As mentioned before, Lugaru is a fighting-focused action game starring a human-shaped, bunny-textured…thing…named Jack as he seeks revenge for the slaughter of his peaceful village. It seems amazingly contrived, but some scenes, particularly when Jack returns to the destroyed village, are oddly poignant. Perhaps we’ve grown weary of feeling bad for humans, but when that village was covered in bunny blood I was sad. Lugaru squanders this opportunity though, and the rest of the game proceeds as a run-of-the-mill revenge story and takes little advantage of the uniqueness of its characters. The promise shown in the first act is gone minutes later.

Story is not the reason you’re going to be playing this game, though. The piece de resistance of Lugaru is the unique and free-flowing combat system. Combat is simple in that there are only a few different moves to master, but also infinitely deep as the true depth comes from timing and skillful execution. There are standard punches and kicks, but the real innovation is in the great counters which easily allow the player to grab an enemies limb during an attack for a quick riposte.

In one-on-one situations, the combat works great. It’s a fast-paced game of timing and prediction as you try to figure out when your opponent is going to strike next. When things get more intense, though, the combat doesn’t hold up as well. With two enemies at once, it’s quite difficult to survive, and with three enemies it’s borderline impossible. Maybe that’s the way it should be, realistic, but in a game it’s extremely obnoxious to get 75 percent of the way through a level, picking off enemies one-by-one only to get ransacked by the last three remaining. Because when it happens, it’s all over.

Thus players have to make very sure to be discreet and careful when choosing their battles. Lugaru becomes something of a stealth game when more difficult levels come up (it reminded me a bit of Tenchu) with players quietly circling the level looking for some lone prey to pick off quietly.

To help you stay quiet and take enemies out quickly, Lugaru has a few different weapons which can aid you. The most useful is the knife, which can be used as a slashing weapon, and also as a thrown weapon that can often kill an enemy instantly. Leading to a morosely satisfying conclusion as you walk up to your fallen enemy and pull the knife out of their chest.

When played casually, Lugaru’s faults are easy to overlook, and it’s hard not to enjoy this unique actioner. Any play session that lasts longer than twenty minutes though is likely to end in keyboard smashing frustration as you get slowly pounded to death by multiple enemies.

Lugaru has a solid premise going, but ultimately doesn’t live up to its potential. The combat lacks fine-tuning, and the story is a limp excuse for gameplay, but the framework of a great game is here. Lugaru: The Rabbit’s Foot isn’t quite there, but I will say that I hope we see a Lugaru 2, because I’m eager to see what a few refinements to the system could add.

Andrew: 10
Windowsill is a puzzle game of the most abstract variety. You have to get the square peg through the hole above the door. That’s all you need to know. The rest is derived from contextual clues, and organic puzzle solving of the highest quality. It’s got a visual style that would make an abstract painter proud. And the game plays like a really neat toy. You keep pressing all the buttons because you want to see what it’ll do next without ever giving a second thought to wondering why it’s there or what it’s for.

Zak: 9
Vector Park’s Windowsill is a wonderfully put together game. The graphics are clean and simple; yet convey a superior quality of artistry. I absolutely loved the style of this game, great job Vector Park! Gameplay was simply point and click with the player interacting with the environment to achieve the level’s goal, that is: finding the little box that opens the next door. Some puzzles can be pretty complex, requiring multiple steps. The sound effects and music were great. The game sported some pretty original puzzles. I just really wished the demo lasted longer than it did. If you like point and click puzzle games, pick this one up!

Ben: 8
It’s rare to see something as wonderfully creative and fun as Windowsill made in Flash. It’s almost a shame to review it; Windowsill feels like something that should be stumbled upon on the internet. It’s not even obvious it’s a game at first, until you discover it’s first “room” isn’t merely a collection of Flash toys, but a cleverly disguised puzzle. Each of the subsequent rooms house equally clever challenges. It’s a generous demo, too, offering up half of the game, then asking three dollars for the rest. It could be very well worth the money to find out where Windowsill takes you.

Peter: 7
It’s a pretty confident developer that gives away half its game in the demo. The first five rooms of Windowsill are free, and they’re a little weird. You have to find the cube in each room and use it like a key to open a door. Some rooms require a lot of experimentation, but others just throw a lot objects at you that do something, but nothing useful, and you have to sort through them to find the cube. If you can, download Windowsill. It runs pretty slow in the browser, and the art only comes alive when the game runs at a proper speed.

Ben: 5
Although the Bejeweled-inspired sub genre can get tired, Balloon Bros. has enough of a hook to justify its creation. Popping balloons (complete with a morbidly comical pre-demise expression of horror on their inflated faces) causes the balloons below them to rise up, hopefully creating chains and combos. The gameplay does get a little tedious after a while, even with consistently new game mechanics being added throughout the game’s progression. The graphics are pretty under whelming, but the simplicity is also probably good for this kind of gameplay. Unfortunately, a lot of the challenge boils down to staring at the game field, trying to find a cluster of three balloons to pop.

Andrew: 7
I can scarcely believe there are still people out there making match-three puzzle games. However, as snooze inducing as the genre itself can be, if you’re into that sort of thing, Balloon Brothers is a pretty decent one. The circus themed soundtrack is highly entertaining, and most importantly, the feedback for matching balloons is quite well implemented. It also packs a surprising amount of personality, and seeing the little faces on the balloons turn to horror just as you’re about to pop them never really gets less funny.

Peter: 6
You’ve probably played a game where you line up three or more blocks of a similar color before. If you want to do it some more, go ahead and try Balloon Brothers. Balloon Brothers introduces a rotating board and puzzle pieces that rise instead of fall. If you pop a balloon, and the one below it doesn’t resolve a line when it rises, one of the other balloons turns into a skull. Skull balloons can only be popped by bomb balloons, which are rewards for lining up four balloons. If you accidentally put three skulls in a line, you lose. The gameplay is solid and the art design is competent, but neither is anything new.

Colt: 2
Bookworm adventures without the aptitude, Bubble Bobble without the kitsch.

Zak: 6
Mousechief’s Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble isn’t the typical puzzle game; actually it has elements of various genres. In the game the player builds a team of 1920’s era girls with different abilities, like an RPG, to interact with various characters in the pursuit of solving a mystery. The style of the game was unique, combining various elements with some interesting hand drawn graphics. I think the gem of the game lies with the originality and script writing, which was humorous at times. However, something kept me from loving this game. It was almost like the game tried too hard to integrate the various genres.

Peter: 7
The high school girls at the center of Dangerous High School Girls are trying to discover what’s going on in their high school. The game takes place on a board game, but your girls confront other characters through a series of minigames. Characters level up in skills like Popularity and Rebellion, which make them more effective at taunting, fibbing, flirting and exposing. The games are easy at the start, and they’d probably get repetitive as time went on. But the dialogue is sharp, so the story might be worth the hassle.

Andrew: 7
While it’s certainly true that Dangerous High School Girls In Trouble is one of the most unique games released in a long while, the gameplay doesn’t quite live up to those standards. It’s still good fun, but it’s carried solely on the back of its amazing concept, not through depth of gameplay. The mystery storyline is mostly played out in dialogue trees and minigames which, while novel, don’t quite live up to my dreams of living the life of a 1920s high school girl.

click the screenshot to download the game demo

Larva Mortus is a fast-paced atmospheric monster hunting game developed by Rake in the Grass. It’s developed in the same “point-to-shoot” style of the Alien Shooter and Zombie Shooter games, although unfortunately it just doesn’t lack the punch, polish, or panache to rival those games. However, if you’re a big fan of those types of games and you’re begging for more, Larva Mortus isn’t a bad bet.

The major problem here is that Larva Mortus is currently selling for $10, and that after a big price drop from $20. With a price point that’s literally double that of the superior Alien Shooter series, this is a hard one to recommend unless you’re begging for more of that type of action.

Larva Mortus is the story of a monster hunter of the 19th century who travels around the globe seeking out evil and purging it where ever it is found. It’s an intriguing concept, and for the most part this involves the player venturing into labyrinths full of zombies, skeletons and other ghouls and shooting them in the face.

It seems like it should be a rock solid formula that could make any game entertaining, but one big problem remains. The levels are virtually all exactly the same. Whether you’re in a dark foreboding forest or deep in cobweb-ridden catacombs it’s all just about the same thing except with new wallpaper. The one big plus to the level design, though is that all levels are procedurally generated.

This means that every time you venture into a level, even if it’s one you’ve been to multiple times, you’ve got to stay on your toes. Here Larva Mortus succeeds brilliantly. There are no monster closets, or planned surprises to scare you out of your boots. Only the stomach-in-knots tense atmosphere that can only be created by knowing you’re stuck deep in a dungeon with low-health, limited ammunition and a horde of demons desperate to rend your head from your shoulders.

The difficulty range is also a success. Levels run the gamut between very easy, and viciously challenging, and by the time you have a full host of weapons at your disposal, the harder levels are very fun as you attempt to forge a strategy not only to survive the next room, but to leave yourself enough ammo (and from the right gun no less) to survive the next eight or more rooms.

Visually the game is a bit of a mixed bag. As mentioned before, the level designs are very basic, and offer little variety. However, there are some good monster models here, and the things you kill generally look good and scary. There are even some nice effects thrown in there once in a while.

In terms of audio Larva Mortus does a mostly superb job. I say, “mostly” because a lot of the sound effects that the monsters use will often loop over and over again rapidly which can be slightly annoying. However, everything else is magnificent. There are wonderful ambient sounds being used throughout, that echo whispers of beings in the shadows. Guns all sound convincing as well, although a few of them lack some punch. Nonetheless, the audio represents some of Larva Mortus’ best achievements.

The setting for the game offers a unique angle that very few video games ever take a look at, save perhaps for CastleVania. It’s rather refreshing, and if you’re intrigued by the whole 1800s Van Helsing-style monster hunter adventures then Larva Mortus will certainly appeal to you as it’s well-animated, if low-budget, cutscenes provide an entertaining glimpse at the world around the dungeons.