Steam Indie Game Reviews

I picked up a lot of indie games on Steam lately, and here’s my opinions on some of them…

Jamestown

Jamestown is a bullet hell shooter, so that pretty much guaranteed that I would like it. It’s got a very unique setting; it’s set in the 16th century, on Mars! The main character is fleeing from the King of England, and is fighting against the Spanish fleet and a bunch of aliens, with steampunk jetpacks things. That’s kind of cool.

Gameplay-wise the most notable thing is that it’s a widescreen, but scrolls vertically. I’m not used to that, as it means a lot of bullets come from the sides, as opposed to games like Touhou and Dodonpachi. There’s also a pretty big variety of ships, with very different play styles. But I still stick to the Dodonpachi-style ship, cause that’s what I’m good with.

The pixel art is nice, the music is fitting, and the game difficulty is quite reasonable.

Pew pew pew!

Pew pew pew!

 

Spelunky

Spelunky is now my favorite rogue-like game. It’s charming, funny, polished, challenging, and incredibly rewarding when things work out for you. There’s tons of awesome secrets, and lots of hilarious situations that can occur. For example: You pick up a golden idol from a trapped pedestal, and a huge boulder rolls across the screen demolishing everything. You get away safely, but this boulder smashes into an item shop, and so the shopkeeper goes berserk, grabs his shotgun, and chases after you. The boulder also destroyed a nearby temple and pissed off a goddess, who unleashes a horde of spiders on you. All of the different entities in the game have so many ways of interacting with each other that the game never runs out of new experiences.
There’s a good variety of items and powerups, and optional hidden levels, which also make each run very different.

Spelunky does get frustratingly hard at times though. (Damn those spike traps in the jungle area!) If they toned down the difficulty a tiny bit, I think the game would be perfect.

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I love this game, but I think it hates me.

Rogue Legacy

I was kind of let down by this one. It just wasn’t all that much fun after a while.
Having permanent upgrades made it feel like the game was more about grinding for gold than actual skill, like most rogue-likes. But maybe I just sucked at it.
Giving your heroes random disabilities was a fun gimmick, but it got quite annoying once you actually started to play the game seriously.

It also felt kind of cheaply made: Most of the enemies had tons of color variations, big enemies were just stretched little enemies, equips didn’t visually change your character besides the color, the backgrounds were quite bland and repetitive… It was also a bit boring that the bosses were just huge versions of normal enemies (pictured).

Anyway, I beat 3 bosses, and then gave up. Maybe I’ll try again later. I mostly ended up feeling that I’d rather be playing Spelunky.

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Super original boss.

Thomas Was Alone

This game might not look like much, but it’s got a very good story! The only characters in the game are a bunch of rectangles, but you’ll start to care for them by the end of the game.

The platforming gameplay isn’t anything too special, and is often quite buggy too, but it’s worth playing for the story and atmosphere. It’s also short enough to finish in one sitting (4 hours), if you like short games.

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Yup, there’s not a lot to look at. But you’ll get quite attached to those rectangles.

Hammerwatch

This game’s probably a lot more fun with friends, but I played it by myself.
Anyway, I didn’t find anything particularly good about this Hammerwatch. It’s just a very simple dungeon crawler. Too simple and repetitive to stay interesting for long.

I actually gave up because I got lost; I think I forgot to activate a switch somewhere. But the switches aren’t marked on your map, and they’re very bland looking, so they’re very easy to miss. I got fed up with that, and just ragequit forever. Also, the map obstacles like spikes and arrow traps are very frustrating, as they often insta-killed me while I was backtracking and not looking out for them.

The bosses were pretty fun I guess.

Hammerwatch-1

You can pretty much explain the whole game with one screenshot.

Angry Video Game Nerd Adventures

If you’re a fan of frustratingly difficult platformers, crude humor, old NES games, or the AVGN on YouTube, then you should check this game out. It pretty much plays like a NES game, though the graphics and music are *slightly* more modern. It’s hard, but not too hard. It gets easier if you keep practicing, and is very rewarding when you manage to finish a level. There’s also tons of references to NES games, which you’ll probably know from AVGN’s videos, and the music is awesome too.

My only complaint is that it seems to crash quite a lot, especially when I’m near the end of a level. Ugh. I’ve also noticed a lot of the sound effects previously appeared in a Flash game called Tower of Greed, and they just feel out of place since I’m so used to hearing them there.

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Strangely enough, spikes don’t kill you in one hit. That’s nice of them.

 

6 thoughts on “Steam Indie Game Reviews

  1. ChaosSorceror Davidicus

    I’ve played Spelunky with my friends. Its moderately addicting, tho damn near impossible to proceed further when with friends, which is the only way I’ve played it, but that doesn’t stop it from being a barrel of laughs, and even if they die, friends are still useful to the party, as their ghosts can activate traps, blow things and enemies around, and even kill you by blowing you off cliffs! :yay:
    Game is great, but I think if I truly wanted to see the end of the game, I’d play it solo.

    Reply
  2. Kkots

    And I’m playing survival horror first person shooters.
    Studying interface designs, elements of realism or RPG, level designs, stealth implementations, the ways the story is delivered to the player. I believe some of these aspects can be implemented in a 2D flash game, albeit heavily modified. That’s why I’m studying other games – to steal ideas.
    ➡ :phone2:

    Reply
  3. SirBlackMage

    I played every game except Jamestown and Hammerwatch.
    Spelunky is one of my favourite games ever; the controls are also REALLY smooth and if you miss a jump, it’s your fault.
    Rogue Legacy is OK, as you already stated, it gets really repetetive after a while.
    Thomas Was Alone has an awesome Atmosphere and Story, the different abilities the characters have are cool.
    Angry Video Game Nerd Adventures is really challenging but fun at the same time (It never crashed while I was playing it :wut: ).
    Please do more of these reviews when you get new games, they are fun to read. :smirk:

    Reply
  4. ShadowSun

    Once again you should try Teletrooper (free download from their website) :hurray:
    The difficulty is tough but good once you get the hang of the controls. :skull:

    Reply

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