Category: The SBRI

Vaccine War is very much unlike the bulk of indie PC games I play. See, it has an actual story that someone put time and effort into writing. Maybe not a whole lot of time and effort, but it shows that someone was actually interested in telling a story in this one.

As the tale goes, The Great War has ended, and your veteran main character (Daniel) moves his family from Prussia to Spain so that they can live a quiet life on a farm. But then a band of rogues bomb the nearby town, killing Daniel’s wife and abducting his daughter. You are then sent on a zig-zagging tour of the game world, hunting down the leaders of assorted military/paramilitary groups to find said missing daughter. Turns out the whole thing was because some secret society planted a “cure” for human cruelty into Daniel, and they wanted to extract the refined version of it form his daughter.

No, it doesn’t make much sense. But at least the developer tried. The developer whose name I didn’t bother to learn and probably will not bother looking up. (Spoiler: I didn’t.)

This weird story is told through many cutscenes, which are slow and not skippable. You can mash the button to speed the text along, but when every cutscene is placed right after a save point, you begin to yearn to be able to skip them completely. Also there are at least a couple typos in the walls of dialogue, which are semi-forgivable because based on the credits, I’m reasonably certain that English is not the developer’s native language.

So what else does Vaccine War have to offer? Well, the visual style is certainly… unique. It sort of reminds me of Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP, but not quite as stylized. I didn’t think it looked very good at all in screenshots, but when the game is in motion, it really does come together. The illustrations for the cutscenes are fairly horrible, though.

Okay, so. Gameplay. How does it stack up? It’s fun enough, I’d say. It’s a left-to-right kind of affair, but the game uses its 2.5D visual style to let you move along the depth axis as well. So, I guess it’s technically 3D then? But you aren’t allowed full 3D movement. You’re entirely restricted to the game’s set paths. Still, it’s a nice touch that both literally and figuratively gives the world a little more depth. The drawback here is that because of the way the combat works, level design is otherwise very flat and samey throughout the duration of the game.

Speaking of which, the combat seems at first blush to be of the typical run-and-shoot variety. You start with only a knife, but quickly get a gun and are thoroughly taught to use cover to keep from being shot. Because you can’t see enemy shots to jump over them like in the average side-scrolling action game, it essentially becomes a side-scrolling cover-based shooter. Which renders it slow and underwhelming.

That is, until you realize that in almost every case, it’s much easier, faster, and more effective to just rush every bad guy and stab him to death. You’ll take plenty of hits, but enemies drop enough healing items to keep you alive, and the save point mailboxes also heal you fully. This strategy is also the best way to deal with bosses, the only difference being that you will occasionally have to stop stabbing them for a moment to dodge their attacks. That said, the final boss is terribly cheap, and it’s not at all clear how you’re supposed to deal with him. It’s such a bad fight, in fact, that I nearly gave up. But stubborn as I am, I banged my head against that brick wall long enough to figure it out and claim victory.

Should you play Vaccine War? Not really. It’s decent enough that I finally feel justified in my purchase of the bundle it came in, and it’s nice to look at in motion for a while. But it’s so simplistic that it never offers anything new or exciting besides the boss fights, and even they’re not that great. Although if you are interested in seeing the whole game, you will need to play it yourself, as the two Let’s Plays on YouTube petered out halfway and four-fifths of the way through, respectively. Still, I wouldn’t really recommend it, unless you absolutely need to burn two hours by stabbing fools that you are supposed to be shooting. And even then, Resident Evil 4 is much more satisfying way to get that fix.

*NB: This game costs a whopping $8.79 CAD on Steam. I paid $5 for the 10-game Indie Gala bundle it came in. $5 is closer to the “correct” price for this one.

It’s been a while since I’ve cracked open an ice-cold Steam game, but also I haven’t bought any new PC games since January (mostly because most of my video game budget is being funnelled directly into the Switch), so the Steam backlog had pretty well stabilized itself.

And then I bought another friggin’ Indie Gala bundle. It’s not my fault, they led with a good banner image and I was a little drunk at the time. This just goes to show: don’t drink and read e-mails.

The good news is that I’ve already played one of the ten games that came in said bundle to completion. I even went ahead and logged some unnecessary time to wring out all the achievements (but gave up because they’re tedious and would take forever), and I still spent less than two hours total with the game.

Zoo Rampage is kind of a pathetic little game. Or, to be fair, it’s a pathetic game for the year 2017. This is the kind of thing that would have seemed more at home back in the mid-nineties. One of those really cheap little PSOne games that you would have still felt half-burned by even if you’d only rented it.

This is an arcade-style game, where you take control of an animal, and then wreak as much havoc on the board as you can in a couple minutes. Zoo Rampage is a fitting title, because it actually plays somewhat like Midway’s old Rampage series. The big differences are that here you’re playing as perfectly normal animals and the action takes place from a top-down camera angle. Also you don’t actually eat or smoosh the humans, they just get flung around with those cartoon dizzy stars appearing above their heads.

Like I said, the goal is to destroy as much scenery and trample as many people as possible in two minutes. If you hit the target score on a stage, you get to move onto the next. Easy-peasy. Your only obstacle is an ever-increasing number of zookeepers that will chase after you in an attempt to shock you into submission. And if a couple of zookeepers get around you, it’s basically over, because they will stun-lock you to death and there’s basically nothing you can do about it.

There are a scant five regular stages to play through, and then two gimmicky bonus stages to play afterward. Clearing the game completely will take you maybe half an hour because of the broken zookeepers and also it’s kinda tough to hit the target score on the final stage. Like I said, I logged a little extra time to wrap up the achievements, but quit because all outstanding cheevos at the end were “run over X number of people” time-wasters that weren’t worth the effort.

The two gimmicky bonus stages are actually less fun than the main game, even though they’re obviously designed to be “fun” distractions. One has you trying to kick soccer balls into a goal as an elephant, which can be intensely frustrating until you learn how to cheese it. The other locks you in as a penguin, chasing around people and scooping up all the fish they drop behind them.

Zoo Rampage does let you play with up to four players at a time, but it’s local-only, so nobody will ever play this game with their friends. The game would also be significantly easier with multiple animals causing mayhem, so maybe that’s for the best after all.

And that’s about all I have to say about this one. A number of the songs on the soundtrack sound an awful lot like off-brand Goldfinger, and nothing about the game will give you the impression that anyone involved with its creation really cared about it. I apologize if I’m off-base with that assertion, but this is like half a game with no heart and no clear vision. It’s something you could get for free and still end up wondering why you bothered to play past the first stage.

Don’t bother playing Zoo Rampage. Just boot up your N64 (emulator) and play Rampage: World Tour instead. That’s what I wish I had done instead.

*NB: This game costs $3.99 USD on Steam. I paid $5 CAD for the bundle. I think it’s safe to say that even $0.50 is a steep price for this heap.

During my, uh, “travels” through my mighty backlog of Steam games, I happened upon one called Heaven Island. It is a game like no other. Wait, no, that’s a lie. It’s actually got a lot in common with Proteus. And I didn’t really care for Proteus. Also, I’m not entirely sure what the actual title of the game is. On the bundle page I redeemed it from, it’s called Paradise Island. In the Steam library, it’s called Heaven Island. I don’t think the game proper ever references its title, so maybe it goes both ways? *wink*

Moving on, Paraven Island is the walkingest walking simulator that ever simulated. That’s almost literally all there is to it. Just bumbling around an island, looking at the trees and random structures scattered about. You can also pick up apples and seashells to earn achievements.

The game’s gimmick is that it’s an MMO, in the most basic sense. There’s no actual player interaction, though, and every player is represented by a ball of shimmering light instead of the more typical humanoid avatar. The online portion seems like a vestigial limb that probably should have just withered off long ago.

I suppose there’s another gimmick, which is that Heavadise Island is VR compatible. I did not play it in VR mode, as I have no VR device. I don’t think that this really affected my experience, because… the game isn’t really VR friendly.

See, the entire conceit of VR is that it’s more immersive than anything else. In this game, however, there is pop-in like crazy (that may very well be my PC’s fault), and you can simply walk through a lot of solid objects. These are not overly immersive traits. Also, there’s nothing to do but wander! Collecting apples only goes so far.

As one more little thing to do, there are a number books scattered about the island. They all contain short messages telling you to appreciate the game for what it is, couched in feel-good adages like “If you are depressed, you’re living in the past. If you are content, you’re living in the present.” I stopped looking at them after a while because if I had rolled my eyes one more time, they would’ve popped right out of their sockets.

Overall, there’s really nothing to Paradise Heaven. It’s a nice little beach to boot around on, but I can’t help but feel like I’d get a lot more out of, you know, actually being on that island. And not in the VR sense. It’s a perfect representation of a secluded little spot that I’d love to go to get away from the world for a while, but the lack of interactivity with anything makes the pretend version feel more hollow than anything. I can only watch digital fish swim in circles for so long.