We’re barely a few weeks into 2012, and already the indie heavy-hitters of 2013 are lining up, it seems. Adhesive Games’ graphically spectacular multiplayer mech-shooter Hawken now has a release date – December 12th, 2012 – and the business model they’re going to be shooting for. Rather than risk the ‘ghost town’ fate of countless abandoned multiplayer games, they’re going F2P in order to attract more people on the ground floor. They’ve also opened an early signup page, presumably getting you into any official beta testing as and when that happens.

As you can see in the gameplay trailer above, Hawken is a very pretty game, but it’s also going up against some stiff competition this year. The venerable Mechwarrior franchise is also being dusted off, and is aiming to launch as a F2P multiplayer title later this year – it’s going to be a rather literal clash of the titans, and I’m more than looking forward to it. For a nostalgic gamer such as myself, 2012 looks to be a return to the best of the early 2000s, with space sims, car combat (Carmageddon is coming back, indie style, along with Twisted Metal being a big mainstream player on the PS3) and chunky giant robot warfare all lining up for another shot at the big leagues.

Jump-jetting mechs and towering future megastructures. Impressive to behold.

As an aside, it’s been interesting seeing the rise and fall of mods as something actively played online. Even freeware indie multiplayer games are often quickly forgotten and left as nothing more than a couple of desolate, bot-filled servers. Some old-school grognards may grumble at the idea of games shifting to this new ‘freemium’ model, but it usually ensures a healthy and active player-base (and in a game like this, players are content) for years to come, so long as updates happen on any kind of semi-regular basis.

[Hawken]

This article originally appeared on sister site DIY Gamer, written by Dominic Tarason

The Unreal Development Kit is amongst a number of kits available to the general public so that just about anyone can make their own game using the Unreal 3 engine. This has resulted in lots of indie design teams putting together elaborate games using Epic’s professional caliber engine, but it also means that fledgling designers are now able to try making a game too. One such newcomer to game design is Melissa Lee Shaw who created Grand Invasion: A Full-Scale Assault.

Unlike the implications of the title, Grand Invasion is a very simple, very easy, and very short mission; barely more than a tech demo. Presumably intended as a portfolio piece and not so much a product for general consumption, Grand Invasion is not a good game in terms of keeping players engaged for more than a few minutes. But for what it is, it does demonstrate a good grasp of game design principles and will keep gamers moderately entertained during this bite-sized adventure.

The premise of the game is that tiny caterpillar-like aliens have landed in a typical human apartment and must assemble materials to repair their ship. Luckily, these materials include ordinary household items and are conveniently lying around the two rooms that make up the entirety of the game.

Players control a two-inch tall alien named Ensign Beta Boson. Do notice the subtitle “A Full-Scale Assault”, which is a little joke about the use of scale and size in the game. Boson appears as a normal-sized avatar for a third-person shooter, but the environment is scaled up so that everything else is gigantic. A typical human kitchen and living room are dangerous and exotic places for this minuscule alien and she must find ways to reach high-up areas like counter-tops and tables, all the while doing battle with enormous monsters like spiders and house cats. It’s a clever way to get a lot of use out of a relatively small map.

The basics of an amusing science fiction story are all present, Ensign Boson has to deal with a cowardly commanding officer, who makes his subordinate do all the work. The aliens also consider worthless Earth items like pennies to be great treasures, and Boson is tasked with collecting these precious “Copper disks” before the crew can return to their home world.

Grand Invasion plays as any other third person shooter would, movement is done with WASD, while aiming and looking are done with the mouse. Boson quickly gets an improvised slingshot and there is a brief shooting sequence. Eventually the character gains the ability to glide, but just about all of the game consists of making Boson scurry around the over-sized kitchen interacting with the items she needs to complete her quest.

The quest is extremely simple, with players being told exactly what to do every step of the way. There aren’t many items in the level and players basically just need to go where they’re told and click on the only objects they can interact with. The only challenge that appears is locating the mandatory ten pennies that are hidden around the rooms.

Art is simple and cartoony, with very little animation. However, this design is sufficient as important items are clearly defined and objectives can be spotted on the levels with ease. Sound is a different story. Voice work is outright terrible, with the designer doing the dialog for the main character. The audio also has a fuzzy sound to it when characters are speaking as though it was recorded with bad microphones.

Most players will spend about ten to fifteen minutes with Grand Invasion before completing Boson’s quest in its entirety. Replay value is virtually nonexistent, and the only true challenge is the brief search for the hidden pennies that always spawn in the exact same places. Combat is limited to just a single sequence against a harmless enemy.

Despite its limits, which do appear to be deliberate, Grand Invasion still shows its designer’s understanding of basic game design concepts. Ms. Shaw also has a grasp on how to use the Unreal Development Kit, so the further adventures of Ensign Boson might be more elaborate, but in its current state Grand Invasion can only be recommended for indie gamers who enjoy seeing early works of new designers.

You can download Grand Invasion: A Full Scale Assault for free and find out more information about it on its official website.

Listen up marines! Colonel Robbo is hear to take to you through the latest development updates for Recruits. If I so much as hear a mouse fart while the Colonel is talking I swear you will never see the light of day again. You hear me?!

What do you mean you don’t know what Recruits is? I should fasten your jaw with wire, Johnson! Drop down and kiss my boots 50 times, you son of a bitch.

Now, for the rest of you ladies and gentlemen, Recruits is a top-down, tactical shooter with both single and co-op play. Are you sniggering Pachowski?! I don’t recall saying anything funny! What, “top-down” too pornographic for you? How about you go bottom-down and I go knee-up, huh?

Once you sissies are done sniggering we’ll continue. Oh, too late. Stand to attention! The Colonel is here.

More information on Recruits can be found on the game’s official IndieDB page.

Four men, a sack-full of Boom, a spaceship full of mutant alien beasties and a high-energy chiptune track to keep you moving. What’s not to like? Pineapple Smash Crew – the first game by one-man outfit ‘Rich Make Game!’ (with help from chiptune musician Syphus) – has been one to keep an eye on since it’s debut at the Eurogamer Expo last year, where folks played and enjoyed it a lot. Now it’s out and available to buy from Steam, Desura and other stores – so, the big question: How does it hold up to long-term scrutiny?

PSC is a game with a lot of immediate charm. The chunky brick-headed spacemen that you lead around have a characterfully low-fi bouncy run animation, the explosions are pixellated and move just right through the tunnels of the spaceships you’re clearing out, and the enemies behave exactly as you’d expect them to at first glance, with spiders scuttling, bugs leaping and zombies shambling. The music is addictive Amiga-era chiptune energy incarnate, and there’s even a strong sense of humor with a lot of silly British wordplay and casual banter between your squad. It makes a fantastic first impression.

Pineapple Smash Crew is – as you’ve probably gathered from the trailer above – a bit of a no-brainer. Reminiscent of some classic PC games like Cannon Fodder and Syndicate, you lead a squad of four little soldiers around with the WASD keys and mouse, the squad acting as a singular entity, their formation only changing as you switch which guy takes the lead. The controls are as simple as you can get beyond that. Left mouse button makes them fire their little laser guns at the cursor, right mouse button throws the current squad-leaders grenade (the crux of the gameplay), and either the mousewheel or Q and E keys cycle who takes point. Simple enough.

Firey Deathplosions! Always best to stand around a corner from these.

The grenades are the star of the show. Every time you smash a crate or kill an enemy, there’s a good chance it’ll drop a random grenade. Your squad can hold four in total (one each), and they’re the key to everything. Basic grenades might just bounce and explode, but rocket grenades can be launched a second time from where they land, shooting into targets. Turret grenades can shoot enemies from a safe position, shield grenades can push back foes, and health grenades magically un-explode your squad. They bounce and roll and feel just right, and the chunky flames spread through tunnels in just the right way. Your basic laser guns might feel underpowered, but the sheer number of explosive tools you have more than makes up for it.

Your goal is equally straightforward. Make your way through a series of infested and randomly generated spacecraft, shooting stuff, completing simple objectives along the way and collecting notes that’ll lead you to the location of the Mothership, a rare and supposedly treasure-filled craft that would set the Crew up for life if they were to capture it. The core experience here is excellent – the basic gameplay cycle of entering a room, expertly dispatching enemies with a variety of creative one-shot grenade-based weapons and moving on is finely tuned and compelling. It just doesn’t have quite enough meat on it’s bones to support it for as long as the game lasts.

The big red beam of the wall-piercing, room-clearing Laser Grenade.

The central ’30 second’ gameplay cycle is rock solid. The first 30-50 minutes or so of the game are interesting and varied, dropping new enemies and mission types on you. And then it runs out of steam, and just kind of coasts from there to the finish several hours later. One key problem is the lack of variety – once you’ve seen the first three or four levels, you’ve seen all three of the possible mission objectives (Kill Everything, Search Boxes or Push Barrels Onto Squares), and almost all the enemies. Beyond the slow introduction of new grenade types, there’s just not much else to see, and as the difficulty level barely seemed to increase (I finished the game having not lost a single man), it just became very repetitive by the last hour or so, made worse by every mission ending with the exact same ‘big saucer with some guns on’ boss.

In the end, the game comes to a close not with a bang, but a whimper. The final level is identical to all so far, just a different color. The final boss is the same UFO-thing but with maybe another (easily destroyed) gun or two attached and the end sequence is a half-hearted ‘congratulations’ screen that unceremoniously drops you back to the main menu with nothing but some updated character skins in the background to indicate your victory. Not even a high-score board to cheerily tap out your name on. There’s no sense of escalation, and no sense of victory. It just ends, and you feel like you’ve been for a dozen spins on the worlds shortest rollercoaster, just wishing it had gone a little higher before each drop.

The one and only boss. It comes back with more guns on, but that's about it.

There’s enormous potential here for expansion – PSC isn’t a bad game, just one that runs out of content too quickly. More modes, more map tilesets, more enemies and more missions would all bulk the game up significantly and extend replay value massively. More difficulty modes, or perhaps a more finely tuned learning curve wouldn’t be too hard to implement either. I can’t help but imagine a multiplayer mode working a lot like a freeform Bomberman, too. PSC starts out bombastic and – taken in small doses – is plenty of fun. It’s just that any extended play session is going to feel like going through the motions, as once you’ve conquered one room of a ‘Hard’ difficulty ship, you’ve beaten them all.

Pineapple Smash Crew is out now for Windows PCs, and is available from Steam, Desura and Gamersgate for $10 or equivalent.

[Pineapple Smash Crew]

This article originally appeared on sister site DIY Gamer, written by Dominic Tarason

Ah candyland, that delightfuly simple little childhood board game that I’m guessing most of us remember quite well. Unfortunately, Spartans In Candyland won’t have you traipsing about the idyllic gumdrop and sweets scenery of the familiar childhood board game, nor do the spartan soldiers you play as possess the weapons of antiquity you might expect them to carry. No, I’m afraid the game’s title is somewhat misleading, which might be forgivable, but the game itself is unfortunately not quite as inspired as its perplexing title.

To start with the more favorable aspects of the game, there’s nothing inherently wrong with any of the visuals in Spartans In Candyland. It’s all perfectly servicable as far as the graphics quality goes, however there’s nothing here that really stands out as exemplerary. Also, as mentioned before, the title paints a confusing idea of what you’re getting visually as far as the design of the world that you play in. Expecting the candy cane and gumdrop backgrounds painted on the classic boardgame, it’s a bit perplexing to see a very average looking suburban landscape, outside of a few randomly placed giant junk food items.

So the ‘candyland’ aspect of the title seems to be lacking, unless it is to be inferred that the bear-like creatures that are your enemies in the game are supposed to be gummi bears, but even then it’s at least maybe more like ‘candycity’. Moving on then to the ‘spartans’ aspect, at least that part visually seems to hold water, as certainly the characters you play as look like spartans. The only confusing thing about them mostly though is that instead of a spear or sword these spartans use guns, which is a perfectly acceptable idea though it does add to the realization that the game’s title is misleading.

Moving along to talk about the gameplay, the title is a top-down shooter in the vein of games like the Shadowgrounds series and other similar titles. The controls are simple enough, requiring the use of both analog sticks to move and shoot respectively. There is also a variety of special weapons and powerups that can be used by activating them with the left and right trigger buttons.

The goal of the game is simple, to achieve as high a score as possible. This is done by defending yourself against the gummi bear enemies as you make your way to the nearest checkpoint, then securing that checkpoint, and moving on to the next one. Really that’s about all there is to the gameplay, which could be potentially enough, but the pace of the game is not quite as fast paced as it probably needs to be in order to be compelling for very long.

There is also likely some additional fun to be had when playing co-op with other players, but even in that case I imagine that the novelty of the game and any fun that might be had with it would still be short-lived. There are a few other positive aspects to the game, but these mostly lie with the fairly solid sound design and a decent soundtrack, but these aren’t really enough to save the ultimately mediocre gameplay. In the end, the game feels like it had a lot of potential, but the limited gameplay and unispired visual design isn’t quite enough to warrant more than playing the trial version of the game.

Spartans In Candyland is available on the Xbox Live Arcade. More information about the developers can be found at Marklund Games official website.

Let’s get one thing out of the way first, before we delve any further into this game – that title is shockingly bad. It’d be a good name for a Hawaiian metal band, but not so much for a game. However, you should never judge a book by its cover, and similarly a game by its title. So believe me when I say this: Pineapple Smash Crew (PSC) is a game that you’re going to want to pick up, and Eurogamer Expo agrees, with the award for Best Indie Game going to it in 2011.

In PSC, you play as a group of 4 mercenaries, who excel in tight formation shooting on spaceships. However, rather than the game focusing on giving you an excellent array of guns, you only have one gun – a submachine gun. Before you start to decry the game as basic, the one-man developer Rich Make Game has put all of the focus onto GRENADES instead. Whilst grenades usually play second-string to their internal ballistic cousins, in PSC they take center stage.

That’s right! Instead of the Mercs using their fingers all the time, they use their whole damn hand to chuck rockets, fragmentation grenades and laser grenades, as well as a whole host of other projectiles. Whilst the machine-gun is useful in the game as a backup weapon, it’s really the turn of the grenade in PSC. When the grenades are accompanied with over-the-top Bomberman-style explosions, it’s hard not to approve of the decision, even when it means that the machinegun is rather underpowered.

The gameplay in PSC is reminiscent of Alien Breed; it’s a top-down shooter set on a spaceship, so the comparison is an obvious one. As you wander about the various rooms, all of which are randomly generated, there are numerous enemies and pickups to destroy and collect, in order to gain credits and XP. Once you’ve gained enough XP you level up your mercenary party and gain access to more types of grenades. With one grenade per slot, however, you have to switch between Mercenaries in order to use the various grenades you pick up.

With no story, PSC relies on the fact that it has an infinite number of spaceships in order to hook the player in, and this is a bit of a double-edged sword. Whilst the game is ludicrously fun at first, the joy you gain from sweeping through a ship and destroying everything in sight quickly runs out to be replaced with a steadily growing boredom. Though the ships change, the gameplay doesn’t evolve and this breeds repetition. As such, it just feels like you’ve done everything once you’ve played through 10-20 levels. The game tries to offset that feeling by providing you with new grenades as you continue to level up, but there really is no real incentive to continue playing past a certain point.

If you’re thinking a multiplayer offering would spice up the experience of PSC, you’re correct, it would. However, due to the sheer complexities of a one-man development team crafting a working network code and multiplayer mode, there isn’t one included. It’s a damn shame, as the 4 soldier team practically lends itself to 4 player co-op. Unfortunately, those are the limitations of indie development, at least in this case.

Where PSC doesn’t lose its charm is in the visual department, with its blocky but colourful visuals providing an interesting and appealing experience. The spaceships are well designed, if seemingly identical after a while, but the area that is the most aesthetically pleasing is the explosions. Sprouting out from the grenades in a pixel-fiery radius that is beautifully animated, the explosions are entrancing and really help draw you into PSC.

For a first attempt at a solo game, PSC is a brilliant game that is well-made and plays around with a previous concept by switching the primary roles of grenades and guns. However, the enjoyment of the top down shooting is quickly replaced with the boredom of familiarity – the XP progression and the new upgrades do little to stop the repetitious missions. The lack of any multiplayer component also inhibits the potential fun factor overall. Pineapple Smash Crew is a valiant effort, and an enjoyable game, but not something you are likely to keep returning to again and again.

More information on Pineapple Smash Crew can be found on the game’s official website. It can be purchased for $8.99/£6.99 on its official Steam page and also on Desura.

“Back in my day sonny, vidya games about space ships blastin’ each otha’ were the bee’s knees young whippersnapper“ Is what I’d love to be saying right now. Unfortunately, I’d be lying though my teeth. The heyday of classics like TIE Fighter and Wing Commander was a little bit before my time. Instead, I had the sad privilege of watching the space combat motif die a slow and painful death at the hands of cigar smokin’ marines and other such more accessible topics.

But that’s not to say it went out with a whimper! There were some pretty sweet swan songs such as Freelancer and Homeworld 2, many of which left a huge impression on me as a young gamer. So I always get a little bit exited every time a new space combat romp pops up; desperately hoping it’ll let me relive those magical moments of Star Wars fantasies made (semi-) real. I know this opening blurb might seem like a bit of a digression, It’s just I want to make something perfectly clear before I start getting all crabby: I really wanted to like SOL: Exodus.

And at a glace, it looks like there’s plenty there to like! Awesome looking space ships? Check. Industrial grade hammy dialogue?  Check. Unnecessarily complicated HUD? Check. Gorgeous, colourful interstellar backdrops (i.e. the exact opposite of real space looks like)? Double check! Man, when that Battlestar Galactica inspired tribal drum music first kicked in, I was totally pumped to let loose on some intergalactic scum. I had all the right tools for the job too: missiles, afterburner, machine gun, laser canon and……..and…uh…. not much else really.

Well ok, there’s also a neat little strafing mechanic, a ubiquitous hacking minigame and a monumentally negligible upgrade system, but that’s honestly all there is. No loadout customisation, ship selections, wingmen commands, shields, scanners or anything like that.  For the whole game you’ve got one ship with one missile launcher, one afterburner, one machine gun and one laser cannon. That’s your lot. Although, I guess you could say you’ve got a few wingmen here and there too. You *could* say that. I certainly wouldn’t. I’d say there’s a couple of green dots on my radar that wander around the battlefield doing very little of anything in particular.

But that’s ok right? Shootin’ stuff in a video game just flat out rules, even if your arsenal is a bit on the thin side! Theoretically yes, but SOL’s half baked combat ensures that you’ll never get even the slightest inking of satisfaction from any of your kills. Enemies mindlessly plod along at about ten miles per century, making dogfights feel more like a point n’ click adventure as you blow away endless waves of the exact same hapless spacecrafts over and over. Lock on to an enemy, afterburn into gun range, line up shot, shoot, repeat, repeat, repeat. Hell, sometimes you don’t even need to bother shooting them at all! The pea-brained AI’s reliance on the good ol’ “fatal collision course with the nearest solid object” maneuver sees to that well and good.

As you can probably imagine, repeating these combat scenarios ad infinitum can quite accurately be described as “not fun”. In fact, it’s the absolute worst kind of “not fun”: Boring. There’s just so little content available in this game, and it’s stretched so damn far it truly beggars belief! It’s not that I want it to be an absurdly complicated space sim or something; I’m not asking for EVE Online here. All I’m asking for is literally anything that would add some kind of variety to SOL. A few additional guns, an extra craft or two, a properly fleshed out narrative, more than one type of missile; seriously, anything would do. On top of that, more than a measly 8 missions probably wouldn’t go too amiss either.

That’s not to say the game’s over in a flash. Nooooo, far from it! You’ll be able to squeeze just under 4 hours out of those 8 missions. 4 painfully monotonous hours of tiresome combat and praying to god that the ships you’re protecting don’t spontaneously combust out of the shear embarrassment of it all. Wait, did I forget to mention the protecting ships part? Oh. Well you see, all 8 stages of the campaign are escort missions, because everyone bloody loves escort missions. But what’s better than an escort mission? How about an escort mission with no checkpoints whatsoever! That’s right, fail to leave your capital ship unmolested for even a few seconds and the game’ll send your ass right back to enemy fighter wave #1. Yay!

Maybe on some level this minuscule amount of unpolished content is acceptable, but £7 is NOT that level. Think about it, that’s close to £1 for each mission in the game, and that includes the tutorial! Not exactly a sound investment. But still, I live in hope that one day there’ll be something special that finally rekindles my passion for all things space shootey. That “something special” is most definitely not SOL: Exodus. SOL: Exodus is just a bad video game.

The trashiest indie game about, Into The Dark, has been given a solid release date by its developers and although it bears resemblances to Duke Nukem, we are pretty sure that it won’t mimic the constantly postponed nature of his last appalling title.

When a developer describes their game as “Indie Horror Comedy Adventure Shooter Trash gem” my ears leap off my head, do a dance and instruct my brain to guide us towards the nearest Happy Hour. Smut, camp and filth are the kinds of things that I revel in, so Into The Dark seems like a perfect title to add to my “lookout for” list. The game is like a very, very dark version of Duke Nukem, except it’s more European too.

Shooting weird mutants, looking at females in a sexual though disturbing manner, and making apparently funny remarks are what define the game. There are levels to complete, keys to collect and loads of dark everywhere as you can discover by playing the early Alpha version of the game, download it here.

Ah yes, the release date! That would be June 30th 2012, or so the developers say they are aiming for. It will be a Windows only release though and we do not know if it will be free or not, instinct tells us it will be because the developers aren’t.

More information on Into The Dark can be found on the IndieDB page.