COCAK Game of the Week

Fit only for a game supreme among all others.

(Boy do I wish this was slightly less blurry)





Another new segment that will be updated on schedule is the Game of the Week. The Game of the Week is (obviously) the best game uploaded in a week (roughly) to Kongregate, updated every Friday or Saturday by me (judging usually starts from Thursday afternoon until the next Thursday afternoon, with Friday off so that some miracle game can't pop up 5 minutes after I post my review).



Anyway, without further ado, the game of the week is...






STORMWINDS 1.5




Is there really anything to say about this game? It is, in a word, awesome. Those guys at HeroInteractive know their stuff. If anybody reading this article has hands, stop reading IMMEDIATLY and give HeroInteractive a round of applause.





The game is great, but it is not without a few minor flaws, which I will be addressing in my review. However, suffice to say, they took care of the problems with the first version of the game. The four major problems with the first version of the game were as follows. The first was the fact you could extremely easily "sell" a turret multiple times in one sale and get infinite money. Luckily, that has been fixed. Next was the fact you could get free exclusive content. Now, short of code trading, the exlusive content is impenetrable (good luck guessing the code, by the way. It is all numbers, but I beleive the string was around 25 numbers long, if not more). The next problem was the lack of variety in enemies. This time around, the enemies are quite varied, and they are put together in (for the most part) well. (Which means, except on a couple of rare occassions, you will never go through a campaign with a machinegun and suddenly find enemies with extensive armor that you need a lob shot to kill).


Yay! Boss enemies (Very cool, by the way) kicking my butt while I take this screenshot!


The final problem, and the most detrimental to the original game was the lack of turret types, especially the lack of "support" turret types that just acted on their own. All you had were 3 buffers, and then almost all the other turrets were manuall aimed and fired, though some of them were more "support" than others. But now, you have 5 different supporting towers with good uses, a lot more manually aimed "power weapons" and more than just the 2 basic "main weapons" that you could stick in your front lines and kill with the whole game. Just take a look at all the turrets I have in this picture (and not a single old one!)



SMALL FONT NOTICE FOR THOSE WHO CARE: To name all the turrets: Spot 1 is an acid cannon, a somewhat fast firing (500 frame start, which for me meant about 10 to 15 seconds) "power" weapon. Spot 2 is a decoy drone dispenser that fires a set amount of drones out each level which take all kinds of fire for you. Turret 3 is a dual machinegun, which is basically my staple weapon. Turret 4 is a sheild gun, which basically makes another turret totally invincible from anything but cannonfire, and severely weakens that (and who can't destroy a cannonshot in midair, anyway)? Turret 5 is a floating blimp which if you click on it, will fly around and shoot in your direction, doing some fairly weak damage. It is useful to distract some fire and get to weak points, it can be re-docked to be healed, and it is pretty cool to destroy a juggernaut with a tiny blimp. (Juggernauts are the things in the first game screenshot I posted).

Back to the review (and the readable font). The graphics are, as you can see, impressive. The animations are fantastic, the enemies all look great, and I have not had any graphical glitches so far (or even a bad looking animation or attack). Likewise, the sound is great, especially considering the range of sounds they had to use for all of the different weapons in this game.

The gameplay is magnificent. I can't say more than that. Just play it. I am willing to bet I would still enjoy it if my computer couldn't run the game as fast as it can. My only complaint is that on any given campaign, if you save and quit it, you can't fully restart the campaign, so if you get a turret matchup you don't like or that doesn't suit the latter levels, you are stuck with it (If there is a way to fully restart one of the campaigns, tell me so I know the game is literally flawless). You can restart every level though, so don't worry if you make an accidental error upgrading a tower with the new (and much improved) leveling system.

Stornwinds: Final Score: 9.9 out of 10.

And that is the weekly review.