BOH

The links section up there only lets me provide four links (my bad), so here's the Amiga demo, should you actually want it.

It may not surprise you to know that I look at a lot of indie games, and that a great may I spend only a few minutes with, because life is too short. Those are the ones that don't normally get reviewed here. Going into BOH, I expected it to be like that. Way retro graphics, manual with lots of widgets in it, ugly website, 3D overhead shooter, a genre done to death many years ago, and Amiga support, forsooth! Should be a quick no.

And then I found myself on the fifth level.

This is a gamestyle that's been done to death, and a great many retro-style games are developed because they're within the developer's capabilities, not because the developer actually wants to work in this metier. That doesn't seem to be the case here; Bevilacqua clearly loves his material, and the result is a tense game, the sort of edge-of-the-seat experience that shooters strive for, albeit in a quite retro mode. And a fair bit of variety introduced over time; not so much in the weapons department, which is what's expected of 2D shooters, but more in terms of powerups, obstacle types, different kinds of gates, and the like.

This kind of thing is clearly a minority taste; and yet, BOH is equally clearly executed with fondness, a passion for the subgenre, and a degree of creativity, and is therefore excellent of its kind.