Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I’ve not put anywhere near as much time as I’d have liked into Rob ‘Squid in a Box’ Hale’s graceful-but-frantic twin-stick shooter Waves, which has built up quite a following in recent weeks – as well as snagging the coveted RPS ‘best use of the Unreal engine’ award at Indievisibility the other week. I did, however, discover the other day that it runs rather well on my laptop’s integrated Intel graphics thinger, so I expect to spend a fair bit of time shooting shapes while hiding in the bathroom from my girlfriend’s extended family over Christmas. (That’s ‘shooting shapes’, not ‘shooting up’, heroin fans).

It’s just had a healthy free update, adding a sixth mode known as Chase, known variously as ‘the hardest mode yet’ and ‘the speed metal of shmups’, so masochistic nutters will be delighted.
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UDK-powered twin-stick shooter Waves is now available for purchase. I played it at the Eurogamer Expo and had a grand old time even though I clearly need plenty of practice to even scrape the bottom of any kind of leaderboards. There are a variety of game modes, one of which you can try in the demo, and the colourful chaos is somehow balanced while unpredictable. It’s also quite spectacular to behold. Buy DRM-free direct from the developer for £5.94, or from Gamersgate with a current discount of 15% to £5.91. Will be on Steam by 6PM GMT but buying direct supplies a Steam code anyhow so that would seem the ideal option.

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Rob Hale’s bemusingly frantic Waves has just released a demo. It’s a three minute burst of the Crunch Time mode, which you can get from Squid In A Box’s main site, here. The full game is out soon, and will be $10 either from Squid (DRM free) or via Steam. But in the meantime, you can finally get your hands on the explody colour confusion.

It’s interesting to see how much one man can do with an engine like UDK. Rob Hale has taken a while to get his twin-stick shooter Waves into a shape that he’s happy with, but the end of the road is close now, and I think it’s actually one of the more interesting UDK projects out there. You can see it in action below. It’ll also be making an appearance at the Eurogamer Expo later this month. The game should be out later this year.
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We’ve been inundated with news of forthcoming indie games over the past few months, and the trend looks set to continue. While we’ll always try to link to the best of them – and especially those which are released and have demos – I want to be a bit more systematic about previewing a few of the titles we see each week. I’ll be doing that every friday. This week we have Waves from Squid In A Box, Alien Zombie Megadeath from PomPom Games, and Vertex Dispenser from Michael Brough. Click below to take a look!

Also, if you are an indie developer and you want to send me news of your forthcoming unreleased game please do so here. Emailing in does not guarantee coverage, obviously… But it’s worth a shot, eh?

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