Developer Summary

In the near future pigs gain superior intelligence and learn of their eventual goal, The Slaughterhouse. They band together and create ships to leave earth! What will all the farmers and chefs do without the delightful pig to serve people up bacon and ham! The farmers and chefs join forces to go after the pigs into the far reaches of space, where the final battle of PIG KIND will take place!

What We Think

Sporting gameplay mechanics akin to Geometry Wars and Super Stardust HD, Space Swine puts players in a spaceship and repeatedly asks them to believe that the game has something to do with pigs.

Sweet and Sour Pork

Pilot the ship with the left analog stick, and fire at enemies by aiming with the right. Fly over upgrade icons for increased firepower. Clear all the enemies on screen to advance to the next wave. Occasionally you’ll have a temporary ring of white orbs that appear randomly in a stage (pearls before swine, perhaps?) and you can fly your ship inside the ring for a temporary respite from the barrage of energy weapons. You have a freeze-cannon at your disposal (though the charges are limited) and you can also throw up a shield, allowing you to take four hits before your ship takes damage. Should you sustain enough hits, your craft will erupt into strips of bacon. You’ll also be confronted with occasional boss battles.

The bosses are really the only connection between this space shooter to the pig theme the game’s title implies. Though there is a decent variety of enemy craft in the game, none of them (including the boss ships) give any indication that they belong to the jilted pork industry. Once you’ve encountered them all, the waves start to get pretty repetitive. After you’ve fought the sixth boss, they also loop. I played into the 100th wave and a few waves past and there was no indication of any looming final boss confrontation.

You can play the classic mode, or Boss Rush, in which you assault all six bosses in succession. The game also features multiplayer and co-op modes.  Try Insanity Mode for a foray into bullet hell.

I've been told there are pigs in this game...

Another Swine Mess

I’d like to make a plea to any budding game designers that are out there who are thinking about incorporating voice acting into your upcoming XNA indie title: If you can’t do it well, skip it. The voice acting in this game is terrible. On every tenth wave, you’ll confront a boss. His ship will appear in the center of the screen, and the boss piloting it will appear to taunt you with slight variations on the theme “My kind eats pigs. You are a pig. I will eat YOU!” and all die by sharing a slightly different version of “A pig beat me? How is this possible?” (swine flu joke: Check!) If my guess is right, it’s one guy doing all the voices.  The bosses are all hackneyed clichés both in their sprite design and in vocal delivery (hicks, rednecks and French chefs OH HONH HONH) and still aren’t delivered well. If you don’t have access to someone with at least a little talent in creating voice characters, don’t bother putting your own recorded voice in the game; it can actually make the game worse.

Also, I know that the concept of pigs piloting spacecraft is a silly one, but when I see a one-toothed, slack-jawed yokel in his overalls and I’m asked to accept that he is also flying a spacecraft, I feel as though there is too much suspension of my disbelief required. Meet me halfway. Have his ship look like a jug of moonshine or something…at the very least, give him some kind of helmet.

Ham-Fisted

Space Swine is a decent shooter title, but it is ultimately hobbled by some of its questionable design choices.

Rating: ★★★☆☆ 

Developer Summary:

It’s about a super-powered squirrel with bombs, in a semi-urban setting of puzzles. Somehow or another space is involved. Why haven’t you played this game yet?

What We Think:

The Few, The Proud, The Squirrelly

Cute, fluffy…highly destructive? Other than the small paragraph provided by DTA Entertainment about Urban Space Squirrels, there was little for me to go on in regards to just what this game was going to be about before I played it, it was left completely up to my imagination. Thankfully, the creation of this game was left completely up to the imaginations of the people of DTAE.

You play as agent 1337, a highly agile, incredibly intelligent super-squirrel with an armament of bombs so vast that only the Bush administration could have possibly provided it to him. However the twist is that these are antiparticle bombs, and rather than blowing up everything in sight, you use your bombs to flip switches, open locked gates, and propel yourself to otherwise unreachable heights. If you were hoping for mass squirrel destruction or a long-lost episode of Happy Tree Friends, forget about it, but don’t let that deter you, what’s waiting for you in this game is far more gripping, challenging and crafty than anything you will find in one of today’s uber-violent button-mashers.

This game will test your brain, your fingers, and your patience… and I mean that in the best way possible.

It’s Your World, Squirrel

Although not exploding (pun intended) with colourful creatures, or crafty character/level design, I still found this to be a highly polished and visually appealing title. Agent 1337 is well drawn and animated and his environments may be simple in concept, but they have a colourful bubble-gum visual aesthetic and help to add greatly to the ambiance. Objects and enemies are also simplistic in design, but do well to correspond to the look of the scenery, giving the title a somewhat 50’s approach to space design. I half expected Marvin the Martian to be a cameo, if not an end boss.

Even the menu screens have a pleasantly appealing cartoonish theme, somewhere along the lines of Dexter’s Laboratory or Clone High. Funny fonts, and simple background drawings help to add to the fun simplistic nature and really contribute to creating a light-hearted but well conceived design scheme.

Though this game will look best on higher resolution screens, It can be enjoyed on nearly any TV because of its basic approach. My TV sucks and I thought this game looked great.

Extreme Animal Testing

The game may not have been given much of a storyline, so here’s my take on it. Somewhere in the near future, scientists have realized that running a mouse through a wooden labyrinth in order to find a piece of cheese at the end is no longer a sufficient means with which to test an animal’s capacity for learning, Instead they arm them with endless bombs and set them loose in one of the craziest, mad-cap laboratories ever invented to see how they fare. What ensues is some of the most intense, skill-testing platforming action available since games like Ninja-Gaiden, or (dare I say it?) Castlevania.

Squirrels don't fear the Reaper

The game starts lightly enough, you can run, jump and deploy a single bomb to flip a switch, open a gate or launch you in the intended direction. It’s a well calculated control scheme which helps to keep things simple at first. Run with the left analog stock, jump with the A button. The right analog will aim the bomb in which ever direction you push it, and then you simply hold the left trigger to send your bomb off in that direction. The Bomb will continue travelling in the intended direction until you let go of the left trigger, the right trigger explodes that bomb. It kind of works along the line of the puzzle bobble games, except you control the distance for how far the bomb is launched, and you can (and will have to) move while launching.

That’s it: the entire game is mapped to 5 buttons.  Seems simple, right? The game becomes much more advanced however as you pick up multiple bombs , which then forces you to use these bombs in succession, or conjunction with each other to solve a variety of brilliantly crafted puzzles which are just as, if not more, intuitive than what you would find on the early NES platformers. After a couple of levels you’ll be thanking the sweet scientist above that you only have to worry about 5 buttons, as the puzzles move so quickly sometimes that any more would melt our tiny little brains, though the game may be pop-rock in design, It’s heavy-metal in game play.

Some of the more brilliant puzzles involve use of the old Metroid-launch-yourself-in-the-air-with-bombs tool, the twist on this is that now some puzzles will force you to precisely place those bombs at certain spots in a puzzle, and in the proper order of detonation(bombs only explode in the order they are launched). Other puzzles require impeccable timing and hand-eye co-ordination as you traverse your way through narrow corridors lined with death-rays.

One puzzle had me so flustered (though it was about 3 A.M at the time) that I was forced to retire for the evening, however I ran it over in my head so many times that I was able to figure it out while I wasn’t even playing. To me that is the true sign of amazing and highly addictive game design.
There were multiple moments in this game, where I swore I was ready to tear my hair out, but all the while I had a smile on my face. It’s a relentlessly challenging game that will push your skills to the limit, yet it will never feel like success is completely out of your grasp.

Even red-necks will love this game. YEEEHAWWW! Fried squirrel!

No Squirrels Were Harmed in the Making of this Game

That’s actually a lie. This is the kind of game where you will die, and die a lot. The designers however have taken this(and your sanity) into consideration. Kindly they have put a number of checkpoints throughout each level, which you will instantly warp back to as soon as you are electrocuted, fried or squashed, however you may only save at the beginning of a level, so you may want to persevere and finish a level if you feel like you’ve made considerable progress through it. Starting again at the beginning of a level can be a might frustrating.

Squirrel Trumps Hedgehog

If it were up to me I’d crown a new king of animal-based platformers. This is Classic-platforming action at the top of its game. Without a doubt DTAE has created something special, and although this game only took me a day to beat, It would be more than worth it to re-visit and try to best my top times and scores. I’m sure that if they continue to make games in the Urban-Space universe, this squirrel is gonna fly.

Rating: ★★★★★ 

Developer Summary:

“Combine and control two characters simultaneously in a post-apocalyptic abstraction of the King Arthur Legend with a haunting metaphorical overtone.” As Arthur the exiled in a post apocalyptic world, harness the powers of 4 different robotic companions known as the “Knights of the Round” over 2 different modes, in a unique “Single-Player Co-operative” experience.

What We Think:
The concept behind Exyle Studios Avalon Legend is a unique one if nothing else. You play as the legendary King Arthur who has apparently been exiled from his kingdom and is forced into a harsh and unforgiving post-apocalyptic wasteland. Here he is lost to an endless battle of metaphorical beasts such as fear, hatred etc. which gives the whole experience a slightly Freudian overtone, making it seem more like the struggle from within, rather than one of the epic world-spanning quests with which King Arthur is commonly associated.

Endless Knight.
The story is told in a unique “un-lockable” fashion in which Arthur’s journal pages are presented to you by completing certain in-game tasks, So unless you are truly invested in the game, this makes the story seems secondary and though interestingly told, may be overlooked by many who don’t browse through options menus.

The game plays out as an endless top down shooter (think Gauntlet meets Smash t.v but set on a single platform) in which enemies start out in light numbers but slowly begin to grow in waves and before long you are surrounded on all sides forced to use all available means to dispatch a variety of foes. Along the way you receive power-ups and bonuses which when used properly can help get you through the onslaught.

Dark and Stormy
Let’s get this out of the way first: Avalon Legend won’t exactly be winning awards in terms of it’s art- design. It’s by no means an ugly game, but it appears too simplistic to carry out the story that’s contained within.

A dishevelled but still bad-ass Arthur. Note the finger gloves.

Upon starting the game you are presented with a menu screen which has a fairly simple-cartoony but charming aesthetic. This is all well and good, it’s the in-game graphics however that fall a little flat. Due to the low-poly nature of the enemies it’s hard to tell exactly what it is you’re fighting. It’s only once I unlocked the special bonus rewards and was able to view the concept art that I could really understand the “nature of the beasts”. I at one point thought that I was fighting blob-monsters and wondering why they were exploding in fiery bursts, only to find out through the concept-art that they were in fact bombs. It may be a personal preference but I would have preferred the enemies to have the hand drawn charm of their conceptual-counterparts. Such is the case with The Arthur Character model and his fellow Knights of the Round, they seem like such creative concepts that are sadly lost in the top –down low-poly presentation. The platform on which you fight as well leaves something to be desired.

Eerie and disturbingly creative concepts don’t quite make the transition to the game world.

On the upside, The models are bright and colourful, there are plenty of well done and well used special effects such as explosions, small blood sprays, and luminous magic shields which at least help to flesh out the epic battle that is raging.

This Knight’s got game

It’s the game play contained within that makes Avalon Legend shine. The “single-player co-operative” experience that the game boasts really does provide an interesting dynamic and a surprisingly fitting motif for a game that has such strong psychological over/undertones.

This experience is found in the “attack mode” setting and it sets the control scheme up so that the left analog stick is used for Arthur and the Right becomes the current Knight of the Round you have chosen to dish out the pain. Upon first use of this mode I felt like I was battling against myself (much like Arthur at this point), and I was left to scurry frantically about the stage trying desperately to dodge, thwart and respond to enemy attacks, it was like trying to decide between left and right brain. However after a few rounds I found myself locked into the flow of battle and was able to move around with a surprising internal choreography, weaving in and out in tandem with my fellow warrior. It was a fairly moderate (though it seemed frustratingly steep at first) learning curve that came with a nice sense of achievement upon mastery.

There’s also a surprising amount of depth to the game-play modes that you are forced to switch between. Almost all of these are found in the “Key Defence” ring which encircles Arthur. On it there are four slots, Each of which contain a different knight of the round which can be summoned with the face buttons (X = Lancelot, B = Guinevere, Y = Merlin and A= Kay). On top of this each mode comes with both a defensive and offensive setting which you must choose between depending on your current situation As well as a magic spell that can be triggered through the use of mana in either defensive or offensive modes. If all of this seems a little confusing or muddled don’t worry, before long you will find a need for almost all of it. At no point did I find myself relying on just one Knight or just one offensive/defensive setting, I needed to use every weapon in my psyches well-stocked arsenal to respond to encroaching dangers.

Put Machinegun Lancelot in the ground, add mana... Even Rambo would be jealous.

My only complaint with the games control scheme comes from the weird choice to map Arthur’s melee attack to the left trigger and the games many magic settings to the right trigger. A swap of this control scheme would seem more intuitive as the mana used to unleash magic takes some time to restore and I found myself using the right trigger more often as this is the common attack button in most games. This is a small gripe that can be overcome easily but I did find it to be an annoyance at first.

A Knight to Remember

Despite the games visual flaws and swept-aside story, Avalon Legend maintains a high enough level of creativity (Sir Lancelot is a machinegun!!) and a well balanced, diverse and mostly intuitive control scheme to keep both casual and hard-core gamers coming back to best their previous attempts, and though in the battle with the Arthur’s psyche, you can never really win, this is still a war worth waging.

Rating: ★★★★☆