Indie Spotlight - PAX Aus 2014

Black Annex
Created By: Man Fight Dragon
Status: In Development

There aren't an awful lot of programming language choices in triple-A game development: either you tangle with C++, or saw off an extremity with a cosplayer's sword and offer it to the elder gods of game development – and sometimes, the latter is by far the less painful experience. Indies, on the other hand, have a bit more freedom depending on their intentions, leaving us with Black Annex, a game programmed in... uh, BASIC, of all things. For a retro cyberpunk Syndicate-like, it seems appropriately anti-establishment; perhaps when the global mega-corporations purge cyberspace of all unauthorised code, this language – deemed too primitive to be useful by their self-perpetuating AI viruses – will be the last refuge of the underground hacking resistance.

Sorry, just speculating. Still, if Black Annex is anything to go by, the language's limits aren't stopping anything. While the PAX demo was short – indeed, short enough to finish without looking over my shoulder to check if people were tapping their feet impatiently at me – it offered a strong glimpse into a merciless-but-cute world of pixelated class-based isometric espionage. With two agents at my disposal – one handy with a gun, the other handy with a hex editor – I was tasked with making my way through a small building and taking out a target, with only a devilish arrangement of locked doors, guards, cameras and computers in my way. Hacking terminals would make nearby electronics go haywire and force nearby computers to display their recent browsing history, causing nearby enemy agents to rush over and try to close the window before anybody sees. This gave me time to duck under the arc of the camera, walk over and slit them up, or – if I messed up and caught them too late – gun them down with my trigger-happy agent. The uncomfortable knowledge that I had killed an anomalously large number of men in wheelchairs – I guess it doesn't have to mean anything; some people just need wheelchairs, right? – will be, I imagine, a relatively minor blip on the karma meter compared to the complete adventures of Black Annex's agents.

From the looks of it, Black Annex – or, to call it by its cool trendy name, 'Blannex', which I won't use because it reminds me of the name of some prescription medication I once took – is keeping things fairly tight, focussing less on the fiddly micromanagement and more on having clever level design to be carefully unravelled. It's not clear of the development cycle yet, of course: the agents reacted sluggishly and controlled somewhat awkwardly, as if their cyber-brains ran on whatever the future version of a Celeron is, and while that's potentially a stylistic choice to ensure I plan my moves more carefully, I won't deny that it made me fume a tad. I also really hope to see the additional agent types at some point, though if there are only two then I hope there's at least a name entry option so I can call one 'Agent Pin' and the other 'Agent Tulip'. Regardless, it's one to watch out for, and almost certainly an astonishing technical feat to boot.

Satellite Reign
Created By: 5 Lives Studios
Status: Pre-Alpha

When I heard two Syndicate-likes would be at PAX Aus, both within a few meters of one another, I'll readily admit that I expected a bit of visible rivalry going on, but if the existence of 'The Black Annex Club' in Satellite Reign's starting area is anything to go by, the relationship between the two studios is anything but hostile. Satellite Reign is the big, boisterous cousin, with a beautiful rain-slicked city to freely run your squad of agents run around in and a bunch of neat gadgets to play around with, and I'll freely confess to getting pretty engrossed in it during my quest to infiltrate a hostile area and steal all their cyber-bits. Or something.

What legitimately feels pretty good is how open-ended the game's challenges are, and how quickly situations can organically shift from 'all according to plan' to 'desperate last-stand shootout' with a single action. You might choose to blast your way in through the front gate, hack a side-door and try to keep your presence under wraps for as long as possible, or send two agents to distract the guards while the other two run around and cheekily plant a grenade under the power generator. Maybe a camera spots one of your agents, though, forcing them to flee into a side-alley as the nearby guards pour in. Perhaps you scan the area and notice a nearby escape route through an inconspicuous exit gate. One of your agents hacks the terminal while the other three take cover behind a ubiquitous video game crate, holding off the relentless attack until... wait, was that a grenade? That was totally a grenade.

Oh dear.

My incompetence – and barely-relevant screenshots from a development video – aside, I am genuinely excited about Satellite Reign, to the point where I can't even pretend to project an air of aloof cynicism while writing about it. With the emergent gameplay and amount of detail already present in such a short demo, it feels almost like an immersive sim – the likes of Deus Ex or Divine Cybermancy – packed into an RTS-esque format. Honestly, I have the developer blog opened in another window right here and it says here that the AIs are now programmed to take a whizz if the need arises, potentially attracting the attention of law enforcers if they do it in public. How great is that?

Nevertheless – in spite of the obvious allure of real-time pee mechanics – this is probably one game you shouldn't be marking on your calendars any time yet: the preview I played was a bit buggy, saddled with a pretty abominable framerate, and clearly lacking an uncomfortable number of the features planned for the frankly ambitious final release. If 5 Lives keep plugging away and come out with the game they intended to make, in its entirety, then I give you permission to get as hyped as you like.

Assault Android Cactus
Created By: Witch Beam
Status: Steam Early Access

Exactly what an assault android is, or why somebody out there decided to name it 'Cactus', of all things – rather than a totally rad code-name like Xx_BULLET_HELL_ELITE_xX – are both questions that I'm afraid I neglected to ask the developers of this game, largely because I was a little bit too busy fumbling with the controller in a near-hypnotic trance of bullets, explosions and powerups. I like to imagine that developers sat down one day, admitted – with rare level-headedness – that twin-stick shooters are rarely the place to experiment with either storytelling or gimmickry, and consequentially planned to just make the most stylish, polished, high-skill twin-stick shooter known to man. They might just have succeeded.

Certainly, if I went and reviewed this game right here and now, I'd probably be a bit stumped as to what to complain about. Sure, shooting robots until they fall over might get tedious after a while, but shooting robots is not just shooting robots. Each enemy appears to have its own bullet-hell-esque attacks that require you to demonstrate that your worn-out meat-stick of a thumb is still capable of subtle movements, each level seems to have some kind of quirk that sets it apart from being just a static arena, and the waves that the game throws at you are – at least by my standards – brutal but balanced enough to keep you on your toes. It's the old 'easy to learn, hard to master' chestnut at work, demonstrated succinctly by one of the developers humiliating me by completing an entire level without dropping his combo. Pah. I didn't want that S+ rank anyway.