Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £5.79
Where To Get It: Steam

I am always appreciative, when it comes to arcade puzzlers, or any sort of puzzler with a grid system, of epilepsy accessibility options. They don’t always work, but them just being there gives me a chance to review them (It’s in advanced options, fellow epileptics.) And so it is with Crossniq+ , a game about, as the title somewhat implies, making crosses in a grid. And, while it has a somewhat slow start… Hot-damn, is it enjoyable.

Okay, so, let’s get into the basics. You shift rows and columns, making crosses to a time limit, using your choice of mouse, keyboard, or gamepad (I found mouse the easiest, but each have their merits.) And, at first, it seems pretty simple. Shift them rows, right? But then the bonus/hindrance blocks start appearing. Fit a star into the cross, and you get more points (you also get more points the quicker you are about it.

But lock icons also start appearing, which prevent you from sliding blocks from one side to the other (two lock blocks near the edges is a very “Deal with it.” situation. And then… The cross blocks. You can move blocks from outside the cross box’s cross into it, but you cannot affect the row and column of the cross-block itself. This most definitely is a block you have to work around. You can get rid of any special block by making a cross’ row or column next to one, but that works for bonus blocks too, so… Be careful!

And, in both endless mode and time attack, you don’t have the luxury of letting it pass, because the more you score, the tighter those times get (and the more score you get for carrying on making those crosses!) It starts nice and slow, easing you into mechanics, and while each block is a surprise the first time, you quickly get a handle on their behaviour, making for a very reasonable difficulty curve.

Aesthetically, it aims for a late 90s console puzzle game feel, and it achieves that feel. Friendly, rounded icons, clear delineation of elements, photographic backgrounds, and music that, put together, distinctly put me in mind of some Dreamcast and PS2 games of the genre. So, suffice to say, I love that they achieved that goal, it’s an aesthetic I honestly wouldn’t mind seeing more of.

Three modes exist in the game (Time attack, Endless, and Local Versus), plus a reasonable tutorial, and a customisation shop for the (local) multiplayer mode, so, overall, yes, it’s a tightly designed puzzle with some simple elements that make for some nice, frenetic strategy. Also, a chillout room, with things you’ve unlocked that are just… Calm, and a cast of well designed, interesting characters. So, obviously… A recommendation from me!

The Mad Welshman never owned a Dreamcast. So, obviously, he wants Chu Chu Rocket on PC. The Devil Dice games too, while folks are at it.

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Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £11.39
Where To Get It: Steam

Sometimes, even games within a genre get hybridised, to interesting results. And so we come to Undermine, which mixes the room-based dungeons, secret rooms, keys, bombs, top down forced perspective, and bosses every X levels (3, in this case) of games like The Binding of Isaac, and the throwing weapon, jumping, and iterative play (including “Don’t lose as much gold next time” purchases) through a panoply of characters you really shouldn’t get attached to, of Rogue Legacy.

In Undermine, I am a peasant. I know my place. And my place is to go into a vast mine on the orders of my landowner, a wizard, and find what’s causing the earthquakes below his residence, or die trying. And then…

I am a peasant. I know my place. And my place is to go into a… You get the picture. But this peasant is slightly better equipped. Thankfully, my loyalty card with the local merchant carries over between runs, because it unlocks a character. Phew, thank goodness for Family Loyalty Programs.

The basic gameplay is pretty simple: In each run, you walk into a room, murder whatever’s in there by either hucking your pickaxe like a boomerang, smacking things with your pickaxe, or, if you’re feeling ballsy, dropping a bomb and hoping they blow up. Then you can leave the room, after smashing everything you can smash in it, collecting gold as you go. Occasionally, you’ll find a locked room, a chest, a powerup, or something behind rocks of some description, and you decide whether you want to spend the resources to open said obstacle.

Oh, and there are Mimics (with small signs that they are Mimics), and Cursed Chests (Which are incredibly obvious, so your main decision is “Do I want to risk curses like ‘The torches start tossing fireballs my way’ to get whatever’s in here?”) Such are the basics, not counting bosses, which are big long fights with gimmicks and patterns you will probably die to a lot of times before you get the hang of them.

Cool, that’s the basics… Except, there’s little touches to a lot of these that I quite like. Combat, for example, on top of pits and traps and whatnots, makes your jump super useful, overall. It’s a dodge. It allows you to leap over pits, either to lure enemies toward them to save effort, or to reach something you sort of need now rather than later. Fast travel is unlocked as soon as you find the map of the next area, and it’s honestly a charming presentation (A mysterious being puts you to sleep, then deposits you, safe and sound, in the area you choose. Said being must be a badass to do this.) And smashing gold?

Well, that lures the adorable, but also frustrating Pilfers, who deserve their own paragraph. Their weakness, in the monster tome, is “Gold.” They love it, and, as soon as you break open an ore chunk of some description, the gold comes flying out in various directions, and the pilfers ooze out randomly, looking to steal your rightful spoils. It has the potential to be really frustrating, except for two facts: Firstly, they take only one hit to reclaim your gold, and secondly, no other pilfer will touch it, because they are assigned to one piece of gold only, and if you take that gold, or bop the Pilfer? That piece of gold is safe, and the Pilfer runs off in disappointment.

Seriously though, they’re cute as heck, even if you bop them.

So, overall, Undermine is pretty fun. Its pixel art is good, its music is pleasant, and the game? Well, while not all areas of the game are done yet, and I’m certain fine tuning is being done as the devs go, it’s already quite playable, and enjoyable to boot. I would, as a sidenote, recommend mouse and keyboard with this game, as it gives you somewhat firmer control over where your pickaxe goes.

The Mad Welshman is against peasant labour practices. Peasants should have a basic minimum (livable) wage!

Filed under: Early Access Releases, Game Reviews by admin

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Source: Review Copy
Price: £4.49
Where To Get It: Steam

Superhero(in)es are, as has often been proven, less powerful without folks who support them. Without Alfred, the Bat Family, and, of course, Ace, Bruce Wayne would have had a much harder time of things, possibly an impossible one (not to mention the many other folks who helped over the years.) And not all of them are in glorious roles. Mo Schreibnitz, for example, is… taxi driver to The Shadow.

In this particular case, you are a delivery driver, getting items to a superhero who… Regularly forgets them. No, really, the conceit is that he’s forgotten something vital to beating a villain, somehow, and you are meant to deliver it to him. In a very real way, you’re keeping this hero afloat in the business. By driving in a horizontal, 2D environment made of lakes, hills, valleys and assorted other obstacles and physicsy things, trying to get to the end by accelerating, slowing down, reversing, and tilting your vehicle to make sure it doesn’t explode.

And I think my main problem with this game is that, from the beginning, it’s a tough job. Trials eased you in. Heck, most games of this genre ease you in. But nope, from the outset, the level you start in is loooong. While there are vehicle upgrades, on that old “Each level is more expensive than the last” deal… This isn’t as helpful as, say… Designing the levels around a vehicle? Because, of course, the faster your engine is, the more airtime you get, the more traction you have on surfaces… This adds to what already happens in such games, where a slightly different landing or jump snowballs into changes down the line. Also, a more powerful engine might let you clear a jump more easily… Or it might mean that reversing to get a better run up is too effective, and you fall down a ramp that was going to make you too slow to make that jump in the first place.

It makes less sense that some of the other tracks seem shorter, so… Should be first, right? Well… No, they all have problems. Not least because they’re all different vehicles. Normally, I would say “Oh, great, different challenges, cool!” … But they have little dirty tricks. For example, in the Mamba stage, there are big hills. Big hills, and your allegedly off-road beast… Can’t handle them without upgrades. There are power ups that help… Well, a jump that is sometimes useful, and a cleaning spray that’s only good for if you’ve been hit with rubbish… But mostly, this appears to be a case of “Awww, sorry buddy, only folks with Traction this high can enter!”

It is, aesthetically, pretty nice. The music’s good, the tracks clearly signpost what’s bad and what isn’t, what things do make sense, and the hero is rightly portrayed as a berk (Although that he’s a dumpy man is… I don’t know how to feel about that, honestly, and that yes, there’s a stereotypical “Voodoo Queen” villain is… Ehhhhh….) But in terms of play, while I’m sure fans of the harder games of this genre may enjoy it, it’s definitely not a great introduction to such games (Which, to be fair, are often frustrating whether they tutorialise or not. But still…)

As The Mad Welshman is a villain, well… You can guess who he’s rooting for, even if his pride won’t let him lose this damn thing again.

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Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £15.49
Where To Get It: Steam

Right, gonna get this part out of the way right now: While I’ve suggested fixes to the developer, at the time of writing, the colourblind support for Crystal Crisis is spotty at best, and the best option is to go into Extras (not Options, Extras), select custom colour scheme, pick colours that seem to work for you, and test them in Practice mode. I have requested further comment from the developer after the steam thread I gave this critique (and advice) disappeared, but so far, Nicalis has not responded, and I shall update the review when they do, or if this changes.

So, now that that particular beef is out of the way, the rest of the game is… Alright. Essentially, a 1P vs CPU game of dropping rotatable pairs of blocks, making patterns, and then popping them with the corresponding coloured gems that sometimes drop, in order to both drop blocks that can’t be interacted with for 5 drops (generally speaking), and to build up meter for the special abilities of your chosen characters (For example, Curly can either destroy rows on her own board, or turn rows of her opponents‘ board into the aforementioned unusable blocks.)

There is a story mode, although it honestly didn’t grab me that much (Essentially, a series of fights in which you choose which character you’ll play, and then get an ending depending on your path), while the game’s replayability depends on how much you like this sort of game (I’m alright with the various tile dropping and tile matching type deals, so I expect I’ll be coming back every now and again.) Finally, there is an Arcade mode, a decent (if slow) tutorial, a practice mode where the AI doesn’t fight back, and an Online mode that… Well, while I don’t normally comment on online modes, I have been seeing a fair amount of “Online is a ghost town” type threads out in the world. So playing with a friend online is probably your best bet.

Finally on the mechanical end, we’ve got a mostly solid, unlockable character roster, which includes both Nicalis characters, and, interestingly, some of the cast of Osamu Tezuka’s works, such as Black Jack and Astro Boy. I do love me some Tezuka characters, so it earns a few points with me for that.

Aesthetically… Well, the menus aren’t bad, with a little bit of character to them, the characters definitely aren’t bad, well modelled and animated, the stages, similarly, are nicely modelled, and the blocks are, apart from the aforementioned colour blindness issue, and the somewhat inconsistent nature of their lighting (Furthering the colourblindness issue at times)… Well, they’re blocks, and stars, and you know the difference between a block, and the various special things. The sound is good, the music’s good.

If it weren’t for the colourblindness problems, I would heartily recommend this. But, here’s the thing: Colourblindness is common. The ways to deal with colourblindness in video games are, equally, well known and commonly passed around in most gamedev circles these days. So to see problems like this, where three of the default colour schemes have green and yellow of similar light values (A big problem), and the colourblind one has pink and purple (Which even non colour blind people can have problems with), with the aforementioned inconsistent lighting further confusing things, I can, at best, merely not recommend it to colourblind folk. Because even when a game does what it says on the tin overall, this definitely is a blunder.

The Mad Welshman refers you to the previous review for education on some techniques folks use to be more colourblind friendly.

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Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £4
Where To Get It: Steam

Sometimes, you want a nice relaxing time. Other times, you play a match puzzler. Okay, I joke, because many folks, including myself, find such games relaxing, but games like ViviEon, with its constantly rising set of coloured, decal covered blocks (for easy colourblindness recognition), and its limited moves, has a surprising amount of tension.

Here’s how it goes down… As the crosshairs show, you have horizontal shifts, and vertical shifts. A single move shifts the row or column by one, in the direction you want, and it wraps around, with the exception of blocks able to fall, which do. Matching three or more tiles of the same type, horizontally or vertically, will allow those blocks to be destroyed once you end your turn. Once you do, some of your moves replenish (to a maximum of 45 moves), four rows of blocks drop down, and you keep going until the blocks reach the top, at which point, game over.

And you know what? I love this. I love the limitations, which are just enough that if you experiment drastically, you’re not going to have the room to reset that experiment, but still give you that room to do what you need to do, maximise the block destruction. I love that, if you find yourself a bit stuck, want to get a better combo score, or are a masochist, you can add more blocks willingly. And I love that simplicity, allowing you to know exactly where you stand. So, is there anything to crit?

Well… Not that much, to be honest. A lack of rebindable keys is not great, but then, the game is turn based, so it isn’t terrible. The soundtrack is slim, but it’s also relaxing, and doesn’t get tiresome, and the sound effects and graphics are solid, with just enough visual interest to keep it going. Maybe the UI could be scaled up for better readability.

Beyond that, though, I’ve had a heckuva time with ViviEon, coming back to it for just one more try, just… Let’s see if we can get a really big combo. Let’s see if I can last longer. Let’s see if I can do it quicker. Self chosen goals, within a tight framework, is one of my many jams, and ViviEon, as mentioned, does exactly what it says on the tin.

The Mad Welshman appreciates the tight. Especially when it also taxes his brain.

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