Recent reviews by Drixxel

A lovingly crafted monster taming RPG with tons of imagination and a richly realized world to explore. That it compares so favourably to the GBA Pokemon titles is pretty dang impressive considering, well... this isn't the product of a major studio, and certainly not Nintendo. This game generally just gives me the warm 'n fuzzies, definitely recommended.

Having played and loved the Prologue, it's been a pleasure getting into the full SOLAS. This is a thoroughly absorbing puzzle game and one that's highly immersive - the music and rhythmic feel to the whole thing, combined with the eye-catching computer world it all takes place in, make it easy to get stuck. The light manipulating mechanics are clever and puzzles require satisfyingly cunning solutions. Highly recommended puzzle game to chill with.

A thoroughly streamlined 'n' addictive space shooter! Altogether, Switch 'N' Shoot is as easy to play as advertised and quite enjoyable in its creative simplicity.

The colourful 1-bit pixel art is bold and appealing, and a great amount of attention has clearly been paid to making the action satisfying, what with constant particle-filled explosions, screen shake aplenty and pleasing shooty-splodey sound effects. An excellent high-energy chiptune plays during gameplay, too, and the frequent quips from your commander/operator/whatever-that-talking-head-represents add just enough personality and world building to help the whole thing feel like more than just an abstract score attack.

From a UI perspective, the menus are polished and easy to navigate, although I would appreciate having the means to access the main menu during a run (which currently doesn't seem possible, but please correct me if I'm wrong!). There's a pretty good amount of configurability here, although the binary choice between running the game in either fullscreen or windowed modes, without any finer control offered over resolution, is a particular shame. This limitation is seemingly not intended to maintain a perfect integer scale or anything since the fullscreen mode stretches to fill and the visuals feature a mixed pixel scale anyway. The ability to rotate the game window on the fly is awfully cool, though, and playing this on a vertically-oriented monitor would surely be the ideal.

Localization options are impressively wide, although I've encountered a bit of buggy stuff when switching between the available languages where the preceding menu refuses to populate with text. There's one particular quibble I have with the placement of the (frequently appearing) textbox during gameplay, in that I kinda wish it were positioned in the empty space below the ship rather than in the thick of the action in the upper half of the play area. The game relies on the Steam overlay for some of the features accessible from the menu, such as viewing leaderboards in-game - not a big deal, but navigating the overlay feels more than a little clunky when running the game in windowed mode.

Anyhow, Switch 'N' Shoot is a fun, well-made little arcadey shmup easily worth dropping the equivalent of a handful of quarters into! :)

A worthy upgrade for any folks wishing to take game development with CF2.5 in a commercial direction.

Absolutely worth considering this upgrade if you're serious about optimizing your Fusion-developed projects. Child events come pretty close to operating as an equivalent to if/else statements and can do a considerable job of uncluttering & trimming redundancy in event conditions, profiling is pretty amazing for sussing out bottlenecks, support for DirectX 11 is definitely welcome (the DX11 runtime's CPU usage is superior to DX9 at the expense of eating up more memory). One thing to bear in mind is that 2.5+ projects can't be opened by non-2.5+ versions of Fusion, so the 2.5+ Addon breaks compatibility with the Mac editor.

As far as criticism that these features really ought to come standard with the Developer upgrade, well, it's hard to disagree with that. These are critical functionality improvements that bring Fusion a little more up-to-date versus the competition and help the editor to feel like a more professional development environment. All things considered, though, Clickteam is doing good work and worthy of support.

I'm usually turned off when video game music features prominent vocals, but the tongue-in-cheekiness of the lyrics and performance totally works with the game. It's goofy, Primus-flavoured indie rock with the big bass sound and eclectic nature you'd expect. It makes for enjoyable listening outside the game, there are some seriously catchy tunes in here! :D

Highlights: Escape The Bees!, Grind-O-Rama, Milk, Surfin' Cleric, Super Boss!

A super fun, thoroughly charming & bite-sized roguelike! It's quite addictive and feels very complete, there's a surprising amount of depth that's only going to reveal itself through multiple runs. While the viewing area is rather tiny (you only see two tiles ahead in any direction), the game received a most welcome "widescreen" update awhile ago which afforded more space for displaying text.

The dev's attention to detail shows, this game is an obvious labour of love like the rest of the DFX Games catalog. It continues to receive substantial updates, one of the most recent being the addition of calendar-specific special events. Definitely recommended! :)

Merely some initial impressions I've only rescued the first two pets of this draft of the review :)

Anyone familiar with the NES classic Legacy of the Wizard should feel an instant familiarity with the setup here: a family of playable characters (each with unique properties), a master inventory of utility items, a sprawling subterranean dungeon divided into a series of biomes to be explored as the player sees fit, and some very cute sprites. I quite appreciate how non-explicit the game is at explaining itself, Weebish Mines rewards experimentation with regard to learning how things work. This might turn some folks off, but anyone seeking a truly oldschool exploration platformer should dig it. On the retro modernization front, it must be noted that Weebish Mines throws one particular bone that the often cruel LotW never did and that's no poison potion drops from defeated enemies!

While there may be a few rough edges to Weebish Mines (I really do wish there was a more elegant way of quitting the game rather than resorting to ALT+F4 while not at the family's house), I'm having a great time with it. You couldn't ask for a more attentive and dedicated dev, too. For anyone familiar with the DXF Games catalog, Weebish Mines is a complete no-brainer.

Regency Solitaire is a luxurious casual timepass that's startlingly well polished and user friendly. It's a wonderful example of how a game can be thoroughly welcoming for first-timers to jump in and get to know, and the metagame (presented as decorating protagonist Bella's room) keeps the rewards coming. An addictive mix, for sure.

While I would love it if there were additional forms of solitaire available to play, this is, IMO, the best spin on golf solitaire available on Steam. The upcoming Shadowhand looks to mash the finely tuned golf solitaire gameplay of Regency Solitaire with a turn-based battle system and other CCG elements, a combination I'm quite intrigued by.

As a true badge of casual game honour, I introduced my Mom to this game over the Christmas holidays and she was hooked straight away, going so far as to start her own Steam account so she could support Grey Alien Games personally! :)

Just a brief rundown of Just a Cleric as I need to sink more time in. First impressions, though, are good!

The game has a lot of heart and an endearing sense of humour; there's a definite self-awareness to the proceedings and nothing here takes itself too seriously. The pixel art is decidedly a bit crude yet thoroughly charming and consistent. Clearly the work of one artist, which contributes a great deal to Just a Cleric's world feeling cohesive. While the game is built for a diminutive resolution (160x112), it means you won't find any unevenly scaled pixels knocking against each other as tends to happen, for instance, when a game aims to merely approximate a low-res presentation. For me, the only real drawback to the pint-sized resolution is the readability of the game's sprite font in lower case, something I gather to be a common gripe. This is an extra shame as the dialogue and description text is generally pretty hilarious.

Mechanically, Just a Cleric isn't the most polished action platformer on the planet but it plays more than competently enough. The RPG elements are well executed and there's real fun to be had taking on quests one-by-one from the rotating cast of snarky characters populating the pub. These bite-sized missions present a wide variety of locales to blunder through and the soundtrack is equally diverse, offering an eclectic mix of self-produced Primus-flavoured tunes with lyrics that often break the 4th wall.

On the technical side, there are some rough edges to Just a Cleric but nothing I'd call dealbreaking. Controller support is a little iffy (an Xbox 360 gamepad wasn't detected at all on a Windows 7 machine but no issues under XP), the instant drop to desktop upon hitting escape is a touch rude and the complete lack of configurability is certainly not ideal, but the game is good.

For those seeking a lo-fi platformer with RPG accoutrements and a whack of personality, Just a Cleric fits the bill. Based on my experiences thus far, definitely recommended :)