Undungeon game review

Undungeon

TinyBuild brings another unique title to the gaming community, this time with Undungeon styled like RPGs from the 90’s.

In Undungeon you play as a Herald, a keeper of an artifact called the core. There are multiple Heralds, each with their own unique core. These cores keep you from dying. Any time your Herald dies the core activates and transports you to a specific location. This world you Heralds find themselves in is the result of a cataclysmic event that brought several unique versions of the world into one amalgamation of them all. There are seven Heralds and presumably seven unique worlds that were combined.

The game looks and feels like the one of the classic roleplaying games I would have played in the 90’s on either the Sega Genesis or the Super Nintendo. Beyond the nostalgic art style the controls are fluid and the combat is dynamic. The game looks simple at first but there is a large amount of options to fine tune your experience and a well fleshed out story makes this a must for old school roleplaying games.

Happy’s Humble Burger Farm

Happy's Humble Burger Farm

Happy’s Humble Burger Farm is a restaurant management simulator with a horrific twist. Will you survive?

Going into the new year TinyBuild brought us several new games and now that the new year is here we should see a few more based on their announcements in 2021. Happy’s Humble Burger Farm is one such game. Throughout the game you play a fast food worker that spends every day going to the Burger Farm, punching the clock, making and serving food. Once finished you return home to sleep and go to bed. Pretty straight, right? Not even close. In the real world the longer you take to make an order the more upset your customers will get. At the Farm it’s not clear if it’s the customers or something much more sinister. As you bumble your way through filling orders the longer you take first the lights start malfunctioning. This is the first sign to pick up the pace. Take even longer then you may see neon messages warning you to save yourself on the floor, a charred man will try to grab you or even one of the mascots will come and try to kill you. Sounds like any other day at a fast food establishment.

Graphically the game is subpar with today’s gaming standards as are the effects. Controls are overly simplistic and yet if your pointer is even slightly off target they won’t work. Spending a couple hours in this game I firmly believe this is intentional. It’s meant to be cheesy and the controls seem to give you a false sense of security because of how simple they are. Having completed several shifts making meals I noticed the game wants you to make mistakes, it even gives you achievements to entice you to screw up on purpose. I found the game to be oddly compelling despite it’s low budget, simplistic and cheesy feel. I was surprised at how much I wanted to keep going to see if I could learn more about the world and why these creatures keep appearing and trying to kill me.

Phoenix Point game and DLC review

Phoenix Point

In Phoenix Point you control a squad of soldiers on a desperate mission to rid earth of the alien menace that is threatening to mutate all life.

Phoenix Point is a hybrid of game styles featuring isometric movements and third person shooting mechanics. Visually the game is stunning and the transition between play styles is fluid, making me wonder why more games haven’t tried doing this. Snapshot Games have built a dynamic turned based adventure game that centers around an alien virus that is bent on mutating all life on earth. The virus adapts and grows based on your tactics, meaning it will grow defenses to counteract how you are already playing the game. This isn’t the first game to make this but the execution of it is much more natural than most.

When you progress far enough you will unlock the Geoscape, a worldview dashboard that allows you to plan research, construction and your next missions as well. Between the Geoscape and the dynamic mutations the claim claims to never offer the exact same experience twice. I’ve now started the game twice and each stage I played has ended with this claim seems to have proven itself true, so far. Neither play through has been completed but as I alternate between save files it seems to be the case.

Back 4 Blood is the spiritual successor to Left 4 Dead

Back 4 Blood

Besides sharing a naming scheme with Left 4 Dead, Back 4 Blood shares more than that with the cult classic.

Before we talk about Back 4 Blood let’s take a quick look at the Left 4 Dead franchise. Originally exclusives on the Xbox 360 both L4D and L4D2 brought the ultimate zombie killing experience. Offering more than just well crafted campaign writing the games featured a difficulty called Nightmare and offered Realism mode. The game was already intense before trying these two and together the difficulty was ramped up considerably. I invested more hours into that franchise than nearly any other title I have played. The first of the games did not offer any sort of melee weapon but when they were added to the sequel it was a game changer. Rumors of a third game and a feature film went around for several years before all news ended.

Out of nowhere Warner Bros Games started advertising the game in early builds on computer/steam and the hype started building. Immediately it appeared to be a sequel to the Left 4 Dead games. It wasn’t long before I learned why- some of the same designers were working on this game as well!

The game controls feel very much the same as what we were expecting, the hordes are relentless and the experience feels exactly like successor to the game franchise should feel. The difficulty is either insane or my skills are not what they once were. Despite being so much more difficult than I expected it is still a considerable amount of fun.

Faraday Protocol – a game of aliens and exploration

Faraday Protocol

Faraday Protocol is a puzzle-centric first person shooter and platformer by Red Koi Box and available on Xbox One and Steam.

In Faraday Protocol you play as Raug Zeekon, an explorer/adventurer, landing your spaceship on Opis. As you leave your ship you are greet by a voice that puts you through a series of trials to test your mettle. Do you have what it takes? The AI is going to find out. Each chamber in the Ziggurats pose puzzles and challenges that increase in difficulty as you progress. Some allow you convert energy types, while others transport it from one chamber to another. Some will even power elevators.

The puzzles themselves, for the most part, are quite easy, they just require some out of the box thinking at times. There are a couple that seem much more difficult. These rare puzzles, at least to the point I’ve completed so far, offer easy solutions that require a bit of creativity. The story is a bit lackluster but the ingenuity of the puzzles more than makes up for it. If you enjoy creative puzzles that require some critical thinking to solve the $25 price tag may be appropriate but I feel it is just too high for what you get out of the game.

Aeon Drive Xbox One game review

Aeon Drive

2Awesome Studio brings us a stressful platformer where you race against time and must collect energy capsules to gain more time to explore. This is Aeon Drive!

Welcome to Aeon Drive, a two dimensional platformer from 2Awesome Studio and constant race against time. Each stage gives you 30 seconds and can be completed in that time or less if you are able to speed run it but if you are slower or want to explore there are energy capsules that will extend the time remaining if you collect enough. Hidden through the stages are also collectibles like hot dogs, diamonds, memory sticks and likely more.

Controls on the game are fluid, action is fast paced with a major sense of urgency with the looming clock in the upper right corner adding to the tension. Unlike most platformers, Aeon forces you to start the level over each time you die, means if you were having a perfect run up to your death you will need to do it all again. I found the game to be a mix of engaging, fun and challenging.

Monster Harvest – a game about growing monsters from plants

Monster Harvest

Have you ever applied jelly to your crops to create pet monsters? In Monster Harvest, from Merge Games, you will do just that.

Joining your uncle at his farm you quickly discover this is not your everyday farm in Monster Harvest from Merge Games. The game focuses on building the farm, exploring a dungeon-like cave and growing monsters by applying various jellies to your crops. Once you have your first monster, or any time you have one of yours following you, you can enter the nearby cave to fight other monsters, collect items and understand just a bit more about what is happening in this town.

I feel this is intentional but the game looks and feels like a knock off of the handheld Pokémon games, closer to the GameBoy Color version graphicly. The big difference between the playstyles however is that you can farm, clear a forest, have limited stamina and breed your plants with jelly to create new creatures, instead of just catching them or trading for them. Playing this game feels likes going to visit a friend you haven’t seen in ten years, there are similarities of what you remember but so much has changed you aren’t sure who this person sitting across from you is. Overall the game misses out on the wow factor and feels too much like other games to have a voice of it’s own.

Cardaclysm – a card battle RPG

Cardaclysm

Cardaclysm is linear RPG full of random maps, encounters and a specific order of bosses you will face. Can you make it to the realm of death?

Cardaclysm from Headup Games is an dungeon crawling roleplaying game where every map is randomly generated, enemies are pulled from a limited pool based on which boss tier you are facing and a book magic made to fit any play style. Players take on the role of a wizard where every fight adds a new card to your deck of monsters and spells. You also collect gold and orbs to determine how many and which of your cards you can play in a fight. As each card is played you will either summon a creature, monster or warrior to fight on your behalf or unleash an ability like poison arrows or fireballs. At most you can hold onto only four cards in your hand but with a properly assembled deck that won’t matter.

The game lets you know when it sees you are strong enough to face one of the bosses but does not force you to face them until you decide to, or if you aren’t paying attention. When the last foe is defeated in a map the boss is summoned and will chase you until you get to the exit or if you take a wrong turn and it catches up with you. Because of the way you build your deck, one card earned per battle, the game can be a bit grindy.

Playing the game I have now spent close to fifteen hours grinding and building my deck and points, now I learned from one costly mistake in that process. If you close the game and shut down your system for the night immediately you risk corrupting your save file, which happened to me about twelve hours into my journey. I learned (this was confirmed with my contact at Headup Games) that the game after being closed saves and updates where you were at in the game while on the Xbox home screen. You must wait at least 5 minutes before shutting the system down to avoid this happening to you. Despite this minor setup I have found the game quite enjoyable and am left with only one complaint- the gamer score choices. Nearly every game that has achievements uses a score that is divisible by five. With Cardaclysm there are a few that have odd scores, ending in two, seven, and and four. I know for some it’s just a number but for me I need my final score to still be divisible by five which means even if I didn’t enjoy this game I would need to play it to completion. Thankfully the game is quite a bit of fun and continuing this grind is not a negative thing.

Tetragon – a rotation puzzle game

Tetragon

Buka Entertainment Enterprises brings their latest title, Tetragon, where the world is manipulated by rotating it and moving platforms.

Buka Entertainment provided a review copy of their latest game, Tetragon. As you progress through the world you will solve puzzles by either rotating the entire world or manipulating platforms to move to the exit or to some sort of collectible. The biggest “pitfall” with this puzzler is that the hero has a limited fall distance before instant death. The good news here though is that you return to the same puzzle but it is reset each time. The resetting of the stage can actually help the puzzle as you may make mistakes the first time around- I know I did on several of them and the reset made correcting those mistakes much easier.

Controls feel a bit clunky as at times you cannot rotate the screen certain directions when you could before or some platforms don’t move until the camera is rotated a certain way and there are no visual indicators, that I noticed, to indicate when this is happening. Visuals are more advanced than the retro 8-bit style but not significantly and the story comes in pieces but left me intrigued. The puzzles in this game are creative and sometimes require more thought than I expected but after two hours of gameplay left me feeling like the game is meh. I plan on playing another couple of hours to see if this changes but experience with the game so far tells me it won’t significantly.

Foreclosed – a cyberpunk game review

Foreclosed

Foreclosed, from Merge Games Ltd, is a cyberpunk game that feels like a living comicbook.

In the Merge Games’ title, Foreclosed, the world is more advanced than what we currently experience but some of the same pitfalls remain. The biggest pitfall being falling in debt further than you can afford. It’s easy to do in the real world but in Foreclosed you are already starting at this point. Through your own cybernetics you attend the court hearing for your debt as soon as you start the game. You learn that your debt has been purchased by a corporation and as you leave your apartment you learn there is more going on than just the settlement of your debt. Corporate thugs are trying to kill you and your debt is causing paths to be blocked from you. You learn that some software has been installed in your cybernetics and they want it.

Graphically it is not the most gorgeous game but the art style is original and works very well for the game. The story is quite intriguing and draws you in immediately. Controls are easy to learn and gameplay is both forgiving and yet unforgiving- turning down the wrong path leads to instant death but you respawn nearby and can try a different path. The game so far is quite engaging and sucks you in. I am really looking forward to investing more time into this game.