“The Stylish New MOBA on XBLA is a Must Have!”

An XboxHornet review by Xavier “Mercedes” Marchena.

What do you get when you have frog sporting an afro from House Party, a french chameleon with a ridiculous accent and a ridiculous french mustache and a cowboy with the best voice actor this side of the Mississippi? Awesomenauts. This game. Dis game! I’ve always been a fan of MOBAs (Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas) like League of Legends and Super Monday Night Combat. Awesomenauts is very similar to these games as the premise is that you must destroy their base, but standing in your way are towers, players and minions.

Each character has their own theme song as well. Frog's all about the funk. Solid.

You roll through the arena in a three man group. At first I was a little wary about such a low number on a team since I’ve really used to playing in groups of five; but it really did grow on me. It allows for strong strategy between your two other teammates if you’re a premade. Speaking of premades.

AWWWWW YEA!!! Same couch co-op bitchez.

You and your buddies can drink some pubbie tears by the goblet full as you destroy them and all their hopes and dreams. One thing that’s important to know for those who are new to the MOBA types of games; not dying is the most important thing you can do. There is this thing called “snowballing” that you do NOT want happening to you. That happens when a player or team a level advantage and they use that advantage to spank you. Then when you respawn and meet up with them, the advantage is larger and then they spank you again leaving hand prints and welts. This goes on until you either ragequit or lose the match.

“Why don't you run home to yo mommah and take a sip off the teat?!”

Even though this game is incredibly fun I have one super major bone to pick with Ronimo Games. Where’s my “aim while not moving” button huh? LT isn’t mapped to anything, get on it. As for you, esteemed reader. Get this game.

Game Score: 9/10.

Download a free demo of the game here.

“More of the Toy Soldiers series is a good thing, and these DLC packs really try to cram even MORE into More!”

An XboxHornet review by WDesm.

Toy Soldiers: Cold War was awesome.  Don’t get me wrong – Toy Soldiers 1 was amazing too, but the sequel has just more everything crammed into it.  More multiplayer options, more challenges, more abilities, more minigames, more decorations, and more, more more.  Toy Soldiers 1 also had some rather impressive DLC, and it was only a matter of time before the sequel also got an injection of “more”.

In fact, that’s probably the best way to describe the twin expansion packs for Toy Soldiers: Cold War : “More.”  Each DLC pack includes one new mini-campaign (of 3 levels), one new survival map, and one new minigame.  The minigames are rather fresh additions: Pop-A-Pig (from Evil Empire) is essentially Whack-a-Mole with a rocket launcher, while Hang Time tries to recreate the fun of the recent XBLA title Choplifter HD (although, admittedly, not as successfully).  In addition, ALL the survival maps are all given a new game mode per DLC pack, and each DLC pack also unlocks a new barrage feature (either an Orbital Laser from Evil Empire or a Napalm Strike from Napalm).  The Survival Game Modes are a neat twist, as Trauma turns the game far more tactical and Commando turns the game far more action-y, offering really refreshing perspectives on familiar gameplay (Trauma damages your toybox with every turret you place, while Commando has you play as the Commando, with no turret placement options).

The only real problem I see, and I’ll admit, it is both a minor problem and a personal perspective problem, is that the Toy Soldiers series feels like it is hitting Content Critical Mass.  I’ll be the first to admit that despite absolutely adoring both games and the DLC expansions in each of those games, I’m nowhere near completing all of the content I already have before my attention wanders to another title.   If you’re a fan of the series, and have tackled all the myriad of challenges in the base games, then these expansions will certainly offer you more content and leaderboards to surmount, and are WELL worth the cost of admission.  If however, you’re a more Regular Joe, and you have to sheepishly admit that completing Toy Soldiers: Cold War (or even Toy Soldiers 1) is still on your backlog….well, then you’ve hit Content Critical Mass.

A silver lining is that whether you love it or hate it, a free Multiplayer patch is available (see the link below) that allows the base game to play online with people who have purchased the DLC on DLC maps, which ensures that the community will not be split by their introduction, and that if you play enough online games, you’ll eventually enjoy the content anyways for free.  Signal Studios gets a strong kudos for that, as “dividing the online community” is usually complaint #1 about online DLC and expansions.

Game Score: 7.5/10.

Download the DLC packages at 400 MSPoints apiece here.

Plus, who doesn't love a background this epic?

]]> http://www.xboxhornet.com/wordpress/?feed=rss2&p=9199 0 http://www.xboxhornet.com/wordpress/?p=9188 http://www.xboxhornet.com/wordpress/?p=9188#comments Fri, 27 Apr 2012 12:27:41 +0000 WDesm http://www.xboxhornet.com/wordpress/?p=9188 .wp-caption { border: 1px solid #ddd; text-align: center; background-color: #000000; padding-top: 4px; margin: 10px; }

“I cannot recommend this game in strong enough terms – BUY IT.”

An XboxHornet review by Xavier “Mercedes” Marchena.

BLOWN AWAY. This game. This freaking game. I honestly did not know what to expect going into The Walking Dead. Wait, that’s a lie. This is TellTale Games we’re talking about. Sam and Max creators. I should have known. My body and mind were not ready for this journey and now I sit here after blowing through the first chapter of this game series in one sitting, my mind blown away. If you, fellow reader are a fan of amazing story telling, really tense moments that may or may not make you curse at the main character Lee, for not being superhuman at all the right moments and bar is now raised voice acting this game speaks directly to you.

If not, you're just as soulless as this zombie right there. You animal.

The absolute best way to describe this game is it’s Indigo Prophecy the first half without the stupid stealth kid flashbacks. Straight up ass stuck to your sofa, top notch adventure and survival horror. It is seriously like watching an interactive movie, it seamlessly goes back and forth between the two. There is this one scene where everyone is arguing with each other and I swear to you on a stack of porn magazines it was perfectly believable. It was as if all the actors were in the room together really pissed off for some random reason and delivered their lines as if they were living it.

“Why don't you live this, you rotting piece of stank ass garbage punk biotch!!!” An actual line delivered in game.*

*This is a lie.

I miss games like this. Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle; those point and click games were perfect vessels for delivering story. The Walking Dead brings it back and thankfully leaves the obscure puzzles in the past. This is the best 400 Microsoft Funbux you can spend right now. We have to support games like this; especially when they’re so freaking good.

There better be more. Yea baby.

Buy this game.

Game Score: 10/10.

Download a free demo of the game here.

“A Very Intellectual Game With Some Neat Features and Horrible Music.”

An XboxHornet review by Xavier “Mercedes” Marchena.

One of two things happens when I encounter card and board games. I either become enamored with the game and I can’t wait until I play it again. This usually happens with game that have high amount of strategy, low amount of math (yuck) and lots of luck. Poker and Caledea come to mind. On the other side are the games that just don’t grab me because of the mathematical calculations you have to keep in mind. Cribbage and Spectrangle360 fall into this category. Now I’m not saying it’s a bad game, it just annoys me at all the mental math you would need to do in order to be awesome at this game.

Xavier no like thinking inside head. Xavier mash button on calculator.

The game is very simple to learn. You have triangle tiles that you need to match up by color to other triangle tiles. The more sides that match, the higher multiplier gets added to the score. Also the number on the actual tile contributes to the score. And the multiplier that’s on the actual board. The player with the highest score win the game and receives a slave for a day from the loser. In the wacky world of compulsive gambling maybe. I never want to gamble again.

Didn't I just show this screen already? I could have sworn I have...

Much of the game’s strategy comes from attempting to screw the other player as much as possible by laying down tiles with colors they can’t match. And it’s great that you can screw people over cause you can take this to Xbox-Live and screw as many people as you physically can. Have a screw fest! The only problem is not many people play this so you’ll most likely play with the same salty people over and over. That could be taken as a good or bad thing depending on your views of screwing your fellow man.

Hehe I've said “screw” seven times this article.

I have one major gripe with this game though. This music is so. Damn. Repetitive. It’s repetitive. It really is. It’s like a broken record player with the music looping every minute it seems. Never changes. Just the same grating music while you’re trying to outsmart your opponent. Of course you can mute your TV but dammit you shouldn’t have to and that’s a definite strike against Spectrangle360.

Game Score: 6/10.

Download a free demo of the game here.

An XboxHornet review by WDesm.

Puzzleboard games have a high standard to achieve – the genre has been in the works for decades, if not centuries, and beautifully rendered XBLA titles like Catan and Carcassonne have set the gold standard for your Xbox gaming needs.  In the XBLIG corner, there’s fewer options, but even those (for the most part) seem aware of the high caliber of title expected of them.  Of this subgenre, MegaCity might very well be a new benchmark.

MegaCity takes a little getting used to, but the tutorial is pleasantly brief, descriptive, and easily accessible – in my eyes, a perfect example of well-thought out instruction.  Basically, a set order of game pieces scroll in sequence (much like pieces served in Tetris), and the goal is to place them anywhere on the board to score the maximum amount of points.  Pieces can either be Scoring Pieces, Manipulators, or Dead Space (made up descriptions mine).  Scoring Pieces give you a score (tabulated vertically in columns), Manipulators alter the Scoring Value of pieces around them (both positively and/or negatively), and Dead Space is there simply to mess with you.  While pieces can be placed anywhere, only the far left column at any time is worth points – if this specific column scores the requisite number of points (listed above), it is scored and removed from the screen (again, much like Tetris) while the screen pans to give you more building room.

Playing for longer stretches of time unlocks more complicated pieces, while a minor metagame unlocks new, powerful pieces at each of the 10 character levels.  Challenge modes and challenge maps offer bonus XP to help the metagame grind, while high score boards keep track of your best work.  The game supports up to four controllers, although all controllers are always fully active, which could allow a sort of turn-based multiplayer couch event, but the game does lack a true multiplayer aspect.

Visually, the game has a cute and appropriate charm, while the music appears to be Creative Commons classical and melodic music, also a good fit.  The lack of some level of online mode (sending score challenges and/or online leaderboards, etc) and a true variant on multiplayer is a slight disappointment, but this game still stands apart from the crowd. MegaCity is certainly a must-have for anyone looking for a relaxing strategy game, as so many things are designed to a beautiful polish and a serious charm.  I only wish I could carry this title with me wherever I travel.

Game Score: 9.5/10.

Download a free demo of the game here.

An XboxHornet Review By Liam Jugler.

Snakez Gunz and Ladderz, the first XBLIG release by DaddyPigGames, starts poorly. The title screen is a badly enlarged upside down picture of the ‘snake’s head, the menu system is flat pasted over this ugly image and asks you to press start. I’d suggest not doing that, but assuming you do, you’re dropped in a sort of hub world, and it’s from here the headaches begin.

Obstinately, this is a vertical scrolling platformer puzzle game, but in actuality it seems to be an amateur attempt at surrealism in video game form. You play a long, segmented snake. The logic behind this is unclear as being a snake never factors into any gameplay. You collect golden eggs which give you the ability to shoot fireballs from your mouth at ants which fall from upside down nests. Usually this kind of craziness alone would be enough for me to recommend a game. Lord knows I buy all my games based on their crazy levels.

The main problem with this is that it’s pretty awful. The level design, to begin with, runs counter to your characters abilities and powers. The levels scroll up, but you lack any ability to jump and sluggish movement speed make any fall a huge pain to deal with. And given the huge problems with collision detection and floaty controls, you’ll be falling. A lot.

The puzzles, for want of a better word, are equally baffling. Almost every one of them consists of shooting a target to make an elevator move, but if you shoot the target too much, the elevator switches off. Frustrating mainly because your only weapon is rapid fire. Throw this in with the multitude of bizarre elements to the game (Ants can bisect you, but it has no effect, your tail lacks any form of physics, mushrooms make you grow and shrink which has seemingly no real in game effects) and it quickly becomes obvious that the game is suffering from a heavy lack of forethought.

I say this on occasion but this really feels like the developers first game. Platforms, enemies and powerups are thrown around the place with little care of their implications of actions, animations are weird to say the least(when you finish a level there’s an extended and the overall level design feels simplistic and, frankly, boring. I also talk a lot about game theory here and this game shows exactly why more critical analysis when making games could go a long way. I feel like the developer of Snakez Gunz and Ladderz has to have had some kind of vision when making this game, some aim and idea they were aiming for because frankly you can’t make a game that looks and feels this strange by accident. In many ways that makes the game tragic, missed potential is always depressing.

I suggest at least giving the demo a play, the game feels almost like an ironic parody of indie arcade games, a sort of Tim and Eric Show but with a snake. The endless snake puns actually make me wonder if I haven’t been trolled by some genius developer.

Game Score: 2/10.

Download a free demo of the game here.

“A Decent Attempt at Minimalism.”

An XboxHornet review by Xavier “Mercedes” Marchena.

We Are Cubes takes a minimalist approach to gaming and does quite well in what appears to be a flying spaceship-block shooting other polygon-like spaceships in a corridor. What you are and what you are shooting can be left up to individual interpretation. This is not a particularly deep game though. You shoot things in a corridor, picking up power-ups and battling bosses.

This is what your imagination has to work with.

It may sound like it, but I’m not really knocking the art direction in We Are Cubes. This is a somewhat fun and challenging game, but it just doesn’t scratch that itch I get when it comes to shooters. They enemies don’t shoot at you, instead they come at you like they’re a crazy hobo with a knife and try to run into you. If they miss, they slingshot straight back in front of you to repeat their kamikaze mission. You need to learn how to lead your shots because you can only shoot one bullet at a time unless you get a power-up where you can shoot two.

Pew pew.

The bosses are just larger polygons that take more than one bullet to kill and fragment when you do hit it. They are also immune to various power-ups at your disposal; like the laser which fires a steady damaging beam in front of you or the freeze bomb which… uh… freezes things in place. If they bosses had personalities they would laugh at you silly power-ups and call your mother not nice names.

There really isn’t anything critically negative I can pinpoint in We Are Cubes; I just didn’t get pulled into it. There was nothing really in the game that made me want to come back and play “just one more”. I kind of wish there was because the game really is a solid shooter. It’s a dollar though, so if you just want to sit down and shoot some evil Nazi polygons (I assume) you could do worse things with one hundred pennies.

Game Score: 6.5/10.

Download a free demo of the game here.

An XboxHornet Review By Liam Jugler.

Kart games are a pretty empty or otherwise lacking genre everywhere but the Xbox Indie games area. It’s a little strange to be honest, the kart genre came and died with Mario Kart (and Diddy Kong Racing which-was-way-better-no shut-up-it-was). And here we have another entry from the developers of possibly the most popular kart games on the Xbox, Racedrome Offroad.

I want to start by saying this is a really well produced and clean. Crisp menus, nice backgrounds and sound effects as well as really well modeled kart designs. When I first loaded up the game my thoughts immediately were ‘Wow this looks really professional’. For the most part the game maintains this high level of polish throughout but does suffer from a lack of charm possibly due to this. Everything feels very same-y. The tracks are nicely designed and are in fairness a good amount of fun for a title this cheap but they lack variety; a lot of the time I didn’t even realize I’d changed the track until I was taking that first corner.

Speaking of corners, one area that could have really done with some extra attention is the physics. Now Rendercode Games apparently revamped their physics engine for this game which is great, you should always be trying to improve the core areas of your game and for all I know the original design document called for the game to be set on a particularly large asteroid where gravity is more of a suggestion but on the off chance this game is meant to be set on earth I highly suggest adding another 0 to the gravity variable guys. Cornering is a pain and the many ramps and bumps that make up the track send you straight orbital if you hit them with any sort of speed. It’s very fun but frustrating.

That actually sums up a lot of this game. Its really pretty fun with a friend or two on Live and I had a good laugh barreling into the walls and ramming into each other and making the physics engine go insane, but any attempts to play any of the single player modes was met with just endless boring unfun. The game has a fantastic little feature where you can rewind the race which I think is seriously aces but suspect it might only be in to deal with the fact that you’re flying all over the place.

There’s also a couple of bugs in the beast. I had occasional massive FPS dips when I collided with my racing partner, said partners avatar would change seemingly at random and more than once we got stuck on each other’s karts, tumbling and turning in some perverse dance that symbolized our love not just for each other, but for the world of karting itself.

It could be far worse. Those readers who remember the dark days of the endless hordes of horrible racing games on the PS1 can attest to that, and for a pittance, this game is worth the price. The online mode seemed to run smoothly and with a friend this is a fair load of fun. The problems with the gravity and physics should be seriously examined for the next game in the series, however.

Game Score: 6/10.

Download a free demo of the game here.

“The Only Night of Doom is a Night Playing This Game.”

An XboxHornet Review By WDesm.

Night of Doom 2 is a first person shooter survival horror, where the goal is to last as long as possible in the face of ever-increasing waves of monsters.  The game starts off with a rather pea-shooter pistol, but includes the option of gaining some rather high-end firepower, including an uzi and a shotgun.  The heavier weapons come with a highly limited ammo supply, so supply boxes (dropped from fallen foes) are rare caches to be lunged for in wild desperation.  With a few different monsters to fight, a local leaderboard, and 4-player offline couch co-op, this sounds like an amazing game, right?  Well, it might be, except that it misses the core ingredient in a game: Fun.

The animations actually make this look worse in motion.

Night of Doom 2 is, bluntly speaking, painfully dull, despite the apparent “spooky” atmosphere backgrounds stolen from a Halloween display.  Sound effects are weak, lighting (as shown above) is poorly implemented, and a lack of tension-building makes the entire gameplay experience one bland note, as opposed to a creative juxtaposition of high-stress and denouement-reloading.

That red mist is the shotgun killing something.

The controls are clunky and the player’s stats are incredibly weak, which means that you can barely outrun even the slowest of shambling hordes .  Slow controls and the lack of a strafe option means that all of the FPS skills gained in the last 2 decades are meaningless, and you are stuck playing the XBLIG equivalent of DooM without any of the glorious nostalgia or E1M1.  Poor animations further degrade the experience, as enemies almost float in and around terrain, while you swivel around to aim headshots at the horde shambling after you.

The gameplay isn’t anything horrible, and to be honest, it’s technically complete – the game goes above and beyond “bare minimum” by including local multiplayer and a local-only leaderboard.  Night of Doom 2 falls into a trap that many XBLIGs have fallen into before: If a game is simply adequate, it is easily forgettable and neglected.  It is far better to make a simplistic game fantastic than it is to make an ambitious game adequate.  As it is, multiple XBLA- and disc-based titles have proven that horde-based group co-op is a huge success.  Night of Doom 2, however, will almost certainly never be mentioned alongside any of those successful titles.

The hats are to tell people from zombies. Why can't zombies wear hats, huh? I thought Plants Vs Zombies ended this argument years ago!

Game Score: 3/10.

Download a free demo of the game here.

“You Can’t Go Wrong With This Game!”

An XboxHornet review by Xavier “Mercedes” Marchena.

Shmups are in a strange place, I think. Good quality ones are rare, but you see many mediocre titles that offer nothing but nice visuals and so many damn bullets you can’t see where your ship is. There’s nothing new to offer to the player; just the same mechanics jumping from game to game. Luckily Sine Mora does the basics so damn well and then on top of that the features that are unique to this game are simply baller.

You're...you're from the Matrix!!

The features that separate this title from other shooters are as followed. There is no “you brush up erotically (or however you want to) against an enemy and then you blow up. Two things happen if you get hit. For one, you lose all your weapon power ups you have collected, but you have a chance to get them back before they float away. The second thing that happens is you are docked a few seconds depending on what hit you. See, between check points, you have a certain amount of time that is replenished when you kill something and docked when something hits you.

Come at me bro!

There are so many bosses. It’s wonderful! They all have multiple stages where you have to whoop ass, and between ass whoopings you fly around the enemy showing off the pretty landscape and artwork. By the by, this game is gorgeous. If you don’t wear sunglasses it’ll be a reenactment of Indiana Jones and that holy Ark and Nazi’s. The bosses are huge and they want to kill you very badly.

And they use the amazing environment to lull you into a slack-jawed stupor!

Unlike most of the other games in the genre, Sine Mora has a story and it’s a dark one. I had my Russian speaking wife confirm that the actors are speaking the language of the hammer and sickle and even though I don’t understand the words myself (they have subtitles, no worries) it’s a welcome addition and it sounds so… perfect. You can hear the emotion in their voices even though you don’t speak the language.

They also curse in the game. For some reason that made me happy.

At 1200 funbux, it might make a few people who are newer to the genre pause; but have no fear I say. You can’t go wrong with this game. Newbies and hardened experts alike can enjoy this game. It’s nice and lengthy and it can be as difficult as you want it to be. Give it a try, you shant be disappointed.

Game Score: 9/10.

Download a free demo of the game here.