Let's Try Under the Farm (Prototype)
7Here's my Let's Try of the (13 week) prototype of Under The Farm, a voxel-based 2D top-down roguelike action shooter currently in development by Appetizer Games. This game is inspired by other major titles in this genre such as Binding of Isaac, Nuclear Throne, and especially Enter the Gungeon.
We play as the farmer Jim Howard, who has noticed that his family fields are mysteriously dying. After a short search, he discovers that demons are roaming the field, and worse still, they have built a large dungeon under the farm. Jim and his family decide to take up arms and rout all the demons from their land.
For this prototype, we play as Jim. He starts out with his trusty old revolver, three hearts, three bombs (which harms enemies and deletes nearby enemy projectiles), the ability to dodge roll, and a pitchfork which can delete enemy projectiles. Like with many other games in this genre, you can find new weapons and upgrades scattered across the procedurally generated dungeon. Coins can also be collected from fallen enemies, and spent for purchasing items and upgrades at shops. But of course, Jim is rather fragile. And once he dies, the game resets. Thankfully, the enemies you face aren't that annoying or hard to dispatch.
The objective of this prototype is to locate and slay the Skeleton King. I believe I could have done so, if I hadn't got embedded in the door gate. Otherwise, going through the dungeon rooms is a relatively smooth experience. In fact, you even have the ability to teleport to any of the previously visited rooms - making backtracking a quick and painless process. The voxel graphics are a nice touch, and watching almost everything deconstruct into small voxel chunks upon death or destruction is pretty fun.
Overall, I liked what I saw in this prototype. There's a still a lot left in terms of developing this prototype into a full demo and/or game. But, the main essentials of controls, aesthetics, and gameplay are present. And the developers have planned to add stuff uncommon to games in this genre, such as local and online co-op, and PVP gamemodes like deathmatch, MOBA, and defense. I just hope that this game will be able to establish itself in a genre that's becoming crowded in terms of released titles.
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You can download the prototype here: https://appetizergames.itch.io/under-the-farm
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Under The Farm is in development by Appetizer Games.