Thursday 26 July 2012

Indie Games: Grotto King


Recently I’ve been playing through a fair few independently made games. When playing these indie games you often find you play a fair few from a certain developer. One such developer is Brendon Chung, lead of award-winning independent games company Blendo Games.

Grotto King is a free game that comes from this company. The game is pretty short, coming at maybe 8 minutes overall. You are on a quest to kill a monster in its lair and your reward is a massive bounty. So you venture forth, into the dungeon/well. Glory awaits!

The actual gameplay mechanics are fine. The inability to look up or down I found to be irritating, but there really isn’t any need to look up or down. The gameplay at the very least is built around this limitation. You fire arrows at the three monsters in this game (or four birds that will explode) and at targets. The targets are there to trigger moving blocks or doors to open, but there are no real puzzle elements.

That’s about it for the game, actually. There’s nothing specifically interesting about the game other than exploding wildlife. You kill a few beholders/eye-monsters in simplistic fights, and then it finishes. The ending to the game is abrupt and somewhat disappointing and the gameplay is adequate, but nothing spectacular. There’s no specific story to speak of to carry you through, so nothing really shines through.

Saying that, though, the general aesthetic is great. I did like the look of the game, though the eyeball monsters were somewhat disappointing. The environment was very good, yes, but it was nothing to really make the game great. 

Overall, the game is fairly bland, but I can tell work definitely went into it. If there were better fights or maybe a better/funny ending then I could enjoy it more, but all I can do right now is say “Meh...”

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A Note On Ratings

This system is now defunct as I no longer use ratings. However, this is kept here just for older reviews.

I honestly believe that with a 10-point scale you can't gain everything from a review, however this is an easy way to quickly gauge my feelings as well as useful for comparisons.

Some reviews using the 10-point scale like to have 7 as an average for their reviews, however I prefer to use 5 as an average. The following also shows the colour coding I use:

0: May well be the worst thing ever made. Ever.
1-3: It's not good. At all.
4-6:: It's pretty much average. Not good, but not bad.
7-9: It's pretty good, with hardly any faults.
10: It's damn near perfect and may as well have been made by God!