Beast Towers Spotlight

Tower defence games, over done? used up ideas? nothing more to give to the gaming world? these are all things one might say when they are told about such a game, But i was lucky enough to try out something a little different, something new, something interesting… something French.

I got in contact with “name” the creator of the brand new tower defence game for mobile devices,
“Beast Towers”, and when i first herd about the idea i thought to my self a lot of the things you are
right now, “how is this going to be any different then all the rest”. But after a little back and forth with
Baptiste Largaiolli i got the go ahead to try out his game and was given a test copy dodo this
Spotlight with.

But first a little back story shall we? get us in the zone for this game, let us get to know the real Beast Towers. development of Beat Towers was started back in April 2014, with the developer only really working on it on weekends as he is a free lance Unity3D dev , so in total time, he spend about 4 months worth of time developing the game, but he first got the idea to start working on it as far back as the Ipad 1 days. With this device clearly not being powerful enough for what he had in mind he decide to wait until devices were at least as powerful as an Ipad2, these features that he wished the game to have included full 3D,and to have both enemies and towers animated.

The project was a one man team, but Baptiste has hopes to work with a 2D or 3D artist for later updates and later games, and with the introductions out of the way lets get into why you are really here huh? the game play.

So the game starts off like any other, a simple menu screen, with deep classical music giving a very dark med-evil tone to the game, with its bright torches lighting the door way and surrounding bricks, it almost makes you feel like you have discovered a secret under ground chamber in a large old castle from the middle ages, this is added upon by the small bugs crawling and flying around the screen leading you to believe that no one has been down here in a very long time, the skull that makes up the door gives the impression that a dark evil power is sealed away in there.

With 4 touchable button on the screen you have the option to turn off the music, turn off the back ground sounds, start the game or quite, which is good, while a lot is going on in the back ground the foreground is kept simple and clean.

Selecting the start button will bring a pop up block, with the option to create a new game or play an existing game, once a choice has been made the door behind the box is opened and both the box are pulled into it.

The first thing you will notice is the music change, it becomes more uplifting, more adventurous, the next thing will more then likely be the first stage,a small brick square with a platform i the middle surrounded by a pit which to me look like a Lazarus pit( a little comic influence maybe?), You have 3 buttons around the sides in the corners, starting from the top right corner you have a button that will take you back to the main menus screen, moving over to the top right, you are given list off all possible towers to play, the music is toned down a little more calming, gentle, soothing almost but still with a hint of adventure lingering in its tone. the third and final button is a “shop” where you can buy upgrades for your towers. Now don't worry, these aren't micro transaction, these upgrades as bought with in game “money” and by completing levels.

To start a level simply click on it and another pop up window appears, giving you the option to play or exit the screen, another button is there but locked at this point, this is called the tsunami mode, where it is one continues wave , this is locked until you have completed the level.

Now I'm not going to be going over how to play the game, if you want to know that you will have to play it for yourself, but what i will do is explain some of the core elements in the game and use them as sub categories to explain each.

Upgrade able towers

Now this isn't anything new to a tower defence game so its not as thought its ground breaking stuff, hope ever with the full 3D animations on all sprites, the upgrading becomes a lot more fun, to be able to see a tower start out a level 1 sprite doing no damage and with in 3-5 waves be fully upgraded to basically doing all the work, and have him flailing his arms around, nice touch in my eyes

Controlling the enemies path

this isn't something you see at lot of in tower defence games, in fact its the first tower defence game i have ever played that implements this, the ability to control where the enemies can walk greatly aids you in being able to create the most efficient design, being able to decide whether you make the path out of towers, walls, or a mixture of both

tsunami mode

this is basically the best part of a tower defence game, seeing how long you can last with out dying, that's right its an all out assault, mass waves of mobs, progressively getting harder , you start with a lot more money then you do in single player mode, but that goes by really quickly.

But now we get into what a lot of the people who are reading this are looking for, my score rating, the thing that tells you if you should get the game, because i know that's why you were reading this… don't lie i know you were ;), so i will do this in my normal fashion. Break the score into 3 parts GamePlay, Visuals and Fun and then give each a rating out of 10 for a possible score of 30

So GamePlay, it played like any other  tower defecne game i have played, challenging at first but once you unlock some of the latter tier towers it becomes a lot easier, the smooth inter face, the fluid controls, the way it just worked is one of the finest examples of a tower defence game i have seen/used on the mobile platform, to give it anything less then an 8 would be a crime.

Visuals, this is where the game really shines, the 3D aspects of this game set it apart from the crowd, it brings something new to the table in this genre, yes i know other 3d tower defence games exist, and i have played a few of them, but this one is something that i felt was special, the dark and gloomy but yet friendly and somewhat cute nature to both towers and mobs takes a different approach on the style of game play, that said a 7 seems very fitting for this game.

And finally Fun, arguably the most important part of any game is how fun it is, that is why its also the hardest one to give a score for, because everyone who plays games plays them a little differently and everyone has different likes and dislikes,but for me? i liked it, i thought it was something i could sit down and play, i had a flight i caught just the other day actually and spend the whole 3 hours playing this game. so is it fun for me? you bet it is, but being that i have to give it a fair score, being that i loved it as much as i did I'm going to give it a 9.

So for those of you who just wanted a number a 24/30 or an 80%.

My final thoughts on this game are that you should defiantly go and check it out over on his web page
www.beasttowers.com or head over to his indiedb page at http://www.indiedb.com/games/beast-towers and let him know what you think of his game...

no good games to play

So i haven't made a post on here in a while but i haven't really been doing much, been looking for something fun to play and nothing is jumping out at me, the last game i played and made a video on was that spotlight i did for artificial selection, i had fun doing it, it was fun to sit down with a brand new game and play it, test it see if i could break it, but there's nothing i have on either my steam or any of my other games folder, and that's pretty sad i think, the fact i have run out of fun games to play.

thats all i  really wanted to say, i put up little things that im doing over on my twitter https://twitter.com/LarryPlaysGames other then that i guess ill see you guys hopefully soon in a a game

Artificial Selection Game Spotlight

So recently I reached out on twitter for any devs with playable  builds of a game they have or a game they know someone who’s is working on, and asked if they wanted some press, and with what I thought was a lost cause, I was contacted by the one of the creators of the game Artificial Selection, a game that has been in the works for a while now and is even going on the steam greenlight program later this year, so after a little back and forth from them I was given a Dev build of the game to do a spotlight on, which I have over on my YouTube channel, if you’d prefer to just watch the game and see what it’s all about, you can head over to www.youtube.com/larryplaysgames

But… for those of you that would like to read my thoughts on the game I’ve decided to to a full write up of my thoughts and idea so let’s get this started shall we?

Firstly I’d like to reiterate that this is a Dev build and not a public release of the game so anyone who wants to play this I’m sorry you’ll have to get in contact with the devs, and maybe, you might be able to work something out no promises though.

So what’s this game about? It’s a 2D top down shooter, that’s what it is, nothing new, but… instead of just using the normal weapons upgrading system what they have done is to “mutate” the weapons which I thought was a really nice touch this is done with creates that you can pick up, but I’m getting a head of myself a little aren’t I, let’s start from the beginning,

The first thing I saw when I loaded the game was the menu screen, its vibrant RGB neon coloured grid back ground really made the darkish blue menu buttons pop, the buttons themselves have small electrical trails in them around the words, which I thought made it stand out more. There are 7 menu buttons in total and I’ll use them kind of like a table of context for the post to explain the elements in each.

Campaign: So the campaign starts out with a basic story of a good guy having to stop a bad guy from unleashing a terrible weapon on civilization, pretty basic story line but from what I was told the main  feature of this game wasn’t the story as much as it was the gameplay, think of the campaign kind of like a tutorial, it teaches you the ropes on how to play so your can jump in and make your own maps to play with friends, kind of like with AAA titles like call of duty, you play the first little bit of the story mode to learn how to play, then you go and jump online to play with friends. So with this being said there are still 8 playable levels with only one of the not having any enemies to kill just power ups and health points this is just before the boss door.

Controls are pretty standard WASD to move, left mouse button to fire main weapon right to fire special, 1234 to swap between weapons, R to reload(game will auto reload but if you want you can manually do it) and the spaced bar to dash.

The enemies in this game don’t go on patrol rounds per say, they are activated via sound and sight, so if one sees you it will come after you and alert the others, just like it will do if it hears the sound of your weapon firing, which I thought made it more fun and challenging, trying to see how far I could get without being seen was a nice touch.

Destroyable environment, not something a lot of games have but something more should, gone with the days of just barrels or pots being broken to give you things, while this game only has specific things that hold items, the fact that I could sit there and spam a wall till it broke was pretty fun (and no you can’t just skip to the last level… I tried).

The music for this game was created by one of the developers of the game Chris mills-bowling, he has a YouTube channel with tons of his own music on it links to this are over in the description of the video if you want to find out, its mostly upbeat techno influenced, relying heavily on both a synthesizer and drums but also using a guitar and even a violin during the open of the track, this all combined adds to a create a fantastic sound track for the game, if I had any complaints about it, it would be that it is quite repetitive, I understand that making a song that lasts for that long will become repetitive, and that there are only so many sounds one can work with.

The more you go through the game, the harder it gets, right? Well yeah it wouldn’t be a challenge if it was easy, to many games these days are too easy to beat, and this one is kind of the same, yes it’s hard to beat the boss, but it’s the boss it should be hard, but the a part from just adding more to the screen on later levels, I didn’t feel that it was really a challenge, which is where the arena comes in.

Arena: Want an arena mode? Yeah this game has it, and boy is it fun, I felt it was just what the game needed, and granted this was what the developers wanted the game to be, I would have been quite happy with just playing this, with a max wave size of 10 waves with a possible 50 mobs each wave and an actual difficulty setting, it was where I spend most of my time with the game.

Editor: Ever thought “dam if only I could make my own levels in this game and make it how I want!’? well they have you covered in this one with a possible 33 different textures to use as walls and a total of 28 different ground types, I doubt you’ll have problems finding room to place the whopping 64 different spirits, now apart from those in the editor mode there’s really only 2 other interesting things, there’s a load/save feature and a test mode, where you can spawn in a player and test out your idea, if you watch the video I go over one of the small levels I made as a test of some of the textures.

Credits: It’s just what it sounds like, it’s the credits it has the names of all the people who worked on the game, including the names of people they got sounds from, they fly across the screen which is nice, but it makes it a little hard to hover over the names to find out what they person did on the game.

Settings: With things like volume, resolution, an in game fps counter there really isn’t much you can’t change in the game, vsync to particle physics, having a good setting menu is key to a game, if you can’t have the game run the way you want, you won’t want to play it. So having the ability to do so was defiantly a tick in the right box.

Simulation: This was one of the things I wasn’t too sure about, pressing this button will play out a 10v10 match on the back ground, while I agree it is a good thing to show as it shows what the game looks like, it felt like there was too much going on, onscreen. Maybe have it as a watchable video or something, but having it playing on the back ground was just a little too much for my liking.

Exit Game: Not much I can really say about this, it was a button to exit the game.

Now comes the part of the review/spotlight that most people look for, a score rating, now here at LarryPlaysGames I do things a little differently the game is broken in to 3 section, Gameplay, Visuals, and Fun, I go over each really quickly and give a score out of 10 for each for a possible best score of 30

Gameplay: With the use of the standard WASD keys and the mouse, the game was very enjoyable for both me, someone who uses a mouse and keyboard often and even others in my house hold who are more console oriented, we all agreed that the mechanics and the way the game was set out was good simple, But yet good for replay ability. With that said I give a 7/10

Visuals: The game was full of onscreen action tons of partials fly all over the place, explosions and dead robot bits, but while I enjoyed this, others felt it was a little overdone , now granted you can turn the partials down to the lowest setting, but to play that low just didn’t give the same immersion 6/10 

Fun: This is the big one, how fun was it, if you’re a fan of beatem ups, that what it is, while it has a campaign that’s not what the game was designed for, its designed as an arena game, see how long you can survive, if your also a fan of casual gaming, it works well as something to sit down with a couple of people and try to beat each other’s score, But, if you like to sit down for a game and play the story sorry but this isn’t for you. Still though 8/10

So my final score and thoughts of the game 21/30 or for the % people out there 70%

The game is fun, don’t get me wrong I had a blast with it but being someone who isn’t really a fan of that style of game I wasn’t fully devoted to playing it, and I don’t think I’ll go back to the game until it’s at least on steam greenlight…

colour wheel game write up

so I recently got in contact with an indie Dev of a mobile game called "colour wheel", Iroiro Games contacted me after Ii reached out for anybody with any sort of playable builds of any sort of games, now normally I don’t play a lot of mobile games, especially ones I’ve never heard of before, but since these guys where nice enough to let me give it ago to do some content on it i thought " why the hell not ?" so that what I did, I downloaded it on my Samsung tab 4 10.1 and started playing it,

Now it’s not anything like a mobile game I have played before, it’s not trying to send you to an end level or anything, but it’s a points based system, think bejewelled meets a painters pallet, the whole idea of the game is to try and match harmonies as the game calls them, there are 6 possible harmonies that can created with several different combinations to make each one, and that points system that I was talking about earlier is based on how many harmonies you can make.

To create the harmonies there are 15 different colours to use , the more larger you make your harmony the more points you will receive, the colours are Red, red-Orange, Orange, Gold, Yellow, Lime, Green, Cerulean, Blue, Teal, Purple, Magenta, Black, White, and Rainbow. The rainbow acts sort of like a wild card, it will mix and match its self to what ever you want it to be.

Now onto actual gameplay, I’ve been playing with this for a couple of days now and while it’s not AAA gaming addictive, its more “ oh I’ve got 15 minutes free lets jump on and try and beat my old score” type of addictive, and I even let my mother have a go of it for a while, she’s a massive bejewelled fan, all the knock off she has all the cookie crunch Facebook games, most of my family play and she’s miles ahead of them, and even she thought it was a cool change to the normal way these type of games work. There are 4 different game modes and each one is slightly different in the way you meet the end goal of a high score.
But I’m not going to spoil what all the modes are, that’s something you guys are going to have to go and check out for your self’s here’s a link to the game on the google play store, its free so go on over and grab it and try it for yourself.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=www.iroiro.games
Being as this is my first sort of review/ spotlight of  game that I have done a write up of I don’t really have a reference to compare it to, when I do videos you guys can see it in my face and hear it in my voice if I’m enjoying a game or not, and me just typing how I feel doesn’t really give of a feel to the game, so I guess a rating system should be brought in but seeing as how this isn’t a AAA developer it won’t be like an IGN review where it nit-picks every little detail I’m thinking Game Play, Visuals, and how fun the game is to play that will be our new system for ratings so…

Game Play: being it a time water game and something I can put down( but want to pick up as soon as I can) I’m thinking 7/10

Visuals: the game doesn’t really have many to judge here, but what ones they do have they have done well, The animated sprite on the menu screen the fluid movement between screens id have to say it’s a solid 8/10

Fun: this is the big one, how fun is the game to play, this is what it all comes down to when deciding to install a game, will I enjoy this, and if you’re the type of person who wants to sit down for a good couple hours and smash out a game, then no, this isn’t for you, but if you want something that’s fun to pull out while waiting for a train, at an airport or even while your waiting a couple minutes for your food to cook, then yes this is a great game for you, and with that said it’s a really solid 9/10

So final scores are 24/30 which if you can do math you will know is a pretty decent score it’s an 80% and that’s not exactly bad…

misseed a couple of days but im still here

So I missed a couple of days worth of blogging and videos as I was a bit ill but i am pretty sure I'm 100% now and should be right back into making videos tomorrow, what videos ill make i haven't decided but I'm hoping to find something tonight while I troll the depths of the web...

Wost comes to worst I'm sure I have something I can play, I would like to do some more spotlights as they are the main thing i like to do, you know giving unknown or less known games some more exposure to show off what can and what is being done by little or even minimal game devs.

I know i say it all the time but if youhave a game or know somebody with a game, id be more then happy to make a video of the game to show it off

But i think that does it for tonights post..


Cya guys and girls..

Not alot to talk about today

So not a lot happened today, it was basically  a write off, i couldnr sleep and decided to stay up and watch the screw attack live stream with chad and sam,, was an awesome tmie, but by the tme that finisghedit was something like 11 am my time, and at that point thers no point going to sleep so i didnt, i stayed awake, so ihave been awake since 2 pm wednesday.

well thats not all true, i had an hour power nap while waiting for dinner tonight so yeah, i didn't get ahole lot doine like id hopped i would, on the plus side i have videos all redy done for up till tuesday next week( minus the weekend days i take off) but im really running out of ideas for videos, theres no real game that is fun to make a video for and the games i am still enjoying i dont want to have the presure of making a video for.

Hearthstone for example, i recently joined when i got my tablet for christmas and its great fun to sit down and play a couple games but idont think id be able to sit down and make fun gameplay for you guys.

So if you have any idea for content you want me to do i can do my best for you guys... and girls head over to my twitter and let me know, or if you know anyone that has a game they want some free exposure for tell them to tweet me or head over to my website http://lucascause95.wix.com/larryplaysgames and get them to contact me and we can work something out.

And i think that's all i wanted to say in today's post..

Cya guys

More videos in the works

So today wasbasically a write off, i spend mostofthe day a sleep as i was up well into themor ing working on some more videos and contacting studios and pr reps about making videos.

So ihavnt reallydo ealot today, i e edited one video which is rendering as i type and shouldbe done quite soon, its nothing special just another need for speed episode, theres alot ofthose comming out lately as ive been wanting to beat the game.

But dont worry ive got a couple plans i  working on for next weeks videos which will hopefull be really cool (hopeing they come thruogh)but i just wanted to type this out as i havenothing else to do while my pc is rendering and its this hot.

Ive got a question for you guys reading, do you know of anyindie games that you think deserve a video showing off the game? Let me me know and ill see what i can do.

Cya guys!