Dire Vengeance: The Devil’s In The Details

I found the Dire Vengeance Kickstarter a little sparse for my taste. I’m still undecided as to whether it’s condensed or lacking, but either way, I’m left unsatisfied. When I saw the trailer for this retro-style 2D Action Platformer I was excited. It looks great! It’s retro-style but still clean, colourful and bright to indicate that modern technology is still at play in the background and the game isn’t just a Rom Hack (Not hating, Pokemon Snakewood is still my go to for long train journeys) and that’s awesome. Usually, I love vibrant colourful Kickstarters, but I still want to read about it and I felt like Dire Vengeance’s approach was to bombard me with the stunning visuals without giving me those metaphorical information calories I actually want.

I’d like to add that once you add enough Gifs to make a short movie to your Kickstarter, it becomes an upward struggle to load and scroll through the page.

Let me reiterate: the visual presentation of the Dire Vengeance Kickstarter is great. I’m just not sold on anything else, even the music doesn’t rate highly for me and I’m pretty easy to please on that front. You know there’s trouble when the only positive thing I can say about the game is the same thing I say when my five-year-old brother draws what I think is a dog or a spider; “it looks great!”

Dire Vengeance just doesn’t seem to have enough work put into the Kickstarter page for a game asking for $15,000. For example, they have titles like “40 distinct enemies” and then 3 Gifs of some choice enemies… and I simply expect more detail. Do they look different? Okay… do they act different? Do I have to kill them in a special way? I don’t mean to roast Dire Vengeance, but how redundant is the term ‘Challenging bosses’? Perhaps rivalled only by terms such as ‘friction reducing lubricant’ and ‘waterproof rain jacket’. Don’t tell me they’re challenging! It’s a boss, if it wasn’t challenging it wouldn’t be a boss. Do you think Sephiroth’s choir is singing “ooohhhhh SEPHIROTH is a tough guy, oooooo such challenge, much boss” in One Winged Angel?

I get a vague sense of joy from the fact that even the boss appears to be flipping off the title.

Perhaps I have become spoiled under the sheer load of fantastic Kickstarters I’ve dealt with recently and Dire Vengeance is just in the wrong place at the wrong time. I’ll tell you right now, I am very much into making retro-style games using modern technology. I genuinely love games like Shovel Knight and such. However the final nail in the coffin for me are the platforms. I mean, I suppose it is obvious that the game would come to PC first, but personally I can’t play action-platformers on PC. It’s mainly the controls that tick me off and the fact my laptop bag is too small to fit my controller, but I simply prefer handholds. Dire Vengeance has stretch goals to reach more platforms, but despite PS4 being part of the roster there’s no mention of the PS Vita. To me that’s blasphemy, the Vita is practically an indie game heaven, why have you forsaken it?

For the record, I don’t think Dire Vengeance seems bad, but its Kickstarter, to put it in layman’s terms, makes me face-palm so hard I am at an increased risk of brain damage. Let me know your thoughts below, I know I’m being a bit hard on this Kickstarter, it’s the straw that broke the donkey’s back.