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chuckroGame Corp DX - A delightful little resource-management simulation game in which you build a game studio, hire workers, develop games, and hopefully sell them and win awards. Not terribly complex (I wish it had more of a skill tree system and perhaps some better explanations, not to mention more variety in the floorplans) but it only takes a few hours to play through and it's amusing the whole time. I'd love to see an enhanced sequel with the same gameplay but a lot more features.
Catlateral Damage - First-person cat knocking things off shelves. Cute concept; amusing for ten minutes. (If the things broke or exploded when you knocked them over, I could see it being fun for much longer.)
12 is Better Than 6 - A top-down Old Western stealth/shooter game. (Extremely top-down—you can only see your character's sombrero most of the time.) I give them credit for an unusual control scheme and line-art graphics style. That said, the dialogue is racist absurdity (even if you're playing “the Mexican” and shooting “gringos”) and the actual play relies more on stealth and quick-draw than I'm interested in. If you like stealth-based action games, this might be a nice change of pace.
Tricky Towers - I played this on my tablet when it was titled 99 Bricks; it's a Tetris-style game where the bricks don't lock and gravity matters, so you can end up with all sorts of uneven, angled builds. There's a lovely variety of puzzle stages and variants on infinite mode, with a number of power-ups and detrimental effects that the CPU/online opponents can inflict on you.
Shu - Is a cartoony platformer in which you play a bird-kid with a glider cape. I think the first level gave me all the impressions I needed: A solid ten minutes of quiet, uneventful platforming and collecting butterflies, then a rolling giant wheel that will squash you dead if you don’t have excellent reflexes and spot a hidden safe spot. Not sure how I feel about that.
I am Bread - I love the concept of this—you’re a piece of bread who wishes to become toast, so you need to stick, flip, twirl and shimmy your way from the loaf to the toaster without falling on the floor, into the sink, or anywhere else that makes you inedible. I strongly dislike the execution (which requires keeping track of eight buttons and two sticks) mostly because I’m horrible at it and can’t even get past the first level. I may go watch a Let’s Play.
Grappledrome - First-person shooter arena-fighting with a grappling hook and jetpack to make it exciting. And online-only play that nobody else is playing, from the looks of it, which makes it even less appealing to me.
CASE: Animatronics - Billed as “truly scary and challenging first-person stealth horror”, this is a game with a dark screen, a lousy flashlight, a picture-in-picture monster monitoring system and clearly less of the “exploration” I appreciate in these sorts of games. When the only thing I could do with a closet was hide in it, I knew this wasn’t going to be my sort of game.
Starward Rogue - A top-down shooter adventure through a procedurally-generated dungeon full of traps and things that want to kill you. I mean, I give them credit for it being a roguelike with a sci-fi twist. My biggest complaint, besides all the dying: In the tutorial, the messages vanish if you walk too fast, and by “too fast” I mean “at the normal walking speed.”
Precursors - A first-person shooter featuring some downed soldiers on a hostile alien world where even the plants are trying to kill you. It’s beautiful. It’s also an FPS game.
Contrast - This is interesting, a cross between a puzzle adventure game and a 3D puzzle platformer, as you play a mime/acrobat with the ability to step into shadows—which means the puzzles often include having to move objects or light sources in order to arrange the shadows so you can get across them. Cool concept, middling execution.
I got Dungelot: Shattered Lands in an Android bundle and played that version—it’s a reasonably fun semi-roguelike, semi-casual game.
Overall: Lots of good concepts here, often with so-so execution, though in a bunch of cases they seemed like pretty good games, just not games I was interested in playing. Game Corp DX, Tricky Towers, and Dungelot: Shattered Lands, though none of them brilliant, were all notably fun to play.
Catlateral Damage - First-person cat knocking things off shelves. Cute concept; amusing for ten minutes. (If the things broke or exploded when you knocked them over, I could see it being fun for much longer.)
12 is Better Than 6 - A top-down Old Western stealth/shooter game. (Extremely top-down—you can only see your character's sombrero most of the time.) I give them credit for an unusual control scheme and line-art graphics style. That said, the dialogue is racist absurdity (even if you're playing “the Mexican” and shooting “gringos”) and the actual play relies more on stealth and quick-draw than I'm interested in. If you like stealth-based action games, this might be a nice change of pace.
Tricky Towers - I played this on my tablet when it was titled 99 Bricks; it's a Tetris-style game where the bricks don't lock and gravity matters, so you can end up with all sorts of uneven, angled builds. There's a lovely variety of puzzle stages and variants on infinite mode, with a number of power-ups and detrimental effects that the CPU/online opponents can inflict on you.
Shu - Is a cartoony platformer in which you play a bird-kid with a glider cape. I think the first level gave me all the impressions I needed: A solid ten minutes of quiet, uneventful platforming and collecting butterflies, then a rolling giant wheel that will squash you dead if you don’t have excellent reflexes and spot a hidden safe spot. Not sure how I feel about that.
I am Bread - I love the concept of this—you’re a piece of bread who wishes to become toast, so you need to stick, flip, twirl and shimmy your way from the loaf to the toaster without falling on the floor, into the sink, or anywhere else that makes you inedible. I strongly dislike the execution (which requires keeping track of eight buttons and two sticks) mostly because I’m horrible at it and can’t even get past the first level. I may go watch a Let’s Play.
Grappledrome - First-person shooter arena-fighting with a grappling hook and jetpack to make it exciting. And online-only play that nobody else is playing, from the looks of it, which makes it even less appealing to me.
CASE: Animatronics - Billed as “truly scary and challenging first-person stealth horror”, this is a game with a dark screen, a lousy flashlight, a picture-in-picture monster monitoring system and clearly less of the “exploration” I appreciate in these sorts of games. When the only thing I could do with a closet was hide in it, I knew this wasn’t going to be my sort of game.
Starward Rogue - A top-down shooter adventure through a procedurally-generated dungeon full of traps and things that want to kill you. I mean, I give them credit for it being a roguelike with a sci-fi twist. My biggest complaint, besides all the dying: In the tutorial, the messages vanish if you walk too fast, and by “too fast” I mean “at the normal walking speed.”
Precursors - A first-person shooter featuring some downed soldiers on a hostile alien world where even the plants are trying to kill you. It’s beautiful. It’s also an FPS game.
Contrast - This is interesting, a cross between a puzzle adventure game and a 3D puzzle platformer, as you play a mime/acrobat with the ability to step into shadows—which means the puzzles often include having to move objects or light sources in order to arrange the shadows so you can get across them. Cool concept, middling execution.
I got Dungelot: Shattered Lands in an Android bundle and played that version—it’s a reasonably fun semi-roguelike, semi-casual game.
Overall: Lots of good concepts here, often with so-so execution, though in a bunch of cases they seemed like pretty good games, just not games I was interested in playing. Game Corp DX, Tricky Towers, and Dungelot: Shattered Lands, though none of them brilliant, were all notably fun to play.
