Bizarre but inventive freeware title
A beer mug might not seem the most obvious hero for a videogame, but that's exactly what you've got in Barstool Adventures, a fun and undemanding little platformer/action game that isn't exactly complex but which is well worth a look. Gameplay is pretty simple but is actually quite varied, with eight distinct levels that see your beer mug avatar battling against barflies, rats and other bar room annoyances. The first level for example requires you to sprint across a bar top (ignoring the fact that you have no legs), while collecting bottles and dodging your enemies, while the second involves the inexplicable collection of a hammer (what a beer mug wants to do with a hammer is intriguing) and the third sees you facing off against a nasty rodent with an attitude problem and who has a penchant for hurling things at you. The other levels continue in a similarly imaginative and slightly bonkers vein and which are certainly entertainingly silly and nicely diverse. Controls for each level are uniformly simple, requiring no more than a couple of seconds to pick up and involving little more than running and jumping with the arrow and shift keys, but which are suitably responsive. Given that this is a freeware title, the visuals are nothing spectacular but there is a certain degree of charm to them and it is certainly unusual to have a beer mug as the main character. Music however is surprisingly good, with some catchy and quite cool tracks to back up the action. Barstool Adventures is certainly no classic but it deserves to be played for its sheer strangeness and proves quite addictive.
