Escape Machines

Early Access Review Escape Machines Escape Machines? What’s that? Escape Machines is a flash based indie action game with an isometric perspective. The hero is a human being within a technical modified and fully upgradable battle suit, equipped with the latest technology in weapon science. The task is easy: Take your guns and kill bad robots threatens the world in various missions. The game At the moment, the game is in beta status and can be supported by buying the beta via <<>> No installation is needed, so starting the executable opens a flash game window. The following main menu comes along in a quite nice retro style, so does the music. The menu is clearly arranged, so you may start a game, go to the armor/weapon shop or quit. Accessing the armor shop through the main menu stands to reason, that there is only one save game storing your progress. Well let’s get some action! Starting the game brings you to the mission map, where you can select a mission to start. Every mission can be replayed to earn more money for upgrading your items. Before you can start, you have to choose your armor and weapons and you may buy some supporting goods like grenades (which are not yet implemented in the beta) or med-packs. May you take unlimited weapons and items to the mission? Well no! Your battle suit has a “load” capacity which limits the number and size of weapons and stuff for the mission. Clearly it is also upgradable. Do you have to be frightened to get out of ammo? No, not really because the standard weapon has unlimited ammo. It may be a Bug within the beta but carrying two weapons with ammo and remove the starting gun seems to be no problem. If both gungs ran out of ammunition, the standard weapon was activated. The gameplay Do you remember Syndicate? Escape Machines reminds me a lot of this classic isometric action game. Just the gameplay itself feels a little bit different. You turn around with the mouse, walk by using WASD and the left mouse button fires your weapon. I think that’s more enough for an action game. Well, except for the multiplayer part. I don’t know if the developers will implement multiplayer, but this would be very, very nice. The graphics Well graphics are Indie-retro-like but this does not disturb the big picture. Animations could be a little bit improved, but the rest looks nice. Especially I like the cars standing around, so I hope you may destroy them in a future version The music Well nothing to say except: Feels arcade! The motivation Well I did not do a full play through but due to the repeatable missions you may spend some time kicking some robots asses. With a multiplayer and dynamic enemy spawning, it has the potential of a long time motivation game. An in game map editor supports the long time motivation. The difficulty seems to be a bit hard for a genre-newbie, so an easy / hard mode would be nice. The story Well, some robots attacking human beings! Not the deepest lore but enough to “fire ma laser”! Pros - Easy to learn - Hard to master - Good old arcade action game - Upgradable stuff - Direct controls - No overhead - Retro-Style Cons - Flash Game (right mouse click opens flash player options, etc.) - Some missing hints (Beta status) - No reset points for upgrades - J ust one save game (so far) - My ideas for the game - Focus on Multiplayer - Difficulty Level Settings - A little bit more smoothness at the volume control - Deactivate Flash options - Dynamically spawned enemies - Level up Crash-fix - More battle suits - More save games S ummary I think for less than 5 € (at the moment on steam) you get a nice casual game which makes a lot of fun. So support the developers and kick some robot’s♥♥♥♥♥