Two Fedoras

Review: Nasty

March 3rd, 2010 | by GeoffS

Old eccentric GuyBob, everyone thought he was mad. That is, until the evil Dr. Slug came to this world and GuyBob’s sons, Guy and Bob, were called upon to plow through 100 dangerous creature filled levels and save the world. And thus, the stage is set for Kris Steele and company’s platforming shooter Nasty.

Gameplay

Nasty, a traditional 2D platforming shooter, consists of 100 single frame levels. These levels are filled with various combinations of monsters that will require slaying in order to unlock the door to the next level. There is also a point system that, in addition to granting bragging rights, will give additional lives every 10,000 points. The extra lives come in handy because this game (I’m looking at you when I say this Level 70) is quite challenging.

The creatures’ behaviors vary and understanding them is essential to making your way through the levels successfully. Some creatures will simply walk forward until they run into something and turn around, others will bounce off a surface and continue in a new direction, and more yet will display an intent to kick your ass by continually meandering in your direction. The creatures of Nasty also differ from difficulty mode to difficulty mode. An example of these differences is the accountant ghost. In easy and normal mode they simply chase you around until either you die or they die. However, in hard mode once they have been destroyed, they split into four little ghosts who then proceed to resume the chase.

Did I mention the clock? Yeah there’s a clock and, of course, it ticks down! Once the time on a particular level runs out you won’t simply lose, that would be dull. To keep things exciting Nasty will deploy Doom Bolt, a giant ball of spikes that chases you unabatedly until either he impales you or you clear the stage of enemies.

When it comes to death Nasty is seriously retro as it relies on a finite number of lives and a limited quantity of continues that it is all eager to relieve you of. The game has a tendancy to be challenging and at times down right frustrating, but manages to balance it out with a pretty decent death system. This balance is one of the systems used to differentiate between the three difficulty modes. You will receive five lives and fifteen continues on easy, three lives and five continues on normal, and three lives and three continues on hard. On top of this system all modes allow you to save progress every 10 levels by establishing a check point. Once you wipe out all your continues you can start a new game from the last check point you unlocked. This was the first time I had seen these two style systems work together in such a way and I found that I really appriciated them as they managed to balance a sense of penalty for death without really preventing you from progressing through the game.

Power ups and points are sprinkled throughout the world and come in various shapes, sizes, and effects. The power ups persist until death and can, in some cases, be required to finish a level. So don’t die because the power up won’t respawn unless you use a continue which is is less than ideal. The list of power ups is quite extensive; they can stop time, improve your offensive ability, increase your jump hight, or make you invincible. The points are all over the place and don’t require much explaining, go get you some.

Bosses appear every twenty levels or so and are mostly of fairly simple design. They will typically make use of minions and mechanics present in other creatures in the game. One of the bugs I experienced during my play through of the game was during the Hell Snake boss, the segments of the creature would break apart into little minions and fly off in a pattern. If these segment are destroyed while bouncing off the ground the minions will tend to become stuck and difficult to destroy. On a more pleasant boss related note, a character who plagues you through the entire game shows up as a boss and presents you with the opportunity to have your sweet revenge.

There is a cooperative mode as well as a battle mode, I unfortunately didn’t have an opportunity to test these, as I have no friends or enemies, but if the cooperative play is anything like I would expect it is, it’s probably pretty damn fun in that double dragons sort of way.

Audio Visual

As previously noted, Nasty is a retro game and, as you’d expect, the visuals are retro as well. The sprites look good and are animated well as are most of the enemies. The levels are decent looking with some nice background art, though there aren’t really any opportunities for any parallax to show it off since the camera is stationary.

I’m not really sure why, but for some reason the ghosts don’t feel quite right visually. This visually awkward feeling goes for the boss Hell Snake as well. I’m not sure if it’s that they are so large and simple in design that they feel as though they lack detail, when compared to the densely detailed smaller sprites, or what. That said, I found the simplest solution to the problem was to shoot them. Oh maybe they could have little green accountant visors? I did mention they are accountant ghosts, right? Don’t be so surprised, according to A Christmas Carol one in four ghosts are accountants.

On the issue of level design, there were some repeats, which is to be expected in a game with 100 levels. I just felt it was worth noting.

How does it sound? It sounds pretty good. The start screen theme is decent, although the game soundtrack gets a little repetitive during marathon play. The sound effects are pretty generic retro, which is a given considering the style of the game. So in essence the sound all works fairly well for the game but it won’t make you weep with joy.

Summary

Nasty costs 80 Microsoft Points on the Xbox Live Indie Games store. Thats a dollar for a game with 100 levels, 3 difficulty modes, cooperative play, and a battle mode. The normal modes have a solid 4 hours or so of play through time. All that said the game is retro and will appeal to mostly retro fans, if you don’t count yourself among such fans I would recommend trying the demo before giving it a buy. The demo is pretty representative of what you will experience in the game and should help you make the right call.