So what are you waiting for? Go buy it now!

Humble Indie Bundle adds more games & soundtracks originally appeared on GamingOgre on December 21, 2011.

OnLive VP of games and media John Spinale said, “OnLive has long been a supporter of independent publishers. Simply put, they’re making some really great, innovative games these days,” a statement that can’t be denied with the quality of titles being released by indie studios these days. Check out the list of titles that will be coming to OnLive shortly:

• Orcs Must Die
• Limbo
• Magicka
• Bastion
• Space Chem
• Avadon: The Black Fortress

OnLive adding six indie titles this fall originally appeared on GamingOgre on October 10, 2011.

There is also a drilling mechanic that I really enjoyed and found myself wanting to do more than actually shooting the bad guys. As you go across the sky you run into other planets that you have to drill through and hit colored lights in order to get more points, and honestly, the entire point of the game is to get points.

The  points you collect can be spent on upgrades which are the default to all bullet hells: more weapons, bigger weapons, better weapons, shields and so on. The game does expect you to die a lot; it is one hit kill and when you die the announcer goes “Yooouuuu tit….” which really is the best game over I have ever seen. There are other game modes but I haven’t had a chance to unlock them due to the fact that they are REALLY FREAKING HARD TO UNLOCK. They take a lot of time to unlock which unfortunate for a game that is fun to play for 20 or so minutes but gets a bit repetitive the more you play.

The environment of the game is pretty neat but doesn’t change at all. It is a purpley looking cloud/nebula/something science-y in the back ground with stars….and that is about it for the entire game. Every once in a while you will be blocked by a cloud of gas and you just shoot it to get it out of your way. The makers of the game really could have benefited from different environment and changing up the enemies based on what environment you were in. The game also has amazing music, but from what I can tell it is only one track which is a shame.

Really Big Sky originally appeared on GamingOgre on October 6, 2011.

Indiana based (hooray!) indie developer Mommy’s Best Games brings you a new twist on the Sam franchise. Sam’s back but this time he’s in 2D, and features an all too appropriately named addition to his arsenal: The Gunstacker. Holy shit, this thing is the best idea in a long time.  You can add up to 6 guns together for some insanely badass monster smashing. At one point, I remember having a big ass chainsaw, a tommy gun, the default pistol, a shot-gun, a rocket launcher, and a machine gun all stacked together. The result was, as the internet kids say, “omgwtfbbqpwn”. There’s something far too satisfying about slicing up a baddie with a chainsaw as the shotgun blasts them off of the blade. Delicious.

As the bullets (and blood) fly, the game gets increasingly more difficult. You’ll continue on your 2D adventure, pummeling and blasting everything that gets near you in ridiculously copious amounts and you’ll find all sorts of hidden secrets all over the place; so I’d suggest you peek into every nook and cranny as you’ll likely missing something extremely helpful. There are also some pretty funny physics involved here as you’ll often be able to continually kill enemies until you’ve built up a high enough stack of corpses to jump out of areas seemingly inescapable.

The other cool thing is how well this game works with a 360 controller. You can play it just fine using a keyboard and mouse, but if you plug-in a 360 controller, you can use the left stick to move, right to aim, left trigger to jump, and right trigger to fire. Perfect controls to keep the action fast and intense. Speaking of intense, this game is damn hard. Enemies don’t just come running at you from the outside of the screen, instead they just spawn around you and it’s very easy go from full health and armor to half dead in the course of 5 seconds. I love a good challenge, so seeing how quickly you can get overwhelmed was frustrating but awesome.

Did I mention how funny this game is? It’s named Double D for a reason, and I’d love to think it’s because there are enemies that are basically headless chicks running at you topless with bombs for breasts. There are so many “WTF?!” moments, I couldn’t stop laughing.  It was like I was 13 and caught an episode of Beavis and Butthead or something, cause I was laughing at the most juvenile and immature things I could find. If you haven’t seen it, you need to check out SkankinPacman’s video introduction to Double D (embedded below). It’s full of things that this review can’t do justice, you just need to see it.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5g1A6dmiFc

Overall, If you’re a fan of fun, I can’t possibly recommend Serious Sam: Double D enough. It’s really well done, and the frantic combat, slick art style, hilarious little details, and of course the awesomeness of the Gunstacker are enough to warrant your $8 bucks.

Serious Sam: Double D was provided for review by Devolver Digital, and available for $7.99 on Steam.

Serious Sam: Double D originally appeared on GamingOgre on September 21, 2011.

The story of LIMBO is fairly simple: You play a young (nameless) boy who has ventured into Limbo to rescue your sister who is trapped there for some unexplainable reasons. As you venture further into LIMBO you will learn EVERYTHING wants you dead. See that blade of grass there? Yeah, it wants you dead. The achievements aren’t impossible, but have fun getting “the complete the game in one sitting and only dying 5 times” achievement. It’s fairly brutal.

Now, where LIMBO really shines (if anything in this game can shine, that is) for me, is in the ambiance that surrounds the game. There is almost no music in the game, which creates an eerie feel to the game, capable of delivering a chill up my spine. The entire game is rendered in a monochromatic color scheme, showcasing silhouettes (as opposed to a full on visible object. ) Much like earlier, this can be a bit annoying, because it’s often difficult to tell the difference between a patch of  grass and a bear trap; which you’ll only be able to differentiate after you watch your severed head go tumbling as you’re whisked away to restart the area.

The game revolves around the physics based puzzles and platforming sections which require a lot of trial and error. There are times that unless you know exactly what is coming you will die. This can be extremely frustrating. However, just like other completely unfair games like Super Meat Boy, there are times where you’ll want to throw your controller across the room; but when you actually complete something, you feel really proud of it.

The game is also extremely grim (like grim as heck, grim.) At one point in the game you see someone sitting and leaning on a pole. As you walk up to them, the ground breaks away, and the person falls forward, only to reveal that they were hanging themselves.

If that isn’t grim I don’t know what is.

Though this dastardly game is cloaked in darkness and full of grizzly violence, it only got a T rating – “How?” You may ask. Well, all of the violence is cleverly done, with it being shot in Black/White/Grey. All of the blood is white, and even though there is a lot of it, it doesn’t “look” like blood. That said, I still wouldn’t recommend this game to children; or anyone who wants to leave a game feeling bubbly. I am not saying the game is bad at all. I LOVED it, but the feel of the game is mostly heavy, dark, depressing, and often very nihilistic. Imagine if  Braid and Super Meat Boy had been mixed together by Trent Reznor. I’m pretty sure LIMBO would have been the end result.

In conclusion, I would EASILY give this game a 9 out of 10. It would be a 10, but like I mentioned above, the style is really awesome and artsy, but at times is too difficult to differentiate between harmless objects and the carefully hidden traps scattered about that will result in your death and restart of the area. If you are a fan of physics puzzlers and platformers, I’d say you should definitely check it out. I also recommend it for fans of dark or artsy type games. LIMBO is a solid (and amazing) game but don’t expect to leave it feeling super bubbly skipping down the road throwing flowers. This is $10 bucks well spent.

LIMBO originally appeared on GamingOgre on September 20, 2011.

The story of the game is you play Garshasp, a monster slayer (who would have thought!) and it begins with your hometown being attacked by all sorts of evil creatures that you pretty much hack the crap out of until they are no longer moving. The game proceeds into you fighting the giant evil to reclaim a precious mace that was stolen from the city and your family. As far as attacks go, you pretty much have a light attack for small enemies and heavy attack for bigger ones and learn various combos as you level up. You’ll get a sword and a mace to do battle with, in which the mace is a pretty bad ass (although you’ll have to play the game to find the true power behind it) that level up as you kill enemies similar to the system in God of War.

To be honest, I am not a huge fan of the hack-and-slash genre so the gameplay did get a bit repetitive for me and I did get a bit bored at times. The game also has finishing moves for bosses and bigger enemies again, a bit like God of War. Now these were pretty cool the first few times but they didn’t give them very much variation so after the fourth or fifth execution they tend to become a bit tedious. One gameplay mechanic I did really enjoy was a mini-game of sorts where in order to get to new places you had to slide down walls with your knife; it’s not a big thing but it was one thing I really enjoyed. You have to dodge over hangs and rocks while dodging other falling rocks as you slide and occasionally have to jump between two walls. It was a somewhat original concept in a game that had a lot of influence from other titles (which isn’t necessarily bad).

The only issues I really had with the gameplay were the controls on the PC felt a bit off, but after I switched to using my 360 controller it felt a lot better. The part of the game that I found to be very well done for an indie game was the story. I genuinely enjoyed the story of Garshasp; I always wanted to see what happened next. I give credit to the excellent and extremely well done narration throughout the entire game along with the choice of voice actor they picked for the narrator. It tells the story through cut scenes like most games made after 2000, but then it also gives narration during the game as you enter new lands and areas. It doesn’t interrupt gameplay in order to let the story unfold which you don’t see very often and I think should be implemented in more games. What I also found interesting is that there is no voice acting in the game other than the narration and the story still got told, proving you don’t need the actual characters to talk in order to tell a great and epic story.

To sum it up Garshasp: The Monster Slayer is a solid hack n slash with a well told story laid out in an intriguing fashion. The game play is not necessarily original and not really my style of play but it is solid. If you know you are a fan of this genre then I would say buy it; it is 10 bucks and you are supporting indie developers, or if you just want to support indie developers get it.

Garshasp: The Monster Slayer originally appeared on GamingOgre on September 17, 2011.

The title pretty much explains it, its me saying my first thoughts on the little indie title Serious Sam Double D, while killing everything that comes my way.

SkankinPacman explains Serious Sam Double D originally appeared on GamingOgre on August 31, 2011.

I’m sure these sales numbers will drop drastically once Minecraft is officially released for the console but for now take a look at the infographic released about the achievement.

FortressCraft makes a million on XBLIG originally appeared on GamingOgre on August 11, 2011.

It seems that Epic’s UDK will get a competitor as Crytek’s Anvi Yerli has told Develop that the company has plans on released an indie-friendly SDK.

There’s no word on price just yet as it seems early days but he does say that it will be “extremely user-friendly” and “The barriers for entry will be very low, and perhaps [it will be distributed] for free”

Crytek ponders indie-friendly SDK originally appeared on GamingOgre on March 15, 2011.