Indie Heroes Collection 2 Evercade Review

One of the highlights of the Evercade over the last year has been the Evercade Game of the Month series where Blaze have offered a free game to download and play each month. There has been a couple of catches with this though as the games were only downloadable on the Evercade VS, and if you wanted to download a new game each month you would lose access to the game from the month before.

Fortunately you can now get the Indie Heroes Collection 2 in cartridge form which means you get all the games that were featured as Game of the Month and you can play them on any Evercade console whether you have the original handheld Evercade, the home console Evercade VS or the fancy new Evercade EXP handheld…I can’t play on the EXP, because unfortunately I’m one of the not so lucky ones who ordered the black premium EXP which was stolen by George Clooney and Brad Pitt in the great Evercade EXP Heist of 2022.

Hopefully in the near future I’ll have my EXP, but for now I have played this mostly on the VS to capture footage for the review and also on the original Evercade. So far the games all work great, and all seem to work as well as they did when they were Game of the Month.

The games featured on this cartridge collection include Tapeworm Disco Puzzle, Nessy the Robot, Reknum Souls Adventure, The Cowlitz Gamers Adventure Trilogy, Gruniozerca Trilogy, Anguna: Scourge of the Goblin King, Eyra The Crow Maiden, Beer Slinger, Lunar Journey, Yeah Yeah Beebiss II, Gelatinous: Humanity Lost and Nix The Paradox Relic…what a mouthful they are!

Now much like the first Indie Heroes Collection there is a real mix of games, styles, genres and some are a lot better than others. Everyone will have their favourites, so let’s dig into what I think are the hits and what I think are the misses here.

Tapeworm Disco Puzzle

Tapeworm Disco Puzzle is a great puzzle where you have to pick up items and get a worm through lots of mazes whilst avoiding obstacles and baddies along the way. From the making of Flea which appeared on the first Indie Heroes collection I thought this was an instant hit when I played it as the Game of the Month. The game isn’t super long, and would have been happy to see it last longer, but can’t fault it for what is there.

Nessy the Robot

Nessy the Robot sees you play as a Robot in a cute typical NES style platform adventure game. You jump across gaps and pick up items like rubies and can shoot baddies. It has a few characters to meet along the way and is a fairly easy game to complete with only the final couple of stages that may give any real challenge to players used to old style NES games.

Reknum Souls Adventure

Reknum Souls Adventureis a game which will scratch that Zelda style itch. It’s played either from a top-down perspective like in the original Legend of Zelda, or from a side scrolling view more like in Zelda II…which to be fair is the mix they did in Zelda II and less so in some later games like Link’s Awakening. Again, this isn’t a terribly long game, and whilst fun this isn’t a Zelda beater. There really isn’t anything in way of puzzles to solve and whilst you can get new weapons and items to use, they mostly just replace the previous weapon to make the old ones obsolete. It’s a charming game about an elf and is a nice length for if you’re taking that long train journey or flight.

The Cowlitz Gamers Adventure Trilogy

The Cowlitz Gamers Adventure Trilogy are a collection of three game…which when you think about it ups the number of games in the cart collection from 12 to 14…so far. The first game has very basic graphics and sees you control a little blob thing as you do basic platforming to jump, climb ladders, avoid obstacles, and collect things. Its simple and fun, but nothing mind blowing. It’s interesting that you can change the filters on this game to make it look like an old TV, Game Boy or Virtual Boy. It’s also interesting that these are the descriptions of the visual styles using the actual names Game Boy, NES, Virtual Boy etc when Nessy the Robot had to have a big red cross to mask that the game was originally called Nessy the NES Robot, but I guess that is because that you can’t really get away with putting the word NES in the name of something.

The second adventure looks a lot better visually and is mostly more of the same with ladders, enemies and collecting things. These are more based around working out enemy movement patterns and escaping one screen to get to the next. The third game in the Cowlitz trilogy which is dubbed as The Lost Adventure and is more of the same. Again, it’s inoffensive, but far from mind blowing. It is nice to see a bunch of easy to get into platformers in the collection as they’re easy to pick up and play if you want something mindless to jump into for a little bit.

Gruniozerca Trilogy

Next up is the Gruniozerca Trilogy which as a trilogy brings the cartridge up to having 16 games! The first game which is just said as Gruniozerca Classic sees you play as a little guinea pig thing, and you have to catch falling carrots of various colours. You press a button to change the colour around the critters mouth so he can pick up carrots of that colour. It’s a game where you trying to go for the high score and build up a combo to get higher points each time.

The second game in this trilogy is the Great Cavy Rescue and is a puzzle platformer which kinda reminded me of Bill’s Tomato Game from the Amiga if anyone remembers that? That game wasn’t a platformer whereas in this you can directly control the hamster thing and make him climb and jump, but you choose from shaped blocks to use to get yourself places. I found that you get used to the controls but they’re not quite as natural feeling as I’d have liked. Selecting the items to use doesn’t feel quite natural to me.

The third game in the Gruniozerca trilogy is more my type of thing and changes up the formula again. A kind of puzzle game where you take the rodent thing across blocks and as you step off of the blocks they disappear. The aim is to make all of the blocks disappear whilst not falling off of them entirely until you get to the level exit. The levels get trickier the more you play and provide a fun challenge to work out the best path through each stage.

Anguna: Scourge of the Goblin King

Anguna: Scourge of the Goblin King is one of my favourite games in the collection and along with Reknum is another Zelda like game. This one is much more like A Link to the Past with the level layout halfway between the first NES Zelda and the SNES classic. You get items like bows and arrows and dynamite to fight monsters and open up new areas to find secrets. The game can be completed in a few hours and is certainly one I’ll be happy to return to again in the future.

Eyra The Crow Maiden

Eyra The Crow Maidenis a great looking game in the collection and is a side scrolling adventure which like many of the games in Indie Heroes Collection 2 isn’t huge in length but will be a game worth repeat plays whenever you want to bung a cart in whilst on a train or whilst waiting at the doctors. Eyra is a likeable character, but her slow paced walk through levels is the main thing which I didn’t enjoy about this game. You do get some fast paced constantly running levels later in the game when you’re mounted on a big cat thing, which shows that the game could have upped the pace a tad to no bad effect. It’s a decent game where you go about platforming, saving dudesals in distress and trying to avoid baddies whilst stabbing or swinging axes at them. The game ups the challenge as things go on and I did end up using the Evercade’s save state feature a lot towards the end just so I could see it through.

Beer Slinger

This is a very simple game in which you play as a bartender that to me looks like he’s wearing an Iron Man helmet – when you see it you wont be able to unsee it. His task is to serve drinks to his patrons and you do this by going to the taps for stout, lager and such like and grabbing a drink to then take to the customer. It doesn’t sound the most riveting game, but it’s more fun than it sounds. You have to make sure you get the right drink for the right customer and you have limited time to get them the drinks. The challenge very quickly picks up as there are more variety of drinks to be had and an ever increasing number of drunks at the bar!

Lunar Journey

Lunar Journey is the first of two game that look and feel exactly like a game for the original Game Boy (three if you play the first Cowlitz game with the Game Boy filter on). To me it feels like Dizzy…in Space! You go around the moon as a little space dude and speak to various characters and find lots of situations which require specific items to resolve. You go from area to area picking up items and then backtracking to where you found the item was needed. It’s a short and simple game and as I’m a fan of the Dizzy games I was quite happy to play this, but with the Game Boy graphics and short length it is more a bit of filler in the collection than a reason to buy it.

Yeah Yeah Beebiss II

Yeah Yeah Beebiss II is a simple game which is a bit like the original Mario Bros game in that you play on single screen levels and have to take out all the bad guys to complete it. There are short time limits and it took me a while to work out that killing the eyeball enemy that just regenerates doesn’t actually take the kill count down at all. From my play through it would seem there are just 10 levels and then the game starts again but maybe changes the colours of the stages and continues the count onwards, but otherwise the levels remain the same. I didn’t like that you couldn’t climb back down the ladders in the game and just had to jump off ledges and climb up again. It’s fun enough, but not one you’ll probably spend ages playing. I do really like the soundtrack in the game as it reminded me of Lemmings which just used copyright free tunes that you’ll recognise and are bouncy.

Gelatinous: Humanity Lost

Gelatinous: Humanity Lost is another Game Boy style game and if I wasn’t reviewing the cart I probably would have given up on it pretty fast. The music is tedious and when you start playing you’re just a blob that rolls around walls with nothing to do. After a few minutes you’ll get a power up which allows you to jump and then the game starts to show some life. You’ll start to come across some enemies and get another upgrade to hit them and eventually shoot stuff at them. I found the game had weird loading times and glitched out on me a few times, so wasn’t super impressed, but by the end I got into it enough. Some of the jumps that should be easy to make are annoying because of the level design, and that was the main reason it took me any time to get through at all. It’s another short game.

Nix The Paradox Relic

Nix The Paradox Relic is one of the games I enjoyed the most and seems to answer the question of what if I combined Metroid with Star Fox? You go around the world of the game shooting baddies and collecting power ups. It’s not a huge game although I did have a couple of moments which took more effort. The first big boss fight was a pain for me until I realised that using the X and Y buttons on my Evercade meant I could shoot rapidly and breeze through them.

Conclusion

This may not be as good as the first Indie Heroes Collection, but it’s still a collection I have really enjoyed playing. For this review I have mainly  played through the games I didn’t give much time to during the game of the month promotions and briefly revisited the games which I completed over the past few months of the Game of the Month promotion on the VS, so I haven’t gone through everything again in full to make sure it’s all the same, but from what I can tell it’s all present and correct. I think the best games for me were the Zelda style games, Tape Worm, Nix and Nessy. I’m glad to have these on cartridge although there are a couple I probably won’t return to such as Gelatinous and Beer Slinger. If you enjoy checking out a curated list of 8 and 16-bit indie games this is a great collection for Evercade at a great price.

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