Dig-N-Rig is Worth Digging Up

Me neither.  Dig-N-Rig is a game straight out of the Digipen Institute, where “resource management with creative building” are the key fundamentals.  Have you played a game like Minecraft?  This review may sound familiar.

• + Colorful and delightful 8-bit visuals.
• + Having tools for every occasion.
• + Quick reward schedule of getting minerals and items from those materials.
• + Compulsive play.
• + Space!*
  
• - Poorly executed tutorial.
• A fix: Give aesthetic care to the delivery of information, or edit the knowledge into a more efficient form.
• - Unrestrained upgrade system, upsetting game balance.
• A fix: Set scales ensuring proper capping of abilities and/or escalation of environment hazards.

Dig-N-Rig has a slippery start.  The first five to ten minutes of the game consist of paging through tutorial slide after tutorial slide.  This wouldn’t be half-bad if the information wasn’t a jumble of hard-to-read text randomly popping up everywhere on the screen.  I’m still not sure I managed to read them all, as tutorial textboxes easily blend with the pixelated background.  Don’t take from this that the visuals are unappealing; they’re not.  Very cool, in fact, for this 8-bit title!

Getting through the tutorial, the game does not try to burden the player with a convoluted narrative or crazy objective.  You are digging down to the center of the Earth for scientific study and exploration.  There.  Past that, go down, mining and building what you please with the boat-load of material you uncover behind nearly every bit of rock so those materials can be used to build even more cool stuff.  Repeat on the next play-through.

The player has a wealth of tools that aid in navigating down to the core.  Drills cut terrain like a knife through butter, but only if they are designed for a specific piece of ground (i.e. dirt drills manage dirt, rock drills blast rock, etc.).  These devices are fun to play with, but I found myself coming back to the rock drill time and again, for it doesn’t stop when it hits a barrier, only meagerly slowing down.  And bombs?  They’re good on the first play-through, but after a few upgrades to the rocket-propelled bazooka bullet, firing that beast makes all other blasting object obsolete.

Despite anything that I have said here that may be a strike against Dig-N-Rig, this game is compulsive.  You can lose hours of an evening scraping-up every last colorful jewel between your base of operations and the end.  You can finish in a fairly straight-forward fashion, and you become overpowered within a few upgrades, but again and again you’ll find yourself carving a complex path down into Earth’s depths.

Dig-N-Rig has holes (see what I did there?), needs a bit more content, and just feels like a game that almost was.  Looking at it from the point of it being a student project, however, this game is a blast.  It’s not a title to kill an entire day, but if viewed as a prototype or a proof-of-concept, Dig-N-Rig does just fine.  Now, what’s my suggestion?  Give this game a play.  Take care to checkout the gallery over at Digipen, too; you won’t be disappointed!

* Hint.

Vessel is a Game Unfulfilled

Steam is a great service for online gaming, and Vessel is one of the many demos that is available to try before making a purchase.  I’ve played this test of a game, and though unique elements are present, they can’t make-up for the hardship I felt in the demo.

To begin this whimsical platformer, the stage is set through a slow camera pan through a lab.  The scene shows pictures of your characters research into creating “fluros”; strange, fluid-based automatons that become the workers of the steam-punk world you live in.  This gallery clearly lays-out that these laborers revolutionized society, but something went wrong, thus depicting the current situation you find yourself in.

The story is put forward in a decent manner, but this is a comment on the first time seeing it.  The second and third times are overly repetitive, and the player has no way to get past them!  This distraction detached me from the world of Vessel when I just wanted to get back into the platforming and puzzles.

So, why did I play the demo three times?  Well, the first time was that the game trapped me in one of its puzzles with no way out.  Getting stuck in a closet is not a way to encourage trial-and-error testing of the puzzles in the game.  Therefore, being left between two inoperable doors, I had to restart.

The third play through comes from something deeper in the very foundation of Vessel.  Getting to a fluid puzzle area – the one that trapped me previously – caused the game to jitter then crash.  Forcing me a third time to play the game, I nearly had the title crash again; more fluid-based areas caused the game to distort and slow to a barely bearable pace.  I made it through that sequence after a few minutes, but my confidence in the programming design of Vessel is deeply shaken.

Now, when I was actually playing the demo, I had fun solving and manipulating the fluid-based puzzles.  Hot and cold fluids have unique effects, levers and machinery fit well in the steam-punk universe, and the “fluro” workers lend a creative element to problem solving.  However, the time I had getting to these places was greatly lengthened not just by the aforementioned unskippable cut scenes, but by long, drawn-out loading scenes.  I was not expecting such a drag from a 2D platform puzzle game!

Vessel’s demo was a quick one; that must be a saving grace.  Don’t get me wrong, for I did have fun with the simplicity of the visuals and the intriguing puzzles.  The downfall comes from lengthy time delays, poor design choices that punish players, and issues at the core of the program execution.  If I have judged this game wrongly, where the demo cannot convey some majesty of the actual Vessel release, please let me know.  But, when it comes to the first impression that Vessel’s designers decided to put forward, they either made a poor choice or worse, made a faulty experience.  Either way, I’d say take care in trying other games before approaching this title.

• + Good setup of background, motivation, and story right from the beginning.
• + Creative and engaging puzzles based around fluid motion and physics.
• - Uncontrollable, unskippable cut scenes.
• A fix: Add a simple button press to take the player straight to play.
• - Puzzles that punish curious testing without redemption from each trial.
• A fix: Leave room for a player to reset to some sort of checkpoint, or create limited, foolproof level layouts.
• - The game crashes over its main mechanic of fluid use.
• A fix: Properly check the quality assurance to the title, making adequate changes in how the game relates to itself and the machine it runs on.
• - Long load times.
• A fix: Better streamline the asset reliance the program makes on itself.

Pay the Dues to Majesty 2

I need to thank a friend of mine for going to the Game Developers Conference.  From his trip, I was able to snag some of his swag in the form of a Majesty 2 key.  Let me start by saying I’ve never played anything like Majesty 2, and rarely anything as difficult.

The game takes itself really light-heartedly.  Very quickly a player will receive funny quips and witty writing for everything from dialogue to loading screens.  Keeping the humor refreshed throughout play, Majesty 2 delivers a balance of easy attitude to counter the intensity of play.

Real-time strategy games are usually characterized by being plagued with micromanagement.  Unique, self-reliant AI of individual units that negates detailed supervision is both a blessing and a curse.  Your heroes can handle tasks by themselves by healing, fighting, and retreating fairly well.  However, when you are in a tight spot, or require something to be done immediately, your troops can be a bit fickle, getting either themselves or your base killed in pitched battle.

Further discussing units brings-up the point that some units are just not useful.  A hero may just be too expensive, or too weak, or not capable enough until a given level to provide the right amount of support to your army.  I found myself repeatedly going back to a 4-class system of knights, rangers, clerics, and dwarves; there are 13 classes in all.  That amount of excess that just doesn’t seem to have much of a place in the game makes the game appear to have not been completely thought-out.

The base your army is hired to protect grows.  Majesty 2 does an excellent job making your settlement seem alive, as all non-essential buildings pop-up around the fortress you make.  This leads to not base being the same another time through, while defenses are also needing to be dynamic as pesky rat-spewing sewers are randomly placed as well.

Time is relative, and Majesty 2 lives this to the fullest.  Full control of how fast the game flows is unimaginably useful.  Speed the construction of buildings or a drawn-out battle, or slow the chronometer to handle full-on assaults in the fantasy world.

Speaking of time, most missions won’t give you enough of it when the baddies come calling.  The game is just brutal.  Enemies never stop coming, and mass attacks can leave your defenses beaten and broken, with your heroes strewn about the battlefield.  Some of the bosses are also sincerely unreal; one-shot kills blow through even the toughest of troopers.  Because of the intensity of fighting can be so much, reliance on slowing game-time and much trial-and-error is a must; even then, the best preparations may not be enough, leaving luck your only friend/enemy.

I had fun playing Majesty 2.  The easy nature of the title, unique AI management, and living worlds create an experience no other game in recent memory delivers.  However, even those prepared for a challenge will find that the computer has an unfair advantage, and relatively useless hero classes don’t help.  So, I guess I can only leave you, reader, with a warning with this title: go into Majesty 2 expecting a good delivery and an experience not had before, but do not get too frustrated at what the game may pull on you.  With that, take care, and farewell!

• + The funny quips balance the intensity of play.
• + Micromanagement of units is a non-issue due to self-reliant AI.
• + Time control of gameplay.
• + Dynamic settlement growth creates a living base.
• - Some heroes are just not useful.
• A fix: Run-though balance issues such that all characters balance and can be effective if used.
• - The game is hard in an unfair way.
• A fix: Rely less on cheap mobs and lots of hit-points, and more on refined AI strategy.