October Next Fest, Day 0
Tasting menu of defeat.
Though Steam Next Fest has not begun, I have decided to whet your appetite for demos by playing a handful last night that I had downloaded early. You’ll notice all of my clips were zoomed in weirdly - I was apparently recording in the wrong resolution the entire time. Oh well.
World War V- Last Call
This twin-stick run-n-gun game has it all - isometric camera, cute character design, v-voxels?? Well, I don’t think they’re actual voxels but that’s what it’s going for. You get a pistol, grenades, and weapon pickups a la Contra or Metal Slug to temporary upgrade your main gun. There’s some pretense at destructible environments with your grenades blowing holes in the terrain and even being able to sort of carve a path through hills, but fences and structures are impervious and so you’re still generally gated into a narrow path full of troops.
I wasn’t too impressed with WWV. The opening teases at a juxtaposition of 2D sidescrolling pixel gameplay and then a transition to 3D isometric voxels but all the gameplay I saw was just basic run-n-gun stuff with no standout qualities. The writing and character design were just slightly above baseline, the controls weren’t great, performance was spotty, and I mostly just wished I were playing Iron Tank or something instead. Maybe you could make an anime voxel version of Iron Tank, guys!
Ship Miner
This is one of those gold digging games but with no gravity. So you’re dropping like, the single biggest restrictive force in games like Steamworld Dig, that means you’re bringing a lot MORE to the table, right? Oh, you’re cutting out the need to return to a ‘surface’ to unlock your upgrades and can just buy them from a skill menu instead. Alright. So what’s new? Ah, rather than each ‘ore’ type having a value, they’re all independent currencies instead and every upgrade demands completely a completely arbitrary mix of vague shapes and clumps of pixels. Ship Miner feels like I’m exploring the genre equivalent of an abandoned, exhausted mine, where you can see where every vein of worth DID go, decades ago, but the machines are dead and there’s only the howl of air gliding its way through empty shafts. If there’s something more going on here, I’d be glad to see it, but all I found was the edge of the map and some holes that shot me with missiles.
Motorslice
Parkour Nier Automata. You play as a girl with a chainsword and she has to do clumsy platforming around a giant aimless megastructure until… I guess until the game ends, there really wasn’t a clear goal presented to me. You can slide, jump, wall-run, climb poles… it’s all pretty floaty, didn’t feel terribly precise, and wasn’t particularly impressive or fun. Combat, at least with the worthless little crane drones I encountered, was similarly flaccid - you just kind of hit the melee button until they fall apart, sometimes in one hit, sometimes they seem to deflect your attacks a few times, no real indication or feedback either way.
Some of my problems may have to do with the performance and the fact that I had to crank the graphics settings to their minimum to get a stable framerate on the Steam Deck… but I doubt it’s unfairly affecting my impression of the game so far. Like the other two, I don’t really get what the point of this is, what the hook is supposed to be, who this is for. And even if I did know, I probably wouldn’t want to play any more of it after the third time I hit jump while pointed the right way and got launched 30 degrees away to my death.
So there you go. Me being grumpy about three demos get your juices flowing? Well, let’s see how things go once the event kicks off. Let me know in comments if anything catches your eye.