By the year 2500, Earth had become toxic and unsafe for human life. Pollution and overpopulation had ravaged the planet, forcing humanity to the stars. Colonies and settlements soon sprung up across the solar system, but man had not left its thirst for war behind. Then, they learned their sun was dying, and everything changed. Only when faced with threat greater than each other did the nations of man finally come together. The United Colonies of SOL (UCS) was born, its first and only mission: to locate a new home for mankind, safely beyond the doomed borders of our solar system.

Suit up and take on the role of the Lieutenant Commander, ace fighter pilot and 2nd in command of the UCS Atlas, as you search for a new home, battle a mysterious enemy, and rescue humanity from a fiery end.

What We Think

Sol: Exodus makes use of the Unreal engine to bring back the deep space dogfighting spirit of games like Wing Commander and applies an impressive coat of paint.

Reviewer Note: As the developers are still pushing out patches that change the game a lot, I must warn readers that I may have not played anywhere near the same game as what may currently be out. With that said the game lasted me three hours. There are no multiplayer modes but there are leaderboards and achievements which might keep players entertained for a few more hours.

Ludicrous Speed

The story was short but it did wrap up basically everything it had set out to do. As the game introduces the flight controls, it also explains that SOL, our sun, is dying and humanity now needs to expand its reach to another solar system. (Side note, SOL is not actually the name of our sun.) The prologue mission explains that humanity has found another habitable solar system but the Children of Dawn (COD) believe that God intended us to live and die in the galaxy orbiting Sol. Ten years later, the news reaches the dying solar system to announce that everyone can pack their bags and move to the new system (as if it’s just that simple).

Rescuing transport ships by shooting COD

A few rounds of of the eight mission series are dedicated to escorting transport ships. The COD continuously try to prevent the player from getting transport ships back to the main ship, the Atlas. These transport ships can be destroyed without requiring you to go back and reload the level, so it’s not a total loss but it is rather frustrating for such a quick game have so much content that feels more like filler. With everything said and done the game could probably be cut down considerably between the pauses in the A.I., waiting for the next part to push forward.

The cut scenes can’t be skipped and if you don’t pass a mission, there are no save points. The entire mission must be begun anew, from the start, no matter how much progress has been made by the player. This making the the inability to skip cut scenes more frustrating.

Shooting COD

As gameplay goes, it’s not terrible but there is definitely room for improvement. The player controls a fighter-class ship from a cockpit view. All enemies are engaged in dogfights. There are three weapons to choose from: a chain gun, missiles and a rail gun, and although all are semi-unique, players can clear most missions by spamming the missiles and rail gun.

Besides shooting, there is the enemy ship hacking mechanic which is fairly simple; target the “hack point” that the Atlas will find for you using the “torchlight” feature, then simply remember what numbers show on the targeting screen and select the correct sequence at the end. This can reveal weak points on the ships, and can even fool the AI on the other ships to attack each other. The opportunity only comes up a few times and can get annoying to wait for the hack point to be presented but it does break up the monotony of constantly firing on enemies.

A lot of the mission objectives are variants of “Battle COD Forces” but with only about three different types of typical enemies it quickly gets repetitive. Larger and unique ships will occasionally appear, but once they are destroyed, they don’t reappear. The “cannon fodder” enemy classes that the game throws at you to hold you over get annoying and bland after only one or two missions. Replaying missions to achieve the highest rank possible is advisable as the bonus points awarded can be used to upgrade the fighter ship.

The HUD is quite nicely done though it does take up a large part of the total view, obscuring some of the niceties beyond the cockpit window. Nonetheless, that is endemic to the genre.

In Space, No One Can Hear Your Soundtrack Looping

The sound effects are repetitive to the point that they become grating. The music is rather epic, if at times a little generic and there is only one track that is only about half a minute, and I quickly turned it off. However, the voice acting was a definite plus: it is well done and helps to make the story and characters more engaging. Good sound design was otherwise demonstrated throughout.

Zooming around in Neptune, shooting COD... Again.

Space Oddity

Overall the story was decent, better than some of the sci-fi-themed games I have recently encountered, but it is clearly not a game based around story. The graphics are impressive, but ultimately don’t offer enough to cover up a general lack of substance. The gameplay was a bit wearing and I only ended up playing the game an hour at a time so I feel it wasn’t horrible but was still really lacking. To put the final nail in the coffin, right when the game was starting to get interesting, the final mission was a let down as, at its conclusion, it isn’t explained what the player should really be attacking. Also for a game that can be cleared in three hours, charging $10 USD seems a bit extravagant.

Nonetheless, if you are a fan of the genre, you might give it a go.

Get Sol: Exodus on Steam

Get Sol: Exodus at the Official Site

Rating: ★★★☆☆ 

You play as Victor and Alicia, a couple who’ve just moved into a new apartment. While trying to get settled in, they soon discover that all is not as it seems in the quiet, unassuming apartment building…

What We Think

Among the dozens of interesting games I saw at IndieCade 2011, I happened to stumble upon one of the finalists in a quiet back corner room where a few computers were tucked away, though their screens were being washed out by the sun blasting through a window in the later part of the afternoon.

Liking stories that explore the landscape of the subconscious and dream-states, and a long time fan of “Psychonauts,” naturally, I was immediately intrigued by the name “The Dream Machine” and then subsequently delighted by its unique look. The graphics you see, comprise hand-made stop-motion animation of clay, Popsicle sticks and other found items handled with painstaking care that would make the Quay Brothers blush.

To quote the developers:

“In order to differentiate it from most other games out there we decided to steer as far away from all things polygonal/vectoral, and are actually building all the environments, props and characters out of materials like clay and cardboard.”

The amount of creativity, and time that went into this is unlike any other I have yet seen. Whereas Telltale adapted the famous claymation franchise Wallace and Gromit for the PC with 3D graphics resembling clay, Dream Machine is literally to claymation what Dragon’s Lair was to Saturday Morning cartoons, except that it has much greater interactivity than the cut-scene style of Bluth’s standup arcade title. But I felt the same sense of awe as I did then.

Gameplay

Once I got to play a few minutes of the game I knew I was in trouble. The creepy vibe and fascinatingly mysterious story had me hooked. It wasn’t until tonight I was finally given the chance to play the first three chapters, and I can tell you that what worked in the first only gets better with the following chapters.

Beginning on a deserted island, you are taken on a journey through a surreal dream-like world, trying to solve a mystery that gets ever stranger and dire. The creepy vibe of the characters, are only made ever more captivating by the taut, but pensive ambient soundtrack that plays behind it. The music deserves a second mention; it really helps put you in the vibe of being in the dream world, that subtly and gradually becomes a nightmare.

The game is quite challenging, but not impossible, and with a little time, (and verbal brainstorming I had to do aloud), I pushed my way through the puzzles that appear within the narrative progression and often require surprising and imaginative solutions.

I want to give nothing away about the plot so I won’t delve into story points, but I believe it took me a total of three hours to finish the first three chapters, and those three hours had me at the edge of my seat and exclaiming aloud in angst when I arrived at the words TO BE CONTINUED that finally appeared across my screen.

Again bear in mind that I only played the first three chapters which are all that has been released thus far. More chapters are in production.

The HUD is clean, modern and nicely executed. Everything from my inventory to dialogue was well placed, easy to read, and never got in the way. From a mere design perspective, Dream Machine was a pleasure to navigate and interact with.

My score

This game gets 5 out of 5 stars for me: one for the plot line, brilliant, interesting, smart, captivating. One for the one-of-a-kind animation that is a character all its own – for the fact that it is so refreshing to see true art in motion in an indie game – true artisty in playable form. One for the whimsically mysterious, and sometimes hypnotic music that helps teleport you to the world of the Dream Machine and maintain the texture and tone of the game even as you migrate from daydreams to nightmares. One for the clever and challenging goals you must accomplish, that get increasingly difficult, but never so frustrating as to make you want to quit.

In other words, they were very balanced with a nice progression. One for the fact it kept me hanging, entertained, captivated and left me excited thinking about the world and characters long after it was over, just like a great bedtime fable.

To get a sense of the work, craftsmanship and thought that went into this title, I recommend visiting the developers blog for behind-the-scenes photos, musings about the game logic and their workflow.

The Dream Machine can be purchased for 5 Euros per chapter or the first 5 chapters can be purchased as an “Early Bird Bundle” for 14 Euros direct from the official site which is a 20% discount (in case you suck at math).

This should be on the top of everyone’s list in 2012. Even if you aren’t a fan of Point and Click adventures (a generic category that encompasses anything from Gemini Rue to Machinarium), I can assure you “The Dream Machine” is an amazing game experience worth your hard-earned bucks.

As a special bonus, you can play the entire chapter absolutely free within your browser at the site below. (Flash 8 or higher support required).

The Dream Machine – Official Site

Rating: ★★★★★ 

FlatOut 3: Chaos & Destruction brings a new dimension to high speed destruction racing. Feel the adrenaline pulse through your veins as you barrel through insane race tracks against monster trucks, race cars, off road vehicles and much more. FlatOut 3: Chaos & Destruction is demolition racing at its extreme.

What We Think

OK, so I’ve rewritten this review, in its entirety, several times now. First, like most reviewers, I was upset that this game wasn’t anything like its predecessors, in content or quality. Then, I decided I was being overly critical and should review it on its own merits. Now, I’m thinking somewhere in between is the place I want to be because, let’s face it, if you want to go out and buy an intellectual property, you have to live up to it rather than riding its coattails.

When I was first asked to review Flatout 3 I thought “How is that an indie game?”, then my brain reminded me that I really like the Flatout franchise and that I should shut up and start downloading. So I did. When I could finally start playing I couldn’t manage to ignore my brain’s constant question over the cheap hard rock soundtrack…

“Are you sure you downloaded the right game?”

Visuals

From the opening screens and menu selection I was pretty psyched. Everything had that gritty look and the cars had that slightly beat up appearance so characteristic of the series. Once I was on the track, however, everything changed.

Cars look very little like they did during selecting. Instead they’ve got a shiny plastic look to them with little to no texturing. Collision damage looks equally artificial; fenders hang off the back in awkward angles, the hood flips up and becomes visually distracting for long periods of time without tearing off. Doors hang fully open despite the fact you’re supposedly doing 275kph.

While the tracks fare much better visually than the cars, it’s hard to notice unless you stop, because any kind of speed causes everything to become a blurry mess. They also use a soft black vignette border during gameplay for some inexplicable reason.

Sound

Audio was equally disappointing: in-game music in the Flatout series has, up until now, been a hard rock soundtrack using licenced music from little-known and up-and-coming bands. Flatout 3, instead, goes with in-house music that mostly sounds like the opening riff from a good song repeated ad nauseum. It thankfully includes the ability to play songs from your own collection, but even this is so unsophisticated that it just randomly picks tunes from the whole library. And who wants to listen to the song you cry into your pillow to at night while barrelling down the raceway?

Sound effects are also subpar, involving average-sounding engine noises and cheap crashes. Where are the sounds of dirt and rocks hitting the undercarriage on dirt tracks, or the hum off the walls in a tunnel?

Gameplay

After four or five patches in its short lifetime, gameplay still suffers.

There are almost a dozen modes to Flatout 3, but most of them seem like tacked-on simulations of previous Team 6 games. Stunt is back, which always seemed like a distraction more than a real game mode and is even less interesting this time around.

There are two demolition derby modes, both of which are tedious because it takes forever to wreck a vehicle. There’s a monster truck mode where none of vehicles move or behave like a monster truck. There’s an F1 simulation with generally uninteresting tracks. Nightshift mode is the classic race mode, except at night with rain and bad fog effects that make an otherwise blurry game almost impossibly blurry.

Offroad mode, while it claims to be free form, is a race of some sort, which I won every time, but I’ll be damned if I ever knew where I was going or how I found the finish. Lastly, there’s challenge mode, which involves fifty pre-set elements from the other modes that you must go through one at a time.

The physics engine just isn’t up to the task of pulling off any of these modes, however – there’s no real sense of the cars connecting with the road, slipping and sliding and feeling like you’re hovering just above the surface. Collisions suffer from cars being somehow magnetically stuck together (less so since the last patch).

I’ve had a few occasions in the last day or so when my vehicle lightly slams into a rock and gets stuck, vibrating there, until it is wrecked. I can’t count the number of times I fell through the universe, left to float in the ether until I reset my car. There are junked cars on many tracks, as obstacles, but instead of slamming into them it seems like a heavy blast of air blows your car slightly into the air when you strike them. Other than the speedometer saying you’re going twice the rate of the previous games, Flatout 3 seems much slower than previous editions.

Let’s talk about the basic racing game a little more now.

Instead of the cup-racing series common to the franchise, here you take on individual races, of which there are only 13 tracks and their reverses. You must beat one track in order to unlock the next on the list.

Car selection is also limited. Oh, there are four styles of car and multiple cars for each style, but each car from a style is statistically and mechanically the same. Just a new model and skin.

All the great tuning and upgrade options from previous editions of the game are gone, replaced by a few pre-set tuning options that don’t seem to make a whole lot of difference. Flatout 3 also includes 20 different drivers to choose from, but they don’t have any effect on gameplay.

Conclusions

While none of that sounds good, it’s not exactly terrible either. And there’s something to be said about a CEO who’s willing to get on the Steam boards, engage with players, and take the results back to the team to tweak the game. It’s definitely a better game today than it was upon release.

If you’re looking for a new Flatout game, it’s safe to score this a 1. If you’re just looking for another racing game this is more like a 2, so that’s what I’m giving it. If you’re looking for smash ‘em up racing game and haven’t played Flatout: Ultimate Carnage I would recommend it over 3. If you want one with better multiplayer and a good modding community, I’d recommend 2. Really, I could recommend a dozen older, cheaper, racing titles on Steam that are easily better than this.

Get Flatout 3: Chaos & Destruction on Steam

Rating: ★★☆☆☆ 

Red Eclipse is a single-player and multi-player first-person ego-shooter, built as a total conversion of Cube Engine 2, which lends itself toward a balanced gameplay, completely at the control of map makers, while maintaining a general theme of agility in a variety of environments.

What We Think

I have used Linux as well as FreeBSD for the last five years, usually as servers to make my life easier, but I have also had a good amount of experience with an open source desktop. I have played a lot of open source games and, in fact, some of my favorite games have been ones that were open source: Urban Terror and Tremulous among them.

As I played Red Eclipse I was reminded more and more of Quake or even Unreal Tournament. It’s a rather simple fast-paced shooter at its core that offers a nice range of play modes and modifiers. The gameplay is nothing short of stupendous, allowing the player to run on walls, double jump and turn jumps into flying kicks that usually translate into instant kills.

Glowing swords are always a good thing.

In modes like Medieval, wherein the player only gets a sword with insta-gib mode, (which is usually turned on in most of the communities servers), one hit of a sword instantly kills, requiring that you have a fast reaction to get close, make the kill and get out before anyone slices you up in kind. Another unique mode is Bomber-Ball which is very much like soccer except with weapons. The Capture-The-Flag mode brought a lot of fun and reminded me of my old days on Half-Life maps that provided the same experience without the same graphics or game-play capabilities.

A face full of rasberry jam brings me back to the good ol' days.

Of course I could go on forever about the mix-and-match style of the game. Mixing Bomber-Ball with expert means that only headshots kill, making a difficult but exciting game of Bomber-Ball and so on. The one interesting mode that really popped out at me was the single-player campaign mode. It was only a run and gun through a few city blocks which seem big but are, in fact, rather small and short-lived. It provided a quick and easy entertainment but the online action really provided the real thrill.

The rendering engine is the open sourced “Cube 2″ engine which was originally created for “Cube 2: Sauerbraten” but as far as I remember it never looked as good as it has in Red Eclipse. They really brought out the engine using the fluid lighting and shadowing all to their advantage, if your PC can keep up with it. The shots off the laser guns provide a glow that not only help locate the shooter in the fast-paced frenzy but allow the game to look amazing.

The weapons are very unique and consist of a pistol, shotgun, sword, flamethrower, submachine gun, plasma gun, rocket launcher, grenade, and rifle. All of these guns have secondary abilities which are more powerful but have their own drawbacks. The weapons are very much like the Unreal Tournament weapons and resemble them in action as well.

If I have gripes, they include the fact that presently the game is only on Desura, whereas I would love to see it on Steam under the free games section. Additionally, I would love to see more player models as opposed to simply having different colors to represent teams; there is presently no model differentiation. When all is said and done, however, Red Eclipse is worth your time to download and try for yourself.

Get Red Eclipse free from the official site

Rating: ★★★★☆ 

A luxuriant abstract 3D puzzle game, wherein the player explores many different rules and mechanics over 17 diverse worlds, each with their own objectives.

What We think

English Country Tune is a deviously diverse puzzle game that is eerily soothing, even as the confines of your logical mind are being dashed on the rocks.

Gleaming the Cube

Nominated for Excellence in Design for the 2012 Independent Games Festival, ECT takes the player through a bevy of different puzzles, each encased in one of the various worlds that make up the larger universe. Completing all of the puzzles in a world will open up the adjacent worlds, thus unlocking new challenging types of objectives.

The core mechanic of the game involves moving a two-dimensional square across various three-dimensional grids. Using the directional keys, the player must manipulate the targets to the end points of the each stage. The initial challenges include moving “eggs” into incubators. Unfortunately, the eggs only exhibit gravity as a defense mechanism, and will “drop” drop in the direction that would be considered down from the last motion of the player. It is every bit as confusing as it sounds, and having the 3D grid shift around drastically to track the player tile can make it easy to lose track of direction.

Up So Floating Many Bells Down

Worlds unlocked later on will require the player to move “whales” around by the beams of energy they emanate, as opposed to moving the whale itself. Players familiar with block-moving puzzles already know that corners are to be avoided, but as it is not the block itself that is being moved, taking a second to reflect on ECT’s added physical rules will help to alleviate undue frustration. Other challenges will require the player plot a course without boxing himself in. Eventually, the puzzles will require the consideration of many rules at once. Here, the game is at its best, and its most maddening.

Fortunately the player has access to an “undo” key, and it is possible to move the camera around the puzzle before taking the next step. Trial and error won’t always immediately present a solution, but it often beats resetting the stage.

Songs to Gaze into a Microscope By

Though the soundtrack is airy and calming, there is also nothing overly glamorous about the overall presentation. The tunes brought back memories of Jenova Chen’s Fl0w, as did the seemingly petri dish-like particles that float by in each stage. The musical ambiance is a nice switch-up from the deluge of 8-bit chiptune tracks that have been accompanying many puzzle games of late.

The three-dimensional stages are crafted well, but do little to jump out from the screen. The models respond well to rotation and can spin around rapidly, but this can be a blessing wrapped in a curse, depending on the stage.

The Jig is up, but up is down(??)

Ultimately, English Country Tune is a wonderfully innovative puzzle game, even if the difficulty can seem unrelenting at times. Players who can stick through the frustrating bits will uncover a seductively complex blend of puzzle styles. There is nothing in the way of bonus material, so the gratification of knowing a sinister puzzle has been bested will have to suffice as its own reward. That said, players who manage to wrap their heads around this heady collection of trials will likely come away with all the satisfaction they need.

English Country Tune official website

English Country Tune on the iTunes App Store

PC/Mac: USD $9.99
iPhone/iPad: USD $4.99

Rating: ★★★★☆