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I was unenthused with most games in this bundle (which was fine, they cost me $2). I think the theme here was, “interesting concepts with potential, lousy execution”. The lone exception was Luna’s Wandering Stars, which while I don’t think it’s worth the $10 sticker price on Steam, is worth your time the next time a sale rolls around.
Cards and Castles - A magic-like card game with a board to accompany it: Summon monsters and cast spells to wear down your opponent's health. Heavily invested in online PvP play. Pay-to-play booster packs and "kill lots of things" quests; this would make much more sense as a mobile game.
Paper Dungeons - Roguelike board game with puzzle elements: Each "dungeon" (of 125) starts you at level 1 and has limited enemies (and therefore loot and XP). You need to be careful and lucky enough to kill the monsters in the right order to make it to the boss properly leveled-up. And I do mean lucky, because battles are decided by dice rolls. So whether you clear any given stage is as much about the RNG liking you as it is about good strategy. I'm underwhelmed.
1Quest - A roguelike-lite with the straightforward goal to rescue a princess, divided up into a series of areas that each have their own win conditions. Top-down, turn-based, far too many action keys, not nearly enough explanatory text. (Certain enemies apparently couldn't be hit with my melee weapon, so attempting to attack them made me move away--but I wasn't fast enough to actually strafe them. Terrible design.) Death isn't the end, but dying means you lose time off the clock, which makes it impossible to get a good ending.
LOVE - A balls-hard platformer with Atari-style graphics and the twist that you can set the respawn checkpoints anywhere you want. So it’s essentially like playing with save states, as you can decide how much you’ll need to replay if you lose one of your 100 lives. (There’s also an Easy mode with infinite lives, and a YOLO mode where you try to get through the game on only one life.) I had some fun with it, but there are better examples of the genre.
StarFence - A cross between tower defense and a shooter, in that you need to set up your space station defenses between waves of enemies, but then you manually control most of the turrets shooting at them. It starts off slow (the turrets turn very slowly) but picks up into bullet hell soon enough. The thing is, I don't think there's enough of either genre's best stuff to make this a good game: You can't actually prevent all the damage through careful setups, nor can you dodge. How you position your turrets ends up being mostly random, and then enemies can see you from off-screen long before you can start hurting them.
Steamalot: Epoch's Journey - Another card-based strategy/board game, this one loosely based on the Arthurian legend with kinda lousy artwork and a very slow-moving interface. It’s like Cards and Castles but with fewer redeeming features.
Space Thinger - Clever name, lousy game. I'm heartily unenthused by this first-person space shooter which throws you into the deep end of trying to destroy asteroids and avoid enemy ships, despite lousy controls and no ability to auto-target against tiny, fast-moving ships.
Luna's Wandering Stars - This one is really cool. It's a physics puzzle game. You are trying to aim your asteroid to pick up a bunch of others without crashing into the moon or flying into space. Each level has a different gimmick: Being able to adjust gravity, having booster rockets, firing lasers; they really change it up. Also, while getting all of the gold asteroids unlocks achievements and you need at least a few to unlock later levels, you don't need to be perfect to try every stage. And the snark when you fail a level is delightful. This was the redeeming game of the pack.
Cards and Castles - A magic-like card game with a board to accompany it: Summon monsters and cast spells to wear down your opponent's health. Heavily invested in online PvP play. Pay-to-play booster packs and "kill lots of things" quests; this would make much more sense as a mobile game.
Paper Dungeons - Roguelike board game with puzzle elements: Each "dungeon" (of 125) starts you at level 1 and has limited enemies (and therefore loot and XP). You need to be careful and lucky enough to kill the monsters in the right order to make it to the boss properly leveled-up. And I do mean lucky, because battles are decided by dice rolls. So whether you clear any given stage is as much about the RNG liking you as it is about good strategy. I'm underwhelmed.
1Quest - A roguelike-lite with the straightforward goal to rescue a princess, divided up into a series of areas that each have their own win conditions. Top-down, turn-based, far too many action keys, not nearly enough explanatory text. (Certain enemies apparently couldn't be hit with my melee weapon, so attempting to attack them made me move away--but I wasn't fast enough to actually strafe them. Terrible design.) Death isn't the end, but dying means you lose time off the clock, which makes it impossible to get a good ending.
LOVE - A balls-hard platformer with Atari-style graphics and the twist that you can set the respawn checkpoints anywhere you want. So it’s essentially like playing with save states, as you can decide how much you’ll need to replay if you lose one of your 100 lives. (There’s also an Easy mode with infinite lives, and a YOLO mode where you try to get through the game on only one life.) I had some fun with it, but there are better examples of the genre.
StarFence - A cross between tower defense and a shooter, in that you need to set up your space station defenses between waves of enemies, but then you manually control most of the turrets shooting at them. It starts off slow (the turrets turn very slowly) but picks up into bullet hell soon enough. The thing is, I don't think there's enough of either genre's best stuff to make this a good game: You can't actually prevent all the damage through careful setups, nor can you dodge. How you position your turrets ends up being mostly random, and then enemies can see you from off-screen long before you can start hurting them.
Steamalot: Epoch's Journey - Another card-based strategy/board game, this one loosely based on the Arthurian legend with kinda lousy artwork and a very slow-moving interface. It’s like Cards and Castles but with fewer redeeming features.
Space Thinger - Clever name, lousy game. I'm heartily unenthused by this first-person space shooter which throws you into the deep end of trying to destroy asteroids and avoid enemy ships, despite lousy controls and no ability to auto-target against tiny, fast-moving ships.
Luna's Wandering Stars - This one is really cool. It's a physics puzzle game. You are trying to aim your asteroid to pick up a bunch of others without crashing into the moon or flying into space. Each level has a different gimmick: Being able to adjust gravity, having booster rockets, firing lasers; they really change it up. Also, while getting all of the gold asteroids unlocks achievements and you need at least a few to unlock later levels, you don't need to be perfect to try every stage. And the snark when you fail a level is delightful. This was the redeeming game of the pack.
