New game, game demo musings

A few new demo games on the 3ds I'd like to write about.

Mario & Sonic at the London 2012 Olympic Games: A very fun series of mini games. Not my thing, but the demo is surprisingly very enjoyable! I'm not sure about the multiplayer features, would make for a really fun group game; as much fun as mario kart is, not everyone enjoys racing games, and this set of mini games runs a wide gamut of genres.

Heroes of Ruin: Now, I was expecting to really enjoy this, however, after I finished the demo my thoughts were: boring diablo clone. I think this game would fare better in a multiplayer situation. One plus point is that you can choose to play an anthro lion as one of the classes: Lion-O, anyone?

Kingdom Hearts: Dream Drop Distance. WHOA! This one goes on list of games to play. Controls are fantastic, and the fighting sequences top notch, graphics are polished.

So, yesterday I got a new game, Dillon's Rolling Western, from the Nintendo E-shop. Pretty much a hassle free experience, and the game downloaded pretty rapidly. The base genre is tower defence mixed in with action. A surprising mix, but quite enjoyable.

The main character, is a cowboy styled armadillo, who, wait for it, does a Sonic style Spin Dash for his main sttack (as well as general getting around), which can be chained into various combos and multi-hit grinding attacks. Controls are very responsive, and the additional of some auto-targeting is very welcome in the heat of battle.

Game play is split into two segments; day and night. Day has you harvesting plants of sorts which, when you hand it over to the towns you are protecting, increases their "livestocks" - better known via its generic term as hit points. Livestock hits zero, GAME OVER! Other tasks include actually deciding what kind of towers go where, and harvesting minerals (without an SCV) in order to fortify the entrances to the town.

Night time brings out the bad guys, who's sole aim is to get into town and chew down on some delicious livestock. The bad guys, are... walking rocks with an attitude. I mean, so far the coolest I've fought are biker rocks. I mean, rocks on flintstone styled motorcycles. Woo!

It's also a pretty tough game, the 4 stage threw me for a loop, randomly throwing in a super enemy that I couldn't reach in time, and destroyed all my towers in seconds. Game over on that run.

The formula is pretty straightforward, fun, and challenging, but it becomes quite repetitive - you spend 3 days in the town, so doing the harvesting stint 3 times (it gets shorter every day), followed by town defence for 3 nights. Meh. I'm at stage 5 right now, and actually can't get in because I need 12 or 14 sheriff stars and I lack 2, so I need to re-play some stages.... uh, no. I'll put this aside for now. Got a busy weekend ahead.