Heavy Metal Thunder

Okay, so this punk-ass tries to cave in your skull - crack - but you're, like, too badass to die, so you break out a shotgun and point it right between the poor mofo's eyes, and you're like, "Yeah, bitch, you think it's that easy to - "

Whoa. Sorry. I've just been in a really gung-ho mood ever since I read Heavy Metal Thunder. Let me take a minute to calm down...

Okay, so this time around I'm talking about Kyle B. Stiff's Heavy Metal Thunder. It's the second app from Barcelona-based Cubus Games. Their first release, The Sinister Fairground, was in a comedy-horror vein. And it was excellent (read my review of it here). This time around, they've gone sci-fi.

And what great sci-fi it is. You take the role of a member of the Black Lance Legion of elite jetpack soldiers, humanity's first and only line of defence against the nebulous extraterrestrial Invaders. You play Mr Wiggles (the name isn't permanent), a wounded amnesiac who struggles to recover his memory, and to return to his home before the Invaders can destroy it. It's grim stuff - what small pockets of humanity remain are on the run; you aren't fighting for victory, but for revenge.

Throughout, there's very much a theme that only the strongest can survive - and as Mr Wiggles strives to do just that, the story presents some probing choices weighing mercy against practicality. Will you kick a man off your spaceship so that you have more food for yourself? Or will you welcome him on board, even though he doesn't seem to have any useful skills? And there's a dark undercurrent that hints that you've been somehow 'programmed' to feel a certain aggressivity in specific situations. That's just begging for more development in sequels to come.

There are some lovely, original touches throughout the story - without being too spoilery, my own favourite would be the long-haul flight through space wearing only a little short-range jetpack, and towing a huge net of food and supplies behind you. Excellent stuff. Or, for instance, a section in which another jetpack soldier's radio is broken out in the vacuum of space, so you have to touch your helmet against his in order for them to convey sound. There are a bunch of fantastic little details like that. Of course, you should expect some pseudoscience with your sci-fi, and the pseudoscience here is well thought out, and credible - the 'fat mass' generators that create gravity aboard spaceships, for example. Kudos to Mr Stiff for that (that must be a fake name...).

Okay, a few technical points. Game mechanics: stats are a bit D&D-esque (Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, Will, Charisma, as well as Zero-G Combat and 1-G Combat), but alongside that you can also learn a bunch of skills (Jetpack, Computers, Xenobiology, Piloting etc.). You gain experience as you go along, and level up, allowing you to increase stats and pick new skills. And it's all pretty well balanced; as with a lot of good RPG systems, you often find yourself just a little short of the next level up, and craving more Exp, more Exp, more Exp... Combat and skill/stat tests require you to roll virtual dice - and, while I'm not a big fan of dice-rolling in apps, these are some pretty funky digital dice. Also, just like in The Sinister Fairground, you gain Hero points as you go along, which allow you to retry, or automatically succeed in, failed tests. Unusually for a gamebook (and this is adapted from the Heavy Metal Thunder gamebook), the story is dialogue-heavy, and each 'page' is usually quite long. Me, I quite like that, and I suspect that Cubus have intentionally tried to do away with a lot of redundant screen-tapping. The artwork is good, overall - the pictures of spaceships, or planets, or machinery, are beautiful; the pictures of people are a mixed bag. And the game motor looks great, and is simple to use - it's another step up from The Sinister Fairground, in fact.

Does the game have any bad points? Not so many. As I hinted at above, sometimes the tone of the narrative and dialogue is just suuuuuper-macho, and it gets a bit tiring. And there are a few too many T-junction choices for my taste. Also, I felt a bit frustrated that a certain key plot thread regarding Wiggles' amnesia seemed to go unresolved. Maybe that's just the way I played the game, though. Maybe I did something wrong; only future playthroughs will tell.

So, overall verdict: great, great, great. Even better than The Sinister Fairground, which was brilliant. Cubus are really starting to establish themselves as makers of awesome interactive fiction apps. Congrats to them, and to the spuriously-named Kyle B. Stiff for writing such a great story.

Trivia of the day: 'Heavy Metal Thunder'? Also an album by Saxon.

(Review by Paul Gresty)  

The Sinister Fairground

Okay, so in this episode of Scooby-Doo, Shaggy wakes up an Incan mummy that begins to terrorise...

Hold on. No. That's not right.

Let me restart. This is my review for The Sinister Fairground, the iOS gamebook app released in May by Barcelona-based Cubus Games.

Here's my short review: The game is great. If you own an iOS device, or if you have occasional access to one, buy it.

Here comes my longer review.

In The Sinister Fairground you take the role of a young man who unwisely chooses to meet his girlfriend Sophia in the diabolical Fairground of the Extraordinary. You quickly realise that the fairground's dastardly denizens have stolen Sophia away, and that you'll have to search through an array of macabre attractions if you ever hope to see her again. It's grisly, horror-themed hi-jinks - though you'll also come across a fair amount of self-conscious, genre-savvy comedy as the game pokes good-natured fun at various horror and fantasy tropes, and even the medium of gamebooks themselves.

There's a lot of good stuff here. The in-game map features 11 main areas to explore - such as the 'Circus of Monsters' or the 'Hall of Mirrors' - and a handful of other mini-areas besides. And there's a ton of content in each one. You won't see everything in a single playthrough. Some encounters and enemies are played for laughs. Others are genuinely eerie. Personally, my most chilling in-game experience so far has been sharing a car with a Portuguese serial killer - though, curiously, this Dexter-esque foe didn't try to harm me in any way (on this particular playthrough, at least - I'm sure I could have easily attracted his ire if I'd been more careless). Each area is essentially independent of the others, though there's some crossover in the clues and items you can pick up that can prove useful elsewhere. You also get a few Easter eggs sprinkled about the game (one of them even gives a shout out to fellow gamebook app developers Tin Man and Inkle).

Cubus has developed a lovely game engine. It's pretty, and it's easy to use. I'm not a huge fan of virtual dice rolling around the screen of your device (Grr...), and a lot of dice-rolling - or rather, dice-spinning - does take place here. But that's not so frustrating, as the game allows you to amass 'Hero Points' that can be used to reroll or even automatically pass failed tests. Similarly, combat is dependent on rolling to hit your enemy (Grr...), and rolling to see if your enemy hits you (Grr...) - but there is also a tactical element, in that you have to choose which weapon to use (Chainsaw? Katana? Magnum 44?) and whether you want to use various one-off items or spells to help you, from round to round.

And, best of all, IF YOU GET KILLED YOU DON'T HAVE TO START AGAIN FROM THE BEGINNING. I love this feature. Instead, the game boots you out of the current area, and pretends that the last few encounters never took place. Brilliant. It's so much more fun to play when you don't have that ever-present risk of total failure hanging over you.

Another great feature - you can use your Hero Points to automatically beat any really nasty enemies. Even big, plot-important foes. It's a sort of 'cheat-if-you-want-to-without-feeling-bad-about-it' mechanism, and it's inspired.

The game isn't perfect. There are a few weak spots. They aren't biggies, but they include: -

• The story is sometimes flimsy. For instance, you never get much information about Sophia, your girlfriend. Why do you like her? How did the two of you meet? What sort of personality does she have?
• I'm disappointed there's no option to play as a girl, or as a gay or bisexual character. I know that coding a lot of different variables like this takes more work, but I'd have liked to see something a little more progressive.
• In the English-language version of the game, there are occasional proofreading problems - typos, misused words, clumsy-sounding sentences. But none of this is serious. It doesn't disrupt the flow of the game.
• A personal bugbear: I dislike inventory management. Yes, it's more realistic and it increases the game's challenge. I just find it a pain in the backside. Here, you're limited to carrying five weapons and ten objects.

So, overall verdict: I refer you back to my short review above. The game is excellent. Cubus have really done well with this one, and I absolutely recommend it. At the time of writing, their second game - Heavy Metal Thunder, by Kyle B. Stiff - is due for imminent release. And I'm really looking forward to seeing what they do with it. Even though it might not have as many scary ghosts.

(Post by Paul Gresty, cross-posted at his blog.)