Xbox Live Indie Game: Square Off
Square Off is a great game from Gnomic Studios that I found on Xbox Live Indie Games. It’s got a solid game mechanic and great art direction. Well worth the 240 points ($3), and a good benchmark for what Xbox Live Indie Games should be.
The Gnomic Studios team paid a lot of attention to detail. The characters facial expressions are one of the first things I noticed; I like how they change to reflect what’s going on. The sound queues lend fun to the game, too, especially the dash of funk that accompanies every round. Enemy variety steadily ramps up as you progress through the levels, which themselves are not-so-obviously designed to maximize opportunities for mega kills. The weapons are specialized for different scenarios and strategies, and the game forces you to make little trade-offs, sacrificing speed to aim, for instance.
This “horde management” game harder than it looks. The game’s actually pretty stingy with the bigger weapons, and encourages you to conserve ammunition, which you’ll need in abundance as there doesn’t seem to be an upper limit on how big the horde can get. Of course, your only source for ammunition is killing off the horde itself.
I haven’t played co-op with the wife yet, but I suspect that’d be really fun.
I only found a couple of things in the game that I would have changed. For example, I can’t seem to come up with a good strategy for using the bomb. 50% of the time its bounciness sends its careening into a totally empty space, and the unpredictability of the ships’ movement make them useful only against clusters of slow-moving horde. I’d also like to have seen a bit more whimsy in the weapons, like MIRV grenades or homing missiles–things that are guaranteed to cause lots of carnage. An overall increase in the giblet count would’ve been welcome, too.
