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chuckroKingdom Rush I reviewed along with the sequel in the bundle that came in. It’s a tower defense game with rpg elements, and I quite enjoyed it!
Super Win the Game - A side-scrolling action game heavily influenced by Zelda 2 and done in a faux-NES style. While the easy mode gives you a lot of checkpoints, it’s still a very unforgiving platformer and your character is a one-hit-point-wonder without any weapons. It’s decently done, but it doesn’t hit the right nostalgia buttons for me. (I got the double-jump but didn’t feel the need to continue, which should tell you something.)
Cook, Serve, Delicious! - A casual game of hands-on running a restaurant, by playing microgames to serve food and drinks and also clean toilets and take out trash. I suspect part of my problem was playing on a laptop that doesn’t have a number pad (a lot of serving alternates arrows and number keys); but while I found it fun (if frenetic), I didn’t find it addictive.
Skullgirls - A classic 1-on-1 fighting game with more variety of movesets than I’m typically used to—some characters clearly play very differently than others, and I don’t just mean they have slightly faster kicks or a different fireball move, I mean everything from the range of their various basic attacks and to whether they actively want to be attacking upwards or downwards to dominate a fight. And then there’s the Skullgirl herself as the final boss of each story mode, who fights much more like an action game boss (she can’t be stunlocked, throws fast projectiles and has utterly broken out-of-nowhere attacks) than a fighting game character. I also just appreciate the very existence of Big Band, who a friend of mine played (as a Shardmind Monk reskinned into animated instruments in a trenchcoat) in a D&D campaign I ran.
Nihilumbra – A puzzle-platformer that, for once, actually does mouse-and-keyboard controls well. You use WASD to move your little ball of shadow around, avoiding the void that wants to reclaim him. You use the mouse to “paint” the various colors you collect onto surfaces where they have various effects: Blue makes things slide, causing you to go faster and enemies to tumble into pits. Green makes things bounce, both you and, say, enemy bullets. Each of the five levels revolves around a new color, and then there are five more “Void” levels that go into nasty mode. The thing is, there are too many “gotcha” puzzles for this style of game—there are too many places where the solution is obvious, but you’re going to die the first time you enter the room because advancing far enough to see the solution kills you. The first level of Void mode has several of those before a checkpoint, and I found that intolerable.
Overall: Nothing in this bundle was bad; they’re all pretty solid games. Kingdom Rush was the only one I felt the urge to play more than an hour or so of, but that doesn’t mean the others were bad games, just that they didn’t drag me in for the long haul.
Super Win the Game - A side-scrolling action game heavily influenced by Zelda 2 and done in a faux-NES style. While the easy mode gives you a lot of checkpoints, it’s still a very unforgiving platformer and your character is a one-hit-point-wonder without any weapons. It’s decently done, but it doesn’t hit the right nostalgia buttons for me. (I got the double-jump but didn’t feel the need to continue, which should tell you something.)
Cook, Serve, Delicious! - A casual game of hands-on running a restaurant, by playing microgames to serve food and drinks and also clean toilets and take out trash. I suspect part of my problem was playing on a laptop that doesn’t have a number pad (a lot of serving alternates arrows and number keys); but while I found it fun (if frenetic), I didn’t find it addictive.
Skullgirls - A classic 1-on-1 fighting game with more variety of movesets than I’m typically used to—some characters clearly play very differently than others, and I don’t just mean they have slightly faster kicks or a different fireball move, I mean everything from the range of their various basic attacks and to whether they actively want to be attacking upwards or downwards to dominate a fight. And then there’s the Skullgirl herself as the final boss of each story mode, who fights much more like an action game boss (she can’t be stunlocked, throws fast projectiles and has utterly broken out-of-nowhere attacks) than a fighting game character. I also just appreciate the very existence of Big Band, who a friend of mine played (as a Shardmind Monk reskinned into animated instruments in a trenchcoat) in a D&D campaign I ran.
Nihilumbra – A puzzle-platformer that, for once, actually does mouse-and-keyboard controls well. You use WASD to move your little ball of shadow around, avoiding the void that wants to reclaim him. You use the mouse to “paint” the various colors you collect onto surfaces where they have various effects: Blue makes things slide, causing you to go faster and enemies to tumble into pits. Green makes things bounce, both you and, say, enemy bullets. Each of the five levels revolves around a new color, and then there are five more “Void” levels that go into nasty mode. The thing is, there are too many “gotcha” puzzles for this style of game—there are too many places where the solution is obvious, but you’re going to die the first time you enter the room because advancing far enough to see the solution kills you. The first level of Void mode has several of those before a checkpoint, and I found that intolerable.
Overall: Nothing in this bundle was bad; they’re all pretty solid games. Kingdom Rush was the only one I felt the urge to play more than an hour or so of, but that doesn’t mean the others were bad games, just that they didn’t drag me in for the long haul.
