PC

Kheops Studio | Aug 2, 2006

Steam’s Daily specials are just fill of interesting little surprises.  Safecracker is one of those surprises.  It’s pretty straight forward in it’s story and presentation.  You’ve been hired by a family to find the will of their recently deceased relative.  The catch is that the late Duncan W. Adams was eccentric and wealthy and obsessed with safes.

So much so that essentially, the entire home is a puzzle.  Never mind that either this guy knew he was about to die and had all of this set up before hand or he liked to open laser locks requiring a key inside a safe in the basement every time he needed to take a piss.

You navigate around the spacious mansion home using a pseudo 3D navigation method.   It’s pseudo 3D in that it is all three dimensional, you can freely look around for clues, but it’s not “FPS” 3D, you move through a series of fixed locations by using navigation arrows and the mouse.  In face, the entire game is played via the mouse, including dropping back to the menus.  Most games use the “Escape Key”, the keyboard does nothing in this game.  Not a problem, just slightly offsetting when one forgets.

Scattered throughout the home are puzzles to solve.  Finding the puzzles is pretty easy, they are all labeled by glowing red lights and show up on the in game map with Xs.  For the most part, keeping memory of which puzzles are unsolved makes finding where to go next fairly easy.  For example, you may pass a locked door then find a key later which matches the lock’s shape.  On the other hand, figuring out the point of the photograph you find or realizing that you have to dismantle another lock are less obvious actions, which can lead to some frustration.

The difficulty of the puzzles vary greatly.  Some are key codes that are just given to the player, others are simply finding the right key.  Other more difficult puzzles involve manipulating objects and switches to activate or open safes.  There are something like 35 puzzles to solve, all of which must be solved in order to complete the game.  They are split probably 50/50 on actual puzzles and simple gimmie “puzzles”.

There is also a vague story aspect through letters and diary entries found throughout the game.  These become important later after finding the will.  It’s a minor spoiler but one that actually is fairly obviously going to come up there more you realize how greedy the family is.  You must puzzle out and pick who should get the inheritance.  Actually, you just pick.  There isn’t much after choosing the heir, you just get a little blurb about what they did with the money and a single screen of credits.  It’s actually a bit disappointingly anticlimactic.

Unfortunately, that kind of is the whole tone of the game.  Anticlimactic.  The puzzles are pretty fun but once you’ve figured out the trick there isn’t much replay value.  Still, the visuals are nice and it’s pretty cheap, so it’s a pretty fun little budget title if you like solving brainteaser style puzzles.

Safecracker can be found on Steam Here.

NOTE: This game was received free as a review copy)

Paradox Interactive | 08.02.2011

It’s not too often you see a Pirate themed game, despite the popularity of Pirates.  Ok, more accurately, you don’t too often see a Pirate themed game that includes many of the traditional aspects of pirating all rolled up into one game.  You will get pirate ships in combat or you’ll get control of a pirate battling piratey villains.  Pirates of Black Cove combines both of these and mixes in some RTS and RPG elements for an interesting pirate experience.

You play as one of three Pirates, chosen at the start of the game.  They each give you slightly different base stats for your character.  You command your own pirate ship as you travel around the islands and seas gaining more reputation among the various factions by completing various missions.  Your missions range from things like “chase down a ship carrying some important cargo” to “raid an enemy base to kidnap important characters” or just all out raids on enemy bases.  There are even some large boss type fights at sea such as fighting the mighty Kraken.

As you gain more fame, you also gain more allies.  This will give you the benefit of more troops to command during combat.  You also can gain more ships, though this is controlled by discovering and collecting blueprints.  The blueprints aren’t specific to any one ship or upgrade but act more as a specialized currency at the ship yard to unlock different things.  The main currency of the game used for actually buying upgrades and hiring troops are Pieces of Eight.

Combat is different depending on if you’re in your ship or if you’re controlling a landing party.  When you’re in your ship you navigate around using the WASD keys (player centric rotational controls not straight up down left right).  You fire your ship’s cannons by clicking in the direction you wish to fire.  Timing is critical and can be a little iffy as your cannons simply fire out one side or the other of your ship.  You’ll have to consider the movement of your enemy and your ship and the momentum of the cannonball’s trajectory.

Land based combat is more like a traditional RTS game.  You select and move your troops and attack enemy troops from an overhead perspective.  It’s a bit more limited than a traditional RTS though which makes it a bit frustrating to control all of your men at once.  Other RTS elements come up when using the towns.  You can buy and build and upgrade places in the towns you control in order to build more units for your crew.

Generally speaking, it’s pretty fun and pretty complex in a good but not too complicated way.

It’s not all completely kosher unfortunately.  The biggest flaw I found was that the game seems to just flat out run slow.  It’s possible this is simply a hardware issue except that the game ran about the same on my wimpy Netbook as it did on my much more powerful Desktop (more than minimum specs).  It seems to take forever to navigate around towns and the controls are a bit less responsive than they need to be.  I could see this issue popping up on my Netbook but I can generally blast through most games with pretty good speed and FPS etc on my desktop with no problems.  I could not find any sort of video quality settings in the menus in order to possibly try to correct the problem that way.  It’s the only real problem with this game but it is a fairly decent one.  fortunately it may be something that could eventually be fixed via a patch of some sort.  Heck it may already be fixed in the retail version and non-review version of the game.

One final bit I’d like to touch on.  I love the art in this game.  The cut scene full screen art pieces are fantastic and the graphics in general are pretty decent.  The character art is done nicely as well and everything features a full dialogue set for conversations.  The theme is somewhat cartoonish so the voices are sometimes a bit odd but they are still pretty decent.

So what you get is a decent Pirate simulation that is plagued slightly by what’s most likely poor code optimization making the game run a bit sluggish at times.  It’s still pretty fun to play at it’s core.

Blitz Game Studios | June 25, 2009

Droplitz is a game about controlling the flow of drops through a series of pipes to a set of collectors.  It’s pretty straightforward in it’s presentation and design.  After aligning a series of pipes and letting them fill for a few seconds the sections used are eliminated and more spill in from the top.  Let things go for too long and it’s game over.  There are varying degrees of difficulty, mostly controlled by how many distributors and collectors are available.

There is a bit more strategy required if you want to maximize your score than just connecting tubes.  Once a tube is connected it becomes permanently locked.  You may discover that had you turned it one more shift 90 degrees you could have connected two collectors for even more points.

It’s pretty well paced and not an overly stressful title to play.  Definitely one for the casual gamer who just wants to get some quick entertainment in short bursts.  It’s not excessively flashy but it’s reasonably fun to play.

Unfortunately, puzzle games have a bit of a hard niche to fill.  On one hand, there are a lot of pretty clever ideas out there for puzzle games.  They range from extremely complex in every way games like Portal, which is a Puzzle game at it’s core.  Or they can be simple and repetitive like Tetris.  Often they are something somewhat in between like say, Rush.  Droplitz falls more on the Tetris end of the spectrum, which is arguably the more difficult end.  Why is that exactly?

There is a lot of free competition in the Tetris end of the Puzzle spectrum.  Which hurts Droplitz more than anything else really.  It’s a decent little time waster style game, but there are so many options in this space that won’t cost a thing or are cheaper, it may be hard to justify a title like this.  On the plus side, there are a lot of sales on Steam involving small time puzzle games so it may be worth picking up for a discount.

Droplitz can be found on Steam http://store.steampowered.com/app/23120/here.

PopCap Games, Inc | Released: May 5th 2009

Occasionally Valve likes to promote other games by having tie ins with Team Fortress 2.  Generally these will be special limited edition Hats or Weapons.  I generally steer clear of the idea of buying a game “just for the hats”.  Especially considering how these are often somewhat expensive games.  Plants vs zombies went on sale for something like $4 plus you got TWO TF2 hats for free.  For the first time I admittedly bought a game just for the special Hats for TF2.  I’ve bought other games that had hat based promos but I bought them because the game seemed interesting (Mount & Blade, Left 4 Dead 2).

The irony here and the point of this little story is that of all of the games I’ve gotten hats from, this one is the one I’ve ended up playing the most.  It did look interesting before I’d played it but I’m not a huge fan of the Zombie Genre. The basic premise here is to defend your home against the oncoming horde of Zombies.  Instead of using the traditional methods of fire, shotguns or old records and cricket bats, you instead use an army of plants.  As the game progresses you get an increasingly more powerful array of plants to help defend yourself, which is good because you must face an increasingly powerful array of Zombie attackers.

This task is not without it’s hindrances.  a third of the way through the game the action shifts tot he backyard where you must contend with the pool, which only takes a certain types of plants or require lily pads to hold up regular plants.  Later you move to the roof where the pitch becomes a problem for your straight shooting Pea Shooters requiring the use of catapults.  Then there is the problem of the night.  The currency of the game is sunlight, which happens naturally during the day and can be produced from Sunflowers.  You can use Mushrooms at night but they are considerably weaker than their daytime counterparts. There’s a LOT more to this game though, which only helps drive up the value and quality.  The main Adventure game consists of 50 stages, though to help break up the monotony, there are several special stages that don’t involve straight planting and defending.  The most common will give you a conveyor belt sort of menu of pre chosen plants to drop.  These stages don’t require Sunlight but you’re limited to what is given to you to complete the stage.  Other bonus stages involve breaking open jars or destroying grave stones hoping to reveal plants instead of more Zombies.

You also get to collect coins as you go along in order to pay for upgrades from the Crazy neighbor.  You know he’s crazy because why else would he price his stuff so cheap?  Oh right, and because he SAYS SO.  Some of these upgrades are almost necessary such as the last line of defense pool cleaners.  There’s also a “Zen Garden” you can buy plants and supplies for, it’s essentially a virtual garden of friendly plants to take care of which will earn some additional money for the player. Top if off with a bunch of themed mini games and an interesting replay mode for the standard Adventure mode where you are forced to use a particular set of plants and you’ve got a lot of good replay value built in once the main game is complete. 

You certainly get a lot of decent and fun gameplay for not much. Plants vs Zombies can be found on Steam http://store.steampowered.com/app/3590/?snr=1_4_4__13Here.  There is a demo available as well.