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Defender's Quest: Valley of the Forgotten - A tower defense game with rpg elements, and as I think I established with Gemcrafter: Chasing Shadows, that's the thing that makes tower defense work for me: Being able to grind if I can't complete a level. Also, there are sliders that multiply your XP and gold rewards from battles, so you can adjust the difficulty level as you see fit. (I suspect that “serious” tower defense players would object to this, but whatever, who cares.) The plot doesn't take itself terribly seriously, with your main character being a straight woman to the wacky barbarians, craven archers, sociopathic cultists, etc. But I think that does well to prevent the game from being grimdark (this is against a background of being thrown in a plague pit/mass grave that a mysterious sorcerer is turning into his own personal zombie army), and it does hold together pretty well. I enjoyed this and would recommend it.
Injustice: Gods Among Us - A fighting game starring the Justice League (and assorted others), revolving around a world where the Joker nukes Metropolis and Superman goes nuts, kills him, and takes over the world. I'm not wild about the art style, especially for the female characters, but it's certainly not the worst I've seen in 30 years of reading comics. I appreciate that the story mode has a Very Easy setting, because I'm not good at fighting games (I just button mash to victory) but I was interested in seeing how the plot unfolded. I give them credit for making all of the matchups in the early game (before the “Kryptonian nanotech pills” excuse came up) ones that are feasible, with the possible exception of Aquaman taking down the Flash and Shazam in sequence. There are about a zillion different modes and a zillion things to unlock (I loved the variety of costumes they managed to include) so there’s no end to reasons to fight the sort of 2D matches made popular by Street Fighter. Mostly, I played the Story Mode and then decided that was enough for me. (Also, I had a hell of a time getting this to run. I reinstalled everything I could think of before finally just copying two missing DLL files from a different game.)
Breath of Death VII - This is a retro-jrpg that doesn't take itself the least bit seriously. In a dystopian future after humanity is wiped out, undead rule the world and a skeleton named DEM decides to go adventuring. Geek-culture references abound. The team that made this went on to make Cthulhu Saves the World, which uses the same system and same type of humor, but is a stronger game overall with slightly less repetitive dungeons and a better overall game-flow/experience curve. This is fun for the few hours it takes to play through, but I'm glad the developers built on this and improved it later.
Bastion - Three-quarter-view action/adventure game where the world builds itself around you, as you smash your way through it, trying to steal cores to rebuild the Bastion. I feel like I should like this more than I actually do, if that makes sense. I don’t even have a particularly good way of defining why it didn’t work for me, I just wasn’t won by the lore or the gameplay and didn’t want to keep playing it. Oh, well.
Destiny Warriors: Way of the Ninja - An RPGMaker game of low/middling quality, in which you play young ninjas-in-training who are sent on various missions. This doesn't take itself seriously but also manages to generally avoid being funny; the writing is riddled with repetitive tropes, typos, misspellings (What the hell is a low-rouge ninja?) and profanity. The systems are passable: It has variable difficulty levels, a variety of abilities and elemental weaknesses, some puzzles, sidequests, and tolerable battles. But the balance is kinda lousy and you have a tendancy to have to guess what will be useful or not, because the shops aren't available during missions. Reviews claim this is a 12-hour game, and that your effectiveness against random battles (even on easy mode) plummets in the final chapter. I was amused for a couple of hours, but not charmed enough to go the distance here.
Injustice: Gods Among Us - A fighting game starring the Justice League (and assorted others), revolving around a world where the Joker nukes Metropolis and Superman goes nuts, kills him, and takes over the world. I'm not wild about the art style, especially for the female characters, but it's certainly not the worst I've seen in 30 years of reading comics. I appreciate that the story mode has a Very Easy setting, because I'm not good at fighting games (I just button mash to victory) but I was interested in seeing how the plot unfolded. I give them credit for making all of the matchups in the early game (before the “Kryptonian nanotech pills” excuse came up) ones that are feasible, with the possible exception of Aquaman taking down the Flash and Shazam in sequence. There are about a zillion different modes and a zillion things to unlock (I loved the variety of costumes they managed to include) so there’s no end to reasons to fight the sort of 2D matches made popular by Street Fighter. Mostly, I played the Story Mode and then decided that was enough for me. (Also, I had a hell of a time getting this to run. I reinstalled everything I could think of before finally just copying two missing DLL files from a different game.)
Breath of Death VII - This is a retro-jrpg that doesn't take itself the least bit seriously. In a dystopian future after humanity is wiped out, undead rule the world and a skeleton named DEM decides to go adventuring. Geek-culture references abound. The team that made this went on to make Cthulhu Saves the World, which uses the same system and same type of humor, but is a stronger game overall with slightly less repetitive dungeons and a better overall game-flow/experience curve. This is fun for the few hours it takes to play through, but I'm glad the developers built on this and improved it later.
Bastion - Three-quarter-view action/adventure game where the world builds itself around you, as you smash your way through it, trying to steal cores to rebuild the Bastion. I feel like I should like this more than I actually do, if that makes sense. I don’t even have a particularly good way of defining why it didn’t work for me, I just wasn’t won by the lore or the gameplay and didn’t want to keep playing it. Oh, well.
Destiny Warriors: Way of the Ninja - An RPGMaker game of low/middling quality, in which you play young ninjas-in-training who are sent on various missions. This doesn't take itself seriously but also manages to generally avoid being funny; the writing is riddled with repetitive tropes, typos, misspellings (What the hell is a low-rouge ninja?) and profanity. The systems are passable: It has variable difficulty levels, a variety of abilities and elemental weaknesses, some puzzles, sidequests, and tolerable battles. But the balance is kinda lousy and you have a tendancy to have to guess what will be useful or not, because the shops aren't available during missions. Reviews claim this is a 12-hour game, and that your effectiveness against random battles (even on easy mode) plummets in the final chapter. I was amused for a couple of hours, but not charmed enough to go the distance here.
