Review #6: Christmas Indie Games Special

 

Platform: PC/Steam    
Type of controller: 360 Controller/Mouse+KB    
Install time: Various  
Dependancies (Included in installation): DirectX, VC Redist 2008 etc  
Notes about installation: None    

Game website: http://store.steampowered.com   
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Well hasn't this year gone by fast again... seems to get faster and faster as you get older!

This month's review is going to be a little different from the last, instead of reviewing one game i thought i would review 10 indie games instead!

Now because of the amount of games in this review, and because of their nature i won't be doing the deep review type stuff i normally do with the bigger name games, instead i will just give a brief synopsis of the game, what i found fun and not fun, and whether or not it was worth buying.

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Ok for first up we have Chime.
This game took me by surprise, i was disappointed with the small amount of levels, but i really enjoyed this. If you have ever played Lumines or Tetris and enjoyed them, you will most likely find this enjoyable too.
Basically this is a beat/music game but like Lumines the beat of the music and the matching of blocks is not critical to the game, it's more of a secondary background feature.
Also it has a the Portal theme song as the final stage, which when you have the rounds set to 11 mins, can actually go for up to 14mins!
Overall this game was definately worth the couple of dollars i paid for it, which i got more enjoyment out of than say a cup of coffee (and i love coffee so that's saying something!)
Total: 7/10

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Second on my list is The Undergarden.
No beating around the bush here, but this game is shit. Well to be fair the developers have done a good job on the art style, but my fairness ends there. This game was probably made for kids, which also makes it worse because the actual gameplay objective is still something i don't quite understand. I think you have to grab these glowing plant parts to use as weights with this bubble thing that grows around you when you press a button so i guess you could call this is a physics puzzler but i was so bored by this i gave up after the first 2 or 3 levels. This probably wasn't worth the couple of dollars it cost me.
Total: 3/10


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Third one on the list is Zombie Driver.
I've actually had this game for quite some time now but it has been in my "pile of shame" for months and months, i didn't even open it up until a few days ago when the Steam Treasure Hunt objective came up i thought it would be a good chance to check it out.
The one thing i have a problem with in this game is the view, more times than i would like to admit, i felt that queezy motion sickness coming on and had to stop playing for 5mins and get my bearings. If you could imaging an RTS diagonal top down view fixated on your car, that is what the view style is on Zombie Driver. You speed through the pretty awesome environments splattering any zombies that get in your way, rescuing survivors from arbitrary numbers of zombies is a specific area. That's pretty much all there is to it, if i could get past the motion sickness feeling it might be a much better game!
Total: 5.5/10

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Alright fourth one down we have The Polynomial.
Now this game is one for the trippers! Haha..
It's hard to actually class this is a game, it's more of a hybrid between a simple space shooter in 3D and a fractal generator/3D visualiser.
I have mentioned to a few friends of mine this game would be perfect for VDJing, because you can turn off all the 'game' elements and you fly around the awesome fractal visuals in first person.
As mentioned previously, you can also generate and save your own fractals as rendered images. Overall this game is hard to say if it was worth buying, if i ever had a party i would definately put this on a big screen and load the playlist of songs inside the game :)
Total: 6.5/10 (Hard to score this, i would say as a game itself 4/10 but as 3D visualiser 9/10)

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Number five on my list is Droplitz.
This game was hard to get used to at first, but it's reminiscent of some games that have "hacking" puzzles to open doors and stuff, and by hacking i mean plumbing skills.
Basically you rotate discs on the board to get the balls to flow from the top 2 output pipes to the bottom 3 pipes. Once you have successfully made a connection, it locks those discs and once all the balls reach their destination, those discs are eliminated from the board and more "drop" down in a bejewelled type manner.
This game was alright i guess but overall not very entertaining and i would probably play it only if i had nothing else to waste time with.
Total: 5/10

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Ok up next for number 6 we have Poker Night at the Inventory.
This is basically a celebrity poker game with 4 different video game celebrities from 4 different aspects of video gaming. You have Max from Sam & Max, Strong Bad from the Homestar Runner web comic series, The Heavy from Team Fortress 2 and Tycho from Penny Arcade.
This game is difficult to score because first impressions were awesome and the novelty of the dialogue between the characters wore off more and more as i played it more and more. If you can afford to spend the money to buy this game i would say its worth it just to hear all the banter between the characters once, but as a poker game itself it's not the best out there. I love Texas Hold 'Em poker but this game makes that style of poker look too easy. The computer characters hardly ever bluff, they are way too predictable but at the same time they can throw a curve ball and be very unpredictable, that would be ok if there was more of that unpredictable type stuff but it doesn't happen too often, and when it does no doubt you have bet all your money on your hand without realising that (most of the time Max) has a royal flush or something crazy and rare like that.
If you asked me to review this the day i got it i would of given it alot of praise, but after a while the dialogue repeats itself too much. (I want DLC characters for this!)
Total: 6/10

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Seventh on my list is Bejewelled 3.
This is the superstar of all things Indie. I"m not sure if you could class this as Indie anymore, when bejewelled first came out the small Brittish studio/website Popcap were only just finding their feet in the casual market, now Bejewelled is their biggest seller and a multi million dollar franchise. I've only put this game on the list because it's basically the AAA version in the Indie game category.
If you have played Bejewelled, you will know what to expect from this. I will say that the new things they have added have been given alot of thought and they are executed well. The addition of being able to swap gems as the next lot of gems are falling has given the game a new "speedplay" angle where you are matching gems faster than the game can restock the board with them. There are some other gameplay modes added, like a campaign/quest mode, but i think this was added purely to bring people back from Puzzle Quest, which is my favourite derivative of Bejewelled (It's also made by Aussie developers -- "Infinite Interactive" !)
Overall this game was worth the money, even if i won't play it all the time, it's a great time waster and very addictive once you get started.
Total: 7/10

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Ok number 8 we have AaAaAA!!! A Reckless Disregard for Gravity.
This is a strange game. The objective is to free fall through plates and rings until you reach the bottom, it reminded me alot of Pilot Wings on N64 but without the terrible graphics and handling. I'm not sure if i get this game, it's attempt at humour while sometimes amusing can be too obvious and it literally has signs saying "LOL LOOK HOW FUNNY WE ARE!!!111!ONE"
Ok fair enough i'm paraphrasing with that last one but they use that internet vernacular that some of us have grown to hate over the years, so be warned that this game is set for that special group of people who find that stuff funny or else you're going to be rolling your eyes more often than not.
Humor aside, the gameplay is good but the objectives can be very challenging and the controls don't help much either.
This is a game for people who love to fly through rings and stuff and play a whole game based around that concept, or else you won't find this very enjoyable.
Total: 4/10

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Alrighty second last on my list for number 9 is Bob Came in Pieces.
Refer to my Undergarden review above. No actually to be fair this is a bit better than The Undergarden, at least this is slightly more challenging and visually simplistic and the goals are clear. You fly around in this little space ship, in a platformer type world, collecting parts for your space ship that you can interchange to help solve different physics puzzles in the levels. That's about all there is to it, and like The Undergarden, is probably aimed at a younger audience.
One thing i should mention was while using the 360 controller for this, my mouse was very buggy ingame, because when you try and attach or detach ship parts, you can't use the 360 controller, and the mouse was all screwy at the ship upgrade screens.
Total: 4.5/10

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Ok last on my list is Shatter.
I think it might be best to break this mini review into 2 pieces, one for the story mode and one for the bonus mode.
As with most of the game above, i bought this game because of the Steam Treasure Hunt. Now i'm not saying that i bought all of these games simply to get the objective, but it was incentive to dive into the Indie game scene and checkout some of the lesser known titles. That said, the objective for this game was so 'balls ina  vice' difficult that i gave up after about 115 attempts, so in that respect it wasn't worth buying, however;

Story mode: This was pretty awesome, i have to say i'm so glad the game made you play through most of the story mode to unlock the bonus mode, or else this would of been a very short and derogatory review. The story mode in this game is basically like Peggle/Pong but with a twist, each level is designed very nicely, and the "balls" (i've heard them referred to as 'Spermoids') obey gravity and can be slightly controlled after you bounce them off the paddle. The graphics are quite good, almost like Geometry Wars but with solid textured objects instead of wireframe. The levels are challenging but not too difficult, and overall it was quite fun.

Bonus mode: Ugh well i really have to hold back with the swearing here, because this bonus mode is nothing short of ridiculous. Basically there are no blocks to 'shatter', and you start with 3 balls that get faster and faster with each paddle hit, you get 100,000 points for each time one of the balls hits the paddle, but because the paddle is curved, and because the balls obey gravity, soon enough you have this mess of speeding balls that you have to be so good with reflexes, but also your cognitive abilities need to be quite high to be able to track and predict where each ball is going to bounce, and where its going to be in the paddle end. Some people may find this thrilling and some may find it fun but the majority of what i've seen and read, most people find this frustrating and alot of those people are screaming on the forums that it's all down to chance/luck. In the game's defence, that's not entirely true, and also the people who are actually good at this mode claim it's all about reflexes which isn't entirely true either. It's a combination of your cognitive processing abilities, your hand eye coordination, luck and reflexes thrown into one, which for the average gamer like myself is too much to handle. I think Steam set the bar a little too high with the objective for this game, as 11 million points spread across 3 different maps with 100k per hit of the paddle sounds easy enough on paper, but that means you have to score an average of about 4 million points per map, which is 40 hits of the paddle. After about 20 hits the balls are going so fast that 98% of the time for me, i lost 2 or more balls around that 20th hit.

If you are going to get this game, disregard my Bonus mode review, and don't play it. Story mode is where the fun is at, and is the main feature of the game.
Total: (5/10 for story mode, 1/10 for bonus mode) 4.5/10

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Alright that brings me to the end of this mini review set and to the end of the 2010 reviews from me.
I would like to also mention that i have been playing Metro 2033 lately and could possibly be my first review for 2011, we'll see.
I have also just purchased Bad Company 2 and a couple of other games during this Steam Christmas sale, and that i might be also reviewing them next year.

2011 is going to be an awesome year for gaming so i can't wait to review things that i am actually looking forward to, like Homefront, Brink, Deus Ex 3, Future Soldier and more!

I would also like to give a special thanks to Steam/Valve for making quite an innovative scheme with the Treasure Hunt, it has been a good excuse to checkout some of these Indie games, some of which i was quite pleasantly surprised with.

Also a special thanks to all my readers, have a safe and awesome Xmas, and hope to see you in the new year!

-Jenkins

Review #5: Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit 2010

 

Platform: PC    
Type of controller: 360 Controller (Recommended)   

Install time: Approx 25mins  
Dependancies (Included in installation): DirectX9c,10,11, VCRedist 2008 

Notes about installation: Originally i thought i was having problems with the installation of this game however it turns out it was Win7 caching things it didn't need to. So aside from those problems on my end, installation went smooth.


Game website: http://hotpursuit.needforspeed.com    
Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need_for_Speed:_Hot_Pursuit_(2010_video_game) ----------------------------------------------------------------


My thoughts about the game;
Arcade racing games are the hardest to review i find, because they generally don't have a central story or even characters, and all that is left is basically the gameplay and presentation, so this week i will be omitting the 'Story & Character development' part of my review.
The very first thing i found strange about this game was there is no intro movie (However it does feature a cinematic teaser for Shift 2 -- set to come out in Spring 2011). For a game of this calibre, especially since the last official Hot Pursuit game was more than 8 years ago, i found the lack of any cinematic "FMV" to be quite strange.
The game shares alot of similarities with Burnout 3 and was heavily inspired by the original 3DO version of "Need for Speed".
If you have ever played a Burnout game before, you should know what to expect, however being one of those people who has played (many) Burnout games in the past, i was actually expecting a little bit more than what is offered. This isn't a huge problem, however the lack of any sort of Boost Chaining made me a little disappointed and the fact that they removed the option to turn off Takedown mini ingame cutscenes (which was in Burnout Dominator) was also disappointing and can make the game frustrating at times.
The range of cars in this game is also a bit what the fuck, because there are 51 "racer" cars, which are your typical run from the cops type of supercars and muscle cars, however the police car lineup is what surprised me, there are 49 total police cars to unlock in the game, which puts to shame any other game featuring playable police vehicles in the past...
This is bitter-sweet however, because the actual range of cars, while the selection is massive, the diversity of cars is lacking somewhat, and you can only use certain cars in certain 'event types'. This also bugged me a fair bit, while it makes sense to have the cars in some sort of category, you don't get much diversity in specs when you have to choose a car, for both racer and police career modes.. That basically means you can pick any car, and if you have enough skill, you will win the race regardless of what car you choose. I found this to be a too balanced portion of gameplay, where inbalance makes things more interesting.


Developer standpoint;

Difficulty
The difficulty in this game is (pardon the pun) difficult to judge. There is no difficulty options before events, and it seems that the grid of cars is split into different difficulty groups, which is randomised at the start of every race. As mentioned beforehand, you can basically choose any car and win the race if you have enough skill and it especially helps if you know the tracks and how the AI acts.
Some events are alot more difficult than others, for example in the Interceptor events (you as cop verse 1 racer) the time limits vary but are usually Gold: around 3mins Silver: Around 4 mins and Bronze: around 5mins, now with enough skill and decent timing, these Interceptor missions can be over in less than 1 min, however in the events called 'Preview' events, where you test-drive a car you don't own yet, you have to reach the finish line before the time runs out, and there are penalties for hitting anything... They can be the most difficult events, and the first time i played one it took at least 4 retries to nail the event and barely get a silver... It took another 4 different Preview events for me to actually get Gold... Like i said, some events are much easier than others, so expect to be restarting a few events simply because you were 0.75s behind in the time trails...

Animations and visual effects
The visual effects of this game are quite impressive, however the first thing i noticed was while driving a police car, and you have the emergency lights flashing, they will only light the world around you while at night, or if you are inside a tunnel, this causes some weird lighting effects when it's daytime, and you come out of a tunnel with almost blinding flashing red and blue lights into nothing, its like they are triggered to go from actual lights into just sprites as you exit the tunnel, which i found quite annoying (but you do get used it eventually).
The other visual effect i thought was impressive was if you scrape a car or a wall at night (or in tunnels -- see above), is there are orange (invisible) lights that strobe on the side of car where you are scraping a wall or something, i thought that was a good looking effect.
The one thing i don't like about this game that i thought could of been much better is the damage, its the one thing i liked about Burnout: Paradise, however they seem to have backtracked to an earlier technology because i've seen better damage on PS2 versions of Burnout (or even Flatout).
The other visual effect i thought was quite tacky but looks good at night, is the actual smoke from a burnout, you can tell they have gotten the idea straight out of GTA4 because you can even hold Brake + Accelerate to do the same wheel spin type thing, however the actual sprites of the smoke are good but the look of it seems cheap and tacky.

Level design
The level design in HP2010 is very impressive, however an old foe of mine is back again, clipping. Before i praise this game for how impressive the levels look i have to talk about how bad fucking clipping is getting in games. I have probably mentioned this in nearly every review i've done so far, but come on seriously i shouldn't have to mention clipping because as a hobbyist developer myself, clipping is the one thing that i would want to get done right, not just done. I wouldn't care about it so much if they had a better way of hiding the invisible walls, but nearly every developer these days don't bother with something to actually hide the fact there is an invisible wall there. For example i was taking a shortcut through this hotel thing i don't know, anyway there was a small gutter on the left, and i thought i would cut across it to save time but also because it appeared that the racing line went that way anyway, but no clipping had other plans for me, i slammed into the invisible wall right above the gutter, and proceeded to lose control and crashed, i also lost that race, so i went back to that spot, and what a surprise, the gutter would of only been about 3 inches high if that, and the bumper of my car was at least another 2 or 3 inches higher than the gutter, so basically they couldn't even be bothered to either put a higher wall or actually let me drive across the small piece of sidewall.

Now onto my praise of these levels, wow just wow, these are some very good looking maps, well to be more precise, it is just 1 big map, actually reminded me of the Just Cause 2 map, crossed with Burnout Paradise, and basically all other Hot Pursuit games aswell. There is something familiar about all the landscapes yet fresh and very good looking. I want to make a special mention of the waterfalls here, because they are some of the best distant waterfalls i've ever seen in a game, for a few moments when i first came around a long sweeping corner and saw that beautiful backdrop landscape, i thought it was a video texture for a moment, but it wasn't until i started getting closer that i realised it was some sort of particle emitter, i was actually able to get close enough to see what it was made of, and believe me it looked 50 times better from a distance than up close.

Sound design
Haha well the sound design in this game is quite over the top, i mean everything sounds great, however i suggest you turn down the volume in options before playing, at least to about 80-85, because if left default they are somehow louder than any other sound on your computer...
The amusing part about the sound design of this game seems to be almost a tongue in cheek response to something the community may have said to Criterion about their previous games, or more simply Criterion just have a fetish for 'whoosh' sounds for every single moving thing in the game and menus lol.
I am not exaggerating here, i suspect this game has at least 10,000 sound files if not more, because everything has a sound effect, and while that might have been what they were aiming for, it gets a bit old fast.
The music of this game is something that disappointed me aswell, while it was good to see local lads Pendulum get a couple of tracks on there, that's basically all i can remember, and the other tracks just scream of generic rock/metal.. I mean even Burnout Dominator on PSP had a much bigger and better selection of music than this game does, and Burnout Dominator is 15 times smaller than this game in MB size.
Also, where is the custom tracks feature? I don't get why something like this was removed, because it was a faily big feature of both previous Hot Pursuit games and Burnout games. Music is essential to the atmosphere of a video game, regardless of the genre, and it's something i feel Criterion have overlooked.


Misc stuff
Because there is no point in including a 'Story & Character development' section for this review, i thought i would put a 'Misc stuff' section because i still have some more miscellaneous things to say about the technical stuff in this game.


I hate being forced to watch every screen.. and this game excels at that and then some. Yes you can skip the opening cutscene from every event thank god, however what you can't skip is things like unlocking new content, which you will do alot of, and you also can't skip or disable the takedown cameras (as mentioned previously). If i was able to skip these screens and forced cutscenes it would shorten the time i play this game in a session, and personally i would feel more immersed in the game if all i had to wait for was loading screens.


Another thing that really bothered me considering this is a AAA video game title made in 2010, is that there are only 3 views for racing, bumper-cam, hood-cam or rearview-cam. The lack of a cockpit cam seems to be almost a deliberate move, i suspect because it would of been too difficult to design interirors for the police vehicles, so to only have cockpit view on racer vehicles would of seemed bias and unfair, so it was most likely removed for those reasons, because i know from experience that coding additional views for a racing game is quite easy if you know what Vectors are.


I should also mention that i played this in offline mode, because my internet was disabled for undisclosed reasons. This meant that i couldn't check out the Autolog feature, which is a big part of the game, and also that Free race mode is completely pointless in offline mode. This bugged me alot, because not everyone who buys this game is going to buy it exclusively for MP, personally i have always enjoyed the SP careers and free race events in racing games before, and MP is just a bonus to me, however this game is heavily centred around the Autolog feature and it's online modes, so excluding something like AI from free race is just silly, because i was really looking forward to just cruising around as a police car and arresting random racers, with no real objectives, however that's not possible in offline mode, and to make it worse, the game mentions nothing of this, so you might be cruising around for 45mins before you realise that you aren't going to get to chase anyone because it seems to be an MMO mode for online players.


The exclusion of any sort of vehicle upgrades or aesthetic addons (like vinyls, or body kits etc) was disappointing aswell, i was kind of expecting not to have any performance upgrades because they seem to have forgotten or stopped caring about that aspect of the Need For Speed series, which is also a big shame because that is an extensive and awesome feature of the NFS Underground games.
You can't even have custom colours on your car, you can only choose from the 6-10 presets they give you per car (which also change depending on the car).


The last beef i have with this game is the notable absence of any Ferrari's. For an EA published (and probablt funded) game, i don't see how they couldn't afford the license for the cars, so that's probably not it, maybe Ferrari didn't want their cars to be involved with a cops & robbers type game, who knows.


Last but certainly not least, i would like to give credit to Criterion for finally adding different lights & siren options that have been badly needed in Hot Pursuit games for a long time. Unfortunately i think they may have stolen this idea from a mod for GTA4 called "ELS", which enables similar siren options with police vehicles (actually ELS has alot more options to do with the lights aswell as the sirens).
There are basically 3 modes with an additional short burst siren. With the 360 controller you hold the Y button to disable/enable the lights & sirens, when they are active you can press the Y button again to cycle through the 3 different siren modes, additionally with them all off and disabled, you can tap the Y button and it will do the short burst siren which i thought was pretty neat. The other cool thing they added which also seems straight from GTA4 is the ability to turn your headlights on and off, it is nice to have a whole button dedicated to this (X on 360 controller), however it seems like a waste of a button, which could of been used for other things like i don't know, say holding it enables your emergency lights with no sirens or something, that would of been nice.


Closing statement
Well it's hard to really say much more about this game that i haven't said above, however i would like to commend Criterion for having the balls to go back to NFS's roots and create a very familiar yet somehow refreshingly new NFS expereince.
Lots of future games could learn alot from this game, however i think that Criterion should also learn that "going back to your roots" doesn't have to mean you somewhat limit the gameplay options you implement. I'm also struggling to think of a score for this because usually i rate it out of 100, with broken down sections out of 10 (as shown below). As i haven't fully finished the game yet (i've completed about 27% of the total game, played about 6 hours worth but that also includes driving around in free race for 50mins looking for any sort of opponents and realising that there weren't any).
The other thing i wanted to say was that for a gamer like myself, living in Australia definitely has alot of downfalls, because from what i can work out, the Online part of this game, which is a big chunk of the game, is hosted on 1 central server, or possibly 1 regional central server, meaning that even if there was an Oceania server, it would most likely be hosted in China or Japan, and for an Aussie like myself, that's not good for online. So even if i was able to test the online capabilities, i think it would be alot like NFS: World was online, laggy, unresponsive and almost impossible to actually enjoy a decent match even against local friends.

Story: NA/10 
Handling: 6/10
AI: 8/10
Sound: 6.5/10
Voice: 5/10    
Controls: 6/10    
Models: 8.5/10  
Level Design: 9/10  
Textures: 8/10  
Technical Complexity: 5/10    
Replayability: 6/10    

Total: 68/100