Last week saw Flying Tigers: Shadows Over China stealthily make its way to Xbox One as a console exclusive. Grab your best pair of flying goggles and keep an eye out for ack-ack guns as we take to the skies in our first quickie of the year. Chocks away! If you grew up playing titles such as Rogue Squadron and Blazing Angels, FTSOC will definitely tickle that aerial combat itch that’s been missing from consoles for too long. Hmm, five hours isn’t that long… There’s a few extra modes that help extend the game’s longevity, including online competitive multiplayer, provided you can find a populated server. The highlight of these extra modes has to be Dogfight, which pits you against enemy AI in a location and aircraft of your choice, including a few that aren’t available in the campaign, such as the iconic Supermarine Spitfire and P51 Mustang. Would you recommend it? Yes. The campaign may be too short, and the visuals can sometimes look a little plain (pun very much intended), but there’s just something incredibly thrilling about hearing the rat-at-at-at of machine gun fire and the thrum of your engine as you pounce upon enemy aircraft formations from above. If you grew up playing titles such as Rogue Squadron and Blazing Angels, FTSOC will definitely tickle that aerial combat itch that’s been missing from consoles for too long. Flying Tigers: Shadows Over China is available now on Xbox One for £15.19/€18.99/$18.99 and on Steam, where it released last year, for £12.39/€15.99/$15.99.
Talk To Me | iFun4All14/1/2018 In our first Talk To Me interview of 2018 we sit down with iFun4All’s Jacek Glowacki to chat all things Serial Cleaner, VR, desert island PCs and visits to West Germany - enjoy! What inspired you and your team during the development stage? We had a lot of different inspirations, but you must know that Serial Cleaner's concept was evolving before the game became what it is today. What we tried to achieve (and hopefully we have), was a "inverted Hotline Miami" kind-of game. We loved Hotline Miami and played a lot of it, but we didn't want to just copy most of the gameplay solutions and add one twist. We wanted to figure out something unique and original. Hence we've decided that it was going to be a game about cleaning up after a killer. So, if I'm to enumerate gaming inspirations, I'd say Hotline Miami and Party Hard, which, in my opinion, is also amazing! But there are the 70s too of course - terrific decade, very colourful, dynamic and revolutionary in so many areas... We adore the 70s, but we adore the decade even more when we look at it through the eyes of great movie directors, like Quentin Tarantino. We always like to say that Serial Cleaner is "Pulp Fiction meets Hotline Miami." Our art team searched for inspirations by studying thousands of photographs from the 70s, but also Matthew Lyons’ paintings. So, as you can see, we were inspired by a lot of pieces of art. Can you tell us about your team at iFun4All? iFun4All S.A. was founded in 2009 by Bloober Team - an indie development studio, responsible for such great games as Layers of Fear and Observer. At the beginning iFun4All was to become Bloober's mobile division to expand Bloober's activity. Hence we started off by making premium titles for iOS, such as Red Game Without a Great Name and Green Game: TimeSwapper, which were later ported to PC, PS VITA and Android. Later on the company's philosophy changed, because the new CEO had started implementing his vision. We switched to PC and consoles as primary platforms and started working on Serial Cleaner. In the meantime the company went public, we found investors and signed a global publishing deal with Curve Digital. The development team has expanded and we moved from a beautiful (but too small) house into a new office in Krakow, Southern Poland. It all happened in just couple of months and we're ready to open a new chapter in iFun's history. How difficult is it for indie developers in this current market? Can you take artistic risks and still make a profit? Two words of introduction: I'm the head of business development at iFun4All S.A. and before I joined in September 2016, I worked as a business developer at Techland Publishing, where I moved from Onet, the biggest Polish information service, where I worked as a gaming journalist. Hence I've been observing the development of the gaming market from three different perspectives: a journalist's, publisher's and now developer's. Regarding your question, the market is completely crazy. Extremely competitive, more and more costly, and super risky in terms of ROI, in constant need of more skilled and talented specialists, but with almost no entrance barriers. Working in the gaming industry is a dream come true to many people around the world (including myself), but it's always stressful, yet exciting; always changing, but in some areas remains constant. If I was to use one word, describing the industry, it would be the word "paradox" (in no relation to the Swedish developer and publisher :D). Still, of course you can make profit, while taking a purely artistic approach, but nowadays your chances for success are really low. Behind one super successful story of an indie developer hide thousands and thousands of stories of failures or, in the best case, average performance. And developers should be aware of that, while pursuing their dreams. "...the market is completely crazy, extremely competitive, more and more costly, and super risky..." With that in mind, are shows like Rezzed beneficial in helping you find an audience? Now, when it comes to fairs and events, I believe that they are perfect places to be, but not really to build the audience (if you're a debuting indie studio with new IP), but rather to get some priceless feedback (from journalists too - and you can meet a lot of people, who'll be reviewing your game after launch) and simply collect bugs for free :). That's where fairs are most helpful. Of course I'm sure that companies like EA or Activision take a very different perspective, but they are swimming in a very different ocean! What advice would you give to someone looking to work in the video gaming industry? Oh, that's easy! My advice is: make games. It's the best way to get into gaming industry. Develop your skills in your favourite area and look for opportunities. That's pretty much it I guess :) Where do you think the industry is heading - is VR the future in your opinion? Definitely VR has been a hot topic for some time, as well as AR and I'm sure they'll remain hot, because a lot of very rich companies have spent billions of dollars to buy and develop the technology - so they'd love to get their money back and earn some more - but I'm not the biggest fan of VR to be honest. From time to time I suffer from motion sickness, the gear separates you from the world around you (which is very frustrating when someone knocks on the door or you have a dog/cat/small child), the visuals are average - compared to modern PC's - there's not enough fluency etc. So, I observe VR with curiosity, but I think that we need to wait for next generation headsets to be sure if that's the direction we'll be taking as the global industry. For now I wouldn't be very excited about the VR, but rather about new, potential markets we can expand to - China is not new, but has still a lot to offer to companies, who are ready to cooperate with companies, which understand the business relations there. Africa is pretty much terra incognita to Western companies, due to lack of infrastructure and poor economic situation but it's a huge land with millions of passionate gamers and very talented game developers. The same can be said about the Middle East and it's no accident that Tehran rises to be the capital city of the gaming industry in the region. Business development is very much about sales and I'm doing my best to build relations in the regions I mentioned above, because I believe that signing agreements there is a real deal right now, while it's important to observe trends and be ready to shift the company in the right direction in the future. What game(s) have had the biggest effect on your life, and why? I've been a gamer since I was 5 and I made my first trip to a non-Communist country - Western Germany, where my grandmother lived. Munich in 1989 was an entirely different universe to a Polish boy. There were lights everywhere, huge malls with all the products you could've imagined, stores that were only selling toys, there were escalators and many other wonders I've never seen before. For Christmas I got the NES with 2 games: Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario Bros. 2. Later I also got Dr. Mario and I remember my dad playing it the whole night. So Mario was the first character who showed me the beauty of video games, one might say that it was him who made me who I am today! Of course there were many games I fell in love with later on - I've learned that I love strategy games and good stories - but Mario was the first and probably the most important gaming character in my life. What does the future hold for Serial Cleaner & iFun4All? We're working very hard to minimize the risk of not knowing what the future brings! But, seriously, our industry is so dense and every single day there's another surprise waiting on Twitter... It's almost impossible for an indie studio to know for sure whether we will enter a successful path or not. But, of course, we have targets we want to achieve after a year, three and five years and we're using every tool possible to make them come true. Obviously, we have ideas and are working on some projects that are still unannounced that we're very excited about, but in this industry you can never be sure about the next hour, not to mention the next 12 months or more! If you were on a desert island (it has power) and could only take one console, what would you take, and why? I'd take my PC. Why? Because 99% of games I love are on it, PC gives the best possible visuals (and as long it supports a controller, I can "emulate" playing on console too :D), PLUS, you didn't mention if there's Wi-Fi on the island, so if there's a risk I won't be able to log into my PSN account, I pick Steam and its offline mode! Thanks to Jacek and the rest of the iFun4All team for chatting to us. Serial Cleaner is available now across all major platforms - so you have no excuse not to play it!
Verdun: A call to arms22/11/2017 Ever since it launched on Xbox One roughly nine months ago, Verdun’s already small player base has been steadily declining over the course of the year to the point where you’d more than likely struggle to find the 32 players needed to populate the game’s standout mode, Frontlines, if you were to venture online nowadays.
The game does have its drawbacks; the class menu is still overly clunky and it’s not exactly a world beater when it comes to visuals, but the unique and strategic gameplay far outweigh these shortcomings and its continued marginalisation by the console community is unfortunate, as there really is nothing else like it available on Xbox One. Verdun's continued marginalisation by the console community is unfortunate, as there really is nothing else like it available on Xbox One. As far as can I see, the only way of ensuring Verdun remains playable in any meaningful form is by enabling cross-play with PC. Out of all the platforms on which the game is available, it’s the only one that has a consistent populous; at the time of writing, Verdun’s 24-hour peak on Steam was 444 players, a figure that’s more than healthy enough to support multiple lobbies and matches. In fact, the game’s done well enough on Steam that developers M2H and Blackmill Games have brought a standalone expansion to the platform, taking players to the eastern front and introducing Russian forces. Somehow, I don’t see Tannenberg being announced for consoles anytime soon. Although this is by no means a perfect answer, due to the balancing issues that come with putting console players up against the greater accuracy and reaction times afforded to PC players by mouse and keyboard support, the game’s First World War setting, and the developer’s commitment to historical accuracy, may actually help to partially mitigate these issues. While a lot of shooters will stick an enlarged set of iron sights or semi-historically accurate reticles on weapons in order make life easier for its players (I’m looking at you, Call of Duty), Verdun is unapologetic when it comes to replicating First World War-era firearms - particularly rifles, the weapon of choice for most players – ensuring that both console and PC users are at the mercy of their limitations, including tiny, hard to use iron sights and limited fire-rates. Coupled with the need to draw breath in order to ensure a steady aim, the advantages of mouse and keyboard control don’t seem like they’d be quite as advantageous in Verdun as they would in other shooters where fully-automatic weapons and large magazines are the norm. Even if it does mean having my ass handed to me by the gaming master race every now and then, I genuinely hope, and I’m sure those who enjoy Verdun just as much as I do agree, that whoever is in charge of these decisions takes note of this plea, because the game deserves better, and it may be the only way to ensure I can keep enjoying Verdun on my platform of choice. Do you have any old favourites that you’d like to see revived by the implementation of cross-play? Let us know in the comments below or over in the forums.
We’re also working on a review of the Tannenberg expansion, so stick around for more on Verdun. Join us as we take Flying Carpets Games' charming puzzle-platformer, The Girl and the Robot, for a wistful quick one. The score’s truly ethereal too, carrying you forward on your melancholic journey through the castle. Trust us when we say: The Girl and the Robot is worth playing for Eiko Ishiwata Nichols’ melodies alone.
Is there anything we should be wary of? The only real grievance we have with the game is its short length - around two or three hours - which some may feel is a touch rich in spite of the relatively small asking price (between £7 and £12 across the available platforms). With that in mind, would you recommend it? We thoroughly recommend The Girl and the Robot to puzzle-platformer fans, as there’s a lot to admire in the gorgeous music, charming art and gameplay - even if it's lacking in a bit of originality. For everyone else; definitely take a punt when the price comes down. Taken for a Quickie | Morphite28/10/2017 Join us as we take Crescent Moon Games’ sci-fi adventure come FPS, Morphite, for a low gravity gruntfest. Don’t hold back now, is there anything else we should be wary of?
It doesn’t take a genius to notice that Morphite wears its influences a little too obviously on its sleeve, which left us with the distinct impression that we’d encountered many of the planets and creatures in the game elsewhere. Some tedious side-quests and resource management don’t help proceedings either, leading to tedium eventually setting in. With that in mind, would you recommend it to anyone in particular? Sci-fi lovers and fans of exploration games will definitely find some enjoyment here, as there’s many hours on offer to keep folks going until Metroid Prime 4. Everyone else will most likely be left cold by Morphite’s offerings, though. Taken for a Quickie | Let Them Come3/10/2017 Let Them Come is reminiscent of a flash game I used to play at school, poised to hastily tab out when Mr. Phillips established line of sight. Nostalgia aside, does the same simplistic corridor defence experience work in the context of a paid console game? Join us for a quick one and we’ll find out. While Obligatory Stationary Turret Section: The Game might not sound immediately enthralling, Tuatara Games have done a lot to make Let Them Come exactly that. More subjectively, some players might not appreciate the fact that failure doesn’t carry any real consequence. This largely makes the campaign a breeze, even on the hardest difficulty setting, though there’s something cathartic about just blasting away without worry. Oh, and three of the achievements are currently unobtainable - completionists beware! On the whole, would you recommend a purchase? For a mere £6.39, Let Them Come is a quality, over-the-top sci-fi shooter that we’re confident will scratch the itch of anyone with a case of arcade addiction. Let Them Come is out now on Xbox One and PC, the PlayStation 4 version will follow later this month.
Talk To Me | Thunder Lotus Games27/9/2017 We recently sat down with acclaimed indie developer Thunder Lotus to discuss their latest game Sundered (which I bloomin’ love - check out the review), the difficulties of turning a profit in an oversaturated market, the power of conversation, PC emulators and more. Enjoy!
Can you tell us about your team at Thunder Lotus Games? We're a small team, around a dozen people at the peak of each project. We're based in Montreal, Canada. The company was founded by Will Dubé, a young veteran of a now-defunct mobile game studio (Sava Transmedia) here in Montreal. Back in 2014, Will left Sava with the goal of bringing an indie game to Kickstarter. In a few months, he had recruited most of the core team from his old colleagues at Sava, and other friends that had some experience among the AAA devs that pepper this city. That core team would go on to produce our first game, Jotun, in September 2015 - and the same core was on-board for Sundered as well! How difficult is it for indie developers in this current market? Can you take artistic risks and still make a profit? It is difficult, and only getting more so. The golden age of indies, where just releasing a game on Steam or Xbox Live would almost guarantee a profit, has long since ended. It's definitely no longer enough to simply make a great game. Great games are now coming out weekly. We would suggest that it's almost impossible to expect a viable product unless you take risks, artistically and otherwise, so that you (and your potential audience) can take one look at your game and identify what is unique about it. "Strike up a conversation with a dev at a game con, or a local indie meet-and-greet, and you'd be surprised what professional opportunities might come from it!" What advice would you give to someone looking to work in the video gaming industry? It's not a hard industry to break into, at least in a city like ours, where a solid core of AAA devs have bred a healthy indie scene. It's staying profitable, so you can keep making games, that's the real challenge. But if you're just starting out, don't know where to begin, you just need to go out and meet people. Indie devs are by far the most approachable creators I've ever seen, speaking from experience, having worked in the music, movies, and TV industries. Strike up a conversation with a dev at a game con, or a local indie meet-and-greet, and you'd be surprised what professional opportunities might come from it! Where do you think the industry is heading - is VR the future in your opinion? Tough to say. VR doesn't seem ready for mainstream prime time in its present form; maybe next generation, once it credibly evolves beyond on-the-rails-lower-res-FPS-ports, prices come down, and some unanimously praised revolutionary killer apps start appearing. In the mean time, it looks like more of the same for the industry over another two or three years, just with slightly better resolution and HDR. What game(s) have had the biggest effect on your life, and why? Strictly personal response here, but the games I played obsessively when I was young basically fused themselves to my DNA, and still define "fun" for me in their specific genres: (in no particular order) NHL 94, Wonder Boy III, Ultima V, Revenge of Shinobi, Civilization I, Pirates!... I could go on. What does the future hold for Sundered & Thunder Lotus Games? Most any news will be revealed when the time is right. Anyone who followed the Sundered Kickstarter knows that we have some DLC planned for the game, but our lips are sealed as to what and when it will be. Meanwhile, prelim work on our next project will begin in parallel - but it will be a while before we're ready to give any details! If you were on a desert island (it has power) and could only take one console, what would you take, and why? No single console would keep me from missing the others terribly. I'd cheat, and bring a PC that could emulate as many of the classic machines as possible. Thanks to Rodrigue at Thunder Lotus for talking to us. Both Sundered and Jotun are available now - go and check them out!
The Domaginarium describe their third-person horror platformer as (old) Tomb Raider meeting Lovecraft, in space - a pitch we found difficult to resist. With The Nightmare from Beyond’s final release slated for Q3 2018, the current Steam Early Access build is far from content complete, but does it seem poised to deliver on the promising concept? The Domaginarium describe their third-person horror platformer as (old) Tomb Raider meeting Lovecraft, in space - a pitch we found difficult to resist. As Sanja, a young D’nyg woman in search of her sister, Dajana, you’ll traverse environments that seamlessly shift from stoney fantasy to techy sci-fi. While starting out linear, things open up to reveal some solid, looping level design that’s complimented by platforming and light puzzle solving elements straight out of a classic Tomb Raider game (as promised). The disparate-yet-connected world, which houses interesting architecture and artefacts that make it enticing in the absence of impressive graphics, definitely has us curious to explore more in the hope of uncovering how exactly the scattered sections came to coexist. It serves as much more a driving force than the beginnings of the bland story, which isn’t helped by a reliance on nonsense fantasy terms that haven’t yet been explained. As a D’yng, you're marked with tribal patterns that emit a neon glow, dimly lighting your way through the bleak nightmarescape. When you encounter the mysterious creatures within, you’ll need to hold your breath to extinguish the light and sneak past them, avoiding a swift and inevitable death. The one creature you directly encounter can’t be combated - though you do get some bombs used to open a shortcut later on, so it’s possible you might eventually be able to put these to use - and is obscured by a black smog to preserve an air of mystery, with otherwise indirect encounters seeing you relentlessly pursued or your ankles snapped at from an off-screen presence to push you through platforming sections at pace. What you don't see is often more unnerving than what you do, and that's the case here. The disparate-yet-connected world has us curious to delve deeper, serving as much more a driving force than the beginnings of the bland story, If you're caught, you’ll need to go back to the last manual save point. These are fairly frequent, so you’ll never lose too much progress, and help to highlight the game’s '90s inspirations by feeling very Resident Evil. Weighing in at around two flawed hours, what we essentially have at the moment is a paid proof of concept demo. As a result, we’d recommend waiting to see how The Nightmare from Beyond develops before laying down your hard earned, especially considering the price isn’t set to increase once the game leaves Early Access. There’s reason to remain optimistic in the interim however; The Domaginarium have put in a decent first showing and hold both a commitment to frequent updates and a development roadmap that looks set to iron out the acknowledged issues. The Nightmare from Beyond is scheduled for release in Q3 2018 on PC, PS4 and PS Vita. It’ll set you back £14.99 or your regional equivalent.
Taken for a Quickie | White Noise 221/9/2017 Milkstone Studios’ White Noise 2 looks to horrify players, but are the shudders it induces brought on for all the right or wrong reasons? Join us in our eerie, torch-lit tent for a spooky quick one. Investigators are progressively driven insane when observing the creature, leading to intense hallucinations that cause confusion as individual members of the team begin to see and hear different things. How does playing as the creature fare? Naturally switching from hunted to hunter saps the scares, but it’s nonetheless devious fun being the one to inflict them. While it’s an entertaining means to mix things up now and then, it can feel quite solitary, which had us missing the camaraderie of working in a tight-nit team to overcome the odds. Does it get your stamp of approval, then? White Noise 2 has plenty of maps, creatures and investigators that can be taken in on your own, cooperatively or competitively with any combination of players - adaptive balancing seeing to it that things remain challenging but fair - making for an accommodating and long-lasting experience in which you can both be terrified and inspire terror. If that sounds at all like your bag, it’s an easy recommendation at just £7.99. Keep your eyes peeled for an upcoming let's play in which Sam and James fumble their way through a few early rounds of White Noise 2. It doesn't end well for them...
Taken for a Quickie | Surf World Series19/9/2017 Wetsuits on, shake that hair and, like, totally grab your board, dude! Let’s hit the waves with Portsmouth-based developer Climax Studios’ Surf World Series. Sounds sweet so far, but what about the bad? If you’re not a huge fan of surfing or combo-based, arcadey games, Surf World Series definitely won’t be for you. If those elements do tickle your fancy, there’s nothing much to complain about; it’s a great sports/arcade mash-up that’ll give you a good few hours of fun for not much money. Safe to assume it’s a winning run and not a wipeout, then? For us, it’s definitely a winning run. £11.99 gets you a generous, challenge-filled single player campaign and a fun online component that’ll keep you in the water until your skin wrinkles. Surf World Series is available now on Xbox One, PS4 and PC.
If it sounds like your thing be sure to keep your eyes peeled for next week’s giveaway, in which you could win a copy on Xbox One! |
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