Look at Defender's Quest

Defender's Quest: Valley of the forgotten is a tower defense with light RPG elements that intrigued me as soon as I saw the screenshots. I love tower defense games and I have sunk countless hours into classics such as Gemcraft and Defense Grid so I decided to try this one to see if it was any good. And it is! Not perfect, of course, but full of neat little ideas.

Apparently there's a new game+ in this. Maybe I'll go for it.

The basic concepts are solid

The flow of this game goes like this, you travel on a world map and pick a level. Then you select what difficulty you want to fight the level and see what kind of enemies you will face and what rewards you get. Usually you need to beat the level on casual or normal to get to the second level, then you have additional challenges like 'hard' and 'lunatic' where the waves are tougher, the enemies are different and you get more scrap (the currency), more experience and special items for beating the level.

Only beating the levels is not enough most of the time, you need to do it perfectly, which means that no enemy can hit your librarian at the end of the maze. It's challenging and you won't be able to beat the harder difficulty before you level up your party and get better gear, so there are good reasons to do levels multiple times when you've progressed a bit.

Here's the map, you see what levels you have perfected (gold stars) and finished imperfectly (blue stars)

The basic tower defense structure is there. You start with PSI energy which you can use to place units and cast spells. Different units have different costs (from 25 to 100) and can be upgraded four times each. You actually have a party that you upgrade and equip with different skills and items and you summon the actual units. It's not like you have an endless supply of archers or fighters, you have six of each class maximum and you can buy more at towns on the world map for increasing costs.

All of your characters gain experience individually to unlock new skills or improve them.

Then the waves start coming and all of the enemy types you're expecting are there, and there some. Armored enemies that can soak up huge amounts of damage unless their armor is destroyed, enemies cloaked in darkness that have 75% to dodge all attacks unless they are hit by light spells, enemies that split into more faster enemies, enemies that attack your characters in melee or ranged.

Because in DQ, your characters can die and have to be resummoned, that's why there's a healer class and armor for your party. Speaking of upgrades, it's important to level up your characters using the PSI you get from slain enemies because the abilities they can use is tied to their in-battle level. Let's say you have a level 25 character with five skills, he won't be able to use his second skill until you level him up to 2, same for his third skill and so forth, maybe that's a bit convoluted.

Some interesting skill trees for your characters here and there.

This being said, the per-character stuff feels too much
I would've been 100% for this game if the customisation and skills were per class and not per-character. Right now if you have 6 character classes and most classes have upwards of 6-10 skills. Each skill has a maximum level of 8 and some of them are used only to boost other skills or to passively boost your character. Additionally, if you don't use a class much (knights and dragons come to my mind) you simply won't buy more of them for your party and never see these skills in action.

Even if I could afford Brestor, I'm not sure I would buy him/her/it

More importantly, it gets hectic into battles. You have a clear view of your party and you can pause the game at any time - or slow it down to half speed - but I feel like I'm always using my highest-level characters first and my lowest-level units last, which means that if there's a skill that I only have on one of these low-level units, I'm not going to see it very often. It also means that most skills are difficult to judge. If I have my six archers out, which one is doing the most damage? Which one is piercing armor? Which one is poisoning enemies? It's especially important if you're trying to place units that can soak up damage first in line so enemies attack them.

More so in level with multiple lanes, you sometimes need to spread yourself thin and having to decide which lane gets which unit can sometimes be a process where you make mistakes because the knight you dropped on the lane with the armored enemies doesn't have any armor-piercing abilities but your other knight does.

I'm not too sure what's going on!

How I would fix this
Lump all units of the same class together - still keeping the limits on how you can summon per map - have the units level a bit faster so they get more skill points and make the weapons/armors a bit weaker so you need better ones to outfit your six units. That way you know what your units do, each unit is similar in power and abilities. It removes a small layer of micro-management but I think it would speed up things a little.

All and all, I really enjoy Defender's Quest
I love unlocking things, I love leveling things, I love trying different strategies with my characters and my spell usage and I love having a battle on fast-forward go really well because my archers are shooting all kinds of arrows. If you like tower defense games, you should treat yourself to some Defender's Quest

Even when you thought you were done, there are special challenges that grant you tomes for your librarian with some special abilities.

iLook at King Cashing 2

Hey there people, starting today on Wednesdays I'll be taking a smaller look at iOS games because I actually play tons of these! They also have less mechanics than 'full' games so these looks might be shorter.

I was a big fan of King Cashing 1, the idea of random (and randomness-based) battles combined with some customisation and a little bit of grind here and there appealed to me, so when I heard that they were releasing a new one, I downloaded it and dove in. Three days later, I think I have a good idea of what I like, what I dislike and ultimately what design ideas make KC2 a game that I enjoyed very much.

All of the ideas from KC1 are back with a vengeance
Basically, you equip different units and weapons and bonuses then play a slot machine game until you defeat your opponent or run out of cherries (each spin costs 3 cherries), you need to match either a unit or a weapon with an enemy on a single line to deal damage, and each unit/weapon has some special attributes that helps you defeat your enemies. You then get gold, experience and random loot to progress, you use the experience to level and unlock new passive abilities and the gold is used to buy things and to fight (you need to pay a fee before you can fight an enemy, so sometimes you might need to grind lesser enemies to fight a big one)

Of course, enemies have also weaknesses and resistances and sometimes very annoying special abilities such as destroying your units/items when they hit or blocking damage. Some special enemies yield special rewards if you defeat them with items they're strong against, and some are special challenges.

I really liked how different units did different things, the gunner deals extra splash damage with guns, the potions deal various effects such as damage over time and adding more enemies to the reel, but my favorite class this time around is the necromancer with the ability to create more units whenever he hits, creating two more powerful ones when he critical hits enemies. Better than that, some of his units create copies of themselves whenever they hit! A great way to turn the odds in your favor. My strategy evolved as I progressed into the game.

Lots of customization with cool effects. I usually went for high hit rates more than damage personally.

I don't care much about the art style
The comic book style of this game is pretty neat but there's something that rubs me the wrong way about the design of certain characters, I'm not going to knock the game much for it because it doesn't affect great gameplay but there's just something that bothers me.

I don't know if it's the style as a whole or certain characters but they make me queasy.

A great game that I wish I could play more
Sadly, the game ends after three chapters right now, I wish there was more! I grinded a bit after I've defeated the last boss, but the 'coming soon' on chapter four is making me wish in a way that they would've waited to release the game so I would've continued playing it. What if I miss the next update? King Cashing 1 felt longer, even if I'm not sure it actually was. Maybe it was because of the way the game was presented, a long list of enemies to fight instead of a comic with story elements.

I would've waited another two months if I would've been able to just continue playing. Which is a good thing!

About the medals...
By winning fights, you get graded on how fast you killed the enemy and if you get silver medals in some pages of the comic book, you can fight a special enemy. You also get reduced costs to fight the same enemy if you get a better medal, making it free completely for gold ones. There is otherwise no incentive to get gold medals - besides bragging rights - and anything would have been a nice touch, maybe a special store where you spend gold medals to get special items? I'm not too sure.

You unlock secret fights by getting medals and usually they're pretty tough

Additionally, a small number to tell you how many turns you have left before you get graded a lower medal would've been neat, at the end of the game I could more or less guess it - usually when I'm down to 6 cherries it's going to switch to silver - but at the beginning when I was trying hard to get the gold medals, I would've appreciated it.

And finally, about the random luck that binds everything
I'm not sure if it's a 'right' way to play King Cashing 2, but I usually start the reels and then either close my eyes and press randomly or just mash the stop button to make it stop as soon as possible. Maybe there's a way to carefully stop each reel to perfectly do what you want with the game but for the number of times I spun that slot machine, it would have been madness to do it every time.

Just mashing randomly still wields interesting results with that many weapons in the second reel.

Some way to just randomly stop the reels after they've started would've been nice, maybe a toggle that you can set to 2-4 seconds or something, it wouldn't hinder the randomness of the game but make it go a bit faster.

Look at ClaDun X2

Cladun X2 is a dungeon crawler game made by Nippon Ichi Software, a company I know for weird games with sometimes interesting concepts, I'm always interested in games with strong meta mechanics and pixel art so I gave it a go and it's a very interesting game, one that I'm not going to finish because of save file loss, but interesting nonetheless.

Fighting in the pirate ship

Gameplay wise, it's fine...
CX2 is an action RPG where you walk around dungeons trying to find the exit - which often means you defeat monsters and collect items from chests, and gold. There are a few weapon types all of which have their own special abilities and associated skills such as swords, maces, daggers, staves, spears and bows. You attack using one button and can charge-up some attacks, you can use some skills by spending SP, you can dash, jump and talk, pretty standard. If you attack enemies from the sides or the back, you might deal more critical hits and some enemies and invincible except if hit from behind.

You also share a big part of your HP with other characters - you can see that in the upper right of the screenshot - so they take damage for you before your main character starts to lose health, which means you're going to create multiple characters and link them together using magic circles. Basically, they are board-game-like things where you place characters and items to strengthen your 'main' character who's going to go fight in dungeons. So you create more characters and level them up also so they give better bonuses when you go forward with your main character and if you try to make different classes with all of your characters and use different weapons, they're not going to play exactly the same and it's good variety.

This is a magic circle. I have made 7 other characters to support it.

Except they don't explain much and it's sometimes a mess
Even after playing a dozen of hours there are still mechanics I don't understand in the game, everything which could be fixed with better tutorials or help menus. Telling me what SP Debt is would be nice, or what these icons mean in the equipment screen - it's hard to figure out which armor is the best for me - or even telling me everything I can do in the game, I didn't figure out that 'item titles' were modifiers such as +1 attack or + 1 defense, I thought they only were names affixed to items. Apparently you can move them around and transfer them to other items. Or 'fame' which increases when you beat levels really fast, or about half of the items that I can use in the magic circle board thing.

Another thing that was really hard is playing this game with a keyboard because you have way too many keys set to different things, there's even a sub-menu for key used inside of dungeons such as jumping and attacking and they can overlap with other keys and it creates weird situations where you can't even open the menu to change your keys.

Play this with a controller.

How to fix this
Identify things better, explain what you can and can't do with the various systems of the game and it will go a long way in helping me understand what the game thinks I should've been doing. For the keyboard thing, maybe have less key bindings or clearer, more contextualized ones.

Lots of class choices with different abilities, spells and a passive skill.

Some of the fighting is clunky
I have tried all available classes and I love ranged classes the most but some enemies are really resistant to ranged weaponry. Melee is okay too but parts of the game are frustrating when you're trying to hit enemies and need to inch away at them until you can hit them but they can't counterattack, when you're fighting ranged enemies with easily predictable patterns or when you need to move in for a few hits then run away again. Movement feels a bit stiff and you need to be very precise at times, since this is a 2d pixel-based games, precision isn't going to be easy with analog controls.

It's also hard sometimes to get a good sense on your actual range and if your weapon is going to hit. Which is annoying, but you get used to it after a while. SP also doesn't regenerate, you need to pick up orbs to recover it, so use them wisely! Or get SP Debt, whatever that is.

How I would fix this
Make the movement a little bit more snappy, being able to move and react a little bit quicker could go a long way, also adding some kinds of range markers for some attacks wouldn't hurt, especially for enemies that periodically hit everything around them or shoot at fixed intervals - maybe a way for these enemies to show off they're going to attack early enough that you can dodge the hits?

This game is silly for the sake of silliness
You can do tons of little custom things in CDX2 such as editing your character's sprite, any of your weapon/armor, you can edit the background music and setup silly character 'links' between them to fool around. I didn't do much of it because it takes some time to make good sprites/music and there's no point to.

I did some character "linking" but it's random nonsense, albeit a little funny. I just wasn't ready to invest any time drawing sprite art or learning this game's music system.

My archer is just fine as he is

How I would 'fix' this
Add some reward for deeply customizing your character, if you edit your face, for example, you can get a bonus to maximum SP! If you edit the music of the level you're going in, maybe you get some boost to movement speed! Editing weapons might increase their strength and linking characters could give them some bonuses when you place them in magic circles.

I picked these links at random but they're pretty silly.

Look at Antichamber

I can't say that I've played many first person puzzle games in the vein of portal recently, mostly because they often encompass some elements of first person platforming and I'm not a big fan of that concept, but probably because I love my puzzles more in the Layton sense, removed in some way from the flow of the game in self-contained bits and chunks. Antichamber is doing the first person puzzle thing greatly with many surprises and fairly impressive technical tricks.

The style of Antichamber is something entirely
Through the magic of - my guess - loading big chunks of levels at the same time and the judicious use of portal-like mechanics, antichamber features what it calls "non-euclidean geometry". Basically, the level layout doesn't make physical sense. You might be going up stairs forever or running around the same corner over and over or looking at a thing from different directions with radically different results. It is probably extremely interesting on how this is done, I can only speculate here but the seamlessness is stylishly impressive.

These stairs all bring you back to the same spot forever.

Would the game work without that kind of element? Would Antichamber stand on its own without it's minimalist style with bright colors thrown here and there and weird hint-like pictures that could also be taken as deep life lessons? I'm not too sure. The way everything connects almost perfectly (I've spotted some areas where part of the levels 'bled' into each other) encourages the player to progress and unlock more things throughout the game.

At any time, you can go back to any room you've been to before

But some of the puzzles can be frustrating
There is no story in Antichamber. No funny narrator to tell you what to do or what's going on. In fact, nothing is going on, I'm sure. You progress in the labyrinth-like map, find new tools with special abilities (some of which that aren't explained well, which stumped me for a while) and discover puzzles here and there that you might or might not be able to solve. And if you can't solve a puzzle, you might try for any length of time to do it, the same thing goes if you can solve the puzzle - i.e. if you have all the tools required to do so - you might fail repeatedly and conclude that no, you can't solve the puzzle.

I spent quite some time on this puzzle and had to look it up on the Internet.

This is exacerbated by the fact that a few puzzle take some time and precision to setup, placing blocks around to trigger chain reactions for example can be a time-consuming process where you need to precisely align things together. Trying that a few time and failing lead me to go to the Internet to find the solution, or sometimes just figure it out by random luck and never think about it again, happy to have proceeded. Some puzzle might also involve light platforming - if I did them correctly - and it is not the most precise thing ever.

You're not very helpful, Antichamber.

In any case, the lack of story hurts a little bit the game in this way because there is no voice over to tell you that you can't solve a puzzle and should come back later, there is no hint anywhere except in cryptic messages that could maybe help you but most of the time they make sense after you've solved the puzzle. The only hint you get about most of the game is that hitting the ESC key brings you back to the main room and then you can go back anywhere you want from there.

How I would fix this
Since one of the most frustrating things is to not know if you can solve a puzzle, adding some kind of code near the puzzles so you know what you need to successfully navigate through them would be helpful. Maybe explaining the functions of the tools better too? I had some trouble figuring one of them out and until I saw what it could do on the Internet, I couldn't proceed.

One other thing that I didn't like about Antichamber is the controls for some of the features of the tools you get. Middle mouse button + right click is perfectly fine, but middle mouse button + left click? Having to move my hand in a weird way to solve some of the puzzles wasn't the most comfortable thing. Maybe binding that to the ctrl key or something else would've helped in that case.

All you need to know, when you start up the game maybe.

Housekeeping

Sorry folks, I've been doing crazy overtime this weekend, no review!

Look at Mark of the Ninja

I'm terrible at stealth games. In metal gear solid, I constantly have to shoot my way out of failed sneaking operations, and I don't feel bad because even tho it was ridiculously tough to win such encounters in the old MGS games, the recent ones - such as peace walker - left you with good options and choices in case you knew you had to fight at one point or another. I've heard many good things about Mark of the Ninja and decided to give it a shot.

No amount of fine tuning will fix bad players
This game plays great, the controls are spot-on and will allow you to do pretty much whatever you want - with some exceptions when contextual menus get out of hand and you can't do a specific thing because you're too close to another, dropping guards in vents comes to mind - the character moves precisely where you want to and you get tons of informations from the world.

You know the radius of the sounds you're making, you know if you're hidden or not with simple visual cues, all of the possible information that you could need to pull of successful stealth missions is readily available. Vision cones, being able to peek out of doors and vents, contextual menus for everything... That being said, I didn't have a great time playing it because I seem to be terrible at it. Jumping behind a guard only to have him turn around and shoot me, or simply miss the assassination prompt - terrible with a mouse/keyboard, but I'm not holding that against the game - and punch at the air instead of being a stealthy ninja. I'm not going to blame the game if I'm terrible at it, of course, but not being able to play it in any satisfactory way is kind of a bummer for me.

Woops

How I would fix this
Add more combat-oriented options to the game so you can get out of sticky situations easily. Maybe some difficulty level toggle to be able to play through the game with easier stealth scenarios and more dispatchable enemies. Or some kind of Ez-Gun like in metal gear solid where you become harder to detect and regenerate life at all times to make the game more easy. Why not allow you to stab with your ninja sword instead of punching? After being spotted 20 times by a guy I had to follow, trying to complete challenges, I decided Mark of the Ninja was too tough for me.

Get points!
You get score for everything you do in MotN, sneaking past an enemy undetected, killing him after, to finally be hiding his body. Secret items hidden in the levels also net you points, so do some challenges where you need to get to a specific point without triggering some manner of traps. You also lose score when you raise alarms - which is a disapointing because your total score is bummed and at this point you're better to just die anyways and restart. Points are used for leaderboard purposes, which I do not care about and to unlock new abilities and item powers, which I do care about.

Challenges and point totals you need to get

You have a few objectives in each stages, one is to get a certain number of points, that unlocks some upgrade points, you also need to do objectives such as breaking a certain number of lights or not being spotted at one point in a mission. Maybe doing these objectives was what I did wrong in the missions I struggled. For example, the mission where I was spotted 20 times it was because I had to hide enemies in dumpsters and doing so placed me in obvious disadvantages. You also need to find three scrolls per level, each with a little poem or story on them.

How I would 'fix' this
Add another difficulty level untied to leaderboards where you don't lose points for raising the alarm - thus removing the apparent need to restart the level each time you mess up.

The upgrades are nice but not earthbreaking
You have a few items in MotN, darts that make noise and attract enemies, smoke grenades to run away of tight spots or block laser beam, spike traps that impale anyone stepping on them, bugs that noisily eat enemies alive - or dispose of corpses. You also get new takedown moves such as hanging from the ceiling or through grates or from the ground. I'm not sure if I'm entirely at fault here but it happened to me a few times where I didn't know which move I had and tried to attack an enemy from a location where I couldn't do anything. All and all, my problem is that I'm not seeing anything here that would change how I tackle the core gameplay, and that's what's important.

It's not really customisation, it's just adding things to your arsenal and you mostly will use them all anyways, adding more uses to the flashbang or a bigger radius to the smoke grenade won't change how I play the game.

I usually associate screens like this with deep character customisation, but not really in this case.

How I would fix this
Add more variation to the moves and different items that would change how you play the game, anything to make the game easier for different kinds of players, maybe stealth enhancing  techniques or straightup fighting  upgrades.

Look at Puzzle Chronicles

Puzzle Chronicles is a nice switch on the classic puzzle fighter genre that got popular with Puzzle Quest and games like it. I'll state upfront that videogame titles haven't got better with times since you can notice how similar both of them are. Usually, puzzle fighters are turn-based grid fighting games where you match gems and skulls and wildcards, often you get experience and gold to find yourself equipped with skills and items that affect the flow of the game in some way, fighting against an array of enemies also empowered with special abilities. Sometimes, mini-games will allow you to do different things to increase your choices.

The core experience of Puzzle Chronicles is subpar
The main battle system is a mess. Basically, you need to match skulls with star gems so they break and that gives you rage, which in turns attack your enemy and that gives you more of the board to play with. You also match wildcards to any colors of gems and match regular gems with multipliers to gain energy to use skills. If you have items equipped and match a square of the item's color, you'll activate its power. Gems fall from left to right and you can rotate them and make them fall faster if you want.

That being said, it's never clear what the goal of the battle system is. While you're winning if the board is mostly yours and losing if the enemy is pushing the line your way, how exactly you can be victorious is vague at best. Consider the following picture.

In the upper half of that screenshot, I won the fight at that moment (you can see the gold and experience gems start to fill up, an interesting system to say the least, when you finish a fight you gain gold in proportion to the surface of the board that is empty and experience in proportion with the filled part) and there is still a good quarter of the board available to my opponent. In the lower half of my picture, I was still fighting (you can see my red gem effect activating) even tho there's only one column left for my enemy.

The problem is obvious, do you win based on your position on the board? Does the character and enemies have hidden HP totals that go down whenever you get attacked or attack? Another glaring flaw is how quickly and weirdly a battle can go and it's often unsure on how you can turn the tide.

These cobras are the worst because they can do a lot of stuff, all of which I'm not exactly sure what are the consequences, but they make me lose a lot.

How I would fix this
Surface more information, that's obvious, if you need to deal some number of damage to win, show that number (and show the damage you're dealing), if the line needs to be at some specific threshold for you to be victorious, show that threshold. If the enemies do special abilities, add markers and icons on the screen so you know when they're active and when they're gone. Also show some text explaining what the abilities do! "Poison: Deals damage" is pretty useless because as far as I know, there is no life total in this game, only a bar that moves back and forth.

The map is stylish but useless
Moving around in Puzzle Chronicles is a bit slow for reasons not useful to gameplay. You move your cursor on a 2d map and then watch your character walk very slowly to your destination. Some specific things such as training your pet or shopping are located on certain areas of the map that you need to walk all the way back to. This drags a bit and cuts between the fights and especially because some minigames are in specific areas of the world map, this makes going back to train or shop not perticulary interesting.

There's some style to this game but walking very slowly isn't good.

How I would fix this
Either you map all the important things (pet training, shop, mini dungeons and other mini-games) to some menu item, or you make movement faster (or instantaneous), that would help the flow of the game.

There's enough variety in the game's systems to keep interest



Otherwise, Puzzle Chronicles is fine, there's enough to do that will keep me from playing it to completion, you get stats, gear and puzzles that allow you to train your pet or discsover new items. It seems like there's a fair choice of equipment too, even tho I'm focusing on certain aspects of the fighting system such as generating rage and the like, because I often win that way.