May the Eighteenth

The game: Evolutionary Games's Galactic Arms Race

The source: The Be Mine Anniversary Bundle from Groupees.

The pre-amble: Galactic Arms Race is a shoot 'em up/RPG in which a player can accept missions, destroy enemies and level up their various ship functions and find new weapons in a series of incrementally higher level sectors of contested space. The real draw is the game's procedurally generated weapon systems: many thousands are generated on the fly by the computer and fire various particles moving along various arcs and causing various damage to enemies. The player can also direct the evolution of their own particle weapons to some extent should they come across a particularly useful pattern.

The playthrough: Galactic Arms Race is an interesting little tech demo of a game. It's clearly built around this fancy schmancy procedural generation tool devised in a university lab that appears to have had this perfunctory space sim RPG built around it. As implied by that previous sentence, the game itself is a little basic, though it's certainly appealing enough in the way that all RPGs driven by loot and inundated with numbers and statistics tend to be from a pure Skinner box perspective. That there's some shooter action and strategy involved certainly helps too.

Honestly, I can't really make heads or tails of the weapons. The rest of the game is made simple enough by the way the game kindly explains its many features to you via a series of tutorial missions - each gives you a decent boost of experience and you're pretty far into the game by the time they finally stop showing up. If you start tinkering with the various algorithms for the weapons you've found, you get hit with graphs and gradients and mathematical terminology and it's all actually quite fascinating, if a little impenetrable. It's something I'm sure @brad would be curious about, given that it combines his twin loves of space and inscrutable video game systems.

Ultimately though, the game is just a little too barebones for its own good. Perhaps obviously, since it's intended to be the tech demo for some really intriguing coding that I don't doubt will be better featured in more full-fledged games from the studio (or from whomever wishes to use it, should it all go unpatented) in the future. Hell, I can't completely deny GAR's addictiveness either, and all the particles from your weapons and those of your antagonists do make for some really intense visuals.

The verdict: Eh, maybe. These loot RPGs can easily become black holes time-wise.

(PSA: Be Mine 8 is currently available for another week, at least.)

May the Seventeenth

The game: Digital Arrow's InMomentum

The source: The first Indie Gala bundle.

The pre-amble: InMomentum is a first-person platforming game that... what's that? You already identified the problem with it? Well, let me just finish the pre-amble first, speedy. It's a first-person platforming game in which the goal is to reach the end of each of its elaborate cyberspace-esque obstacle courses by jumping over gaps, jumping off walls, shooting switches, occasionally finding power-ups and maintaining that momentum as you collect orbs and reach the finish line. Purely a competitive game, the player can choose any of the seventeen stages and try their luck on the global leaderboards.

The playthrough: InMomentum isn't... well, it's not good. The trouble, I fear, is in its fundamental design. Not so much subtly nodding towards Mirror's Edge than headbanging in its approximate direction, InMomentum is largely focused on reaching a "flow" - a chain of commands that fluidly direct your character towards the various higher platforms and out the way places they need to reach to progress. Unfortunately, as with Mirror's Edge, this is all done via a first-person perspective that gives you no sense of where your feet or your hands are relative to your viewpoint.

Mirror's Edge, to digress a moment, had everything else right besides its gameplay core. While Faith and her story weren't particularly exciting, the world she inhabited and its stark white appearance were definitely striking. The manipulation of the surroundings made for some really interesting environmental puzzles, the sound quality was fantastic and the game oozed style from every pore. I just couldn't perform its flowing actions with anything like the grace it demanded. I was less of a swan and more of a dyspraxic duck with an inner-ear infection.

InMomentum has the same core problem: The game wants you to chase highscores by not only effortlessly jumping and running over and through its various platforming challenges but also do so without missing a beat. The wall jumping helps - as long as you're near a vertical surface, you can hit the left mouse button to launch yourself up once - but ultimately this game becomes less about breezing past the various obstacles than frequently dropping past them and resetting. The blocky environments are nice to look at, if you're particularly partial to that cuboid VRML-focused take on computing interfaces of the future a la Assassin Creed's Animus or Jurassic Park's not-Linux, but they might've been better off directing their artistic prerogative towards creating interesting images on the underside of platforms to give you something to look at as you plummet past them.

It's possible I just suck at the game and am petulant about it, yet I also have absolutely no eagerness to "get" InMomentum either. I could say that I've played enough games with first-person platforming to know I'll never get the hang of it, especially when I can't even see my own virtual feet, but then the very idea of first-person platforming has been derided frequently enough by all and sundry already that it almost seems redundant.

The verdict: Heck no at all.

May the Sixteenth

The game: Black Jacket Studios's Metal Drift

The source: Bundle Stars' Catnip Bundle

The pre-amble: Metal Drift is an online multiplayer competitive vehicular combat/sport game in which the target is to score points by collecting a ball deposited in a central location and putting it in the opponent's goal. Deterring you from this task are the opposing team of hover cars with assault weapons - the player can select between and upgrade weapons and power-ups, but must level up in true competitive online fashion before stronger variants become unlocked. While destruction of enemy vehicles - whether by your own hand or assisting another - earns yourself experience points, it is only by scoring goals that you start seeing big hauls.

The playthrough: Metal Drift initially seemed like a bit of dumb fun, albeit the sort that would be greatly enhanced by a cadre of online friends than some soulless bots, but like so many of its ilk the game is yet another victim of a certain modern online gaming foible. Specifically? The part where you begin as an underpowered weenie with zero chance of succeeding until you've humbly subjected yourself to enough drubbings--fratboy pledge style--to level up to the point where you can actually stand tall alongside the big boys, rather than lying in a crumpled heap a few yards away bereft of your proverbial lunch money. A new player is thus doubly disabled: first by their relative lack of expertise at the game and second by the dismal array of utilities at their disposal when compared to their higher leveled peers. I forget which game started this trend (though I heavily suspect it involves duty and the calling thereof) but it's among the most insidious and hostile models and, either in spite or because of this, has spread to become the de facto system for almost every online game in recent memory.

As if to recreate what it will be like to play against opponents like this online, all the bots in the game are also incredibly overpowered in a comparative sense. Even when bots are "dynamically" assigned weapons (which I clearly misinterpreted to mean "bots that are only as strong as you are") they tend to outgun you rather severely, and you're left trying to scrape whatever small amount of experience points that are given by assist kills from your burly teammate bots in hope of being at least a fraction closer towards a new level by the time the brutal beatdown subsides. Of course, leveling up has no guarantee that a new weapon or defensive ability will actually unlock - the game has a limited amount of both and only ekes them out at seemingly inscrutable intervals.

It really doesn't help that the initial - and for a long time only - weapon is something called the pulse cannon. Now that might sound impressive, but let me just throw a little botany at you: A pulse, or legume, is the collective term for a family of vegetation that commonly have pods as ovaries; the seeds from which are frequently devoured by humans and other animals. These seeds are invariably types of bean or pea. Therefore what a pulse cannon is, semantically speaking, is a peashooter - and this is never made more clear than when you expend an entire ammo clip just to drop an enemy's shields in time for them to actually deign to acknowledge that annoying buzzing noise behind them and demolish your hovercar with a single shot from their high-powered missile launcher, temporal cannon, rail gun or whatever ludicruous sci-fi weapon their high experience level affords them. "Dynamically balanced bots" my disintegrated derriere.

The verdict: Not a chance. (Though I feel I should give Metal Drift some slack here: this would also be true of any multiplayer game in my Steam library with discouragingly few exceptions.)

May the Fifteenth

The game: Konjak's Noitu Love 2: Devolution

The source: Indie Royale's June Bug Bundle

The pre-amble: Noitu Love 2: Devolution is a scrolling brawler and the sequel to Noitu Love, which was a homage to 8-bit action games. In the same vein, Noitu Love 2 is based on classic Treasure games filled with frenetic action and oddball bosses. The player controls operative Xoda Rap (who, like the original game's Noitu Love, appears to have gone all in on the whole "backwards name" idea despite how dumb it sounds) and has to fight off an invasion of grinning robots that were thought to be destroyed along with their creator centuries earlier during the events of the previous game.

The playthrough: My knowledge of Treasure is rather limited - they had a stronger presence on the Sega Genesis and I didn't get to play a whole lot of Mischief Makers, which appears to be the chief source of most of this game's homages - and nor do I really play a lot of the super fast, super tough action Arcade games in which everything seems to move at mach speed and before I blink it's asking for another quarter. In spite all this, I can definitely appreciate the appeal and the craft in this game. Made by a single person more or less (that would be Joakim Sandberg, an industry bit player who went on to make his own games), it's an artistic and programming endeavor on par with Dean Dodrill's Dust: An Elysian Tail from last year.

I haven't gotten too far through the game but the few bosses I've thought were very imaginative and, well, huge. Like the kind you'd face every five minutes in the aforementioned Treasure games and Metal Slugs and what have you. Unfortunately, the bits between these amazing set-pieces are often a whole lot of mild platforming and brawler filler. Some of the stages have some neat ideas, often requiring the use of Xoda's Shield ability which generates a small safe haven on the screen to hide behind, but a lot of it is clearly building up to the next big encounter. This isn't an inherently bad practice, because the occasional breather between colossal bosses is definitely appreciated, but it means so much of the game is kind of... dull. You rush through it, because there's no real reason not to, and hope the cool bits aren't too far away.

I'll be giving Noitu Love 2 more attention at a later date, for sure, but deep down I sort of think I ought to be educating myself on the various Treasure games that it so affectionately mimics. I don't believe I ever beat Gunstar Heroes or Dynamite Headdy or Mischief Makers, and that seems like something I should rectify before I can really give Noitu Love 2 the appreciation it (probably) deserves.

The verdict: Yeah, I'll keep it around. I think some homework is in order first, however.

May the Fourteenth

The game: IonFx Studios's Obulis

The source: Bundle Stars' Catnip Bundle

The pre-amble: Obulis is a physics-based puzzle game in which the player must sever chains and ropes holding up marbles in such a way that they all end up in identically-colored receptacles. As well as puzzling out which rope is meant to be severed when, the player needs a keen sense of timing and precision in order to solve each stage. The marbles have momentum and force but zero friction: once a marble starts moving, it takes a slope or an obstacle to get them to stop again.

The playthrough: Obulis is a very straightforward take on Cut The Rope by way of something like Peggle and, were I to be a bit more crass, is mostly just balls whizzing in front of your face for hours. However, despite the simple set-up it's actually quite a bit of addictive fun. The key to its appeal is that the puzzles aren't nearly as difficult as they seem, at least early on. A nice, steady difficulty curve that constantly introduces new elements (there are quite a few Incredible Machine-esque contraptions that come into play) is the sign of a well-crafted puzzle game.

The presentation around the puzzles is less remarkable. It's all very pleasant and polished, with a Egyptian theme that more than reminds me of Luxor (another casual puzzle game focused around marbles), but there's nothing really to be said about it. I tend to get the impression with many of these low-budget puzzle games that the graphics and music are crafted only to meet a satisfactory level of quality and the chief focus is instead spent on the design of the individual puzzles, which seems like the entirely right way to go about developing a puzzle game.

If I have a complaint with this game, it's one that's slightly more universal with games of its ilk: that of the Precision Predicament. Yep, I even capitalized it. Many of these games depend on precise operations and it's an aspect of skill that is most prone to human error. There's a reason musicians rehearse and practice for hours, and surgery is one of the most difficult careers in the world, and it's because we can't be as mechanically precise as a ruler or a calculator: our brains simply don't work that way. So while certain facets of human intelligence are at the forefront with Obulis - puzzle-solving, spatial reasoning, reliably predicting several steps in advance - more often than not it is the precision part of the process that tends to let one down. Say we have a puzzle in which a certain order of ropes need to be cut (this is, in fact, every puzzle in the game but bear with me here) with the last of which needing to be cut at a precise moment - by the time the player has figured out this order, and are ready to move onto the next puzzle, they're stymied because they're still trying to nail the right moment to cut that last chain. Over and over, each time just a millisecond or so too early or late. The game's built to be as frustration-free as possible - most stages are very short and will reset instantaneously when a button is clicked - but when the obstacle blocking one's progress isn't the smarts to figure out the puzzle but a relatively torpid reaction speed, it's a little disheartening. This is opposed to something action-based like a shooter, in which precision is simply one aspect of a greater skillset required to excel.

Still, I'm grousing about an issue to applies to a wide range of games, so it's unfair to single out Obulis for it. While the game's nothing special and is pretty much exactly how it appears, it is every bit a competently made game. It was clearly enough to get IonFx's foot in the door, as they went on to produce the much stranger and more interesting Miasmata. Proving yourself by doing a simple puzzle game right has frequently been the first step of a great many of the industry's best developers, after all. Hey, that's not a bad idea for a list...

The verdict: Eh, maybe. It is satisfying to solve a puzzle, but I have a habit of dropping off puzzle games as they get tougher and require even more precise timing.

May the Thirteenth

The game: Tale of Tales's The Path

The source: The Evolved Bundle

The pre-amble: The Path is a survival horror adventure game in which the player chooses one of seven sisters, each at a different stage of their childhood/young adulthood, and guides them to their grandmother's house in the woods in a spin on the Little Red Riding Hood folktale. Though the game explicitly tells you to stay on the path, greater rewards and discoveries await those who dare to venture deeper into the forest.

The playthrough: I haven't yet done a straight up walkthrough of what I experienced with one of these games, but in this case I feel its apropos in order to better explain what The Path is and what it's trying to do. You do lose a bit of it by having it described, though, so if you currently have it in unplayed in your Steam library or are otherwise planning to play it at some point, I might suggest skipping the playthrough part and move to the last paragraph for the appraisal. I'm not spoiling anything (if there's spoilers to be found in The Path, I'm equally in the dark about them) but it seems this game is built on revelation and discovery and I'm always loathe to disrupt that relationship between a game and its player in order to elucidate on how it functions. It'd be like explaining a clever mechanic in Portal that the player needs to figure out in order to progress: while not a spoiler of the traditional "Soylent Green is people" narrative variety, one can still deprive someone else of a portion of the enjoyment a game can provide and is therefore equally deleterious. But man, am I waffling. Here goes:

• So I originally picked the middle girl, Ruby, she of the leg brace and gothy make-up. Seemed a decent fit for what appeared to be an artsy horror-themed jaunt into the woods. After being told the controls by the game's tutorial messages, it left me with a warning to stay on the path at all costs. Which is what I ended up doing, until reaching Grandma's house, climbing the stairs to her bedroom and falling asleep next to her. Apparently this is what the game considers a "failure", as obeying the rules is the quickest and most uneventful course to a dull conclusion.

• On the second playthrough I chose Ruby again and wandered off the path. As you head deeper into the forest, things get ever more obscured and I soon spotted other young girls milling around the forest at random (I couldn't talk to them for whatever reason) and finding little yellow flower collectibles everywhere. Eventually, I came across a broken playground and a Kanji Tatsumi-looking suave guy on a bench. Choosing to sit on the bench, Ruby coyly shared a cigarette with him and eventually woke up outside of Grandma's house in the rain, a little worse for the wear. So hey, this game has some ambiguity and symbolism in it, no surprises there. Entering Grandma's house, everything was a darn sight more sinister and I can only infer that after discovering some bizarre rotating bed in a red room and getting whupped on the back of the head that Ruby was no more.
• Indeed, when it came time to play again Ruby was nowhere to be seen in the character selection screen. The book she was reading laid abandoned on the large table around which her other sisters stood, absorbed in their own activities just as they had been previously. I next chose the eldest sibling, Scarlet, and a similar series of events occurred: A bit of rudderless walking around the trees, a few wandering naifs, a few arbitrary collectibles, a broken structure and a charming white-haired gentleman of my character's age that apparently did untoward things upon her person before leaving her in a heap outside of Grandma's house. Grandma's house had an entirely green interior this time, but Scarlet collapsed all the same at the end of her journey, felled by an unseen foe.

The Path is filled with symbolism and subtext, a fair amount of which is deliberately obfuscated the heighten the unease. The discordant melodies, the plaintive singing, the fuzzy lighting and artifacts that appear around the screen and in your peripheral vision, the ambiguity of each sister's fate after meeting "the wolf": it all serves to discomfit and discombobulate. I've heard that if games are going to be art some day - with the view that they aren't already - they need a way to challenge a player in a manner beyond simply setting obvious goals and asking the player to reach them through skill and perseverance I don't know if The Path necessarily manages that, as grave, unerring narrative fates, disconcerting visual and audio tics and ingénues suffering various mishaps aren't exactly uncommon in the Survival Horror genre, but the way the game tasks players to essentially doom themselves rather than walk straight ahead for an uneventful "happy" ending is an interesting twist on the grim inevitability of these horror games. Can't say I enjoy it as a game much, but it's definitely got--as the French might say--a certain "I have no effin' idea what's going on" to it.

The verdict: Maybe. There's more to discover, but I kind of got the jist.

May the Twelfth

The game: Recoil Games's Rochard

The source: Humble Indie Bundle 6 (getting a lot of mileage out of that one)

The pre-amble: Rochard is a 2D physics-based action platformer starring tough space miner John Rochard: a hard-working, hard-accented salt-of-the-earth type currently employed by Skyrig to locate and extract valuable deposits of Turbinium from asteroids. The worst day of his life begins when he uncovers something entirely different from an asteroid after years of disappointments. Rochard's chief tool (and weapon) is his trusty G-Lifter gravity gun, which can be used to carry and manipulate objects in the environment as well as throw heavy items at enemies. The G-Lifter also goes through several upgrades during the game, expanding both its utility and combat effectiveness. (For more pre-amble check out the game's Quick Look, though be forewarned that it's a QL EX.)

The playthrough: Rochard's a great little game so far. I was one of those people who never got tired of using the gravity gun in Half Life 2 and similarly spent the entirety of Red Faction: Armageddon playing around with the magnet gun in lieu of an array of generic "Call of Duty but Mars" weapons available. Rochard's versatile G-Lifter is used throughout the game and while it does eventually pick up a standard firing mode flinging crates at just the right trajectory to bop some villain on the head from a room away never got old. Likewise, the inventive puzzles that require bypassing forcefields of various colors (blue stops crates, red stops organic matter, etc.) and turning down the gravity to increase one's jumping height demonstrate that the game has more up its sleeves than the standard seesaw puzzles and box-stacking puzzles common with the physics-based puzzlers. (Which isn't to say there aren't those too, but I appreciate the eclectic mix.)

The presentation's pretty solid too: The studio got ahold of Jon St. John for its eponymous character, and his dialogue is filled with all sorts of goofy Southern turns of phrase. It's additionally funny when you consider this game was made in Finland, so it's one of those "how we Europeans imagine Americans talk" situations. Rochard's female companion voice work is a little odder, as she is (I can only assume by the occasional "Crikey!") supposed to have a British accent of the "Queen's English" archetype (which itself really only exists in fiction) but in reality is something slightly askew. She's also supposed to be part Native American - a space casino run by her Uncle is the second major location of the game - so I'm not even sure what's going on there. The game's sense of humor can be a little confounding, but it's weird enough to hook for the time being.

Of all the Indie games I've covered so far this May, Rochard might well be the most impressive, at least in terms of having a really polished look, some responsive gameplay with a lot of imagination behind its physics puzzles and just feels overall like a big, professional product at what I imagine was a fraction of the cost of an AAA game. I know I frequently joke that every other game in my Indie Steam list seems to be a puzzle-platformer, but I can't really complain when they're as well-made as this. I feel I should mention that I'm only around a third through the game (based on how many of the collectible achievements I have) so I might end up getting horribly frustrated with some overly precise puzzles or overwhelming combat further down the road. Given early impressions though, it really doesn't strike me as the type of game that would play me like that.

The verdict: Absolutely. This is my kind of game.

May the Eleventh

The game: ACE Team's Rock of Ages

The source: User @teflonbilly (thanks!)

The pre-amble: Rock of Ages is a comedic action/strategy tower defense game in which two players compete to be the first to roll enough giant boulders with bemused expressions past the other player's defenses. The game is depicted as a series of contests between tortured Greek mythological figure Sisyphus and various warlike figures throughout history. I wish I could say that this is the weirdest game that Chilean developers ACE Team has made, but they also happen to be behind the Zeno Clash games.

The playthrough: OK, so Chrome crashed for the very first time ever and ate this entire blog. Can't say I'm super enthused to write all this out again. In fact, I dare say I'm as enthused to talk about my considerable distaste for the tower defense sub-genre of real-time strategy as Google is enthused to actually grant its browser some manner of data back-up in the case of catastrophic dysfunction. Perhaps needless to say after that last sentence, but all the amusing presentation and semi-historical references and silly boulder expressions can't exonerate Rock of Ages for its central tower defense core, a pervasive sub-genre I've frequently decried against profusely before now and am choosing to save you all from a second tirade on the topic. That you're controlling legendary put-upon figure Sisyphus as he repeats his strenuous actions for no appreciable reason beyond the amusement of the Gods isn't lost on me after this crash. Did I mention how much I don't approve of Google Chrome patiently waiting until this blog was complete before crapping its own proverbial bed? Because I'm happy to reiterate the tale many times as I vainly try to recall any of the multitude of witticisms I had previously leveled towards this otherwise blameless game.

I don't like Rock of Ages. It's a shame because it was a kind gift, but I'd be happy if I never had to launch an enormous boulder with the momentum and steering of a shopping cart filled with pumpkins down a sharp incline filled with gaps that could safely be hopped over had any of my desperate applications of the button assigned to that particular maneuver were ever acknowledged. Nor am I terribly eager to endlessly redistribute siege towers and catapults, the actual utility of which I have no earthly way of comprehending as the computer always seems to have comparatively untroubled jaunts regardless of what I place and where. I could stick around and watch it defeat me in real-time in order to glean its route, but that would be self-defeating in a quite literal sense.

Anyway, despite all my grousing about this game, much of it a repeat from a more innocent time when I didn't know the browser I was using could throw up in its own mouth without any explanation, it's not something which I'll summarily abandon. It does seem like the multiplayer, which at least involves another human opponent struggling with the same issues, could be a laugh and a half. Should I ever find myself inebriated and in need of some competitive insanity, the game will be patiently waiting for me in my Steam library. It's not like a libation or sixteen is going to impair my ability to steer that damned rock any further than is currently the case.

The verdict: Nooooope.

May the Tenth

The game: Nifflas's Saira

The source: The very first Indie Gala bundle.

The pre-amble: Saira is a platformer/puzzle game from Swedish developer Nifflas, creator of the Knytt series among other things, and like the Knytt games depends on exploring non-linear, attractive, desolate environments to moody ambiance tracks. Saira takes place across a series of star systems, each with one or two planets, and the goal is to hunt through the remains of human civilization to find the parts you need to complete a massive teleporter. There's also a strong emphasis on using Saira's day job as a photographer to take pictures of clues and codes in your surroundings which invariably are required to progress elsewhere.

The playthrough: Saira's an interesting take on the standard Metroidvania formula. If I had to draw a parallel to a big studio game, it has a similar capsular nature to Order of Ecclesia and the more overtly planet-hopping antics of Metroid Prime 3's Samus Aran. There's no map, but each region is just small enough to not need one: Instead, the player has a specific challenge for each planet which might involve Layton-esque brainteasers, exploring the planet for codes in the environment, time trials which test your ability to get around the environment.

I reviewed another game from the same developer, Knytt Underground, a little while back and I can't help but notice many of the same systems in play here as well: This includes the general ambiance of these games, but also touches like an environmental power-up that allows you to fly for short bursts and the fact that both games are utterly devoid of combat. It's clear Nifflas has his preferences, though when you consider the cookie-cutter nature of his most affluently-funded contemporaries it's entirely exonerable.

Saira's not particularly long - nothing really surprising for an Indie game - but it manages to fill its run-time with a lot of interesting puzzles and diverse settings. The climbing, jumping and running mechanics are functional enough and there's a bevy of cute background details like a few galactic radio stations and some entirely incidental mini-games - if nothing else, they display a keen vision for world building. Saira's presented as simply the first of a series of adventures for its titular heroine, a jumping off point for a series as potentially long-reaching as Knytt, so I'd be interested in seeing any follow-ups. I do have a weakness for interplanetary exploration games after all.

The verdict: I've beaten the game. Kind of a pattern so far.

May the Ninth

The game: Sidhe Interactive's Shatter

The source: Humble Indie Bundle 6.

The pre-amble: Shatter is a modern update of the Breakout/Arkanoid bat n' ball subgenre which heavily relies on modern shoot 'em up scoring and a fantastic electro soundtrack to set it apart from its antecedents. The game uses a gravity-changing technique in order to effect the ball and the various free-roaming blocks and the goal is to destroy everything on the screen without letting the ball or too many of the blocks leave the arena. The action switches angles from horizontal to vertical to cylindrical (like Tempest) and follows Arkanoid's example by including bosses and power-ups.

The playthrough: Shatter's quite something. Bit.Trip Beat pulled off a similar trick a few months earlier by introducing rhythm to the then cobwebby Breakout subgenre that had once ruled the Arcades and home computers of the late 80s. I seem to recall a game of that formula coming out every other month back when I had an Atari ST, to the extent that "bat and ball" became one of a handful of genres the magazines used to describe whatever new releases were out that month. As such, I have something of a nostalgic appreciation for this type of game, if not one that has quite crystallized into the kind of actual affection that would cause me to seek those games out.

But Shatter pulls off its masterstroke by borrowing several of the more important elements of the (semi) recent wave of psychedelic dual-stick shooters with pounding soundtracks and twitch gameplay, and introducing them to that humble "one-player Pong" archetype. The result makes for a game that is a darn sight more appealing than, say, BreakQuest, as charming as that game could occasionally be. The soundtrack, as stated earlier, is fantastic to listen to and the visuals are a mix of the colorful geometric shapes of, well, Geometry Wars and backdrops that almost seem to resemble interplanetary mining operations, or perhaps microscopic mining operations. It's too indistinct to tell and ultimately rather incidental beyond having a series of arenas filled with awe-inspiring mechanical features that feel germane to the electro music.

Shatter's not perfect. The paddle sticks out too far and breaks a cardinal rule of bat and ball games by making the event horizon (that is, the point where the ball is unrecoverable) too ambiguous: it's hard to explain how exactly deleterious this is without playing it and experiencing the disconnect yourself. It's also hard to see where the ball is when a thousand particle effects are going off and juggling some of the more gravity-afflicted blocks can cause all sorts of headaches when I just want to bounce a ball around without worrying half the level dropping past my paddle and sapping my multiplier bonus. I also don't care a fig in general about high scores, though having a friend's list to compete against is always going to motivate me a little. And really, in spite of all its fanciful notions, this is a bat and ball game and there's a reason they died out and have more or less continued to do so in the decades since. With all that in mind, Shatter still left a pretty positive impression on me. Hard to argue with nostalgia if it's been competently gussied up enough.

The verdict: I've beaten the story mode and I'm not really the high score chasing type, but I'll keep it installed just because. There's something to be said for just smashing a few blocks to some fine jams now and then.