The subject of this installment: the procedurally generated, action platformer Unfair Rampage: Knightfall, by indie developer Imphenzia. The game currently has a demo available on Steam, but no official release date yet.

Unfair Rampage requires players to take control of a futuristic knight who is sent back in time. The past is falling apart, literally, and the heroes of the past need to die an honorable death. It is then the player’s mission to kill the knights of the past using firearms or close melee attacks. I didn’t find much more to the story, but even without extended lore I dig this humorous sci-fi take.

Levels in Unfair Rampage are procedurally generated — the main terrain consists of randomly-stacked blocks meant to be traversed, leapt, and destroyed. Players must do so quickly, as the landscape slowly crumbles behind them. Besides the decaying terrain, players must also contend with the knights of the past, huge buzzsaws, bottomless pits, and other various hazards to avoid.

This is all presented in a cartoon style, with well-designed graphics. Imphenzia is a one-person development team, so it’s impressive what a single designer can create. Not an easy feat.

However, I can’t say much more about Unfair Rampage, because I was not able to progress very far. There are checkpoints throughout the campaign, but I couldn’t even reach the first one. While the game is designed to be a challenge, the issue wasn’t difficulty, but rather the controls.

Controls for this type of 2D play need to tight and precise, which is not what I have experienced. The knight drifts after releasing the control stick, which might be manageable if not for the imprecise jumping. In a fast-paced, crumbling world of this type, jumps need to be immediate and exact. In Unfair Rampage, my character jumps almost an entire second after I press the controller button. It was such a noticeable problem that I thought perhaps it was my wired controller having issues, but the same problems were present while utilizing the keyboard. After a dozen or so attempts, I gave up.

For me, controls are the most important part of a videogame. In Unfair Rampage: Knightfall, the controls in their current state are prohibitive to advancing in and enjoying the content. I Hope that the controls will be fine-tuned before release — if not, those digital knights of the past will miss out on dying an honorable death.

The post This Is Not A Review – Unfair Rampage: Knightfall appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Finishing construction on Gopher City!

LOW I accidentally unlocked everything before starting the real game.

WTF The return of the boss-maker.

Boss 101 couldn’t have come at a better time. While Cuphead is out there humiliating thousands of people foolish enough to take up arms against it, Boss 101 swoops in with an antidote — A boss rush experience that’s completely accessible and beatable by players of all skill levels. That’s right, boss rushes aren’t just for hardcore masochists any more!

The game is set in a near-future world where Earth has been conquered by a heartless robo-bureaucracy and then left to its own devices. This proves to be a poor decision on the part of the Robo-council, as it allows a group of rebels (including a talking jetpack and a kid desperate to impress his X-Games star brother) to fight back against the various bosses who have set up bases throughout their arm of the Milky Way galaxy.

These boss fights make up the vast majority of Boss 101‘s content. Beyond them, there’s only story segments and a couple of classic arcade minigames. Fortunately, the boss fights are intensely playable, using the techniques of bullet hell games to challenge players while letting them earn enough health to survive the onslaught of beams, rockets, and arcing electricity. At the end of each fight players get a payout based on their performance and the boss’ bounty, and they can use the money to unlock weapons or upgrade stats to prepare themselves for the next match.

Also, the player enters each fight with an upgradeable machinegun and special weapon of their choice, and they’re free to swap between the two at will – each boss is weak or strong against particular weapons, so players will want to practice with all of them so that they’re ready for whatever comes.

…Or maybe they don’t, considering Boss 101‘s most intriguing feature — the boss generation mechanic. The game offers an interesting narrative conceit in that every time the player warps onto a stronghold planet, a boss is constructed to fight them.

The human forces have an ace up their sleeve, however – they’ve hacked into the boss generation algorithm, allowing them to randomize the boss output every time they head off to fight one. In practice, this means that the player is always able to choose which boss they’re fighting, with the exception of four setpiece battles. Like using the flamethrower? Just keep rerolling the boss until it’s weak against fire. Prefer bashing bosses apart with a giant wrench? A few more clicks and it’s suddenly very doable.

The result is that Boss 101 is a game that is exactly as difficult as the player wants it to be. They’re always free to fight whatever the first boss loaded is, just as they’re able to spin the wheel as many times as it takes to spawn a crumbling wreck that’s nearly ready to defeat itself.

Players looking for a more traditional challenge can try the boss rush and iron man modes – and yes, there’s a boss rush mode within the boss rush game. In these, the player is thrown up against a series of truly randomized enemies, each one with more health than the last, until finally they run out of steam. Any money earned during these bonus modes can be used in the main game, so an industrious player could easily unlock everything the game has to offer simply by practicing their boss-fighting before delving into the story mode.

The game’s pixel-art style is another strength – specifically, the design of the modular bosses. Each of the game’s 40 pre-built bosses has five distinct body sections, with each one employing a different kind of attack. As bosses are generated, each of the five sections a randomized to offer a functionally-unlimited number of possible foes, each one more bizarre than the last. I saw a dragon with a shark head and a beehive coming out of its back, and another time, a brontosaurus riding a samurai sword with a robot head. Every boss creation is more loopy than the last, and I never tired of seeing inventive new combinations.

However, the most unexpected thing about Boss 101 is how utterly chill the whole experience is. The cutscenes all feature light comedy conversations between quippy characters, and the threat posed by the enemies never seems particularly dire or imminent. Even Boss 101, the game’s titular villain, seems like a perfectly reasonable fellow who’s not particularly concerned about the wave of destruction crashing over the planets he controls. All of the elements combine to create the first side-scrolling bullet hell game to qualify as a ‘hangout’ title. There’s even a bonus mode where the player can fly a kite while the main character and his jetpack muse about the big questions in life.

With its simple gameplay and great style, Boss 101 would have been a perfectly serviceable ‘light’ bullet hell shooter. The fact that it has endlessly diverse bosses and a huge wealth of bonus content is just gravy. I’m always happy to see developers attempting to revitalize genres and bring them to new audiences, and this is a perfect example of devs going above and beyond to deliver far more game than they needed to, aimed at a larger audience than I would have thought possible. Rating: 8.5 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed and published by Donley Time Foundation. It is currently available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 6 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: This game was not reviewed by the ESRB, but it contains Fantasy Violence. It’s fun for children of all ages! Seriously, this thing is basically harmless. A guy in a jetpack shoots robots until they explode. There are references to people being killed off-camera, but it’s never scary or threatening in the least. Basically anyone can play this game.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: You’re fine. I played almost the entire game without sound, and all I had just one problem: The final boss has a charge-up laser that can completely destroy the player in seconds. Immediately before it fires, it makes a distinctive whining sound. Without being able to hear it, you’ll have to be much more careful about getting out of the way of the beam early.

Remappable Controls: Yes, this game offers fully remappable controls.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available in the options.

The post Boss 101 Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH The Castlevania-tribute Clock Tower level.

LOW Seriously, how is the shotgun this well-hidden?

WTF Hey, why can’t we get Aliens Infestation on Steam?

It’s not really a ‘demaster’. There was never a current-gen Mummy game to be stripped down into a 16-bit format, as Devolver Digital has so effectively done with the Serious Sam franchise. No, despite the title, this is something older and far more interesting.

The Mummy Demastered harkens back to the SNES and Genesis days, when a publisher – often Acclaim – would obtain the license to a film and then farm it out to a dev who would attempt to plug the movie’s plot into an existing videogame genre without being overly concerned about how closely it hewed to the source material. While this approach rarely led to anything but serviceable games (and a lot of terrible ones) we occasionally got a true classic, such as Alien 3 for the Genesis. I bring this particular title up because it’s extremely relevant to this review — that game was one of the inspirations for Aliens: Infestation, which is, in turn, the inspiration for Demastered.

The Mummy is a Metroidvania title in which the player controls agents from Prodigium, an agency responsible for keeping monster activity to a minimum. When an ancient evil escapes her Iraqi prison and attacks London, it’s up to these gun-toting specialists to explore a warren of tunnels underneath the city, blasting away at the hordes of monsters she’s brought along for the ride.

The game is almost shockingly faithful to the formula of the genre. Players start with a hundred hit points and an SMG with unlimited ammo. They have to explore mostly subterranean levels, seek out storage rooms holding equipment from previous agents, and eventually unlock the tools necessary to open up new areas where they’ll find whole new sets of monsters and bosses to deal with. As they grind their way up through the supernatural food chain, they’ll eventually face off with the Mummy herself.

This is a perfect example of ’90s style pixel-art done extremely right. All of the creatures are lushly detailed, and drawn in bright colors to ensure that they’re distinct from the intricate backgrounds. Enemies range from tiny hopping spiders to screen-height boss monsters, and there are more than enough types to ensure that a constant flow of new threats appear for the entire length of the campaign.

Prodigium has also arranged for a huge arsenal to be left scattered around the area. Assault rifles, rocket launchers, a lock-on plasma beam – there’s a gun for every situation, and enemies are good about dropping ammo when killed. Once I’d picked up enough ammo pouch upgrades, I was able to stop using my default rifle entirely. It shows the the developers put quite a bit of thought into weapon balance and enemy drop rates.

The one drawback is that players can only hold two weapons at a time, and certain weapons are only useful in such rare situations that it doesn’t make sense to hang on to them. I spent too much of the game relying on my two staples (the flamethrower and stake launcher) and I can’t imagine that letting players select weapons from a pause menu would have given them too much power, especially since the bosses have such startling amounts of health that I never beat one without exhausting all of my special weapon ammo and finishing it with my base weapon.

Demaster‘s other big problem is the map — specifically, that doors are NOT marked on it. It’s just a grid of rooms and hallways pushed up against each other, with no clear indication of where various rooms’ openings are.

The Metroidvania experience is built on seeing a blocked-off area and wanting to know what’s inside, and coming back when the correct upgrade has been obtained. The Mummy contains three types of doors, each destroyable by a different type of weapon — grenade doors, C4 doors, and shoulder charge doors. Unfortunately, none of them are noted on the map, and it’s far too easy to forget where certain blocked rooms are located when there’s been two hours of hectic gunplay since the last time it was seen. This is a massive oversight, and it makes backtracking for secrets far more difficult than it should be — a significant problem when doing so is the entire point of the game.

Also troubling is the way Demastered handles player death. In a clever move, when the player dies, their corpse is reanimated by the Mummy, and a replacement officer is sent to finish the job. Their first mission? Kill the zombie commando and acquire all of their equipment. It’s a great idea, and it plays out beautifully, especially since the zombie will be armed with whatever weapons the player was using when they died. The problem is that once the player kills the zombie and grabs the equipment, they’re given empty weapons and health tanks.

Ammo isn’t such a problem since there are supply rooms scattered around the map, but there’s no way to quickly restore health. Unlike many others in this genre, Demastered‘s save rooms don’t heal the player. Since players are most likely to die fighting bosses, this forces players to not just kill a heavily-armed zombie, but then spend 5-10 minutes farming health from rats and trash cans until they’re ready to fight the boss again. It’s unnecessarily demoralizing.

Even with those frustrating oversights, The Mummy Demastered is a fantastic example of its genre. There’s great creature and boss design, perfectly designed platforming sequences, and a wide enough variety in environments that it can offer unique visuals all the way to the end. As a tight, confident action title, The Mummy Demastered succeeds not just as a love letter to movie-inspired cash-ins from the ’90s, but also as a legitimately great action game in its own right. And, if that wasn’t enough to recommend it, it’s also a rare tie-in that ended up far better than the movie it was adapted from. Rating: 8.5 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed and published by Wayforward. It is currently available on XBO, PS4 and PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 10 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated E10 and contains Fantasy Violence. Well, the violence isn’t fantastic – it’s all assault rifles and grenade launchers and flamethrowers – but it’s being used against zombies and mummies and giant wolves, so I guess that’s what they mean. Seriously, though, it’s no more traumatic than the old 2D Castlevanias were.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: You’ll be completely fine. Any story is presented through text, and the only audio cue is a ‘low health’ ringing that is accompanied by a red-flashing health indicator. It is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: Yes, this game offers fully remappable controls.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available in the options.

The post The Mummy Demastered appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Wiping the Cryptark out by firing my super-weapon over and over…

LOW …after having the game crash the first time I tried to do that.

WTF Enemies can fly through walls now? That seems fair.

Cryptark misses something important in its tutorial. While it’s busy running through in-world diagnostics designed to get the player comfortable with their ship, it mentions – so quickly that it’s easy to miss – that players can press a button to boost.

I didn’t notice it at the time, and the casual way the dialogue lets the information slip by means that for my first two hours with the game, I didn’t realize that every one of the ships the player can select had a special ability that could be activated by tapping a button.

I bring this up because if I’d known about these super-useful powers, I would have found the game considerably less daunting, and it wouldn’t have had to work so hard to charm me. That said, it did charm me completely, and I was more than willing to grind my way through the rough opening until I got my space legs. I’m happy I did, too, since it allowed me to appreciate the nuances that this deep and complex action-roguelike had to offer.

Cryptark puts players in the role of Privateers tasked with boarding a series of space hulks in a nearly-infinite flotilla, shutting down security systems and looking for clues that will lead them to the game’s namesake – the Cryptark itself.

Each megaship the player must tackle along the way to the Cryptark must be disabled by shutting down a shield generator and destroying a computer core. However, each hulk plays completely differently because every one has a random set of defensive subsystems and drones protecting the core, creating an ever-evolving challenge for players to navigate in this 2D strategic shooter.

The developers have come up with a crafty array of obstacles – drone factories need to be shut down to prevent the enemy threat from constantly growing, repair stations regenerate destroyed subsystems, minefields and buzzsaws operate from central locations – there’s even a ‘shuffle’ module that randomizes the placement of targets within the ship every sixty seconds. In a nice touch, each one of the subsystems is designed to look like the thing it controls – the sentry cannon is an actual giant cannon that blasts anything attempting to destroy it, the nuclear tripwire system detonates in a huge blast radius when it’s destroyed, and so on.

All of the game’s visual design elements are top-notch. There are a huge variety of enemy drones and hulk types, but they’re all built around a central design style made to appear as the obvious work of an ancient galactic empire. Turrets feel like natural extensions of the walls they’re affixed to, and all of the drones — from simple knives-with-engines all the way up to huge leviathans — have a distinct feel that’s entirely different from the shiplike suits of power armor that the player can equip.

Cryptark‘s roguelike elements are incredibly well thought-out. Every complete run takes the player through six increasingly challenging hulks. The Privateers begin with 500K in the bank, and must spend cash for every loadout element they bring along with them. There’s a standard base ship to start, and there are randomized tech upgrades found on the hulks which allow players to unlock new and possibly better weapons as they go. Each hulk has a cash value associated with shutting down the main defense grid, but that payout can be supplemented – or even dwarfed – by payments for meeting a set of conditions. Tiny bonuses are awarded based on things like destroying specific components, but huge payouts can be earned for feats like defeating the central computer without shutting down the repair systems — the kind of task only masochists need attempt.

While Cryptark is a fundamentally fair game and players will quickly learn strategies to deal with most of its threats, it has a high potential to frustrate, as most roguelikes do. For example, success or failure will often come down to which tech upgrades randomly spawn. Getting the right weapon can make the entire game a breeze, while getting the wrong one can make winning a virtual impossibility. This is even more true in the ‘rogue’ mode which runs players through five random hulks with no break between, forcing them to use whatever weapons they find along the way. I think the developers would have done well to include an ‘easy’ mode with fewer subsystems and drones in each hulk. They could have locked away certain weapons and ships for the normal difficulty level, while massively increasing the game’s accessibility to a wider audience.

Other than a punishing difficulty level and a camera that feels a little too close to the action, the only real problem with Cryptark is that, at the time of publication, it’s still fairly buggy.

In my twenty hours playing the game it crashed nearly ten times – both while loading new levels and also while simply playing through them. This wouldn’t be such a problem if the devs didn’t take such a hard line against potential cheaters. Failing or quitting a level means players will lose all the money they’ve spent on a run, so obviously the temptation exists to simply shut the game down and resume from the last save point. Possibly anticipating this, the developers have made any game shutdown count as a failed mission. The result is that victims of the game crashing will find themselves not only out the money they spent on the mission they were playing, but an extra hundred thousand as punishment triggered by the game’s lack of stability. That’s the kind of hit that can end a successful run, and it’s deeply unfair in a way that simply playing isn’t.

Cryptark is a wholly satisfying action-roguelike. The developers have offered an embarrassment of riches when it comes to weapons and equipment, and pilots can figure out their playstyle in settings that reward exploration and experimentation. There’s a huge amount to see and do, and tight combat mechanics support it all. Cryptark is a perfect example of how well-implemented randomness can elevate a great action game into an endlessly replayable work of art. Rating: 8.5 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed and published by Alientrap. It is currently available on PC, PS4 and Xbox One. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 20 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. 1 hour of play was spent in multiplayer modes

Parents: The game is rated T by the ESRB and contains Violence and Blood. There isn’t too much intense content – the action is about a robot suit shooting biomechanical aliens with little graphic content on display. The edgiest things in the game are the descriptions of the various artifacts that industrious players will spot, filled with tales of destroyed civilizations and horrific bio-modifications.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: All instructions and plot are presented in text, and there are no audio cues that don’t have visual counterparts. It’s fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: No, this game’s controls are not remappable.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available in the options.

The post Cryptark Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Climbing onto a gunhorse for the flappy bird section.

LOW The enemy that knocked me off more plaforms than a Castlevania medusa head.

WTF The trick to beating the final boss is… something else.

Abandoning the strict Mega Man comparison the first game invited and replacing it with a far more interesting influence, Super Gunworld 2 brings back the gunseed-planting madness of its predecessor and adds RPG elements, equipment shopping, and even an overworld with random encounters. Yes, Gunworld has gone Zelda 2, and it’s a blast.

Picking up sometime after the last game left off, Gunworld 2 sees the titular planet threatened by a team of interstellar superheroes who are concerned that there’s a planet where guns literally grow on trees. Really, who can blame them? They’ve kidnapped a number of prominent botanists and endangered the planet’s gun supplies, so it’s up to the player to defeat them, rescue the scientists, and discover who the mad genius behind the whole scheme is!

While the game can be played without the RPG elements (there’s an ‘Old-School’ just-the-levels mode to prove it) they fit the formula surprisingly well. Wandering around an overworld closely modeled on Zelda 2‘s interpretation of Hyrule was a nice change of pace for a side-scrolling shooter, especially when random monsters turn up to pull the player into a mini-zone that they have to fight their way out of, earning experience and cash in the process.

Gunworld‘s central mechanic is still a little on the awkward side – planting guns and then picking them is strange and funny, but gets frustrating whenever the action gets hectic. This is especially true in complicated platforming sections because the player must plant and harvest the gun that allows them to double jump, and it only has two shots before it runs out of ammo. Likewise the invincibility bubble has just one use before the player is forced to plant and pluck a new one. I’m sure the developers were worried about these special weapons making the game too easy, but in practice, finding a four-block-wide space on which to plant a needed weapon can be extremely difficult.

Other than this hiccup, the level designs are fairly simple — the player can choose which of the first two bosses to take on, but both must be defeated before they can unlock the door to the third, after which they’ll move into a second map where the rest of the bosses are situated. The developers have built some notably complex maps which demand to be revisited, Metroid-style, as players bring back their new weapons to reach inaccessible areas and unlock secrets.

In addition to the solid level design, Gunworld’s strongest feature is the setting, which is just as wonderfully bizarre as ever. There’s a decent amount of dialogue between the characters in the main town location, all of it witty, strange, or both. Likewise, all of the bosses are well-drawn and clever, each offering a completely different kind of challenge than the next.

Gunworld 2 is a pleasure to play, and a retro experience in all the best ways. Unlike Double Dragon 4, which preserved the worst parts of that franchise, Gunworld has looked at Zelda 2 and the Mega Man series, carefully decided which parts still feel worthwhile and will work best together, and transformed them into a new experience that captures the 8-bit feel without being beholden to its limitations. Rating: 7.5 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed and published by M07 Games. It is currently available on XBO, PS4, and PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PS4. Approximately 8 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated E10 and contains fantasy violence. A guy plants guns and uses them to shoot aliens. Honestly, you’d think this would be more objectionable than it actually is. Monsters explode bloodlessly, and the more humanoid boss enemies are clearly subdued, but not killed by the gunplay, as they turn up in jails later on in the game.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: There are no audio cues of note, and all story is told through onscreen text.

Remappable Controls: No, this game’s controls are not remappable.

Colorblind Modes: There are colorblind modes available in the options.

The post Super Gunworld 2 Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.