Backlog Beatdown: Shooting Many Robots with, er, Shoot Many Robots.

After beating both One Finger Death Punch and Mortal Kombat, I decided that I wasn’t quite ready to get off my ‘Pick It Up And Have A Play’ horse yet, and played an arcade game I downloaded sometime in 2013: Shoot Many Robots.

This game reminds me of Metal Slug, and with good reason – it is a classic action platformer. You run, gun and jump your way to victory, using power-ups and upgrades to your weapons. Your enemies are robots, but curiously enough for a video game, most of them seem to have been designed look like they were built for function, not combat. They’re dangerous enough, but it’s a refreshing change to fight something that doesn’t look like it was deliberately designed to kill you.

Side-Scrolling BadAssery. What's not to love?

Make no mistake, this game is good fun. There’s a reason this was so popular in the 80s and 90s: The format worked so well. You run through a Post Industrial environment shooting anything that moves, and picking up anything that doesn’t move. The design of the characters and music put you in the shoes of beer-swilling rednecks who’d love to be doing nothing better, which adds to the light-hearted yet determined nature of the game. And as with the old games, Shoot Many Robots will let you get through the first few levels without trying, before forcing you to think for a moment about what you’re doing and how you’re going to beat the next level. There are obligatory boss battles, and even though some of them have a kind of ‘recycled’ feel to them, this is nothing new for this kind of game either.

But as this game is on the Xbox 360, the developers had to make some token effort to innovate, and they do this by putting in an economy with which to buy new weapons and equipment, a ‘level-up’ system similar to Charlie Murder. As far as I know, all the latter does is unlock some of the game’s later gear. Your characters can carry two weapons: A primary gun with unlimited ammo, and a secondary weapon which is usually more powerful but with limited ammo. But it’s the helmet, armour and trousers where it starts to get interesting, as they affect the way the character moves. Some gear speeds you up; others have more damage resistance but slow you down and can lock some actions like slides. Certain upgrades allow jumps to resist gravity, and you can even acquire a jetpack to keep you in the air for a few seconds. This is more useful in some situations than others. At times you’ll love floating over your enemies bringing death from above; at others you’ll miss the tightness of the controls of the regular gear.

The game also has some multiplayer modes including up to 4-player co-op. I didn’t bother with this, as I don’t usually play games with people these days. I would imagine it would be somewhere between having a laugh with a few friends, and a frustrating pain in the bum as you have to wait for each other to upgrade your gear before you can actually play the game. I think it would have to be played in the right spirit, and with the right people, but if you can find both of those things you should have a good night in at least.

Having been watching YouTube’s The Completionist, I’m developing an appreciation for the kind of gamer who wants to power through games and unlock everything. It’s not my style – I prefer to go get to the end of the game once then come back to it if I really want to – but I can see why some people make that their hobby. Shoot Many Robots is a game that caters for both demographics; getting through the game on Normal difficulty was fine for me, but the individual levels give you a star rating out of 5 and maxing out all the stars on a higher difficulty level will probably give the game a lot more mileage for the completionists among us.

So, quite a good game. Not the best, but far from the worst, and it’s done it’s job for me.

Backlog Beatdown: Kicking Ass with One Finger Death Punch

Free from the constraints of No Game New Year, on New Years Day I downloaded One Finger Death Punch from Xbox Live. You may remember early last year, this was one of the games that tempted me away from NGNY. I didn’t go for it at the time, but I was reminded of it when I had a look at TotalBiscuit’s Top 10 games for 2014. He mentions this game in his top 10, and I remembered his WTF is video and wanting to try the game out for myself. Well, why not?

Most people reading this probably know the score, but if not, here’s how the game works: Enemies come running at you. When they get close enough, you press the X button to attack to the left and the A button to attack to the right. There’s absolutely nothing else to it. No movement, no special moves, nothing that involves anything other than pressing X to attack to the left, and A to attack to the right.

Simple? Yes, definitely. But it is so much fun.

Two buttons. This game is brilliant.

There’s a lot to be said for a game that only does one thing but does it very well. Mechanically, it’s

fantastic. As the attack animations happen instantly, timing is essential but there’s no faffing about waiting for a move to wind up. However, if you miss, you’re left vulnerable to attack for about a quarter of a second, which for a game of this speed is a very long time. The player character and enemies are stick men; an odd decision, but it fits the light-hearted nature of the game and keeps the attention where it needs to be: On the action.

Variety is provided by the different ways in which the levels and enemies are organised. Most levels are ‘Mob Levels,’ which simply require you to kill all the enemies. But there are some that require you to do it in a certain amount of time, smash a certain number of items, or do the level in black and white so that you can’t distinguish different enemies and there are even some levels that give you a Light Sword or Knunchaku. Some enemies require more than one hit – from potentially more than one direction – to take down, and others, called ‘Brawlers,’ cuts away from the main stage and requires you to press X and A multiple times in a sequence to beat them. Your character can pick up weapons, which increases your reach or gives you a ranged attack. Outside the levels there is a ‘map’ screen where you can choose what levels you play and activate the skills you acquire in certain levels. These ‘power-ups’ usually involve either being able to use weapons multiple times, or slowing the enemies down in some way. All this content from a game that uses two buttons.

But doesn’t it get old? Well, the whole game takes around 4-5 hours to complete, and you’re probably not going to get through it all in one sitting unless you’re determined to do so. But that’s not the point of this game. It would work very well on a Mobile device because it’s absolutely fine just to pick it up and play. There’s no exposition, no plot, no reason for you to be doing anything other than the fact that you are. The levels are generally over in about a minute, so you can do as much as you like depending on how much time you have. Finally, your score for the level depends on how many times you missed – the fewer, the better – and whether or not you took any damage yourself. You can always replay the levels and aim for a better score, if you’re interested in tackling the game this way.

As for me, I’ve got to the end of the game on the easiest difficulty. While I’ll probably come back to it at some point if I need something to fill half an hour, I will mark this game off as beaten. But if you’ve got £2 to spare, I recommend you check this game out. We could all do with some more games that don’t take themselves too seriously!

No Game New Year part 10: Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel, and some Temptations...

Right then, first thing's first, I've recently become aware three games that have brought me ever closer to failing the challenge. I haven't given in, but here they are, and the reasons why:

Temptation 2: South Park: The Stick of Truth

This one's a bit of a mystery to me. Am I a South Park fan? Not really; I kind of lost interest as it got ever-more ridiculous. Am I an RPG fan? Yes, and I've got plenty of those games and I know it. But everything I've seen on the new South Park game looks so good that I really wanted to give it a try. I've seen Angry Joe's review, and Total Biscuit's WTF is... video on it, and it really does look like a game I would enjoy playing. Apart from anything else, it's about time someone put out a decent South Park game!

Temptation 3: One Finger Death Punch

Another one from Total Biscuit, this simple-but-intricately-timed brawler looks like an absolutely amazing way to fill a few hours. I'd love to download it onto my Xbox, (there's no way it would happen on my laptop!) but I'm keeping it quiet for now.

Temptation 4: Final Fantasy VII.

An old friend put me on to this. I think this game is as good as Final Fantasy ever was or ever will be, and I've owned it on the PC and the Playstation. Sadly, there's no way on God's Green Earth that any computer we have in our house will run a game ported to PC in 1998, and I've lost my copy of the game for the Playstation (we suspect it was stolen.) Then my friend put on Facebook a picture of him playing the game on the PSVita, and if I ever get one of those, that will be the reason - so I can play Final Fantasy VII again. Trouble is, dropping at least a tonne on the Vita and buying a game I already own will come dangerously close to breaking the challenge, so in its spirit, I will wait until it is over before I do this.

And now on to what I've been up to this week...

Actually, not a lot. Apart from the fact that I've been busy most nights this week, I've also been quite ill with the back-end of a cold. I've had headaches, I've been dizzy, and I've been unable to regulate my body temperature - three things that are not conducive to having a particularly good time when I've been playing video games. Plus my girlfriend was up this weekend so my PS2 has remained off. So most of these notes actually cover what happened last week...

Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel

So I spent quite a lot of time last week talking about how I think we came to have such a game on the PS2, and why a relatively poor addition to the otherwise-excellent Fallout franchise came to exist at all. If you missed it and are wondering what Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel is, here's a quick re-cap: The game is a top-down Dungeon-Crawler action title, with some very basic RPG elements based on the Fallout setting (post-apocalyptic 50s style.) The idea is that you are an initiate in the Brotherhood of Steel - about as near as the Fallout series gets to having a 'good' faction - sent on a quest to find some of the brotherhood. Naturally, things don't go to plan, and you end up fighting your way through Radscorpions, Raiders, Ghouls and Super Mutants.

There are quite a few aesthetic differences between this game and the other games in the Fallout series that are worth mentioning straight away. First, you do not 'create' your character in the usual sense; you choose from a choice of three (and later six:) Nadia, Cyrus and Cain. Nadia is the 'quick and nimble' archetype who moves slightly faster and has the ability to use dual weapons. Cyrus is a heavy-set man, tougher than Nadia who can't use dual weapons but can use heavy weapons. Cain is a Ghoul, neither tough nor particularly quick but can use all the weapons and also has the advantage of being immune to radiation. This difference will put off a lot of the more traditional Western RPG fans, but it does have the advantage of being able to put you in the action more or less straight away. These, by the way, are the only differences between the characters. The dialogue options and the way each character handles certain situations never changes in the slightest.

The other change of course is the music. The background music during the game, when present, evokes a feeling of hopeless defeat and laziness, synonymous I think with Fallout. We do have an ironic 1950s track that plays at the start (uncredited, but probably called 'Nuclear Blast.) Most significantly though are the inclusion of tracks from a number of notable Metal bands of the time, including Slipknot, Messhugha and Chimaira. These generally appear during boss battles, and there is nothing like shooting the shit out of the devious mayor of the local town while listening to a vocal-free mix of The Heretic Anthem. It is a little out of style with the usual music you might expect from a Fallout game, but as I mentioned last week, this game was to cater to a very different demographic.

The graphics aren't amazing, in fact for a 6th gen console game they're actually quite poor. The character models only look a little bit better than something you might find on the PS1. Generally, they didn't have to be much better than that, as most of the action is coming from the top-down so you wouldn't necessarily have the kind of view that would give rise to that kind of detail. But you really do notice when you talk to characters and the quality of their models and animations are... repetitive, to say the least. The voice acting is done well enough, but the script sounds like it was written by a teenager with a very limited vocabulary.

Then we get to the gameplay itself. It is pretty standard stuff; running around, hacking and slashing and shooting at various enemies that will do nothing but try to kill you. You eventually pick up a balance of Ranged, Melee and Grenade-style weapons, and as you can equip up to three weapons I guess it's the best balanced option to pick all three types. With Melee weapons, there's usually not a lot of difference in how they handle; a Hammer is only marginally quicker than a Knife, for example, but does more damage. The difference, then, is that certain characters can't use the larger weapons. With ranged weapons, there's a little more variety between single-shot, automatic, shotguns and all sorts really, though certain characters can't wield two at the same time. The aiming is rubbish: you press R1 to aim a shot; sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. Finally there are the grenades, and I have to wonder what on earth they were thinking when their functionality was designed. You have to hold down the button to throw them, and then a little glowing light moves steadily ahead from you to represent your shot power. You then let the button go and they're thrown in more often than not a random direction as it gets stuck on a piece of scenery. Cover is limited to being able to duck, which I wouldn't have notices at all if I hadn't bashed all the buttons to find out, and even then it's hard to tell.

To be fair, I think all this was before controls in shooters were really standardised, so there are some differences to the controls and functionality which may have just been ill-educated guesswork. And there is some fun to be had in gunning and slashing your way through hordes of enemies. Why do you think we play Dynasty Warriors? However it gets repetitive very quickly and, despite the inclusion of three characters, doesn't lend itself well to multiple play-throughs. This is about my fourth, though I've never reached the end of the game.

For this one, I chose Cyrus, and ramped up the difficulty to the maximum available, and here's where it starts to get interesting: You have to pick your spots carefully. Some enemies are better dealt with ranged weapons than others, but ammo is limited and so is your health, so you have to learn how each enemy attacks, how to avoid it and how to kill them as quickly as possible. You find yourself asking questions like: "Is it worth using a few rounds of ammo to deal with this Radscorpion who will poison me if I get too close?" "These raiders are pretty fierce and I'd love to shoot them but I know that some of them have got Flamethrowers, should I save my ammo for them?" "Is it worth taking a few hits to take down four guys at once with a grenade?" This is where the game comes in to its own, and almost becomes reminiscent of the old-school platform/run and gun style games where you'd have to memories enemy types and attack patterns to survive.

The problem is that the old games it emulates were generally over in an hour and a half. With this game, it takes about that to get through a single section of the game, and there is a LOT of it. The plot isn't particularly compelling either. Currently I'm at the end of the first chapter out of three. I'd love to get to the end of this title simply to say that I have, but I have a feeling I will be tired of the overly-repetitive gameplay long before the game is.

We'll see where I am with it next week, though if my eye doesn't stop twitching, I won't be playing much of anything...