Week 3! The holidays are drawing near and it's basically cram time for me. I've got to try hard to resist the siren call of the many digital sales going on right now and finish what I've already got on my plate!
With that out of the way here are the games!
Game 10: Trace Vector
Time to completion: 2 hours.
I'm not 100% sure what genre Trace Vector falls under but the closest thing it resembles is the endless runner. You never stop moving and you have to focus on changing lanes to collect fuel (so you can keep moving) and avoiding dead ends and obstacles all while going really, really fast.
There are two modes in this game, Adventure and Endless mode. Endless is all you really need in a game like this, but Adventure mode is pretty cool too. In Adventure mode, you play as a pilot named Jason along with the AI on his ship, named Aurora, hitchhiking across the galaxy in search of a way back to Earth. It gets pretty hard and it has some elements that aren't in the endless mode, like teleporters and adversarial pong paddles.
Endless mode is about what you'd expect, randomly generated paths that require you to think on your feet as the game gets increasingly faster and faster. It's pretty much perfect except there are no online leaderboards! The high score screen at the end of every run always ends up looking like you're playing this game in a deserted arcade.
I'd also be remiss if I didn't mention the soundtrack in this game, most of which you can hear over the course of the story. It's seriously some of the best stuff of it's caliber I've ever heard in a video game.
Game 11: Card City Nights
Time to completion: 8 hours.
Card City Nights is a single player collectible card game made by Ludosity, the makers of fine video game products such as Ittle Dew, Space Hunk and many other smaller, lesser known titles. It takes place in the town your character just moved to where everyone and their pet Fishbun is playing some sort of card game. It's decided for your character that they're going to aim to get the 1 million coin prize that's awarded to the best card game player in town. Along the way you'll battle against a variety of characters from the surprisingly large catalgue of Ludosity games, also they've all got Persona 4 secondary character naming conventions such as; Excitable Student, Business Casual Man and Fiery Woman. The writing is also really well done and pretty funny too! Very charming, much like that other game they did.
The actual card game itself is actually pretty fun! Each turn, you and your opponent take turns placing cards on your 3x3 board. Each card has arrows on any of the 4 sides or corners and either an attack; defense, neutral or revive icon on it as well as an effect. You play cards in order to connect the arrows and match the icons on said cards. When you connect 3 icons of any type, the icons you matched the most of activate (so if you match 2 attack with 1 defense your combo will attack the enemy).
It sounds somewhat complicated on paper, but what card game doesn't? It's practically second nature once you play a game or two. There's tons of strategies available for you to use once you get some good cards, many of the opponents you face will use very specific methods in order to win such as constantly increasing their health and defense or extreme rushdown tactics. Personally, I made my way through the game using an all offense deck based around the HYPE SNAKE (which is kind of really broken). I could pretty much win against any of the AI without much hassle once I perfected it.
I have virtually no problems with this game except for the fact that it suffers some shortcomings because it was made for touch based platforms (the game at one points asks you to swipe something across the screen). Other than that, this game's pretty dope! I don't imagine many people have played it though, which is a shame!
Game 12: Princess Remedy
Time to completion: 40 minutes.
Princess Remedy is one of the 6 or so games to come out of the recent Games Against Ebola game jam. The other games haven't been released to the public but fortunately for you and I, the boys at Ludosity have released it for free!
The game puts you in the role of the titular Princess Remedy, who has been sent on a mission from her home planet of Saturn to heal all the sick people in Hurtland! The various peoples of Hurtland have many ailments, ranging from sick burns to an actual lack of a body. What I'm getting at is that it's a Ludosity game. It's got their trademark silly writing and some cameos from a couple of their other games too.
Despite being made in less than 4 days the game has some solid gameplay. When you heal people you go inside their bodies(?) and blast their troubles away with your Saturnian healing magic. You're constantly shooting, so you only need to focus on dodging enemies and their bullets. After you heal someone you get a heart, which increases your max health in healing mode and are also used to unlock doors to other areas. There are also other upgrades you can find in the overworld that increase your damage, the number of shots you shoot, health regen and the amount of flasks (bombs) you can carry.
Oh, and at the end of the game you are given the option to literally marry anyone you've healed over the course of the game. It comes straight out of left-field but it's still a neat addition since there are about 30+ characters to choose from. That's like 30 different endings! I kinda wish they would expand this game into something longer, I love everything about this game. I'm 1000% sure they probably won't but I can dream can't I?
Game 13: LISA
Time to completion: 12 hours (first playthrough), 6 hours (second playthrough).
Man, I don't even know where to start with this one. I was hoping to wrote a review for this at some point, and I probably will, but I forgot I was even doing this blog so I guess I'll tell you a thing or two about LISA.
I suppose I can start by saying that I pretty much love everything this game has going for it. Every single thing a great game should have; a compelling story, engaging gameplay, entertaining characters, interesting setting, LISA hits every single one of those things almost perfectly for me. It's the kind of game I would hope to one day make if I had the patience and talent required to make a video game by my lonesome.
In addition to that, it's also got some really cool gameplay ideas that I don't think I've ever seen in a game before. There are very few "safe" options in LISA, meaning there is almost always a chance for a negative consequence to whatever you do. Sometimes the game tells you straight out; choose between the life of one of your party members or give someone all of your money. Other times it forces these situations on you to prevent you from getting too comfortable. There are even times where bosses will straight up kill your party members. I'm not even talking about "Aw man, now I gotta revive him" I'm talking about Sephiroth stabbing Aerith through the torso kind of kill. When your party members die they are dead, it can even happen outside of battle too which make almost every interaction a matter of life or death.
Luckily, there are 30 party member in the game but a lot of them are missable or even almost not worth the trouble of risking yourself to get them. There's also nothing stopping you from save-scumming the hell out of the game (which I don't recommend, by the way) but man, playing through this for the first time when I barely understood anything was such a great experience even going through it again once I thought I figured everything out was still fun.
There's also so much more I'd like to say about this game but I'd end up making this blog longer than it has any right be. I don't know if I'm actually going to write a review, but I will be editing the wiki page for this game into something presentable.
Game 14: Dungeon of the Endless
Time to first win: 9 hours.
Technically, you don't every truly finish any rogue-like game until you 100% it. Dungeon of the Endless is exactly one of those games, it's so mechanics-heavy and with so many modes and characters to choose from it'll probably be a good long while before I end up "finishing" it. I did however end up winning a run recently and man, let me tell ya. This game is tough.
For starter's there a lot going on mechanically; DotE is basically a tower defense game with rogue-like elements and resource management. You control up to four characters who are essentially your towers. You can move them about the dungeon to fight enemies and find resources, items, shops and ultimately the elevator to the next floor. Your resources are food (used to heal your characters when they're fighting and level them up), industry (used to build structures that generate resources and defenses), dust (a finite resource that is used to light up rooms to stop enemies from spawning and power your structures) and science (used to research new and better structures).
To leave the floor you have to carry your crystal (your "base", the thing the enemies want to destroy in every tower defense game) to the elevator while fighting off the enemies that will endlessly spawn from any unlit rooms on the floor.
There's also a ton of stuff that would take way too long to explain (character relationships, skills, random events, equipable items). This game has a lot of meat to it and I can't wait to get really into it. I've been keeping an eye on this game ever since it entered Early Access a while back, I held of buying it until it was finished though. It's good to see it turned out great!
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