Zeno Clash is on a sale over at Steam this weekend. The indie FPS melee brawler set in a tribal punk fantasy world features some of the most brutal and satisfying melee combat in any modern game. The tale it weaves is surprisingly charming too, featuring a host of weird characters and some gorgeous visual design. The developers, Team Ace, have a new game out soon too, and its about a giant rock bowling through time and smashing stuff up. Talk about a change of pace…
Built in the Source engine, Zeno Clash has the proud honour of being absolutely nothing like a Valve game. The locations you pass through are constantly stunning and I was really impressed with how much detail went into its world – for example, you won’t ever see a duplicate character, save for a few animal enemies. Almost every humanoid character you fight with is uniquely modeled, which is extremely rare for a game thats been built by such a small studio. It’s full of humour too, some of it deliciously twisted and dark. And I can’t praise the brutality of the melee combat enough – new games like Dead Island look disappointingly flimsy when it comes to FPS melee combat, so why is it a small indie team managed to get it perfect 3 years ago? Definitely check it out: for just under 3 quid, its a real bargain.
But if you’re curious about this rock bowling game, there’s a trailer below. It looks like marble madness crossed with a tower defense game full of the crazy physics destruction of a FlatOut race. It looks original, at least.
Dome Keeper is an excellent little spin on the tower defense game, in which you play the role of a jetpacking miner defending his base from swarms of aliens, whilst searching for a hidden relic buried somewhere beneath him. And now, with this huge free update, you can play it with friends.
I want to talk about Cloudpunk, a game where you get to be a flying-car delivery driver in a futuristic cyberpunk city. Its world is an incredible achievement of environmental design, and while the gameplay itself may be basic, the city of Nivalis is a thing of beauty to behold. Nivalis is built out of hundreds of hand-modelled cuboid buildings; there’s nothing procedural about it. Apparently it took 3 years for the devs to design the city, and it really shows.
I do love me some quality pixel art, and it doesn’t get much better than this. Cast n Chill is a cozy side-scrolling fishing game by small indie dev team Wombat Brawler, with absolutely gorgeous visuals. It’s simple to play, and you you can dip in and out of it at your leisure, making it a fine addition to our collection of coffee break games.
You might have heard of Pokémon. I can’t quite believe that date. 1996!? Holy crap. 21 years ago, apparently, I got well into this strange Japanese game about collecting made-up animals, stuffing them into balls and training them to fight each other.
The successor to Goldeneye, Perfect Dark improved every possible aspect of the classic shooter and created an original masterpiece. 4-player multiplayer game modes, with the option of adding 8 extra bots made matches frantic chaos and endless fun. The singleplayer was fantastic at the time, featuring such state-of-the-art features as realtime lighting, blood spatter effects, and fully voice acted cinematic cutscenes. It even let you play the story in local co-op with a mate – player 2 got to be Joanna Dark’s weird-looking blonde sister – the first game I ever encountered with a co-op singleplayer mode.
It’s safe to say that Fumito Ueda’s third game was one of my most anticipated titles of the previous generation. Announced in 2009, I eagerly watched every gameplay trailer and read up every snippet of information I could. Ico and Shadow of the Colossus remain two of my most beloved games, and I found the idea of another game by the same studio a mouth-watering temptation. A multitude of delays and long periods of silence from both Sony and the developers led many to believe it would never see the light of day, not to mention the troubling news that Ueda himself had left the project due to creative differences with Sony. The game lingered in development hell for several years and its fate was uncertain. Ueda and his team remained with the project as consultants and the game eventually had a release date set for December 2016. My excitement rekindled and I wondered how it could ever live upto 7 years of anticipation. So, was it worth the wait?
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