Apparently Flow will be a downloadable for the PS3 or something crazy like that, but in the mean time there’s an awesome version of it on the web for your enjoyment. You swim around, gobble up smaller creatures, and fight other creatures for survival rights. Spore got you excited? It’s something to get your brain pondering. Eat the red creatures to dive deeper. Play to the very bottom level, and you’ll get a chance to play as a different creature.
Why would anyone intentionally name their MMO Dofus? It’s the first of many questionable design choices in an otherwise above average freebie. The next thing that caught my eye was the character designs. Dofus leans perhaps a bit heavy toward the “furry” side of things, while retaining that trademark low quality fan service that seems to be all the rage with the freebie titles. Not to mention cheesy music you can’t tolerate for longer than 10-15 minutes, tops.
On the plus side, the graphics are quite impressive for a freebie. Nice painted 3D backdrops, a large world to explore, many different character designs and classes, and amusing monster sprites. Perhaps the best part is the tactical RPG style battles against multiple monsters, alone or in groups. It’s a nice change of pace from the “walk up and whack em ’til they die” strategy of most freebies.
Seems like fun if you put enough time into it, but I can’t help but find it somewhat bland overall. There’s no real drive or coherent story, even though there are in fact some quests to do, thankfully with a compass. While it may be free, I think I’d rather pluck down the one time fee for Guild Wars or play a month of WoW for the same amount of time invested. Not to say I won’t play it again, but it seems like I’ll forget about it quickly.
I was flipping through Game For Window’s feature on 101 Free Games the other day and RayHound quickly caught my eye. Turns out it’s another freebie from Hikware, the awesome dev behind titles such as Warning: Forever and Shooter’s Solitude. RayHound offers something pretty new though: You don’t actually have a gun. Instead, your ship releases a field which traps enemy lasers and redirects them, making them your own and under your control.
It’s a really interesting system to play with. Once lasers are caught in your field they become harmless to you. They’ll then follow you around under a sort of gravitational pull until released, or directed into an enemy turret. If you’ve grabbed a large amount of lasers, flying them into a ring of enemies may be a decent strategy. Often times it’s fastest to simply release the lasers at just the right time to slingshot them right back at the shooter. Either way, it’s a fairly deep mechanic.
Hikware really excels at putting a solid execution along with a fun concept. Like Warning: Forever, RayHound is something like what a sandbox game might be in the Shoot Em Up genre. Your only enemies are an ever increasing number of turrets and a countdown timer. The turrets grow in clusters as well as numbers, meaning more lasers simultaneously shot in increasingly complex patterns as well as more to dodge.
Instead of a life system, getting killed lowers your remaining time, while completing a stage increases it. At 0:00, it’s game over. While stage select every 10 levels is very welcomed, it would have been nice if one could have kept playing until death after 0:00, like in Warning: Forever.
Warning Forever is another awesome title from Hikware. It was the first of his titles I came across, and it’s seen some great updates over the years. Picture it as a Shoot Em Up with nothing but boss fights, where the bosses learn as you go.
What makes Warning Forever so cool is that the bosses build up in complexity with each round. Every boss has a core, and around the core is a mishmash of arms, thrusters, rocket launchers, lasers, turrets, plasma cannons, pincers, and so forth. While the first ship may be little more than a core with a few cannons around it, soon you’ll fight monstrosities that nearly take up the entire screen.
Cooler still is that you can blow them up part by part. Blow off a thruster, a left wing, a laser cannon, and watch the ship react. Blow up a part close to the core and all the connected parts are destroyed. For each ship you defeat, the enemy learns from your patterns and gets stronger in that area. Do a lot of front attacks, and soon you’ll find extremely strong front armor. Get shot down by the cannons, and you can expect even more cannons. This thing is a great time killer.
