Recent reviews by Uberbeard

I really like how chill this game is. You can really lose all sense of what you're doing.

A bit of nostalgia paired with sommit new. Good stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MR7zaZmF5N8
Immortal Redneck is a first person shooter that has the titular character, a mummified redneck with a penchant for glib one-liners, shooting and cursing his way through three progressively more difficult pyramids filled with ancient Egyptian monsters.It may bear resemblance to games like Quake and Serious Sam at first, but at its core is a set of systems taken wholesale from roguelite action titles like The Binding of Isaac and Rogue Legacy. The game hosts a whole range of features familiar to anyone who's played a roguelite in the last few years; procedural generation, classes, skills, permadeath and a literal upgrade tree.

The game plays very much like a modern take on it's 90's influences. Character movement is fast and there is a mix of enemies that force you to keep it that way. From static ranged attackers who fire projectiles to faster melee based enemies that chase you out of cover. The designs of the enemies are very readable and their behaviours are predictable, which makes the early part of the game deceptively easy. When enemy variety is upped, however, you understand that learning the way the enemies work together and which of them to focus on is important to each encounter.

Enemies regularly drop health, ammo and money which will eventually despawn; this helps to encourage you out of cover and comes right out of the 90s shooter playbook. Guns drop from downed monsters too and there are about 30 to choose from with each having it's own strengths and weaknesses. Enemies might even drop a powerful game modifier presented in the form of a papyrus scroll. The effects of these scrolls range from simple stat boosts to more strategy affecting abilities like immunity to arena traps, damage reflection or the chance to turn enemies into chickens. Oh, and some of these scrolls can be rather less helpful. I was unlucky enough to pick up a scroll that removed all of my previously collected upgrades just before a boss fight. Naturally, you can't tell what a scroll will do until you pick it up which creates the familiar risk/reward gambit. If you've grabbed a couple of useful power ups, you probably won't want to risk losing them.

The layout of the three pyramids is randomly generated from a large pool of hand crafted rooms and there are more than enough of them that the game never feels samey. There's a generous variety of design in each room too and a surprising amount of vertical space in which to explore and, well, shoot at stuff. You're able to climb up ledges from the get go and can later upgrade the amount of jumps you can use. There are occasional secrets hidden in the larger spaces and I suspect there's a lot to learn in Immortal Redneck for anyone looking for a title they'll keep going back to.

As you make your way up each pyramid the floors become smaller and smaller, encouraging as much exploration as you can manage as early as possible so you're better prepared for the more difficult fights towards the top. There are usually a couple of exit rooms on the larger floors and occasionally you will find a reward room with one or more treasure chests in it. These can be freebies but there are a few presented as little challenges. In these rooms enemies don't spawn and instead you're tasked with getting through a gauntlet of jumping puzzles and traps without taking damage. It's a nice way to break up the otherwise relentless pace of high energy gunplay, I like to call this gameplay punctuation. By that measure, a full stop might come in the place of boss fights. There are two in each pyramid, one at the halfway point and another at the top. Each boss will require a different strategy to defeat and they're sufficiently difficult enough that they become choke points for progression.

When you die in Immortal Redneck, your current run is over and you're deposited back to the start with all of the money you've collected. You can spend this money on an upgrade tree, I really do love that it's an actual tree, ripped directly from Rogue Legacy. Here you can boost statistics like health, damage and defence and even unlock a shop and different classes.

Classes offer alternative powers and starting weapons as each class has a passive and active power which can be popped off in the middle of a fight. Again, this plays into that moment-to-moment strategy formulation that is at the heart of the roguelike genre.

Standard roguelike fare with the shop as well; you can buy a few upgrades, shortcuts further into each pyramid and the ability to revisit the pyramid set up you previously visited - albeit without gaining coins again. Once your ready to move on, you can re-enter the pyramid at the cost of your remaining coins.

I'm really enjoying my time with Immortal Redneck and about the only thing I don't like about it is it's main character. Whether or not he's intentionally cast as a foul mouthed doofus is hard to read but those glib one-liners I mentioned before? They rarely hit base. The Immortal Redneck himself may well fit with characters like Duke Nukem and Serious Sam but I never had any fond feelings for those characters either. On top of that, there are a few one liners that seem to be more prone than others to activating. If I have to hear "What's wrong McFly, chick chick chicken" one more time I may throw my computer out the window.

Changing your strategy to account for what skills you have and what enemies you're facing is fundamental to Immortal Redneck and it's ability to take so many design trends from roguelites and apply them to the shooter genre is it's biggest strength. I recommend to anyone looking for their next roguelite fix. It's a polished, fun experience and I'm going to do my best to at least beat the second pyramid.

https://youtu.be/v2X216JaowY

88 Heroes is a callback title to 16-bit era platformers with all the expected trappings of tricky jumping, floor spikes, moving lasers and spinning chains of death. For all intents and purposes it probably plays exactly how you think it would play at first glance. That is, until the character on screen is changed completely and the joke becomes clear. Every time you die or finish a level, you’re given a completely different character to play as. 88 Heroes, 88 different ways to play the game.

This is a game about the joy and humour of discovery and surprise. Every character has their own look and abilities, handy or otherwise, that change the way you approach each level. They have guns, swords, explosives; some can fly and some can barely even jump. One of the heroes is a giant hamster in a ball that crushes enemies by rolling over them. A few of them are absolutely useless but, hey, they won’t be hanging around for long. They’re all goofy and funny and brilliantly rendered in pixel form. About half of them are named with a pun and a good lot of them are sly references to cultural figures and characters from other titles.

Is there a story here? None insofar as an opportunity to make a few jokes. As you might guess after looking at the store page, the game is themed around the number 88. On top of their being 88 characters you can play, there are 88 levels to get through, with 88 seconds given to complete each level and 88 minutes to complete them all in total. In the game’s universe the year is 1988, it’s the 8th of August and the game starts at what other time but 8:08. The villain is called Dr H8, and he’s demanding 88 octillion dollars or his 88 nuclear missiles will blow the world to smithereens. To my mild disappointment, and I had to double check with design director Mike Tucker on this, he isn’t an octopus; he’s an alien. He does have 8 fingers though, and there is a character called The Great Blocktopus who is, of course, an octopus magician who can summon blocks. It’s all ridiculous, which is sort of the point.

You might be able to see every character in the game in your first hour of playing but 88 Heroes is a title that encourages you to go back and spend more time with each of it’s eclectic cast. Death is fast and sort of permanent, meaning your first encounter with a character might only last a few seconds. You’ll probably laugh at whatever gimmick each new character presents, read their bio – something that shows up at the entrance to each level, walk forward a few paces and die immediately. Till next time, then? Unless you collect enough coins to pull them back into the roster. Enough coins, by the way, is 88 coins. (what else?) It’s unlikely you’ll even be able to get through the game on your first playthrough, I ran completely out of heroes twice but... well... I’m sort of terrible at games.

Past that, trying to get through the game with as few deaths as possible is the ultimate sell. Every time you get through a level, your active character is shuffled to the back of the group, meaning that to really do well you need an understanding of every character you’re presented with. There are a couple of other modes which are repackaged versions of the main game. One allows you to pick a team of 8 heroes, and attempt it with a more predictable roster, the other allows you to pick just one. I could see the speedrunning community picking up on that and it’s possible this allows for 88 different variations of challenge. Like the hero with a jetpack? Stick with him then.

The art direction is pretty great in general. I think the backgrounds are a little plain but that might be a necessary conceit to prevent such a variety of different character designs from getting lost in visual muddle. This criticism could land on level design too as Bitmap Bureau have had to do the incredible job of ensuring such a diversity of abilities and movement controls can navigate to the end of each level. This means that complexity has to be somewhat restricted and while the game certainly gets more difficult the further in you go, occasionally the levels just don’t hit. When I first played the game, I had to double check that the levels weren’t procedurally generated which is incredible considering how bespoke they actually are.

Keeping the levels malleable enough for each character has created a strange feel to the design. It’s an understandable handicap, though, and it doesn’t stop the game from being challenging in the same way that it’s 16-bit forbears were. The design is best when it presents multiple routes through a level that require different abilities to take. Early on getting a character that can fly seems like a cheat but later levels tend to account for everyone. Apart from Batbot, though. Batbot is broken.

88 Heroes is out today for digital download on PS4, Xbox One and Steam for £11.99 and a boxed version of the game is even available for PS4 on Amazon for £19.99. For that price I think it’s worth the early few hours of discovering each new hero alone, the fact that there’s a proper game behind the scenes? Well that’s just icing on the cake.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9puXvtpMIFI

DESYNC is a first person arena shooter with a flashy, retro-futuristic style that has you going from level to level circle-strafing manic enemies and combining weapons, abilities and traps not just to get though each level but to score big on its leaderboards. If that was all gibberish jargon, that translates to “it’s a bit like if DOOM and TRON made a baby”.

The core play loop has you moving between relatively small arenas and taking on enemies as they spawn around you from out of thin air in successive waves of difficulty. To do this you have slowly growing armament of weapons and abilities, including a dodge mechanic that is crucial to your survival. You will absolutely be following the classic five “D”s of high energy shooters; Dodge, Duck, Dip, Dive and Dodge.

You’re locked off from leaving each arena while you’re in combat so fights become a high-speed juggling match between getting hits in and avoiding melee and ranged attacks without stepping into the many traps found in each arena. There’s relatively no room to cheese anything here, you can either get used to the combat pace or get used to seeing the death screen regularly. It’s a hard game. It’s too hard, actually, and increasingly I found myself wanting a whiny baby easy mode so I could just settle in and enjoy myself without repeatedly having my face stomped in. High difficulty is definitely a genre staple here so I can see how this would appeal to fans, it’s just not for me.

To complement the scoring system, you are awarded extra points for pulling off “desyncs”. These are combinations of different moves and attacks such as killing an enemy after they’ve been stunned or after narrowly dodging their attack, or knocking them off the arena or into a trap with your shotgun blast. The only way to discover these combos is to accidentally pull them off, and the first time you do time slows to a glorious crawl and the game gives you an explanation of what you whilst you watch each dispatched enemy fly backwards and fizzle into nothing. There’s a very satisfying play feel around this and it reminds me of the underrated gem that is Bulletstorm, only with the bro-fist humour removed.

It’s surprising that such an important feature, the title feature in fact, relies so much on random chance in discovery. Experimentation might be what the developers where looking to encourage but I can’t help but feel having a few more guide lines would have improved the experience. It’s an issue that runs across the board.

On top of getting extra points for “desyncs”, the scoring system can measure and rate even more subtle elements of how you’re playing – mobility, situational awareness and apparently even your mouse movement patterns. I regularly scored straight Ds and I don’t think I’m close to good enough at this game to have an good insight into how effectively I’m being scored – although in fairness I think D’s are about right.

Stylistically DESYNC is similar to titles like Heavy Bullets and Paranautical Activity, with an aesthetic of futuristic computing systems as imagined by the 80s film industry. Visually, it’s dark in temperature with bursts of neon colour cutting through. Enemies pop and gun effects are like fireworks against an evening sky.

It’s full of digital artefacts and fuzzy glitches and may boast the most chromatic aberration I have ever seen in a video game. It really looks great, and the combination of a driving synthetic soundscape along with these visuals when you’re in the middle of fighting is fantastic. It never quite captures the sense of panic and urgency of something like Devil Daggers but it encourages a sense of flow that is crucial to this type of game and it’s a fun setting either way. There’s a big but here, as there are definitely times where presentation becomes a problem. The developers have stuck so rigidly to the retro aesthetic that you have to trudge through these clunky interfaces that might amuse at first but easily become an irritation when you’re stuck trying figure out exactly how the systems interplay.

There’s weapon upgrades, abilities that trigger when you pull off certain desyncs and a useful core ability you can chop and change but so much of this is introduced with no explanation and is relegated to these ridiculous terminals that you can only access outside of the main levels. No real information is provided about how to upgrade your guns, or what those upgrades even do. It takes trial an error just to figure weaponry out when you first pick them up, so when faced with the prospect of a variety of abilities and weapon upgrades I found myself letting it all go over my head. Again, experimentation might have been the original intent here but there’s a certain point where being obtuse becomes an detracting factor and DESYNC doesn’t seem remotely concerned that it passes that point before you’ve finished even it’s first hour.

Adult Swim Games has fast become a publisher with an eye for a certain type of game. It’s hard to really put a pin in what it is their published titles really share in common but if you’re a fan of their general catalogue you will probably enjoy DESYNC but for my tastes this is a true genre title. Fans of twitch-shooting mechanics and leaderboard heavy games will find something interesting here, I have no doubt, but I couldn’t enjoy more than a fleeting few hours.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8o5JsfQxKAA
In Induction you can control a cube through over 50 isometric levels attempting in each one to get to the exit point.

The game uses bold, colour-rich visuals that keep each level readable and relatively easy to navigate. Every level fits on one screen and this presents a simple aesthetic that, at first, gives no indication of the complexity Induction is capable of. This complexity is created instead with the game's main puzzle mechanic, time travel.

Levels are solved by moving around and interacting with the geometry; with bridges that fall down when you cross them or that require you to keep them raised by standing in specific locations and with barrels you can move, trigger switches with and ride upon. You can then use a power that resets the map to the start, only you stay where you are and a new version of you appears and proceeds to replicate exactly what you have just done. While it plays through your earlier motions you remain in control, interacting and augmenting your new pre-programmed duplicate, as you see fit. Later levels add new powers that complicate things further, letting you reset the level more times, carry barrels with your when you reset or swap back to your original cube.

All of the puzzles in Induction involve trying to predict what you're going to need yourself to do and then coordinating yourself with the ghost you set in motion. On top of that your ghost always has to finish off where you left it, with the ultimate goal of creating a paradoxical little time loop you can watch from the menu.

It's great, and It prevents the sort of accidental puzzle solving some games allow, to get through each puzzle here you're going to have to learn the level and plan a solution accordingly.

It reminds me in the most flattering way of Jonathan Blow's Braid, especially its late game puzzles solved with the protagonists shadow. It's a fantastic mechanic for a puzzle game and is explored in Induction with similar level of depth and complexity, albeit without any sort of highfalutin meta plot. As with Braid, you can speed up and reverse time at will so having to restart puzzles is unlikely. You will probably find yourself idling round the more complicated ones, though, while your brain tries to figure out the solution.

It's Steam page claims that Induction does not pander with it's difficulty and to be honest, that's an understatement. It can be genuinely obtuse at times, with the cube switching mechanic introduced in later levels that makes planning your solutions brain-tormentingly complicated. That said, it is definitely a game that allows you to have many a eureka moment and given enough time all of the solutions can be planned out logically.

If you like puzzle games that slowly introduce you into a series of logical systems and expect you to work out the solutions without hand holding, you might find that Induction is for you. If you get frustrated at the prospect of being stuck on a single puzzle for 10-20 minutes, maybe not.

It's just a simple point and click come hidden object game and can be completed within a few hours. There really isn't much here past a pretty aesthetic.

The visuals to this reminded me of a well made Flash game and mid 2000s Adobe videos like Of Montreal's "Gronlandic Edit". Not really worth trying, the only thing that sets it apart is the well done visuals and that's mostly because they're sort of weirdly nostalgic.

For £1.99 (or £0.60 as I paid for it) it's hard to really be critical about a title that presents itself as being a casual experience. That said, Refunct really doesn't offer much outside of a brief glimpse at a game I'd happily spend more money on. The controls are tight; running, sliding and bouncing off of walls feels great and the buttons, pads and pipes you can interact with have a satisfying game feel that'd translate well into future titles. What game there is here however feels sadly light. While I enjoyed bouncing around the many blocks that make up the play area I can't help but feel a more linear level design might show off the well pitched controls better.

I'm not sure I'd recommend this, even at it's price point, to anyone when there are similar freerunning titles with greater depth but it's a promising start. Give me a procedurally generated runner with these controls and I'd snap it up in an instant.

With an art style that takes liberally from abstract geometry king M.C. Escher and absurdist imagery by Salvidore Dali and Rene Magritte this was a title that I picked up on it's release. I'm a huge fan of those three artists, so Back to Bed was of great interest to me. After having played a few levels I quickly bounced off of it. And though I've come back to it more than a few times over the last year and I still enjoy it's little quirks (borrowed and original) this was ultimately a let down for me.

Back to Bed is a simplistic route planner puzzle game. It offers a more harsh recasting of it's 30 puzzles in a Nightmare mode but you have to go through their easier counterparts before the harder mode is unlocked. As a result, most of the puzzles are pretty forgettable and you can whiz through the entire thing under an hour. There's even an achievement in doing so (45 mins!). I'm not sure I'd reccomend this to anyone interested in a well conceived puzzle title (even my partner found it repetitive) but those who just want a light puzzle title and those who are interested in the art to which this game takes it's visual style might want to take a look.

Especially when it's under £2, which it currently is.

Was hoping this might be a sillier answer to Monument Valley but it does not really come through on it's core gameplay. It's a 6 or a 7 out of 10 for me.

Great little sub-hour diversion. I would recommend this to anyone who likes chilled, minimalist puzzles that don't get too obscure to the point of frustration.