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This past weekend, I was privileged to play an interesting new indie title named Mushroom 11.
When I watched the trailer of the game, I was instantly interested in the unique mechanic in controlling your ‘character.’ Of course the design of the character you control is absolutely worth mentioning. You play as an amorphic green blob, with no name that I was able to discern. I had no issue with the lack of description or simplicity of the character model, in fact, I applaud it. Mushroom 11’s tutorial instantly begins to show you how to control your blob, and the game becomes completely about the game’s mechanics.
The mechanics of the game appear shockingly simple, you essentially use the 2 mouse buttons to delete parts of your blob to move it. Except when you delete blocks, the blob replaces these blocks randomly out of different sides of itself where the level allows. The mouse gives you 2 types of control: a large sweeping deletion type, and a fine tuned deletion tool. The large sweeping tool, bound to the left mouse button, allows for rapid movement and easy size reduction. The fine tune deletion tool makes it much easier to delete smaller portions of your blob which becomes essential for some of the tougher puzzles as the levels progress.
During the hour I spent playing this game, I easily encompassed the tutorial and enough levels to start to need several tries to clear an area. I was even able to conquer 2 boss fights. It is definitely fair to say the game has a steep learning curve. Rather than being frustrated while playing, and failing several times, I started to see the brilliance in the game. It is the first game where I found myself not having direct control on my character and it’s movement through the game. We are allowed only indirect control, and it’s an absolutely fresh and fantastic idea for a game mechanic. I find myself more and more interested to see how the game will show me to stretch, bend, curve, and express the flexibility of my little blob through the future levels. With the modest price tag, this game is an absolute steal for hours of mind-bending gameplay.
A Solid 9/10
The only reason it’s not a 10 is because I really like a story and it has none. But Otherwise, this is an amazing game!
The new Star Wars Battlefront game seems to have been quite popular in its beta stage if the numbers released are any indication of its popularity.
The number of people who played the beta during its run was around 9.5 million across all the three platforms that had a version active, with a combined playtime of 1.6 billion minutes. That’s a lot of blaster fire and thermal detonators sailing around a battlefield of players.
Playable ‘hero’ characters Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader have each been spawned just under 6 million times, while 783,392 walkers were taken down. The most popular Star Cards from those that were available during the beta (and that wasn’t a lot) were the Cycler Rifle, the Thermal Detonator and the Jump Pack, in that order.
While popular, the beta did have its problems with an inbalance of power between the sides that led EA to admit that it was too easy for the Empire side to win and some rebalancing would need to be done to fix it. Mind you, that’s one purpose of a beta – to identify these things before release (although it was kind of obvious).
Digm tried out the beta and while fun he didn’t feel like the game offered much in the way of uniqueness. What about you? Did you get to play and what did you think?
The release of the PC version of the Batman: Arkham Knight game is one of this year;s most well-known gaming failures. While the console versions were at least playable, many players had trouble with issues that rendered the PC game unplayable. Frame rates were all over the place, textures were missing and even for those it worked for, it was far from perfect.
Warner Bros and Rocksteady released the game anyway, but due to the amount of player protest and the poor reviews the game was receiving the game was eventually pulled while Rocksteady worked to get it up to scratch. That was around four months ago, and for those who didn’t get the game refunded there have been a few small patches to fix certain things. Now it seems that the big final patch that will render the game ‘finished’ is finally due to be released, along with a re-release of the PC version.
“At 10 am PDT, Oct. 28th, Batman: Arkham Knight will be re-released for the PC platform. At the same time we’ll also be releasing a patch that brings the PC version fully up-to-date with content that has been released for console (with the exception of console exclusives). This means that next week, all PC players will have access to Photo Mode, Big Head Mode, Batman: Arkham Asylum Batman Skin, and character selection in combat AR challenges.”
As far as timing, it’s not great. With a number of large games being released in the next few weeks in time for the holiday market (Fallout 4, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Black Ops 3, Halo 5: Guardians etc.) it will be hard to stand out. Not to mention the bad reputation it already acquired thanks to its terrible first release. As a group, gamers are getting quite tired of spending money on games that are released in such a half-finished state.
Which is a shame because it’s such a sad ending for the Arkham games that were always so good.
It wouldn’t be a Call of Duty game if there wasn’t some map or mode that involved zombies and asked you to survive against waves of them. Black Ops 3’s is coming in a few weeks time at the same time as the game, although that means it’ll release a week after Halloween. Not that a delay is a bad thing, it’s preferred to having a game with bugs out in the market.
The map, entitled “The Giant” asks players to survive against zombies, but also hellhounds and giant robots using a variety of special weaponry to hold back the hordes. It’s a reimagining of a classic map ‘Der Riese’ and will involve the characters of Dempsey, Nikolai, Takeo and Richthofen as they fight to return to their own worlds.
Check out the trailer for it below, filled with a lot of slow-motion zombie shooting:
Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 will release on November 6th and players can gain access to The Giant bonus map on day one with a purchase of the Collector’s Edition or the Season Pass.
Starting off as always with a review of games I’ve covered in the past, Home Free has 6 days to go until campaign end and has reached its next stretch goal; adding cats to the cities for your low-poly puppies to interact with although it won’t be possible to play as a cat. As expected Aberford didn’t reach its funding target in time, and pretty much all of the projects from the Round-Up of Oct 9th have more than half of their totals to make up in just under two weeks.
Of last week’s selection only GOAT ARMY is close to target, having less than €300 to make up in 29 days.
First up is a little mobile game with a simple task: set alight and burn corpses of monsters and fallen heroes to gain loot for your master. Also you play as quite a cute but angry looking little fire-spitting robot and that’s just cool.
Crematory Bot tasks you with charring the corpses being produced by a war without letting a single one past, collecting loot pick-ups as well as upgrading The Bot through collecting enough scrap pick-ups then using them to generate a randomly selected upgrade for The Bot. Each corpse will have some different attributes and you’ll even get to face ‘boss-level’ corpses. Makes a difference to play a game where your ‘enemies’ are technically already dead!
Crematory Bot has made nothing of its goal yet, but it has a target of only $300 to make in 27 days.
This game’s page describes it as “a love letter to platform games”. As someone who grew up with a number of good platformers, that’s appealing.
Super Axe Boy will feature a combination of 2D and 3D levels, sometimes switching between the two perspectives in the same level. The creator is advertising that the game could be available for many platforms both computer and console but the console versions are only going to be made if their stretch goals are met in time. It’ll feature pop culture references and some leaning on the forth wall and has a silly story that sees our hero and his sidekick Bebop as the sole people not abducted by beaver-like aliens for the purposes of slave labour/meat products.
Super Axe Boy has a target of €25,000 of which €5,297 has already been raised with a further 26 days to go.
I admit it, this one caught my eye because the hero is an anthropomorphic kick-ass rabbit. Who doesn’t like battle bunnies?
Dusty Raging Fist is a beat’em up action game with 3 player co-op play, both locally and online and is actually the sequel to a 2014 Steam game; Dusty Revenge. It follows the heroic lapine Dusty and his allies as they fight their way through levels, using their hands and feet to fight as well as picking up elemental power pick-ups to use against foes as well. The three have been sent on a quest to acquire elemental powers from the world’s Guardians to fight an evil that resides in the dark Catacombs.
Dusty Raging Fist has 27 days to go and has made $3,988AUD of its $60,000AUD target so far.
Wrapping it up with a tabletop board game with miniatures this week, one that includes a group of players working against one ‘game master’ player. Those are always fun.
Fanthoms is described on its Kickstarter as “a cooperative adventure game, with miniatures, in which a group of players fight against hordes of undersea monsters controlled by a game master”. It features either a campaign to help players grow their characters and acquire skills to help them deal with the undersea terrors and hull breaches or a number of stand-alone scenarios that have been included in the game for game masters who are a little less sure of crafting their own. Each game comes with five character miniatures, several monster miniatures, a series of weapon cards and a foldable game board, although you can only receive this core game if you back at $60 or higher.
Fathoms has 26 days to go to make a $35,603 goal (I know, it’s not a nice rounded number for once) and has made $5,022 so far.
