Category: Reviews

Blood of the Werewolf: The hunt for a good werewolf game.

(content warning: blood and cartoonish gore.)

Y’know, I realized there haven’t been many good games where you play as a werewolf. Out of all the horror monsters out there, werewolves seem to be the ones who get the shaft the most. Often times they’re used as an enemy or a villain, but rarely are they ever the hero. I even asked a few folks about good werewolf games and the one suggestion I got was a quest line in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. So yeah, it seems kinda dire.

But then there was this one game I saw where you play as a werewolf that seemed kinda neat. And I have a knack for playing the fairly niche Xbox Live Arcade/PlayStation Network titles from the early 2010s, so I grabbed it. Will this game be the one that breaks that curse?

Gotta say, that title is metal as hell.

Blood of the Werewolf is a platforming game developed by Scientifically Proven, a studio that proudly boasts its 11-person development team, as per one of the load screens states. Scientifically Proven doesn’t have much of a major resume; outside of this game, they worked on assisting Epicenter Studios on games like Real Heroes: Firefighter and… Man vs. Wild with Bear Grylls. Now, to be fair, just because they work on what amounts to shovelware doesn’t mean they can’t put out an original game on their own. But this definitely doesn’t bode well.

I had heard of this game because it was being one of the few games being delisted off of the Xbox 360 marketplace. I was trying to grab games that were only available on the 360, and since this had a PC release, I figured I’d just grab it there instead. In hindsight, this was probably a good move, as we’ll get into in a bit.

This was available a few days early for patrons. Wanna get in on that yourself? Well, transform into a werewolf and howl your way over to my Patreon, where just $1 will get early access to my work. It’s fun! Like being a werewolf.

She’s quite the resilient mother, that’s for sure.

The story goes like this: You play as Selena, a mother who’s child, Nickoli, has been kidnapped by some monsters, and her husband has been left for dead. Armed with her trusty crossbow, she must travel the various hazards of the world to save her son and keep the blood family alive. Oh, by the way, Selena is also a werewolf. One of a dying breed, according to this game’s lore.

This… doesn’t bode well.

Selena in her human form has the usual platformer rules: Walk, jump, climb ladders, and shoot a crossbow. Pressing RT will shoot in the direction she’s facing, but using the right stick will have her aim at a specific angle, which can be useful for hitting enemy targets or switches.

If you’re expecting an elaborate transformation sequence, you will be solely disappointed.

At certain points in each stage, Selena turns into a werewolf upon a full moon, which follows common werewolf lore. In werewolf mode, she can double jump, do a forward dash with RB, and charge up a damaging shot with RT that takes a bit of time to charge. There’s other powerups you can find and switch between with LB, but for most of the game I stuck with the default dash. Playing as a werewolf is a lot simpler than playing in human form, which turns out to be a good thing, as I’ll get into. The game will switch between Selena’s two forms at certain spots, and sometimes they get quite crafty with the change.

I knew something was off when the first level takes place in The Sewers…
Continue reading…

Avicii Invector: A rhythm game tribute to an electronic musician.

(content warning: mention of suicide.)

My tastes in music are… rather eclectic. If you’ve ever been a longtime reader of the site, you’ve probably had me write about some of the weirdest stuff and sometimes finding good stuff in them. I end up picking up soundtracks a lot because of the licensed music. Hell, while I may not talk about it a lot on the site here, I really enjoy rhythm games. So when I saw a rhythm game based on one of the most notable EDM artists out there, I had to give it a try, even if I never heard of him before playing it.

Is he about to drop the sickest beat?

Avicii Invector is a rhythm game developed by Hello There Productions, a small developer based out of Gothenburg, Sweden. Originally released in 2017 on the PS4 as simply Invector, the game was updated and re-released in 2019 to more prominently feature the artist whose music was used in it, Avicii. Avicii is the stage name of Tim Bergling, a Swedish EDM musician who was a major worldwide success, releasing two major albums and a few EPs in his lifetime.

Tragically, Avicii committed suicide in 2018 at the young age of 28. In the years that followed, there’s been work released posthumously, an Avicii museum in Stockholm, Sweden, and his family launching The Tim Bergling Foundation, a mental health/suicide awareness charity, in his honor.

I grabbed this game on a cheap discount on Fanatical, a digital discount storefront. Since I’m a fan of rhythm games – glancing at the hundreds of dollars I’ve spent on Rock Band and Guitar Hero stuff over the past decade – I figured I could probably enjoy this game even with only knowing Avicii as “a guy who has a game dedicated to his music.”

So I’m basically Faith from Mirrors Edge but piloting a spaceship? Cool.

The story is rather barebones: A female ship pilot has to send things to various planets, while blasting the songs of Avicii to get from planet to planet. These cutscenes play every few songs, and while they’re mostly non-contextual, they bring a bit of life to the game’s overall feel. After all, if you’re a rhythm game, you either play it super-serious like a Rock Band or you go full over-the-top like a good chunk of the Guitar Hero games did, so for Hello There Games to go for the latter route is a wise call.

I assure you it’s a bit more complex than this.

Avicii Invector plays rather simply: Press buttons in time with the music for points and to build a combo. While most of the time you’ll be pressing the face buttons, sometimes you’ll also need to hit either shoulder button for lines that are on the track. Changing lanes is handled with the left stick. Higher difficulties add more buttons to press and a lot more lane shifting, which can be quite disorienting if you’re not used to it. Much like most modern rhythm games, if one hits enough notes, they can activate a booster with the triggers which doubles score for a brief time.

While I’m used to games like Rock Band where it’s less about timing and more about making sure you hit the notes, Avicii Invector takes its cues from games like Dance Dance Revolution, where hitting notes right on time gets more points and a bigger combo. This took a bit for me to get used to, but thankfully the timing seems to be rather generous, even with that little gameplay quirk.

Continue reading…

Slingo Mystery: Who’s Gold? – A casual classic meets the modern casual game.

In the many years I’ve been writing about oddball video gaming stuff, I thought I covered it all. The unofficial expansion packs, the weird cross-promotions, the mostly forgotten cheap games that came out during the 2000s. But it wasn’t until recently did I realize there was one genre I never talked much about: The hidden object game.

A genre I haven’t really covered on here, the hidden object game involves usually finding a bunch of items inside a room to make progress. For a good long while, the hidden object genre was the go-to game for super casual gamers everywhere. I assume it’s still modestly popular, but I figure most people have since moved on to Candy Crush Saga and similar easy-to-understand mobile game offerings.

Normally, I wouldn’t cover these, but then I found an interesting hidden object game. One mashed up with a classic online game I remember from my teen years. When I spotted this game at a thrift store, I had wondered how they decided to bring back a mostly dormant franchise and combine it with one of the most popular casual gamer genres out there. Turns out it’s quite a journey.

James Bond this ain’t.

Slingo Mystery: Who’s Gold? is a game developed and published by Funkitron Games – no relation to Toejam & Earl – that combines the popular hidden object game with Slingo, a game show-like game that mixes slot machines with bingo. Released around 2007 for PC platforms, this game seemed to slip through the cracks, as I didn’t realize this existed until I picked it up last year at a thrift store.

A screenshot of Slingo Deluxe, one of the earlier offline versions of the game. Sadly, there isn’t much footage of the original online game available, so this will have to do.

But before we get into the game itself, a small primer on what Slingo is. You have a bingo card and every spin of the reels gives you five numbers to fill the card with. Alongside the numbers are jokers – a wild card that can be used to mark any number on the column its on, gold coins – gives you extra score, and the devil, which cuts your score in half. You have up to 20 spins to fill the card, and the first to do so wins the game.

Slingo is a game I fondly remember from my days of playing it on America Online. For people of my generation, Slingo was one of those classic games people played in the early 2000s, web 1.0-era internet. That, Yahoo Games, You Don’t Know Jack: The NetShow and Acrophobia are many of these online games I fondly remember. Sadly, most of these are gone now, or live on through fanmade clones.

Totally forgot how jovial the Zynga Slingo joker was.

I’ve talked about Slingo once before: Way back in 2012, covering the time Zynga licensed the game for a Facebook mobile game that was fairly short-lived. It was perfectly fine, but filled with microtransactions and nagging your Facebook friends for help, which was pretty common at the time. Thank god we kinda moved past that.

But I’ve waxed enough nostalgia. Let’s get into the hybrid Slingo meets hidden object game that is Slingo Mystery: Who’s Gold?

Freddy doesn’t really seem happy to be there…

You play as Maggie Gold, a divorced, destitute woman who finds out from her friend Kyle Sparks that her ex-husband Freddy has passed, and decided to give his massive Las Vegas casino, “The Gold Casino,” to his current wife Gloria. Throughout the various areas of the casino, Maggie tries to find out the secrets of the casino, which involves a bunch of unusual item hunting and puzzle-solving.

This is the usual fare for hidden object games: Mostly licensed properties like Gameloft’s The Blacklist: Conspiracy.

Now, normally I wouldn’t talk too much about hidden object games. They always seemed to be the kind of genre that would flood the bargain bins of office supplies and department stores, sitting alongside a rack of cheap PC releases of games past like Braid or Far Cry 2. To me, these kind of games peaked when books like I Spy and Where’s Waldo came out. I couldn’t imagine these kind of games were anywhere near my wheelhouse.

Continue reading…

Total Overdose: Mex Payne.

If there’s anything I kinda miss about gaming these days, is the sense of people copycatting ideas from other games because they became a breakout success. Sonic the Hedgehog was popular, so here’s a bunch of platformers of characters with some ‘tude. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater rejuvenated a fading extreme sports genre and had a few copycats throughout the 2000s.

But the biggest was around 2001, when two major franchises released that would shift the balance towards what games were for the first half of the decade: Grand Theft Auto III and Max Payne. GTAIII was a free-roaming open world game that was actually critically acclaimed. Its success suddenly had many games pivot to making GTA clones or even open worlds to drive around in an otherwise linear action game. Likewise with Max Payne‘s release, a fair share of games started taking the bullet time shooting mechanic as well, though not as big.

Now most of these copycats are perfectly fine, solid game, but they rarely stood out unless they had some kind of gimmick attached to them. One game in particular decided to copy both of those games together, with a pinch of Mexican cinema pastiche for flavor.

hey, watch where you point that, buddy

Total Overdose: A Gunslinger’s Tale in Mexico is a game definitely in that Grand Theft Auto and Max Payne mold, but with a little Latin flavor. Developed by Deadline Games, a Denmark development studio mostly known for adventure games, this game has them trying to make something previously unknown to them: the third-person shooter meets open-world sandbox.

Guess you gotta start things off action-packed somehow.

The game starts in 1989-era Mexico as DEA agent Ernesto Cruz tries to find Papa Muerte, a major drug kingpin. While shooting his way through a Mayan jungle, Ernesto makes his escape on a plane before forcibly being removed from it. The death was reported as a drug overdose.

Cut to a few years later, when Ernesto’s son Tommy, who’s also a DEA agent, tries to figure out the mystery of his father’s death, where he goes undercover working for some drug cartels. But an unfortunate incident at a gas station leads to him being stuck in a wheelchair and being strictly reconnaissance for the time being.

Real smooth there, dude.

Enter Ram Cruz: Tommy’s delinquent brother who helps him out by doing missions for the DEA in exchange for his freedom. While Tommy is kind and supportive, Ram is a massive dickhead at the start. This doesn’t last for long, though, as he eventually sheds a lot of that attitude for a more casual personality towards the end.

Dive, shoot, survive. Easy to learn, difficult to master.

Total Overdose starts like a conventional mid-2000s shooter for the time. WASD moves, left mouse button shoots. Since this is taking a page from the Max Payne playbook, hitting the shootdodge key – Spacebar by default – Ram can dodge and shoot enemies for bonus points. Holding right mouse button gives a more precision headshot that can be a one-hit KO if timed correctly. There’s other little tricks Ram can do, including climbing up walls and rappelling down wires while shooting, giving that sense of style that Max Payne refined just a couple years earlier.

perhaps they took inspiration from Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater as well…
Continue reading…

Hell Yeah! Wrath of the Dead Rabbit: Cutesy, yet gory.

(content warning: cartoony violence and blood within. there’s also an aside about a game designer’s transphobia, but not in the game itself.)

Ever had a moment where you’re scrolling through your library on Steam or some other digital storefront and spotted a game in your library that you have no memory of acquiring? Something that made you wonder “when the hell did I buy this?,” causing you to frantically search Humble Bundle and the 3-4 other discount key storefronts you have accounts on just to have the record of when you purchased that game? Well, the game I’m writing about this time was like that for me, a game that somehow was in my Steam library for literally years. I was confused on how it got there. Maybe I bought it from hell or something.

Or, as the game calls it, “Ugh yeah!!!”

Hell Yeah! Wrath of the Dead Rabbit is a… rather bizarre action-adventure/metroidvania (ugh) game that was in my Steam library for a long time. Released in 2012 for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Steam, it’s an unusual choice of game in my library mostly because of the game’s publisher: Sega.

“SEG-” *frantically mashes start to get to the main menu*

You know Sega, right? The company that puts out okay-to-great Sonic the Hedgehog games, the amazing Yakuza/Like a Dragon games, and occasionally dabbles in their back catalog once in a blue moon, right? In addition to its main headquarters in Tokyo, Japan and the oft memed USA branch, there’s another important division, an unsung hero of the company: Sega Europe, publishers of iconic PC gaming franchises like Total War, Company of Heroes, Endless Space and Football Manager. They dabble in other games as well, but Sega Europe’s is the reason Hell Yeah! was published by them and not like, 505 Games or something.

Pretty sure this is also the name of a my bloody valentine tribute album.

Hell Yeah! was offered as one of the free gift packages in “Make War Not Love,” a promotion Sega Europe was doing with its iconic strategy game franchises where playing either of those games – Company of Heroes 2, Total War: Attila and Warhammer: Dawn of War II – would result in unlocking content for those respective games. Hell Yeah! was packed in alongside other Sega games like Viking: Battle for Asgard, Renegade Ops and some of the games in the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive Classics Collection. All of these were offerings for the third “Make War Not Love” event, which happened in February 2016, just in time for Valentine’s Day.

But let’s talk about Hell Yeah! itself. Developed by Arkedo Studio, a games studio based in Paris, France, was mostly known for relatively forgotten platformers in their “Arkedo Series” of games. Said games had fairly unremarkable titles like Jump!, SWAP!, and Pixel!. Hell Yeah! would be their last major game released while the studio was still active. Eventually one more game would be released not long after the studio shut down: Poöf vs the Cursed Kitty, released one year later and published by Neko Entertainment. Surprisingly this game doesn’t end with an exclamation point in its title.

Don’t try to go to that web address, it doesn’t exist. Though, watch as Google suddenly makes .kom a top level domain…

In Hell Yeah!, you play as Ash, a bunny rabbit who reigns supreme over the realms of hell. Through negligence on his part, pictures of him are taken by paparazzi and spread around the shores of hell, causing it to damage his reputation. With help from his servant Nestor, Ash opts to seek revenge by finding the culprit who leaked those photos in the first place, which requires defeating 100 monsters around the world.

Why does it feel like I’ve waltzed onto a bullet hell shooter?

Ash has a fairly modest arsenal to start. Not long after the beginning, Ash acquires a super-sawing jetpack that allows Ash to drill through certain materials and fly to certain areas. In addition, Ash can acquire a slew of weapons: Slow-firing missiles that can blast through rock and destroy enemies with ease. Eventually after the tutorial area, Nestor gifts Ash with a second weapon: A machine gun, one that looks similar to the famous M41A Pulse Rifle from the Aliens films.

Continue reading…

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