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Game Reviews, Games

Jamestown+ (PC) Review

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Developer: Final Form Games | Publisher: Batterystaple Games || Overall: 8.5/10

Overview:

Jamestown+ is the remastered release of 2011’s Jamestown with all of the content released as DLC included in a complete package. Additionally there are two new levels, new ships, and other general improvements to the game.

The idea of the game is to blow shit up with lasers and missiles and stuff. It is an arcade style “shmup” (shoot-em-up) reminiscent of the SNK boxes you’d see at the pizza parlors or other similar restaurants. The “games” section of those restaurants let the kids play while parents threw back another couple Bud Lights while griping about how stupid their kids are.

Anyway.

Graphics:

The graphics are great, as previously mentioned, it looks like an old arcade games from the 90’s. What is fascinating about the title though, is the theme. Imagine colonial Britain/imperialist Europe from the 1600’s and 1700’s. Then put them on Mars with space ships and lasers and shit. That’s basically what is happening and it is a glorious amount of WTF.

There are story interludes to world build, but most of it is essentially tongue-in-cheek nonsense. The Spanish conquistadors are generally the villains here, but throw in aliens and other-worldly fauna and you’ll get an idea of what else you’ll encounter.

Sound:

The sound is well designed and gets the right feeling in basically all aspects. The music accentuates the adrenaline and when a boss fight starts, the mood typically shifts to be more ominous, as it should.

Gameplay:

Jamestown+ prides itself on its difficulty and variety. Although there are only about 7 actual levels to play, there is a multitude of ways to play them. Difficulty ranges from “Easy” to “Legendary” and as you progress, you’ll have to beat previous levels on the higher difficulties to unlock more levels. There are also challenge levels that put you in a specifically designed scenario to beat. The nice thing is that even your failed attempts help you with unlocking new things, so nothing feels like a “waste of time.”

A major part of the variety is the amount of ships/weapons available. There are four different ships with four different loadouts, with one loadout being able to be customized in twelve additional ways. Each is progressively bought with gold unlocked in the store, but at a slow enough pace where you can try out each ship long enough to learn what you like and don’t like, or how it can be specifically useful. Some ships might feel redundant at times, but when playing with 4 players, the slight amount of overlap isn’t very important.

Crappiest Part:

The worst part of the game is definitely the grind. At a certain point you’ll stop playing new levels or new difficulties because you’ve hit your wall. I’m not very good at shmups in general, especially the bullet hell kinds. The lower difficulties are VERY lenient since the hitbox is pretty small, but when enemies get harder and more bullets are flying everywhere, I’m not really into it anymore. Since progression is tightly tied to difficulty, that’s also a drawback.

Conclusion:

Jamestown+ is a fun game for sure, and is definitely worth playing if you love those old arcade shmups. The bosses and levels are well designed, and the extras will keep you playing. Replaying levels isn’t even all that bad because the art is so interesting to look at, and the increasing difficulty will keep you challenged.

Games, Game Reviews

X-Morph: Defense (PC) Review

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Developer/Publisher: EXOR Studios || Overall: 8.0/10 | Note: Review includes the “European Assault” (DLC)

I’m a big fan of the tower defense genre, so whenever I get the chance to review a new game in the genre, I get excited.  Unfortunately, there’s not usually a whole lot of variety, as a lot of it relies on how well the levels are designed, what kind of towers are available, and if there’s anything particularly charming about the game.  The hook for X-Morph: Defense is that it mashes the tower defense with a “twin-stick” shooter, turning the player into a very important and active participant in defeating the waves of enemies.

Back in high school, I used to play Starcraft quite a bit — but I seldom played the game as it was meant to be.  I always played the “Use Map Settings” customized maps, and there were a lot of different iterations of tower defense, among other “new” genres.   On its face, X-Morph: Defense feels like a fully realized version of those old Starcraft tower defense maps.  The idea of forcing your enemies to move around your towers and build barriers was one of the strategies you’d employ to make those maps easier and get the most kills, whether it was intended or not.  Since X-Morph: Defense is designed with this aspect in mind, this leads to putting way more emphasis on the placement of towers and terrain manipulation, rather than the tower configuration.  The path of your enemies to the core requires significantly more player agency than most tower defense games offer, and that’s one of the shining aspects of the game design.  Where the tower placement gets complicated, is that enemies come from multiple directions, and even more directions are added as the map expands.  This forces your strategy to change between waves, and you’ll have to re-evaluate your previous tower placements.  Each wave demands you to pontificate to see if you can improve it even slightly; the freedom to do so comes from not “losing” resources for selling or moving your towers.  Unfortunately, the tower weaponry variety feels intentionally basic, because the main emphasis in gameplay is with the player-controlled character.

As the titular “X-Morph” defender, you will eventually be able to switch between four different weapon sets on the fly (pun intended), depending on the situation.  You’ll constantly be encountering helicopters or jets trying to shoot you out of the sky, and combine that with the ground units shooting projectiles at you, you’re almost in a bullet hell game.  The towers become a secondary thought in the heat of the battle and you just kind of hope everything is working out… until it doesn’t.  I’m not very good at bullet hell games, so it sort of takes the enjoyment away from the tower defense for me.

There are 14 levels in the original game and three more levels that are introduced in the DLC, which is called European Assault.  There’s a lot of game, with approximately five to seven waves in each level.  The story is an interesting take as you are the alien invader against a highly technologically-advanced human society who make giant mech bosses.  The power fantasy of being an advanced alien seems a bit softened when the measly humans bring out these huge machines, but I digress.  The boss battles are really unique challenges and have a more traditional twin-stick shooter vibe.  While towers are still important during this phase, depending on the boss, it definitely becomes a game of skill rather than strategy.

As you complete each level, you’ll gain more skill points to put into a tech tree, which unlocks things like weapons, more health, or other buffs. You are mostly free to create your own strategy, but eventually you’ll unlock them all so there’s not a lot to strategize around when that happens.  What you do notice is if you don’t have certain tech unlocked that matches the challenge of the map, you’ll just be fucked and have to start over.  There are several difficulty levels, and it is pretty difficult on normal once you progress past the first few levels.  I even put it on easy and it was still hard!  I think I mostly suck at the shooting part of the equation, which isn’t surprising.  Very Easy is a lot more in my wheelhouse, but it’s not like the game is going to play itself, you’ll still have to make sure to pay attention to what is going on.

I enjoyed X-Morph: Defense quite a bit until I realized that it was the same sort of challenge for the non-boss waves.  It also becomes daunting when you see 8 different lines heading toward your core, you’ve already got a bunch of towers manipulating 4 different paths your enemies are taking, and now you have to worry about 3 different airborne enemies, and I don’t even know where the last line is coming from.  After the 8th or 9th level of dealing with crazy lines, I just lost interest.  I think there needs to be more depth in the way towers worked for me to really see this as a tower defense game first.  There’s only so much fun in spamming the same tower without being able to improve them in some way within the confines of the level itself.  Instead, I feel like it is a twin-stick shooter game first and that’s not particularly my cup of tea.

Despite my personal misgivings, I think there’s plenty of value to this game, it’s well made, and it has fun terrain physics.  Once you get through the trash waves, the fun boss fights really throw in a unique aspect to the gameplay.  If perhaps there were some smaller bosses sprinkled around it’d break up the gameplay and make it a bit more engaging since the trash waves take a long time to get through.

Game Reviews, Games

Blasters of the Universe (PC/HTC Vive) Review

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 Developer/Publisher: Secret Location || Overall: 8.75 / 10

So we’ve got another VR game up to the plate. This one, Blasters of the Universe, by Secret Location, is something of a mashup.

A vast majority of VR games belong to a genre collectively called “wave shooters,” which pit the VR player against wave after wave of enemies. Sometimes there are mechanics for moving around, but most of the time it’s standing or room-scale. Often the player is taking cover behind something, like a shield, and dodging what they can. Sometimes the enemies are zombies, sometimes they are robots, sometimes they are gangsters.

Blasters of the Universe doesn’t break all the molds of the wave shooter, but like some kind of VR Coldstone Creamery it rolls in a heaping cup of “bullet hell” while spectators watch behind the glass counter thinking, “Are these guys insane?! Who wants Ikaruga in their wave shooter?! Gross!”

Turns out: I do! And I don’t think my tastes are that refined, at least when it comes to VR.

The premise is that some unemployed nerd named Allen was really good at arcade games in the 90’s, or maybe late 80’s. He was only good at games, somehow he was able to get into “VR” and has been living there ever since. Despite how very close the antagonist is to me in the game, the story’s not important. The Grand Master Virtual Space Lord Alwyn will be around to mock you, or even awkwardly praise you, but the meat of the game is blastin’ and dodgin’ with a lil’ bit of blockin’, and isn’t at all story driven. The same basic premise for the wave shooter: enemies will appear periodically while you shoot at them. However, their attacks come at you very slowly, often in patterns or huge fields of bullets. In many games, the player’s hitbox is some amalgam of their head, the area beneath, and possibly their hands. Blasters of the Universe does the unthinkable in most by making only the player’s head the hitbox. That allows for some pretty miraculous dodges, but it also allows the bullet hell mechanic to work without being absolutely frustrating. Your are limited by your own movements, which isn’t novel in VR, but it is for a bullet hell.

There are a variety of enemies with their own patterns of attack that, when they are all firing at the player simultaneously, leads to some interesting gameplay. While the player tries to 3D limbo through all the space in between the bullets while trying to counter attack with their own gun. Less enemies means less things shooting, which means the player won’t have to somersault through death-fields. Occasionally there will be a boss that needs spanking, and they will have their own attacks, telegraphs and “puzzles” (if you can call the process of “how do I kill this?” a puzzle). There are four campaign levels with casual and “hell” modes, and each of those has an infinite mode if that’s your thing.

What’s the shooting like, you ask? Well, that’s up to you. There are a bunch of weapon parts to fabricate your own gun out of. Semi-auto or full auto, magazines or recharging ammo pools, precision or spreadfire, you name it. Players pick a weapon frame, barrel, bullet type, magazine and a gadget to make their own weapon of choice. Along with this, they can pick different kinds of shields that, while unable to block everything that comes at the player, they can provide some relief in a pinch. They vary in size, strength and mechanics, with some changing the player’s defensive tactics entirely. The last thing of note is that each weapon frame has a special ability that charges as you shoot n’ dodge your way through waves. Specials like a super-powered laser that sustains for a few seconds, or having two guns for a short time.

Blasters of the Universe performs pretty well on a 3770K processor and a GTX 980ti, and it took quite a lot going on to get any frame drops, which is somewhat admirable considering some of the garbage I’ve played, which is saying quite a bit. The art style might not be everyone’s scene, but it fits the narrative, and it gets the job done just fine.

I like this game quite a bit. I don’t really dislike wave shooters, but there are a ton of them and most of them have their own “twist” that either doesn’t add anything novel, or complicates something that would otherwise be fun. Blasters of the Universe‘s take is one of the better, more unique spins, and in some ways improves on what “classic” (bare with me, the platform’s a baby) VR titles, like Space Pirate Trainer, laid out in the genre. It’s not what I’d call a relaxing game, but if you’re in the mood to move around and shoot at things, this is one of the better choices I’ve come across.