Test Subject Survival: Well, first of all, I'd like to say that I love boss battles when they're not just "slightly harder than normal enemies". They offer a unique element to otherwise replaceable combat. Shadow of the Colossus, for example, is a glorious beacon of light in this regard. The first abomination boss was pretty fine. And then there was nothing. Points for premise; not much else.
Path of Blood: Right off from the start, shame on you for trying to use the loading screen to hypnotize me. The game's balancing seemed a bit off to me, as on normal mode, I was getting my ass kicked left and right, and yet on easy mode, my computer was lagging from the sheer amount of items left on the field before I quit. Otherwise, the gameplay is nice, if not a bit too repetitive. Obviously, contests don't give a very good time span to add tons of spiffy features, so that deserves leeway. Other minor flaws include the necromancer's skeletons costing food, lack of midgame gore adjustment (I might have missed it, but I definitely bit much more than my computer could chew), and the bleeding system, which really turned into more of an annoyance than anything else. The problem with adding gameplay elements like equippable items and bleeding into the fray is that you have to make sure the player finds it worth integrating into his gameplay. You can expect the typical player to just ignore those features and treat them like some kind of minor annoyance and random, unspottable sounds when they have too many units to care. Otherwise, though, I love the variety of units, and it's definitely a game worth playing.
Shockwave: Well, right off the bat, the game asks me if I'm "Ready to be shocked," and in my mind I reply "Hell no; I'm not even resisting arrest." Anyways, the first thing I noticed was that the map was rather large. And the units were rather slow. To pass the time witnessing what was evidently an elderly man's journey to the other side of the continent, I decided to choose a spell. Namely, Multi-Shock, because the name of the game is Shockwave, so the more shocks, the better, right? Well, evidently not, because I was treated to soul-crushing disappointment when it turned out that Multi-Shock required twice as much mana as I started out with. Which begs the question, why was it available in the first place? Unless its purpose was to trap greedy cretins like myself. In which case, brilliant! The fact that all the competitors are allied seems to be a bit counter-intuitive as well. The range at which you cast shockwave is not the same range at which shockwave reaches, so it inevitably comes up a little short of the enemy. Not that it actually hurts the enemy, because it doesn't hit allies. This also means whatever kills you can get don't add to your experience. You should also get someone to proofread all your text, but really, who's going to notice besides me? Easily remedied design errors aside, there's also the very generic and boring feel to the game. According to the description, Thrall decided to have a competition for something something go kill each other plots are for pussies. I'm not entirely sure what unique gameplay element this was supposed to prominently feature to capture our attention. There might be some explanation to all this, but I don't have the patience to slowly drive my Tauren around the map, killing allies at least 30 times with just my heavy-ass halberd to find out.
Exterminatus: The model's textures can use more contrast around the edges, because it looks like I'm playing with army men. But that's a tad irrelevant. First off, please make the text slower and color-coded. It's somewhat of a strain to look at. Better yet, make the dialogue into a cutscene, so I will have more reason to read it. At first I didn't know what was going on. It was just marines tearing through some orcs like condoms in a frat house, and there was some sidequest to rescue marines. This game suffers Shockwave's problem of being rather generic, but it works and it's based on WH40K, so it's at least more excusable in that regard. All of a sudden, a bunch of larger orcs came and beat the shit out of all the marines, and I survived just long enough to spontaneously win. Huh. Well, there's not much to this game, but whatever it does, it does without fucking it up. The spells could use some work too. Ground pound really isn't all that useful when everyone uses a gun, the supercharge spell shouldn't be a target spell when the only person it affects is yourself, and resurrection really doesn't work that well when there are so few marines and their corpses decay. Overall, the game works just fine. I just wish it actually did something interesting.
Vengeance of the Land: To begin with, this was the first game that made me lol because the "Summon Holy Guard Dogs" spell had the icon of a cobra. Irrelevant? Hell yes. Anyways, my laughter turned out to be unreasonable because the Guard Dogs turned out to be shiny weird-ass salamanders, which still don't look like cobras, but I would imagine it's hard to find a suitable icon for "Blindingly Crystalline Lizard Thing". Okay, still irrelevant. Moving on. It's readily apparent that this game is broken, so I won't prod into that. The cliff-walking and lava-walking is hilarious, and Lio has a clone, but the terrain's nice-looking. There's really not much else to say about this game. Whatever was attempted to be accomplished simply wasn't in the given time span. So I accumulated an army of Dog-Wolf-Lizards and took down the Firelord boss thing multiple times.
Aerial Attack: If there's one thing I love about this map right from the start, it's the user-friendliness. The map description even says "The Entry of our Mapping Madness!" so you don't get confused. Then they go on to solidify this notion with a starting game cutscene. Smartassery aside, I quite like the cutscene with the moving trees to imply flight over land. I think it's creative and funny. The gameplay's rather fun, and the spells are actually worth using. I would have appreciated it, though, if the birds didn't kill me in a single hit. Sinister avian scum. I quite honestly don't think I could survive flying into a plane, yet die because I ran into a bird. Perhaps if everything could kill you, it could make for a bit of a fun game with Gradius-style elements. You'd also need lives for this to work, because god damn did I die a lot. This is one of the more creative and promising of the maps here, and the best part is that it works! By the third level, though, I was greeted with a black screen, left only to listen to the amount of fun I could be having if the game didn't break down on me. Oh well. It's still a great game.
Sunken Battle: A Kafka-esque representation and deconstruction of mankind's follies. Brilliant.
Lycantrophy: I hope that's a pun. In any case, contrary to what the title may imply, there are no wolves, and and there are no trophies. While this is one of the less broken of the maps, it's a tad dull and uninteresting. There's exploration, but not much reason to do so. You have 3 forms and 4 spells, which is pretty good for a hero, and the atmosphere was fine. But I don't know, something was missing. Besides the werewolves and the trophies.
HEX: The game introduces itself with hackers and viruses and opening doors, so from the very beginning, it caught my attention. It has a bit of a nice, frantic feel to it when I open doors in a frightened attempt to outrun the virus. However, the hacking sequences are repetitive, you play the same 40 seconds over and over again, and the game actually seems to get easier over time. Overall, you just get tired of this game really, really fast.
Monster Madness and Beach Brawler I couldn't play, either single player or online. Don't know why.
Anyways, my vote goes to Aerial Attack. It was the most interesting, fun, creative, and complete of them all.
As a side note, Test Subject Survival is the one I would most like to see completed.
