Introduction

This review is going to work a little differently than the usual here on Nitchigamer. It’s broken up into two parts.

The first part is a concise review containing a summary of the game followed by a recommendation on who might be the right audience.

The second part provides important context and detailed criticism for the curious reader.

The Concise Review

Venture Kid is a throwback retro 8-bit platform game. The development team says it’s their love letter to the games they grew up playing. It’s akin to the J. J. Abrams film, SUPER 8, which was his homage to the Stephen Spielberg adventure films of the same era.

This game has all the hallmarks of titles that were popular from that era, from the colorful overview map to the melodic chiptune soundtrack.

There is even a pitch-perfect storyline where you assume the mantle of Alex, a young man who must stop the evil Dr Teklov from completing his super weapon in an attempt to take over the world.

Alex is aided by his uncle who provides new special weapons as well as upgrades that can be purchased anytime during the game.

Players run-and-gun through nine visually distinct levels including classics of the platformer genre such as the futurist city, the snake-filled jungle, and the slippery ice caves.

Navigating each level tends to be a reasonably straightforward affair – fight a variety of hostile enemy combatants while avoiding deadly environment hazards, like spikes and lava, until you reach the final boss battle.

Venture Kid is tough to recommend for most audiences.:

1. People who are new to retro platformers might find this game frustrating, even on the easy difficulty setting.
2. Hardcore gamers may be unsatisfied with the short levels and inconsistent design.
3. Casual gamers might find titles with contemporary mechanics better suited to their taste.

The game is best suited for players who grew up with 8-bit platformers, and still love them – warts and all.

Context And Criticism

Creating a video game is difficult under the best circumstances. Ideally, a developer has sufficient funding to pay the entire team market-rate wages (with benefits).

They should also have the backing of an experienced publisher to manage the go-to-market tasks, such as distribution and marketing. Even with that, success is not guaranteed.

Most indie teams are working on a shoestring budget with the hope their finished product will find an enthusiastic audience to provide them with some measure of financial security and the ability to make the next game.

That makes a difficult task significantly harder.

Anyone with a developed sense of empathy would take great care in suggesting that an indie game could have trouble finding their audience.

With that in mind, let’s dive deeper into how that conclusion was reached. There are three areas worth examining in greater detail: level design, powerup weapons, and difficulty setting.

Level Design

The biggest concern with the level design is simply inconsistency. Sometimes the design feels inspired and surprising, other times it feels confused and derivative.

The design and placement of enemies are emblematic of the consistency issue. Many levels feature unique enemies that perfectly mesh with the theme. The primates feel right at home in the jungle level. The robots whose heads pop off in the factory level are delightful.

But then we have snakes, jumping piranha, and giant spiders that appear in multiple levels. That isn’t to say a designer can never reuse quality enemies, but there are already some nearly identical clones (snakes/scorpions, piranha/fireball, rifleman/spearman).

If you’re going to commit to reskinning enemies, it’s best to go all the way.

The use of branching in the map feels similarly inconsistent. Most levels are linear, while a few of the levels contain branching paths. Some branches appear to lead to dead ends or circles, while others contain secret passages.

Unfortunately, some players may never find those secrets and end up frustrated. Confusion and frustration are generally emotions that players don’t want to experience.

It would be preferable to streamline the levels and hide most (or all) of the branches behind secret passages along the main route.

Power-Up Weapons

Power-up weapons are an aspect where Venture Kid could really shine. The weapon designs are interesting and provide variety. Two major problems with how the weapons are implemented: usage and management.

First of all, there just aren’t enough opportunities where the weapons provide significant advantage. Players can easily defeat most enemies with the standard blaster weapon and they can reach most items without things like the boomerang or the freeze weapon.

Later stages show a little bit of promise in this regard. For example, the grenade and spike boots come in handy in the factory level. However, these situations felt like the exception to the rule.

The bigger problem is managing the weapons. Each special weapon has limited charge. Enemies will randomly drop fuel canisters that recharge the power, but those canisters are only useful if a weapon is actively equipped. So, picking up a canister with the standard blaster will result in nothing happening, even if all of your weapons were drained. This effectively wastes the energy.

This design choice means that players are required to constantly cycle through all the weapons in order to use and maintain their arsenal. That can quickly become tedious for all but the most hardcore players, and those players might find the limited effectiveness of these weapons disappointing.

It would be great if more enemies, boss and regular varieties, were weak to particular special weapons. For example, many of the denizens of the ice cave could be weak against the fire blast from the grenade.

Also, it would be great to have a special weapon slot so that a player could have one of special weapon active at all times. That way picking up a canister would always charge the active weapon.

Difficulty Setting

The last thing that is challenging is the difficulty setting. The only difference between the various difficulty settings appears to be the maximum number of hearts allowed to the player.

This is a problem because there are many other variables that make the level challenging, including a high number of instant-kill environmental hazards.

The game would benefit greatly from changing other variables too.

Depending on the difficulty level, enemies could also have a lower or higher rate of fire, respawn points could be moved closer or further apart, and some enemies could take fewer or more shots to kill. Those changes could increase the appeal to a much wider audience.

Humans, despite our lack of brute strength, when compared to other predators in the animal kingdom, have managed to stay on top of the food chain due to our innovation, particularly when it comes to the creation of weapons.

But, what if another species suddenly developed weapons as well and decided our time as king of the jungle had come to an end? And, no, I am not talking about Charlton Heston against a band of royally perturbed, highly intelligent apes.

I am talking about an enemy that seems far less likely to arise, but if they ever did, man would find they have a bone to pick with us: sentient fruit.

Juicy Realm Review

Juicy Realm is a roguelike in which you’re taking part in an ongoing war against cognizant crops of various berries, pomes, and melons.

Notes left behind by a brave, or foolish, observer provide some context for the world in which you now find yourself. However, it doesn’t take more than a few seconds of gameplay to figure out regardless of why or how these once docile and delicious eatables are out to kill.

Equipped with weapons ranging from dual-wielded swords to portable Gatling guns, the fruit prove to be formidable foes.

You have the choice to stand in the shoes of four different character types who come with varying stats and starting weapons: the Boxer, the Botanist, the Mercenary, and the Ninja.

All, except the Ninja, begin with a gun. The Ninja is the only one who begins with a melee weapon in the form of a giant sword. Between playthroughs, you can choose to switch out characters by going back to camp, but not during a play session.

Each character also comes with a unique item/secondary weapon classified as “gear” that cannot be dropped or replaced during combat. The Botanist comes with a grenade launcher type weapon. The Ninja has a tiny, mobile companion that can be dispatched to electrocute enemies. The Mercenary can set up a turret that sends single blasts toward approaching enemies. And, finally, the Boxer can use a life potion that refills portions of her HP as long as she stands within the glowing, green circle.

Once a character deploys their gear, a meter on the bottom of the screen empties and then slowly refills, indicating when the gear can be used again. the time between uses is long enough that you don’t depend too heavily on them as a sort of trump card during combat.

However, they do give some characters more advantage over others.

For example, the Boxer’s life potion and high beginning HP do make her easier to use than, say, the Ninja who’s beginning weapon, as badass as it may seem, make him far more vulnerable to attack since he must engage enemies at close range.

His companion, however, being mobile is far more useful than the Mercenary’s turret which requires you to lure enemies close to it before it becomes useful.

In this way, the developers of Juicy Realm have done a decent job of establishing a simple balance between characters and requiring you to use each character slightly differently during combat.

I do wish the game allowed you to compare the stats of each character’s starting weapons along with their other stats. Without this information, I had no way of knowing whether there was a specific advantage to any of the guns over the others, or even how the Ninja’s sword stacked up against other melee weapons I found throughout my journey.

The game does give you some simple stats for new weapons you find but unfortunately does not offer a way to compare them to weapons you are currently carrying.

A recent update improved the attack power of melee weapons, thus making their use feel a bit less like an unfair disadvantage during combat. This is especially important since weapons are dropped or discovered randomly.

So, if you end up running out of ammo and need to use the baguette you just found to defend yourself (yes, a baguette), you are not at the disadvantage you once would have been before this was corrected.

In fact, I often noticed certain melee weapons could take out enemies in two hits when the gun I was using took at least four or five shots. The advantage of the gun, obviously, is that I can keep moving and stay much farther away from enemies during a firefight.

The only issue, however, with the game giving you melee weapons is as effective as they may be, you are literally bringing a knife (or, rather, a wrench) to a gunfight. Some of the enemies can shoot three shots in quick succession. Others can fire multiple rounds one after another.

When there is a cluster of enemies, this makes using melee weapons quite difficult and made me wonder a few times why melee was available at all, or at least as common as it is, within what is clearly a dual-stick shooter type game, along with its roguelike elements.

In order to help players maintain use of their guns longer, the same update that increased melee attack power also added random enemy ammo drops. This means that while you can indeed run out of ammo, I rarely did. I was quite thankful I did not have to battle a boss with the baguette.

Plus, blasting away your equally equipped fruity foes was far more fast paced and enjoyable than the comparably slow melee attacks.

Aside from locating weapons and ammo at random, you can also break open boxes to reveal food which will restore your health.

Coins that you can either find or collect from fallen enemies can be used to purchase randomly generated items from vending machines you will find also at random throughout your run.

Keep your eyes open because “hidden” areas will appear that, though not hard to figure out how to get to, can offer extra coin or food or ammo. The game’s controls are smooth and straightforward. On the keyboard, you use the mouse to aim and WASD to move about. You click left to fire and clicking right on the mouse allows you to dash a short distance in the direction your mouse is pointed.

This works especially well when in close combat with an enemy that can fire several shots in succession, but I found I rarely needed it when using a firearm because all I needed to do was keep moving about.

Just like with the gear, there is a meter that depletes each time you use your dash ability which will need to refill after a certain number of uses before you can use the dash again.

The game also has controller support, though I found aiming with the mouse much simpler than the dual-stick controls on the controller. There is no way to customize the controls using either, but with such simple design, I didn’t feel the need to do so.

Boss battles have a traditional Zelda-like feel, requiring you to learn a series of attack patterns in order to achieve victory.

For instance, the first boss I fought, a giant melon, had four basic attacks: a dash, a ground pound, shooting several rows of wooden spikes, and setting loose a gaggle of tiny watermelon slices that are surprisingly aggressive despite their tiny appearance.

I quickly learned I could not do any damage unless the boss was momentarily incapacitated. So, I had to learn how to make that happen.

Of course, this means you will likely die at least once or twice before reaching your goal.

Punishment for death means going back to camp and starting over again. This might seem likely a heavy price, but due to the constantly changing level layouts, I never felt like I was making the same run twice.

On the downside, though, without any real way to upgrade or customize your weapons or characters, the multiple run-throughs begin to lose a sense of reward aside from hopefully making it all the way through.

The game is rather short, at least, so I never got to the point where I lost interest entirely. But, if I could customize my weapons or my character so that each run-through at least rewarded me with something that would make tearing through the same levels much faster and with more satisfying violence, it might raise the replay value quite a bit.

As it is, you can play against your own time once you finish the game, but there isn’t much else to keep you coming back. Unless that is, you want to play through with a friend using the local two-player mode.

Despite its tendency to perhaps be a bit overly simplistic, Juicy Realm boasts gorgeous visuals and a handful of different level designs. From dense jungle to desert sands, the vibrant, stimulating colour palette paired with the jovial soundtrack adds a level of excitement and wonder.

There aren’t many times where I don’t sing the praises of the Nintendo Switch, and the same is going to happen here. Albeit not in the form of praise for its power, prowess or its stellar first-party line-up, but more for the fact it is helping me catch up with some games that I have missed on other consoles.

The Switch is the perfect platform for smaller, indie games new or old and it’s great to see so much support for the little guys out there by Nintendo.

Max: The Curse of Brotherhood Switch Review

Such a title that I missed back in 2013 was Max: The Curse of Brotherhood. Not through ignorance or purpose, it was just something that I never picked up at the time, much like many indie games I must ashamedly concede that launched around this time.

So, Max has had his time already on other platforms, including this generation and the last generation of consoles, not to mention PC. Now, though, is his time to shine for Nintendo…

The Curse of Brotherhood starts with Max squabbling with his younger brother Felix – much like anyone else did when they had another sibling. Rooting through his toys and making an almighty mess, Max puts a curse on Felix that he found on the internet in an attempt to make him disappear.

Somehow it works and both Felix and Max get pulled through a wormhole into another creepy and bizarre universe where Felix has been kidnapped and Max must rescue his brother.

Permanent Marker

The game plays out across your typical 2D platformer landscape with you having to navigate Max over obstacles and dodge enemies to move onto the next area.

Sadly Max didn’t come well-equipped for this task beyond having a permanent marker in his possession when he came through the wormhole. After meeting an old lady who has magic power, she grants his marker the ability to manipulate certain parts of the terrain to Max’s advantage.

This allows the Switch to show off its multiple inputs by having you control Max with the thumbsticks on the Joy-Cons but allowing you to use the marker by using the touchscreen display.

It’s simple, and makes perfect sense, as I imagine most people will play the game in handheld mode – as I did for the duration of my time before writing this review.

The game also looks very shiny on the console and runs smoothly, but it does also show its age sometimes, with the textures and reliance on the same mechanics throughout.

There are also a couple of issues with the detection when jumping and input for the marker pen which can result in you repeating certain sections.

But, for a five-year-old game, this does not detract from the title and it is to be expected that it won’t be as ‘shiny’ as if it were launched today.

Max: The Curse of Brotherhood is the perfect game for the Switch. It’s a game you can pick up and play at any point and makes use of the Switch’s portability and touchscreen. In fact, if you ask me, playing games like this is one of the biggest selling points for the Switch.

I remember playing Oregon Trail in the library of my middle school back in the day. Even with the best planning, hunting, and river rafting skills, you died often enough on your journey that the ability to leave witty messages on your tombstone for a future passerby to read became a regular ritual.

Bandits stealing all your supplies and dying of dysentery became part of the expedition. Luck played in almost as much as skill, but we kept playing, again and again, determined to get a bit further this time and, eventually, make it all the way to Oregon.

Death Road To Canada Review

Death Road to Canada, a rogue-like title set during the zombie apocalypse, takes a lot of the simple concepts from earlier adventure titles such as Oregon Trail and sets you on a fun, addictive, and often hilarious journey. Like that childhood trip to Oregon long ago, death comes often in this game, but you will almost instantly find yourself ready to get back on the road.

Your goal in Death Road to Canada is clear and likely self-explanatory. You must guide a ragtag group of survivors to Canada, the only allegedly safe place after the world has been ravaged by the ravenous undead. Everything you have you must scavenge from locations you visit along the way. Food, medical supplies, gasoline, weapons, and any other items you need must be obtained at the risk of life and limb. And, as if fending off hordes of the undead wasn’t difficult enough, you also have to keep up morale.

The Caretaker

Along with ensuring everyone is fed and rested, you must also keep characters happy and loyal and, obviously, keep them from getting murdered. The events in the game are randomized, so you don’t always know how your choices will turn out. Sometimes, your choices appear fairly straightforward.

We chose not to accept an overnight invitation from a creepy-looking caretaker (and, yes, the game explicitly told us the caretaker was incredibly creepy). Of course, perhaps we shouldn’t judge by appearances, but as we have learned from TV shows like The Walking Dead, trust doesn’t come easy and is rarely rewarded during the zombie apocalypse.

Other times, choices seem more capricious. Once, I had a character shoot a deer that was standing in front of our car, blocking our path. One of my other members became angry I hadn’t chosen him instead, thus dropping his morale. After losing our car later due to an unfortunate encounter with a man wearing heavy body armour standing in the road, this member’s morale dropped so low he became despondent and wandered off into the woods to an unknown fate.

Oh, and I also learned not to tell bandits to “Cool it.” They don’t appreciate it and can become surprisingly violent as one of my former teammates tragically discovered. On second thought, perhaps that really isn’t so surprising.

Zombie Forecast

What you do have more control over during the game is how you handle your inventory. Weapons range from rifles and shotguns to blunt weapons such as wrenches, hammers, and even femurs. There are also less common weapons such as grenades, and you might even get the chance to buy a turret.

You can easily swap weapons between team members during missions by pulling up the menu, as long as you are within range of that teammate. Some characters can hold more weapons than others, but most can hold three. You are able to drop weapons if you find one during the scavenging event you would like to keep, rather than one you came with. You can also easily switch between the weapons you are carrying during a battle with the press of a single button.

There is no crafting in Death Road to Canada, so weapon management is simply a matter of distributing weapons thoughtfully, and only keeping the ones you think you will need. You have a total of 14 slots that can be used for storing weapons not currently being carried by characters. Before each mission, you can select which weapons you would like to take. Things like medical supplies are used automatically by team members after certain events and do not need to be managed.

In fact, one of the best aspects of the game is how it keeps it simple while offering just the right amount of customization. For example, each character comes with a certain set of skills and attributes which includes things like Medical, Shooting, Strength, and Mechanical ability. It might also include personality traits like a low morale, or low loyalty.

Boosting Characters

In the regular game mode where you will encounter random characters, you can increase some of their skills and attributes through certain activities or choices. For instance, you may get the opportunity to take shooting lessons, thus increasing everyone’s shooting skill. Or, you might have a certain character tinker overnight while at a rest stop, increasing their mechanical skill.

You also have the option of building your own custom characters. Each character comes with a certain set of traits. Traits can both positively and negatively affect skill sets and attributes. For instance, the “Inventive” trait will add two points to your mechanical skill, which might help you fix your car eventually if it breaks down.

I say eventually because on the negative side it might take a little practice. Sometimes the negative effects are comical. The “Nurturing” trait says it adds two points to your medical skill and gives you a great attitude. On the negative side, your positivity “may be an act.” For the risk taker, you can choose more extreme traits like “BESERK!” This boosts the character’s strength, fitness, and shooting ability by four points, but they can also be killed in one bite.

Being Surrounded On All Sides

You earn Zombo Points throughout the game that can be traded for perks. For instance, “Phoenix” resurrects a character upon death to full health, though it can also be used once per game. There are also more bizarre perks such as “Anime Fan”, which gives the player an overpowered Katana that cannot be dropped upon death. Just what every anime fan needs.

Combat is super simple, but fun. Cracking zombie skulls never seems to get old, and the splat they make when defeated is always satisfying. Using guns is also super simple and doesn’t require careful aiming, only that you are facing in the right direction.

But, be careful. Don’t be too overzealous with your zombie slaying. Your weapons break, and bullets, though not particularly scarce, are valuable, particularly when you find yourself in a siege event. What is a siege event, you ask? Only your worst nightmare, if your worst nightmare involves being surrounded on all sides by zombies.

There are five different game options available aside from the regular mode. Familiar Characters mode increases your chances of running into your custom characters. Rare Characters Mode increases your chances of coming across special characters, some with incredibly useful abilities, and some that look a lot like well-known characters such as Link from the Legend of Zelda series.

Deadlier Road Mode makes the game, well, more deadly than usual. The two remaining options either significantly shorten or elongate your road trip.

Best of all, the game never takes itself too seriously. The music, a 16-bit style techno and rock mix, is exhilarating and sometimes even quite catchy.

Quirky And Weird

The characters themselves are quirky and weird. My first character was using his time at the end of humanity to write a comic book about his life. I also ran across a man in a horse mask who, for all intents and purposes, considered himself an actual horse. I found him running along the highway, perhaps trying to locate his four-legged compadres, before my team forcibly pulled him into the car and made him join us.

Then, we all went to Y’all-Mart (you read that correctly). While at Y’all-Mart, I located a treadmill I had the horseman use despite the game’s warning against using a treadmill while surrounded by zombies. It all turned out for the best, however, as using the treadmill increased the horse man’s strength. Which was all well and good until I died some ten minutes later in a blaze of glory, mobbed by ravenous corpses. And, thus, the cycle began anew. The circle of life.