As a part of Community Love Week, Game Team One will be playing some of the latest community created games and weighing in on them. We really love seeing how creative all you designers out there can be with the GameSalad toolset!
Billy Garretsen of Game Team One reviewed a collection of GameSalad developed games and now offers his 3 sentence reviews for each game.
Bamboo Forest
This game is one of the slickest overall packages available from the GameSalad Community. The art, animation and sound design creates a beautiful tone that immediately grabs you. The physics mechanics do not always behave as expected but the game is polished enough to not be spoiled by these minor instances.
Simply Wizard
This game is incredibly devious! Early levels will lead you to believe that the gameplay is without any challenge but get into the second and third worlds and your fingers will be seriously moving. It all boils down to a rhythmic management of on-screen chaos, but damn if it isn't beautiful chaos.
Tiny Diggers
As a soon-to-be parent I have been keeping my eyes on educational apps since inevitably my kid, too, will be fluent with an iPad. Tiny Diggers is just pure enjoyment - simple and bold graphics highlight basic mechanics that even a toddler can understand. It outshines learning apps and products ten times its price and respectfully treats parents and child alike.
Wonder Diver
Be prepared - this game will totally melt you with its FANTASTIC presentation and catchy feel-good music. The pixel anime style will fool you into thinking you aren't playing a GameSalad game and is totally reminiscent of 32bit era NEO GEO, PSONE and DREAMCAST arcade games. The game is FREE so get it right now!
Tropic Ninja
Fruit Ninja inspired games are pretty common nowadays, but the presentation of Tropic Ninja is pleasing with crisp graphics and fun splat and explosion animations. I had to turn the sound off though because the slicing sound effect loop is mixed really hot and sounds a little like a machine gun. Nice for a few quick play throughs but not as fully featured as its inspiration.
Beyond Dead
February's game of the Month does not disappoint as a technical showpiece and example of ambition in scale. Many systems work in harmony from the dual controller system to engaging cutscene segments and impressive level progression that seems to mask loading times. Minor bugs in collision detection (stairs) prevent it from being perfect, though I am eagerly anticipating the next great thing from Monster Robot Studio.
EPig Monster Smasher
What I love most about the EPig games is that each takes a new mechanic and adopts it with the familiar EPig character lineup. It takes the rotating world formula and executes on it fairly well - with all the fart sounds you can handle (an EPig mainstay). If anything can be said about MagoNicolas its that he likes to try a lot of different things and I'm excited to see what genre he's got up his sleeve next.
Mixed Up & Mumble Jumble
By far my favorite TShirtBooth games to date! My favoritism lies with Mumble Jumble as it is a more fluid execution of word building, but each take the concept in unique and fun directions. He, himself, has proclaimed his love of word games and it shows. Can't wait to see what he does with writable tables!
