The amount of Independent games appearing is on the rise! It seems everybody wants a piece of the action, luckily, most Indie companies don't have the funds available to force us into liking their idea! We take a look at a series of games in development stages and see whether the 'Games Got Potential'?...or not?
For the first in this series we will be looking at 2 games that tried their luck at crowdfunding via the popular Kickstarter website. Sadly, due to lack of exposure, and other unknown issues, both projects were unsuccessful. We test out both games and give a verdict on how they play. The first game is Slime of Fury, a 2d platformer from Jon Harwood Games. Then we have Night City Assault by XtraMile Games, a company that could now possibly be defunct.
Slime of Fury.
SoF is a 2D platformer with a storyline that doesn't take itself too serious. You play as a green slime monster who is on a mission to rid the earth of an evil eternal darkness. Humans and Slime monsters get along just fine, so on your journey you'll meet plenty of people able to give you objects and advice. you'll quickly learn the art of karate, and you set off into the distance where a mysterious dark castle stands.
The game has been designed with pixilated graphics and reminds me of various mid 90s Amiga games as opposed to an 8/16bit era, and although the graphics are simplistic, you can feel the depth in them, everything seems quite polished and well animated for what it is.
The gameplay is quite addictive and you do feel drawn into it, though there is a level of irritance it carries which i can only compare to early Megaman games. What I'm talking about is specifically the platform jumping distances, In which your required to be absolute perfect in your timing, or risk re-doing a portion of the stage again. Now I'm not saying this is a fault, the game has obviously been designed to be challenging, and just like with the Meagan series, the 'irritance' is soon turned into determination as you refuse to let the level defeat you!
Jon Harwood is responsible for the coding, artwork and pretty much everything else apart from the soundtrack, and has done a pretty decent job at making a playable game. This isn't the first release to come out of Jon Harwood Games, they have had a previous release named Demon Hearts which retails on Steam @ around £2.79 and had some success as being extremely difficult. I can definitely see how SoF will become harder as levels increase, but its still a good fun game to play.
I'm not sure why the Kicksarter project failed, they reached only $1203 out of the $5000 goal. Luckily that didn't stop the developer from finishing the game! It has been given the Steam green light, and is looking at a December 2016 release date! Originally there were plans for a Wiiu version, though that now could possibly only rely on the success of Steam Sales. If the price stays in line with their previous releases then i can see Slime of Fury being a success. It definitely has potential!
Night City Assault
In honesty, when i first saw footage of NCA, i thought it was another homemade Beats of Rage skin. But, as i took a closer look i realised this was too well designed, and seemed to play very smooth compared to the BoR engine. As i looked deeper into it i was happy to see its been developed using the Unity game engine, and has been developed from the ground up.
Looking like a Streets of Rage clone, the game pays heavy tribute to that, and other classic beat em up series. You play as a detective on a mission to rid the city of an evil syndicate (pretty standard beat-em-up stuff), and you set off on a journey to serve and protect.
The levels have been very well designed. The artwork fits really well, and its nice to see someone take that extra step with a style of game we've seen many times before. The character artwork is to match and the animations make a great playing experience. The game features full spoken text and a pretty well produced script that keeps you entertained. Theres no reason why any beat-em-up fan wouldn't like this game, so it seems strange that the Kickstarter only reached $14,957 of its $26,290 goal.
The developers, Xtra Mile Games, seemed to keep high hopes and continue to work on the game for a Steam release. Originally they had planned for Xbox One, Ps4 and Wiiu releases, but that would now be on hold. Things seemed to be looking at a 'Late 2016' PC release date, but an unknown problem occurred, and now it seems that Xtra Mile Games have vanished off the planet?
With the Xtra Mile Games website offline, and no apparent presence of them since April 2016, it seems Night City Assault may never see the light of day! Hopefully theres a good reason, and work is still continuing. But until i can find some form of working contact for them, then only time will tell.
NCA was a game that had a lot of potential, you can download the demo from the links below, but sadly we experienced a lot of crashes due to it being an Alpha build, and therefore we don't have footage of this one to show yet.
Copyright © Copyright 2020