As promised, here is part two of what games to watch out for from going to EGX 2015, which was taking place in Birmingham this year. Are they all either good / bad or perhaps even somewhere in-between? Also there will be a third part, remarking on the show itself and some of things witnessed at said show which were shall we say, eyebrow raising and perhaps not for the right reasons.

We continue on with two indie titles which certainly has gotten a lot of attention since they were first shown earlier this year;

Cuphead and SuperHot

Super Hot or Super Not?

Two games on show at the ID @ Xbox part of the huge Microsoft presence that was clearly needed given that most of the floor was in fact filled with PlayStation 4s and PCs running code were Cuphead from StudioMDHR and Superhot by the developers who indeed called themselves Superhot too.

Cuphead made waves at E3 due to the wonderful animation style of the game, which made it look so much like a cartoon from the 1920s. Wonderfully different situations, reactions from bosses, it looked to be something new to enjoy. It was also the only game in the ID @ XBOX stand which had a queue to play, all the others, not a sign of anyone. That speaks volumes for sure.

Having played it for all of two minutes at EGX, I can actually state one thing with massive confidence. It’s a shoot-em-up with nothing but boss levels where admittedly you are fighting a variety of wonderfully entertaining bosses, (one of which certainly looks like Bluto from that Popeye show from years ago….) which will at first be challenging, but then very quickly turn into being something truly frustrating to the point you will throw a controller into the TV.

You have to learn the patterns of the bosses first to then have a chance of being able to defeat them, all the while all sorts of things are flashing and moving around on the screen, perhaps in an attempt to see if the game can make you suffer a seizure. As with all shoot-em-ups, you have a limited amount of life before you die and you only have the one life. You die, that’s it and you have to start again.

You can play with one or two players but whether or not you want to inflict this amount of pain on someone else…..truly debatable and sadly this has affected whether or not I even want to spend the money on it. It seems to be difficult just for the sake of being difficult and that does throw up the question of whether or not it will actually be worth the time.

SuperHot, on the other hand was a much more straight forward affair in that, it was a refreshing new concept on the first person shooter.

With time only moving when you do as the game tells you in the opening demo level, it becomes a little bit more of a puzzler when you move and shoot the red enemies, as basically you have to move and dodge being hit while then taking them out. While you would think this gives you lots of time to work things out, it appears that on the Xbox version I tried, time was still actually moving, but just at a massively reduced pace while attempting to work out what to do.

Whether or not, this was done to trying to move the point of view to see what you were doing by using the control stick on the joypad, and therefore time was only moving forward as a result, I don’t know. But I can say I would like to see more of this for sure to see how more complicated it can get later, and perhaps if it will get to the impossible frustration level that a lot of puzzle games can reach where then you put the controller down and never return.

Street Fighter 5

Round 1, fight, then button mash and die.

Street Fighter 5 actually was somewhat hidden away in the Playstation area and it was remarkably easy to get some decent time to play the demo they had on show with three different arenas, with a small mixture of old and new characters to boot. Of course, this was just local two player versus and therefore there was nothing else of the game on show, for single or internet play.

Rather surprisingly though, at the EGX fight Zone where you would expect them to want to allow people to try the game itself, Street Fighter V was nowhere to be seen except for the stage where two random people played against each other every so often and then wandered off. The game there that everyone else got was Ultra Street Fighter 4 on the PlayStation 4 (yes the version of the game that took a while to fix properly by all accounts)

As for the game impression from someone who basically can only button mash and lose badly at fighting games, It’s basically the same as Street Fighter 4 right now, in terms of the fact that the graphics style is pretty much the same as the previous title which is not a bad thing at all, and in fact there has clearly been some improvements in animation and the backgrounds are a lot more detailed for sure, some of the crowd even react to what’s just happened in the fight taking place..

If you’re a complete moron when it comes to fighting games like I am, you are still going to lose pretty much every single time. Also, you may be wondering if you’ve got Ultra Street Fighter 4, then why would you purchase this, and at the moment, I cannot give you an great answer really. Without being able to practice with the characters to only be awful as opposed to complete and utter s*it at the game and not seeing more of the different modes, it’s hard to actually say how much has actually changed. A few new characters are most welcome and they all seem to have greatly different moves, which should provide some variety for sure, but again, still not sure if that is enough.

Very much on the fence as far as this version of the game goes, and perhaps the next beta where both PC and PlayStation 4 will be a part of, will show a different side of the story.

And finally…..

In a round up of others which caught attention, Raging Justice was present at the show, the Streets of Rage brawler game we got to play at Rezzed back in March of this year, and it seems to have had some more content added in the meantime. Still looking forward to that for sure, and also we wish the developers well as they are expecting a baby in the next few weeks.

it’s still there baby, and we’re waiting for it….

Next up, Monsters & Monocles comes from an American developer, Retro Dreamer made up of three people, who basically saw it fit to build a co-op game where up to 4 players go into various locations firing at various bad games with wonderful weapons such as a crumpet launcher and you drink tea to gain health back.

Sorry but that was just brilliant and yes, despite the fact it really does appear to be at times a fireworks display being sick, it does warrant further investigation when it finally arrives on Steam.

Tea and Crumpets while killing monsters? Damn right!

Aaero (did they not do a spell check on the name?) was apparently being shown for the first time in both the Xbox area and the PC Rezzed area, at least according to the web site ThisisXBox.com.

Basically the best way to describe it, is it’s a rhythm based flight simulator game (perhaps best to say in the same vein as Starfox is from Nintendo, as that’s the closest match I can currently think of) where occasionally you need to blow up things in your flight path as you try to fly your ship into a white line to get a noise added to the music and gain score from that.

With a techno soundtrack that’s actually not bad, this was something which did raise the eyebrow enough to want to play it more to see if there’s more to it than what was shown in the demo.

Everybody dance and fly now!!

There you have it folks; A very long couple of posts but surely worth it to find out about some of the games which were being shown at EGX 2015. The sad part was, that there was no way to possibly cover everything at the show in the one day, and perhaps it may have been better to stay for at least another to squeeze in more time to try and find some more gems among the high seas of meh meh meh.

Surprisingly, this is not the end of the tale. Join us again soon for part 3, where we will go into some of what was witnessed at the event which as alluded to earlier, made eyebrows raise up. But for what reasons? You’ll have to wait and see.