Smash’em

Forgotten indie game of the week (03/05/21)

With 232 new games releasing, it sure was a busy week on Steam! But even though more games were released then usual, there weren’t really any big noteworthy games. Even amongst the indiegames, the average quality was lower than expected. But that doesn’t mean they were all bad. The game that appealed to me the most this week was ‘Smash’em’, a cute pixely hack and slash game where you fight waves of enemies.

What appealed to me the most about this game, was that it didn’t try to be a big and extensive game. But rather a small enjoyable snack in between other games.

About the game:

The game is made by LongerGameStudio, who released their first game just last year, and ‘Smash’em’ being the fourth game they published on Steam. I generally distrust developers who release a game every couple of months, since it generally indicates low quality and buggy games. But since it had a cute artstyle and was only 3,19€ ($3.99) I decided to give it a shot.

Steam link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1591120/Smashem/

The game is also available through itch.io with ‘name your own price’.

Gameplay:

‘Smash’em’ is quite a simple game and it doesn’t pretend to be much more than that. Monsters spawn around you in waves and you smash them. Occasionally the enemies drop temporary upgrades, health packs or magic scrolls and weapons that do a one-time attack to give you a bit of a breathing room.

If you kill enough mobs, you also get upgrades or new weapons such as a bow, daggers and random boxes? I couldn’t really figure out the intended use for those though.

What I liked about the gameplay was that even though it looks very simple, it did still have some depth to it. For example, you start off with a regular sword which has a small radius around you, but once you kill enough monsters you unlock sword combos. This allows you to at least stand a chance against the growing mob of monsters. According to the store page you also unlock magic spells later on, but to be honest I never got that far.

The game gets very hectic very fast, and even on the easiest difficulty it was very hard to stay alive for long enough to unlock most of the weapons. Which I actually didn’t mind, since the difficulty ramps up rather quickly and most weapons unlock relatively quick, so it didn’t feel frustrating at all, and it actually gave me a goal to try and improve towards.

There were a few things that did bother me about the gameplay though. The player attacks are always angled towards your mouse cursor which is normal and feels pretty natural, but dodging is also aimed towards the cursor. Which causes the player to jump directly towards the enemies if you aren’t cautious. Having the dodge be tied to the walking direction or the inverse of the mouse cursor, would mean you didn’t have to aim away each time you wanted to roll out of the crowd. Which is especially annoying when playing with the bow or daggers. You do get used to it after a couple of tries, but it does require some more reflexes.

As far as the controls go, it would also be a lot better if you could attack while walking. Stopping to throw daggers or shoot my bow even for a split second, felt weird and unintended. And made most weapons, except for the sword, a lot less appealing.

Graphics:

As you can see from the screenshots, the graphics of the main game are cute and simple pixel sprites. The art style works very well for this type of game, and has lots of small animations and particle effects to make it feel very organic and polished. I especially liked the random pixels enemies drop when they die. Which gives a nice overview of how many enemies you have already killed and adds a lot of dynamic to the game.

What I didn’t like about the graphics is literally everything else.

The main menu graphics look very amateuristic and cheap. It didn’t suit the style of the game at all, and you can see it was clearly made by a different artist then the sprite art. I would have much prefered just a simple background screen using the same sprites as in-game.

The UI and buttons are okay, at least they are in a similar style as the game. But they are needlessly big. I did like the font style of the text, though in most places it could also be a bit smaller and less in your face.

Bugs:

Like I said at the start, games made in a couple of months tend to be buggy. And for a game this small, it was really disappointing to see how many bugs there actually were.

The first bug I discovered was by dodging into the trees while trying to move out of the way of the enemy mob. For some reason I glitched through them and started violently glitching over the place only to get teleported to the starting location after a couple of seconds. Not a deal breaker, but slightly annoying.

The second bug was when I received my bow for the first time. For some reason it’s completely broken, and trying to use it will just glitch out the game causing you to teleport back to the starting position. Strangely enough, it’s only on the easiest difficulty, the other two levels are fine.

Now the third bug was actually the most annoying one of all and was actually game breaking. When I triggered the poison spell and hit an enemy at the same time, the game threw me a null reference error and crashed the game. Which is ideally not something you want to see in a game you paid for. I do think it’s a bit of bad luck on my end, because I only had it happen to me once. Which might indicate just a very small chance of it happening.

Bugs aside, the game could also use a little bit more polish before I would call it finished. The main thing that bothered me the most was when you are out of health, the game just instantly fades to black and sends you back to the main menu. This is a beginner’s mistake when doing game development. Always make sure the player knew what happened to them! Because 99% of the time the player wasn’t paying attention to his health bar and now suddenly he’s back in the main menu, which is easily mistaken for a bug on it’s own.

Conclusion:

‘Smash’em’ is a fun little game to play when you just want to spend a few minutes smashing some buttons and killing lots of mobs. There isn’t as much depth as I would have liked, and there are still quite some bugs and polish needed before I would be satisfied. But for the current price point there isn’t really much to complain about, as I did have a good time for the couple of hours that I played.

My opinion as a game developer:

You can clearly see that the game still oozes from beginner mistakes, but I feel like the developer is definitely already on the right path. By creating many smaller and cheaper games, you can make rapid progression and learn from your past mistakes.

This is definitely also helpful if you want to do game development as your full time job. By creating smaller more do-able games, you don’t have to work on a game for a long time before you see any sort of profit. It also safeguards the developer of working on a game for years only to fail at the end when nobody notices your game.

It also doesn’t have to be negative for the players of your games. I feel like there is still a huge open market for smaller, shorter and cheaper games in this ever growing market of big games that cost hundreds of hours of your time that just not everyone is willing or able to commit to.

Just don’t create games that are broken asset flips with little to no value, just to make a quick bug. That might seem like a good short time strategy to make quick money, but it will not pay off in the long run.

So what can you do as a gamer?:

If ‘Smash’em’ seemed interesting to you, you can support the developer by buying it on Steam. You also have the option to play it through itch and donate any amount you see fit. It also greatly helps the developer of this game or any other by interacting with the community, such as leaving a review, talking about the game to friends or just giving feedback to the developers.

Do you enjoy games like this? Definitely let me know in the comments and follow me for similar content. I also highly recommend you to go out and do some digging yourself, there’s still tons of great forgotten indie games out there waiting to be discovered! Who knows, maybe you will even find your next favorite game.

Good luck, and thank you for reading.

~Vincent