[Dox]

For those of you who were around in the early WoL (or WC3/BW days), you'll be familiar with a fellow named Paz. Paz is a close friend of mine & mOOnGLaDe's, who spent a good portion of his RTS days playing at the highest competitive level; having even represented Australia on the world eSports stage. Most recently, he commentated the Battle.net SEA Invitational alongside JacziE, Benji & myself back in 2011, and has popped up from time-to-time as my co-caster for numerous events. Although he is no longer competitive, Paz continues to support and spectate all major eSports tournaments.

These days, Paz has been keeping himself busy as an independent video game developer. Those of you who keep tabs on my Facebook/Twitter would have noticed some of his previous games that I shared. Now I'm tremendously excited to announce the culmination of countless months of his hard work.

To copy/paste directly from the title description:

Assault Android Cactus is a twin stick arena shooter with an emphasis on high pressure and stylish action. Expect screens full of enemies, buckets of bullets and high scoring combo chains!

Take on the role of Cactus, an enthusiastic police android, who responds to a stranded space freighter only to discover it under siege by its malfunctioning robot workers. Cut off from the outside and in over her head, Cactus and the androids she recruits along the way battle through the crippled Genki Star to reach the brain of the ship and put things right before it's too late.

But honestly, the description doesn't do it any justice. So I'll take a swing at it.

This game is a classic arcade shooter, with vibrant graphics, fast-paced action and an impressive array of strategic challenges. The game features numerous characters, all with unique weapons and abilities to suit your play style. Each character has their own strengths and weaknesses, which when combined in (up to 4 player) co-operative mode, creates a wide variety of possible synergies to explore.

The fun twist is that within 5 minutes of picking up the controller, I could tell this game was developed by competitive RTS gamers. It has all the challenging elements that a SC2 player craves. It's VERY fast paced. Creative use of weapons, (dynamic) terrain, cooldowns, power-ups, positioning and line of sight add countless levels of depth to a game that looks so simple on the surface. To me, I think this is a really valuable and successful component - making it easy to pick up and play without any introduction, whilst giving you more dynamic elements to expand upon as you get better and better at the game.

Another one of my favourite features is the variety of enemies and boss strategies they've come up with. Each different type of enemy needs to be understood and engaged in a very specific way. As more and more different types of enemies populate the screen at once, these dynamics overlap and create more challenge. As far as scoring goes, your score is multiplied by maintaining a combo, or killstreak. If you manage to clear a whole level whilst maintaining your combo, the score will be huge. But if the flow of killing is interrupted, your multiplier will reset and your score will suffer as a result. This element alone increases the challenge factor significantly, especially when you're playing co-op and players need to be careful not to interrupt eachothers combo's.

For me personally, this is a really wonderful game and since beta testing it last year, I've been dying with anticipation for it's final release. I can't wait to play this game again! So this is where you come in. They're now trying to get the game greenlighted by Steam. They're going to need your votes in order to make it happen. It's very rare that we have the opportunity to directly influence the success of a game in the industry, and as an Indie developer, they need all the help they can get! So please, whether you have a Steam account or not, I beg you to take a moment of your time and upvote them via the link below.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/250110

Source: HBHUD

Cactus was created by:
- Sanatana Mishra
- Tim Dawson
- Jeff Van Dyck

You can follow the Developer blog here:
http://www.assaultandroidcactus.com

[syfMiley]

Rammed my vote in

[Dox]

Cheers!

Everyone else - feel free to rep or reply to this thread so he knows who to thank! Hehe

[Maynarde]

Voted and commented looks like a legit fun co-op experience

[ETL.abbadonz]

upvoted and passed it around my group of friends, looks pretty awesome

[iM tgun]

Looks like a good game, earned my retweet.

[Pazeroth]

You guys are awesome. Seriously. Just freaking awesome.

Thanks for the beautiful write up Dox, I kind of love you right now!

Quick Comments

Dox:

WHO IS THIS NEW GUY

[Seffy]

Voted it. looks like it'll be a lot of fun for co-op play.

[Plottel]

This game actually looks amazing. How does one get their grubby mitts on it? Or do we have to wait until its available on something like steam?
Got my vote

[exan]

Just gave it a yes vote because i have that kind of time.

[mGGHalt]

game looks sick, voted and re-tweeted

[Pazeroth]

Originally Posted by AxSPLoTTeL

This game actually looks amazing. How does one get their grubby mitts on it? Or do we have to wait until its available on something like steam?
Got my vote

We're still in mid development at the moment, If we get greenlit for Steam then it will be up there later this year when we finish making it. Being on steam would mean we can sell the game effectively to a big audience and afford to keep updating the games content and start new game projects, Tim and myself actually quit our jobs to work on this so we are using our personal savings for all development costs (software, cost of living, and then working all day every day on it!).

Of course before it is finished we're hoping to have it publicly playable so you won't have to wait too long

Quick Comments

Plottel:

Hooorayyy!!!! Best of luck to you all =)

[Paroxysm]

Voted! looks like a fun game

[Dox]

@SanatanaMishra
He has a Twitter now!! Gogogo.

[Dingobloo]

Looks great, I wish I liked the character designs as much as I liked the look of the game play.

It got my vote.

[syfChadMann]

Looks fun!
Voted! gl mate.

[Delraich]

Upvoted

[x5.Stormz]

Wasn't what I was expecting at all but the game really looks fun. Upvoted I have

[mGGDrGooSe]

It's kinda like Asteroids meets LoL meets Diablo 3.

[kookielah]

looks like a lot of fun maybe even a console port at sometime upvoted and retweeted