A college convenience store is a magical place. So magical, in fact, that proper physics do not take place! Hence the word, “Magical.” It is magical in ways that you can only experience as it happens. Not through traditional scientific method, rather through make believe. One of the major dictators of physics within your convenience store is the old lady who complains about noise coming from your convenience store. For the sake of this article, we will call her Pamela. Ms. Pamela runs the building your convenience store is located in, and within this building is the little world she has created. Your convenience store is part of this creation, as your employer has rented a space from this lady and put you to work behind the counter.
One aspect of this magical building is the bending of physics of sound.
Ms. Pamela’s intentions are questionable. Whether she is truly a human within a rotting sack of flesh or an alien in an unconvincing human costume. Anyway, that’s for later. The point of this lesson is about Sound. And boy does it ever make no sense.
If you ever have the radio/music on while in your convenience store while Ms. Pamela is in the building, she will always come and tell you to turn it down — no matter what volume it is. She claims that the sound waves from “the radio,” which is pointing toward the trash can, is actually bouncing up into the air ducts, through the elevator shaft and into the study room (that is about 30-40 feet away from your convenience store) in enough amplitude that it is possible to hear it! Not only is this clearly bullshit, but simply impossible. On many occasions, the radio is nowhere near as loud as the refrigerators and slushy machines that are inside the convenience store!
Because she rules the building with an iron fist and we rent the place from her, she wants to always feel like she’s in control of everything that is going on. That imperialistic, alien, sound adept masterbitch.
It’s often that I’ll play random games and discover that I like them or hate them. It’s quite another experience to play a game that brings the question of “why does this exist?” Keeplanet is more of a game that confuses me more than anything else. I don’t hate it and I certainly don’t like it, but mostly I just don’t “get” it. There’s some sort of design philosophy to this title, but the end goal didn’t seem to be “fun.”
Keeplanet‘s concept rides on the principal of “balance.” You are the “World Commander” of a set of planets in a solar system, your role being to develop the new home for humanity after Earth got blowed up. Your goal is develop your world by placing objects on the outer rim of the planet and keep the balance of all of the objects such that the world keeps spinning and isn’t dragged down by being too heavy on one side. You can balance the world on the fly by placing more objects down and hoping you are “calculating” correctly before your world’s inhabitants are killed off from the lack of rotation. Gravity seems to have taken a vacation from the rules of physics, but there’s stranger things happening in quantum mechanics so anything is possible, I suppose.
There’s nothing that’s inherently fun about the concept of randomly placing objects on the extreme edges of a planet, though. Not only is it a pain to actually see where you’re placing things, but the planet will get “bigger” as more objects are placed and you put down even more objects between those objects. Some levels require putting down a hundred or more of these “objects” so you’ll really have to be paying attention to what the hell is going on. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t really provide you with the tools or information to help you in this manner. There is a weight scale that defines the weight of the planet’s “left” and “right” (whatever that means) and as the world rotates on its axis and more objects are built, these numbers change constantly. The goal is to keep these numbers as balanced as possible and the world will rotate. If it stops rotating, then your population will start dying out from heat and cold and once it reaches zero, it’s game over.
The user interface leaves a lot to be desired. There’s a large “Play” button on the menu screen that you only use one time, but stays there after you click it. Selecting your level beckons you to click a WORD that says “Play” not the big Play button that becomes a quick way to close the entire menu and put you back to the Title Screen. Like, why the hell do I need to go back to the Title Screen at that point? Just hide the Play button or use it as the level selection.
The information provided regarding objects is basically nonsensical and I just don’t care about the numbers when I have to plop down 300 objects quickly — otherwise I’d be here for 30 minutes for one of these levels and that ain’t happening. Of course, I die over and over regardless, so I’m stuck playing that long anyway! I also really don’t get why the outer edges of the planet are the only thing being used; when the planet becomes bigger it becomes impossible to see all parts of the planet without zooming out, which makes the objects you are placing much smaller. Where’s the joy in placing some stupid ass mountain on a planet if I can’t see it???? Or those dumb trees, for that matter. There’s no agency here where I can pick which objects I want to place and create a strategy to overcome the task at hand — it’s more of a Tetris with objects being served to you and you dealing with it. So, some World Commander you are. Who is building these unwanted mountains for you? Why not some big speakers that play Spanish music to liven up the place? There’s also a big wasted space in the center of the planet which I feel could have been used for the user interface information in a more creative way, but instead the UI elements get in the way of the game play, and you mostly just stare at blank space on your screen. The graphics are generally inoffensive, otherwise. The sound isn’t that annoying, but there’s a siren that will go off when your population is dying, which can be a bit annoying.
The only real positive aspect of this game is that it is really cheap. It is currently $1.99 on Steam at full price, so you can probably get it with some Steam balance and check it out if it interests you. There are probably about twenty levels including the “Challenges.” It’s not particularly impressive, but it works and you can play it.
I don’t really understand why the title of the game is “Keeplanet,” but it probably goes along with the translation errors that can be picked out in the text. Maybe it’s as simple as “Keep your planet alive. Keep. Planet. Keeplanet.” ::facepalm::
When it comes to the store’s page, it’s almost comical how weirdly it is worded at points. Two quotes from the Store page and my analysis:
Develop the planet In Keeplanet, you create your own history – there’s no right or wrong way to play! Become a world’s landlord, spread out trees, mountains, houses and other objects to make the planet rotate around its axis. Remember, the most important thing is not to let the planet stop. Otherwise, all inhabitants of the planet will die out from sunburn or freezing.
Except there is a right or wrong way to play. You get game overs when you don’t play the right way! It says it right in the same paragraph that if you let the planet stop you lose, that’s the definition of having a wrong way to play!
Fight for the humanity Universe is a dangerous place, protect people from external hazards – meteorites, meteor rains and vigilant aliens are waiting for your mistakes. Don’t let them break you!
Fighting for “the” humanity = fighting for our morals?
External hazards from outside of the universe?
The vigilant aliens just ram your planet, similar to meteors. Meteorites are also meteors that have hit the Earth, so are meteors that hit Earth, flying off of Earth across the universe and then hitting your new planet? What a bunch of assholes.
The same sort of thing happens with the in-game text, but there isn’t nearly as much writing, so there’s less to fuck up. Some of the English is so broken, they are just words on screen with no association to each other.
It’s a Monday night, and I’ve got my Vive on my hip; Soup Tyrant is on the prowl! Reeoww!
Tonight I’m playing… let’s see here… glasses… “Mighty Monster Mayhem” by Rank17. It’s a VR monster game where players get to smash stuff up as a big ol’ hulking brute. Hard to fuck up what’s essentially Rampage in VR, right? Anyway, here’s what the Steam store page says:
“As an outcast-scientist-turned-mutated-monster, seek vengeance against those who rejected your research! In Mighty Monster Mayhem, you can tear down buildings, make entire cities crumble, and munch on unsuspecting pedestrians. Choose from a variety of creatures, and battle with (or against) friends, wreaking havoc in multiple campaign modes – unleashing fury on everything to increase your score! How much mayhem can you cause?”
First thing’s first: the unskippable tutorial. You’re not allowed to play the main game or multiplayer without being a big boy and/or girl and playing along with the voiceover’s lesson plan, so I figured I’ll just jump through the hoop. I appear to be a big fishy monster with a big ass watch on my left arm. It’s not super clear from the narration, but from the store page description you can piece together that this annoying dude in your ear is yourself. They teach you how to walk, and then explain some basic monster techniques at your disposal: punching, grabbing, throwing, climbing and jumping.
The controls aren’t bad in theory. The locomotion alone is kind of neat. Locomotion is activated by squeezing either controller’s grip button and then swinging your arms. The rate that you swing dictates the rate that you move, from a tiptoe to a sprint. It works pretty well, and it’s one of the better thought-out aspects of the game.
Punching is what you think it is. You ball up your first by holding the trigger on the controller, and then swing around to punch. Swinging your arm around without holding down the trigger doesn’t do dick, so swatting things doesn’t seem to be an option. Grabbing things is done by moving your hand close to something and holding the trigger down. You can grab a bunch of things, but what I’ve found is that if you grab things that are too close together, you destroy the thing you’re holding along with whatever you’ve “collided” with that was next to it. If you’ve managed to pick something up, congrats: you can now throw it at something by doing a throwing motion and releasing the trigger. Throwing has weird physics to it. Either something flies off into the horizon, like shitty Pokemon villains, or it flops a few feet ahead of you straight into the dirt, like my hopes and dreams do. It’s also your only ranged attack. More on that in a bit.
Now for the weirder things. For climbing, you grab a part of a building and pull yourself up, repeating the process with your other arm. Moving around the building isn’t very difficult, but doing things on the building is kind of annoying. Punching the building requires you to move your hand far enough away from the building that you don’t grab it. Otherwise, you can grab and twist the part you’ve grabbed to rip it off, which sometimes happens unintentionally when you’re climbing frantically. Jumping rounds off your skillset, which you control by holding both triggers down, raising your hands in the air, and then throwing your hands toward your feet while releasing the triggers. Jumps are, for the most part, uncontrollable catapults into the air. You can control direction and power, sort of, but most of the time I felt like a fly without wings. There is no method of controlling your descent, so often times you will just have to hope shit works out.
Monsters can interact with the environment, picking up people (and eating them for one hit point), cars, you name it. Most things you can pick up, most things you can smash. Most of them share use, though; you either want to break something, or throw it at a building or enemy. Nothing you can pick up is functionally different from anything else, aside from humans, which you can eat, and powerups, which are used rather than grabbed and thrown.
There are a few monsters in the game, but the change is cosmetic as no monster has a unique ability or function. I unlocked “Toni the Oni” twice in two different levels. I’m not sure why I did, but when I used Toni, the change was of no real significance, at least none that I could find or had any explanation. I’m sure this is more geared toward multiplayer, as the game does offer drop in/drop out four player coop.
“My fitbit says I’m behind on smashing. Excuse me, officer.”
The meat of the game, single player or otherwise, is in a quasi free roam environment. The player’s goal is to look at your watch and figure out how many buildings you have to smash. There’s some side objectives, too, like eating scientists, smashing mailboxes and some other dumb shit, but it only seemed to add to score and ended up being more trouble than it was worth. Buildings are felled by doing damage to them, but for some fucking reason the way you take down a building is via “structural supports”, which are random, unmarked bits of building that have to be destroyed to take the building out. The only way to see them is with a powerup called “x-ray”, which outlines them in red. It ends up being more like a game of “needle in the haystack” once you get to later levels, since players have to take out about 6 or so buildings before the level’s finished. Building chunks are huge, by the way. It’s like the pentagon built all these fucking things. Each building is layered with several feet of concrete, to the point where pulling out chunks obstructs your vision and clutters the damn place.
As the player ruins the city’s shit, things change a bit. At first the city is a vibrant environment, with like 5 guys walking around and a few dozen parked cars, but when players start breaking shit it goes into chaos, with up to 5 guys walking around, some of them soldiers! Soldiers shoot these slow blue shots at you as they clip through buildings out of view, or into the assload of debris on the ground that doesn’t disappear. Out of sight, out of mind, right? Nah, they fire through buildings and debris. If players take out a building or two, they start sending these fucking weird looking cars at you. They have a few miniguns on them and rocket launchers, but only shoot the same blue bullets the little soldiers fire out of the middle of their hoods, rotating perfectly with you as you move around them. This makes more sense with the treaded tanks that come later, but cars? C’mon. It’s not like there’s a lot of detail in anything else. Could it have killed them to at least have the projectiles come out of the guns?
So, on top of all this, the game doesn’t run particularly well. The recommended specs for this game are at (unspecified) i5 and a GTX 980 or better. Even on superior hardware, this game has a bunch of issues rendering buildings without chugging. This is problematic, as it seems some physics and most player movement is tied to it. It becomes harder to eat people or pick them up. Throwing things is a crapshoot. Jumping becomes hopping. It’s just not a very pretty or busy game to be having these many problems.
Mighty Monster Mayhem is still indeed playable, but it’s a frustrating experience that can’t be carried by its novel approach to player locomotion. The game suffers from such a textbook case of, “great idea, terrible execution,” that it would make No Man’s Sky blush. It feels like Early Access, even though it isn’t. It feels like a tech demo, and with a heapin’ helpin’ of polish and some expansion of the “break buildings to win” formula, it could be a great game. Mighty Monster Mayhem may truly, one day, be the VR monster game to beat, the benchmark, defacto “you are a giant monster” game.
As it stands, though, as of June 2017… pass. There are other VR experiences more worthy of your $14.99 right now.
Note: This is a review based on playing with normal-ass PC controls, not VR. Play experience may be significantly different if you choose to play in VR.
Build stuff, blow stuff up, spawn little guys with swords, and watch it all come together in the hectically-paced Siegecraft Commander. Your quick reactions and propensity to spam the map with your buildings will get you through almost any challenge the game has to offer. While it is technically a real-time strategy game, strategy is not usually what is rewarded, single player or otherwise. Since the game mechanics are pretty easy to understand, the title can appeal to a broad group in the strategy genre, mostly for beginners or people who never play RTS games usually.
The basic idea of Siegecraft Commander comes with placing towers on your map, and using them as stepping stones to travel across the map as you maneuver to vanquish your enemy. To place one of your buildings, a slingshot mechanic is introduced. Rather than simply clicking on the map where you want to perfectly place your building, you will have to gauge whereabouts you want to build by aiming with your previous building. You can’t spawn buildings everywhere, however. Terrain, other buildings, and seemingly-random obfuscations will prevent you from placing buildings down. What can make the gameplay chaotic at times is that buildings are hierarchical — meaning your buildings are reliant on its parent building existing for itself to exist. If Outpost A spawns Outpost B and Outpost C, and then Outpost A is destroyed, all three go down in flames (and all of the buildings attached to Outpost B/C as well). You’ll have to keep an eye on your earlier buildings for any dangers heading their way, since you could lose 10 or even 20 buildings when an important node falls.
With those basicalities explained, you’ll have a number of different buildings available to build. Due to a tech tree, you’ll need some buildings as a prerequisite for other buildings. There is typically no hard limit to the amount of buildings you can spawn from one, but there is a limited amount of space around the existing buildings before you need to branch out further. Buildings cannot criss-cross, as they lay down a straight line to their parent building, so you’ll need to plan out how you spread across the map in different lines. Outposts are the most important building, as they extend your keep and can allow for the eventual building of all other towers. You can make Barracks, which spawn infantry that auto-attack ground enemies and buildings, with no input allowed from you. There are also other sorts of towers that shoot projectiles, but typically require manual control — the Barracks are usually the strongest tower since there is no micromanagement involved and you can spend more time brute forcing into your enemy’s territory with your regular Outposts to launch explosives from them while your infantry back you up. The more advanced buildings are powerful in their own ways, but there’s not much impetus to bother with them due to cooldowns of their abilities or construction.
Unlike most RTS games, there is no resource-gathering. There is a blue and an orange resource on the map that is required for the more powerful buildings — all you need to do is build an Outpost on them to acquire it as a binary value. Construction is regulated by cooldowns, so if you accidentally launch your building onto an area that can’t be built on, you’ll be waiting for 30 seconds or so for your second try. The goal is always to eliminate your enemy, and in the single player campaign you will always start out with just your initial Keep while the computer will start with all of their buildings down already. They will sometimes expand or rebuild lost buildings, but it seems to depend on the level itself whether or not they are told to do anything. I’ve had a couple of levels where they have a lot of buildings but don’t try to advance on your position other than with spawning enemies or projectiles, and others where they don’t do much but defend. There are two single player campaigns, sixteen levels in all.
A multiplayer mode is included but unfortunately seems to lag out or become unresponsive at a certain point. I was lucky and had my very first game continue for about 10 minutes and it was surprisingly a lot more fun than the campaign since you are racing against the other player(s) in a bid to outmaneuver them on the map and then destroy them. All sides starting with just a Keep also makes it considerably more competitive, as facing against an already-established network of towers always feels like pushing a boulder up a mountain.
Unfortunately, there’s a lot of frustrating aspects that don’t make the gameplay enjoyable. First of all, the slingshot mechanic is a chore to use, and it is the primary thing you’ll be interacting with. By default, the slingshot will not show you where it is going to land so you have to guesstimate where it might, and even then you’ll be ripping your hair out when it goes half the distance you thought it would for the hundredth time. Frustration is further enhanced when your building lands somewhere it can’t even be built, forcing you to wait for extended cooldowns and deal with the slingshot yet again. It would have been nice if there was some sort of flag for noting what terrain could not be built on so you didn’t aim it there. However, there is a control option available called “Shot Guide” that shows you generally where the thing you are launching is expected to land, but it is for the campaign only. I get why it isn’t available in multiplayer and is off by default, because it would probably make it not as fun since part of the enjoyment is seeing your opponents fail at hitting their target all of the time.
There’s also a lot of random bugs, the biggest one being that if a tower you are currently controlling dies, you won’t be able to select any other towers unless you open the game menu (via Escape); after doing so, you are then able to select a new tower. Once, I even saw an infantry soldier die, then the sword came back to life (no person attached) and it started hitting my tower again! It was kind of funny, but annoying at the same time since I didn’t know if the tower was going to take any damage randomly and the damn thing wouldn’t go away. Perhaps with future game updates some of these issues will be resolved.
The graphics are pretty good and the cartoonish style of the art meshes well with the idea of the gameplay. There are only two factions, so there’s not a whole lot of variety in units or buildings. There is some nice/funny voice acting, but seems to be oddly incomplete. As I got further in the first campaign, voice overs didn’t play during the story bits — they either weren’t working due to a bug or maybe they didn’t get around to recording them? I honestly don’t know. The music isn’t bad, either and also fits the theme well.
Another big feature for this title is that it is also designed for VR play. While I didn’t get a chance to play this title in VR (I don’t have that equipment available to me), I have played with an HTC Vive for about half an hour or so. I can see how the experience could be a lot more different, as controls are a significant obstacle for enjoyment here. Since VR is still a pretty new platform, a game like this might be pretty unique in the range of titles out there.
While there are some interesting points to be had with Siegecraft Commander, I came away mostly frustrated with the experience. Wrestling with the controls and the lack of information regarding where buildings can be placed is a big detriment to any enjoyment to be had. The campaign doesn’t feel very exciting, and the stories weren’t too interesting either.
kohnohkicl – n. a sketch on the back of a napkin that ends up being a multi-story, many faceted, extremely complex building. And then you sneeze into it.
name = tyler
bjoke = who fell first of the twin towers first the blonde or the redhead A.the red head jumped off a toy twin towers and the blonde tried finding it
Friday the 13th – n. the ultimate day of bad luck. Be careful this day, you may fall off buildings and other things you thought you would never fall off. There is also a high probability of getting all the curses in the world that have ever existed, simultaneously.
A dog followed his master to school. His owner was a fourth grader at a public elementary school.
However, when the bell rang, the dog sidled inside the building and made it all the way to the child’s classroom before a teacher noticed and shooed him outside, closing the door behind him. The dog sat down, whimpered and stared at the closed doors.
Then God appeared beside the dog, patted his head, and said, “Don’t feel bad fella’…they won’t let ME in either.”
First thing’s first: the unskippable tutorial. You’re not allowed to play the main game or multiplayer without being a big boy and/or girl and playing along with the voiceover’s lesson plan, so I figured I’ll just jump through the hoop. I appear to be a big fishy monster with a big ass watch on my left arm. It’s not super clear from the narration, but from the store page description you can piece together that this annoying dude in your ear is yourself. They teach you how to walk, and then explain some basic monster techniques at your disposal: punching, grabbing, throwing, climbing and jumping.
