Explosionade is a featured game on Steam today, and under it was a bundle of four games from Mommy’s Best Games for 7.99. That many games for one dirt cheap price had me thinking “At least one of them has to be worthy of a review.” And it turns out, all of them are, with three being truly fun diversions. So today, you get FOUR reviews in one post. AREN’T YOU LUCKY!

(Hint: You are!)

So let’s start with Explosionade, which I didn’t quite know what to make of at first, so I closed it and played the others before coming back around for a second attempt. It grew on me after the first few levels.

You play a stereotypical nerd given guard duty while all the “manlier” soldiers in your space army are planning a final assault on an alien base. Getting bored, Private Atticus looks inside the storage bay he’s guarding and finds a prototype mech that’s so sweet, he HAS to take it for a test drive. In the sewers. This leads him to finding a whole bunch of aliens. Let the butt stompening commence! Continue reading

Bionic Commando: Rearmed has been one of those games that I was reluctant to play after suffering through the train wreck that was the 3D “sequel.” But I wondered, “How bad could it be?” Pretty bad, actually.

Well no, that’s not entirely fair. Certainly, many levels remain mostly faithful to the original NES game, although GRIN felt the need to add secret areas to uncover and upped the difficulty in many places. The dialogue of the original game was pretty bad, so I can see why they might decide to make changes to that, but I’m not fond of the “wacky” tone of the new material. This is a game about resurrecting Hitler in a bid to take over the world, after all, so why did someone feel the need to lighten the mood with bad comedy? (And it is bad, with not a single joke being even remotely funny.) Of course, since this is using the same engine that made that 3D turd, there had to be dialogue added to remind you about Rad’s “missing” wife. (Thanks, guys. I’d almost blocked that idiotic memory out.)

There’s other changes that I’m not sure how to feel about. In the original game, killing enemies would make them drop green bullets, and after collecting enough of these, the player would earn one hit point. Now there’s a health meter given right away, and instead of dropping bullets, the enemies drop points for some scoring system that I don’t even know where to look to find it. In the NES game, you could only go into each level with one item, but in the new game, all weapons and items are worn at all times, and you can swap weapons on the fly. Someone decided to add grenades to the game, making it possible to blow up enemies hiding behind obstacles or lurking on the floor below. The barrels that the enemies hide behind can now be picked up and thrown. Oh, and replacing the wiretapping option in each communications station is a hacking mini-game. I don’t hate it, but it’s another arbitrary change that makes me ask “Why?” Continue reading

Sega is giving away some older games on Steam in a bundle, and Hell Yeah! Wrath of the Dead Rabbit is the only one in the bundle I haven’t played before. As it’s free, this will temper my review somewhat. Man, what a festering bowl of dog snot. I KID! But seriously, this game was very much a mixed bag for me, with lots of stuff to love, and almost as much to hate in equal portions.

Let’s start with the premise. Hell is now run by a dead rabbit, Ash, who has deposed his father for control of the realm. Given how little Ash knows about his own kingdom, and how so few of his subjects seem to respect his authority, I’m going to guess he hasn’t been in power long. But this is just a guess, as the story is ambiguous on that point. In any case, Ash gets caught taking a bath with a rubber duck, and fearing what this might do to his reputation, he sets out to kill every last demon who has seen the pictures online.

So far, so wacky, and the various worlds that make up hell are no less crazy. There’s almost too much going on in the design, although there’s only a few places where it becomes so distracting as to be a problem. In those cases, it’s because the design is in the foreground, hiding Ash, several enemies, and their projectiles. This makes it really hard to know which way to move to dodge, but thankfully, it doesn’t happen very often. Continue reading

Steam is having yet another sale, and Ronin was down to 7 euros, which hubby said was okay for our budget. Ronin has been on my wishlist for a while based on game play trailers, but having completed it with the “happy ending” in a little under fifteen hours, I have to say, I really, really hate this game. I ought to be used to half baked indie games with shit controls, buggy interfaces, and bad level design, but seeing a combination of all of them plus gleeful trolling by the maker knowing nothing in their game works consistently? Oh, that’s enough to raise a super seiyan level hate boner.

You might think I’m exaggerating, but in the “hints” is the comment that the jump arc lies. The arc is a fundamental part of the interface, because when you go into combat the controls go turn-based and you CANNOT move any other way than using the jump with the right stick. Now I want to be fair and say that this control scheme has potential. The problem is that where the end of the arc indicates your landing point is not accurate for 80% of your jumps. Why should it matter? Because it’s the difference between landing on a ledge and landing on a laser or a land mine.

Worse still, the arcing path you think you’ll take is also often inaccurate, which will send your eponymous ronin (who I will name…Ronin) leaping directly into gunfire. Between turns, the enemy line of fire is represented by red lines, so optimally you want to ease your jump arc under those lines. But quite often what seems like the right height will end up a lie, and Ronin takes a face and chest full of bullets. As you die with one shot, this is…aggravating, to say the least. It’s even more annoying because the game isn’t long, nor is it particularly difficult. Had the arc line and landing points been more accurate, I probably could have finished in around 4 to 5 hours, tops. As it is, I didn’t win because I got better at the game. I won through sheer willpower and blind fucking luck. Continue reading

Crashlands gives me fits trying to decide how to score it. The biggest hurdle I have in giving it a better score lies in several glitches and in the lousy controls, problems that frequently and consistently plagued my playthrough even when they weren’t always fatal.

Before I begin my review properly, I want to mention two things that are slightly related. First of all, I picked up this game because Kotaku ran such a glowing review about it, and the activities they listed certainly made it sound funny, fun, and unique. But–and this is what irks me–what they mention is all stuff that happens in the first half hour of what is a very, very long game. This would be like me doing a book review based off the first paragraph without finishing the rest of the book. (I’ll be returning to that book analogy again later for another issue.) It’s a pretty lousy review that is written even though you’ve not even made it to the first boss of the game. I know y’all are in a rush to do these things quickly, but damn, this is some seriously lazy reviewing, ya know? At least beat the first boss before you rush to the keyboard to gush.

The second thing I want to mention is that this is a cross platform game, and someone pirated the Android version and is selling it on Amazon’s app store as their own game. Whatever my feelings for the game are, this is so not cool, even before you take into account that one of the three brothers who made it has cancer. It takes a special kind of scumbucket to steal the hard work of an independent artist, but this particular scumpuppy stole it and then sold it as their own product. What the ever-lovin’ fuck, y’all. Continue reading

I’ve had Monument Valley on my phone since November, and I probably should have done a review of it right after I finished it the first time. But I got busy with other stuff for a little while, and by the time I thought of it again, I felt it would be better to play the whole game again, and then write up a review. It’s not a very long game at all, not even with the additional purchase of Forgotten Shores, a collection of eight new puzzles. It is also not very expensive, so the time to cost ratio is pretty good. Upon finishing all the levels for the first time, I likened the game to one of those fun-sized candy bars. It’s good, really good, but it leaves you wanting more. This isn’t a bad thing, either, and I think it’s one of the nicer kinds of complaints one can have about any form of entertainment, wanting more of the same.

Monument Valley follows a princess, Ida, through a strange world with beautiful puzzles that look harder to solve than they actually are once you’ve got a good grasp of the game’s mechanics. I might compare them to Escher’s Relativity, except they’re not quite that complex even if they are just as visually appealing. It helps that the game uses a colorful palette to render these monument castles and their surroundings. The designs are simple, but every bit as pretty as games with much fancier graphics. The music is very soft and relaxing, which fits with the relaxed pace of the levels.

As I said, none of the puzzles are hard to solve, although they do get progressively more elaborate with higher levels. You start out only needing to rotate a walkway to help Ida move from one checkpoint to the next, but soon the game expands so that you’re rotating the entire level to make walkways rise and fall to meet each other in ways that are both clever and charming. This is not a game you play to challenge your speed or smarts. It’s instead a nice casual stroll that’s perfect for passing a few minutes on a train or in the bathroom. Continue reading

“Zoe,” you say, “I thought you were broke, so how did you get a new game?” Well, faithful reader who always asks the right questions, I discovered I had 4.99 still stashed in my Sony wallet, and being desperate for a new game, I went looking for something on sale cheap. LA Cops was only 3.49, so I got it, and here we are, another review for you loverly peoples.

My first impression of LA Cops is that it’s very similar in design to Hotline Miami, with some minor improvements in a few areas. It unfortunately also replicates a lot of the problems and design flaws I saw in Hotline Miami, but I’ll hold off on listing those just yet.

First, let’s talk about what it does have going for it. One, it’s got a diverse cast of cops to choose from, with no need to mess around with unlocking. It’s got a neat visual style to its cut scenes, something I can’t say I’ve seen in any game in recent or even distant memory. The voice acting in the cut scenes is pretty good, and the story is…it’s okay, for what little there is to it. The music is very good, something my husband noticed after only a few minutes into the game and commented on. A couple of the songs don’t sound like the era they’re aiming for, and they’re more like an extended Pearl Jam solo. But eh, I like Pearl Jam, so this worked for me. Continue reading

I have EXTREMELY mixed feelings about Assault Android Cactus in that I want to like it based on most levels and its graphical and aural charms. My problem is mainly due to the control scheme, although I do have several other complaints as well. Assault Android Cactus is categorized as a twin stick shooter, and it’s about androids (surprise!) on a freight ship whose AI has gone nuts and started killing everyone. I’d worry about spoiling the plot, except the plot is unbearably stupid and goes like this: an evil emo android showed up and told the AI that the universe is a lie and everything sucks, and the AI agreed and set about killing everyone to “save everything.” Stupid? Oh absolutely. But for video game writing, one can almost pretend this is some deeply philosophical shit.

The game’s title is also the “main character,” but right from the start, the player can choose from several other androids, each with their own unique payload of weapons. Further, by beating bosses at the end of sections, the player can unlock even more androids, including making the evil emo Licorice playable. All of these choices give players a lot of options depending on what kind of rate of fire on their primary weapons they want, and on what kind of secondary weapon they can deploy. Those include options like a flamethrower, land mines, missiles, a force field, and a singularity. (Because an indoor black hole is always a good idea, amiright?)

For the most part, the non-boss levels are fun if a bit frantic due to these androids having extremely poor battery life. This is for me another problem, as I’ve got no love for games that put me on a timer and demand perfect speed. It’s particularly frustrating to pop the icon for a battery, only to die while trying to reach it. (Or worse, while circling around it because the damn thing has decided to go in an orbit around your character without connecting.) And there’s one level called Repeater that I honestly was ready to murder someone over because it rearranges the floor underneath my character whenever I moved. I could turn a perfect circle and rather than return to my starting point I’d end up in a confusingly dense range of hallways, which conveniently only melted for enemies to take pot shots at me before rematerializing again to block my shots. Confusing doesn’t even begin to cover it. Continue reading

Bethesda…Bethesda never changes. I truly believe they are the only company who could get away with the things they do and still receive so much love from the community. The games can crash or glitch and still have people clamoring “game of the year!” with so many more qualified candidates out there. This year’s most qualified, Witcher 3, comes from a smaller team that went out of their way to make a world feel truly alive. By comparison, Fallout 4 feels like a lot of lazy half assing in so many ways. The vast majority of the sound effects in this game have been used in every single other Bethesda game in recent memory. Even the music playlist for the radio station has been heard before in previous Fallout games. The recycled engine is given some new next gen spit and polish, but aside from the prettier outdoor environments and new more colorful locations, the character models are often but ugly and badly animated.

The problem here for me is that I’ve seen other companies raise the bar higher and higher for what to expect in terms of character design and animation with each release, but Bethesda…Bethesda never changes.

However, this is actually the first Bethesda game I’ve played all the way to the end, (Unless you count Fallout Shelter, which I don’t.) liking and loathing it in equal measure. There is nothing I can praise in the game that does not instantly lead to a big BUT, and for every time I was enjoying my game, there’s at least twice as many times where I was left groaning, “This is utter bullshit.” Or yelling it, or even growling it. And I want to note that it was rarely the challenge level of the game that was the reason for my anger. Sometimes it might be a glitch or a crash, but more often, it was just lazy writing or coding.

But let me start off at the beginning. Bethesda never changes. That’s why yet again, Fallout 4 starts with the same introductory sentence. However, this time the world is fleshed out in more detail before the character creation process begins, and I think it hurts the premise even more than the previous entries. In this version, the war did not take place in an alternate fifties era. Instead, the world went on with the same culture and technology until 2077. Try to think about that. If a person from 1950 were frozen and taken to our time, they would not recognize quite a lot of the progress we take for granted. But not only did technology freeze, but so did all culture and art. So for this period of supposed nuclear peacetime, no one ever did anything in any field. Ever. The game actually contradicts this idea many, many times, and yet…Bethesda never changes. Continue reading

There’s a very small part of me that wants to go easy on the makers of Loot Heroes on the grounds that I only spent 2.99 on it, and really, what did I expect? Well for starters, I expected a game that was fun and relatively glitch free. Given the videos and reviews I saw, I expected something like the NES version of Gauntlet. What I got was a lazy, shitty little turd that I wish I hadn’t wasted my money on. I can only think of one thing to compliment in this game, and that’s the music. The music is nice and catchy, but everything else is awful.

Where to begin? Well first, there’s the shitty graphics, with just the barest minimum of effort put into the design of the dungeons and the enemies. There’s the boss monsters, who have the ability to deal damage through walls because their “hit box” is ridiculously huge. There’s the recycled sound effects, meaning it’s damn near impossible to tell if that one sound was my rune spell, an approaching boss monster, or a trap just outside of my hazy area of view. There’s the cheap tactic of opening a dungeon with 20 fucking enemies and two boss monsters already in my ass so that I’m dead before I can even look for a way to escape. There’s the monsters stacked all on top of each other so that it’s impossible to tell if the monster around the corner has one friend with him or ten. There’s the fucking glitches, where I could walk down an empty hall with no enemies or traps and still take damage.

How about those awful controls? This is supposedly a twin-stick shooter, but the aiming on the right stick is shit and will send 99% of your shots into a wall. When almost all of the game is tight corridors, that’s not the least bit helpful. One would think using the face buttons to fire in a straight line might help, but NO. Why? Because no matter which face button you press, it still only fires in an “auto aim” manner, usually at the wrong enemy. Additionally, auto-aim only works for a short distance, and then the face buttons fire in whatever direction the character is facing. Absolutely fucking useless.

“Zoe, maybe you didn’t play it long enough to give it a fair chance,” you say. Nope. I played long enough to unlock the barbarian by fighting my way through to dungeon 30, and I unlocked 61% of all the trophies. I played as every class multiple times, for all the good that did, and I played long enough to collect enough class specific items so that three of my classes started at levels 2 and 3 instead of 1. In all that time playing, I went from a merely apathetic verdict of “meh” to full on hate for this piece of shit. The longer I played, the more I wanted to ask for a refund.

I give Loot Heroes 2 stars. I WANT so badly to give it 1, but I reserve that score for something so broken it’s unplayable. This is playable, but I can’t think of a single reason why I’d want to. Can’t delete this fast enough from my Vita to make room for something better.