Yokus Island Express Free Download GAMESPACK.NET

Yokus Island Express Free Download GAMESPACK.NET It’s safe to say that Yoku’s Island Express is the first pinball-Metroidvania game we’ve ever played. We sincerely hope it’s not the last. Swedish indie studio Villa Gorilla has produced an improbable mash-up that succeeds through an uncommon combination of charm and inventiveness. Beyond all that, though, it’s just brilliant fun to play. You play the part of Yoku, an adorable little beetle who washes up on the mystical island of Mokumana just as things start falling apart. The island’s lumbering god-figure has been attacked by a mysterious assailant, throwing its tribes into turmoil. Not only is Yoku tasked with filling the vacant postmaster role, but he also has to deliver the entire island from impending calamity. No pressure, then. Yoku can scamper to the left and right via the left Joy-Con stick, and interact with items and NPCs by pressing ‘A’. However, the bulk of your interaction comes through a ball that Yoku finds himself tethered to early on. Mokumana island is a compact yet diverse place filled with dense jungle, chilly peaks, arid deserts and gloomy caves. However, the entire island is saturated with pinball paraphernalia. TOP/BEST ADULT VIDEO GAMES IN UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA)

: The game features an open world that players can explore at their own pace. There are various areas to discover, secrets to uncover, and puzzles to solve.

There are flippers that help you get to higher ground (activated with the shoulder buttons), bumpers that flick you off at an angle, and rails that loop up and around to new areas. The pinball influence goes further than mere traversal mechanics, with each instance of what you might call a dungeon – where all of the game’s key puzzles, trials and bosses are contained – essentially playing out like a fully-fledged pinball table. There are targets to hit, sequential switches to flip, slots to land in, and loads of bonus fruit currency to collect. It sounds like an unusual mix of ingredients, for sure, but it somehow never feels contrived. At no point did we wish we were playing a more conventional Metroidvania with regular 2D platformer controls. Besides the pinball physics being really well executed, there’s a distinct lack of compromise here. All the key attributes of a Super Metroid-inspired game are present and accounted for. Yoku’s Island Express isn’t a particularly vast game, but exploration and discovery are at its heart. Heading to your next location on the map, you’ll invariably encounter several tantalising distractions with the potential to divert your attention.

What’s brown and sounds like a bell?

Whether that’s a secret room, a curious new character, a goody-filled treasure chest or one of the game’s many collectable knick-knacks, your curiosity is always rewarded. Indeed, like all the best Metroidvania games, it’s possible to approach many of its main tasks in an order of your choosing. Where you are forced to do things in a certain sequence, it’s because you’ll need to have acquired a particular new ability in order to progress past a certain barrier. Sound familiar? It would be a crime to spoil any of the game’s surprises, suffice to say that Yuku’s steadily increasing abilities are a delight to discover and utilise. It’s a small roster, but each new piece of equipment is put to thorough use across the map – especially if you have a completionist streak in you. We’ve hinted at it already, but the thing that really knits the game’s disparate elements together, and that stays with you in between playing sessions, is the beauty of its world. Mokumana has a gorgeous hand-painted feel to it, while its animalistic denizens are a wonderful mish-mash of shapes and sizes. It feels like some fantasy collaboration between Jim Henson and Studio Ghibli, with a little Pikmin magic stirred in. Fallen Doll Operation Lovecraft

Yokus Island Express Free Download GAMESPACK.NET

The sound design is also tip top. Each creature has their own distinctive babble, which cuts through a background of gentle birdsong, pitter-pattering rain, or the harsh winds of an exposed mountainside. Accompanying all of this is a range of memorable analogue ditties, which we guarantee will find their way into your head at various points throughout the week. We should note that Yoku’s Island Express is far from flawless. The game’s map screen isn’t particularly great, for one thing. Sure, it looks lovely, but it offers two less-than-optimal zoom levels, with the furthest being nigh-on useless in portable mode. This map screen doesn’t label any of its locations either, which can leave you confused as to where you’re supposed to be headed when the game occasionally communicates your next location verbally. Where exactly is the obtainium mine, again? Indeed, the biggest points of frustration in Yoku’s Island Express come with getting about the world. There’s a very handy (and highly entertaining) shortcut system that slowly unfurls, but figuring out exactly how to get from A to B in the early to mid-game stretch can feel like groping around in the dark.

A closed-loop open world

It can especially grate on the odd occasion that you find yourself drawn back into an extended pinball section that you’ve already encountered. You’re often not quite sure whether you’re wasting your time in an area. Some of the game’s collectible traversal mechanisms – a manual swing system and an explosive-retrieval system in particular – feel like they needed a little more fine-tuning, too. The amazing thing is that none of these flaws really matter in the final reckoning. There’s just so much love and skill and charm on display here that complaining about a few navigation issues seems churlish. After the credits roll, all you’ll be left with is a warm sense of satisfaction and a strong desire to experience your second pinball-Metroidvania game as soon as possible. To be honest, we’re not sure whether Yoku’s Island Express even cracks the top 10 of weird video game ideas; not when games like Seaman and Katamari Damacy already exist. The latter comes to mind not just because we’re looking forward to meeting its creator at E3 next month (he’s got a new game out soon called Wattam) but because it was also inspired by dung beetles. Fallen Knight Switch NSP

Yoku’s Island Express has a colorful and charming art style that brings the world to life. The game is set on a tropical island and features a variety of environments, from beaches to jungles.

Although in Yoku’s Island Express you actually are a little insect, one who inadvertently gets made a postman and is forced to take part in one of the most charmingly inventive games of the year. Whenever we encounter a really strange game we can’t help but wonder exactly how the idea ever occurred to the developer. We assume this must have had something to do with a pinball machine and a holiday on a tropical island, although the list of other elements and influences seem so random perhaps it was just a good old-fashioned fever dream. Either way, as soon as you wash up on the island the outgoing postman (a pterodactyl, for some reason) gives you your first delivery and nothing else in the way of instruction or explanation. You’re left to discover that the ground is peppered with pinball flippers and bumpers, and that actually the whole island is designed very much like a Metroidvania game. Like we said, it’s an odd mixture but it totally works. Thankfully Yoku doesn’t push around an actual ball of dung but his attachment to it still works in a similar manner, as he clings to it while getting hit by pinball flippers or knocked around by bumpers.

Freedom to choose your own path across multiple questlines.

Yoku can’t jump though, so all vertical movement is purely down to your pinball skills. As you might imagine, you activate the pinball flippers with the shoulder buttons and the clever level design means it’s usually very easy to get back to them if you mistime a jump and need to try again. The game divides itself between open world exploration and more constrained pinball areas, although the mechanics remain the same throughout. Most of the tasks you’re asked to complete for the island’s inhabitants are essentially just fetch quests, but that doesn’t really matter because it’s almost always how you get to where you’re going that’s the issue and not what you do when you get there. Even though you can’t jump the game is still a platformer at heart and the level design throughout is exceptionally clever, especially given all the hidden shortcuts and secrets. Since this is a Metroidvania many of these are inaccessible at the start of the game, even though you can theoretically go wherever you want, and so you slowly gain a set of additional abilities to do things like blow up boulders or swim underwater. Falling Out Switch NSP

Yokus Island Express Free Download GAMESPACK.NET

The pinball areas work like little mini-tables, complete with features and lights to activate, multiple lanes, bumpers, spinners, and collectibles. A lot of the time they’re used as a way to unlock a new part of the island, requiring you to hit gems in order to open exits and the like, and sometimes they’re essentially boss battles that have you batting around multiple balls at once. No individual table is as complicated as a dedicated pinball game but the same skills are still needed and rewarded thanks to a very convincing physics system. And if you’re really bad at pinball you still have the safety net of Yoku to rely on, as even when you’re just concentrating on flipping the ball about you can still move it around manually as well. Like any Metroidvania there is a certain amount of backtracking to the game, which can be a problem when it involves having to repeat a table just to move back to a previous area. There are plenty of shortcuts around the island though and while it takes some time to get the fast travel system up and running it’s so amusingly cute you can see why it was being held back as a special reward.

While the video game seems to have scoured all horizons for the last decades, we are sometimes still surprised by absurd ideas coming from more free spirits than the average. Some of these concepts die in the bud, while others offer us a fresh and unique experience that we taste with pleasure. Yoku’s Island Express clearly falls into this second category. In Yoku’s Island Express, you play as a postman dung beetle who must save a fantasy island in a mix of Metroidvania and pinball. In one sentence, you have surely understood that the title of the Swedish studio Villa Gorilla intended to be original. Immediately, we discover a singular universe, populated by cute and strange creatures transposed to the screen by an artistic direction close to the tale. It’s soft and sweet in all circumstances, with a few onomatopoeias to accompany the dialogues. The images speaking for themselves, let’s focus on the gameplay instead.

ADD ONS/PATCHES AND DLC’S: Yokus Island Express