Do you remember the Ouya? The Kickstarted Android console that cost $100 ($140 adjusted for inflation) and was never a commercial success? The one that released 12 years ago?
No? You don’t? Oh. Okay. Well, it was sort of a thing. Not a “thing” thing, but boy did people like talking shit about it, and writing articles about how it was a doomed to fail.
Anyway, when it released, one of its exclusives was TowerFall, a 2d multiplayer platform fighter. It became the Ouya’s best selling title, at just around 7000 copies.
TowerFall ended up being ported to all the other consoles, including Switch, and it was on Switch that I ended up playing it recently at a friend’s birthday party.
And this is how TowerFall should be played. A full six players. A giant screen. Preferably a crowd of onlookers. In this sense it resembles one of my favorite discontinued games, Killer Queen Black.
Unlike Killer Queen Black, though, TowerFall is every person for themself. Everyone starts with three arrows. Getting shot with an arrow or goomba-stomped kills you. After only one player is standing, the next map is loaded, and the next round starts. Victory points are awarded for kills, and the first person to reach 10 points wins.
Of course, there are a few more meaningful mechanics. There’s a dash that allows the player to grab arrows out of the air, and the screen wraps both directions, so falling into a pit to go up is an entirely viable strategy. There are also a few subtle catch up mechanics, as players who fall significantly behind get a shield that blocks one hit.
Perhaps your friends don’t want to turn each other into pincushions. That’s okay! There’re also a few co-op campaigns: a 1-4 player one, and a 1-2 player one. It’s hard to find much to say about these. They’re fine, and mildly interesting, but in most cases I’d rather be playing the versus mode.
As a fairly mild point of criticism here, I will say that I generally dislike how the ideal strategy for some of the co-op modes was memorizing when/where certain enemies would spawn, and setting up to kill them immediately upon spawn.
It’s hard to think of much else to say about TowerFall. It’s fun. It’s fine. I think it’s best as a party game or in person couch co-op, and it’s one of very few games that works on one console at six players.
I’m going to get back to worrying about the collapse of society now. See you folks next week.
Interestingly, the designer Maddy Thorson would later go on to make Celeste, which sold a million copies in under a year. Slightly more than TowerFall’s 7000 on the Ouya.
Note: I usually try to take my own screenshots, but this week I’m just using images from the Steam store page, and I usually prefer to call it out when I’m doing that. Anyway. Hope your week is going better than mine.
I spent some time dragging Dragonwood over the coals recently. As such, it seems fair to spend an equal amount of time talking about another very simple game that I actually really enjoyed. That game is Quickity Pickity.
Quickity Pickity is a manual dexterity, real time set collection game. The goal is to be the first player to win 3 rounds. Here’s how rounds work.
Each round, the goal is to build sets of fruit. Fruits have 3 characteristics: they can be smiling or frowning, they have a shape, and they have a color/pattern. A set of fruit is multiple fruit tiles that all have the same expression and either the same color or shape.
All the fruit tiles start face down. Once the round starts, players flip up fruit tokens in real time, and take them to place into their own sets. The catch here is two-fold. First off, once you place a fruit in one of your sets, it can’t be moved or removed. Secondly, if you take a fruit, you must place it in a set.
But while the general gameplay is the same each round, the scoring changes.
At the start of each round, the players flip up a score card. These determine how points are awarded for the round, and are fairly variable. They might payout aggressively for large sets, or instead just reward a large number of points for medium sets. They might even punish for sets that are too large, or only payout for sets with an even number of fruits.
In addition to this, each round has a special fruit: a specific color and shape that rewards bonus points. Bonus fruits give yet another thing to keep track of and switch up.
The round ends when all three of a set of monkey tokens have been flipped up, at which point players stop and score points. Now remember when I mentioned that fruits can’t be moved? Well, if you accidentally placed a mismatched fruit into a set (for example, put a frowny face fruit in a set of smileys), there’s a massive penalty of minus 10 points per bad set. This almost always enough to lose the round.
While I liked Quickity Pickity, I do have one big gripe and it’s with the round ending monkey tokens. It’s very easy to flip one over, and not notice, and there isn’t really a penalty or reward for spotting that fact. Twice in the 9 or so rounds I played, we flipped all the monkey tokens up without realizing it. We only noticed later that the game was supposed to be over.
Monkeys also have an interesting effect of being an acceleration mechanic. If a player thinks they have a big enough lead, they can quickly try to close out the game by quickly flipping up tokens with no interest in collecting sets.
But these are minor complaints. The score cards do a really good job of actually making each round feel different. I had to actively change up my strategy each round based on what the payouts were. And this is while there’s room to improve the actual set building. Bonus fruits also did a good job of contributing to this, keeping the game from feeling stale.
I really liked Quickity Pickity. It’s simple, fun, and offers decisions that aren’t inherently complex, but are compressed into such a tight time frame that they’re still fun to try to solve.
If you’re looking for an interesting small game, it’s $23 on Oink’s website. As always, that not a sponsored link or anything. I just think think Quickity Pickity is good.
Rubber Bandits’ one good game mode, Heist, can’t carry the weight of the other seven.
I don’t like Rubber Bandits very much. I don’t recommend it. Before I get into reviewing Rubber Bandits, though, I want to talk about party games in general a bit. I’ve written about this here, but I’ll go into some more detail on why I do not trust the party game genre.
Doing virtually anything with friends can be a good time, or at least a good memory, assuming everyone makes it out unharmed. I spent a lot of time in college playing Magic, and I remember it somewhat fondly. I also remember the time I convinced folks to follow my example and run a lap outside around an area near our dorm with almost no clothes on and no shoes after a winter storm.
While freezing my feet off wasn’t the best idea I’ve ever had, it was definitely memorable. Playing around and doing ridiculous things is just like that. The value isn’t from doing dumb shit, it’s from doing dumb shit with friends. Something can be dumb, questionably made, and only mildly amusing and still be a good time.
Which brings me to Rubber Bandits.
Rubber Bandits is an up-to-4 player party game, with 8 competitive game modes, and 1 cooperative arcade mode. The game modes all share the same controls. You can jump, you can move with WASD or the controller, you can pick items up, throw them, and “use” them. The use function varies from item to item. Using a grenade pulls the pin, using a pistol shoots the gun, and using a chair beats someone over the head with it (just like in real life).
I have two important notes about these controls. First, characters control in a sort of wibbly wobbly way. I’ve had weapons I’ve picked up seemingly clip behind my character making them impossible to swing. There’s a jello-like feel to movement. Second, the game has a VERY heavy auto-aim system for projectile weapons. If you roughly point at another player and try to shoot them, you will likely hit. Not because you lined it up well, but because the auto-aim just works like that.
The result is a “combat system” that is fairly unsatisfying to actually fight with. Long range attacks are almost automatic hits, and short range attacks are a wobbly unfortunate melee. I’m not saying that a system of weird and wonky controls can’t be fun, but it doesn’t work here because the combat is so unwieldy. Now that we’ve covered controls, let’s talk about game modes.
First, you have the “Just Beat People Up” ones. These are Brawl, Team Brawl, Dodge Bomb and Snack Panic, and Carnage. Then you have Pork Pursuit (Hold the object) and Bomb Panic (Don’t be left holding the object). Finally, you have Heist and the co-operative game mode. The co-operative game mode isn’t very fun or interesting. It’s effectively just a reskinned version of the Heist game mode with extra NPC’s. Points are awarded after each round, and the first player to 21 points is the winner. Scoring is a bit weird, but I believe it’s 5 for a win, 3 for second place, 1 for third, and none for fourth.
Of these game modes, Heist is the only one that does something I haven’t seen before. If you’ve played Mario Party, Pummel Party, or honestly any mini-game based party game, you’ve already played something similar.
Heist is the only game mode with any sort of interesting tension. All players are dropped into the map. The map has a set of valuables to steal, and an exit. The exit only opens once all valuables are picked up. The goal is to get as much loot as you can, and then escape.
It’s a fun idea. Heist is the best Rubber Bandits gets. Most of the maps have some sort of switch or activatable object that changes up the play area. Grabbing all the money and running usually doesn’t work, because another player will just drop the floor out from under you. So even once you get the cash, you need to incapacitate your fellow players long enough to make your escape.
Even at its, best, though, it doesn’t always work. Some maps only have a single gem instead of multiple pieces of loot, so only one player gets any points. Some maps are just kind of janky and unfun to play, like the map where almost everything is dark. Other maps have the start of a good idea (the map where you need to mine down with pickaxes) but don’t really execute on it.
I’ve already made it clear I don’t recommend this game. Now I want to quickly run across the border from the land of opinion into the unoccupied territory of speculation. So if you want, you can stop reading this article here. Rubber Bandits is $5 for a copy, and it’s available on PC and Console.
The Land of Blatant Speculation
Anyway, now that we’re safely located in speculation, I want to share a theory I have about Rubber Bandits and how it ended up this way. There are a lot of little things that to me suggest Rubber Bandits was developed as a different experience, and that the 7 game modes that suck were sort of tacked on after the fact to fill space.
The first one is the camera. Rubber Bandits uses a locked camera that keeps all players in frame, instead of just focusing on your character. This would be fine for couch co-op or versus, but in internet multiplayer it’s pretty awful. In addition, because the camera has to always keep everyone in frame, it cuts down on a lot of the design space available for creating maps. Everything always has to face the player, there’s virtually no space to hide behind anything, and maps are a sort of “3D but only in one direction” affair.
This brings me to the second point about the game and Heist. When I was reading Steam reviews to find justification for my own opinions about the game for investigative purposes, one review stood out. Actually, it was one genre of reviews: a group of players who enjoyed an earlier demo the game had, but were disappointed by the full product. From what I could glean, that demo only offered Heist, but also offered an alternative scoring system. Remember when I mentioned different placements give amounts of points? Well, in the demo, apparently points were awarded based on how much money you escaped with, not your placement. To me, that feels like it would shift things up quite a bit in terms of both where the player pressure is, and where the player reward is.
I don’t have any evidence for this theory, but given the game’s whole theme around stealing money, jailbreaking, and robbery, it all makes me feel like Heist was a primary game mode. But then Heist got sidelined when the other modes were added. If that’s the case, I think it’s a bit of a bummer. Heist isn’t some world shaking innovation, but at least it’s interesting and different. Every other game mode available is something I’ve played before in a different game, and burying Heist under all the crap is just unfortunate.
