Developer Ronimo Games proved with Swords & Soldiers that they’re adept at merging real-time strategy gameplay with a two-dimensional world. But how did they do marrying MOBA mechanics with frantic side-scrolling action? The following should give you a hint:

When you start playing a game that features a giant robot, a space cowboy, a monkey with a jetpack, and the word “awesome” is mentioned well over five times within the intro movie, you know you’re in for something out of the ordinary. Welcome to the world of Awesomenauts.

The first thing you notice about Awesomenauts is its fantastic art style. Reminiscent of over-the-top 80s cartoons, the characters and environments hearken back to a time when GI Joe was on TV and hair metal was popular.

The intro movie sets the stage–there’s an interstellar war with two sides locked in a robotic stalemate; only the elite mercenary team known as the Awesomenauts can break it. That’s really all you need to know. There are robots and bad guys to fight. Get to it.

Awesomenauts is a 2D MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena) style game that combines some of the deeper genre nuances seen in titles like League of Legends with some of the more whimsical sensibilities of side-scrolling brawlers.

Each team of three starts out in their home base on opposite sides of the map, and the objective is to destroy the enemy’s “drillcore” located in the middle of their base. Sounds simple enough, except that you have to contend with automated turrets, computer controlled droids (creeps to those well versed in MOBA nomenclature), and of course, the enemy players. You accumulate Solar–the game’s currency–over time and when you destroy enemies. This currency is used to upgrade your character’s abilities and unlock new ones.

Players can choose to play as one of the six Awesomenauts: a self-destructing robot, a space cowboy armed with dynamite, a monkey with a jetpack, an alien brain, a frog with a laser gun shaped like a fish, and a French lizard with a sword. Each character looks visually distinct and handles quite differently. For example, the robot functions as a tank and has a bite attack that can steal life from opponents. On the other hand, the lizard has no ranged attacks but can cloak himself and move around the battlefield like a stealthy assassin.

While it’s cool that all the characters play pretty differently, some of them feel more useful than others. It feels a little unfair when the cowboy can throw multiple sticks of dynamite, shoot you with a gun, and then knock enemies back with a ghost bull, but the lizard is stuck with a tongue move that works like Scorpion’s harpoon and no ranged attacks.

Plus, the characters you unlock as you level up seem to be better than the original starting three. Zoltar, the alien brain, has abilities that let him heal his allies. It makes certain matches feel a little unfair if you’re facing an enemy team that can heal itself in the thick of battle and your team can’t because all three of you are playing with the starting characters.

However, as became the case with most my time with Awesomenauts, I couldn’t tell if my struggles with certain characters had to do with my inexperience or actual imbalances in the game. The developers have already announced that a patch is on the way to address balance issues brought up by players in the forums, so it will be interesting to see what they tweak once the patch is released.

While Awesomenauts can be played alone with bots (why would you want to do that?), it’s much more fun to be played with other players. The game features up to three player split screen and drop-in/drop-out functionality. All of the games I played online took almost no time at all to get set up, and there was virtually no lag to speak of.

While MOBA purists that cut their teeth on League of Legends or Defense of the Ancients might complain that Awesomenauts is too simple, there’s plenty of depth for both more casual players and seasoned veterans. Each character has two main skills and several different ways to level them up. For example, the frog character has a dashing, lunging attack and a tornado attack. By spending Solar you can upgrade the range or damage of the dash attack, or if you’re feeling fancy you can add a damage-reducing shield to the tornado attack. The multiple tiers of upgrades give Awesomenauts a lot of depth.

In my case most of my first ten matches were spent learning how the characters work, and even after that, my time with the game still feels like a learning process. Occasional hiccups like strangely large hitboxes–being not close to an enemy but their special attack hits anyway–lead to some head-scratching moments, by doing away with the inherent seriousness in some MOBA-style games, Awesomenauts makes learning to adjust your tactics fun. If you were killed by that special attack the last time, make sure you’re anticipating it the next time.

Some gamers might get a little frustrated when they win their first match and then go on to lose ten more in a row. But at the same time, because Awesomenauts is so inviting with its ridiculous aesthetic, it’s hard to resist the temptation to play “just one more round.” With Ronimo promising that more characters are on the way, there’re plenty of reasons to stick with the game. You will lose matches; you will feel like other players are so much better at the game than you, but Awesomenauts will make you want to learn its intricacies and improve.

This review is based on review code of the Xbox 360 version of Awesomenauts, provided by Ronimo Games.

Bad news Awesomenauts fans. Today I received word from Ronimo Games that the publisher, DTP Entertainment AG, has filed for insolvency. Jasper Koning from Ronimo says,”We’re unsure what this means for the game, but we’re working hard to try and resolve the situation.”

I reached out for comment, but so far there’s no word on whether or not Awesomenauts will launch as planned on May 1st on PSN and May 2nd on XBLA. I really hope they get this all figured out as it looks like it’ll be a fun, possibly insane, game. DTP Entertainment is a German company known for publishing games like Drakensang, Divinity II and Cursed Crusade.

You guys like that Trials Evolution game, right? Well turns out you’re not alone. RedLynx’s Trials Evolution set the record for the highest grossing day-one sales on Xbox Live Arcade. How many sales did they need to break that record? Try over 100,000 in its first day after release. Hot damn!

RedLynx has to be pleased with those numbers. Demand for the game was so high that according to Gamasutra, Microsoft had to add more servers to accommodate all the users. In addition Gamasutra reports “leaderboards for Trials Evolution‘s recorded 120,000 users playing the game just a day after its release, and around 180,000 playing in its second day.”

[Source: Gamasutra]

Fez has been in the works for many years — odds are if you are reading this review, you have heard of the game.

So, given the game’s prestige, I’ll keep this intro short — the wait was worth it.

Writing a review for Fez is difficult, as I do not wish to reveal a large portion of the game, but I’ll be able to cover pretty much every core aspect without spoiling key sections. Simply put, the game is basically a mix between VVVVVV and Cave Story. There is no hard action per se — Fez is a straight puzzle platformer, in the rawest sense of the term. There’s no gunplay, no enemies, and no complicated inventory system.

The actions your character (a puff-ball man named Gomez) can take are fairly simplistic, given that outside of movement, there’s only a jump and interaction button. But where the game  excels is not limited by what Gomez can do — it’s what you can do by manipulating the camera with the LT/RT buttons. By pressing either trigger (or bumper), you can switch the camera’s point of view around the game in a cube-like fashion. Using this method, you can find hidden doors, areas, and pick-ups to help continue on your quest to collect as many cubes as possible (which help you gradually unlock new doors to complete the game)

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Fez excels in the sense that it mostly offers players a choice on how they would like to approach completion. You can choose to engage in a number of the game’s tricky puzzles in mystery rooms to collect the coveted blue cubes (ranging from block puzzles to more complicated endeavors), or focus more on hard platforming, to collect the more common yellow cube pieces, which can be assembled into cubes once you collect enough. Each cube is counted as one currency, so you can open cube-doors with any combination of both types. To complete the game, you have to collect 32 of any combination of cubes — yellow or blue. In total, there are 32 yellow cubes and 32 blue cubes, so theoretically you could complete the game with mostly venturing after yellow cubes, or wracking your brain over blues. Letting you work at your own pace is not a major genre-bending decision, but it still helps make the game enjoyable nonetheless.

But while it is a platformer at it’s core, Fez excels at setting a relaxing and unique tone that is rarely found in gaming today. Through a combination of sights and sounds, Fez is able to draw you into it’s world without forcing it down your throat. While there is a finite amount of the world to explore, the game basically lets you find it at your own pace. Occasionally it may remind you of a particular area to visit so you don’t get lost, but for the most part, you can get to anywhere you need to go with your basic set of abilities. Once you earn more cube collectibles to unlock the game’s limited amount of key-doors, you can enter more areas and explore more of the game — however, this design choice is clearly to avoid you simply walking into the ending.

Fez does have a few technical issues, which is strange given the lengthy development time. For starters, my game crashed twice (once in a menu, once randomly), and I was put into an infinite death loop, forcing me to restart my game manually. Thankfully, the game saves as often as an MMO, so I was able to load up my game in less than thirty seconds and pick up where I left off. Also, given the prestige of the game, I can’t imagine these issues being patched out at a later date.

Visually,  the game may not blow you away if you’re not a fan of pixel art, but those who are open to the medium will find some incredible level designs to behold. Even without the rotation mechanic that allows you to see each area in it’s fullest, the game’s aesthetic design could still be considered in a league of it’s own. While there are tricky jumps, nothing feels unfair — yet, areas also feel challenging at the same time. You can clearly tell that much of the game’s development time went into fine tuning the platforming mechanics to ensure that they were pretty much perfect.

While it’s not mind blowing, Fez’s soundtrack deserves credit for fantastically fitting the game. If I had to compare it to anything, it would be the soundtrack to Clockwork Orange, in that it simultaneously gives you a feeling of whimsical calm and makes you feel uneasy in the same measure. Not many soundtracks can claim this feat, so it’s nice to see that a large amount of work was done ensuring that each track matches the area in question.

So aside from the mood, there of course is actual gameplay involved. Thankfully, Fez goes through great lengths to ensure that you have fun. For starters, you have an unlimited amount of lives, and you basically respawn immediately after your death right where you left off (similar to VVVVVV). Fez also highlights cube pieces., and gives you subtle hints as to where pick-ups can be found, without explicitly revealing the solution to a puzzle. As a result, even casual gamers can find solace in the fact that they’ll eventually find where they need to go, even if they have issues navigating the (initially) complicated map system.

At first, the map will feel like it’s difficult to read, but once you take a look at it for a while, you shouldn’t have any issues. Every possible power-up or pick-up is represented on the map, and if you clear an area in it’s entirety, the quadrant will turn gold — ensuring that you don’t aimlessly wander around areas you have already completed. You’re free to not only collect all thirty-two required cubes to finish the game, but a number of artifacts and collectibles as well. If you rush through the game it could only last you around five hours or so, but if you’re keen on getting absolutely everything, you’re going to net around double that.

Fez is a truly remarkable game, and can be placed in the indie pantheon along with Cave Story and VVVVVV. It provides a unique sandbox to engage in puzzle platforming, and it does that platforming aspect well — if you’re  fan of the genre, don’t miss out on Fez. Let’s just hope the sequel doesn’t take five years to produce.

Since it ‘s been marinating so long in development hell, most people don’t remember the name “Fez”. But fear not, patient gamers, as Polytron’s pitfall plagued platformer will be out this Friday for 800 Microsoft Points.

Fez is particularly notable, as it’s appeared in Indie Game: The Movie, and pretty much every single Indie Roundup for the past five years or so.  Personally, I’m getting a good Tomba vibe from the game, but we’ll see if it really meets the hype this week. If it’s successful, the developers would consider additional platforms (my guess is Steam/PC).

You guys have heard of Awesomenauts, right? If not, go here and check it out. I’ll wait. Now that you’re properly hyped, the game has official release dates.

According to a press release, North American PS3 users will be able to download the game for $10 on May 1, while worldwide PSN and XBLA users will have to wait until the next day. The game fuses MOBA style gameplay with 2D sidescrolling action with a nostalgic 80s flair. Sign me up, please.

If you said ten years ago that the Xbox 360 would be the premiere choice for shoot ‘em ups (shmups), I would have laughed in your face. But with a number of rare gems being ported to XBLA like Radiant Silvergun, and a handful of Cave ports transposed onto the retail 360 market, Microsoft has no doubt taken the shooter market by storm.

Sine Mora (latin for “without delay”) is a horizontal shoot ‘em up co-developed by both Digital Reality and Grasshopper Manufacture, that’s basically a mix between Einhander and the bullet hell genre. It carries a lot of expectations, given all of the hype and the fact that Suda is not involved with the project itself.

So, sine mora, it’s time to get to the review.

Our story takes place on the beautiful planet Seol, and involves a whole host of anthropomorphic creatures that would make Thunder Cats jealous. It’s a tale of deception, emotional distress, and philosophy of war/revenge. While I wasn’t blown away by the theme of the game (most of it is pretty elementary), the fact that it has some semblance of story is quite amazing for a shmup. You can even enter the options menu and explore some extra codices for a bit more story — like the rest of the game, the amount of effort put into it by the development team shows.

I don’t say this often about games, but Sine Mora is absolutely gorgeous. I can hardly believe Sine Mora is an XBLA game — quite frankly, without exaggeration, it looks like it could have been a retail title. You’ll sail over beautiful seas, crummy looking slums, and giant capital cities. All of them are incredibly detailed, to the point where you’ll easily want to go back to certain levels just to look at everything. Akira Yamaoka’s (Silent Hill, among others) soundtrack is also quite good, and helps compliment all of the pretty pictures.

So what’s gameplay like? Is it equally as beautiful? Like most shoot ‘em ups, the action will entirely take place in a ship, but the concept of life and death is fairly different from most shooters you’ve played before. Sine Mora deals with the concept of time, and it takes that concept to an extreme level when it applies it to your life bar.

Instead of dealing damage when getting hit by enemies, bullets, and terrain, you’ll take time damage. Once your counter goes to zero, you’re dead and gone. This helps create a sense of urgency that’s fairly easy to read for players of all skill levels, and thankfully, you have a few tools at your disposal to avoid losing some time.

Each ship has a standard bullet that can be upgraded by grabbing power-ups, in addition to a sub-weapon (which ranges from aoe explosions to beam attacks), and a capsule. Most of the time your capsule is going to be an ability to move quickly in time, and make everything else around you seem slower. You’re going to need this ability on a handful of bosses, which exhibit patterns of bullet hell.

If you’re looking for a bevvy of replay options, this game has it too. Sine Mora has a story mode, an  arcade mode, a time attack option, and a boss battle mode. If you aren’t a fan of shoot ‘em ups in general, this probably won’t do much to sway your opinion. But, if you’re fairly new to the genre, this is a great jump-off point, as the game goes through great lengths to teach you the fundamentals and the normal difficulty setting is fairly simple to boot.

You can also choose your own ship and pilot, as well as unlockable color schemes. As far as shmups go, this is one of the longest ones I’ve ever played. Without skipping cutscenes, Sine Mora will last you well over an hour — even if you barely have any deaths.

The ranking system is extremely complicated, much to the delight of hardcore shmup fans. In order to rank up, you must earn the previous rank in addition to meeting 5-10 goals, ranging from things as easy as “deploy power-ups 10 times” to tasks as time consuming as “play the game for 24 hours total”, or as difficult as “beat the entire game without continuing”.

But it’s not all easy-going: shmup vets will be glad to know there are a number of hardcore options available. In addition to the Insanity difficult level, you have the option to turn off enemy healthbars (old school style) and you can view the  precise hitbox of each ship.

The only significant issue with Sine Mora is that the game may not have everything you’re looking for if you’re not the biggest shmup fan. After you “one and done” the story, you’ll be greeted with the above modes, but they’re not really providing anything outside of a broad or concise score attack mode. There’s still going to be a ship; there’s still going to be bullets flying at you; and you’re still going to be shooting some yourself.

For future reference, the game’s director commented that if it sells well enough, there will be free DLC, which may even include a two player coop mode. I don’t consider promises of content to be a factor in any review determination, but it is something to keep an eye out for.

Sine Mora is one of the best shoot ‘em ups I’ve played in a long time. It not only sets the bar for XBLA shooters in general, but visually, it sets the bar for the whole marketplace. If Grasshopper is capable of this level of caliber without Suda, I think they’re in for a solid future.

This review was based on a digital copy of Sine Mora for the Xbox 360.

It’s good to be the king. You get to sleep in under comfy silk sheets while your vassals wake at dawn and go out to till the land. Architects build your towers. Wizards slave over mysterious, glowing artifacts. All the while, your coffers fill with gold.

One day, you’re awoken by one of your purple robed advisers alerting you that a rival lord’s army is at the gates. Such a travesty! Who does he think he is? And why does your adviser sound like a caricature of Sean Connery?

Defenders of Ardania (DoA) for Xbox Live Arcade starts with the player waking to find the enemy at the outskirts. Tower defense battles quickly carry you off into the lands of Majesty, in search of ancient evil, gathering key allies and powers along the way. With effective gameplay twists (yes, there is tower offense), DoA offers a gaming experience that may be rough around the edges, but is thoroughly entertaining.

Defenders of Ardania is a simple and honest game at its heart. It offers up every gameplay aspect right at the start — defense, offense, spells, buff, resource management — and relies on its presentation to wow the player. If we’re being honest, it does wow in many ways.

Defenders of Ardania is downright rich in the gameplay department. While most would say the biggest element is the addition of tower offense, the real bit is the strategy that it affords. With traditional tower defense games, the player’s aim is to set up suicide alleys to catch the enemy horde in crossfire. Other games like Dungeon Defenders try to amp up the action allowing the player to attack, but the crux is still defense. DoA goes far beyond that by allowing the player to send entire armies back at the opposing base, with the caveate that the enemy is also setting up towers to defend itself. The whole thing quickly becomes a complex game of chess.

Real estate plays a big factor as there are only so many places you can put a tower. The game also puts restrictions on placement, allowing players to only place towers closest to the base at first, opening up more spots on the grid as more towers find their way onto the field. Knowing that the enemy can block your suicide alley with one of its own makes the whole affair that much more urgent. A tower arms race ensues.  Layer on top of that waves of warriors, tanks and rogues going back and forth and it’s utter war on screen.

This fantastic arms race can at times become overwhelming. Especially when there is not one, not two, but three enemies to deal with. Imagine setting up a tower while there are four or five popping up around it. Then enemy waves going every which way on different prerogatives. There were several times when this player’s eyes opened wide and an expletive or two echoed throughout the room.

It can be easy to get lost because there is just so much going on. At the same time, no other tower defense game supplies this much action and chaos. It’s a tossup because an argument can be made on artistic merit — battle can be chaotic in real life, and the game evokes something lifelike. One could just as well easily argue that it is poor game design to clutter the screen; it’s just plain ugly. However, what can be said for certain is that multiplayer mode is never a dull moment.

That’s the fault of being a simple and honest game. The ugliness is held up right next to to beauty. DoA definitely has it’s ugly parts about it.

A big low point for Defenders of Ardania is the tutorial. A stop and go affair as most tutorials are, with DoA it can distill the excitement of tower defense / offense because often times it locks down full controls until the player does what the tutorial says. Meanwhile, take enough time and the enemy hordes can be seen sneaking underneath the tutorial text to get a head start on hit points. The truly sad thing is, there is a tutorial element in some form or another for nearly all the levels. Often times, it can just be a simple instruction like “you must destroy the base located here,” but the game never lets you forget it.

The tutorial’s voice acting is another thing all together. That Sean Connery caricature mentioned in the beginning, he’s real; he’s annoying; and he’s with the player every step of the way. It may have been a well thought out device, the adviser serves dual purposes as tutor and the conveyor of story. However, he delivers the message in such a way that the player may want to load him into one of the catapult towers and launch him into the wind. The other characters’ voices don’t fair any better. While voice audio may not be the biggest thing in a tower defense game, make it bad enough and it leaves one wishing they just stuck with silent text.

Despite the sputtering tutorial, as the player progresses into the later stages it can be hard not to appreciate the learning curve and appreciate the tutorial that DoA does offer. There is just so much a player can do in the game, and the controls that enable it all are spot on. Through the D-pad, players can easily cycle through the bevy of options that allow them to set up multiple tower types with upgrades, cast spells, send out countless combinations of army waves, set rally points and bounties — all while managing resources and buffs. This makes for fast action.

Nine times out of ten, fast action, depth of strategy and crisp graphics are enough to look past all the flaws that crop up throughout DoA. It makes for an ultimately positive experience to war against AI and, when you can, a friend. Sure, there are moments when the game herp derps (the voice acting definitely sounds like they were partaking in major derp), but when all the ugly is held up next to all the beauty, DoA‘s beauty wins out in spades.

This review was based on a digital copy of Defenders of Ardania for the Xbox 360.

The tower defense genre has always been one of my favorite ways to kill time when gaming. There’s something that is just so satisfying about building the perfect line of defense and watching your maze of death take care of everything. While this genre has previously been relegated to modifications and other derivative works (WarCraft III custom maps, etc.), now digital distribution services like Steam allow game developers to create fleshed out, full fledged titles. Orcs Must Die is one of these full fledged tower defense titles.

As the name implies, Orcs Must Die involves building a series of traps so that wave after wave of oncoming Orcs meet a grisly end. This sounds entertaining on paper but, as gamers know better than anyone, the proof is in the play. To see if Orcs Must Die is worth your money, hit the jump.

Long story short, yes. Orcs Must Die is a great little title that effectively combines the joy of building traps and mazes with the non-stop action of a third-person shooter.

The story of Orcs Must Die is pretty basic. There is a world full of Orcs and other beasts that is sealed off from the Human realm. There are portals that allow passage from one world to another, and it is up to an elite group of “War Mages” to keep the Orcs out. Unfortunately, these War Mages have been falling left and right to Orc hordes leaving only your character, the prototypical douchy bro who, despite his immaturity and ignorance, is the one person standing between the Orcs and the Human Realm.

In order to defend the Human Realm you need to set up a series of traps between the Orcs and the portals. Lucky for you there’s a wide variety of killing machines at your disposal. Spiked floors and Arrow Walls are just the basics. As you complete each level you’ll unlock a new tool of destruction. Expect to see some wacky devices like spring-board floors that send Orcs into pits of lava or a wall of blades that dice up any poor monster that steps too close to it. Unfortunately, these traps aren’t cheap.

The way the game works is that after each kill you get a small amount of money. In addition to these bounties, every time you clear a wave of monsters you get more money. Additional funds can also be found on the bodies of larger monsters like Ogres.

Speaking of larger monsters, there are a whole slew of beasts that want in on the Human Realm. On top of the basic Orc, which is relatively slow and pretty easy to put down, there are armored Orcs, fast but fragile Gnolls, Orcs with cross bows, giant Ogers that can stun your character with a bash from his club, and a whole host of other standard fantasy monsters.

One thing I really liked about Orcs Must Die is the third-person shooter aspect. I always get stressed out playing standard tower defense games because if there’s one hiccup in your tower line you lose the game. Orcs Must Die gives you a sense of urgency. If a few Orcs slip through you can put them down yourself thanks to a pretty hefty arsenal. You start the game with a crossbow (which can insta-kill most monsters with a head shot) and a sword. As you get further in the game you’ll unlock new weapons like the Wind Belt, which allows you to summon a gust of wind sending the Orcs into a pit of lava, or the Fire Bracers, which lets you cast a devastating fireball. Each weapon also has a secondary fire option allowing you more ways to stop the horde. For example the crossbow’s alternate fire stuns a small area of Orcs.

In addition to traps and weapons, you can also hire mercenaries to help the cause. Elven Archers and Paladin Guardians will eventually be unlocked when you hit a certain level. These mercenaries deal a decent bit of damage to the Orcs, but be careful. If you put them in a dangerous spot the Orcs won’t hesitate to bum rush them and take them down.

To add more depth to the gameplay, Robot Entertainment has included two systems for upgrading. First, at the end of each level you will be given a rating of one to five skulls based on your performance. If you don’t let a single Orc though the portal you’ll be taking home five skulls. These skulls can be used to upgrade your traps, mercenaries and weapons. For example, I upgraded my Elven Archers for fourteen skulls and in turn they now cost less money to deploy on the battlefield.

The other upgrade system is not persistent like spending skulls. Basically you can hire Weavers, magical sorceresses that will upgrade specific stats for your character and traps, once per level. There are two Weavers to choose from; Elemental and Steel. The Elemental Weaver will allow you to pay a certain amount of gold to have specific elemental damage upgraded. The Steel Weaver upgrades physical things like how much damage arrows do or how much money you get if an Orc dies in a trap. While these two upgrade systems are nothing new to gamers, they do add an additional level of strategy to the game.

My one complaint about Orcs Must Die is that there’s no multiplayer. I understand that the game is suppose to be an arcadey title with a heavy focus on leaderboards, but I can’t help but imagine how much fun this game would be with other players. It could be something as simple as co-op or a last-man-standing type of game mode, just something so that I can play with my friends. To be fair, Orcs Must Die is a $15 title, so the exclusion of multiplayer is totally justifiable. I just hope that Orcs Must Die sells well so that Robot Entertainment makes a more in depth sequel with multiplayer.

All in all, Orcs Must Die is a fantastic budget title with more than $15 worth of entertainment. Available on both Steam and Xbox Live Arcade, you should do yourself a favor and check it out. It’s a great way to kill time while killing Orcs.

This review of Dungeon Defenders must begin with a short study of M. Night Shyamalan’s film, Lady In The Water. It’s a worthy comparison in its own way. Both game and film feature casts of characters who must defend their precious jewels from evil (in the film it’s a lady and in the game it’s an actual jewel).

One character in Shyamalan’s film also serves as a metaphor for the game as a whole. It’s Reggie the Guardian, that guy with one super buff arm and one regular arm. Translate that into Dungeon Defenders; from one side it seems to have true strength as a co-op RPG. Take a look from another angle, and it’s a rather bland tower defense title.

By looks alone Dungeon Defenders is bound to catch people’s interests and hold them for a good time. Graphically, the game delivers sharp, 3D cell shaded characters with smooth animation, who can be customized leveraging a wide color palate. The environments are also highly detailed — one can really get a sense of the grittiness of each stone on the castle wall, the inherent magic of glowing crystals, etc. It is apparent that Trendy Entertainment makes good use of the Unreal Engine in this regard.

If the game were to fall short presentation wise, it would be for the simple fact that it is full of completely worn fantasy tropes. The Squire (knight), Huntress (elf), Apprentice (wizard) and Monk (okay, wizard again) are not breaking away from convention. No matter how much one customizes their outward appearance or how wacky their names (and no matter that Trendy chose to render them as cute yet vicious children) they are just the same old characters with predictable abilities.

The environments fair no better. Triteness can be found in the snowy castle, the fiery forge, the cellar, etc. for a total of 13 levels. Then again, what is there to expect from a game with “dungeon” in its title? Dungeons are dungeons. At least, in this game, they are well designed and make for compelling strategy from a tower defense perspective.

A big part of what makes Dungeon Defenders fun is that, unlike other tower defense games, it challenges the player to strategize on multiple levels. Traditionally, the map is the player’s best friend. It is critical to have that bird’s eye view to determine the various choke points where you can catch baddies in crossfire, the places where you want to divert the flood of enemies. That’s only the beginning with this game.

Each round in Dungeon Defenders is broken up into a Build phase and Battle phase. This introduces the next level of strategy. During Build, the action is essentially paused, giving the player unlimited time to determine whether defense or offense is the best approach. The choices are really diverse since the game also allows you to cycle between characters and take advantage of their respective arsenals, accommodating any play style.

Examples — for those who like to hang back, it may be best to set up the Squire’s spiked barricades, with the Apprentice’s magic fireballs and the Monk’s lighting aura traps. Then, in Battle you can use the Huntress and her crossbow, dispatching enemies from afar while they spend their time trying to break down defenses. For the more adventurous, it may be fun to set up the Apprentice’s towers, Huntress’s mines and gas bombs and the Monk’s slow aura trap. Then, go gung ho with the Squire swinging his two sided broadsword in the midst of explosions and debris.

Dungeon Defenders offers a robust RPG experience on top of this all, making for the last level of strategy — character progression. Whereas Build phase allows switching between characters, only one can be used in Battle. Essentially, the game forces the player to think about which character she wants to level up since XP is rewarded only to the one used for finishing off the stage. The more a character is leveled up, the stronger her towers, traps and walls are. So, depending on play style once again, it will behoove you to favor certain characters, leveling up certain abilities at the expense of others.

There is also plenty of loot to be had. From more jewel resources to weapon upgrades to pets that augment the character’s stats and/or attack enemies, vanquishing the evil horde offers more reward than just satisfaction. Albeit, sometimes navigating the RPG portion of Dungeon Defenders screws with pacing.

Having a Build phase for the player to architect the perfect playhouse of death already brings the game to a halt. Having to cycle through menus, sort through items, sell items, lock certain ones, bank jewels, upgrade stats and so on, one can run out of breath. It doesn’t help that in the beginning characters are relatively slow as well. Sometimes it can feel like an eternity to travel from point A to point B just to set up a single tower or to repair a wall. Even when speed stats are accounted for, it is just hard not to yawn when traversing the map.

Another frustration comes from the fact that Dungeon Defenders favors co-op to the point that it marginalizes those who like to play solo. The game doesn’t scale, so the same amount of enemies that four players would experience is the same amount single players experience. In other words, if you play by yourself, you die. There may be a chance to survive solo on easy difficulty, but, who wants to be stuck playing on easy?

The game has a penchant for randomizing bosses, hammering this frustration deeper. The scenario happens something like this: you’ve managed to get to level X on your own (quite a feat!). You’ve gotten to the last stage of the level, and it seems like you’ll pwn this thing. Then the words pop on screen “an ogre has appeared”; that’s enough for a rage quit because that green behemoth has thousands and thousands in health points and the rest of the horde has broken through. Expect this to happen a lot; and if you’re not playing with three others, it’s a hopeless enterprise.

Pulling from the Reggie the Guardian metaphor from the beginning of this review, the game is strangely imbalanced, because the co-op side of things is great. Strategy takes on a whole new dimension when others are involved, and you feel the camaraderie in teamwork when taking down hordes of foes, including the seemingly juggernaut ogre. It has to be said that Trendy Entertainment had sought to build a co-op focused game early on, and they achieved their goal, even though the final product has one super buff arm and one mediocre arm.

This is the second week of my personal, three week journey through blood and horror. Beginning with a review of the highly anticipated Dead Island, this month started off rather well. If you liken it to a plot in a good B-movie horror flick, this would be around the time we get a twist. Whether it’s a good one will surely depend on your point of view.

While horror films are lauded for their incongruous material, that’s not something you really want to see in a video game. Not when incongruity means poor design, lack of depth and self mutilation. On that note, I have to say I feel my review of BloodRayne: Betrayal is going to hurt me more than it hurts you.

The concept is rather inspiring. Take the unlikely, bloodlusting heroine, Rayne, from the recognizable BloodRayne franchise. Insert her into an old school  hack and slash platformer. Then dress it all in bright 2D visuals with generous amounts of gore. Who doesn’t love old school platformers, vampires and furious deluges of blood? You can’t miss. Yet, somehow WayForward did miss. Not only did they miss, they turned the proverbial gun around in an act of self defying trickery and shot themselves in the foot. Never you mind the charming, vapid plot.

The biggest pain point is in the controls. Take the unusual but strangely appropriate metaphor of Swiss cheese that has been left out for a few days; the controls are full of holes and have taken on superfluous, toxic elements. There is no crouch. There is no block. There is only a questionable mechanic that forces you to run forward and quickly change directions to skid, then jump for a high backwards flip.

Let’s save the holes for a second and focus on the skid mechanic. While this skid jump has potential, (showing off some visual flair in character animation) combining it with the way levels are designed only causes the game to work against itself.

Prime example, around the eighth level, Rayne is forced to jump across a series of narrow moving platforms lest she falls and instantly dies in green acid. To up the challenge, WayForward placed acid geysers in between the jumps. It begins to feel like the awesome platformers of old; and it would be enjoyable except for that pesky, mandatory skid. This guarantees that forward momentum will cause Rayne to skid off the platform, fall and die.

It’s not just this skidding that will have the player getting used to her death scream. Raise the marker on this next scene. BloodRayne: Betrayal‘s horrible controls, take two.

The lack of a crouch/block/walk option is sorely missed. WayForward tries to balance this out by giving players the ability to suck an enemy’s blood for health in case Rayne takes damage (given that the particular enemy bleeds). Granted, this could have delivered challenging, strategic gameplay in theory. However, in application it’s ugly and frustrating. Throughout the entire game, enemies and projectiles will come at Rayne from all angles resulting in overcrowding and range issues thus rendering this ability null and void.

There are many times where Rayne will attempt to steal life from an enemy, only to lunge at an adjacent, non-bleeding enemy. Damage taken. When the player just wants to stand and fight, Rayne will be in the middle of a combo on one side of the screen while a dandy vampire ripped straight from the Castlevania franchise on the other side pulls out a gun (block button, wait, no block button?!?). More damage taken.

Rayne is on a moving platform that has reached the top of the screen, soon to descend. She can’t go anywhere because there’s a temporary acid gyser in the way. An illogical rocket is headed straight for her. Crouch would be useful. Instead, the player gets death. It truly is like the game is trying to offer up great gameplay in terms of control scheme, at the same time ruining it by incompatible level and combat design.

BloodRayne: Betrayal, take three. If anything good can be said about the game, it does have clean animation. After playing through all the mire and muck, it can be a delight to see Rayne chomp down on a bad guy, see him wither in her arms; or, during a combination, see heads pop off with spires of blood.

But the delight only goes so far. This is because once you’ve seen an enemy die in a shower of blood, you’ve seen them all. Also, the environments become recycled quickly. The game takes the player through dark forests, a gothic castle, catacombs, etc. all with repetitive backgrounds. In the end it all makes for a trite experience with less than unique platforming.

To top it all off, the game doesn’t provide much replay value. You can collect gems and kill enemies enough for a high score. Then again, in another act of self deprecation, the faulty combat turns this quest into something nearly impossible — points are liberally deducted for missing a kill streak or taking the slightest damage. You can collect red skulls for health and ammo increases … and that’s about it.

If BloodRayne: Betrayal works at all it’s in starts and stops. Honing in on one thing at a time, like the animation, one can arguably find areas that are enjoyable. A platforming section here or there may be fun to play through once. The part where Rayne runs the gauntlet of enemies just before the castle crumbles under her feet can provide hack and slash relief with excessive (in a good way) blood and dismemberment. Put it all together, however, any fun to be had gets lost in a vortex of suck. Pun totally intended.

With Diablo 3 and Torchlight 2 right around the corner, there is no better time to fill that desire we all have for an enjoyable dungeon crawler than right now. Crimson Alliance sets out to do just that. And in all honesty, it can — if you let it.

This co-op action RPG for the Xbox Live Arcade is a throwback to titles like Gauntlet and  provides the most basic elements of your typical dungeon crawler. This isn’t a bad thing, but it is up to you to decide if that will provide enough content to your liking. For me, it did.

The first thing to mention is its unique pricing structure. You can either purchase Crimson Alliance for 800 Microsoft points and get one character, or purchase for 1200 Microsoft points and get all three characters. Unfortunately, there is no suggestion I can make as to which you might want to purchase. It is completely up to you whether you see yourself sticking to just one character or dabbling in all of them.

Again, sticking to the typical elements of a dungeon crawler, the characters available to you are the ranged, magic casting mage, the elusive assassin, and the heavy melee focused mercenary. Each character allows for a solid single player experience and a fantastic co-op experience. However, there are some that end up falling into specific categories.

The mage, for example, is a very solid support class that works best in the co-op environment while the assassin operates best in the single-player environment. This isn’t to say that these two classes aren’t enjoyable in either environment, it is just that each class ends up having its obvious advantages and disadvantages. But in the end, this is where that sense of strategy can come in.

Once you have your character setup, it is time to dive into the many dungeons laid out in front of you. These pre-made dungeons provide a ton of replayability across many facets. In order to fully understand what I mean by this, let me rundown what a typical dungeon is like in Crimson Alliance.

While the video below will provide the best understanding of the dungeon experience, simply put, you will make your way through very well designed environments full of unique enemies, hidden areas, and puzzles. Using the tools provided to you, you will kill your way through the dungeon, get some loot from chests, and kill a couple waves of enemies to finish out the dungeon.

Describing the game in such a simple manner does it a disservice though. Sure it doesn’t redefine the dungeon crawler experience, but it definitely uses a proven method that results in a very enjoyable experience. Each dungeon provides a number of unique combat situations that allows for the player to approach them in an endless number of ways.

The first set of tools available to you in combat — irregardless of class — are your light and heavy attacks. There are also consumables that can be acquired. At your disposal are deployable turrets, monster bait, healing totems, and throwing axes. As you can imagine, the variety these consumables can provide are where another element of strategy lies. Finally, there is an ultimate power that each class has which is acquired by killing a number of enemies. This is that fail-safe ability you will undoubtedly need in dire situations.

httpvh://youtu.be/wIj4FLe5TSA

Throughout each dungeon you will also have explosive barrels at your disposal to either pick up and toss at your enemies or simply hit the barrel to light it, and let it explode where it stands. While these can be very useful, you will come to find that there are far too many explosive barrels scattered throughout dungeons. This can either make things too easy at times or overly frustrating as you accidentally hit one in a frenzy and allow for you or your friends to take damage.

Taking damage will quickly become the largest element of frustration as each dungeon is ranked in a leaderboard based on your score. This score is largely dependent on the idea of a multiplier. This multiplier increases as you successfully kill enemies without taking damage. Unfortunately, this is where the combat falls apart as you will do whatever it takes — be it cheap or repetitive — in order to maintain that multiplier.

They are called leaderboards for a reason though. And the challenge is certainly there at higher difficulties. Unfortunately, the default difficulty proves to be an extreme pushover. I strongly recommend increasing the difficulty unless you are just looking for some seriously mindless fun.

And if leaderboards are truly your thing, then you will thoroughly enjoy the challenge maps that can be unlocked by finding the hidden map inside of each dungeon. These challenge maps are meant to be played over and over with the idea of just improving your overall score. Each challenge map has the same concept: kill waves of enemies until there are no more waves. Simple yet an absolute blast to kill some time in.

But let’s be honest, dungeon crawlers are only as good as the loot you can get. This is both an area of strength and weakness for Crimson Alliance. Weapons actually have both advantages and disadvantages to their use as they cater to a certain play style. For example, if you are in a combat situation as the mercenary where you find the need to manage a large group of enemies, it might be best to equip the sword and shield which increase shield bash. This made each piece of loot useful and I never really felt like I was completely replacing gear.

Unfortunately, the biggest weakness here is the way in which gear is acquired. You can either purchase the loot with in-game currency from the many mercenaries that become available to you or you can acquire it within the dungeon from chests that can only be looted once. That enjoyment of finding a unique upgrade is completely lost here.

At its surface, Crimson Alliance is a bit shallow. But if you take advantage of the tools provided, tweak the difficulty at times, and play with a group of friends, the depth starts to show. It won’t deliver in areas that other action RPG games do, but there is no denying this title is an absolute blast to play.