Sunday, August 25, 2013

Shade

It's no secret that I'm not a fan of RTS games.  I find them, for the most part, unengaging and unintuitive.  There are exceptions, of course, but my problem is with the starting point.  I don't like having other people do my dirty work for me.  If I want a bunch of people dead, I want to have the pleasure of tossing their innards around myself, not just ordering a bunch of samurai to do it for me.

You know what kind of game understands this?  The beat 'em up.  Games like Double Dragon and Kingdom Hearts (that's right, it's not an RPG, despite what people want you to think) know that the best way to clear a room full of baddies is to bash 'em into the ground yourself.  Don't get me wrong, those games have their flaws too, but they are rarely unengaging.  That's because you tend to have complete control over your character, and, by extension, the events of a battle.

So now, here's Shade.  A beat 'em up that renders everything I just said completely moot by being as engaging as an RTS.

I'll start this review, with complete disregard the for context of my intro, the way I always do when I'm afraid I'll be done blogging before a scroll bar even appears on my page: talking about the aesthetics.  The game looks fine when it's not bugging out.  The main problem is that your character(s) have a very strong love of walls, so good luck getting them to obey orders whenever you make the mistake of directing them within the same postal code of a building or lamppost.

And then of course there are the mechanics.  This game can serve as a fine lesson in how not to make the player feel like he or she has control.  Instead of just moving your minions around the screen, you use WASD to vaguely suggest where they should head off to, which only exaggerates the problem of wall hugging ghosties.

The biggest complaint I have, though, is that the only attack method you have is to mash the space bar.  That's it.  If you have enough ghosts following you around, you'll kill people.  If you don't, you have to travel back to the middle of the map to get some and then you can kill people.  It's about as dull, formulaic and uninteresting as a beat 'em up can get.

That's all I got for now.  Until next time, stay repetitive repetitively.

Links
Ghouls on Parade: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=25916

SeigeBreaker

huh, now this sounds interesting.  Let's go ahead and start this up an-
OH AHHNNNGGGGGHHH MY EYYEESSSSSS

Jeez! You know, there's a reason the people who made games for DOS never tried to do 3D effects.  It hurts your brain to look at all those dull colors colliding with one another.  Ah well.  The splash art may have left me with a slight concussion, but how does the rest of the game hold up?

Well, I was thrilled as always to hear that this was a tower defense game.  Oh boy, I love tower defense.  Nothing more fun than watchin enemy troops slowly walk right through your defenses because you don't have enough money left to pay someone to go down there and bash them on the head with a rock, nor the moxie to do it yourself.  You know what the world needs?  A tower defense game where you play as God, so you can just smite the little bastards attacking your castle and erect an infinite number of walls instantaneously to halt their progress.

Well, turns out, Siege Breaker is just that, although the god you play as either has very limited control over how much fire and brimstone he sends to do his bidding or just doesn't really care one way or another whether the castle survives.

You play the game by swapping between two views: one of the entire territory and one of a selected area that you zoom into.  You can only attack while zoomed, so you're going to have to be clever about where you place your walls and towers if you want to have any hope of surviving the first few waves.  Before long, the screen will be flooded with attackers of all shapes and sizes.

Switching between the two views is quite hectic and fun.  demands that you constantly be on your toes, spotting the highest concentration of attackers and smiting them all swiftly before moving onto the next bunch.  You'll never have to wait for your arbitrary amount of money to increase to be able to throw more fireballs or build more walls.  The only limited resources are the towers, which ostensibly do damage to oncoming attackers, but honestly I didn't notice them helping at all.

If I have any critique for the game, it's that the developers spent their time on some rather unwise things.  There is a variety of maps, all of which had to have taken a nice amount of time to create, but you're going to spend so much time in zoomed attack mode and focusing so heavily on placing walls that really where you play doesn't matter.  If the time taken to design the extra levels had instead been directed toward, say designing a tower that actually did something, I think this game would have benefited as a result.

Oh well.  It's still a very fun game and I recommend it to anyone who likes to play God.  There is no way to win, of course (unless you count surviving until the million objects on the screen cause the game to crash, which I like to interpret as God throwing a temper tantrum), so I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who thought Missile Command was too hard.  For me, however, this game gets my seal of approval.

That's all I got for now.  Until next time, stay fortified.

Links
Sij Bricker: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=18871