The PC's indie gaming scene is a wonderful thing, but there are so many bite-sized pieces of pure brilliance skittering about that it's near-impossible to keep track. Enter Steam. In its never-ending quest to win our hearts and devour our wallets (not the other way around, happily), Valve's storefront has bundled together a bunch of the best indie games on the block. Not only that, it's given them a whopping 80 percent discount.

Both bundles clock in at $9.99 a piece - one focusing on strategy games and the other on 2D, well, anything. This isn't just some bottom-of-the-barrel bargain bin deal, either. Among many others, the bundles include the likes of Bit.Trip Runner, World of Goo, Revenge of the Titans, and Sanctum. Basically, if you're looking to dive into indie gaming's deep waters but don't know where to start, look no further. Now then, go! The deal only lasts until September 22, at which point the games will turn back into pumpkins. Or, you know, get their normal price tags back. One of those.

I’ve got to get to my crewmate! I’m flying through the jungle canopy toward his transponder when a spear bursts from the undergrowth. I dodge it with a burst from my jetpack, spin, and snipe the head from the masked native who hurled it. This leaves me facing the wrong way, heading fast for a wall. I ram a baby pincer-blob out of the way, fire my grapnel at a passing outcrop, and use my momentum to swing up the wall toward the transponder signal. And into a huge pack of pincer-blobs of all sizes. The screen cracks as I’m devoured.

Capsized is a 2D platformer, where you’re an astronaut shipwrecked on a hostile planet. In order to escape you must first gather any surviving crew and any communications systems that have survived the crash. The Harry Harrison-style deathworld is inhabited by all sorts of beasties, ranging from a wide variety of angular natives equipped with primitive weaponry to the local fauna, which crawls, buzzes or leaps, but is always deadly.



Getting through this world is a matter of learning to use the various tools – grappling hook, kinetic ram (knocks enemies and objects away) – and large arsenal of weapons, to navigate the mostly non-linear levels. All the tools work exactly as anyone raised on platform shooters would expect. The grapnel enables you to swing around like a heavilyarmed Tarzan. The jetpack’s gentle lift has limited fuel. The ram knocks you back a bit, but the subject of its kinetic affections back a lot. And the ammo-hungry guns kill things.

The only flaw is that switching to the right weapon using the mousewheel, when the natives are raining spears on you, is like trying to find a pencil-sharpener in a geek’s satchel of techno-crap. The game is so reaction-based that having the wrong weapon out tends to hasten your death, so instead of being agreeably gung-ho, you find yourself creeping slowly forward and running away lots.



There’s always non-hostile fauna moving in the scenery too: stiltlegged spiders, overgrown hermit crabs and anenome-funnels that shy away on your approach. Even the internal texturing on the landscape resembles the organic, fecund drawings of surrealists like Max Ernst. Electronic music, an oldfashioned interface and hand-drawn layered backgrounds conjure memories of such ’80s platform shooters as Metal Slug or Contra, but stepped up to HD and buffed until the game is 90% polish.

The varied, well-designed levels range from flashlit tomb-crawls to low-gravity atmosphere exploration. With these, and variety of secondary game modes – co-op, deathmatch, time trials, survival and a wonderful no-guns race – Capsized is an example of what can be done with a handful of old-school game mechanics if a developer has excellent taste.

Whatever it is that you did, the Titans want revenge for it. And that means you must defend against them, with towers. Towers that whittle down their numbers as they swarm over the map, towards that final point of your homebase.



Each new Tower Defence game tends to have some sort of twist to set it apart from the others. However, Revenge of the Titans has focused on getting the basics right, forgoing the usual bells and whistles that serve to distract you from the fact that, really, you’re just putting down some towers and waiting for bad guys to walk within range.

What does set it apart is the freedom you’re allowed with how you set up your defences. Before you get to the fights themselves, there’s an extensive research tree presented to you, allowing you to focus on where exactly you want to go, be it building better turrets, or passive bonuses like straight damage buffs.

Which then translates onto the battlefield, affording you a growing repertoire of toys to scatter across the map, using them in concert so blockades can force the Titans to bunch up before they break through and walk straight into a mine, wiping out five or six instead of the usual one. Or batteries and cooling towers, which boost your turret’s magazine and firing rate, respectively, boosting damage output.

Add to all that various different Titan types, some armoured, some fast, some huge, some small, and you’re going to have to mix things up regularly to keep them from breaching all the way to your command centre. One of your primary worries is researching yourself into a corner and being left with a useless loadout when facing the bigger boss Titans. Or, if you do focus entirely on the super powerful heavy turrets, you can’t deal with swarms. The game favours a balanced approach, but this doesn’t become readily apparent until you’re already in trouble.



This is partly because the first five or six levels are easy to botch. You can build turrets in the Titan’s path without much worry, have inefficient resource gathering and blow all your specials (which carry over from level to level), leaving you with poor tactics and poor equipment when you go up against something challenging. But, once you do overcome that obstacle, you’ll be all the better to deal with the rest.

There are a pair of supplementary modes: Endless and Survival, two spins on surviving against increasingly large numbers of enemies. It’s a nice distraction from the campaign, but by taking away the customisation of the research tree, they remain somewhat hollow.

While it has a tendency to lead you into a misstep with its choices, Revenge of the Titans is a game that rewards repeated playthroughs, so fine-tuning your research path and building placements are rewarding in and of themselves.