Anyway. Like I said: I’d planned to review some demos, but they were taken down.<\/p>\n
But! The Steam Summer Sale began just a few days after SNF ended, and basically my entire wishlist went on sale. So what I’m going to do is drop coverage of games that have pulled their demos and instead cover a few of these shiny new wishlist items I’ve picked up. And to be clear, I’m not trying to punish<\/b> the games that pulled their demos. It’s just that, you know, I can’t cover them, because the demo is gone<\/b>.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Let’s start with one of the demos that’s still live:
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City of Beats<\/h3>\n
<\/div>\nThis one is right up my alley. I dig twin stick shooters. I’m into electronic music. I like cyberpunk-y stuff. I like high-contrast scenes with saturated neon. I like roguelites with some sort of meta-progression.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The idea is that you’re flying across this cyber-city in your hovercar. You stop at rooftops along the way to get out and fight drones \/ robots while electronic music plays. When you use your weapon, the projectiles come out at 1\/16th note intervals and the laser sounds become part of the music. You’ve got a dash move to evade attacks, which usually land on the beat. Once you kill all the stuff, you pick up some sort of prize and then jump back in your car to continue the journey.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Your journey has you navigating between these rooftop nodes as you move left-to-right across the city. Do you want to take the high route and have a normal encounter, or perhaps navigate to the lower route and face some elites? Or perhaps you’ll have to choose between a mystery encounter and a shop. Or maybe one way will give you currency you can use if you find a shop later, while the other way will yield some meta-currency you can use between runs.<\/p>\n
<\/div>Like I said, this is my jam. It feels like someone tried to make a game perfectly suited to my tastes. This cyberpunk+neon particle+twin stick+action shooter thing is pushing all the right buttons for me.\u00a0<\/p>\n
My one problem with the demo is that I’m not sure what I’m missing? I was able to complete an entire run in about fifteen minutes. Is that just the first leg of a much longer journey, or is the whole game built around fifteen-minute runs? What is the full version going to give me that I don’t have already? Longer runs? More node variety? Same gameplay but more music?<\/p>\n
<\/div>Usually people making demos are really good at putting desired things just out of reach. “Ooh! You could have this powerup \/ fight this boss \/ proceed to the next level, if only you had the full version! By the way, here is a link to buy the full version!” The City of Beats dev forgot this step. Oopsie.<\/p>\n
I’m buying it regardless, but I would like to know what I’m supposed to look forward to in the full version and what I’m supposedly missing now.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This makes a nice comparison with the next item on my list, which is also a bullet-hell twin-stick roguelike with neon lights and an electronic soundtrack…<\/p>\n
Release date: “This Winter”.<\/p>\n
Neon Abyss<\/h3>\n
<\/div>\nI got the full version of this game. If there was a demo of it during SNF, I missed it. But it’s been on my wishlist for months and I picked it up as soon as I saw it was discounted.<\/p>\n
This game is… a lot. I still don’t really have a handle on the huge library of meta-unlocks. There are perks to buy, characters to unlock, pets to find, weapons to collect, powerups to acquire, and new rooms to add to the bar that acts as your home base between runs.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Once you’ve found an item \/ weapon \/ pet \/ powerup, it gets added to the appropriate room in your base. You can even disable a few you don’t like.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Like City of Beats, this is a twin stick shooter. Unlike City of Beats, this is also a side-scrolling platformer.\u00a0<\/p>\n
<\/div>I’ve said before that 2D platforming is not my thing. I’ve spent some time with the genre because I usually love the art, but I’m always wretched at it and I don’t seem to be improving with time. Moreover, I just don’t get any satisfaction from doing it. I actually find it vaguely irritating. I just want to go through that door over there and for some reason it feels weird<\/b> that it should be possible to fail at “moving around the gameworld”. When I miss a jump by a couple of pixels and fall back down to ground level, I feel like the game is wasting my time on purpose. I feel like I’m playing a version of DOOM where you have to press a button once in a while to avoid dropping your gun on the ground in the middle of a fight. Why does this need to be hard? I’m not getting anything out of this.<\/i><\/p>\n
I realize that 2d side-scrolling platformers are a perfectly valid genre and are enjoyed by millions. If anything, this is one of the most foundational genres in the entire hobby. I don’t know why I have this weird dislike of it. To make this even more inexplicable, I actually enjoy some 3D platformers like Prince of Persia: Sands of Time<\/i>.\u00a0<\/p>\n
<\/div>So I dunno. We are all special unique human beings, and my special thing is that I am unable to enjoy this beloved genre. Whatever.\u00a0<\/p>\n
So about half of this game (neon bullets and music) is my favorite thing and the other half of the game (platforming under pressure on a busy screen full of foes and bullets) is the sort of thing that really gets on my nerves. These two extremes don’t cancel each other out, and they don’t average out into some sort of middle-of-the-road experience either. Instead I’m delighted and irritated at the same time. It’s like eating chocolate ice cream while someone flicks my ear, and the only way to stop the flicking is to give up the ice cream. This is so weird.<\/i><\/p>\n
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