The Indie Royale “Getaway Bundle” was released just the other day, and now I’m back with some thoughts on the package. These will be very quick, mini-reviews of each included game with my take on the overall quality of the bundle. As of this writing, you’ve got just under three days to pick it up, so choose fast!
Shattered Horizons
In this zero-gravity, team-deathmatch FPS, you float, hop, and fly between pieces of space debris and asteroids while taking out the other team and/or capturing/defending objective points. You’ve got a handful of weapon loadouts to try, including railgun, machine gun, assault rifle, shotgun, and submachine gun, and a few types of grenades. The controls are quick and intuitive if you’re familiar with other FPSes, but the freedom of movement takes some getting used to. Stealth also plays a part here, when you move your jets flare brightly, so you blip on enemy radars. On the other hand, you can affix yourself to any surface and move around without your jets, or you can take a gamble, set yourself in motion and put your suit on standby to make it harder for enemies to notice you. The catch is that booting back up takes a good second or so. It’s a quality game, and absolutely gorgeous too, the main problem is that no one seems to be playing it. At least through Steam, I wasn’t able to find a single server with a single human player connected, and you can only play against bots for so long without losing interest. There also doesn’t seem to be a ton of depth to it, strategically speaking, but that impression may be due to the fact that I haven’t seen a human team take on the zero-g environment, maybe there’s more to it than a team of bots can reveal.
Analogue: A Hate Story
This is one of those “games” that stretches and causes us to question the definition of the term. It’s less game really, and more of an interactive fiction, and an interesting twist on the epistolary form, since most of the narrative is relayed in the form of archived email messages and journal entries between people. Personally I had a hard time getting interested in Analogue because I had this nagging feeling. First, if I’m going to be reading, I’ve got a constantly-growing backlog of books that need attention, whereas if I boot up a game, I’d like to play a game. I give the Analogue team props for taking a stab at something new and interesting and innovative, but it wasn’t for me. The story concept is very interesting, a generational ship goes missing and hundreds of years later, you’re sent to investigate and find out what happened on board. The small percentage of the story I did gather struck me as very intriguing, so I can definitely see this being very appealing to a certain type of person.
Da New Guys
In the style of old point-and-click adventure games, you’re tasked with solving the case of your kidnapped wrestling teammate who recently won a title belt through questionable means. Art-wise, it’s not terribly impressive and looks like it was made in Flash. The voice acting is mostly decent but the writing attempts to be funny and consistently falls short. Between the not so successful humor, and the fact that I didn’t really like any of the characters, I had a pretty hard time getting into this one.
Super Amazing Wagon Adventure
This is the surprise hit of the pack, as far as I’m concerned. Playing on Oregon Trail tropes, this game offers a variety of retro-style mini-games strung together in a death defying trek across a country riddled with delicious wildlife, ornery buffalo, heavily armed bandits, unicorns, narwhals, sharks, mummies, zombies, giant bats, giant spiders, swarms of hallucinogenic mushroom induced inner demons, and a ton of other craziness. There’s a handful of weapon power-ups littered along the trail including things like arrows, machine guns, bomber jets, and trained falcons. Also, the more times you play, the more chances you have to unlock new wagons, some of which seriously alter gameplay. It’s a hilarious, addicting, and brutally difficult game with surprising variety and great music. Highly recommended, but watch out for those Space Rabies.
Waves
Another twin-stick shooter. As far as I’m concerned, there just isn’t a ton of room for innovation in this genre. Despite that, this is a solid entry if the twin-stick is your kind of bag. The defining mechanic in Waves is a time-slowing buffer that slowly fills up as you destroy your enemies. Activating the ability gives you a very, very short window of extreme slow-motion so you can assess your situation and adjust course accordingly. It’s a pretty addictive mechanic, and certainly adds as unique a flavor to Waves as a game of this genre can get. It’s certainly a pretty game, the visuals are flashy and impressive. The music and sound are high quality.
MiniFlake
It’s possible that this would have been more enjoyable if it struck more of a nostalgic chord with me, but I just could not get myself into this game. It feels almost intentionally clunky—but keep in mind that this game is still in Alpha. If you’re in the market for a retro-inspired rogue like I’d point you toward Desktop Dungeons instead, their alpha prototype is free to play and is visually far more appealing than MiniFlake.
Overall thoughts on the bundle:
Shattered Horizons and Super Amazing Wagon Adventure are solid games, and since Wagon Adventure is an exclusive debut in this bundle, it may be a while before you can pick it up anywhere else. Waves is decent, but doesn’t break a ton of new ground. Analogue, Da New Guys, and MiniFlake just weren’t doing it for me.
All things considered, I’d say that Horizons and Wagon Adventure alone merit the suggested price of $15, even if you never touch the others. However, being an Indie Royale bundle, as of this writing the minimum price is still only about $5.30, so if you’re not feeling particularly generous you can always opt for that. If the only thing that sounds appealing here is Super Amazing Wagon Adventure, you might want to just wait until it pops up as a standalone somewhere.