Steam Next Fest February 2026 Part 1 of 2

A double dose of demos

The Demo Man Returns

Thousands of demos have been unleashed on an unsuspecting public, and I’m here to play a very small fraction of them and tell you what I think.

Demos are listed in no particular order.

Wild Blue Skies

A group of former StarFox 64 devs got together to make another game about furries in space. Wild Blue Skies is a spiritual successor to Star Fox, which is to say, it’s Star Fox again. I’m a huge fan of the N64 game, so I welcome it, but at the same time, I’m thinking asking myself why I’d play this when I could just play the original. The devs answer by making a game that’s both reminiscent of the old, with enough new to keep things interesting.

Wild Blue Skies is a 3D rail shooter. You fly around in a little space ship, shooting at enemies and avoiding obstacles while constantly moving forward. You can move in all eight directions, boost to move a little faster, brake to slow down, and do a barrel roll to reflect incoming projectiles. You can do everything you could in Star Fox 64, with the exception of the loop-de-loop. A glaring omission, in my opinion.

For offense you have your laser, a lock-on shot and a bomb. The lasers are your basic shot, good for shooting at stuff. You can’t rhythmically tap the shot button to get rapid fire lasers anymore, which is a bit of a shame. That was a nice little bit of tech you could do in the N64 game which gave it a little bit of depth. The lock-on shot explodes when it hits an enemy, letting you take out multiple ships at once, giving you a score bonus. The bomb is sort of there.

Star Fox 64 wasn’t a difficult game, so Wild Blue Skies tries to be a little tougher to please the more hardcore fans who have replayed the original dozens of times. They do this by adding more enemies, which is good. They also made them a lot tankier, which isn’t very good.

Your basic laser is weak and can barely take enemies down, and some enemies can’t possibly be killed with them before they vanish from the screen. The upgraded shot is a necessity here. This is especially obvious during the boss. If you don’t have the good laser, you’ll develop a severe case of carpal tunnel syndrome and die of old age before you defeat it. Other than that, the enemies shoot more projectiles, but they’re still passive. It feels more active than its predecessor, but it’s still a bit on the easy side.

The game’s presentation is a mixed bag. The graphics look nice, and the game runs well, but enemy designs, at least in the demo level, are very boring. They’re all dark, abstract blobs. Sure, the Star Fox series has always had these types of enemies that are just polygons stapled together, but they had better silhouettes and designs. The ones in Wild Blue Skies are rounded little blobs with not much to differentiate themselves. They also blend in with the demo stage’s dark, dreary background.

For me, the worst part about the presentation is the sound design. It’s limp. The voice acting is fine. It’s cheesy but endearing, a lot more Saturday morning cartoon than the N64 game, but every other sound lacks impact. Star Fox 64’s sound are iconic. The harsh, wobbly slapping sound that enemies make when shot, the crisp explosions, the way the pick-ups bleep and boop, and of course the wonderful explosions from the bosses. They were great with how the wind whistled. It was a great suite of sounds that gave the game a strong audio identity, one which Wild Blue Skies is sorely missing.

Your shots don’t make much of an impact when they hit, explosions are weak, the boss explodes but he just sort of poofs out. The pickups don’t make any interesting noises. It’s like every sound in this game needs a shot of espresso to perk it up. Make them louder, brighter, give them more oomph. The explosions need more bass. It’s one of those games you could play with your headphones off.

The game plays a lot like Star Fox, as you’d expect. The ship handles smoothly, it glides across the screen, there’s just enough inertia to sell the flight fantasy without making things unwieldy. It keeps a lot of the mechanics from its inspiration, like how your allies will ask for help during missions. It’s a lot more focused on routing. This time around there are more missable enemies. If you’re not ready, you can miss out on certain foes that show up for a few seconds, and you have to position yourself in advance ready to take them down. There are more complex enemy formations that require better preparation to take down in one shot, for maximum score. They added collectible letters, like the ones in Donkey Kong Country, where you collect WILD, each little token hidden in special enemies across the stage. It also gives you a medal for the stage if you beat a target score. You also have new scoring bonuses for completing the stage without taking damage, with your squad alive and for killing the boss quickly. It’s a faithful recreation of its forefather, with some fun new twists.

I recommend Wild Blue Skies. If you like Star Fox, you’ll like this, since they’re pretty much the same game. If you’ve never played Star Fox, you should still give this a shot. It’s fun, and the demo is really short, so you won’t waste much time if you don’t like it. The sound design is like having a wet noodle in your ear, though. They really need to fix that.

Download Wild Blue Skies demo here.

GUN.DOG.REVENGE.

Your dog’s been taken, now you gotta take… revenge!

GUN.DOG.REVENGE. Is a retro-inspired 2D shooter. You walk to the right while shooting enemies and avoiding the dogs. You can’t hurt the dogs. If you do, you get a negative score penalty. Everything else is fair game.

You walk at a slow speed, but you have other ways of avoiding the enemy’s bullets. You can crouch underneath them, jump over them, or hide in a doorway. When an enemy shows up, shoot them. They won’t let you just kill them. People tend to avoid that sort of thing. They can duck under your bullets, too, and return fire from a crouched position. This simple high/low system gives the game a surprising amount of decision making. You always have to consider the possibility of an enemy dodging your shots, so you’d best be prepared to take action against it.

The shooting is complicated a little with the addition of a reload. This is one of the few instances of a reload done right. Your pistol has a limited magazine, but you get unlimited magazines. After eight shots, you need to reload manually. If you don’t you can’t fire. While reloading, you’re stuck in place for a second, so you need to find the right spot to do it. This gives you something to manage, and it introduces a nice wrinkle into the gameplay. It never feels intrusive or flow-breaking. If you find yourself with an empty gun, or just want to conserve ammo, you can also slash at enemies with a melee attack.

The game goes for a deliberately minimalist retro look, which it pulls off well. Everything is easily readable at a glance, and it looks nice. You can always tell what kind of enemy you’re facing and what they’re doing thanks to some clear, if funny looking stances. The music is good, too. High-energy synthwave tracks to keep you trucking forward.

The game is very basic, but a lot of fun. It feels like a forgotten classic from the NES era. The few mechanics it has are used very deliberately and to great effect. It captures that “simple, but tough” feeling of old-school games perfectly. It’s easy to learn, but when you’re up against multiple enemies, all firing at you, things get intense. I recommend it to anyone who wants a quick game that gets straight to the point.

Download the GUN.DOG.REVENGE. demo here.

Soul Quest

2D Devil May Cry, with better pacing.

Soul Quest is a 2D action hack n’ slash character action game. You beat up various magical enemies using your stylish sword skills. Send them up into the air and juggle them for as long as you can, thanks to the game’s generous air combat. There’s also some platforming thrown in, which is less intrusive than in other games like this.

The combat is the game’s main focus, and there’s some cool stuff here. You have your basic 3-hit light combo, a 3-hit heavy combo, and a bunch of air moves. You can chain from almost anything into anything; it’s very free-form.

The combat’s mostly about launching enemies. You can send enemies flying very easily, and you can keep them in the air for as long as you can manage.

The way you can maneuver in the air and juggle enemies reminds me of Smash Brothers, but a lot more exaggerated. Air movement is a little floaty, with full control over your jumps. You can launch enemies, then re-launch them in midair, or spike them down. There are a lot of aerial moves, like a cyclone attack and a lunging drill. They all combine to make a very intuitive air combat system. You can throw enemies around with a lot of control, letting you move them to more advantageous positions, or just send them off a cliff into their death.

With these sorts of games, whenever you introduce air combat, there’s always a risk of it being the dominant strategy, but Soul Quest manages to work around this well. In similar games, when you launch an enemy, you keep them in the air while their buddies are stuck on the ground unable to do anything to you. In Soul Quest, there are a lot of enemies that can still hit you in mid-air. Enemies that launch projectiles, others that fly or some that are tall enough to just smack you out of the air from the ground. This ensures that your air combos are earned, and still dangerous. A good compromise, which lets you style on your enemies while still keeping some brain activity going.

There is a slight downside to the air combo system. It’s a little easy to send an entire room of enemies flying and keep them there, disproving that Newton guy who said “what comes up must come down”. What does he know? I think this could be remedied by limiting how many air moves you can do in one jump. You can keep cycling your re-launches and other options, and never come down. If you had to touch the ground to reset your air options, it would make the combat a little more challenging.

That’s not to say that the game is easy. The enemies you face are pretty simple, but they are combined well to make fights more difficult. You have to maneuver around the enemies, and find ways to bunch them up, or focus on the more dangerous enemies first. The combat is very active.

The game’s presentation is great. Clean pixel art with great colors and smooth, cool looking animations. The enemies all look interesting, with clear silhouettes. The music ramps up as you fight, getting more exciting the higher your style rank, and it stops when you get hit. The music itself fits the game well. It’s nice and upbeat. The overall sound design is good, too.

I recommend Soul Quest. It’s a solid action game with some cool mechanics and great fights. There are some platforming sections, and they don’t interrupt the flow of the game like in Bayonetta or DMC. If you like stylish action games, give this a shot. I suggest playing it on hard for the full experience.

Download the Soul Quest Demo here.

RUIN: Beast City

You’ve heard of Suda 51, now get ready for Suda 5 and a half.

RUIN: Beast City is a boss fight action game heavily inspired by Killer7 and Furi. You take on various bosses in close-quarter combat. It looks like one of Suda 51’s lost works. One that should have stayed lost.

The game is style over substance. You start by walking to the boss in an auto-walk sequence like the ones in between the bosses in Furi. Then you fight a boss. The fights are fast close-quarters affairs where you and your opponent trade blows. It sounds great on paper, but falls apart in practice. Much like paper, the combat is also thin and flimsy.

The boss fights are parry-fests that play out more like a game of Simon Says than an actual fight. You dodge when the boss does one attack, parry another and use your gun counter when he uses the gun counter attack. When you survive the boss’s attack string, you get your turn to attack. There’s no spacing, movement doesn’t matter. All you do is parry and attack when the game says you can.

I beat the first boss of the demo with one hand, using two buttons: parry and attack. It’s like a rhythm game without a beat.

The game uses a unique health mechanic. It’s unique in the same way making a house out of Styrofoam would be unique. Sure, it’s new, but why would you? Your health and the boss’s health is tied together in a sort of tug of war system. You attack the boss, you recover it, he attacks you, you lose it. The goal is to get your health bar to full, then you can win the fight. The problem with this is that, if you make a mistake, the boss heals. This makes fights go on for longer than they should. Instead of chipping away at the boss steadily, your progress can be erased if the boss decides to string together a few attacks.

The game’s presentation is pretty bad. The graphics look nice. They’re reminiscent of Killer7, near to plagiarizing, but it looks slick and stylish. The animations, on the other hand, are pretty bad. Attacks are weird looking, stiff and happen quickly, which is terrible in a parry-focused game where you have to react to your opponent’s attacks.

The sound design is non-existent. Every attack has the same cheap “whoosh” sound and a metallic clang if it’s parried. The characters don’t have any voice acting, not even a grunt here and there. It makes the game sound empty. There’s a looping drum and bass track over the whole thing, because of course, drum and bass/breakbeat is the hot new shorthand for style thanks to ULTRAKILL. It just plays. I’m serious about the looping thing. It loops over and over, re-starting with the intro. It’s not even a clean loop.

There’s also a ton of slowdown and hit-stop. Whenever you land a hit, the game stops for a few milliseconds, to make it look impactful. This makes the game feel choppy and slow. Every single attack triggers hit stop, every dodge triggers a slow down, certain moves put you in a long block animation. It’s like trying to play the game by sending your inputs through carrier pigeon.

I do not recommend RUIN: Beast City. It’s pure style over substance, and what little substance there is isn’t worth checking out. If this game looks kind of interesting to you, go give Furi a try. I guarantee you’ll have a much better time with that one.

You can download the demo for RUIN: Beast City here, but I don’t think you should.

Mace Knight

It needs a little something.

Mace Knight is a top-down wave survival game where you attack with a big, heavy mace. Instead of swinging it around, like some boring, normal knight, you drop it on the ground and then it flies back to you, killing anything in its way.

The mace mechanic is interesting. Its chain has a limited range, so you have to position yourself well to use it, then put the enemy between you and the mace to kill it. It keeps you active and moving around the stage, interacting with the enemies and such.

The game’s presentation is alright. Catchy chiptune music and the graphics are colorful and neat looking.

The thing is that the game’s main mechanic is very simple. It’s fun at first, but it doesn’t have anything else going for it. Once you use it a few times, you can’t help but think “that’s it?”. There aren’t any cool tricks to pull with the mace. It doesn’t have physics, so you can’t use its acceleration to swing it around or do anything like that. Once you put it down, it’s a static interaction. You let go, the chain retracts, enemy dies. It doesn’t have any other features. There are different maces you can unlock, like one that heals you if you hold it, but that’s it. I was expecting more.

The enemies are pretty interesting. It takes a while to ramp up in difficulty, but the boss is tough, and it has some interesting attack patterns, but the way in which you interact with the game world with the mace is very one-note.

I didn’t really like it, but you could check it out if it looks interesting. It’s a cool concept for a game, it just needs a “but”, or something to add just a bit more depth.

Download the demo for Mace Knight here.

Portal Brawlers

I’m always on the lookout for a good beat-’em-up. I’m still on the lookout for a good beat-’em-up.

Portal Brawlers is a 2D beat-’em-up set in a fantasy world. It takes some inspiration from Golden Axe and Chronicles of Mystara, with its spells and light RPG mechanics. They were inspired by those games. I don’t think they actually played them. Maybe they saw them in a magazine or something and thought they looked cool, because this game was made by someone who has never played a videogame before.

I like beat-’em-ups, and I am very critical of them. I hold them to a higher standard. They’re not button mashers. Sure, their gameplay is simple, that simplicity means you can’t skimp out on solid fundamentals and good basics. You have to be able to see those fundamentals, and appreciate them.

I don’t even have to break out the fancy concepts for Portal Brawlers. It just sucks, on every conceivable level.

You can move around, and that’s about it. That’s the only thing the game does right. Your punches exist, and you can use them to hit the enemies, and when you do you stun lock them for ages and they die. The enemies don’t have access to this arcane magic known as “punching”. They walk up to you and put their faces out for you to smack them. Even saying “them” is generous. There are at most three enemies on screen at a time. Most of the time you’re going up against one guy, and they don’t do anything.

Your punches do a better job of stunlocking you, in fact. If you do your basic combo, you get locked into a long animation, and you can get hit out of it. That is, if there’s another enemy on screen.

If I actually try to look at this as a beat-’em-up, it’s missing the most basic things. It has a jump attack, and it’s just there to send an enemy flying. Your jumps are extremely floaty, it’s like you’re on the moon. There’s a dash attack, but it usually misses, and for some reason, whenever you dash attack you slow down to a crawl like the game suddenly went down to 2 frames per second.

The presentation is a mess. The graphics look amateurish, but kind of okay.

The sound design is demonic. It’s like something that would be used by the CIA for interrogation purposes (allegedly). The game starts with a two second music loop that sounds like a Casio keyboard drilling your inner ear. This repeats all throughout the first stage. The second stage’s music has more than four notes, at least. They broke the bank and went for five. It still sounds like an alarm clock from hell. The enemies all make this horrible grumbling noise when they’re hit.

It’s surprising how everything in this game is terrible. I hate to be rude to indie devs like this. They work had on their games. I don’t feel bad for ragging on Portal Brawlers.

Don’t download the Portal Brawlers demo, but it’s here if you still want it.

Tax Return

Tax Return? More like Return This Game. If the devs don’t put any effort into their game, I won’t put any effort into roasting it.

This is a 2D platformer shooter. You play as a guy with a shotgun. It’s very bad.

Your gun has less range than a punch, enemies are mostly static and throw stuff at you, the levels look like they were randomly generated. If they were designed by a human, they should say they were randomly generated, because claiming authorship for these levels is like claiming responsibility for the 2008 financial crisis. Just say the machines did it, and absolve yourself of the guilt.

If I had played this for free on Newgrounds back in 2005, I would have asked for a refund. I feel I’m owed reparations for playing this thing.

I’d tell the developer to try harder, but that would imply he tried in the first place.

Here’s the demo, but why would you?

Ekoman

My first draft for this section would have gotten me banned off Substack.

Ekoman is supposedly a game. I don’t know what it is. The trailer on the store page shows some kind of 3D brawler. I wouldn’t know. I started the demo and it had a terrible, unskippable cutscene. AI-generated voice reading off a terrible script written by someone who hates language. You can press space to fast forward, but it just overlays the dialogue while playing the cutscene at regular speed.

It says the game used AI for the translation. Translation from what to what? From slurs to English? Is this even English?

Even typing one paragraph about this game feels like too much work. Whoever put this on the store should be shoved in a locker.

Not linking to the demo for this one.

Slash-Out

It’s Punch-Out.

Slash-Out is a first-person 1v1 combat game. It plays like Punch-Out.

The main difference is its directional attack system. In Punch-Out, you dodge attacks that can come from the left or right. In Slash-Out, they come from the right, left, top or bottom. Four ways. You can block in those directions and attack in those same directions.

The four way attack thing sounds cool on paper, and it’s what made me try the game, but it’s kind of flat in practice. Like paper. Wait, I made this joke already.

The direction in which you attack doesn’t seem to matter. At least not in the first two fights. I thought since you could attack in any direction, it meant you had to attack in certain ways to hit specific parts of your enemy. Like if they have a shield on one side, you hit them on the other, but no. Your sword just hits the enemy, doesn’t matter where. You can’t attack from certain directions to intercept enemy attacks, either. You can only hit your opponent when the game lets you. There’s a discrete attack and defense phase. It’s not like in Punch-Out where you can weave in quick jabs between dodges if you find an opening.

The game has a cool retro pseudo vector graphic look to it, which is nice. It sounds okay.

The game’s directional gimmick is just that, a gimmick. It never uses it for anything interesting. Like RUIN: Beast City, which I mentioned earlier, the fights are very Simon Says. This one is almost literally Simon Says, since the second boss previews her attacks before she does them, so you have to memorize her sequence and then repeat it when she tries to hit you.

The base concept is alright. This is a very alright game. It could have done a lot more with its base mechanic, a lot of obvious things, but it doesn’t. It takes a lot from Punch-Out but it feels like a step back in every way, from the characters to the game’s speed and pacing, the challenge and the player’s freedom. Punch-Out is already a very binary game, making it even more railroaded is impressive.

Download the demo for Slash-Out here.

Dyping Escape

Mario teaches typing spooky creepy pasta.

Dyping Escape is a text-based interactive story. You type the sentences that appear on screen, and spooky stuff happens. It breaks the fourth wall, telling you things about your computer, specifying individual parts and referring to them by their name and anything else you can get by querying MSINFO 32. It’s about a spooky entity in the game trying to take control of your PC and then you.

It has some neat tricks. The aforementioned PC info stuff is interesting. A spooky game that breaks the fourth wall is always enjoyable, but when it starts mentioning your RAM’s memory, it adds a little sprinkle of something extra on top.

The presentation is great, with lots of glitchy effects to simulate your system taking a dump, and some well done minimalist drawings. Good atmosphere.

The thing with this one is that it’s not really a game. You interact with stuff every now and then, but you’re not really doing anything. You type what the game wants you to type, and you watch stuff happen. It’s like a cutscene with really long quick time events.

I thought this would be more of a puzzle, where you had to figure out loopholes to what the game is trying to get you to type. Maybe there would be some meta-puzzles, where the game does some weird stuff like write to a .txt file and you look for it, or do some basic problem solving. Anything, really, other than just typing to advance a predetermined cutscene. I think you can fail, if you run out of time, but the timer is so generous I never saw anything come of it. I didn’t want to sit and wait for it to countdown, either. I didn’t have all day.

It’s a neat little experience. Check it out if you like horror fiction with a technological theme, or if you like more story-driven, less interactive games. I don’t think I’ll be checking it out when it releases. Again, I just with it had at least a little bit more to it than the typing. This kind of story game isn’t for me.

This one was requested by GreatGoose. Sorry to disappoint, but I don’t mesh well with these kinds of games. “Games”.

Download the demo for Dyping Escape here.

Denshattack!

Bouncing up and down, doing tricks on it (and by “it” I mean… my train)

Denshattack! Is Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, but with trains. Sort of. Lionel’s Pro Trainer. Lionel coin bank, Lionel coin bank, Lionel coin bank. You drive a little train across different levels in a Jet Set Radio version of future Japan. Drive dangerously, avoid obstacles, jump and do sick tricks while keeping your speed. It’s more like SSX with a train, now that I think about it. Lionel coin bank.

Your movement is limited to the rails, as is tradition with trains, but there’s a lot to do while going clickety clack down the track. There are obstacles in the way, that force you to switch tracks, or jump over them. There are turns, and you need to brake to take them without derailing, which has a little mini-game where you time your brake to get a boost. You can also jump and do tricks in the air.

Each stage plays out like a Pro Skater level, with different goals in each stage. There are collectibles, a secret tape, stage-specific challenges like destroying two bridges or finding toolboxes. Each stage also has bonus points for completing them under a set time and without crashing, which is a lot harder than you’d think.

The trick system is taken from Skate, of all places. You flick the right analogue stick in different directions to do kickflips, heelflips, impossibles and all sorts of flip tricks. It’s a train, you can’t really do much other than flip it. If you do more complex movements, you get harder tricks that give you more points. It was a cool system in Skate, and it’s translated perfectly here into Denshattack!

The game’s presentation is a highlight. The graphics are bright, colorful and cartoony. Everything is stylized, with thick outlines and flat, saturated colors. It takes inspiration from Jet Set Radio, but it has its own visual identity. It doesn’t feel like it’s ripping it off. The UI and loading screens are fantastic, too, with monochrome illustrations that look very striking. It has an anime-adjacent art style that looks cute.

The music is a lot of fun. High-energy, funky tracks to get you in the mood to flip a train. The sound design is a bit weak, unfortunately. Sound effects lack that metallic punch you’d expect when jumping a train 60 feet into the air. Riding on the tracks doesn’t make any noise, nor is there an engine sound or anything like that. If you don’t notice it, it’s not too bad, but once you do, it’s hard to ignore. Their absence is felt.

The game manages to mix in enough little mechanics to keep it from feeling too restrictive. You’re still tied to tracks, and most of the things you do are reflex/timing challenges, but it’s a lot of fun. It has a very arcadey feel to it. It has big, ridiculous set pieces, where the camera goes flying all over the place, and you ride into a volcano and dodge flaming rocks, or ride on top of a giant ferris wheel. It reminds me of the insanity you’d see in old Midway games like Arctic/Hydro Thunder. The fact that you have to memorize the stages to optimize them gives them an arcade feel, too. Some good ol’ routing and optimization.

I recommend Denshattack! It’s a ton of fun. Its premise is unique. Making a game about a train means there are some limitations, but the developers found very clever and creative ways to circumvent them, while also implementing them into the gameplay in interesting ways. The end result is an engaging, chaotic thrill ride that’s sure to entertain anyone with a pulse. Lionel coin bank.

Download the demo for Denshattack! here.

Airframe Ultra

Combat and racing that combine like graham crackers and spray cheese.

Airframe Ultra is a futuristic combat racing game. Drive hover bikes like the ones in Jet Moto, use weapons, hit your enemies, make them feel pain. The game is split between two distinct modes: combat and racing. You race, then you fight in an arena. This repeats a few times until a winner is you.

The racing controls feel great. The machines have a nice sense of weight and inertia to them, and the analogue acceleration and steering give you precise control over them. The steering is arcadey, and fun.

Too bad you spend only half of your time racing. The other is spent in a battle mode type deal where you drive around a small arena shooting at your opponents. You pick up weapons, and use them. You can’t just pick them up, no, that’d be too easy. You need to buy them, and to do that, you need money. This leads to moments where you’re waffling around the arena trying to pick up a pea shooter, but you keep getting blown up by someone with a handheld nuke. Imagine if you had to buy the rocket launcher in Quake.

There are also some on foot arenas, which are baffling. Your character lumbers around, shooting at others with auto-aim. There doesn’t seem to be much finesse to it. It’s like playing Street Fighter with your little cousin and you’re both mashing.

The game’s presentation is interesting. The visuals are meant to emulate a PS1 game, but with every screen effect thrown on at the same time, like the artist just discovered the filters in photoshop. The music is the standard drum and bass you put in these retro-inspired games. Drum and bass is to modern indie games what chiptune was to indie games in the 2010s.

The game is fine, but I would have liked it to be purely about racing. That’s what I was expecting, at least. Truth be told, I don’t really know why I thought it’d be about racing. Maybe because it looks like a Jet Moto clone- I mean- spiritual successor, or “inspired by”. I assumed that because of the jet bikes, but that was me making assumptions. I’ve seen videos of this game on YouTube a few times in the past years, and every one I’ve seen just makes it look like “Screen effects: The game” and hints at some racing aspect.

I don’t really gel with the battle half of the game. It’s like all kart racing battle modes, kind of fun for a few minutes, then it gets annoying. Except in this one, you don’t just grab a power up and use it, you need to go through the rigmarole of buying them with money, which you get by racing. This is a winmore mechanic. If you’re ahead, you get more money, which you use to get better guns, to stay ahead.

I don’t really recommend Airframe Ultra. It’s nowhere near awful, but it’s not for me. Its racing basics are nice, but underbaked, and the battle part of the game is really weak, but you’re forced to do it. It’s like playing Mario Kart with that one annoying kid that kept making you play Battle Mode. The fact that the camera doesn’t stay behind you while driving is a sin, too. I know it’s so you can see around you during the battle mode, but it makes the races a pain in the ass. Again, the battle mode dragging us all down.

Overall, a weird mix that doesn’t really go together, but there might be a niche for it. Kind of like pregnancy craving snacks. No one in their right mind would eat an oyster, jelly and pickle sandwich, but hey, if you get the itch for it, it’s available. Or if you’re the annoying kid who makes everyone else play battle mode. This game’s for you. Maybe next time they’ll make a game for the kid who invited you over to his house to play videogames, but hogged the PlayStation and made you watch him play singleplayer games.

This is a multiplayer game, by the way. I didn’t know at the time.

Download the demo for Aiframe Ultra here.

Escape from the Black Monolith

Escape from the Black Monolith is a first person shooter. You’re falling out of a building, and you can move in all four directions, avoiding enemy fire. There are other weapons. I think.

The gun you start with is slow, and it only has two shots before it needs to reload. Enemies don’t do much. They sort of float around and fire at you every few days.

I made it to the first boss, then it gave me a prompt which was on screen for around 0.5 seconds, then I got jumpscared by a giant pyramid eating the level. Then the level restarted, and I moved too far to one side and got jumpscared by the giant pyramid again. It has a long animation before you can retry, and the game wasn’t grabbing me, so I didn’t want to wait for the game to reload.

The presentation is mixed. The graphics are amateurish, but charming. The audio design is where this falls apart. I’ve found that most of these games are mixed in a tin can. The music is a grating loop, perfect for enhanced interrogation. Every other sound is like a mouse fart. I will not elaborate.

This is a game jam project by one developer. It will be free on release. That seems a bit expensive to me. I’ll wait for a sale.

Download Escape from the Black Monolith here.

Super Alloy Crush

What if Mega Man… but bad?

Super Alloy Crush is a 2D beat-’em-up/shoot-’em-up. It’s Mega Man, but boring. You can pick between two characters: Zero with boobs (I know Zero had boob lights, but this one has actual gazongas), or Mega Man with a scarf. No, not the Mega Man with a scarf from X Command Mission, or Proto Man. You go through levels and shoot stuff.

I can’t really say you do much of anything in this game. The demo stage is the most boring thing imaginable. There are a few enemies along the way, but they’re so passive they might as well be training dummies. They don’t react to your existence, and they can be ignored safely. They’re not placed in inconvenient locations or blocking your path. Not that there’s a path to block, since there isn’t any platforming to do. Sure, you jump to get to a higher elevation, but there are no stage hazards, no pits, no moving platforms, nothing. You can get to the end of the stage by walking past everything.

Each character has their own combat style. Boob Zero uses her claws to do melee attacks. She has all sorts of big attacks with cool animations and combos. Too bad you never use them against anything that can defend itself. It’s like you’re Mike Tyson beating up an 80-year old. Not-Mega Man uses a blaster. It shoots.

The presentation is nice. Good pixel graphics, nice colors, okay art style, cool character designs, smooth animations and Boob Zero bounces on the pause screen. The music is pretty good. It’s copying its sound from the PS1 Mega Man X games, and those sound amazing, so its derivative would sound decent, at least, and they nailed decent.

Can’t say the same about the rest of the game. Mega Man games are simple, mechanically speaking, but they make up for that with great level design and enemies that are actual obstacles to overcome. Super Alloy Crush does neither of these. It has a boring level with big, empty rooms, senseless platforming, no obstacles and enemies that are about as threatening as those letter your ISP sends when they catch you torrenting.

I got conned by this game. It appealed to my Mega Man fan brain, and it betrayed that trust. It stinks. It’s dumb and mindless. Why would I bother with this when I could play any other Mega Man game?

If you say something like “it’s just the demo, maybe the rest of the game gets better” no. That’s bullshit. Why would you put out a demo featuring your most boring stage? You’re supposed to hook the player, make them want to play more, not give them an empty room and a promise that the rest of the game might be better. Better than what? Than the nothing you gave us in the demo? You have to give the player something to trust before making that sort of proposition.

I don’t recommend this. They have the building blocks for a game, now they just need the game part.

Download the demo for Super Alloy Crush here.

Don’t Kill Them All!

You’ve heard of Tactics Ogre, here we have Tactics Orc.

Don’t Kill Them All is a turn based tactical game where you manage a party of orcs and try to keep their rage in check. Your goal is to go to an area, and get resources to upgrade your base. You do this by defeating enemies in turn-based battles. The enemies will try to kill your orcs, but more importantly, they want to destroy your resources, and you can’t let that happen. Every time anything happens to an orc or a resource, the orcs get angry. If they get too angry, they go into an uncontrollable rage and act on their own, hitting enemies, allies or any resources they find. If all your orcs rage, the expedition is a bust and you return to base empty handed. Then you probably get flogged or something.

The game’s rage system is a unique take on the health bar. Instead of life, your orcs’ existence is dictated by their rage. Taking damage increases their rage. If a resource is destroyed, they get angry, too, meaning that if the environment takes damage, so does your party. Enemies will target resources as often, if not more often than your own units, so getting them away from your precious treasure is a top priority.

To keep their grubby mitts off your stuff, you have a variety of options. You can smack them with your weapons, which is inconvenient but gets the job done. You can also use a variety of displacement abilities to move the enemy or the resource. If an enemy is about to hit a rock, you can push the enemy away, and they’ll attack the ground next to the rock, or just move the rock out of harm’s way.

You can also move your orcs around, which is useful when enemies attack. When an enemy is about to strike, it marks an area, and any orcs caught in it can’t move out of it without triggering the attack. They can’t move on their own, but they can be moved. You can push your allies out of the way, or move the enemy so they attack somewhere else.

The meat of the game is about moving things around so you can attack without ruining anything. Your orcs’ attacks are massive and brutish, as you’d expect form an orc. Every weapon has an area of effect, meaning if you want to attack an enemy in one tile, you have to hit an entire city block as well. The hammer, for example, hits a 3x3 area of 9 squares, which is massive. There’s never a 3x3 area clear of resources or allies, making this a tough weapon to use.

The massive attacks are a bit limiting. Maybe I’m playing it wrong, but most of the time, I found I couldn’t do much with the hammer because there’s always something in the way. The maps are too small for that kind of tomfoolery.

The displacement aspect reminded me a bit of Metal Slug Tactics. Deceptively simple tools that have a lot of applications. Things like moving a unit one square don’t sound very exciting, but in the game’s context, it has a lot of powerful applications.

Each combat feels like a complicated puzzle. There are layers of intertwining attacks to consider, optimal turn orders and multiple hazards to watch out for. It only takes one stray hit to break a random log, which sends your entire party into a cursing fit of rage. It’s very intense, and a lot of fun.

The game’s presentation is fantastic. Extremely polished. It has Klei’s signature cutesy Tim Burton-adjacent 2D/3D art style, which is weird since this game isn’t from Klei. It looks one-to-one like a Klei game, though. I love how those games look, and I love how Don’t Kill Them All looks. The orcs are dopey and cute, ironic for a bunch of bloodthirsty killers. Each enemy has a nice design, you can tell what they are at a glance, the battlefield is clear and readable, and the UI elements do a good job of telling you what everything does and where. Inventory management and other things might become a problem down the line, as it tends to happen in these kinds of games, but from what I’ve seen, it looks like they know what they’re doing.

I’ve been complaining about sound design a lot, but finally, I get one that sounds good. The music is unique, with catchy melodies. Each area has its own theme. The music is nice to listen to, but it doesn’t get annoying or interrupt your train of thought. Everything has its own little sound, like the subtle clicks when you hover over the tiles, attacks sound like they should and I like the orcs’ dumb little grunts.

I recommend Don’t Kill Them All. It’s a promising tactics game with some solid problem solving and fun mechanics.

Download the demo for Don’t Kill Them All here.

Espectro Fighter’s Focus

Still looking for that one good beat-’em-up.

Espectro: Fighter’s Focus is a beat-’em-up. You walk to the right and punch people. There’s not much to it other than that.

The stages are huge and empty for the amount of enemies you fight. This is something it has in common with previous heavy-hitter Portal Brawlers. You never go up against more than three enemies. You punch them, they get hit, then fall down. They don’t have any get up attacks, they’re easy to dominate and they don’t have any interesting behaviors. They walk up to you and present their face for punching.

When you grab an enemy, you can’t throw them. Baffling decision.

The presentation is bad. I kind of like the graphics, but the music is grating and the sound design stinks. It’s not good, which is another way to say bad. This paragraph is three sentences long and I’m already repeating myself.

I don’t recommend this. It’s bad, but it’s still kind of competent, at least. After playing Portal Brawlers, this looks like Streets of Rage- wait, no- let’s not get carried away.

Download the demo for Espectro: Fighter’s Focus here.

End of Part 1

Read part 2 for more even more demos.