Outside of some Nintendo big guns, 2D sidescrolling platformers rarely get the triple-A treatment they once enjoyed. They have, however, found a home in the indie space as smaller, cheaper downloads, an encouraging development if you’re worried about how videogame blockbuster economics affects entire genres. Despite presenting a format that’s been around since arcades, Max: Curse of Brotherhood is a game that exists thanks to the modern controller and development environment.

I’ve seen Max‘s visual style compared to Pixar, but let’s not go overboard here. It’s bright and cartoony, kid-friendly CGI, but it’s more Jimmy Neutron than Up. This isn’t at all a knock on the graphics. They set a rich, adventurous tone with characters that pop against lush backgrounds. All we get in the way of exposition is titular hero Max, in an act of whimsical malice brought about by the presence of little brother Felix, recites an incantation (found, of course, on the internet) to vent his frustration. Immediately, a magic portal opens and Felix is snatched right from their bedroom. Angered and motivated by this unexpected over-escalation of sibling justice, Max dives through the portal after him.

You don’t really need more story than that for a game like this. From here on, with mercifully few cutscenes, Max is a 2D action platformer with a few puzzles that slowly transforms into a puzzle game with a few action sequences. This change is due to a steady diversification of the game’s core mechanics, which are about using a “magic marker” to freehand draw objects with different properties into the world around you. This is an interesting concept for a game – usually all the objects needed to complete challenges are already in-game, or are created by assembling parts like Legos. Max‘s mechanics call for (the most rudimentary) art talent to create shapes you’ll need out of thin air.

From there, most of the game revolves around using the environment and your on-screen creations to get from Point A to Point B and maybe get the drop on a few enemies on the way. Need to get to a high platform? Pull a rock pillar up out of the ground. Need to swing across a ravine? Pull a branch out of a wall and pull a vine out to attach to it. Some of these abilities rely on your freehand skills with a thumbstick (freethumb?) more than others, and much of the difficulty curve comes from getting the hang of drawing them in exactly the right way. This is what I meant by a modern controller – the switch between familiar plaforming motion and on-screen line-tracing is a trick only the thumbstick can pull off.  Sometimes the game is a bit more picky with shapes than others, and I think my biggest frustrations came from occasional inconsistency. Still, it’s typically pretty forgiving of minor imprecision. A slightly lopsided box will still get you up to a previously unreachable platform, an oblong wheel will typically roll well enough, and you usually won’t need an exactly-measured curve to launch a projectile with the perfect arc.

This is not at all to say the game is too easy. Max dies less than Meatboy, but more than Mario. I did get a bit of a grim chuckle out of how much this game beats the crap out of a 12-year old boy. It’s nothing gory, but he screams in horror as he plummets to his death or as living vines drag him away. It’s a bit dark, but the game doesn’t linger on child-killing, instead restarting you instantly at the beginning of the most recent puzzle. Platformer purists might roll their eyes at the lack of consequences for failure, but the game ramps up the challenge enough that you’ll find parts that eat up a lot of your time and effort anyway.

The game shines the most in its quick changes of pace. I would often find myself banging my head against a particularly frustrating puzzle for minutes on end, only to be confronted with a sprinting, pellmell chase scene next. For a pretty kiddy tone, Max can get pulse-pounding during think-fast obstacles during these action sequences, requiring nimble deployment of your abilities to escape. Your magic marker gains more abilities as the game progresses, and level design dials up the complexity to engage them. I’m not the easiest guy to satisfy with puzzle game challenge balance, but Max threaded the needle for me. It’s particularly satisfying as your powers expand enough to start to turn the tables on a few persistent antagonists.

Max would be a solid, brain-wrinkling game to set a 10-year old after, but adults shouldn’t blow it off. It’s focused, balanced, and creative, and includes enough hidden secrets to even squeeze in some replay value. The venerable, versatile analog thumbstick may not be the new hotness of videogame hardware anymore, but Max: Curse of Brotherhood showcases its fundamental value well.

This review is based on a review code of the Xbox 360 version of Max: Curse of the Brotherhood developed by Press Play

Galactic Civlizations III is merely in alpha now, so don’t expect anything even close to a complete experience. In fact, much of a playthrough of the game in its current state is about bumping up against features that aren’t even playable yet. Fans of grand-scale turn-based-strategy games will instantly recognize the mechanics skeleton: manage production nodes and move units on a grid of hexagonal tiles. Build improvements and units at these nodes, and click a button to end your turn, giving the other players their turns. Your economy is about how many turns it takes to accomplish everything from manufacturing a scout, to building a spaceport, to researching xenofarming.

While Civ fans will find the general concept familiar, the most noticeable difference is the nodes are entire planets instead of cities, and the world geography is nebulae, extrasolar star systems, and asteroid fields instead of rivers, oceans, and mountains. Colonization must happen on habitable planets, which means outposts can’t pop up just anywhere – but also more intense and direct competition for that resource. Expansion is about finding those habitable planets, but space stations can go anywhere. There is less emphasis on exploration for just the right spot on a river or a coastline for a port city or industrial center, and the planet’s production advantages are not even visible before you colonize it. I can infer from visible but unavailable features that networks of trade routes and space stations for military fleets will be what will ultimately determine the geography of the game.

In space, there is much less in the way of obstacles and ideal geographic spots, so I quickly discovered that exploration in the early game requires much less attention. In fact, the game makes it pretty easy to automate from a big-picture standpoint, sending scouts and surveyors happily and boldly going where no man has gone before, and even checking out searchable debris fields and artifacts when they can. Actually, I found a de-emphasis on micromanagement to be a pretty consistent theme, even with just the alpha version of this game.

In its current state, a game only consists of a 1 v 1 with a CPU opponent, and so features in trade, diplomacy, and cultural influence aren’t even implemented yet. The several games I’ve played are almost entirely about the military, which boils down into the smashing together of fleets. Galactic Civilizations III wars are fought by assembling individual units onto a single tile, thereby making a fleet whose strength and attributes are more or less the sum of its parts. There are three different kinds of weapons and defenses and so it’s possible for a smaller fleet to beat a larger one if the tech, weapons, and defenses are all to the smaller fleet’s advantage, but it’s not very difficult to make your fleet well rounded enough so that it just becomes a numbers game.

You’ll want the industrial capacity to pump out those space fighters and battleships quickly, which is actually another reason big-picture automation is a plus. It’s easy to queue up what will be an entire fleet complete with a diversity of space superiority fighters and transports for planetary invasion, while another planet works on building the space stations you need to create a militarized border. The menu makes it easy to see what each planet is working on in case you need to step in and change on the fly.

“Ideology” takes the role of what the Civ games call social policy, except it’s done with a bit of a twist. You don’t entirely choose your ideology, your in-game choices give you points in each of three ideology trees: benevolence, pragmatism, and malevolence. Build up enough points in a tree and you can choose one of several passive boosts for your civilization. It’s not necessarily easy to predict the effects of each tree: all three can arrive at influence and toughness boosts in their own way. In the alpha, these choices come when exploring a new planet or discovering a floating artifact: do you proceed cautiously and carefully with the safety of your personnel, or do you kick down the door in the name of getting a +5 to your science?

Galactic Civlization III‘s success will hinge on how well the game scales up and how well the less overtly militaristic features flesh out. If you’re interested in this alpha, keep in mind that its purpose is more to stoke your imagination for what the game might be than to deliver a mind-blowing gaming experience in the here and now. If this game can interest players in a galaxy’s worth of diverse spacefaring race competing with the best of their might, charisma, and guile, then we might see an interesting space war between turn-based strategy games this fall.

This is such a multiplayer-focused game, the “campaign” is literally just some cinematics book-ending regular multiplayer matches, with scripted dialogue throughout. That’s it. There’s a handful of fun set-piece moments to be had, but not enough to make me tune in to any sort of plot. You’re playing against other humans online like you normally would, there’s just extra story elements added over top of it. By the way, these dialogues have zero bearing on the situation or what you’re doing at the moment. They play out whether or not you win or lose the match. It’s such an afterthought, clearly so peripheral to the core experience of the game that I have a hard time even being critical of it. I love a good game story, and I suppose players who need to have a story experience will be disappointed, but I need story in Titanfall about as much as I need it in Tetris. I have a feeling the game is going to take some flak for placing the fiction on the back-burner, but I just don’t care. It’s a low-value detail. My only real criticism is you’re forced to get through the campaign to unlock significant customization options.

Those familiar with Call of Duty will recognize the mechanics skeleton that the Infinity Ward vets at Respawn Entertainment bring to the table. Sprint into a battle map, often in an urban environment, and hold the L-trigger to aim down your sights. The game starts to differentiate, however, when you jump and then double jump, catch a ledge on a wall or a window, or wall-run along a vertical surface for 20 feet or so. The speed and mobility of the infantry, called pilots, might take some getting used to, but you’ll find yourself dashing and gunning along rooftops and out second-story windows soon enough.

The slick parkour is the first major core mechanic hook to the game. The other such hook is summoning and piloting a 20-foot-high battle mech called a titan, and taking it into the action against opposing titans and pilots. Every player will almost certainly call down at least one titan in a game. Now your first instinct for your first titan is going to be a rush of power. You’ve played games before, you know that getting into the cockpit of a walking tank is a recipe for a rampage of explosions and destruction with your enemies fleeing before your unstoppable might. You point yourself to the biggest grouping of red dots on your mini-map and charge straight into the blizzard of rockets, missiles, grenades, and haymaker-throwing fellow titans.

You blow up in 30 seconds, ejected indignantly from your titan, and this is actually the feature I love best about Titanfall. It’s a masterwork of game balance. Of course your titan is far from invincible – with 12 players all throwing titans into the mix, it would be stupid if they were. The truly impressive part is the dynamics between titans and pilots. A pilot isn’t going to match a titan’s firepower in open space. But a titan can have real trouble taking down a pilot who’s getting off potshots from inside buildings, and the pilots’ anti-titan weapons pack enough punch to be taken seriously.

I really love how this game punishes the reckless and rewards even the most rudimentary teamwork without slowing down the action at all. A titan is such a huge target, there’s just no way to avoid all the damage coming your way, but you can choose your ground to your advantage. If engaged by another titan, don’t expect to school it with sick stick skills and get out without a scratch. This isn’t Halo. Two enemy titans is just about impossible. The standard-issue paradoxically calm female AI voice pointing out “Caution: you are outnumbered two-to-one” is the designers’ way of driving home that it’s a very tough spot, even if you’re an ace in your titan. Conversely, however, I’ve been having a lot of success timing my titan falls to coordinate with a buddy of mine. We are more often than not rewarded for our patience with at least a few minutes of making short work of enemy titans foolish enough to wander alone. Furthermore, the pilot’s melee option against a titan is to “rodeo””: jump on it’s back and attack its machine guts. A solo player will have to park his titan, get out, and risk getting killed to engage the enemy pilot on foot, creating moments of pretty high-stakes parkour gun-fighting. However, with a buddy titan, I can just put my back to him and a few seconds (and urgent curses) later, he’s cleaned the riders off me.

The level design dictates how these titan-pilot encounters play out, and is another shining example of the game’s balance. A complex town of multi-level houses, walls, and second-story walkways becomes a completely unrecognizable maze of corridors and open spaces in a titan. Managing space is a titan’s greatest weapon, but also its greatest weakness. It’s easy to think your titan has the advantage against an enemy, and then you find yourself in a rat’s nest of pilots pouring on damage from all sides. Some of the more exhilarating and satisfying moments of the game is bringing down an enemy titan as a pilot. Even soloing a titan is a possibility, if you play your cards right.

Customizable load-outs are the norm with shooters nowadays, and between your pilot and your titan, you have plenty of options for preferred weapons and perks. Again, the balance shines as each weapon fills a different niche, and I don’t really feel like any weapon is just straight-up better than any other one. In fact, my favorite pilot weapon is the very first one you can use as a level 1 pilot. There’s enough to play around with to keep your experimenting, but it’s not nearly as tinker-heavy as Call of Duty or especially Battlefield.

There are only a handful of game modes now, all fairly predictable reiterations of the team death match, capture-point, and capture-the-flag types. Most new players will find the routine action of Titanfall so fresh and different that it will be a long, long time before this game starts to feel stale. Each match seems to have its own narrative, with a prelude of pilot skirmishes, a crescendo as titans start to show up, and a climax as all hell breaks loose in a battle royale of titans. Victory goes to the side that better sees, predicts, and understands these phases and their cycles, which shift along with the maps and gametypes. I never use the fastest, most fragile titan for anything except capture-the-flag, in which it’s irreplaceable to how I play that game. Similarly, I rarely jump out of my titan and let the autopilot takeover except in the capture-point mode, in which the titan creates a ruckus outside while I work my way into the building. All of this nuance adds up to fertile ground for the sort of spontaneous moments of organic game drama players live for, and love to share with others.

This is obviously a critical year for the industry, it’s their best window to demonstrate if next-gen Triple-A blockbusters are going to be the same-old, same-old with a graphics upgrade or if this is a new dawn of innovation and design creativity. Believe the hype with Titanfall. With the splash this game has made, I’m having more optimism for the latter and a better vision of the future than I did a month ago.

This review is based on a retail copy of the Xbox One version of Titanfall developed by Respawn Entertainment published by Electronic Arts

The buzz around Titanfall is closer to a low roar, and I can understand why. The console shooter scene has been so overwhelmingly dominated by Call of Duty and Halo that even industry veteran Battlefield seems like a distant third franchise. A fresh new shooter that’s the first game in its franchise rather than the 8th? Critical praise for early test builds? Giant Robots?! The stage seems to be set, and the gaming public is Titanfall‘s audience to lose.

Now with the open beta (I remember when demos were just “demos”), the public can get their hands and heads around the idea of the game. Developer Respawn Entertainment was founded by Infinity Ward expats, and so the Call of Duty genome is immediately apparent in the basic controls, general level design, and game structure. As an infantry grunt on foot, you’ll spend a lot of time sprinting into what looks like a good position and then pressing the L-trigger to aim down your sights with a modest zoom-in. Kills earn you points toward Titanfall’s equivalent of Call of Duty‘s kill-streak bonuses, but in Titanfall’s case, it’s the very core mechanic of the game. You’re not calling in helicopters, or body armor, or a goddamn dog – you’re calling in an honest-to-goodness 3-story-tall battlemech.

This game is about the relationship between the mechs (titans) and the infantry (pilots). It doesn’t take many points to earn your titan, so everyone will get theirs in the course of the game. It’s certainly a rush of power like you’d expect once you hop in your Titan, and enemy infantry would be foolish to stand against you in open ground. While piloting, the controls are generally similar (aim, shoot, sprint, melee), but the game certainly plays different. To a pilot, the world of the battle map is alleys, balconies, stairs, buildings – to a titan, it’s merely open spaces and tight spaces. Titanfall is a much more three-dimensional game than the likes of Call of Duty. It’s not as bouncy and athletic as Halo, but it’s more so than Call of Duty and double-jumps and wall-jumps adding interesting layers of agility for pilots. Not so for titans. There is no jump for the giant mechs, and not much in the way of cover, so your world becomes two-dimensional, albeit taller.

While robot battling in Titanfall can look and feel like glorious robot mayhem straight out of Pacific Rim or Transformers, it’s important to keep in mind that you’re not at all an unstoppable juggernaut and a little finesse can help you out. You’re a giant target, and pilots all carry anti-titan weapons. It’s unlikely a single pilot will out-duel a mighty titan with just a rocket launcher, but those launchers hit hard enough to be taken seriously, especially in numbers. You’re also undoubtedly going to run into other titans out there, and you can only take so much damage before you must safely eject your wreck before it explodes. Incoming damage can be mitigated by judicious deployment of a frontal “vortex shield” which stops and gathers projectiles in order to hurl them back the way they came. Both the shield and the titans’ dodge abilities are limited in their use before they must recharge, so fighting other titans often turns into a bit of a bluff match to get your opponent to burn his defensive moves before you really pile on of the offense. It’s damn near impossible to avoid damage for long, and difficult to run away, so taking on more than one titan opponent is almost impossible. This challenge, however, does incentivize teamwork and focusing fire on titans. It might be a disappointment when your titan goes down, but just keep in mind that switching back and forth between pilot and titan is fundamental to the game – you’re not supposed to spend the whole game as only one or the other.

There’s one more side of the game worth mentioning, because I’m not sure how I feel about it. Multiplayer matches are only 6 vs. 6, but the maps are populated with infantry AIs, most of which are essentially cannon fodder with rare exceptions. Their primary purpose seems to be easy points for the other team to rack up toward titans. Compared to enemy players, they’re barely any threat, but it will truly irritate you to sprint into defilade clinging to a tiny but of health, only to be administered the killing bullet by one of those stupid AIs. They help balancing a bit so that titans aren’t exclusive to the players that are already crackshots at killing other players, and as someone who sucks at Call of Duty, I can appreciate that a bit. But ultimately, with 12 players, the maps will never be huge like Battlefield or Halo, and so these throwaway infantry units just seem a bit like clutter in combat.

The beta only grants access to two game modes and a few customization options for pilots and titans, but more will be in the full release. If you’ve got the Xbox One and are at all a fan of shooters, there’s zero reason not to look into Titanfall right now. This game will sink or swim on how well it can flesh out from this core, but if it can, Titanfall just might be the next big thing.

As the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 wrestle with their awkward infancy, gamers look for games that specifically showcase the newest technology, rather than merely apply a quasi-noticeable graphics upgrade to a game also out for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Xbox One owners, here is your game. It’s not perfect, but within minutes, you will see some solid evidence of what you paid for with your new console.

I find myself back in the same position I’ve been in since I started seeing gameplay video of the XB1 and PS4: the graphics in Dead Rising 3 are without a doubt some of the best I’ve ever seen in a video game, but they don’t leave the previous gen completely in the dust. Characters are rendered in impressive detail and faces are emotive and expressive, but I don’t think much more so than Halo 4, which also did a great job with those features. It’s hard for me to declare a new dawn of video game tech just by looking at graphics detail alone.

However, here’s what does blow the 360 away: the sheer number of moving bodies rendered onscreen and the draw distance at which individuals are visible, even in crowds. Man…it’s literally hundreds of zombies. Heretofore Dynasty Warriors games only wish they could have done this. When I found a high vantage point, I would sometimes find myself taking time to gaze out over the roiling undead masses the way I would stop and look out over the Gotham cityscape in Batman: Arkham City. If you’re looking for an example that demonstrates something of the latest in video game tech, the zombie hordes of Dead Rising 3 is a good one.

Handy Mechanic Nick Ramos is one of a small number of holdout survivors in a Los Angeles analogue overrun by tens of thousands of shambling, flesh-eating zombies. The authorities, embodied by the ominously named Federal Bureau of Zombie Defense and Control (the ZDC) have pulled out, warning survivors that the city will be flattened by bombs in less than a week. The objective before Nick and friends is simple: get out. The obstacles – completely walled and road-blocked perimeter and zombies in every direction – make the task a bit more complicated. I’m honestly not going to bother criticizing story much here. The story is fine, but this isn’t a game that really needs much story. They put one in because they had to, and it works.

The game actually borrows a lot of pages from Arkham‘s venerable playbook. The playable space is enormous, a richly varied urban maze with side quests, collectibles, upgrades, and mini-challenges practically around every corner, down every alley, and up every playground slide. Like Arkham, the sheer density of stuff to get distracted by, multiplied by the sense of scale to the space, is daunting. I was gleefully lost in chasing down weapon plans and fellow survivors for hours without pursuing the campaign objectives at all. Make no mistake, you will need to use vehicles and travel highways in order to get around fast enough, especially when pursuing timed objectives.

Like previous Dead Rising games, the hook is that so much of the random debris that litters the environment is accessible and useful. If you’re unarmed, pick up that nearby crowbar and you’ll be able to beat your way through several dozen zombies. If you’re truly desperate, stuff like the old-fashioned brick fastball can get you out of a jam. Sometimes you’ll happen across more suitable force multipliers like swords or firearms, but the real jackpot is finding weapons that can be jerry-rigged together with devastating and often wacky results.

This weapon-MacGyvering is the core mechanic of the game. The limiting factor on weapons is a finite amount of use before they break down and are automatically dropped by Nick. A broadsword would seem like the perfect weapon for a zombie apocalypse, but try to hack your way through too big of a crowd, and it will break in the middle of it. Hope you got a backup plan. However, combine that sword with a gas can, and the result is a balls-to-the-wall inferno chopper of zombie annihilation, a weapon with a wider sweep, more punch, and longer durability than it had before. Now you can take on crowds of over a hundred before it breaks. Charge into action with a few combo weapons in your inventory, and an entire crowded city block can be flattened one slaughtering melee swing at a time. You’re a one-man flesh grinder, sending severed, pulverized hunks of unfortunate zombies in every direction. You’ll start to wonder if “Zombie Apocalypse” actually means an apocalypse for the zombies.

Two weapons can only be combined together if you’ve discovered the schematic for that specific combination, and there are literally hundreds of them to find. Some are even upgrades of existing combinations. Wire a car battery onto a broken street light post and you got a giant cattle prod with an area-of-effect slam. Stick a gas can on it, and the thing can switch back and forth between electric and flame attacks. One of my favorites was to run around in full football equipment, chucking Nerf screamer footballs with blades stuck in them. There are throwing weapons, slashing weapons, sweeping weapons, firearms, bombs, blunt weapons, area-of-effect weapons, traps, gun turrets…I think this game has the most variety of destructive implements I’ve ever seen. Even vehicles can be combined into rolling murder, like a motorcycle with a steamroller for a front wheel and flamethrowers, because there is no God for zombies. If that’s not enough to convince you, just wait until you hit the streets with a horrifying combination street sweeper-ice cream truck known as The Party Slapper.

The weapon diversity actually also brings me to my biggest criticism of the game. Considering the ridiculous range of your arsenal, you aren’t really challenged to make use of specific weapons in clever ways. There are a few minor change-ups of enemy types – fireman zombies are a bit tougher and swing axes, football zombies are a bit tougher and tackle you to the ground – but you don’t see them very often and you can beat them by just hammering away a bit more than you would on regular zombies. As per usual with zombie stories, the most dangerous thing out there is hostile fellow humans. They shrug off more damage and have some ranged attacks, but even they can’t stand up to sustained flailing of your combo weapons. You don’t need to plan much for a combat scenario when you’re deciding what weapons to make or keep. In fact, the game will often leave obviously combo-able weapons or vehicles right in spots where there’s a solid chance they might come in handy.

I still had a blast with the combat, but it is almost always just a crowd control game, and a pretty easy one as long as you don’t let yourself get caught empty-handed. Much of the fun of the game is giggling “No way…” when you make something like chainsaw nunchucks, and then the ensuing glee as you wreak havoc on the nearest cluster of undead. I would have liked there to be more pressure to, for example, have to use my shockwave blaster to knock something over and then a specific piercing weapon to penetrate armor. There are a few minor glimpses of weapon-specific challenges, but well over half of those cases are boss fights and those exact weapons are usually lying at your feet.

Character customization is decently detailed, and experience points can be used to fine-tune Nick to your play style – although there just aren’t enough guns and vehicles to make those options reasonable when you’re going to need health and melee prowess much more. Cosmetically, there are scores of outfits, hairstyles, accessories, and beards to try. I went full football gear and never looked back, and cut scenes look hilarious like that. Personally, I never really care all that much about playing dress-up in video games, but it’s there if you want to.

With the Xbox One still fresh and available full-featured triple-A games still limited to very few new-gen-only options and a bunch of cross-platform fare, I say Dead Rising 3 is a must-own for fans of fast action. The generally low difficulty is forgivable (I never died in my first playthrough) with the core action so wildly fun, and gamers after a real challenge can always opt for Nightmare Mode. In fact, if they threw in a bit more challenges to your sense of engineering to go with all the build choices you get, Dead Rising 3 would be real close to a 10 out of 10 game.

For some reason, Germany is the place to be for point-and-click adventure games right now. Germany is home to Studio Fizbin, makers of recently reviewed The Inner World, and Daedelic Entertainment, which is trying its hardest to carry the torch in this genre after the demise of LucasArts. The latter even serves as publisher for PC-distributed new titles in venerable LucasArts classics like Monkey Island and Sam & Max. Their own development efforts have produced Night of the Rabbit and the Deponia series, which now adds a third and final installment.

The story follows Rufus, a resistance fighter on post-apocalyptic junk-industrial planet Deponia in his struggles against the privileged, technologically advanced Organon. Rufus would like to think of himself as a mechanically gifted, think-on-his-feet Jason-Bourne type adventurer, but most of his successes are the result of bungling, slapstick luck. His narcissism in the face of danger is pretty funny, and occasionally reminded me of Archer without Archer’s genuine unmotivated talent. Rufus must save the entire planet from obliteration at the hands of the Organon, but his efforts usually take second consideration to his fawning over Goal, a defector from Organon-run Elysium. Her name serves as a literal reminder of Rufus’s true…well…objective.

By nature, these games have limited mechanics, and so must attempt to be captivating in other ways. In Deponia‘s case, it leans on colorful cartoony art, and dialogue sequences with lots of fourth-wall-breaking sidelong glances at the audience to poke fun at the genre. Comedy is foremost here. Knowing it depends so heavily on dialogue, the game pumps out a lot of it. Maybe it’s because I’ve played a lot of point-and-click adventures lately, but I’m starting to lose a bit of patience with prolixity. It’s very cool that all the dialogue gets voice acting today, but the performance for Rufus tries too hard for laughs. I think actor Kerry Shale was directed to never go for subtlety when he could go for over-acting. Every word in the sentence is dripping with a heavy dose of emotion piled on. “Please” becomes “puh-leeze” whenever possible.

It was usually a little much for me, but part of my slight discomfort was the script. This game tries very, very hard for laughs, which sometimes felt like forcing it. There are, however, plenty of legit funny moments attained by (if nothing else) the sheer volume of comedy attempts thrown at the player. Much of the script really is quite good, with observational gems like “When Chaos floods order, genius mounts a surfboard.” The game brightens when events involve other characters with whom Rufus can react, rather than his own internal monologue.

The artwork is much better than the animation in this case, but overall, setting and sound design are excellent here. Characters pop with cartoony flair and although they could have used a few more facial expressions, they were good enough to occasionally deliver a reaction joke without any dialogue at all. The game would have been well served with a bit more excitement to the movements. When something crazy happens, having characters use their stock walking animations to move around the scene seems very out-of-place when they would reasonably be running and diving around.

The challenge design in Deponia is mostly familiar, if you have played any point-and-click adventure game before. Move (usually an unhurried mosey) through colorful, picture book scenes and collect items that can be tinkered with or manipulated to form solutions to obstacles in the way of plot advancement. I’m still on the fence about built-in object highlighting that serves as a shortcut to what otherwise might be a scavenger hunt, but regardless, Deponia has it. Maybe it’s because I’ve been playing a lot of these games lately, but I find Deponia‘s challenges went more smoothly through my brain than most other such adventures, and this is something all three Deponia games have in common. It’s not that I’m particularly great at adapting to madcap anti-logic indigenous to a comedy game, but I think they did a great job of writing hints into Rufus’s dialogue that shone light on the perspective I might try to take on an object in order to see it as a key that could fit whatever lock barred my way. Much of the design success there is about skillful use of language – hint without being stupidly obvious. In this sense, the scriptwriters deserve a lot of props.

Moreover, Deponia throws in delightful change-ups in the form of self-contained puzzles that must be solved immediately before the player can advance. The game will often provide a few brief sentences of overview before setting you to it, and these brainteasers provide a little hint of Professor Layton feel to the game. I really liked this change of pace a lot. I thought they struck a good balance of being challenging without aggravating, and used sparingly enough to avoid dominating the more narrative-focused item tinkering.

Here’s my biggest complaint of the game. Occasionally, the series of events will advance off-screen and you have no idea that happened. Working past a challenge will trigger something else completely unrelated to develop, and you will just need to happen across it in order to know it happened at all. For example, there was a scene in which Rufus must execute a comedy of errors on series villain Cletus, and when it’s over, Rufus’s three sidekicks have wrapped up the thing they were waiting for. There was no way to know that without just checking in on them, since Rufus’s caper was unrelated to their wait. I was stuck for awhile until I decided to just start poking into rooms to see if there was anything I missed, therefore essentially finding the “answer” by luck or process of elimination.

I have to be cryptic about story events, since story is so crucial to the experience of this sort of game. Suffice it to say that if you have played the previous two Deponia games, this one is a must-play. It’s relentless attempts at levity actually do a great job of letting the very few moments of actual despair and darkness stick out by contrast. Any more would be getting into spoilers. Goodbye Deponia wraps everything up nicely to me, but I could see room for argument there.

I tend to wrap point-and-click adventures up with similar sentiments: if you’re an enthusiast of the genre, here’s a worthy recipient of your $20.00. I’ll go a step further in this case. Whether you seek out point-and-click adventures or are just looking for something new and different, give the Deponia series a look, but don’t start with the third one. Taken together, Deponia, Chaos on Deponia, and Goodbye Deponia are the best downloadable point-and-click experience on Steam right now, and will deliver the most and best content this genre has seen in years.

This review is based on a review copy of the PC version of Goodbye Deponia published by Daedelic Entertainment

Despite my nostalgic fondness for the LucasArts (may it rest in peace) point-and-click adventure/puzzle games of yore, I’ve come to the realization that I don’t always love this sort of game. Or at least I find myself definitely enjoying some sides of it more than others. So it is with The Inner World.

Mechanically, this game is very standard – I’ve yet to see an example of this genre (I’m sure something’s out there) that bends too far out of the familiar. Your see your character stand and move in an environment that looks straight out of a picture-book, and you can explore certain points or items in the environment to determine if they are useful to you. You can’t interact with every little scrap of paper or table in the scene, so you don’t have to worry too much about trying to find needles in haystacks. Mostly, these games are about trying to figure out how to use items in your inventory to overcome your current obstacle or pursue your current objective, with context clues or dialogue providing some directing hints as to what to keep an eye out for. The Inner World certainly follows suit in that regard.

The distinctive styling for this game is certainly about the visuals of the world the game inhabits, the characters, the script, and the story. Since point-and-click adventures are never going to offer much to dissect in terms of game mechanics and gamplay “feel,” it’s appropriate to dwell on these stylization factors. The Inner World definitely provides the aforementioned picture-book appearance, and I suppose it’s credit to them that I’m having a hard time coming up with comparables with which to describe it. I’ll credit developer Studio Fizbin with creativity with world-crafting in that regard. The game takes its title from its fictional universe, in which outer space is an infinite expanse of dirt, and the habitable world Asposia is the inner surface of a sphere (planet?) provided with life-sustaining air by air fountains that somehow manage to pipe it in. The air isn’t merely what the life-forms breathe, it also is the force of nature upon which Asposian civilization is built, everything from bio-luminescent critters used for light to wind-powered industry. Wind is central to Asposian culture and – more relevant to the storyline’s immediate purposes – their religion.

The player takes control of Robert, an innocent, pleasantly-mannered acolyte of Wind Monk Conroy, whose influence and stature within Asposian society makes him a respected although dominating figure in Robert’s life. Robert is naïve, but also clever, and ventures outside Conroy’s castle the fix what he thinks is a mistake for which is is responsible. Asposian society doesn’t look the same from the streets as it does from the castle, and Robert’s exposure to the outer world (bang) constitutes somewhat of a coming-of-age story.

Both characters and settings are hand drawn in children’s-book style, and designs for both are fanciful if rather unbalanced. The Asposian cityscape and interior spaces employ a more drab, monochromatic color palate against which the more brightly-colored characters popped to my eye, with rich reds, blues, greens, and yellows, often accentuated with dots, stripes, and other eye-grabbing touches. Maybe this was a deign choice to lead the eye to key spots in the scene? I generally liked the art style, although it’s not as lush as Night of the Rabbit (the previous point-and-click I reviewed). The characters are sort of humanoid, I guess, they’re more like anthropomorphic quadrilaterals with limbs and carrots for noses, but it’s the kind of style conceit that, when coupled with the universe they’ve crafted, quickly got me to stop asking questions like “So what is this character, biologically?”

My only real issue in terms of game mechanics had to do with the “highlight” feature, which many modern point-and-click adventures employ. First of all, I’m on the fence whether or not I even want to be able to push a button and have the game highlight all the things to pick up or talk to – it removes any real pressure to search. However, I have to admit that I would be pretty frustrated to be stuck because I missed picking up a tiny, detail needle in a rich, expansive scene. In this case, the highlighting provided by the game isn’t enough. If they’re going to include this feature, they should make it pop. Instead, you get faint-ish white dots that can sometimes blend in a bit with the background, making me wonder if it’s a feature that should really be in the game at all.

I’ll admit right now that I don’t always have the most fun with this sort of game, because solving puzzles often involves some sort of creative solution at which I would never arrive logically on my own. I found myself frequently mentally complaining about this issue with The Inner World. Here’s an example: right off the bat, one of the first challenges is to get a bird off a windowsill. It’s too high to just reach up and grab it, but I’m able to combine a piece of string with an empty windsock to create a net. I still can’t reach? There’s a nearby worm, I should be able to use that to lure the bird, right? Too bad the worm is too quick for me to grab. Use the net on the worm? Nope, still to quick. There’s nothing else that really makes sense to do in my inventory…

Use a puppet on the worm? Nope. Use a stick on the worm? Nope. Use an open bottle of booze on the worm? Wait…that’s what works? Dump booze down the worm hole, and grab the hammered little guy when he pokes out again? I’m not saying this solution is awful, giving a little worm an instant rager is kind of cute. I’m saying how would I ever have come up with it without backing into it by default? If someone had mentioned local booze-hound worms nearby or something, maybe I would have made the connection. Then it would have almost been too obvious. Maybe I just don’t think outside the box enough, but I get frustrated when the solution turns out to be something I don’t think I’d ever be able to reason my way to beforehand. Some of the solutions are really a stretch to me, and wouldn’t have figured them out if I hadn’t just tried everything in my inventory on the object. A walking stick can be used as a knitting needle? I dunno. I wouldn’t go as far as to say the puzzle design for this game is defined by this “who would think that?” tendency, some of the obstacles and their solutions were fun, not obvious, and made me feel smart for putting together the chain of logic to arrive at them. I’m hesitant to over-criticize this facet of the game, because somehow I feel like many of the puzzles I would complain about would be solved super quickly by people who are much better at advanced abstraction than mine. In that sense, maybe I should relish the chance to stretch the imagination a bit? Maybe I need to be more mature, but I ran into a sort of challenging that was more frustrating than fun a bit more often than I want in a game.

Story needs to matter for a game like this, and the story and characters are very strong here. I’ve read some complaints about localization, but I never really had a problem with it that I couldn’t dismiss as a minor detail. In the first five minutes or so of dialogue and game cinematics, I gritted my teeth a bit because the world and characters were introduced as so story-book kiddy, I was worried I was going to have to review a full-length game’s worth of Nick Jr. content. I can do kiddy in a nuanced and mechanically rigorous Mario or Zelda game, not sure if I could do it in a point-and-click. However, my persistence was rewarded with a delicious shift in tone as Robert ventures outside his bubble, and the dumbed-down innocence of the game’s introduction adds layers to the slow discovery of political, societal, and historical complication. It was an unexpected but welcome surprise when wisecracks were made about drunkenness, Robert’s ignorance of women’s intimate wear, and vengeful castration. The final act spiraled a bit out of control, but not enough for me to feel the need for a spoiler-laden rant about it in the review.

Point-and-click adventures aren’t a super mainstream genre right now with games aplenty, so if you’re a fan of them who actively seeks them out, The Inner World is a must-play. However, if you’re not an aficionado of the genre but looking for a title to dabble in, I think there are better options out there, and The Inner World would be something to come back to. If you’re in a great mood for a story-intensive game, it should get bumped up your list a bit. Iffy puzzle design and story quibbles don’t hold back the merits of the game, but I wouldn’t call The Inner World one for the ages.

This review is based on a review copy of the PC version of The Inner World developed by Headup Games

This is the weirdest, most difficult review I’ve ever written. Where do I even start? Killer is Dead is the latest from oddball rock star developer Suda 51, known for cult-hit flashy action games like Killer7, No More Heroes, and Lollipop Chainsaw. All I can say now that I’m through Killer is Dead is: Mr. 51…we need to talk.

I’m having such a tough time reviewing this game because I had such a wildly varied experience with it. I’m the very definition of ambivalent. I think all critics of all opinions can agree that there are many different faces to the game, and it’s hard to synthesize them all into a single whole. So I’ll start with any game’s heart and soul (in my opinion), the core mechanics. You control a lanky, very anime assassin in a cel-shaded world, slashing and blasting your way through levels filled with enemies to reach your mark, a boss fight. The action is rapid, stylish, and nuanced but understandable. Combat leans toward the swift, swinging swordwork only a katana can provide, with necessary change-ups provided by the protagonist’s cybernetic left arm. Predictably, this prosthesis is a transformer, able to change into various guns, heavy melee weapons, or just throw an honest-to-goodness old fashioned guard-breaking haymaker.

Man, the combat in this game is so sweet. Tim Rogers’s essay on “sticky friction” really stuck with me, and I will insist I would eat up a game that stripped out all other elements – say, just throw wire frames on the screen against gray-walled environments – and merely delivered straight-up Killer is Dead combat. As is, combat is very fast, explosive, punchy and stop-and-go. When you’re in the zone, it feels like that speed-up-slow-down sequence from 300. It manages an interesting, flowing balance between button-mashing, razor sharp block/dodge timing to set up counters, and enemy types demanding different applications of your arsenal. There aren’t a ton of different enemies, but there are enough to present fresh challenges in every level, especially when thrown at you in new combinations.

I’m not going to say it’s perfect, but it’s close enough for me to love. I had some camera issues, especially in tight quarters. When attempting to dodge with a backstep, it picked up my directional lunge much better when the camera was behind Mondo rather than to his side. Boss battles are a constant whirlwind of activity. Pauses in which to collect your thoughts or reset your tactics are few and preciously far between, but that’s not a bad thing. I started to feel like the colorful, counter-and-combo animation was getting stale, but you can unlock other counter options which freshen the mechanic up.

The styling goes hand-in-hand with the action. Cel-shading has a lot of haters, but I love the choice for this game. I’ll concede it covers with cartoony flash some graphics deficiencies – the environments don’t have near the level of detail as other games striving for a more “realistic” look. One of my personal favorite things ever is Japanese design of American characters. Stoic, wiry, suit-and-tie-wearing protagonist Mondo Zappa (?) is deliberately established as a Yankee, although his general archetype leans toward characters that are usually Japanese. Mondo isn’t much of a talker, unless he’s trying to out-witticism his mark, like a badass is obligated to do. Oh, the dialogue is B-movie hilarity at its best, it has to be intentional. He couldn’t crack his smile if his life depended on it, and his sunglasses only exit to reveal, when he removes them, that his irises are f*cking red, you guys. And when he goes to bars, he enters a mini-game in which the player must ogle a chick’s boobs and crotch.

Wait, what?

I was playing a balls-to-the-wall action game and now I’m…having to control Mondo’s gaze as an anime female says things like “Fascinating,” and “You’re making me blush,” (despite the fact that exactly zero dialogue is coming from him, written or spoken), trying to steal looks at her cleavage and skirt when she’s not looking…

Jesus Tapdancing Christ. What the balls just happened? So now we take a deep breath and get into what makes Killer is Dead controversial.

Teasing apart all of this weirdness would be an essay unto itself, so I’m not going to get into more than necessary for review of this game. Let me state up front: I am no feminist champion. When I say Killer is Dead‘s bizarro take on sexuality is f*cked up, I’m not white knighting it. I will state for the record that some of the biggest laughs I had playing this game were when my friends were watching me do these Gigolo Missions (yes, they’re called that). However, upon discussion, one of my friends put his finger on it best – we weren’t laughing at a joke the game was trying to make, we were laughing because of how uncomfortable it was.

When I drill down to the core of my problem with Killer is Dead‘s sexuality, it’s that the game doesn’t seem to be trying to make a joke with it, like other discomfort-based humor does. It’s just doing it. It’s having you fight through your own facepalms (“you” the player’s, not Mondo’s) ogle this vapid chick just because. It literally says “ogle” in load screen game tips, to try to coach you on doing it better. I might feel differently if a joke were attempted. I believe anything and everything should be the subject of humor, it’s perhaps humanity’s best mechanism for understanding and coping. That doesn’t mean I think every joke is defensible, you need to do it right. But there isn’t even a joke here. Out of nowhere, you’re forced to creep on women in a mini-game that rewards you with a brief “romantic” cinematic. Yay, you get to see Mondo not smiling and wearing a suit as a cel-shaded anime chick gets down to her lingerie and purrs something stupid before a fade-to-white. Oh, and you get a weapon upgrade. So you got that going for you.

Other games like to sexualize for humor’s sake. Duke Nukem Forever is wall to wall sexuality and objectification to make jokes about the industry’s infatuation with hyper-masculine protagonists. Bayonetta joked about cockteasing, and Lollipop Chainsaw joked about superfluous sexuality used for its own sake. All these games are symptomatic of media’s weird relationship with women and sexuality, and it’s particularly acute with video games. But at least they were trying to do or say something funny or satirical with it. Killer is Dead doesn’t even have that slim justification.

The ogling mini-game isn’t even much of a game. Oh yeah, I did them. They make them easy because, I assume, they want you to see the lingerie. You’ll find more depth in “dating sims” on Newgrounds. The hell of it is there are other mini-games that are good! And fun! Man a gun turret to defend an innocent from waves of enemies! Ride on a motorcycle while slashing and ramming enemies and blocking incoming fire! These mini-games totally fit the rest of the game’s tone. This boob-ogling doesn’t. Why is it there?. Some sort of wink-wink, nudge-nudge from the developers? “Chicks, guys. Amirite? Look at that.” Someone thought this was okay. This game is so aggressive with its objectification that I get the idea Suda 51 and others would call me a pussy if I told them Killer is Dead overdid it.

It’s a shame that I have to dwell on the downsides, because I want it to be known that this game has great upside as well. In terms of a pure action game, it’s one of the best available for console download (although I maintain the $50 price tag is at least $10 too steep). I’m not saying the industry needs to get rid of boobs, or sexuality. I love boobs. LOVE THEM. I don’t want them gone from games. I’m rating the game a 6 because I think the cool combat has to ultimately outweigh the stupid eye-banging for review purposes, but I can’t ignore the broader cultural context. If there’s anything that Killer is Dead demonstrates, it’s that I’m running out of laughs for this juvenile horse shit, and sexuality done wrong can drag down an otherwise stellar game.

This review is based on a review copy of the Xbox 360 version of Killer is Dead, developed by Grasshopper Manufacture, published by XSEED Games.

Following the brilliant critical and commercial success of game-development unicorn Duke Nukem Forever, developer Flying Wild Hog has decided to resurrect Shadow Warrior, a less famous but still culty 3D Realms title from the 90s. Those were halcyon years for first person shooters, and Shadow Warrior followed in the footsteps of its predecessor, combining intricate level design, trying-too-hard-but-still-pretty-funny taglines (“Who Wants Some Wang?”), with buckets of monster-splattering gore.

This reboot aspires to slap a few modern touches onto a retro FPS. The original melee-and-gunplay core concept was pretty unique for a pure shooter back in the 90s (Doom’s chainsaw notwithstanding), and even now is only attempted by a handful of out-of-mainstream titles like Red Steel. If you think you’d have a good ol’ violent time just playing with that core concept – sword work augmented by special moves and punctuated by quick switching to firearms – then Shadow Warrior should be on your radar. If you are more interested in anything else about a shooter – interesting enemy types and challenges, level design, tactics, enemy AI, or even story, then the game might come up a bit short.

The shooting parts of Shadow Warrior feel like an FPS in the classic mold. Firefights are mostly about circling around wide spaces and dumping as much ordinance as you can manage into enemies with increasing capacity to do the same back to you. You don’t need to worry much about a Call of Duty or Rainbow Six level of nervous-twitchiness, and the most cover you’ll take is occasionally running behind a wall. The guns would be at home in the hands of Duke Nukem, from basic handguns to rapid firing automatics, and a hard hitting grenade launcher. There’s some other equipment that I hesitate to classify as “guns,” so…they’re sort of demonic fantastical weapons with ranged effects?

I tend to like my firefights a bit more methodical and tactical, so I might have found this game to get pretty stale if it weren’t for the swordplay. Melee combat in a first-person game can be somewhat tricky to make both fast and precise, but Shadow Warrior gets pretty close. Aim your reticule on the body part you’d like to sever, and watch as your katana makes a clean slice through an arm, leg, neck, or torso with much resultant Kill Bill-style gore spray and shrieks of pain. Dodging incoming melee attacks is mostly about quick sidestepping or back-stepping – I would have loved to see a parry or counter system thrown in there.

The game was at its best when they pushed the challenge to mix up your attacks by armoring up some of the body parts on the weird demonic enemies. Their loose-limbed shuffling can make them tough to hit with guns, so you have to aim well with good timing to avoid the helmet to slice a knee and set it up for the coup de grace. Others bring massive shields to bear which must be blown away with firepower before getting at the vulnerable demon behind it. The FPS vantage point by nature doesn’t not lend itself to keeping your head on a swivel to see what’s around you, which is why most melee combat games are third person. I was a little miffed at the game’s proclivity to get you surrounded in a swordfight, but started to like it once I got access to the special moves.

Special moves are limited by a mana-like “karma” system and turn what might have been a bit of a rote point-and-click hack-and-slash into something a bit more John Wooey. Surrounded? Slice that sword in all every last gory degree of a 360 circle to create an opening to dart out. The special moves require a simple button combo that (for me, at least) added an unusual fighting game sort of feel to a FPS look. This is when the game was at its best for me, although the button combos seem a bit better fit for a controller (which is optional) than a mouse and keyboard.

Since it’s unfinished, I’m reluctant to harp on technical problems too much, but I have to report what I saw. They’re going to have to do a lot of clean up on textures before release, some surfaces in both the environment and characters were straight-up black spaces, even in cut-scenes. My other biggest gripe was little balance between guns and swords in the sections I played. Except for enemies which are designed to necessitate the grenade launcher, the sword always seemed like the right choice and there’s no incentive for style points. Also, it might be just my sorry machine, but there was a significant if not debilitating amount of frame rate problems, even on the lowest graphics settings. The game either needs to iron out those kinks, or else beware that your system will need to be fairly robust.

I’m not too concerned that the story didn’t grab me – this game isn’t trying to compel you with intricate plot. If dialogue play on the word “wang” is too stupid for you to tolerate, then this game probably isn’t for you. I’m also feeling that the $39.99 price tag is a little steep, even with the $34.99 pre-order. However, if you know you like the idea of an old-school FPS with enough melee twists to keep it pretty fresh, Shadow Warrior is worth keeping an eye on.

Most of the games I’ve reviewed lately have been describable in terms of other games. Magrunner is similar to Portal, Megabyte Punch to Smash Bros., and Expeditions: Conquistador seems inspired by Oregon Trail. Cubetractor, on the other hand, is an action-puzzler for which a clear precedent doesn’t spring to mind.

The name of the game is to navigate your little, smiley, blue, three-legged robot around levels with various structural hazards and destroy all enemy units and structures onscreen by moving around cubes with different attributes. The core concept is simplicity in action. Cubes can only move by being pulled toward the robot (by some kind of tractor beam?), but once set in motion, they continue on their straight path. If there is an enemy structure in line with some cubes, move so as to put the structure between the robot and the cubes, and then pull the cubes into the structure. It will blow up with a satisfying 8-bit boom that sounds straight out of Contra.

Some pairs of cubes can be pulled into one another to form your own structures, and here’s where the game starts to get puzzley. You can make your own blue versions of most red enemy structures. In later levels, arrangements of enemy structures start resembling fortresses, bristling with turrets behind walls, and the challenge is about finding a weakness, exploiting it, and then following through on the breach you’ve made. Does your own turret get blown up from enemy fire before it can do any damage? Next time, put a wall in front of it first. Does it seem like you just don’t have enough firepower? See if there are some ways to thin the enemy ranks with a few direct cube-pulls before putting up your own stuff.

The difficulty curve takes off in a hurry, so some of the levels start resembling bullet-hell arcade titles of yore, but still demand nimble precision and timing for cube pulls. It can get tricky for your timing to be just right. Although cubes can only move in the four cardinal directions, it can still be tough to nail the pulls in a way that brings two of them together in just the right spot. You will frequently need them to be in just the right spot, but fortunately, you can unspawn your own structures with a push of a button and the cubes themselves respawn in their starting places after only a few seconds. Those few seconds can seem like an eternity when you’re dodging dozens of bullets, but I found it very rewarding when my plans came together and the momentum started to shift my way, even if I had to plant myself in front of a bullet and just eat the damage in order to give my structure a chance.

Such sacrificial behavior is a no-go if attempting to ace the score on each level. You’ll be rated for index of speed, damage taken, and batteries collected – the highest rating requires perfection in all categories. There’s tons of replay value for those so inclined to bash their heads against a major challenge. Simplicity in design, but difficult to master is one of my favorite things for a game to do, and I’ve not experienced the same sort of razor-thin margin for error since Super Meat Boy. Just when you think it’s impossible to shave another three seconds off your time, you’ll make a breakthrough (possibly by accident) to discover you can destroy two towers with one series of cube pulls. With 88 levels, there’s a feast of frustration in store if you find such things satisfying.

My only serious design gripe is the lack of customizable options for graphics and controls. I know the developers are attempting a callback to some bygone 8-bit sentimentality with the look and feel of this game, and that’s great. However, I would like some more options for aspect ratio, please. Also, despite being very right-handed, I have a hard time in any game navigating with right-hand arrow keys. Why can’t I switch to WASD? I solved my problem by plugging in my wired Xbox 360 controller, which is how I recommend playing, particularly if you’re the mastery type.

This is a linguistically awkward thing to say, but I don’t care that I don’t care about Cubetractor‘s story. I meta-don’t care. There’s script and characters saying things, if you want to read them. I love what a story can do for a game, but this one doesn’t need it. The titular robot protagonist Endroi delights in surmounting challenges, an attribute to which a fan of this game would relate, I suppose. He seems oblivious to the destruction his enthusiastic puzzle-solving visits upon his creators, as well as their resultant dismay. It’s cute, but the script didn’t give me too many legit chuckles. I also don’t think it matters; a game like this shouldn’t feel like it has to have an emotionally compelling story. They could have completely deleted it all with no hard feelings in my book, but it’s there, and that’s fine too.

For $9.99 on Steam, Cubetractor is a standout for action-puzzle fans with a bit of a sentimental streak about 8-bit and 16-bit graphics. A unique core mechanic and clever puzzle design should easily provide dedicated players $9.99 worth of play and then some, but you might want to steer clear if you’re quick to be frustrated and feel like you’re wasting time. This game’s got some devilish fangs behind its cute smile.

This review is based on a review copy of the Steam download of Cubetractor, developed by Ludochip.