bLight

oh dear, where to begin with this one?

I suppose the first thing I should mention is the first thing that intrigued my about this game: the graphical style.  Hot damn this game is pretty.  I say that not only because the graphical quality is enough to rival even the most affluent of indie developers but also just because the game looks beautiful aesthetically.  Like Aphotic Ascent, the game plays with the whole Light/Dark dichotomy, except this game is a lot more pleasing to the eye.  For starters, the light is colorful.  That's more than just a childish desire for pretty colors, mind you.  Visually, more colors are simply prettier to look at.  The game is very vibrant for the most part, which really makes the enemies stand out.  When you go over a dark area to introduce light to it, you can see the shadows being replaced by twinkly moss, the character designs are wonderful...it's just a damn fine game to look at.  Certainly the prettiest game on the list so far.  But, the question still remains...how does it play?

Well, for the most part, the controls are solid.  The setup is simple, but the implementation of the controls is kind of complex.  I'll try to summarize it, but you would get a much better understanding from actually playing the game (yeah, big surprise).  Basically, you WASD to move and use the arrow keys to change into any 4 colors: blue, red, yellow and green.  These colors correspond not only to which kind of teammates you can spawn, but also the attack formation your teammates will take.  This gives the game a good amount of complexity, leaving the player to constantly analyze in his head which position he or she wants to be in strategically while also needing to consider which enemies to spawn.  In addition, teammates can be combined together to form significantly stronger teammates, but there are only a small amount of combined teammates you can have on the field at one time, giving the player even more to think about.The gameplay as a result could get very frantic as a result.

It could...but it doesn't.

The main flaw of the game is that it's just way too easy.  In fact, it's so easy it becomes literally impossible.  Allow me to clarify: the game starts up difficult enough when you only have a limited amount of troops to work with, but eventually you're so bogged down with troop-spawning crystals that every slot is filled up and you still have about 300 crystals in your inventory just wasting away.  Also, the only way you can get rid of teammates and free up some space for more teammates is to have enemies kill them.  Unfortunately, if you're like me and filled up half the screen with healing creatures, you're SOL because the little buggers never die.  It got to the point where I needed to collect the power of blue (yes, that's actually how the game refers to it) and spawn some defensive guys, but there was no room for any more troops.  I suppose this is why the game decided never to give me the power of blue, thus preventing me from advancing.

Perhaps this was a glitch, but still.  The low difficulty is noticeable and spamming monsters is just too effective a strategy.  This game would have really benefited from a fratricide button so you could clear out some space to rearrange your team.

This flaw is really glaring, and makes the game kind of unfun after 20 or so minutes of play.  Nevertheless, I recommend it.  Most of these games aren't 20 minutes long anyway, and the 20 minutes I had with this game were some of the best I've had since I started the list.  This game gets my seal of approval.

Until next time, stay beautiful (hey, it actually works here!)

Links
https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=18531

BlackOut

The amount of games that simply don't work on this list is starting ti get disheartening.  I've reviewed 35 games so far and something like 5 of them gave me some sort of error screen when I tried to play them.  That's not even counting the ones like Apoch, which broke down after I played it for a bit.

It's a shame too because BlackOut looked like a really fun game.  The screenshots were promising and it advertises itself as having "incredible replay value."  Unfortunately, I can't be the judge of that because "the side-by-side configuration is incorrect" (honestly sometimes I think programmers just make stuff up).

Well I'm not going to waste any more time on this because I want to get a legitimate review out my the end of the day.  Stay beautiful.

Links
*sigh*: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=26138