Rogue Legacy Review: Everybody Rogue

rogue-legacy-headerWith the games release schedule decidedly quiet during the summer, it’s a good time for everyone, including would-be games critics, to catch up on games that you might have missed during the first months of the year. To be quite honest, I’m not sure how many of this year’s big releases I’ve finished.

I’m starting with the current indie darling du jour, Rogue Legacy. It’s received heaps of praise from critics but what do I, a gamer of average skill and free time, think of the latest big thing on the indie game scene?

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Gunpoint Review: Spying Excellence

gunpoint-logoIt’s not everyday that one single indie game, an indie game that’s the first effort of a former gaming journalist, causes the whole of the gaming press to pause and take notice. But that’s what we have with Gunpoint, the rookie effort of now-former PC Gamer writer Tom Francis. I say that he’s now a former PC Gamer writer because the commercial success of Gunpoint has given Francis the financial freedom to pursue game development full-time.

So could the debut effort of a man who hasn’t made a game before and put it together in off-the-shelf game making software be worthy of all the praise it received? Yes. Yes, it can.

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Super Puzzle Platformer Deluxe Review: Jump and Gun

super-puzzle-platformer-deluxe-logoBefore I got around to playing The Last of Us, I found a fun little sink published by one of new best friends of indie developers everywhere. Adult Swim Games’ move from the flash game market to publishing games on Steam was unexpected but their propensity for getting simple but fun games straight onto Steam without going through the hit-and-miss Greenlight system benefits both the developers and gamers.

Their second release on Steam is another upgrade of an Adult Swim flash game. Super Puzzle Platformer Deluxe might be a bit of a misnomer but that doesn’t make Andrew Morrish’s creation any less delightful to play.

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Element4l Review: Slip Sliding Away

element4l-logoSometimes, I need to play a game that’s on the calm side. As fun as driving cars at speeds approaching 200 MPH and shooting baddies with overpowered weapons is, I like to throw a quiet game into the rotation to mix things up. Lately, that’s been the oddly spelled but appropriately titled puzzle platformer Element4l.

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Montreal’s gamesbymo Needs Your Help to Make A.N.N.E

anne-logoEvery once in a while on our sister site et geekera, we cover some of the more interesting offerings on Kickstarter. For Canadian Gaming Week, we thought that we would do a Kickstarter preview of our own.

Montreal indie studio gamesbymo is the one-man operation of developer Moise Breton. He’s taking to Kickstarter to get funding to complete work on his latest project called A.N.N.E.

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Papo & Yo Review: A Game in a Metaphor

papo-and-yo-bannerWhat make a video game a game? That’s a question that is being asked with increasing frequency. It’s also a question that one could ask about Papo & Yo. It’s a game with a story and a message hidden behind a metaphor but the actual “gameplay” is fairly thin. So does that mean it’s a game or a metaphor?

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Retro/Grade (PC) Review (or Wibbly-Wobbly Timey-Wimey Insanity)

retrograde-logoWhat happens when you mix an arcade style shoot-’em-up with a rhythm game and then do it all backwards? You get the delightful (and difficult) Retro/Grade. Originally released as an indie game on the PlayStation 3, Retro/Grade has made the jump to PC.

Rhythm games and shoot-em-ups have been done before so the base genres are well represented in gaming. However, they’ve never been done like this.

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