This is a video from Rikudo, to show off one of the weapons in Second Hand: Frankie’s Revenge
Unfortunately, I don’t always have time to do in-depth reviews of things that come across my desk, try as I might. So I thought maybe I’d also do brief highlights of things I think are interesting, and are certainly worth taking a peek at, whether they are Steam, mobile, or otherwise. I will probably do this for both sites as it becomes possible. But the first of these, I want to take a peek at an indie game from Rikodu, called Second Hand: Frankie’s Revenge. Who or what are Frankies, though? Frankies are awesome customized robots, that you can attach a variety of weapons to, from the dull and dusty, to the overwhelmingly mighty and powerful. You have a main attack and a secondary attack, the first generating energy, and the second using it. You can control them with keyboard/mouse, or a controller but personally, the controller felt better to me. Completing missions unlocks new parts for your Frankie, from the Glue Gun to a Chainsaw!
The camera angle is a little awkward, I’ll admit, and I do sort of wish I could zoom in/out (preferably out), but I love the visuals of this game anyway. The art is bright and colorful, and it has plenty of mechanical violence without being filled with ultra-violence and gore (even though I love ultra-violence, don’t get me wrong). This makes me think though that it’s able to be played by a much wider audience without causing any parents to freak out. At least insofar as I’ve been. The core gameplay is pretty simple. You customize your Frankie, and head into a variety of missions, where you have different goals, but the one constant will be hacking into terminals, and hacking other robots into bits and pieces.
Your team has three lives to spare, and yes, you can definitely play this online co-op. That’s one of the real drawbacks right now, is it was very hard to find people to play with. I think that the more people are aware of it, that could become less of a drawback. You need to be aware of things blowing up though because they damage you, but many bigger enemies also seem to drop med kits to bring back some of that help. Hacking and Escaping use the same mechanic, hitting the E button at the right time a few times to trigger the proper event. When you’ve done everything, you can call jetpacks to escape, and once you have them, you mash E to get them to activate. Now, if you left enemies behind, they can still chase and try to kill you while you’re escaping, so be careful.
At least you can adjust the difficulty if the gameplay is too easy or too hard for you. As you complete missions, depending on how you do you gain from 1-3 stars, and the more stars you collect, the more campaigns you can go on. There are two campaigns with at least 7 missions right now, but there’s one “Coming Soon” that I see on the main Campaign screen. I love the chaos and pure madness of this game, and running around, bashing things to bits is very satisfying, I honestly have to say. A little more variety could be had in the enemy designs, but I’m sure that’s something that can be addressed in future updates. It has plenty of difficulties and would be an absolute blast to play with people online, just running around with awesome bots and kicking the stuffing out of other robots. If it blew up if you’ll pardon the expression, an Arena PVP mode would be sort of interesting, just as a casual way for friends to beat each other up as their bots. It can feel very very difficult when playing solo. I had a hard time getting through most of the missions alone, but I did it, usually by playing smart and taking my time. But it’s still a very fun game for its price. It can be found on Steam, and I thought it was pretty charming and challenging for its price point.
