Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

I am a sucker for Steam sales, and after hearing a bit about Merchants of Brooklyn, I was intrigued, but it took the game dropping 25% for a weekend sale for me to buy it.  The premise is simple enough, high society moved up the ladder and needed servants, so they cloned Cro-Magnum slaves to do their bidding.  When they made too many clones, they castgated them to the lower ruins of old Brooklyn where these clones would do battle against one another, to the death.

So far, Merchants of Brooklyn has played like a mix between a shooter and a brawler.  You don’t start out with a weapon, and you use combos to fight your way through the fighting arena.  Later you gain what appears to be a flaming shotgun, as it fires shotgun blasts that are laced with fire, and I gained what looks like a flak gun.  Also, you have been upgraded with a cybernetic right arm that can do great things like gouge people’s eyeballs out, or take environmental items or discarded limbs and charge them with the arm before launching them like a grenade attack.

Much has been made of this game being made with the CryEngine2 technology, and while some of it looks really neat with a graphical style far from Crysis, it was also blocky and glitchy in other parts.  When I first got into the world, I was impressed with the color palette and different styles that came together between old Brooklyn and new Brooklyn.  But then when too many characters came on screen, or when guns could shoot you through doors because of clipping issues (see in the video above for  that one), it made me want to stop playing.

In the first thirty minutes, I have had fun, and frustrations.  As an impulse buy, and on sale, I feel okay, but if I was more rational, I might have held up a bit.  I hope to have a review up soon for the game, as it does do a few things quite right.  Check out some of the screenshots below for more of Merchants of Brooklyn.