Corpse Craft: Incident at Weardd Academy mixes real time strategy with block clearing in this charming new zombie game by Tim Conkling and Jon Demos at Three Rings.
When the head of the Weardd Academy's School for Responsible Reanimation mysteriously dies in a fire, the students blame each other and take up sides. They summon up the undead and dispatch them into battle. You start out in the school, then battle on the docks, and eventually make your way to London.
In this action-puzzle hybrid, you are playing a block clearing game the entire time, which represents the building materials to assemble your armies of disambiguation. Each type of undead needs a different combination to reanimate. You have to keep track of building your characters, and strategize by selecting the order and magnitude of your attacks and defenses, while quickly gathering enough blood, flesh and energy to replace your shambling hordes.
On each level, your goal is to destroy the other side's workshop before they destroy yours. The game starts off simple and slow. You soon have to plan a multi-prong attack as your opponents devise tougher and more gruesome creatures like the Flesh Behemoth to thwart your efforts. The later levels include infusions like "blood lust" for speed and "rigor mortis" for strength. When the sun comes up, all creatures in battle die, so don't release too many attackers right before sunrise. But while the sun is up, work furiously fast to gather enough resources to resume the fight when the sun sets again.
Analysis: Corpse Craft has delightful character design. Edward Gorey-esque streetwalkers, exploding dog-boys, and multi armed guards do your bidding with parlor music to accompany you. I especially liked that you have to keep clearing blocks while you deploy your zombies. It can get like a frantic shooter game, although it becomes hard to see what's going on as you are busy clicking away. The more you can accumulate during the day, the more you can watch your glorious little minions at night.
The early levels are pretty easy, but it gets much harder the further you go. I barely made it through the last three levels.
The game saves the level you're on (requires registration), and you can come back and play any level you have already unlocked. There's also a two to four multiplayer version available, in which you have access to all characters and infusions and play single rounds. But you should certainly start with the solo version to see what each character trait does for you.
The game was developed by Three Rings for their site Whirled. If you join Whirled, you will also accumulate a lot of fun trophies like "pressing the flesh," "morbid infection," and "Maledictiorian." You also win coins you can apply to the Whirled universe. If you don't want to join, you will just see a pop up screen that invites you between levels, just click "later." The Whirled site itself is in open beta, so sometimes there are a few glitches. If you find yourself anywhere besides the start of Corpse Craft, you may have to close the "room" you are in and get back to the games menu. I also experienced a lot of lag on the later levels. The developer suggests Firefox 3, and refresh seems to make Flash more happy. There are some other fun games on the Whirled site, which I hope to see featured here in the future. In the meantime,
I've been at Whirled since closed beta. Woo, glad to see it mentioned here :D
I was surprised to see a game of this quality pop up when I last checked. The concept is nice, but if it were less laggy and the instructions a little more clear, it would be much better. Seeing as most of the games in Whirled are being tweaked anyway, I see lots of potential for this game in the future.
It's a fun game, but once the battles start getting complex, it gets bogged down when you try to animate more monsters. Only played solo.
Wow. This game is intense. And I mean both gameplay-wise, and how much effort it takes my machine to keep playing it. I like the combination of puzzle and action, but I didn't see an option to switch to a lower quality. I got to the level where you could start making Flesh Behemoths, but the game was running so slowly, I was getting a headache. That's probably it's biggest flaw right now for me. Except that I always had too much red and white in stock but not enough green or yellow.
Ahhh! It's Puzzle Pirates, except with zombies! Wow, this is awesome. Except I really need someone else to play the blocks while I watch my minions wreaking havoc.
..... hmmm, maybe a zombie.
After playing it a few more times, I've a quibble: with the amount of white tiles needed for the long-range zombies, you'd think they'd provide more of them. Instead the red tiles are in such abundance that it really slants it towards a defensive game instead of that lovely cluster of offensive zombies.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. I just prefer the pointy end of the spear. Bit frustrating being boxed into one class of strategies.
All I get is a black screen...
Try again?
Great game, I now have wrist strain from clicking the blocks! I especially liked the Gorey-like illustrations. Why are the games involving the undead always the prettiest?
I got to the level where you make your own the flesh behemoth as well before my wrist gave up. I couldn't see a way to save my progress, which is pity because there's no way my tendons are going to let me do that all over again.
Heavens, but that site is processor hungry. I was sitting on 100% most of the time, and once things got hairy the lag was really noticable. This is a crying shame, because that game is marvellous.
Shudog: I found playing two or three days on the defensive, accumulating fat and flesh during the day, to be a pretty reasonable tactic. The loveliness of unleasing wave after wave of Street Walkers is well worth the wait. Of course, this was before my PC decided that it was too much effort to run...but hey.
Hello, long time player of whirled here. Whee new people to play with!
Saving of progress is actually tied to Whirled account, I think. Unfortunate for those that don't want to go through the trouble to create an account just to play a browser game, but I think it is worth it for the rest of the stuff whirled has.
(And you'll be able to keep your pretty trophies and precious coins :) )
Also, as a slight performance suggestion, try using Firefox 3. Please don't take this as a browser superiority posting, whirled just plays nicest with FF3 right now. I'm sure the devs will tighten up the screws so favorite browser of choice will work better, but FF3 seems to be dealing with the heavy js and flash best right now.
Looking forward to playing with a lot of ye :)
I had a go on this last night. Got through the first couple of levels easily, but got stuck on the level where the dogs are introduced.
It was just stalemate, back and forth, I couldn't get through to the other side, and kept running out of blue blocks to make the dogs / walkers.
Any tips?
I just get a black screen too :( And the help page lists no actual 'games dont work?' help.
I can never get enough blue/green tiles. Once there was a time when there were literally NO sets of three tiles of any color, forcing me to click sets of twos, which reduce your supplies of stuff. They should have an algorithm to prevent that.
After you get the abomination-type creature, I found it very difficult to get through the enemy's defenses on the first go. Especially if you're really unlucky during the daytime and can't collect enough to launch a good attack. So, I went turtle. I defend the first night and collect like mad for the next night's rush.
Defensive: 7 defenders will kill 2 dogs without killing any of your guys. When I see the ladies coming, I send out 2 dogs, that kills them no problem. When I see an abomination, I wait until my defenders attack it, so it slows down, then I summon 5 ladies to finish him off. Works great. I also try to have 2 collectors out at all times. Those defensive/offensive pots are useful for the next day.
Offense: 3 defenders. I won't attack until I can build 20 ladies and 1 abomination. So. Send out 12 ladies, 1 abomination, 2 dogs. Once you get in range of their defenders, activate the pots for an added boost. Keep summoning 3 ladies and 1 dog.
Obviously, you need to have the items to build that massive attack. Don't both if you can't send them all at once.
I'm stuck on the level where your resources are limited. I can't build behemoths because flesh is limited, yes? Well, that means I can't build defense either, and the opponent has no such limitation.
If defenses and behemoths weren't BOTH limited, this might be fun. As it is, it isn't.
Er, sorry, BLOOD is the limiting element that affects defenses and behemoths.
Jilder -- I've played a bit more, and the defensive strategy starts to make sense. Especially on the levels where they start taking away materials. (By the way, I think I tried a wave of delivery boys. Something to confirm when I finally connect to a game server...)
What can I say, I like stabbing things. Erm. So to speak.
I too get a black screen. Ah well, no corpsecraft for me I guess.
AAAHHHH!!! The story mode ending!!!
Huge spoiler!
Are you sure you want to see it?
It's violent...
Gorey-violent, but still.
Are you positive you don't want to play through?
O-positive! Okay...
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v126/shusu/be5c42e0.gif
The screenshot. (Please don't link or post.)
Okay, that might have made it all worth it. I started to notice something weird going on with the
portraits of the opponents.
Nice touch. My blood-thirst is officially satisfied! (I'm sure you're all glad to hear that...)
If you're still getting a blank screen -- try again when there are fewer people playing the game. I notice I have no trouble getting in when there are fewer than 280 people playing.
And a caveat: I did join Whirled just to save my progress. I wouldn't have gotten to the end of story mode otherwise, since the server kept dying before I could finish.
My bad
No portrait switch. My eyes were playing tricks on me.
I too had been experiencing memory problems while playing this game, causing huge lag. I've installed firefox 3 (i had been using firefox 2.something), and it seems to have fixed that problem. I'm currently stuck on level 13, but not ready to admit defeat quite yet!
I wonder if these coins will be useful for anything..
Jaiim -
Keep in mind that longer runs give (proportionally) more resources.
So 3 runs of 3 tiles give 30 units for your nine tiles, whereas a 1 run of 9 tiles gives 70 units.
So if you want to maximize resources:
Ironically, your best bet is to not click on the tiles you want. Click on anything but, and let your desired tiles pile together in a single run. Even strategically remove other resource one- and two- sets (if you can take the negatives) to join separate runs. Only once you get large sets of the desired resource should you click on it. This way you'll maximize the resource you get from the number of tiles you are given.
It's a speed (resources now) vs. efficiency (maximizing total resources) trade-off.
Oh, I finally figured out if I register with Whirled it saves my progress automatically... duh. I should have read Stacey's review properly in the first place, huh?
Still stuck on the level where you make your own flesh behemoth though. I'll try defensive on the first day, like suggested.
As a rule of thumb, I try not to send any flesh behemoths if I can't also send a few ladies in support. Otherwise he lumbers over there and rolls around until he's popped.
That means 1) making some of the ladies first, 2) waiting until the white (flesh) is lined up that I can send a wave of ladies, make up the difference in flesh, then send a behemoth before the ladies arrive at the target.
I think the key for most of the levels is mastering the dogs and ladies. (Snipped for space.)
The handymen are no-brainers -- they defend. The behemoths are great finishing moves but can be either +/- in the middle of a battle.
But little things like:
- sending one lady at a time so dogs don't attack them on the way in,
- or sending a massive wave of ladies just before opponents at your doorstep expire, to save time
- or being mindful of when a dog will attack, when he'll blow up, when he's vulnerable
- or deploying a fingerling to divert a group of incoming ladies... all that can make a difference.
Oh thanks very much for showing me this site and this game, it is very cool. Lag issues are perhaps a problem sometimes, I'm currently stuck on the level where they first start taking away resources. No blood = no handymen :{
Great art and nice rhymes, and a beautiful fictional universe, perhaps.
Is it me or is the game annoyingly to the right of the screen? I can't view all of it and it's driving my crazy. Like I see 2/3 of the game screen and the chat window to the left is what's mainly in the way but I don't know how to get rid of it :(
Help? I can't even start the first level because I can't see the start button after the book is opened.
whirled is my life XD i kick but at this game. if you play multi, look me up!
Corpse Craft is definitely the best game i've played yet. I even changed my username to Ursula after one one the students there!
(Ursula is one of the students you play against in the initiation challenge if you have corpse craft complete)
Extremely wonderful game! (Om Whirled, my username is as well "Professor Weardd". He is the principal of Weardd Academy from Corpse Craft. If you play Whirled.com and want to add me, my profile image is a big ball-like guy with a beard. Corpse Craft:5/5 :)
-Weardd
as ive seen from reading the comments not many have gotten to this part but...
i cant get past the part where ralphs team destroys ure blood/flesh resources and ivy attacks u
i dont get enuf flesh to make street waslkers to siege my enemy and on top of that i need to destroy flesh behemoths with just delivery boys
any tips?
John, use the dogs to your advantage! Summon as many as you can right when there's about 10-15 seconds left before the night ends, either they'll take damage or they don't but either way you'll have time to build up stock for the next round. Just keep sending in a swarm of dogs until you win, it works in multiplayer too ;)
Update