50 Reviews for UFO 50

See also my review of the collection itself on Backloggd.

Barbuta: An appropriate introduction to the collection in more ways than one. Much hay has been made in my earshot of the "kaizo-like" trap in room one, and to a degree that's emblematic of the logic of UFO 50—it does ask you to take your lumps and learn what it's teaching you without focusing overmuch on a concept of "fairness"—I think it's not the heart of what either the game or the collection is about.

A stronger indication of what's to come is found in the game's pacing, the slow walk speed and deliberately long load times between screens, the way the game is structured like a search action game but doesn't have internal saves, asking you to replay it from scratch each time and thereby map out your preferred route rather than just passively accumulating everything in one run. Stronger still is the sense of mystery: even with a cherry in hand, there are rooms I haven't found and mechanics I haven't used. Barbuta challenges the player to dig deeper if they so choose, and in doing so presages the deepest puzzles the collection as a whole has to offer.

Bug Hunter: My arc with this game presaged my own personal experience with a lot of UFO 50. When I first picked it up, I got so overwhelmed that I put it right back down and wasn't sure if I was ever going to go back. Every decision has so many cascading outcomes that it was hard not to feel like I wasn't drowning in opportunity costs. But Cera loves it and coached me through the basics enough that I began to get the hang of it.

One of my favorite things about UFO 50, the thing that made it a slam dunk for my game of the year, is the way it gets people swapping hints like they're all hanging around a cabinet in an arcade. Almost every single one of these games had someone I knew championing it, someone who was also willing to sit down and help me not only beat it but understand what they saw in it. The true joy of the collection is the community it inspires.

Ninpek: I started out so bad at Ninpek, but what really got my goat was that as I kept attempting it I could feel myself getting better. It's not fair of it to be so fair! And the better I got, the more fun I would have just jamming it over and over again, and the more I jammed it the better I got... I went from “no way am I golding this” to getting a cherry within a couple weeks, and it felt so good.

I never actually played a run-and-gun enough to become good at it before Ninpek. Once again, an early illustration of the theme of the collection: the presentation itself encourages the exploration of new genres that in another context I'd avoid. Their existence in the collection vouches for the quality of the games, and in providing a structure to play them with friends and clear victory and challenge conditions, pushes me to explore them thoroughly and makes even the experience of failure (an absolutely inevitable part of playing these games).

Paint Chase: I started out as bad at this as I was at Ninpek, but I couldn't muster the desire to go back to it enough to get cherry. Even the gold was among the last things I did in the whole game, despite playing through the games chronologically at first. Simultaneously too fast- and slow-paced, trying to juggle all the things I had to pay attention to at once never stopped feeling a bit like pulling teeth.

Magic Garden: An early favorite. Until I got my first cherry, every time I'd boot up UFO 50 this would be the first game I'd play just for the joy of it. I loved working out a strategy first to maximize drops for gold and then, with that achieved, to score well enough to hit cherry without building too much of a backlog and dying. The two characters are very obviously in love and I will fight you if you try to tell me otherwise.

It's interesting to me that, in a collection with plenty of "arcadey" games, this is one of the most arcadey: the play is all constrained to one screen with no change in setting or mechanics, and scoring all about optimizing the play of a very simple system. I'm a little surprised they didn't go back to this well more often, especially considering how much of a delight this dip into it is.

Mortol: The first game whose design made me say "holy shit" right out loud. Although nearly every game in UFO 50 is meticulously designed to great effect, Mortol stands above almost all of them in being a work of real genius. It feels both totally outside real-world design currents even today and entirely plausible for the 80s (although '84 does seem a bit early for something this complex). The ability to replay levels and add to your total guys is incredibly engaging, and building up a sufficient buffer of sacrificial men to attempt the final level in cherry runs was a deeply satisfying culmination of the meticulous optimization the rest of the game encourages.

Velgress: Another early game that started out feeling fiendishly difficult and ended up being a total joy. This very much feels like it expects to be played like a mobile game from the golden age, slowly pushing your best height higher in short-term play sessions in between other activities—a pattern the shared UFO 50 launcher encourages and rewards. Dying at the very beginning of a new level is undeniably demoralizing, but runs are quick enough that it's hard to take too much umbrage. It's hard to believe that the designer of Downwell contributed a game and it wasn't this one.

The manual scroll in Velgress is a very clever companion to the dissolving tiles. You can't have it be a standard autoscroller because it would suck so much to get stuck at the top of the screen with your platform disintegrating, and at the same time it does give you a bit of grace if you're at the bottom of the screen with tiles to spare to actually take a breath and think through your routing.

Planet Zoldath: The heart of a randomizer pulled into a game in and of itself. If you'd shown this to a naïve Natalie and told her it was part of the genesis of procedural world design she would have believed you. Lacks a bit of depth in the long ends of the play, but it's fun to run a few times and not so tough that it overstays its welcome. The real treasure here is how it fits into the overarching world that begins to develop among the various sci-fi games produced by UFOSoft.

Attactics: A tremendously stressful video game that, for a long time, I only ever booted up with fear and trepidation. It demands so much situational awareness and such digital swiftness (fingers, not bytes) that I struggled mightily to understand what to do. Another one where more skilled friends taught me its ways, although not one I ended up loving so much as quietly accepting as reasonably fun if sometimes still frustrating.

My biggest complaint, after all the dust has settled and I'm no longer struggling with the basic strategy, is the way swapping works. It's intensely annoying that you can't move a unit up without affecting all your intermediate ranks, but the worst of it is the fact that you can swap a unit backwards but not forwards, despite those being equivalent maneuvers. The controls are already hard enough, there's no need to make it harder arbitrarily!

Devilition: A very charming premise. Either a skosh too easy or just very in tune with my strategic mind, because I only ever played two games of it: one that ended with a trophy, and a second that ended with a cherry. All the same, an extremely satisfying way to represent a domino effect that I would love to see expanded upon in something a bit more complex and toothsome (and maybe with less of a time pressure element).

Kick Club: Pretty middle-of-the-road as far as the difficult arcade-y games go, this is one where even my friends who championed it couldn't make me fall in love. It doesn't have the gratifying replayability of Velgress and the score farming isn't as deeply compelling as Ninpek, but neither do the initial levels feel as much like a repetitive slog as Paint Chase.

The level design here really runs the gamut, too. Some of them are really fun to route—I like the baseballs in the final world a lot especially—while some are intensely aggravating, feeling like you're supposed to just memorize a movement pattern by rote rather than reacting to the level.

Avianos: This is a sick one for sure. I ended up starting it while video chatting with a bunch of strategy gamers and we had a lot of fun learning the ropes from nearly no information and eventually powering our way through all five trials. The only reason I didn't instantly cherry this was because I wanted to save some for later, and even then I was only able to hold out for a few days.

The board game history of the UFOSoft founders gives a very cool in-universe context to this. It's very much euro game in flavor, feeling a lot like an early port of an existing board game to a digital context. Specifically, it feels like a game made by board game designers who are specifically excited about the potential of the computer to do things like "automated combat" and "hidden board states" that just aren't possible face to face.

Mooncat: I adore the way the controls page completely buries the lede for how bizarre this game is, but even more than that I adore how good this feels once the controls click in your brain. It's insane to describe this as "the sequel to Barbuta" (I genuinely wonder if Thorson Petter's characterization comes from "what sort of person would be assigned Barbuta 2 and make this"), but it does have the same sense of mystery with lots of corners to explore and secrets to discover. And the mood throughout is truly immaculately strange.

Bushido Ball: I go back and forth on this one. Sometimes it feels like a compelling game of lightning-fast strategy, other times it feels basically random. Even after achieving gold I couldn't entirely tell if I'm missing mechanics to make the super and curve shots do something more useful than fly straight at my opponent, and I'm not ashamed to admit that I got my cherry in the cheesiest way I could find.

This is also the first of several PVP games in the collection, all of which left me really curious how they'd actually feel in a mildly-competitive setting. I'm not interested (or frankly good) enough to find out myself, but if anyone's tried this or any of the others, drop a note in the comments because I'm eager to hear.

Block Koala: Go soak a bone! The early game of this has been a bit controversial among my friends for how little tutorializing it does, but I generally enjoy puzzles where part of the puzzle is figuring out what to even do. I think the level design here is generally solid, although some levels lean a little too hard on gotcha moments where you realize you have to unwind your entire solution for my taste.

There is a common pattern across this collection of games asking for the player's patience. Often this is patience with failure, patience with dying, patience with learning what the game is trying to teach you. In Block Koala, the patience is just being willing to move your guy around the level at an ambling pace. It's the sort of game that's much more palatable if you consider it to be a bit meditative, or else if you have someone around to chat with while you play.

Camouflage: Juxtaposing this game's ten breezy levels with Block Koala's fifty in the default chronological order is quite surprising. I don't mind the short (breezy!) length in and of itself, but I think I would have moved it elsewhere in the order just to make it feel less strange how tiny this is by comparison. I do enjoy the puzzles, though—”stealth puzzle” is quite a neat genre, and it exercises very different parts of the brain than the other puzzle games.

Campanella: They somehow managed to encapsulate the feeling of putting on eyeliner in video game form. This is so fucking hard, especially past the first world where the difficulty of the levels starts to pace and then outpace the number of lives you can readily farm from them. This was the first game where I really didn't know whether I could get the gold, even if I put in the time. But I did keep putting in the time, and like Ninpek I somehow did get better on average run over run. By the time I got the cherry, I'd become quite fond of the way it felt to fly my little bell and traverse these wacky and colorful spaces, and I could understand why this was such a hit in-universe.

Campanella is also a great example of how the hardest games often have the easiest cherries. Naturally the cherry condition is always strictly harder than the victory itself, but in Campanella and a number of other particularly tough games once you can achieve gold the cherry seems like it's already within your grasp. You've probably already found a bunch of hidden coffees on the way to your trophy—after all, each one is fully half an extra life, and you'll need those lives if you're struggling—so how much more work could it really be to route in the rest of them? This is such a smart choice, and this sort of thoughtful challenge design is a big part of why I ended up with so many cherries to my name.

Golfaria: While I think Golf Story is a slightly better execution on the concept of a "golf RPG" than this, it's a concept that can comfortably include multiple entries. Some of my friends found the early game frustrating, but I liked the challenge of getting more freedom to roam as I found shot extensions and routed in birdies and eagles (a lesson I've learned from playing these games is that I find routing particularly fun). Even once I had a comfortable number of shots, exploring the overworld and earning more power-ups was a lot of fun.

My big complaint here is that the path to cherry felt sloggy. I never particularly like the experience of combing an overworld I've already mostly explored for nooks and crannies I happened to have missed, and where other games with 100% cherry conditions give direction as to where to look you're absolutely on your own in Golfaria.

The Big Bell Race: I absolutely cannot hold myself back from calling this Kampanella Kart, and I won't apologize for it. I loved this game the instant I started playing it, even while I was feeling pretty ambivalent towards Campanella itself. The movement feels much freer when you can take a hit or two, and there's so much edge to be gained through both skillful movement and clever planning in the races against AIs that you can breeze through it quickly and have a good time doing it.

Warptank: My favorite of the outright puzzle games. Lots of lateral thinking involved in the trickier bits of figuring out how to navigate, let alone how to grab the secret treats. The parts of this that are more action-oriented aren't as interesting to me, but neither are they terribly intrusive so I'm not complaining.

The borrowing of the flower motif from Mooncat is extremely clever, very neatly solving the problem that Golfaria suffers from when trying to go for a cherry without coming anywhere close to giving away the whole game. I find myself wishing they'd used it even more in later games, but perhaps there's a lore reason why that couldn't be.

Waldorf's Journey: Kind of a successor to Mooncat in the sense that it's another game (and certainly not the last!) built around the idea of coming to grips with a strange movement scheme. My first completion was by the skin of my teeth, and left me feeling if anything even more confused about the best way to approach motion across the floating ice platforms that make up this game's terrain. My second (again with Cera's help) ended with a cherry and a comfortable margin of extra shells and fish in my belly. This still isn't my favorite, but it is fundamentally a lot of fun to learn new strategies and then put them in action to great effect.

Porgy: A search action game that's oddly by-the-books for the standards of this collection. The economizing of which upgrades you bring when does encourage an interesting kind of risk/reward calculation, although the patience required to spend the time on an exploratory journey before going back for the upgrades you now know you'll need can be frustrating.

I do appreciate the way the world holds onto certain aspects of its state until you die, allowing you to open pathways semi-permanently and encouraging you to explore with caution rather than making sacrificial runs just to get information. But I wish this were a bit more telegraphed... I spent a lot of time just resetting to save time getting back to base and unknowingly losing progress as a result.

Onion Delivery: This is the game for which I had the biggest swing in opinion between starting and finishing it. Plenty of games in the collection started out hard, but when I started playing Onion Delivery it felt like licking sandpaper. The controls are, of course, intentionally obtuse. Even given that, I had trouble executing actions like strafing that seemed both simple and critical with the remotest consistency.

But I kept playing, and Eden kept guiding and encouraging me, and little by little I started getting an intuition for how to move my little car and a sense of how the big city was laid out. I could pretty consistently make it from delivery to delivery with relatively few deaths, and eventually I managed to last a whole week.

My cherry run was where I really fell in love with the game. After pointedly never looking at a map all the way to gold, once I decided to go for cherry I brought up a conjoined map to which Eden had added a bunch of useful additional information. After each delivery, I'd plot my exact route to the next stop, nabbing as many time extensions as possible along the way. This was a blast, and I quickly had the cherry as well as a lingering desire to play even more.

Challenging the player to understand and engage with the city map, laid out organically like a real city with weird little cul-de-sacs and cross streets, is so smart. I don't think it's original to this game, but encapsulating it so neatly and positioning it as the "next level" challenge after getting a handle on the controls is still very smart. It certainly helps that the place names and the visual design of the city are so intensely charming.

Caramel Caramel: I got to this game at just about the same time I cherried Ninpek, and it definitely feels like a suitable upgrade. It's hard as hell but still fun enough to lose hours just jamming it over and over trying to eke out a bit more progress than I made before. I'm not much of a shooting gamer, but as I mentioned I do love routing, and the points routing for this game is incredibly deep.

I think this is probably the game with the biggest ratio of "time to cherry" versus "length of run" for me in the entire collection. I wasn't sure I was even going to be able to get a gold until I was already on the final row of games, and I'm still a little bit flabbergasted that I managed a cherry. But when I got it, it sure did feel good.

Party House: Absolute natbait. I love a deckbuilder, and the particular kinds of resource management this asks for are both deeply compelling and totally different from anything I've played elsewhere. The scripted scenarios are fun, but they feel mostly like training for the real meat of the game: the random mode. There are games that allow for total combo horseshit, games that require extremely precise fundamentals, and everything in between.

My only real complaint about this game, if I have to articulate one, is that it feels much more out of its time than the rest of the collection. To be sure, there are plenty gentle design anachronisms, but this whole game is wholly embodying a premise that wouldn't exist for another couple decades. But even so, I'd rather be able to play it than not!

Hot Foot: I found this much more comprehensible as a versus action game than Bushido Ball. It's still quite difficult, but as I played I grew to understand and appreciate the strategic depths—which players to pick, how to use the various supers, how to score multiple hits and avoid getting multihit myself. The co-op mode is a particular treat, and a fun way to grind for cherry, although I'll admit again that in the end I grabbed it on my own by somewhat exploiting the enemy AI.

This is, however, the first game that really starts to show the shortcomings of the "two buttons and a d-pad" restriction imposed by the fictional LX-system consoles. While the game hums when it's doing what you want it to, far too much of the skill is tied up in trying not to switch teammates when you want to pick up an item or passing the beanbag when you want to slide it at an opponent. I bet a version of this with two more buttons would be noticeably more fun, and I say that as someone who generally likes silly and technical input schemes.

Divers: What some consider slow about this game I find pleasantly contemplative. It is undeniably a bare-bones version of the RPG concept, and the lack of any sort of UFOSoft twist on the formula is a little puzzling, but nevertheless I enjoyed the time I spent exploring these watery caverns and I found more than a little mystery to intrigue me in their depths. I will say that I had no problem grabbing a cherry without ever learning what the point of hammers or shields is, though, which may speak to a flaw in the design.

Rail Heist: An absolute banger that I picked up and did not put down until I'd reached sixty stars—something very unusual for how I played UFO 50, where most of my play sessions involved bouncing around between all the games I had started but not yet cherried. An incredible execution on the concept of an 8-bit Hitman, and it scratched all the same itches. In some ways the formula is even better—by keeping the runs short and forbidding mid-level saves, the player is motivated to actually engage with the think-on-your-feet mechanics and learn to salvage imperfect runs while still planning and playing towards specific goals. This tops my list of games in UFO 50 that I want to see elaborated on more, if not by these devs then by someone taking inspiration from them.

Vainger: Metroid meets VVVVVV, or as Zandra pointed out, more accurately Metroid meets Metal Storm. While this definitely has some of the draggy feeling of the orthodox search action formula, where traversal can get to be a slog and finding the last few upgrades feels like looking for your lost keys, mixing and matching your build is very cool and the level design providing different challenges depending on exactly how you've set yourself up is extremely clever.

Rock On! Island: Would you believe I'd never played a tower defense game before playing this? I wasn't sure how much I'd like it, but it ended up sucking me right in and getting me hooked. I love going wild with econ in strategy games, so parsing out exactly how to spend the smallest amount of meat on actually surviving the first few rounds and the largest on starting to snowball was a delight, even if it did involve restarting over and over again.

This game is not without serious flaws, though. The fact that most of the late-game maps cover multiple tiles makes sense from a need to ramp up the complexity, but it also fights with the core conceit of the genre—in order to improve your build, you need to understand why it failed. It's especially painful when your avatar's actions can be critical for either defense or econ, so you just can't hang out and watch the other screen. Many of the hours I spent on this ended up being lost to rebuilding to the third wave exactly as I had before, just to try a slightly different arrangement of units to see if they would fix an issue that happened off-screen.

Similarly frustrating is the inclusion of four unique units in wave twenty of the massive final map. While the flavor purpose is understandable, this map took me at least a couple hours in its own right to complete the first time, and needing to redo it after once of those units was more resilient than I could possibly have known to plan for was deeply demoralizing.

Pingolf: "Pinball golf" is a beautiful concept beautifully executed. This is so intensely visually appealing, both in the level design itself and in the pinball-inspired UI around it, and it lives up to that promise in its play. You can let your ball ricochet all over the place and eventually make some progress, but as you learn the levels you learn to set up shots and time your dunks to shave more and more points off your score. This is a game I could easily play five more level packs of and enjoy every minute of each of them.

Mortol II: A game that manages to totally preserve the heart of Mortol while creating from its form something totally new and different. If Rail Heist encapsulates the play of Hitman, this encapsulates its level design: a massive world packed chock full of secrets and interconnections that you gradually begin to understand as you peel away the layers and move further and further inside. Its real genius is the way it asks the player to plan their route. 99 guys isn't enough to win if you're exploring everything in every direction, so a victorious run must plan a route, and a cherry run must plan one that's fairly slim.

The biggest disappointment here is the size. The world is bit smaller than it feels like it wants to be; once you see the whole thing it feels a bit like it under-delivers on the initial promise of scope. Despite knowing that these games generally hewed small, I did kind of expect this to have a second stage or something like that. But instead I'll have to hope that some other dev takes up the inspiration and creates something that could be described as Mortol III.

Fist Hell: This is my least favorite game in the collection that I don't believe to be actively bad game design. While UFO 50 has taught me the joys of many genres I hadn't been into before, brawlers still just don't click with how I think. It's hard for me to understand why I do well when I do well and what I'm supposed to be doing when I do poorly. Coupled with the late-game level design which really seems to fall into "just throw the whole pantry at the player" I found myself constantly overwhelmed and unhappy. The only reason I even got the trophy was because I knew if I quit out I'd lose all the progress I already had.

Overbold: A twin-stick shooter without the second stick! It took me a long time to wrap my head around the controls well enough to rapidly adjust my aim without walking too far in the wrong direction and slamming into an enemy or a bullet. Most of my equity came from slamming bomb-related upgrades which didn't need to be aimed and took a bunch of pressure off my movement, so it could be argued that I never really got the hang of the controls at all. While the actual combat sections here never stopped being kind of stressful, I did come to enjoy the strategy around when to buy which upgrade—once again evincing my love for routing.

Campanella 2: I find this game deeply upsetting, and not just because they followed up my beloved Campanella with something so miserable. Even more than its predecessor, Campanella 2 demands constant precision and high-level execution. Although you can survive more than one hit, the stream of extra lives—so generous in retrospect!—has dried up, and the net result is that you have far less latitude for mistakes in a game with substantially longer runs.

But that's not intrinsically a problem. There are plenty of difficult, demanding games in this collection that I came to love. The real issue is that on top of demanding precision, Campanella 2 will also regularly make you lose runs (sometimes twenty minutes deeper or more) for reason largely or entirely outside your own control. The resource economy and cherry condition requires you to explore the map, but the strict fuel limit means that going the wrong way can kill you stone dead. So you are put in a position where you must decide whether to go down a certain path, and some of the time doing so will end your run and some of the time not doing so will end your run, and you have no way to know which it is.

The real dagger here is that it doesn't have to be this way. The game is salvageable. The core conceit of flying around with campanella physics and getting out to explore the world is so good, the exploration is really fun at first, the upgrades and level designs are compelling... this has everything it needs to be a great successor to a great game. Just tweak the balance, provide more ways to refuel, and you've got something delightful instead of a horrid game that I only cherried because I had a run that happened to get lucky.

Hyper Contender: Definitely the weirdest of the versus games, but kind of charming for its strangeness. The conceit here is that all of the characters have a unique attack and movement mechanic, with only one character having what you might describe as a "normal jump". That character, unsurprisingly, is generally considered by far the best because she can actually go where you want her to and she even shoots in a straight line to boot. Which is too bad! I wish they had all been weirdos you really had to learn to play with.

But that's why the cherry condition is so smart. All three versus games have different cherry requirements: Bushido Ball requires winning without continues, Hot Foot requires winning by large margins, but Hyper Contender is the coolest of all and requires winning with multiple characters. That means you have to learn to use at least a couple weirdos and engage with the heart of this game.

Valbrace: A pleasantly compelling synthesis of the ideas of an action RPG and a classic dungeon crawler steeped in mystery and unexplained mechanics. The fact that you can miss a major (but not necessary!) movement mechanic early on is laudable, and really serves to re-emphasize how much of the collection as a whole is built around the concept of word-of-mouth (or more likely -keyboard) communication as a key factor in making progress.

I spent a tremendous amount of time while playing this cobbling together maps for each level, of which I'm quite proud even if they weren't tremendously necessary when going for cherry. There's just something deeply satisfying about taking a space that feels mysterious and rendering it not just legible but shareable. It's part of why I enjoy making wiki contributions as well.

Rakshasa: Another game that scratched that routing itch real good. The addition of what I called "little guys", the green dudes who fly around next to you, is the core of what elevates this above being just a nice Ghosts 'n Goblins-alike. They help show you secrets, but you don't need them to get the secrets, so they serve as a means of mapping out the space for you. As long as you can keep your little guy alive (by not getting hit yourself), you'll learn how to grab everything in the level even if they're not around to help you next time. And of course doing so is also practice in its own right, so eventually you've almost always got a little friend tagging along protecting you from danger. What a charmer!

Star Waspir: The only game in which I never even got gold! And not because I didn't like it, I'm just quite mediocre at shooting games. I bet if I put as much time into this as I did Caramel Caramel I could get at least a trophy, but since it shows up pretty late in chronological order I just didn't have as much time to keep going back, iterating, and getting a little bit better. In the end, I only ever managed to see Wave 3.1, but I still had fun learning to get that far. It's the best I've ever gotten at any game like this, so I'm proud of myself!

Grimstone: While mechanically this is "just" an RPG (albeit one with a clever little timing minigame for the attack system), it's a totally competent one and it's absolutely packed full of charm. The setting alone ("what if Texas was pulled into hell") is really cool, and has the Eden "I grew up in Texas" stamp of authenticity. And there's so much care put into the worldbuilding and the dialog writing. Every one of the eight possible members of your posse has their own vignette you can find somewhere in the world as well as their own specific mechanics, so different party compositions feel totally different. You don't know what you're getting when you first choose them, so a lot of the game is learning what they can do and how to best get them to work together, just as though you were building a real team.

Lords of Diskonia: Carom tactics is such a smart idea, and this does a lot with the unit design to make it feel fresh and interesting all the way through. The enemy AI definitely feels a bit wonky—Zandra described it as "like you're playing basketball against Michael Jordan but he has scorpions in his shoes, so sometimes he's pulling off incredible feats that you could never hope to match and sometimes he's just screaming and thrashing around randomly", which will live in my brain forever now. I suspect it's a way to balance for the fact that a computer is capable of lining up arbitrarily good ricochets so it has to make bad decisions to make the game winnable, but I did find it maybe a bit too easy in the end—especially considering how much of an edge you can get on top of the tactics by just being better at navigating the overworld.

Night Manor: The visual design here hits the part of my brain that imprinted on early Humongous Entertainment games just right, while the horror story brings joy to my more adult sensibilities. This is cool, it's creepy, and it tells its story—both the narrative of what happened and the underlying themes of the rot that already existed within this particular house—very effectively. As is inevitable with a point-and-click, there are moments where things that would work in reality don't work in the game, but overall this is one of the better short-form horror games I've played, and I've played more than a handful.

Elfazar's Hat: While this may not be as meaty as the other shooters in the collection, I found it to be a lot of fun. It's not too tough, but the combination of cherry condition and bonus minigame gave me a nice bit of room to optimize without ever wearing out its welcome.

I like the design of the upgrades here a lot, especially because the way they're useful varies so much from upgrade to upgrade: shot is the best but you only ever want one and a partial is nearly useless, option is decent partial and pretty good full but never crucial, health is good in partial repeatedly but only if you've lost life, shield is good repeatedly but only at full, and bomb is never good. It makes figuring out which cards you want when and what you should hold out for a fun little minigame even when you're doing the early levels that you have down pat.

Pilot Quest: As an idle game, this feels oddly curtailed, with its resource generation curve capping out at relatively few upgrades and really only requiring a handful of waiting periods—odd in a collection where there are so many other games to play while waiting. The exploration segments are a bit more fun, with a fair amount of reward to learning the lay of the land and where to go to maximize your time early on or to maximize your rewards later. But on the whole, this was never really that fun to play moment to moment.

Mini & Max: I played this whole game side by side with Liz, with her taking notes while I ran the controls, and we had a blast. The constantly increasing scope of the game is so cool, and it does a fantastic job of filling out the space with fun stuff to do and interesting people to talk to. Like Grimstone, much of what makes this game excellent is just the writing and world design, but it has the added benefit of the exploration of finding that writing being novel and exciting in and of itself. And to be completely honest: I always have a soft spot for games that get me to take notes.

Combatants: This game is neck and neck with Campanella 2 for my least favorite game in the collection. It's miserable to a similar degree, but for very different reasons. It's a real-time strategy game where your units are all blithering idiots who rarely do what you say and never what you want, playing against an enemy with superior numbers and superior strength. There are ways to win, of course, but they all rely on some combination of exploiting holes in the AI (both your enemies' and your allies') and sheer luck.

On top of that, the controls are absolutely horrendous, somehow even worse than you'd expect from an RTS on a two-button system. To command your ants, you have to open a sub-menu which does not pause the game and navigate it with the d-pad. Because time is always in short supply, you have to do this at speed, often just before moving your avatar elsewhere. If you press the d-pad to move even slightly before releasing the menu button, you'll send a different command than you expected and likely ruin your whole run.

Unlike Campanella 2, this game is totally unsalvageable. There's nothing good to be had here. That said, at least it's mercifully short and not too hard to cherry once you know the right AI exploits. I'm genuinely not sure how these two rancid games made their way into an otherwise tremendouso collection.

Quibble Racing: A vapid game that's all about playing the random number generator slot machine and seeing what happens. There are a few ways to put a finger on the scale, and with enough care they could have made this into something genuinely strategic around accumulating and using knowledge. But they're not consistent enough to make doing well better than a slightly-weighted die roll.

But for all its lack of substance, this is still fun. The writing and visual design when you interact with various merchants and other characters are entirely charming, and despite being random you can pretty readily beat the game before it wears out its welcome. It's cotton candy: very sweet, mostly air, but still a fun treat every now and again.

Seaside Drive: The last real banger UFOSoft ever made. This is extremely stylish and extremely smart. Combining the drift-to-charge mechanic with the idea that your direction of movement controls your gun gives this a tremendous amount of mechanical depth before it even has any level design, and then the levels really optimize for creation tension and release in how you position and move your car. This isn't terribly long nor is it terribly difficult, but it's screamingly fun and it's one of the big reasons I'll consider booting UFO 50 back up for a few minutes long after I officially consider it finished.

Campanella 3: Playing all the games up to this point really gives context for how cool the 2D-3D effect this is going for comes off in a way that's hard to get for people like me who are used to modern graphics cards. The final full shooter in the collection is definitely not my favorite, but it's pretty entertaining and very novel. The biggest issue is that it indexes extremely heavily on memorizing the enemy patterns for each wave, so that in the end the first few stages are relying more on memory than actual execution.

On average, the Campanella series was average.

Cyber Owls: A suitably weird game to end the collection on, given the in-universe implication that UFOSoft bet big on it and lost their shirts. This game has high highs and low lows. The writing is great, the visual design more lush than any other game in the collection, and the fictional media tie-in is actually a pitch-perfect parody of 80s/90s badass anthropomorphic animal cartoons. The game's mechanics are all over the place—the conceit is that each of the four members of the avian secret agent squad star in their own genre of game, as well as a fifth tactics game to rescue captured teammates—but most of them are a lot of fun. The tactics game is easier with some characters than others but a pretty decent little design, the rail shooter has a surprising amount of depth to it, and I had fun learning the waves of the bike shooter. Brawlers, as mentioned, are not my thing but I didn't find this one particularly offensive.

And then there's the stealth game. The stealth game is bad. I was so excited when I booted it up and saw a Metal Gear riff, but it's a nightmare to actually play. The logic by which enemies see or don't see you is totally incomprehensible—I had three people in group chat all tossing out theories as to how it worked, only to have each of the theories disproven by a clear counterexample that worked the opposite way. In the end we could only shrug our shoulders and say "I guess sometimes they just notice you and other times they don't". The only saving grace is that the guards are pretty bad at actually shooting you when you're seen, but that's mitigated by the fact that the spy only has two hit points.

The overall arc of the game is to play each of the four segments, accumulating as many points as possible in each one to get extra lives which you can then bring with you into the final segment. There's no tactics minigame to rescue agents in this final segment, so those lives are important, especially since spending them is the brawler's main damage mitigation strategy in the final boss fight. So imagine my shock when I learned that the cherry condition for this game is to have no one die, ever. When going for cherry, points don't matter, extra lives don't matter, the only thing that matters is playing as cautiously as possible at every turn. I just don't get it, and learning that was a bit of a sad ending to an otherwise wonderful experience playing UFO 50.

Miasma Tower: A really lovely and crushingly sad little coda to the rest of the game that gives context to the dribs and drabs of lore (and offhand lines in games you don't even realize are lore) throughout the rest of the collection. My friends who have worked in the games industry were hit particularly hard by this, but I think we can all see in our own lives the echoes of the way capitalism commodifies, infests, and ultimately hollows out art. The collection takes on new emotional weight once you know this context, and it encourages the player to start thinking of the games in terms of the people who created them—first the fictional people who you've come to know through this experience, and then the real people who actually exist. This is a wonderful habit to instill in those who care about the medium.

The Final Ranking

Tier List

S

A

B

C

D

F