Good afternoon, everybody! Today was normally going to be reserved for a new weekly feature where I review an app game to supplement my console releases each weekend, but the unpredictable responsibilities of school are going to get in the way today. My plan was to play through my intended game and take all the notes I needed to last week, but I ended up getting distracted by a few other games. The culprit is the Humble Bundle, and I couldn’t be happier.
What is the Humble Bundle, you might ask? You can learn a lot more about it here than you will from me, but I’m going to go into my quick impressions on each of the games you can get as well. Every couple of months, a new package titled the Humble Bundle is released on the main website. Each new bundle contains a handful of indy games, usually ranging between five and ten dollars to purchase normally. The unique thing about buying a package of games from the bundle is that you set your own price. If you want to be stingy and pay a single penny to collect a couple of new games, that’s an option. You can also buy the games for their retail price, or be generous and donate far more than that (last Humble Bundle saw Minecraft creator Notch donating $8,000, and a group of My Little Pony fans donating a whopping $16,000). Each bundle takes multiple statistics based on how often people pay different amount, and a rapidly changing average amount payed by consumers is calculated. If you donate more than the combined average, you usually get a bonus game or two as well. You also get the complete soundtrack to each game, which is an absolute must for videogame audiophiles like me. Money goes to a split (decided by you) across the developers, charity, and the distributors of the Humble Bundle packages.
The current new bundle is the Humble Bundle for Android, featuring the unique ability to download any game that you buy for PC, Mac, Linux, and Android supported devices. The game lineup is Anomaly, Osmos, and Edge, along with the addition of the incredibly successful World of Goo if you donate an amount greater than the average purchase price (currently hovering around $6, and it seems to be rising a few cents every few hours). I hadn’t played any of the game’s three main titles, but I bought World of Goo for the Wii when it was released for $20 and I ended up loving it. Seeing as you can get all four games for $6, it’s an absolute bargain. I highly encourage you like Humble Bundle on Facebook to stay updated on which new packages they release. If you like videogames, you won’t regret it.
I gave each of the three games I hadn’t played before a spin, so here’s my first reaction on each of them. I don’t have World of Goo fresh enough in my head at the moment to talk about it in depth, but it received critical acclaim from every major news outlet and you can find much more about it there. It’s a unique and beautiful puzzle game that involves creating structures, and it’s a lot more fun than it sounds.
As for the other three games:
Anomaly
I had heard about Anomaly before, but never really got invested enough in the game’s release to look at it for purchase. Lucky for me, I was able to get the game as part of a wonderful bargain, and now know that it’s a game I would have easily paid full price for. Set in the near future across multiple countries, you play as a human task force assigned with defeating an alien invasion on Earth. The gameplay is a unique twist often marketed as “reverse tower defense”. Instead of being the team forced to plant down structures and prevent an onslaught of marching opponents, you play as the marching opponents looking to overtake the towers.
Both the isometric view and detailed graphics remind me a lot of Starcraft 2. What Anomaly doesn’t remind me of Starcraft, though, is the complexity. Instead of playing as a group of individually controllable units, you play a single squad commander that supports a convoy of armored vehicles. As the commander, you’re given a multitude of support powerups for your team, as well as the ability to purchase and upgrade your squad of units. There’s still plenty of depth to determining how to protect your team and which route is the most advantageous for you, but it’s all without tedious micromanaging of every single unit. It’s not without its flaws (the voice acting is hit or miss and the inability to turn around on a road can be annoying), but it’s quickly becoming a game that I really enjoy.
Osmos
An interesting, ambient puzzle game about single celled organisms. It sounds incredibly boring, but it’s actually a fantastic time sink. The main concept of the game is finding ways to make your own organism larger than everything around it. You can absorb any other cell that is smaller than your own, but you also decrease in size as you fire off tiny cells behind you to propel forward. As you get into the deeper levels (especially the ones with multiple live cells trying to outlive you) the challenge increases tremendously, leaving for a game that can really test your ability to react quickly and plan ahead. The soundtrack is amazing, too.
Edge
Edge is another game that is a lot more interesting than it sounds. You take the roll of a single cube, rolling over a land composed of cubes as you collect more cubes. I have no other way of explaining it than that. It hosts some absolutely fantastic chiptunes to accompany its soundtrack, and you get a new song for every stage! It’s extremely simple and might not hold your interest much longer than a single run through each of its levels, but for such a low bundle price it’s a nice add-on.
If school isn’t still hounding me tomorrow, expect a review of the iOS app, Temple Run. In the meantime, enjoy the current Humble Bundle while its still here! Even if you don’t jump on this one, I’m sure there will be plenty more to come.
-Josh
