Indie Bundle 7

This is the seventh entry in my series of reviews for the Steam Indie Bundles. Each review is short and subjective, and is geared to give you a quick look at the game. Indie Bundle 7 includes: Avadon: The Black Fortress, Dungeons of Dredmor, Q.U.B.E, Vessel, and Zombie Driver.

Avadon: The Black Fortress

Avadon is a typical RPG dungeon type game, where the player interacts with other characters, forms a little team to go adventuring with, collects loot, fights baddies; you know the score. The fighting is turn-based, and the interaction between players is all text.

The graphics are a bit old but the game is Hor+ and you can center the HUD on multimon, as per the DR. There is always the risk with these that you need to invest significant amounts of time into them just to get a basic understanding of the interface and controls, but they are simple enough in this game for even a casual gamer.

There's alot of gameplay here, and you can enjoy it in sweet multimon. The only downside would be the music and sounds, they just seem like they were recorded from a great distance away and played back through a laptop using onboard speakers. But if the graphics bring back good memories of the early days, you might find alot of value out of this game. 8/10.

Dungeons of Dredmor

Two games that are gold certified in multimon in a row! A fantastic start to the bundle.

This game is more engaging than the last; the graphics are fresh, the humour in the game is actually funny, and the interface even easier. The music is good, the sound effects are good, and the text is more abbreviated. When it comes to unravelling plots, I find less is more. I didn't sign up to read a novel, so a shortened storyline is good. One nice option when setting up the game is an abbreviated mode, where the levels are smaller with less baddies, so you don't spend so much time doing the usual hackenslash treatment for an excessive amount of time.

The game supports multimon, but I highly recommend playing at a non-bezel-corrected resolution, otherwise you'll end up with parts of your menu and game screen hidden. This doesn't work for a top down game, because you can't shift the view. It's only a minor thing, set the res in the launcher before starting and you won't have any issues. The game tries to display as much of the current map as possible, so while the game will track you if you are in the center, you do end up playing on the side monitors when you reach the far edges of the maps as the camera cannot pan further than the map limits.

The battle is easy, and picking up gold is easy. I'm not sure why the character automatically picks up gold and not other loot, which you have to click on, but it's not the first game I've seen like this. Probably to stop you getting over-encumbered with stuff you don't actually want. The game is fairly difficult, so consider yourself warned if you choose the hardest difficulty setting!

This game is better than the first, I like it. 9/10

Q.U.B.E

So we go from a game that is gold certified in multimon to a game with limited support in basic widescreen and no support in multimon. Q.U.B.E. stands for Quick Understanding of Block Extrusion, in case you're wondering.

The game is about manipulating blocks to work your way through a maze. Some blocks simply slide in and out of the walls. Other blocks need to be set, like pre-loading a springboard, so that when you walk or jump on them, you get thrown through the air; like a slingshot effect. Other contain a series of blocks that come out at different lengths, depending on which of the 3 you target. You are presented with situations and need to try a few things to get past the challenge and move on.

The game is Vert-, although it's barely noticeable in this format on a single monitor (don't even bother with multimon). Multimon Hor+ goodness would have been great because some of the views can induce a bit of vertigo; multimon would have enhanced this. I always take a peer back down big drops that I have just navigated up. Surprisingly fun and addictive. 8/10

Vessel

This game is just brilliant. If it supported multimon, then it would get a perfect ten from me. The graphics and art is just superb; the steampunk feel is perfect for the style of game. The game eases you in without any text at all, just really well designed levels and fun challenges from the start. Even the intro cut-scene has no text, just a few pictures on a wall with some great sound effects. The music and sounds are fantastic. I love it.

The game is a puzzle platform game, where you have to manipulate various controls to work your way through the levels. The game has a heavy focus on water and using it to manipulate other controls as well. When you interact with a vessel that can contain water, it becomes semi-transparent to allow you to view the water level to decide when to move it.

To me, this is what indie games are all about. A great idea, covered with great graphics and artwork that work with the theme, mixed with brilliant story-telling and mood setting, accentuated by fantastic sounds and music, enhanced with intuitive controls. Only loses half a mark for not supporting multimon. You should buy this game. Now. If you don't hear from me for the rest of the month, you'll know where I am. 9.5/10

Zombie Driver

Oh boy, what a fun way to end an indie bundle. Drive around running over zombies, blowing up stuff, doing burnouts, saving people? Sign me up! It's like playing with your matchbox cars from when you were a kid, with your imagination cranked to 10!

You're tasked with driving a car through a zombie-filled city, performing tasks to get rewards. There are also optional achievements along the way for extra booty, if you feel the desire. In the first mission, you need to go save some people from a building and return them to safehouse. Run over 100 zombies on the way to get the optional bonus. As if you need any encouragement!

You even get to play this sucker in multimon. The only downside is that the waypoint marker seems to follow the edge of the screen, so when it's off to your left or right it can be hard to see where to go easily, but you soon find it again.

I really enjoyed this for an easy going carnage-filled killing spree. I wanted to play more to find out what new cars and weapons I could unlock and cause mucho destruction with. 9/10

Summary

This has been the best bundle so far. Vessel is worth it by itself - game of the whole series so far. The others are great too; the ones that fall down technically make up for it in awesome gameplay. Just buy this one and thank me later.