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| Freeware/Shareware roundup: THE RETURN! by Mischief Maker 10/12/2008, 1:24pm PDT | ||||
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| Battle of Tiles ($5)
This game is way more fun than it deserves to be. I once described Styrateg as strategy RPG solitaire. That game has been unceremoniously kicked from that throne by Battle of Tiles. You start out as King Arthur with a small squad of footsoldiers and archers, all represented as crudely-carved tiles, making your way from left to right across a huge game board crawling with enemy tiles. You can either move a single tile or a group of them in eight cardinal directions. When enemy tiles get in range, your tiles automatically attack each other, gaining gold and experience. Enemy tiles are all for sale and will permanently join your army if you've got enough gold, swelling your ranks. And that's pretty much it. Keep going right until you hit a boss, then proceed to the next board. The main weakness of the game is the pacing is way too slow and misleads players into thinking it's easier than it really is. Each level is divided into an easy first part, where a new variety of level one enemies appear for you to slaughter or purchase, and a difficult second half, where the enemies mostly outclass your army in level and are too expensive to recruit. The thing is, the first half goes for so long that the player may very well decide the ultimate formation is a wall of fighters in the first column, a wall of archers and wizards in the second column, and a wall of priests in the 3rd. But once the heat gets turned up, a thick formation of wizards will make mincemeat of your armored columns. Suddenly you need to pay close attention to formation, attack type, and weaknesses. The lowly slime, for example, is weak in all categories except for magic resistance, which is so high it's practically immune to magic attacks. So a staggered line of units can be a superior strategy, allowing slimes to get to the front and wipe out enemy wizards before retreating behind the armored knights. It's fun in small doses, I just wish the levels weren't so ungodly huge. Well worth a measly 5 bucks. Temporal (Free) So while those of us without 360s wait patiently for Braid to be released on the PC, here's a charming time-traveling puzzle platformer with none of the price-tag hystrionics, since it's free and all. I like the fact that paradoxes factor into your score. Solid State Survivor (Free) This manic dodonpachi-esque shmup has been in development for years, slowly released to the public piecemeal as new levels were added. Now it's finally done. The graphics are pretty crunchy, but it's fun and difficult and the music kind of reminds be of the old Genesis shmup Gaires. Gravitron 2 ($5) A gravity-based shooter of the Lunar Lander, Thrust, and Subterrania variety. This is pretty much the best game in its subgenre, adding little touches like a health bar, the ability to land on any flat surface, and a bullet-reflecting shield. Far from making the game too easy, the extra abilities are necessary to survive when the game throws you into some of the craziest level design this subgenre has ever seen, with twisting and turning caves, rotating platforms, and plentiful enemies. Top it off with some gorgeous vector art, this game is great. (Though secretly I'm much more excited about his 3D Gravitron project that is currently in development purgatory.) World of Goo ($20) So yeah, this goes on sale to the public tomorrow and I was one of the preorder people who got it a week early. It's based on the experimental freeware game/toy tower of goo, and plays like a cross between bridge builder and lemmings. The object of the game is to use the scattered goo balls of various properties to reach a distant pipe that will suck up all the remaining unused goo balls. The graphics are beautiful and charming, the music sounds like Danny Elfman doing a Tim Burton movie, and the solution to the final stage of level one is both whimsical and disgusting. The game also includes the "World of Goo Corporation" minigame, where all the extra goo balls you collected in the main game levels gather and you can use them to build a tower of goo whose height is tracked on the game's server, and little clouds appear representing the heights reached by other players. I proudly was #12 worldwide for a split second before my giggling creation collapsed under its own weight due to a tiny flaw in my support beam structure. There is only one negative to throw at the game and that is that it's fairly short, with only four and a half worlds with around ten levels apiece. It's also coming out for the wii. |
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Freeware/Shareware roundup: THE RETURN! by 10/12/2008, 1:24pm PDT  GOD DAMN YOU I'D ALMOST GOT THROUGH ALL MY BROWSER TABS by 10/12/2008, 2:24pm PDT Gravitron 2 is amazing. I completely agree. NT by 10/24/2008, 9:26pm PDT |
