Aliens Kidnapped Betty

Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to Kongregate's newest featured game, Aliens Kidnapped Betty! It's like canabalt with more timing! It's like a generic platformer, but with a twist! Combine those and what do you get?!?!?

(A pretty awful game)

First off, let me put it out there that I am very biased here. I love platforming games, and something about removing a sense of control from a complex platforming game tears at my very being. See Meat Boy and then PETA's parody Tofu Boy for an example. The PETA devs, bless their big crazy heart, did everything right in emulating super meat boy except for the movement. The tileset layouts were the same, the sawblades, art style, everything was well above par, except the controls. Tofu boy slips around like he's made of mercury, his speed is more erratic and his horizontal jumping is too short by about a third. These small, minute differences turn two otherwise identical games into, well, a comparison of normal bacon and soy bacon. Aliens Kidnapped Betty does the same thing, it turns what would be a generic platforming game into a completely subpar experience by applying an interesting game mechanic in a place it does not belong.

That said on to the story. Betty gets kidnapped by aliens, and guess who is going to rescue her? Congratulations, you are correct, those of you who chose the obvious answer and not something ridiculous like Lisa Edelstein. You play as Mike McManly, a man with restless leg syndrome who is able to jump 8 feet high in a single bound. This comes in handy as your woman has been kidnapped by aliens who seem to not understand the danger of leaving magical doors of teleportation around town. Mike however, and full advantage of this, and uses said doors to get his woman back.

(note: none of this is actually said in the game, but I feel it was implied)

What do you do to win? press up or click.What do you do to get away from an enemy? press up or click at the right time. How about getting coins? Press up or click in the specific pattern the level designer intended. That last bit is unfortunate, because of the 16 levels I played, two of them had genuinely interesting mechanics that went along with the game. The rest were just standard platformer fare, sans everything but the jumping.

On a graphical note, I really do like the background and tileset for this game. The people look out of place, but the urban tilesets are done neatly, and the backgrounds are well done in that retro 8 bit style.

Well folks, that's my take on the game. Not one I'd recommend, but to each his own, and if it seems like something you'd like, have at it.

Ninja Hamsters vs Robots

Well, it finally happened. The AIs rose up and conquered the world, and presumably skewered all of us meatbags on the ends of metal spikes or something. Anyways, in this robot controlled world, a resistance of sorts exists, a resistance fronted by a hamster. He's no ordinary hamster however, he is also a ninja, and with his mighty ninja powers, he hopes to defeat the entire robot horde and free the world from the shackles of robotic oppression (or something like that).

Ninja Hamsters vs Robots is a game by Nerdook, that websiteless rascal whose games are always on the front page of Kongregate and Newgrounds. In ninja hamsters vs robots you play as *gasp* a hamster who happens to be a ninja. You just click an area of the screen and you move there, and attack anything nearby, and since no game is a game without upgrades these days, the game naturally has...upgrades. Its a pretty simple game, but its not without its strategic moments, which come in two forms: choosing upgrades, and choosing your target order. As simple as they sound, see what happens if you mess around and focus on the grunts before the missile droppers. Lucky for you your hamster is invincible, but the ground below his feet is prone to...sinking, and your hamster can't swim.

The upgrade system, while generic, as done without flaw. Each upgrade makes a sizable gameplay difference, they start out relatively cheap, and all of them are useful. Which ones you take really depends on your play style, and other than the OMGBIGFUKKENSWORD none of the upgrades are a real necessity to win the game. The basic goal is to survive enough robot waves to summon the boss, who generally dies in a couple hits. The boss isn't the challenge, surviving until he appears is the problem, its a bit frantic, but as long as you make sure to drop the most deadly robots first no level should be a problem save for the final two, at which the robots throw enough soldiers at you to fill the ocean beneath your feet.

 The graphics are standard nerdook fare, they look good, but they also look like graphics that were made in flash. The hamster generally looks like a hamster, the robots look like robots, and though it may look a little unpolished, it is by no means a bad looking game.

Ninja Hamster vs Robots is a fun little action game, its fairly simple and thus manages to avoid making any obtuse errors. It's a bit on the grindy side, as even after beating 23 bosses I still Hadn't gotten max level in every upgrade, but it's balanced so that you don't need them all to finish the game. If Nerdook keeps pumping out good games like he's been doing, I will definitely keep playing.

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...

Kill Damn Beavers

Picture it, Russia, circa 2011. You are a veteran soldier armed with only a semiautomatic machinegun, and your wits, and you must protect your villages dam from a massive arm of...beavers!?!?! Kill Damn Beavers is a BestGamesLand game in which you protect a damned dam from a bunched of damned dam hungry beavers. The game is simple, with only a few upgrades, but make no mistake, this game is harder than the mighty walls of your dam.

The upgrade system is simple, there are three upgrade trees with three levels each, three combo upgrades, and one special upgrade for a total of thirteen upgrades. Once you fill your satisfaction meter, you get to place one upgrade, the meter gets harder and harder to fill, but it's incredibly easy to obtain all the upgrades before the advent of the BeaverZord.

The gameplay is much like any other building defense game, you click things, and they eventually die. The key to winning in Kill damn beavers however, is timing your reloads and special abilities correctly. If you mess that up, you WILL get overwhelmed and fail. I'd advise getting the bomb ability first, as it completely clears the screen of enemies, and the cooldown on it is pretty low.

Once you finally get past the sixteen saves of beavers before the boss, you actually have to fight him. At this point the game becomes completely horrible. 90% of the time the boss is invincible, one of his two attacks is guaranteed to damage your damn no matter how fast you fire, and if you miss any small gap to shoot him at all, the entire game was for nothing because you are done for. This is really a case of poor balancing on the developers part, unless one were to do the boss over and over until you had the attack patterns down pat, its hell to beat it, and if you fail you get sent back to wave one.

The game may be a fun way to burn a few minutes in your day, but don't go in expecting to, ya know...win.

Gunball Arena

Do you like guns? How about balls? Do you get a thrill from arenas? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then have I got a game for you! Gunball Arena is a new game from Armor Games that pits you and your little ball, and his gun or sword against huge waves of enemies. The game is by no means hard, and has some rather annoying bits to it, but it is definitely worth playing.

The basic game play is simple, you have two type of weapons, melee and ranged. Melee weapons are short range, high damage, and lack recoil. Guns are longer range, but the damage is much worse, and though the more powerful guns can nuke half the playing field, they also send you flying back from recoil. In addition, you have three special powers the can be used infinitely, sans the individual cool downs. Unfortunately, two of the three abilities are neigh useless, berserk increases damage, but spins you around in an uncontrollable circle, and teleport teleports you about 5 feet away and seems to hit everything in between you and the teleport location. Slowdown on the other hand, functions like a bullet time mode where everyone but you slows down, and is incredibly useful.

On the weapons front, the game has quite a few, and there are no down sides to buying a weapon since they sell for exactly what you pay for them. The fact that your weapons are specifically glued to the front, back, left and right of you is rather annoying though, as it means you can't focus fire on where you put your mouse, and instead have to aim sideways to use side guns, or slot up your sides with shields/mine layers instead of actual guns.

While playing I did encounter a pretty game breaking bug after I'd bought all the upgrades. As soon as I sold my sword, my money displayed as NaN(not a number) and I wasn't able to buy anything. Nothing I could do fixed the problem, so I was essentially stuck with no weapons at all.

Another disappointing facet of the game was a lack of a final boss. The beginning plot has you set up to enter a tournament to fight the king, but even after beating every level and fighting all five bosses, you never have a final boss to fight. It wouldn't be that much a problem, but your character accepting the king's challenge to a fight to the death was the entire premise of the plot, and it just seems really weird that it never played out in the game.

Overall, Gunball arena is a damn good game to play if you want an easy, fun game, but be weary of that bug, because not being able to change your weapons is no fun at all.

Embrace

Embrance is a Kongregate exclusive game by a use named Mongolish. The basic explanation of the game is that you spin an open circle with your mouse and try to get a high score. The more in depth explanation is as follows:

You have a shield with a gap in it. You get swarmed by pluses and minuses. Letting pluses through your shield gives you points and repairs your shield, while letting minuses through depletes your shield. Letting either hit your shield depletes your shield by a very small percentage.

Yep, that's really all there is to the game. Its a fun little game to play when you have ten minutes here or there, the upgrades aren't a grind and the game only stops being fun right around the time you buy all the upgrades, which is one hell of a step up from a game like Burrito Bison. While the game is not exceptional, it's everything a flash game should be, easy to pick up, pretty without being distracting, and most importantly it's fun.

Burrito Bison

Burrito Bison is yet another launcher game, this one by NotDoppler. The setup is as follows. You, a macho, manly luchador, are browsing the candy isle of a food store when suddenly a bag of candy open up and pulls you into an alternate dimension. You are then pitted against a giant jawbreaker in a wrestling ring. Instead of fighting however, you choose to take the easy way out by flinging yourself sky high with the use of the ropes of the ring. Along the way, you end up inadvertently committing genocide against thousands of gummy bears, but who could blame you?

The game play is straightforward as can be, you launch yourself, watch the screen, occasionally click to slam yourself onto the ground or use travel boosts, and then fail and purchase upgrades. Wash, rinse, repeat about 30 times and you have enough upgrades to actually finish the game. You spend 80% of this game just watching, and about half of your runs are pointless grinds to be able to make enough capital to buy an upgrade you need. The upgrades pretty much do everything for you, as I completely ignored the game and it beat itself with all upgrades maxed while I was off doing something else. Other than the upgrades, the only thing in the game that stops you from winning are cop gummy bears, which are neigh unavoidable at high speeds. Since there is little you can do to prevent them from slowing you, its best to do your damnedest to stay as high as you can and try to never touch the ground.

The art is pretty, and the sound is fairly well done. All the gummy bear types are distinct and easily recognizable from one another, and the same applies to the travel powers. The sound effects are nicely done, but the music gets grating after about two minutes, luckily it can be turned off.


Overall, Burrito Bison is a completely misable game, but if you enjoy a game where you don't actually do much playing it may be worth checking out.

Edit:
For those of you having trouble finishing burrito bison, or breaking through the final glass wall, The most important upgrades are Rockets, Initial Launch Speed, Hang Gliders, Bounciness, and Endurance. Hang gliders and rockets are the only things capable of negating the slowdown you take from cops, and breaking the glass wall will be hard without them, even at level five endurance.

Topsy Turvy

Topsy Turvy is a flash game by Candystand.com that is also available for the iPhone. Its a cute little gravity shifting platformer. The concept has been done to death in flash, but the game is still rather fun, albiet too easy and lacking in the puzzle division.

For about the first twenty levels, the game is pretty puzzle based, you turn the world and find the appropriate direction for your planned jumps and falls, but after that point, the game becomes more of a mildly puzzle based traditional platformer, it takes a lot of reflexes, but not which thinking, which is disappointing following the levels before the final five. Overall the game is a bit on the easy side, no level took me more than two minutes, except for the final one, which requires either perfect timing, or you to stand in a hard to judge, nearly pixel perfect gap and jump over a moving spike wheel multiple times.

The level design isn't perfect, the story is a throwaway plot, and the graphics are pretty generic, so why would you keep playing this game? Because it is damned addictive. Its not one of those games there the puzzles eventually become completely insurmountable, after thinking for a few seconds just about any map's solution should become pretty obvious, but executing the solution becomes harder and harder as the game goes on, and the drive to finish compels you to play until you see it through.

No Time to Explain

There is no time for me to explain what this game is, but you must play it. Not much to review of the game since it only takes about 5-7 minutes to beat, but all in all it OH GOD MY RIBS ARE IN MY EYES

Bubble Tanks 3

Bubble Tanks 3 is another bubble tank game by hero interactive, of armor games. If you've either of the prequels, the gameplay should be familiar, as should the sandbox environment with little to no objective. In the first game, you played as a tank that slowly grew in size as you collected bubbles from fallen enemies. The second game included a branching tree of tanks that emphasized either speed, rate of fire, or damage per second. The third features an even more robust system in which you unlock ship classes with the bubble collects, and allows you to build your own ship, which is limited only by the amount of gun points and ship class.

At class one, the speed are incredibly fast, but lack the firepower and special abilities that a higher class would have. At class six, you inch along at 30% of the speed that the class one moves at, turn at a snails pace, and have little in the way of dodging abilities, but in turn can have a massive amount of firepower, shields, radar, and anything else you might want to outfit yourself with.

The enemies in this game seem more annoying than in previous bubble tank games, particularly single bubbles on non hostile levels, which are nearly impossible to hit, and the various enemies that shoot out both purple and green bubbles. When hit by a purple bubble, your speed slows to a crawl, making dodging hard as hell, and when hit by a green bubble, you cannot shoot. Combine these two against a high class ship and you've pretty much created an infinite stun lock combo that can only be rid of by leaving the area you are in. There also seems to be a distinct lack of boss type enemies like those introduced in the second game in the series, which is a disappointment.

On a technical front, the game seems to be slowing down or locking up completely for many people. While I haven't had this problem to nearly the extent of others, I do get lag that oftentimes persists until I kill everything in the room I'm in, which is quite frankly ridiculous with 4gb of ram and a quad 2.12ghz of processing power. There are also bugs with certain abilities, most notably the apocalypse gun, which obliterates the entire room you are in, and occasionally freezes you inside a feedback loop, forcing you to restart the game.

My favorite part of the game had to be the tank creation mode, I probably spent more time designing a tank than actually playing the game. Every ship has a class, and in order to move up a class your ship needs to take up more and more of the total area of the playing field. Personally, my favorite class is class 3, 80% move speed isn't horrible and at class four the guns function as rotating turrets rather than mounted weapons, but to each his own.

All in all bubble tanks 3 is a fun creation game with a few bugs, major lag problems, and an interesting sandbox type game at its core. I'd recommend you play the second one instead of this one if the creation aspects don't interest you, as the gameplay is far smoother.