Tag: Tiltagon

It’s back! New! Improved! Well not really, it’s pretty much the same.

You can check out my older reviews here, but for those of you who don’t know, over the past few years I’ve accumulated a lot of games on my Steam account that I’ve never even heard of thanks to Humble Bundles and giveaways and such like and I’m terrible at getting around to playing any of them, so they just keep building up.

So, I came up with a solution, where every fortnight I would pick 3 of these games at random and play them for an hour or two until I felt I’d got a good idea of how the games play, then I write a review for each of them. I also score the games, but I don’t use the traditional system of ranking games out of 10 or 100, instead, I rank them out of 3.

A 1 means that I didn’t like the game and don’t recommend it; A 2 means I thought the game was ok and I would recommend it if it looked like your thing and finally a 3 means I thought the game was great and definitely recommend it. Maybe one day I’ll find a game so bad I want to give it a zero, but that hasn’t happened yet.

So now we’ve got the concept down, let’s get to the games.

Absolver

Developer: Sloclap
Publisher: Devolver Digital
Released: 29th August 2017
Steam Reviews: Mixed
Price: £24.99/$29.99/€29.99

Absolver is quite an interesting game which seems to draw inspiration from many places. It’s a game focusing all on hand to hand martial arts combat, with systems that allow you to customise your moveset and an RPG like progression system.

The combat at the base level is pretty fun, I didn’t get too heavily into customising my movesets, but I experimented a bit and found some success with what I came across. Each strike both for and against you feels very weighty, and the blocking and parry systems create a great feel for every combat encounter. Every fight feels like a proper challenge, and the visual and sound design of the combat system, along with the meat of it, means that no two fights feel the same.

I also quite like the way the game takes you through its early stages, it takes you through one linear level during the tutorial and then throws you into a sprawling world with various branches that you can go through in any order you like. It’s quite sudden and a tad confusing at first, but once you get your barings, it’s quite a nice world to explore.

It’s also at this point in the game that you realise it’s an online game, which is good and bad. The good thing is the world feels a bit more lively, even though you don’t see many people, the realisation that you’re not on your own can add to the experience a little bit. The main problem I have is the that the online isn’t optional, which would be fine except for the fact that, more people there are in an area, the more enemies spawn in packs, including the mini-boss fights. I understand it from a balance perspective and it encourages co-operation between players, unfortunately some of these areas can be rather big and in my experience it was quite hard to get anyone to help you out, you instead had to stand just outside the boss arena and wait for someone else to come along, otherwise you’re going up against 3 tough enemies on your own and it’s damn near impossible when you’re new at the game.

This brings me to the biggest issue I had with the game – a problem I have with a lot of Soulslike games – is that it’s extremely unfriendly to new players. The learning curve in this game gets extremely steep very fast to the point where after lucking my way through the first mini-boss fight because someone else showed up to help me at the last second, I could barely touch the second. The game gives you the barest explanations of how it’s systems works and then just shoves you into the world to work it out.

Doing that to some extent is fine, I wouldn’t want a game that holds my hand the entire time either, but there’s got to be some middle ground that doesn’t leave me frustrated because I feel like I haven’t been taught enough to face the challenges in front of me. Even Dark Souls holds your hand a little more than this and that’s mostly thanks to its pretty linear path, which is something I think this game could’ve benefitted more from.

If you’re looking for a game that you can really sink your teeth into and are prepared for a challenge, then you’ll probably get loads of out of this, but if you’re looking for a more casual experience, then you’re not going to have a nice time in this one.

Score: 2/3 – OK

Descenders

Developer: Rage Squid
Publisher: No More Robots
Released: 7th May 2019
Steam Reviews: Very Positive
Price: £19.49/$24.99/€22.99

So, as anyone who checks my Steam account will know, I’m cheating the rules ever so slightly with this one, as I’ve actually played Descenders for over 400 hours. However, it came out of early access recently and it’s not getting nearly as much attention as it deserves, so here I am.

Descenders is a game where you ride your bike downhill through increasingly extreme environments, and you can do all of the tricks you’d expect from a biking game such as this. That’s the whole game.

When I first picked up Descenders, I really thought it would be one of those games that I play on and off for about a week and then completely forget about it, but I never did. Instead, it became my game to play when I don’t feel like playing anything, to the point where I play it for around an hour almost daily. So what keeps pulling me back into it and avoid boredom?

Well first of all, this game was made by the same people who developed Action Henk, which was a game based all around momentum and timing, trying to nail jumps and tricks at the perfect moment to get through the level as fast as possible and it’s safe to say that the philosophy of Action Henk very much carried over to Descenders. The feeling of speed and momentum as you speed down the extreme hills that this game presents to you is so satisfying to play. As I fling myself off the end of a ramp at a speed that is clearly way too fast, it gets this pure sense of joy out of me that I find almost addictive in how much fun it is.

There’s also a suitable level of challenge since in every run of the game you start of with 4 lives if you come off your bike you lose one, and you can gain more by completing bonus objectives (such as doing certain tricks or completing the level quickly etc). This means that if you’re looking for more of a challenge then this game has you covered, but at the same time, if you just want to ride casually, then there are modes for that too.

Each of the 9 environments that the game gives you provide a very different style of play, but it’s very subtle. If you go into each environment with the same mentality you’ll find yourself burning through your lives very quickly. To use the standard career environments as an example: In Highlands you can pretty much just go at your own pace, cutting across the fields of grass with little risk of disaster; Then you move into Forest, with lots of tight corners and precise tricks and obstacles, you go off the track you’ll quickly find yourself wrapped around the tree, so you have to focus on the precision of your riding; Following that is Canyon, which is a bit of a mix of the first two environments, it’s got some very fun, wide-open paths to roll down, and if you go off the path, you’ll find some very fun challenges come your way that you can just about manage if you’re skillful enough; Finally there is Peaks, with very step paths and long drops if you come off, this environment is about finding the balance between careful riding, and the speed required to send you flying over the most over the top tricks in the game.

Descenders really fit into that niche for me of what a good casual game should be, in that it lets people of any skill level do reasonably well at it while allowing those people who are really good at it to do incredibly skilful things. You don’t have to dig very far to find video clips of people doing some insane tricks that someone of my skill level could never even dream off pulling off.

Ultimately, if you’re looking for a game to occupy a bit of your time every now and then, this will be a great game for you and if you’re looking for a game that you can really sink your teeth into and hone your skills to become a master, then you’ll be very satisfied with what Descenders can offer as well.

Score: 3/3 – Great

Tilatgon

Developer & Publisher: Kiemura Ltd
Released: 29th March 2016
Steam Reviews: Positive
Price: £1.99/$2.99/€2.99

When it comes to cheap games on Steam, the one genre that is almost entirely contained within it is the Reflex game. A genre mastered by games like One Finger Death Punch and Super Hexagon, that style of easy to learn, impossible to master is one that I find very enthralling and I love to see so many different game’s take on it.

Tiltagon’s gimmick is rolling a ball around on a variety of different hexagons, that contain various obstacles for you to overcome as you roll around each level. As I’ve mentioned before in this series, I judge these games on three main factors: Movement, Difficulty curve and Death. So let’s jump right into them.

First up is movement, which in Tiltagon is very strange and I’m honestly not entirely sure how it works. The name of the game implies that you move Super Monkey Ball style by tilting the level and dealing with the momentum of the ball and that also appears to be what visually happens when you move your controller around, as the level will tilt slightly in the direction you’re rolling the ball. However, as I was experimenting with the controls, it seems like the tilting of the level is purely visual, and you actually control the rolling of the ball directly with the analogue stick.

Personally, I think it’s to the game’s benefit that you control the ball directly given some of the platforms you’re faced with, however, the tilting can create this weird disconnect between what you expect the ball to do and what it actually does, which can take a little bit of getting used to. That said, once you do get use to it, I think the movement is very smooth and I had fun rolling around the levels.

Next up is the difficulty curve and this one’s a little difficult to tackle given with how this game presents itself. There are set levels, 10 of them and from as far as I got (level 5) before getting stuck, it seemed to progress very well. Each level provided you with one or two new obstacles to throw at you, and every level after that mixes all of the mechanics together in a really nice way to create a good challenge.

There are slanted hexes, moving hexes, hexes with holes in the middle, blocks and sweepers that spin around to knock you off and every combination thereof are just a handful of the obstacles I came across during my time with the game. There’s a nice variety in what’s being thrown at you, so no section in each level feels the same and they’re plotted out in such a way that makes for a well-scaled challenge, instead of just feeling randomly plonked down.

The other mode in the game (and seemingly the main one the game is centred around) is the endless mode. Where hexes will generate one at a time and you have to grab a cube somewhere on each hex to generate the next one. I found this mode is a lot faster paced than the levels and that’s generally to it’s benefit. This game seems to be at it’s best when it’s forcing you to take risks and play just a little bit faster than you’re comfortable with.

Finally, death. Death in this game is pretty standard for the genre, the death animation doesn’t take very long and restarts are pretty much instant, which is great to avoid frustration. For the most part, it felt like every death was my fault too, although there were a couple instances where I could’ve sworn I pushed the stick in the opposite direction to where the ball went, those were quite rare, so I’m willing to give the benefit of the doubt.

While not every death felt like a learning experience, I never got frustrated when I died, partly because I was having plenty of fun as it was, but also because it honestly never felt like the game was screwing me over. Everything’s perfectly completable, I just wasn’t good enough. This added to the satisfaction of finally completing levels.

Ultimately, Tiltagon is a good addition to the reflex genre and if you’re into that style of game then I’d definitely recommend picking it up, even if you’re not, it’s so cheap that it’s worth giving it a go and seeing if it can’t win you over.

Score: 3/3 – Great

That’s Triple Threat Review! Thank you very much for taking the time to read, I’d love to know what your thoughts are on this format either in comments below or on Twitter @10ryawoo! Also, make sure you come back next weekend as I’ll be ranking every Wrestlemania of this decade!