Seneste anmeldelser af BugZy

BugZy\'s Review: One More Line - A great little arcade game

The following is my opinion.

One More Line is a great little arcade/party game where you swing around circles on a randomly generated course in an attempt to beat your high score or your friends, colouring the track with the constantly growing trail of your semicircle character.

You must hold the “space” key (“A” if you wish to play using an Xbox controller and “X” for PlayStation controllers) in a skillfully timed manner to navigate through the course, trying not to crash on the edges of the map or the circles that you swing around. Be careful though, because one mistake and you’re gone.

The game features 2-4 player local co-op so you can race against your mates in a bunch of different gamemodes such as Chaos, Destruction, Time Attack and Survival, or if you don’t have any friends you can play by yourself and try to beat your own high score.

As you play and accumulate mileage you automatically unlock new hats and trails to customise your icon, to show off to your friends how hardcore you are.

The game is small, but for $3, I believe anyone looking for something to play with mates should have it.

I rate One More Line 8/10 boomerangs.

Misfits Attic, the developers and publishers of Duskers, have kindly given us a key to review their game. Any opinions are strictly my own.

At first sight, Duskers looks like something that you would scroll past, not thinking twice and, if you did happen to think twice and decide to take a closer look at it, you would most likely think “this looks rubbish, I would never play it and it sure as hell doesn’t look like it’s worth twenty dollars.” Although that is an unfair assumption on what may be a very interesting game, we are all guilty of it. Even your neighbor’s cat. This game is a very good example of the common phrase “don’t judge a book by its cover,” because even though you may think it looks old and boring, it is far from it.

Upon launch you are greeted by a menu that looks like command prompt, or the interface of an extremely old computer. Extremely old. Think dinosaurs, then think before that. That old. The interface is relatively easy to navigate, that is all I can really say. It doesn’t support mouse input, but with all the shortcuts it is very easy to get use to pressing “P” to play. There isn’t much visual detail, but really, you can’t add detail to something that isn’t meant to be detailed.

The next thing you will be greeted by is the map screen, and I would like to point out that after several hours of playing, the game is huge. It took me thirty minutes to get through all of the abandoned ships in one area, then I had to jump to a different one. The second one had twice as many ships to explore, which were more difficult so that took about an hour and thirty minutes. The third took even longer and so on. It is in no way a small game. In fact, it is quite the opposite.

The gist of the story is that you are a human stranded in the middle of nowhere, using a computer to remotely pilot some drones into infested ships, trying to gather fuel and scrap to make more trips to more ships whilst trying not to lose your drones to what lurks inside. You hear and see what your bots hear and see through equipment from the 70s, which baffled me a bit at first. At first I thought “space exploration is very clearly a thing of the future, especially travelling through galaxies. It has been nearly fifty years since we first sent man to the moon. We haven’t gone much further than the moon. Where we stand in the tree of technology has come extraordinarily far. Add a few generations onto that and we are exploring other galaxies and supposedly, we are using microphones, monitors and interfaces from the 70s. #RantOver.”

I was very wrong to think that, because after actually playing the game, I realised that if it weren’t for the old timey feel of the game, Duskers wouldn’t be the beauty that it is.

You control your drones and the surrounding parts of the ship you are searching using commands. For example, d1 opens up “door 1,” navigate 1 r3 orders “drone 1” to navigate to “room 3,” etc. The game consists mainly of these sorts of commands unless you’re manually controlling your drones, which you will need to do frequently to make sure you can easily assist your drone’s escape if it gets into a pickle.

Don’t worry, you won’t be restricted to the two examples above for the whole game. They are the commands that you will most likely use the most as they are essential commands, but your bots also come with upgrades. Upgrades add features to your robots, such as generator which has one of your drones use a power inlet to feed power to the surrounding doors, rooms and interfaces, motion which detects enemy motion in the surrounding rooms and drone’s best friend, tow which allows the towing of almost dead drones and other objects back to airlock 1 to return to your ship, and a bunch more that I can’t fit into one review. You can obtain more upgrades by swapping with dead drones that you can find in derelict ships.

The infestation is the game’s backbone, what makes it suspenseful and exciting, what makes opening a door scary and what you must constantly be checking for. This is the reason motion is drone’s best friend, because if you don’t check before you open a door and there is an enemy behind it, your mechanical pals might not be coming back. Ever. Duskers being a rogue-like makes it even scarier, one wrong move and you have to start all over again.

There are more threats than just the infestation, such as security drones which are just as bad, drone swarms which you should steer clear of at all costs, bacterium which multiplies towards you and leapers, which as their descriptive name states, lunge towards you dealing immense amounts of damage. There are also environmental threats such as the vacuum of opening an airlock causing your drones and enemies to fly out of the room, and radiation, caused by having an airlock or doors blocking already irradiated rooms open for an extended period of time.

Don’t worry, hope is not lost if you are in a situation that is going downhill faster than a fat man on a bobsled, there are ways to keep your drones from being destroyed by organic and mechanical life. If you needed to get the enemies out of the room fast, you can use the “Sonic” upgrade, which sends out a sonic pulse that repels organic threats. Maybe you want to attract enemies from nearby rooms to get their attention so you can explore the room they are occupied in, which is when the “Lure” upgrade comes in handy. You can drop a remotely detonated explosive device to blast the threat to pieces if you have the “Trap” upgrade, but if worse comes to worst, which is bound to happen eventually, you can use the “Shield” upgrade which negates incoming damage to the drone that has it equipped (not completely, but maybe just enough to buy you some time.)

If you think you’ll have trouble and need a bit of reassurance, there is a “Difficulty Options” section under “Options” where you can change a bunch of stuff. I suggest you don’t, because it takes away the difficult and original “Duskers feel,” but it’s there if you want it.

Duskers doesn’t have save/load points, instead it overwrites the other save points with the current one. There is no way to save to an external file so you can re-load if you think you might lose some drones in a ship or have misclicked on something and spent half your scrap fixing a drone you wanted to trash. That means if you make a mistake, you can say goodbye to your game. I ended up accidentally travelling to a ship I had already explored before. Whoops! Bye bye two days worth of fuel.

The game is astonishingly (and surprisingly) atmospheric, which I believe to be one of the key elements in any game. Duskers is a great example of something that can be as simple as “controlling some robots through a screen that the 70s thought the future of technology was going to look like” being this amazing.

Overall Duskers has impressed me a lot and I’m sure if you get past the common first glance scenario it’ll impress you too. There are a few minor issues here and there but if you get past them Duskers is truly an awesome game. It is an experience you won’t forget any time soon, I certainly won’t.

I rate Duskers 9/10 Australian flags.

BugZy's Review: UnderDread - A brilliant puzzling horror adventure game

The following is my opinion.

I absolutely love horror games. The suspense, walking around dark corners, wondering if something - or someone - is going to jump out at me. Then when that does happen, I have woken up all the neighbors and have a brand new mess in my pants that I have to clean up. Bigzur’s horror game, UnderDread, makes this happen very frequently with random spooky noises and jumps, things randomly falling from above, and running from monsters that are trying their hardest to make the rest of my life as painful and miserable as possible.

The story takes place in the early 1700s where you and your daughter are travelling on a carriage and after growing tired, you decide to stop and rest at a small inn for the night. You wake up the next day to find that your daughter is nowhere to be found. You look around nearby but to no avail. After asking the locals you have been told that there are strange things happening, other disappearing children, and the people believe it has something to do with the former local landlord’s castle. Time to investigate!

It sounds like an urban legend, something that you could imagine people back then telling their friends around a campfire to scare each other. It is a spooky tale and a great concept for a horror game to be built around if you have the right people working on it and making sure it is done justice. Don’t worry, Bigzur have done a great job!

The game consists of lots of very difficult puzzles and challenges, in lots and lots of different rooms. Making sure you aren’t caught by a giant floating skeleton with three heads is a challenge enough, but just to add to that you have to flip a bunch of levers spread around the room too! You may use the hints you have acquired to assist you in figuring out what must be done to proceed and the shields to make the enemy leave for a little while, only to return a few minutes to grab you and steal your soul if you aren’t careful enough.

The visuals and animations bring me nostalgia, reminding me of some old school horror games. This is nothing bad, from an indie game development team it is far beyond what I would expect. Some of the animations and physics - like the lantern - have been buggy, but it is only visual issues from what I have seen so far which are very minor and don’t really take away from the feel of the game. The eerie sound effects and music adds a grand amount to the immersive atmosphere of the game, which make me jump even if nothing happens visually.

As far as horror goes, the game is more jumpy than something that would keep you awake at night. It is creepy and suspenseful while you are playing it though, like something out of the Slender games, especially at night and with headphones on!

In conclusion, it is a brilliantly fun game and well worth the money. I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys horror games like Outlast, Slender or Amnesia.

I rate it 8/10 floating skeletons with three heads.

BugZy's Review: RFLEX - Geometry warfare!

The following is my opinion.

Enter the arcade world of RFLEX, where the only thing that will save your pentagonal character from ultimately colliding with what seem to be big black rectangles are the swift reflexes that you hope and pray to possess upon launching the game. Without them, you won’t last 10 seconds.

The game consists of a few basic elements, they are ‘dodge things,’ ‘don’t let things hit you’ and ‘move damn it, that thing is going to utterly destroy you.’ You use the arrow keys or a gamepad to move your pentagon out of the way of your lifeless enemies before they reach the end of their path, ending the round if they hit you.

When I started playing the game my first natural assumption was that the projectiles flew at my shape in a random order, but a few minutes in I realised that that was clearly not the case. There are patterns that you can predict in order to stand a chance at dodging your impending doom. It’s handy to know and has saved me several hundred times.

As you may predict based on what I have stated previously, the game is astonishingly challenging. After watching the trailer and maybe a few videos of gameplay, you may think ‘this looks pretty easy,’ but let me tell you, the game is a lot harder than it looks. There are five levels in RFLEX, they are Amusement, Challenge, Addiction, Lifestyle and Death Wish (the name scares me,) each with their own quirks and patterns and all very, very difficult.

If you would like to let everyone know you are amazing or are happy with telling the world you are terrible at the game, there are both global and friend leaderboards. Brag away!

The graphics are simple, just black on certain colours depending on what mode you have picked. Simple doesn’t mean bad though. Having the same colours every match makes it easy on the eyes as they aren’t constantly changing like in Super Hexagon (where you need the special glasses to prevent brain destroying migraines.)

You play the game to an awesome electronic soundtrack featuring ForeverBound, Valiant and RollingFacade. Oh and I couldn’t resist to mention that there is a drunk mode. It’s pretty self-explanatory and is a perfect simulation of being drunk whilst playing RFLEX.

Wesley is such a great guy that he has also added an epileptic friendly mode for those of you who suffer from photosensitive epilepsy and has stated that ‘if you are not satisfied with this option, and are unable to play this game, you are entitled to a refund.’

All in all, RFLEX is a great arcade game of dodge and if you have time to kill and a few dollars to spare, you should definitely check it out.

RFLEX has earned 9/10 wallabies.

BugZy's Review: Vaccine War - Experience a brand new platformer/sidescroller experience!

The following is my opinion.

Vaccine War is a brilliant little game set in the 1930’s where you play a Prussian war veteran named Daniel. The general gist of the story is that Daniel tries to escape the terrors of war by settling down in a farm in Spain to live a peaceful and harmonious life, only for it to break out where he lives. His main goal is to find and take back his daughter from whoever took her (whoops, spoiler alert) and find out why whoever invaded his farm attempted to kill him (whoops, again!)

Trying my best not to spoil what I have already spoiled about the game lore, the above paragraph is about the whole backstory. You must fight the bandits and different armies within the country to get to your objectives around the map and ultimately, try to live in peace and harmony again. There is game dialogue that you can read if you want to which adds to the feel and emotion of the game. If you aren’t interested in that sort of thing, however, you can skip it easily. I recommend reading it though!

The game has its own unique play style, where you move between the ‘layers’ of the map. Daniel is such a good citizen that he literally can’t jaywalk. The reason for that is because there are preset paths that guide you around the map and you cannot move outside of them. This can sometimes be tedious and slightly annoying, but also makes the game different from other games of the genre, a new experience definitely worth trying.

The combat system Vaccine War uses is new to me and as a new experience, I enjoy it a lot. Hiding behind the cover of a crate or rock and peeking out with your loaded gun or grenade to attack your enemies with whilst utilising an angle-based aiming method is a big plus for me! You must take down riflemen, grenadiers and CQB experts with guns, grenades and knives before they take you down, or you die. Not for good, though, as long as you interact with a mailbox every time you see one you should be fine.

The bosses of Vaccine War are a good challenge as each of them have their own combat style (one throws barrels, one throws grenades and I won’t spoil the rest) but can be easily defeated if you get your timing right and find their weaknesses!

The visuals are also unique, 2D and pixel-based with a healthy amount of 3D models involved (like houses, fancy awnings, fences, bridges, etc.) The different parts of the map introduce different colour palettes and objects such as cover for you to hide behind in a combat situation (as stated above) and enemies controlling different parts of the map.

The game features some nice acoustic music which turns hardcore if you find yourself in a standoff with an enemy and sound effects that you would expect from a game with guns and grenades. The music that plays is different for the different parts of the map but also plays on a loop so it can sometimes get repetitive. If it does get on your nerves you can turn it down in the settings and turn on some music, maybe hip hop or electro, whatever floats your boat!

All in all, Vaccine War is a new experience and something I would definitely recommend to people who enjoy platformers/sidescrollers and/or wish to try something new!

Vaccine war has earned a score of 8/10 dingos.

BugZy's Review: 12 is Better Than 6 - The fast-paced Wild West

The following is my opinion.

Greetings from the excellent hand-drawn and very inky Wild West of 12 is Better Than 6, a top-down shooter like Hotline Miami but where everyone calls everyone ‘amigo’ instead of blowing each other’s brains out. That’s not to say there isn’t an incredibly satisfying amount of shooting people on sight, but your intent isn’t to massacre every living thing in the area. Or is it?

In this dangerous world you will find yourself coming across friends, foes, blue and red ink and guns, which will fail to help you if you don’t have fast reflexes. Your best friend in the Wild West is your reflexes. If you turn a corner you will need to have your gun ♥♥♥♥♥♥ and be ready to pull the trigger or lunge your knife into your opponent, because wait half a second and your enemies will chop your limbs off and make a nice stew out of them.

The game has unique shooting mechanics, where you press a button to ♥♥♥♥ your gun and press another to pull the trigger. Sometimes it can be tedious, like when you are trying to take out a large group of enemies but makes you feel better about managing to kill them all in the end.

Something I believe is great is the ability to choose whether to go in guns blazing or be stealthy, which this game executes in a perfect style. The first option can be dangerous but is very possible, and the second option is all about timing and waiting for your opponents to walk in a certain direction, allowing you to sneak up and take them out from behind or sneak past them altogether.

The basic story is that you are a Mexican prisoner in the late 19th century fighting for freedom, ultimately making your way through the dangers of that time to get from Mexico to Texas. If you choose to pay close attention the story can be quite interesting, but if you aren’t patient or decide not to delve deep into it you can just skip most of it.

The visual side of the game is a stunning hand drawn masterpiece and, through killing lots of enemies, quickly becomes very bloody. The game is based around this graphics style created by talented artists almost entirely and, without it, would probably be ‘just another shooter.’

It has a great soundtrack too that can go from calm piano tunes to ‘LET’S KILL SOME PEOPLE’ in the space of three seconds. It makes the adrenaline rush through you as you hide behind the cover of a table, popping your head out while your enemies aren’t shooting and shooting them back.

Overall the game is lots of fun and I recommend you buy it if you enjoyed Hotline Miami and other top-down shooters. You’ll have a blast!

I rate this awesome western shooter 9/10 hand drawn sombreros.

BugZy's Review: Dig or Die - Almost as difficult as Super Meat Boy!

The following is my opinion.

Welcome to Dig or Die, the wonderful yet terribly hard 2D sandbox game where if you haven’t watched walkthroughs or read any helpful reviews, you’ll go through world after world before actually being half decent at the game. Trust me, this is far from your ordinary sandbox. Oh, and I would like to state that while being inspired by a game like Terraria, it is vastly different and a heck of a lot more difficult.

Here is a little background. Dig or Die is a game released in March 2015 by Gaddy Games. You are a representative for a space-based company called Craft & Co. and have crash landed on a hostile planet, leaving you stranded with no way to get out besides using the equipment manufactured by the company to survive and ultimately build a rocket ship to escape.

When you load up a new world, your gaming instincts will kick in and you will have the urge to kill every creature in sight, but let me warn you that if you do, it will make the game an astronomical amount harder than if you just mind your own business. Of course you will have to kill some things anyway for crafting materials and other stuff, but if you haven’t killed any of its kind and have no reason to, then try to resist the urge to obliterate it with your pulse rifle.

If you are wondering why I am warning you about this, it is because at night the enemies come as a wave of creatures trying to get their revenge. Basically, different types of creatures will attempt to kill you if you have killed said type of creature. For example if you kill a dog, more dogs will attack you. If you kill a giant blue wasp, waves of giant blue wasps will attack you, which leads to my next point.

Defense is a major part of Dig or Die, especially when - as I’ve stated above - the monsters attack in a big wave. You must build a fortified base that hopefully you can survive in by using turrets, sturdy walls and your nifty craft-o-tron to help build these. Be careful though, because the hostile creatures that your base so desperately defends you from can and will tear your base apart, so be prepared to repair things! Also keep an eye out for blocks that are holding up large amounts of other blocks as this game enforces the laws of physics and they, also, crumble apart.

Something I would like to point out is that there are quite frequent flash floods, which add a great deal to the game’s suspense and makes it even more difficult as your base can be flooded in a matter of seconds. This is another thing you should look out for, so just a tip: build drainage pipes!

The game works somewhat in tiers, where you start with MK I gear and try to go up through the ranks to get better equipment, to venture further and get more items to craft better stuff and survive for longer. Eventually, you will have climbed the ladder of better items and will be able to create the rocket ship that I mentioned earlier, which is where the game ends.

The game’s art style is incredibly beautiful, being what you would imagine from a cartoon-styled game set in an alien planet. The animations can seem jittery and not-so-smooth, but if you are not paying lots of attention to them there isn’t really much of a problem.

The music and sound effects feel very fitting to the game’s atmosphere. I have had a few encounters where the music stops altogether when a sound effect plays and doesn’t start again until another sound effect plays, usually when I shoot my pulse rifle, but that is only a very small issue that I have come across and haven’t seen anyone else complain about it, so it could just be for me.

In conclusion, Dig or Die is a brilliant game. There may be some issues here and there, but in the end the game is a great play and for the price it is, I wouldn’t think twice about recommending it to any friend who enjoys 2D sandboxes.

I rate Dig or Die 8.5/10 hungry dingos.

BugZy's Review: SinaRun - The best game you'll fail hundreds of times at!

The following is my opinion.

Retry, retry, retry, retry...

SinaRun is a great 3D platformer racing game, where you try to get to the end of the levels in the fastest possible time by using your extroardinarily fast cybernetic legs. The whole game is basically a time trial that is so relentless that if you make a mistake - and trust me, you will make several hundred before completing each level - you'll have to start from the beginning of the level. No checkpoints, no excuses.

The game currently has 17 levels including the tutorial, with the dev's best score displayed for you to try to beat and a leaderboard for your best score to be displayed publicly too. 17 levels may not seem like much for a game, but when you add the time between your fails and the amount of fails you have accrued, it quickly adds up, especially when you are trying to beat everyone's best times!

You will gain some very useful skills whilst playing SinaRun, such as the natural instinct to swiftly reach for the 'R' key if you get stopped or slowed down when missing a jump, or the ability to get used to the control of your character which can be somewhat awkward to get used to, seeming slippery in a sense. This can have a big impact on your experience, but once you get comfortable with it it becomes second nature.

Despite the game's visual theme being minimalism, it has a high level of beauty with the different map colours and particle effects flying fast towards you as you attempt to make it to the end. This, accompanied by the relaxing music that tries to keep you calm every time you fail, creates a very unique atmosphere (in a good way.)

All things considered, the game is a great play if you would like something to play every now and then and don't mind failing a few hundred times and in all fairness, for $3, it's a bargain!

I rate SinaRun 8/10 extremely quick wombats.

BugZy's Review: Doors - Bacon is wonderful

The following is my opinion.

Mmm, bacon.

Doors is a superb atmospheric logic puzzler with a simplistic art style developed and published by Calvin Weibel, fueled by bacon. You have to use the power of deduction and true or false facts given to choose which portal - or 'door' - to go through. One or more doors leads to bacon, the others death and sometimes, a door leads to an office.

If you have played before and know most of the correct doors it'll be a breeze, but it makes up for that by making your first time very difficult, especially if - like me - you weren't expecting something quite so challenging. Get your brain working, because you'll need it!

It plays very smoothly, a few frame rate hiccups every so often but nothing so bad as to be game-breaking. There is also no HUD but in all honesty, Doors has no reason to have it.

Despite being simplistic, the game is visually brilliant with the audial ambience just as great. One moment you're staring into the void of black and grey, trying to figure out which door takes you one step closer to your delicious victory and never-ending supply of bacon, the next, you're wandering through an office as though you own the place. The sound effects add to the mysterious atmosphere as well, sounding somewhat like you have entered the stomach of a dinosaur.

Overall, the game is a great concept brought to the world using an almost perfect balance of atmosphere and gameplay for a puzzler like this and if you enjoy games of the puzzle genre, I highly recommend you buy it.

I give it 9 out of 10 juicy rashers of bacon.

BugZy's Review: INFRA - Debris, debris everywhere

The following is my opinion.

In INFRA, you enter the world of a structural analyst, just another day at the extremely large and detailed office - and I say large and detailed because that is completely the case. About half of the building is unavailable to explore, but you can see through the many big windows that more than a lot of time and effort has gone into this building alone. The building is only a fraction of the game and it would already make up one of the best maps for an online FPS.

Anyway, your job turns from bad to worse when you go to visit and report deteriorating infrastructure. I will avoid spoiling any more of the game so you can experience it for yourself. Just expect to spend a lot of time exploring places that the people at Loiste didn't need to add, but added anyway, which made the game just that little bit more detailed and affected the overall amenity of the game in the long run.

The game can be compared to a not-so-scary version of Outlast, in that you are navigating dark areas with a camera. Unfortunately your camera doesn't have a built-in flashlight, so you carry one seperate (which if the developers had thought through, you would be able to smack some stuff with.) The camera and flashlight both have batteries that drain unbelievably fast though, so you must find some new ones lying around in convenient places. Not to worry, there are more than enough lying around!

As you can see, I am so far, very impressed with INFRA. It has some very meticulous developers and the environmental graphics are brilliant (the humans could use some more detail though, but the environment makes up for that.) The sound effects in the game make the game a bit eerie and - although it is a completely non-violent game - it does get a bit spooky (especially when you take a picture of something out of the ordinary, that sound caught me off guard a few times.)

The game plays nicely once you manage to load it up without crashing, Sometimes it crashes on launch, sometimes mid-game, sometimes when I'm trying to quit. No game is without problems, though.

Overall, the game is awesome and I would recommend it to anyone who likes exploration, attention to detail and/or taking photos.

I rate it 8/10 very detailed koalas.