Hack, Slash, Loot, and Indie Gala 4

I finally finished my scheduled hour's worth of Hack, Slash, Loot. I just can't stop dying in this game.

I did finally manage to get a character to the second level, though! This archer guy found an enchanted pair of boots that regenerates HP, which apparently is game-breakingly absurd because normally you have so much HP and it basically never goes back up (you can find healing items but they're uncommon), but with regenerating health, all those minor injuries that would otherwise chip away at you until you're dead just get shrugged off completely.

Then I got poisoned. Poison is the opposite of regenerating health. If you get poisoned, you're screwed because unless there's a healing item within a few rooms of where you're standing right now, you are stone dead and there's nothing you can do about it. Since I had regenerating health, though, they canceled each other out until I could find a cure.

I beat the boss of the second level, some dwarf king guy, and then I went to level 3...

...and I got dogpiled by some Orcs and Uruk-Hai and they busted through my regeneration enough to kill me. So my archer is dead.

This game is frustrating because it feels like I have no control over what happens. Everything is blind luck. Hit or get hit in combat? All controlled by a roll of the dice. Get poisoned? Sorry, you're dead and there's nothing you could have done. Find a power-up? You got randomly lucky, good job. You can't stockpile items to save for a rainy day because there's no inventory system. You can't do anything meaningful to affect combat because you only have one attack and one set of gear. All you can do is cross your fingers and pray. I keep dying and having no idea what I possibly could have done differently. A couple times I died in the first room, to the enemy who spawned a few steps away. What exactly did the game expect me to do?

Is there any reason to play this when I could be playing Dungeons of Dredmor instead? Dredmor has deep, varied gameplay, far more appealing visuals, a more sensible combat system, a satisfying level-up mechanic, customizability through game mods (which I even know how to make myself, if I want to)...this game is just worse in basically every way. And by the way, worth noting, they're the same price in the Steam store.

I'm going to have to disapprove of this game. It could be worse, I guess, but I like it less each time I try it. I just feel like I have no control over the outcome of the quest.

Anyway, the Indie Gala 4 is out. I paid the minimum price for it. The beat-the-average games didn't look very interesting. There was some multiplayer airplane-dogfighting-thing which I doubt I would have ever played, and some strategy-type game or something...neither of them looked like they were worth an extra five bucks. But I got two games for a dollar and they're adding a third one at some point. That's a fair enough price.

A.R.E.S.: Extinction Agenda is a side-scrolling shooter of some sort. I dunno. Whatever.

 Alien Shooter is a top-down shooter where you shoot aliens. Straightforward enough, I guess. It was originally released in 2003 so it's pretty vintage.

• Alien Shooter
  
• Alien Zombie Megadeath
• A.R.E.S.: Extinction Agenda
• Astro Tripper
• The Baconing
• Ballistic
  
• Beat Hazard
• Defense Grid: The Awakening
• Depths of Peril
  
• Explodemon
• FlatOut
• Future Wars
• Gear Grinder
  
• Greed: Black Border
• Grotesque Tactics: Evil Heroes
• Hack, Slash, Loot
• Inferno+
• Madballs in...Babo: Invasion
• Plain Sight
• Slydris
• Sol Survivor
• Tobe's Vertical Adventure
  
• Trapped Dead
• Twin Sector
• Unstoppable Gorg

Dungeon-crawling

I kept having this problem with Hack, Slash, Loot where I couldn't move or do anything. But then it somehow started working again so now I'm fine and I tried another quest!

Here's my Elf Archer, traipsing along through a dungeon looking for treasure and--

 

Dammit, I died. This is going to happen a lot, isn't it? Oh, you roguelikes and your "difficulty". Always with the dying and the game overs. 

Speaking of dungeon-crawling, I played Inferno+ today. It's not bad.

It fuses "dungeon-crawling RPG adventure" with "Geometry Wars-style twin-stick shooter". Instead of doing all your shoot-em-up stuff on a single fixed screen, you explore dungeons, collecting treasure and trying to find the exit. And you level up as you progress, unlocking new abilities with a Point Build System for upgrades. And every ten levels (I believe), there's a boss fight.

It's got solid enough gameplay and some colorful laser-light-show visuals, although I don't feel like it's knocking anything out of the park. Still, reasonably good value--it's a different take on the twin-stick shooter concept and it works okay.

• Alien Zombie Megadeath
• Astro Tripper
• The Baconing
• Ballistic
  
• Beat Hazard
• Defense Grid: The Awakening
• Depths of Peril
  
• Explodemon
• FlatOut
• Future Wars
• Gear Grinder
  
• Greed: Black Border
• Grotesque Tactics: Evil Heroes
• Hack, Slash, Loot
• Inferno+
• Madballs in...Babo: Invasion
• Plain Sight
• Slydris
• Sol Survivor
• Tobe's Vertical Adventure
  
• Trapped Dead
• Twin Sector
• Unstoppable Gorg

That makes 11/23 complete.

There's also a new Humble Indie Bundle out today, but I'm not really interested in this one. It only has three games. All of them are point-and-click adventure games, which, frankly, are pretty lame, and I already have one of them (Machinarium), so I will probably not be adding these to my Quest for Value. I notice, by the way, that the Humble Bundle now requires a minimum $5 instead of $1 in order to get the Steam keys. This makes me sad. Quintupling the price is not good value. =(

Grotesque Tactics: Evil Heroes and Hack, Slash, Loot

In Grotesque Tactics: Evil Heroes, I play as this emo kid, Drake. He's all depressed because he dropped out of school, and he's going to commit suicide-by-mushroom when he receives the Call To Adventure™. Turns out all the good guys are dead and the bad guys are going to, like, do bad stuff or whatever, so this "Holy Avatar" fellow tells him to get off his butt and recruit some bad guys to form a team to fight the other bad guys.

That's as far as I got because I ran into a problem...I turned down the Draw Distance setting to get a good framerate and it ended up looking like this:

I could see right up to about the end of my nose and that was it. Somehow I managed to get in 18 minutes before I had to stop to change it...? How did I do that?

Well anyway more on that later because I tried my first run in Hack, Slash, Loot. It is indeed a roguelike, as I found out when I died on the first level.

 

See, I am dead. I am a dead Elf Archer. Well, better luck next time. I managed to survive for about five minutes before a kobold tragically cut my life short.

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