as I don’t own the third weapon physically anyway”.

“So what about the digital version”, I hear the imagined voices in my head cry, because I imagined them crying that.

I’ll tell you. The digital edition includes the game + 4 ships, 6 pilots, and 12 weapons. Add to that the Switch version includes the exclusive ship, pilot, and missions. All this for slightly less than a physical version. Those weapons cover all elemental options, meaning you can unlock (as far as I can tell) every elemental door/chest and easily find a weakness for every elemental enemy without the need for additional purchases. Furthermore, additional ships will act as extra lives, meaning you can respawn immediately, rather than back at a prospector/observatory.

Throughout the game, there are upgrades you can make to your mothership. These include adding additional mod slots to your ships and weapons, the ability to fuse low level mods into the next level up, extra space in your inventory for collected items, etc. At first progress is nice and steady, but before long you’ll notice the bottom three categories can’t be unlocked with the pilots you have available in the physical edition (and, I understand you need at least two extra pilots with the digital edition). Right now, I can’t tell if these are really important to the game, but I feel it’s important to let you know where you’ll need to spend extra monies.

Right now, ship packs – containing one ship, a pilot and a weapon – will set you back £24.99 for physical editions and £9.99 for digital. Then there’s pilots, which are sold individually for £6.99 physical and £4.99 digital. Lastly, there’s weapons in two packs which go for £9.99 physically and only £3.29 on the eshop. I have no idea where they got these prices, but it feels like they just drew numbers out of a hat.

I get that it’s a toys-to-life game. I get they want to make fat cash off of these toys, but when you’re skint like me, the value from the physical game feels greatly lessened when I start finding bits I just can’t do, because I was wowed by a plastic Arwing.

As far as I can see, someone buying the physical edition of the game will need at least two extra weapons (gravity and levitation based) and 2-3 extra pilots to unlock everything. I’ve tried to work out what the smallest amount of extra stuff I’d need to buy to see what I currently feel is gated, but it’s proving a pain so close to release. Best guess right now is two ship packs 1-2 pilots.

“Enough of the gripes about how much the damn thing costs and tell us about the actual game”, the imagined voices holler. To which I say, “shut your noise hole and try a brownie. While your mouth is full, I’ll tell you.”. The voices agree, and I move on.

The game starts with a grumpy alien vulture kidnapping the team’s peculiarly named leader (just as Starfox and pals arrive in the area). Apparently they’re the Legion and they’re bad, so they’ve decided they need leader guy more than we do. With our ships disabled, we’re helpless to fight back and badly named vulture makes off with our heroic motivation.

Next thing you know, you’re down on a planet, learning to fly around, plucking fruit, scanning fauna, helping out the locals, mining currency, blowing up the Legion forces, looking for plot clues, and planning epic revenge.

Play went something like: do all listed tasks on planet, upgrade some stuff, head to space, attack a few random space pirate bases, head to next planet, start again, go back to space, plot happens, go to next planet, find all my weapons are made of fail against these enemies but do my best (standard enemies taking nearly 3 times longer to beat, not due to their skills, but because they’re bullet-sponges), encounter a jumping puzzle.

A. FUCKING. JUMPING. PUZZLE!

If you think jumping puzzles in FPS games are bad, try it in a hovering ship that will just slide all over the tiny ass platforms. It’s absolute garbage and whoever, thought it should go in needs an Arwing, with the wings on backwards, shoved right up their nose for their crimes. True, it was 1am when I got to this bit, but hovering ship-based jumping puzzles can get in the freaking bin! Worst part was that the first time I made it to the top, I couldn’t finish the puzzle as I hadn’t noticed that I needed to cut free the final platform from the ground first. This really doesn’t help that before this I was already starting to feel that the game was getting a little repetitive. This just made me swear at the screen and go to bed.

I’ve got past it now, only to be rewarded with a well done that implied that it took me ages, it did, but heck you and the modular ship you flew in on.

Overall the game is fun-ish, graphically very pretty, nice to listen to (really digging the Starfox theme when you call for support), good to explore, ship design is interesting, and the plot isn’t too awful.

Pros:

The worlds are diverse and pretty
Nice Arwing model
Solid space and planetside combat

Cons:

Switch version requires a huge download before you can play the physical version
Physical copies really skimp on content compared to the digital versions
FUCKING JUMPING PUZZLE!

Overall Score: 5/10

Do You Want Anything From The Shop?

I went on a bit of a Kickstarter spree in the nine months from September last year. I backed a bunch of boardgames. So far, they’ve all come through and been pretty darn good. Last week I got the latest one delivered. The small but mighty, Tiny Epic Zombies.

The game comes in a box not much bigger than the average novel, but contains a huge amount of stuff. Firstly, there’s the nine mall cards. The eight stores are laid out at random around a central courtyard. Once the board is laid out, you can move on to picking the three objectives for the game from the 9 each available for co-operative or competitive modes. Between the randomised nature of the stores and the variety of objectives, there’s a lot of replayablity with this game.

Each of the objectives will include their own setup instructions with extra tokens being placed out, or markers placed on the objectives themselves, to monitor progress. Objectives could be anything from tracking down the true source of the zombie outbreak to building a weapon and ammo cache by scavenging the mall stores.

There’s options to play cooperatively with 1-4 players against an AI zombie force, or else 2-4 players can go up against a human controlled enemy.

Each player is dealt 3 characters and picks one to represent them in the world. Different characters having their own unique skills which offer an advantage against the horde.

A zombie is selected or chooses who they’ll play as. These zombies can be found on the back of the character cards and are the decomposing versions of those heroes. For the AI versions, only the passive skills are used. However, for a human controlled horde, there are a range of increasingly powerful skills available.

Gameplay consists of players moving three spaces through the mall and carrying out any number of actions as they do so. This could involve performing melee attacks on zombies in the same room, ranged attacks on zombies in adjacent rooms, collecting items from stores – once they’ve been cleared out, etc.

At the end of each turn, players perform a search by turning over their scavenge card. If the icon on the card matches the store, this will give the zombies an advantage. Once revealed, these scavenged items can be collected by the next player to visit the store, after it’s clear.

For the zombie player, they’re trying to attack the central court of the mall, break down the barricades and kill any survivors they find there. They can also kill the player characters, which will deplete the survivor count from the central courtyard.

The health and ammo mechanic in this game is unlike anything I’ve encountered before. Basically you start in good health and with 9 bullets for your ranged weapon. Ranged attacks (and some of the player character abilities) will deplete ammo. Zombie player abilities and poor melee attacks by the players can cause them to receive wounds. However, the health and ammo meter are on the same track. Should the two meet, or overtake each other, that player is dead. Either due to their wounds or because they were too badly equipped to survive. If there are survivors left in the courtyard, that player can take another player card and start again. Their old character dropping all their weapons and items in the store they’re standing for anyone else to collect.

One of the first things that really drew me to the game on Kickstarter was the ITEMeeple. These are fairly standard shaped meeple – maybe a little larger than average – but with little holes at their hands. One of the unique things about this game is that the weapons you scavenge around the mall can be equipped to your meeple. Adorable knives, swords, Uzis, mp5s, etc can be attached to your avatar as you wander around the mall. There’s also the vehicles that can be used. Either a motorcycle or a police car. You really haven’t lived until you’re riding a cute little motorcycle through a mall while brandishing a dinky chainsaw and rocket launcher.

Pros:

Lots of replayablity
Great artwork
Adorable game pieces

Cons:

Can be a lot to take in the first time
Good chance you may lose a zombie or two due to size
If you’ve got the Deluxe Edition, you may have to deal with the dog dying.

Overall: 8/10

Alone In The Dark & Slightly Poorer

Three and a half years ago, I chucked $5 at an interesting little project on Indiegogo. It was an augmented reality game for mobile called Night Terrors and claimed to be “an ultra immersive gaming experience that transforms your environment into a terrifying hellscape”. Fucking. Sold.

There were updates as the campaign went on, but it came to an end, having made only about ¾ of it’s target. A a couple more email updates came thereafter, but then things really slowed down. I heard rumours that the game had come out, in some manner for iOS, but the promised Android version was still nowhere to be seen. Backers were told to wait, and as soon as the Android version happened, we’d get our copies. However, on Monday night I got an email telling me that Night Terrors: Bloody Mary was being released (woo?). This was followed a day later by a request for information. Telling me that if I still had that email address, I should should them a message and get a code for NT:BM. This I duly did and tonight my code arrived.

The first thing that struck me was that the game’s icon is a default Unity icon with the text “BMH-test”. I was now preparing to be more disappointed that if the game hadn’t even shown up, if they’d just taken the money and run. It wouldn’t be the first thing I’ve crowd funded and lost out on.

I remained unsurprised as the usual array of checkboxes for permissions that games are want to have, popped up on screen, before the game presented me with instructions to turn off my lights – check, put in my earbuds – check, and click to sign a long ass waiver to say that the dev isn’t responsible if I fall over my headphone lead while wandering around my house in the dark – check, I guess.

The camera light flicked on and the screen showed my living room with some video flicker effects over the top and a timer in one corner. Oh the horror. Be still my racing heart. As I wandered around, the light periodically flickered off, odd noises came out of the speaker, and occasionally, the screen would just go black and some video would play. The first sighting was someone cutting up a body on a table and eating bits of it. I wouldn’t call this AR though, despite the fact that angling my phone around could show it mostly hanging in one area. The room wasn’t showing as a background, just this cheesy video.

Once that faded I wandered to the hall and lost light again, lots of weird sound and then a phone ringing sound and a screen showing an incoming call. Pushing answer on screen did nothing, as far as I could tell so the whole point of putting this on a phone and in my hand felt pointless and gimmicky.

The whole dreary experience took about 15 minutes, and by the end I was just walking up and down the hall waiting for whatever happened next. At one point I was told to look on the floor for something, which wasn’t there, but did eventually show up. At which point it just followed me around the house, until that scene had played out.

I wouldn’t call this augmented reality. Just a badly implemented gimmick. Considering that the project I helped crowdfund had promised environment mapping, meaning that the scares would be appearing in your play area. Ghostly figures appearing in doorways, etc. All in the hopes of creating a “breathtakingly scary experience”. Sadly, that’s not what I got when I walked into my bathroom, the light went out and I watched a video of a person in period costume and a mask sitting in a puddle (of blood?) on the floor, while someone else scurried past in a totally black space. At least in Pokémon Go makes Pikachu stand on my couch sometimes.

The acting is cheesy, the graphics are ok at best, the sound design is fair. Nothing about this game should make you want to spend just under £3 for this on Google Play

Pros:

Short
Over Quickly
Good costumes

Cons:

Not worth the money
Cheesy acting
Not nearly as AR as it claims to be.

Overall: 2/10

Night Terrors: Bloody Mary is out now on Android & iOS.

Hurling Poop

Windjammers has been around as long as Super Metroid. Sadly, it hasn’t stood the test of time nearly as well. First released on the Neo Geo in 1994, and then again in 2010 on the WiiU Virtual Console, this Flying Disc Game (because I guess frisbee is a brand name) sees you picking one of six characters and to play a suped up pong-like.

Characters each have different power and speed, meaning they can throw the disc harder or move around faster. As rallies go on, the pace gets more swift and you find yourself sliding around at high speed to avoid letting your opponent score.

The angle you throw at can be changed by moving the stick diagonally forward before throwing. Alternatively, throwing while holding diagonally backwards will make the disc bounce up and down across the court, making it more tricky to catch. You can also perform a half circle before throwing to do a powered up special move.

Each match takes place in a different arena and each has a unique layout of scoring areas and centre obstacles. Score in a yellow zone for 3 points or red for 5 points. The center obstacles provide additional bounce points in around the net, meaning that you can bamboozle your opponent by hitting them just right.

Between some matches, you’ll get to play one of the two minigames: Dog Distance – throw your disc and have your doggo friend chase after it, while avoiding beach users; and Flying Power Disc Bowling – Knock down pins with your definitely-not-a-frisbee (I found playing as the Spanish character and holding forward and throw got a strike every time,so that’s fun /s). These are very short and simplistic and can also be accessed through the local game menu.

Windjammers, features online multiplayer, local single and multiplayer, and a wireless mode. So plenty of opportunities to bore the crap out of your friends playing this.

Like a lot of old games being ported to modern systems, and new games that want to look like they were, there’s options to play with or without scanlines, or even a CRT mode. Furthermore you can play in the original 4:3 (with or without your choice of borders to fill in the blank spaces at the edges) or a stretched out 16:9 screen ratio.

According to Wikipedia, there’s talk of a sequel coming to Switch next year. So if you really must throw digital discs at your rapidly diminishing circle of friends, you may want to hang on for that and hope for the best (I don’t really see how it could be much worse), or else invest in something like Mario Tennis Aces.

Pros:

Er
Um
Oh, the controls function

Cons:

Bland
Short
End screen is a picture of you holding a trophy and a three line congratulations message. Fucking woo!

Overall: 4/10

Windjammers is available now on Switch.

Legendarily Fiendish

Every now and then, a hero comes along. One hero, born to fight the hordes of evil. You probably know the drill by now. Mighty, smitey, probably not bitey human comes to wreck evil’s shit. And you, you are not that hero. You’re Bill. Say hi to Bill. Look at his evil little goatee. Marvel at that despicable widow’s peak. Stare in awe at his angry eyebrows. Yeah, you know he means business. He’s a go-getting type, ready to wipe out humanity like a baws.

The Legend of Evil as a 2D, side scrolling, tower defence game, with a pleasant pixel-art style, and a chiptune soundtrack from Springloaded Games (a fact, I only know because it’s written on the Steam page, not because I found it mentioned anywhere on their website. Still, I suppose making games is more important than rabbiting about them. Perhaps Peter Molyneux could learn a thing or two).

The wiley Bill begins his conquest of the human world with limited powers. Movement is controlled by left stick, there’s a dash on B, you can interact with towers with A, view the whole area with L, and dig with R. Later on, in certain circumstances, you get to use a summon move, with Y.

Your first task is to get a demon tower built by moving next to the glowing rune on the ground and hitting A. This brings up your a menu showing all the available demons you’ve unlocked. At first, you’ll only have access to a very basic melee unit, but as you progress you can unlock all kinds of creatures – the slow and sturdy, rock-like Lapis; the mighty, flying Sky Spear, the kind of like, but legally distinct from a beholder Coral Lights, and many more..

Over time, your towers will generate demons to fight for you. Demons will be opposed by the pitiful human forces. These wielders of sticks and stones will pose you little threat and once there bodies are broken, you can harvest their souls. Souls are the currency needed to upgrade your towers. Have them generate more souls over time, churn out demons more quickly, or create area of effect fields such as healing, slowing enemies, or protecting your horde. With your army made strong, you make progress across the map to destroy the human gate and claim victory, before moving on to the next area.

During play, you may find yourself waiting for souls to generate for your next upgrade, It’s times like this you should be searching for small, lit areas. These can be dug up to reveal coins (used for winning bonus medals in the campaign and permanent upgrades in rogue conquest mode) or yet more of those tasty tasty souls.

Gameplay is fast paced for the most part, and the difficulty curve is steep, bordering on vertical at times. With the first six or so levels of the campaign being simple affairs, to introduce mechanics, you’re suddenly thrust into levels where you’re forced to make decisions about where you will build your first tower within seconds. Choosing incorrectly can lead to very quick death. However, with practice, you can pick up what the level wants from you. Be it a quick start from a particular position, followed by demolishing an old tower and replacing with something stronger and then working on upgrades, or building ranged and melee units to support each other against a more diverse enemy.

Ultimately, I haven’t found the campaign all that fun. It often feels like there is one specific way that the game wants you to play an area, and it’s up to you to figure out exactly what the designers had in mind.

Significantly more enjoyable was the rogue conquest mode. Here you play through eight, randomly generated stages. You use a random generator to create an avatar you’re happy with (I got a little green-haired person in a witch hat, who suits me just perfectly) and head into the world. Initially, you are awarded a low-level demon, who is adapted to the biome you start in, be it forest, cliff, snow, or swamp.

As you play through each level, it’s important to keep an eye out for the glowing dig points, as getting money is vital to unlocking new demons, additional towers, power-up orbs for your troops, and abilities like additional starting souls.

Aside from the shop, you can also visit the forge between battles. Here you can attach orbs to your minions to boost their stats or give them new abilities, such as explode on death, knock-back resistance, or the ability to survive in biomes that they are not naturally adapted to. Want to take your best melee, ground fighter out on the cliffs? Give them the ability to jump, and they’ll be able to navigate safely in these battles.

Rogue conquest mode is a great way to see more of the demon types and upgrades that you’d have to play further through the campaign to get a look at otherwise. It’s a fun and interesting challenge that avoids the steep difficulty curve of the main campaign.

The Steam page makes note that the developer is planning to release more content for the game, including PVP, a map editor, a hundreds of levels long conquest mode, and more. I’ll certainly be interested to see what comes of all that.

Pros:

Nice graphics.
Pretty soundtrack
Very replayable rogue conquest mode

Cons:

Steep difficulty curve
Not a huge amount of content
Those lumberjacks can get in the sea (of fire)

Overall: 6/10

The Legend of Evil is available now on Steam and Switch

Let’s (Mario) Party!

If you’ve owned a Nintendo system in the last 20 years (well, now I feel freaking old), chances are you’ve played one of the fifteen or so Mario Party games. If not, the concept is pretty simple – roll dice to move around a game board, compete in simple minigames, collect coins (to buy bonus items and stars, the player with the most stars after a set number of turns get to rub their glorious victory in the faces of their loser friends (Suck it, Peach. Shy Guy is the boss round here. Go back to your castle and cry more! … Ahem). It’s a really simple idea that is made or broken on how good the minigames are, as that’s what you’ll spend most of your time doing.

And so we come to the eleventh game in the main console series – Super Mario Party.

Once again, Mario’s heroes and villains have gathered to see who will be the superstar. Choose from 16 characters (to start with and 4 more to be unlocked as you play), including fan favourites like Shy Guy, Waluigi, Bowser and Dry bones (I mean, Mario and that lot are in there too, but they get quite enough of the spotlight in other games tbh. Also, I think it’s time to petition Nintendo for Bowsette DLC). Each character will have access to their own unique special die as well as a basic D6. Shy Guy, for example has is five sides showing ‘4’ and one of ‘0’ – pretty handy if you’re looking to move a very specific amount to land on something good.

With your character chosen, you can set the difficulty level for any CPU players and then stroll on into the Party Plaza. Here you can check out the game’s modes. Initially, not everything is open, but in time you’ll have access to a whole range of options.

First up there’s classic party mode. 4 players go head to head to take on one of three game boards, each with their own unique mechanics to help or hinder your progress. Once all three have been completed, you’ll open a fourth board for this mode. You can choose to play 10 or 30 turns. With 10 working out to approximately an hour of play.

Different spaces on the board will have different effects, blue for extra coins, red to lose coins, exclamations cause special effects on the board (e.g. taking a warp to another area), clovers award a random bonus, bad luck spaces cause a random loss, and then there’s the ally space.

The ally space allows you to pick up a companion from the remaining available characters. You’ll get to use their special die and they’ll roll a bonus die along with your roll that will add 1 or 2 to your total. It’s cute and fun watching dialogue between sworn enemies, agreeing to help out… just this once.

Next there’s couples mode. Two teams of two make their way across a much more open board. Rather than the usual, single lane, branching path, these boards tend to have more room to move and plan your strategies. Both players on a team will roll their dice and the total is added together. Players then get to move the total of the dice roll each. I found this mode to be a bit slower on the board itself, as the teams make plans to move around. Do you move together, towards the star or split the party, with one going for a special item, to gather coins, or pound on your opponents in order to steal their precious coins?

Additionally, the fact that one player will always move first of the two, becomes important, since the first player can trigger a special event, which may change the possible routes around the board. This could mean that bad planning sees the second player being stuck behind a wall, losing some of their moves.

During this mode, you’ll find allies being air dropped in at intervals. If you can swoop in and grab them before the opposing team, they can really make or break your game. Here the ally’s added dice rolls will only go to the player that picked them up, rather than to the team as a whole.

If you’re feeling up for some rhythm action, there’s Sound Stage mode just for this. The actions range from washing suds off of a window, riding a horse by pulling on the reigns, spiking fruit with a sword, and more. The music is great and controls are suitably responsive as you waggle your way to victory.

Next up is challenge road. A single player mode where you must play through each of the 80 minigames in a specific order. The difficulty is pre-set and can get pretty tricky, especially if there’s games you know you’re weak on.

Finally, why not take a nice gentle paddle down the river? I’ll tell you why not, because the water it pretty darn choppy in River Survival and there’s plenty of obstacles in your way (Bloopers making whirlpools, Cheep Cheeps bouncing out of the water, etc.). This mode is played as a co-operative, four player team, working together to take on the many dangers of these choppy waters (and maybe overthrowing capitalism once they’re done… please?). As there were only two of us playing, I was initially concerned that having two CPU players would make life super difficult. We made sure one of us was on either side of the boat, with the CPU helping one of us each, they did a great job paddling where we wanted and held their own in the mini games.

One game in particular really showed off how considerately programmed they are. It’s a basic memory game, with cards laid out showing the suits, you’re given the target suit and after a few seconds, they’re flipped over, some will move and then you have to pick out the correct cards. My first thought was that, if I’ve been focusing on one particular card, and the CPU picks that one, I’m pretty screwed. However, I noticed that there was a distinct pause before they move, giving you good time to get to your target. It’s a simple thing, but makes all the difference and stops it feeling unfair if you’re not playing with a full team of hoomins.

Along the course of the river, you’ll find balloons, which will trigger minigames. These can be completed for additional sailing time, with higher scores/better times meaning your earn more time. There’s also stop watches which award an extra three seconds. As you progress, there’s the chance to pick different routes so you can eventually see all five endings of this mode.

If all the main modes seem like a bit of a time commitment that you can’t afford, there’s a mode to free-play any of the games you’ve unlocked and even compete in five minigame, online marathons.

That’s already a lot of game, but wait, there’s more. Anyone who’s seen the trailer for the game will have noticed that there’s a special mode using two Switches. First, you’ll need two consoles and two copies of the game. Set up is pretty simple from the tile screen, and then you can head into Toad’s Rec Room. Now, just lay your Switches down next to each other, on a flat surface. Draw a line on the screen to let the system know where they are relative to each other. Now you can drive tanks through warp pipes to travel between the screens and attack your opponents. It’s pretty cool, but expensive to get started.

This game has a huge amount of heart. One of my favourite features is the high fives. At the cue, just punch the air with your controller in hand and your characters will perform a cute little high five. In River Survial mode, you can perform the manoeuvre after every minigame, or clap your paddles together between areas to earn three extra seconds. In couples mode, you can do it to gain some extra coins after minigames.

If that’s all a bit hectic for you, why not retire to the sticker room and just cover some scenes in Mario themed stickers. If you’ve got Mario character amiibo, you can unlock shiny stickers for those characters, other amiibo will award you additional party points to spend on more unlocks.

I’d say we spent about 15 hours total playing through classic party mode, river survival, couples, sound stage mode, and challenge road. After all that, I’m still up for playing it a whole bunch more and really excited to see what it’s like with four friends. The music is great, it’s graphically beautiful, with wonderful texture work, and it never once felt like I was fighting the controller.

Speaking of which, all you need to play the game is a single Joy-Con. There’s a good variety of games using motion control (for example to throw boomerangs or shave ice), many using the stick and one or two buttons, or just single button pounding. Even the HD rumble feature is put to good use (This was really my first experience of the HD rumble as I’ve not had a chance to check out 1-2 Switch). One game features a number of passing characters (Wigglers, Bullet Bills, Thwomps, etc) each causing the controller to rumble very differently. The rumble is then played back blind and you have to identify which character it was you could feel. I was super impressed with how different they could make the rumble feel.

Another game sees you having to select boxes and shake them to see which have the most nuts inside. Once you’re happy, pop them down on your side of the play field and see how you scored at the end. It’s a really innovative use of the controller and I’m super glad it’s not been ignored beyond that pricy tech demo

#12SwitchShouldHaveBeenAFreePackInWithTheConsole.

Pros:

A lot of game to get through.
AI is capable in co-op and challenging at higher skill levels.
Very replayable.
Looks beautiful.

Cons:

No option to use download play to try Toad’s Rec Room.
River mode doesn’t work super well in single player.
I was robbed in classic mode during the bonus awards *shakes fist*.

Overall Score: 10/10

Hyrule Genocide Simulator

Hyrule Warriors: Definitive Edition has just been released on Nintendo Switch. This is actually the third version of the Nintendo-property-skinned genocide simulator from developer Koei Tecmo, having previously been released on WiiU and 3DS. I’m told this one suffers with less frame rate issues than the previous incarnations, but having never played them, I couldn’t say for sure.

You take control of various familiar faces from the Legend of Zelda franchise history + KT’s self-insert character, that I’m fairly certain is contractually required in all such games. The game opens with Hyrule castle being attacked by enemy forces and Link – here appearing initially as a fairly standard guard, training at the castle – find’s themself on a chaotic battlefield full of demonic looking little bastards that need a strongly worded… sword to the face. Hack cleave and grind your way around the map, following blips on your minimap and character conversations in a tiny box on the bottom left of the screen.

Ok, here goes, I’m going to wade in with everything I hate about this game *hits the badge shop and throws all the resources into defence badges*. I get easily overwhelmed. It’s a thing. If there’s too much going on around me in the street, I sometimes need to just go hide in a toilet stall and gather myself. So the idea that I would have to track hundreds of onscreen enemies, a minimap that could do with being about 10-20% larger to be clear enough, and unvoiced character conversations in a tiny corner of the screen. That’s too much, man!

*waits for the bottles of piss to stop being thrown*

Right, so here’s the thing. I love this game. I’ve been playing it every spare minute and I nearly blew off going out for my friend’s birthday this weekend because it would have allowed me another 8 hours of solid play. In spite of all I listed above, this game is brilliant fun and very addictive. The first thing I had to learn – as this is my first time really digging into a Warriors game – is that a lot of the shit on screen really doesn’t matter. You just push your way through the general minions to whoever the quest marker deems important, like a white, middle-class woman with a bob desperate to take her ire out on the store manager. Then, if the quest marker isn’t satisfied with their answer, you go find someone more senior to shout at until victory happens (look out summer 2019 for Soccer Mom Warriors).

As you progress through the game you’ll gain experience from those that fall at your blade (or crossbows, or book… somehow). As you level up, your characters become stronger. Just stronger, no other stats matter. Just how ready you are for more slaughter.

Randomly brutalising any enemy with a health bar can gain you extra weapons or materials. Weapons add a little more strength to your attacks and often come with various elemental or bonus perks. These perks include the ability to find better weapons (with higher damage or more perk slots), power up certain combos, have advantages against certain enemies, or the ability to find better materials. Perks can be swapped into empty slots in the smithy between battles, for a price.

The final way to power up your characters is with badges. These are crafted between levels and allow yet more perks. These come in three delicious flavours: attack, defence, and assist. The attack badges unlock more combos, more damage against defending foes, give additional special attack uses, etc. Defence badges will let you take less damage from different elemental sources or allow use of health potions. Assist badges allow you to take over enemy keeps more quickly and increase the duration of certain power-ups. Each character will need their own badges, and each may require different materials for the same badges, on different characters. So there’s going to need to be a lot of item farming if you want to unlock everything for everyone.

The Story Mode takes you on a super meandering journey through Hyrule to defeat Cia (a witch originally tasked with keeping the balance of the Triforce) as she causes chaos while trying to gather up some funky glowing orbs. I’ll not spoil the plot here, but there’s more to it than that, obvs. The story takes several branches along the way, as you get to visit areas from Ocarina of Time, Twiglet Princess, and Skyward Sword. Then sends you back to see things from other perspectives. See how things got going for Cia and her captains – Volga and Wizzro. In addition, you can enjoy Linkle’s side adventure. (Side note: Pleeeeeease Nintendo, we need you to fully adopt Linkle, she’s hecking awesome and needs to be in mainstream LoZ games).

The graphics are beautiful and the characters are really nicely modelled. It’s really good to see hi-def versions of so many familiar faces form LoZ history. Each of these warriors plays quite differently, having different movement speeds. From the plodding Goron, Darunia to the fleet of foot Link. Each character has a number of combo attacks and specials to wreak havoc on the armies that oppose you. The animations for these are pretty stunning, but can get a little repetitive if you’re playing the same character for an extended period. A perfect excuse to swap out to another of the 28 playable characters.

As well as the familiar playable characters, there’s some familiar boss monsters in the shapes of King Dodongo, Gohma, Manhandla, the Imprisoned, the Helmaroc King. They all look stunning and all need to be taken down at some point. Luckily, you’ll slowly be gathering the unique items during the game that will help with this. Series favourites like Bombs, boomerang, hookshot, bow and arrows, and hammer will help you take those giant, aggy arseholes down in short order.

While all the original game characters are open from the start, the DLC characters of old now have to be unlocked from Adventure Mode. Speaking of which, here’s where you’ll be spending a considerable amount of time if you want to get those final characters and indeed the epic number of alternate character costumes and weapons that are hidden away. I’d felt like the Story Mode had been a good value for money experience. Then I popped open Adventure mode – as the character select screen was now showing a bunch of question mark characters in addition to those I already had – and it suddenly became obvious to me that amount of content in this game is fucking ridiculous.

There are 9 separate Adventure Mode maps, each with slightly different mechanics, but based on a previous LoZ game. Each cell of the map represents a different challenge and can lead to new character, weapons, costumes, or item cards. These item cards can then be used on certain cells to open up more rewards in other cells of the map. Each of the maps features a wide span of difficulties per level and each map is rated overall from the menu. This is an epic task and should take you a decent chunk of time to work through. I’ve probably put about 16 hours into this mode and still have 2 characters to unlock and I’ve barely touched the weapons and costumes yet. Challenges include slaughtering more mobs than your opponent, butchering a certain number of enemy captains, trouncing a number of boss monsters in a time limit, slaying specific foes to answer questions, and more. Basically, this game does killing a lot.

LoZ has some pretty iconic music, and HW:DE does a wonderful job of covering them as stunning, driving guitar tracks that really add to the metal as fuck mass slaughter fest. I’m terrible for turning off game music and whacking on my own tunes most of the time. I had no intention of doing so with this because it’s just too good. I can’t recommend the soundtrack for this enough.

Pros:

A whole lot of awesome game for your money.
Beautiful graphics.
Awesome soundtrack.

Cons:

Starting the co-op mode is ridiculously contrived and needs to be reinitialised after each level.
The minimap is a little small for my liking.
Possibly dangerously addictive.

Final Score: 8/10

Hyrule Warriors: Definitive edition is out now on Switch.

A Strong Dose Of Skoompurr

This week I finally gave in to the cute graphics and pointy eared chests that have attracted me at a couple of expos in the last year. And so, money spent, I hung out to the sound of cute mewing and slashing swords, in The Gentlebros’ action RPG, Cat Quest on Nintendo Switch.

As a cat-starved cat lady, it seems perfect for me. You take the role of a brave cat who’s sister is kidnapped by a sinister looking white cat in some really snazzy headgear called Drakoth. Before I knew it, they’d blasted my tiny boat and left me adrift on a chunk of wood that genuinely didn’t have room for both me and Leo DiCatprio.

Next thing I knew, I was washed up on the shores of Felingard with Navi-wannabe, Spirry. Spirry the spirit guardian (real thoughtful there bros gentle) who is giving orders and instructing me how to grow my power and work towards saving my sister. My main complaint about this glowing guide, is that they continually refer to townsfolk as ‘peasants’. Well fuck you, you classist, twinkly bastard!

It’s quickly revealed that I bare the mark of the Dragonblood, the dragon slayers of long past. I’m not ashamed to admit that this had me immediately meowing the Skyrim theme and desperately trying to come up with related puns (Fus Ro Purr! I used to be an adventurer like you. Then I wubbed the belleh. Play along at home, if you like).

Soon enough the game opens up into a large, beautifully drawn, open world inhabited by a number of strange creatures. There’s some brown sheep things that hop around fairly harmlessly, bandit kitties, large floating fists, weird floating scorpion-tailed penis creatures, and a selection of dragons great and small to swipe your weapons at or cast powerful magics upon.

Throughout the world are a number of caves or ruins which can be investigated for experience, gold, and funky loot. Each of these areas is fairly short which is good for on the go/on the toilet play. Before entering, there is an opportunity to check the level against your own so you can tell how likely it is that you might be destroyed in a single hit. Loot comes in chests with adorable cat ears (that make me squee every time I see them, because I am kitty trash.) and could be weapons or armour. There’s plenty of fashionable hats and armour to collect and level up throughout your adventure. Items are levelled when you come across duplicates, meaning that you won’t necessarily have to change from your favourite wizard hat, it can grow with you.

In addition to the swords, maces, and knobbly staves that you’ll find, there’s a number of wizard towers dotted around the map where you can gain new magic spells and upgrade them. While there’s a good selection, to be gained, I spent most of the time just using the first spell. This Flame Purr creates a circle of fire damage around you in a good radius and never stops being useful as it also does decent damage over time. The other one of note is the freeze spell, which slows your enemy. Perfect for taking down the more mighty dragons with ease. You’ll encounter others including: lightning strikes, spike floors, and one of the most pathetic healing spells I’ve ever encountered in gaming.

As you travel across the land (searching far and wide. Da Da. Da-Dum.) you’ll come across towns and villages. Here you can chat to the locals for news, check the notice board for quests, or fall flat on your face in front of an inn, in order to rest up and save your progress. I’m not kidding, pressing the action button in front of the inn will see you just crash out harder than me after four pints of scrumpy on an empty stomach. Something that, like the adorable chests, never ceased to entertain me.

Once you’re all done with the main quest, you can go back through on new game + – which strips some of your plot-based powers, but leaves your sweet loot intact, or try mew game. Mew game mode lets you add meow-difiers, like forcing you to stay at level one, having only nine lives, or forcing you to play without armour. While I’m sure this would add something if you felt the game was short and too easy, I finished my initial run feeling like I’d had my fill of this catventure.

The soundtrack is a cheery and bouncy adventuring tune above ground and somewhat darker in the caves and ruins, but nothing really to write home about. I didn’t get annoyed with it, but it did tune out after a while.

Overall the game is basic, purrfect for short bursts of play, endearing, beautifully drawn, and suitably full of cat puns.

Pros:

Pretty
Punny
Entertaining

Cons:

Classist companion
Rather short unless you want to keep cycling through.
Twice the price on Switch that it is on mobile.

Final Score: 5/10

Cat Quest is out now on Switch, PlayStation 4, Windows, macOS, Android, & iOS

Zombies Ate My PC Gamer Weekender

tl;dr get Basingstoke! Here’s a link

Image result for pcgamer weekender 2018

This past weekend I got the chance to visit the PC Gamer Weekender at London Olympia. Not a venue I’ve been to before, so it was nice to explore a bit. The door staff were helpful and pleasant; the lifts were huge, certainly enough room to not only get a couple of electric wheelchairs in, but to turn around easily too. On the event floor, there’s a cloak room café area, and toilets are well sign posted. A seating at one end for refreshments and a large tabletop gaming area near to stands selling collectable cards, general nerd merch (including the legally required number of Funko Pop figures for such events), and a good selection or tabletop games (damn you Pandemic and your many tempting variants!). In addition there were two stages – quite close together – which hosted a number of panels for game reveals and tech talks that I largely missed. And Finally, the most important area, the bit most people came for: the glorious corridors of game stands *crowd makes excited oooooh sound*. Luckily, the event wasn’t too crowded, so it was easy ish to get to try things, and wasn’t too overwhelmingly peopley.

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Game I actually went to see – 2 Point Hospital.

I played a lot of Theme Hospital in my youth. Like, a loooooot of Theme Hospital. Its quirky humour, charming graphics, and involving gameplay kept me coming back for more, even though I wasn’t very good at it. It’s one I came back to again and again and had only recently been wishing that someone would update. So the recent announcement that some of the old Bullfrog team were getting 2 Point Studios [www.twopointstudios.com] together and would soon be releasing 2 Point Hospital, a spiritual successor to Theme Hospital. The panel introduced some members of the team and their mission statement.

Good news everybody, 2 Point Studios want to re-imagine sims and be the home of “little people games”. For those who loved Populous, Powermonger, Theme Park, and Theme Hospital, this is excellent news. Personally, I’ve felt the industry has been lacking good games in this genre for some time. From what the announcement trailer has shown, and the gameplay footage shown at the Weekender, the game is looking fantastic. The graphics are clean and colourful, looking great from a distant overview, right down to fully zoomed in; the interface is simple and clear; and for those familiar with TH, it’s looking like everything we would want from a successor.

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One of the main draws of TH for me was the wacky afflictions which patients could come in with. Bloaty head – a massively swollen head that needs to be popped and lightly re-inflated to normal size, slack tongue – a huge lolling tongue that personally I’d just learn to live with for… reasons, and invisibility to name a few. 2PH has new conditions all of its own. Including light headedness – waking up to find your head is now literally a lightbulb which will need to be unscrewed and replaced with a new head, and mummification – wandering, bandaged horrors that need to be popped into a casket, and have their coverings unwound. The devs announced that the final game will be filled more of these punny illnesses for you to cure with unusual and entertainingly animated equipment. Do try not to get embarrassed at people seeing your skeleton when passing through the x-ray machine.

I was excited before, seeing this at the Weekender and nothing I saw did anything to lessen that. It’s looking great and I’m very hype. Devs are not yet ready put an exact date for release, but my body is ready just as soon as they are ready to put it out.

2 Point Hospital will be available on Steam at some point in 2018.

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Pleasant surprise of the show – Guns of Icarus Alliance

I’ve not played GoI for some time. I got quite into it for a while, but I just didn’t have the time and too many other things that ran better on my PC (To be fair, the PC I was using at that time was junk and GoI just chugged on it).

This new game is very much more of the same first-person, steampunk/dieselpunk multiplayer, airship crew simulator. Take to the skies and battle rival crews in huge areas. Take the high road, or sink as low as you can and into clouds to avoid detection, then sneak up on your enemy. Take on specific roles as gunner, engineer or pilot – though anyone can do any job in a pinch even put out the occasional fire. The original game featured 7 magnificent airships, with Alliance adding a further six to date. Each is differently manoeuvrable and having varying amounts of guns and armour.

Alliance adds more than just new ships and enhanced graphics to the original 2012 release. Developers, Muse Games are very excited that they have successfully integrated cross-platform play with Windows, Mac, Linux, and PS4. While your account can’t be moved from platform to platform, you can play with your friends, without problems, regardless of which system they’re using. Additionally, faction war gameplay lets crews to earn war effort for their faction, which in turn allows them to take over or defend pieces of land on the map. There’s time in lobby to strategize and plan for the war effort, but if that’s not your thing, you can always set up a private game and have it out with your friends.

Alliance also sees the game ported to a newer version of Unity, which has allowed them to improve enemy AI. Staff at the booth told me a great story about one of the devs loudly complaining, as they believed someone in the office was picking on them. It later turned out to be an AI player that they’d upset.

So gather your crew, inflate your balloon, and set sail to the skies to fight your enemy. For the good of [insert preferred faction] because you’re the best and most right, obviously.

Guns of Icarus Alliance is available on Steam and Humble Store

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Game of the Show – Basingstoke

I’ve played a few of Puppy Games creations. They’ve mostly been fun and engaging updates on classic games with a unique art style that is instantly recognisable if you’ve played any of their stuff. Even their most fearsome enemies have a certain adorable look about them. Like a hangry loved one on a rampage. Speaking of hangry, what monster encapsulates that idea better than zombies (phew, think I landed that segue with no problems). This brings us to Basingstoke. Well, it’s Basingstoke, but not as you know it. Unless you know it to be on fire and the residents to be rather bitey. In this case, I’m referring to, the terminally British isometric roguelike zombie survival game that makes me crave a strawberry Cornetto.

“But Jane, everyone’s tired of zombie games. They’re so dead.” Well friend, unless you sever the head or destroy the brain, only the crappy, asset flippy, BS zombie games are going to fall to something like market saturation (also, your pun is bad). On the other hand we have this, which is beautiful, charming, and wonderfully fun.

The graphics are typical for the studio, simple, stylish and cute, with excellent lighting effects. It’s not often I get to see road signs, traffic cones, keep left bollards, and ridiculous helmeted police officers that match those I see every day, in the videogames I play. That’s because so many games are set in the US. However, it’s these simple pleasures that first drew my eye to this game.

Sneak around post-apocalyptic Basingstoke to gather all the materials you can, avoiding the cute and dopey looking enemies. Items can be crafted from the materials you find to either directly attack the shambling horde – like a pool cue or pepper spray. Other items, such as a kebab can be thrown to try and draw the attention these ghoulish creatures from your delicious bod (I’ve been out drinking in Croydon on a Friday night and can attest that this does in fact work).

Apart from the shambling undead, I got to see some of the fast and vicious monsters. And by “see” I mean, I ran away as fast as possible, flailing and hurling sausage rolls to try and distract them. They may be adorable but those teeth aren’t to be trifled with… unless there’s a trifle to be found or crafted somewhere and used to temporarily blind them. Then I would maybe consider that as a last resort.

Once you’ve looted everything that takes your fancy and found the key item, you can make your way to (temporary) safety at the exit to the area. The end of the first section allows you to escape to The Red Lion pub, and part of me hopes there will be an option to stay there and wait for it all to blow over, shoot some pool and listen to Queen on the jukebox like a super quick, waiting for the phone call to end, Far Cry 4 alternate ending.

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For the event, they had all the current classes unlocked, with each character having varying starting equipment. I had a quick look at the office worker, police officer, and tourist – who gets a distracting polaroid camera and a GPS that guides you to the level exit. Each is beautifully designed, and I can’t wait to spend more time with them, waking up in strange toilets, in the middle of the zombie apocalypse.

Basingstoke’s areas are a mix of prefab and procedurally generated areas, to make for more variety and replayablity. I’ve only been to Basingstoke once, but if this game is accurate, I’ll have to go again, and be surprised it seems.

Not going to lie, of all the things that I’ve fallen in love with, the loading screen was the most surprising. It’s a set of temporary traffic lights and one of those “When red light shows wait here” signs, with an adorable zombie in a hard hat and hi-vis jacket. As the level loads, the lights change. I have no idea why this charms me so much, but there it is.

You can play it right now by supporting the Puppy Games Patreon for as little as $5. Or wait until March 30th for the Steam release How’s that for a slice of fried gold?