Indie Bundle 10

This is the tenth 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 10 includes: All Zombies Must Die, Beat Hazard, BIT.TRIP RUNNER, Eufloria, and Machinarium.

All Zombies Must Die

This is a fun little top-down zombie shooter game. It features some cool funky music, great graphics, and some good humour along the way. As with most zombie shooters, you run around shooting zombies who drop ammo or health to let you survive long enough to shoot more zombies for more ammo and health drops.

The controls are easy enough and it's simple enough to know what's going on without reading through excessive amounts of tutorial text.

The game plays in multimon but mostly pillarboxes. Curiously, some HUD or 2D overlay elements are drawn on the outside monitors. Anyhow, it's a fun game when you want to do some mindless zombie slaughtering and have a good time doing it. 7/10.

Beat Hazard

I hate Indie titles that do not give you proper resolution control. This game is Vert- in multimon so I attempted to play it in 16:9 instead. I would select a new resolution from the menu and it would inform me that I needed to restart the game for it to take effect. When it restarted, it was still in the same fullscreen resolution. I HATE GAMES LIKE THIS; you need to spend time just to get the cursed thing running. Giving me options but not taking them is worse than no options at all.

The game is supposed to be some sort of rhythm game where you shoot asteroids and spaceships and stuff. It seems ok but I could think of more enjoyable things to be doing while listening to my music.

If you suffer from epilepsy, stay away from this retina-searing eye-blaster. I couldn't get it running in any other res so enjoy the Vert-multimon goodness like I did. Stop wasting my time now. 3/10

BIT.TRIP RUNNER

Ok so this is a bit of a retro gaming experience. A full on fast-paced sidescroller, at first all you need is the space bar to jump. As the levels go on, new functions such as sliding are introduced. The pace gets very quick very fast!

You can collect gold and power-ups along the way, but it didn't see to matter how many I collected, once you hit something, it's back to the start for you. One thing I always loved about getting powerups was that the music seemed to get more involved and pumping.

If you collect all the gold in a level, you get to play a retro type gold-grab bonus level which is pretty fun. Multimon is stretched and due to the blocky nature of the graphics, it's bloody hard to work out what text is supposed to be. I just enjoy playing it windowed. 7/10

Eufloria

Did you ever have a burning desire to send seedlings to asteroids so that you can grow a tree, but were frustrated that no-one had made a game for this yet? Stop your frustration, Eufloria is here.

After playing two levels of this riveting game, where something is sure to happen once every few minutes, I am pleased to announce that I had grown at least 6 trees. The little seedlings orbit your asteroids like moths around a light.

Be sure to play this in full multimon glory to maximise your Eufloria experience. 6/10

Machinarium

It seems to be a common theme that the games with the best gameplay, humour, and atmosphere have the worst multimon support. Here's another classic example. Machinarium is pillarboxed in any wide resolution, widescreen or multimon.

It's easy to see why the game designer would do this, though. The game is made up of small areas that you interact with, working your way through the challenges. There is no text or dialogue - if the character wants to convey a message, it's done through an imagination box. Some of the interactions with objects are entirely unexpected and funny. After you take a witch's hat which you need to solve one of the area challenges, any subsequent witch's hats you take get thrown over the edge of the chasm, telling you without question that you probably didn't need that one!

I really don't think widescreen or multimon would achieve alot in this game. I am grateful that i can play it at my desktop resolution without having to change it and it just works. I like this game, keeps the brain active and kept me laughing. 8.5/10

Summary

For me, Machinarium is the only real must-have of this group. Ironically, it's the one with the lowest grade on our site for widescreen and multimon support, but it's the best. Everything else is take it or leave it. I'd wait for Machinarium to come out on sale and just buy that one.