A small disclaimer before we start: I beta tested Unity of Command. I played it to death over a two day period, and then I went to the developer’s forums and posted a single incredibly long and exhaustive breakdown of what I liked and didn’t like about the game. Then I forgot about it, because the beta was released around the same time as Space Marine and Dead Island and I obviously felt I had to play something shit to restore karmic balance.
I’m pretty old. I’m sure most people would agree with me on this. I am not, however, old enough to have played Choplifter, an ancient game for an ancient incarnation of the Apple in which your little helicopter flew from left to right and right to left again, picking up refugees and blowing up tanks whether left or right or centre. I think all that’s left of the people who are old enough to have played Choplifter1 are fossilised remnants scattered amongst sedimentary deposits on the seabed. So it is a good thing that developers inXile have released Choplifter HD, a modern update with modern innovations such as pretty graphics, awful voice-acting, and zombies.
A slight scheduling snafu means today’s article isn’t quite ready yet, so I’m swapping it with Tuesday’s. Tune in tomorrow if you want to read science!
This isn’t really a genuine review of Defender’s Quest. A genuine review would outline all – or at least most of – the specific reasons why you personally should or should not buy the game. However, the existence of this excellent browser-based demo makes a genuine review of Defender’s Quest entirely pointless. (Go ahead! Play it! It’ll even let you export your demo save to the full game if you end up liking it so much that you buy it!) Instead, I’m going to spend this column space writing about why I personally like Defender’s Quest, and why it is an outstanding example of – not to mention an excellent take on – the tower defence genre.
EDIT: Check the comments for some additional discussion of Pineapple Smash Crew; while I stand by most of what I say here, at the very least it seems I had some expectations of what the game would be like that weren’t entirely valid.
I wanted to like Pineapple Smash Crew. I really, genuinely, desperately wanted to like it. It should have heralded the bombastic return of the top-down arcade shooter. It should have featured a game world where literally everything exploded. It should have left me with a perpetual silly grin when playing it. Unfortunately only one of these things turned out to be true.
Just one thing before we start:
GORG! AAAAAAAHHH! HE IS THE UNSTOPPABLE!
Right, now that’s out of my system we can get on with the review.
For anyone born into the heady days of the early nineties, playing Sonic 4 is kind of like returning to your family home after a long absence only to find it populated by complete strangers. They say they know you. They say they’re your family. They say please put the knife down, you’ll hurt yourself. And then they say BLEEP BLOOP as you cut away their human-looking exterior to reveal the unfeeling robot automata beneath. Sonic 4 is a clinical, emotionless replica of the original games, an experience utterly devoid of any warmth or vital spirit. It’s the sort of game you’d expect to see if there was a race of intelligent aliens out there who had quixotically decided to make a Sonic sequel fifteen years after the last “true” instalment in the series – all the parts are there and they’re all working as you’d expect, but the end product is fundamentally wrong on a level so subtle you can’t define it.
In some ways I suspect a proper review of Dustforce is redundant. People will look at a gameplay video or two and immediately know if they’re going to like it, because it’s just that sort of game – the kind that has a visceral appeal to a certain type of mindset, but one that will repel others in exactly the same way – and whatever I write here is going to be unlikely to change that. But Dustforce may just be an exception to that rule, seeing as my own reaction to it surprised me quite a bit.