Tuna Unleashed's Angry Cave of Justice

added a few new sprites and drawings

New review of Iji.

Check it out here

Iji

Iji is a pretty well known indie game, not exactly Cave Story inpopularity, but still more popular than most. Is that popularitywarranted? Lets jump in and find out.

Gameplay

The gameplay isn't particularly innovative, but that doesn't mean it'sboring. It's a run n' gun game, like contra, only less action and a fewother differences. One of the first things you'll notice is that youcan only shoot straight and can't shoot in midair, but this isn't a badthing. You will rarely find yourself wishing you could do either and itserves its purpouse of increasing the challenge well. For a run n' gun,it has a surprising amount of depth, theres a fun little crackingsystem which allows you to break into doors and disarm enemies, anin-depth leveling system with hundreds of possible different styles, aweapon combination system which easily doubles your weapon count, andtons of awesome enemies of bosses. It also has tons of exploration,multiple pathways, and a lot of attention to detail. For example,depending on whether you avoid killing or whether you slaughteranything in your way, the storyline changes, even to the point that Ijisays either "sorry..." or "DIE!" when you kill someone. It's quite aneat little inclusion, but if you trained your Iji to whimper everytime she kills someone you really need to grow a pair.

Graphics

The first thing you'll say when you play this game is "these graphicssuck, they're just blobs of colour" but you'll soon realize they arevery attractive and well animated blobs of colour. Although they seemlackluster at first, the stylized and charming graphics will soon growon you. This isn't to say it wouldn't be better with shading and such,but the lack of it isn't as bad a crime as you would think. Theanimations are terrific, every movement is smooth and realistic. Youalmost feel like a real nanomachine altered human in the middle of afight for earth against aliens.

Story

The story starts out with earth being attacked by aliens called theTasens. You awaken years later after learning what happened and thatyour body has been altered by your family using stolen Tasen technologycalled nanomachines. The story unfolds through conversations with yourbrother, one of the only humans in the area alive, and through enemylogs scattered throughout the game. Every character is well fleshed outand you even find yourself sympathizing with your greatest enemies bythe end. The final boss is a doozy by the way.

Flaws

The largest flaws in the game would probably be the graphics, whichwhile not being bad by any standards, aren't exactly spectacular, andone scene where you get to control one of the most powerful enemies inthe game. You may ask what could be wrong with that, what's wrong withit is that it only gives you one of its attacks, an attack you canperform anyway, and lets you tear through all of one short corridorwith some odd ten weak enemies throughout it. This could've been one ofthe coolest and most memorable parts of the game if executed properlybut instead it was just a big Komato robot suit of disappointment.

Overall

I love this game. There are very few flaws, most of them insignificant.The gameplay is simple, yet complex. The story is deep, but easy tofollow. The Velocithor is one of the coolest weapons ever created. Iwould highly reccomend downloading this amazing gem of a game,especially if you like run n' guns and/ or real time rpgs.

By the way, sorry about the spaces getting cut out, it does that when I paste the reviews.

Soon I'll be doing reviews of Indie games for pixelcore (http://www.pixelxcore.net) which will be opening on the tenth. Anyway, I'll be posting them here as well. We'll start with Iwanaga, a fun little shooter.

I'll start off by saying that what really drew me into this game was the graphics. From the screens they looked extremely nice and stylish.The game of course has other merits, but that's what really pulled me in at first.

The gameplay is simple. Press attack to use your sword, hold it to go into shooting mode. There's a couple of control options and two different weapons to choose from. The jumping is nearly useless, only handy for an occasional dodge. The dash is extremely useful if you choose the standing still while shooting control scheme and still pretty handy if you can walk. Occasionally you will get a super that causes you to obliterate your foe when you double jump or dash. This game would have been better with some platforming, more uses for the sword and possibly some more collectible weapons but its an excellent and intuitive jumble all the same.

As I said prior the graphics are what really drew me in from thescreenshots and let me tell you, they didn't disappoint. The charactersare well designed and stylish, the bosses are cool and creepy, the animations are smooth and the whole game has a nice dark atmosphere.

The controls are alright but the attack button would have been much better suited to the mouse. The aiming feels sluggish with the keyboard and the lack of the option to use the mouse would have been the finishing touch to a great game.

Overall, this was an enjoyable, intuitive, though somewhat repetitive game. I would highly recommend it to fans of run n' guns and shmups.

Redid the main page as a blog for updating ease.