Slaps and Beans 2 review

Slaps and Beans

Who remembers Bud Spencer or Terence Hill? The iconic duo have returned to voice their characters for Slaps and Beans 2 from Strictly Limited Games!

The iconic duo of Bud Spencer and Terence Hill have returned with their characters of Slaps and Beans for the second game of the same name. It is styled after arcade classics like Double Dragon or Streets of Rage while poking fun at themselves and the genre. You start the game adrift on a makeshift raft and arrive in Africa. Hilarity, slapping and chaos ensues as they embark on their next adventure from Strictly Limited Games.

I have always had a place in my heart for classic brawling arcade games, Streets of Rage especially. You have the ability to play solo or with a partner. Playing solo allows you to alternate between Slaps and Beans at will. I have never played a brawler that did that, closest I can remember would be one of the Lego games. This allows you to strategize based on the needs of the fight.

Graphically the game is on par with those same classics with a similar quality to Streets of Rage. What really sets this game apart is not that they use Bud and Terence’s likenesses but that they voiced it too. Controls are quite simple and intuitive, especially the ease of swapping characters. The writing for the dialogue is cheesy at best and is hilarious. Even with the sound off I was still laughing. There are even some minigames that add more character and hilarity to the gameplay. Overall I was surprised by how enjoyable I found the game considering I’ve never heard of Bud Spencer or Terence Hill. If you’re looking for a laugh and a fresh perspective on the arcade brawlers then you won’t want to miss this one.

Ashina: The Red Witch

Ashina

Ashina: The Red Witch is part of the same world of My Big Sister from Ratalaika Games but is it’s own title.

In Ashina: The Red Witch, from Ratalaika Games, you play as Ash, a young woman who wishes for something new while clinging onto the loss of her mother. The game starts as you make dinner for you and your sister, talking some trash as siblings do and enjoying the home-cooked meal. After the sister leaves for the night, you awake to the sound of someone in the other room and find a yokai making food and almost starting a fire. He steals a keepsake of your mother’s and runs. Chasing him leads you to arriving in the afterlife and a world full of yokai. Here you must track down the item, with the help of the thief and his friends.

The dialogue in this game is great. The banter between the two sisters alone is worth playing for. I legit laughed out loud while playing through making dinner during the game’s intro. I honestly can’t say the last time I laughed that often just during the opening, never before in an RPG/JRPG game either. Visually the game and animations are clean, despite being made in a retro style, very similar to SNES titles from back in the day. With the amount of laughing I’d done during my first two hours of gameplay is anything to go by I expect the rest of the game to be funny as hell and a great deal of fun.

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.

Aerial_Knight’s Never Yield from Headup Games

Never Yield

Aerial_Knight and Headup Games brings us the endless running action game Never Yield and it is crazy addicting!

Most endless runner games throw random obstacles at you that you use one of a couple methods to avoid and will literally go on, forever. With Aerial_Knight’s Never Yield the formula is changed, it actually has an end. Simply put it just looks and feels like an endless runner. The bulk of the story is told through quick glimpses of action but no dialogue, no trailing prologue like in a Star Wars film, everything is centered around the action. 

The stylized characters look like something you would expect to see in Back to the Future’s version of the future but full of weapon-wielding drones and vehicles looking to run you over. Without quick reflexes expect to die, often, but with each death you see a continue screen where you’re given the choice between “Never Yield” or giving up, along with a death counter for the particular run. With enough skill you can complete the story in a single sitting within a couple hours tops, my reactive skills were not on point and it took me about five total hours to complete the story. I found the game to be fun, despite the frequent deaths and well worth playing through more than once.

Kill it with Fire from TinyBuild

Kill it with Fire

TinyBuild’s Kill it with Fire allows players to kill their eight-legged foe fire but so many other options as well including C4.

We have a saying in our house when we see almost any bug, but spiders and scorpions especially- “Kill it with fire” and with this game you get to do exactly that and more, at least as far as spiders are concerned. The folks at TinyBuild saw fit to share the game with us, not once but twice. We got to test it out on both the Xbox One and the Switch. Personally I only played the Xbox version while my son played both. I will speak to the game as a whole and mechanics followed by his thoughts on which platform is the better experience.

Each stage you must locate weapons, upgrades and of course the spiders themselves. Some allow you to smash, explode, shoot and burn them. I’m certain there are other ways to kill the spiders as well but I just haven’t found them yet. As you find ways to kill the spiders you’ll find each death counts towards unlocking various doors. Some will reveal new rooms, others will reveal hidden documents, a secret chamber or even a storage for ammunition. Visually the game isn’t the most gorgeous but with a game like this it doesn’t need to be. It feels like the goal was focused more on user experience than on a stunning visual and for most of us that experience is much more important.

I thought a traditional controller would be ideal for gameplay but my son, having played both versions, believed that the Switch version was the far superior method for the game. We will have to agree to disagree.

My expectation of the game was it looked like it would be fun but would be forgettable. I make it a point to play each title for approximately one hour, a testament to the quality of the game is how much time I spent after that hour. I played this for three to four hours so far and wish I had more time to invest in it. I can say that this game is not to be overlooked. I look forward to finding each of the hidden weapons and upgrades to use to kill those eight-legged bastards.