PC Review #132: Galak-Z

Title: Galak-Z
Developer: 17 Bit Games
Platforms: PC, Mac, Linux. PS4
Price: $19.99
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I had been anticipating Galak-Z for a while. The fluid combat, the bright flashy visuals, mech mode, roguelike elements...all signs pointed towards a fast-paced frenetic dual-stick shooter with screen-filling missile barrages. And Galak-Z definitely has all those things and more, but what I wasn't expecting was a deliberately-paced shooter with a focus on stealth and cautious exploration. It was a welcome surprise.

As ace pilot Atak, you alone must take on the might of the Empire. But while you may be outnumbered, you aren't outmatched; your fighter is an agile weapon, able to strafe and reverse direction with ease. Part of the challenge and fun of Galak-Z is mastering its movement, learning to handle momentum and thrust, how to dodge over bullets and circle around enemies.

Modulating your thrust is crucial, because despite its frenetic appearance, Galak-Z actually has a large focus on stealth. Reminiscent of Mark of the Ninja, enemy light of sight is visually represented on screen, and the sound of engines displayed as a circle around your ship. Enemies will investigate suspicious sounds, become alerted if they catch a glimpse of you. You only have a few health and shield points, and enemies attack relentlessly, so hiding and flanking and attacking when you have the advantage is key to surviving.

But when combat does finally erupt, it does so in a spectacle of swooping missiles, colorful explosions, flaring thrusters and neon bullets. Galak-Z certainly doesn't disappoint in the action department. Weaving between lasers, unleashing a flurry of missiles, then boosting out of sight to flank your enemies is always satisfying. Mods and blueprints found through each stage can upgrade your ship with extensive array of bullet types, shot speed and range, and enhancements like immunity to lava.

Sometimes your arsenal isn't enough and Galak-Z features emergent gameplay elements that allow for more strategic depth. Enemy factions fight each other, so leading a fleet of Empire ships into a nest of space bugs is always a viable tactic. The environments are filled with hazards that can be used against enemies, from lava pools and drifting debris to alien growths that unleash shield-draining spores. Choosing where you fight can be just as important as how you fight.

But no element is Galak-Z is as stylish as its seamless mech transformations, At the press of a button, your ship shifts into a sword and shield-wielding robot that can slash through a squadron, or grapple an enemy and fling it into an asteroid. Fluidly switching between ship and mech mode, along with stealth and environmental hazards and your arsenal, lets you turn the tides against the game's challenging enemies and bosses.

The PC version of Galak-Z features a new Arcade mode, to complement its original roguelike structure. The threat of permadeath looms over every encounter in Galak-Z, but Arcade mode lets you save your progress and restart stages without losing all your upgrades.

Galak-Z is available on Steam, as well as PS4

Quick Fix: Screenshot Saturday 10/31

Title: One Last Sunset
Developer: Benjy Bates and co.
One Last Sunset is a story about betrayal and revenge set in a post-apocalyptic world with Wild West overtones.
The game combines RPG-esque sandbox elements, choices, consequences, etc, with rogue-like random generation (maps, locations, quests and so on), perma-death and ticking clock goals - you have only a 72 (in-game) hour window to get find and kill the man who betrayed you.

Title: Bazaar
Developer: Greysphere
Fly on a magic carpet through the mystical land of Bazaar. Explore this twisting city to find exotic trinkets you'll need for your journey. Beware the dart traps, sea cobras, and hungry crocs that lurk around corners. Lamassu, guardian of the the labyrinth, is furious that vandal monkeys have stolen his relics. Will you recover them in time or be trapped forever?

Title: Sub-Species
Developer: Howling Hamster
Sub-Species is a 2.5D Shooter, in which your submarine can rotate 360° in order to blast alien sea monsters that will be coming at you from all angles.
You’re a scavenger piloting a small salvage submarine that must journey into to deepest Sub-Species of the ocean and blasting enormous sea monsters into oblivion. Kicking ass and saving the World, now how could that not be fun?

Title: Quest to Aztlan
Developer: A Bonfire of Souls
Quest to Aztlan is a small huge rpg game. You choose an exploration team to explore the ancient ruins of Atzlan. In the way you fight against creatures that prevent you reach the city treasury. Upgrade your equipment spending coins in the merchant shop (a peculiar character) and manage the battle in real time combats 4 vs 4.

The Watchlist: Beacon

Title: Beacon
Developer: Monothetic
Platforms: PC
In development
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A sci-fi action roguelike, where you have to mutate your way to victory through repeated cloning

Beacon is an upcoming isometric roguelite that takes the generational concept of games like Rogue Legacy to a new level. Your successor isn't your offspring; it's you, your clone, able to be biologically molded through genetic engineering. The mutations are your most effective advantage against the alien and mechanical threats awaiting on Beacon's hostile landscapes.

In Beacon, you play as interstellar mercenary Freja, stranded on an alien planet with only a functional cloning bay scavenged from the wreckage of  her ship. If she can build a distress beacon, help could be summoned. But first, you'll need to explore the dangerous maps, gathering resources and weapons and facing an array of extraterrestrial enemies

Being a fast-paced action roguelite, Beacon offers a extensive arsenal, from your basic assault rifle and grenade launcher to more exotic weapons from other factions. But modifying your DNA can provide abilities as useful as any gun. Scaled skin will let you absorb more damage. An aerodynamic tail will increase your speed and agility. Stone muscles increase your strrength and health. Each mutation is represented through cosmetic changes, and each has both positive and negative effects: extra health at the expense of speed, or trading stamina for increased accuracy.

Aside from mutations, you'll also be able customize your playstyle through weapon mods, various grenades, one-use pickups, and powerful auxiliary items. Your enemies are equally varied, from the native species such as the tritoraptor to the hologram-headed Prism droids.

Beacon is currently in development, and doesn't have a set release date yet. You can follow the game's progress on Monothetic's devblog and Twitter page.

Quick Fix: Kickstarters and Greenlights to watch

Just a short post for today, but there are a lot of interesting indie releases and projects on the horizon. The gorgeous hand-made adventure game Lumino City is releasing on iPad tonight and frenetic roguelite shooter Galak-Z is finally coming to Steam tomorrow, so you can definitely expect impressions of those soon.

In the meantime, here are some promising Kickstarters to watch, as well as a few games on Greenlight that might interest you:

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On Kickstarter

Doko Roko

Doko Roko is a 2D rogue-like, vertical action game with an emphasis on lightning-fast combat and rich atmosphere 

Collect strange and ancient magicks to do battle with the more hostile denizens of The Tower. Wield massive swords forged from meteorites and cursed earth to slay the many dreaming demons who climb the tower alongside you. A frenetic and responsive combat system that is easy to pick up, but difficult to master.

Wanderer

Wanderer tells the tale of a man called Rook, a greying convict who wakes from cold sleep aboard a massive orbital prison facility to find that it's crash landed on the ruins of an abandoned Earth. 

With the guidance of a hacker named Jin and the aid of a ragtag group of survivors he recruits along the way, Rook must locate and explore the nine cell blocks which have detached from the prison's central tower and scattered across Earth's ghostly wasteland.

Puzzle Depot

In Puzzle Depot, you start out as Todd Torial, Box Pusher 3rd Class, who's just been “volunteered” as a test subject for the facility's CryoFreeze program. When he wakes up, he finds the facility is in chaos. As you navigate your new, more dangerous world, you realize it's not just the facility that's fallen to ruin, but the entire planet.

On Greenlight

Cally's Cave 3

Join Cally and her friends in this action-packed run and gun platformer, conquering insane bosses, exploring to find secrets, and levelling up EVERYTHING. Use your weapons to level them up and evolve them into their ultimate forms! 

Unlock new character abilities like the Triple Jump, Dodge Roll and Water Wings. Use a second playable character, Bera to unleash crazy awesome ninja moves and solve challenging puzzles.

The Mooseman

The Mooseman is an atmospheric 2D adventure game set in the mysterious lands of Perm chud’ tribes. The player's avatar is the Mooseman; a mythological character from perm animal style objects, which we were greatly inspired by.

Intersection

InterSection is a spatially-challenging puzzle game based on manipulating two 2D planes aligned to your player in 3d space. You are linked to two worlds; the dying world of your people, and a young, green world. Use this link to connect these worlds and save your people.

PC Review #131: Mushroom 11

Title: Mushroom 11
Developer: Untame
Platforms: PC, Mac, Linux
Price: $14.99
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We're all quite familiar with the standard platformer formula nowadays. Run around, jump over gaps, possibly some wall-jumping, dashes, and other maneuvers. But how would a platformer work if your character lacked limbs? Or had no concrete form at all? Mushroom 11 is a challenging physics-based puzzle platformer that turns the typical genre gameplay on its head by putting you in control of an amorphous fungus that can mold and shift into any shape.

The world is ruined. Humanity is absent, perhaps extinct or long gone, leaving only dilapidated cityscapes and overgown environments in its wake. But life continues, from weird insects to your character: a green fungus that absorbs other organisms and is nearly impossible to destroy. In fact, destruction is your means of movement. Using the mouse, you can erase parts of the fungus and it'll regrow those sections elsewhere on its form; through careful erasure, the fungus can flow through chapters with speed and agility by continuously growing in a certain direction.

But Mushroom 11's unique control scheme is used for far more than movement through destruction. You have no defined shape, able to mold into any form, and can be divided into multiple parts that can all act independently. Split in half to hold down a button with one part while moving the other through a now-open gate. Carefully shave off parts to extend into a tower to bridge a gap. Mold around ledges. Clamber up walls and across ceilings. One of the most important aspects of a good platformer is satisfying movement, and it never got old experimenting with and mastering Mushroom 11's free-form traversal.

However, traversing the chapters is only part of Mushroom 11's challenge. Each section is rife with hazards and physics puzzles. From fireball-flinging organisms and lava to fungus-melting acid and challenging bosses, you need to carefully move around these dangers, considering how each erasure will affect your mushroom's form, weight, and balance. Later chapters will have you molding the mushroom into the shape of gear, shifting its weight around to stay within a speeding minecart, forming ramps for rolling objects, completing circuits, and much more.

Each chapter introduces new mechanics and dangers, always exploring new uses of the mushroom's amorphous design. The unique gameplay was Mushroom 11's initial hook, but discovering what new hazards and puzzle elements the developers would introduce next was what keep me intrigued throughout my six-hour playthrough.

Mushroom 11 isn't just enjoyable to play, but also offers a atmospheric apocalyptic world to admire, an array of ruined cities, otherworldly environments, and faded graffiti that hint at the fate of mankind. The mushroom itself is always fun to watch, as it instantly reforms, or its insides pulse and rumble, or absorbed organisms dissolve into splashes of color within its green body. Each chapter features a ticking clock, offering replay value for fans of speed-running, and hard-to-reach insects that challenge the limits of your mushroom molding skills.

Mushroom 11 is available on Steam, Humble, and GOG. IOS and Android versions are expected to release next year.

Quick Fix: Screenshot Saturday 10/24

Title: Starfallen
Developer: Starfallen team
Starfallen is a procedural action-rpg about an engineer that crashes on an alien world, and who is believed by the native aliens to be one of their gods.
Though the world is beautiful, it is dangerous and hostile and the Engineer must find a way home. The Engineer explores the vast alien world inhabited by archaic civilizations, and is snared into a dark conspiracy.

Title: Somber
Developer: Lost Cause Games
Somber is a 4 player coop, third person suspense game, set in a fictional city of Argentina during mid 1950’s.
The current president has been replaced by a militar dictator. With the attention of the authorities in other places, the mysterious cult of Somber has taken control of the small city of Dale in preparation for the arrival of an ancient god. A group of brave residents of the city have joined forces to stop the cult before its too late.

Title: Fat Mask
Developer: Paper Cult Games
Fat Mask is a frenetic local-multiplayer action-puzzler in which you connect pieces of monsters to create even bigger monsters, but beware of other players trying to steal your creatures!

Title: Spooky Pooky
Developer: Fistful Of Squid
Spooky Pooky is a 2D platformer that combines action, exploration and puzzle-solving set against the backdrop of a B-movie plot.

No Money, No Problem: Spellrazor

Title: Spellrazor
Developer: Dene Carter
Platforms: PC, Mac
Free build
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What's the most weapons you've had in your arsenal while playing a shooter? Perhaps it was merely two, in a game like Halo, or maybe you had a portable armory in Borderlands. But I doubt that can hold a candle to Spellrazor, a Robotron-inspired roguelite shooter that lets you carry 27 weapons at the same time.

Influenced by titles like Rogue, Robotron, and Berzerk, you control a figure in randomly-generated levels where waves of powerful enemies roam. From the swarming frogs and rushing flies to teleportiing drones, they're all dangerous and your shields won't last very long. But thankfully there's a massive array of tactics at your disposal.

27 weapons and skills, one for each letter key on your keyboard plus a close-range melee attack on spacebar. Opening chests and killing enemies will provide ammo for various slots, but it's up to you to experiment and figure out what each does. You might learn that S recharges your shields or that E unleashes a devastating energy beam, among many other useful abilities, projectiles, and buffs.

With its flashy neon aesthetic, expansive arsenal, and relentless foes, Spellrazor delivers hectic arcade action. You can't manually aim, only maneuver and auto-target near enemies, so combat becomes about strategic positioning and using the best abilities at the most opportune moments. You never know what ammo you might gather, so your strategy is always shifting.

This version of Spellrazor will remain a freeware title, with more enemies and weapons being added. There will also be an interesting text adventure-esque element that involves using a debug terminal to decode glitches and uncover secrets. If the game is well-received, the developer plans to expand Spellrazor into a larger full-fledged release.

You can download Spellrazor here and follow its development on TIGSource.