Indie Bundle 4

This is the fourth entry in my series of reviews for the Steam Indie Bundles. Each review is short and subjective, and is geared to give you a quick look at the game. Indie Bundle 4 includes: A Valley Without Wind, Atom Smasher Zombie, Blocks That Matter, Sanctum, and Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP.

A Valley Without Wind

A real throw-back to the old console sidescroller adventure games, this offering seems pretty basic at first, but you soon realise it actually contains a very deep and complex world to explore. Buildings are able to be entered, as well as rooms inside buildings; all in a sidescroller view.

The gameplay itself can be challenging; there was not much of a tutorial and you're left to work things out on the most part, although some tips windows do appear from time-to-time. On at least one occasion, I ended up stuck in a room with no idea how to get out and had to reload. As they tell you during the character creation screen, don't get too attached to your character, because it's not a matter of if but when you will die!

A Valley Without Wind does work in multimonitor, although the HUD elements are on the far edges and the visual scene is limited to around half of the total available width. I would say it was a fortunate accident rather than actively supported. The game looks pretty enough and the action flows nicely, plus some humour in the dialogue never goes astray. 8/10.

Atom Zombie Smasher

I must admit, I had no idea what to expect from this game based on the name, but did not have high expectations. What I found was actually really cool.

A world view is divided into areas, and the player chooses an area to go to attempt to rescue citizens from the zombie hordes, called Zeds. The rescue area is shown in a top down strategy view, and you have to deploy rescue helicopters to rescue as many citizens as possible from the invading zombie hordes. When the choppers come in to land, they deploy a beacon that the citizens run towards. Seems simple enough, but it's actually pretty difficult to position the helicopters to rescue the most citizens possible before the Zeds get to your chopper and you need to make an emergency liftoff.

As you achieve goals, weapons unlock that you can deploy onto the map to slow the zombie advances, with the goal of rescuing more citizens. I found the challenge very addictive, and usually replayed the same map a few times to see if I could rescue more citizens.

Multimon is available but there is no advantage to be had during regular gameplay, although you get to see more in the cut-scenes than any of the single monitor resolutions. However, this is traded off with a HUD that is not optimized during gameplay, so 16:9 is probably the best compromise for this game. All round though, a great indie game. 9/10

Blocks That Matter

Wow, this bundle just keeps getting better. Another game that sounds fairly uninteresting from the title actually turned out to be great. I expected a block type puzzle game, which it is, but it's wrapped nicely in a neat story and fun graphics. The game heavily references Minecraft and Tetris in a fun way, both in the storyline and in the gameplay.

Some game developers in Sweden get kidnapped and you need to rescue them using the robot they developed. You control this cute little robot (called tetrabot) and crank around the platform environment, much like Mario Bros in a way. You collect blocks by destroying them and then redeploy them to get past hurdles as you work your way towards where your developers are kidnapped. It's actually pretty challenging; I kept replaying the levels to try to get all of the bonuses.

Multimon is Vert-, so expect to play in 16:9. I also had some drama getting the game to run, it appears to be related to the fullscreen autodetection on multimon systems. Refer to the DR for how to fix this. Minus a point for multimon issues, I still rate this game highly. Is that a nod to Firefox in the first of the screenshots below? 9/10

Sanctum

This game is epicly good. This game is a tower defense game combined with a first person shooter, and is even better played in coop. Some of us WSGF people have gotten together for some fantastic gaming sessions with this one.

Before the game even starts, you need to work out with your teammates who will be able to build which towers, to ensure you get a good spread. In game, like all tower defense games, you all need to work out the best way to route the oncoming hordes. Although you can view a top-down map, you must do all your tower defense building in the first person view, which is a fun challenge to start with.

Not only do you have to decide what towers to build, you have to decide between spending money on towers or your own weapons, because when the hordes are coming, you get to spend your time shooting as many of them as possible to assist your towers. You get a range of weapons to choose from and upgrade, from guns that slow down the hordes to high powered rifles.

The only flaw that this game has is that multimon is very broken. Otherwise, it's a brilliant idea and very well executed. 9.5/10

Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP

You always hope when you fire up a game and then menu works in multimon that the game may actually play in multimon. Unfortunately, this isn't the case for this game. In fact, the whole game is Vert-, except in the unusual circumstance when playing 16:10 and you zoom out. That is the only time the game is Hor+. Go figure.

The graphics are neither moody nor beautiful; the whole world just seemed flat and dull. The game was supposed to have featured special attention to music, but it didn't impress me. The control system sucked, it was difficult to predict and not intuitive at all. Furthermore, the storyline did not grab me in the slightest. Attempts at humour struck me with the same impression as when politicians do it - points for trying, but really, I cant wait to be doing something else.

The only downer on an awesome bundle. No plans to play this again. 5/10

Summary

Ok, so let's pick up the mood a little if you've just finished reading about Superbrothers, coz that's the only bad news. The other games are great; Sanctum is worth the price of admission alone. Do yourself a favour and get this when it comes back out on sale. Best bundle so far.