The Backlog - Nuclear Throne
I have a confession to make. Like many of you reading this, I have a list of games that I’ve been meaning play for years. I have way too many games on Steam, and a stack of cases sitting next to my TV. Close to five hundred games now. Maybe more. It makes me feel guilty. I haven’t touched 90% of them in one way or another. I need to fix that. So this week, I dug deep into my backlog and pulled out a game. I want to play all of them; I’ve just never had the chance. Now’s the time.
I landed on the twin-stick, rogue-like shooter Nuclear Throne. A former early access game by Clamber, the critically acclaimed indie title has you taking control of one of a cavalcade of mutated freaks and monsters as you try to blast your way through dozens of disfigured enemies to reach your ultimate goal, the Nuclear Throne. There is no story. No character motivations. Only pure gameplay.
The Backlog - Receiver
I have a confession to make. Like many of you reading this, I have a list of games that I’ve been meaning play for years. I have way too many games on Steam, and a stack of cases sitting next to my TV. Close to five hundred games now. Maybe more. It makes me feel guilty. I haven’t touched 90% of them in one way or another. I need to fix that. So this week, I dug deep into my backlog and pulled out a game. I want to play all of them; I’ve just never had the chance. Now’s the time.
It turns out that guns are more complex than video games make them out to be. You don’t just hold down the giggle switch until all the bullets kill all the bad guys. There are a few more steps to remember. Receiver tries to capture some of this complexity by putting you in control of every aspect of your handgun. You search a dark building scattered with lethal flying drones and automatic turrets that are ready to do their devastating duty on your flimsy body. Luckily, your enemies are as fragile as you are, and you have to survive while finding tapes that can tell you more about the reality that you have found yourself trapped in.
Every time you spawn in, you are given one of a few different handguns and a pocketful of bullets. Maybe you’ll even get a flashlight, if you are lucky, but don’t count on it. You could find yourself with a Glock 18, 4 fully loaded magazines, and a flashlight, or you could have a revolver with half a cylinder of empty shells and six usable bullets. It quickly becomes a game of managing what you have, balancing your few available rounds between whichever magazines you are lucky enough to start with or find. There is no ammo counter, or indicator of how many rounds you have left. You have to remember how many shots you have fired, how many fit in one magazine, and how many rounds you have to reload with.
It’s easy to find yourself in a situation that will get you killed because you aren’t prepared. You forgot to take the safety off, and you die. Your hammer isn’t cocked, and your gun can’t be fired. You only have two rounds left in your magazine but three enemies are coming at you. There isn’t a quick reload here, and it comes down to finger dexterity to see if you can survive. It makes each room into a nailbiting-ly tense experience. You don’t know what is around the next corner, but you know it can kill you in a split second.
You are fragile as hell. If you are so much as touched by an enemy, you are about to die. You might have a few seconds while you are bleeding out, but you won’t survive. It is brutal, and it changes every encounter from something normal into a life or death situation. All of a sudden the shot you are about to take is way more difficult. The possibility of death lurking around the corner compels you to panic. You’ll die countless times as you try to learn the world and it’s mechanics, and there is something amazing about the first time you manage to operate the gun without using the help menu in the corner fo the screen. The learning curve is practically a vertical line, but there is something intriguing about the way that the game plays.
The fundamental idea is solid, and the simple environment can be beneficial as it contains no distractions, just the few things you need to notice to survive. It is like a proof of concept that this can work, I just wish that there was a little bit of variety in the world. What would it be like if you were dropped in a forest full of monsters with a hunting rifle, or in the streets of a war torn city with an M4? I loved the idea, but I found myself enjoying the idea more than the execution sometimes. There are marked improvements that could be made to the graphics, voice-acting, level design, enemy variety, and more. But the core, the fundamental idea is as solid as I’ve seen. With some amount of polish and experimentation it could be great.
_____________________________________________
Tom has been writing about media since he was a senior in high school. He likes long walks on the beach, dark liquor, and when characters reload guns in action movies.
You Might Also Like:
The Backlog - Nuclear ThroneThe Backlog - Heavy Bullets
Death Doesn't Matter Anymore
_____________________________________________
The Backlog – Tower of Guns
I have a confession to make. Like many of you reading this, I have a list of games that I’ve been meaning play for years. I have way too many games on Steam, and a stack of cases sitting next to my TV. Close to five hundred games now. Maybe more. It makes me feel guilty. I haven’t touched 90% of them in one way or another. I need to fix that. So this week, I dug deep into my backlog and pulled out a game. I want to play all of them; I’ve just never had the chance. Now’s the time.
With a name like this, how could you not want to try this game. Tower of Guns is a simple first-person shooter heavily inspired by Quake and other fast-paced, movement heavy, arcade shooters. Part bullet hell, part roguelike, it has a somewhat novel take on the genre that is unfortunately held back by its limited variety.
The Backlog - Risk of Rain
I have a confession to make. Like many of you reading this, I have a list of games that I’ve been meaning play for years. I have way too many games on Steam, and a stack of cases sitting next to my TV. Close to five hundred games now. Maybe more. It makes me feel guilty. I haven’t touched 90% of them in one way or another. I need to fix that. So this week, I dug deep into my backlog and pulled out a game. I want to play all of them; I’ve just never had the chance. Now’s the time.
With the announcement of the now 3D sequel, there is no time like the present to jump back into Risk of Rain, Happo’s side-scrolling roguelike. You take control of one of a cast of high-powered characters, each with their own special attributes, from the simple Commando, to the quick and lethal Huntress, or the careful Sniper. And while it is technically a roguelike, the levels themselves follow a predictable format. Every one of the first four levels is a choice between two separate maps, each with two, slightly different, versions. So if you play half a dozen games or so, you’ve seen all of the level variety that there is to see.
Roguelikes and Story
I’ve written about roguelikes before, but one thing about these games has always been limiting, at least in my opinion. The implementation of a story (or lack thereof) constrains these titles, prevents them from being something other than a casual endeavor to pick up and play when the mood strikes, and then drop after a particularly frustrating death. As a genre, it hinges on gameplay and mechanics so much because mastery and its pursuit is what keeps players coming back.
The idea of “grokking”, of not only understanding the mechanics of the game, but absorbing them enough that it enables you to look at the game differently, is the bread and butter of the Roguelike/lite genre. Sure you want to reach the end of the dungeon and fight the last boss, but even after that, you will endlessly chase the perfect run, the platonic ideal of what a playthrough could be, where everything comes together just right, with all of the correct pickups and weapons to make playing a breeze.
The Backlog - FTL
I have a confession to make. Like many of you reading this, I have a list of games that I’ve been meaning play for years. I have way too many games on Steam, and a stack of cases sitting next to my TV. Close to five hundred games now. Maybe more. It makes me feel guilty. I haven’t touched 90% of them in one way or another. I need to fix that. So this week, I dug deep into my backlog and pulled out a game. I want to play all of them; I’ve just never had the chance. Now’s the time.
For some reason, it seems that I can't bring myself to stop playing roguelike/lite games, even though my criticism of them remains the same every time I lay a new one. FTL has been out for several years now, and while it does bring a slightly different style to the genre, it does so in a shell that can feel almost punishingly random, even after dozens of tries. It is a game about time management, a game about the agony of unknown decisions, a game about hoping for the best all wrapped up in a skin of a procedurally generated roguelike/lite space game.
Monolith - Review
Roguelikes are a genre that we’ve written about many times before, and will no doubt continue to revisit for a long time coming. In some ways, it is the perfect genre for an independent game, as it has an inherent sense of replayability to it that other genres lack. Level design is still important, but by allowing the gamer to slot remade rooms together at random instead of having to design each level by hand makes for a significantly easier creation process. And players are far more forgiving of repeated assets and gameplay in roguelikes than they are in a first person shooter or adventure game.
Monolith takes lessons from its predecessors (The Binding of Isaac) to blend the room-by-room, top-down roguelike gameplay with "bullet hell-esque" boss fights, and the marriage is a remarkably happy one. Your little ship can flit and soar across each room, dodging shots and tearing apart your enemies. You feel capable, partly because it isn’t a particularly difficult game, with a high baseline of health that lets you tank way more shots than most roguelikes do out of the gate, and it’s relatively easy to restore your health pool, or even expand it later on in the dungeon.