Alpacapaca Dash from Publisher and Developer Synnergy Circle Games
Alpaca runner with freaking laser beams shooting out their mouths.
Alpacapaca Dash is a side scrolling endless runner.You play as an Alpaca sent to save the Alpaca World from Eternal Darkness by running around shooting a laser beam from your mouth to destroy the evil darkness and restore the world.
There are 2 modes in the game, Easy and Hard Mode. Easy has auto-aim enabled which turns the game into a 2 button game; one for jumping and one for shooting the laser. Hard is where the challenge ramps up as you now have to add aiming into the run. Just like most endless runners, the game has you running on a set track at a set speed. All you can do is jump and shoot while the character moves for you. We would have loved to have a little control over the character as some of the jumps felt impossible to do correctly. We did figure out that you can run off the edge of the platform and jump right as you start to fall to get a little extra distance on the jumps.
While running around you will find items that will benefit or hinder your run. Items can give you a save for missing a jump, power up the laser beam, or cause you to lose all of your upgrades. The items are easy to see but sometimes hard to pick up or avoid as it all depends on timing for your jump.
While running on the platforms, your Alpaca starts to bring color back to the dark world. Running past dead trees brings them back to life. You will also collect coins during the run which can be used to purchase different skins as well as a “coin power up” bonus. Once the power up has been purchased you will find sacks of coins as well as treasure chests to collect.
There are a total of 11 different Alpaca skins to purchase. Some are a simple color shift while others add a little extra by changing the color of the Alpaca, adding a hat, tail, and changing the laser beam color.
Overall we enjoyed the game. It was good for pick up and play once we got used to the timing on the jumps. It also has several easy achievements.
Alpacapaca Dash is available on Xbox and PC. A digital copy of this game was provided to SimpleGameReviews for the purposes of reviewing the game.
Cat and Ghostly Road from Publisher Sometimes You and Developer BOV Games
Fairly standard point and click game play mechanics. Enjoyable story and characters. Very nice art with extras in “Cat Vision”.
This is a point-and-click game where you play a cat going on a journey to recover your master’s soul.
You start out as a cat walking around in the snow and get into some trouble. Your cries for help are heard by an artist who saves you and brings you in from the cold adopting you. All seems pretty normal, until one night when an evil spirit attacks the artist and takes his soul.
It’s time for you to go on a journey to defeat the spirit and recover your master’s soul and save his life.
Like most point-and-click games you will be going to different locations, picking up items, and combining them to see what you can make. You also have a special “Cat Vision” that lets you see into the spirit realm. You will use this ability very often to find items or clues to solve the puzzles. One of the nice quality of life additions present in this game is the option to press the LB Button to get a visual indicator (shining star effect) for items or objects you can interact with. This helps you identify what you can and can’t interact with. It also helps save time trying to figure out what you might’ve missed. We ended up spamming this very often when accessing a new area or just going back to a previous area when we got stuck. If you get stuck, remember to check to see what items you can combine.
There are some mini games and puzzles throughout the game that you need to complete before being able to move on. You get an unlimited amount of tries on these so there’s no need to worry if you fail them a few times. There is a sneaky one towards the end of the game that took us a few tries before figuring out the secret (Hint: Cat Vision). We ended up over-thinking some of the puzzles and making them harder than they needed to be. Remember, the game wants you to figure it out and the hint is normally nearby.
There are standard fetch quests, getting an item from here and bringing it to there to use it, that are standard for most point-and-click games.
You could tell the game was designed for a PC with the pointer that moves like a mouse. But they did a good job mapping it to a controller with one thumbstick moving the character and the other moving the pointer.
The one issue we had was that the movement speed felt a little slow for both the character and the pointer. We would have loved to see a movement speed option in the menu so we could speed that up.
Overall we enjoyed the game, the story, and the characters but the art style might have been the best part. The backgrounds look great and have a little added extra when using Cat Vision.
Cat and Ghostly Road is available on Xbox, Playstation, Steam, Windows and Nintendo Switch. A digital copy of this game was provided to SimpleGameReviews for the purposes of reviewing the game.
Rise of the Triad: Ludicrous Edition from Publisher and Developer New Blood Interactive, Nightdive Studios, Apogee Entertainment
A remake of a cult classic 90’s first person run-and-gun shooter. Adrenaline runs high with crazy fast movement speed and occasional frustrations from not being able to find the exit for the level. Recommend giving it a try and blasting some enemies with your super bark of destruction or Excali-bat today!
Rise of the Triad: Ludicrous Edition is the updated remaster of the cult classic 1995 game Rise of the Triad. It’s a retro First Person Shooter that actually lets you pick from one of the five Members of the High-Risk United Nations Task-Force (codenamed H.U.N.T.). Each of the characters has different stats in movement speed, health (or hit points), and accuracy.
As expected it plays like a 90’s FPS run-and-gun which is both a good thing and a bad thing at the same time. If you didn’t grow up playing these kinds of games you will get frustrated as there are no tutorials and there are hidden entrances all over the place. You end up getting stuck and have to just start spamming the A button against the walls hoping to find one of the hidden doors and open a path. Some of the levels feel like a maze where you keep going back and forth trying to figure out what you missed to find the exit. There is a map that is a little bit of help but there’s no mini map so you need to open the menu and check it all of the time or you risk having to run back and forth for something you missed. The story is about what you’d expect from a 90’s FPS game. There are bad guys you need to stop, that’s pretty much as deep as it gets.
As someone who didn’t play the original Rise of the Triad I was surprised by the crazy powers you get in this game, like being able to fly for a small amount of time, turning into a dog with a super bark, having a magic baseball bat (Excali-bat), becoming a god, and making people explode. The powers added some diversity to the game play and let you experiment with different play styles. Just like most good FPS run-and-guns, it’s all about the weapons. Along with the normal standard weapons like pistols and machine guns, they have some other interesting weapons with several of them firing different types of rockets.
Since it is a remake, we wish they would have added some quality of life improvements, like autosave. You read that right. It’s 2023 and there is no autosave, only manual saves, which is easy to forget to do nowadays as that has become a standard function in games for quite a while now. It’s frustrating when you forget about that and end up losing hours of gameplay. This happened to us as we stopped playing for a bit and when we reloaded, we realized that our last save was from hours ago. Another thing we would have loved to see is the option to change the controller sensitivity. It felt like it was set way too high which made some of the platforming parts much harder than they needed to be.
There are 4 different campaigns to play, with a total of 109 levels, giving you hours of gameplay. Just make sure you remember to save often (or at the very least, save before you stop playing). There is also the option to use the game’s original cheat codes if you remember them or you can look them up online. The game gets bonus points for letting you unlock achievements while using cheat codes. Unfortunately, the console remake did not include the multiplayer game type from the original game. But we hear the PC version does include this game type. Would love to see this come to consoles in a future title update.
Overall, it did hit that 90’s FPS nostalgia nailing the ever so classic look and feel of those games. The controller sensitivity was a challenge at times and made us feel like our character was speed skating on ice, but the option to play as different characters was a really cool option and we ended up playing as the character with the slowest movement speed to help offset some of the issues we were having with the controller sensitivity.
Rise of the Triad: Ludicrous Edition is available on Xbox, Playstation, Nintendo Switch, Steam and Windows. A digital copy of this game was provided to SimpleGameReviews for the purposes of reviewing the game.
Antstream Arcade from Publisher and Developer Antstream
Nostalgic retro games galore. Cloud hosted so can have some latency issues at times.
Antstream Arcade is your home for playing legal copies of Retro games with over 1300 games available to play anytime. Sounds a little too good to be true right? So, what’s the catch…? Well, first off, you are buying a subscription/license from the service to play the games. There are currently two options; buying a 1 year license (that you would have to buy again if you wanted to access the games after that 1 year is up), or a lifetime license. At the time of this review the 1 year is $30 USD and the Lifetime is $80 USD on Xbox (it is also available on PC). The second catch is that all of the games are cloud only versions that are streamed to you and not installed or run locally on your system which can lead to a little lag with your controller input at times. But, at least it saves hard drive space, right?
When you first access the arcade you might be overwhelmed with the sheer amount of games. 1300 is a lot of games. If you were gaming in the 80’s, 90’s, and even the early 2000’s you will find tons of games that will bring back memories, some good and some bad. There is a search option to help you find games to play but you need to know what you are looking for to make it helpful. We noticed a bunch of times that the same game appeared more than once since it was listed separately for different systems/consoles (ie: Skatin USA for the Spectrum and for the C64). We would have loved the option to make our own playlist. You can favorite a game by clicking on the star but you need to go into your profile to access your favorites. Having that on the main Play Now screen would have been a better choice. We would love to see this changed in an update to the arcade.
Going through the games we instantly found a few games that made us stop everything and play. The music, the sound effects, and the look just hit us with all of the nostalgic feels. Replaying these was both good and bad as it seems some games weren’t as good as we remembered them being and would’ve been better left safely locked away in our fond memories. It also took a little bit of getting used to trying to play the old games with a modern controller as most of the games only use a few of the buttons since that’s all that was available when the game first came out.
In all of the games we played we were able to make a save at any time and had 3 save slots. This was a welcome change from the original versions as a lot of the older games were known for being harder than they needed to be and not being super forgiving with checkpoints. Being able to save at any time lets you take a break from that game to play something else or just put it down for a while without losing your progression. For anyone who remembers playing early console games you know that saving on demand was not an option.
Just playing the games can be a little boring after a while which is why Antstream added Mini challenges, weekly tournaments, and community challenges. These are great additions to the original games and completing the challenges rewards you with a Bronze, Silver, or Gold Medal as well as some system currency. You even get a daily login bonus just for loading the game. You might be a little confused about the system currency since you already have access to all of the games. We were confused too at first since we couldn’t find anything to buy with it. We eventually found where we could use it to unlock new challenges, join the tournaments, or create challenges against a friend or the community. This extra layer of gaming on top of the original games was really interesting.
Overall, we enjoyed playing a lot of games from our childhood and discovering new old games to play. If you are an older gamer with young kids it would be fun to show them a bunch of games you played when you were growing up. For anyone who missed gaming in the 80 and 90’s this is an easy way to check out the games without spending a lot of money on the retro hardware and games.
Antstream Arcade is available on Xbox and PC. A digital copy of this game was provided to SimpleGameReviews for the purposes of reviewing the game.
Flat Heroes from Publisher and Developer Parallel Circles
Not for the faint of heart or easily frustrated. Fast paced platforming with high degree of difficulty.
Flat Heroes is a fast-paced, minimalistic, intense, action platformer. You control a square just trying to stay alive. To do that, you need to jump from platform to platform, landing and jumping off walls to avoid being killed by the enemies and traps that appear.
There are 3 modes to play: Campaign, Survival, and Versus. Campaign is divided into two parts. Normal, which is the standard mode, and Heroes, which is pretty much equivalent to Hard mode. We suggest leaving Heroes until you have completed Normal mode. Most of the levels consist of avoiding the different types of enemies/traps and staying alive.
The game does provide a lot of challenges with 300 levels broken up into 20 worlds between normal and hero mode with boss battles at the end of each world (and we do mean battles). Some of the boss battles take a little bit of time (and many deaths) just trying to figure out what you need to do to beat the boss.
New mechanics are introduced every few worlds and new enemies/traps are introduced every few levels which keeps the gameplay interesting and keeps upping the challenge. If the levels become too challenging we suggest getting a friend to join as you only need 1 player to survive to the end in order to finish the level. Sadly, the game only offers local (couch) co-op. But, it does have drop-in and drop-out 4 player co-op which made it easier for a friend to drop in to help for a couple of levels and then drop out and we could keep going on our own. If you don’t have a local co-op player who is willing to join you there is an option to skip the level but it looks like you can’t skip back to back levels so be aware of that when choosing to skip or not. You are unable to skip the second to last level in the world (the level before the boss battle).
Survival mode, as you might have guessed, is a timed mode seeing how long you can stay alive. There are a bunch of modes to play but sadly most of the modes are locked behind SP, the game’s point system. You “earn” SP by climbing the leaderboards. There is a daily challenge that you can play once for free. If you would like to retry it to try and get a better time it will cost you some of your SP which turns it a little into a currency system. It does have online global leaderboards which is great to see as that adds to the replayability. We did notice that the top scores are all Dev accounts which should probably be removed or not included in the leaderboards.
Versus mode is a battle mode. Much like Survival mode, most of the versus modes are locked but can be unlocked after playing a few games. There is couch co-op for all of the modes and the option to add AI for the versus modes. We would have loved to see different options for the AI as it is no joke; they play to win.
The game carries its minimalist theme throughout from the controls and enemies, to the art style and music. All of this adds to that pick up and play feeling where we can play it for 15-30 minutes here or there, put it down, and come back another time.
Overall we enjoyed the game in spurts, some of the levels were very challenging and a little frustrating as we didn’t know what we were supposed to do during the boss battles. It is satisfying finally completing a level that you died a bunch on and that included the boss battles. The game does not hold your hand, you learn by dying over and over until you learn the pattern or figure out the objective. We would have loved to have been able to play more of the modes without having to grind points or battle the AI.
Flat Heroes is on Xbox, Playstation, Nintendo Switch, Steam, and Epic Games. A digital copy of this game was provided to SimpleGameReviews for the purposes of reviewing the game.
Endling – Extinction is Forever from Publisher Hearobeat Studios and Developer HandyGames
Don’t mess with momma fox. Emotional journey of a momma getting her stolen cub back. Beautiful art and well told story.
Endling is a 3D side-scrolling survival eco-conscious journey in a beautiful yet polluted world. You play as the last mother fox on Earth with 4 newborn cubs. A hunter traps one of the cubs and you will need to track down the hunter to rescue your cub while keeping your other 3 cubs safe, fed, and alive. Mankind is slowly destroying the world with trash and junk everywhere. The forests are being cut down and rivers are polluted. As the game goes on you will see the world getting worse and worse.
For the first little bit, when the cubs are very young, they will stay in the shelter and you will need to go out and bring back some food. Sometimes, you will have to hunt other animals or dig through garbage looking for food. Most of the expeditions take place at night while the humans are sleeping. The game does recommend you return to the shelter before morning. This is not mandatory although it does make it easier to move around because if the humans see you they will attack. When returning to the shelter to sleep you will see an adorable image of you, the momma, and your cubs sleeping. Every once in a while you will see an animation of a cub yawning or moving around.
After a few nights of solo foraging for food, the cubs will venture from the shelter and join you. This adds another component to the game as you will need to make sure they are safe and keep them within range. They start off not being able to do much, just following you around waiting for food. There are certain areas of the game that will teach your cubs new skills. With some of the new skills they learn they will be able to get their own food and escape when being hunted. The cubs can get scared with everything happening in the environment or when you have been attacked. You can pet your cubs to reassure them everything is ok. This little extra touch adds something special to the game and really makes you feel connected with your character.
With all that said, not all interactions with humans are bad. Yes, most of them will be trying to hunt you with traps and if they do get too close to you they will attack you but, some of them will ignore you and a few will give you some food and try to pet you. For the ones that are hostile, you are able to fight them off but it does take a toll on your character as you are unable to run and will have to walk away.
If you die you are provided with a message letting you know that your cubs couldn’t survive without you as well as the image of your character being killed sometimes a little graphically. If you don’t take care of your cubs, they will die so it’s important to not neglect them if you want to keep them alive. This adds to the message about how serious survival is.
From time to time you will come across other animals; some you will hunt for food and others will attempt to hunt you. You can also befriend a few who will give you food and maybe even show you some short cut (fast travel) locations around the world.
The game provides you with a sniff mechanic, showing you a “scent trail” for food (prey and garbage) as well as the hunter who took your cub. Everytime you find a clue, which is something the hunter has interacted with, you get a little flashback image. This is used to help progress the story and also unlocks new areas. We really liked the way this was used as it felt like the hunter’s tracks came every few days normally after you had finished exploring your current area. The more clues you find the more you learn about the hunter.
As you play the world keeps changing, seasons change and so does the environment. While following your goal of keeping the cubs safe and getting the taken one back, new paths and escape ways to use and explore open up. There are events that happen on certain days in specific areas that you can completely miss out on. Luckily, this doesn’t impact the story but it does add another little something extra if you happen to experience them and gives players the opportunity for unique experiences in their playthroughs.
Overall we really enjoyed the game, the story, the world, and with all of the little extras it made it feel more like an experience than a game.
Endling – Extinction is forever is on Xbox, Playstation, Nintendo Switch, Steam, GOG and Epic Games. A digital copy of this game was provided to SimpleGameReviews for the purposes of reviewing the game.
