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Team Bonding Has Never Been So Much Fun

  • Addit
  • 11/16/2015 12:22 PM
  • 2614 views


A Game Made By: Razelle
Created Using: RPG Maker VX Ace
It's A: RPG Game
That Roughly Takes Around: 2 Hours To Complete
And It's A... COMPLETED GAME!!!


Well, isn’t this a little bit of a kawinkydink sort of situation.

After last year’s Indie Game Making Contest where I managed to play and review a whopping total of one game out of all the many different entries that were submitted – count ‘em, one – this year is pretty much exactly the same! Expect this time I actually have a somewhat descent excuse this time around.

…Okay, I don’t really have a decent excuse for why, but let’s just that I’ve been busy doing other things lately on the side that need my fullest undivided attention.

(Yeah, that’s right, laugh it up.)

So when it came down to picking and reviewing one of the IGMC 2015 entries to give it a go, I was actually kind of torn between picking either Free Spirits and the game that we’re about to review today. It was a tough call, because both of them did so well overall in the end, but I decided (based on a coin flip and a little helpful assistance from Liberty) to review today’s game, “Grist Of Flies,” instead, created by Razelle and the now “older” RPG Maker engine of the whole entire Enterbrain lineup, RPG Maker VX Ace. (Damn you, MV, you and your much more sleeker design, multiple platform support and random character faceset generator. Apox on thee!)

So Razelle’s kind of an interesting fellow who’s only been a regular member of RMN since around April of this year but has gained critical acclaim status recently after his successful stint in the IGMC 2015 contest that netted him top honors in the RPG Engine’s category, which is an impressive feat in itself, considering that he only had thirty days, exactly, to pump out this badboy and get it out on time. Now that’s he a superstar in the making, it seems like the next best logical step is to climb that rigid mountain ever further and resist the urge of temptation of fame going to one’s head, like it has done to so many others around here.

- So is this game any good and worthy of all that wonderful drug prize money that, hopefully, isn’t going up somebody’s nose?

(Well…it kind has to be somewhat good if it won that award out of all those many different games, right? Right…???)

Ahhh...I’m sure it will be okay. Let’s go!!!

The Story


That was fast.
(And what a b**ch!)


Our story begins after a brief introduction and tutorial sequence of five different human survivors on the first day of a post-apocalyptic future with zombies and various monsters running around trying to eat people. (Sounds like my type of town!)

After collecting themselves a bit from all the shock and haste, the five decide to explore the broken down facility further in hoping to locate and discover more survivors that have managed to stave off becoming a newly found cast member of the Walking Dead. It’s not going to be easy, but a team’s gotta do what a team’s gotta do.

While it’s not truly fully explained about how this whole doomsday thing came to be and all, I don’t think it really matters that much in the grand scheme of things as you pretty much get the idea from various other horror-survival types of media that came before this that the whole gist of the plot is just trying to make sure that you’re not the next zombie club BLT. You basically just have to get the hell out of dodge and make sure that there are more than just the five you that are still alive out there.

While I believe that the story overall is the weakest part of the game and not fully fleshed out as well as it could be part of that stems from the massive supporting cast of characters that join you overall in the end. And to the author’s credit, it’s kinda hard to flesh out all fifteen characters different motivations and backstories when you have only thirty days to complete the game and the game’s only two hours long overall in length, but’s it’s kind of a personal pet peeve of mine. These characters that you find throughout just nonchalantly join up almost in an instant and with little persuasion that it’s amazing that they’re willing to risk life and limb by going out there with a bunch of other crazed weirdos like that. You’d think that some of them would just be too scared to go anywhere out there or would mistake the team for other zombies and monsters and just simply want to defend themselves from the threat, or maybe some of them just didn’t manage to make it in time. I think if there were some situations like that it definitely would have created more of a gloomier atmosphere to what’s going on in the background, but, nope, everyone’s willing to chip in and help out towards the greater cause…even the freakin’ artistic maid, Marie, is willing to help. (Jesus…)

This game does end off on a bit of a cliffhanger and potentially sets up the fact that there could be a lot more to this game in the future, but I guess we’ll have to just wait and see…

The Gameplay


Yeah, that’d be team Shump, alright…


Okay, this is arguably the best part of the game, for sure! There’s a reason why this game won the award, and I can definitely see why, as the combat system in this game is quite unique in itself and the only closest thing that I can even think of that kind of renacts in some way is Wild Arms 4 when everyone joins up on the same HEX and gets damages together from enemy attacks, but even then, Jesus…

So unlike other RPG’s where each character that’s fights on-screen is his or her own person and represents themselves as an individual unit to the team, this game has the entire team of five party members fighting together as one whole unit and shares team turns and their overall stats together, like HP and such. Okay, “so what,” you ask, “what’s so special about that?” Well, each team member is assigned various different classes, like a Medic that restores the team’s overall health when its low or a Trooper that’s strictly in charge of just damaging the enemy. These different traits make each class for each character unique in certain situations and you’ll be mainly taking advantage of everything that they got. While some battles are just mindless violence, where a good fist to the groin will get the job done, others, like boss battles, will require you to use different tactics overall. Each team gets two whole turns in battle before the next team manages to go through their own list of actions. You can essentially do something like have the Trooper attack on the first turn and then have the Medic heal you as one complete turn. Each team shares things like HP and EP too, so if one person gets hit – they all get hit! This includes nasty status effects, too, like Bio, Shock and Curse as well. Luckily, the Medics can remove all these nasty things, so thank god we still have doctors in this post-apocalyptic dumpsville. There are no items to find or purchase in this game, such as new equipment to boost your stats or things like potions to heal yourself that the other characters that are not Medics can use, so you essentially have to rely on everyone’s own abilities and work together as a team to get things done. (Genius!)

Perhaps the coolest edition as that each character that you acquire doesn’t have to be naturally assigned to his or her own speciality role as you can mix and match various different characters in different positions to discover new talents and hidden abilities that might help you out in different situations. This gives a nice freedom and flexibility to form many different types of teams for different types of strategies. It’s quite awesome, actually, and I really like this type of mechanic.

Grinding is virtually not much of an issue here as long as you basically go through each battle encounter and win the fight you’ll basically be fine the rest of the way through. It’s almost like each battle gives you some sort of a stat increase regardless, whether it be your overall HP or not. You can’t gain any new skills to use in combat, but you can increase your stats a little by gaining XP.

So this whole battle system sounds like it’s f*cking awesome, doesn’t it? It sounds like the second coming of Jesus, doesn’t it? Well…

You see, the combat in itself is really well done, no one’s denying that, but it’s far from picture perfect. You see, for most of your attacks this game uses something called EP to perform various actions in battle. When you use up all your EP you can’t really do that much other than use the Leaders “EP Surge” ability, and among others, to slowly regain your EP back. If you want to go from 0 to 100 and get back in tip-top shape, you basically need to spend two whole rounds of regenerating your EP before your team’s ready to fight and use all of their special abilities again, including some of the most deadliest attacks in the game. This is where some battles, especially the third boss fight, can seemingly drag on for a long time because you’re spending at least a turn healing yourself and removing bad status conditions and another turn restoring some EP when you just realized that restoring your health drained some of that recovered EP in the process. It’s basically like a long winded cycle that can definitely drag some of the battles out. You don’t even have your own EP completely full after a battle has ended and only receive a small boost from winning. I think it’s probably worth maybe exploring and testing out the option in the future to have 50 EP restored at a time when using the EP Surge command rather than having 30 EP restored each time, just to speed the process of battles up a little. The enemies don’t have to spend any turns restoring any EP and can wail on you mercilessly - so why the hell do we have to put up with this shit?

But, hey, at least there are no random encounters in this game and everything is all touch based, which is pretty cool, I guess.

The Soundtrack


I can’t see anything in this shit place! (But, hey, at least the music’s kind of good.)


Music wise, this game’s whole gloomy, yet instrumental rock based soundtrack was done entirely by a band named “Black Math,” which I really don’t know all that much about, and trying to find any information on them is pretty difficult to find, so I’m assuming that this either is an indie band group or a group of artists that are really, really obscure over here in my neck of the woods.

The music in the game definitely has this unsettling vibe to it that really amplifies the effect of being in a post-apocalyptic world, and I think it did a decent job here. It’s funny, because at first glance when you first start the game up and hear that dreadful sounding title theme, you instantly think, “Oh yeah, this is another one of those horror-survivor type of games, isn’t it? I guess the rest of the game’s music is going to sound something like this too.” But as you dive deeper and deeper and discover your first taste of that sweet, sweet unique combat system and hear that incredible sounding battle theme, you’re instantly jacked! The battle theme in this game is fantastic, and I recommend that you check it out.

The boss battle theme is good too, but since most of the boss fights drag on way too long the song starts to get a little disheartening after listening to it for a little while. I guess if this was attended to be something that focused on the dread and the misery of the situation present then I guess this track did its job fully, because, man, this song gets a bit depressing after a while.

Everything else isn’t bad, but it’s usually hit or miss with me. “Block 1-2” isn’t a bad piece for the first level of exploring a darken soaked hellhole, but the other level themes don’t quite stick out as much for me, with “Block 3-4” being the worst one, by far. It’s just such a different shift in tone compared to the first level theme, even though it’s done by the same composer; I actually would have preferred it better if the first theme was played throughout the course of the level instead.

The event and the credits themes aren’t too bad, and they sound just fine for what they’re intended to be used for. It’s a decent soundtrack, for sure, but that the battle theme, though, ohh - so god damn good and kickass! It’s almost like something that Neok or Sated would have chosen for their own battle themes in their own games.

The sound department is the typical RTP stuff; nothing you haven’t heard from before. But considering the type of situation that this game’s development was facing, I really can’t complain about it too much.

The Aesthetics


Oh, now you tell me after I’ve been wandering around in this bloomin’ darkness for the past ninety minutes!


Graphically speaking, the game looks great and I really don’t have too many issues with it as whole as everything looks quite nice, especially all the different facesets and different emotions that the characters have during various different cutscenes (although I think I’ve seen these types of face graphics used somewhere before…maybe it’s just me). I also like all the different interior tiles used throughout, and all the hand drawn monster sprites look pretty good, if not look a little bit goofy at times, and some of them don’t even feel like they even belong in a game like this! It’s a pretty nice looking game – especially all the different sprite work for the characters, even though that they don’t show any emotion on them unlike their facial counterparts do.

If there’s one real gripe that I have with the presentation is that I hate wandering around in the darkness the whole god damn time. Like, holy shit, pretty much every single floor expect for the final floor has you wandering around in these dark-like corridors with only a small lightning fixture that makes navigating and seeing all the enemies on screen coming after you extremely annoying. Since all the doors and latter’s that you need to find to locate some of the other survivors are in these dark-like rooms, you’ll probably accidently skip out on some of them because you simply can’t see anything. If the lightening fixture was a bit larger or everything was tinted a bit brighter than it is then this wouldn’t be too much of a problem. I mean, I guess it’s bearable and it’s not as bad, as I did make it out pretty good in the end, but it still kind of sucks to walk around in that shit.

The End Result


Someone here obviously doesn’t know how to count. What a shame.


Despite some issues, Grist Of Flies turned out to be a pretty fun romp shooting and gutting down some zombies while presenting a new collective spin on a team building combat mechanic. I would definitely like to see something like this fully expanded on more in the future, because it definitely has some great potential in it for either a future update or a future game somewhere down the road. While some tweaks are needed overall, the combat system in itself is great and unlike anything I’ve ever seen before, so I have to give Razelle mad props for trying something new and inventive and doing it with such style. Thirty days isn’t easy making a game like this, but he managed to do it and do it quite well. And for that, I tip my hat off to him.

(If I had a hat…)

OVERALL GRADE:
3.5 / 5 - C+ ~ A Few Quips, But Otherwise A Great Game.

Posts

Pages: 1
Razelle
801
11/16/2015 10:33 PM
Thanks for the detailed review Addit! I agree with a lot of what's been said here, and am actually working on the plot for an update to the game to be released sometime next month.

You've given me more to think about while I do update the game to it's most likely final state.

Also, thanks for loving the battle theme. I was starting to feel sad, since a lot of players who left me feedback considered it death metal and didn't like it. If I make another modern styled game, I'll warn people in advance.
unity
You're magical to me.
12540
11/16/2015 11:33 PM
Just wanted to chime in that I also love the battle theme and music in the game in general! It really added to the overall feel of the game for me :DDDD
Red_Nova
Sir Redd of Novus: He who made Prayer of the Faithless that one time, and that was pretty dang rad! :D
9192
11/17/2015 01:07 AM
Yeah, really. You don't need to warn anybody about what music you're going to use. I loved the battle theme!
Razelle
801
11/17/2015 01:51 AM
Haha okay then, it really is good to know that there are also people who liked the music choice. It was something I was nervous about, especially since it's purposely lo-fi to fit the setting of the game.
Addit
6394
11/18/2015 01:01 PM
author=Razelle
am actually working on the plot for an update to the game to be released sometime next month.

Next month, really? Wow, that’s fast. (How are you so fast!?)

author=Razelle
Also, thanks for loving the battle theme. I was starting to feel sad, since a lot of players who left me feedback considered it death metal and didn't like it. If I make another modern styled game, I'll warn people in advance.

- That was death metal, really? Wow... It sure didn’t sound like death metal to me. If it is, that’s quite amazing, actually, because I really don’t like listening to death metal all that much besides the odd exception. It just that whenever there are vocals in the type of track at all it almost sounds too satanic in nature or I can’t really fully understand what the overall singer(s) are trying to say. Either way, I love the battle theme, and like what Red_Nova said: You don’t need to warn anybody about the specific type of genre of music that you’re using just because you have to.

- And you’re welcome for the review. Congrats on the accomplishment, again. ^^
Razelle
801
11/18/2015 02:02 PM
author=Addit
Next month, really? Wow, that’s fast. (How are you so fast!?)

Not that fast, been plugging away at it since September.

author=Addit
- That was death metal, really? Wow...

It's actually Goth Rock, which is why the Death Metal comment perturbed me. I don't think I'd go so far as using Death Metal music in a turn based RPG; regular metal...maybe.

Thanks again.
Pages: 1