I searched on Lost Frontier and came up empty and I am wondering if anyone has played it and can recommend it? One of the Steam curators said this about it, “Advance Wars-style turn-based tactical play with a Weird West theme; cowboys team up against rival gangs…and werewolves…using six-shooters and derigibles. From a dev that worked on Battlehearts”
Positive reviews on Steam from a couple dozen reviewers. Mobile port from Mika Mobile, Inc.
Pretty sure I played this on mobile ~6 years ago. Don’t recall enough to recommend or dissuade, unfortunately.
Well, I made a start on the Punkcake mega bundle and Ecstatic is magnificent. I chose it first because it was the least clicked on game listed! :) But, I mean, just look at it:
Délicieux indeed!
So you’ve got a carrot-on-a-stick cursor that your spider follows when you left click, then a mouse-over lock-on, right click fire-and-forget shooting system. It feels weird at first but there’s this tension and rhythm between mousing over to lock-on and mousing away to move. It’s amazing how smooth it feels when you’ve got the hang of it. What’s more: when you lock-on to several targets, your spider does a burst dash on release which feels very satisfying and counteracts the stationary time to do all the locking-on. That’s a really smart touch. The heart of the game is in the pick-up/levelling system though.
Each level will periodically spawn a randomised pick-up. There’s blast (missile blast radius), drill (expands arena and speeds up lock-ons), hsink (reduces cooldown between salvos), speed (spidey speed), build (rate at which you store missiles), fangs (bite enemies on collision), freez [sic] (time slows down when you stop—this makes the game feel turn-based when levelled) and store (how many missiles you can store). Getting the right balance is key so not enough store and you run out missiles. Not enough hsink and you’re waiting too long between salvos. Not enough speed and it’s harder to dodge. But, hey geggis, I thought you said they were randomised? Well you can lock-on to pick-ups to cycle them!
There are three levels, each with their own music and BPM (and an editor that you can bung your own music into but I’ve not looked at that), each with four difficulties (easy, normal, hard, ecstatic) and a bunch of challenges or achievements to do for each one. I’ve done each level on easy but it’s getting really tough on normal. I daren’t think what hard or ecstatic are like. Restarts are lightning fast and as such I’ve found it very difficult to stop playing. It’s so easy to just have another go…
If the other games in the bundle are anywhere near as good as this then I’m in for a treat.
I didn’t buy the bundle, but I did buy Rush for the Ages. It’s… a fun diversion. Individual games are very quick, but the strategy doesn’t seem to be very deep. Mostly just hope you get good cards, and also recognizing when a particular card in the pool of available cards is good for you right now. There’s a little bit of manipulating the available card pool, since the size of the pool determines what cards you can play (and the values of a couple of the cards).
Worth the price, for me anyway, but probably not a lot of staying power.
Yeah, I’m quite keen to check that one out!
My understanding is that these games are made in around a month, a bit similar to Sokpop’s stuff. I’ve got about 7 hours on Ecstatic now, somehow, god, it’s addictive (just completed normal), but for how ‘quickly’ it was made it’s absurdly good, as a very polished, tight and mechanically interesting shooter that’s holding my attention. The soundtrack is also great:
Yeah, I’m curious now about “sugar”, the tool/library used to make Rush for the Ages. I’m guessing all their games are made with it.
Ah, it appears to be a game engine they’re developing:
Well, apologies for once again missing the point. I know this confused me previously, and it was probably explained to me, and I obviously missed the point again. I saw the other thread had been bumped after a long inactivity, and it looked to me like the post that bumped it belonged over here.
So, basically, this thread is for games you haven’t played and the other thread would be for games you have played? Honestly, I’m not sure I see the point, but if we make sure they’re labeled accordingly, I’m less likely to mess it up again.
-Tom
EDIT: Okay, I’ve opened the other thread and renamed them both. Hope that clarifies things. Again, I don’t see the point in there being separate threads, but I’m not the person to evaluate these catch-all threads. To my mind, they’re all abominations! :)
This doesn’t seem like the best new name.
I’m pretty sure some evil person like justaguy2 would jump on it to start listing every single games they haven’t played.
What was wrong with the old title? I found it very enticing and the new one is just wrong if you look at the majority of posts.
I definitely used this thread to post impressions and mini reviews of games I had played or that I played a demo of.
The other indie thread has 700 posts while this one has 6000. I saw this a the thread to discuss any indie game that caught your fancy, that you played and liked or indeed sometimes ones that you didn’t play but looked forward to. While, for one reason or another, not yet justifying creating a specific thread for it.
Hello, Lawful Good loremaster here!
So, basically, what had happened was, in this thread people would post about any and all indie games that looked or were cool.
A lot of the time, someone would be like “Hay this game Knights of Justice: Return of the Liberators is visually stunning.”
Someone else would say “But is it gratifying?”
And the first person would be like “How would I know, I haven’t played it, it’s $4 and I’m waiting for a historically low price!!!”
After this happened 5,000 times, someone else was like, “I want a thread where people HAVE played the games,” and they started the other one.
But this original thread wasn’t just limited to games that hadn’t been played. It was both, like eventually when Knights of Justice: Return of the Liberators went on sale for $3.99 and someone bought it they might post their impressions.
So, yeah, that was confusing and the new title is probably better moving forward. But it doesn’t fully describe what this thread has been so far.
Lawful good loremaster out!
I like the new titles. Thank you @tomchick. I prefer the other thread, because it was definitive, hey, I recommend these games. Whereas this one was supposed to be contemplative, like “hey, this kind of looks cool in the trailer, and John Walker recommended it”. But you guys are right, sometimes people played it personally and they reported back in THIS thread instead of the other thread.
The only thing that’s different now, is that the other thread used to be exclusively for games that you recommended AND had played. Now the other thread can also be used for reporting back on games you didn’t like, which is kind of sucky. I kind of liked that the negativity was corralled into this thread (along with hope), while the other thread used to be only positivity.
(EDIT: Oh hey, I hadn’t noticed, the other thread’s title changed again, and it’s both for games you played AND recommend again. Woohoo!)
But… Bbbuuuut… now I look [even more] stupid for posting game recs in a thread that’s now clearly titled ‘games I haven’t played’.
But I did! I played 'em! I played the fuck outta them! (;´༎ຶ Д ༎ຶ`)
I haven’t played many indie games, this will be a great thread to post in!
Yeah…
Well, it looks like I’m not the only one who was confused by the previous subject headers. This seems to be the sort of situation where too many different people have too many different ideas of what these threads are, and they’ve been going for too long. Rather than upset any apple carts trying to fix anything, I’ll just put them both back as they were. Sorry for the (additional) confusion.
-Tom
I would have guessed you were right, but reading the original post here, it turns out that I started the other “game I played” thread and then this one was started a year later! Honestly, I’m not sure if there are many threads here that are as clear in their first posts about what they’re intended for as these two!
OMG! Ok, well, I’m retiring as a Loremaster and transitioning to a Mage.
I was just messin’. I think you were right to rename the threads. My fault for not reading the first post in here anyway!
I would have named this thread ‘I Didn’t Play This Indie Game And You Should Too!’ but that’s probably just me.