Humble Bundle gaming
I've been trying some games from recent Humble Bundles.
Let's start with Hack n Slash. It's an interesting title that starts you off as an elf with a sword that can literally hack the computer world. Hit an enemy and maybe you change Aggressive to False. Or make it do zero damage. Or change it from Bad to Good so that it attacks your enemies. Door locked? No problem. Just hack it and change the locked value from True to False.
I've enjoyed the game for the most part. It's fun to solve the programming puzzles or to break things so that you can gain a ridiculous amount of health. You don't have to know anything about programming to play, but without a small amount of background I feel that players would be completely lost without some sort of guide. As such it's a niche title that could have been great with some sort of tutorial and polish. It gets a "do not buy" from me unless the "hack the planet" mindset sounds irresistable. I like it, but I'm a particular sort of nerd that does programming puzzles on Project Euler for fun.
Next up is Massive Chalice. It's a turn based tactics game that spans 300 years of time in your kingdom. The gimmick is that you need to keep the kingdom from being overrun by baddies, but only your "Heroes" can survive a single attack from them. The Chalice will save the kingdom, but it needs 300 years to charge up. This creates a situation where you have to breed bloodlines and have multi-generational dynasties of heroes. Some heroes are infertile, some are exceptionally fertile. But maybe an arranged marriage doesn't work out to get children because they are passionless. No children means no new generation of heroes to defend the kingdom.
Also, when you set up your heroes to start popping out babies they don't adventure anymore. So you have to manage your roster and get heroes a bunch of experience while they are young, then set them up to try and get as many babies as possible that will carry forward some of that experience and maybe take a bloodline weapon as well.
I like it and can recommend it for anyone that likes turn-based tactics games with permadeath. Hero genetics are random, so there is a ton of replayability.
Last up this week is Lumino City. This is a point and click puzzle game. You like games like Myst? This might be for you. You are a girl trying to find her Grandpa who was kidnapped in the opening scene. The gimmick/hook here is the graphics. Lumino City was hand made and stop-motion photographed to make up the graphics of the game. Check out http://luminocitygame.com/ to see what I mean. The puzzles so far haven't been too hard, but if they are there is manual left by your grandpa. The table of contents will say that the useful page is (9* the number of bushes on the clifftop + 21), so looking for hints is a small puzzle all on its own. For me this is a definite buy. It's available on iOS, Mac and Windows. I haven't gotten too far yet, but I only stopped because the game had crashed. Something odd happened with Adobe AIR.
Let's start with Hack n Slash. It's an interesting title that starts you off as an elf with a sword that can literally hack the computer world. Hit an enemy and maybe you change Aggressive to False. Or make it do zero damage. Or change it from Bad to Good so that it attacks your enemies. Door locked? No problem. Just hack it and change the locked value from True to False.
I've enjoyed the game for the most part. It's fun to solve the programming puzzles or to break things so that you can gain a ridiculous amount of health. You don't have to know anything about programming to play, but without a small amount of background I feel that players would be completely lost without some sort of guide. As such it's a niche title that could have been great with some sort of tutorial and polish. It gets a "do not buy" from me unless the "hack the planet" mindset sounds irresistable. I like it, but I'm a particular sort of nerd that does programming puzzles on Project Euler for fun.
Next up is Massive Chalice. It's a turn based tactics game that spans 300 years of time in your kingdom. The gimmick is that you need to keep the kingdom from being overrun by baddies, but only your "Heroes" can survive a single attack from them. The Chalice will save the kingdom, but it needs 300 years to charge up. This creates a situation where you have to breed bloodlines and have multi-generational dynasties of heroes. Some heroes are infertile, some are exceptionally fertile. But maybe an arranged marriage doesn't work out to get children because they are passionless. No children means no new generation of heroes to defend the kingdom.
Also, when you set up your heroes to start popping out babies they don't adventure anymore. So you have to manage your roster and get heroes a bunch of experience while they are young, then set them up to try and get as many babies as possible that will carry forward some of that experience and maybe take a bloodline weapon as well.
I like it and can recommend it for anyone that likes turn-based tactics games with permadeath. Hero genetics are random, so there is a ton of replayability.
Last up this week is Lumino City. This is a point and click puzzle game. You like games like Myst? This might be for you. You are a girl trying to find her Grandpa who was kidnapped in the opening scene. The gimmick/hook here is the graphics. Lumino City was hand made and stop-motion photographed to make up the graphics of the game. Check out http://luminocitygame.com/ to see what I mean. The puzzles so far haven't been too hard, but if they are there is manual left by your grandpa. The table of contents will say that the useful page is (9* the number of bushes on the clifftop + 21), so looking for hints is a small puzzle all on its own. For me this is a definite buy. It's available on iOS, Mac and Windows. I haven't gotten too far yet, but I only stopped because the game had crashed. Something odd happened with Adobe AIR.