UTOPIA 9 - A Volatile Vacation

On vacation on a planet infested with radioactive mutants, you need to survive in order to contact customer services and complain about the false advertising. A really fun game! But watch out: the enemies are genuinely intelligent and great at hiding. Then the procedurally generated environments are different every time, and death is a permanent affair. Even funnier in co-op!

Imagine the scene: you've just set off on holiday when you're forced to make a crash landing on the planet Utopia 9. That's unfortunate, because this planet is inhabited by mutant aliens with no sense of hospitality.

Will you be able to survive long enough to claim you refund? If you are, you'll need to be armed to the teeth and blow all of the locals away if you're to make it home alive.

The only hitch is that you’ll notice that you're running out of ammo pretty early on, and you'll need to show some ingenuity to clear a path through each area. But no ammo, no problem: there are melee weapons like the monkey wrench and even briefcases. These weapons might get you out of a pinch, but they don't do as much damage as a good old gun.

The game's cartoony vibes reminded us of Plants Vs Zombies, but from a top-down isometric point of view.

Best get one thing straight from the outset, though: the game isn't easy and you'll be dying a lot.

It's a roguelike, and that means that when you die, you respawn at the start of the game, where your ship has crashed. You've also lost all of your weapons and upgrades (or mutations).

We liked the unique idea when you die: one of the aliens that killed you loots your body, earning experience and equipping the items you dropped. This means that if you take the same path as last time, you can try and take out this upgraded enemy and relieve it of your experience and gear. It's a fun version of the Dark Souls mechanic.

Our advice? Keep an eye out for the red barrels of explosives that you can use to take out crowds of enemies.

What's great about this game is that it's just as much fun for 20-minute bursts as it is for much longer sessions.