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SpeedRunners is one of those multiplayer games that you can play with friends quite a bit. Each round is quick, your reflexes are tested to the limit and it makes a really good show for a livestream. Now, if you’ve been unsure whether it’s for you or not you’ve a chance to give it a risk-free go: it’s free all this weekend on Steam.
Still in Early Access right now and developed by Dutch developer DoubleDutch Games with tinyBuild being the publishers, SpeedRunners lets you control a number of colourful characters who seem to take inspiration from superheroes so you can jump, swing and race around the levels to be the last survivor per round. There’s also ways you can mess up your opponents too, so it’s a wonderful multiplayer game. After all, who doesn’t enjoy messing with their friends in game?
It’ll be free until the end of Sunday, and is also on sale for a third of its usual £10.99/$14.99 price at £3.62/$4.94. There’s also two Youtuber Packs available for 49p/98 cents each, in case that floats your boat.
I’ve not really had much time to look in the direction of Battlefield 4 recently, so it surprised me to hear that the game is still getting content updates from DICE. Long support times for a game are always nice to hear about, and it gets even nicer when you realise that the new map coming in the next big update was designed with the help of the players themselves.
Part of the big Fall Update, the new map comes atop of the typical seasonal update to the game and is called Community Operations fittingly. Players were apparently involved in the process from day one; concept to final design. What’s resulted is a fast-paced jungle map with a medical facility, temple and waterfall boasting narrow access point and some infantry-heave zones. Vehicles in the map are of the small and fast variety as you’d expect from such a heavily grown battle area, including bikes and ATVs.
DICE will be revealing some more information about it closer to the release date, which is still unannounced itself. In the mean time, take a look at this playtest trailer of the map to get an idea what it’ll be like to play in:
Kickstarter’s always busy with new ideas popping up all the time for people wanting to fund their ideas through the power and funds they can get through crowdsourcing. A number of the games we’ve featured in the past on the Indie Game Show were Kickstarter-funded and more wonderful ideas are coming through all the time. Here’s just a few:
This game sees you as a low-poly ‘lost’ dog in a randomly generated low-poly city inhabited by many other dogs and humans… who are low-poly. The aim of the game is simple: survive any way you can.
The game lets you play as any one of a number of breeds with some customisation of colours and markings allowed, and ultimately the results of the game depends on what actions you decide to take. Will you steal food, beg for it or scavenge in bins for a tasty scrap? And will you stand your ground against other hostile dogs or turn tail and run? It’s ultimately up to you.
Also at every backing level this game comes packaged with another one – a multiplayer game called Dog Park that lets you and your friends just basically mess around as virtual dogs in a park. Simple but cute and sounds fun.
The game has 28 more days to go on its Kickstarter and has made $38,268 of its $50,000 target.
This particular game has quite an interesting history. It started on a Tumblr post of all things a few years back where someone proposed the idea of your typical zombie apocalypse game; but with 50s housewives instead of the typical rugged male heroes or other ‘badass’ character stereotypes. The idea was quite popular and so Sketchy Panda Games took that core idea and worked it into Aberford.
The game has a graphic adventure-style campaign to play through, which switches to brawler-style play when in battle with zombies. The story itself deals with the immediate after part of the ‘turning’ and has the 50s wife characters teaming up to discover what exactly happened in Aberford to bring about the sudden zombie oubreaks. There’s also a freeplay/challenge mode that’s multiplayer to let you and your friends just have fun dispatching zombies in the best ways you possibly can.
The campaign has 16 days left to go and has made $75,225 of its $675,000 target so far.
I like the art style of this game, its simple but not too basic. Just what you need for a 2D arena shooter really.
Crashnauts will feature six different races of being to choose from (although two are currently being worked on) with a few different customise options for each piece of your character. The aim is simple: shoot stuff that’s not on your team and don’t shoot things that are on your team. There will be a number of gamemodes, including classics such as Free-For-All, Team-Deathmatch and Hold the Flag across either single-screen enclosed maps or ‘progressive’ ones that scroll across the screen as battle pushes one way or another. You can also use your respawn crashpod to squash other players, which is just brilliant.
Crashnauts has only made $4,818 of its $40,000 goal so far, with only 5 days to go. Be quick if you want to see this game made!
This one’s a little different to the rest. It’s a card-based game which caught my eye with the subtitle: “A vampire kitten game.” How could I not look?
Made and developed by a French studio, you play as a Hunter whose job is to catch as many vampire cats as possible, aided by items and weapons that you can buy with coins. The game has already been designed, playtested and has a prototype so this campaign is to fund the printing of the game to sell in the market.
Dracucat has made €1,297 of its €1,900 goal so it just needs a little more funding in its remaining 26 days to make the campaign successful.
And in news of Kickstarter success stories Battletech has made quite a name for itself by making $1,300,535 so far with 32 days still to go; far in excess of its original $250,000 goal.
Some of this is undoubtedly down to having the name of Jordan Weisman behind it, who has worked on previous BattleTech games as well as ShadowRun. This is also the first turn-based BattleTech game in two decades that has been available for the PC, so interest is high.
If you’ve been playing games for any length of time, chances are you’ve seen the Havok logo before. Havok is a middleware company and it’s Havok engine provides all of those lovely ragdoll physics you are used to seeing in various games. It seems that Microsoft has been rather interested in the company, as they have just acquired Havok from Intel for an undisclosed sum. A corporate article regarding the purchase reads, in part:
Microsoft’s acquisition of Havok continues our tradition of empowering developers by providing them with the tools to unleash their creativity to the world.We will continue to innovate for the benefit of development partners. Part of this innovation will include building the most complete cloud service, which we’ve just started to show through games like ‘Crackdown 3.”
IGN reached out to Microsoft for further comment and recieved a response to several questions, the most pertinent being the availability of Havok to other console manufacturers:
“We will continue to license Havok’s technology to the broad AAA games industry. This also means that we will continue to license Havok’s technology to run across various game consoles including Sony and Nintendo.”
Havok, of course was recently used to power such games as Destiny, Watch_Dogs, and Dark Souls 2.
