Syndrome is a survival horror game set in the future, where the player controls a character who wakes up in a spaceship, with no memory of what happened. The spaceship is adrift in space, and most of the crew is dead or insane. The rest is changed…
With the emphasis on strategy, coordination, and reflexes, your ability to master the skills of controlling moBOTs will be put to the test through varying missions scattered throughout the cosmos. As you continue playing, an underlying mystery adventure awaits…
Action Legion is a mouse-controlled, single-player war game with comparable similarities to classics such as Cannon Fodder. Fight your way through waves of enemies using an array of weapons, destroy enemy structures and bases, and defeat tough boss fights in this classical single-player epic!
Title: Swapperoo Developer: Fallen Tree Games Platforms: PC, IOS Universal Price: $9.99 (PC), $2.99 (IOS) --- I'm not the biggest fan of match-3 puzzlers outside of the genre hybrids like Hero Emblems and Puzzle Quest. So it was a nice surprise that I enjoyed Swapperoo as much as I did. Although, perhaps I should have expected it; Fallen Tree Games had proven themselves with the excellent series of Quell games and Swapperoo evolves the traditional match-3 formula in interesting ways to deliver a surprisingly strategic puzzler. At its core, Swapperoo follows the same principals as any other match-3 game - connect three or more like items on a grid, removing those matched items from the grid, and so on - but that's where the similarities end. The first and most crucial change is that you only move certain tiles on the grid, and furthermore, only move these triangular tiles in the direction they're pointing. This change alone makes matching a strategic affair, requiring planning moves ahead and thinking if or how to move tiles around the grid,
But soon Swapperoo adds more elements into the mix. Each new addition introduces a new hazard or new caveat to the basic match-3 formula. Suddenly you have tiles that explode after a certain amount of turn, ending your game; now every move you make matters. Then you have sawblade tiles that destroy any tile they collide with; careless moves will throw your grid into chaos, but with planning and careful maneuvering, you can use the sawblade to clear the path for other tiles and set up some high-scoring matches.
And those two are only the start. Tiles that needed to be protected, tiles locked in place, and more continue to add new wrinkles and challenges to the puzzles. On top of those unique tiles, Swapperoo also gives you access to three special abilities, to be used at the most opportune moments: moving a specific tile in any direction, increasing the time on the bomb tiles, and completely detonating the grid. Powering-up these abilities require calculated matches, so each use shouldn't be wasted.
The game features both a hefty selection of handcrafted levels, with unique objectives ranging from simply making a certain number of matches to only making matches with specific tiles, and 38 randomized challenges to truly test your skills and offer long-term replay value.
Swapper is available on Steam, as well as IOS; an Android version is expected soon.
Become a powerful mage in a world shattered by magic
In RPGs and other fantasy games, there's perhaps nothing more satisfying than unleashing mystical chaos on your enemies as a mage. In Dragon's Dogma, you can conjure tornadoes and call down meteors. In Magicka, you bend the elements to your whim. And Fictorum enhances that mage power fantasy by letting you adjust your spells on the fly and literally raze the environments to the ground with your magic.
Fictorum takes place in a world ravaged by a magical apocalypse that left millions dead and the land shrouded in a killing mist. The remnants of society have retreated to the highest peaks and travel by portals and ley lines to avoid the mist-choked lands. It's in this ruined civilization that you enter, the descendant of the infamous Fictorum, the order that destroyed the world. Hunted by the Inquisition, you travel from city to city, increasing your strength and embarking on a quest for vengeance.
While other games like Lichdom and Skyrim have featured flashy first-person magic, Fictorum turns each spells a spectacle of destruction. Ice spikes shear buildings in half. Lighting storms leave gaping holes in structures or reduce them to rubble. Houses are set aflame by streams of fire unleashed from your hands. Entire squads of enemy soldiers can be destroyed with a gesture, frozen solid or slaughtered by destructive explosives.
Fictorum lets you adapt and alter your spells in real-time through a unique spell-shaping mechanic. With a button press, time slows and you can select the attributes of each spell based on three pre-selected runes. A simple fireball can be changed to an explosive multi-shot blast or a focused attack to unleash increased damage on a single foe. Randomly-generated runes, artifacts, and equipment can further enhance the effects and potency of your magic.
Fictorum is currently in development; a Kickstarter is slated for May. You can learn more about the game and follows its progress on the main site and Twitter page.
Title: Auto Age: Standoff Developer: Phantom Compass Auto Age: Standoff is a colorful car combat game with the style of 1980s action cartoons. Featuring single-player, multi-player (co-op and PvP) and VR game play, Auto Age: Standoff is fuelled by real-time driving and shooting action.
Title: Tricky Towers Developer: Weird Beard Tricky Towers is a frantic physics action puzzler. You have to build a tower with tetromino bricks and make sure it doesn’t topple. To spice things up, use magic spells to either support your structure or mess up the towers of your opponents. With spells flying everywhere and bricks dropping like flies – Tricky Towers gives a chaotically good time.
Title: The Thin Silence Developer: Voltic Games A narrative-driven atmospheric, puzzle-platformer based on a mechanic of collecting and combining items to create tools you use to manipulate your surroundings. You begin deep underground and must work your way back to the surface and the past you left behind.
Title: Dropcore Developer: YC960 Studio A unique hybrid of tactics focused RTS/RPG/Topdown Shooter
Title: Blown Away: Secret of the Wind Developer: Black Pants Studio Platforms: IOS Universal Price: $2.99 --- Besides being quirky and/or having a unique art style, the only definite thing you can say about the games from Black Pants Studio is that they're diverse. From the hand-drawn mirrored landscapes of Symmetrain to the 3D platforming and environmental dicing of Tiny & Bing, each of their games seems to try something different. Blown Away: Secret of the Wind is their newest iOS game and it combines auto-running and fast-pacing puzzling in a charming and colorful package. Hendrik is unfortunately having a bad day. Through a gust of wind, Mother Nature took away not just his home, but his hair too. Now he travels a weird and dangerous world, collecting the pieces of his house along the way. For the unprepared, this land would prove to be an insurmountable challenge, between deadly gaps, roaming monsters, and raging flames, among other hazards. But Hendrik has a unique tool in his arsenal: a pair of teleporting boots, that Blown Away's puzzles and platforming revolve around.
In each of the game's 120 levels, you walk to the right automatically, recharging your boots with each step. Tapping the screen teleports you to that location, even as you're falling to certain doom. The charging element is what turns a relatively simple mechanic into a puzzler. Your boots only charge when you're moving, and you only have a limited amount of teleports, so reaching the end of a level means assessing the level and figuring out where to teleport so you have enough distance to recharge. But distance isn't the only thing to consider; timing is important as well if you want to evade patrolling monsters and crushing sawblades.
The auto-running and boot recharge complement each other nicely, forcing you to always pay attention to the path ahead, thinking of how many teleports you'll need to cross a gap, where you should teleport to and when. Through that simple single-tap mechanic, Blown Away delivers both puzzles on the go and the arcade-y thrill of dodging traps, and it's all presented in a vibrant hand-drawn art style that brings to mind old-style cartoons.
Title: Broken Puppet Developer: iDec/UPF student team Platforms: PC --- I've played a lot of freeware games. Long before I started writing about games or checking out the more known, mainstream indies, it was freeware games from Digipen and various sites that introduced me into indies, from ASCII roguelikes to the neon futuristic cityscapes of Nitronic Rush, Broken Puppet has some of the most impressive visuals I've seen in a freeware game and, while featuring some janky controls and physics, offers a fun and atmospheric physics-based puzzle-action game. Broken Pupper puts in the worn faded shoes of puppet Katherine, replaced by a new pupper performer and left in the forgotten shadows of the basement. But she is determined to return to the stage and must ascend through the dreary dilapidated levels to destroy her replacement.
The game centers its puzzles and action around using threads; threads act as both a grappling hook to pull objects or a tether that can connect two points. This allows you to knock down heavy cabinets to activate pressure plates, support broken bridges, and even fight the weird puppet enemies that roam the basements. Soldiers charge you with swords, spinsters collect the needles you fling, and other threat lurk.
But Broken Puppet's most impressive element is its atmospheric aesthetic, build with a custom engine rather than Unreal or Unity. The ruined halls, the dim industrial rooms, the eerie arrangements of discarded toys and parts make for an engrossing world to traverse through the game's six levels.
Title: Failure Developer: Dream Harvest Games Failure is a rule-bending RTS that redefines the foundations of the genre. Combining elements of RTS, Card Battle Games and God games all set within a neon filled digital cyberspace world called the NeuroNet.
Title: Run Far Developer: Team Porpoise Run Far is a first person parkour game with an emphasis on movement and a laid back atmosphere
Title: Wizard's College Developer: Matt Wizard’s College is a simulation game where you build a school for Wizards! Design your campus, hire professors, and develop your students, as you create a legendary academy for spellcasters. Send your students on quests to gain experience and, if they survive, bring back gold and artifacts to grow your school.
Title: Judgement Developer: Suncrash Studio Judgment is a real-time colony simulation taking place during the apocalypse, with emphasis on tactical combat.
Title: Dag's Adventure Developer: Dag's Adventure team Long time ago in a small and remote village, people were living in peace and prosperity, old men and women told stories about how they were legendary warriors. All lies? Who knows... In the meantime, evil forces lead by the Black King are preparing their strike to the earth. Soon our heroes will have to prove their valor. Will you be able to save their world?
