So I might as well say up front that this will probably be a shorter review because this game is essentially all mechanics, there’s a lot of them and they’re well-built but there isn’t really any context or story to worry about here. The real hook is the game’s simple but addicting gameplay, you have a map which is split up between all the players who then have units allotted to those territories so that turn based strategy can commence. Each player can transfer units to an adjacent territory or attack enemy territories during their turn with each one of their own territories, it’s basically just RISK in that fashion. The hook comes when you get into battle where instead of rolling dice you and the enemy have to make words using a jumble of letters all of which have a point value, the winner is the one who makes the highest scoring word fastest. There is some strategy involved though as you can only use as many letters in your words as you bring units-up to a max of eight-with you to attack (or have to defend).

It's not about the size of your word, it's how you use it.

There are two distinct strategies to use both reliant on different mechanics and word lengths the game has which allows players of all vocabularies to have some fun. If you have that max of eight units on a territory you’ll be able to make that particular battle’s anagram, player’s both use the same pool of letters and every seemingly random pool of letters can be reconfigured into a word or phrase for a ton of score and a nigh guaranteed win. However let’s say instead of massing your troops on the battlefield you decide to spread out a little bit and bolster your defense all over, well in certain situations a lower unit count is in its own way useful. When you have lower unit count than the enemy and manage to win a battle (tough but possible depending on your opponent) you can sometimes take some of the enemy’s units prisoner and make them fight for you, buffing you and rubbing your enemy’s nose in it. With either strategy if you keep racking up the territories you’ll gain certain bonuses. With each win you have on your turn with a certain group of units you’ll gain more treasure which allows you to call in back up units in a pinch, those extra wins will also increase the number of units you get when you end your turn.

Those torches represent how many extra units you'll get on that territory when you finish your turn, assuming you don't screw up your winning streak.

The gameplay as you can tell is strong but that’s not the only high point; there is also the jaunty, vibrant, and just little jazzy presentation to enjoy. The stages have a nice over-saturated look to them with a soft design that’s whimsical enough to be just shy of childish. All of the characters look like bowling pins with heads and are modeled to be meme-tastic groups of warriors like Ninjas and Pirates; the impression you get  from the whole thing is very similar to that of the Worms series. You also have some nice jazzy music filled with lots of great stings for when important events happen in-game and a tons of flavor text describing what your and the opponent’s words mean (because you can and totally will win on a guess) as well as just other random fun stuff.

Good to note there are a bunch of extra modes in the single player, they all play the same but have different goals and amounts of opponents.

The only real problem in this game is an A.I. that seems just a hair too damn knowledgeable, obviously this isn’t apparent in the multiplayer but I’ve been playing pre-release so the A.I. and I have been the best of frenemies. The problem here is the A.I. already knows all the words the game has programmed into it and it isn’t afraid to use them. While I’m certainly impressed by the lexicon the devs have managed to cram into this, it’s the rare human player who is able muster something like the word “taconite” (which is a rock and not a delicious evening of Mexicana) out of thin god damn air (I never saw the word taconite in this game just for the record but it seemed like a good example). The result is you very regularly calling bullshit on the game only for it to pull out a description that you never could have imagined, it’s educational but also incredibly frustrating. All that said the game does only cost $5 and despite it’s E10+ rating it allows you to use swear words (at least in single player) so for entirely puerile reasons I’m pretty willing to forgive this flaw.

In the end I think this game is ton of fun in single player and I’m sure ten times as much in multiplayer if you can bring a bunch of word nuts together to play it. While it certainly has a flaw or two and it isn’t exactly a substantive gaming experience, as essentially what amounts to an online board game it’s fantastic. It’s cheap, it’s addictive, and it’s educational fun which assuming you’re not adverse to the occasional issue of National Geographic can be one of the best kinds. So for making me feel dumb while actually making me smarter, not to mention allowing me to win a match with the word “shit”, Quarrel gets a 4.5 of out 5 stars.

Doors leading to a "reality switch".

First off, I need to explain how DeadEnd is played. It is a first person maze game. You walk around mazes of varying sizes collecting enough cubes to unlock the next maze and then find the exit. That sounds easy enough, but Membranos made a grave error by limiting the player’s movement to one step in one of four directions. This is a full 3D game, where you can spin the mouse around in any direction to look around the maps, but then you click the left mouse button to move forward one square in the direction you are (mostly) facing. It’s as annoying, unintuitive and disorienting as it sounds.  At first I couldn’t work out why this design decision was made and then an even uglier game mechanic revealed itself that tied the two together in an unholy matrimony that ultimately dooms DeadEnd. Walls and doors will appear and disappear when you move within a one block radius of them. Try to imagine how that plays out. You move forward one step at a time, in one of four directions. As you move slowly around in one of four directions the walls and doors around you will appear or disappear seemingly at random causing you to turn around and blindly but your head into walls until a path is revealed. This is the basic gameplay of DeadEnd, literally walking into walls to find invisible passages through the map. No amount of thematic dressing up (The mazes are in your mind man! It’s, like, your subconscious dude!) could save this inherently atrocious idea of gameplay.

This is a very common site when playing DeadEnd.

On top of this insane base of alleged game mechanics is added a number of collectible items and tools to “help” you navigate the game’s mazes.  Paint buckets will show your footsteps so you know where you have travelled already, which is helpful because the walls of the mazes have barely any discernible features to help distinguish where you are. What isn’t helpful is the fact the paint bucket runs out at an indeterminate length of time leaving you with footsteps you can no longer make sense of because you don’t know when your footsteps stopped being recorded. There is also floating eyeballs and some weird alchemy set looking thing that increase the range at which you can see past the illusionary walls. These actually help, and if you collect all of them in a level all the illusionary walls disappear. Once this happens you are left with a gaming experience that almost approaches being sane but unfortunately the ability to make this happen only appears in a handful of the mazes.  There are also “Reality Switches”, which I suppose are the main facet of the games much touted ability to distort reality. What they actually do is switch some of the illusionary walls around, which in essence just makes an incredibly frustrating and obtuse game even more so.

None of these doors lead to fun.

As I hinted at earlier DeadEnd is thematically dressed up to intend that all of the mazes take place in someone’s mind and the dead ends and fake walls are symbolic of the gaps in experienced reality, or something to that effect. Notice how I said “thematically dressed”, as opposed to “the story”. That’s because there is no story and the “thematic dressing” is next to nonexistent. Approximately three or four tutorial pop up’s preface the game and explain what is happening. Outside of that you’re left to your own devices to make up any number of wild theories as to why the player character is plodding through game’s inane mazes. So, without any real story or motivation, all the player is left with in DeadEnd is bumping their way through some ugly mazes.

These trees are as about as visually exciting as the game gets.

A game doesn’t need a plot or a cool theme to be fun to play, but what it does need is something that is enjoyable to do. Unfortunately the game play of DeadEnd is the very essence of unenjoyable. There is no sense of achievement with the completion of a level, nor do you get that buzz when you work out a puzzle like in other games. This is because you simply wander around at random until you get to the end. There’s no rhyme or reason and all that that’s needed to complete each stage is perseverance and clicking in random directions for about 5 minutes a which point you’re done.  It may sound like I’m whining because the game is too hard or that I’m missing a fundamental part of the way it’s meant to be played, but I in fact made my way through every stage the game had to offer. Against my better judgment I plodded through every stage and finished the game.  The saddest thing about that is that my total play time wouldn’t have been much more than an hour.  That said, there is the option to go back and get a 100% completion rate (I had about 75%) but that would only tack on an extra hour or so. Also any person willing to do this, in my opinion, should be closely monitored for mental illness.

I feel like I’m picking on the small guy here, ripping apart a very small developer’s first independent release. I’m all for supporting any independent release as much as possible to help keep this crazy hobby of ours healthy with all sorts of off-beat games that wouldn’t see the light of day with big publishers; unfortunately though DeadEnd is simply, in a word, crap. The gameplay is inherently frustrating without reward, and all the work put on top to flavor it as some sort of psychological exploration game is lazy and uninspired. I can only recommend this title to the very small group of people who enjoy automatic doors closing in their face, over and over and over again. I unfortunately have to give DeadEnd a measly 1 out of 5 stars and hope Membranos can come up with something a little bit stronger and entertaining next time around.

FO KRAH DIIN! ...ugh, I've been playing too much Skyrim.

Well first off why don’t we talk about that added charm I mentioned earlier, both new mechanics and dimensions are added to the well-worn formula and sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t. The most apparent hook this game has is the fact that at any time you can switch into various elemental suits which grant you special abilities. Fire allows you to throw fire balls and surf the air for a few seconds, ice allows you to slow time and throw freezing gusts,and rock gives you super strength and area attacks. There are of course plenty of other situations and abilities these suits are good for that become apparent as you play. These mechanics thankfully work very well in context, a meter limits how much you can use it so the game doesn’t break and become too easy but it refills fast enough so that you never have to wait around for the bar to fill so you can finish a puzzle.

Bosses are large and impressive but devolve into the familiar "figure out the pattern" stages we all grew up with.

The less apparent thing that this game does different is adding 3 dimensional movement…kind of. The game is ostensibly a straight side-scroller but it works on what looks like three planes similar to something like Little Big Planet. Unfortunately the demarcation between those planes isn’t nearly as clear as it is in something like LBP and this leads to a lot of flubs in the platforming. It can be very hard to tell where a platform is in 3D space and your ability to switch between plains is analogue rather than digital meaning it’s very easy to not be where you’re supposed to be or move where you shouldn’t. This game also likes to put a bunch of stuff in the foreground and have enemies and hazards move into and out of the foreground and background which can make things very confusing. This one aspect which I’m sure was meant to be a neat feature just ends up making the game feel difficult in entirely unfair ways.

The variety of environments and at least the look of the enemies is quite nice.

One of the odd things about this game is that it can’t seem to decide whether it wants to be a kids game or not. Despite the fact it sports a very simple story and has pretty rudimentary combat, the overall difficulty swings pretty heavily and the kid’s game vibe never feels fully committed to. The whole things feels kind of like a Saturday morning cartoon both in design and story. The environment is very colorful and to its credit well varied with a design aesthetic very similar to that of the first Ratchet and Clank game. The story is a well-worn cliché but it works for what the game is trying to accomplish. The story goes that Zack Zero and his partner Marlene save the world from Zulrog and his bro, Zulrog wants revenge so he kidnaps Marlene, Zack goes to save Marlene but it’s a trap; this is ground we’ve walked so much the earth is three feet deeper here. The characters are one note archetypes but honestly for this kind of story that’s just fine, it feels the same way a lot of video games from the NES/SNES era did. Unfortunately though the game just doesn’t feel as precise as those old games in its controls which feel a little too loose in pretty much every aspect.

These gems also help level you up and thankfully they don't run from you like the stuff dropped from enemies does.

The biggest problem in this game though is that despite the fact it plays fairly easy there is a lot arbitrarily added difficulty that really impacts the enjoyment. Probably the best example of this is the fact that all the health and score pips that drop when you kill enemies or destroy boxes don’t stay in one place, they actively run away from you. This leads to a lot of lost score from those pips running off platforms or into pits and again making the game harder in dickish ways. These pips also influence your level which determines your abilities so losing those pips to AI shyness can make things harder in the long run as well. The other major issue when it comes to the difficulty is the hit boxes, a lot of hazards seem to hit a bit farther out than their visual effects might indicate and enemies have launched attacks at me that I’ve dodged by a mile but I’ve still been hit by. Also it’s worth mentioning that this platformer has fall damage which seems weird and completely needless.

In the end this game kind of sits right in the middle of the enjoyment spectrum for all players. Adults will find some of the gameplay engaging but overall find the game too simple whereas kids will get a kick out of the Saturday morning cartoon style the game has but most likely have some trouble with the difficulty. Overall everyone will have some problems with the issues the extra movement planes and loose controls present. I enjoyed a lot of what Zack Zero did; the suit mechanic is very neat, the playful colorful visuals are light and fun, and there’s just something I like about a good mix of platforming and combat. Unfortunately the game mucks just enough stuff up to not really achieve all it could. While this game may be far from perfect as a first effort from this developer it shows a lot of promise and I’m very excited to see what these guys do next.  Assuming they take some lessons from this game it could be something to watch out for. So for a lot of charm but gameplay that’s not sturdy enough to support it, Zack Zero gets a 2.5 out of 5 stars. Don’t let that score fool you though this isn’t a “bad” game it’s just not where it needs to be to be called a “good” game, as convoluted as that may sound it’s the best way to describe it.

When you are away from Amy you'll gradually become infected with the nondescript virus.

I really don’t know where to start with this game as there is no high point to jump off from, there are elements of quality in this game but no single facet that could be considered “good”.  This game plays almost entirely off old school survival horror sensibilities (think the first Resident Evil game) but where games like that have evolved to something more playable this sticks a little too close to what many consider the faults of that genre. Tank like controls, laborious animations, puzzles that are less puzzling than needlessly convoluted, and just not providing the player with enough information to properly conduct themselves. This anachronistic style the game has while being defended by some as “old school” on forums is as broken today as it was back in the ’90s; for all the supposed tension it creates in a modern setting it serves simply to infuriate. Hell, the whole game is based around an escort mission for god’s sake and while they certainly attempt to do some neat stuff with it in the puzzles and health mechanics it still hampers the entire experience. It essentially splits up all the abilities a character should have between two separate characters, one of which you don’t have direct control over.

Amy is actually pretty good about staying away from enemies but that still doesn't make the combat interesting.

Not only is it taking play style from those old games though, it’s taking its sensibility from them as well. The idea of enjoyment through attrition seems to be at play here with the game making checkpoints kind of sparse, only saving progress after you finish a chapter (of which there are only six in the game), and taking away all of your items between chapters and when you die. In this game death isn’t the punishment, the painful slog back to where you died is. The game also has very “game-y” ideas about things like enemy placement and stealth. Enemies move and hang out in very set places and patterns which change not with any sort of logic but just by showing up wherever it would be the most annoying. Combat is also very one note with it consisting of essentially just hammering the attack button (while in attack stance obviously because why should something so basic be made just a simple button press) until your combo finishes then dodging once and attacking again. Now it should be noted I didn’t play past the start of chapter three, which let me remind you is still a third of the way through the game, as the exasperation of this-well to put it bluntly-bad game was simply too much to bear. However unless this game becomes something entirely different upon completing chapter three (and my research says it doesn’t) then my opinion remains the same.

Lana sure seems to care about Amy though you quickly won't give a shit about either of them.

I haven’t even gotten onto the story and presentation yet and if they were good they could have saved this game, too bad they are not.  The story is vague at best, while it’s clear this was an attempt to build an air of mystery to drive the player forward they go too far with it and don’t characterize any of the elements of the story making it hard to give a damn. The basic plot is that the main character Lana is taking the titular little-girl-with-spooky-powers-who-can’t-speak cliché Amy away from some sort of facility and corrupt professor however no effort is made to explain any of those elements and make us care about those characters. We have no clue why the professor is evil or what he was doing, we don’t know exactly what Lana’s relationship is to Amy other than rescuer, and we don’t know why the facility has such power and sway to the point that it has its own army. All we know is that it’s the not too distant future, we’re a in developed country of some sort, and shit seems like it’s not going too great. While I’m sure some of these things are explained in some fashion later on in the story having so little to go on at the start makes the characters pretty much non-entities and their journey just so much fluff.

Rarrgh, I'm a zombie shark man!

The visuals of this game also do it no favors, while they are nice on a sheer technical level for a downloadable game they are bland beyond belief and rife with their own faults. The most noticeable problem is the frame rate which at its absolute best sits around what looks like 25-30 frames per second however-in cut scenes especially-it can get down to slide show levels of stuttering. Of course if the art design was at least interesting this might be excusable but naturally it isn’t. Everything is a gray, black, and rust covered mess of bland and boring faux apocalyptic masonry; we’ve seen it before and we’ve seen it done better. Everything about the look of this game is derivative and simply (ironically I suppose considering the zombies) lacking life. The facial animation in particular looks very robotic and hangs out at the bottom of the uncanny valley. Oddly enough the game chooses to focus on this facial animation to make up for Amy’s lack of speech which was simply a bad choice on their part as it makes her less the sympathetic victim and more a frightening child of the corn that is trying and failing to emulate human emotion.

I don't have a screenshot that makes this point but I'm going to say it anyway, why is Lana wearing high heels when the rest of her outfit is very casual? It seems completely unnecessary.

There’s also the sound design which is unremarkable at least but it does have one offensive quality and that’s the V.O. which just feels unrefined and hokey. Lana has an accent that seems to drift ever so slightly into french territory on regular occasions and while not inherently bad can be very distracting; of course it isn’t helped by her repeated use of the word “Bravo”. The worst voice I encountered in my time with the game though was Marcello, a bit character in the first chapter whose entire role seems to be that of dying to show you that “bad guys are bad”. He sports a thick to the point of offensive New York/Jersey accent and says things like “over dere” or “deese guys” which of course the game spells out in its subtitles making it so he’s annoying even on mute. The worst part is that half of his lines make him sound like an intensely creepy pedophile (going so far as to say “come out, come out, wherever you are” when he and Lana search for Amy) and his babyish tone towards Amy is easily the most frightening thing I experienced in my time with this “horror” game.

So looks like the internet was right, this is a game to be avoided by pretty much everyone. While I think die-hard fans of old school survival horror might get some enjoyment out of this you must have a love of this particular type of gameplay so strong it borders on obsession to be one of those people. Before release it looked like this game had a lot of promise and it’s sad to see the state it ended up in. In the end I just can’t recommend this game, I wasn’t able to gleam any sort of fun from it and playing it just felt like a chore. So for being the bland unintuitive mess that it is, AMY gets a 1 out of 5 stars. It’s a pity that the promise this game had went to waste.

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Nothing says excitement like the suburbs of Detroit.

So to start things off why don’t we get right to the point and talk about the sense of insanity this game tries to evoke. All of the game modes center either around massive crashes, ludicrous speed, or some combination of the two and it’s clear the focus of development was get those things right above all else. Thankfully for the most part it manages to achieve this, the crashes are visceral and constant while the speed is appropriately break neck. All that said it comes with a lot of issues in service of all the excitement. There are some issues with the visuals, controls, and pacing that sadly do a lot to knee cap this game. The easiest way to define this game is as pure Id, doing its damnedest to provide thrills and non-sequitorial fun but not doing the legwork to make the rest of the game a sturdy and worthwhile experience.

Cars look a little too "Trackmania" for the surrounding gameplay.

For as readily apparent as the flaws are here none of them are overall deal breakers but there’s a lot of little things that quickly build up and start to grate on you and sadly this extends to all aspects of this game. The visuals are hampered by a poor frame rate and some rather ugly car models, the controls are never well explained, the handling can be a very wonky, the cars are fragile beyond belief, and not enough content is available at the beginning to make the pacing fun. A lot of these problems could be easily fixed too, while the visuals are what they are, the addition of some sort of actual campaign rather than just assorted modes would help the pacing and create some sort of tutorial. Weirdly enough the game has all the components for a good campaign too, there are a ton characters (almost all an awful puns or celebrity spoofs) and with all the available modes already in the game you’re assured a varied campaign. It’s seems like the idea of a structured single player mode was put off in favor of building a game that could be played identically in multiplayer; unfortunately the community is completely barren and I was unable to find a single game.

The arena modes lead to some occasional spectacular crashes,

All that said in its execution this game does have it’s better points, while not all of the game’s large amount of varied content is fantastic there is still a lot to enjoy here. There’s a total of nine game modes, 62 tracks, and 47 cars (this is all according to the game’s Steam page, I can only verify the amount of modes) and while a lot of the tracks and cars are locked away when you get started what’s on display is pretty good. The cars in terms of modeling look crappy but there’s plenty of skins available for each car so they can at least look like your specific favored kind of crappy. In certain modes you can even change the tuning which is neat as it gives you an explanation as to what it’s doing, it’s just flavor text but I enjoy it none the less. More importantly the tracks are pretty well made, in fact I would say they’re the best part of the game. They visually look decent (far better than the cars) and there’s a good amount of variety between them; add onto this good course design with well planned twists, turns, and set pieces and you have some tracks that are at least some fun to play with.

Uggh, that car deserves to be destroyed. I mean c'mon orange and green, how garish!

Sadly though this game just doesn’t feel finished and it’s not really in a way that could be adequately fixed in a patch. There just isn’t a ton of balance here and so much of the game just feels like a bunch of features and modes haphazardly glued together rather than constructed as an actual cohesive product. While there are certainly moments of fun here a lot of it is couched in jank, for every awesome 10 car crash that results in a massive fireball there’s a head on collision that ends up with your front wheel stuck in the windshield of another racer and you being dragged around the track until your car explodes. The feeling of speed you can attain is great but get too far ahead and things get very boring very quick as the cars in back will just constantly crash and battle preventing each other from over taking you. Of course getting stuck in the back means you’ll be crashed into relentlessly preventing you from actually winning the race and unlocking new content. I want to like this game but it just keeps throwing up obstacles and the overall quality is not on par with the $30 price tag.

In the end despite whatever manic enjoyment you can derive from it, Flatout 3: Chaos & Destruction is ostensibly a bad game. While it certainly has its charms and as those who watched our Heads Up know a lot of weird bits that make it fun in that intentionally random kind of way if you spend any more time than we spent with it there it’ll get boring rather quick and fight with you the whole way. At the price of $30 and at the state it’s in right now (patches and DLC have been promised and since it came out two patches have already been released so it can be assumed there more are to come) this game can’t really be recommended, even if you’re an arcade racing fan with nothing left to play I’d probably recommend at the very least just waiting for a sale. So even though I kind of like the seemingly hastily put together lunatic charm of this game I-almost reluctantly-have to give Flatout 3: Chaos & Destruction a 2 out of 5 stars. As much as it’s vibe is a lot of fun the game attached to it is less so and I have to review accordingly.