Master Spy: No such thing as too much stealth

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Anyone here remember the 90s when stealth games were like the coolest thing ever and assassins and thieves actually did their allocated jobs instead chasing down magical apples or straight up killing people in Dishonored clones. Well those days are coming back around baby!

Master Spy is a 2D stealth game designed to look like it was the best thing to come out of the Genesis. It’s set to come to Steam and the Humble Store on the 9th of september oozing so much nostalgia that you’ll probably want to watch an episode of Quantum Leap right after playing it.

The game is going for a very neo noir style with it’s architecture looking like a mixture of art-deco and 20th century industrial. Gameplay wise Master Plan reminds me less of modern day 2D stealth games like Mark of the Ninja and seems to be trying more for a genuine old style platformer feel but with stealth elements.

Lastly, what little I’ve heard of the soundtrack sounds good and the story seems like it’s playing it straight faced to the point of hilarity. But in a good, knowing way.

I hope Master Spy turns out to be all it’s promised as gaming in general could always do with more good stealth games. In both 2D and 3D.

Released on 9/8: You can pick up a copy of Master Spy on Steam for $8.99! Get your copy today!

Mutant Factions – Top Down Multiplayer Mayhem with Cars and Guns Galore!

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Mutant Factions is GTA Style Multiplayer Manslaughter

For a long time top down multiplayer shooters have been relegated to sites such as Miniclip and Armourgames due to their flash game-esque graphics. While Mutant Factions is not the prettiest game in the world and will probably never garner widespread acclaim for its art style but its gameplay stands up quite well.

While Mutant Factions does have CTF and Free-for-all, though under different names, fans of more atypical game modes are in luck with game types such as Checkpoint in which teams race to pick up a battery with one of their vehicles and then complete a lap with it; or Outbreak where you have to run a zombie gauntlet to set off a series of bombs on the map.

The gunplay in Mutant Faction is nice and fluid with my only complaint being that people feel awful bullet spongy which is compounded by the fact that a lot of the more powerful and quick firing guns aren’t terribly accurate.

Speaking of guns there a lot of options and anyone who’s ever played a military shooter will recognize many of the names though due to the top down perspective they all look the same. Kills earn you cash which lets you buy guns. Or cars!

Driving actually feels really nice and drifting round corners while firing missiles from your hood like your James Bond is probably my favorite part of the game. The game also lets you drive a Dodge Challenger, under a different name, which is my all-time favorite car.

At the end of the day Mutant Faction is a solid game held back by a mediocre art style, utter lack of story (I still don’t know why it’s called Mutant Faction or why I’m killing random folk) and the fact that no one is playing it. I had to wait for ages before I could even find a darn game with anyone in it. Keep in mind that this is a free online shooting game and that multiplayer battles will grow as more players join.

At the time of writing this article, Mutant Factions is currently on Steam Greenlight and hopefully this unpolished but still fun gem will get the attention it deserves as a result.

You can download a copy of Mutant Factions for free from the developer’s website.

Sean Couture, an ex Mouthlondon writer, is an avid lover of gaming, anime, and anything cyberpunk who spends his days correcting people on the spelling of both his for and surname. You can find Sean on Twitter @JohnJonhSewing

The Final Station, zombads and trains galore

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The Final Station – Locomotive of the Dead

I’ve always enjoyed commuting in games. The ability to move around freely without my bank account and I having a falling out is something that’s always been a dream of mine. The Final Station promises to be yet another game in which I get to live that dream. In it you star as an apparently nameless train driver whose job it is to ferry passengers around in a post apocalyptic world rife with the undead.

Sporting a pixel-art style akin to Gunpoint but with the jazzy noir switched for a more color sci-fi aesthetic the world of Final Station feels like the result of an eastern block nation, the world from the anime Desert Punk and a dash of final fantasy slamming into each other to create a genuine treat for the eye that looks like it’ll be a joy to traverse across.

The trailers and the demo have so far showcased two gameplay sections. The first being on foot where you pick up passengers in safe spots and clear out zombies with your trusty shotgun in less reputable areas. The second is where you drive your train between stations, making sure the engine is full of coal and conversing with in-game characters via your phone/messenger thingy in your driver’s cabin. The formerly mentioned on foot sections often feel very horror inspired, with your shotgun having a very finite supply of ammo and zombies coming screaming out of dimly lit rooms that only reveal their contents when you open the door to them, making building clearance a dangerous affair.

Game Features:

The information below is directly from the developer, Oleg Glauzer:

– Narrative Environment: We a bit tired of sad diaries and long notes scattered around locations, we believe that one fridge note can tell background story more effective.

– Zombie apocalypse is just the beginning. We trying to use zombies to make the game more understandable at the beginning, but a story takes a big twist in the middle and you start to explore and uncover what happened with world after it ends.

– More than 30 train stations and railway levels.  Abandoned, infected, mysterious and living stations, various roads in different continents.

Overall:

The world of Final Station also has a less end of days feeling than it would at first seem but instead goes for a more melancholic tone. Its world is one that has yet to fall apart but is slowly sliding towards that end and picking up speed. Conversations with passengers on your train and at stations help flesh it out and make it seem as if people are still going about their daily lives despite everything else.

All in all Final Station is a game that managed to grab my interest with only trailers and a brief demo. It’s set to get a kickstarter this fall and with what the devs have shown and what they’re promising I hope that won’t be its last stop.

Platforms: PC / Mac / Linux.
Release date: 2016
Kickstarter Launch: Fall 2015

Sean Couture, an ex Mouthlondon writer, is an avid lover of gaming, anime, and anything cyberpunk who spends his days correcting people on the spelling of both his for and surname. You can find Sean on Twitter @JohnJonhSewing.

Yamamoto San – Japanese Retro Platformer Review

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yamamoto san title screen

Yamamoto San is a retro themed, side-scrolling platformer by Japanese indie developer Yasuno Yuzuru, which sounds suspiciously like a pseudonym, but maybe very well be their real name. The game sees the player character, Yamamoto San, running and jumping through 16 stages of awesomeness in order to collect as many coins as possible. It’s a simple game, made for a little coffee-break fun, and even better is that it is absolutely free. And not in a ‘freemium’ sense either. It won’t cost you a cent.

According to the creator’s website, Yamamato San was out on a stroll one day when she was whisked away to a faraway land by a roaming tornado. This sounds a lot like certain classic film where a young lady finds out that she’s not in Kansas anymore, but at the end of the day you’re not playing a cute little freeware platformer for the story, now are you? For what it’s worth the story is just there for flavor; it has no bearing on the gameplay itself.

Gameplay

Unlike most of the platformers found in the Japanese freeware scene, Yamamoto San doesn’t seem to have been created with any specialized game creation software. It’s been built almost from scratch. And thanks to that it plays really quite smoothly. Controls are spot-on, even if the only controls on the game are ‘run’ and ‘jump’, the character animations full of pseudo-8bit charm and the music provides a ‘where have I heard that before?’ kind of nostalgic soundtrack to the whole affair. With production values as high as these, it’s actually a little surprising that the game is free. I’ve seen worse on sale. At a mere 16 short levels the game is over before you know it, but still, the creator could have gotten a couple of bucks for their work if they wanted to. God knows I would have coughed up some of my hard-earned yen to play this game.

Yamamoto San is the definition of a platformer. You run, you jump from platform to platform, you collect coins and you hop on baddies to send them to video-game hell. It’s a tried and true formula which is pretty difficult to mess up, and Yamamoto San pulls it off with ease. The amount of enemies is actually fairly sparse, and they can all be taken out with a single swift kick to the head. Collecting coins is optional, and exist solely for scoring purposes. One thing you might notice at the top of the screen is the dreaded timer. I hate timers in games. But what might surprise you is that you don’t actually lose a life if the timer runs out. The timer too is there solely for scoring purposes. This means you can spend your first play through just worrying about finishing the game and subsequent attempts focusing on score.

I don’t think you will have much trouble finishing the game. If I could make one criticism, (and I shouldn’t really as it *is* free) it’s that Yamamoto San is a little too easy. You’ll blast through the first few levels with ease and will probably not run into any real trouble at all until you are halfway through the game. Some of the more hardcore platform junkies out there might actually be able to finish the game on their first try. To be fair, the first two or three levels act as a kind of tutorial. The tutorial itself consists of floating in-game dialogue boxes which explain how to maneuver Yamamoto San. Unfortunately these are entirely in Japanese. Fortunately though, you’ll find that the control scheme is pretty standard and will have no trouble picking it up.

The arrow keys dictate direction, while the ‘x’ key jumps and the ‘z’ key is held down while moving to dash (used of course with a running jump). So more or less like Mario. I had played the game a couple of times before I thought to try out my game pad and, low-and-behold, it worked like a charm. The game will open in a window by default, and while there are no display options, you can force full screen the usual way (alt + enter). Running the game should be simple enough as the game consists of a single executable file. I’m personally running Japanese native Windows, but from what I understand this game will run on anything. Just click and play. Super simple stuff.

Overall

At the end of the day, Yamamoto San punches well above its weight for a freeware title. Yeah, it’s short and not much of a challenge, but it’s cute, retro as hell, and a whole heap of fun. And with a price tag of ‘nothing’ you don’t really have an excuse not to try it out. Visit the developers website to download Yamamoto San, or check out the trailer for the game on youtube!

What do you think of Yamamoto San? Let us know in the comments section below!

 

Horrible Unicorn Game Studios – Game Developer Interview

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Horrible Unicorn Game Studios Interview

This week I was lucky enough to have a chat with the indie game development team Horrible Unicorn Game Studios about their new pixelated action adventure game Legacy of the Copper Skies. The team was so friendly and had some great insight to share about being an indie developer, their new game, crowdfunding, and what retro/indie games inspired them.

1) RETRONUKE: When did the Horrible Unicorn Game Studios team come together? Tell us a little bit about your studio, where you are from, and how the team formed?

Horrible Unicorn Game Studios: Starting our own studio was always the goal, or at least the eventual goal. In November 2014 my wife and I moved back to my home town in Ontario Canada to start the studio. Some friends of mine joined us shortly after this, and we began brainstorming company names while we worked on what would eventually be Legacy of the Copper Skies. HUGS as a name actually started out as a threat. Most of the ideas we came up with for company names were taken, or too generic, so I was like “if we don’t come up with something better I’m gonna name us HUGS”. Clearly we never came up with anything better, and we’re proud Horrible Unicorns now. Joe our pixel artist, and Eric our lead programmer joined us shortly after this, which pretty much rounded out our core team.

2) RETRONUKE: Legacy of the Copper Skies looks beyond awesome! Can you tell us a little bit about the gameplay and its story?

Horrible Unicorn Game Studios: Legacy of the Copper Skies is classic action adventure game. In the same vain as A Link to the Past if you could play Link and Zelda at the same time. Our two main characters Tir, and Isen need to work together in order to solve the puzzles, explore, defeat the bad guys, and save their worlds from destruction. To do this players will need to swap between these two characters on the fly, and sort of play them both at the same time with our rewind time mechanic.

As for story, this is something we wanted to improve on over other action adventure games. We don’t want silent protagonists, and princesses in need of rescue. We want our characters to have a voice, personality, and be fully formed characters. For a more detailed information on both story and gameplay the best place to check that out is probably our Square Enix page located here: http://collective.square-enix.com/projects/136/legacy-of-the-copper-skies

3) RETRONUKE: The characters and level designs of LOTCS are reminiscent of 16 bit era SEGA Genesis & Super Nintendo titles. Why did you choose this particular era and style for your game?

Horrible Unicorn Game Studios: Mostly it’s just something we love, and wanted to work in. We all grew up on SNES and I’m pretty sure many of our top 10 favourite games are on one of those systems. It also fits perfectly with what we wanted to do with Legacy of the Copper Skies.

4) RETRONUKE: A games music is such an important part of the gaming experience. What retro game music was the inspiration for the music you’ve created for LOTCS?

Horrible Unicorn Game Studios: We’re pulling from a few sources for inspiration. We’re all pretty big Nobou fans, like most people with ears. So I’m sure that has some influence on what we create. Our composer Jules Conroy also pulls inspiration from more modern stuff too, bands like Anamanaguchi. Our goal was to have this kind of rock/metal vs chiptunes hybrid. Kind of old meets new.


5) RETRONUKE: Can players hope to find any Easter eggs for exploring larger areas of each level?

Horrible Unicorn Game Studios: Absolutely, but I won’t spoil them here.

6) RETRONUKE: What can you tell us about our main characters – Tir and Isen?

Horrible Unicorn Game Studios: First there’s Isen, the sole sentient robot of Grimstad. Curiosity and logic are her virtues, and she has a strong inner desire to create and tinker. To her, the world is a giant collection of spare parts, and it is her job to transform them and create order. Every inch of Grimstad and all its well-oiled robotic inhabitants were created by Isen from scratch. Sadly, that work is quickly coming to a close and she’s finding that there is less and less for her to do. She’s constantly searching for more… something new, something different – something that excites her again.

Then we have Tir, a hunter of great strength and primal instinct. Tir craves the peacefulness of solitude in his remote forest home, but does venture out from time to time. During these outings he spends his time defending his people from the shadows of the strange monsters that are often born into his chaotic world. He works tirelessly to ensure that his world maintains a balance between the natural areas and those that his people have claimed. Unfortunately for Tir, he is feared by his people. To them he is just another powerful beast no different than the other monsters. They’ve seen his temper and his power, and they fear it. Tir doesn’t mind so much though, as this means that they’ll leave him alone.

In each case, they are the warden of their world, the keystone that keeps everything running smoothly.

7) RETRONUKE: Judging by your Square Enix collective page, It looks like the response has been overwhelmingly positive for Legacy of the Copper Skies. What is your next step after this campaign ends?

Horrible Unicorn Game Studios: Yeah we’re pretty happy with how it all went. As for next steps, we’re going through that process now so I can’t say too much. If Square-Enix likes what they see they may back us for our Kickstarter. Co-marketing from someone like Square-Enix would be huge for us. Being noticed against a sea of competitors is one of the hardest things to do for new studios.


8) RETRONUKE: If you are going to run a crowdfunding campaign – once that is completed, is there a Kickstarter or Indiegogo in mind? How long after that is completed do you expect the game to be finished?

Horrible Unicorn Game Studios: We’re definitely planning on going the Kickstarter route. Seems to be one of the best options for indie games. As for how long it would be post campaign for us to release; that is yet to be determined. Odds are it will be about a year, but it depends on how well we do, stretch goals, etc.

9) RETRONUKE: Which retro games inspired you to become indie game developers, and what is the most rewarding aspect of being an indie dev?

Horrible Unicorn Game Studios: I can’t speak for everyone, but the retro games that made me want to get into games are Final Fantasy 6, GoldenEye, and even Heart of Africa on Commodore 64. All very different games, but they all meant a lot to me for different reasons. As for more modern indie games, games like Fez, and Bastion definitely inspire me. Those games are wicked, unique, and polished.

As for the most rewarding part, that’s pretty easy. It’s that you get to work on stuff you love and actually want to make on a daily basis. Work doesn’t even feel like work for me now. In AAA you have little control over what you work on. As an indie now we can do what we want for better or worse. Which is terrifying, and freeing at the same time.

10) RETRONUKE: What indie games are you playing now? and which are you excited for this year?

Horrible Unicorn Game Studios: Haha, this question should be: What games are you attempting to play now? I have a rather large pile of shame at the moment. I keep trying to finish Shovel Knight, Transistor, and a few other Indies on PS4. On top of that I really want to finish Farcry 4, Witcher 3, and a few others. Unfortunately work takes up most of my time so playing games is more difficult than it used to be.

The game I am most looking forward too is probably Camelot Unchained. I loved me some Dark Age of Camelot back in the day. I’ve found no other experience as exhilarating as RvR was in that game for me. I just hope they have a Minstrel type class in Camelot Unchained so I can get my stealth melee flute on again. That and No Mans Sky. Omg No Mans Sky. I can’t wait.

For more game developer interviews read our PixelJam Studios Interview with Miles Tilmann and our interview with Imagos Softworks about their latest Kickstarter project Starr Mazer!