Levelhunter #4!

Hey guys, and welcome to Levelhunter #4!
The game we'll be reviewing today is...

"The Everloom" by Lucas Paakh is a chilling, retro style RPG with graphics similar to games like Final Fantasy 6, Chrono Trigger, and Secret of Mana 3. (Phew, thinking about how emotionally powerful this game was makes me shiver!) In this short adventure role-playing game, you assume the role of a man up in his bed at night, troubled by his dreams. You play the role of the man as you walk through his dream, a pristine island high in the sky, unsure whether or not this is reality or a dream world. As you progress through the game you encounter more NPCs, more who have landed upon this hidden dream in the sky, stranded.

As you run into an ice cream vendor, a girl with a monstrous frog, and a man and wife who own a blimp, you go through many mini quests to help the NPCs escape this dream world. Although some argue that the addition of ice cream vendors and blimps, along with mini-quests that chop up the storyline, destroy the genuine "fantasy" feel, I present my counterargument that Paakh, by adding these little blips of quests and NPCs, did a wonderful job of recreating both the familiar sensation of a dream while capturing the hazy, otherworldly, imaginative explosion that a dream gives to humankind.

And that's not it. We haven't talked about the whole entire AESTHETIC sense of it.

Just a mere, quick glance at the images of the game and its art wells up a funny nostalgic, powerful emotion inside me. This game is a stunning work of art, and none of the tiles in the game have seams. The clouds in the background are outstanding, complementing every little nook and cranny of the game's concept of a "dream world". Some puzzle-like gameplay also enhances the experience, although the difficult puzzle seemed to have been forced into the easy, movie-like style of the game a little bit.

Although only a short exhibition, this game is undoubtedly the beginnings of a masterpiece. As I expect a massive project greater than this one, I wait with high hopes that one day, his name gets recognized through all pixel art and retro RPG enthusiasts. :) A must play.

Final Rating: 9.5/10

Levelhunter #3!

Hey guys! Today were going to be doing our first UNITY GAME. :)

Featured on the front page of Kongregate, I saw that this new hot game was attracting a lot of attention, so I decided to check it out.

The game is...

Crash Drive

Big Idea: This game is a semi-sandbox type game where you are able to explore giant, biome-based worlds (snow, desert, tropical, forest) and earn money, points and cash by carrying out tricks and flips on your vehicle.

A rally car game with a twist, Crash Drive offers a huge, vibrant, and colorful world for your car or truck to explore, with plenty of ramps, twists, hills and ledges for you to maneuver and carry out your tricks like your flips, drifts, and jumps. The game comes with a multiplayer function as well, but it's not very effective as the only "interaction" it provides is speeding way past and losing sight or crashing into/flying over each other. However the random competitive events give a more PvP sort of environment for a while. 

Now let's get a little bit into the details.

My first impression of the game was this vague nostalgic feeling. Remember those 3-D games that used to come with the old iMacs? It's like those, except a lot more tested, tried and true. Practically no glitches physically were found, as well as any graphical glitches like seams in the texture, dirty shades, etc...

The shaders and graphics were mellow and colorful, with the subtle cartoonish hues coming from houses, trees, tepees, roads, etc. There were no harsh, jutting edges to the 3-D model and was not a GPU-murderer, running cleanly and without any problems on my MacBook Air (Intel HD 5000 graphics).

Although backing the car up twists the camera in a funny way, the controls are all extremely responsive in midair, allowing for precise movements and landings to chain together tricks to reach a score multiplier of up to 5. 

This game stays surprisingly fresh and entertaining for a godly time. The map environment is vibrant and colorful with sharp looking colors, but with none of the sharp, extruded edges that we see so often on uninspiring 3-D games with bad modeling and world design. Collision detection is amazing and the integrity of the game is kept through a consistent mood, color, and tone choice. 

This is one game you should always play at least once on the Internet. And you always know - with these type of semi-sandbox, achievement based games, there's a 100% chance that the devs will push greater updates. ;)

Final Rating: 9.2/10

Levelhunter #2!

Hey guys! Welcome back to Levelhunter #2!

Quick news: I might be adding a new admin/poster soon so keep your eyes peeled for that ;)

If you guys think I have a thing for zombie games, you're wrong; it was just by pure coincidence that my next game decided to become another zombie game!

Give it up for,

Earn To Die 2

Seems like this game is a sequel to an Earn to Die 1 and is ALSO a game for the Android - sucks I don't have an Android phone.

In this game, you are a middle-aged, hard-faced man in a post-apocalyptic setting in the United States. Attempting to find a mystery in the vicinity of Seattle you set off on your trucks to ram all the zombies on the way there.

A side-scrolling, hilly truck game like Hill Climb Racing, the objective of the game is to reach the end of the map with your truck while ramming as many zombies and going as fast as you can. Between each levels are upgrade screens where you can upgrade the gearbox, engine, gun, boost, fuel, etc. of your vehicle to inflict maximum carnage. 

The very first thing that struck me when I played this game were the great physics - of all the code in the game, I can most likely accurately guess that the physics took the most tweaking, fixing, improving and adjusting. Every zombie has multiple armatures for all its body parts, allowing you to see in grotesque slow-motion, the groaning zombie lose its head and flail around its arms as you pluck it off with the truck tires of your speeding car. As well as the added accurate armatures, there seemed to be no flaws in the physics, crates are crushed according to your speed and momentum, and there even seems to be weight variables across all objects as heavy trucks break thin wooden planks. The background, though mundane, had no seams or glitches and was smooth and tasteful.

Although full of perfect physics and awesome crate-breaking, this game lacks in added features. True, the Android version has many, many more trucks, upgrades, and maps, but all together, they're actually all the same. To me it seems like the same gun, same truck, and the same map. There are too little variables in the map. You might have two guns, for example a plasma gun and a machine gun on a different truck, but in the tiny art in-game it doesn't make a difference. In the same way you might have a dirt map and then a desert map that look exactly the same with different colors. In the end the game turns out to become a "hold-up, tap left" game where the main objective is to see how well you can keep pressing the up button. There's really no way to lose. The helpless zombies get crushed under your truck as you press the up button and drive up the hill. The slow-motion that happens when you destroy a lot of crates and zombies at the same time is kind of nifty but gets a little annoying when you're feeling the speed, then all of a sudden, the slow-motion comes and stops your drive.

The technical part of the game is already done. The physics are set in place. The armatures, the bulky, computational part of the game is done. What this game lacks is creativity. The creator could go wild with anything. He could make different types of zombies, add new materials, new buildings, foregrounds, and weapons in a way that would keep the integrity of the game.

All in all though, I would have to say it's pretty satisfying to see yourself revving across a desert, boosting your truck hundreds of feet into the air and crushing whatever is beneath you, whether it be a zombie or a brick. :)

Final Rating: 7.1/10

Levelhunter #1!

Hey guys! Welcome to the first ever post in Levelhunter's Flash Game Reviews:

Quick overview: In this blog, we'll be playing, thinking and writing reviews on browser-based games across the internet - you'll never get bored!

Note: every in-browser game review I post may not be only Flash games but may include other platforms such as Unity, WebGL, etc. - please be prepared to download them if you wish to play those games when they come up!

First in our lineup... clap it up for...

Infectonator: World Edition

This game always will be a classic; for those who don't know - it's INTENSELY fun.

The objective of the game, or course, it to dominate the world. You, a mad lab scientist, develops a zombie virus in the lab.

In the game screen shows up a town ranging anywhere from a dozen people to over a hundred people depending on what level you are. Your goal is to deploy the zombie virus anywhere in the crowd and help start the zombie virus spread as quickly as possible through the town to help reach your population death goal, which, upon reaching, will unlock new towns for you to infect.

Also, added bonuses for completely wiping out a town's population!

This game combines repetitive and identical sound effects, nostalgic pixel art and beeping retro music to create an old-school, pixellated SNES-style game. All aspects of the game come together and create one seamless and entertaining 2D top-down game.

The visual effect of the pixel art, however, was a tad uninspiring - more effort should have been used to convey unique landmarks worldwide during your zombie conquest; such a feature, I believe, would have boosted the effect of the game even further!

One reason this game makes you so addicted is the sheer satisfaction from zombie-fying a town with a hundred people; similar to the effect of rolling a snowball down a giant hill and watching it grow to a humongous size by the time it gets to the bottom.

Combined with little in-game features such as being able to watch a zombie Michael Jackson "Thriller" his way to zombie domination, or being able to watch zombie Colonel Sanders infect populations with his deadly rotting chickens, this beeping little retro game on the internet will be sure to attract some big attention from you!

Final Rating: 9.0/10 

P.S: Be careful when attacking Russia; every single person there has a gun!