The in-mission map can get a bit cluttered, and lacks a zoom feature, but it's never truly a bother. There are physics-based catastrophes, but it's in service to the cartoon goofiness of it all it never falls into 'hehe wobbly fall down streamer game', as it were. Certainly there's the satisfaction of having your sniper posted just right so you can headshot the tougher/more annoying beasties, making desperate runs to revive teammates and unfuck a situation, and so on, but it's a pretty breezy time, and due to the game's brisk pace and pick up and play nature, failure isn't so bad (you get a Failure Stipend). It's also as it should be that the missions are fairly simple: typically you'll go somewhere, research something (holding A on it will do), bust a lot of ghosts, or rather a Universal Studios worth of b-movie monsters, and then perhaps survive a few rounds until your van comes to pick you up.Īnd so the game is not terribly deep, but I don't think it needs to be. (You can, of course, develop new weaponry and gadgets as well as plant defences on your territories etc, but you're not at all overwhelmed with micromanagement and finnickyness, and that's as it should be.)

Perhaps there's a name for this genre but I remain ignorant.Īnyhow, you've got Gary, a short, rotund spaceman who may be slow, but can pack a punch, as well as eat one, in my case equipped with a short range rocket launcher Marie, a tallish Scooby-Doo looking woman, somewhere in the middle when it comes to movement, mine being a sniper unsurpassed finally, Larry, a lanky mad scientist type who can really cover ground, armed with a honking Boson Gun which can disastrously, hilariously wipe out half your squad and probably yourself. You can move and shoot all you want, until the little clock runs out and you've used your turn time/points/whatever. Once in the action you control your team of three people in real time: select a character and you're playing a third-person shooter, more or less. It's a strategy game wherein you (and, ideally, a pal) glance at a Civ-lite map and dive into conquering various monster-infested territories, occasionally defending your own land along the way. I've never played Valkyrie Chronicles, but from what I gather it may be a bit like that. Developed, apparently, by three UE4 technicians in Tokyo (their only game), published by the deathless Spike Chunsoft, with a mere 14 Steam reviews to its name, the game is fun.Īnd so, my mouth blackened with crow, I shall stopper my pen against this grotesque of Wodehouse I seem to have slipped into and let you know about the game. The vibe check on this game was more of a shoulder-check, or a bounced one, landing my vibes neatly in the red and my interest in the thing squarely in the soup of Complete Lack.Īnd yet, I am here to tell you that this game is Fun.

Had I not played it, I would have declared this the least memorable thing I'd laid eyes on since the last one, which, naturally, I can't remember. I am a firm believer in judging a book by its cover the old idiom is idiocy, there are patterns at work here, and I was enmeshed in the business of Judging. The cover appeared to me as a Bunch of Things and Colours, the majority of which I feel I must have gotten sick of sometime shortly before I was born. The title, for instance, is at least two bad puns contained inside two bad logos. Looking at it, I was reminded perhaps of a sad little 360 disc sitting in a blank case, its contents being Technically a Game.

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