Previews// Reporting from Rezzed: Impressions from the Floor

Maxed out on AAA games and next-gen chatter? Rezzed had an antidote for all that, presenting a showcase for PC and indie games down in beautiful Birmingham. Chris O'Regan was down there for SPOnG, walking the floor and sampling what was on offer. Here are some words on what he saw...


Full Mojo Rampage

Full Mojo Rampage from Over the Top Games is an action adventure game set in a world where the magic of Voodoo actually works. The player takes on the role of a Voodoo keeper as they try to grapple with the forces of darkness while collecting large amounts of treasure. Other items of interest are voodoo dolls and mojo that is needed to increase the player's strength and luck attributes.

The game plays in a similar style to most action RPG's, such as Diablo, Titan's Quest and Torchlight. The major difference is that the environment is significantly more interactive, with traps being some of the most potent I have ever come across in a dungeon crawling game like this. The visual style is similar to Torchlight only with a heavy bias towards deep jungles and voodoo-based motifs, as you'd expect. From the time I had with the game, the character I was controlling relied heavily on ranged attacks as they blasted away enemies with what appeared to be some form of wand or maybe a miniature totem. The lighting struck me as being some of the most impressive I have seen, as the glowing from the spell blasts splashed the walls of the dungeon very convincingly.

The traps are extremely devious, with many being the primary cause of a player's demise rather than being attacked by creatures. This requires the player to pay plenty of attention to what is happening on the screen, as some timing and skill is required of them in order to avoid the worst effects of these traps. It's not too dissimilar to playing a platformer like one of the Rayman games or a Mario title, and that's not something I've come to expect from these types of games. It certainly made me more engaged with the game than I might have been, as it didn't reduce to me half-heartedly mashing away at the buttons as I slaughtered my way through the dungeon. There is also an underlying current of humour that runs through the game that wasn't too jarring and does a good job of getting the player to smile as they get swathed in hot fiery death for the 100th time.

Ethan: Meteor Hunter

Ethan: Meteor Hunter is a platform game that features a mouse who, as you may have guessed from the title, likes to hunt meteors. It features a mixture of physics-based puzzles with the ability to pause time and manipulate objects while in this frozen state. It's quite fast-paced and much head scratching is involved as you try to get through a screen using the abilities that Ethan has. I went through the tutorial of game and found the idea of manipulating various objects while suspended mid jump to be quite liberating. It opened up a set of options that in any other platformer would not be present. The number of times an area can be paused is limited based on the how many time freezing icons you collect in a section. This creates the feeling of limited resources as you progress through the game.

Developers at Seaven Studio admit that they were influenced by titles like LittleBigPlanet and the Mario games, but I fear they may have taken too much from the former in terms of the controls. The primary reason people lambast LittleBigPlanet is its sloppy control scheme. It is highly inaccurate, forcing the player to fall to their death as the result of the poorly realised control system. From the time I had with Ethan: Meteor Hunter it became very clear it suffers from the same problem. Time and time again I fell to my death in the game thanks to an imprecise control of Ethan as he inexplicably slipped off yet another platform I thought I had landed on.