Super Sonic Racing - Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed

If there's one subgenre of racing that has a bit of a rocky history, it's kart or mascot racing. A subgenre made most popular, if not outright started by Nintendo's own Mario Kart series and said series in fact has handily dominated the genre. several companies have tried over the years to make a racing game like Mario Kart, but there's not much in the way of major success stories, at least that I'm aware of. Which makes this game kind of a surprise.

Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed is a racing game about games made by Sega. It's worth noting that almost everything about the game comes from or is some nod to Sega's past as a game developer and publisher. The music, racers and tracks are all based on various games made by Sega, and there's actually a good amount of Sega's history covered here, everything from the old master system and arcade days, up to the Dreamcast and beyond. This game is very much a love letter to all things Sega, and if you're one of those people who like myself grew up playing Sega Games instead of Nintendo, there's a lot of recognizable stuff here.

This is a game about racing as Sega characters on tracks based on Sega games

All-Stars Racing is an arcade style racing game and the driving feels solid, cars can readily power slide through turns, catch big air on jumps or charge over boost pads for an additional burst of speed. Races feel nice and fast and it's honestly fun to speed through the games various tracks. What really impresses me is the game's big gimmick. Throughout the race cars will transform between three modes: a car, a plane, and a boat, to handle specific sections of each track and it's honestly impressive that the game can take three completely different vehicles and get them all to work as well as they do, although the planes can feel a bit weak. Drifting with them is difficult and the controls make throwing items backwards while flying somewhat problematic. Even with those problems however, everything holds up well enough and I don't find myself dreading having to drive in any of those three modes.

The game has a large number of characters to race as, again from several Sega games. There's over 20 of them, which gives a lot of gameplay options, but what makes this even better is mods. Each character has access to about eight different mods, unlocked through a leveling system that gives characters xp as you race as them. These mods alter how a character plays and some of them have a drastic impact on how they perform, giving players a lot more options that it initially appears. The characters cover a good amount of Sega's history. Alongside fairly obvious picks like sonic and Tails, AiAi from Super Monkey Ball or B. D. Joe from crazy Taxi, there's a lot of picks you might not have initially expected. like Vyes from Skies of Arcadia, or Gilius Thunderhead from golden Ax. There's even a good number of guest characters, like Ralph from Wreck-it Ralph or even several characters from Valve's Team Fortress 2 on the PC version. Overall there's a good selection here.

Races see you switching between car, boat, and plane mode on the fly.

The tracks, like the playable characters also cover a good bit of Sega's history. Alongside obvious picks like Samba De Amigo  or House of the Dead, there's tracks for titles like Panzer Dragoon, Afterburner, and even a track based on the Saturn game Burning Rangers. The tracks are fairly complicated and can change drastically over the course of the race, to the point that one lap can seem completely different from the previous one. how varied this gets varies a lot from track to track though, some like Temple Trouble, barely change between laps, while others like Rogues' landing greatly change things up each lap, so this ability for the track to change over time can feel pretty under-utilized in places. The tracks are fun to drive through however, and do a good job of representing the games they come from, and include little touches that fans of the respective games will recognize, such as Professor K DJ-ing over the music in Jet Set Radio's Graffiti City, or the various Nightmarens and Nightopians that populate NiGHTS' Dream Valley.

The game comes complete with several different modes to play in, outside of single race and the Grand Prix, which has several cups to race through, There's the world tour. The world tour consists of a map from which you can pick various events to play in, covering not only single races, but special challenges like dodging traffic or hitting chains of boost pads, all of these events have 3 levels of difficulty and earn you stars, which allows you to unlock things like mods and extra characters. There's a large number of events to go through although some of the special challenges, particularly battle races, can be something of a pain to deal with.

The world tour map is fairly large, and covers dozens of events.

Graphically, the game is very nice looking. Characters look like you'd expect, with properly updated models where needed on older characters, and the oldest characters from 2D games being given a proper 3D makeover. Track environments are nice and varied and again look like something out of the games they're based on. There is however, one major problem in that the game seems to suffer from some graphical issues, with things failing to load properly after I've played for a while. I'm not sure what the reason for this is, if I had to guess however, I'd say that the game might be a bit resource hungry as the solution seems to be lowering the graphics settings. It's a bit weird as my system is close and even beats several of the recommended system requirements, though I'd expect It wouldn't be a major problem for people on beefy newer PCs. For people on slightly older ones like myself, it might be best to crank down the graphics and try not to play for too long at once.

One of this games biggest strengths is it's soundtrack. not content to simply port songs over from their respective games, several of the songs have been updated and remixed, and the results are amazing. A few standout tracks include Carrier Zone's take on Afterburner's stage 1 theme as an 80's style rock song that sound like something out of Top Gun, or Burning Depths version of "We are Burning Rangers", There's a lot of good music here. Sound holds up just as well, tires squeal, weapons fire with a satisfying fwoosh, and vehicles make this nice mechanical sound whenever they transform, of particular note is the game's announcer, who's fittingly loud and energetic and who's voice actor clearly had way too much fun with this. This is a good sounding game.

Each racer has several mods you can unlock, which alters how they perform.

As much as I like the game, there are a few flaws worth pointing out, the first is that the items, while useful without being overly disruptive, are somewhat generic. In a game where almost everything ties back to a Sega IP, it's sad that we only get simple fireworks and speed boosts to use. It would of been nice if the items were also based on stuff from Sega games. For example: Summoning a swarm of hornets is nice, but why not make them full-on Buzz Bombers from Sonic the Hedgehog? Also, while it's nice that they included a few tracks ported from the original All-Stars Racing, they didn't update them to account for the games new mechanics, so the tracks use cars only and nothing changes between laps, meaning they tend to stick out a bit as a result.

Overall, this is a good kart style racer, which is impressive given how rare it is to see one outside of Mario Kart. If you're looking for a game like Mario kart to play on your PC, or other system for that matter as this was a multi-platform release, this will do nicely. That alone is enough to make the game worth looking at, however beyond that the game's biggest strength is how much of a love letter to all things Sega it is. If you like Sega and grew up with their games and systems back in the day? This thing is pure Sega fanservice and you'll find a lot to love here.

Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed was developed by Sumo Digital and published by Sega. It is available on Steam.

More spells than you can shake a wand at - Magicmaker

With the rise of games like Minecraft and Terraria. Several games have followed in their wake, offering large, randomly generated open worlds with complex crafting systems and plenty of character customization. Even when games aren't trying to follow directly in the footsteps of those titles, some games have taken those ideas and incorporated the into their own designs. One of the games to do this would be Magicmaker, a platform game that uses procedural content and a simple crafting system to create an amazing amount of content.

Magic maker sees you as an unemployed wizard who's taken on a temp job as a security guard at Dörwall Community College, being sent out on various tasks, risking life and limb in the name of a steady paycheck. The game actually has a fairly quirky sense of humor, the game's text includes a lot of wit and sarcasm, characters are weird when they're not being smart-assed and the game very obviously does not take itself seriously. That said while this can be amusing it should be noted that story is very much not the focus of the game and what story the game has exists simply as a cheap excuse to make spells, then go out into the world and hit things with them.

There's a lot of interested spells to play with.

Gameplay in Magicmaker is fairly straightforward, you choose a randomly generated level to take on, using the spells you've made to fight off enemies as you search for new spell materials and make your way towards the exit. The game is actually good at keeping levels interesting, there are several zones you can visit to complete missions, each of which has it's own enemies and gimmicks to deal with, such as the desert zone's periodic sandstorms, which require you to hide indoors. Missions are also rarely if ever a simple case of beating the boss and find the exit, and often require you to search the level for hidden objects, or avoid killing a certain kind of monster.

A big part of the game is customization. You're allowed to carry three spells and a single robe into each level, making these spells and robes is actually fairly detailed as there's millions of possible spells and robes to make and use. going beyond simple mechanical effects, you can even tweak their appearance, and there's a lot of options to change the look of your character. The game even lets you save what you've made to reload later. This is actually somewhat important as the game's levels make good use of this customization: you'll often have to tailor your spells for the mission ahead. for example, if a level doesn't want you to kill a certain kind of enemy, you'll likely want a spell more controlled than the one that rapid fires exploding projectiles that home in on enemies and bounce off walls.

You have a lot of options for editing your character.

One of the game's biggest strengths is how it handles making spells and robes. While the game offers a wealth of options for making the perfect spell or robe. Actually making them is surprisingly simple. Each of your spells or robe has a number of slots, and you fit the materials you gain from clearing levels into them.  Each material has 2 effects, one for use in spells, and one for use in robes. You simply simply pick the materials you want, limited by the number of slots you have, and the game will create the spell or robe by combining their effects. There's no special rules or complex systems to deal with, as long as you have the materials, you can quickly throw a new spell together and get right back into the action.

Perhaps even better than how the game keeps it's wealth of options simple to handle, is how quickly it gives you access to them. Most game that make heavy use of crafting tend to save the interesting things you can make for later. Spending most of the early game with fairly simple, straightforward things. Magicmaker wastes virtually no time on getting to the good stuff. Even in the tutorial, you'll have to make a projectile spell that lights things on fire to deal damage over time, and has a limited ability to pass through walls, and it only gets better from there. Almost immediately, you'll be making spells with crazy abilities. Even better, you can freely replace the materials used for spells and robes without penalty, meaning not only can you readily make fun and interesting spells, but are free to experiment and try out new things. This is a game that wastes no time in getting to the good stuff.

Each level ends with a fight against a gigantic boss.

Graphically, the game's art style is made to look like paper cutouts, complete with little folds and crinkles. The result is a actually pretty nice looking, everything is bright and colorful. Characters, bosses in particular are nice and detailed. The few things that don't look like paper, namely your spells, are nice and flashy without sticking out much. While the game isn't a graphical masterpiece, it's a very cute style that makes a nice change of pace from all the pixel art out there.

Along with the graphics, Magicmaker has a lovely soundtrack. The songs all fit the light tone of the game, though they do get a bit more serious for the boss fights, each zone of the game has several songs to use, so the soundtrack avoids getting repetitive. Everything holds up well wither your exploring or fighting, and it again makes a nice change of pace from the usual chiptunes found in a lot of indie games. Sound effects meanwhile are unfortunately fairly minimal. There's a handful of sounds for firing spells and enemy attacks, along with effects going off, Everything works and sounds more or less like you might expect but there's nothing really exceptional about any of it.

The game's levels are spread between several different zones.

While playing the game, I haven't encountered any major bugs, but I did encounter some issues. namely, when saving spells, every time you click save, you save a new copy of the spell, you can't overwrite saves, so when you adjust or add to a spell, you have to remember to delete the old version, otherwise you end up with a bunch of redundant spells in your list. A larger problem is, at least going by the requirements on Steam the devs seem unsure of the game's ability to readily run on any operating system besides windows 7. Fortunately there is a demo available to make sure the game will run properly, and the GoG version claims to be compatible with Windows 8 and Vista. If in doubt, remember to try the demo first.

In the end, this game is very good at what it does: Allowing the player to set about making various crazy spells to go blasting enemies with, and it wastes virtually no time in letting players get to the good stuff. While the main campaign is only a small handful of levels, random level generation, and plenty of side missions along with a new game+ option ensures plenty of replayability. If you like tinkering with options and trying various equipment loadouts, there's a lot to love here.

Magicmaker was developed and published by Tasty Stewdios LLC. It is available with a demo on Steam and GoG. It's soundtrack is available on Bandcamp. It's homepage is available here.

Housekeeping

With the new year starting today and my previously mentioned RL issues starting to clear up, I figured I should take a little time to fix up the blog. I have an FAQ written up now, there should be a link to the side. It's a bit of a rough draft at the moment, but should shape up nicely as I improve things and get feedback.

Speaking of feedback, I also added a contact forum so people can send feedback, questions, etc. through it. I saw a lot of little gadgets and add-ons I can readily use while setting this stuff up. so if there's anything people want me to add, feel free to yell at me and I'll see what I can do.

Here's hoping for a good year for the blog.

When you play it, you'll shoot bricks - Hyper Princess Pitch

It's December, the holiday season, Christmas is in a few weeks, with the new year right behind it. the snow and cold means it's a good time to stay indoors and play some games. It also means idiots like me running stupid little blogs nobody reads are required to review Christmas games. Well, I say that but the truth is I've got a good Christmas themed game, one that I like to play for a bit each year and while my medical issues mentioned in my last post prevent me from readily playing and reviewing games for the time being, I figured rather than close the year here on that, I should try to put aside some time and pull myself together to give this game a review.

Hyper Princess Pitch is a top down action game based on an old action games like Smash TV, or the old DOS Operation: Carnage, which the developer says this title is a remake of. I'll admit I have never played operation Carnage and am not very familiar with it. but I don't think that's too important to enjoy the game, just under stand that this is a fast paced, arena based top down shooter and you'll have a good idea of what you're in for.

When a game starts with a scene like this, you know you're in for one hell of a ride.

The game has a simple story. you play as Princess Pitch who, along with her legless, jet powered cat named Catstrike, head to the north pole to rampage through the factories of Mecha Santa in an attempt to stop Christmas, because she never got any presents. while the story is mostly just an excuse to run around shooting things, I have to hand it to developer for coming up with a completely insane story that sets the tone for the rest of the game.

Gameplay in Hyper Princess Pitch is fairly simple. Each of the games stages are broken into several rooms, each room being a sort of set piece, with waves of enemies that swarm into the room that you have to defeat to move on. An interesting feature is that while the game boasts about 70 rooms to paly through, you don't see them all in one game, instead each room can have multiple exits, leading to each stage having several branching paths. it leads to a good amount of replayability as it will take several playthroughs to see all the rooms.

enemies like to attack in huge swarms

To clear the rooms, you have several weapons at your disposal. Starting with a basic gun that shoots bricks. Yes, bricks. you also have a rainbow gun that shoots bouncing projectiles, and an ice gun that has a short range, but can destroy some projectiles. There's also several powerups, giving you temporary access to abilities like spread fire or extra movement speed, or even an airstrike from your cat Catstrike to clear out large waves of enemies. while there's only a few weapons and powerups, each one feels unique and nothing feels redundant or useless.

The game also has plenty of enemies to fight. from killer elves and tops, to trains and sleighs armed with cannons, some rooms even have unique or rare enemies not readily found anywhere else in game. this culminates in the boss, which are as crazy as the rest of the game, wither it's a massive robot elf or cat headed tank, each boss is massive, filling most of the arena and takes some effort to bring down. there's also what happens when you beat the bosses that While I won't say what happens as I think it's best if you see it yourself, I will say it involves a lot of explosions and is fitting over the top for a game like this.

Some rooms like this, offer some unique challenges

The game uses pixel graphics and while it is Christmas themed, it handles it in a slight unusual way. This is a Mecha Santa we're dealing with and the game's graphics reflect it with you fighting off elves and Santa hats in giant metal factories. graphics for the most part are simple and fairly clean, every thing is nice and colorful, and simple enough that the details don't detract from the frantic action on screen.

The sound in the game is fairly retro, all bleeps and bloops that fit the game nicely, and don't become annoying when the action gets heated, there's even a few lines of voice acting which are suitibly over the top and fit the tone of the game nicely. The music however, is easily the games greatest strength. interestingly, Hyper princess Pitch does not use Christmas music, but instead has an original score that consists of some rocking chiptunes that while somewhat short, are a lot of fun to listen to and back the action perfectly.

Each stage ends in a fight against a large boss

The game surprisingly doesn't have any major flaws. i haven't encountered any bugs, helped by the fact that the developer still supports it, releasing a new patch about once a year or so two tweak things. The game even has two separate executables to make sure it's compatible with as many systems as possible, which is amazing given this game is a small freeware Christmas game. The game is fairly short, but is built around replayability with local high scores and multiple difficulty levels to play through. Plus it's free, meaning it's not like you're paying anything to start with.

Overall. If you want a good game to play around Christmas time, this is it. it's fun, crazy, highly replayable, and is freely available for download. It's even a very small download, only about 20mb zipped. so there's very little reason not to go and give this thing a try.

Hyper Princess Pitch was developed and published by Remar Games. It is available from the developer here. it's soundtrack is available on Bandcamp.

A small delay

Just a heads up. on top of the holidays, I am currently dealing with some medical issues, nothing major, but it's keeping me away from the computer, which in turn means I can't readily  play and review games.

I do have one game I'm hoping to review for this month. But past that I'm not sure I can do much else until things improve. Expect things to be slower than normal, if not outright stopped until then. Hopefully I'll be back to normal in January.

My apologies for things suddenly grinding to a halt like this.

The first part of one of Falcom's biggest series - Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky

If there's one trend I would of never seen coming in gaming, it's Japanese RPGs on PC. outside of stuff by indie devs, JRPGs had been content to stick to consoles and handhelds, but lately there's been a trickle of them showing up on Steam and there seems to be a slowly growing interest on seeing more of them on PC. enter The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky. the first part of a trilogy, itself part of a much larger series. This game had initially seen a release in North America on the Playstation portable, with no sign of the second and third games being released until last year, when XSEED announced not only is a translation of the second chapter in the works, but it, along with the first chapter, would see release on PC.

Trails in the sky is about a pair of characters named Estelle and Joshua, and their attempts to become what are known as Bracers, basically adventurers for hire. As you might expect, this seemingly simple task ends up anything but. I should note that there is a LOT going on in this story, not only due to it being a fairly long game, but because this is the first game in a trilogy, so the game has to lay out a lot of ground work for the later games. Fortunately, while there's a lot of information to chew through, I never found the game very hard to follow. It helps that the game has some wonderful characters and a good sense of pacing: The story is serious and treated as such, but there's enough humor and lighter moments to keep thing from getting too straight faced for it's own good.

You will meet several characters in your journeys, some weirder than others.

At it's core, the gameplay for Trails in the sky should be fairly familiar for anyone who's played a JRPG before: you travel a very large world, solving various quests and fighting in turn based battles. it's worth noting however, that battles battles have a bit more to them than a typical JRPG, rather than your party and enemies lining up to trade blows, battles take place on a grid that characters can move around on. This changes things form a more typical JRPG because you can't simply attack, you have to be able to reach enemies to hit them, also spells take some time to cast and while many can simply target a specific area, some have an area of effect need to be targeted, forcing you to think ahead to where enemies might be in the next few turns when deciding where to aim them. at the same time, some enemy attacks can be avoid by using your characters turn to move out of the way. It forces you to think about how the battle is going and not just constantly attack, pausing only to use the occasional healing spell or item.

Another thing that stands out in the game is orbments While the game does have various pieces of equipment your characters can wield and wear, orbments are how you really customize them. Each character has an orbment with several slots you can put what are called quartz into. These quartz have various elemental values and the total value of the quartz decide what spells the character has access to, on top of that, the quartz themselves can have various stat bonuses or penalties on them, as well as extra bonuses like decreasing the casting cost of your spells, called arts in this game. it's actually a fairy complex system, where slots can require certain types of quarts, and there's lines that decide how your quarts various values are added up. fortunately it's easy to come to grips with once you've tinkered with it for a bit, and the game has a built in magic list so you can see what values you need for what spells.

Battles take place on a large grid

On top of a lengthy main quest, the game also has a number of side quests. From the bracers guild in any town you can pick up any of a number of side quests that range from finding lost items to exterminating dangerous monsters to delivering items.  Fortunately, these side quests are not your typical MMO-style 'find x items' or 'kill x monsters' quests, some of them involve various puzzles, and even the simplest of them: exterminating dangerous monsters' have specific encounters for you to deal with and aren't just random monsters. There's even some hidden quests if you're willing to explore and not just rely on what's in the guild. It helps break up the main quest and gives you a good reason to explore the world beyond what's strictly necessary.

It should also been noted that the game has a very large world. While there's only five major towns to visit, there's plenty of side areas and smaller villages to explore. each chapter of the game takes place in a different section of the world map, and exploring any one of them can take some time. Exploring is also well rewarded, as useful items are often hidden off the main path. This size however, does come with one drawback. The game has no fast traveling, and you're often required to travel between several distant locations. Granted, the game world isn't as large as a full blown sandbox game like Skyrim, but it's still a lot of ground to be stuck repeatedly traveling through.

There's a lot of ground to cover in this game

Graphically the game is pretty decent, the game uses 3D graphics mixed with sprites that appear to be based off 3d models, everything looks nice, textures are nice and colorful, and hte game world is nicely detailed without becoming cluttered. The only major fault I noted is the animation for some of the 3D objects in the game seemed a bit choppy, but otherwise there's nothing to really complain about.

The game's sound is also decent: Everything sounds like it should and while the game doesn't have much voice acting beyond a few lines used in battle, what's there is done well enough. The music, is actually very nice. Falcom is known for producing some great soundtracks and this game is no exception. Though I should note for those who know of Falcom mostly through Ys and are coming here from that series, this game is an entirely different beast so sorry, no rock music to headbang to.

Attempting to take items form the same chest twice has interesting results

Overall I would highly recommended this game if you like RPGs, JRPGs in particular. it's a very large game that took me over 40 hours to beat, and even then I missed quite a few things, the story is well told and the characters are very likeable. As I've said before there seems to be a recent trend with JRPGs showing up on PC and out of all the games involved, this is one of the ones to get.

The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky was developed by Nihon Falcom and published by XSEED and Marvelous USA, Inc. It is available on Steam and GoG. It's homepage is available here.

Gravis Gamepad Not Incluided - MURI

NOTICE: please excuse the windows borders in the screenshots. the game had some issues with me taking screenshots and this was the only way that didn't upset it.

As someone who plays a lot of indie games, I see a lot of 'retro' homages. lots of games with chiptunes and pixel graphics meant to mimic old 8 or 16 bit systems, usually the NES and SNES. I don't mind this, and some games manage to do an amazing job with mimicking the look and feel of these older games but I prefer it when developers decide to base them game on something more unusual. For example, 80s DOS shareware games.

MURI is a platform game about the disappearance of Mars, the game actually has more story than you might expect for a simple platform game, told through cutscenes at various points through the game. it's not a massive story or an insanely complex one. That said, since a big part of the story is finding out what's actually going on, I can't give any actual details for fear of spoilers. I will say however, that the story felt like something out of and old 80s anime, which does a good job of fitting with the retro tone of the rest of the game.

cutscenes like this tell the story

Gameplay is fairly simple. This a classic run and gun platform game, you job in each level is to simply find the exit. levels however are fairly open. you do have to explore a bit as the exit isn't always simply to the right. even when you do know where the exit is, exploring is still worthwhile as levels can be full of side passages and hidden areas which include powerups and extra lives on top of bonus points. there's also a cell hidden in each level, which you can use to get extra powerups to help fight the boss at the end of each episode. So it pays to thoroughly explore each level.

Each level also has plenty of enemies, and there's a good variety of them in game. ranging from wall turrets to combat robots to tiny flying drones. Each enemy can come in several variants, these variants are not only tougher than the original enemy, but have extra abilities like jumping or shooting. to fight them, you actually have a decent selection of weapons. Weapons are mostly straightforward but get the job done nicely, wither it's rapid fire or a spread shot. Some of the later weapons however, can have some interesting abilities, such as a laser that splits and bounces off of walls.

you can even bounce off enemies Mario style

Each episode in the game ends in a boss battle, and the boss battles are pretty good. They're nice and big, take some effort to beat, and finish off each episode nicely. boss stages are also where the cells I mentioned earlier come into play. Before the boss you're presented with some doors blocking the way to various powerups and the cells unlock them, meaning if you managed to find some cells in the episode, you can get some extra help with dealing with the boss. it's not required as the bosses can be beaten without having any cells, but it's there if you need it and a good way to reward exploration.

While MURI is a solid platform game, it's greatest strength is easily how well it captures the look and feel of an old DOS game, the game is broken up into episodes, each of which is played separately and you can tackle them in any order, just like in old shareware games. The game's story feels like something out of that era and the gameplay does a good job of supporting this. If you've played any older DOS games like Commander Keen, Duke Nukem 1 and 2, or Bio Menace This game will feel very similar. it even has keyboard only controls, no mouse input, though you can use a gamepad if desired.

Each episode ends with a boss battle like this one.

Graphically, the game mimics the look and feel of dos games perfectly, The game uses large sprite graphics with a minimal color pallet like an old EGA game, the game can even be made to run at 16 frames per second and when run this way it looks exactly like an old DOS game. If it wasn't for the 2013 copyright, you could readily pass this as something from the 80s, it does it's job that well.

The game's sound is authentic as the graphics, which is both good and bad. It's PC speaker only which fits the game perfectly, Everything sounds exactly like what you'd expect from an older game and nothing is out of place. This is great, but it does have one major drawback: the game is fairly quiet due to a lack of a soundtrack, there's a small tune played for the title screen, but that's it. What you here fits the game perfectly, there's just very little to hear.

Levels are fairly open, and readily reward exploration

The game has a few minor flaws. Namely, weapon selection is automatic and can't be controlled by you at all. the way weapons work makes this mostly a non-issue, though it's a touch annoying if you wanted to use a specific weapon to save ammo for later. The other problem is the game is short. I beat all 4 episodes in one sitting and that took about 2 hours. It would of been nice if there were a few more stages, though the inclusion of high scores and multiple difficulty levels does give a decent reason to play through the game multiple times. Finally, and this is just a personal thing, the game does not have a demo, as the game is based on old shareware titles, it would of been great if there was a shareware demo of the first episode, and the lack of one feels a bit like a missed opportunity.

In recommending this game I'll have to note that what you get out of it depends a lot on where you're coming from. If you grew up playing those old shareware games, this game is an awesome throwback that's definitely worth picking up. If you didn't, it's still a solid game that could be worth a playthrough, but you might find it hard to appreciate what the game is doing.

MURI was developed by Ludosity and Remar Games and published by Ludosity. It is available on Steam.