Dread Lock (113Mb)
This is a fabulous free Japanese Doujin 2D side-scrolling platform sh’mup game by Team GrisGris, featuring gorgeous simulated 3D graphics, giant mechs and huge boss battles. You are on board a robot fighter, tackling both small and very large enemy robots, and you can choose/change weapons as you wish.
In the year 20XX a giant meteor falls on the central district president and his Earth Protection Force as monster waves of attacks suddenly and simultaneously occur all around the globe. At the same time, a dangerous computer virus has spread to the entire network of computers world-wide, all-told, causing a great disaster. You are Rock Hongo aka "Dread Locks" an elite soldier who is given the task of eradicating the evil alien forces. Ride a robot with super weapons and save the earth in time!
Select your weapon from the standard gun, cannon or missile launcher and upgrade these by collecting red power-up items. Other power-ups can restore your health/ repair your robot ship. Ammunition packs are color coded, red for the gun, blue for the cannon and yellow for missiles. There are temporary shield power ups and also some platform elements, such as moving elevators. The platforming element is a nice addition as you have to time jumps and make multiple double jumps accurately to progress through the levels. You can also backtrack and fight more robots and sometimes get an extra power-up or bonus or two. There’s extra lives and extra life packs, and an add on vertical shooter that hovers above your robot (it fires in tandem with normal shots but you can fire this separately using the ‘C’ key, if need be). All the weapons have a good long range.
Enemy robots come in different sizes and with different abilities and there are fixed guns firing at you in places. You start off with 3 lives and if you find the easy difficulty setting too tame there’s the normal and much more difficult option.
And if stunning battles aren’t enough, there are also strict time limits for each level!
Controls are : ‘L/R’ arrow keys to move, ‘X’ key shoot /confirm menu selection . ‘Z’ or ‘Up’ arrow key to jump. A double jump can be carried out by pressing either jump key twice quite quickly. You can also hover briefly in mid-air if you time a double jump accurately. Holding down the jump button after a double jump will cause your mech to hover and stay in flight for a short time. Joystick/gamepad use is supported.
It has superb graphics and a great sound track, which also gets more intense during boss battles. The animations are very nicely drawn as well and the explosions are great!
The main menus in-game are in English.
Dread Lock plays full-screen in XP, Vista and Win 7. Use the ‘Alt’ + ‘F4’ keys to quit the game. The ‘Esc’ key pauses the game. The config exe in the extracted folder is in Japanese, sorry, no translation but you can set the Gamepad/joystick buttons, audio volume and screen mode (16 or 32 bit) and it is quite easy to figure out (or just play the game at the default settings!). The game plays well on a fairly modest PC, so should play on practically any modern laptop, especially as there's a 16 bit screen option.
This is a cracking good game. Almost needless to say it’s very great fun, battling small and giant Mechs in intense battles. But surviving is difficult and getting through to higher levels is a real challenge!
There’s a smaller demo download if you wish to try it out, and it was a commercial title but you can now get the full version free via the links from the main download page. (The main download links don’t involve any waiting time, and you can download both files simultaneously).
Video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CG-KeO0Dn0
Demo Download (48Mb) HERE (link immediately underneath file size)
Download Full Game HERE (copy/paste links - below minimum requirements - into browser)
Update patch HERE (click the Second ‘Japanese’ link near the top of the page (takes you to the patch download link page)
