Caltrops - Reviews - Indie shit

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by fabio 12/04/2017, 7:44pm PST

Bored on an overnight shift this week. Trying out my GOG back catalog.

Satellite Reign

File this under "maybe it starts being fun later?". Ran out of patience by the time the tutorial told me to go wandering around hacking ATMs to fund researching a shotgun. How is it the combat in the first hour is more boring than what Syndicate threw at you in the first 5 minutes? I'm thinking this game would have been a lot better going with Shadowrun setpiece heist levels rather than the Ubisoft open world horse shit model.

Cayne

Free isometric horror adventure game. Very short. Supposed to be a tie in to the company's other IHAG "Stasis".

Great visuals. It's what The White Chamber would have been without the anime art.

Everything else? Pretty bad. You play a 9 months pregnant woman who walks slooooowly and the levels are designed to do a LOT of backtracking long distances. This should be a horrific experience but your character makes constant wisecrack quips about everything like she's writing a Buffy article in her head for TV Tropes. You figure with all the freaky shit happening that it's going to turn out to be some portal to hell or a dream. Nope. You find logs of all the crew and they are all extreme edgelord sexual fetishists. Did Garth Ennis write this?

A good deal of the puzzles are completely nonsensical. I can't imagine anyone beating it without a walkthrough or resorting to methodically using every item combination on everything. The fuse puzzle in particular is right up there with the cat hair mustache puzzle for not making sense even when you read the solution.

You come across a locked door. There is exposed wiring in the wall nearby. The wiring has a burned out fuse. "Looks like the fuse needs to be replaced," says your character. In your inventory is an ID card, a multi-tool, a bladed shovel thing, and protein powder. Use the multi-tool to fix it? Nope. The bladed shovel thing? Nope. Use the multi-tool on the bladed shovel thing to carve something out? Nope. Backtrack through every room to find a fuse? Nope.

1. Use protein powder on the ID card. You will receive a powder coated card.
2. Use powdered card on wiring. This will press the card into the wiring and leave an imprint of the wiring in the powder.
3. Use multi-tool on ID card. This will cut off pieces of the card until you have some weirdly shaped piece of plastic coated in protein powder that used to be an ID card.
4. Use weirdly shaped protein powder covered thing on fuse box.
5. THE DOOR IS OPEN!

The ending was pretty good.

Battle Chef Brigade

Match 3 game slash platformer hybrid. You hunt monsters for cooking ingredients which you cook for a match 3 game in order to win an Iron Chef competition. Sure why not.

It fails for the same reason that Tower Defense slash shooter hybrid fail: it's a mashup of 2 half baked mechanics.

You're given a 5 minute time limit to cook the highest point value dish possible. 3 of those minutes are spent hunting monsters in an awful combat platforming segment with the worst controls. There was no controller support at the time and you can't rebind keys. The arrow keys are used for moving while WASD is attack while spacebar is jumping. Want to do an uppercut or stomp? Just press space to jump, then hold the up arrow and W key. Fuck->that

The cooking portion has you dump ingredients in, which are represented by different shapes and colors. Match 3 and they fuse into a single level 2 gem. Match 3 level 2 gems and get a single level 3 gem. Have the most level 3 gems as possible in the final dish. It might have been sort of interesting as you try to squeeze out more points in an increasingly cramped play area. But the area is so small that you quickly reach the limit of what you can do. The only challenge is that you don't have much time because you've wasted most of it on the stupid awful hunting portion.

But there's not even any challenge beyond that. Each judge prefers one color over the others. You can buy specialized cooking pots that will make a specific color fuse with only 2 matches. You just use the specialized pot for that color and you can't lose. That's pretty much all you have to do.

But wait! You're not told which color you're doing until after the equipment prep screen! And you have limited equip slots. So you're fucked if you bring the wrong pots. You cannot reload an old save during a battle. You must lose the battle at which point you get the option to re-equip and start over...so why don't they just let you equip after learning the colors the first time?

This might have been a cute fun game if they just focused on the puzzle part. I'm pissed because there was some potential in changing it up from the typical bullshit match 3 games. They actually let you make non-match moves and it's sort of similar to Tetris Attack (the best Tetris) in that way.