Hammerfight came out unexpectedly on Steam this week. Formerly known as Hammerfall, the game is set in a unique fantasy world and puts you in control of a flying machine that can be equipped with various knives, swords, flails, hammers, axes, and guns. Use the mouse to fly and to fight – Hammerfight employs a physics engine to let you swing weapons using the motion of your machine.
This game is strong and very manly in an ancient sort of way, kind of like Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments. Because of the direct control you have over swinging your weapons, getting a solid hit in Hammerfall feels REALLY good, and you’ll be doing a lot of it during a variety of manly activities like hunting giant cave worms with a ball and chain or fighting for your life as a slave in the arena. After each battle, a victory screen will pronounce your glory and say things like “You are now known as Derek the Barbarian,” or “You are the Worm Slayer,” or something like that. Also, as you progress, you’ll get decked out with all manner of sweet flying machine armor, and have banners hanging off of you that flap around as you kick ass. It’s awesome.
When the game was still called Hammerfall there was a playable demo available. Hammerfight is still the same great experience, but with all the polish it needed to be a full commercial release. (For one thing, the English text has been cleaned up considerably, making the storyline much more easy to follow.) It’s just as gorgeous, detailed, fun, and challenging as it was before, just better.
Hammerfight is a masterpiece, and $9.99 is a bargain. Go grab it!
Here are a couple of good-looking old-school 2d games coming from teams known for FPS’s:
Capsized is a platform game that’s reminiscent of Exile. Coming in 2010 to Steam and XBLA, from the creators of the multiplayer FPS Nexuiz.
Locomalito, best known for their chunky FPS 8-bit Killer, are working on Hydorah, a Gradius-style shmup. It will be released as freeware at some indeterminate date.
Fans of Ben There, Dan That! and its excellent follow-up Time Gentleman, Please! will be happy to know the saga of the two bumbling brits is confirmed to continue for an episodic series featuring some Day of the Tentacle style gameplay where Ben and Dan will seperate from each other, which given Dan’s malady regarding solo adventuring could be pretty great indeed.
The series so far has been a brilliant mix of great writing and some smart puzzles and I can’t wait to get stuck in to another game. Another key appeal of the series is the insane value for money, as the first game is still entirely free or alternatively can be bought as part of a $5 pack on steam featuring the even more sublime sequel.
On top of this, this month’s edition of GamesTM in the UK features a four-page interview with the creators as well as a review for TGP. A great month for the duo so far then, and with the new episodic series focusing much less on parody I think there’s far more comic originality left from the creators yet for us to see this year, and it’ll certainly be worth waiting for.
Seems Steam has answered the indie games D2D package with a package deal of its own (two, in fact): Audiosurf, Blueberry Garden, Braid, Crayon Physics Deluxe, Darwinia, Everyday Shooter, Gish, Mr. Robot, The Path, World of Goo, all in one package for $30. And a subset of five of those for $20. Ends Monday.
BREAKING KOTAKU EXCLUSIVE! Natural Selection 2, the sequel to the popular multiplayer Half-Life mod, is slated for a Fall release on Steam, according to its developers. The original game blended FPS and RTS mechanics and featured two very different playable teams – the alien Kharaa and the human Frontiersmen. NS2 will maintain the same basic mechanics, but with some new features (and obviously much prettier). It’s now running on an unnamed proprietary engine, with Valve’s Source engine having been dropped due to the cost of licensing.
This is great news, as the development has been through some rough times, with its creators selling a Sudoku puzzle game to make ends meet at one point.
Tale of Tales’ beautiful and terrifying horror game, The Path, is now available for purchase ($9.95) through the ToT website, Steam, and Direct2Drive. Two years in the making, the game has already drawn its fair share of praise, confusion, and unabashed criticism (the discussion in the comments of this one are very interesting). And more praise.
But you should probably just try it for yourself before reading too many of everyone else’s opinions. And given the open-ended and experimental nature of the game, and its adult themes, I can understand why ToT has chosen not to provide a demo for it, either. Fans of horror and/or experimental games should find it easy to take the plunge and support developers who stray off the beaten path (pun very much intended).
Eternity’s Child, a once promising-looking indie game, got slammed recently by Destructoid and the game’s developer, Luc Bernard, responded, er, slightly ungracefully to his critics in the comments under the post:
P.S I’m drunk and why i take things personally is because its my baby
I wasn’t sure if it was a good idea to continue this train wreck, but like Kieron Gillen (Rock, Paper, Shotgun), I think there’s a good lesson here on how to handle criticism as a developer (including the unfair, thoughtless, and/or overly cruel kind). I see Jeff Minter and Denis Dyack’s names being bandied about in threads like these all the time and it makes me sad that such talented and influential individuals are now thought of as poster children for bad behavior (unlike, say, certain people who might truly deserve it!). I can’t see much value in these public arguments and there are certainly plenty I’ve been involved in that I wish I hadn’t been!
Also, I’m curious… if the game is so completely broken, how did it end up on Steam?
