Card Crusade: Riddled Corpses

Riddled Corpses is the byproduct of yet another Groupees bundle, or so I think. I'm not entirely certain which one and I'm not going to look it up, but I want to stress that most card grind games I write short reviews on I didn't exactly buy them. I also want to mention the game doesn't let me take normal overlay screenshots, so this has less images than I'd like

Riddled Corpses is a zombie themed very arcade era twin stick shooter. You moved with one stick, shoot with the other. And you will move, and you will never stop shooting. That's almost the entire game right there, except you also get screen clearing bombs and a time freeze power that doesn't really work the way you'd expect. Seriously though, you move from zombies and you shoot zombies. Zombies primarily do touch damage, though higher power enemies spit gunk at you and the like.

Visually, Riddled Corpses is a pretty simple and clean looking pixel game. It does have some sort of dynamic lighting going on, which looks pretty cool sometimes and at other times seems to blotch out random parts of the screen. The pixel artwork is good, solid work with lots of variety and the animations are simple but satisfying. Admittedly the game isn't exactly a joy in motion, but it's a twin stick game where you shoot zombies and that doesn't really require or benefit from insane graphical fidelity. Visibility is crucial and that is a problem we'll come back to.

The audio is good. There is no speech or voice acting that I found in an hour of playing it, but the music is decent and the sound effects are mostly good. I do find the zombies seem a little ... Less than invested, we'll say, in being shot but you kill a ton of them so it's probably for the best.

In fact, the game is largely pretty good, except for two glaring issues. The first one, which I mentioned above, is that visibility was not precisely the cornerstone of the UI's development, meaning there's a ton of clutter on the screen and things will happily hang out under there. This is primarily an issue of difficulty, but it feels unfair that you can't see something because it is hanging out under the player 2 press start flashing nonsense.

The game's other big issue may or may not offend. In the first playthrough I was rather bemused - I lasted a couple minutes, but it seemed like absolutely everything was taking ages to go down. Were cars destructible terrain? Am I supposed to do a move and shoot phase on the mini-boss? Would I always have the identical same weapon? As it turns out, the game drops "gold" which can then be used to upgrade your character, buy other characters and the like. The grinding isn't super horrific, but it took me a couple attempts on the game's first level to get to the second level, and that level's required DPS was once again well above what my leveled weapon was pointing out. Basically, a big part of the game is being an extremely stripped down ARPG. Get loot, upgrade your mang, shoot many zombies until your current level isn't enough to push you forward.

Obviously play skill is important, but I honestly don't think you can DPS some of the later waves even in the first level without a decent chunk of upgrade. So whether or not you like grinding in your pick up and play game, well, that's on you.

There's something odd about the controls. I'm not entirely certain if it has something to do with the xbox one's deadzones or the game, but it acts really odd at times. You find yourself pressing hard left on the stick but firing sort of on a diagonal. I honestly couldn't quite figure it out, but it wasn't quite as responsive as I'd like.

Anyway, general conclusion is I'd give the game a pass, but if you like grinding or really want to play a decent twin stick, it is decent. But it is also super grindy which for me takes away from the appeal of the game. More than anything, though, it is how weird the controls end up feeling - like I said, that could very well be the xbox one controller not quite working right, but the deadzoning gets really obnoxious and kinda cut enjoyment of the game.

March into Bad Games month: Blood Knights

I was tempted to type out 'bad games mouth' but I'm not sure that joke has any teeth. I totally forgot to game over march anyway, so this review is coming out in April and oh well.

I noticed, around the time I was finishing up Dungeon of the Endless, that I felt like I'd been very hard on the recent crop of games I've played. I've played through some really good games since the start of the year, and not really very many games I've taken seriously that were seriously bad. I mean Final Dusk was sort of alright, but nothing really to digest. FF8 is a weird affair, but it's an older game that feels sort of patched together to accomplish its goals. So I set out to play two games I was under the impression were bad.

I believe I got Blood Knights from bundle stars, who sell bundle which are ... Generally not as well priced as IndieGala or Groupees bundles, but do seem to often have somewhat higher profile games in them. I actually had, at best, little idea what Blood Knights was. I knew it was relatively poorly rated, and also knew it was sort of silly and SteamShots had done a review ages ago. I assumed it looked B-movie as fuck and good lord if you like b-movie cheese nonsense, this is actually a game for you.

Blood Knights is a basic behind the back, god of war slash darksiders slash zelda or whatever brawler where you play as a crusader trying to fight the bad vampires. At the start of the game you are bonded to a vampire, who wears very little in the way of clothing but does look like she could throw a punch at least. Apparently this is cast on you by a priest, who seems oddly nonchalant regarding making some sort of blood pact between the commander of his knights and creatures of the dark. Though to be honest she mostly looks "mean" not really much else.

If you're playing the game two player, you divide up the characters, but if you're playing by yourself you can swap between the two. More on this later.

For the first little while the game hints that your character is unnerved by the blood pact and the vampiress is really hostile to the whole thing, but she's self-serving at best so doesn't really mind killing her former comrades to survive. You sort of get the idea it's going to have tainted feedback or you're going to be made ill by it and then NOPE another vampiress vomits on you and then you're a vampire. I'm not kidding. The scene is totally your dude being like 'oh god some of it got in my mouth aaaaaahh'

And then your second in command kicks you off a cliff. This pretty much sets up how storytelling works in this game. Right off a cliff and into the loo.

Monochrome slider: Betrayer

I don't know if Betrayer had a troubled development cycle or overly much about the game; I do know that it was made by 'at least some dudes' from the sweet team that made FEAR. While FEAR had a pretty iffy story that essentially did whatever it wanted and left you to pay the bill, it was a really enjoyable shooter with a really bad sequel.

You really hope that when they say "the guys who worked on FEAR" they like, left after the first FEAR and watched in horror as the second was made. Not the other option, that they worked on FEAR 2 and just left the digit out. You could say it makes too much of a difference!

(Snakefist)

don't want no skeletons on the lawn

Anyway the thing Betrayer is known for is its original prerelease materials depicted it with a very stark color palette of red on black, giving the game a weird perhaps even noir feeling to it. This may have done a lot to actually hurt the sales of the game, since lots of people went 'oh god my eyes they bleed red on black' and then wrote the whole production off. As it turns out, and the screenshots posted about here will display, Betrayer is on a rather unique slider system that allows you to set the contrast and intensity however you like. While I admit I didn't find I disliked the original artistic design, I do really appreciate actually getting to see some green in my gaming that isn't my wallet being devoured by steam sales so I flipped those sliders to see some glorious leaves. Such glorious leaves.

Also just kidding Canadian money is like blue and plastic now. I haven't seen green money since 2010!

Whoops I forgot about Scary games month: Dead Space 2

The scariest thing about scary games month is the way, every year, like a creeping zombie the holiday sales crawl just a little bit further up the month. I fully suspect by the time I pass from this mortal coil that "holiday sale" will follow "back to school" in like, early september, and halloween will be a one day event where they jam candy at a 400% markup then it disappears from the shelves after being priced 'to move' into garbage bags full of candy while they rush out their Christmas cacophony. But we're not allowed to call it Christmas sales, which does actually make sense, since really who cares?

"Dead space" is a good term for a horror game in a lot of ways even beyond being a puntastic little riff. There's a lot of dead space, filled with spooky but pointless noises, in just about every horror game I've ever played. Need to walk down the spooky empty corridor for your spooky surprise! Which is, unspookily enough, more zombies. Or sometimes, just nothing. Spooked you! You get nothing!

in a shocking twist, horror goes surgical

Oh I'm sorry, necromorphs. Which is basically like going through the dictionary and assembling two words which are as close to 'zom - be' as ghoulishly possible. Regardless, while I've always been a huge fan of the title of the game, I have largely mixed feelings about the first game. I really liked the crumbs button, the ship design and the way combat felt just different enough to be different. But horror largely isn't my cup of tea, and horror seems to mean 'colon sounds and raspberry jam' more than trying to build a scary atmosphere.

I feel sometimes like the feeling that violence is all around you gets away from 'horror' and turns more into being 'horrifying' if that makes sense. Dead Space 2 has even less restraint than the first game, it opens up with a reference to hallucinations that slowly unveil themselves in the first game then some totally hyper violent murder. I understand they're sort of going for a 'look at how real this shit has already got' moment, but horror is at its best when the shit is more implicit, less real so I don't even know how to start with this game.