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chuckroDragons, fighting…most of these games have some of those things, I guess?
Angels of Fasaria: Version 2.0 - A RPGMaker game in which you're a priest/knight looking to save Fasaria from an evil Order of Dominion...or something. It's not terribly well translated. The major gimmick is that you collect Mana from defeating enemies and meeting angels, and you need Mana to unlock the various quest areas. The game doesn't alert you when you level up, and the battle system is simultaneously simple (you can basically attack and heal until special attacks sneak into your list) and obtuse (enemies are both visible and random on the map screen; you sometimes get double-turns in battle; attack and defense numbers don't clearly correspond to anything, etc). The balance for attacks and weapon strength is really wacky (your healer basically can't do damage, but she's a super-tank compared to the knight.) Oh, and you can't read the HP numbers on the battle screen because the character art blocks them.
MP costs are very high, but most dungeons (at least early on) have healing fountains every 2-3 battles. The difficulty curve goes kind of insane, as you can make your characters basically invincible to random battles, but have a boss wipe them all out in a single attack. (Which is exactly what happened to me on the second continent. The ghost king's Double Attack wiped me in two turns, despite no other enemy in the area being able to scratch me.) Basically, it’s a hot mess, but it was entertaining for a while as such.
Pizza Express - A pizza restaurant simulator, where you play the chef who has to fill pizza orders quickly to satisfy customers. It's clearly in the "casual game" genre, as mostly you're trying to arrange ingredients in the right order and hit the "restock" key at the right time so you don't run out (but also don't spend all your profits restocking). Fun for a little bit, but I didn’t find it addictive.
Signal to Noise - A music-based shooter that seemed interesting, but crashed upon loading in Windows 10 (including in compatibility mode, which was the only fix offered online). Oh, well.
Pongo - A 3D shooter/platformer with lousy controls that seems to revolve around a pogo stick that doesn't bounce particularly well. Nope.
Pester - A standard bullet-hell space shooter; I didn't really see anything to distinguish it from every other game in the genre.
Invasion - A collection of small pixelated levels in which you must shoot a certain number of aliens before dying. The aliens drop coins when you kill them, and you can buy upgraded weapons and armor for absurdly high sums. (Or...you can edit the save file. It's in plaintext.) Meh.
Uncanny Valley - Tom is having a lousy life: He has terrible nightmares, and just took a job as a security guard at a closed research facility in the middle of nowhere. As the title suggests, yes, there's a terrifying android. I found one ending (of something like a dozen); it moves rather slowly and the "falling asleep after ten minutes" thing is annoying.
The I of the Dragon - Did you every play Drakengard and think to yourself, "Man, I love these dragon-flying areas but I wish the controls were worse and the plot was dumber." Then this is the game for you! Controls are clunky, unintuitive and non-responsive; graphics are middling; plot is generic fantasy mishmash. (This was probably the most disappointing game in the bundle, because the concept has such potential and the execution is so crappy.)
The Adventures of Mr. Bobley - A ¾-view action-puzzle game in which you play as Mr. Bobley, a construction worker who needs to get around a huge construction site by jumping, rolling and operating machines. I wouldn’t say it’s bad, it just didn’t get interest me? I wonder if ARR might like it in a year or two, once he can handle the controls.
The Dark Stone from Mebara - A Lovecraftian RPG Maker game (which I give them credit for--it's not something you really see) that uses darker, more mood-appropriate graphics that most and seems to have a reasonable (if overly purple) story. That said, the difficulty level is insane--the battles are very hard, healing is very limited, and you apparently can't run away from fights. If you survive until you're teleported and manage to gain a few levels, you can net recover in cultist battles and actually get stronger. But then solving the puzzle in the pump station dumps you into a battle against much stronger evil cultists, and I’m not sure if grinding will necessarily help. I'm curious as to where the plot is leading, but the difficulty is completely out of wack and there are a number of odd glitches. This might be worth revisiting after an update or two, as it does seem to still be in development.
Rubber and Lead - A driving-sim shooter. Buy a car, head out to the wasteland on courier missions, shoot down the cars that try to destroy you and steal your cargo, and hope that you earn enough to pay for repairs and gas. Repeat as necessary. I don't find it necessary.
Air Brawl - An arena-battle flight simulator. The controls are odd...or maybe it's just that I don't handle 1st-person-ish 3D flight very well? After I succeeded in locking onto an enemy exactly once in ten minutes of play (and got shot down a dozen times, and crashed a few times on my own) I decided that maybe this wasn't for me.
The Adventures of Tree - Side-scrolling rpg/adventure with kinda crappy, overly-complex keyboard controls. It seems loaded down with "get me 10 logs" and "find a red bird" but without a plot structure around that; and the battle system has weird hitboxes and no combo system. Oh, and a food meter. I hate food meters. Pass.
(This bundle also included Schein, which I'd already purchased. Anyone want the key?)
Overall: This bundle didn’t have anything amazing, but included a couple of rpgs that were trying very hard to be inventive and a bunch of sim/fighting games that didn’t quite live up to their decent concepts. Certainly nothing I’d say to rush out and buy, but I definitely got my couple of dollars’ worth.
Angels of Fasaria: Version 2.0 - A RPGMaker game in which you're a priest/knight looking to save Fasaria from an evil Order of Dominion...or something. It's not terribly well translated. The major gimmick is that you collect Mana from defeating enemies and meeting angels, and you need Mana to unlock the various quest areas. The game doesn't alert you when you level up, and the battle system is simultaneously simple (you can basically attack and heal until special attacks sneak into your list) and obtuse (enemies are both visible and random on the map screen; you sometimes get double-turns in battle; attack and defense numbers don't clearly correspond to anything, etc). The balance for attacks and weapon strength is really wacky (your healer basically can't do damage, but she's a super-tank compared to the knight.) Oh, and you can't read the HP numbers on the battle screen because the character art blocks them.
MP costs are very high, but most dungeons (at least early on) have healing fountains every 2-3 battles. The difficulty curve goes kind of insane, as you can make your characters basically invincible to random battles, but have a boss wipe them all out in a single attack. (Which is exactly what happened to me on the second continent. The ghost king's Double Attack wiped me in two turns, despite no other enemy in the area being able to scratch me.) Basically, it’s a hot mess, but it was entertaining for a while as such.
Pizza Express - A pizza restaurant simulator, where you play the chef who has to fill pizza orders quickly to satisfy customers. It's clearly in the "casual game" genre, as mostly you're trying to arrange ingredients in the right order and hit the "restock" key at the right time so you don't run out (but also don't spend all your profits restocking). Fun for a little bit, but I didn’t find it addictive.
Signal to Noise - A music-based shooter that seemed interesting, but crashed upon loading in Windows 10 (including in compatibility mode, which was the only fix offered online). Oh, well.
Pongo - A 3D shooter/platformer with lousy controls that seems to revolve around a pogo stick that doesn't bounce particularly well. Nope.
Pester - A standard bullet-hell space shooter; I didn't really see anything to distinguish it from every other game in the genre.
Invasion - A collection of small pixelated levels in which you must shoot a certain number of aliens before dying. The aliens drop coins when you kill them, and you can buy upgraded weapons and armor for absurdly high sums. (Or...you can edit the save file. It's in plaintext.) Meh.
Uncanny Valley - Tom is having a lousy life: He has terrible nightmares, and just took a job as a security guard at a closed research facility in the middle of nowhere. As the title suggests, yes, there's a terrifying android. I found one ending (of something like a dozen); it moves rather slowly and the "falling asleep after ten minutes" thing is annoying.
The I of the Dragon - Did you every play Drakengard and think to yourself, "Man, I love these dragon-flying areas but I wish the controls were worse and the plot was dumber." Then this is the game for you! Controls are clunky, unintuitive and non-responsive; graphics are middling; plot is generic fantasy mishmash. (This was probably the most disappointing game in the bundle, because the concept has such potential and the execution is so crappy.)
The Adventures of Mr. Bobley - A ¾-view action-puzzle game in which you play as Mr. Bobley, a construction worker who needs to get around a huge construction site by jumping, rolling and operating machines. I wouldn’t say it’s bad, it just didn’t get interest me? I wonder if ARR might like it in a year or two, once he can handle the controls.
The Dark Stone from Mebara - A Lovecraftian RPG Maker game (which I give them credit for--it's not something you really see) that uses darker, more mood-appropriate graphics that most and seems to have a reasonable (if overly purple) story. That said, the difficulty level is insane--the battles are very hard, healing is very limited, and you apparently can't run away from fights. If you survive until you're teleported and manage to gain a few levels, you can net recover in cultist battles and actually get stronger. But then solving the puzzle in the pump station dumps you into a battle against much stronger evil cultists, and I’m not sure if grinding will necessarily help. I'm curious as to where the plot is leading, but the difficulty is completely out of wack and there are a number of odd glitches. This might be worth revisiting after an update or two, as it does seem to still be in development.
Rubber and Lead - A driving-sim shooter. Buy a car, head out to the wasteland on courier missions, shoot down the cars that try to destroy you and steal your cargo, and hope that you earn enough to pay for repairs and gas. Repeat as necessary. I don't find it necessary.
Air Brawl - An arena-battle flight simulator. The controls are odd...or maybe it's just that I don't handle 1st-person-ish 3D flight very well? After I succeeded in locking onto an enemy exactly once in ten minutes of play (and got shot down a dozen times, and crashed a few times on my own) I decided that maybe this wasn't for me.
The Adventures of Tree - Side-scrolling rpg/adventure with kinda crappy, overly-complex keyboard controls. It seems loaded down with "get me 10 logs" and "find a red bird" but without a plot structure around that; and the battle system has weird hitboxes and no combo system. Oh, and a food meter. I hate food meters. Pass.
(This bundle also included Schein, which I'd already purchased. Anyone want the key?)
Overall: This bundle didn’t have anything amazing, but included a couple of rpgs that were trying very hard to be inventive and a bunch of sim/fighting games that didn’t quite live up to their decent concepts. Certainly nothing I’d say to rush out and buy, but I definitely got my couple of dollars’ worth.
