Wow, this game surely has gotten a lot of hype since being launched a week ago, and I can certainly see why.

IndestructoTank is a refreshingly original game full of simple physics and mass destruction.

You play as a gas guzzling tank with indestructible armor, who has nothing better to do than to actually buy enemies.  Said enemies try and blow you to bits with a variety of explosives, which merely send your tank into the air and let you smash any baddie in your path.

The graphics in the game are certainly sub-par.  If you are the type of person who values looks over substance, don’t bother playing this game. Well… at least it’s not stick men and gradient fills.

The sound is okay, but nothing impressive.  The music is very repetitive and does get old after a few levels, but thankfully the gameplay is fun enough to keep you playing.

If you enjoy games that allow you to juggle and build combos, you simply NEED to play this game.  That’s pretty much all it is.  If you are looking for more substance, play it anyway, it’s still a great way to kill some time while your Warhammer torrent is still downloading, you damn dirty pirate!

Most younger players are going to be pissed that this game actually forces you to read the instructions before playing, and you may find a strange void in your pre-pube lives when you can’t bitch about how the game doesn’t work after you’ve only played it once, but I think you’ll survive.

High scores aside, there isn’t a lot of replay value in this game. But, like your mom, it’s certainly fun while it lasts.

[ Play IndestructoTank ]

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 ]

I remember when I was younger, watching my dad try and play Doom.  I gave him such a hard time for leaning his body and trying to look around the corners in the game.  I guess he was just so immersed in the game environment he felt like he was actually in it, but it was still pretty funny to watch.

I never thought I would catch myself doing the very same thing, let alone with a web game. But those bastards over at FreeWorldGroup (with DX Interactive) got me ducking and diving through their new game, ‘Missile Game 3D HS‘.

Missile Game is not an incredible feat of gaming genius by any means. You play as a missile trying to fly through a tube with rotating obstacles, and it’s all 1st person view. The art is simple black and white circles with varying shapes cut out, and lines to indicate the walls.The sound is pretty plain, and the music, while certainly not bad, is nothing to write home about. Even the control is extremely basic…. you just move the mouse.

But what you don’t expect from such a simple game, is just how easily you get sucked in. As you start shooting down this 3d tube at break-neck speeds, you no longer care about any of the shortcomings the game may have, all you want to do is not run into a wall.

I could write a large review, as I have in the past, but I really think this is one of those games that you just have to play.  Words and screenshots will not do it justice. I’m not sure I would play this game for large amounts of time, and I probably won’t play it next week… but damnit, I am having a blast (pardon the pun) with it right now!

[ Play Missile Game 3D HS ]

I know puzzle games are typically supposed to be all cute or shiny with colorful tiles and all that other vibrant crap that supposedly makes them appealing to girls, but it’s always a refreshing change when we get a puzzle game that looks more like an action game.

Mindfields 2204 is a brain-busting puzzle game where you essentially place tiles on a grid-based level to direct a tank through various perils in an attempt to capture the world’s most valued military targets…. FLAGS!!!!

The art in this game isn’t that impressive. The terrain looks like what Advance Wars may have looked like had it been an 8-bit NES game rather than a GBA game. The tank, mines and turrets are all rather plain as well, but I’ve seen plenty of games with way worse art. At least you can tell what everything is supposed to be.

The sound isn’t so bad… basic effects, nothing fancy. It only uses one looping music track. It’s a pretty subtle one and doesn’t make your ears bleed in any way.

It took me a little time to really get this gameplay down, but not so long that I gave up on it. Once I did figure it out I kept playing and playing until, before I knew it, I had beaten it.

Basically you play with the mouse and you drag tiles onto the map. When you are ready the tank will drive on it’s own in whatever direction it’s facing. If it hits a tile with an arrow, it will change direction. You also have tiles that trigger the cannons and force fields on the tank so you can get past the mines and laser turrets that are diligently guarding the precious flags.

The challenges of each level keep you thinking, and you feel REALLY good when you finally solve them.

The only gripe I really have with this game is the speed. It would be nice if the tank went a bit faster so you didn’t have to wait as long to find out of you screwed up or not.

I would really love to see a more polished version of this game, perhaps as a sequel. It’s a ton of fun, and it really could be a contender as a fully produced game.

[ Play Mindfields 2204 ]

As Flash has grown as a game development platform, I have seen many fad genres that stand out due to the simplicity and ease they offer the designers and programmers. Mouse shooters, dress up games, stat-based sim games, etc… have all shared their time in the limelight. In 2006 the fad that got the most attention was drawing games.

These games are great for the game designer, because they don’t really need to spend much time on level designs, and can use any basic game engine for following user-drawn lines they want. This lets designers get the games out much quicker then other genres.

Drawing games are great for the user because they offer a ton of variety and control in how a game flows. It’s win-win… or at least that’s how it started out.
Stunt Bike Draw, by FreeWorldGroup.com (creators of the Bow Man games and Deflector), tries very hard to use this fad and it’s proven formula for success to give you a stunt jumping game with crazy user-made jumps and crashes.

The art in the game isn’t quite production quality, but it’s definately well done, if a bit dark and low in contrast. The bike moves pretty well with all the bounciness you would expect, and the tracks you draw show some innovation over other drawing games by actually generating the braces that hold the track to the ground rather then just using free-floating lines.

The sound effects are great too, the engine revs, cashes and smashes all sound as they should. The music however is very VERY repetitive with no variety whatsoever. It sounds like a fast-food employed punk ass kid playing dance music in his 1993 Honda Civic with holes in the floor panels, busted AC and a $3k subwoofer in the back.

The gameplay is what should make you forget the horrible bass beats that the music rapes your ears with, but alas, it misses the mark (not a good thing to do with a stunt game). Drawing the ramps and watching the bike fly is pretty satisfying, but when you realize how hard it is to crash on the landing ramp there is no challenge or fulfilment.

All you need to do here is keep your landing ramps high enough from the ground that at least ONE wheel will land on them. You can completely miss with the front tire, and the back tire will catch on and suspend you safely, like some kind of batman bike might do.

The “level design” in the game is pretty lame. They just add these hopping robot alien water balloon things that seem way out of place, and cars that are smaller than the stuntman himself. Where’s the swimming pool full of sharks? The flaming ring of death? The fat lady that lives up the street?

As with a LOT of less creative drawing games, this one will give you at least 5 minutes of entertainment, but if you like these kinds of games, there are a lot of better choices to invest your time into.

This game isn’t BAD… but it’s not that great either… I think we are due for a new fad.

[ Play Stunt Bike Draw ]

Last week I reviewed a game called Hovertanks. I was impressed by the fully rotating 3d play field (wich is a good accomplishment for a flash game) but mentioned the game was pretty choppy due to low framerates.

Holiday Snow Wars uses a similar 3d engine and has fixed the framerate problems in hovertanks, wich is a step in the right direction, but then takes 10 steps back in the actual gameplay.

The art in this game isn’t too bad, but like hovertanks lacks any detail on the ground. Edmund McMillen lends some last minute art to the game due to the original artist bailing out just 2 days before x-mas. But given the crunch time, you’ll notice the art isn’t what it WOULD have been had the award winning designer had a bit more time.

The sound effects are pretty minimal but mostly fitting, and the music is nice and wintery. Normally I would complain about there being only one music track, but you will get bored of the game before you get annoyed by the music.

As I mentioned earlier, the gameplay is sorely lacking. It seems without a game designer directing the development, Florian Himsl (aka Komix, programmer on Triachnid and Blockhead) has a hard time taking an engine and making it into a real game. The 3d play field and the camera rotation works perfectly, but the movement of the characters is extremely slow. The battle mode had 2 characters (Santa and Jesus) racing to snowball each other’s snowman. Basically it’s like a race… whoever gets to the snowman first and shoots a snowball wins.

And then there is the race mode. If they replaced the Santa and Jesus sprites with 2 snails, it might not be so bad, but somehow the cpu player can actually go a bit faster then you can. I don’t know if this is just buginess or if there are some controls to speed up that aren’t mentioned in the instructions.

The speed isn’t the only failure in this game. When you shoot a snowball, you can’t see it. I’m not even sure that I’m even shooting ANYTHING half the time.

Once again I just can’t believe that this is the same kid that programmed Triachnid. Between this game and Blockhead I am seriously starting to question Komix’s programming ability, and wondering if the parts of his games that do work well may not be borrowed source code from open-source flash demos.

Before any of you indy-game fanboys try starting shit with Komix, I want to say on the record that I don’t see anything wrong with using open source code at all. When I got started, I learned a ton from some of the old flash samples on flashkit. I even made some open-source engines myself back in the day that a ton of people used. I’m just disapointed by these latest games from Komix after all the great things I had heard about him.

Maybe next time….

[ Play Holiday Snow Wars ]

No, it’s not Sheryl Crow’s old pet name for Lance Armstrong. (Get it? He only has ONE BALL!!!)
Tank Ball is a really fun and simple multiplayer arena game where you join a team of off-road tanks that blast over-sized dodgeballs at each other.

The graphics are all 3d, and pretty well done to boot. The forest-like island you play on has tons of variety in the terrain and foliage and the tanks themselves interact with some nice physics. The explosion effects are pretty lame, but still forgivable.

The music and sound are pretty basic, nothing fancy, but no ear-rape either.

The gameplay is, at the core, very basic. You move forward or backward, and steer left and right, with one button to fire. The fun comes in the physics and speed. You can’t aim your guns up and down so you need to get your tank on level ground to get a clear shot. Holding still is usually bad strategy so you end up driving like a drunk-to-the-gills redneck and firing at tanks and trees alike.

The only thing I really hate about this game is the lack of a game setup screen so you can actually play with your friends. For the most part you just get dumped in a random game with random people. That said, blowing up perfect strangers is still pretty damn fun.

[ Play Tank Ball ]

Warp Forest, by Arseniy Shklyaev, is a very interesting blend of driving action and puzzle solving with a ton of play-time packed into it. Fans of classic adventure puzzles like the Lolo games or Chip’s Challenge should be able to pick up this game very quickly. It’s a simple tile-based playing area with the object of collecting power-ups and keys to activate the exit warp.

The graphics in the game are fairly pleasant bitmap sprites. Being the type of puzzle game it is you shouldn’t expect too much variety in the levels, but there was a lot of attention put into the car’s rotation; each angle is rendered with accurate perspective. The enemy art is re-used a lot with simple pallette shifts to visually portray varying abilities, but that didn’t ruin the game for me at all.

The soundtrack is a better than average electronic style with a lighthearted sound that suits the game rather well. The sound effects are typical puzzle game type sounds, but are not annoying by any means.

What I loved most about this game is the variety in play with simple changes per level. In some levels you are plotting your moves with precision, and others you are just hauling ass to avoid enemy firepower. If you are a casual gamer with only 20 minutes or so to play, there is even a save system so you can quit playing and jump back in at your leisure.

All in all this is a fantastic game. I just can’t believe it took me this long to notice it!

[ Play Warp Forest ]