Pixelbit Snooker & Pool, a budget game on Xbox Indie Games for 240 Micosoft Points but is the game actually any good? Well, why not watch the video review and find out?

Xona Games has pulled off another extremely addictive Indie Game for Xbox Live users to enjoy. This time with their newest title Score Rush this game is going to keep you up all night trying to beat your previous high score. What makes this Indie Game so great? Well it’s a four player shoot’em up with ridiculous firepower, kill everything on the screen bombs and tons of enemies fire tons of bullets. Now that I have your undivided attention I’ll continue with what you can expect from this title.

Score Rush is a sixty frames per second SHMUP (Shoot’em Up) with intense colorful graphics. It plays a lot like Geometry Wars from Bizarre Creations, but with a lot more enemies to kill and even more bullets to dodge. Score Rush is a very intense 2D experience where up to four players can play at the same time and dual stick kill as much as you can. The main goal of the game is to rack up as many points as you can before you run out of lives. Simple.

In Score Rush you also can collect mini orbs that give you even more fire power to aid in your quest of annihilating the enemy. At one time I had about 15 orbs collected and I couldn’t believe the fire power that was on display. There is also one really cool weapon though that I found the most interesting and that’s the screen bomb. It will kill pretty much any enemy and all of the projectiles flying toward you as well. This bomb really saves the day when you have a million bullets coming right for you and you have nowhere to run. Just hit your left button and let the “save your ass” bomb do its thing. Trust me when I say there are going to a lot of times when this bomb comes in handy, but choose your times wisely because you only have so many available. Save these bombs and only use it when you need to frankly, save your ass.

The sounds in the game have been handled by Dragon Music. They not only have one of the coolest logos I have seen for a company, but they add good ole fashioned hard rock music as the soundtrack of the game. The hard rock really sets the tone for the game, and there is nothing like listening to rock while killing everything that moves. For the explosions and weapons they sound as you would expect them to sound. Not too much variety in the different weapons you get. No worries though as this doesn’t really affect the game play and besides the rocking soundtrack makes up for it.

The visuals in the game are run on the award winning Duality Engine. The engine does handle all the loads of enemies, their bullets and some very bright vibrant explosions on the screen with no problems at all. Score Rush resembles Geometry Wars in many ways but I honestly feel that Score Rush has a lot more polish. You can just feel the love that Xona Games put into this game to make it look as good as it does especially since it will only cost you a dollar. Yes, that’s right, only 80 Microsoft points.

The replay value on Score Rush is definitely high. While it really doesn’t set a new bar for the SHMUPS it has very addicting game play and the music is great. As I mentioned earlier you can play with up to four of your friends. The challenge of being the first to hit 1,000,000,000 points first has me hooked for sure. I will never get there but it sure will be fun trying.

The bottom line is that, Score Rush is an Indie Game that you do not want to miss out on if you are a fan of Shoot’em Ups or even a fan of Geometry Wars. A lot of heart and soul was put into this game and it delivers on almost every aspect a gamer could want. And the price of the game is definitely not an issue in anyone’s book, that’s for sure. Head onto XBLA and grab Score Rush. Its game’s like this that really put the Indie developers on the map. Fun, insane and intense gameplay will have you playing for hours on end just to achieve that high score plateau you set for yourself.

If you ever thought that Microsoft’s console was lacking some invention and some charm then you only need to look on the indie platform to find developers covering that gap that Microsoft have clearly not taken a massive shine to. Kydos Studios latest game Lumi, combines beautiful hand drawn visuals, colourful and relaxing game play, coupled with a physics based control system that is both challenging and fresh. Kydos have already had one success over the last 12 months alone with the release of Soul, so it’s hardly a surprise that there new offering would be interesting.

Just switching back to Soul, it’s unfortunate that they updated the game recently to get rid of the shrieking girl so much. This is apparently due to complaints, but I personally loved shitting my pants every 5 minutes. You knew the scream was coming but at the same time it still scared you half to death. Lumi on the other hand is serene visually and audibly so it’s a massive change for the developers from the rather freaky Soul. The premise of the game is to guide your creature around stages plunged in darkness and find firefly’s. By feeding the fire fly’s to the light tree’s you’ll be able to bring the world back into light. A nice concept. Where the games unique control system comes along is that your creature is magnetised and must travel around magnetised rings which can attract and repel off of each other.

Controls take place on the trigger buttons for the most part and initially the red and blue ring combination can be a little fiddly. As soon as you know the concepts of magnetism you’ll be able to use repelling techniques to travel between the rings dotted around the level with ease. It feels fresh, we certainly cannot think of any other game to apply the same concept. You are not expected to light all of the tree’s in each level to progress within the level, however to get 100% completion, you’ll need to light them all. The game gradually increases in difficulty, more traversing and some obstacles and traps will make you carefully navigate the stages but there is nothing here that will frustrate you, but at the same time still offer a decent challenge.

Lumi has illuminated the Xbox Indie games arena, which for the last month or so has become stale with some very shit games. Kydos have once again produced another gem and it’s little wonder that this game won the Build, Dream, Play contest recently. Another fantastic effort and at a steal price too!

Tasty morsel’s of time consumption

I am starting to love Xbox Indie Games more and more. I am also starting to loathe Xbox Live Arcade even more after recent revelations from a developer that pitching games to XBLA have now become stupidly hard to get approval as Microsoft is simply bolstering it’s weekly queue full of games by the big developers. The fact is, Microsoft is a massive cash hungry machine and whichever way you look at it, sometimes they make monetary decisions without looking at the best interests of gaming itself. The Indie Games section was very much undervalued by allot of gamers whom are signed up to Microsoft’s service and even we were criticised by some stupid air head that we don’t offer enough support for the platform because we gave a bad rating to Hoyles Texas Hold Em. The problem was that the author of the comments obviously didn’t look further this his very own nose to see the other reviews that we had on display.

Colourful and reminds me of my school scrapbook.

Today’s latest Indie review, comes from Spyn Doctor Games an independent one man operation headed up by Johannes Hubert. Spyn Doctor games for those unfamiliar have also made the games Kuchibi, Golden Tangram and also single handed responsible for Tony Blair’s coming to power as the UK prime minister in 1997. Okay, so the last part isn’t true but if Alistair Campbell had a games studio, he’d call it Spyn Doctor. Now, the game has you navigating bugs from your doodles into a pot of honey, for some unbeknown reason this then brings the bugs back into the real world and hey presto, you have a unbelievable and rather random half baked story to the game. Don’t worry though, this game is 80 Microsoft points, so you’re not going to care about that element.

What you will care about is whether this game is much fun, provides much of a challenge and whether you will get bang for your buck. Fortunately the game does fulfil in the majority of those area’s but that really depends on what sort of a gamer you are. To best compare this game it does remind me a little of Lemmings but without all the tools. You’ll have to draw bridges, lines and dotted ladders for the bugs to make their way to the honey pot and this is all done by a pen that you control with your Xbox controller. You will find that you will run out of ink when you draw after the tutorial missions, so you’ll need to delete some of your existing drawings to create new paths for sectioned bugs. Sounds like a good interactive challenge? Yes, in many ways it is, whether I would say that you’d actually have fun doing it, is questionable. Be warned with this title, you will have to sink in some serious time to even complete a level, it took me nearly 20-25 minutes to complete a single level. Perhaps I am cack handed, but I’m usually great with physics puzzles and general logic, this then requires a level of patience that simply will not be cut out for everyone. One of my biggest bug bears with the game is the randomisation of the bugs themselves. They’ll often follow a set path and just as it looks like your going to complete a level, one of the bugs decides to move in a different direction. This can become insanely frustrating at times, especially if the bugs fall to the bottom of the level map.

Presentation is definately one of the games strong points.

Graphically the game is really pretty, the doodles are nice to look at and Spyn Doctor add in some high score leaderboard’s that seem to be populated by people with Quantum Physics degree’s. I like how you can zoom into the level for more detail to make drawing more easier and I also like the fact that they have even considered the ability to speed up the bugs travel (much like in Lemmings) and also the ability to increase the drawing speed of your pen to help you complete the level quicker. There are enough levels in this title to give you an extensive lifespan and like one of the featured review blurbs says on the Spyn Doctor website, this is the type of game you’ll want to play in between other games. It’s not something you could sit through and complete in one sitting, not unless you have Buddhist like qualities. The audio in the game is adequate too, nothing special, nothing really worth talking about.

In essence then, Doodles Are Bugged packs a hefty value punch for the money your forking out 80 Microsoft points, which is the equivalent price of buying a share in ALDI. Cheap, very cheap. If you are technically challenged like I am you’ll be able to get over the initial frustration by taking a look on the Spyn Doctor forums or there featured videos for solutions on how to complete levels. This will help you out, as once you get the basic principles in place it becomes a more enjoyable game to play. Do we recommend this title? Absolutely. Doodles Are Bugged is one of the very few games that can wipe hours from your day, without you even realising it. Addictive (once you get around the logic)

A diamond in the rough

I sometimes wondered whether there was much point in RTS games on Xbox Live. Only a few have been made well. Well, 2 actually and I think we may have a third on our hands. The two that work well for me are Tom Clancy’s Endwar and Halo Wars. Both titles have been made with consoles in mind and fortunately Protege Productions have also thought about console gamers in this RTS title. Sometimes in RTS games you feel like god, or you feel a little subtracted from the overall action, mainly because you are giving orders around. Well originally RTS games did not work like that and for some stupid fucking reason everyone seems to think that RTS games started with Command & Conquer, bullshit. Anyway, i won’t go into a fullscale rant about that, mainly because i think C&C games are drastically overrated and that they suck harder than Michael Barrymoore on poppers when it comes to it on consoles.

So, what is different here? Well firstly, you are actually a part of the action. You man a helicopter that looks like it’s come straight out of the movie Avatar. As you progress within the story mode you can indeed fly some more interesting ships that offer you better speed and also aerobatics. What does this all mean? Well you’ll actually be doing the shooting and missile launching yourself, whilst you can buy units to follow a set path to the enemies base. It’s refreshing that you don’t control the NPC’s that are on your team and that’s good because they are pretty intelligent themselves at shooting shit up. When it comes to strategical elements you really need to cover deployment. You can buy tanks, surface to air missle launchers, normal troops but the fourth unit is deceptors. Deceptors are the EndGame. You need to protect these with your life, as they are the holy grail to winning a battle. If you can manage to get one of your deceptors into the enemy base, it will knock out the shields around the base and open it up for fire and that’s it, the game is up.

Homing missles, salvation!

Story mode really is pretty pointless, its very empty and the only real noticable effects of going from one level to the next is that you’ll have new vehicles to buy or special weapons to rotate between. Special weapons then are pretty useful, you can have anything from being able to parachute your infantry, straight to homing missles or mach boosts. As you fly your helicopter you’ll need to be careful about your fuel and ammunition levels, these will run out. So flying back to your base at times is essential. You can thankfully buy extra lives with credits in this game, they are pretty costly but definately worthwhile as your helicopter is not only leathal for combat, it’s also your eyes in the sky to see how well your machines are doing on the ground. It’s funny, this game is by an indie publisher and yet it pisses all over Hudson’s Military Madness: Nectaris that we reviewed last month.

Perhaps the most enjoyable part about Armor Valley is that you can bypass the rather pointless campaign mode and jump into quickplay. Fortunately the developer has been very coy in allowing you to access all the level maps from the off, which means none of this unlock-level-in-campaign-mode bullshit. So yes, thankyou Protege because that little masterstroke alone just bought you an extra staff in our final score. The maps really range from various landscapes, from nuclear to ice, straight through to desert landscapes that look dryer than Margraet Beckett’s crusty mot. Having access to all these levels will certainly take away the feeling of frustration which can sometimes reside when you have helicopter battles against the A.I. This is one area the game could of had a little more attention, manual targetting of missiles is so annoying on Level 2 that sometimes you feel like deleting the game off your system, thankfully Level 3 onwards introduces homing missiles and that frustration is gone. It’s a great feeling, similar to taking the stress edge off by having a crafty wank in the office toilets. My other gripe with the game is the bombing system, you can have a top-down camera in this game to aim bombs at turrents, don’t bother. In some maps you’ll struggle to find what terrain is flat and what is hundreds of feet in the air.

Just to talk briefly about the sound, the soundtrack is really professional. It sounds rather epic in scale. However, the sound effects in the game in most cases are woeful, especially when your helicopter crashes into the ground, it’s particularly awful that soundbyte. Either way it once again shows that the production quality needed some extra polish which if given a bigger budget no doubt would of succeeded.

Split screen support (hardly anyone does anymore)

The big cau de date that the developers had up their sleeves was multiplayer. It’s split screen, it plays excellently and there is no frame rate slow down. I’ve seen a few reviewers bitch and moan about how there is no Xbox Live support here, but unlike the other reviewers, I actually have friends so that’s not an issue. Adding multiplayer has added longevity to a title that already would have given you your 400 Microsoft Points worth. On that note let’s talk about the price. 400 Microsoft Points is perhaps a steep price to pay for an indie game and I must state that graphically you are definately not getting the polish you would expect from a game sitting on Xbox Live Arcade  so fortunately the gameplay does make up for that. The game does look a tad hideous in places but nice in others. I’d love to see this title totally refined with a bigger budget because I would love to play a sequel and immerse myself in proper decent HD visuals. That last sentence alone is a testament to the developers themselves because i’m not a massive lover of RTS games, but this title had me in all sorts of emotions. At one point i thought the game was shit, I then discovered how to beat the opponents on level 2 and then i found that quickplay offered me salvation if i was to get stuck in story mode. So if your looking to get into RTS games, or are a seasoned RTS player, I would recommend this game, even at the 400 Microsoft Points. Sure it has its niggles and annoyances but you are going to get your moneys worth here and it’s a very entertaining multiplayer experience for those that have a social circle off the inter-webs. Highly recommended.