Over the past week my fat arse has been struggling with a pretty nasty cold and so I’ve been keeping it relatively light on the GAMING front. In spite of this I sat through the entirety of SteamWorld: Heist as I keep occasionally hearing good things about it, and thought it was finally time to see if this was actually a good game or just babbies first TBS. Fortunately it’s the former and SteamWorld: Heist has a solid amount of stages which it fills with a varied assortment of enemies, across the game’s three separate acts. Before diving fully into the game’s mechanics though, there are a few things to note. Firstly your crew members can never permanently die, although if they die on a mission they get 0 XP from it while if everyone dies you lose a big chunk of your existing currency (H20 in the case of this game). Secondly these crew members are pre-baked from an existing roster of 9 potential characters split across a handful of classes, each of which can only utilise certain weapons which are again split into multiple types. Finally missions give you a certain amount of stars, with stars being lost for having team mates die or failing to collect the (occasionally hidden) “epic loot” within a stage, which is important because at certain parts of the game there’s a barrier that only goes away once a certain amount of stars have been collected within that act. With that basic housekeeping out of the way, I’m happy to report that the characters are all generally pretty powerful and that you’ll be able to get through the game with whichever ones you pick, although you’d be remiss to sleep on Sally. You see while every other class can only fire once per turn, Sally can fire again if she gets the killing blow on an enemy. This doesn’t sound massively overpowered, but when you consider that you’ll only have 4 squad-mates available on a mission at most adding an extra shot per round really begins to add up. The other classes are still cool too, but her bounty hunter class is the closest the game comes to having an “essential” choice.

Regardless of which character(s) you pick to take on your missions, they all have 10 levels and have 4 inventory slots that can be filled with 1 weapon and then 3 utility items. Annoying enough you have an extremely limited inventory space and items which are equipped still count towards it, so you’ll often by spending your hard earned err… water on inventory storage upgrades solely so that you can have the pre-requisite 16 items for those 4 character missions. Additionally weapon selling can only be done either at the end of each mission (when you get new weapons/items) or from the pause screen for some weird reason. Which means you can be in a store, see an item that sounds good, then have to go fiddle with your inventory for a minute before you’re able to buy the item. It’s not a huge annoyance, but a weird design choice and one that means you’ll constantly be faffing with your inventory. Especially as you keep gaining items, many of which are duplicates. Oh and did I mention that the game only marks equipped items if they’re currently equipped? So if you do some smaller missions then item’s stop being marked as equipped, especially if you’re switching characters (lest you end up with 3 at max level and 3 at low levels). Fortunately the levelling system doesn’t make huge changes, but grinding up the lower squad mates can be a bit of a chore because of this system. Inventory is arguably the largest factor in an individual squad mates effectiveness, as outside of some HP/movement increases all that your levelling up does is increase or unlock their class abilities. These abilities are powerful, but generally new squad mates start with them unlocked anyway. Constantly cycling out older weapons is by far one of the most important parts of the game, as new enemy types are constantly introduced and they generally continue to gain more and more and more HP.

Speaking of enemies, the game has a surprisingly large variety considering that the game only has around 45ish stages to play through. The main reason for the divergence in enemy types is that each act introduces a whole new faction of baddies, each of which has it’s own unique enemies. While each faction have significant overlap, the way that they operate is still pretty different and the way that the game leans into it’s level design emphasises this. Initially you’re facing scrapper bots which don’t have too many gimmicks, although they still have snipers that rarely move, shielded enemies that can only be damaged from behind and low health melee bots that try to rush you. The latter diesel-bots have standard enemies with partial shields, alongside a “goop” mechanic that a synchronises with bullets and explosive damage to cover swathes of the map in potentially flammable (and highly damaging) material. Finally the Vectrons make almost excessive uses of shields, which require you to aggressively focus your fire lest you be unable to take them down. They also have laser weapons that take a turn to charge and fire at a designated area, but can shoot through cover making them a menace. Plus their basic infantry can teleport for free at the end of their turn, making them a pain to pin down in one place. As a consequence of the myriad foes arranged against you, the game does a good job of feeling fresh and rarely if ever feels stale. Especially as despite each level being semi-procedurally generated, the different objectives and the inclusion of generators that must be smashed and alarms that continually spawn in tougher and tougher enemies keep the pace up. This pacing is then neatly tied into a risk reward system, as shooting enemies doesn’t give you any bonuses such as XP and instead you need to gather up loot that is spread across the stages seemingly at random. As such it’s common to have to choose between running through a stage to keep reinforcements off your back versus aiming for the maximum reward, or to decide whether to finish off an enemy or grab what could be a useful upgrade. It’s a good system that keeps each stage fresh, especially as higher rankings require you to gather the pre-placed “epic loot” that often requires you to go out of your comfort zone.

The combat is therefore generally pretty fun and while the game does have a slight habit of spiralling out of control, it’s rarely the game’s fault and more often caused by your greed. You see if you lose a squad mate you’re losing one hit per turn (and remember, almost every character can only fire once per turn) and the ability to flank certain enemies, which makes the remaining combat encounters harder, which then gets doubly dangerous when enemies are spawning in due to an alarm being triggered. Losing a squad member due to poor positioning is often the difference between a mission being easy and exceedingly difficult. One mechanic the game has that keeps the game tense is that each shot “sways” slightly while you’re aiming, kinda like Valkyria Chronicles if you’ve ever played that game. What it means in real terms is that unless you’re using a grenade or a sharpshooter weapon (the type that your starting character wields) then you might miss a shot slightly. Over the course of the game you’ll gradually get adept at this mechanic and can even use it to bounce ricochet shots around to hit enemies in creative ways, but it can also mean that you just whiff a shot entirely. In a game where you often have a timer counting down to dump more enemies on you and in which you can only fire a limited number of shots a turn, this mechanic adds some much needed stress to the game. Even if I’ll be the first to admit that it can be exceedingly frustrating. Fortunately you only lose your currency when you fail a mission and all missions can be replayed infinitely, so it’s only a light penalty. This also means that you can leave a mission with a low ranking, then go back to replay it later once you’ve levelled up your team and gained new equipment. So the difficulty is rarely overwhelming, although it can creep back in no matter how well you’re doing.

Outside of these missions there isn’t really anything to be found in the game, for better or for worse. While there is a New Game+ mode, it doesn’t carry much over to your second run outside of letting you start with all the characters you previously unlocked. Instead the real “side game” of SteamWorld: Heist is collecting hats, of all things. These hats don’t do anything, but the game has invested a weird amount of time into having a variety of hats, giving them to enemies, letting you loot them and even simulating the feeling of having your hat shot-off during a tense firefight. Considering that most of the in-game stores are kinda useless and that you’ll constantly be cycling through your inventory anyway, these hats constitute the majority of your spending throughout the course of your playthrough. The only other thing to do would be to listen to the robotic band that can be found in each bar, which plays through a handful of tracks that are part of the game’s faux-retro theme. As SteamWorld: Heist is embracing the steampunk, aesthetic the music is a mix of western themes with some light swing-band vibes, although I’ll confess that I’m not an expert in this sub-genre by any means. Generally the game is sparing with it’s musical theme and instead you get some standard background ambiance during engagements, although after defeating each boss you do get a specific track from the OST that fits the game’s theme. SteamWorld: Heist also features an announcer who narrates over brief cutscenes between each of the game’s acts, in a faux trans-Atlantic accent. These cutscenes are one of the major methods the game uses to give you it’s modest story, alongside some brief chatter between characters who all make robotic sounds instead of actually talking to you. The story is minimal but the narrator helps to infuse the game with some personality and without him the game might feel a little bland. It’s nothing amazing, but it helps to make the game standout, much like it’s competent but charming art style which nicely distinguishes the various areas and zones by imbuing each of the factions with their own feeling.

In summary then, SteamWorld: Heist is a competent TBS with minimal story telling or side content in favour of focusing on it’s missions and combat. These encounters do a good job of balancing risk and reward, which encouraging the player to go fast from mission to mission. The shot sway in SteamWorld: Heist can be annoying, but it does ensure that the game remains challenging and generally the game is pretty flexible with the characters and load-outs you use while not being excessively challenging. So SteamWorld: Heist is a pretty solid game with a nice soundtrack and one or two things that help it standout from the pack. Not the sort of game I’d consider a must-play, but as it’s on pretty much every system (PC/Playstation/Nintendo/Xbawx) for a reasonably low price I’d recommend it to anyone looking for a TBS game. It’s an especially good fit for handheld systems, or for players who like to play a game while listening to a podcast.

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Quick Note – As of the Nvidia 2000 series of graphics cards, this game will crash after a single level with near 100% consistency if you have “Flux” enabled. This physics simulation therefore needs to be turned OFF on modern machines.

Dangerous Golf is a game I don’t remember buying, but which came in a $1 bundle wayyy back in 2016. Considering that this game came out in… 2016 I think it’s safe to say that it didn’t meet with a huge amount of commercial success straight off the bat, quite possibly because of the largely critical reviews it received with an average below 60%. Which is kind of a shame, because for an indie game Dangerous Golf has a decent amount of polish and genuinely decent graphics alongside a pretty good presentation. For those who don’t know (a phrase I seem to trot out every week) the game itself is a puzzle game centred around trying to smash as many items as possible with your golf ball. You get a standard shot, which if it destroys enough things will turn into a Smashbreaker shot and then once that’s done you generally get a putting shot with which to sink the ball into the hole. Everything I’ve just said can vary from level to level, but generally speaking that’s the way the cookie crumbles. You’ll want to smash a bunch of stuff on your first shot, use the Smashbreaker to make your way to the hole and then sink it in. If you fail to get the ball in the hole, then you don’t automatically fail but your score is halved. And this game is entirely about scoring, with each level having bronze/silver/gold/platinum medals which are granted solely on the basis of score – with a failure to get even a bronze medal resulting in failure and the game refusing to unlock any new “courses” to play.

To go into more detail about how Dangerous Golf actually operates, there are actually a few types of course in which you’ll be playing. Generally you’ll be able to shoot the ball as per normal, will be able to unlock Smashbreaker shots and will be highly recommended to sink the ball into the hole which is visible at all times. Sometimes you’re playing on a course where you can’t unlock the Smashbreaker shots and sometimes you won’t be able to see the flag until you’ve gathered up enough score with your previous shot. Sometimes the flag will be visible but is in an area which you can only access by breaking through a door, or by utilising a warp-hole. Occasionally you’ll have a glue effect applied, which means that shots stick to walls (but not the floor) and that you can fire as many balls as you like until you run out of glue shots. Often these glue courses also let you place bombs, or automatically place bombs wherever the ball sticks. To reiterate, the key point of this game is to smash items (the dollar value of this damage constituting your score) and to try to smash specified objects which will give you a bonus should all items of that type be destroyed (e.g. 2 Pianos or 14 Vases). Sometimes the game will automatically fail your attempt for entering a certain area or hitting certain objects which are designated as hazards. Finally at the end of each “tour” which the game uses to refer to each batch of 10 levels, you’ll enter a putting challenge in which there are myriad flags that you need to put your balls into. On these courses you only get a few missed shots, before your attempt automatically ends. Oh and I almost forget that sometimes Dangerous Golf applies a somewhat strict time limit, or the fact that you can occasionally “drop” your ball into a bucket or trolley so as to let you take another bonus Smashbreaker shot. Oh and there are sometimes bonus flags which give you an extra putt shot plus a score bonus, alongside the ability to get another normal shot if your smash-shot lands too close to the final flag.

Have I made myself clear? No? Well fortunately the game is actually pretty simple to understand which you might not believe after the game starts with a near 5 minute long tutorial video which has 0 interactive elements. Thankfully most courses are pretty obvious, and the real challenge is just figuring out which thing to hit first so that you can bounce your ball into the right area to smash enough things to unlock a “Smashbreaker” shot. These Smashbreaker shots let you control the ball as it bounces around, up and down, in a flaming inferno and smashes almost everything it touches. Due to the combination of ball control and the fact that it becomes considerably bouncier, you can then farm up those last targets that you’d missed. Ideally you’ll also get the ball near the final flag for your putt shot. Basically the whole game is just smashing things, so you can bounce around so you can then be near the final flag. Which is fine, because the occasional twists work around this gameplay and are generally done well enough that the game feels fairly varied. As a bonus the game is pretty snappy to play and has a decent level of visual polish, so it’s a pleasant enough little diversion. Yet there are still a few aspects which are kind of annoying and which I believe are the real reason that this game has received such a kicking post-launch. The first of which is that the difference between a GREAT shot and a totally rubbish one can be pretty subtle and so it’s very easy to just miss a shot you needed which can then kill your run dead. Then you need to watch your ball fail, then rack up your score, then get told to retry, then wait a bit to reload the level, so that you can watch the overview of the course, so you can take your next shot but slightly to the left. It’s not a huge issue, but I found myself sometimes baffled as to why a shot failed to work on occasion and considering this is a game all about the final score (with most of the game’s depth being in your attempt to get the max score for each of the 100 levels) it’s a bit of a concern.

There are also some oddities with the game’s camera angle which can be especially grating on the “glue” stages, as you’ll find yourself stuck unable to see the ball will take or have what should be a perfectly valid shot bounce off something that you thought you’d be clear of. Generally the bronze score requirements aren’t massively challenging, but the system can be a pain to deal with. Then there is a weird bug related to the game’s physics engine which will cause a guaranteed crash on Nvidia 2000/3000/4000+ series cards due to software that hasn’t been updated in the game, alongside the fact that the scoreboards and leaderboards have already gone offline. The main issue with the game however is that the core gameplay system, in spite of the variety is a bit one-note and therefore a lot of players lose interest in a fairly brief period of time. From the Steam achievements; 88.5% of players started up the game, 19.2% finished the 10th level and 2.3% finished all 100 levels. Perhaps it’s just me, but personally I felt that some of my best shots were total accidents and that some of my failed shots were frankly “unfair” (boohoo). I think the real issue with the game is that it tends to have a narrow margin for error, even though the physics can feel a bit rough around the edges. This then conflicts with the overall tone of the game being one of fast paced FUN, even though every course starts with a slow overview and in spite of the fact that each shot has to be planned with some care lest you miss.

And there really isn’t too much else to say, as while the game itself is enjoyable enough it always feels a touch at odds with itself. It’s presentation leans into the fast paced nature, but it’s actually a relatively methodical game. It wants to see very silly and fun but at it’s heart it’s a puzzle game. It’s overall a fun little puzzle destruction game, but still quite a weird game to describe. There’s a decent amount of variation but most courses boil down to the same thing, namely aiming for the targetted objects while avoiding the hazards and ultimately trying to get into the final hole. Whether you’ve got the ability to stick to walls, use buckets to gain extra Supersmash shots, can see the flag or need to reveal the flag everything is pretty much the same albeit with various gimmicks in play. As such Dangerous Golf is a game that would probably be fun as a lazy couch co-op game, but is hard to earnestly recommend unless you really like destruction physics or are interested in a light hearted puzzle game. I had an alright time playing it, although I’d be lying if I didn’t confess that I found my mind wandering a bit between stages.

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Quick Note – Snapshot has two technical issues that you might want to be aware of ahead of time. Firstly the CHEEVOS do not stack, so if you want all of the completion achievements then you’ll need to either deal with downloading saves from the internet or only do the bare minimum before gradually re-watching the ending for each of the completion milestones. Also if you’re playing the game on PC and have a zoom level above 100%, then this will screw with the game and you’ll need to reset your display settings to have zoom at 100%.

Oh Snapshot, you little scamp thinking you could cower away behind all those games I didn’t get in a bundle over a decade ago. Thinking you could avoid the CRITICAL GAZE of my all mighty blog and it’s dedicated following of uhm… 5 people who don’t even read most of these “reviews”? Well you were wrong buddy, because after vaguely remembering a good friend’s recommendation I’ve finally decided to track you down and figure out why the hell he thought you were a good game. Which sounds harsh but honestly, while I enjoyed the first hour or so of the game I spent most of my 6 hours wondering why everyone seemed to be leaving nice reviews. After all, a mere 2% of players actually bothered finishing this game even though someone in a rush could easily bang it out in a couple of hours. Like any good flatterer, I’ll start with a positive and note that I really liked the central concept of the game which is a puzzle platformer where you can snapshot (GEDDIT???) various items within a stage to then place again somewhere else. This means that finding and getting items constitutes much of the level design, with many items often being blocked by “no photography” zones that prevent you from snapping a quick pic until you’ve done something – generally involving hitting a switch or putting a box on something. These little puzzles are never too hard, but most of the time offer a modest little teaser of challenge and for those who aren’t satisfied, each stage has both a bonus “objective” of sorts to snap a pic of, plus there are time trials for every stage which are genuinely pretty tough.

With all that being said, the fact that the puzzles are kinda easy is a tough sell for a game that bills itself as a puzzle game. After all, if you bought a book of crosswords or Sudoku puzzles and found out that they were all a piece of piss you’d probably feel smug for a couple minutes and then be a tad disappointed. While Snapshot has a couple of puzzles me and my COLOSSAL intellect found a bit challenging (they took MINUTES to solve I tell you), most are pretty basic to be honest. The game’s real challenge is instead not the puzzle part of this puzzle platformer, but the platformer part due to a combination of finicky controls with weird momentum mechanics and how annoying it can be to need to take a picture of something at the perfect moment for it to “solve” a puzzle. To give examples of both, our plucky protagonist can’t just step down from a ledge without flinging himself without gusto, meaning you need to jump for these small little gaps and frankly the jump momentum is also kinda screwed up especially once you start needing to bounce off various objects. As for the snapshotting, the principle is sound but sometimes (i.e. more often than you’d like) you’ll need to do something like place an object while you’re doing a jump so that you can bounce off it or not drown in lava like an absolute loser. Unfortunately this is harder than it sounds because your lovely little camera not only needs to capture pictures exactly, but remembers where things were within the boundaries of the photo, which will then occasionally cause it to refuse to place an object where you actually bloody wanted it. To add insult to injury, you can rotate objects but it controls like absolute arse and you may as well shove a tablet stylus up your bunghole and control it that way for how intuitive it feels. This becomes especially apparent when you need to rotate the objects your deploying, for them to actually be useful. Sometimes you need to remember the momentum of a falling object, so you can rotate it at an angle to use it to shoot upwards so that you can then knock something over. A task which should be easy but due to your pedantic camera rushing to let you place objects, and the pain in the butt rotation controls this can quickly become surprisingly annoying. When playing Snapshot I frequently knew the solution to a puzzle, but would still spend minutes trying to persuade the controls to let me just solve the damn thing and move on with my life.

As mentioned earlier, there is also an additional “objective” within each stage – namely to take a photo of a random object. These are fun to hunt for and generally require either a bit of exploration, but a bit of extra puzzle solving. There are two catches with them however. Firstly you need to hang on to that photo(!), so now you can only have 2 usable photos for capturing and placing objects at a time as opposed to the normal 3. Secondly the game doesn’t believe in checkpoints, I can only assume because the Berlin Wall had checkpoints and nothing related to that odious symbol of Stalinist tyranny can EVER be allowed to infest fun little indie games. As a consequence I quite often found myself 4 minutes into a level, after having spent most of those minutes pissing around persuading to do what I wanted, only to see the optional bonus objective area and scoff. No thanks buddy. I’m not braving insta-death spike walls for the off chance that I can get a picture of a dohickey that doesn’t do anything, in a game where the completion achievements are totally broken anyway. Other than these little bonus objectives, the game doesn’t really have any content outside of the stages of which there are 3 per level, with 9 levels per world and 4 worlds for a total of 108 stages. Which sounds good but honestly they could’ve culled the bottom third and been better off for it, fortunately you can skip around 4 levels (so 12 stages) per world without any consequences. With that being said, you must ALWAYS do the first level with it’s 3 stages otherwise you will be verboten from playing any of the others in that world and thus BANNED from getting the ending.

So why do I think that they could’ve just had less stages and ended up with a better game? Well the simple reason is that most levels follow the same pattern: Introduce gimmick in very short stage 1, implement gimmick in a fun way for stage 2, implement draw out level for stage 3 to prove MASTERY. Which in and of itself is fine, but when the gimmick sucks it means you just get fed up around the end of stage 2 because your character is just ever so slightly annoying to control and the gimmick isn’t fun and now you’ve slipped on some stupid jump so you have to do it all again and half the level is waiting for shit to happen and you already figured out the goddamn solution 5 minutes ago and ugh. My personal “favourite” examples would be any level from World 4 involving the magnetic push/pull because it’s imprecise as fuck and annoying because those levels are riddled with insta-kill spikes, in stages where the gimmick is that you have magnets messing with your momentum. They’re not all BAD but as a gimmick it just kinda sucks. Same with the cloud focused stages, which were fun-ish at first but man once you manage to fall between them it just feels like a slap in the face because it looks like there’s no gap there and then WHOOPS do it all go again lmao. Then sometimes you get a gimmick like the big bombs you can jump off that are just fun and kinda silly but before you know it, you’ve done that level and there are no more big bombs to play with, because we’re onto another shit gimmick at breathtaking speed. My point basically is that it feels the devs came up with like 80 ideas for some puzzles and threw them all in the game, instead of sticking with the best dozen or so. There are meditating monkeys that cause a platform to move between them for example and those levels were actually really fun, because you had to account for obstacles and the platform timing while being able to move those amiable apes around. Then they stopped being in the game 20 minutes later so we could have a bunch of shitty ass magnet levels. To each their own but this is the indie puzzle equivalent of sticking the whole pot of pasta at the wall to see what sticks.

Yet in spite of finding a lot of levels to just blow chunks, I’m not going to be too mean to an indie game that was very cheap like 10 years ago and honestly was done by people who just wanted to make a fun game. I think the fact that they have a thoroughly paltry 2% finish rate is indictment enough, but I don’t Snapshot. I don’t get who is earnestly recommending it either, considering that it’s a real hit or miss smorgasbord of an experience that has been forgotten by the gaming industry but you know, you could do much worse than Snapshot honestly. At least the graphics are nice, the game has a cutesy air and a very minimal plot that’s still enough to keep you semi-interested in carrying on. The levels are sometimes bad, sometimes good, sometimes bland but overall there’s enough good stages that it’s worth a quick bash for the curious. As for the soundtrack it’s just pretty good, so thumbs up to the music man. I wouldn’t listen to it outside of the game and it’s not OUTSTANDING or anything, but it’s pretty fitting and pleasant enough. As for the amount of content, well you get over a hundred stages which often have bonus objectives and the time trials are seriously difficult so if you wanted to be an obsessive, this game is actually damn good value for money. For the more casual player, you’ll just get bored before finishing it to be totally honest. You really have to be either PRO-INDIE GAMES YEAH INDIE DEVS RULE SCREW THE MAINSTREAM MANNNNNN or just love puzzle platformers to really care about this one. Yet like I said, I don’t hate and just wish they’d been more prudent about which levels they actually bothered to release. Hell they could’ve just said “here are the main stages, and here are the bonus stages” or something and it would’ve been fine. Sometimes less is more, like if I’d eaten less pies I’d probably be more attractive.

In conclusion then, Snapshot is a game I don’t really recommend despite not hating it and enjoying some of the levels. Unfortunately it’s just kind of a drag for many stages, and while the visuals, soundtrack and the like are charming they’re not enough to push me through a game with some annoying controls. Like WHY does my freaking camera cursor MOVE WITH ME (so now I can’t take a picture of the bounce jump I’ll need again once I land) and why does this then IMPACT MY MOMENTUM FOR JUMPS who the fuck thought that was a good idea???? In all seriousness though Snapshot is an OK/10 puzzle game from a bygone era when indie games were still kinda new and exciting and as a consequence I can forgive the bad levels in favour of the good ones. The developers had to put into making this game a reality because guess what, it’s not yet another goddamn UE5/Unity game. Which means I gave it the benefit of the doubt, played through it til the end with 51% overall completion and… honestly I don’t know if it was worth it. Therefore Snapshot does not get a recommendation, but I’m not gonna give it any particular hatred either. It’s just an OK game. No more, no less, if you got it in a bundle maybe take a look, otherwise meh don’t worry about it.

The post Snapshot appeared first on Big Boaby Gaming.

First up is the wannabe Star Fox imitator “Redout: Space Assault” (henceforth referred to as “AS”) which in spite of the name has nothing to do with the quasi-popular high speed racing game Redout, aside from one or two shared sound effects. Now Redout was widely seen as a spiritual successor to Wipeout on it’s release and while it did have some differences, that inspiration was pretty nakedly and unabashedly worn on it’s sleeve. Space Assault is a similar attempt to piggy-back off a formerly popular but now dormant IP, and unfortunately it completely and utterly sucks. The first of AS’s myriad issues is that it’s a mobile phone game port (yay!) which is not disclosed anywhere on it’s Steam page with the exception of the mixed review section. Now I was willing to let this one slide, against my better judgement, as I thought that a Star Fox clone didn’t really need many controls as the whole point is that it’s an on-rails shooter. So all you’d really need is the ability to shoot and do a modicum of movement across the screen, which theoretically a smartphone could handle. Alas the game handles poorly and has a weird feel to it that I can’t quite put into words, but essentially you always feel a little sluggish and the enemy projectiles have the same issue. This means dodging them can be weirdly annoying, an issue that really makes the game a pain in the butt. To make sure it wasn’t just a SKILL ISSUE I went and played the original Star Fox on SNES, only to discover that I didn’t have that issue at all and so it was just AS living up to it’s moniker.

But(t) of course just having weird controls and a suspect pedigree wouldn’t be enough for me to totally drop the game, as I’ve beaten around 600ish releases and honestly a lot of them had some issues. What makes AS so wretched is just the lack of any redeeming features. The story is cliché and bear in mind, this is cliché within the context of videogame writing. It is so, so, aggressively bland and utterly fails to provide even the flimsiest reason for the player to engage with it or care about any of the characters. These characters also don’t do themselves any favours because their dialogue is below “Direct-to-DVD sequel” levels and it feels like every line of dialogue was cranked out by a bored intern on a single, lazy afternoon. The voice actors meanwhile appear to be totally aware that the plot, writing and characters are all a big pool of wank because they put zero effort into their roles. In space no one can hear you scream, so why bother having any dialogue with emotion, wit, charm or warmth? I can only assume they had random members of staff perform these lines because honestly everyone has the same accents (despite ostensibly being a diverse international group) and no one can act. As for the rest of the sounds, you’ve got standard PEWPEW space laser noises. Alongside a totally forgettable OST with some occasional attempts to insert PUMPIN electronic music during the action sequences. Last but not least, you’ve got a missile lock-on noise so enjoy a slightly tinny beep beep beep every time an enemy shoots a missile at you – which they do quite frequently!

And you’ll need to frequently avoid those enemy missiles with a half-hearted barrel roll feature as you have a Hull strength life bar and a regenerating Shield. So far, so Sci-Fi. But for some reason a bunch of random attacks just ignore the shield, to the point that in the early game it’s pretty much 50/50 as to whether you can regenerate any damage or not. Fortunately the developers have included absolutely 0 penalty for dying (I guess it’s a phone game so they know the controls are garbage?) …Well that’s not entirely true, as you lose the money you’ve accumulated thus far in that mission when you are instantly respawned exactly where you died. Although as the money can only be used for really, really lousy upgrades that barely make a difference (e.g. you need to buy the missile upgrade ten times to go from shooting 3 missiles per salvo to 4) AND you get most of your money from objectives and upgrade cards (you can equip one of these at a time, and they do really exciting things like increase your shield bar by 6%) it’s a very light-touch punishment. Speaking of the missile upgrades, you have two main ways of attacking the baddies; your normal laser weapon which can be swapped during the game for a variety of equally useless types and missiles which are much better because they do more damage and auto-lock on. You have infinite ammo for both, but the enemy health bars have been deliberately designed so that you’ll need to constantly spam both weapons to clear through everything in good time. This wouldn’t be an issue, but some missions just abruptly end after around 3 minutes if you didn’t shoot enough of the bad guys down. But don’t worry, as the missions are very bland anyway and you’ll probably not even notice that you’re replaying them as they’re basically all premised around doing the same thing against the same enemies (seriously the Act 1 boss and the Act 2 boss are the same). To it’s credit the game does have some “free flight” missions where it dumps you in space surrounded by the same props that it uses in every other mission, but this time you need to find the enemies as they won’t come to you! This would be more interesting if your space ship didn’t feel really slow and, there was like, stuff going on but alas these missions blow chunks too. Oh and once you beat all the 48-ish missions the game comes with, that’s it as there are no other gameplay modes. Probably for the best to be honest.

Second up on the naughty step is a game that broke my big fat clogged heart, as it just has such a great concept. Big Mutha Truckers 2 (henceforth referred to as BMT2) is an attempt to marry Crazy Taxi with a big dumb parody of truckin’ across all 48 continental US states. Unfortunately this parody is really, really dull and is very predictable with every character falling short of the “amusing but played out” archetypes they’re aiming for and instead feel like a very uncreative pre-teen designed them. But it’s a quasi-budget release, so it doesn’t matter if it’s dumb and unoriginal so long as it’s a dumb kind of fun. After all, no one was that bothered when the Simpson’s made their own crazy taxi rip-off even though it had extremely familiar characters and very little original gameplay ideas. Unfortunately BMT2 is just… bad when it comes to the actual moment to moment gameplay and it feels like it was really, desperately hoping it would be carried by it’s tongue in cheek characters and world. Alas this doesn’t pan out, as neither the gameplay nor the writing is above D-tier and so you have two shoddily put together halves colliding to form a weak whole. There’s really not much to be said about the writing, other than the fact that every character is summed up in their entirety the first time you meet them and after a few encounters you’re just bored of them. You’ve got the Hollywood airhead, the douchebag celebrity, an Area 51 inspired alphabet agency spook, a couple of hill-billies, a generic greedy millionaire businessman and a corrupt Russian who spends the game on his big ass yacht. You go between these KOOKY, ZANY, THIGH-SLAPPING characters to earn cash by moving items that one of them will sell you on the cheap, to another character who is willing to pay more. Ostensibly there’s some strategy to this, but… there really isn’t. Just buy the cheapest items and Keep On Truckin’ til you make a profit while trying not to let the stale, repeated character quips get you down.

And trust me, I don’t enjoy writing this as the game has a sort-of heart to it. You can tell the developers wanted to make an amusing game, but much like with Cel Damage the humour is simultaneously going to go over the heads of the well-behaved kids and yet isn’t funny enough for the grown ups. It’s just stuck that awkward spot, much like a stand-up comedian who’s bombing because their material just isn’t that good. You don’t hate it, but you do wish it would end if only to save everyone’s sanity. As for the gameplay, as mentioned above it’s pretty basic and while you can use the money to buy upgrades they don’t really make that much of a difference, because pretty the whole game is split between two activities. The first is driving from character to character to make that sweet, sweet money. The second is compromised of missions, which also involve driving from place to place but have a bit more effort put into them even if they’re still pretty bland. The big issue here is just that the driving mechanics aren’t very well implemented, so you have a game that’s almost entirely based on driving and the driving isn’t very good. Sure there are some moderately entertaining environmental hazards (and the cops) to watch out for, like UFOs stealing your cargo, but these are little sprinklings of inspiration that are trying to distract you from the fact that the core gameplay mechanics are bad and that the game just isn’t funny. Unlike Redout Space Assault this game does have plenty of content, but most of it’s locked behind delivering enough cargo to store up money so you can the next mission which plays the same as the grinding so that you can then grind so more to unlock the next mission and so and so forth. There are one or two features that are actually OK, such as the ability to set a time limit between destinations with lower limits providing a larger delivery bonus (which encourages and rewards skill) and a variety of radio stations ala GTA including a talk show with a decent amount of content. It’s just that none of it is good and there’s a reason that this franchise died on it’s ass with mediocre reviews. If you played this game as a kid, hang onto those memories and do not bother revisiting BMT2. Especially as the current Steam port is so busted that even basic Steam features like the overlay and screenshots don’t work.

Last but not least in our trinity of tedium, we have Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop which is the sequel of sorts to Alien Swarm the throwaway Valve project that was most notable for letting the player receive a free TF2 hat. Unlike either of the two preceding games, I didn’t pay anything for this one but instead came across it while searching for a free game that I could play with a friend on his lousy laptop. As such you might argue that it doesn’t deserve it’s place on this list, as it’s literally free and to my knowledge doesn’t even have a monetisation system due to the fact that it’s a labour of love from a dedicated modding community. Yet in spite of the potential for a cute little underdog story, I’m including it here for the simple reason that neither me nor my friend enjoyed it. In fact the more we played, the more frustrated we became as while the game has some good ideas it’s also riddled with questionable design choices that got on our collective tits. Due to it’s price I promise not to be as mean to it, but still why the fuck does the infestation system require you to place a medkit down and then wait for some god damn long? Who thinks this is fun? Who thought “oh my goodness we’ve made the game BETTER take THAT Greg Coomer”??? There’s a ton of content in this game, but also a lot of WHY’s that remain on our minds after playing through the first campaign and mutually agreeing that we are not going to bother with the rest because fuck that noise.

But I’ve gotten ahead of myself, because many of you are probably asking “what the hell even is Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop?” Well I’m glad you asked dear reader, as it’s a top-down shooter that allows up to 4 player co-op in which your team is split between around 8 characters and 4 classes. Each class has two characters who are slightly different in terms of their stats, but these stats don’t seem to matter that much anyway so I think this is more for the advanced players to care about. As me and my buddy were casuals only playing the game because we were running out of options, we just went with a medic (because otherwise you are guaranteed to die) and a Tech Marine because they’re mandatory for most of the missions. Once you’ve chosen a character you get a surprisingly extensive unlock system, where you pick 1 weapon, 1 weapon or utility item and then one equippable item. There’s a variety of guns, but also some more interesting tools like a deployable sentry turret, a medkit that heals the squad, an ammo pack for the squad and a bunch of other things that aren’t weapons per see but are useful tools for the entire squad. Then there’s that utility item which is generally a bit mediocre, such as the ability to weld the occasional door, take a bit less damage (not that matters much), lay down mines, take a personal medkit for emergency heals and so on. Once you’ve picked your squad and your gear, you’re then able to play through any of the game’s approximately eleven multi-mission campaigns. These missions might have sections where you need to use a certain item to clear the path, such as big rocks that need to be destroyed with a mining laser or hive-growth that needs to be destroyed with a flamethrower (or a mining laser). Unfortunately the game doesn’t tell you if this is going to be the case, but in our experience the map-makers are generous enough to provide those items when they are needed to prevent you from being totally stuck. Now as for all these shiny new weapons, they’re generally pretty varied but they all have not that much ammo which is a problem in a game where you are shooting things a lot. Missions do tend to give you some more ammo every now and then, but generally speaking you need to be careful with your shots (especially as friendly fire is enabled) and even your reloads as reloading a magazine throws any remaining ammunition away. Plus reloading can take a surprisingly long time for a game in which even the basic enemies can knock you around like a pinata, which is somewhat negated by the introduction of the active reload system that’s also used in Gears of War.

So the game itself is free, it has a lot of content, why is it in the did-not-finish triad? Well aside from the counter-productive nature of the game having eleven freaking campaigns which feels a tad excessive frankly the biggest issue is just that most of the enemies are annoying to deal with. You’ve got the standard grunts who can almost stun lock you, as their attacks knock you back a little bit and can mess you up more than they otherwise would. Then you’ve got ranged enemies which love to hang out just off-screen while pelting you, big fat enemies that eat up a lot of ammo then explode, annoying little enemies that spawn into the game world with a little jump that makes them temporarily immune to gun fire and are too quick to melee. Plus there are flying enemies that are a fucking pest because they’re so small and fast, spawners that spawn in those little enemies with their stupid little jumps constantly and are a chore, especially as when they die spawn more. Wrapping up the selection of annoying enemies are levelled up ranged baddies that fling explosives at you and finally (from what we played anyway) a boss monster that is immune to damage from the front and takes a lot of bullets being fired into their ass to give up. Oh and of course I almost forget the small infectors who will take you from full health to fully dead (no respawning btw) in about 6 seconds unless your medic deploys the tiny medkit with it’s tiny healing radius next to you. An action that takes slightly more fumbling than you’d hope for, and if you’ve split up or they’re picking their nose it’s over for you. As a bonus if the medic dies, then everyone who isn’t a medic can’t take their medkit tool so after that it’s basically sudden death. Did I mention that the basic bitch enemies are almost constantly respawning? Because once you combine that with the skimpy amounts of ammo, the game does become a bit of an endurance test. Can you and your friends manage to get through an entire campaign without getting frustrated at the game? Great, then go do another 10! The scoreboards tell you if your friends bothered, and I can safely say that all of mine gave up around the end of the first campaign. Because this is a game with a lot of love put into it, by people with questionable test in videogames. It’s the quintessential problem with the fan project, namely that the fans are really into the base game and so they’ve made a game that’s only going to be of interest for people who really into the base game. Imagine if they made L4D3 but each player had a specific type of mini-game they’d occasionally have to do, and if any of your team died you got to eat a big mouthful of shit. That’s basically the Alien Swarm: Reactive drop experience. A great game for those who really want a 4 player co-op top-down shooter that requires coordination, but a bad game for those who don’t have 3 friends with those interests. The best I could do was one additional buddy, and he kept dying which meant that I slowly lost the will to live. After clearing out 3 of the boss enemies, avoiding infection, fighting through the whole map and then rushing our way back out, I died at the final hurdle because the extraction objective wanted to make things more exciting by taking even fucking longer than it usually did. Oh and did I mention my buddy kept dying because you can’t see shit in most of the areas of each map, as everything is made deliberately dark so that the game can have a spooky horror vibe. Either find 3 patient friends with plenty of co-op top-down shooter experience, or crank the brightness up and hope for the best. Either way, it’s an acquired taste much like that freakish Corsican cheese that’s filled with maggots and mould. You might have a great time and I wouldn’t think less of you for doing so, but we didn’t and that’s why we cut our losses.

And that’s the trio, each of which I’m proud to say are in different genres and from developers (or modders) of varying pedigree. Unlike the slightly meaty promise at the start, I didn’t end up HATING all of them and in fact consider Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop to be fairly impressive in it’s own right. As for the other two however, they can eat my big fat arse as they are fucking garbage and I am mad that people are inadvertently still paying real money for them. Of the three, I’d give Alien Swarm: RD a tentative chance of redemption as we all love modders really, but the other two should be avoided at all costs. Especially Redout: Space Assault as the developers really should know bloody better than to shit out such a woeful and half-assed game. If you disagree with my take on the worst Starfox clone I’ve ever had the misfortune to play, then get on your bike. At least Big Mutha Truckers 2 was trying (albeit failing) to be entertaining and to offer something a bit different. It had heart, if not only brains or intelligently designed gameplay. Redout: Space ASSault is the definition of a bland, boring, ambitionless, uncreative, tedious gaming experience. They couldn’t even be bothered to avoid repeating the boss fights. Fuck that game. I did hate it, and Big Mutha Truckers 2 was a Big Mutha Pile of Poo (don’t complain about this petty and childish insult, it’s exactly the level of dialogue and writing from that game) even if it’s not quite so reprehensible because intention matters. In conclusion, Redout: Space Assault is fucking woeful, Big Mutha Truckers 2 is a Mutha-Trucking disappointment and Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop is just a bit of a pain in the backside.

The post The Did Not Finish Triad (Part 1 of ??) appeared first on Big Boaby Gaming.

Quick Note: I’ll include links to each game’s demo just incase you wanted to play them too, just click the title headings to be magically transported to the game’s Steam Store page.

Game #1: Warbits+

Starting off our review, a game that is excessively in my comfort-zone. Warbits+ is a rip-off homage of the Advance Wars (AW) series, with a cutesy art-style and just enough changes that it’s not a mere clone. While the demo is fairly short, it contains 6 campaign missions, 4 “skirmish” missions and 4 puzzle maps which is enough to last for about an hour. In that time you’ll realise that while most units are directly analogous to units from the AW series, the changes to prices and movement ensure that 1-to-1 copying of AW tactics won’t always work. The ranged basilisk unit, which is basically the rocket unit from AW for example is much weaker than it’s AW counter-part albeit it’s also a 1/3rd cheaper. There’s also a new unit in the form of the Ranger, which is basically a hybrid of the basic infantry unit and the artillery unit, as it can’t move & shoot or defend itself, but it can attack enemies that aren’t directly adjacent to it. For those who haven’t played any AW games, it’s basically a turn-based strategy game with around 2 dozen units split between ground/sea/air and most of these units can only attack enemies next to them. You’ve got infantry who can capture structures on the map, vehicles which generally destroy them without much difficulty and then ranged units which are super dangerous but can’t defend themselves when attacked. All units have up to 10 HP, and to get more units you need to gather funds from various captured buildings on the map, then spend them on units at your factory/airfield/port buildings. Players each take turns, and during each turn players move units one-at-a-time with each of those units having a set amount of ammo and fuel which are used for attacking and moving respectively.

With that super basic summary out of the way, I’ll just repeat that Warbits+ is basically just another Advance Wars game. The gameplay is almost identical, with a variety of modest tweaks that will only really be noticeable to AW veterans. Infantry only heal +1HP per turn on structures instead of +2HP, there’s a new type of city that requires half the capture points but provides half the income, some units are a bit weaker and there are no battle animations, among other minor changes. Yet in spite of or perhaps because of the abundant similarities I’m actually (somewhat) excited for Warbits+ to be released. You see, the game has 3 modes and while they appear to be fairly short each mode is enjoyable – as stated above you’ve got the campaign, a selection of challenge maps (called “skirmish mode”) and a puzzle mode. The campaign is pretty standard, a selection of maps which you play through in order and which start off very easy before ramping up slightly. This is also where the game’s story is told, although it’s more of a blip as the dialogue is minimal and at least in the demo doesn’t go anywhere – it’s basically just a vehicle to advance the game’s central premise that we’re in the FUTURE and battles are simulated between robot armies (hence why no one takes them particularly seriously). Then you’ve got the skirmish mode which is basically the “War Room” of Warbits+ and features a series of maps which are tilted towards the AI in various ways, with you as the player trying to beat them as quickly as possible while losing as few units as possible to receive a good score. Finally you’ve got the puzzle maps, which are basically unwinnable unless you do things in a very specific order and as such the challenge is using your limited forces to maximum effect to figure out how to actually win. Each mode is pretty fun and the core basics of the game are great because it’s basically just Advance Wars again. The art-style is also charming enough and the music is perfectly acceptable, but much like the campaign dialogue neither are hugely noteworthy. In short Warbits+ is a modest indie game which sets out to emulate the AW series and succeeds, but still offers enough to justify it’s existence.

Game #2: Tempest Rising

Following on from an unofficial sequel to Advance Wars, we’ve got an unofficial sequel to the Command & Conquer series. Unlike most of the other games in this glorified laundry list review Tempest Rising is actually a (relatively) big budget release and aside from Homeworld 3 is probably the most mainstream upcoming game in the RTS scene. The demo is unfortunately missing one of the three promised factions, but it still does a decent job of setting up the lore of the setting and the differences between two of the factions – namely the Global Defence Force (GDF) and the Tempest Dynasty (TD) who are filling in for GDI and Nod respectively. This means that you’ve got a high-tech but micro-intensive faction on the one side and a more basic “Attack Move to victory” on the other, although as the demo is just the first mission from the campaign for each it’s still a little hard to tell. The GDF mission gives you a modicum of base building, but the TD one only gives you a barracks and only at the lowest tech level so there’s no doubt a ton of depth I’m missing. Either way both factions are fighting over Tiberium Tempest which is a brand new energy albeit creepy energy source that is spreading across the planet following Kane’s Nuclear shenanigans. Our GDF “heroes” are essentially NATO and live in clean zones where Tiberium Tempest is just treated as a new resource, while the TD are comprised of former USSR states with a heavy reliance on local militia, conscripts Tempest Guard and flamethrowers who have a slightly more intense view of the resource.

Of course everything is going great in the world until the TD start causing trouble, at which point you get to playthrough at least two campaigns each told from the respective faction’s perspective. The other modes weren’t included in the demo, but both Skirmish (against the AI) and multiplayer modes are included. As for the game itself it’s basically a very pretty RTS with every mechanic from the original C&C, including most of the units, albeit with many units having one or more abilities (kinda like C&C Generals to give some perspective). You’ve got the same building mechanics, most of the units are refreshed versions of the ones from the original C&C, you’ve got the same story structure wherein a blinged up general refers to you as commander while giving you your mission briefings, the same 1 man = 1 unit philosophy, the same exploding barrels and pick-up crates and so on. As for how it plays? Perfectly fine, with all those little abilities no doubt giving RTS veterans enough micro to prove themselves to be the GOD GAMERS that they know they are. Yet for those hoping for something more, I’m afraid that it really does just seem to be C&C 1.5 (this time with more Russians). Even Frank Klepacki is back to do the soundtrack, so you know you’re in good hands there. It’s entirely possible that as the game opens up after the first couple of campaign missions that we’ll begin seeing some bold new twists, but thus far I’ve yet to see anything outside of the ability to call in airstrikes in exchange for cash (like C&C3) or a lot of units have 1 or more abilities (like C&C3). As such I’d recommend the demo to RTS fans, and indeed only to RTS fans. It’s only 2 intro missions so the whole thing takes less than an hour, even with the two unskippable trailers bookending each mission.

Game #3: Sentry

Unlike the previous two games, Sentry isn’t a spiritual successor to anything and is instead an indie game with minimal baggage centred around defending against waves of baddies. It’s an FPS game that promises to have co-op in the future, but in this demo you get two levels with either 4 or 5 waves (depending on whether you choose the normal or advanced difficulty). The core premise of the game is that you are a robot (the “Sentry” from the title) who is deployed into various sci-fi areas that are being besieged by hordes of evil aliens. Your heroic defence is split into two parts, you’ve got a setup/building phase where you get to construct various mini-structures such as ammo stations, turrets and traps that will help you resist the relentless enemy incursions. Then after 90 seconds (or once you hit ready) they begin pouring through a predesignated breach, with later waves often featuring multiple spawn locations for the enemy. As you have a relatively limited amount of resources to use for constructing buildings and traps, a core part of a successful strategy is to identify choke-points that the enemy can be forced through. The other major limitation for our plucky robot protagonist is the fact that you can only carry a modest amount of ammo at a time, so you’ll either need to keep running back to spawn or spend some of your limited resources on ammo stations. Both ammo stations and health stations are available, with a few important caveats. Firstly they themselves only have a limited amount of health/ammo they can give you, which is initially four magazines/small medkits with two additional uses being automatically generated provided you keep them around. Secondly to use these stations you’ll need to hold down the use button for a few seconds, which is fine so long as you aren’t actively getting shot at. Finally you’ll need to select these stations as part of your load-out, which much like everything else only has a modest amount of slots. As such you’ll need to share these useful tools with various traps.

This could’ve resulted in a slightly frustrating game, but there are a few aspects which give the player an advantage. Firstly while there are a decent amount of different enemies in this demo, almost all of them are pretty easy to deal with. You’ve got tiny slugs, quick attack dogs, enemy grunts, enemy grunts with guns & grenades, little flying beetles, shambling enemies with specific weak-spots and finally big guys with chain-guns. With the exception of the last two, your shotgun turrets shouldn’t have much of an issue when dealing with them (and for now the shotgun turret is much better than the machine gun turret). Secondly the maps themselves aren’t particularly large, so you don’t have to worry about getting flanked or taken by surprised – especially as the enemy spawn zones are clearly marked. Those aforementioned turrets also have unlimited ammo, which is handy although you can’t repair any damage they’ve taken. Finally the player gets 2 lives regardless of difficulty level, and if you respawn then you come back with full health, armour (if you took it as a utility item) and ammo. Each map also has a few pre-built health and ammo stations, so generally the only difficulty comes from managing your own ammo and cooldowns as the enemies aren’t particularly overwhelming. With that being said the Advanced difficulty provides a decent challenge, so you’ll need to be at least moderately competent if you want to prevent all the baddies from slipping through. You are allowed to let a couple get through your immaculately planned defences, but it’s always embarrassing when that one enemy waltzes past you. As for the rest of the game’s content, I can say the soundtrack is a decent electronic affair that isn’t overly intrusive but keeps the energy up, whilst the visual style looks nice even if it is somewhat low-poly. Speaking as someone who enjoyed the Orcs Must Die games, I must confess this game seems like it has a lot of potential and the demo is quite entertaining even if getting a perfect result on both levels only took me around 20 minutes.

Game #4: Wizordum

Wizordum is a game that’s not a rip-off, but more of a spiritual successor to the now ancient (and possibly long forgotten) Heretic, which came out around 30 years ago as of the time of writing. Like Hexen: Beyond Heretic, Wizordum is a 2.5D FPS game with all of the design philosophy of the “boomer shooter” era including keycards, pixel graphics, terrain objects that are always staring at you and a focus on finding the secrets and figuring out how to blast through each level while circle-strafing around the enemy. The demo itself is exceedingly short, giving you only two levels to playthrough even though the full game is releasing (in early access) before the end of this year. As such you’ve only got 3 different weapons and around 5 enemy types to deal with, none of which pose a massive threat. The game itself is fairly enjoyable at least in these two levels, as both the art style and minimal soundtrack are appropriately charming for a small game. The music itself loops continually and the track isn’t very long at all, but it does successfully capture the feeling of older fantasy games and even if it doesn’t amp up the pace like the OST from Sentry, it fits the game well. As for the visuals they’re appropriately pixelated, although they do feature a rich colour palete and each enemy type is easily identifiable and acts in a way that’s simple enough to counter. The combat isn’t particularly deep, at least in these early stages, but it is enjoyable and there is enough variety between the enemy types that you’ll need to keep on your toes least they nibble away at your health. Obviously it goes without saying that you’ve got the classic health/armour system, with vast quantities of pick-ups that help build your two respective health bars, and much like classic FPS games the larger items stop working at 100HP but you can exceed this quite handily by continuing to grab every smaller health item like a hypochondriac kleptomaniac.

Due to the relatively scarce amount of content offered, I don’t have a ton of things to say about Wizordum in all honesty. The gameplay is exactly as you’d expect from a 2.5D FPS game, right down to the fact that I managed to temporarily get stuck because I missed a new door that opened up after pulling a lever. Generally the two maps flow pretty well and I’m chalking my idiocy up to my own, well, idiocy but the game does have a handy-dandy map feature which is kind enough to mark doors you haven’t opened yet (and show what key is needed, if any). You’ll need to find this map within the level, but normally you get it fairly early in each stage so it’s not a massive ordeal to track it down. You also won’t have to go to far to find your weapons, although in a nod to the distant gaming past you only start with your melee weapon and will need to find the rest within each map. In the demo you get your melee weapon (the same mace as you get in Heretic) alongside “fire rings” which act as akimbo SMGs and the “Ice Staff” which acts as a machine gun. No shotgun, at least yet! As for the enemies you’ve got melee grunts, bigger melee guys, goblin wizards who can inflict friendly fire damage on the other enemies, alongside leaping rats and a loot goblin who drops loot (to build your score) after every hit. The only hazard in the absence of the ability to jump or fall down are various traps, which come in floor spikes and automated (automaged?) fire ball shooting variety. These aren’t going to cause you much trouble, but they can block you in when enemies start respawning or bursting through the walls. In short it’s a fun little demo and the game has promise as a neat little diversion on the inevitable path to the grave, so I’d recommend it to anyone who is somehow running low on Boomer Shooters to try.

Game 5: The Fancy Pants Adventures: Classic Pack

The Fancy Pants Adventures: Classic Pack (tFPA:CP) is a HD overhaul of the classic flash series, now with some added content in the form of new levels. This is great news for those who played the flash games back in the day, but despite spending countless hours on various flash game sites like Newgrounds, Kongregate and Armor Games I must confess I never really gave these ones a go. After trying out the demo I can safely say that I didn’t miss out on too much, as while they seem like a competently put together series of platformers I can’t see much to gush over here. The fancy pants guy has the smooth platforming control of an old Sonic The Hedgehog game, with even more of an emphasis on momentum and some slightly quirky movement controls when he’s not rushing around at the speed of sound. The game does have a life system alongside a health bar, although I’m not sure if they’ve been implemented properly or not as quite often when I hit a stage hazard or just an enemy I would instantly die and be respawned. The enemies also sometimes have health bars, and sometimes don’t, so I’m not able to definitely state how it all pans out. What I can say is that that while the presentation is suitably simple, it does look pretty nice after receiving a HD touch-up.

As for the soundtrack it’s a pretty basic looping affair, that I can only assume was carried over from the flash games as it’s kinda basic and loops a lot. Similarly the gameplay is also pretty basic, you run to the left and occasionally to the right, picking up little icons that are scattered around the stage like coins from sonic and uhhh that’s about it. There are a couple instances where the game boots you back to a previous level (ahhh… the reverse warps of Super Mario Bros 2) and you do have the ability to attack enemies with a big pencil. Something that would improve most platformers and is a particularly good idea here as jumping their little heads can be a bit finicky due to the momentum based movement controls. You’ve also got wall jumping, stage hazards, enemies that “patrol” a certain small area and so on. Really the main thing to commend would be the smaller details, such as enemies smiling when they hit you and looking nervous when you’re about to stomp them, or the fact that our fancy protagonist will have a little snooze ala Super Mario 64 should you leave the game idle. Otherwise I didn’t really care for this one and would rate it purely as a nostalgia trip for my fellow flash-kiddies, or potentially as something as interest for the handful of souls who are desperate for a 2D platformer.

Game 6: All Quiet in the Trenches

To be entirely honest, All Quiet in the Trenches (AQitT) was not at all what I was expecting as I downloaded all of these demos in a flurry of activity lest my place in the Steam Store’s infinitely loading download page be lost and force me to start looking over everything from the very top of the list again. In my unscrupulous haste I’d assumed that AQitT was going to be a turn-based strategy game based on defending the trenches from waves of attackers, an idea which had some basis in reality as that is one of the modes contained within this game. The game developers had other ideas for their project however and much like Valiant Hearts AQitT is more about the struggles of surviving the war with your squad of earnest (soon to be jaded) comrades in arms against the ensuing meat grinder of industrial warfare. As a consequence the actual combat takes a backseat in this one, serving to puncture the existing status quo of what turns out to be more of a management simulation than anything else. You see, AQitT has you serving as a sergeant in Ze German army and so it’s up to you to divvy out the various thankless tasks while trying to keep the chain of command off your back and your soldiers from pointing their guns at you. Due to this design choice, most of the game consists of you being given a series of tasks that may or may not be optional, which will need (or at least be recommended) that you finish during each of your “turns”. Helping the supply master unload rations, digging trenches, clearing the latrines, sending men to assist the field hospital (after they’ve washed their hands of course) and a bunch of other bureaucratic exercises are therefore the order of the day. Even when you’re in the trenches the core crux of the gameplay is broadly the same, as your troops will get tired from performing these actions and while they each have attributes that might make them better or worse at performing certain tasks, pushing an individual trooper too far will make them less effective. Having tired troops affects morale, which must be kept up lest they perform worse and you start getting stuck in a negative loop. Likewise you need to perform tasks for your commanding officer and failing to do them will result in you gradually getting assigned more and more lousy jobs to do. So it’s a management sim with some dialogue trees (basically involving relating to / offending various people) and trying to keep everyone happy all the time. With the occasional bit of turn based quasi-combat where you need to position your troops and prevent them from getting all shot up.

As you can see in the screenshot above, the game has a stylised cell shaded approach to the visuals whilst still being realistic enough that you can grasp the full War is Hell message that the game is ultimately shooting for. As for the OST it’s appropriately minimal and muted, although there are the standard sound effects of gunfire, artillery and a guy going AAAAAA every now and then. Unfortunately I can’t really vouch for the narrative chops of the game as this is going to be an experience where it all really starts going to hell towards the end of the war and as our demo is set during 1915 we’re only given the “good” years when Ze Germans were relentlessly bullying the French/Russians/Romanians and it seemed like the war was winnable for them. As such I have no doubt that things really start to pick up towards the end of the game, but based on what I’ve actually been able to play it’s basically just juggling how tired everyone is and occasionally choosing to give them more or less rations depending on how many rats the cook has to deal with. As mentioned above there’s also a dialogue tree system with various characters who aren’t in your unit, but as of my experience with the demo this basically just boiled down to “give me more work so my soldiers can be even more tired!” because the poor bastards are seemingly always tired. There’s also that combat as mentioned before which can be tense, but I suspect that was more because I didn’t really know what I was doing and so my boys ended up getting flanked a couple of times. Probably a more accurate assessment of my battlefield capabilities than the Command and Conquer games but I digress. Anyway I’d say overall that everything is entirely functional and that this is a game that manages to get you involved with the bureaucratic nature of the first world war, albeit I’m not sure who I would recommend this one to. Kids studying the war perhaps? I personally just think that the juxtaposition of occasional shoot out, lots of chin-wagging with various supply masters and juggling a bunch of fatigue bars make this a tough one for management sim enthusiasts and also a bit too slow paced for any TBS game fans. Ultimately it seems like an interesting game which I fully intend to be damning with fine praise as I have no idea who this game is actually for outside of a small contingent of history nerds who don’t really care about the actual gameplay.

Game 7: The Last Exterminator

The Last Exterminator on the other hand is exactly what is prescribed, namely another one of these boomer shooters doing the rounds and trying their absolute best to out Duke the legendary Duke Nukem himself. Interesting enough the game’s quick demo blurb states that The Last Exterminator (TLE) is running on an entirely bespoke and new engine, although I must confess that it bears an uncanny resemblance to all of the build engine games out there. The only difference I could really notice was that the enemies seemed to be uncannily accurate, almost as if they were using hit-scan weapons like those chain-gunners in the original Doom (no not the 2016 one). Otherwise this extremely short demo, which only take 10 minutes to playthrough, offers a good Duke-esque experience for any punter willing to give it a quick go. You’ve got a handful of weapons and enemies to mess around with, including a pistol, double-barrelled shotgun, SMG and some exploding demolition disks which basically work like throwable landmines and serve as the game’s equivalent to grenades, dynamite etc. As for the enemies you’ve only got standard pistol wielding grunts, some shotgun wielding baddies with a touch more health and then some big charging brutish melee fellows who mainly serve as a distraction due to the fact that every other enemy has exceedingly good aim. Unlike our protagonist, who in a slight diversion from the other 2.5D games I’ve played doesn’t get any aim assist at all by default when using the mouse & keyboard. You can enable it in the options, but I went in expecting the Shotgun to be practically heat-seeking as it was in Doom and instead I quickly had to re-learn how to actually bloody aim the damn thing. Especially as it only does partial damage if you’ve only partially hit the enemy, something which sounds pretty common in these more refined days of truly 3D combat but which did take me by surprise! As such it’s a clearly modern game trying to ape the conventions of the classic 90s shooter experience, which it largely achieves thanks to it’s strong visual design and no nonsense level design (or at least I assume it’s no nonsense as you’re only allowed to play one of them in this itty bitty demo).

Obviously with the demo being so short, it’s hard to get a good grasp of what the final product will look like even if the post-demo sales blurb screen you get once you’ve finished the only level promises SIXTEEN enemies, a level editor and a bunch more guns to arse around with. From what I’ve played though the combat is decent and pretty fast paced with accuracy being key, alongside what I’m hoping to be a decent variety of enemies and some more level variation. The one level you get to play through is riddled with nods and homages which are too numerous to list, but interactivity is fairly pared back compared to the rest of the pack at least at this stage in development. There was a little arcade machine that had a mini-game to play (a 2D auto-scrolling shooter) but other than that you can’t expect vending machines to drop cans or phones to make a little noise when you try to use them. One thing that was in full evidence was the fact that we have a voiced protagonist who in Nukem style starts her crusade following the loss of her ride (in this case just a van) and who makes plenty of comments throughout the game. I thought it was a nice touch and a way to reinforce that this is a game with it’s tongue firmly in cheek, even if I felt the voice acting was a tad weak in the sense that she sounds pretty normal for a mass-killer. Maybe this is part of the charm, but either way was something I noticed while playing. As for soundtrack it’s quite minimal and feels like a cheesy Duke clone, for better or for worse and doesn’t make the game feel more intense but instead more… retro? Either way I didn’t have any actual issues with anything and had fun over my admittedly short playthrough of the demo, which I would recommend to any FPS fans. If you’re of the opinion that the boomer shooter trend has gone on long enough, this definitely won’t convince you otherwise, but for everyone else this is a pretty straight forward shooter with a retro styling and of course everyone’s favourite keycards that lock off sections of the stage. At least in this one the keycards are in pretty organic places, so you would have to really struggle to get lost!

Game 8: Last Train Home

Rounding things off is (the) Last Train Home (LTH), a RTT (Real Time Tactics) game centred around the Czech Foreign Legion and taking place during the Russian civil war, when those poor bastards had to make their way across the entirety of Russia so that they could get home. LTH has been a game I’ve been keeping my eye on for a while, as it promises to combine genuinely high production values with an interesting premise, solid RTT combat and the addition of management gameplay conducted via the game’s overview stages which occur between skirmishes. After playing through the demo I can confirm that basically all of these expectations were met, but I must confess that I didn’t actually find myself having any fun with the actual demo itself and as a consequence I’m now somewhat concerned about how the whole thing is going to pan out. There are two reasons for my concern, the first being the RTT combat sections and the second being the train management that takes place in between battles. Before diving into these concerns though I’d just like to re-iterate that this is a polished and ambitious game, with good visuals, plenty of gameplay mechanisms that all work in tandem with each other and a large degree of care has evidently taken place to ensure that this game lives up to it’s potential. It’s just that… I’m a long-time RTS, RTT and TBS fan and even I wasn’t enjoying it. Firstly while the RTT sections are detailed and involve everything you’d expect including a tiered cover system, enemy vision, stealth options, multiple classes of legionary each of which have different abilities, the ability to find and obtain new items while each map, usable entrenchments and callable off-map abilities like artillery barrages the whole thing felt somewhat clunky. Part of this is that you can’t see how far your units can actually shoot, which means you can end up taking up position in a very secure area with good cover only to have most of your guys not do anything. Then when you tell them to attack, they leap out of cover to stand up straight in the middle of a field or street. You’ve also got the multiple class mechanics, which while varied and offering high potential as the game proceeds are initially a pain in the arse as if you select multiple squad mates you can only see the abilities for one of them. So you need to quickly scan the squad bar at the bottom, pick say the grenadier, then select his ability, then deploy it when really all you wanted to do was have a squad member throw a damn grenade. There’s also the stealth mechanic, which is a cool concept especially in a game where ammo usage is disincentivised, but the way it’s actually implemented is again, a pain in the arse. Basically you select a squad member (or members) and hit the Y key, at which point they are in stealth mode and won’t shoot enemies but are quieter and can do stealth kills. Of course if they’re in a good position for covering fire, you’ll need to manually tell them that stealth has failed. Alternatively if they are spotted trying to sneakily stab someone, then they’ll kind of just gormlessly stand there for a couple seconds while they get beat up and/or shot. It’s not the most fluid system, which is troublesome because the combat is fast paced. Most enemies and even most of your guys go down in a few shots, so group firefights can be exceedingly lethal for anyone outside of cover (although if you’re in cover there may as well be a gigantic magnet opposite you considering how often shots now miss, something which the enemy also benefits from). Then you’ve got deployable abilities such as having your squad’s machine gunner setup a focused zone of fire, which works well but you then need to manually disable this otherwise he’ll just sit there like a twat as everyone else moves on. That’s the core issue really, in that while micromanagement is a key part of any RTT game you need to micromanage fucking everything here and Christ help anyone you forget to tell to move back once he’s done riffling through sacks of grain, otherwise he’s just going to stay there until a patrol guns him down. Of course RTT veterans are going to shaking their heads in disbelief at reading these braying complaints from an evident NOOB, but I swear even considerably older games like Men of War didn’t need this level of babysitting. I could trust my guys to lie down, shoot at anything that came in range, know when stealth failed and use AT grenades on any tank that came close enough. Here each action would need to be assigned manually, and of course that AT grenade ability would only be available to the grenadier who would have selected manually because I’m only seeing the medic’s abilities right now. It’s a perfectly fine RTT experience that’s really in need of some squad level AI tweaking to make me feel like a Major, not a nanny.

But let’s say you’re pumping the air in joy at the prospect of managing multiple vulnerable units, who need to be assigned groups manually, with each group only being able to see the abilities of one randomly selected squad member at a time, who all need to be told to take cover. Well then the good news for you my micromanagement loving friend is that the fun does NOT stop there! Oh no! Because once you’ve beaten a skirmish, you now get to perform a bunch of micromanagement on your troop train as well. Assigning each legionary to a train role, across both day and night shifts? Yeah that’s here. Having to manually reassign these roles when legionaries get injured? Yeah that’s here too. Having to keep track of multiple separate resources? You better believe that’s here! Between the promotions, managing the speed of the train, how many rations everyone gets, what roles they have, what skills they have, whether to stop at a village doctor or use up your limited supplies of med-kits, upgrading the train and dealing with breakdowns and maintenance of the train, it’s a lot. Unfortunately the demo is basically one tutorial message after the other and while I can appreciate the depth, and the fact that things will inevitably get easier as you get to grips with the system, by God is it fucking tedious. Every single time you think you’ve figured out new micromanagement task G, the game reveals with a beamingly bright smile that you’ve now unlocked tutorial message #27 about micromanagement task H because now your troops are sad and you need to decide whether to use vodka and risk them becoming more tired (micromanagement task F) or stop the train to dispatch a squad to gather more food to temporarily increase the amount of rations you give (assuming the cook didn’t get injured). It’s just so goddamn much to pack into a demo that’s meant to be selling you on a game that’s imminently about to release, especially when it’s one-after-another for the full duration of the damn thing. The worst part about it is that the UI, while pretty is also not great at just making things easier. I have some idle guys, I’d like them to be more useful, how can I see how to do this? Well it turns out that right now they can only be workers during the train segments and we have enough of those, but maybe if you get some other squad members they can be the cook in the event that my current cook who is assigned to a squad because he’s the best machine gunner gets injured. I really can’t describe how annoying it is, that a game that I know is enjoyable is just such a fucking mess of menus and mechanics and other things to juggle. It’s like starting a new job where they didn’t bother training you, but everyone expects you to be up to speed already. If you’ve ever tried temping with an agency it’s like that, but with more Czech people complaining about the Red Army. Which isn’t even to say this is a bad game, the potential is clearly there. The RTT missions aren’t bad or poorly paced or anything they’re just unintentionally annoying. As for the train management, I have no doubt it gets engrossing juggling all those balls while researching +10% more resilient squad cars that can hold +2 more people. But as a demo this really needs you to be fully engaged with the premise and willing to learn without swearing at it. I failed in this mighty task, because after 90 minutes I was loudly bemoaning the fact that I have to open and close 3 different bloody screens to figure out how to make a nurse work the night shift, only to realise that I had to upgrade my train. In summary it’s a very well polished game with a barbed wire barrier to entry, claw your way through and I have 0 doubt it’s a good time for RTT and strategy game fans. For me? I’m absolutely bricking it as this was my strategy game of the year and I spent most of the demo reading tutorial messages. Even the cunting zoom in feature causes you to zoom into your train after a certain point, even if you’re not looking at anything near it. When I’m getting grief from the act of zooming in I know I’m out of my depth.

The Summary

Alright so after playing through 8 demos (and dropping 2 after a couple of minutes, namely Motordoom which blasted my house with shit metal after demanding I plug in a controller for a not terrible control scheme, and Peripeteai which was Deus Ex with a weird anime girl protagonist player model and an intro that consisted of me dropping an item through a floor then getting filtered by a hacking mini-game) I can safely say that I have my clear winners and losers. Obviously the biggest losers are the two games that I barely even played, because they sucker punched me in the face and killed my pathetically thin veil of impartially stone dead as I realised that bad metal music and animoo gurls are my personal kryptonite for these things. Following them would be Fancy Pants adventures which I thought was fucking trash and should’ve stayed on Newgrounds to be totally honest, alongside Last Train Home which I was really excited to play and bored me to the point I got a headache (possibly also due to my recent substitute of cigarettes with Snus and staring at screens all day but I digress). Barely saved from the ranks of games I can’t fucking recommend to a living soul would be Tempest Rising, another game I was pretty excited about but which is just C&C without the cool C&C characters or any attempt to evolve the gameplay. I mean I love C&C, every RTS fan does, but fuck me guys would it kill you to take a step back and go “yeah everyone is still talking about Kane, and we’re never ever going to beat Starcraft 2 so let’s worry about the characters & macro, not the graphics & micro”? I don’t know, I just think it’s going to come and go like Company of Heroes 3 or Grey Goo, and only get briefly mentioned in passing while people discuss how much C&C Tiberium Sun and Red Alert 2 and Starcraft 1 and Age of Empires 2 were soooo good. Then I’m going to give participation awards to Wizordum and All Quiet in the Trenches, which are games I think aren’t going to set the world on fire (especially the latter) but hey they were interesting and tried and I wish the developers the best. Maybe they’ll be in a Humble Monthly by the time literally anyone reads this pointless recap. As for the winners? Well I had a lot of fun with Warbits, which I think is going to be another decent but not quite as good as Advance Wars TBS game and would recommend it as it was fun. Which was the whole point of downloading 10 demos on my slow internet connection. Similarly The Last Exterminator was also… fun! Super short sure but what was there was cool and what was promised sounds good and hell, the Aussie government (or at least Victoria) is helping to fund it so go get em blokes! Finally there’s Sentry which is a neat little FPS defence game that I think would be fun to play with friends, whenever I actually make some that want to play something other than trash like [INSERT THAT GAME YOU LIKE HERE]. In conclusion, Warbits for the TBS fans, The Last Exterminator for FPS fans and Sentry for co-op fans. I’m not going to pretend my winners are the best or anything, but those would be my actual recommendations. Everything else is basically “it could be good BUT” or “I didn’t have fun, but maybe someone else will!”

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Quick Note: While the game is available on basically every platform (GoG, Nintendo Switch, PS4/PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series) the only platform with a physical copy available is the PS4 which had a limited run release.

Absolute Drift: Zen Edition (Absolute Drift: ZE) is a game that piqued my interest years ago due to it’s interesting art-style and solid presentation, but once which had been sitting in my GoG library for years. After finally getting around to playing it, I’m surprised I waited so long as it’s a stellar example of how to develop a short-but-sweet indie game without falling victim to bloat or an off-putting difficulty cliff. To be fair, the game’s handling engine can initially be a challenge to get to grips with, as in spite of the fairly generous tutorial and relatively simple initial challenges, the central drift mechanic can be difficult to pull off. This isn’t due to a convoluted control scheme, but is instead due to how easy it is to oversteer or understeer, especially as you need to be going at a decent speed for the drift system to even work. If you’re going slightly too slow then you’ll still feel like you’re drifting and produce tire smoke, but it doesn’t count as actually drifting. On the flip side, going slightly too fast will cause you to either spin-out or be unable to turn in time, which can cause a collision. Both of these consequences for poorly performed drifts are an issue as they interfere with the game’s scoring system, which is one of the main way it gauges performance within courses. The system itself is fairly simple, you gain points for drifting and a few other things (such as hitting destructible bonus boxes) and these tricks can be increased via a score multiplier. If you go too long without drifting, or crash into an obstacle then your multiplier is reset and all allocated points are instantly earned. The tracks are often short enough however that you’ll need to maintain a multiplier to hit the higher targets. Oh and it almost goes without saying but the game has a leaderboard feature, so you’ll want to aim for those high scores if you’re the competitive type. As such the basic act of drifting is one that you can kind of fumble in the early game, but as the courses get more complicated and the score requirements get higher, you’ll eventually need to have a good grip (ahahahhahaha geddit xD) of how it works.

Despite these challenges, you barely need to understand how the drifting system works to actually “beat” the game interestingly enough. This is because there are two largely separate progression systems in the game’s campaign (or “free roam” mode). The first and most obvious is a series of tracks, with around 4 or 5 per “world” that each have 5 goals in them. To fully beat the track you’ll need to complete all 5 objectives, although you don’t need to do all 5 objectives in the same run. This means that if you need to beat the track within 80 seconds and achieve a score multiplier of say… x15 then you can focus on beating the track quickly on one playthrough and then restart the course while aiming for the multiplier. As such each objective in the game is eminently achievable, although I’d be lying if I said that there weren’t some towards the late game that felt extremely difficult. Each world also has one midnight stage, which are more challenging courses that take place at night and involve running through a course once (as opposed to the normal stages which will either dump you in an area with a time limit, or have you race around a small course multiple times). These midnight stages are the highlight of Absolute Drift: ZE in my opinion, but to unlock them you’ll need to complete a certain amount of track objectives across the normal tracks in that world.

As mentioned above though, these tracks are actually optional for “beating” the game. In an unexpected twist, you instead merely need to complete a series of objectives across each world which are scattered around within the overworld sections. Once you’ve cleared all of these overworld objectives you’ve unlocked the next one, with this cycle repeating for 5 worlds. This means that you can finish the entire game without ever playing a course, if you were insane so inclined. These overworld objectives are fairly simple and can include clearing a jump, spinning around a piece of terrain or drifting between two pieces of scenery on the map. They’re visually obvious as they appear in a luscious red, before reverting back to the normal white colour once they’ve been completed. Each world has around 20ish of these mini-objectives scattered around, and they tend to be incredibly forgiving so long as you can find them (the worlds increase in size as the game proceeds, so I’ll confess to “losing” one in both world 4 and 5). What makes them forgiving is the fact that if you need to clear a jump, then you can attempt it as many times as you like for example, or if the objective is to spin around an object doing donuts then you can spin-out and then start again without any progress being lost. As a consequence beating these objectives is basically just a matter of time (and finding them) so there isn’t much challenge to be found if you were to only do the bare minimum needed to “win”. Instead the real meat of this game is found in it’s stages and in particular the objectives contained within them. As such I’d really recommend playing through the stages, even if they are treated as an optional objective for some reason.

And that’s about it as far as the gameplay goes, while there are some further tricks that can be pulled off such as spin-boxes which require you to spin multiple times within them or donuts that require you to drift around them, the game really is just about drifting and those overworld objectives. Fortunately the game not only has a charmingly simple visual style (as illustrated by the screenshots in this review) but also has a great accompanying soundtrack which manages to be laid back but energetic. This soundtrack is provided by the artists C41 and Nyte and does a great job of complimenting the tone of the game, which has some subtle nods to that whole mid-2010’s vapourwave nonsense without going too far. Instead the game has a clean, crisp visual style that holds up well in spite of the relatively low amount of assets and quality, while the soundtrack is distinctive without being obnoxious (no badly warbled J-POP samples and lazy repetitive beats here). As mentioned the game does have a modicum of longevity thanks to it’s leaderboards feature, although I must confess that as of 2023 the GoG version’s boards no longer seem to be working – which also removes the ghost functionality. This ghost functionality would just show the route that your previous high-score, friend’s high-score or even the global high-score took through a stage, but alas it has gone the way of the dodo (at least for those buying it on GoG). There is also a sliver of customisation for your car, with a handful of different models and some different colours/decals that can be applied to them. This functionality is admittedly fairly basic however, so it’s more of a cute bonus than anything to strive for. Plus no one will be able to see it aside from you, as outside of ghosts (which may or may not work on other platforms) this is an entirely single player game.

In summary then Absolute Drift: ZE is a charming little game with a decent difficulty curve rooted around it’s central mechanic, that also provides a solid amount of content for those aiming for 100% completion. Those not seeking any stress are free to skip difficult track objectives, or even entire courses in their quest to reach the next world giving it an entirely optional amount of difficulty. Yet I remain adamant that you would only be cheating yourself by skipping most of the courses. Fortunately retrying objectives isn’t very frustrating thanks to the accompanying soundtrack, while the visual style gives the overworld linking everything together a stylish look. Ultimately I personally thought that Absolute Drift: ZE was worth the modest asking price and the time I spent on it (just over 6 hours) and so wouldn’t have much trouble recommending it to most players. Just be aware that this is a game that is all about learning one mechanic, so if you aren’t keen on practising a single thing repeatedly and would instead prefer a varied experience then this probably isn’t the game for you. Absolute Drift: ZE is a game that rewards commitment and expects players to gradually learn how to drift, so casual players will probably rush through it or (as the abysmally low completion rates on GoG attest – less than 4% of players beat the game) end up dropping it entirely.

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