Introduction

Background

After playing “UFO 50” for over a year, on and off since it came out, I finally beated all 50 games in it.

I absolutely loved it! It’s probably up in my top 10 games of all time now.

If you didn’t know, “UFO 50” is fifty retro-style indie games, made by a very small team over ~8 years, and released all at once as one big collection in 2024. The games are for a fictional 1980s game console that never really existed.

Ever since I beat it, I’ve been pretty addicted to watching tier lists on youtube, of people’s opinions of the 50 games. And everyone else is wrong! So I couldn’t resist to try my own hand at making one, along with a written review for each game, ‘cuz I love the games and wanna talk about ’em more!

Criteria

My reviews will avoid describing the games, and get straight to my opinions and my editorial critique.

So, this is mainly meant for UFO 50 fans, not newcomers. (Although, I’m also trying to keep the game in the public consciousness so more people play it!)

Attributes of a “good” UFO 50 game, in my opinion, are SOME combination of: good aesthetics, good music, innovation of a genre, captures retro-gaming nostalgia, cuteness, deep strategy/skill, no tutorializing, has secrets or opportunities for discovery, great level design, not too short, doesn’t overstay its welcome, fulfills a core promise of some video game genre, etc.

I played the games in single player mode only, so this could affect my ranking.

I will try not to complain, if a game is too hard to get the “Cherry” (which is how you “super beat” a game and turn the cart cherry red). I don’t think the developers really intended you to “Cherry” every game unless you really like a particular game and want more replay value. I might complain a little, if a game is too hard to get the “Gold” cartridge (normal completion).

I’ma include at least one picture with each game.

Any Spoilers?

I will avoid spoiling games if they have mid-game twists or anything. And the pictures will be from early parts of the game.

Apparently there are some sort of “meta” secrets in UFO 50, but frankly, I know nothing about that, so I can’t spoil it!

The Tier Names

I’ll start with my least favorite game, and work my way up. Along the way I’ll group the games into the following “tiers”:

• SSS TIER (These would be in my top 100 favorite games ever, by themselves): 5 games
• S TIER (Masterpieces, these are everything I want in a video game): 13 games
• A TIER (I love it! Basically no complaints): 12 games
• B TIER (I like it, but with complaints): 11 games
• C TIER (Meh, I could take it or leave it): 4 games
• D TIER (I don’t like it, but I see some appeal): 4 games
• F TIER (I absolutely hate it, it’s a complete failure of a game): 1 game

As you can see, I really really like UFO 50!!! I dislike hardly any of the games. Keep that in mind as I roast the first few.

My Progress

Here’s my golds and cherries at the time I started writing this:

Although, by the time I finished writing this, I got the cherry in Campanella 2 as well.

Ok, let us beginning!!!

This is Part 1 of 3

I split this article into 3 parts, because of all the animated gifs. Didn’t want to have one big page with 10 megabytes of gifs.

You’re looking at part 1! It has my introduction, and my F Tier, D Tier, C Tier.

Part 2 is here. It has my B Tier and A Tier.

Part 3 is here. It has my S Tier and my SSS Tier.

F TIER (I absolutely hate it, it’s a complete failure of a game)

50 – Divers

[My Description: An underwater story-free JRPG, with turn-based random battles, that you can kinda avoid engaging in, while exploring.]

It’s really hard to find anything to enjoy about this game. I guess I like the main character’s animation as you swim around, and I like the atmospheric grid-based lighting effect. I also thought the final boss was an interesting tactical challenge (which is hard to pull off IMO in this genre).

But listen to these straight-up dealbreakers: No story? Basically no context/exposition? No music while you’re exploring? Insane design choices, for this genre!!! (Admittedly I don’t like this genre in the first place!)

Furthermore I don’t think the game’s design fundamentally works. I think the intent was, you explore a little further each day, returning to base before you die… (Because if you die, you lose all the experience points and items/money you found, since the last time you went to base!)

…However, when you’re exploring, you have no idea when you’re gonna run into an enemy that’s too hard for you that will quickly wipe you, wasting your progress. So this strongly encourages grinding as close to your home base as possible–literally the least fun thing! (And this strategy works–you can find various enemies to grind on, surprisingly close to base, that will get you to a very high level, reasonably fast).

Finally after a big grind, once you feel strong enough to explore the world, there really isn’t much to find or see! Just various crafting materials to bring back to the shop to buy better weapons.

And while exploring, you really don’t want to fight anything–because presumably you’re going to want to be strong enough for a boss, or, you want to simply find a switch or item, and then have enough HP to safely get back to base to save it. So…why fight anything? So exploring is just kinda playing a bad swimming game.

And oh no, big mistake: the turn-based battles focused on my least favorite combat trope: elemental weaknesses!!! Ugh. Every enemy has 1 element they’re weak to (out of 3). So basically just bring weapons that can cover each situation. Unless you have a specific enemy in mind you want to kill I guess, e.g. the last boss, or while grinding. Or just ignore the elements because they don’t really matter that much. In any case, there’s very little self-expression for the player.

The way I would improve this game is: remove the exp/levelling system, and remove the shop. Hide the upgrades in the world. That’s it. Now you have to EXPLORE to improve your character. And through your improved power, you can explore deeper and deeper.

I never found the “flippers” move-speed-increasing item, so take that into account for this rank.

D TIER (I don’t like it, but I see some appeal)

49 – CombatAnts

[My Description: A top-down real-time-strategy game, where you control one ant unit. You gather food to spawn more units. You can ask units to follow you, to help you fight, or carry more food.]

This is the most unpopular game in the pack, although I’ve heard that the game is intentionally bad for some reason, which seems plausible–a fictional 80s game console SHOULD have some bad games. So that’s kind of a charming concept, actually.

It’s pretty easy to see why it’s hated: the programming doesn’t really appear to be functioning correctly. The other ally/enemy units are clearly INTENDED to have a pathing system, to grab food and then head back to base… But often, they seem to meander in random directions, or just get stuck running into walls. There’s also a menu to send orders to other units, but most of the orders don’t seem to work, at least not in an intuitive way.

Have I mentioned the player’s unit has the slowest movement speed ever put in a video game?

Also, the game is unfairly hard, a great shortcut to frustration! Enemy units feel exactly TWICE as strong as your team’s units, and to make matters worse, in most missions, you’re outnumbered from the start, AND, the enemy bases are much closer to the food source objectives. It’s designed to be as unfair as possible.

And yet…every mission is beatable! And that in itself, is intriguing! And this is why I don’t 100% hate the game. A game THIS unfair, is an opportunity for players to get creative, and discover little tricks to get things done. Creativity is fun, and each mission completed, becomes a satisfying moment. They’re puzzles, not tactical missions.

That being said, it’s still not good. I would have preferred to play as an RTS, without resorting to little tricks, because it looks like it would have been pretty fun as a simple combat-oriented “area control” sort of thing, if it worked correctly.

The graphics are not great. If we’re going to be ants, maybe some more tiny recognizable objects to battle around, would be cute?? But no, it’s mostly just dirt and… green pellets? Huh? OK there are some cute objects on the world map, but none of the creatures there look at all like ants–what the heck are they??

48 – Quibble Race

[My Description: Gamble on tiny animals that race each other, based on limited information. You can also spend your money to try to affect race outcomes.]

It doesn’t really feel like something you would want to play by yourself. It’s only 10 minutes long, and winning mostly depends on luck. So as a single player game… if the objective is to win… just keep playing and guessing, until you eventually beat it?

It’d make a little more sense multiplayer, maybe as an in-person board game. But not great at that either, because there’s almost zero depth, maybe literally zero depth, it’s honestly hard to tell. You make a guess, and you’re either right or wrong. Who cares. I dunno, maybe I’m not smart enough?

And push-your-luck is one of my favorite board game genres, so it’s not a taste problem. I love risk management and stuff. I even love board games literally about betting on races, like “Camel Cup” and “Ready Set Bet”. But this is even simpler than those games (which are already extremely simple, as far as board games go!)

If more UFO 50 games were like this one, it would have been a disastrous disappointment. Thankfully this is a very odd one!

I do like the art, especially all the characters, and watching the races can be kinda funny–especially when a quibble performs very pitifully. There’s some decent comedy here, I’ll give it that.

On the road to 50 gold cartridges, I almost tricked myself into liking this game, just because of the feeling of relief it brought me, because it was such an easy+quick way to make my gold carts count go up by 1. I had to remind myself, that doesn’t mean I actually like it as a game.

47 – Mortol

[My Description: A platformer where you want to die as few times as possible, but the only way around most obstacles, is to strategically sacrifice your character, to permanently affect the level, and then respawn to continue onward.]

This is a very popular game in the pack, which makes this entry perhaps my most controversial. But I really do have a lot of problems with the game!

Fundamentally, it’s a pretty tedious idea, to me. Your first run through a level, you don’t have much hope of playing very optimally, so you’re gonna have to do it again and again, to keep finding optimizations, and memorize all those solutions. It’s literally repetitive! And while re-playing a stage, most mistakes you make lead to extra deaths, so even once you have all your solutions for the level memorized, you’ve gotta keep re-doing the whole level, until you execute your vision.

And these are not short levels! So that’s a lot of re-playing the same parts of the level over and over to get to that one part you keep messing up.

Furthermore, each obstacle is just not that interesting to me, to optimize a solution for. Like, OK, there’s a cliff I can’t jump up, so I gotta sacrifice myself to make stairs or a ladder. Who cares. (And ew I have to jump exactly the right height, so annoying.) Oh there’s a wall I need to explode. Who cares. Oh, I can explode WHILE killing two enemies, which helps award me an extra life. That’s just exhausting. (And again, I need to re-perform these same boring solutions every time I replay the level!)

The helicopter respawn system has a habit of undermining your solutions–because what often happens is, you sacrifice yourself to solve a problem, but then when you respawn and glide out of the helicopter, you’re able to just glide over the problem anyway, so it didn’t really matter how you sacrificed yourself, any death would have worked. Cheapens the experience a lot.

I also find the game very ugly. The color choices really clash for me, and there aren’t enough colors to go around. All the tiles are monochrome, all the enemies are monochrome, and all the player sprites are monochrome orange. Each one is boring, AND they don’t come together well. The background is ugly too. And all the levels look the same (until the last couple).

The last boss was bad.

To fix this game maybe I would have just split every level into 3 smaller levels. I guess the only downside is that it might be trivially easy, but if that’s true then the difficulty must only be coming from overcoming tedium. And I suppose I still probably wouldn’t love it I guess, fundamentally. Oh and make it prettier.

In the game’s defense, I didn’t go for the cherry completion, and maybe if I did, I might have discovered some really ingenious solutions that would have improved my opinion of the game. But still, I spent plenty of time with the game and didn’t really have that experience at all.

46 – Fist Hell

[My Description: A very difficult “beat-em up” game, with 5 levels, 4 characters, and infinite continues.]

I have to admit, this is probably my least favorite genre. I just don’t like the way hitboxes work in these games, it feels janky. Moving up/down to line yourself up with enemies just looks very ugly and janky to me. I also have trouble figuring out where the strategy or tactics are.

To make matters worse, I found this particular game to be astoundingly hard. I was stuck on level 2 for quite a while, and then HARDSTUCK on level 3 for hours, trying it over and over. I typically like the idea of a difficult game with infinite continues, so you can treat the level as a combat puzzle, and figure it out; but I was not figuring out the puzzle here, I felt I was playing very well, but tiny chip damage would eventually add up, and end me.

BUT THEN, I looked up guides to get combat hints, and that drastically improved things. Turns out, the really good spin-attack I was doing, was dealing damage to myself too! I never would have realized that. And if you stop your combo after 4 punches, wait, then start a new combo, then you can stunlock enemies until they die! Never woulda known that either. (I don’t think it’s very good that I had to look this stuff up!)

So the game became closer to reasonable–and each time I got stuck, I could actually find tricks to re-strategize and improve, and that was surprisingly fun. Kind of the good part of CombatAnts.

But then, that final level… ugh. It’s so long. And the final boss fight, is so hard. There are so many “adds”, you can’t possibly keep up, so you gotta focus the boss. And you can die in any short instant–and have to start the whole long level again. By the time I beat it, I had the whole level memorized, and could do the whole thing without getting hit, just to get trounced by the final boss fight, tediously.

So that miserable experience kinda soured me on the game again. At least in many NES combat-oriented stage-based games, if you get to a stage boss perfectly, they’ll give you like 3 full attempts at the boss, before sending you back to the start of the stage. That’s better.

You can find money and buy stat upgrades between stages, but this system doesn’t work well, your first time through–if you finish a stage, and didn’t find enough money in it for an upgrade, then the money is worthless, because you’ll definitely die at least once in the next stage and lose it all. This also means you might reach the final stage and have way worse stats than intended, but you’ll probably refuse to start over because you don’t want to re-do all those previous stages.

I do have to give the game big credit for the high variety of colorful environments, and fantastic sprites. LOVE the zombies, love the 4 main characters (OH I just realized Amy is from party house!). I definitely enjoy watching the game, a lot more than playing it!

Also I do respect Beat-em-ups a lot more now. So, props for that.

C TIER (Meh, I could take it or leave it)

45 – Waldorf’s Journey

[My Description: As a walrus, keep launching yourself from platform to platform, high in the sky, with limited control, to try to reach the end of this challenging randomly generated 1-stage game.]

My heart does like Waldorf’s Journey. It’s fun. But my mind keeps returning to this thought: It’s just a bunch of randomly placed platforms in the sky. That type of level design is just TOO simple, for the platformer genre. When people say they don’t like procedural generation in games, it’s because of un-inspiring levels like this!

There’s some stuff to give it credit for. There’s some resource management going on, with your flying-adjustment juice, and your shells currency, and your consumable items from the shop, and your extra lives (kinda). So there exists some elegant depth here, and some interesting decisions to make…

But the game is so short, you’re not really gonna be on the edge of your seat making those decisions–each run is only maybe 5 minutes long. It might be easier to get a win by ignoring most of that, and just playing fast, and keep flinging yourself as far as you can, and get more runs in; rather than playing slowly and strategically, and ending up making a mistake that ends your run anyway.

It just really doesn’t feel like a full-fledged game, it feels more like a web game, or a flash game, or a minigame, or a miniature challenge, which is not what I want UFO 50 to be–I want 50 full-fledged games that blow my mind.

I think I would rank the game higher, if it had 4 scenarios you progress through, each one harder than the last, with different biomes, adding new obstacles, or items, or gameplay rules. Until then, I’m just not impressed enough. Enjoyable! But not something to write home about.

44 – Block Koala

[My Description: A traditional top-down block-pushing puzzle game, with 50 designed puzzles, where numbers and symbols on the blocks affect how they can be pushed.]

I enjoyed my time with Block Koala, enough to complete all 50 puzzles, which got me the cherry.

The puzzles are well-designed, I can’t fault that. (There’s a weird difficulty spike in the 10-20 area or so, and then gets easier after that, that’s not a dealbreaker though!)

The aesthetics are fantastic. The pixel art of the levels and blocks are gorgeous, the UI is cute, and all the colors are very pleasing to the eye. If I had to imagine what an old block pusher might look like, it’d be exactly this (although I’m sure they never actually looked this perfect!). Although, I have to dock points because the aesthetics and music don’t change throughout the game, and it’s quite a long game.

The problem with Block Koala, is that the fundamental idea is TOO traditional. Block pushing is one of THE oldest, most common, most cliche types of video game puzzles. (At least it’s not Lights Out!). OK, yes, ALL of UFO 50 is steeped in tradition, true–but in most of the games, there’s an ingenious spin, or some “modern take” on that tradition.

But in Block Koala, I don’t feel that’s the case–they didn’t take much risk here, as far as I can tell. Yeah there’s the numbers/symbols on the blocks that you have to slowly deduce what they mean, over the course of multiple puzzles… but they don’t end up being that interesting. In fact maybe I’ve even seen numbers used like this before, in a random adventure game or something.

Does every game in UFO 50 have to be innovative, to be good? No.

But consider the long length of Block Koala, and also consider the number of recent innovative games in this exact genre. Do I really want to be doing 50 relatively tame Block Koala puzzes, when there are recent mega-innovative indie hits like Baba is You, Patrick’s Parabox, Stephen’s Sausage Roll, Jonathan Blow’s next game, and many others I could be playing instead? Not really. So I’d rather they pursued something else with Block Koala, than what we got.

43 – Big Bell Race

[My Description: A spaceship racing game, where each of the 8 races are many laps on a single-screen course. Press A to thrust upward, press left/right to move.]

This is only ranked so low because it is SOOOO small and short. 8 unique tracks is just not enough. The full game takes, what, 10 minutes? Maybe less. And it’s easy, so you’ll probly beat the game first try. Decent chance you 1st place every race and get the cherry too!

It’s ok for some games in this collection to be short, and it’s also ok for some to be easy. But for a game to be both? Doesn’t leave a lasting impression…

Would it really have taken much time, to add more courses? How about just 4 grand prixes, with 8 courses each? Each course is one screen, how hard could it be!! I just can’t forgive this.

The gameplay IS good though. The controls are exactly how I want them, and they’re intuitive and satisfying. Feels so good when you get knocked in a bad direction by another ship, but you somehow use that momentum to your advantage and swing perfectly around the next corner. The usable items are cool too. (But there aren’t many of them!)

Like Quibble Race, this is another one I thought I loved…until I realized, maybe I just loved seeing my gold (and cherry) cartridge counts go up, when I beat it so quickly.

I’ve seen someone else suggest, this should have been a multiplayer mode, WITHIN Campanella 1, and that would have been an awesome surprise hidden gem for people to discover! But as taking up one of the 50 game slots, it leaves me disappointed.

42 – Lords of Diskonia

[My Description: 10 campaigns, each campaign is several strategic battles, in which you and your opponent take turns flicking your circular “disk” units at each other, to deal damage via chain bounces and special unit-specific behaviors.]

It’s a good idea! Funny, cute, and extremely unique, haven’t really played anything like this, in video game form. I like board games with flicking, but they’re a bit janky, and usually one player is simply better at flicking so it’s not fair. So, a single player adventure version, is very appealing to me!

It reminds me of tactics RPGs, where units differ from each other, not only by offense and defense, but also by mobility and range, which for me adds a LOT of depth in choosing units (and is why I love tactics RPGs way more than standard turn-based-combat RPGs!).

They do a surprisingly good job of keeping things fresh, by adding new types of units in each successive campaign, with impressive new abilities. For example, I love the unit that can instantly take enemies to 1 HP, but is unable to kill them.

I think where the game disappoints me, is that the battlefields are pretty annoying. The obstacles in the battlefields are HUGE and obstacle-like. And the not-perfectly-top-down perspective makes angles confusing, so lining up bounce-shots (which SHOULD be fun) isn’t feasible enough. Also there’s way too many water hazards as the game progresses, which are ridiculously deadly, you don’t wanna be anywhere near them.

As a result, I feel very limited in my decisions in battle, I feel like usually there’s only 1 reasonable move to make, besides slightly tweaking my shot to improve the offensive chain reaction. Plus you can’t just select any of your disks, they pick 3 for you, and usually 2 of the ones they chose are in the back of your group or something annoying. And your own disks are so big you can’t ever really squeeze past them.

The “macro” stuff you’re doing in each campaign, between battles, is not great. It mostly makes each campaign longer than I’d like–each can be like 45-60 minutes and consist of several battles, and that’s a lot of Diskonia battles in one sitting. And there are 10 campaigns, I actually think that’s too many, the game overstays its welcome for sure (and that’s just for the Gold, not Cherry!).

The macro game DOES add interesting decisions to make, about which units to buy and when/where. And I especially like the “scrolls” you can collect, which let you choose a really good upgrade–a very juicy decision every time!

I vacillated a lot on putting this in B or C tier, but I’m settling on C tier because I don’t think I will ever play through this game again. Whereas all the games in B tier I definitely will.

That Was Part 1 of 3

You’re looking at part 1! It has my introduction, and my F Tier, D Tier, C Tier.

Part 2 is here. It has my B Tier and A Tier.

Part 3 is here. It has my S Tier and my SSS Tier.