Indie Bundle 11

This is the eleventh entry in my series of reviews for the Steam Indie Bundles. Each review is short and subjective, and is geared to give you a quick look at the game. Indie Bundle 11 includes: Hydrophobia: Prophecy, ORION: Dino Beatdown, Star Ruler, Waveform, and World of Goo.

Hydrophobia: Prophecy

I find it hard for games to build atmosphere for me. I usually get hung up on something silly like some graphical issue or dodgy play-acting, but this game actually pulls things off fairly well. You start out trying to escape from a collapsing building that is being systematically destroyed, and it's actually somewhat intense. The story is engaging enough to keep me interested, and the more I played, the more I wanted to keep playing.

Be aware of the setup issue with this game - if you don't have the same desktop resolution as the chosen game resolution, it will appear stretched or squashed.

It's a pity that the 2D overlay is Vert- in multimon; you can't see your instructions about what to do so it's unplayable in multimon, which is a shame because this game would be great. Hayden has said he'll have a look at fixing it so if you want a fix for this game, please reply to this article and register your interest! I'll still give it a play-through anyway, I really like it. 8/10.

ORION: Dino Beatdown

So in this game, you need to protect items from the waves of incoming dinosaurs and just shoot em and stuff. And shoot dinosaurs. Beat them down! Dino Beatdown. Sorry, I just don't have much else to say about it. Did I mention that you shoot dinosaurs?

The game has a FOV slider so you can tweak it to your hearts content if changing resolutions. Unfortunately it stop at 100 which is way too narrow for multimon, so probably best played in 16:9 (I used a FOV of 90).

You can play online and work with friends to beatdown dinos. Unfortunately, over the course of the review period, I checked the online servers many times and only ever found 1 person in a game - refer to my screenshots. This means you're pretty much by yourself all the time. And this game sucks by yourself.

This game scored the lowest on Metacritic of any of the games that I have reviewed, that I can remember. It's a contender for worst game, but I am not sure it would even win that. 4/10

Star Ruler

Star Ruler is a large scale, real-time grand strategy set in space. You can design and build ships that you send out to trade and fight your way across the galaxy. Researching technologies is a vital part of the game too.

To me, it's all too complex. I personally am not the sort to sit down and take the time to work out a bazillion strategies for each type of ship and which technologies I am researching, let alone trying to set up trade between planets.

I totally understand that this appeals to some people, and you can play in glorious multimon, but be prepared to throw a great deal of time at it to have fun. 7/10

Waveform

"You control a wave of light as it transmits through space and you’re able to modify the wave’s amplitude and wavelength to line it up with objectives, avoid obstacles, and interact with a slew of objects that affect the path of your wave, and the world around you, in interesting ways." And by interesting, they mean repetitive. In fact, this type of game comes free with Hydrophobia - it's how you hack into terminals in that game. But here it's a stand-alone game with a few twists.

You click and drag the mouse to make your wave taller, shorter, more spaced out, or compressed. Line the wave up with the dots and giggle with glee when you collect them. Repeat repeatedly. Gets an extra point for multimon but it barely deserves the ones it gets. 6/10

World of Goo

This game follows in the likes of X-Construction and other building type games. You use your goo (nothing suss) to build your way to the vacuum pipe, which sucks your goo. Ahem.

Underneath the cute goo graphics is a fairly basic building program, although the physics are pretty good when your structures get large and are not properly supported. It's enjoyable and doesn't require a massive investment of time to get into it, but there isn't a great deal to the game either.

To play in widescreen, you'll need to edit a config file. Refer to the DR for more info. Attempting to apply a multimon resolution sees the game launch at 800x600, but it played fine at 1920x1080. Might just play this one on my phone while spending quality time on the throne though. 7.5/10

Summary

Ok, so this bundle is not worth it. Hydrophobia is the only game I would spend money on (other than World of Goo for the mobile, which I am pretty sure I picked up in a humble bundle somewhere), and it's only $4.99 regular price. Even that's a bargain price for a good game; if it goes on sale, buy it and enjoy. The rest, don't worry about.