Five Way "Quick" Review - The Greatest Indie Pack
The Greatest Indie Pack, as previously mentioned, is a now-defunct Steam package of five indie game releases. From what I can figure, these games were placed together for the sole purpose of going on sale at $10 (compared to the original total price of $45). I snapped it up, because I'm an absolute sucker for getting multiple games with one purchase.
Unlike my other reviews, which I intend to give after playing a game all the way through (or eventually giving up out of pure frustration), I don't think it's terribly necessary to play all the way through these, since the games are either short, simplistic, or in one case, multiplayer-oriented.
Let's begin.
Eets - $10
Eets is a fluffy puzzle game along the lines of Lemmings crossed with the Incredible Machine. You're in indirect control of the titular lagomorphic rabbity thing, and must guide him to the goal of each level, denoted by a puzzle piece.
The puzzles in the game generally revolve around Eets' moods. Eets can be happy, angry, or scared. When he's happy, he'll gleefully hop off ledges (and usually to his doom). When angry, he flips out and will do his best Sonic the Hedgehog impression as he leaps across long chasms. When scared, Eets is too chickenshit to jump down a bottomless pit, and instead toes the edge and turns around, repeating this until his mood changes (or is simply moved).
Before action begins, you place various provided items into the level, and then let the scene unfold. Items include fruits that change Eets' mood, whales that suck Eets (and other items) up and spits them across the level, explosives, a trio of things that shoot other things, including a pig that farts out super exploding pig babies, lightbulbs, and mine carts. Then you hit the play button and let things unfold. Some of the items are interactive, so you can't always rest on your laurels as Eets does his own thing.
Pictured: Super Exploding Pig Babies, and other stuff too, I guess.The game's only noticeable flaw is its physics. While the "character" items (like the aforementioned pig-shooting-pigs) will stay put at all times, Eets, the fruits, and other doodads are at gravity's (and sometimes anti-gravity's) whim. This has the unfortunate effect of sometimes rendering even the absolutely correct, official solutions to the puzzles invalid due to something bouncing wrong, forcing you to retry. Sometimes the interaction between Eets and certain surfaces screws up and instead of landing correctly, he just bounces off (usually to his doom). Very occasionally you can run into "pixels" of land, too (fans of the Worms series will be quite familiar with the phenomenom).
On the plus side, the game's difficulty is cleverly designed. Instead of a strictly linear progression, you're only required to beat a certain number of puzzles to unlock the next set, and usually that number is equal to the number of easy (or easiest) puzzles in the bunch. Eets also features a hint button that will clue you on where to place an object. It's nice, but not always as helpful as it could be. It only ever shows one specific item, which means that it could be the item you already placed correctly. And on more complex puzzles, you're only getting anywhere from 1/4 to 1/8 of the solution. I long for a smarter hint button.
While I'm not a huge puzzler fan, I have to say I was pleasantly surprised by Eets. I would have never sought it out on my own, but it turned to be a nice diversion and a pretty good boredom buster. Unlike the rest of the games on this list, I've actually almost played this one all the way through.
Recommendation: Check it out. (Plus it's kid friendly.)
Gravitron 2 -$5
Here's a headscratcher. As part of the world's worst practical joke, Gravitron 2 defaults to the super-challenging bonus level pack (listed simply as "OfficialPack1") instead of the normal game ("Standard"). Not just when first starting, but when you always start it. Ugh.
So, originally, I was ready to decry this game as the worst one ever, because seriously now, those bonus levels are crazy hard. But after finding out about the switch-up on the Steam board for the game, I played the real deal and I'm...hrm. I'm not impressed, but I'm not turned off.
This is not the right level 1 aaaagh!Gravitron could be called a mash-up of Lunar Lander and Defender, wrapped up in Geometry Wars-style neon-on-black graphics. The game, is in fact, a homage to pretty much every omni-directional, inertia-based shooter ever - Thrust, Oids, Sub-Terrania, whatever. You take control of a spaceship, and fight against turrets and gravity itself (hence the name?), to rescue scientists from the surface of planets, then blow up their reactors and get the fuck out of dodge before they explode. Just don't run out of fuel.
It's arcadey. It's not awful, but it does grate on my nerves in places. I suspect that it might just not be for me.
For one, it has limited lives, which are just blah in any game these days. Second, while not mind-blowingly difficult, it is unforgiving, with collision damage against everything, turret fire that makes you flip out of control, and insta-kill lasers. The gravity aspect is also annoying at times, since most objects are below you, so you must turn upside-down to fire at them, but you have no backwards thrusters. Reverse thrusters would have been nice to have, and could've been balanced by making them weaker than normal. Without them, the game feels artificially unfair, which is perhaps what they were going for.
On the plus side, Gravitron 2 is the only game out of these five that is only $5, so the risk is minimal.
Recommendation: If you like puzzle-y shmups, you'll probably like it. If you like Nintendo Hard games, you'll probably like it. And it's dirt cheap.
I-Fluid - $10
Oh I-Fluid. I wanted to like you.
I-Fluid is a...um...puzzler/platformer type...thing. Basically, you control a cute little droplet of water. You can pick up moisture from wet stuff, as well as free-standing droplets, which makes you grow, effectively standing in for health. But on the flipside, absorbent materials will soak you up, hot things will evaporate you, and both will kill you dewey ass quickly if not immediately.
Your droplet (controlled with WASD and the mouse) can jump, double jump, cling to smooth objects and crawl up them, and most bizarrely, take control of fruit and vegetables, rolling them around for all manner of strange purposes.
Each level contains various goals for your droplet to carry out, and there are bonus challenges available, such as time attack.
The concept is pretty good, but I was ultimately disappointed by its presentation, especially due to various problems and limitations.
1) A little too varied, bad progression curve. Every level is pretty much completely different from the last. In one, you might have to knock five walnuts out of their containers using physics. In another, you might have to do exciting platforming shenanigans. "Put all five tomatoes in their containers." and then "Follow the firefly." in the level following.
This wouldn't be as bad if the game gave you a gentle curve of simpler challenges before shoving you along. For instance, the first real platforming exercise, jumping up leaves of ivy, was extremely tedious if not outright difficult, which nearly put me off of the game right there.
2) Physics! Just like Eets, physics rears its ugly head. There were a number of times where physics got in the way of fun. For instance, with the walnuts. At least one of the walnuts you have to simply push out of a shallow bowl. But...this boiled (haha get it) down to pushing a big round thing with something else that was much smaller and had less mass. It's not a difficult task, just a frustrating one.
Mind you, sometimes the physics were used really cleverly. My favorite was riding inside a plastic bottlecap, scooting along long stretches of fabric. But for every clever use, something else would piss me off. One level's ultimate goal was getting into a swinging ladle and knocking over a pyramid of cups. I did exactly that...only to die when one of the cups landed exactly inside the ladle and crushed me. Gah!
I was going to get a screenshot of cool bottlecap-sliding, but I got stuck instead. The ramp in the foreground is where I have to go up, coming down are infinitely spawning chocolates.Not pictured: Thoughts of suicide.
3) A lacking application of core concepts.
- Missed opportunity: there's a limit on how big your droplet gets, and it's not very large at all. Wouldn't it be more interesting if you could just keep growing up to a much higher limit, with the idea being that the larger the droplet, the harder to control and the harder to keep your extra water?
- The tutorial helpfully tells you to "use your common sense" when determining what materials will and won't kill you. I find this to be somewhat reprehensible. Imagine any other game telling you this regarding basic game mechanics. I understand what they were going for, but you're a tiny little water droplet (and not to mention that the game's graphics aren't top notch). Common sense cannot be relied upon when the game changes the player's perspective like that. I can't recall this ever majorly biting me in the ass, but when it came to any kind of wood, I was extremely confused that it usually wasn't lethal.
- Bad level design. For one thing, I was rather disappointed to find most absorbent materials used simply as roadblocks, rather than actual hazards. Worse still, this made a lot of the levels more confusing than they needed to be, as I stumbled about trying to find the correct path. And at least once I hit an invisible level boundry, while still on a safe surface, and abruptly died.
But by far the most egregious incident was an early level challenge to skid as quickly as you can across hot(?), wooden(!), segmented(?!) cooling mats. Flying in the face of common sense, the only hazardous thing about these mats is their warmth. Instead of getting trapped between the segments, they merely act as speedbumps. As far as I could tell, there is no obvious strategy to winning. You just try it sixteen times until it works. Your time to completion is tracked on each level. Generally I clocked in around two to five minutes. That level? Twenty minutes.
Recommendation: Skip it. (I probably make it sound worse than it is, though.)
Multiwinia: Survival of the Flattest - $10
Multiwinia is the multiplayer follow-up to the hit game Darwinia. I can basically stop writing right there. Introversion is a pretty cool company, releases good games and doesn't afraid of anything (not even Microsoft).
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In short, Multiwinia has you take control of computer programs to defeat other computer programs in a deliciously retro 3D bit-scape. There are several different game modes, like capture the flag, king of the hill, or just plain elimination.
Much to my delight, Multiwinia distills the RTS formula down to its basics, and then uses those basics to craft an almost party-game styled affair. This reminds me of one of Introversion's other titles, DEFCON, though unlike the Wargames-inspired nuke-tastic march towards mutually assured destruction, Multiwinia feels a bit more newbie friendly.
Unlike its precursor you don't have immediate access to the directly player-controlled Squad programs (big tough soldiers that wipe out viruses), instead you guide clusters of the dimunitive and cute stick figure Darwinians right into battle, watching as the little guys shoot the crap out of anything not their color.
Even computer programs are filthy, filthy racists.(This screenshot is from a game I lost to the Easy AI, a testament to my leet skillz.
I played again and whupped 'em, though.)
Power-ups are dropped randomly onto the playing field and must be retreived in order to gain various bonus units, such as a troop carrier, or a tank. These can be crippling or overpowered in the right circumstances, but that lends to the playful, pick-up-and-play nature of the game.
The controls are simple, but sometimes not as intuitive as they could be. WASD and the mouse control your camera view. Holding down the left mouse button expands a circle used to select groups of units (very Pikmin-esque), and is then used to tell those units where to move. The right mouse button can be used to make a Darwinian a "leader" which will give the rest of the Darwinians who encounter him a simple directive, usually "go over there". It's also used to control the special units. Spacebar cancels any unit selection.
The problem I ran into was mostly when dealing with the troop carrier. You have to cycle between its modes, two of which are "load all surrounding Darwinians" and "eject all Darwinians inside". It just lead to some awkward fumbling about to make sure it was doing what it was supposed to.
Ultimately, as someone who has never really enjoyed strategy games, real time or turn-based, I was very surprised by how fun Multiwinia is, regardless of some of its awkwardness (which will assuredly pass with some practice).
Recommendation: If you can get some friends to play with you, don't hesitate. Otherwise, pick it up at your leisure.
Trials 2: Second Edition - $10
This is going to be another fast one. Trials 2 is, in brief, one of those balance-on-your-bike-while-doing-stunts type flash games, but in fully rendered 3D. And it costs $10. One thing that does set it apart is that when you wipe out, instead of just giving you a very disatisfying sound effect and an "OOPS!" sign, you get a nice dramatic rag-dolling, bone-cruncher of a fuck up, immediately making me want to play Stair or Truck Dismount again.
So, the gameplay is derivative. It does add in a few clever tricks, like using the lean system to duck under obstacles (or fit through pipes!). My only real complaint came down to the game's initial tutorial levels, and a pet peeve with all of these types of games.
For starters, viewing the tutorial demonstration of a level loads up a demo right onto the instance you're playing in! This means that trying to see how to do a trick halfway through the level, it will restart the entire thing. Ugh.
Another issue I found was that the game doesn't really talk to the player well. The demos include a graphic of what buttons to press when, but this never felt particularly useful when the timing is so finicky (because, why else, physics!). Moreover, the game launches right into talking about the inner-workings of its own systems, referring to the center of gravity for the bike and its rider and such, right in the middle of the tutorial. That sort of in-depth, high-level talk could really have been saved for a more advanced training stage. Similarly, instead of getting you accustomed to the fundamentals slowly and evenly, it tends to fly right into technique (the aforementioned finicky button sequences).
As for the pet peeve, it's crappy level design and lack of checkpoints. Trials 2 does actually feature checkpoints in its levels, but sometimes they simply do not come often enough, or they checkpoint you in a very inconvenient place, like in a valley between two steep ramps or three jumps prior to a big trick. Barring this, the game is rather entertaining.
Vroom, screech, etc.Trials 2 isn't terrible, but it does make me question what it really offers. While the game looks nice, the graphics feel a little pointless, mainly concerning the really high-level bells and whistles, since it leads to more headaches in ensuring the framerate doesn't crap out.
Incidentally, it does have a worldwide leader board and downloadable levels, but still... *shrug* I ultimately have no strong feelings one way or another.
Recommendation: If you really like bike games? If you couldn't get enough of the flash variants? (Not bad, just lacking in draw. Lack of a level editor is a massive letdown.)
Credits!
These fantastic people made Eets fantastic.
These groovy people made Gravitron 2 groovy.
These smooth people made i-Fluid smooth.
These wonderful people made Multiwinia wonderful.
These crazy people made Trials 2 crazy.
(Dang it's hard to find comprehensive info on some of these developers.)
And that's all you need to know about the Greatest Indie Games Pack!
