Physics games and online games - GameInterlude

After a brief opening cinematic, enemy bee swarms will attack from the left side of the screen. Using the mouse, you point and shoot every single insect in sight until the wave is complete. You'll visit Mr. Bee's Upgrade Stall to spend money on weapons, and you'll repeat this process 19 more times before the final boss. This is all that Angry Bees has to offer. The upgrades barely save this shooter from being a boring 45 minute mini-game. There are two offensive power-ups available for purchase: the ineffective grenades and even more useless rockets. When used in combat, they'll explode in all the wrong places while dealing as little damage as possible. Conversely, the store's selection of guns is much more helpful. In fact, a fully upgraded machine gun makes the entire game a breeze, even on Hard Mode. With the right upgrades, this shoot-em-up just becomes another round of "Hold-Left-Mouse-Button-To-Win". The pitiful amount of enemies include invisible bees, flying bees, explosive flying bees, and my personal favourite, the undead hordes of Zombees. There was so much more that could have been done with this concept.

Upon pressing the "New Game" button, the player skims through a lengthy, useless tutorial that gives a horrible exposition of the game mechanics. Immediately, he is introduced to the battle system. These full-out monster brawls are actually automatic screen pushers in which he has no control over his monsters. All he can do is plan for war before throwing his mindless beasts into combat. Pet interaction is reduced to upgrades, quests and side quests, all of which require the player to wait several seconds before seeing the results. Quests are available every year at the same time. They reward food and money for their completion, but the player may only send one monster on any given quest. Specific conditions limit the monsters allowed to quest, which usually require upgrading stats to a certain level. There is also the success rate to keep in mind, to see if the monster can complete the task at hand. Tournaments are available to rank up the player’s breeding license, opening up even more possibilities to explore and upgrade.

While all this sounds cool, it is actually just another example of a good concept poorly executed. Frequent ad interruptions add to the already horrendous loading times, battles move at a snail's pace, and there are no options to rearrange the monsters in your party, or even change your character name. Monster Saga got all the little things wrong, the time-saving buttons that skip pointless scenes and graphics. Ranged units are inexplicably overpowered, and you can easily breeze through the game with four ranged Level 5 monsters. There are no healers, no way to prioritize attacks, and the antagonists are represented by boring blocks of text instead of respectable pictures or cutscenes. Perhaps Monster Saga's greatest flaw is its tedious slowness, which may turn away even the most patient gamers. The only worth to be found in such a game is in the collectible monsters. However, you have to play through the game a ridiculous six times over to obtain a full bestiary, since New Game+ deletes all your data instead of keeping your monsters! Monster Saga is a commendable effort to replicate the successes of past monster trainer classics in a flash game medium. However, it is plagued with several flaws, bugs, and glitches that seriously dampen its potential and transform the game into a chore.

When you finally begin playing, you'll get to choose your anthropomorphic space pet avatar, and then breeze past the hazy and generally unimportant plot to your first duel. Almost everyone knows how these kinds of games work: you swap any gem with an adjacent gem to create a line of three or more matching gems. This blows up the matching gems and summons new gems from the top of the screen to fill the empty spaces on the grid. But the twist lies in how every gem colour have diverse effects in battle, such as unleashing a special attack or filling your rage meter. It is worth mentioning that matching four or five gems awards you with an extra turn. This battle match-3 method works surprising smoothly, although the AI does follow a predictable pattern. Eventually, defensive matching becomes a much more effective strategy towards the end of the game. This essentially sucks out the fun of pummelling your enemy to a pulp since gameplay will suddenly be based on patience. Knowing when to attack and defend is crucial, although victory often depends on a great deal of luck.

Since you share the same board with your opponents, your options will become very limited, especially when you encounter stronger opponents that hit hard and gain increased bonuses. However, there are many ways to turn the tides in your favour, such as swiping all the energy gems when your opponent can no longer attack or swapping defense and counterattack gems on the same turn. The ability to skip a turn would have been nice, but rarely do you need to wait for the 20 second move timer to expire before realizing that you can line up another explosive combo. While some casual gamers may find Biogems to be too difficult, you can obtain rubies to upgrade your character after every fight. Matching shiny gems during a match allows you to collect more rubies to spend at the upgrade shop before your engaging in your next battle. Even though the game gets kind of unexciting after a few hours, Biogems is an innovative and fresh take on a popular genre.

Gore galore!