The Quest For Value: Indie Royale April Fools Bundle

Oh man, I haven't finished my last Quest For Value and there's another bundle out. No matter! The quest continues. It's the Indie Royale April Fools Bundle, available at http://www.indieroyale.com.

I'll run this concurrently with my other Quest For Value. Each game gets at least an hour of play...for value. Because I love value.

Defense Grid: The Awakening is a tower defense game. Hey, I already own this one! I got it from the Potato Sack back when Portal 2 came out. It's a pretty good tower defense game, as tower defense games go. I've already logged 9 hours in it and written a full review of the game. As such, I will exempt this from my Quest for Value, since I have clearly gotten Value out of it already. Ideally I can trade away the Steam key for another game and get extra value that way!

Hack, Slash, Loot is a turn-based dungeon-crawler with retro graphics. From the description given, it sounds like a Roguelike. Okay, I've played those before. The Binding of Isaac and Dungeons of Dredmor were both about as awesome as they come. If this is another game of that caliber, I will be pleased. If it's more of an RPG with random encounters and whatnot, eh, that's okay too. Well, I dunno, we'll have to see.

Alien Zombie Megadeath has a pretty loaded title there. They're not just aliens, they're alien zombies. And it's not just death, it's megadeath. Sounds like the title of a cheesy B-movie that you might see on Mystery Science Theater 3000. Well, apparently it's a platformer shoot-em-up. A lot of variance in that genre. Maybe it's something like Contra or Sunset Riders? Who knows.

Explodemon touts itself as a throwback to SNES-era platformers with added physics-based puzzle elements and lots of bangs and booms. I don't really know what to expect here either. Platform games vary a lot in quality. Hopefully this is a good one. Sad that it's not on Steam, but what can you do.

Astro Tripper appears to be a horizontally-scrolling shoot-em-up. Sure, that's always a classic genre. You've got your guns, your bad guys who shoot at you, your boss monsters or whatever. They're pretty much all the same, more or less, and from what I can tell this doesn't look like it's going to stray far from the formula. Not necessarily a bad thing, since the formula is fine (I liked Jamestown), but hopefully it doesn't feel like I've already played it for ten hours after only five minutes.



Let's review my progress so far.

• Alien Zombie Megadeath
• Astro Tripper
• Defense Grid: The Awakening
• Explodemon
• FlatOut
• Future Wars
• Greed: Black Border
• Grotesque Tactics: Evil Heroes
• Hack, Slash, Loot
• Trapped Dead
• Twin Sector

That's four down, seven to go. I must have MORE VALUE! Om nom nom nom