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By Sam, October 25, 2009 12:14 am

Dark – Platformer – 80 Points – Download

With the massive success of Braid the 2D plaforming genre has recieved a notable boost in popularity over the last couple of years. There have been many attempts already on XBLIGs to appeal to this market (Jonny Platform’s Biscuit Romp is one of the best) and now we have Dark, a puzzle platformer from developer Andrew Russell.

The first thing to note about Dark is that it is short, only taking around 30 minutes to complete and there isn’t much reason to go back. However, that 30 minutes is great quality and the atmosphere and style make it more than worth the 80 points.

You control a black, diamond-shaped character and must navigate through the various physics-based puzzles to get to the end of each chapter. The first level for example sees you have to find and push boulders off a ledge to break the floor below. Each of the stages look slightly different and the use of lighting and shadow gives Dark a very unique look. The visual style is complemented by the beautiful piano music composed by Kevin MacLeod.

Throughout the game you are never given any hint of story or any context as to why you are there. But it doesn’t matter, Dark is all about the experience and aside from a few awkward moments with the jumping, it succeeds at being something truely unique and more than justifies the price.

Short, but a unique and atmospheric puzzle platformer.

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By Sam, October 23, 2009 1:56 am

A collection of people from various sites that cover Xbox LIVE Indie Games, including myself, as well as the developers of the game willbe playing Little Racers online on Monday. If you wish to join in you can download the game here. We are scheduled to start playing at around 8:30pm GMT.

List of people who are participating:

WaaghMan and Soy1Bonus from Milkstone Studios
MarkMN76 from XBLIG.co.uk
Jigsaw HC from XBLA Ratings
duckols from Gay Gamer
Chuckbutter from Small Cave Games
Dhalamar from Wasted Seconds
Exaltedlegions from Exl Studios
XboxHornet from XboxHornet
AllApologies17 from Indie Game Blog

All this was arranged by XboxHornet and the plan is to make this a regular occurance with a different game being played each week. I hope to see you online!

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By Cronan, October 23, 2009 1:42 am

Physics Sandbox – Other – 240 Points – Download

Making a computer game is hard. Really, really hard. Even making a relatively simple game like Pong or Breakout takes imagination, skill, attention to detail, and a lot of time. I’ll give a simple example. If I throw a ball into the air in real life, it curves back down due to the force of gravity, strikes the ground, and bounces and rolls across the floor. The force with which I threw the ball and the angle, the resistance of the air, the hardness and friction of the ground, the force of gravity, the bounciness of the ball, all have an effect. In real life we tale this for granted. In a game, everything to do with the ball and the floor must be programmed. Every last thing.

Adding real-life physics to a game is a hard problem. While providing simple gravity and adding a force to a ball is easy, and uses grade-school mathematics, all the other details are much harder. So hard that many people who want to make a realistic game don’t even try. Instead, they use a physics engine.

A physics engine is not a game. Rather, it is a tool that developers can use to add realistic physics to their games. Instead of having to worry about how balls bounce and how joints work and how springs will act when they’re sprung, the developer can focus on making their game.

Physics Sandbox, the game under review here, is not actually a game. It’s a thin wrapper around a popular physics engine for Xbox Live Indie games called Farseer Physics. It also has six samples, and a means of saving and loading the screens you’ve made. But unless you’re a developer, and unless you read and understand the Farseer Physics documentation, you’re not going to have much joy with Physics Sandbox. Want to know about springs?

Some springs need anchors relative to the bodies’ position and some need world anchor points. So pay attention to the type of spring you’re using.

Springs are attached to bodies.

All springs share some variables and methods.

Anchors don’t have to be inside a bodies attached geometry.

When springs break, they are disabled.

Got that? No? Then you’re going to find it hard to “create your own physics scenes” using Physics Sandbox, because the “game” itself doesn’t supply you with any documentation, other than a single screen labelling each of the tools. Worst of all, there is no way to control your physics creations; once you’ve set up a scene, all you can do is start it running and watch what happens. It took me four hours to make a car that actually worked – and five minutes to realise that I couldn’t even control it.

If you’re planning on using Farseer Physics in your games, get Physics Sandbox. It’s a great tool for exploring the basics of the popular physics engine. If not, I’d move on and try another game.

Too complicated for most, though useful for developers.

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By Cronan, October 9, 2009 10:12 am

Chaos – Action & Adventure – 80 Points – Download

After I’d played Chaos for about an hour, I decided I had better search the Inter-tubes for other reviews on this game. Here are some of the comments I found:

“A homeless man’s Geometry Wars, but really, for not much more money, you can actually have Geometry Wars”

“While playing, I found myself getting frustrated and upset. My fun came from pressing yes to quit the game”

I fired up the game again, and tried another hour, but I still couldn’t come up with anything kinder than the above.

Chaos is a viciously unforgiving game. It’s a dual-stick shooter, but instead of shooting, the second stick causes you to emit a weak force-field. Using this field, you have to try to slow down bouncing balls of death. I died 150 times before I cleared the first screen. I have never cleared the second screen.

Download the trial only if you’re having too much fun, and need something to bring you down. Buy this game only if you’re a masochist.

Chaos is a viciously unforgiving game.

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By Cronan, October 8, 2009 5:03 am

Planet Delta – Puzzle & Trivia – 80 Points – Download

I hold the green button down, and then release it. The red ball slides up out of the launcher and across and down, into the glass container, towards the far right. It comes to rest on top of a collection of coloured balls, making a group of three reds. The red balls vanish, satisfyingly, and another ball, yellow this time, slides into place in the launcher. Again, I use the green button, but this time I tap it, and the ball ends up in the left side of the container, stranded in a sea of purple and green.

And that’s when it happens. The floor of the container rises, pushing all the balls further up into the container, and I feel a surge of panic. There is now less space, less time to make my decisions. The pace of the music quickens, just by a beat, and my heart-rate quickens with it. Suddenly I don’t feel so confident that I’m going to reach the core.

Planet Delta is Puzzle Bobble (aka Bust-A-Move) turned upside down. You match coloured balls to earn points, you use points to buy special balls and other objects to help you finish the harder levels. In some ways this game is like pinball, which adds an extra level of challenge to the basic game – you’re never 100% certain where each ball will end up. At the beginning of each round you’re given a “shadow” that tells you where your ball will end up, but this is taken away as you get further into the game.

Planet Delta isn’t perfect. I picked up a few spelling mistakes, occasionally the ball doesn’t end up where the “shadow” says it will go, and the cartoon at the beginning is a mistake. Poorly executed and coming right at the beginning, it reflects badly on the rest of the game.

But 30 seconds more and you’ve forgotten any previous dodginess. The music is good, adding to the game, without being annoying. The career mode is a good fit, and sees you travelling down through layers of Planet Delta’s crust, trying to get to the core. I haven’t reached it yet, but I don’t expect the trip to end well. The Earth’s core is made of a solid iron-nickel alloy, and is as hot as the surface of the Sun. Maybe the core of Planet Delta is filled with puppies, but I think that’s unlikely. Still, I’m having a great time getting there!

You’ve played games like Planet Delta before. But I’m confident you haven’t played an Indie game in this genre that is quite so well executed. The game is addictive, challenging and just plain old fun to play. The basic game mechanics are solid, and there’s enough variety in game-types and ”special” balls for many hours of playing. And what more could you ask for?

Planet Delta is addictive, challenging and just plain old fun to play.

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By Cronan, October 7, 2009 4:27 am

Bomb Disposal Expert – Puzzle & Trivia – 80 Points – Download

Hollywood has made many war movies over the years, but none has focused so exclusively on addiction to danger than The Hurt Locker. The well-received 2009 film follows a US bomb-disposal team as they move through Baghdad defusing bombs of various types. It’s gripping and powerful, a critique of war and the societies that make war possible.

Imagine then, if the bombs in the film had been like the bombs in the Xbox Live Indie game, Bomb Disposal Expert. Each bomb has four lights, and they flash in a pattern. You tap out that pattern, using your hand-controller. Do that a few times, and you defuse the bomb. Then you move onto another bomb. I didn’t like Simon Says when I was 10 years old, and I like it even less now.

I’m being a little harsh. The game is pretty polished, and it adds a few wrinkles like mirrors and direction changes. There’s an arcade mode, and a career mode, and even support for (sort-of) multi-player. The graphics aren’t badly done, the music is fine, the menus are a bit clunky, but they work. But it’s not enough.

The developers, Evolution Dreams Studio, can definitely do better - watch this space for a forth-coming review of their excellent game Planet Delta. But Bomb Disposal Expert is a one-trick pony, and you see the trick in the first ten seconds. And then you’re done.

The ultimate disappointment? It doesn’t even have animation or sound when the bomb blows up; it has a message box. Bomb Game Fail.

A one-trick pony, and you see the trick in the first ten seconds.

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By Cronan, October 6, 2009 4:03 am

Totem – Puzzle & Trivia – 80 Points – Download

The last game I played with a native American theme was Custer’s Revenge on the Atari 2600. Totem is nothing like that game. Instead, it’s a matching puzzler, a genre made popular by games like Bejeweled and Puzzle Quest. In place of gems there are totem poles split into segments, each resting on a stone pedestal. As additional segments drop down from the top you need to match the pieces in order to destroy them. Game features include “tools” that can be used to destroy totem pole segments in various ways, and “elemental” bosses to be fought every seven levels. Destroying segments and pedestals earns you points, and I noticed a number of combos that seemed to rack up the points in a satisfying way.

If Totem has a unique selling point, it’s the degree to which segments may be moved around after they have dropped onto the pedestals. Segments can be moved around on the same totem, and can be moved onto adjacent totems if they are lower down. Unlike other matching games, there is no limit on how many moves you can do, although you are under time pressure as the segments continue to drop down. If a move results in a segment dropping onto a matching segment, they detonate right away, giving you the ability to clear out the totems in between drops.

I found the game a challenge even on Easy, partly due to the relatively sparse information provided on how to play the game. Two simple still screens do a reasonable job of explaining the basic mechanics, but provide no information on combos, tools and other subtleties of the game. It certainly doesn’t help that I’m terrible at these kind of games, but I felt like a little more information could have been provided. While the game design is good, and the art style consistent, the segments are not always easy to tell apart. I tried the game on Medium difficulty and had to admit defeat after only two levels, but that’s probably because I suck.

Only two things in this game caused me annoyance. The first was the music, which is a 30-second loop of drums and flutes. Repeated over and over again. It got old very very quickly. Thank goodness for custom playlists. The second is the save system. The game only saves after you finish a boss, which can take between twenty and thirty minutes (more if you suck, see above). I like to use Indie games as palate cleansers, playing them for a few minutes in between the shooting and killing and maiming I normally engage in online. The design of the save system means that Totem is not suitable for this, but this may not represent such a problem for most.

Totem is fast-paced and addictive and deeper than most games in the genre. It comes with two game modes, 28 levels and four bosses. Even including the niggles I mentioned above, this is a great game, worth many times the asking price (a mere 80 Microsoft Points). Totem has a professional feel all the way through, marking it out from most other Xbox Live Indie games, and I’ll be keeping a keen eye on games from Fervent Interactive in the future.

Totem is fast-paced and addictive and deeper than most games in the genre.

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By Sam, October 5, 2009 12:16 am

Update: Thanks for the interest, the positions have now been filled. I may have more openings in the future.

Due to my massive backlog of Indie Games and the fact I don’t have a lot of free time at the moment I am looking for one or two people to help with the reviews.

I cannot pay anybody but you would recieve free Xbox LIVE Indie Games and have your reviews published under your name.

If you are interested please use the contact form, if you have any reviews you have already written that would be great, but not essential (though good spelling and grammar is).