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Review: Samudra

Jonah Ehlers

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Oct 21, 2021

My Fears

As a child the ocean scared me, and if I’m being honest there’s still a bit of residual fear as an adult. I’d go to the beach with friends or family and just feel intimidated at how endless it all looked. What was under the surface that I couldn’t see? What monstrous sea creatures called the dark and crushing depths of the sea their home?

I remember once, I went about thigh deep into the water, when something slimy brushed up against my leg. Immediately I panicked and bolted for the safety of the sand. I didn’t care that it might have just been a harmless bit of seaweed. That moment ruined the sea for me. The fact that something unknown had touched me was all the justification I needed that the ocean was meant to be feared.

Under The Sea

So it was pretty impactful when Samudra’s opening scene was basically my nightmare. Trip, the protagonist, is sinking to the bottom of the sea. As you fall deeper into the abyss, you begin to notice your surroundings. Bottles, cups, masks, gloves, wardrobes, washing machines, and broken TV’s. The contents of multiple junkyards are exactly what we see on our way down to the ocean floor. And unfortunately this pollution is not limited to this opening scene. The floor itself and most of the landscape we explore is littered with this waste. It’s bleak, and what makes it all the more upsetting is that it’s rooted in reality.

Trip is one of the helmet-wearing survivors of a world that’s been decimated by climate change. Resources and animals are scarce. And the only place left to find resources to survive and possibly to exploit is the ocean. Trip is, for some unknown reason, sinking down into its depths. From the ocean floor he sets off on a journey back to the surface. Along the way he encounters huge sea creatures, some friendly and some eager to take a bite out of him. Trip explores giant factories meant for consuming every resource the ocean has to offer. He navigates through crashed planes, ancient temples, and sunken cities and every bit of it adds to the sad story of this world without even seeing much of the surface.

The visual storytelling is simple but effective. Although Samudra isn’t a particularly lengthy game, Trip goes on one hell of an adventure. I think it comes down to the variety of locations. The scale of the ocean that I had feared as a child is brought to life beautifully in Samudra. Especially in moments when the camera pulls back from Trip to reveal the monumental backgrounds. He ends up being this little speck making its way across a post-apocalyptic ocean.

Child’s Play

Trip’s journey across this ocean is interrupted quite often by environmental puzzles. These make up the bulk of the gameplay so to speak. There are a variety of things that will end up halting your progress. From natural blockages to more synthetic obstacles. As you progress puzzles are accompanied by other dangerous sea creatures or helmet and business suit wearing humans. While this does elevate the challenge, the puzzles in Samudra are hardly challenging. In fact most times it comes down to memory games, timing, or picking optimal routes to flip switches in factory puzzles.

While I may have personally preferred some more challenge. The puzzles are designed really well in terms of pacing. Things always move at a reasonable pace and you’ll hardly every be bogged down in one place for too long. It helps that level design synergizes with the puzzles to create simple but fun environmental puzzles.

It’s a Beautiful, Ugly World

Samudra is gorgeous, every frame may as well be a wallpaper at worst and a painting at best. Even when the screen is filled with more rubbish than ocean, I can’t help but appreciate the artwork. The sheer amount of pollution and ruin was bewildering. It does a brilliant job of illustrating just how bad things are down in the depths of the sea. As well as how scary the leviathans that occasionally stalk you can be. Some of these monsters were simultaneously beautiful and terrifying.

The visuals were also really helped by the unintrusive UI. Mid game, the most that you will end up seeing are button prompts and images replacing dialogue. Speech bubbles will pop up above characters’ heads filled with a warm yellow/orange neon. These communicate or indicate that a button ought to be pressed pretty soon.

To accompany the visuals we’re treated to some pretty solid music, along with some wildly soothing ambient ocean noises. You know, that calming muffled underwater sound. This underwater ambience is always audible under the soundtrack that often consists of piano and beats. A lovely combination. The beats often take on a more industrial feel when in the human-made factories. You’ll be hearing this soundtrack quite often. However, one of the recurring side characters is an octopus that strums their guitar whenever you come across them. With each visit they also seem to add another instrument to their collection. Between the one-octopus band, and the story’s own climactic musical pieces, the selection of music is relatively diverse.

I’m Afraid It’s Good

The entirety of Trip’s journey are my fears realised. Being cast down to the bottom of the sea. Preyed upon and chased down by a number of huge sea creatures, and what was basically a post-apocalyptic world to boot. And yet, Samudra was still a really enjoyable experience that was, if nothing else, a treat for the eyes. Plus partial proceeds go to the Indonesian environmental activist circle. So supporting the game means supporting the cause of environmentalism.

Review: War Mongrels

Gaming

Brendan Freeman

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Oct 21, 2021

0

I never heard of War Mongrels before, but it was an awesome game to review. War Mongrels is a real-time strategy title. It is available on Sony PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X and S, and Windows PC. You play the role of Manford. A German soldier who refused to shoot innocent civilians. As punishment, he is sent to a Penal Squad. On the way, his transporter is hit with artillery. What follows is Manford escaping with another deserter hoping to get away from war.

War Mongrels’ Setting

in the beginning there were War Mongrels — Transporter Down!

War Mongrels is set in the Eastern Front during the year 1944. Near the end of World War II. This is unique as few games focus on a German deserter. Since the two main characters are both deserters. it is easier for the player to empathize with the characters.

Manford doesn’t hesitate to help a guerilla group on turning the tables against the Nazis. Like most military armies, the Nazis do not treat deserters well. But civilians are treated even worse. It’s a great eye-opener on what it was like to be a soldier in the Nazi army. Especially when they are forced to slaughter innocent civilians.

War Mongrels’ Gameplay

Unlike most real-time strategy games, you are not building bases and units. You have limited personnel and resources. You have an option to be either sneaky or loud. Unless you have difficulty on easy, the loud route will almost always get you killed. Yet if you have taken out most of the enemy on the level, there’s no reason you can’t finish the rest off in a gunfight.

The Party

Each character has a set of skills that can be used to make your life easier. Manford has a pocket watch that can be thrown to distract enemies. If he loses the watch, he can whistle to distract enemies. He is an expert at hand-to-hand combat, which makes his attacks quieter. He is the most useful party member in the early game since you will try to stay hidden. One character is very strong and can push large objects which can fall onto enemy soldiers. But, remember that while you’re focused on one character, the others are vulnerable. If any of your party gets spotted, every soldier on the map chases you down. Your party is useless at open warfare. Even in combat mode, they won’t be able to fend them off.

The Difficulty

A quick tip for those that have experience in other RTS games. Go into the settings and change the controls to RTS. Otherwise, you will be fighting with the controls. Remember that the left mouse button controls the actions. While the right mouse button handles selection. I was having a hard time adjusting and it would be helpful if this option had been shown during the tutorial.

It does feel unfair at times, but there are tools that are available to the player to make it easier. If you hold the left mouse button down on an area on the map, it will reveal who can see that point at that moment. This is useful when you plan to throw a distraction or move to that point. It’s easy to forget, but it saved my skin many times.

Game over for me happened often. Even so, the game reloads the previous save in an instant. Yet I did find the manual reload buggy as it didn’t load the save I chose only the most recent one. This was after the day one patch. This meant I couldn’t reload to an easier point where I had more resources. There were a few other bugs, where enemy NPCs are stuck on a loop of spotting a distraction and not moving. But this was few and far between.

War Mongrels’ Presentation

War Mongrels scary cutscene — Creepy cutscenes

The graphics of the game are beautiful. Especially when you take into account the isometric viewpoint. The GUI is easy to use and clear. It also isn’t too small that it takes up needed space on the screen while being readable. The menus are fine as they are nothing special but they get the job done.

My favorite feature of War Mongrels is the cutscenes between chapters. The style of them is beautiful to watch and adds to the plot. I preferred this to if they had done in-game cutscenes. I wish more titles did this style so that the story can be told in the best visual way.

The soundtrack is fit for purpose. When you are playing, all the information you are taking in is visual. It would have been nice if they could have used fog of war to make you rely on the sound. The music sits in the background and doesn’t distract from the action which is exactly what you want. The music changes depending on what is happening on screen. I began to hate the music when I got spotted, which makes you fear it.

Verdict

Omit I had a blast with this title. I couldn’t wait to play more. It was on my mind throughout my day and wanted to watch the story unfold. Even though dying can get frustrating, I learned something new from each death. It is tough, but other similar titles like Desperados and Commandos are harder. For that reason, this title gets a solid 8 out of 10.

Review: Aeon Drive

Daniel Waite

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Oct 21, 2021

0

Game developers have a bleak outlook on mankind’s future. Robots take over, people live in slums, and usually, we’re all doomed, one way or another. Though the picture isn’t as rosy as I’d like, there are always positives. Alien technology, special abilities, and new unfounded worlds. Aeon Drive mixes all these elements in its dark and doomed cyberpunk-inspired gameplay.

Developed by 2Awesome Studio and published by 2Awesome Studio and CRITICAL REFLEX, this is a speedrun platform game. Using a 2D side-scrolling perspective, this neon-infused game reeks of old-school charm with a futuristic twist.

Aeon Drive has an unusual but fun concept.

Time is of the essence is a well-known phrase and it’s very apt for Aeon Drive’s main concept. The gameplay revolves around a thirty-second countdown clock and a desperate dash for the finish line. You must search each small stage looking for collectables and energy cells to extend your time. You’ll encounter obstacles and monsters that will kill you instantly. You must balance speed and poise with guile and patience. You’ll die repeatedly, but as long as you learn from your mistakes, it matters not.

You control Jackalyne, a pilot of a time jumping, space hopping vessel. Her core drive has become damaged and she must land on a strange planet before it explodes. She touches down near ‘New Barcelona’, but fragments of her engine are spewed across the land. You must find these unstable entities before they explode with catastrophic consequences.

Slash your sword and avoid those bullets.

Collectables, obstacles, enemies, and energy cells.

No platformer is complete without an array of collectables to locate. Fortunately, Aeon Drive spoils you with data cubes, gems, and hot dogs to find. However, unlike other platform games, Aeon Drive pushes you to your limits if you wish to collect them all.

Luckily, your limited timer can be extended. If you explore each level and gather further energy cells you’ll slow the ticking clock. These handy power sources must be combined to increase the timer by five seconds. This doesn’t sound much, but these precious seconds can be the difference between victory and success.

To increase the challenge further, the developers decided to add obstacles and enemies to block your path. Your foes can be killed with your handy sword, but touching them is certain doom, so beware. The traps are equally brutal and many require a teleportation device to pass them. You’ll encounter flames, saw blades, moving platforms, cannons, and so forth the further you venture. It quickly becomes a headache and planning is a must if you wish to succeed.

Aeon Drive looks great and has a Sega vibe.

Old-school gaming is massive at the moment, and I love anything with a retro look. I was particularly pleased to see the Sega-inspired aesthetics that run through Aeon Drive. Its wonderfully pixelated world and neon-infused colour palette transport you to this dangerous futuristic world. The gameplay is smooth, and I encountered no bugs or issues while playing.

The dated style continues with the synth-wave audio. This 80s staple works brilliantly with the purple hues and cold atmosphere of the robot-controlled world. Its pace and aggressive tones matched the time-pressured action, and it was great to listen to. The music was complemented nicely, by the odd smattering of dialogue and the cutscenes. The Americanised style would normally annoy me, but its cheesy influence matched the personality of the overly confident protagonist.

Lots of mechanics make it tough to learn.

With many mechanics to concentrate on and time ticking away, this isn’t an easy game to master. Its thorough tutorial breaks the ice nicely, but in the heat of the action, mistakes are made. Once you get to grips with the controls, you’ll love slashing your enemies, transporting through obstacles, and leaping chasms. It’s a rewarding game because of its difficulty and it’s extremely addictive.

Every stage has a leaderboard to try to top, and this simple idea is so moreish. Racing across lands to beat strangers around the globe was a fantastic concept and one that kept me playing. The longevity is increased further, still, because of the array of collectables. You’ll die, lose your way, and beg for help as you attempt to find them all. This feeling continues with the challenging achievement list that’s tough to complete. The game must be finished and everything found if you wish to unlock everything.

Aeon Drive is unusual, but it’s wonderfully polished.

The platform genre is saturated, so games have to stand out from their peers. Aeon Drive is so well polished and unusual that it does just that. I loved the time pressure and the small but intelligent stage design. Its old-school aesthetics work brilliantly and it’s an unusual and special platformer that needs your attention. I loved it and recommend you to buy it here! Save ‘New Barcelona’ from a catastrophic event. Avoid the obstacles, kill your foes, and grab each shard.

Review: Bonito Days

Michael Hoade

-

Oct 20, 2021

0

Good vibes, city pop and a summertime aesthetic make Bonito Days – a new game heavily inspired by the target minigame in Super Monkey ball – an incredibly pleasant experience.

Simpler times:

Playable with up to four friends, Bonito Days is a game that relies on its simplicity. Playing as a flying fish (which can come in a number of different colours), your goal is to collect as many points as possible while navigating the many different bright and colourful maps.

You start each level inside of a little ball, with the aim of gaining enough momentum so your fish can soar through the sky and start building up that score. You cannot fly indefinitely, however, and this is where the game’s (modest) challenge comes into play. If you fly too high – or too low, you run the risk of hitting the water and quickly losing a life. For each game you have three lives; three chances to rack up your score.

I think the developers have done a good job of balancing a simple concept and controls, with enough considerations to keep the gameplay interesting. The maps themselves play a large part in this success, as the different structures of the levels all take some time to learn. Knowing the optimal route to take to get the best score, whilst keeping yourself airborne and positioning your character to hit the target (and not roll off, like I did many times), are all considerations that elevate the simplistic gameplay to something more thoughtful.

Power-ups (often found in hard to reach spots) offer an additional incentive for players to work towards,

The more the merrier:

The charm of Bonito Days is undeniable, but, this isn’t a game with a lot of depth – and that is okay, mostly.

For the modest price, Bonito Days provides a relaxing and initially fun experience. Where the game shines is in the company of others. The two modes (cup mode and free play), lack of unlockables and short learning curve mean that, as a single-player experience, Bonito Days might struggle to hold your attention.

That being said, with a group of friends this game can be really fun. The casual nature, calming aesthetic and numerous different maps encourage a fun couch co-op experience full of laughter, stress and good times.

The lack of a leaderboard or score-tracking does feel like a big oversight, however.

Good vibes all day:

I’ve alluded to this already, but Bonito Days visual design and excellent pop city soundtrack elevated the experience a great deal for me. This might seem like a somewhat muted compliment, but I just found the game a pleasure to play.

Each track harkens back to simpler times – for me, to when I was a kid during summer losing countless hours to my Playstation 2, without any sense of time or structure. The music is bright and positive, with enough variety to match the many different locations.

The bright and cheery colour palette and creative map designs all contribute to a game that is just a pleasure to sit down and play. From snowy mountains, to small waterside towns, to of course bright and cheery beaches, each location feels perfectly idyllic.

Bonito Days is a game that manages to encapsulate a certain feeling, whether that be childhood nostalgia, or a particularly relaxing holiday – or even something else entirely.

Whilst the gameplay itself would have benefitted from a tad more variety and incentives to work towards (such as some sort of leaderboard or unlockables), there are still bundles of happiness and good vibes for the player to derive from this experience. And the simple gameplay can provide plenty of laughs if you can get a group of friends together.

Bonito Days isn’t a game that you’ll likely lose hours and hours to. Shorter, more infrequent play sessions are where you’ll see the game really shine, and get to appreciate the warm, cosy aesthetic and vibe that the developers have absolutely perfected.

Yes, the experience isn’t all that long lasting, but I’ll be damned if it wasn’t memorable.

Review: Doctor Who – The Edge of Reality

Sean McCarthy

-

Oct 20, 2021

1

Review: Doctor Who – The Edge of Reality

As a Doctor Who fan I have always been disappointed in the lack of actual main console platform video games based on the show. There have been attempts with free to play Flash browser experience games which are short, throw away and not very memorable. In recent years only LEGO Dimensions saw any real use of the Doctor Who license but it was a very monetized experience locked behind the pay wall of the game itself and the cost of the toys you needed to access the Doctor Who content. Earlier this year I had the opportunity to review Doctor Who: The Lonely Assassins, a game brought to consoles from the original mobile game and due to the very puzzle solving nature of it, it translated very well. Now we have Doctor Who: The Edge of Reality which was originally a VR game which is a very different experience to turn back into a stand video game. So, the question is, was it a success?

In short, the answer is almost as The Edge of Reality has some elements that managed to transfer across well but there is a huge chunk of it that will leave you wondering how on earth it managed to get past the feedback of any QA team. The story is rather fun, as you the unnamed and voiceless character, finds yourself in a very traditional British Launderette (Laundry Mat for our American friends), when all of a sudden a door intercom buzzes and with no one else around, you answer it to find The Doctor (Jodie Whittaker’s 13^th Doctor) in a panic and asking for help for she has been kidnapped and needs your help to save all of reality and the life within it from a Reality Virus threatening to destroy it all. Standard Doctor Who Saturday night story really.

Immediately you can really feel the VR nature of the gameplay with limited movement such as no ability to jump but then the location designs only require you to move around in a very limited way as you would expect. Puzzles often resort to nothing more than collecting items to be combined to make a device or to repair something before the, admittedly, fun mechanic of using the 13^th Doctor’s Sonic Screwdriver to activate the device or open a lock and door. The puzzles are guided, often with a companion character to hold your hand and constantly verbally tell you what you need to do or might need to solve a puzzle. As such this is very much a linear experience for the most part with the only reason to have a look around is to find pages to fill in your Journal which explains where you are, who all the rogue’s gallery of Doctor Who monsters is which is great for fans and new Doctor Who fans. The most challenging part of this game is just putting up with all the bugs and issues this console port of a VR experience has sadly.

Visually Edge of Reality is a very average, even by last generation console titles for PS4 and Xbox One, game. Levels are just paths to move around with little to do other than the very short and again, handheld all the way, puzzles to give some Doctor Who reason to use the Sonic Screwdriver with common sense puzzle solving needed on rare occasions. The controls always feel clumsy and janky which again is a big part of why it would work so well as a VR experience instead of holding a full console controller with limited things to do. There are sections where the game fails to render in all the elements and dare to look too closely and you will see some terrible resolution and textures. At times it can be very off putting especially in sections where you come across the old guard of Doctor Who iconic monsters with the DALEKs and Cybermen. The Dalek section becomes a clumsy first-person shooter which puts you inside a DALEK shell to ‘EXTERMINATE’ any and all DALEKS before you but on my run through the game, the heads of the DALEKS fail to render at all so just floating eye stalks which refused to load in no matter how many times I reloaded the game. For the Cybermen, well they just posed no threat at all, their animation so terrible that you could simply run to get away from them and they failed to have any weapons such as their arm lasers so instead just shouted that they wanted to delete you but looked as though they were just offering you a hug.

It was not all bad however as the Weeping Angels section was incredible fun and worked brilliantly well, so well that I do wish I could experience that entire section as VR as the sound of a Weeping Angel moving when you turned your back on them to continue through the maze of corridors was legitimately thrilling to play through. It was so good that it made the other sections with the DALEKS and Cyberman feel even more poorly done, whilst they may have worked for a VR experience, for a main console game it lacked substance to make it as detailed and well thought out as the Weeping Angels. Getting to be in the TARDIS was also quite fun as a Doctor Who fan though it was the 13^th Doctor’s TARDIS interior and the which I am not a big fan of, there is still some fan moments as the TARDIS helps teach you how to work it and a particular moment right at the start which at some point, all Whovians have dreamed about having.

The story is actually very good as well having the 13^th Doctor explaining by not fully explaining what is happening in the way only she can but for me the biggest joy came from the cameo of the 10^th Doctor (David Tennant) who just adds so much every time he returns to the fold in any way he can, which despite the visuals and animation not really doing him or the 13^th Doctor credit, hearing his voice and returning to the lore of his adventures was very satisfying. Though there is only so many times you can here “Alonsy” thrown into dialogue before it just feels forced!

Overall Doctor Who: The Edge of Reality can at times bring the Doctor Who experience, and nostalgia fans have been looking for but at its heart it sadly is full of so many faults and average elements that can stand out far more than the positives. It needed more refinement and content when making the jump from VR to a normal video game experience and just makes me wish that someone would take Doctor Who and just make a fully developed gaming experience for consoles rather than taking a mobile game or a VR game and trying to make it work just to re-release it one more time. At a play time of 4-5 hours if you try to find all the collectibles, it does offer a Doctor Who experience which is better than not having one, but one for the sales of which I sense this will very quickly land in the bargain bucket of the TARDIS before too long!

Just give Doctor Who fans the LEGO Doctor Who 60^th Anniversary Special game we ALL want on our Consoles!

Review: Teacup

Daniel Waite

-

Oct 20, 2021

0

As I’m British, I have a slight obsession with hot drinks. I can consume one of these beverages any time of day or night, and they always quench my thirst. It’s for this reason I understood the protagonist’s plight in my latest review, Teacup. This cute and wholesome game is bizarre, colourful and tea obsessed.

Developed by Smarto Club and published by Whitethorn Digital, this is a narrative adventure title. This relaxing game demands you explore a land filled with mystery, helpful individuals, and anthropomorphic creatures. It’s a short tale that tugs at the heartstrings and makes you feel warm inside.

Teacup doesn’t really make sense.

I loved the calm and captivating concept surrounding Teacup’s plot. However, it rarely made any sense. Its surreal story requires that you go with the flow and limited guidance has you scrambling for answers.

You control a tea-loving frog called Teacup. She lives in a quaint house and enjoys her own company. Yet, occasionally, she’ll throw a tea-related extravaganza. With the next party only days away, our heroine checks her herb supply. Shock, horror, she is all out of tea! Fortunately, however, she has a handy herb encyclopaedia and Teacup begins her adventure to refill her cupboards. Surely a trip to the local convenience store would have been easier?

Helping friends and mini-games.

The wholesome element of Teacup is felt throughout. She is a popular figure, though she is clearly aloof. Her adventure demands she explore forests, plazas, meadows, and more, as she hunts for those elusive herbs. En route, she must speak to the locals, listen to their stories, and take notes of the clues that’ll help her.

This was wonderful to experience, though the gameplay was a little repetitive. Subsequently, the short playtime was just right, as this prevented boredom from setting in. Many of the tasks involved meeting an individual to help them with a problem. Whether it was serving coffee, fixing cogs, fishing food from a lake, or hitting carpets, it’ll keep you busy.

Though you are treated to an array of mini-games that match the theme and setting, they will fail to test you. You are asked to complete an array of tasks, including memory games to shooting events and sadly, they are too easy. I’d have liked a difficulty option to mix things up and to challenge myself further.

This will make you feel good.

Teacup’s ability to make you smile is fantastic and its slow-paced yet touching story is wonderful to see. Its range of characters and strange and mysterious locations capture your attention immediately. It’s rare that such a simple concept maintains my focus, yet I fell for its calming charms.

The developers clearly wanted exploration to be the key concept, yet their approach was a little off. With no guidance or journal to turn to, you must remember every bit of information. It was strange that a relaxing title would be so demanding.

Teacup captures the essence of a Spring day.

No matter your location, Spring is a beautiful and vibrant season. Teacup has captured the essence of a Spring day within its aesthetics. Its pastel colour palette, varied locations, and hand-drawn characters are wonderful to look at. I loved the 2D Paper Mario style models and the combination of beautiful landscapes and dream-like worlds.

The audio enhances the calm and relaxing atmosphere with its soft and dreamy tunes. The music transports you to each location, and you’ll allow the chilled music to wash over you. A lack of spoken dialogue and sound effects were the right choice, and I adored the simplicity and its no-fuss approach.

Clumsy controls and no reason to return.

Teacup’s controls were serviceable, mostly. However, during mini-games, they were clumsy and lacked accuracy. This oversight from Smarto Club undermines the enjoyment found in each task and added unnecessary frustration. Fortunately, though, during the exploration aspects, they worked well and were easy to understand.

This short adventure is great during the first playthough which is lucky as there are few reasons to return. There are no additional modes to explore or alternative stories to experience. This was a shame, as I would have liked to see another character’s point of view or to explore the world in more detail. The longevity is reduced further still thanks to the small achievement list that offers little challenge. Subsequently, though, this does make it a completionist’s dream as it’s finished in a little over two hours.

Teacup may not be everyone’s cup of tea!

I enjoyed Teacup because of its warm aesthetics and touching story. However, I can see why this won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. I liked its simplicity, short story, and interesting characters, so I recommend you to buy it here! You can’t have a tea party without tea! Grab your encyclopaedia, go on an adventure, and collect the herbs.

Review: DwarfHeim

Vasilis Tatsiopoulos

-

Oct 19, 2021

0

Sadly, if you take one look at DwarfHeim, you’ll probably think it’s yet another mobile strategy game. The generic art style, the toothless music, the character designs and the voice-overs all point this way, to the mobile RTS niche. The characters are dwarves and their depiction comes as too overused: big, loud, carrying mugs of ale and yelling with a forced Scottish accent. Not very interesting, to say the least, and not representative of the game as a whole.

A refreshing spin on strategy

If you move past the generic visuals and the audio mishaps, you’ll find a very daring game, risking and trying something entirely new with its core mechanics. It is indeed an RTS game, full with resource gathering, micromanaging teams of warriors, farming, mining and building/upgrading various structures. It’s all there, it’s all overly familiar, but there is a big twist: the gameplay is divided in 3 parts, ideally to be played in co-op with your friends. One player takes the role of the miner, the other is the builder and the last one the warrior.

This approach solves a prevalent problem of the genre by letting you focus on what you actually enjoy doing. In DwarfHeim you don’t have to juggle all the different roles; you don’t have to manage the fighters sieging a far-away enemy base while paying attention to the upgrades and the resource gathering. Here, you assume one role and focus on it entirely. This means that you need to communicate efficiently with your team, as every part is tied to the others. For example, the warrior cannot function if they don’t have enough resources to create more fighters, so the miner and builder need to gather food, wood, minerals and provide as needed.

Class-based RTS

As a builder, your main role in DwarfHeim is, well, to build. You create various structures: houses to maximize the unit limit, a university used to research upgrades, an alehouse to heal nearby units, you build walls and everything else typically included in RTS games. Also, you have to chop down trees, to farm the land and in general you need to gather the many resources found in this game (food, for instance, is divided in different categories, each used for particular upgrades).

If you play as a warrior, your role is straightforward: you control the army units to fight trolls and other monsters roaming the map, but also to attack the enemy bases or defend yours. There are some very simple objectives to be cleared: mainly you have to find some control points and stay inside them long enough to challenge them and then use them to your advantage (they clear the fog around them and you get to see more of the map, in strategic points). Of course, your enemies may try to take them from you and some fights break out, playing in typical RTS fashion. You also control a main hero, who gives you some specific, unique abilities that affect battle but also resource gathering or just moving around the map, with buffs and stat raises. In the end, you win if you destroy the enemy town hall, so it’s on the warrior’s hands to give the finishing blow. It’s all familiar, nothing new to see here.

Now, the miner is the most interesting of the three distinct classes found in DwarfHeim. The other two mainly move and work above ground, but the miner goes in the underworld to find precious minerals -a simple press of the “TAB” button alternates between the over and the underworld. The mining process is incredibly satisfying and very complex: you have to build huge contraptions with belts, rails and machinery to process the metals and produce ingots. You start with some rails, on which you place a gathered resource consisting of many different minerals. For example, if you mine a specific block, you may get some stone and a bit of iron. Then, you can build structures that separate the resources and send them on different rails to be forged and processed accordingly. You can mix them to create certain recipes or just store them as they are found.

Just look at all this beauty:

Miner wins all

It’s a complicated process and sadly the tutorial doesn’t do a good enough job explaining it, but after some matches you’ll be building huge underground factories that work autonomously, and it’s really a blast. Complex as it is, mining gameplay is the best part of DwarfHeim; it feels integral, very important and is glaringly harder than being a warrior of builder. So, if you play a good miner you’ll be a very important asset to DwarfHeim’s teams -that is, if you ever manage to find other people to play with in the excruciatingly long matchmaking queues. There are some fundamental problems, affecting all three classes, like faulty pathfinding/collision systems and a mediocre UI, and they do bring down the experience, but not enough to detract from its good parts.

Also, the complexity of the miner’s role creates another problem: the other two are just not as interesting. While the miner creates complicated machinery to optimize the process of gathering underground resources, the other two classes are just doing normal, commonplace RTS things, that can get a bit tiresome after a while because the upgrades, buildings and warrior-types are not enough. Also, the battles themselves are quite simple and can in no way compare to the Factorio-like mining mechanics.

Fun with friends

Also, while the core gameplay is interesting and fun, the available modes are underwhelming. You have the typical skirmishes, played against a team of AI controlled opponents -in this mode you can use AI controlled teammates too. Then, in survival, which has you trying to survive against monster attacks, you have to play with other people, as AI is not an option. The same is true for conquest mode (one team VS another) and sandbox, which is the equivalent of a training, free-form mode.

The available types of matches are not a lot and not different enough to maintain player interest for a long time. Also, playing alone, with AI controlled teammates and enemies, is just not that fun, because the AI is not very competent and you can’t communicate with it to request specific resources, for example. It’s a game that’s designed to be played with others, but doing so is not that easy, sadly. Oh, and there’s no campaign mode to be found too, and the few maps that are available for the various modes, inexplicably, have to be unlocked first to be used…

All in all, DwarfHeim has a lot of potential. Based on a really great core idea, it’s a game that can revitalize the RTS genre. To get there, though, it needs a lot of polish and more though-out game modes. As it stands, it’s still a fun game to play with friends, and shows some strokes of genius, but mostly on paper.

Review: DEVOUR

Luke Maguire

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Oct 19, 2021

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DEVOUR is a co-op horror survival game starring former cultists. Their mission is to stop the goat demon Azazel from being unleashed into the world.

DEVOUR contains three different maps. The most recent addition is called ‘The Inn’ and was released in a free update on September the 23rd. The three maps have great variety in style and aesthetics however they all suffer from the maze like map design. This is both a good and bad thing. On the plus side it improves the thrilling experience of being chased down and not quite knowing your way around the map. On the negative side it can be irritating when you are trying to find your way back to an item or ritual piece that you found earlier but didn’t get a chance to pick up at the time.

One of the altars you place the ritual piece on the inn map.

I highly recommend this game being played in co-op for the hilarious moments it can produce. These include other players screaming due to jump scares or panicking while running terrified from the maps demons. It would be an extremely tough game to play solo. I personally wouldn’t recommend playing solo as the tasks tend to take around thirty minutes to complete even with three or four people. DEVOUR doesn’t hold back on its difficulty as the demon gets far more aggressive as you get closer to your goal. This makes teamwork and communication essential even on normal difficulty. You’ll need to be revived by your teammates and work together using the UV lights to stagger the boss and ensure your survival.

Molly hunting while we gather the ritual pieces

The greatest flaw is that it lacks replayability, however for the price tag of €4 I can’t complain at all. I had completed every map once close to two hours in. The biggest question was did I want to go back and play them again? My honest answer was kind of. I wanted to play it again to laugh with my friends while being on edge of a jump scare that was ready to be brought upon us. But the tedious tasks that DEVOUR invokes really showed the lack of creativity from the developers. In every level you have to collect ten ritual items while a demon chases you. The difference in each map was the skins of enemies and the map itself. However in each level you have to do the exact same tasks every time.

The horror tends to make you on edge especially with the creepy designs of the bosses. Zara’s is the most unnerving as she has a spider body with a human head. Molly has by far the most terrifying jump scare. The sound effects create a state of paranoia as everything sounds closer than it actually is. This makes it feel more tense and creates an unsettling atmosphere.

One of the many enemies waiting to attack

The game also has perks which is an incentive to keep playing as you level up. These perks will help you survive with some simple abilities like faster movement speed and some crucial ones like being able to see the last ritual piece on the map. However, levelling up doesn’t seem to be that quick on normal difficulty. This forces you to play on hard, getting a 15% XP boost and 25% on nightmare mode.

DEVOUR is a joy to play, particularly with friends or with people you’ll meet in public servers. It has solid horror and a tense atmosphere but it is rather short with only three maps and tasks never changing. However with the developers, Straight Back Games, releasing free content through updates this makes DEVOUR a bargain that’s bound to have a long lifespan with new content releasing.

Review: Escape Simulator

Daniel Waite

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Oct 19, 2021

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Puzzles have fascinated mankind for years, and people set aside hours to complete each problem. It matters not if it’s for work or pleasure, the sense of achievement when we solve each puzzle is rewarding. Recently, the genre has ventured into more dramatic and interactive scenarios, and escape rooms have become big business. Escape Simulator aims to build on this success with its challenging yet fun problem-solving experience.

Developed and published by Pine Studio, this is an escape room sim title. Available to play solo or online with another player, this is a tricky yet fun game to experience. Its simple style, colourful characters, and interesting scenarios capture your attention from the start. Its many logic-based problems will get under your skin and once you begin playing, you’ll struggle to stop.

Escape Simulator has lots to offer and many unique puzzles.

I’m a massive fan of the puzzle genre and have taken part in many escape rooms. Therefore, I was always going to jump at the chance to give Escape Simulator a go. However, I hadn’t prepared for the vast amount of problems and scenarios that were on offer. I was shocked by the level of detail and the complexities surrounding each puzzle.

The game offers four playable areas, including the tutorial. Each of the three main scenarios comprises five stages that match each theme and have unique problems to solve. You’ll explore an Egyptian area, a futuristic space zone, and a Victorian building. Each area attempts to create theme accurate puzzles that require logical thinking and an eye for detail.

You’ll smash vases, twist dials, move pyramids, pick up gems, search for keys, and more. Each room has three main objectives to complete and achieving each one within the time limit is nearly impossible. The objectives are the same throughout and players must search for hidden tokens, complete each room, and get out before the clock reaches zero.

Clues, frustration, and a level editor.

When every object is a possible clue, it’s hard to decipher what is useful and what is not. Luckily, Pine Studio considered this issue and added a handy visual guide to ensure you don’t waste time with junk items. This was a considered and well thought out mechanic that makes the gameplay much more accessible. Yet, this doesn’t make the problems any easier to solve.

Some of the puzzles are frustratingly difficult and a scenario can quickly turn from a fun experience to a nightmare in seconds. With no hint system, you can be stuck on a level for hours. I wish the developers had considered this problem as less skilled gamers will be put off by the complexities of some of the puzzles.

Where Escape Simulator truly shines is its co-op action and its level editor. Co-op play requires a good level of communication to be successful. However, a good teammate does help to alleviate the aforementioned lack of hints. It was great fun solving problems with a friend and though it got messy quite quickly; it was extremely rewarding when you completed each stage together.

The level editor allows creative players the chance to design and share their escape rooms with the community. This was a fantastic idea that increases longevity while adding some interesting content.

Escape Simulator has a nice look, but it won’t amaze you.

Thanks to the small stages, the developers have been able to focus on the finer details. This was essential when every item can be a clue. I loved how the surrounding world changed as levers were moved and puzzles were solved. Boxes can be shifted, new paths created, and fresh problems introduced. It was a clever approach that brought the claustrophobic stages to life. However, for all its positives, it won’t amaze you with its aesthetics. Sadly, they are a little dated and the textures are a bit rough in places. Subsequently, this does reduce the final polish.

The clutter-free UI and the ability to inspect every item were a brilliant touch from the developers. Flipping, spinning, and searching every item was a great way to find clues, and it gave the game a real hands-on feeling. I loved how this sucked you into the action, and no matter how obscure the item, you’ll scrutinise it, nonetheless.

A calm problem-solving title needs a mellow soundtrack. Escape Simulator delivers this and it helps to keep the action going at a steady pace throughout, however, I think this was an oversight by the developers. I’d have liked the countdown clock to be more dominant, as this would have added pressure. This could have been supported further with a mixture of upbeat and more aggressive songs. If these ideas were implemented, it would improve the experience and increase the challenge. In its current build, the music is suitable and pleasant, yet it simply fails to add to the emotion.

Easy to pick up and play.

When a game focuses on problem-solving, you don’t want to concentrate on the controls. Fortunately, Escape Simulator has a well-mapped button layout and is easy to play with Mouse and Keyboard. Sadly, though, it doesn’t support a gamepad, and this is something that should be implemented at a later date. The well-designed UI allows you to select items with ease, and moving around the small stages was simple and smooth.

Thanks to the level editor, online co-op, and multiple stages, this will keep you playing. It’s not an easy game, and its lack of hints will sadly put off some gamers. If you can cope with the challenging levels, you’ll experience a moreish game with intelligent puzzles to solve.

Escape Simulator replicates the atmosphere of every escape room I’ve experienced.

What makes Escape Simulator fantastic is its ability to replicate the difficulty and claustrophobic nature of every escape room I’ve experienced. The tough puzzles and intertwined problems will challenge the best in the puzzle genre. I enjoyed it and recommend you to buy it here! Every room is full of clues! Can you piece together the information, solve the puzzles, and escape each room? Collect the tokens, search every object, and beat the clock.

Review: Raging Blasters

Reviews

Brendan Freeman

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Oct 18, 2021

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Raging Blasters is a vertical-scrolling space game developed and published by TERARIN GAMES. Also, know as shmup or Shoot ’em ups It’s not a genre I’m familiar with, yet with the amount of time I played, I enjoyed every minute of it. Raging Blasters is available on both Windows PC and the Nintendo Switch.

What is Raging Blasters?

The premise is simple, you are a space cadet tasked with destroying the enemy. That is it, and it’s all the game needs. The action is constant and it never gives the player time to breathe. My eyes were darting across the screen so that I could predict the enemy’s every attack. You can control the speed of your spaceship and the direction you move on the screen. Big exclamation marks appear at the bottom when an enemy sneaks behind you which is helpful.

There are two game modes. One is the arcade mode, in which you defeat enemies and bosses to progress to the next round. Then there is the Caravan Mode. This gives you three minutes to progress as far as you can while scoring as many points as you can.

Raging Blasters Boss Fight — One of the many boss fights

Raging Blasters’ Presentation

The pixel art style of the game suits the simplicity of the story. But, the black outlines of the main characters are ugly and could have been cleaner.

The enemies are many and varied. The bosses have interesting designs as you progress. This keeps you on your toes as well as makes it interesting to find out what the next boss will be. The only negative I have is that your ship can only take one hit. I admit I’m not the most experienced in this genre, but it does feel unfair. The difficulty is quite high on normal, and there is no easy option. But to counter the unfairness, it doesn’t take long to start a new game. You also have access to different power-ups from lasers to a ring shield that damages enemy spacecraft.

Raging Blasters Fast combat — Fast-paced combat

Platforms?

Where this game makes the most sense is on the Nintendo Switch. It is so easy to pick up and play. No long story to remember and with the caravan mode, you can have a quick three-minute round between tasks. Such as working from home. Even so, because of the low system requirements, it can run on almost any PC hardware. I used my laptop and it worked flawlessly.

The audio sounds like it comes from the 16-bit era. Fast-paced and with limited instruments which contribute to the arcade machine feel. For the majority of the time, it will play one track, but when you encounter bosses the music fades away, replaced with boss music. For an arcade game, this is all you need.

Raging Blasters Homing Weapons — Homing weapons

The Verdict

After playing a few hours I started to get the feel of the game and how to progress. It is rewarding when you progress further than before. Much like the Souls games. For gamers that love this genre, it would appear shallow even when expanded with co-op play. For the casual gamer, but, this is a great introduction to the genre and would be a great entry point to the world of Shmup. Due to this, I can only give Raging Blasters a 6/10. It’s too shallow to be a game you come back to, but at the same time introduces new players to the genre.

Review: BPM: Bullets Per Minute

Alex Chessun

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Oct 18, 2021

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Do ya’ feel funky? Well, do ya, punk?

Emerging from the depths of hell comes BPM: Bullets Per Minute, an innovative and punishing Rhythm FPS roguelike that requires you blast to the beat of its guitar-shredding soundtrack while teetering on a knife-edge difficulty.

If you ever thought that the standard Doom formula need a bit of shake up, then BPM is for you, as it reduces Doom down to its 90s core and shoves it into a randomizer. While the goal in BPM is to clear each grungy room and defeat the main boss of each dungeon, everything else – the rooms, the enemies, their drops, the number of ways to get potential abilities, equipment, and stat boosts – is completely random.

This makes every playthrough different – as you’ll rarely see the same upgrades and abilities in consecutive playthroughs – and requires you to adapt your plan of attack based on the arsenal available to you. If you have a revolver or a semi-automatic gun that requires frequent reloading, then you’ll need to be more evasive in your movement when planning your shots. Starting off with revolvers, you’ll unlock weapons (through the shop or in treasure chests) that extend to equipment such as laser guns, shotguns and rocket launchers, all of which handle wildly different.

The dark and environs clearly an ode to the 90s shooters of old.

Abilities and standard stats round off the trifecta of essential elements that dictate whether or not you even escape the first dungeon. Once you are lucky enough to happen upon some effective abilities, such as a regenerative ability, explosive shots and a great weapon, the real thrill of the game kicks in, with its high octane action and overpowered weapons combining with a motivating soundtrack to make you feel invincible.

In my experience, though, expecting an epic combination of abilities is like playing against the house – you are going to end up empty handed, and more often than not you’ll find yourself at the mercy of it. When you inevitably lose your one and only life, all of the equipment and abilities you’ve gained are lost. Knowing that you won’t see be able to pick-up that equipment again for hours is more than enough to make you want to throw your controller across the room.

For better or worse, this forces you to think about giving up on your current run and instead consider spending your coins in the equipment shops to potentially see better weapons in future runs (unlocked from your accrued loyalty points).

One of the shops that becomes more of an investment over time due to the many, many failures you’ll come to experience.

Keeping your heart’s BPM up and your headbanging is the game’s soundtrack, but shooting to its beat is also no walk in the park. Developing a calm trigger finger to follow the beat and lining up the enemy in your crosshairs takes practice, while getting this wrong will cause your gun to jam, and will lead you to flail around in circles even more than normal. The developers were kind enough to provide an option to disable this feature for those without a rhythmic bone in their body – like me – but they also ramped up the difficulty and lowered the points you can generate in said mode, making its benefit mute.

A nice offering after tossing a few coins into the pot. I should note that there are other levels with different designs, but well, I didn’t take any screenshots of when I was there and well, I never was able to return….

There are 10 playable characters with different abilities, 4 difficulty modes and a challenge mode which add depth to the product for those looking for more from the shooter, but the big attraction is certainly in its main mode.

It’s as clear as day that there is an enjoyable game hidden within BPM, but it might take a very specific audience to fully enjoy it. The system that strips you of your abilities upon death while offering no extra lives, for example, might be par the course for hardcore games, but linking your entire fate to the pick-ups rather than any skill you can develop, is a little too extreme for my liking. You could argue that this what the developer was looking for, and that this does indeed feel like emerging from hell as it isn’t possible to ease into the game or build momentum for more than a few minutes.

The emerging Rhythm FPS subgenre changes up the FPS in ways I hadn’t thought possible, and is a genre that I hope continues to grow, adding a tremendous twist to the standard shooting mechanic. BPM does a decent job integrating this system, but then shoots itself in the foot centering the game around equipment drop rates rather than graded difficulty levels. While this keeps the dungeons feeling fresh from the beginning as the difficulty level is essentially static, you lose any sense of control over the events in the game and it feels like you are dicing with an invisible and overly sadistic 8-ball rather than a specific enemy.

Another element that isn’t quite so perfect are the controls, which demand a speed and accuracy that I’m not sure the PS4 controller is best suited for regardless of how sensitive you adjust the aiming settings for the joysticks, which makes me believe the PC version, which the difficulty was made for, might be slightly easier to pick up.

With its randomized playthroughs and victimizing difficulty BPM will humble even the cockiest of revolver-wielding Cliff Eastwood wannabes, but once you are able to find your groove with the rhythm mechanic, its appeal makes a bit more sense, just know that you aren’t playing BPM – it’s playing you.

Review: Farming Life

Daniel Waite

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Oct 18, 2021

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Farming is one of the toughest industries to be involved in as farmers deal with long hours, horrendous weather, sick animals, poor crops, and more. However, strangely, the gaming industry smooths over the rough bits while selling us a picture of tranquillity. Farming Life is the latest farm simulator title to tempt us to live our best life in the virtual countryside.

Developed by Pyramid Games and published by Gaming Factory and Ultimate Games, this is a relaxing farming simulator. Using a Voxel aesthetic and semi-realistic storyline, you must turn around a run-down farm to help the local community.

Allow the machines to make your life easier.

Farming Life adopts a serious approach with twangs of Harvest Moon.

The farming genre attracts a dedicated fan base, and no matter the title, these loyal followers will sink hours of their life into their favourite games. Farming Life hopes to capture the attention of both Harvest Moon and Farming Simulator’s fans. With many serious management aspects and a silly rundown farm mechanic, it’ll tempt many players.

The game opens with a decent tutorial that covers the fundamentals. Here you are introduced to your rundown (Harvest Moon) farm that needs your attention. You must complete quests to build your reputation, increase your level and unlock better equipment. You must micromanage the day-to-day running and this attention to detail will drive sim fans crazy.

A relaxing game that’s packed with content.

I normally love the idea of sim games, but quickly the intensity overwhelms me. Fortunately, Farming Life is a lot more laid back. Its slower pace and quest-driven gameplay allow you to plan more accurately. You are free to design the farm of your dreams and choose between animals, crops and fruit trees to work with. You can take on as many or as few quests as you wish and the gameplay expands at your pace.

I adored this approach from the developers and loved expanding my farm whenever I wanted. I also liked how new crops, buildings, animals, and vehicles unlocked the further I progressed. The volume of content was drip-fed, making it much more relaxing. Alongside the excellent farming content, were the well thought out resource management mechanics. These complex yet simple to understand elements were cleverly intertwined with the day-to-day business.

Staff, animals to feed, and making profits.

A sim would be hollow without the finer details and Farming Life gets the juices flowing. You must balance cash flow with the sale of goods, growing crops to feed animals, and the well being of your staff. You will maintain vehicles, kill pests, visit the town, and expand your empire.

Balancing your workload can become hectic, but the simple staff management screen and easy to locate quests makes it much easier. Your employees will drive to town, sell your goods, sow your fields, harvest your crops, and feed your animals.

Selling your goods is a sure-fire way to make a profit, but this must be balanced with in-house needs. After all, there is no sense in selling crops that your animals would eat. Another way to keep the account full is to complete quests. There is an array of tasks that reward you with XP, reputation, and cash. The better you do, the more land you can acquire and the richer you become. You get to help the town while helping yourself, so it’s a win, win.

The Voxel aesthetics in Farming Life look great.

Voxel games fill me with dread as they normally feel unfinished and dated, yet Farming Life bucks this trend. Its warm colour palette and quaint landscape create a wholesome atmosphere. This matches the relaxed and calm theme while selling the image that farming is a romantic vocation. The free-flowing camera and ability to zoom freely were well implemented, and I experienced no graphical issues or frame rate drops.

The wholesome atmosphere continues with the calm and soft background music. You’ll waste hours ploughing fields, pulling crops, and tending to your animals, and all the while, you’ll enjoy the lovely soundtrack. The relaxing music is complemented by the realistic but not overbearing sound effects. I enjoyed the sounds of the tractors working the fields and the noises of the animals.

A well-designed UI and simple controls.

Pyramid Games got the UI spot on. The clean-cut look and excellent submenus make navigating the game much easier. With plenty of content to pick from, this could have been a horrible mess. However, it is easy to pick up and simple to master.

This isn’t the first time I’ve lost my life on a virtual farm, and it won’t be the last. Farming Life sucked me in from the start and its addictive gameplay kept me playing for hours. With multiple quests, lots of content, and a large achievement list, you’ll easily become addicted.

Farming Life is the right blend of serious and fun.

Pyramid Games have created the perfect balance between serious action and mindless fun. It ticks enough boxes to interest veterans of hardcore sim games and isn’t overbearing either. I loved its relaxed approach and recommend you to buy it here! Tidy up your farm, help the community, and expand your empire.

Review: ZOMBEEZ: A Killer Queen Remix

Vasilis Tatsiopoulos

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Oct 17, 2021

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If you want to play a macabre platformer as a weird bee that looks like a bear wearing a blindfold, there aren’t really many games for you. And who doesn’t want to control the bear-bee and carry huge purple berries in an iron maiden torture device, only to emerge as a flying winged creature brandishing a sword to fight demonic creatures that look like a ninja turtle? You really can’t make this up. I’m talking about Zombeez: A Killer Queen Remix, a 2D platformer / not-quite-endless runner that takes its inspiration and iconography from a classic arcade game named Killer Queen. The original title was a team-based effort, where 5 players competed against 5 others to win some very weird rounds, riding snails, picking up berries and fighting to the death. It was a very fun game.

Run like hell

Zombeez tries to take some of the key elements of its arcade spiritual predecessor and incorporate them in this new style of single-player gameplay, while maintaining the weirdly funny demonic feeling. Visually, this new iteration looks just as the original did, with strange creature design and pixelated graphics. The music is hit or miss, mostly because it is really chaotic, like a chip-tune on steroids. It is indeed fitting, but it will undoubtedly annoy some people. There’s not much to talk about in regard to this game’s presentation really. If this particular style is your thing, it looks perfectly OK, reminiscent of the original Killer Queen and of arcade games in general.

The gameplay follows a design approach similar to what Super Meat Boy Forever tried to accomplish; Forever was to Super Meat Boy what Zombeez is to Killer Queen. Meaning, it’s a pretty simple and straightforward score-based runner, based on a different game that defined a franchise, and is making you complete small, ever-changing levels that are filled with traps, spikes and enemies. A level can take 3 minutes to be over, but there are many alternate paths to follow so you can replay it almost endlessly to find your ideal route, to maximize your score and to fool around with the enemies.

As expected, there is a “wall of death” that follows you, here a swarm of demonic creatures, so you have to hurry and move fast to avoid dying. What is really weird is the behavior of the enemies and even weirder is the way you fight them. It goes like this: you find a big berry, you take it, and then you carry it to an iron maiden, you go inside and you come out with new powers. Without those powers, the only thing you can do is jump on enemies to push them around, if you don’t touch their swords and weapons, that is. Even when you do have a weapon, you need to touch enemies in a specific manner to kill them: you have to hit them while being above them; if you’re below, they win the fight. It’s a fun little system, weird, a bit annoying and surely not done to death.

Randomly handcrafted

Pushing enemies to fall in pits and lava pools is particularly satisfying and flying to bring death from above to unsuspecting larvae is great, but the controls don’t help much. The jumps feel floaty and slow, with not enough precision to match a fast-paced, hard as nails platformer, and the flying system is frustrating, making you press a button repeatedly to gain height but with no clear feedback and a sluggish response.

The similarity to Super Meat Boy Forever is found in the way Zombeez handles level design. The stages are not proceduraly generated, they are not totally random, but they take their aspects from a pool of possible choices, mixing them up to create the feeling of entirely different levels every time. This way, the stages feel random but also handcrafted. After you finish a short and quite funny prologue that serves as the game’s tutorial, you can compete for high scores with other players, in daily or weekly generated levels and leaderboards, or just have fun in random setups.

Weirdly fun

You can even tinker with the formula, changing the different parts of a level as you see fit, but without really knowing exactly what you are choosing each time. You change some numerical values, like 089765, and each number represents a part of the level. So, there are many combinations, but not infinite or truly random, meaning that there is some familiarity to be gained, which is a good thing and it makes the high difficulty manageable. A thing that bothers me is the snail, which is not important enough compared to its game-winning role in the original arcade game. Here, if you manage to ride the snail to the finish line, you just earn some points, not really enough to justify trying to do this in the first place. Sadly, there are more elements that are not properly utilised and feel a bit pointless, not adding much to the gameplay loop.

Then again, nothing makes absolute sense in this game, but it is strangely addictive and unexpectedly fun, despite its shortcomings. It’s a title that has the potential to keep you playing for a long time if games of this specific type are your thing, and its comedic demon-like presentation is just delicious. Zombeez manages to feel somewhat like a Killer Queen game, while drastically changing the core mechanics and the general approach. And, if you play it enough, maybe you can finally answer the eternal question: is this a bear or a bee?

Review: International Space Banana

Daniel Waite

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Oct 17, 2021

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Space still holds many mysteries and much of its vast depth is out of reach. Exploring its emptiness has intrigued mankind for years, and I don’t see that fading any time soon. Whenever scientists get the chance, they love to meddle with things while floating at zero-G. Though the results of these experiments are interesting, most of the time mistakes occur. This is exactly what happens in International Space Banana! It’s a fruit-filled physics-based title that’ll drive you insane.

Developed by Cool Scooter Software and published by PQube, this futuristic adventure game is infuriating. Zero-gravity has never been so frustrating, and this game will make you scream within minutes. However, it’s oddly addictive and will make you chuckle between your fits of rage.

International Space Banana is simple, but you’ll despise bananas forevermore.

I’m not sure many developers create their games and hope that you despise the protagonist. Yet, that’s exactly what happens in International Space Banana. This perfectly grown and ripe banana was part of an experiment that went wrong! A scientist who is working on merging monkey and banana DNA, screws up and turns himself into the titular character. With no arms and legs to move, he must rely on the lack of gravity and surfaces to propel himself along. Its insanely silly story will make you giggle, and I loved the absurdity of the situation.

Though the story is amusing, and the narrative comical, this is where the laughter ends. International Space Banana isn’t a game for the faint of heart and players will despise this yellow fruit forevermore! This is the Dark Souls, Super Meat Boy, or OkunoKA Madness of the zero-gravity world. You will bump off surfaces, spin forever, and beg for mercy as you lose your mind and patience.

Who’d have thought space would be so troublesome?

When the lead character is a piece of fruit, you don’t expect the gameplay to be challenging. Yet, I was horribly wrong! Subsequently, its brutal ways make it unfairly harsh and almost too tough to play. The core concept is basic, as you simply must move from A to B while avoiding obstacles. Therefore, you may be confused about my moaning about the difficulty, so please, allow me to expand.

The scientist banana is solely reliant on surfaces to propel himself, and this is pretty tricky to master. One false move and he spins in the wrong direction. If you then chuck in the many switches you must activate, gaps to navigate, and traps to avoid, it quickly becomes a hellish nightmare. Strangely, though, it’s still thoroughly enjoyable, and it’s tough to put down.

International Space Banana looks great, but depth perception is challenging to read.

Cool Scooter Software has captured the space theme perfectly. Its metallic greys and sultry colour palette show off the traditional tones and imagery that was expected. I loved the futuristic items and the larger-than-life objects that matched the banana’s stature. Yet, for all its positives, depth perception isn’t one of them. When planning your route is reliant on every item you hit, you need to know what’s in the foreground and the background. Sometimes this was impossible to tell and subsequently, the tough gameplay just got harder.

I loved the audio as it sets the tone and pace for the action brilliantly. When every room and corridor are problematic to cross, you want a soundtrack that’ll distract you, and that’s what you get. This was wonderfully punctuated by the comical narration. The witty one-liners and informative dialogue make you laugh while progressing the story nicely.

Simple controls, but gravity is a menace.

The movement is achieved through the use of two buttons, so this was fortunately very easy to master. The developers have also allowed multiplayer action to be achieved on one keyboard. This was impressive, as it created a cramped yet fun experience. Alongside this, full controller support has also been implemented, so many input methods are available. Controlling the banana isn’t the issue, however, gravity is the problem! This menacing mechanic undermines your progress at every opportunity!

The story comprises a handful of stages that follow a similar pattern, so repetition sets in pretty early. Fortunately, though, the challenging gameplay ensures that it doesn’t become tiresome. To enhance its longevity, the developers introduced a competitive race mode for up to four players. This silly setup has you rolling across obstacles as you race to the finishing line. It was a welcome distraction from the madness and I applaud the developers for incorporating it within the game. Steam achievements enhance the replay value further, and a tough list demands you complete every element of the story, so best of luck!

International Space Banana: the rage-inducing, fruit-driven masterpiece!

My love for brutally tough games that demand a thick skin has waned over the years. However, here I am looking at International Space Banana. Its harsh mechanics are papered over by its great looks, wonderful audio, and comical story. It’s absurd, tough as hell, but addictive and fun. I hated and loved it and recommend you to buy it here! Life as an intelligent banana is fun, but there is always the risk a space monkey will eat you. Complete your adventure and try to reverse the experiment.