01 February, 2009

Keepalive: Titan Quest Wannabes and Other Demos

written on Thursday, Jan. 29, 2009

I checked out a few demos (Silverfall and Loki) on Steam. Wow is it easy to make a horrible feeling Titan Quest type game. Add these to Sacred 2 and Space Siege and you have a whole lotta meh. It's like they couldn't decide which interface they wanted to have. They could have had a direct control interface where you're running around attacking. Or they could have done an overhead clicky game. They did neither and the games are no fun to control because of it. I'm constantly rejiggering the camera as I'm fighting. It's a pain.

I also checked out some other demos. Sorry for the no pictures, but I deleted the demos as soon as I was done with them.

Arx Fatalis is kind of a weird game. From the demo, it looks like Ultima Underworld ten years later. There are a lot of different interface modes in the game. Casting, combat, and inventory are all separate modes. And the game seems to always want to come back to inventory mode, which is a nuisance. But it's an interesting concept. The sun went out. So the surface is frozen and the orcs, dwarves, humans, and whoever had to dig down to the lava for heat. It's only $5 on Steam, so I'll have to give it a whirl.

Heroes of Annihilated Empires is basically Heroes of Might and Magic in real time with no base building. The troops in the demo couldn't stand up to any of the bad guys, so the game was just picking off bad guys one by one with my hero, waiting for my troop summoning ability to give me small periods of uninterrupted DPS. It was criminally dull.

Project Aftermath is a squad based RTS with no base building. The game's gimmick seems to be constantly switching which weapons your squads are using to keep hitting whatever the nearest enemy is weak to. It's definitely fast paced, but it didn't seem very deep. Maybe that's just because the demo ends before any upgrading would take place.

And finally I played a little Lumines, which is a straight puzzle game. It was pretty and appealing. I just don't get much out of puzzle games. If I did I'd probably still be playing Planet Puzzle League on my DS. :P

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