Engauge Pre-Alpha

Time is winding down for Engauge, a 2D action platform game looking for funding on Kickstarter. The game is coming close to its goal of $50,000 as it marches toward its end date of September 1st.

Engauge is a title that has you take control of a robot known as X1S. As a robot, you jump, punch, defend, wall jump, rocket punch, and use all manner of interesting moves in order to fight your way through the Mechanical Cities, Hushed Jungles, and Rocky Sea Cliffs. In addition, developer Toastie Republic has stated that they took inspiration for ambiance and presentation from Bastion and Dark Souls. The game will be releasing on Windows PC, Mac OS, and Linux. They also hope to port the game to consoles eventually.

Having played the demo, the gameplay seems inspired by SNES and Genesis platformers. Movement feels tight like it would in a Mega Man game (if Mega Man were able to double jumps). Fighting enemies feels like you are being thrown back into the days of Rocket Knight Adventures, Mega Man X, and the Super Star Wars games. However, attacking still seems like a work in progress. In the pre-alpha demo (which you can find here), it has you use the mouse buttons to attack. This wouldn’t be too bad if it weren’t for the fact that M1S aims his attacks towards the mouse instead of the direction of the corresponding button you’re hitting. This will probably be fixed before release, if it hasn’t already. Other than that, it was pretty good.

As of this writing, Engauge is currently sitting above $43,000 with 4 days left before its Monday midday deadline. If you want to help out the project, check out the Kickstarter page. You can also check out more at the Engauge website.

Jeff Neuenschwander
Jeff has been a supporter of the website and campaign since the beginning. Joining in for E3 2012, he worked his way up the ranks quickly, making it to the Editing Manager post at the beginning of 2013. Jeff has a wide variety of tastes when it comes to gaming and pretty much likes anything that is quirky, although his favorite genres are Action, Platforming, and RPG. Outside of gaming, Jeff is a musician, being trained as a trombonist for Jazz and Classical music, and holds a degree in Sound Recording.