Played at PAX - Dismantle: Construct Carnage

This multiplayer robot-brawler is dripping with style and potential. It's also chock-full of explosive fists, grappling hooks and delicious destruction physics.

Dismantle: Construct Carnage is a top-down multiplayer brawler where robot gladiators beat at each other with medieval weapons, it's a simple premise, but with some pretty great twists. Foremost, while you may start with axes and hammers, as the battle wages on you'll find your own weapons, from pieces of the map, to pieces of your opponents.

Don't let the words "regular" and "human" fool you. This 5v5 game about monstrous robots lining up to shoot hoops is one of the more exciting and outlandish games I've played.

PAX is a hub of new ideas, new games and big tech innovations. But sometimes, PAX is also a perfect testing bed for outlandish prototypes. This is just where Regular Human Basketball enters the arena (woo, sports puns!). This is an experimental Game Jam concept from Powerhoof, the Melbourne-based developers of Crawl, which we highlighted as one of our top Steam Early Access titles.

What may not surprise you now that you've seen the image above, is that these really aren't ordinary humans, and what you're playing is only a strange facsimile of the game we call basketball. Really it's a competitive slugfest between two unwieldy titanic machines that want nothing more than to shoot hoops and crush humans.

The game is played with anywhere from two to ten players, and the demo I played was using eight classic SNES controllers. Each team has one giant robot and a hoop to shoot at, and there's an oversized basketball between them. The trouble is, moving the robot is as easy as spinning plates. Just like Overcooked or Lovers In A Dangerous Spacetime, there are always more jobs to do than there are squishy humans to do them.

Each player controls one such rotund little homosapien, and once you jump inside your giant mech (without getting crushed by its legs, arms, wheels, body or the ball) you need to control the robot cooperatively. This means running from compartment to compartment around the creature and pressing buttons. These could tell it to move forward or backward, or control the limbs, fire the rockets or raise the body. They all have simple on/off states, so you can push forward and leave the robot to do its thing while you go raise the legs or fire the rockets. 

It's strange how having that many things to do and working together to man a lumbering machine can force people to play as a team. You might spend more time rambling incoherently than actually communicating or making clutch plays, but through a sheer force of wills, both robots did actually play basketball, and both robots did score points.

It's a strange, over-the-top, bizarre little game that makes me want to get ten friends together and shoot some mechanical hoops. And yes, you can jump into the opposing team's robot for a little impromptu sabotage.

Regular Human Basketball is publicly available for download here, and the developers are thinking of expanding it and releasing a full version if the community is interested. 

Writer:
Nathanael Peacock
@OhThatPeacock

Played at PAX - Kieru

Imagine slinking through the shadows, katana in hand and sneakily assassinating other players without ever being seen. That’s pretty much what Kieru pushes you to do, hunt down your enemies without being seen before disappearing again. Only, it's multiplayer.

Kieru is a first-person ninja combat game that pits you against an opposing team of ninjas. It's fast and hectic, but the true style comes from the aesthetic. Imagine a modern Japanese garden, starkly coloured in black and white like a scene from Sin City.

This feeds back into the gameplay because each team of ninjas is invisible on their own colour. So black ninjas disappear completely into the shadows, while white ninjas fade into the light. It makes for a tense back and forth where you feel safe in your own area, but know you need to cross into enemy territory to make a kill.

Oh, and every successful strike leaves a red slash, and kill and explosion of bright red across the otherwise colourless world. It means kills are spectacular, and being wounded (quite literally) paints a target on your back.

The mode I played was a traditional team deathmatch scenario with two white ninjas and two black ninjas battling over a Japanese train station. You have your trusty katana, which can dole out quick slashes or a charged dash attack that becomes a special attack if you nail the timing. You also have a handy teleport ability that is great for offense and defense, as well as the ability to hurl a shuriken from range to damage distant foes.

It was stealthy, tense and at times terrifying to be hunting an invisible foe who was also hunting me. It made for brilliant moments like watching a team mate lose a quick duel only to notice the enemy was still dripping bright red blood all over the map, I followed him to a quiet place for an easy kill right near the end of the match. These fights are stunningly quick and usually over in an instant, before you need to reassess, hide and start the hunt again.

And the level design is wonderfully twisted, offering verticality and small spaces of safety in its black and white patterns. However, the environment shapes are all made of jaggered edges that cut into each other, meaning you can't go any great distance without exposing yourself to enemies. The idea of laying a human trap and baiting a foe out of cover certainly crossed my mind.

To find out more, check out the game here.

Writer:
Nathanael Peacock
@OhThatPeacock

VR was huge at this year's PAX AUS, but the biggest players weren’t the AAA developers. Indie developers were all across the show floor showing off a tonne of innovative experiences, from strategy games to VR boxing. Of all the games I tried, A Township Tale was by far the most exciting, and the demo shown was just a proof of concept.

 
The pitch for A Township Tale goes something like this: imagine a VR world where multiple players work together to run a medieval village. So different players acting as miners, blacksmiths, builders, hunters and more combine their skills together. You'll work together to manage the town and support each others' goals, or mess with other players as you see fit. 

Unlike its inspiration, Minecraft, A Township Tale's aesthetic is cartoony and lush. Everything feels slightly larger than it needs to be, but in going with this stylistic choice, Australian developer Alta ensures the world  feels very clear and crisp on a VR headset.

A Township Tale is made by Sydney-based team for the HTC Vive, making full use of the headset, motion controls, headphones and a microphone to talk. When I first put on the headset I found myself standing on a small road with a sign pointing towards “the mines” or the “old castl.e” I pointed my gloved and cartoony hand towards the old castle and teleported down in a few short hops. The dilapidated structure was mostly crumbled stone walls around a grassy clearing.

I immediately spied a treasure chest and sauntered over to it.

It’s strange how doing something in VR can make it immediately feel exciting and new again. I opened the chest and with my right hand, saw it was full of coins and started to pull them out one by one with my left hand, throwing them into a nearby bucket.

I did that for almost all of my five-minute demo, it was utterly engrossing.

That is, before the multiplayer element kicked in an I heard someone behind me say, “what’s in the chest?” I turned around quickly and saw another player peering over my shoulder. “Nothing, it’s empty,” I replied, trying not to look at the bucket full of coins. He spotted them anyway and picked up a couple of the coins and started to juggle with them. I quickly joined in and before long we were throwing coins at each other and playing frisby with a nearby shield.

It’s these little interactions that make me think the future of VR isn’t as insular as we've been lead to believe. The potential for engaging, evolving stories built out of real human interactions is simply amazing.

When I came back in the afternoon for a second shot at A Township Tale, I found something completely different to fill my time with. This time I found a bow and quiver of arrows.

I quickly realised that I could strap the quiver to my belt and the bow across my back before setting off in search of targets. All I found was another player, and after exchanging a few words we set about making an impromptu game of dodge-arrow. We firied from behind rocks until one of us eventually got hit or we ran out of arrows.

What I didn’t realise until I got out of the game was that the other guy I was firing arrows at was actually set up across the other side of the convention centre at a completely different VR booth. It was a stunning moment of realisation.

To find out more about A Township Tale, head over to their website here.

Writer:
Nathanael Peacock
@OhThatPeacock

If you are wondering who we are, we're primarily a digital magazine for the iPad focused on the coverage of indie video games. Run by the former editor of Game Informer, you'll find worldwide exclusives, but also an interactive media experience unlike any you have seen before. If you have an iPad, you should check out the free sample issue at the very least, or enjoy one of our other episodes as listed below.

Get Every Episode:
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Played at PAX - Lost Castle

The PAX Rising Indie section of PAX Aus 2016 was chock-full of awesome innovations, new stories and some returning favourites. Here's a quick look at Lost Castle, a Chinese-developed side-scrolling hack 'n' slash just making its way to Australia.

Everyone remembers 2012’s Castle Crashers, a great little side-scrolling beat ’em’ up with a cool fantasy aesthetic. Well here is Castle Crashers' sadistic cousin.

Lost Castle was  was described to me as Castle Crashers meets Dark Souls and Streets of Rage. I feel like that’s a pretty great comparison.

Bethesda’s New Review Policy is Risky Business

In a recent Blog post, Bethesda has revealed it will no longer send out advanced review copies of games to media, a move that is sure to flood the internet with inaccurate information and poor reviews.

Bethesda Softworks is one of the brightest emerging publishers in the video game industry. Building on the storied foundation of its own Elder Scrolls and Fallout series, the company – a subsidiary of Zenimax –snapped up a number of other big name studios to its label earlier this decade. In quick succession, the legendary id Software, Arkane studios, MachineGames and Tango Softworks signed on, and soon after Battlecry Studios was founded. Together, they have released such games as Doom, Dishonored, The Evil Within, Wolfenstein: New Order and Fallout Shelter.

In short, Bethesda has become a source of high quality, highly anticipated video game experiences. And having spent plenty of time with the developer, I applaud the way they operate; with each team completely free to explore their creative visions without overseers spoiling the broth.

In the past 24-hours, Bethesda has declared that it is changing its review policy. It wants media and gamers to experience a new title at more-or-less the same time as each other. As such, review copies will arrive with journalists the day before release, and there are some big problems with this stance.

The innovative and amazing Framed by Loveshack Entertainment is getting a sequel, and Kojima will be stoked.

We adored the original Framed when it released in 2014. Its stunning concept intimately linked story and gameplay, asking you to rearrange the pieces of a comic book to not only unravel the noir story, but also evade the police. Moving each panel therefore not only had to make narrative sense, it had to function to keep the protagonist safe. Wonderfully presented, it was not only Grab It that fell in love with the project, with Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima nominating it as his 2014 game of the year.

Not bad for a little indie studio from Australia!

With swords, demons, explosions and some really bad jokes, this latest stab at recreating a fast-paced 90's shooter makes all the right moves.

If you're looking for a brilliant, mildly offensive time-waster, this is probably it. It's not long after your first fire up Shadow Warrior 2 that you're up to your eyeballs in demon guts, explosive crabs and wang jokes. And it just gets better from there.

When we lose sight of why we game, our hobby becomes nothing more than a humourless chore.

My 18-month old daughter had finally gone to sleep. As is my usual evening ritual, I trudged downstairs and plonked myself, bleary-eyed and exhausted from work, in front of the TV ready to game the remainder of the night away. For 10 minutes I stared blankly at the screen, unsure of what to play. My ever growing "pile of shame" beckoned to me with merciless taunts and jeers. The pressure to pick up a game - any game - merely to wipe off my backlog was immense. It was at that moment I had an epiphany: sadly, my wonderful hobby had become nothing more than a humourless chore.

A charming and relaxing folktale adventure that empowers the player through a wonderful sense of discovery.

The opening scene of Burly Men at Sea is brilliant, setting the tone of the entire game. As the title screen popped up, I waited rather impatiently for the game to start. After around half-a-minute, I began to think that the game had frozen. A rather inauspicious start, I mused to myself. Frustrated, I swiped at the iPad screen. Surprisingly, the screen reacted to my touch, revealing something hidden on the right. Holding my finger down, the screen began to expand until the path forward was revealed. And so, my seafaring adventure had begun...