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Coin Crypt - A pixelated, simplified roguelike in which you collect coins to fight with. Battles are a mixed blessing, because you need to spend your coins to fight and might not win back as much as you use/lose. When you die, your winnings go toward unlocking new characters. Unlike Vertical Drop Heroes, I didn’t enjoy the base gameplay enough to find this worth grinding.
Glorkian Warrior: The Trials of Glork - A shoot-em-up in the vein of Space Invaders, but with the added need to collect pickups and jump over (or on) land-based foes; and an incredibly silly motif. There’s some amusement value to the kooky cutscenes (“My elbow has a bad feeling about this. The rest of me is in a state of blissful ignorance.”) and new items that unlock as you play, but it's a one-note repetitive game. Recommended as a game in this genre, but I’m not going to play ten hours of it, you know?
Lovely Planet - It's an FPS with a few puzzle elements and a strong Katamari-like flavor--colorful, bordering on psychedelic. The thing is, I’m not crazy about FPS games or 3D platforming, and that’s pretty much what this game is. If there’s a story, I’m not seeing it.
Alexia Crow and the Cave of Heroes - This is actually the first two episodes of a multi-part series which is nominally about a girl who falls down a hole and is chosen by a centaur to change time and prevent World War 3. Given that the plot is nonsensical and the subtitles are full of errors and misspellings, the real point of this game is a series of puzzles, which I generally found very good. I only needed a gentle nudging from the internet to solve all of them, and completing the entire game takes only about 2 hours. Good if you want an excuse to do a series of Greek mythology-themed brainteasers.
The Architect - A puzzle game in which you're some sort of celestial being and are assembling life by collecting little glowing orbs and raising and lowering blocks so you can travel across them. The aesthetic is interesting, but it really didn't win me as a game--it felt hard and tedious at the same time.
Last Inua - This puzzle platformer game, which features a father and son traveling through the arctic tundra, is very, very pretty. That said...it's not that great a game, as the characters' abilities are very context-sensitive (the father can climb and punch only specific things; the son can sometimes teleport or make bridges but not always) which means the puzzles are less about figuring out clever moves and more about wandering around trying to read the developer's mind. The controls are also a little rough and the jump physics aren't quite where they feel like they should be. This is fun for a little bit as you take in the atmosphere, but I won't be going back for the gameplay.
Starship Traveller - This is a sci-fi Fighting Fantasy gamebook! It offers a "classic" mode where you have to play by the rules, and a "free read" where you can always turn back and have unlimited stamina. The story is very, very Star Trek: Your StarshipEnterprise Traveller accidentally falls through a black hole into an alternate universe, and you must explore strange new worlds and boldly get yourself back where you had gone before. As is typical for this series, it's not into "instant death" endings the way that CYOA books were--instead, it's a maze of options and choices that reveal the location and time of the dimensional warp that will get you home, and if you find the wrong ones, you get the "bad ending."
Rituals - First-person horror/exploration game with some elements of point-and-click adventure, which I tend to have mixed feelings about to begin with, and it's hampered by the polygon-based completely unrealistic art style and the awkward step-based movement (rather than a standard FPS free-to-roam style). It's very short; lengthened only by the obtuse nature of several puzzles. It's weird into the realm of nonsensical, and tries to be either poignant or mysterious but really doesn't succeed at either. If this interests you, do yourself a favor and play The Moon Sliver instead.
Aaru's Awakening - I feel like this should be something that I like--it's a puzzle platformer with the gimmicks that you have a charge attack and a teleport ability. The control style really doesn't work for me, though (WASD movement and mouse-controlled teleporting); the plot is kind of inane; and the voice acting is really grating. Oh, well.
This bundle also included Crash Drive 2, which I reviewed under a separate header because I played so damn much of it.
Overall: Crash Drive paid for this bundle by itself several times over, but pretty much everything was at least fun to try, even if they got old fast and many of them were flawed. I think Glorkian Warrior is the only other game I’d actively recommend trying unless the genre is question is totally your thing, but I unquestionably got my $2 worth.
Glorkian Warrior: The Trials of Glork - A shoot-em-up in the vein of Space Invaders, but with the added need to collect pickups and jump over (or on) land-based foes; and an incredibly silly motif. There’s some amusement value to the kooky cutscenes (“My elbow has a bad feeling about this. The rest of me is in a state of blissful ignorance.”) and new items that unlock as you play, but it's a one-note repetitive game. Recommended as a game in this genre, but I’m not going to play ten hours of it, you know?
Lovely Planet - It's an FPS with a few puzzle elements and a strong Katamari-like flavor--colorful, bordering on psychedelic. The thing is, I’m not crazy about FPS games or 3D platforming, and that’s pretty much what this game is. If there’s a story, I’m not seeing it.
Alexia Crow and the Cave of Heroes - This is actually the first two episodes of a multi-part series which is nominally about a girl who falls down a hole and is chosen by a centaur to change time and prevent World War 3. Given that the plot is nonsensical and the subtitles are full of errors and misspellings, the real point of this game is a series of puzzles, which I generally found very good. I only needed a gentle nudging from the internet to solve all of them, and completing the entire game takes only about 2 hours. Good if you want an excuse to do a series of Greek mythology-themed brainteasers.
The Architect - A puzzle game in which you're some sort of celestial being and are assembling life by collecting little glowing orbs and raising and lowering blocks so you can travel across them. The aesthetic is interesting, but it really didn't win me as a game--it felt hard and tedious at the same time.
Last Inua - This puzzle platformer game, which features a father and son traveling through the arctic tundra, is very, very pretty. That said...it's not that great a game, as the characters' abilities are very context-sensitive (the father can climb and punch only specific things; the son can sometimes teleport or make bridges but not always) which means the puzzles are less about figuring out clever moves and more about wandering around trying to read the developer's mind. The controls are also a little rough and the jump physics aren't quite where they feel like they should be. This is fun for a little bit as you take in the atmosphere, but I won't be going back for the gameplay.
Starship Traveller - This is a sci-fi Fighting Fantasy gamebook! It offers a "classic" mode where you have to play by the rules, and a "free read" where you can always turn back and have unlimited stamina. The story is very, very Star Trek: Your Starship
Rituals - First-person horror/exploration game with some elements of point-and-click adventure, which I tend to have mixed feelings about to begin with, and it's hampered by the polygon-based completely unrealistic art style and the awkward step-based movement (rather than a standard FPS free-to-roam style). It's very short; lengthened only by the obtuse nature of several puzzles. It's weird into the realm of nonsensical, and tries to be either poignant or mysterious but really doesn't succeed at either. If this interests you, do yourself a favor and play The Moon Sliver instead.
Aaru's Awakening - I feel like this should be something that I like--it's a puzzle platformer with the gimmicks that you have a charge attack and a teleport ability. The control style really doesn't work for me, though (WASD movement and mouse-controlled teleporting); the plot is kind of inane; and the voice acting is really grating. Oh, well.
This bundle also included Crash Drive 2, which I reviewed under a separate header because I played so damn much of it.
Overall: Crash Drive paid for this bundle by itself several times over, but pretty much everything was at least fun to try, even if they got old fast and many of them were flawed. I think Glorkian Warrior is the only other game I’d actively recommend trying unless the genre is question is totally your thing, but I unquestionably got my $2 worth.
