The Flock Review

• I paid: £2.99 (Bundle price, normal price: 12.99)
• I expect: 20-30 hours of play
• I rate it: 87/100 if you have others to play it with or 37/100 if you are buying alone
• Story-driven: no
• Demo available: no
• Worth the money only if you have others to play with or if you get it in a bundle, otherwise don't bother

"The Flock is a fresh breath of life into the arena of first person multiplayer gaming. Sadly, its lack of a player base means that you are wasting your money unless you buy it with a group of others. I am one from the latter criterion, and I have loved every minute of the game; I simply wish more people played."

Did you ever play the game statues when you were a child? I did. It was one of those playground games that were only possible as children because you could be anyone’s friend by simply asking them and you could easily form a group to play with. The Flock is essentially a spooky version of that exact game with a few added mechanics. I will talk about the looks, sounds and gameplay before I say anything about the netplay. This is an indie title that attempts to be a lobby multiplayer and I shall leave the netplay until the end on purpose such that it does not colour the whole review.

The game looks so-so. If you look at any screenshot, you might think that the fancy glows and filters make for an appealing package. Take a look at this screenshot, for example.

That’s taken straight from in-game without any post-processing so the game clearly has the potential to look beautiful. Unfortunately, most of the time you are not looking at artily placed statues and camera angles that are dripping with edginess; instead you spend a lot of the game looking at textures which are mediocre and the hands of your character which look – for want of a better description – like two mutated tuna fish. Either that or a little gun which smacks of Portal reject that has a texture looking neither like smooth plastic nor rugged gun metal.

The particle effects are unimpressive at best but at worst actually obscure your sense of direction. One of the best ways to figure out where you need to go is to look for the column of light in the sky so having that column almost completely obscured by smoke and cloud in some instances is questionable design.

Oh, and there's this clipping glitch.

It doesn't affect gameplay and you have to look for it but it's sloppy.

The sound for this game is fantastic. There is little to no music due to the fact that it is inherently a horror game therefore it is riding on the ambient noise a lot of the time. What little of it there is has this beautiful Diablo feel about it that sends me right back to when I was 15 and trying to play hardcore characters, listening to the rogue encampment music over and over. The ambient sounds mimic footsteps and other things that a flock does thereby tricking you into thinking there are spooky things coming to get you when there may actually be nothing there at all. The sound effects themselves are fine. I didn’t have any particular thoughts either way but I am sure a lot of work went into making the cry of the flock sound as it does without it falling flat or making you cringe. It is however a merciful thing that the game plays a sound effect if you are standing in the beam of light. Without this, there would surely be many frustrating deaths from simply not knowing where the cone of light ended and began.

As I mentioned in the introduction, the greatest part of gameplay is simply the playground game of statues. One person is the carrier (of the light artefact) and must achieve objectives in order to “ascend” and escape the living hell that is being one of the flock. The rest of the flock chase the carrier and try to kill them thus taking the artefact for themselves and becoming the new carrier. The carrier can shine light upon the flock in order to burn them away and thereby achieve the objective. The flock can stand still to become “petrified” and immune to the beam of light. They can also drop a decoy statue with which they can exchange places. Flock can call out to one another which identifies their location (to other flock) and attacks the carrier with a scary screen effect, hopefully spooking them into turning around the wrong way.

In order to prevent the carrier from being able to destroy flock too easily, the light artefact has a limited battery that recharges by running around. This means that even in situations where the carrier knows exactly where the flock are hiding they will become vulnerable at some point, allowing for counter-play from hidden flock. Flock are also significantly more agile than the carrier and are capable of jumping up and over objects to attack from above. Jumping from roof to roof has a satisfying feeling about it, but the camera moves around in a drunken fashion that is strange and disorienting until you have gotten used to it.

The objectives are clearly defined and require the carrier to point its artefact at it for a small amount of time. This means that flock can set up decoys near objectives and fool or ambush a wary carrier forced to either become partially vulnerable while capturing the objective or flee.

Every game requires a dong

Finally, the part which makes or breaks any game so daring to attempt to be a lobby multiplayer: the netplay. The lobby system is well designed, allowing you to smoothly drop into sessions with your friends or to just click a button and find some other players. The voting system is simple and easy and leads to an expedient start to your game session. When in game, the effects of latency can at times be quite pronounced:- characters will stutter around the screen as they move along their path. This is not the worst latency-produced effect that I have ever seen; the characters are not rubber banding around and you do not get killed out of nowhere for what seems like no reason. It is difficult to say if there is much effect on the clutch moments but it would be ignorant to assume that there isn’t a bit of unfair loss on behalf of lag.

All of these positives and negatives are irrelevant with regards to the biggest nail in the coffin of The Flock: there is almost no player base. While it is neat and interesting that the developers think that having a limited number of deaths (200+ million) adds intrigue, it is a moot point when there is nobody playing the game to trigger those deaths. A lot of time can be spent searching for people to play with and unless you already have a group of people (check out the steam group http://steamcommunity.com/groups/flocktogether# ) this adds up to hours of wasted time. Since the game has no single player mode, it makes this the most damning reason for the game’s eventual failure. As it is, you must organise groups to play with on your own ahead of time or else waste your money on a game that you will never play because you can’t.

And finally, I will speak about the limited lives gimmick. The general opinion seems to be that having a game which 'ends' after you have paid real money for it is a terrible idea. I don't think this is really the case; if you play a game with an active enough community for long enough that limited lives actually becomes a concern, then can you really be unhappy with it? If I get 30 hours out of this game, I will be happy if it ends or not. The campaign that the devs have promised after the game's end is an added bonus and is one that I hope turns out to be impressive.

The Flock is a fresh breath of life into the arena of first person multiplayer gaming. Sadly, its lack of a player base means that you are wasting your money unless you buy it with a group of others. I am one from the latter criterion, and I have loved every minute of the game; I simply wish more people played.

Cally's Caves 3 review

Cally's Caves 3 review

• I paid: £2.99 (Bundle price, normal price: 4.99)
• I expect: 12 hours of play
• I rate it 83/100
• Story-driven: no (but there is one)
• Demo available: yes
• Worth the price. Review below.

"Overall, I think the game will offer you a solid 10-15 hours of gameplay for a very reasonable price. I certainly enjoyed the experience more than I was expecting."

I picked up Cally’s Caves 3 as part of a bundle on BundleStars.com for £2.99, and I was surprised to find that it was quite competent. Casting my eyes down the list of games that I just purchased and downloaded always fills me with buyer’s remorse.  Games which are presented as ‘indie’ titles have been so over-done that they have moved completely out of vogue, and knowing that a game has been developed by an independent entity is no longer impressive.
That being said, I decided to try it out anyway. I will begin with the negative points.

The game looks nice, the sprites are very crisp and clean, but it lacks that last little bit of aesthetic polish. The ground and terrain is built up using tiles but as far as I can see, there is only one multi-tiled geographical feature and that is the soil corners. What this means is that the environment looks blocky and un-natural when it could be much richer; the best comparison that comes to mind is the mega drive Sonic games – they have floating islands that look none-square despite being made entirely of square tiles. The damage text is clearly just a basic font – arial? – and considering the frequency of its display, one imagines it would have been given a little extra attention. I like the fact that the game has a world map that allows you to freely teleport to checkpoints, but the actual map looks as though it was made in mspaint, which surely could have been improved with a small amount of work.

The music is very pleasant. If it was to my taste, I would download the sound track quite happily. Unfortunately though, the songs are not in sync with the game itself - instead, they play as though it was a playlist on repeat which I found a little jarring. The controls are generally quite sharp with the exception that rolling is needlessly clunky. For some reason, you have to come to a full stop before you can roll and there are two buttons depending on which way you are facing.
These complaints are either minor or aesthetic in nature and have almost no bearing on the gameplay. The game is extremely competent despite these flaws, but it breaks no new ground. Platform games that include shooting components are tried and tested, and this game brings nothing new to the table.

If I hadn’t recently decided that I was actually going to play through some of the drudgery on my Steam account I probably would not have even considering installing this game. What I found in place of a boring game that failed to hold my interest was instead a game that draws together the elements that it claims to work with and polishes them to a mirror-like sheen. Nearly everything about the game is tight and it just feels great to play. No falling to your death because your foot nudged the platform corner; no weird Mario-like momentum; no throwing your character into a wall of spikes for no reason; no trying to control a crosshair on screen while also jumping from platform to platform. Everything simply works.

Let not these complaints deter you, however. The positive aspects of this game far outweigh the negatives. The difficulty scaling is essentially perfect, for example: there is enough of a slow canter towards challenge that people unfamiliar with gaming can ease themselves into it but this is not so long as to bore those who are familiar with platforming. The deaths are frequent but fair. I did not feel as though the deaths were undeserved (with one exception) and they were infrequent enough to avoid being annoying. The exception to this is that early on in the game, you rapidly learn that water is actually made of a kind of magma, and stepping into it causes an instant death. There’s no reason that the game can’t just damage you and allow you to jump out, but this is ultimately a minor gripe.

The game has a sense of progression about it that places it somewhere between a Mario game and a Castlevania game in terms of RPG elements. There are enough McGuffins to collect for completionists to come back and take a second look – one of them unlocks a secret level – and the weapons all have growth and upgrades for those who get a kick out of those sorts of minor rewards. Indeed, just looking at how many weapons there were impressed me when I first opened a shop dialogue. To add to this, there are special blocks that require you to use a specific weapon to interact with them. It was truly a mercy to find out that these weapons were actually useful in their own right. Nothing kills my enthusiasm for a weapon system than a clumsily handled switch because you are forced to use something that sucks.

The levels are laid out in such a way that you will see secrets before you have the means to obtain them. This is pretty standard, but for an indie developer it is a sign that some extra thought has gone into the design of the game; something that too many indie titles are lacking. In addition, there are extra game modes for once you have finished the main game which is a nice reason to pick the game back up again.

Overall, I think the game will offer you a solid 10-15 hours of gameplay for a very reasonable price. I certainly enjoyed the experience more than I was expecting.