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Welcome to the weekly update on interesting gaming Kickstarter campaigns. Firstly we catch up with some of our previously covered campaigns, and we have quite a few updates to bring to you.
In the good news camp, we have two campaigns that finished with goals met – UnDungeon and Pixel Princess Blitz, both of which I have noted met their targets in previous week updates. Either way, it’s nice to see both ideas set to become reality. Three other games have reached their goals, although haven’t yet concluded their campaigns. These are LEGRAND LEGACY, The Pedestrian (which might have just gotten a boost from a popular Youtuber’s video released today) and Die For Valhalla – all will hopefully become good games once the campaigns are concluded. BEAUTIFUL DESOLATION is also very close to reaching its goal, but has only 4 days to do it in – so we’ll see.
However, there are some other updates which aren’t so good. Project Life for example has 7 days to go to make a £2,000 goal of which it has only raised £5 of. Not quite impossible but very, very difficult to get done. What is most surprising though is the update I have to give you about Elite: Dangerous Role-Playing Game. The campaign page had listed that the project was officially sanctioned by the makers of the game – yet now the page redirects to an “intellectual dispute” page the same as Berghein’s does. Whether this means that the ‘official’ part was a lie or not, is unknown. I’ll update you in weeks to come on changes.
First up, we have something a little bit different from the normal things covered in this weekly article – a piece of hardware.
Marketed as a smartwatch for gamers, Gameband will apparently be coming with “a built-in upgradable MicroSD drive, gaming design” (which probably means it’ll light up in awesome ways) and “exclusive content”; whatever that actually means. The device has been covered on a number of different outlets already and the list on the campaign page includes The Daily Dot, the Discovery Channel and Engadget.
Whether you think this is a gadget or needed, enough people have already backed it to bypass its $75,000 twice over. Check it out if you wish to join them in funding the Gameband.
Now we have a top-down brawler game, which by the looks of it contains animal people.
The image of this one shows three different animal characters, including a bear with a braided dwarven beard – and that’s actually kind of awesome. You build your character from a list of abilities and outfits, then take to the arena to fight for your tribe’s glory as you compete to slay your opponents. Inspired by a mod from Warcraft III, the dev team is hoping to capture the fun of fast-paced, chaotic gameplay fun – which as long as your connection holds should be possible given that this game is online multiplayer PvP anarchy.
RUiN has a SEK 100,000 goal, of which is has made SEK 77,758 with 23 days to go.
Next up we have a game that’s attempting to make a new ‘type’ of game.
Dubbed a “technical platformer” by the developers, FictionSphere is combining elements from hack n’ slash, fighting games and platformers with a story. Said story can be experienced in two different ways based on which character you play as; Ratio who is more of a platformer-type character, or Paradox who is a hack n’ slash-type character. It’s certainly ambitious.
FictionSphere has 29 days to go to make its $30,000 goal, of which it has made $341 so far.
Finally we have a survival multiplayer game, as you can probably tell from the title.
Deep World seems to be inspired by Limbo’s aesthetic, being dark and shady. The backgrounds are in greys and the characters appear as silhouettes with white eyes on the background, as well as the game looking to be in 2D. You play as a character awoken on a hostile island and you must craft, hunt, eat, drink and survive while you scavenge the parts of a helicopter and build it to eventually escape this creepy place.
Deep World has made MX$ 2,510 of its MX$ 80,000goal and has 27 days to go.
GOG are known for their dedication to making older games available in the modern day, because usually a number of those games are no longer being sold anywhere and even if you can find copies – they usually don’t work on modern PCs without a lot of tinkering. GOG are good at bringing you those games without hassle, and now they’ve announced that they’re bringing three Sierra classics to their service.
Caesar I and II, along with Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom are now available for sale on GOG, ready for returning players and new ones alike to come in and build their own historically inspired cities. This completes GOG’s collection with the first two of the Caesar series and letting you build your city into a big superpower of the early ADs. Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom however places you in the East, and has you working on construction of an empire which will last for 3000 years of China’s history. You start in a small plot on the shores of the Yangtze river, and build to rule the whole of China, dealing with political, social and economic upheaval along the way. Released in 2002, it was the last game that was a part of Sierra’s City Building series of games.
Each of these games is now available for $5.99 or £4.79 DRM-free and compatible with most operating systems. To celebrate GOG are currently running the Grand City-Builders Sale to celebrate the PC’s history of city building games. However, it’ll only last until 2pm UTC so be quick if you want to build up some city-building fun.
I love Starbound. It’s a nice chill game that lets you just get on with playing the game but also has a set of missions you can do if you choose to do that. If you’ve never played it, think Terraria but less complicated and with more species you can be. I like to play as the bird-like Avian race myself.
The game spent quite a while in development and Early Access before it released last year, but developer Chucklefish continues to improve the game and the next patch they’re going to be adding will add new locations for you to explore in between the planets you can hop between. This includes derelict space crafts, merchant ships and more.
To aid you in this (because as you might be able to guess some of these places are pretty hostile to life!) the game will be having giant mech suits added to allow you to engage in extra-vehicular activity, which means you can explore abandoned space stations and derelicts all you want. You’ll be able to customise these suits, adding weapons, painting them in custom paint jobs and much more. Updating it and keeping it repaired will be crucial to continue to plumb the depths of ever harder and more dangerous space wreckage.
To make travelling between planets, planetoids and locations between orbits, the navigational interface is getting an update too. Now you’ll be able to zoom all the way out to see what is orbiting around the star you’re currently in the system of, and the map is active which means you can see where everything is in their orbital paths – including your own craft. You can even watch other crafts moving around so you can intercept a merchant at where they’re going to be next. No word on whether this means we’ll get space pirates though – it’d be a logical next step I imagine.
Chucklefish haven’t given a date of release for this update yet, but keep your eyes on the Starbound website for up to date information.
BattleForge was a combination of card game and RTS that was launched back in 2009, and had its servers shut down back in 2013. Now in a post on the BattleForge Reborn forum, community manager MrXLink has made the announcement that EA has apparently permitted a fan revival of the game called Skylords Reborn to be a thing. According to the post, EA has officially sanctioned this revival with the help of a company called Ardent Peak; and the revival will bring the game back up to the same standard it was at before the server shutdown with potential new content in the future.
Originally developed by EA Phenomic, BattleForge was a freemium game where players could build armies not with resources but by collecting and trading cards with other players. Cards were divided into frost, shadow, fire and nature, with players having to use special BattleForge points to get more cards – which in traditional freemium fashion meant microtransactions and quite a few of them. This was back when they were only just beginning to take root in games, so people didn’t quite hate microtransactions as much as we now do.
This new version though is stripping out all of the microtransactions and upping the amount of BattleForge points you can get through regular play of the game – the Skylords Reborn team promise that the game will never “Pay2Win or Pay2Play”. The team have also have a new server run by Ardent Peak, and have apparently been given permission to alter the original BattleForge client mostly to remove all references to EA. However, the post does also state that while they can “alter the server in such a way to release additional content”, they will not be allowed to “release any paid DLC or paid updates for the game.” For now the aim of the team is to simply restore the game, although it does make you wonder how they will continue to fund both server upkeep and any further updates afterwards – apparently the team are allowed to “commercialise the game to the extent that we are allowed to gain money for the project” but we’ve no idea what that means other than to take donations from the community. We’ll see in time I guess.
It certainly sounds interesting, but it is worth noting that the post is not from an official EA source and EA themselves haven’t made any statements on their own sites or social medias. Maybe wait for that before you jump into the game; it’d be a shame to make any progress only to have EA come in and shut it all down again.
I like stories. I love to evaluate the way they’re built, characters and especially those narratives that play with the typically accepted patterns and turn them on their head. It’s been done quite a bit, but I never get tired of flipping a story on its head and experiencing it from the other side.
So Nefarious, which is a modern take on the 2D platformer genre that has you play as the villain? Yeah, it got my interest immediately. The main character is villain Crow, who indulges in the time-honoured tradition of kidnapping the princess of his area, Princess Mayapple, as well as building doomsday devices and so on, so forth. Pitted against him is hero Mack, a Megaman-esque type who is in a relationship with Mayapple and is her ‘hero’. Only throughout the first level, which takes place in the city location the three are based in, you get hints in the dialogue that honestly the kidnapping thing has happened so often that Mayapple and Crow understand each other a bit better than Mayapple and Mack do right now. It’s wonderful to see the three play out their roles while still being believably the role they fit into.
The gameplay itself takes place over several different locations as Crow sets out beyond his usual boundaries to kidnap many princesses for an ultimate weapon. Enemies will be encountered and can be dispatched with punches or with grenades which have a timer of a few seconds unless they hit an enemy. Grenades can also be used to hit buttons and can also sometimes be found fixed into place to act as a jump booster for higher up platforms. Defeated enemies usually drop grenade refills, also they can also drop heart canisters if you have taken on some damage. Crow starts with 3 hearts and enemies can take a half or full heart on hit, while most enemies early on take only one punch or grenade. Different princesses grabbed also give Crow certain abilities, such as the Insektia princess letting Crow jump higher or further than before; and abilities can be upgraded in between location levels by spending accumulated currency that you pick up while in the location levels. Death will also leave behind a chunk of the current amount of money you are currently carrying too, and you can grab it again as you go past by touching, punching or blowing up the container left behind.
I really enjoyed this game, as I adored the characters, the use of tropes and the chance to take part in ‘reverse boss battles’ (you get to be the boss against heroes!) as well as the regular boss encounter type battles. My gripes with this game extend to one thing though – who thought it was a good idea to tie the punch to the right-mouse button and grenades to the left? Most games will tie a punch to the left and grenades to the right, so my muscle memory really played havoc with me (fortunately you cannot blow yourself up with your own grenades). We have a suspicion that this might be a game that plays better with the aid of a controller.
If you love 2D platformers, give this one a go. It’s not that expensive and it’s a lot of fun, with interesting characters and awesome music.
