[LPC] Game Review: Archer Man

I’m reviewing Liberated Pixel Cup games, one by one. There’s 48 games.

Disclaimer: I am also competing in the contest.

Archer Man: Defender of the Unnamed Village [Download me!]

This game was made in Ruby. It comes with install instructions for Ubuntu and Windows, however I had to manage by myself to set it up on Fedora.

Installing it wasn’t that hard on Fedora, I had to yum install rubygems, ruby-devel libsndfile-devel openal-soft-devel (And several other dependencies). Afterwards, gem install gosu, check that it compiles successfully, then ruby Compile.rb, check that it compiles, ruby Main.rb.

As the game title implies, you are an archer, and must defend an unnamed (And Unseen) village against infinite waves of skeletons.
To stop them, you’ve got your trusty bow, and you can use the souls of the defeated enemies to power up.The skeletons come in three flavors: White, Yellow and Red. The white ones die after one hit, Yellow ones need two hits, and Red ones require three hits. They also drain health points based on their color.

Killing these skeletons creates a mini-fireworks show, and after a couple of waves, using your skills such as the random arrow rain created a huge firework show from all the defeated enemies.

The game is kinda monotonous. My score was a bit over 9000. (10,000 to be exact), and I wasn’t trying very hard because I was tired of the game. There’s also a graphical quirk: The enemies aren’t transparent, they have a black box around them.

With that aside, the game is fun to play. I manage to get on the 10th position of their high scores list. Lets see if you can beat my score!