Goombd Played! - Akimi Village

It's the PlayStation 3's time to start building! Akimi Village was released a while ago and if you're not familiar with the name, think of Keflings. Still not ringing a bell? NinjaBee's Xbox Live Arcade franchise started out with one of the first games to use the dreaded Xbox avatars, A Kingdom for Keflings. Last year, we got to mess around with its sequel, A World of Keflings, which carried over all of the best from the resource gathering and building world had to offer.

Akimi Village is pretty much the same type of game. After choosing your character, whether it's a boy or a girl, you're given the task of aiding a race of 'very' little people with the rebuild and cleaning of their world. There's a group of core materials you have to start out harvesting and from there, a handful of blueprints to build from. Each building carries an unique function. Some help you generate more villagers to help with the gathering of these materials, while others, for instance, help turn stored items into other types of building blocks that you'll use for different constructions.


Just like the 'Keflings games, your goal in Akimi is to build every single blueprint. There's no particular challenge to this, in the 'challenge' sense of what games have come to accustom us to watch out for. You're never put in any danger nor will you have to fight any enemies. Building and harvesting are the only goals, and even though they might seem simple and crude at first, they're not.

This is a ridiculously busy game. You won't feel like you're aimlessly playing it at any point thanks to a very well paced style of gameplay. There's always a new goal to strive for and just like 'Keflings, you're always treated to some very funny writing and an extremely colorful visual presentation.


Sadly, though, some of the gameplay improvements introduced in A World of Keflings did not carry over to Akimi. You're not given the option to move buildings that you construct nor are you able to guide workers into helping you complete blueprints on their own. The interface is also a little hard to figure out, due to small and sometimes similar looking icons that are confusing to pick out from.

Regardless of some of these issues, if you're in the hunt for an easy going game that doesn't treat you like a 6 month old toddler but isn't as complex as a military strategy simulator, Akimi Village might just suit you. It's a fun download that should take you about nine hours to get through and after you're done saving a world, you can take your gathered resources and help other players online save their own, if you so wish. |7

Goombd Played! - A World of Keflings DLC: It Came From Space

The concept of playing a game with absolutely no confrontations and violence might seem foreign to many videogame fans. Killing and being victorious over your opponent always seems to be the goal of just about 90% of all games. Luckily for us, the 10% left sometimes turn out to be amazing. That's the case for Ninja Bee's A World of Keflings.

I already made a case about how much I love that game a while back, when it was released as part of the Summer of Arcade promotion that Microsoft likes to make during U.S summertime. It's an absolute blast putting together your own towns and not have to worry about anyone coming around to demolish it. It was truly a "busy busy bee" game.


So it comes as no surprise that we're getting to play a set of DLC for that game, a little more than a year after its release. It Came From Space features a whole new set of blueprints to build, a new environment to pluck resources from and a handful of crazy characters to laugh at. As the name suggests, this DLC is centered on aliens. They crashed on the Kefling world and lo and behold, it's up to you (mainly, your Xbox Live avatar) to help them get back home.

Luckily for your E.T friends, all of the materials they need happen to have come along with their ship. You'll get things going by putting some of them to work and harvesting the base items like bars of radioactive materials, wood and clay but soon enough, just like in the original game, you're steered towards turning these into more specialized materials.



The gameplay structure It Came From Outer Space follows is right on with what we saw in 'Keflings. Those base materials are harvested into a single building at first and from there, you expand and build new structures as objectives are met and blueprints are learned. This time around, though, there's a catch. Some of these buildings are living beings and can be mutated into other types of structures. This might sound pretty complicated, but it's really not. You basically build the core structure and feed it a carrot filled with alien mutagen. Mutated buildings can then produce other types of much needed raw materials.

Another new type of unit introduced in this DLC is the robotic minion, which already starts out at high levels on just about every job you could put him to. And you'll need to put him to work right away since he's the only one capable of handling the nuclear materials and junk parts required by your schematics.


As you might have picked up by looking at these screenshots, there's only one environment to play in It Came From Outer Space. It's relatively smaller than the usual A World of Keflings stage and takes about as long to play through as well. You're likely to take around 2 hours to complete all the objectives and get every achievement, but there are incentives to keep building even after the story is done.

There are plenty of good reasons to pick this new DLC pack up. It's charming to no end, brimming with the sort of personality we've seen in previous Ninja Bee games and the pokes at science fiction tropes are hilarious. The writing is quick and witty and just like A World of Keflings, it's very reverential to pop culture and loves to make fun (in a fun way) of the tenets of videogames. It Came From Space is a great excuse to pop A World of Keflings back in, no probes abo...er... doubt about it! |8