RPGamer.com just posted an interview of yours truly talking about Cthulhu Saves the World. Click here to go read it.
I love RPGs, but sadly, there isn’t a whole lot to choose from in this genre on XBox Live Indie Games, especially when you consider that the service is almost two years old. There’s our game, Breath of Death VII. There’s Light’s End which is decent and sort of an RPG (although despite its RPG-esque visuals, it really has more in common with the old graphic adventure games that Lucasarts & Sierra used to make). There’s Dungeon Adventure which is supposed to be a decent rogue-like (but all things considered, I’d rather just play Nethack for free). Then you have Star Cross, ZenHak, and Legend of the Rune Lords, all of which have major issues. And that was pretty much it for the RPG genre on XBLIG, up until yesterday when Aphelion: Episode One – Graves of Earth came out.
Aphelion looks great. It’s by far the most professional looking RPG on XBLIG and wouldn’t look out of place on XBox Live Arcade. It’s not perfect, and the indie nature of the game peeks through here and there (like in the running animations which feel out of place), but overall, the visuals are one of the game’s strongest points.
The music is solid. Everything ranges from decent to good, with one or two great song. No complaints here.
Story is a mixed bag. The banter between the 4 playable characters is entertaining enough and their personalities are about as fleshed out as you would expect with a 5 hour game. On the other hand, the plot is fairly cliche. Yes, the big bad guy of the game is a mysterious silver-haired swordsman. No, Aphelion isn’t going for parody. Even worse, though, is that since this is an episodic game, there’s no real resolution. The game ends with a climactic battle, but it felt like I had just finished disk 1 of a 4 disk game. Nothing is answered and I didn’t feel like I understood the overarching plot any better after beating the game than I did halfway through the game. Plus, since this is an indie game, who knows if the future episodes will ever get finished?
Gameplay has serious balance issues. There’s a Break bar that fills up as you deal damage or are hurt and after it’s full, you can unleash a crazy powerful attack that can target multiple enemies, deals massive damage, and doesn’t even cost a turn. It’s as broken as it sounds, especially when you consider how quickly you can fill up the bar later on in the game after you’ve gotten several multi-hit techniques. Sadly, the unbalanced gameplay doesn’t stop there. Restoration items are dirt cheap so I was never in danger of running out of EP (the game’s form of MP) so I just unleashed my strongest attacks & spells all of the time. Because of this, random battles would frequently be won before the enemy even got a chance to move. Similarly, I rarely used healing magic in battle since I could just use one of my many powerful Full Party heal items.
The game uses a fun LV-Up system similar to Mass Effect, but here too, the game is unbalanced – each character has 3 skills that they can upgrade to gain new abilities, 3 skills that give party benefits, and several additional skills that just give stat bonuses. The problem is that the stat bonus skills give such small bonuses like +2% per level. Admittedly, these add up over time, but it’s just not very fun to waste a LV-Up on something that has no real discernable effect on your character.
There are a couple annoyances that detract from the game. Random encounters are frequent. Font sizes are rather small, to the point where I leaned forward slightly to make it easier to read. I’m playing on a high quality 32″ HDTV so I can only imagine how difficult it would be to play on a small low quality SDTV. These problems don’t render the game unplayable, but they do make the game a little less fun.
The game took me a little over 5 hours to beat. After beating the game, you unlock a New Game+ mode that lets you restart the game at new, harder difficulty levels while keeping your LVs and equipment from your previous playthrough(s). Between that and a few optional harder bosses near the end of the game, Aphelion could keep you playing for quite a while if you’re so inclined.
Despite Aphelion’s flaws, I had some fun with it. Not enough for me to want to replay the game (although I’m mildly tempted to try skipping straight to the highest difficulty level in New Game+ to see if it offers a challenge), but I had fun getting new equipment (the game has a ton of equipment for a 5 hour game) and utterly decimating everything that stood against me. There were a couple of parts where your party splits up for a short period of time which were kind of cool and a nice change of pace. On the other hand, I can’t help but be disapointed by Aphelion. It’s obvious that many people spent a lot of time making this game so it’s disappointing that the gameplay and story aren’t up to the same high level of quality that the graphics exhibits.
Aphelion: Episode One – Graves of Earth was released on July 7th, 2010. It can be purchased for 240 MS points ($3 USD).
EDIT: This review was done based on a peer review version of the game which had horrible load times. I just tried out the version that you can purchase on the marketplace and I was shocked to discover that the load times are drastically better and are actually rather short, all around. I’m really surprised that there was such a huge difference between the ccg file version that people were playtesting & peer reviewing and the version on the marketplace. I’m sure my overall impression of the game would have been slightly more positive if I had played the version with the short load times.
Radiangames Crossfire Short Review: Buy it as soon as possible.
Radiangames Crossfire Somewhat Longer Review: Picture Space Invaders. Now add modern graphics, the ability to teleport back and forth between the bottom and the top of the screen, a good variety of enemies that compliment each other nicely, various power-ups (most important of which is a power gauge that lets you drastically increase the power of your shots for a short period of time), co-op play, 50 main levels, and 2 unlockable modes (super fast mode & a gauntlet of extra hard levels). The game looks fantastic, it’s a blast to play, and the gameplay has more depth than you might think at first glance. Well worth the 240 MS points.
Radiangames Crossfire is one of the best arcade shooters I’ve ever played.
In short, buy it as soon as possible.
Progress report, we’re up to 123 monsters for Cthulhu Saves the World and we’re not done yet. For comparison, Breath of Death VII had 100 monsters, about a third of which were palette swaps. Cthulhu Saves the World does include some monsters that are variants of other monsters, but the percentage is smaller, and in most cases, they aren’t just palette swaps, but have other variations as well. Not only are there going to be noticeably more monsters in Cthulhu Saves the World, but I really think Bill outdid himself with the quality as well.
To whet your appetite, here is a sampler of some of the monsters we have done yet.
Click on the image to see them at full size.
Remember FMV games? Remember how much fun they were? Yeah, I don’t either, because aside from the novelty factor of the early stuff like Dragon’s Lair, FMV games were about as fun as you would expect watching poorly done movies that keep rewinding on their own would be.
Bloody Death doesn’t buck the trend. Although I applaud the fact that they were able to make an FMV game at all given XBLIG’s size limitations, that’s about all I can applaud them for. The acting & directing are laughable, the plot is non existent, the pacing attrocious, the visual quality of the video is horrible (no doubt to fit under the 150MB limit), and if all that wasn’t bad enough, it’s very obvious that there was not one native English speaker to work on the game so not only are you watching a bad student horror flick, but you’re watching a bad student horror flick with hard to understand accents, out of place swearing, and poor grammar.
Come on developers! Start releasing more good games so I don’t have to review dreck like this. We had a wonderful stretch earlier in the year with great game after great game coming out on XBLIG. What happened?
Breath of Death VII: The Beginning, the first RPG from indie game developer, Zeboyd Games, has achieved a LTD conversion rate of over 66.6% with sales of over 20,000 copies in the first 70 days since release. Conversion rate is defined as the number of sales divided by the number of demo downloads. Breath of Death VII has also achieved the second highest user rating of any XBox Live Indie Game on the US marketplace with an average rating of 4.75 out of 5.
“We are thrilled with these results,” says Breath of Death VII creator, Robert Boyd. “Most casual game developers consider their game a success if they manage to achieve a double digit conversion rate. To have achieved a rate of over 2/3rds is just phenemonal.”
“I attribute our high conversion rate to the high quality of the game, the positive press we’ve received on sites like Yahoo and Kotaku, and the tremendous value the game provides. In a world where even indie RPGs frequently have price tags of $20 and above, being able to buy a great RPG like Breath of Death VII for $1 is unheard of.”
Zeboyd Games’ next RPG, a dark comedy called Cthulhu Saves the World starring the insanity-inducing monstrosity from the horror fiction of H.P. Lovecraft will have a slightly higher price tag of $3 due to price/size limitations imposed on XBox Live Indie Games ($1 games are limited to 50MBs, whereas $3 & $5 games can take up to 150MBs). However, the developers at Zeboyd Games are hard at work to make Cthulhu Saves the World just as much of a value as Breath of Death VII.
“Cthulhu Saves the World is longer, the visuals look better, the gameplay is deeper and more balanced, there’s more music and the music we are using is of higher quality, and the story is more interesting than the already great Breath of Death VII. Not only that, but there will be greater incentives to replay the game with multiple difficulty levels and three unlockable bonus modes, one of which (Cthulhu’s Angels) will include new dialogue and a bonus playable character.”
Breath of Death VII: The Beginning was released on April 22, 2010 on the XBox Live Indie Games Marketplace. The demo and full version can be downloaded at http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/games/media/66acd000-77fe-1000-9115-d802585504bd/ or directly on the XBox 360 Games Marketplace.
Cthulhu Saves the World is currently scheduled to be released on the XBox Live Indie Game Marketplace at the end of August 2010.
Just a quick note to let everyone know that my first e-book game, Epiphany in Spaaace, is now available on Kindle for a mere $0.99. It’s the same as the version available on XBox Live Indie Games, except now it’s portable!
You can get it here.
If you enjoy Epiphany in Spaaace, please show your support by writing a positive review on Amazon.
Cthulhu Saves the World has 3 post-game modes that are unlocked when you beat the game.
Score Attack is the same as it was in Breath of Death VII – i.e. random encounters turned off and you gain points for beating bosses at lower levels.
Highlander – Cthulhu is the only character useable in battle. XP gain rate is increased.
and finally…drum roll…
Cthulhu’s Angels – The details are a secret for now, but I will say that it is going to require substantially more work on my part to add than the other 2 modes.
Breath of Death VII just passed 20,000 copies sold!
To celebrate, here’s a little gift – a copy of the Breath of Death VII world map. You can get it here.
Although there should be a lot of awesome games coming soon (based on what I’ve seen floating around in the peer review & playtesting queues), the releases on XBLIG have been pretty weak of late. But hey, here are two games that are well worth a trial.
First up is a great bullet hell shmup called Vampire Rage.
Next up is a highly polished geography game called Around the World
Both games are only 80 MS points and are well worth checking out if you’re interested in difficult vertical shmups or geography-based quiz games respectively.