Xbox Live Indie Games Round-Up – 02/12/09

Graphically, Wool’s a colourful, cartoon like, simple affair, and the game is helped largely by some fine sound effects (the noise of the sheep legging it away from the dog’s bark is wonderful). It’s polished enough for there to be four-player co-op and versus modes available, but the solo player is fun enough as it is. It’s not certain why you’d want to play Wool with anyone else, nor, realistically speaking, why you’d want to play it more than the once since the pleasure derived from herding cattle quickly fades. That said, if the border collie bug bites hard enough, the 30 levels will be enough to eventually become challenging. The initial levels are a little bit simple, so it’s testament to the decency of Wool that they’re enjoyable enough to continue to trickier heights.

By and large, though, Wool is the kind of game you could find for free on the net, a mild diversion from a dull day in the office that you quickly tire of and return to daydreaming about that perfect lap on Forza 3 you’re going to nail when you get in.

Cute? Yes. Worth playing? Maybe. Worth buying? Probably not.

//College Lacrosse 2010
By Carlo Sunseri [link]
The game of lacrosse originates in North America where native Americans used to play it between thousand strong teams on huge open plains. Which is probably why barely anyone on this side of the pond knows what the hell it is. The modern game is something like a mix between hurling and ice hockey, if they played ice hockey with a ball and hurling with some tennis racquets made by witch doctors that usually spend their days shrinking heads.

College Lacrosse 2010 claims to be the world’s first ever lacrosse videogame, which may very well be true, but developer Carlo Sunseri can certainly hold his head up high and state that he has made a very decent sport sim. There are bound to be rules for Lacrosse, but beyond the score-more-to-win one, they not very clear. That doesn’t actually matter if you’ve ever played a hockey or football sim as you’ll know exactly what to do.

Passing is slick and helped along rather nicely by a guiding line between yourself and the player you’re attempting to pass to. Shooting is all on the right thumb stick, allowing a full 360 degrees of scoring opportunities. There are the ice hockey elements of body checking and random stick swinging (always satisfying to swing your stick at someone, right?) on the face buttons, and a number of defence actions on the bumpers.

Visually, they’re taking their queues from older ice hockey classics, an angled top down view running up and down the pitch, and though the players themselves don’t look particularly striking, they never make the game look cheap.

It seems you can really tell when an indie game has been worked on thoroughly because the good ones have online multiplayer options, so when you’ve finally learned the rules and feel that you’re good enough to beat the AI every time, you can step out into the online world where someone, somewhere in America, who has played the game for real and knows exactly what they’re doing, will thrash you so badly that you’ll wish they hurried up and brought out a who can down the most pints of strong lager on a Saturday night game, because we know we’re champions at that.

It’s making a huge march up the charts right now, presumably because there are plenty of people in the US who have been crying out for a Lacrosse game, and even though you might not have the first clue as to what exactly is going on, College Lacrosse 2010 is most certainly a quality sports sim that pushes all the right buttons: fast, flowing and thoroughly playable.

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