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Lifeless Planet will release May 13 on Xbox One, Stage 2 Studio’s David Board announced on Twitter yesterday. The puzzle-platformer first released on PC in June of last year …
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Developer Comcept has announced that they have partnered with publisher Deep Silver for the release of Mighty No. 9. The Mega Man spiritual successor will be available in the Americas on …
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Project Root was developed by OPQAM and published by Reverb Publishing on Xbox One. It will release on April 28, 2015 for $9.99. A copy was provided by Reverb Publishing for review purposes.

Shoot-em-ups are one of my favorite pastimes. There is an odd sense of satisfaction from seeing bullets fly by your ship (or equal equivalent) while shooting your own back and trying to survive. Failure occurs often, there is a thrill in seeing how long you’ll last before dying. In the old days, you’d coin feed an arcade machine until you (eventually) beat it. Nowadays, most shmups have reached niche status and rarely see support in the retail market. For every Deathsmiles or Akai Katana that sees a localization, there is another title like Eschatos and Ginga Force that fans hope lucks out with a region-free Japanese release. Occasionally, we saw XBLA shmup releases such as Triggerheart Exelica and Guwange, which are compact experiences. Project Root is one of the first shmups to reach the Xbox One and try something different: free roaming. As a fan of the genre and sub-genres like bullet hells, I was excited to try it.

Project Root can be fun. It really can be. However, the amount of time and effort to create that opportunity far exceeds the benefit. The game relies heavily on the player upgrading their ship to succeed, yet the experience system to level up for upgrades is atrocious. A majority of your experience will come from a first-time level completion bonus. If you can’t beat a level, you’re in for a miserable time. As is typical for progression systems, the other way to gain XP is to gradually fill the experience bar by killing enemies. The rate of gain, however, is slow, especially on the first few levels where you need it most. It takes one to two hours to level up once via killing enemies, and all of that effort is for a modicum of XP; it may not even be enough for the upgrade you’re pining for. Tack on having zero checkpoints and it becomes a frustrating sortie of trial and error. Adding salt to the wound, upgrades and progress do not carry over to other difficulties, so all of your hard work doesn’t matter if you want to try something harder or cruise through something easier. Outside of free roam, Project Root does nothing new or exciting to add to the genre. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone outside of the absolute diehard shmup fans that must have every shmup game.

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Minecraft, on both Xbox 360 and Xbox One, will be receiving new content via a free update releasing this Wednesday. Players on both consoles will be receiving a new …
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In addition to our scheduled streams below we also sometimes do impromptu streams. The best way to stay informed of those is to follow XBLA Fans on Twitter …
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Aaru’s Awakening was developed and published by Lumenox on Xbox One. It was released on April 21, 2015 for $14.99. A copy was provided by Lumenox for review purposes.

Despite having cleared every level and obtaining all gold medal times in a day, a strange sense of self-doubt looms about my opinions on Aaru’s Awakening. Indeed, this title contains some fantastic features and tries a few things differently from many other games on the market. However, Aaru’s Awakening holds questionable design choices that have left me disgusted and passively angry. After all the trials and tribulations, I’m fed up with this game. As a platforming experience, this title falls somewhere between too difficult for casual play but easy enough for enthusiasts.

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Like most worlds The Behemoth has created, that of Game 4 is a little outrageous and more than a little deranged. If you know anything at all about the studio’s fourth game, it’s probably that a gargantuan, six-limbed, space-faring bear has slammed into the planet and unleashed all manner of chaos. So comically massive is this Goro-like animal that it’s a wonder anything on the hapless planet it strikes survives the impact. But survive some inhabitants do; after all, it would be more than a bit tricky to build a turn-based strategy game without a plethora of units to conscript and command.

Though the early section of Game 4 on display at PAX East is brief, we see or hear about units as varied as humans, trolls, robots and some sort of living cupcake creatures. Yeah, cupcakes. Playes are given control of Horatio, a simple blueberry farmer and father of one. The extravagantly mustachioed Horatio is forced to take up arms when a band of “Child Eaters” threatening to — what else? — eat his child show up alongside an unseen narrator hurling threats at him. Before you know it, green bear blood pours down from the sky and destroys Horatio’s house, killing his son in the process. It’s as dark as it sounds.

At least, it would be if not for the fact that Game 4 is also utterly goofy. In a repeat performance from his turn in The Behemoth’s BattleBlock Theater, narrator Will Stamper uses his absurd, tangent-filled rants to bring the funnies while also making you question whether or not it’s appropriate to chuckle after witnessing a child being disintegrated by caustic alien bear blood. Of course, this sort of irreverence is nothing new for The Behemoth. Castle Crashers had poop-propelled deer mounts, a literal catfish that coughed up hairball projectiles and princess make-out sessions. Then there was BattleBlock Theater, for which the setup was a group of anthropomorphic cat overlords forcing shipwrecked sailors to perform in a deadly game show. Game 4 is clearly being made from the same mold.

Dan Paladin has served as the main art director for all of The Behemoth’s games, and it shows. But you get the sense that even were Game 4 bereft of Paladin’s bright and charming visuals, you’d still pick up on the connection to the studio’s other games, despite the fact that they are all set in different genres. Production Coordinator Ian Moreno agrees that The Behemoth’s titles all carry a similar tone, but he’s not entirely sure how that happens. Or even whether or not it’s on purpose.

“It’s very much…” he says before pausing a few seconds to search for the answer, “there’s an overall feel and vibe. It’s not just a platformer or a shooter or a turn-based strategy [game]. There’s always more to it, and, yeah, that’s a really tough question. I think it’s just in our DNA, whether it’s the humor and the way we present things, we like to present things very differently.

“When you look at say, how we design our HUD or something, it has to have a little more nuance to it, whether the nuance is just humor or is just offbeat or different.”

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Infinity Runner was developed and published by Wales Interactive on Xbox One. It was released on April 22, 2015 for $6.99. A copy was provided by Wales Interactive for review purposes.

Is it possible to hate a game that you really enjoyed playing? Infinity Runner makes the case for that paradox. The production value is pretty awful, the difficulty level is ridiculously frustrating and it doesn’t add anything new to the genre, but I still enjoyed my time with the game.

Infinity Runner is an endless runner like the games you see on smartphones such as the mega-popular Temple Run. You’re constantly running forward, and the controls are limited to strafing side to side, jumping and sliding. There’s a few new ideas here, but otherwise it’s basically like a smartphone game on a console, with only slightly better graphics.

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The prisoners of The Escapists have gotten out of some sticky situations, but this new DLC may be the toughest challenge yet. The new Alcatraz DLC adds a true-to-life recreation of the prison in which you can live, explore, and hopefully escape. Alcatraz is famous for being one of the strongest prisons in the world, known for its high security and numerous breakout attempts. The DLC is out today on Xbox One for $2.99, ready to see if you got what it takes to perform the jailbreak few have accomplished. If you want a brief look at the floor plans, check out the announcement trailer after the jump.

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Goat Simulator was developed and published by Coffee Stain Studios and Double Eleven on Xbox One and Xbox 360. It was released on April 17, 2015 for $9.99. An Xbox One copy was provided by Coffee Stain Studios and Double Eleven for review purposes.

One might look at Goat Simulator and wonder why on Earth they would want to play a game as a goat. After all, it seems like a rather mundane life, filled a lot of grass eating and standing around, but the goat’s life in Goat Simulator is anything but mundane. I found myself attending rooftop parties, riding roller coasters and getting into fights all while laughing hysterically at the ridiculous bugs physics that surrounded me. After spending a day in the life of a goat I was asking myself if I could somehow become a goat in the real world because clearly goats are having way more fun than humans.

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