Kaiju Panic (Xbox One) - Review

Kaiju Panic is available now on the Xbox One and is priced at £11.99.

Kaiju Panic is an insanely bright and cutesy tower-defense x RTS, seriously you made need to don your sunglasses if you're the type of gamer the Daily Fail writes about. The way the villages are set out kinda reminded me of an old Pokemon game - just not as pixelated.

Anyway you've been tasked with evacuating the village whilst defending against the invading kaiju. You need to harvest the purple stuff so that you can spend it on defence and artillery. Collect the villagers and they'll follow you around like Pikmin and speed up any of your constructions. Simple.

Except I didn't think it was, as the learning curve is just too steep - that or I'm just a bit shit, which is a very real possibility. I like to think I'm a fan of a good old tower defense and to be fair I rock at Defense Grid, but I found this game a little too fast and frenetic. In contrast to the corridors of Defense Grid, Kaiju come from all over the map and take unpredictable paths to the village, making it difficult to place turrets for maximum efficiency. This left me hurriedly attempting to put down some artillery in the way of the invading Kaiju, but often I wasn't fast enough.

The game is very well presented. My son was incredibly excited to play it after watching me but unfortunately found it too difficult. I think the art style does really pull in the younger audience, but be wary of buying this solely for your child as the chances are they'll find it too hard and turn off. If you're after a cute but tough tower defense game then you could do much worse than picking up Kaiju Panic!

6/10 TRY IT!

A code was provided for the purpose of this review.

Defenders of the Last Colony (XBLIG) Review

Defenders of the Last Colony is a unique mix of twin-stick shooting and tower-defense. Available now on the XBLIG Marketplace for just 80MSP.
Up to three others can join you as you try to defend the last colony from alien invasion (and trust me later you will definitely want your co-op buddies to help out!). Pick one of two classes, Engineer or Fighter, and you're good to go.
Ok so this game works like so. Between waves of enemies you (and any teammates) have the opportunity to lay down barricades to help you defend the colony. Once they start to invade you switch to a twin stick shooter set-up and annihilate the alien race.
Now the story is pretty cliched and the writing leaves a lot to be desired. It all feels pretty clunky. But the gameplay is brilliant in the campaign mode, so stick with it! There does sometimes seem to be a little too much going on on the screen, for example some enemies seem to carry on exploding for ages after their death, leaving bright fireworks burning into your retinas. The HUD gets quite crowded at points too, but none of these points in my eyes are a game-killer.
Everyone loves a good twin-stick shooter, even if only for five minutes. Some of the modes available on this game are fun for about that length of time, but honestly the campaign in my eyes makes up for that. There is a lot of variety offered in the campaign. The two different classes are really good and offer up slightly different challenges in the ways in which you will complete the level.
The multiplayer option on this game s also good. As you'll be aware if you read my blog regularly I'm a big fan of any game that allows four of us to play!
Overall I'd definitely say try this game. Anyone can enjoy a twin-stick shooter, and the extra bit of strategy involved in this game makes it a little more interesting. It's not amazing by any means but for 80MSP you really cannot complain, you're getting a lot of game for that amount and a lot of fun into the bargain!

7/10 TRY IT!

A code was provided for the purpose of this review.

More for Four?

This is something that has bugged me for awhile now. We can play with SO many people online so why can't more games include a four-player local multiplayer option?

You see I do love to play games on my own. I'm 150+ hours into my Skyrim play through and I love it. There is nothing better than sinking a few hours into a game once everything you need to do is done. Totally immersing yourself in a new world for however long. But once or twice a week my best friends come round and for awhile now we have found ourselves struggling for four player games to play together. There really isn't all that many, and it sucks!

Now I'm not expecting all games to suddenly start making their multiplayer four player on one console. We're lucky enough to have a set up that includes two Xbox's and in some cases two copies of the game. Gears of War 3 is the most recent example. At midnight I queued up at our local GAME store and picked up the Gears console and a Special Edition of the game too. We KNEW this one would be a great one to play together. All of us have totally immersed ourselves into the Gears universe, with me championing the novels by Karen Traviss to anybody who will listen to me. This game was special. And it had the four-player co-op we were always looking for. For the next couple of weeks we played through the Insane campaign together, wave after wave of Horde and Beast mode. It was great. Leaving Gears behind one night to play on something else we suddenly hit a brick wall. Aside from multiplayer CoD, Project Gotham and a few others there weren't much for us to get our teeth into.

There are many games that claim to be four-player co-op or competitive. Look a little closer though and most of the time this requires two consoles and two copies which alone will set you back £80/$120 if bought new. Left for Dead champions itself as four player co-op...online only, absolutely useless when there was only one copy knocking about. Whilst we all love CoD we don't always just want to keep killing each other. It's great to play as a team to reach a common goal.

So we turned to XBLA titles. Games like South Park Tower Defense Go! got us through one dry spell.  After completing this we were back to scouring the XBLA market for more four-player goodies. Platformers, Beat 'em ups, we didn't care, we just wanted something that wouldn't leave two of us watching the others. This lead to a massive increase in our XBLA Games count. My partner and I are now rocking a game collection of well over 400 games, most of which are, unfortunately two-player co-op at most.

Spelunky is one that has us hooked at the minute. Pick up and play platforming goodness at it's best. Working as a team we might just make it through the ice caves, individually we're all pretty rubbish. South Park Tenorman's Revenge is waiting in the wings for when we're just too annoyed at Spelunky. Fable Heroes and Castle Crashers are other good ones. But they are, whilst amazing for awhile, all lacking in something...a story driven narrative that FOUR people can enjoy.

With all the military games that come out now, you would really think that four-player co-op campaign, whether online or on console would be more prevalent. But they're not. For a generation of consoles that has the internet at it's disposal they sure are harping back to solitary games quite a lot. When multiplayer is a feature it's often pretty underwhelming. I'm calling for more developers to remember that many of us would love to enjoy a story-driven campaign as part of a team.