Part III of our Game EXP Trilogy series continues with these next three games I received as part of Humble Indie Bundles 3, 4, and V. There's no real through line with these three games, although they do share some commonalities between them. Both Hammerfight and NightSky are physics-based games, although one's a combat game, and the other is a rolling platformer. Gratuitous Space Battles is its own beast that I'll get to below, so we might as well just jump right in.
Systems: Linux, macOS, Windows
Release Date: November 17, 2009
Publisher: Positech Games
Time Spent: 42 Minutes
I kind of get Gratuitous Space Battles, and I appreciate the boiled-down experience of what science fiction adventure games were in the early 2000s. Games full of various types of simulation coupled with planning out and executing intricate space battles against an overwhelming foe. Here, you just have the battles, and they're not even battles you micromanage. Instead, you select which ships you want to place using a point-buy system, place them on the top-down 2D battlefield, then click the proverbial "Play" button and see what happens. You're able to see the general size and comparable class of ships you're going up against, so there really aren't any surprises, just your knowledge of which ships are more effective against each other, kind of like a game of intergalactic roshamboe.
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But for all of the autobattler aside, there is still a lot you have to micromanage, which is where I ended up falling off of Gratuitous Space Battles. Each class of ship has different parts to it, such as laser cannons, shields, power generators, and engines that offer different elements and affect the speed and power of that class of ship. Managing what each class of ship is equipped with can be key to eking out a victory or losing an eight-minute battle, then having to go back and make micro adjustments to figure out where you went wrong. Or maybe you did have the best combination of equipment on your ship, but you just didn't have the right combination of ships deployed. Or maybe you had enough heavy cruisers, but your light fighters weren't fast enough, and you deployed two too few.
So after 40 minutes, one tutorial level, and three beginning levels, I felt that Gratuitous Space Battles would be a game that I wasn't going to be able to finish because I couldn't commit to the amount of micromanaging needed in this game where one of the key features was a hands-off approach to space battles.
Hammerfight
Systems: Windows, macOS, Steam OS, Linux
Release Date: September 19, 2009
Publisher: Kranx Productions
Developer: Konstantin Koshutin
Time Spent: 32 Minutes
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I had previously played Hammerfight sometime after first getting the Humble Indie Bundle 3 back in 2011, but it didn't click with me then after only 12 minutes, and so I thought I would give it a second chance. Hammerfight is a unique physics game where you pilot a strange steampunk-propeller-propelled-cockpit-type ship with a hammer/club/weapon attached, and you swing said hammer by spinning your mouse around in circles. The physics is kind of twofold. First, the game measures the speed at which your mouse moves, asking you to move your mouse in circles as fast as you can. It's important to remember that this game was released in 2009 when a standard optical mouse had between 200-1,000 DPI (Dots Per Inch), depending on the quality, but since a standard flat screen monitor was about 1024x768, you didn't really need a mouse with a high DPI. Jump ahead 17 years, and the mouse I use has a base DPI of 1,000 and goes up to 4,800 if I want; I'm pretty comfortable at 1,600 for what it's worth. In the game settings, you can change how the game registers your mouse movement from a default DPI of 100 up to 2,000, and since this game is all about mouse movements, that's also how you navigate the menus, by moving your mouse left and right. In order to play the game at all, I have to have the in-game mouse settings down to 100 and my mouse set to 1,000 DPI; otherwise the cursor is all over the screen, and I can't manage to click on anything.
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The second physics aspect of the game is how your ship moves while swinging your hammer around at your enemies. You need to spin the hammer around your ship with enough force to do damage to your enemies; otherwise the hammer will just bounce off of them, causing no damage and leaving yourself open to an attack. If you're proficient enough, you can use your hammer to deflect the attacks of your enemies, but that took more coordination than I was capable of, and any defense skills on my part were purely accidental.
On top of all of that, Hammerfight is really hard. I was only able to make it to Chapter 1: Part III-II, where you're supposed to escort an unarmed zeppelin full of refugees from the kingdom you're a part of. You have to fly around a large screen that isn't fully visible on your single screen, taking out both enemy ships and their projectiles. If your ship or the refugee ships take too much damage, you die, and the level starts over. Granted, I only put in 32 minutes this time around, and probably about half of that was spent on the previous level, Chapter 1: Part III-I, which was spent taking out enemy ships and projectiles in a vertical stage where even hitting the cliff face that took up the left quarter of the screen meant taking damage, but it just didn't feel fun with all of the combined mouse and control-related physics issues I was having.
Systems: Windows, macOS, iOS, Linux, Nintendo 3DS
Release Date: March 1, 2011
Publisher: Nicalis, Inc.
Time Spent: 7.8 Hours*
I saved NightSky for last because I didn't want to have only games that I didn't like in this article, and I wanted to end on a high note.
Before I came back to NightSky, I had figured that I only played a bit, but I had just over four hours, which means I either had already beaten the game or gotten close. This time around, I didn't "technically" beat the game, but like Crayon Physics Deluxe, I beat all of the primary levels, and all that I have left are the "optional" bonus levels in the form of the "Slightly Nonsense" levels. These levels you unlock by collecting stars that are often very well hidden and in out-of-the-way areas in a couple of levels in each world. Anyway!
NightSky is another physics-based platformer where you play as a glass ball rolling across three screens. But to get across those three screens involves modifying your roll by speeding up or using a slow "sticky" roll, triggering objects to access paths, using contraptions that are affected by how you roll, or sometimes by doing nothing extra at all and just rolling across the screen. The visual aesthetic is very reminiscent of LIMBO, with colorful backgrounds and oftentimes matte black foreground and interactable objects. There were some levels in each world/stage that I found challenging, but nothing so difficult that it would have induced rage quitting.
What definitely helped the game maintain that sense of calm was the sound design. In the Beach, there's the sound of crashing waves; in the Harara Mountains, there's the sound of wind and rain; in the Rana Caverns, there's the sound of wind and grinding stone. There's also sparse music that plays, but it functions more as an accompaniment to the environmental ambiance and the sound of the glass ball plinking against various surfaces. Sometimes you'll come across a level where all you do is move left to right, maybe jump a gap, all the while there's a little tinkle on piano keys with the sound of wind and rustling leaves or rain pouring in the background, and it just feels amazing. It was a game to play to help me unwind.
Until I hit a level that utterly confused me as to its solution, or if I could see where a star was likely hidden, but for the life of me, couldn't figure out how to get there. And then it's just embarrassingly frustrating, but those felt few and far between. Although I don't think I'll go back and collect all of the stars, that's just extra.
Another three games down! I have another Game EXP Trilogy article tentatively planned for September, but I may have to put that one on hold until October if the three games take me longer to finish, or if I don't decide that I'm done with them. With luck, that will close out the games from Humble Indie Bundles 3 and 4, so we'll see.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Instrumental
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