Other Community Games worth checking


Lately I’ve been playing some Community Games made by other developers. I’ve found many of them to be original and pretty polished, but also find that most of them lack something I reallycan’t describe. I’m putting here a list with mini-reviews.

Biology Battle

The first Community Game I bought, also one of the most polished CG out there. With a gameplay very similar to Geometry Wars, the game features one single-player mode and many Vs. modes. It has a very interesting life/death scheme: You start the game in life mode, in which a combo meter goes up for staying alive. After some time and defeating three rather easy bosses, you are given the option to enter death mode whenever you like. When entering this mode, the combo you got multiplies by ten and stays there.

So, it’s very important to stay alive for a while in life mode to ensure a good score later in death mode, but if you change too late you won’t have enough lives left to get a good score. Also there’s a text telling you on which position are you on the global scoreboard while you play, it’s very interesting and challenging.

I was able to reach Top 5 when the game came out, now I barely reach the Top 100. Now the game is sold at 400MP, so it’s worth checking out.

Halfbrick Echoes

First of all: Halfbrick is the name of the company, the name of the game is just “Echoes”.

This game came out pretty recently, with nice art design and production values. The gameplay is interesting: You need to get to all the specified points on a level by walking to them. When walking you leave a trail. When touching one point of the level, an “echo” appears and travels by the path you left. If you touch them you lose one life. So basically it gets harder when you’ve touched most points of the level.

Although interesting, I didn’t find the gameplay fun enough so I’ve not bought it. Anyway I recommend trying it.

Sol Invasion

A game where you control a fleet and have to survive as much time as possible.By killing you get resources that enables you to improve your fleet or your own ship, so the trick is to kill lots of aliens and spend resources to ensure your fleet survives.

Although I find it rather easy and can get boring after a while, I found it interesting and funny. I don’t know why, but I kept playing for 30 minutes, even it’s the same all the time. Also I don’t know if the game gets harder on each attack wave, I got to a point where it seemed all the waves were more or less the same.

Air Legends

I recently downloaded the trial version of this game. Although small, the game is pretty polished, with simple yet good-looking visuals. The gameplay is fun, basically a 2D arcade shooter where you control a plane which only can shoot forward, and turning takes some time. You can do some maneouvers to avoid fire and get into other plane’s tails.

I think the game has great potential, and personally have bought it, but still it seems uncomplete. It has four game modes, but three of them are almost essentially a deathmatch: Team deathmatch, 2vs2 and 1vs1. The fourth is a mode where you paint into the sky with no defined goal.

In my opinion, the game cries for more long modes, some sort of campaign, or maybe a survival mode where you face waves of increasing difficulty, etc. Also, the game is rather easy, and you can’t set difficulty although you can set the game speed to a higher value.

It would improve a lot with a online multiplayer mode or a 4-player split screen mode.

Rabid Gophers

The most annoying game I’ve found on XBLCG so far. I’ve faced about 4 or 5 upsell screens for a simple 3 minutes play. Really. And only one mode is enabled on the trial mode, one mode you’ll probably get tired of before the demo finishes.

The more you insist, the less I want to buy the game.

Jonny Crush

This game reminds me a lot to Serious Sam, even the name of the game is somewhat similar. Anyway, I found the game not very good. The visuals are weird. There are some good effects, like the blood (red and green) splat on the screen when you kill a nearby enemy or you get hit by them, but the 3d visuals look like they could get an improvement. I’m not talking about more detailed models, I find them OK, it’s just the textures seem way too simple, also the scenario is just formed by textured cubes. Also the weapons on your hand doesn’t move at all when you shoot or move.

And finally, I found it rather strange that, even when Xbox 360 thumbsticks are analogic, the movement in the game isn’t: You only can move in 8 directions, and you’re either moving or not moving. I find that really disappointing.

If you can live with these things, the gameplay is based on getting combos for killing enemies in a row and getting a high score. There are many weapons to choose from.

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WaaghMan May 21st, 2009 News 1 Comment