The Legend of the Golden Robot

Oh no, an evil and generic wizard has taken over the countryside around the village and threatens the lives of all its citizens! What to do? I know, lets make that new guy, the one who looks like Indiana Jones, kill the bad guys.

 This plot may sound perfectly reasonable to everyone in the town, save for Indigo Steve. Unfortunately, you are Indigo Steve. Armed with only a sweet hat, a knife, and his wits, Indiana Jones Indigo Steve must set out to collect objects such as the crystal skull, King solomon's seal, and the holy grail, in order to fund himself enough to buy things, of course. The real prize is a shiny golden robot that can dispell any hostile magic, including that of completely un-nazilike wizards.

The legend of the Golden Robot is a game about a man, a blade, a shovel, a wizard, a robot, and an annoying guy who has to be the worst house side gambler in existence. You play as Indigo Steve, a brave adventurer who sets out to save a village (with a population of four men and two houses, but a village nonetheless) from an evil wizard. To do this, he must reassemble the 5 piece of the golden robot, an artifact that is known for dispelling hostile magic.

The gameplay is divided into a couple of parts. You start out in the village, where you can buy weapons, gamble,and learn about treasure locations. This is also where you manage your equipment. Once you leave town you go to a map that shows all of the game's dig sites. Most are locked until you have the proper equipment. Once in a dig site, the game becomes minesweeper in reverse, the objective is to get to the treasures by reading how many treasures are in adjacent tiles. Often while treasure hunting, you will be attacked my hostile minions of the wizard, which initiates the combat stage of the game.

Combat is pretty simple, but your stats are what make all the difference. You have four moves you can use on your turn. A normal attack, which is accurate, does normal damage, and uses 10 stamina, a block which reduces damage by half and fills your stamina, a rage attack which does 1.5-2.4 times normal damage for 20 stamina, and a buildup attack that does four times normal damage, costs 30 stamina, and takes 2 turns to use. As a bit of side advice, get attack and defense to 5, stamina to 7, then put everything into strength. If you do this, just about every fight near the end of the game will be a one hit fight, even the final boss will die in 3 rage attacks if you focus on strength. Other than than those skills you have a special that can be used once a day, most are pretty darned useful.

When treasure hunting, keep in mind the rules of minesweeper, so you don't waste daylight hours searching an obviously blank spot. if the tile shows and 8, that means every side and corner of it has treasure, if it shows 0 that means all of its adjacent tiles are blank. If you are having trouble finding treasures, gamble with Brian to earn locations of treasures. Remember to always bet higher if he rolls 27 or lower, and bet lower is he rolls above 27. Also keep in mind as far as treasure hunting goes, a better shovel can save you a lot of money in the long run by saving hours of digging, but you don't need to buy every single shovel.

The equips are probably the best part of the game. You have a hat, coat, weapon, pet, spade, and a special items to equip. The hats give defense and speed, armor gives defense, the spades reduce time spent digging, the swords give attack, damage, and crit%, the pets do random damage, and the specials have a variety of effects. Most of it is strictly tier up equipment, meaning you want to use the shiniest, newest weapon you have at all times, but there are exceptions, such as with Excalibur and the light saber. There is something about unlocking a new, secret item that is just addicting.


The storyline of the game is actually pretty anticlimactic, to the point where it actually makes me wonder why it was done so cheaply. The game play time from start to finish is about one and a half to two hours long, and pretty much ends with the final boss dying and the villagers being mildly happy that you succeeded. The fact that the final boss drops in three hits doesn't make it any better. For such a long game that was so story driven, it should have had more work done on the endgame.

The Legend of the Golden Robot is a pretty fun game, there is no doubt, but its not without its flaws. The game is far too slowly paced and grind happy, and collecting the final robot piece is a chore because you need to find all four map pieces to dig site twelve to even get it. This, coupled with an dreary ending, means that I'd recommend the game, but know what a long trip you are in for, and that a lot of it is pretty mindless grinding and searching.

Hack Slash Crawl

What in the hell makes dungeon crawling so addicting? I'll be damned if I know, but the 150+ hours I put into diablo 2 means that there must be something to it. The fighting, looting, the leveling is all so addictive. Hack Slash Crawl follows just about every trope that makes a hack and slash dungeon crawler a hack and slash dungeon crawler, namely its focus on; hacking, slashing, and dungeon crawling.

Hack Slash Crawl is a hack and slash dungeon crawler by Void. It aims to boil dungeon crawling down to its purest form; character creation, fighting enemies, fighting bosses, getting loot, and leveling up. The fighting is pretty simple, there are two attack types, melee and magic. To melee you click on an enemy, to cast magic you hit the magic quick key and the game pauses until you select the target of your spell. The combat really doesn't have much depth to it, the real depth instead coming from racial traits, equipment, and how you choose to approach the mobs.

When creating your character, you have a few important options. You have the name, which really doesn't matter, but I'm preferential to naming my vampires Vlad, my werewolves Witherfang, and other blatant ripoffs. After the name you have the race, and the class. The races are the biggest game changers, you naturally don't want to play a golem the same way you play a celestial, at least if you plan on surviving. It seems to me a few of the races are pretty underpowered as they only give initial spells, which may be nice around level one, but by level five that werewolf will outclass your Atlantean in every single way, and probably have a chance to get both of your racial spells too. Classes are less game changing, but still are designed to fit every play style. The are classes for melee and magic, healing and shielding, etc. So long as your class and race match your play style you should be fine. The last options you have available aren't initially accessible. The titles are only gained upon death, and you only receive one when you die. You can equip two at a time, and some of them are crazy powerful, but you only get access to them by doing extremely well.

On the looting system, I have to say it works decently, but it's pretty lackluster. All loot is random no matter whether it was obtained from a skeleton with a rusty sword, or Deathmaul the Destroyer, or even a chest. As a matter of fact, every level has exactly one chest, and one boss, but the equips you obtain from either of these is no different then that obtained from random monsters. As for the equips themselves, they vary wildly, and the usefulness of each piece will change depending on your play style.

I think the biggest problem the game has is that it tries to setup a short, simple, re-playable game, with little reason to replay it. That seems like it is the goal of the title system, but since you can only get one title per game play, and each game takes around five to ten minutes, with thirty two titles you are talking about 3+ hours to get them all, and that is assuming you know the requirements for each one. Other than that, the game pretty much becomes impossible to lose at past level 10. I can rush a room with a boss in it, and peel off all the enemies around me one by one while my regeneration keeps me alive forever.

Despite my gripes, at the core of it is a very good game. Its definitely not a game to be played for as long as it wants you to play it, but who cares, its still fun while it lasted, and the flagstaff series could certainly gain a lot from making use of the dungeon crawler elements in place. Hack Slash Crawl is definitely worthy of your time, but I wouldn't recommend grinding past the point where the game loses all its fun.

Elephant Quest

Yesterday, I reviewed Treadmillasaurus-Rex, a game by jmtb02. Today is another, more recent (as in, this morning it released) game, Elephant quest. As the title informs you, jmtb02 is finally getting back to what he knows best, elephants. Elephant quest is a mishmash of platformers, RPGs, and metroidvania games. You play as an elephant who was robbed of his hat by a large mammoth, and naturally goes on a long and dangerous quest to get the hat back no matter what the cost. Why would you do all that for a hat? You obviously haven't seen how sweet that hat is.

The controls are pretty simple, and the game is both arrow key and WASD friendly. You start out with one turret, and the ability to jump about 5 blocks high. Through doing side quests you can unlock normal sentries, and flying autoguns which greatly boost the damage you are capable of. The basic goal of the game is to go to the 4 corners of the world (literally) to obtain four blue keys, so that you can unlock the door that holds wooly, and your sweet hat. Depending on how many sidequests you do, the game can take anywhere from 15-40 minutes, it honestly could have used a bit more length, as it had a good skill system in place, and all it would've taken would be more unlockable areas and more NPCs.

On a graphical note, I'm actually rather impressed. jmtb seemed to go far above his standard artistic fare with this flash game and it shows. The way the enemies health bars slide along the screen and display works well, the crazy physics of the turret string is cool to watch, and everything looks and feels like you are in some perfect magical world inhabited solely by Elephants (and bison).

The stats system is rather complex, and relies a lot on forethought about levels to come. You start out only being able to upgrade to one of four stats, each of which branch off further, ala dynasty warriors. There are also a few +15 bonuses scattered about and four huge +50 bonuses, on in each corner of the skill chart. As far as actual skills go, you without a shadow of  a doubt need to get 100 int first and foremost, because int has a skill increases the amount of points you gain per level up. Other than that, the jump skill is probably the most important, as the final boss would be ridiculous with the default jump. Damage is also nice, as is speed, and minion summons, though they are by no means required, and you can spend points on whatever you feel would benefit you the most.

The questing system is what you'd expect ofjust about any sidequest from an RPG, and there are three quest types:

1. Talk to Person X
2. Go find item X and bring it back to me
3. Collect Y number of X's and show them to me

None of these are difficult, and in actuality, you can probably pop of nearly all of them without doing any real backtracking.

All in all, Elephant quest was probably one of the most fun flash games I've played in a while. Everything runs smoothly, and it feels very professionally done. Its the type of game I could see being up on the iPhone or android app store for a buck fifty or two bucks.

Flagstaff: Chapter One

So, you like dungeon crawling, but think that every single dungeon crawling game ever has been to complex? Well have I got a game for you, it features a four member party, each with a stunning 5(!) upgrades, and 3(!) different types of enemies to fight!

Flagstaff: Chapter One is a featured game on Kongregate by Joelesler. Its a typical dungeon crawler, though most of the parts of the genre, such as weapons, armor, loot, and exploration, have been stripped in order to make a very simple, streamlined dungeon crawler. You play as a party send to destroy a fairly typical skeleton infestation, in a fairly typical castle dungeon, at the behest of a very generic king, and what little story there is fleshes itself out along the way.

The game is controlled with the mouse, though you can use WASD or the arrow keys to scroll around the map. Each of the four party members starts out with one skill, and the ability to attack once a turn and move five squares. You can also buy upgrades to increase the amount of health you have, the amount of attacks per turn, amount of steps allotted per turn, and two new skills per party member. Not that any of it is essential mind you, because this game is easy enough that I'm pretty sure a kindergartner could beat the game in under a half hour. Never once did get below 4/10, and I was able to heal them on my turn and kill whatever enemies caused the damage as well. The AI is pretty dim, as the enemies wont even focus fire on one target, choosing instead to damage whoever is closest to them, even if they are able to hit a weaker character who is farther off. In fact this is one of the game's biggest flaws, since the game lacks any other important tactical choices, you figure the combat would at least attempt to challenge the player, but it merely throws small nuisances at the party from floor to floor, which takes away most of the redeeming value the combat would have provided.

On the issue of graphics, I really do like the art designs of all the characters and tiles. The art is fairly simple, but all of the isometric faces are drawn correctly, and present a nice clean look. It all looks quite attractive in motion, with all the basic attacks and movement being fully animated. The only problem I noticed was that many of the special moves lacked distinct animations.

Flagstaff looks like its shaping up to be an interesting series. As the game stands at chapter one, I wouldn't recommend it because it is far too barebones and presents no challenge. The game is supposed to be a series though, and maybe the next one will be better, who knows?

Shadow Rising

What happens when a side scrolling hack and slash game meets a JRPG? Shadow Rising, that's what. In shadow rising you play as a spiky haired young man with magical powers and a bit of a chip on his shoulder. Your friend/girlfriend has been kidnapped and you must do whatever it takes to get her back, all while acting like a complete ass to Everyone you meet.

As far as graphics go, this game is pretty damned...pretty, but the dialogue leaves a lot to be desired. The animations and backgrounds are impressive for a flash game, and really make the game feel polished. You can tell the artist behind the game put a lot of time into the project, however, the same cannot be said of the voice acting and actual dialogue. The main character comes across as one of the most annoying people I've ever heard speak, and its as much the thick British accent as it is the fact that he's written as a cross between Seto Kaiba, and Neku from the world ends with you. The characters also make quite a few grammatical errors, and the voices don't seem the fit the characters at all.

As for the combat, its as slack and hashy as a hack and slash could be. You hit enemies, move to them, hit them again, rinse, repeat until they are all dead. I'm not over simplifying it, that pretty much IS combat. The bosses are even more ridiculous, because while the game has a fast paced combat system, the bosses move quite slowly and predictably, their only strength is that they can take a metric ton of damage without so much as blinking, so boss fights are of the Triple Slash->Double Slash->Jump to avoid attack->Triple Slash and so on until the thing dies. Even if you had never leveled up at all, it'd be one hell of an easy game, even with the neigh useless specials.

As for the actual leveling system, there is very little in the way of options. For your skill bonus, you can put one point each level into either a nearly useless special skill, or a nearly useless passive skill. The specials aren't capable of doing nearly as much damage as your slash spam, and they consume MP while spamming slash does not. The passives are no better, giving you buffs like "+2%armor", when armor could be gained much more easily by using attribute points. As a matter of fact, as the base armor level, 2% armor is only equivalent to 1 point in armor.

Overall, it's a really well polished game,  and it's still absolutely horrible. You know what they say...

Monster Slayers

Monster slayers is a party based RPG about a group of adventurers who do the bidding of the ghost of the kingdom's king, who dies during the prologue. You start with one hero in your party, but the number will likely expand to five as the tutorial progresses. There are four basic unit types, each with 5 unique advanced classes. Like Dungeon Developer, it was created by Nerdook.

The most important part of the game it probably one you won't spend too much time on, that being the party screen. Here you hire warriors, change and upgrade your units, and equip your units with hats. The hats are the only form of equipment in the game, providing minor general stat bonuses to hp, max damage, or armor level. Every unit has the ability to upgrade and advance in class, but  each new class tier must be unlocked via the main storyline.

The game has four main types of game play modes, all of which are nearly identical. The Main story shows mini  cutscenes and sends you on a bunch of random and increasingly difficult missions that generally end with some type of boss. Bounty hunting is a mode in which you slay a stronger version of a previously defeated boss. Quests are side missions which involve a variety of tasks, but it really always has the same goal. Whether you are taking a caravan across the map, killing everything on the map, delivering an item on the other side of the map, or what have you, you are always simply walking forward, attacking, rinse, repeat. This holds true for the fourth game type, by it is still by far my favorite, the multiplayer challenge mode.

In the multiplayer mode, you select any team you want from someone else, and fight against them. The star raking shows the general ability level of the enemy team, but the value doesn't exactly always rule king. At star level 25 my team was able to successfully kill a star level 40 team, though just barely. Multiplayer battles are a fun pseudo pvp game type.

I really liked this game, and the pvp can add some additional fun to the game after it's ended, but a few design choices annoy me. Certain class branches are absolutely useless, notably anything to do with building damage. Buildings are rare, and usually the class upgrade choices are either take a unit that fires twice as many shots, or a unit that does double damage to buildings alone. Even if 50% of enemies were buildings, the building destroyers would never be the right choice, because two arrows is just as good as one double damage arrow. Another problem, which I hold it has in common with Dungeon Developer, is that you really dont have any control over the game. Being able to do something simple like set formations for your units would've made it so much better than just telling them to move forward, back up, attack, and defend as a group.

Stick RPG 2

Remember playing that old game, "Stick RPG", a few years ago? It was a short, simple little game consisted mostly of grinding one's stats until you could meet a benchmark for a promotion of some type, which then allotted you more money to buy things with which further helped your stats and the loop continued so on for about 4 hours, and then you had pretty much maxed everything there was to max out. Something about the game kept you playing, despite the fact that it was merely a game about watching numbers go up, and reading a new line of dialogue once every 15 minutes. Xgen Studios Stick RPG 2 takes the same exact game play and greatly expands on it, offering a huge amount of jobs, three city blocks, and quite a few new random type events that seldom happened in the first game. In essence, its much, much more of the same.

The Highlights
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The first thing you'll notice about the game, it that there is a lot of stuff. three over world maps,  two casinos, six food shops, two gyms, three bars, two general stores, and over ten different employers man that there is a lot to do in this game, and the side quests are quite involved. The stats system works well, given that the main focus of every stat is now the same, that being job advancement, and the three best jobs in the game all require at least one of the three stats, as well as a particular karma rating.

The dialogue is interesting, and while you wont want to read the stat gain screen message 50 times in a row, you will want to read it at least once. There are cute little Easter eggs scattered throughout the game, and many of these actually can serve the purpose of advancing the plot. The game also has added a couple more RPG elements. The background trait you take at the beginning of the game can help quite a bit, and it's a nice feature for any RPG. The banking with compounded daily interest is still there but it seems a lot less efficient than the previous game. The days are much longer, and the general interest build is down, meaning living purely off your bank account is harder.

The Downsides
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First and foremost, from a technical standpoint, this game is prone to crashing, and hogs CPU resources like very few other flash games can. I'd recommend saving at the end of each day, because the game crashed on me four times in my six hours of playing it, and three other times I was forced to reload the game, as the game trapped me in a dialogue I couldn't escape. It shouldn't cause too much of a problem if you remember to save frequently, but if you don't, going back 7+ days can really suck.

As for the storyline, its about 5 minutes long, and pops up out one of many random fetch quest the game invites you to partake in. The fact that the game has three different endings is interesting, but the fact that you essentially choose your own ending blindly with no way of viewing the others kind of bites. In order to see the other two endings, you have to go through the gauntlet of light saber and electro shock using enemies, which really gets to be grating by the third time.

Overall, its a very fun waste of time, and its a great sandbox rpg with lots of little hidden secrets, it's just a shame that the story was done as it was, and it'd would've also been nice if there was some way to fight enemies more than once.