My experience with Outright Games – Part 1

After playing some of the delights that GameMill Entertainment had to offer I decided at some point
I would take a look at it’s sworn brother in licenced shovelware, Outright Games. They too have
published a fair few licenced games in their day ranging from making games out of cartoons to even
movies to even youtubers (yes, I mean even youtubers – have a look at Race with Ryan). They will
publish anything that will make a quick buck, take a look at their Wikipedia page and you’ll very
quickly get a good idea of what kind of games they publish. Now onto the reason why I bring it up
today, I thought it would be a long while before I’d touch anything from Outright Games, but I guess
fate had other ideas as low and behold, Humble Bundle, of all things had a bundle which had a load
of Outright Games included in it. It was called the ‘Heroes of Film and Television’ bundle and it
exclusively had Outright Games published games in it, so I dug deep, all of £15 or so deep, and got
the whole lot. I made doubly sure that all of the money was going to charity, and none going to
Outright Games and made the plunge. I recently tried the first three games and thought I’d share my
thoughts on them.

Game 1 – Trollhunters: Defenders of Arcadia
Developed by WayForward and based off the TV show of the same name, Trollhunters is a 3D side-
scrolling platformer, a very basic one at that. To be honest, I’d expect more from WayFoward,
developers of the great Shantae series and other good platformers. But I also know that they’ve
made their fair share of shovelware on the Nintendo DS. I played the first three levels and found
them to be pretty much the same, you go along a straight path with slight elevation differences and
get an enemy thrown at you once in a while and they are barely a threat. Collect trollcoins or
whatever and find socks and gnomes, socks are a delicacy to trolls apparently and I couldn’t
remember why the gnomes are important. I just found the whole thing bland. I won’t talk on the
story as I hate talking about such things. Art style was alright, I guess.

Game 2 – Ben 10
Now this one is a big stinker, developed by Torus Games, I had a look at the kind of games they’ve
made over the years, and I have to say, shovelware, shovelware, shovelware. They’ve put out so
many games, it’s unreal, I’ll have to make a note to take a look at their games at some point for a
separate set, although it’ll be hard to decide what will make the cut seeing as they’ve made so many
games. Now, onto Ben 10. I have fond memories of watching the original TV series of Ben 10 when I
was a kid, never got into Alien Force or whatever it was called and when they rebooted the series, I
just uttered one word…’why?’. So this game is based off the reboot, it’s a 3D beat-em’-up style game
with boring, clunky gameplay. It was like I was playing some shovelware on the PS2 with how clunky
it was, ended up bashing the same clown enemies again and again. At least graphically it looked
alright.

Game 3 – Transformers: Battlegrounds
I was actually pleasantly surprised with this one, developed by Coatsink which from what I saw has
been developing small indie games and they look pretty alright. T:B is a turn-based strategy and
don’t get me wrong, it’s a fairly simple one at that, but it does the job. If you’ve never played a turn-
based strategy before I might even recommend this for first time players. I will also say I’m not a fan
of Transformers but I have seen some of the Michael Bay films, so I’m not this games target
demographic but I thought it was fairly enjoyable regardless. You move characters in a grid and take
down enemies. It was pretty enjoyable, so enjoyable in fact that I decided to keep playing even after
I stopped the video for YouTube. So maybe I’ll do an update post at a later time.

After all is said and done you may think that I haven’t given much explanation as to whether these
games are good or not, but in reality there just isn’t much to say about them. I’d say the only one
worth even trying is Transformers: Battlegrounds and then you should draw your own opinions on it.
I am not a damned game reviewer.