Steam Pack 15

Here are some more quick reviews of Steam games!

Finding Hope

"My godly long hair commands you!"

After last week's RPG Maker game review, I decided to try another one out. In this one, made by Falling Star Studio and released  on Januaery 30^th, 2017, the story is simple: Long ago, a paladin blessed by the Gods turned to evil and, in an attempt to reign him in, Gaia put a curse on him where his love interests would all eventually die, and the same would apply to every of his descendants. Which means he has to be allowed to have kids first, if there are descendants at all…

"What's this, a TV quiz game?"

Cut to the present day where Shin, possibly completely unrelated to that legend, is approached by Dawn, a girl trying to reach an Oracle in a faraway forest to ask for advice. A plague has been striking the people of this fantasy land, and it’s getting worse - more and more denizens of the land have turned up cursed or affected by strange ailments. So Shin embarks (quite unwillingly at first) on this quest, with a friend named Flame joining. Will they heal the plague? Will they save the world? Will the weirdness end? And, apparently the most important question of all, will Shin and Dawn hook up or not?

See the white text over the characters? It's obscured by the
character profiles.How do you want me to read some of
those numbers??

...the flow... your mind? ...Oh, the curse. Heh.

As RPG Maker titles go, this one’s pretty straightforward. Though I understand the focus on romance due to it mattering in the plot, various scenes involving romance are tacked on and disrupt the flow of the game. Oftentimes, while you travel across the vast lands, you’ll be intercut by forced scenes of character interaction, which feel clumsy at best when introduced to the plot. That would be fine, if these scenes didn’t often amount to more than banter between Shin and Dawn and random silliness that lead nowhere. Not to mention that the growth of their relationship isn’t very believable, going too fast from barely standing each other to mad love.

This doesn't looks like much, but trust me, it gets really
difficult to navigate those huge maps after a while.

The maps are gigantic and labyrinthine. I can tell that a lot of work went into them. I am a bit annoyed at the very small number of different monsters I’ve seen so far, I hoped there would be more. There are treasure chests hidden all over the place, so you’re encouraged to visit every path and corner. Although, I’d say there can be such a thing as “too big”, when maps are involved, as you walk around for a long time and there are no shortcuts on the maps themselves - only between a big map and another.  You can’t even run! The first city you find is very big, and has a pretty large number of side-quests if you’re interested, so I can’t say the developer(s) of this game were half-assing it. Adding to this a lot of drawn images as art for the characters, a version of the fight screen with more graphics… Yeah, there was some effort put into making the game look good. Although some design choices are questionable, such as the use of white text atop the characters' profiles in-combat, which means the text is hard to read above the character portraits. Especially over the fourth party member, who’s a… ghost.

Another problem is that instead of using the Z key to activate things or talk to people like in most RPG Maker titles, you press Enter or the spacebar - and those with muscle memory will still go for Z. Yet, canceling choices is still done with the X key. The experience gain is painfully slow, and the rate of random encounters is big enough to annoy considering the size of the maps and the small number of different enemies per map. Some glitches and programming errors happen here or there, such as the crackling sound effect of a campfire still playing, with no way to stop it, after a campfire scene has ended.

Yes, it's the same characters.
I guess Kermit needed to make ends meet so he did
figuration in some little game.

I feel like this game was experimental in a lot of ways, trying mechanics of the RPG Maker program, adding scenes to see how good it looks, often even changing the images and sprites of the characters (such as one instance where they turn into animals in a single area). It also becomes vital to stick around earlier areas to train, as each new gigantic map will be a difficulty spike with much tougher monsters. Oh, and stock up on items, too. You’ll need them.

It’s certainly not a great RPG Maker game, but it’s not the worst I’ve seen. It’s just alright. I don’t see myself keeping it in my collection, but I don’t regret playing it either - this could have been someone’s first game, their foray into Steam, and a fair training for better later games. It experiments with the features of the software, it has quite a few side-quests, and it's featuring a full story. It’s only about 3$, too. It's very flawed, but hey, it could have turned out so much worse.

Gun Rocket

Developed and published by Space Wedgie (heh), and released on May 2^nd, 2016, this is a little physics game about sending ships into portals. You move the ship with Up, steer with Left and Right, and can give a boost with Down. You can even shoot bullets with X!

However, it gets pretty tough when you realize that you’re not allowed to go into the areas with purple lines… or, rather, you’re allowed in there up to a certain point, but at some distance within these lines your ship is destroyed. Must maneuver carefully to stay in the open space.

…I give up.

It literally exploded before I could do anything.

That’s when the rocket doesn’t explode instantly at the start of the level, for no discernible reason! That happens way too often. And then there are levels where the path to travel into is impossibly narrow. That’s one of the final levels of the very first area, and I wasn’t even able to get through that! Therefore, I don’t think I should review this game considering I haven’t even seen half of it, but… so far, I am not impressed.

Admittedly, the game does offer a variety of six ships to be used to play the game, with varying boosts, acceleration, bullet size and speed, and gravity drive. Some of them certainly lack any sort of aerodynamics in appearance, but that’s not really a problem.

Navigating tight spaces? I wasn't thaught that in school.

I would have probably enjoyed this game a lot more if the difficulty didn’t increase so heavily, so early into the game. The fact that you can shoot bullets makes me believe that there may be enemies in later levels, or things to activate by shooting at them. The controls aren’t so bad, but since this is a game that requires utmost precision, it gets quickly frustrating. Plus the glitch that causes the ship to explode as soon as the level starts! Forget about using the mouse to restart a level, it kept causing my ship to blow up… I had to use Enter instead, which is a viable alternative, but let's be honest - the ship blowing up so often when you restart a level with the mouse is something that shouldn't even happen. Also, you can never tell how much leeway you’re given within the areas of purple lines.

I didn’t enjoy that one. I really despise it, actually. But feel free to try it and make up your own opinion, if you wish so. It costs only a dollar. You might be better at it than I am.

LocoSoccer

I’m not even sure there’s anything I could say about this one. It looks cheap, plays horribly, and there’s really no point to it. Next!

Sun B-

This is way too blue. Da ba dee, da ba dye.

Nah, I gotta go through this. Published, developed by Startreming and released on December 9^th, 2015, LocoSoccer (or, for some reason, LowcoSoccer as How Long To Beat calls it) is a minimalist pixelated soccer video game. There are teams, there are uniforms, there are different ball colors. It’s soccer, so it’s simple: Just shoot the ball in the opposing team’s net. Use your team players, take down the opponent’s defenses, shoot and score! Win cups, make money, get flashier equipment… become the best team ever?

Too bright and colorful! It's hard to see what's going on!

I should mention that this game happens solely on a 2D plane. No three-dimensional soccer for you, you only paid one dollar anyway. Second, you control all 5 players of your team in three groups (two teams of two and the goalie), and must switch around with the keys 2, 3 and 4 on the keyboard. All players move with WASD, probably because the arrows would make it too easy.

It’s a brawl on the battlefield to get to the ball, as all you can really do is jump at the ball to send it flying. The adversaries can do that too, leading to pileups and pyramids that would be far more common to see cheerleaders do, rather than field players. The game describes itself as a crazy physics-based title. I don’t see any of that. There are no physics here. There is no complexity.

Playerpile!

Points for the colorful backgrounds (although they may feel distracting) and the simple art style, but with the terrible controls, the terrible physics - both of which would need to be done really well for a SPORT GAME - and the overall terrible concept. I’d suggest other soccer titles, but then I’d have to go down the entire list. Well, except maybe the FIFA series. Too microtransaction-based nowadays.

Oh, and this game is available in a bundle that also contains Battle Ranch, The Chosen 1 and The Chosen 2. None of which I’ve been very nice to. I guess that says it all.

Sun Blast

Think of a vertical shoot’em-up, except in 3D. By which I mean to say, enemies come at you like normal but the perspective is behind your ship. That’s a somewhat novel idea, no?

This game was developed by OBLONE Software and published by EQ Games to Steam on April 3^rd, 2015. It reminds me of some classic older games that function similarly. But! I realize I should review Sun Blast without comparing it to other games.

Not a lot of ships... the visibility is pretrty low...

You can start a New Game or play one of many Challenges - I’ll go over those later. In the main story, you choose a ship with varied speeds going left/right or up/down. Of note, Up and Down’s controls are reversed here, with Up to go down and vice-versa. You can even customize your ship’s color!

The levels are pretty basic, requiring you to either shoot a certain number of enemies on the screen - asteroids, ships, you name it - or survive an amount of time by avoiding the hazards. Every few levels, there’s a boss, with a checkpoint recorded on your save file once it’s defeated. However, losing a life means starting over from the last checkpoint, a few levels prior. Thank goodness they’re short.

Incoming spikeballs! ...In space?

There’s the usual for shoot’em-up games, too; power-ups appearing here and there, to be picked up by your ship so it’ll shoot better bullets. Hit a hazard, though, and you lose one upgrade and one HP. You have a decent amount of HP, so the difficulty is fair... Even if the bosses love head-seeking bullets.

In each series of levels before a boss, you also unlock challenges based on levels of the game, as survival modes where you can earn Bronze, Silver or Gold medals. That’s nice.

NEVER DOUBT THE POWER OF THE SUN!

I was pleasantly surprised by this one. I think my first few lines about the game weren’t quite appropriate, it’s too different from a vertical shoot’em-up to be properly compared to one. It is its own thing, and that’s good. It offers a selection of three ships with different stats, it has levels and challenges. The CGI is pretty decent for an indie game like this one. The bosses are threatening and tough, as is to be expected from this genre. The second boss kicked my ass repeatedly with its ray of yellow light, its… its… sun blast, yes. I see what they did there.

My biggest issue has to do with the change in perspective. The enemies come at you towards the screen, instead of downwards or right-to-left, and are obscured until they’re close enough to be seen. The problem is that it leaves you with too short a window of time to shoot at them. The screen feels small as well, meaning you don’t have a lot of room to flee some of the nastier attacks, like head-seeking projectiles or the aforementioned “sun blast”. Later levels throw in gigantic hazards like monster slugs and walls to fly over or beneath, and these can be really difficult to avoid, again because of the perspective.

But it’s something new, and I could see myself playing this again someday. I feel it’s worth keeping. It has enough content to keep one invested, and I had a good time with it.

That’s it for today. Make sure to tune in for the next review!