Eagle Island is an indie pixel darling developed by Nick Gregory. This procedurally generated platformer was changed from a dream to a reality thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign.
In Eagle Island you play as a boy and his owl in a brightly colored world filled with monsters. Much like Cappy and Mario, you and your friend need to work together to overcome obstacles and help defeat enemies together. Hurling your bird buddy at enemies is fun, but takes some getting used to.
This seems like the type of game (much like other platformers) that the more you play the more it becomes muscle memory. Even in the short time I had with the game, I started to get a feel for the mechanics and could soon see myself ripping through levels getting combos as I go.
I got a chance to try both a beginner’s level and a more advanced one. Let me tell… you the advanced one was certainly more advanced. The enemies in these harder sections sometimes took multiple hits to kill and there was even a frog that had a tracking tongue that followed me as I hopped around.
One of the coolest parts of the game is the different powers your owl can have. My favorite was one where when your owl impacts anything it explodes. These powers were obviously more powerful than your standard attack, but that came at the price of blue gems. Blue gems are attained through killing multiple enemies in combos.
This loop makes up the meat of the game. If you can manage to get combos you essentially have an endless supply of blue gems and therefore an endless supply of badass exploding owls. After encountering a monster for the first time, it goes into a log for later viewing. After viewing the enemy log and seeing how many enemies I had yet to encounter I certainly think that this game will not suffer from a lack of variety. Between that and the potential of epic boss fights, this game is one to keep an eye on.
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