Just what a click and point game needs, TRAIN OF DEATH! Railway to Heaven by Gamershood puts a nice twist on the C&P genre with a time limit of sorts, involving you in a cage on some train tracks with a not to concerned train coming right at you.

While fairly decent art, there’s just two things you will see actually moving: the TRAIN OF DEATH and you getting hit by it and oh yes you shall get hit by it often trying to beat this. Myself, I would rather see pre- rendered backgrounds than basic flash hand drawn but you will be franticly clicking on everything to much to care.

Sound wise, you cannot get better than a train slowly coming up ready to crush you. The audio makes this C&P game want to kick yourself fairly hard to try and find what you need faster.

I haven’t even beating it yet as I wanted to post this for people to play. It’s like a horror/scare/the Saw movie type C&P. While situations in games like this isn’t uncommon it still makes you wanna crap yourself, turning around the cage looking for stuff than you see the train is right on you, hehe. Game play wise, standard hover the mouse over stuff and click, with the edges making you turn around. I’m sorta pissed though as there was no top hatted mustache twirling baddy but not everything can be perfect.

[ Play Railway To Heaven ]

Five ’til by JMTB02 is a nice addition to the “4 sec games” genre but with an actual plot and a bit more than 4 seconds to know what the hell is going on. Around 30 seconds per level, which is nice for old and bitter people like me.
Nice action and decent art. While it could be spruced up art wise it in no way detracts from the great game play. Some better backgrounds and better explosions would flesh it out more, but you’re going so fast trying to get crap done you hardly notice it, unless some dumb reviewer mentions it then you can’t help but notice.

Sound effects and audio are well played except after I beat the game and listened to the end music for 10 minutes before I closed the window. Other than me zoning out, nothing annoying with what you hear.

ANGRY FIST SHAKING MOMENTS: for some parts where you have to use the mouse I REALLY wish I could see what part of the icon that got changed I’m actually using. The wire cutting took me several tries because it’s different than the glass cutting. Not sure if that’s just a minor bug but yeah, on the wire cutting it should show where your actual arrow cursor is for the hit area, where you click.

Other then that, game play was freaking great. Combining several different aspects of game play I loved helped. I like this approach better then the 4 sec games (which I won’t link cause I don’t want to remember that much to beat a game) as you get some time to learn the controls. I might just be old and bitter though. I also like how if/when you lose a level you start back with the same amount of time remaining when you started that part. Great game to play and get better at, mostly for me since I want to get better then a -C, haha.

[ Play Five 'til ]

It seems like everyone is doing mouse shooter games these days, which is cool with me, because some of them are actually damn fun.

Crusader Tank is a solid game where you play as a super tank sent to infiltrate the territory of some cult or other… the story was a bit too nerdy for me to bother reading in great detail…

Anyway, it’s a fun game and it looks pretty good too. The art is all rendered with high detail, and there are some nice touches like enemies being able to hide under the trees and such. The only thing I didn’t like was the variety in level art. Sure the actual layouts of each level change up drastically, but it’s always the same tree, oil tank, and dirt art over and over again, without so much as a pallet shift or anything to even TRY and make it look different.
The sound effects are pretty solid as well, but holy crap does the music ever want to make you want to stab your eardrums with a magnetic phillips-head screwdriver. The same short song loops non-stop for THE WHOLE GAME.

Ear-rape aside, the game is still rather enjoyable. While the game visually and audibly does not change much, the difficulty and strategy does. As you progress you run into bigger and badder enemy types, and you have to avoid barricade walls that will destroy you on contact.

I didn’t find the game terribly difficult, although the controls were rather uncomfortable. using the arrows AND the mouse on a laptop is a fast way to get carpal tunnel. If you have a separate keyboard on a desktop, this probably won’t bother you though.

While this game has several drawbacks, I still found myself playing for 20 minutes before my hand was too cramped to continue. The fun is there, I just hope you like the color brown.

[ Play Crusader Tank ]

varStudios has been developing visually stunning vector-style games for some time. Games like Neon and Lumination put them on the map for as some of the best mouse-busting game designers in the web-game industry.

Abstract Sea, their latest game, continues the tradition of stunning your eyes and busting your mouse.

I REALLY wanted to love this game. As a designer myself, I really can appreciate the overall style of this game, and fired it up with high hopes.

What I found was a game that certainly delivered artistically, but fell a bit short in the fun department.

The game is straight monotone color. Everything is all on the play area, from battleships to the score display, nothing is segregated. The explosions look very cool with the spinning boxes that fly off of enemy ships as you blast them into the sea, and all the alpha effects just look great. The game is just gorgeous.

Even the sound is great. The music isn’t really anything special, but the effects really help the game. Your bullets make no sound unless they hit something, which is a huge help when you are evading and firing at the same time.

You can watch your own boat while listening to the sounds. If your bullets go quiet, you know can move your attention to aiming for a split second, then resume a defensive watch. Not a lot of games use sound to this degree, and it’s just another thing that made me want to love this game.

Unfortunately, the gameplay is simply a recycled single screen 360 degree shooter game. There’s not a huge variety in the weapons you can get, although this may be due to the simplistic vector style art. There is a good AMMOUNT of weapons, but they don’t really FEEL all that unique, and the single color blocks used to represent your bullets is probably the reason for this.

The other thing that gets old is the variety in enemies. I think there are severl types of boat, but in the frantic assault they all tend to look the same and only vary in minor ways such as overall armor and the amount of shots they can fire.

I tried to give this game a long thorough play, and I really did have fun with it for a few minutes. But after the initial enjoyment wore off, and the variety screeched to a halt, I just got bored and let the enemy ships sink me.

I think this is still a good game to waste time with, but beyond killing a few minutes, there’s not much to this game to keep you coming back.

[ Play Abstract Sea ]

In the past I’ve been rather critical of developer Florian Himsl, better known as Komix, for producing some lackluster games since his breakthrough success with Triachnid.

I’m happy to say, he’s back on the scene with a new game that is incredibly addicting.

Rings and Sticks is one of the most original (yet simplistic) puzzle games to come around in some time.  The basic premise is to grow your wood and slip it through every unsuspecting hole you can find.  Sometimes you have to plant your seed so that other shafts can be erected and eventually penetrate rings that are otherwise out of your range.

The art in this game isn’t anything to write home about, nor does it need to be.  The simple use of monotone color for the trees and interface art is very artsy without needing any incredible amounts of detail. The goal in each level is visually clear, and that makes this game insanely easy to pick up and start playing.

The sound is just as simple as the presentation.  No annoying music, just a weird ambience and bling sounds when you poke your chocolate colored pole into a glowing ring.

Most of the levels are very clever, and force you to really plan your approach before you stick your shaft into anything, but other levels seem a bit less thought out and you end up with a lot of extra options after you have penetrated everything in sight.

Still, it’s a very fun game, and I look forward to the sequel: “ribbed for her pleasure”

[ Put your stick in some rings.... ]