Two Fedoras

The harsh reality of the world is that you typically need money to play games. Unfortunately, Brooks and I spent all of ours on Nendoroids and fancy hats. This puts us in a position where we must pick and choose which games we can purchase and write full reviews of. But hey, just because we only played the demo doesn’t mean we aren’t going to tell you all about it! This series of posts is dedicated to those games that we played the trial of, opted not to buy, and why. We reserve the right to be wrong in our snap analysis and encourage our readers to tell us why, who knows maybe we’ll go back and take another look. If you are a developer and feel slighted, feel free to either make your demo better or give us a free serial code so we can try our best to hate the full version.

Shooting Chicken Revenge(indie)

A 2D side scrolling shooter featuring a metal soundtrack and anime art. The music and art at character select are the high point of this game demo, with the previously mentioned styles. Unfortunately the gameplay is that of a game I wouldn’t play for free in a web browser at the worlds most boring job. The aiming is rigid and seems to have 3 primary positions straight ahead, 45 degrees up, and 45 degrees down. The enemies are lifeless looking chickens who bounce and crawl in your general direction. The game itself is unpleasantly difficult and overall feels very unrewarding. For some reason killing dead chickens simply isn’t fulfilling enough. Roughly 240 Microsoft Points over fair market value.

Missing Reel(indie)

Missing Reel is more or less, a top down shooter featuring alien invaders which must be killed by 1-4 players. It uses stylized 3D graphics that don’t look too bad. The sound is rather midiocre and the gameplay is excessively generic. Similar to Shooting Chicken Revenge, you just don’t feel overly impressed with yourself after killing some aliens. With it clocking in at 240 Microsoft Points it was no dice for Missing Reel.

10 Seconds or Less(indie)

I dont get this game at all. It appears to be a simple pattern recognition game, in which you are given a small part of a picture and are instructed to move the crosshairs over the area on the larger picture. The problem is, even the pictures themselves are rather uninteresting. They look like generic stock photos you might find accompanying a third rate photo editing program.  I would think a game like this at least would offer the ability to use your own photos, but I didn’t see any mention of such a feature in the demo. In any case the game works, but seems conceptually flawed.  At 80 Microsoft Credits they almost have it priced right.

Inevitable Outcome(indie)

This game may very well not belong on this list. It is a top down shooter, with 3D models and your typical shooter mechanics, power ups, health recovery, and various weapon upgrades, but also seems to have a level up element that may greatly diminish the gameplay faults. For instance there is a speed stat you can choose to increase that probably makes the game feel a lot less sluggish. However, the game has some issues beyond gameplay as well, with what appears to be vertical sync issues causing some tearing. The developer does deserve some credit for a pretty good looking game with some good dynamic lighting and a pretty creepy atmosphere. It supports 1-4 players and is available for 240 Microsoft Points which doesn’t seem too unreasonable, but not quite reasonable enough to provoke a buy.