Hyper Light Drifter is an incredible and intense experience. It pulls at you with war, death, illness and loss, but it never says a word. A surreal game without any written nor spoken dialogue. The game isn’t easy either, I would say it is one of the most difficult in its genre. This grinding frustration makes the game all the more worth it when you finally do defeat one of the bosses.
Recently released from a 2013 Kickstarter, I received my digital copy of Hyper Light Drifter. The project was originally presented with a 2014 release when I signed up. The Kickstarter proved enormously successful and raised far beyond its original goals, leading to an expanded game being released on many platforms. Alex Preston, who started the studio “Heart Machine”, to make this game cites numerous inspirations: these include The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Diablo, Nausicaa: Valley of the Wind and, surprisingly, his own illness.Read More
Its been a very long time since I learned to type on Mario Teaches typing in the early 1990s. Since then typing games have come and gone, now one company is trying to revive the genre. Epistory – Typing Chronicles is a love story to a type of game thats mostly been ignored for the last 20 years. We have had a few games that use typing, off the top of my head I can think of typing of the dead and Disney’s Mickey typing adventure, but its a pretty uncommon genre.
Remember this? I do.
So it was with interest that I saw this new trailer come across the wires this morning. Mixing typing and an adventure game, with the attraction of riding on the back of a fox I had to check it out. The story turns out to be pretty bizarre. You’re fighting insects in an origami world, in Epistory, something you achieve by typing words using your actual keyboard. its proabably best if you just watch the trailer honestly
Its also intresting to note, that the game supports: QWERTY, QWERTZ, AZERTY, BEPO, Dvorak, Workman and Colemak, keyboard layouts, perhaps catering to a crowd that might not normally be interested in such a basic game, but rather wants to learn how to use one of the these more obscure keyboard layouts. The game is available on steam for 14$ now.
The new platformer / smash’em’up “Slain!” is the first release of its developer Wolf Brew Games. “Slain!” was KickStarted exactly a year before its release to a figure just shy of $20,000. It is currently out on Windows, Linux and Mac via Steam, with releases planned for WiiU, Xbox One, PS4 & Vita in June. The game is a retro style platformer with some light puzzle elements and very much in the style of many older “hardcore gamer” games. It has more in common with Castlevania or Ghouls & Goblins than it does with Super Mario World. This means it doesn’t really feel, play or look as you’d expect if your experience of “retro” really means “Nintendo 16-bit era”. The graphics aren’t shiny happy and you’ll kill everything you run into with a bloody glee. This is not a bad thing. In fact, I think it’s fantastic to seen something along those lines. Beyond just the graphical difference of goomba stomping and swords, those games had serious differences in their play and controls.
Lovely pixel art
To start with the best points, the game’s art is phenomenal. The pixel art is detailed and fresh, showing that plenty of time was taken on it. Further, levels have several layers of parallax and on screen effects. Sadly, despite trying every graphical quality setting I couldn’t get the on-screen mess, splatters and glow to tone down, making it hard to play through at times. That “mess” is mostly 3D layers, effects, blood, parallel overlays. It’s not a bad choice and fits in solidly with the graphics being almost exactly what I’d expect of a well-designed PS1/Saturn-era game, but it is impossible to tone down and can make it hard to see what I need to see in order to avoid instant death. The underlying pixel art, and some touches, such as seeing the floating medusa heads before reaching the “Hive” is fantastic and reminiscent of top notch games in that art style. A lot of the pixel art in the parallax layers is great as well.
The music is well done, there are great and varied metal tracks throughout. I do wish there were more pauses though, the music is always on full blast regardless of your character pausing, fighting, or beating up a mini-boss. The sound effects do mix in well. Largely, I suspect the developers simply didn’t have time to add in more variety to the backing tracks. The music lends a serious element to the game and works well for slicing and dicing your enemies.
Unfortunately, the dialogue works against that. The writing is extremely basic, peppered with the use of instant messaging shortcuts such as “tho” and “btw”. Unfortunately, this wrecks the “mood” of the game. Further, much of the dialogue in the game is fairly light hearted. Not only does most of it just not hit my funny bone, it also cuts against the serious feel of the game’s graphics and music. This takes you out of the immersion. This is the start of the many problems with the game.
“Ugh, MOM, five more minutes!”
For one, there’s no cloud save. Your saves are stuck to a single system, no good in case you often switch between OS installs or machines. In fact, the save system simply isn’t all that well thought out. The game auto-saves at each major level, but not at each checkpoint. There is no easy way to manually save or check where your last save is, so be prepared to play through some small or not so small sections all over again without expecting it. If there is a save icon or screen, I missed it. A full-on save screen would be appreciated, even if it can save almost instantly. The checkpoints are extremely frequent and do allow for any meaningful progress to be maintained while you’re playing, and there is no life limit since you’ll die almost as often as Super Meat Boy. These checkpoints help keep the game from being frustrating for the wrong reasons, but with the shaky save system it’s just not enough.
Of the bosses, some of them are extremely repetitive, especially in the first level where you can simply bash through all of the mini-bosses if you time the first swing right. There are occasional AI glitches, for example the Thorn Beast boss simply stopped moving, letting me kill it easily. Further in, the fire hounds stopped moving too, although they at least kept shooting at me. Some moving platform puzzles didn’t sync up right, meaning they could be easy to get across or extremely hard depending on your timing. One “skeletress” simply didn’t attack me while I hit it from another, moving platform. Basic enemies, for example skeletons and the rat-claws can simply be bashed through and most of them have extremely simple movement, never jumping, maintain a constant speed and floating enemies bouncing off walls at predictable angles. Outside of certain bosses, the initial difficulty isn’t quite enough for a game of this nature. Most of the bosses had very basic attack patterns, opting to simply swing away at your character instead of being animated into doing something more interesting.
The simple bosses are good considering the awkward controls. While only three of the Xbox buttons and two shoulder buttons are in use, but instead of weapons switching with R2 and L2, the directional pad is sacrificed for weapon switching. For a retro platform this is a disappointment, and the pre-game configuration didn’t seem to be able to fix it. I couldn’t get the game to play at all with my Steam controller [Update: managed to get this working, but using the bottom most buttons and top most shoulder pads together is no fun], and the controls are mostly not configurable. Since this game supports SteamOS, I found that very concerning. I found the keyboard control layout to be okay after learning it, but different from most games’ usage of the bottom row for no obvious reason. In the end I stayed with my trusty Xbox 360 gamepad.
Attacks are fairly simple, there are three weapons, each has two swings. You get all of them after the first level and two during the first level. These weapons affect monster types differently, which is nice. The main swing always has a button-mash combo, the other decapitates basic enemies for Mana on their final hit point. You do get two “spells” that use up mana, and in return give you a ranged fireball and a screen-wide explosion. In theory, combined with the enemies that require well timed attacks and restraint on the combos, this is a great system. In practice, I found most enemies could be smashed through and the timing to be frustrating. That said, I think the control problems are something that mostly require tweaking. Further into the game enemies became more difficult on average and it’s okay to only need somewhat careful timing & memorization on mini-bosses. Assuming they patch in more configuration of the controls, this part would be acceptable. The movement back and forth or while jumping is okay, jumps are not in the “fluid” Mario style, but the choppier older platformer style that allows for pixel perfect precision. As there are plenty of lava-floor scenarios in this game, it was a good decision and works well, even if it doesn’t look fluid.
The floor is lava.
The game’s configuration menus are extremely awkward. Audio can be configured within the game, but is the only thing that can be. All of the graphics, resolution & controls that can be changed are configured pre-game. This pre-game configuration pops up every time, the game never launched directly into play for me. Further, after that screen, my mouse cursor refused to hide on either Linux or Windows, leaving a cursor on top of the game at all times. I’m not sure if this is something the developer can fix, or an underlying problem with the platform they chose to write the game on. The developer seems aware of many of these problems. They released a note on the Steam page promising the following:
“As of this week we will be using an updated SFX professional. We don’t have a timeline on the SFX re-haul but it will start this week. As soon as we know the date it will be delivered we will let you know!
The first patch is going to take care of: bugs, in game text, control pad, transition screens in game and we will also be looking at Keyboard lag and menu bugs, again this is in the works but don’t have an exact date. We will let you know as soon as we do.
We are of course looking at the combat system and some other additional issues, but do not have specifics or timelines as final decisions have not been made.”
This is good, as it shows the developer cares and is aware of at least some of the issues I pointed out. Still, if they were aware of these issues, they probably should have held off on the release itself. I am hoping that some soon to come patches will put this game into a recommendable spot, but I cannot recommend it fully at this time. “Slain!” Is not a long game, not inherently bad for an affordable indie title. That said, combined with the frequent checkpoints, I could see someone decently good at these types of platformers & okay with slogging through its rougher spots beating it in a day.
Overall, especially with something of a glut of games available today, I can’t recommend this game. It is genuinely gorgeous, and has good music, but the gameplay at its heart fails to pull together.
PolyRace may seem like a deceptively basic and easy racing game at first glance, but it provides enough variety to be able to play though and try for the best times while not trying to crash and burn. After starting the game up and customizing the controls to my liking, I fired up a training mission to get a feel for the overall game. With a fresh game, the player is limited in their options for choosing hover-cars, difficulty, and track type. As one progresses though Missions, those will unlock, which gives decent variety for running through races.
One of the big things that I noticed that can make things interesting is how race courses are seed generated. For people that aren’t familiar with seed generation, for this game it’s a six character set that is used as the basis for generating every race course. In this case, two letters, two digits, and two letters are used for generation, thus keeping variables limited, but not to the point of where courses are repetitive on play-through at least. With choices of desert, Arctic, and continental terrain types, courses are filled with valleys, hills, mountains, cures, straight lines, and obstacles like trees and rocks to avoid. Taking a note from the F-Zero series, the hover-car has a shield which limits how much punishment it can take at one go. Thankfully, it automatically regenerates after a time of not taking any damage, but something like a head-on collision with a mountain will make the hover-car crash and burn.
Space Grunts is a lovely little game available now on Steam for PC/Linux/Windows, the Humble Store, Apple’s App Store & Google Play. For this article I reviewed it on Linux. The game was released cross-platform at the end of February. The one-man development team, Orange Pixel, has a track record of creating simple cross-platform action games. This game is similar to those in of its action-oriented screen shaking chibi-pixel style. It is unique, however, in of that it’s a turn based rogue like with a light strategy bent.
Like its predecessors’, Space Grunts is a straightforward game at face value, with three moderately unique classes to choose from, dropping you right into alien stomping action. As a full-on rogue like it features a wide variety of items, enemies, traps and variations on each. The dungeon is randomly generated, only saving your progress at the beginning of each level, but your ‘save’ is deleted if you die. Further, the current level regenerates upon loading a save. This means that save-scumming is pretty much impossible, which lends some credibility to the global leaderboard. If you can’t crack your way into that, there’s also a daily challenge with its own, daily, leaderboard. The game is glossed and polished extremely well, setting it apart from many in the genre.
In addition to the general polished feel, the game sets itself apart with the action heritage of Orange Pixel’s other games. While Pascal Bestebroer’s (Orange Pixel’s sole full-time developer) other games may not normally be turn based, they are all solid mobile adaptations of existing genres. Their past games have included Gunslugs, a run ‘n gun, Heroes of Loot, a twin-stick dungeon crawler & Groundskeeper, another run ‘n gun. All of these appear to have tapped the same team for art and music as well. Similarly, Space Grunts can be played quickly and is good for a jam session on the go. While this is unlikely to get you into high score territory, it’s fun and refreshing. The controls are simple, inventory management and character development are very light and mostly automatic. You can play with a joypad, keyboard, mouse and of course on mobile devices’ touchscreens. Played quickly, the game feels more like an old top-down shooter, such as Alien Breed, than a rogue like. Gameplay immediately reverts to a slower turn based rogue-like, however, when you’re faced with a challenging room.
Levels in the game are, thankfully, split into sealed rooms. Each room requires you to open the door before the monsters, turrets and NPCs come alive. This allows players to pace out the action and approach each room as its own unique puzzle to be beaten. A perfect puzzle-like assessment is impossible as a monster’s health is unknown at start and slightly random without an extra, turn limited, in game item. This means that there is an additional element of chance beyond just the loot drops and enemy movements, which I found refreshing over number-crunching.
Why not both? Poison and healing spores.
With perma-death and no saves for old characters, you’ll be starting fresh frequently. The game doesn’t make this difficult and accepting that is part of the fun. Each play through is a chance to get further in the dungeon, or see a new hidden area. There are plenty of types of areas too, each occupying several levels and having unique challenges to it. Some are hidden behind destroyable architecture in the game, others caused by activating a found item. Lots of things are breakable, dropping loot or exploding in unique ways, even rooms can be reshaped by explosions. Despite the wide variety, I’ve yet to see an area that is simply unbeatable. It’s conceivable you may find an acid covered floor you can’t cross without boots and be unable to proceed. Some destructible elements are fairly unpredictable too, such as crystal flowers that can either heal your or irradiate a room. That said, I haven’t seen an area which careful tactics, experience and critical thought can’t manage. This is a hard balance to achieve with random dungeons, and again that polish is where the game shines.
Exploration is a joy, taking things one room at a time. Some levels are fairly linear while others amble about with hidden bosses, and dead-ends. Some rooms seem to have pre-programmed archetypes. For example, there are rooms made entirely of flame grates firing in random sequences, almost always with an item in the middle. Being able to learn how best to navigate each room and when to use your items is essential. The items are almost never permanent, minus some stat upgrades and detectors. This makes almost everything ephemeral and takes some of the bite out of a character’s death, which in this case is probably a good thing. Characters dying so quickly, it’s reasonable that there’s no way to make permanent progress ‘developing’ them.
I’m not showing what level this is from, because it’s embarrassing.
There are, by the way, only three main character types. Each has a unique variation on three main attributes: strength, tech and luck. These are respectively the character’s brute damage and hit points, ability to fully utilize new items, and likelihood of finding items. The characters’ types of “captain”, “strongarm” and “techjunky” don’t quite translate into the rogue/fighter/mage roles you’d expect. They do come close, though. All character types start off with the same three weapons, but are able to use each to different effect. There’s only four main weapons in the game, the three starters plus a crowbar mostly good for opening crates you find later on. Weapons can be upgraded via random drops, and there are limited use weapons such as mines, RC robot bombs and flame throwers. Other drops run the gamut of possible upgrades, one off ammo-burners, regeneration items, time stoppers, teleporters, practically anything you can think of. Ammo packs and health packs are used immediately, so it’s sometimes wise to skip around the health packs for backtracking within a level.
Always wanted a Space Cube
There is some permanent progress to be made in the game. In addition to leaderboards and daily challenges, there are data cards revealing backgrounds on each enemy, a Moonbase Log updated as your characters proceed further into the dungeon and meet NPCs, statistics about your gameplay, three unlockable ‘skins’ that are actually more powerful characters, and plenty of achievements to reach. These synced across systems for me in Steam, I can’t vouch for Google Play but I assume it uses the cloud sync there as well. Proper support of ‘cloud saves’ has been on the uptake in games, and it’s lovely. I only wish there were ways to sync from Steam to the mobile app stores and vice versa with games like this. All of those extra numbers and items, in addition seeking the final boss of the dungeon, gives you plenty to rank your game mastery against.
The graphics are a solidly modern take on pixel art. Which is to say, pixelated but not retro. The effects and fog-layers are often high-resolution and 3D, glowing light sources and reflections abound. Your character even leaves little ephemeral foot prints. Effects and animations in the game run constantly, somewhat masking its turn based play. I see the style of the characters & mobs as anime influenced, with that big-headed chibi look to them. This look is in tune with the restraints of mobile screen sizes but still reasonably fun to look at on a bigger PC monitor. The music is similar, good, easy to listen to, but not overwhelming. A series of slick bubbly techno-ish tunes played over the ambient noises of machines in the dungeon and sound effects. The music neither grated on my nerves, nor made me pause to listen. I’d say only slightly better than average in this regard but it fits the game well and doesn’t sound like stock effects.
Glowing, reflective, shininess
Despite having a one-man development team, Orange Pixel maintains proper community forums. They are very active on those and release frequent bug fixes and updates to their games. I have to say I’m impressed. I’ve seen plenty of better funded developers not do nearly as well by their fans.
The game also doesn’t “feature” in-app-purchases. Once you’ve bought it, you have the full game, regardless of platform. Prices vary between mobile and PC, which is frustrating even if it is standard practice. The PC version is the most expensive, at $9.99, while the Android and iOS versions are $3.99. It is nice to see Android & iOS at the same price point.
Are you a fan of Nethack or Rogue like games? If so, are you looking for something mobile friendly, more accessible and modern? Then this is a fantastic choice. If you were let down by “Steam Marines”, or if you want more of the same, definitely consider this game. Space marine alien stomping is one of my favorite themes and Space Grunts pulls off the ambience of it well. The graphics are slick, the music fitting and the gameplay tight. It isn’t a rich, beyond-expectations game, but it is clever and well made. It feels absolutely worth the price. Especially if you like the genre or want to try something new on mobile. Orange Pixel has been around for a while now releasing these well packaged, small games. Their experience and style shine through.
Sherlock Holmes: The Devils Daughter is an action-adventure game that transports players once again back to Victorian London on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Windows PC. This latest iteration improves upon previous entries in the franchise by bringing features and gameplay elements from previous games like Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishment. I got the chance to check out the title at a demo booth at this year’s Games Developer Conference, here are my impressions.Read More
If you have read any of my content at all on this site you know I absolutely love anything in the Warhammer 40,000 Universe. So when I heard that Tindalos Interactive was bringing their expertise in space combat to the Warhammer universe I was extremely excited. The resultof all of their hard work is Battlefleet Gothic Armada. Fans of the Warhammer table top games will know that Battlefleet Gothic is the space branch of the 40K universe of games, and involves a much different rule set than the tabletop game. Ships still have gear, and crew, and all sorts of manuvers, but Gothic is a slower more strategic game. Knowing that I went in expecting a fairly faithful recreation of the game, and Tindalos has done a really good job of that. The game is real time, but other than that change, it feels extremely similar to the tabletop.
To understand the story mode you may want to dig in to 40K lore a little bit, but basically the Gothic Sector is its own area of space, quite close to the eye of terror. From the eye of Terror, which is a rent in space emerges Abadon the despoiler and he’s here to kill humans, in the name of Chaos.So stars the Gothic War. That’s about the entire story I needed. It should be mentioned here that the Beta we were given access to, only gave us access to the first act of the story. This arc, which is a tutorial of sorts and showed off only three of the 4 races, but already, I am in love with this game and its story.
The real question of course is how does that story and gameplay translate to the PC experience? So far very well. The game is fun, its deep but not impossible to get in to, it has plenty of room for charging in and trying to just brute force things, but also requires strategy and longer term planning and larger thinking to overrule brute force.A very nice tutorial is provided for players who may not understand how RTS style games work. This is really important because moving a ship is nothing like moving units in standard RTS. The huge ships of the world of Warhammer do not turn on a dime, instead they shift, have weight, and move like you might expect a spaceship to move.
Quickly played action-oriented survival games appear to be all the rage lately, with some of the bigger titles like H1Z1splitting their offerings into multiple games. It should come as no surprise then that ARK: Survival Evolved would join in on the fun.
Titled Ark: Survival of the Fittest, this new stand-alone ‘multiplayer online survival arena’ (MOSA???) allows players to literally drop into the world of ARK and rush to supply rich locations before their opponents do. Survival of the Fittest offers a number of different play-styles: there’s the traditional free-for-all battle royale and 2/4/6 player team competition. If the title of the game sounds familiar that is because we covered the massive e-sports tournament that launched last year featuringthe Survival of the Fittest game mode.Read More
Having never played a Deponia game before, I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into. 10 hours of time looping nonsense later, rather unfortunately, I still wish I didn’t.
Deponia Doomsday follows the entirely unlikable lead character Rufus, as he self-narrates his way through time and space. Along the way he runs into a fairly large cast of characters, that range from the rather funny Nilbot (Chillbot, Killbot, Illbot), to the frankly offensive Manly-man-turned-manly-forced-transwoman Lotto (later Lotti). Confused by that description? Don’t worry, I’ll come back to it. Read More
Yesterday saw the launch of one of the most anticipated new gaming IPs in some time, Tom Clancy’s The Division. Like many other eager players I set aside time in my schedule to try out the full version of the game after putting several hours into the two betas that Ubisoft held earlier in the year and I was psyched to see what the full version had to offer. I woke up yesterday morning at 4 AM and after a few false starts I’ve logged just over 4 hours in the game as of the writing of this post.Read More
Have you ever wanted to feel like you are in the Hunger games? Yah, me either, but I always thought it would make a cool video game. The culling starts off sounding like it’s just another king of the hill style combat game with some light crafting and exploration, but its managed to win over my heart because it’s so much more. A rock-paper-scissors style combat system, the scarcity of firearms, and the simplicity of the crafting really make this game fun. While it’s still pretty basic, with only one map, it is in early access which gives the developers more time to work on and add to it.
Don’t let the fact that its early access fool you, this is a feature complete game. You drop in, and are forced to craft and find resources to survive. There is no instance where this game feels unpolished or not done. It has a great crafting system which relies on a resource called F.U.N.C and players have several ways to earn it. The easiest is to roam around the map and find barrels it’s stored in, or collect it from dead animals and piles of bones. The fastest way to gather F.U.N.C is to kill other players. Players also gather a limited amount over time and based on how far they move. Everything in the game requires F.U.N.C to create.
This tier three spear is not something you will be crafting.
Crafting is basic; the game has two materials, sticks and rocks. Both can be found lying around on the ground or produced by hitting trees or stone outcroppings. This means that the game basically has an infinite amount of basic crafting materials. However at least for now, you can only craft a small amount of items. These items are basically all tier one (weapons are divided in to tiers I, II, III and IV), and won’t do you much good in the later parts of the game. Still, after playing other games completely relying on RNG, it is pretty nice to be able to drop in and if you aren’t near any buildings or other lootables instead craft your early tier weapons. Currently there are about a dozen basic craftables, from a stone knife, to bandages. Most of what you need in the early part of the game is there. Crafting however won’t get you the win, though basic weapons like a spear and a bow can be crafted, more powerful weapons are scattered around the map waiting to be looted.
It seems no company can launch a game these days with out headlines proclaiming that the game is not doing well. The Division, the new, much hyped, MMORPG shooter, from Ubisoft has fallen prey to the problems of so many other massive multiplayer games before it. It appears that the games servers collapsed under the weight of the good ole USA’s player base. In case you missed it (or were sleeping like me) The division launched on Australian midnight last night, allowing players world wide to play at that time.
Players who woke up expecting to be able to log in and get an early start on the game found themselves confronted by errors ‘Romeo’ and ‘Sierra’. Which seems to mean that the game client was unable to reach the servers. Ubisoft sent out this tweet at 2AM
2 hours ago, there was a Ubisoft services outage. This issue has now been resolved and players should be able to resume playing the game.
— Tom Clancy's The Division (@TheDivisionGame) March 8, 2016
Fortunatly service was restored by the time of that tweet. There is rampant speculation that the error was server overload, but it seems unlikely and a post on the official Ubisoft forums seems to point to “Ubisoft Services Degradation” as the issue. Perhaps they simply underestimated the number of players that wanted to get in to the game. That seems odd considering that “More than 6.4 million players apparently participated in The Division Beta” according to Ubisoft themselves. It seems like they ought to have prepared for this, but perhaps it was simple underestimation of demand. Service is now restored, and players are happily killing the cleaners and ganking each other in the darkzone.
Let me just say that out of the gate, Kôna Day One captures the idea and view I have of Canada: Ice Age.
Heh, all joking aside, I really liked this game. I got to see a little of it at PAX Prime last year and I was intrigued with what they were going to do with it. This game is a multi-episodic game and Day One just refers to Episode One, so if you thought this was an one shot, then you would be mistaken.
When I say Rock Band, it evokes in most people memories of playing the game in a crowded college common room, or home living room full of friends. So its a bit of a suprise to hear that Harmonix developer of the series has decided to port the game to PC. PC which is pretty much a 100% solo (at least in person) experience. I am even more confused because Harmonix has specifically said Rock Band 4 wasn’t coming to PC. Well that all meant nothing becuase yesterday Harmonix announced that Rockband was coming to the PC in the worst way possible. ok, not the worst that would like a Linux only port or something, but the second worst, crowd funding on FIG.
Harmonix is askign its fans for 1.5 million dollars to push their PC port out. Perhaps this has something to d with the fact the co-founder of Harmonix sits on Figs board of directors? If you arent aware of FIG at all its a smaller alternative to kickstarter, that basically allows you to “invest” in a project. Its an intresting take on crowd funding. This new PC version will at least have support for Steam workshop, so maybe we wont have to pay for all of our songs! Mouse and keyboard will be support (in case you just want a rythm game) and Harmonix has said they will support as many rock band instruments “as possible”. If you dont own any, the FIG campaign has several tiers which include them.
Important to note is that while Harmonix is doing the majority of the PR and crowd funding the game itself will come from Sumo Digital. Sumo has a good track record, so I am not expecting shovel ware, but 1.5 million dollars is a lot of money to ask your fans for a port to PC!
Will you be getting the new Rock Band port? Reach out to us on twitter @brokenjoysticks and tell us what you think of big companies doing crowd funding for games or PC ports!
With nothing but a flashlight, staff, and your faithful companion, everything is important and the dangers are more real in the Flame and the Flood.The Flame in the Flood was made by development team members from the studios behind Bioshock, Halo 2, and Rockband. Knowing that the development team had members from these games I already had high hopes for an engaging experience. The game is marketed as a roguelike survival game, and it holds very true to that name. Each play through is different than the last, with your character Scout trying to build a different path each game. The game may seem simple but its actually quite hard with the ever evolving levels and hazards making harder than it seems.
Starting off in the game you are met by Aesop, your faithful dog, who also serves as an expanded inventory, and you are given a slight look into what has happened to the world. The game intentionally keeps the look short and no real information is given. This adds to the mystery of the setting.
