Welcome to the third installment of Game Bundles Of The Moment! For those uninitiated; GBOTM highlights some game bundles that happening to be running at the moment of writing. And onwards towards the bundles and video games!
First up is Steam’s Red Faction Collection, which contains every single game in the Red Faction series and the sole DLC for Red Faction: Armageddon for a good $14.99 US. For those unaware of the Red Faction series, it includes Red Faction, Red Faction 2, Red Faction Guerrilla, and Red Faction: Armageddon. I have sadly avoided contact with the Red Faction series, so I have no opinion on any of the games. However, from what I have gathered, Red Faction 1 and Red Faction 2 are too much of corridor shooters for their building-destroying mechanics to become any fun. Thankfully the individual games of the collection are discounted, so you can pick and choose with this bundle.
Next up is Steam’s Swedish Indie Pack which contains 10 Swedish independent games for an wallet-friendly $14.99 US. Included in this pack are Blueberry Garden, Bob Came in Pieces, Dwarfs?!, Hamilton’s Great Adventure, Harvest: Massive Encounter, Lucidity, Noitu Love 2: Devolution, Puzzle Dimension, Saira, and The Ball.
Although I have yet to play 50 percent of the games in the pack, 40 percent is not a bad substitute. Blueberry Garden is more-or-less an experimental 2D sandbox game and it shows. Although pretty and winning several best independent game awards, the game is mostly an extremely short medtroidvania-esque game where the main goal is to find objects to stack on top of each other. For me it took less than three hours to beat and I did not find any immense value in the title. Bob Came in Pieces is a wonderful 2D puzzle game. The main gimmick is that the player ship can have an array of different parts attached to it, thus making the player ship adaptable to many situations. While certain puzzles force the player into frustrating situations, the rest of the game is charming and fun enough to outweigh those few situations. Puzzle Dimensions is a good and challenging puzzles game despite not offering much else except for style. Every puzzle stage in Puzzle Dimensions tasks the player with “De-Pixelating” enough level panels until the exit opens, which upon exiting a new stage opens.
My last foray into this set of games was Saira, which left me immensely disappointed. The game is not necessarily bad (it is quite good as any exploration-based platformer from Nifflas usually is), but the game is essentially unfinished. Despite appearing longer, the game only has one chapter. That chapter is well-crafted and quite lengthy for what a normal chapter would be, but Saira is not a game with a large community-driven fanbase nor is it receiving any more updates, so it feels like an abandoned letdown.
For my money the bundle of the week based on pure value goes to GamerGate’s IndieFort Bundle #3, which is a pick-and-choose bundle that comes in three flavors and has 24 games for the picking and choosing. The tiers for the bundles are three games for $3.99 US, six games for $6.99 US, and nine games for $8.99 US
While I cannot give 100 percent confident comments on any of the games as I have not played them, I have heard a few interesting words spoken about 3079 and Tiny & Big. 3079 started out as an extremely ambitious mod for Minecraft and the dev team decided to cut the Minecraft ties when they started to completely recode Minecraft’s core engine. Apparently it is also easy to tell that 3079 started as an ambitious Minecraft mod as the rest of the core mechanics besides shooting and looting are nearly identical to Minecraft’s. I have also heard that 3079 does not perform its unique mechanics very well, so it just ended up being a Minecraft clone with adequate gun-play and loot mechanics. I have heard that Tiny & Big starts out open and extremely fun, but eventually boils down to limiting situations where the main mechanic (cutting through solid objects) becomes restricted and boring.
And that is it for this weeks Game Bundles Of The Moment! Tune in next week where we will find more game bundles for the buying and more games to be added to the backloggery!
