Starbound

So I have been playing a lot of Starbound recently. It's a Minecraft/Terrarria style game where you dig, mine, craft and build. now I said it's a Minecraft/Terrarria style game but don't get me wrong, it's actually good.

I like Terrarria and Minecraft, although they both got pretty stale after a while. Starbound on the other hand seems like it's going to keep me captivated for a good while.
The main draw of Starbound is that it's about space exploration. 

At the beginning of the game you have to create your character from one of six races, each with their own backstory. When you begin playing you will be stranded by yourself in your ship hovering above a strange new planet. After a quick (and optional) tutorial you learn how to survive. 

The gameplay is pretty solid, the crafting system is works like Terrarria although the game tells you what you can and cannot make from the get go bar some unique designs that you have to find blueprints for.
Melee combat is fairly basic and boils down to click when monster A gets too close. On the other side the ranged combat is more varied, on the other hand ranged weapons, in the form of bows and guns, is a lot more engaging even if the bows are pretty under powered at the beginning.
When using a bow you have to charge the shot by clicking and holding the mouse, by timing it right you can do more damage adding an extra layer to combat. Guns also come in various forms ranging from pistols to assault rifles to flamethrowers.


The game is very much similar to Terrarria in terms of aesthetic and the reason for this is that the lead artist worked on the art for Terrarria.

Right now the game is on Steam Early access so it's not finished yet so that means tons of updates are on the way, this is, to me, both a good thing and a bad thing. Many people wil claim that the game is unfinished and unfit for purchase and they may be right but what is currently in the game is several quadrillion randomly generated planets a simple and usable multiplayer system (I'm looking at you Minecraft) and tons of content with more to come.

If you love indie games this one is a must buy, if you don't mind it changing frequently and wiping your saves through patches.

The price on Steam early access is £11.99 here.

Another 100 games

Valve let 100 games through steam Greenlight today. most of them are fairly "eh" but there is one or two that caught my eye.

One game that looks interesting, if not insanely silly, was Probably archery  in which you control an Archer from a first person view, the only thing is that it controls very similarly to a game like QWOP. A good video of that game is on the channel of the wonderful man JsmithOTI here.

Another that I thought looked pretty good was The Girl and the Robot which is a game where you play a young girl escaping a tower along with a robot companion. The artistic style seemed very Disney-esque reminding me a lot of Kingdom hearts. The amazing Prescription Pixel also did a video here.

If your interested in seeing the rest of the games then check out the Steam page about it.

The Consuming Shadow (Beta)

I have been a big fan of Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation for the last few years, so when he announced not too long ago that he was working on a new game I was more than a little stoked. The new game he has been working on is called The consuming Shadow currently in open Beta and it's a Lovecraftian horror themed game similar to his previous Chzo Mythos.

The game is a rouge-like, similar to FTL: Faster Than Light, where you have 72 hours before an ancient God returns to the world to brutally slaughter all of humanity. No pressure. Luckily there is a banishing ritual that will stop the invading God from crossing over to our world and killing us all. Unfortunately our main hero knows nothing about it but it's existence.

The game is played by making you travel from Town to Town all over Britain. Each city you encounter could either be completely fine and you could buy supplies or look for a job so that you can earn money for said supplies, or the city will be "terrorized" which brings you to the action of the game. In a Terrorized City the Citizens will request your help with one thing or another, which brings you to the action.

In these sections of the game you control your character in a dungeon crawl styled environment. To move you can click the arrows, although it was updated to add keyboard controls, and you can click on the screen to shoot enemies at a distance or melee them at close range. your goal in each dungeon is different but usually descends into, search every room, interact with every object and hope you don't encounter enemies so that you don't need to waste bullets.

As you explore these dungeons you will come across notes. These notes will mostly give you information about the three Gods influencing the world and how to banish them, as you find more of these notes you get ever closer to banishing the God that wishes to wreak havoc on our world. after you have gathered up enough information you must travel to Stonehenge, cast the Banishing ritual and save the world!

Ideally.

I have never beaten this game, I failed to mention how tough this game can be. There are very limited supplies in game and although you can still fight, running out of bullets can be disastrous, and bullets are not the most common thing in the world. You also have to manage your health and sanity. 

Health is easier to manage, every safe town has a hospital that you can use to find medical supplies to heal yourself up. Sanity on the other hand can be refilled with the use of  "Illegal Drugs" in the form of a syringe, this is only a temporary effect though, the only way to refill the sanity meter permanently is through random events, like your family texting you a encouraging message. 

This obviously means that your sanity can stay very low for a long time and the effects of low sanity are not good.

 When you start a new game you will notice two boxes, "Begin journey" and "shoot myself". 

You might think that it's a nice gimmick but shooting yourself is actually a mechanic. When your character gets low sanity he will get stressed and when he gets stressed your options can change suddenly into "Shoot myself" allowing some unobservant players to get killed. 

It is preventable by rapidly clicking the mouse but the lower your sanity the more difficult that is, becoming impossible with very little sanity.

There is also a magic system. the system reminds me of Eternal Darkness in which you combine certain words of the Ancient Gods to help yourself. I have only found a couple of spells ranging in usefulness one allowing me to see in the dark and another unlocking doors. 

And on the final note. This game is a rouge-like for a reason. Every time you die you start again. From scratch. That's it. There is a progression system that helps out a little bit. Every time you die the game totals your score. This is cashed in to level you up, every time you level up you get a skill point that you can use at the beginning of a new game to give you various bonus like more health, a faster car speed, higher maximum ammo etc.

I personally love playing this game, it's very atmospheric and while it doesn't scare you by making things jump out at you, it does terrify you when you waste your late bullets on a hallucination.

So far there isn't much in the way of graphics or plot, but it is in Beta and I look forward to seeing more of this game in the future.

100!

Holy crap!
I started this blog 3 weeks ago to this date and after that time I managed to get 100 page views, now that might not seem like much too many people, I'm even sure that more people can get more views in shorter time but it makes me feel very proud to have people from all over the world read my silly ramblings on things, I'm going to keep on doing this and try to get to the big 1K. Cheers to all of you how took the time out of your day to read this and anything else I posted  in the last 3 weeks it really means something to me.

~B

P.S. Yahtzee from Zero punctuation just released the Beta for his new game The Consuming Shadow and I've had a go at it, it's a very fun and promising game so expect a review in the near future.

Can it be!?

I swear to all that may or may not be holy, is this a Gurren Lagann reference? If it is Risk of Rain just earned some serious respect!

Kickstarter and Steam Greenlight

So if I am going to do this Blogging thing for real I should probably talk about some things that I'll mention a whole bunch and that is Kickstarter and Steam Greenlight. Kickstarter and Steam Greenlight are two major aspects of the Indie game Community. Now most people already know what they are but I feel that I should explain it to those who don't know or those who completely get it.

Lets start with Kickstarter. Kickstarter is a website that allows people to crowd fund projects. 
"What is crowd funding?" you ask, well crowd funding is when companies skip past publishers and go straight to the audience, us. 

This means that some game developers can use Kickstarter to bypass a publisher that doesn't want to publish their game.

The way it works is that someone, in our case a games developer, will create a Kickstarter campaign for a game that they want to develop, asking for an amount of money. Gamers like you or me will see said campaign and think "hmmm that looks interesting I might want to play that" and might fund it, adding to the total funded.

When that game gets fully funded, the developers will be trusted to fully develop the game but even if the game is funded many people can still add their funds to the game, because of this many Kickstarter projects can have "stretch goals" that are additions to the project if it gets funded by an extra amount.

A prime example of a good Kickstarter would be the game Shovel Knight as it was funded really early into the Kickstarter campaign but decided to add many stretch goals that all got funded, adding in many new features into the game.

It's important to note that although Kickstarter has had a massive  impact in the Gaming community it is not restricted to games, many projects are not gaming related at all.

That was Kickstarter in a rather lengthy nutshell, I guess I will go onto Steam Greenlight now.

Steam Greenlight is a way for smaller indie games to get noticed. Because Steam is freaking awesome and it is pretty much the primary place to shop for PC games Valve decided to help the little guy with Steam Greenlight.

 What Steam Greenlight does is helps smaller games get published onto Steam. They do this by allowing the community to vote for which games they want to get published onto Steam. 

Valve then accepts the highest rated games into steam every now and then, this is super useful for indie games because many of them don't get much attention and would get overlooked easily but with Steam Greenlight they will get onto Steam and get seen by loads of people.

Thanks to both of these systems the Indie game community has grown so much over the past few months. 

With some Kickstarter games going viral like Shovel knight or FTL: Faster Than Light they can get accepted onto Steam Greenlight allowing many gamers who didn't know about it before to notice the game and play it.

"Hello World!"

Hello to all fans of Indie Games (or Games in general) this is my brand spanking new Blog.
What I intend to do with this is to post general news and such about games, but most specifically indie games.
This was created because my Course in Tech requires me to do this but if people actually like this I wouldn't mind making this a continued thing!

And to actually be relevant, the Kickstarter funded game Risk of Rain managed to get onto steam recently, now I haven't purchased the game yet but I have had a brief chance to play it through the demo which is free on the Risk of Rain website Here.

The game is a 2D Action RPG Rouge-like that revolves around speed. Your character has 4 abilities that are unique to each character.

There are many characters able to be unlocked although I only had a chance to play a couple of characters they were definitely varied, each one playing very differently.

When you start the game you will spawn in a random world that starts out empty. as you explore enemies will spawn around you, encouraging you to keep on the move as you'll get swarmed by enemies otherwise.

Spread out around each level you will find various chests, some containing money or experience, others containing items that help you survive.

Now to the big one, the unique feature in this game is that the difficulty increases over time, every 5 minutes the game moves up a difficulty level from "very easy" to "easy" and so on until you reach the highest or, more likely than not, die.

When running for your life looking for that one item, that one chest with a full heal, you may stumble onto a Teleporter. These Teleporters are the end of the level, once activated they will start to charge up but in the mean time the give you a nice juicy boss and oh boy are those guys tough so good luck fighting him, I hope you were prepared. As well as summoning the boss the Teleporter will also cause enemies to stop spawning and the Teleporter won't be ready until you defeat all the enemies and the boss.

Onto the graphics. oh boy them graphics. the game looks stunning, now it doesn't blow you away with its super realistic Crysis 3 had a baby with Battlefield 4 graphics, but it does have amazing visuals none the less, creating an atmosphere that, for me, is very reminiscent of shadow of the colossus, helped in no small part by the beautiful music. For 2D pixel art, the guys at Hopoo Games know their stuff, making the most beautiful collaboration of pixels I have seen in a long time.

The game is £6.99 on steam right now and whatever that is in USD for all you Americans out there and I think that is a price definitely worth paying I know it will be for me.

All images Courtesy of the Risk of Rain website as well as the steam page.

EDIT: Finally bought Risk of Rain so now my opinion means something. the game is really worth it but something I failed to mention was that is super hard, like seriously I can't get past level 3, really addictive and fun though every time I die I feel the need to play more. I have only unlocked one other class other than the starting class but he plays hugely different to him and I expect that all the others will too.