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Joshrevengezombees.jpgWhen you think about zombies (and who doesn't on a daily basis?), have you ever wondered why the undead plague is relegated to the human population? Couldn't dogs, cats, and the northern spotted owl be susceptible to zombification? And most importantly, why not bees? Yes, those flying pollinators we shrink back in terror from at picnics and other outdoor events could be prime candidates. The developers at Adult Swim seemed to think so, and they have even allowed YOU to control an undead swarm in their latest offering, Revenge of the Zombees.

Zombees? That's right. Where did they come from? Why are they attacking? In this game, it doesn't really matter. The point is to cause the maximum amount of damage and carnage across five retro-looking levels. Like Miami Shark, your killer members of the animal kingdom wreak havoc on everything from equipment and machinery, to buildings, tanks, and even planes. The controls are simple - just move the mouse around the screen and keep clicking at different areas to get the swarm to follow. Clicking on floating honeycombs and passing over stray bees will add to your numbers. Do more damage to fill your damage meter, and eventually your bees will catch on fire, causing even more mayhem. And that's about it. It's silly and simple fun, with excessive pixel gore we've come to expect from Adult Swim titles. Sound intriguing? Why not give bees a chance and exact some undead revenge on your next coffee break.

Play Revenge of the Zombees


Joshridingshotgun1.jpgHow's your trigger finger feeling today, partner? Itchy? Excellent. How about your noggin? Is it feeling muddy after a night of too many sasparillas at the saloon? Well, try to wrap your 10-gallon hat around this one: cowboys aren't just about gunfights, fistfights, horses, sunsets, and aliens. They're also about thinking, and that's the setup here in Vadim Diduk and Oleg Pereverzov's new Western-themed puzzler, Riding Shotgun.

Riding Shotgun is a turn-based strategy title where your "player-with-no-name" (who looks oddly like Owen Wilson) tries to defeat numerous bad guys in one-on-one shootouts while traveling to town. You do this by strategically manipulating a wagon in straight lines across an 8 x 8 board. The spaces on the board include various attack icons that do 1-4 damage, while other icons are collectable powerups that increase your overall attacks, defense, and health. The rules allow you to move your wagon horizontally by clicking the mouse on any icon-filled tile to the left or right, while your enemy does the same vertically, up or down. If you have more health points than your opponent when there are no more moves possible, you win and get to advance. If you have less health or it's a tie, you have to play the level again.

ridingshotgun2.jpgWhile the basic premise and level structure is the same, Riding Shotgun has some variety to gameplay. Each level has a different board setup, and some levels have certain goals that award you bonus gold to spend at the Trader's for permanent powerups. There are also "timed" levels where you have to defeat your enemy before dusk, complete with the level getting darker as each turn progresses. Finally, one unique level has a basic form of draw poker, letting you gamble some of your earned gold against a computer opponent.

Analysis: There are many things to like about Riding Shotgun. The strategy-turn-based gameplay has an addicting quality to it, and things move fast enough each turn to keep things moving. Riding Shotgun also has a nicely-stylized interface and graphics that helps to set the Western mood, accompanied by solid sound effects and an oddly compelling (though not quite Western-sounding) music soundtrack. The rules require a bit of explaining, but the in-game tutorial during the first few levels is quite effective. If anything, the game's shortcomings lie in its untapped potential. More random elements (offered on one level with the dice icon) would have been interesting to see, as well as more story/RPG elements and items to collect. It's also worth noting that the game gets somewhat unbalanced in your favor once you spend gold on permanent upgrades, though it does make beating the game easier.

The strategy element to the game comes in deciding which icon to move towards. Do you grab the 4-damage shotgun icon if you see that, on the next move, your enemy might take a star to do more damage? Or do you grab a weaker attack icon that will set you up to steal a shield the next round? On the later levels, when your character starts off with less health than your opponent, such movement decisions are critical to success. Riding Shotgun offers you with a fun casual puzzly experience in a setting that often doesn't get enough attention. Care to exercise your both your brain and six-shooter? Then hop on board and start Riding Shotgun.

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Joshmercx.jpgShoot. Run. Jump. Switch guns. What more does a 1980s side-scrolling videogame need? How about a storyline involving a mercenary hired to rescue a biologist's daughter, incoming bad guys and robots, and a nefarious plot by an evil scientist who's determined to take over the world with cyborg soldiers? Mix that with pixelated tile-based environments, traditional boss fights, and coins locked in breakable crates, and what do you get? You get MercX, an ode to classic 1980s action titles by the retro-specialist, Alistair Maunder (alillm).

Like some of his previous offerings, MercX is a run-and-gun pixel-based game that draws on classic Castlevania elements of exploring, shooting, collecting, and upgrading. After being dropped off into a combat zone, you control your pink-haired mercenary with the [arrow] keys, and can jump and aim by pressing [up] and [down]. You carry three weapons - a machine gun, a shotgun, and a bazooka, which you fire with [Z] and switch with [X]. Each of the six missions begins with a briefing and a chance to upgrade your health and weapons using cash collected at the end of each mission. The stages are pretty lengthy, but luckily there are checkpoints along the way in case your mercenary bites the dust. Like classic home console games, most missions include a boss fight that requires you to recognize attack patterns and fire away until the enemy's health bar is depleted.

MercX is not a deep game by any means, but it offers players with straightforward retro-gaming goodness that kept us playing late on school nights back in the day. The action is simple, yet satisfying, with predictable enemies you can take down without too much trouble. The parallax-scrolling environments are nicely varied in their simplicity (with neat animated weather effects), while the old-school sounding chiptunes further set you in a classic frame of mind. The pixelly-theme does have a downside in that the text in mission briefings and tutorials can be hard to read, but it is something you get used to after a while. Besides, it's all about the action anyway, right? So channel your inner pixelated Rambo and learn what it's like to live as MercX.

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Joshscuba.jpgSurely you've heard of Minecraft by now. What? You haven't heard of that popular downloadable indie-game where you run around in a virtual 3D world consisting of pixel-like blocks, harvesting anything that isn't tied down to create tools, structures, and even entire worlds? Hmm, you say you're intrigued, but you don't have the time and energy to invest in such a robust and addictive product? Well in that case, it sounds like you should give Scuba by Louissi and Mapoga a try.

Directly inspired by titles like Minecraft and Terraria, Scuba is a casual game of discovery, crafting, and exploration across a randomly-generated, side-scrolling world. The story begins with a meteor-deflected rocket ship that needs to make a quick landing on a cube-like planet. As the stranded pilot, you must find parts to build a new motor so you can take off again. Armed with only a puny mining laser, you need to guide your character on land and under the sea, collecting 10 types of resources and crafting them to form dozens of new materials and objects. You control your diver-character with the standard [WASD] keys, and click and hold the mouse within a defined radius to collect resources. Back at your rocket ship, you can place items from your inventory into a 3 X 3 grid to craft other materials and objects from a list of recipes accessed by pressing [R]. Only through persistence and lots of collecting will you be able to build your new engine and return home.

While there are a limited number of resources on the surface, most of the better materials are found underwater, requiring you to dive. You start out with a limited oxygen supply, a shallow pressure suit, a weak flashlight, and feeble boots. As you dive, you have to watch your air, pressure, and battery meters. The deeper you go, the darker it gets, and the added pressure uses up your limited air supply more rapidly. You can keep returning to the surface and your rocket ship, but for more time and bounty underwater, it's quicker to build submersible mobile workbenches, air cabinets, lights, and battery chargers.

scuba2.jpgAnalysis: Even if you haven't really played Minecraft, by playing Scuba you can get a sense of how the former game can be so popular. There's something satisfying about creating increasingly-advanced items from scratch, knowing that you went out of your way to find the nuts and bolts that went towards their creation. With Scuba, there's a definite goal you have to reach, and certain milestones along the way that give your character powerups and a sense of direction. Need the level 3 diving helmet? That'll require a level 2 helmet, two iron, and two gold. How do you get gold? That's four coal, one energy unit, and one glow bulb. Short on energy units? You can craft one out of stone, mushrooms, and glow bulbs, or you can go diving and zap the energy from swimming creatures. And so on. The fun part is that there's an arcadey-element to running around and zapping the stuff you need, and a puzzly part to finding the right combinations and forming them on the 3 X 3 grid.

Of course, there are some problems with the game as well. The screen's scrolling motion (as of v1.1) can be extremely jerky in certain browsers, though it's something you get used to after a while. Navigation can also be difficult, since there's no mini-map to tell you where you are in relation to anything (other than your rocket ship). It's also possible to accidentally destroy your mobile workbench, forcing you to backtrack to your rocket ship before you can build it again.

Most of that can be overlooked, however, compared to Scuba's pluses. The graphics, while tile based, are nicely detailed and stylized, using lighting effects and nifty shading gradients. In addition, the music is varied and relaxing, keeping you going throughout your quest. All this coupled with the fact that the random world generation gives you a new experience each time means you may be coming back to this title more than once. While it would have been fun to face off against tougher monsters than the neutral underwater creatures, Scuba's casual and forgiving gameplay is a nice gateway to more advanced crafting games. Even if you're already a hard-core Minecrafter, Scuba's fun gameplay and underwater aspects definitely make it a casual title worth checking out.

Play Scuba

Thanks to Crankyanker and Cyberjar88 for sending this one in! :)

Joshimmortalsoulsflash.jpgMonsters. Slimy ghouls. Lightsaber-wielding Knights Templar. And one vengeful trench coat-wearing vampire with guns, claws, and a trusty baseball bat. Mix them all together and you've got the dark, gothic backdrop of the online Flash version of Comic Book RPG's 2010 indie strategy-RPG title, Immortal Souls: Dark Crusade.

In Immortal Souls, you play John Turner, a reluctant vampire on an action-filled mission where he takes down hordes of impressively-animated enemies across eight story-filled chapters. The turn-based gameplay is similar to Bejeweled and Puzzle Quest, with a 4 x 3 grid of icons representing different colored attacks and defenses. Enemies have weaknesses to certain colored attacks, encouraging you to find specific patterns on the grid for maximum success. Clicking on chains of the same icons leads to longer, more powerful attacks, and is the key to winning battles against multiple enemies. Outside of the battles, there are also RPG elements that let you level up your character, add skills and attributes, and purchase equipment to strengthen your attacks.

While much remains the same from the downloadable version, Immortal Souls now features multiple enhancements. One of the biggest updates is the new character class system. There are three classes (Warrior, Scoundrel, and Manipulator) to choose from at the onset that grant your character various powers to manipulate the 4 x 3 icon grid. These manipulations (called "Tech Skills") prove essential during battles whenever the random layout of the grid deals you a bad hand. Some Tech Skills let you reshuffle the layout, while others add bonus chain icons or make normal attacks more powerful. In addition to these Tech Skills, there are also special power icons on the grid that let you combine different colors in chains, leading to some awesome combos. Players of the original will also note that now enemies can sometimes miss, healing and defense can be chained like attacks, and animations feel faster and smoother.

immortalsoulsflash2.jpgAnalysis: This new version of Immortal Souls, with its updates and additions, feels much more refined and a lot more fun. Some elements, like the graphics and animations, still shine in their original hand-painted comic-book look, while the story is now less complicated and the action feels more fair. I especially like the class system, with its Tech Skills that can turn the tide in your favor when all seems lost. The new achievement system also makes fighting through the repetitive rounds of enemies feel more compelling.

At the same time, certain issues still remain. There's still no way to exit battles early, and the game's over-emphasis on earning gold trophies by beating enemies quickly doesn't have much of a payoff. It would have also been neat to see enemies perform attacks that affect your icon grid, as is done in games like Puzzle Quest. Regardless, with its new layers of features and streamlined, turn-based action, Immortal Souls has become a more accessible title for the casual gaming public... one you shouldn't be afraid to sink your teeth into.

Play Immortal Souls: Dark Crusade

Josh1899steamandspirit.jpgSir Winston Churchill was many things during his long and distinguished career... a globe-hopping soldier, Nobel Prize-winning author, and even Prime Minister on two occasions. But what about his life as a secret agent onboard a Mediterranean steamer in 1899? While biographers have stated that Churchill spent that year in Britain writing about his army experiences, the Italian game developers at Moloc Lab offer a different take on history. In their old-school point-and-click adventure called 1899 Steam & Spirit, you get to play as a young Lieutenant Churchill (and bump into other historic characters) on a mission to Algiers filled with mystery, ingenuity, and discovery.

Moloc Lab's DHTML (HTML + Javascript) adventure takes place in the late 1890s, but with its large pixel-like appearance and control scheme, it has a quaint look and feel like something from the early 1990s. You control young Winston Churchill with the mouse by clicking around the screen. Selecting items of interest brings up a series of icons that let you pick things up, use them, examine them, or talk to them. Your inventory is spread across the bottom of the screen, and you can combine items or use your inventory on things in the world. If you get stuck looking for hotspots on screen, there's even a handy help feature that reveals all a room's clickable areas.

Despite its minimalist appearance, 1899 Steam & Spirit is a fun little adventure game with quite a bit of potential. Everything takes place in a compact world that, despite its size, still has a rich flavor to it. The game's characters, while not detailed visually, have amusing personalities that emerge based on their short conversations. Players should find that most of the puzzles are fairly straight-forward, though some object combinations and interactions are a little more obscure. In typical old-school style, moving around the screen requires you to wait for Winston to walk around, which can be somewhat tiresome, especially when you have to revisit areas. Regardless, the game's episodic nature offers a nice bite size experience for adventure and escape game fans. In addition, as a technical presentation (which seems to work on iOS platforms) it shows that you don't always have to design games in Flash to get fun and robust gameplay. Want to make your next break your "finest hour"? Then "never surrender" and go full steam ahead with 1899 Steam & Spirit.

Play 1899 Steam & Spirit


Joshmuse-quest.jpgCan you imagine playing Super Mario Bros. without hearing its trademark da-da-da, da-da, daaaaa theme? Or any Final Fantasy game without its epic soundtracks? Music and games often go hand in hand to help set the mood or tell a story, and most casual games have joined their mainstream brethren in featuring original tunes. Recently, to help stress the importance of music in games, Kongregate teamed up with Ubisoft to launch a contest called Project Eden: Experience the Music. The goal was to get developers to create a game that synchronizes music with unique gameplay. Heeding this call was the indie game developer Submu, with their musical platformer called Muse Quest. In order to advance, your character acts as a sort of "muse" to a series of pushable potato heads that resemble Japanese Kodama spirits.

You control your character with the standard [arrow] / [WASD] keys, and eventually collect music notes to get new songs. Once you have these songs, you can play them to create a special "music radius" that affects the potato heads. Your first song (triggered with [X]) makes the potatoes start walking, while the second song (triggered with [C]) gets them jumping. This "muse" mechanic, along with pressing colored switches to remove blocks, leads to some interesting cooperative single-player gameplay with the potato heads.

With its musical theme and cooperative elements, Muse Quest is an interesting game with enough extra personality and uniqueness to help it stand out from standard platformers. Kevin MacLeod's songs are nice, ranging from soft piano music to tribal-like beats and new-age synth, covering for the lack of sound effects. Graphically, Muse Quest presents itself with stark, stylized grey silhouette backgrounds covering a muted landscape. It's effective, though it would have been nice to see more attention paid to the tile-based art throughout the entire game. As a whole, the game experience feels somewhat unfinished, with only 10 fairly brief levels and a few quirks. You have to manually restart if you do something that makes beating a level impossible, and jumping off potato heads to reach higher areas doesn't feel quite as precise as it should. Ultimately, however, the puzzle-like gameplay and enjoyable music trumps most of Muse Quest's faults. As a demonstration of music mixed with platforming, the developers have indeed found their muse, so heed the call and give it a try.

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JoshBlipzkrieg"You're a tough, battle-hardened general on a difficult campaign... a campaign of freedom, liberation, and justice. Your enemy? A gray, totalitarian menace, filled with hard-edged soldiers that will stop at nothing to make all your bases belong to them as they leave behind a trail of destruction in their wake. Can you recruit enough troops to fight the enemy? Will your mix of leadership, quick reflexes and tactics win the day? Does this sound epic enough for a game about circles and squares? You'll find out soon enough in GameClay and Noonat's new strategy title, Blipzkrieg.

Blipzkrieg is a unique and stylized game that mixes simple, abstract graphics with intense real-time strategy elements. The objective of the 29-level game is to reach a portal on each stage that advances to the next level. This is a fairly easy task early on, but later levels require you to get past pesky barriers, hostile gray squares, and deadly laser turrets to reach your goal. Eventually you need to take out fortified enemy bases that spawn more hordes of menacing squares to reveal the portal. In order to be successful, you must rely on friendly troops to assist in capturing areas and destroying the enemy.

Meeting your objectives in Blipzkrieg requires an understanding of the controls, which are simple, yet surprisingly robust. When the game starts, you command a blue circle by clicking on it and dragging a path around the screen in a manner similar to mobile titles like Flight Control. The blue circle soon follows your path, and you can speed it up by clicking and holding the arrow icon at the path's end. A key skill in Blipzkrieg is attacking the enemy and capturing areas, which requires troops. Early in the game, you recruit disorganized troops (which are multicolored circles) by moving your blue circle near them, causing them to turn yellow and swarm protectively around you. Later levels require you to spawn new organized troops from a reinforcement portal, with more yellow circles appearing the longer you wait. To attack something, just move your blue circle (with its swarm of troops) near enemy troops or a capture point, and they will automatically fight to the bitter end, often leaving behind pixelated corpses. Capturing areas can also make deadly turrets your allies, helping to defend areas against the enemy squares.

blipzkrieg.jpgAnalysis: This is a game that takes some getting used to, but once you get past the learning curve (made easy thanks to an excellent set of tutorial levels) it can be quite fun and addictive. Many of the levels are cleverly designed, with the AI putting up a significant fight as you try to take over portions of each map section by section while defending your home base. I especially liked the ability to capture (and lose control of) certain areas of a map, with a clear system of dots and colors letting you know who currently controls a barrier or turret, and how strong or weak its control point is. Indeed, the game's use of symbols instead of detailed traditional characters allows for fast gameplay and quick thinking unhindered by unnecessary adornment. Just like a coach's playbook can depict a grinding football play using just X's and O's, Blipzkrieg's use of circles and squares depicts a truly epic struggle taking place.

Despite its deceptively simple controls and graphics, Blipzkrieg is not an easy game, and at times you may find it difficult to get past a level. Some of the later ones are quite tough, and can take up to 10 minutes to pass unless your plans are crisp and your luck is strong. This is part of the game's strengths though; not every map has the exact same strategy to win, and there are enough random elements to keep things interesting. Getting through the game is worth it however, as everything wraps up with a hard but satisfying final level that throws in some surprises. All in all, Blipzkrieg provided me with a challenging and satisfying experience, one where I was looking forward to beating each level to see what was coming next. Will you feel the same? Are you ready to get your war on? Then let's blipz this krieg!

Play Blipzkrieg


Joshcurvy.jpgAre you the type of person that likes to bring order out of chaos? Do you see a mass of tangled cords around the house and feel an overwhelming need to organize them, complete with twist-ties and little labels? Is your favorite card game "52 Pickup" due to the sheer joy of returning cards scattered on the floor back to their numerical, suited order in their pack? If so (or if you just like puzzles), you should find much stimulation in FlamingLunchbox's HTML5 adaptation of their Android puzzler, Curvy.

Line-based hexagon puzzles are nothing new; most recently we reviewed Gopherwood Studios' Entanglement (another HTML5 offering) back in June of 2010. While Entanglement's goal was to get a high score by forming the longest segment of lines possible, Curvy, by contrast, is a randomized game with a definite solution every time. The object of Curvy is to solve a completely visible hexagon puzzle so there is a proper connection across all segments. To turn a hex, either click it with the mouse or click and drag the hex to twist it around. There is no time limit, and you can customize the layout at the onset. Options include multiple colors and greater complexity, as well as various numbers of columns and rows (with 7 x 5 being the default). Since the size of the hexes shrink to fit on one screen, those with a magnifying glass handy or gluttons for punishment (200 x 200, anyone?) can try increasingly greater columns and rows.

Despite the game seeming graphically and conceptually simple, Curvy is surprisingly fun and satisfying. There's a soothing method to solving the smoothly-flowing lines and shapes, similar to the feeling you get when you're in the rhythm of a good Sudoku puzzle. Watching the pieces turn until they fit correctly has a certain Zen to it; like despite all the difficulties and complexities around you, the Curvy hex shape fits, so all is right with the world. Everything is fair, and there are no tricks, just pure logic. My only gripe is that on larger layouts, it would be nice to have an easy way to identify which hexes are still problematic. That said, Curvy is still a work in progress, with features like a scoring system and user preferences still on the drawing board. Regardless, the bottom line is that playing Curvy should make you feel good as you solve it, and isn't feeling good something we could all use more of?

Play Curvy

Joshragdollcannon4.jpgZounds! Are you ready for some death-defying stunts, truly mind-boggling in their impressiveness? Can you handle the thrill of physics-based pixels flying through the air with the greatest of ease? The drama? The excitement? The intensity?! Then my friends, step right this way and witness, for the benefit of Messrs. Johnny-K and Anton Koshechkin (the game designers), a new entry in the esteemed Ragdoll Cannon series: Ragdoll Cannon 4!

Like most of its previous incarnations, Ragdoll Cannon 4 takes place in a sketch-like, physics-based world where the object is to fire one or more stickman-like ragdolls towards a "HERE" target. Aim your ragdoll cannon by moving the target reticle with your mouse, and click to fire. The further away your reticle is from the cannon, the more powerful the shot. Each shot lets loose a ragdoll that flails through the air. You get an unlimited amount of these Normal bouncy ragdolls, but there are also Bomb ragdolls (which blow up certain walls on contact) and Sticky ragdolls (which can add weight to certain obstacles). These new ordinances come into play on many of the 50 new levels, adding an extra bit of challenge and novelty to the overall experience.

If you were a fan of the gameplay in other Ragdoll Cannon games, this latest entry should not disappoint. The clever level design that has been a staple of the series is in full effect here, complete with moving platforms, bouncing balls, explosives, and strange mechanical contraptions. On top of this is the inclusion of the two new ragdoll types (collectable on each level) which help get your brain thinking in new directions. The fluid physics and sound effects are great, though the baroque-sounding music can quickly get repetitive. While Ragdoll Cannon 4 has achievements like its predecessor, its level editor is strangely absent. Nevertheless, with its compelling gameplay and tried-and-true theme, there's certainly plenty of entertainment value here to satisfy your need for more high-flying antics.

Play Ragdoll Cannon 4

Joshlegendofmulida.jpgOld school, 8-bit Zelda. It's like a refreshing glass of cold lemonade on a warm day. Simple graphics, easy-to-learn gameplay, and great characters keep you returning to it again and again. With this in mind, many developers have designed fitting odes to this classic, but none quite like Nora Shishi of Noragames, with his latest side-scrolling Flixel offering, The Legend of Mulida.

When you first start this game with its familiar pixel art, you immediately notice something is amiss. Yes, as usual it's dangerous to go alone, but this time around there's no sword for you. Instead, you find yourself dropped in a world that feels like Super Mario Bros., grabbing powerups while dodging endless waves of the very swords you felt entitled to. Strangest of all is the control scheme, which requires you to move your character left and right with the mouse (your character follows the cursor) while clicking to jump. Some players will immediately decry this as unnecessarily difficult, but those who can make it to the end despite the pokey controls will be rewarded with a bonus quest containing more robust gameplay and some new surprises.

The Legend of Mulida is a game with classic charm, a nice amount of challenge, and old-school fun. The graphics, while not an exact pixel reproduction of Nintendo's masterpiece, effectively evokes the past while you play. Your sense of nostalgia gets further heightened by chip-tune melodies that loop in your ears, accompanied by familiar sound effects. Yes, gameplay is short, and I agree that getting the hang of the mouse control is tricky, but I urge you to play through the game with it in order to unlock the second quest and the surprises that await. All told, with The Legend of Mulida, Noragames taps into the essence of a classic title and gives you something fun and different to try on your next break. So, brave adventurer, why not click the Link and give it a try?

Play The Legend of Mulida

Joshbossbattle.jpgHe's laughing at you. Laughing! That massive, evil black space rectangle with the triangular eyes and mouth actually has the audacity to mock your presence in this part of the galaxy. Perhaps you were on a peaceful mission of exploration. Maybe you were supposed to deliver badly needed medical supplies to a remote outpost dying of plague. Ah, forget all that. It's on now! That rectangle's going down even if it takes endless rounds, thousands of bullets and missiles, and mad avoidance skills. Can you accomplish this simple task in The Final Chapters' "bullet hell" shooter, Boss Battle?

Boss Battle is a simple nod to the typical end-level encounters players face in vertical-scrolling shooters. The whole game consists of fighting a single boss across 20 rounds, with your ship getting more powerful while the boss and his weapons gets nastier. You control your small triangular ship with the [WASD] or arrow keys while moving the crosshair with the mouse. Your weapons fire automatically, but you can press [spacebar] to trigger one of your limited bombs that destroys everything on the screen (except for the boss). Powerups such as increased firepower and extra lives appear on every level, giving your ship a fighting chance.

By the way, you'll need every chance you can get in this game since the boss pulls out every dirty trick in the book. Aside from filling the screen with endless bullets and obstacles that you need to snake a path through, the boss tries to ram your ship, shoots solid lines of lasers, pulls and pushes gravity, and even temporarily reverses your controls. Thankfully you get lots of lives, and there are three difficulty levels and an endless mode, giving you time to get the hang of the game before any frustration sets in.

Despite its simple graphics and concept, Boss Battle is an entertaining break game and a nice challenge for vertical shooter fans. It's satisfying to power up your ship and pump hundreds of bullets into the nefarious rectangle, watching it deform with the damage (too bad it heals itself). There's even a bit of replayability to the game thanks to its rating and medal achievement system. While gameplay is somewhat short and can be a bit repetitive, those looking for a quick shooter fix (especially those with a vendetta against evil rectangles) should find that this Boss Battle is worth fighting.

Play Boss Battle

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