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.)