Reviews

(This is copied from my Steam review, though I changed the last line.)

Athopiu is an irredeemable pile of junk in the vein of the Arcane Raise "franchise," only somehow worse and with less effort invested in almost every way. It keeps the conceit of "DLC" characters (really, just savegames where you start with 4 characters in your party instead of 3) since that apparently generates money, but has even less story than the Arcane Raise series, with absolutely none and no ending, the same bare minimum of mechanics (3 characters in fixed classes, all items available from the shop at the beginning of the game), is missing the ability to save the game, and is only about an hour long at best, insofar as anything that can neither be enjoyed nor completed can be considered to have a length.

To sum up the entire game easily: You are dumped into an empty "town" room with walls you can walk through, a tutorial-style popup that shows up every time you enter the town, four NPCs selling all of the items in the game, and nine exits to one-map dungeons full of obnoxiously high-rate random encounters and treasure chests full of gold. The whole "go grab all of the chests, then buy +attack items at 200 a pop / 99 for 19800, enjoy the sound of consuming items 99 times in a row" bit remains, as well, but there's no actual boss or goal, you'll reach absurd power levels after even the first area you complete, and one of the nine areas is essentially unexplorable as the game will crash 50% of the time upon encountering a random monster there.

Also, it's got a bunch of bizarre errors: two basic chest armors are called "Shield" and "Hat", Mythril Caps are accessories, Mythril Armors are helmets (yes, that's right - this game is actually pants-on-head stupid), slimes are called bats, bats are called slimes, bees are called orcs, spiders are called minotaurs, gazers crash the game if encountered, and the Cleric class gets most of the damaging spells, while the "Helix" class (drawn to look like witches, mostly) gets all of the healing spells.

So yeah, no. This is actually zero-effort enough that I reported it as some sort of fraud at the time. Sadly, it wasn't delisted.

(This is copied from my Steam review.)

Dark Tower is another puzzle game in the guise of an RPG, taking after the free indie game Tower of the Sorcerer, the Steam game DungeonUp, or the DSiWare game Crystal Adventure. This one may well be the worst of those, however, because many of the key fun elements of the genre are missing.

The puzzle elements of the genre are fairly simplistic: Basically, fighting monsters is completely deterministic, and you can tell what the results of any fight will be before you get into it, in terms of how much damage you'll suffer, so you just need to figure out what order is the best for fighting things, what to put off fighting until you're stronger and can defeat it without taking damage, et cetera.

However, unlike all the other entries into this genre, you can't actually tell what an enemy's stats are until you fight it, and you can't attempt to fight an enemy that you wouldn't defeat, so if you run into an enemy you can't beat, the game doesn't tell you whether your attack is too low or your defense is too low, you just need to spend points and pray, and reset the game if you can't do that or if you did it wrong. The game also autosaves after every step, so there is no way to save before fighting an unknown monster and see if the results are acceptable. In addition, Dark Tower is pretty much entirely lacking in puzzles OTHER than determining the best order in which to kill everything, with essentially no level puzzles or secrets.

In conclusion: No, even if you like this genre it's not a good entry. Buy DungeonUp instead if the genre sounds interesting.

(This is copied from my Steam review.)

Snuggle Truck is basically like a Trials game - control your vehicle using accelerate, brake, and tilt forward/backward, attempting to get to the finish line as quickly as possible. However, unlike Trials, where you ride a motorcycle and must avoid doing a flip or otherwise letting the rider hit the ground, in Snuggle Truck you drive a much more stable pickup truck... with nine stuffed animals loose in the back, which you have to keep as many of as possible from hittinig the ground. At times you get activatable powerups, either a cage that keeps your animals inside for a few seconds while you do maneuvers, or that plus rocket boosters for the same time.

There's not much to say about Snuggle Truck, really. It's like Trials if it was a small-team indie game, but Trials Evolution Gold Edition is right there and easily worth the $20 instead of the $5 this costs. Sadly, both of these games have gotten worse since launch, Trials Evolution by going through uPlay, Snuggle Truck having shut down its level-distribution server so that only the 41 levels included with the game are available.

I don't really recommend this, but mostly because there's strictly better games available, rather than because it's bad.

(Note: This is actually another of my unfinished-game reviews, since while I completed every level up to Hard difficulty (30/41), I got kind of bored with the game and wrote it off as one I wouldn't be coming back to, either to obtain the badges I missed or to play the Extreme levels. Feel free to take this with a grain of salt as necessary.)

(This is copied from my Steam review.)

Rolling Sun is a My First Indie Game-quality platformer where you control a rolling ball with physics, instead of a normal character, and attempt to reach the end of each level while picking up all the glowing energy balls on the way.

It's a bit frustrating at first, when all you have is awkward movement (it was often hard for me to tell if I was too close to or far from the camera to land on a platform) and a single jump, but over the course of the six levels, you gain a double jump, an air dash, and a glide, all of which kill your momentum and allow you to recover from badly-thought-out jumps easily. The powerups past the double jump are rarely required, and mostly act make the back part of the game significantly easier than the beginning.

Ultimately, however, Rolling Sun felt out of place - in a lot of ways, this sort of 3D-platformer-with-janky-physics is much more common in Unity, and the fact it uses and brags about CRYENGINE is because the unusually pretty graphics are probably Rolling Sun's strongest point, even if the art direction doesn't always hold up. Its "My First Unity Platformer" qualities shine through strongest in the incredibly broken menus, which don't remember my graphics settings, don't have sound settings at all, don't show me what levels I've unlocked until I go into the extras menu and back out, and allow me to play the first two bonus levels even though I shouldn't have any of the four unlocked.

I guess it's interesting if you want to see what My First CRYENGINE Platformer looks like as opposed to My First Unity Platformer, but I'd have to say that's not worth anywhere near $5, and the game never really becomes all that fun. I found some of the second level to be the most awkward, but beyond that, once I started getting upgrades, it was never terrible, through the end of the normal game and the first two challenge levels.

(Note: I'm counting this one as a "finished game" review, but I only played the 6 main levels and 2/4 of the bonus levels. Some sort of bug let me play Bonus 1 and Bonus 2 without meeting the stated requirements, but I'm not willing to go through levels 1, 3, and 6 again or repeatedly in order to get all of the energy orbs in order to unlock Bonus 3 and Ultime Ascension.)

(This is copied from my Steam review.)

20XX is an excellent take on both the "roguelite" genre and the Mega Man series, It's more or less structured like a Mega Man game: eight platforming levels full of enemies, pitfalls, and traps, with a boss at the end of each carrying a new weapon for your character, followed by a final set of levels - two, in this game - ending in fights against the real villains of the game. Likewise, it plays like a "roguelite," featuring fairly short (~45 minutes) runs through procedurally generated levels full of randomly selected powerups, forcing you to adapt your playstyle to the abilities you are given in your current run.

Compared to a normal Mega Man game, it's significantly easier in some senses, with early bosses falling very quickly to basic attacks and no instakill traps (spikes just hurt, pitfalls send you to the last solid ground you were on), but this makes sense given that it's a "roguelite," with death ending your run. The levels are also procedurally generated, rather than hand-crafted, which adds to the replay value significantly but, unfortunately, provides one of the few points of frustration I have with 20XX: some layouts are absolutely obnoxious without a "proper" set of mobility abilities, and can't be forced through at the cost of health due to either falling down during a climbing section or being sent back a good distance by a pitfall, leading to the very few unfair-feeling losses I've had.

Compared to a normal "roguelite," it's a fairly standard setup with persistent unlocks between levels, both in the form of a limited set of permanent upgrades, and new random items you can make available for your future runs. (You can also spend the persistent-unlock currency on a small selection of bonuses for your next run only, so it never stops being useful.) It's also on the more merciful side, with a low difficulty mode which offers you three lives before your run ends and the ability to save a singleplayer session between any two stages, though it also features quite a few extreme difficulty options for players who want to rise to the challenge, through a customizable challenge mode system, as well as fixed-layout daily and weekly levels with leaderboards, both in normal difficulty and challenge-mode difficulty.

Mentioning "a singleplayer session" hits on my favorite thing about 20XX, though: it has two-player cooperative multiplayer, both local and over the internet, and it's amazing. Despite the "loading some sketchy netcode" loading screen, by the end of Early Access the netcode for 20XX has actually been quite stable, though with occasional glitches, and multiplayer Mega Man is one of those things I never knew I needed until I had it.

All in all, 20XX is a good entry in the indie "roguelite" category, and a very good Mega Man-like game. It comes in highly recommended for any "roguelite" fans, and recommended for fans of Mega Man if they're not opposed to a version focused on replay value rather than polished, hand-crafted level design. Even if you're not particularly into either of those, it's a fairly solid action platformer - probably a bit harder than average, but significantly easier than Super Meat Boy or something, and I would still recommend it even at full price. (Which isn't that high: only $15.)

(This is copied from my Steam review.)

Startide is a strangely boring shoot-'em-up, strongly reminiscent of the 2003 freeware title Warning Forever mechanically but much slower-paced, to its detriment. Essentially the entire game is fighting bosses by destroying them part-by-part from the extremities inward, since only the outermost parts on a limb take any damage, with the scaling falling off such that hitting any part other than the two outermost is almost worthless.

So, it's all about slowly circling enemies, minimizing the amount of hits you take, and slowly wearing them down. Of course, with a system where you both regenerate health and destroy the boss's weapons as you fight, this means that essentially all stages get easier as they go on, which contributes to the tedious feeling. Likewise, there's not all that much difference between stages - some will have time limits, and some will have breaks for asteroid fields (which are to your advantage, since you regenerate health and super bar during this time), and as you go on you fight five different alien races, three of which have their own gimmicks, two of which matter - except for stages where you are attacking supply trains, which are similar (you still destroy armed parts coming off the train, from the outside in, then destroy the "core" that contains the supplies) but involve different enough mechanics that they at least feel like something different.

Startide is also not free of minor issues that I felt dragged the game down. The biggest one is that I felt the 4th alien race was the hardest to fight by far, which made the entire end of the game where you fought the 5th race feel very anticlimactic. Another is that, instead of getting notably harder (except when you fight the 4th race) or more interesting, stages just require you to fight more bosses in a row, which increases both the likelihood that you'll mess up and die sometime during them, and makes you have to replay even more when you die. The least and silliest gripe is that the game gave me a giant laser cannon with only one fight left before the rest of the game was fighting the 5th race, and due to how the mechanics interact, the giant laser cannon is useless against the 5th and final race of aliens.

Ultimately, I don't think I was expecting tedium from a shoot-'em-up. It's a genre with quite a few bad entries, but few boring ones, but Startide somehow managed to be. Check out Warning Forever instead, it's a significantly more fun freeware take on many of the same ideas.

(Postscript: Startide has a workshop functionality, but I felt it was somewhat limited in terms of being able to create interesting things due to fairly low "cost" limits, hopelessly degenerate designs like my Invincible are quite possible, and there's no real ship design community for the game. It's at least fairly easy to use, but I didn't think it was notable in any way.)

(This is copied from my Steam review.)

A standalone expansion for Deep Space Waifu, Deep Space Waifu: Flat Justice is twelve additional stages, complete with several new bosses which continue the trend from Academy of being significantly harder and more interesting than the ones in the base game. In addition, it continues having surprisingly good audio design and mostly consistent visual design - though I felt some of the girls who make up the backgrounds were poorly-drawn this time around, most notably Pucky - as well as adding new features by having new versions of your main weapon unlocked as you go through the game, giving you spread shots and somewhat strange piercing shots to choose from in addition to your standard focused shot.

As I said about the original game, it comes through with its premise, even though the premise is incredibly silly, and my gripe about the stages feeling samey is significantly alleviated by the better boss design in this expansion. It's an incredibly short game, at under 2 hours, but given that it's a $2 fanservice game, this is probably to be expected.

As with the original, I'm going to give Flat Justice a thumbs-up, and recommend it over the original because it does everything even better. My few caveats - that it's not worth going out of your way for, that it feels incredibly sleazy, and doesn't really work as porn - still apply, but it's still a competently made, if very easy, shooter for $2, complete with naked anime girls. If that sounds like what you want, it's not going to let you down.

EDIT: They patched in a 13th girl as a postgame bonus. I'm pretty sure her boss is reused from one of the previous level sets, but it was a free bonus so I'm not really going to complain.

(Disclaimer: I'm friends with the publisher of this game but I insisted on buying a key because of how much I liked the demo. This review was written based on Early Access version 1.0 and is a repost of my Steam review from that time - the current version as of this repost is 1.3.)

The Void Rains Upon Her Heart is a side-scrolling boss-rush shoot-'em-up roguelite. Which sounds like it could be a questionable mix of genres, but the roguelite elements are handled quite well, providing a bit of spice to its surprisingly robust shoot-'em-up gameplay by making each run somewhat different, rather than dominating the design.

As a boss-rush game, Void lives or dies by its boss design, so it's reassuring that the 14 bosses in the current version range from excellent to, at worst, somewhat uninspiring, with at least 11 of them being very entertaining to face off against. Likewise, they're almost all very different from each other, with only two feeling too closely related. I hope the developer can keep this up for the final version, with an intended 36 bosses. Likewise, the graphic and sound design is very well-executed, so fighting them also looks and sounds great.

The roguelite elements, as I mentioned, are more of a spice than a main attraction. A lot of the available powerups have fairly minor effects rather than game-changing ones, and (as a shoot-'em-up) it's generally possible to beat every boss without powerups regardless of difficulty. Likewise, while the enemies are randomized, later in the game you are often given a pretty wide choice to fight mostly the enemies you want, so that also mostly acts to vary things up rather than force the player out of their comfort zone. That said, it's not as though the choices are wholly uninteresting - I find the boss Syncron quite difficult still, and some of the major powerups - such as ones that allow you to shoot while charging shots, or give you triple shots - do change my strategy significantly.

About the only major downside for me is that I'd class the game as relatively easy, but I'm fairly good at the genre and, due to the selectable boss difficulty, this also means that it's fairly approachable for players who are new to the genre, or just not very good at it. Later versions claim that they will fix this, however, by adding a third, even harder difficulty mode, and there's still hard challenges in the game's "Quickplay" mode for me to accomplish - the highest scores require you to beat each boss with as close to never getting hit and never ending your combo chain on the boss as possible, which can be fairly hard even against the easier bosses.

In any case, I'd recommend The Void Rains Upon Her Heart to most fans of shoot-'em-ups, and due to the lower and generally player-selectable difficulty, for aspiring fans of shoot-'em-ups as well. The current Early Access version already has a good amount of content and feels like a full game - heck, the demo version also did, and could have come across as a highly-rated free game by itself - and I'm expecting it to only get better as the developer adds more bosses and powerups.