Hard Drinker

In Brief

Firstly, let me say; this is a weird physics based game. Controls took me a few moments to figure as there are no instructions. On opening the main menu, you can toggle off broken bones, blood & damage and the sound. You can also select the difficulty level . Easy = Drink Beer, Medium = Drink Vodka and hard = Drink Vodka and Beer. This determines the number and height of various obstacles the drunk has to negotiate.

There are no keyboard controls apart from the Esc key that enables you to pause, return to the main menu or exit the game. Your left mouse button (LMB) spins the drunks legs, the right mouse button (RMB) spins the drunks arms and the middle mouse button (MMB) adjusts the power of your jump; (indicated by an icon that looks like a squiggly red line with an orange background, found in the top left of the games window). To move you have to jump and spin at the same time to be able to move forwards. This is not as easy as it sounds as you have to synchronise each button press to be able to move forwards, and negotiate the various obstacles. It's just as easy to move backwards as forwards. if you have the blood and damage toggled on, touching the cat will see you being scratched with copious amounts of blood appearing.

There's an arrow that changes colour from green to red and changes length and direction. As yet I've not figured out what that means?

The game starts in a window and appears to be windowed only.

The difficulty settings appear to relate to the height of the objects you have to navigate over. It took me several minutes to figure out what the game was about; basically move your drunk from the pub to the dance hall, at which point the game ends. Once you get used to the controls, this game lasts no more than three or four minutes. There's only one level. As with many of these games, this is probably ideal play for a quick coffee/tea break, but once you've played through the three difficulty settings I doubt you'd boot it up again. It's a pity as I thought the rag doll and physics elements were decent enough; however, the lack of any level system or rewards meant it became rather tedious after a few tries. Consequently, I'd score this less than a 5 out of 10. If the developer were to add more levels as well as add some puzzles and rewards/achievements, this would be worth keeping. I liked the hand drawn graphic, reminiscent of platform games from 20 years ago.

You can see a video of game play HERE (doesn't show much apart from he beginning of the level. The creator of the video appeared to have great difficulty in moving the drunk forwards. It's all down to the synchronisation of increasing the power of your drunk and clicking the LMB and RMB.

The latest free game from Epic Games is one we've been given previously called For the King. It's a procedurally generated game with a challenging blend of strategy, turn-based combat, and roguelike elements.

Also available for free this week is the excellent Metro: Last Light Redux which you'll find HERE. (The game is one of my favourite post apocalyptic survival games and second in the Metro series; based on the stories written by the Russian author Dmitry Glukhovsky ), The Metro series is the spiritual successors to the S.T.A.L.K.E.R series (Shadow of Chernobyl (2007), Clear Skies (2008) and Call of Pripyat (2010). From Thursday afternoon (4pm UK time) we will be getting Halcyon 6 Starbase Commander; a retro space strategy RPG with base building, deep tactical combat, crew management and emergent storytelling.

Notes on Security

I scanned a zipped copy of the installed game and it found one hit (Yandex) from 64 antimalware engines. The downloaded executable includes some low level adware that opens your browser to Falcowares home page once the game has installed, but does not inject any malware into your system. When your browser is opened to Falcowares home page it earns them some money, part of which is given to the developer of the game for allowing the game to be given away free. You can see the results of the scan via the following link:

https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/61f47b72d0ffb3764af4f7eee5d5f2afede9b73f4684e0dfc848870cca9862d1/detection