The Best One Button Collection Yet
Before I started reviewing the One Button Games collections, I downplayed the achievement of making these games. I think I got it into my head that PAC-Man was a one-button game, alongside Snake, Vampire Survivors and a few others. In those games, you tend to only use the analogue stick, or you could feasibly only use the stick.
But One-Button Games are strict about the definition: an analogue stick represents FOUR buttons at least – up, down, left and right. The games in their collections require one.
One Button Games 5-in-1 vol. 8 contains the fortieth game that follows this rule. Which, in our book, is something of an achievement. And to commemorate that achievement, ABA Games and m1s3ry have produced possibly their best compilation to date. Wahoo!
Pump Press – 4/5
When m1s3ry is at their best, they produce games that are elegant and easy to understand, but add small details that allow strategy to creep in. Pump Press is my poster-boy for that approach. If you want to know what makes these games special, play Pump Press.
On the face of it, Pump Press is a simple shmup. Little blocks that look like rhubarb and custard candies speed towards you in a single lane. Shoot them, and they turn into rings that you can zoom through. But you can also shoot them multiple times, creating a bigger ring. The size of the ring determines how far behind your spaceship they travel before they reverse course and start chasing you. Shoot them once, and they cuddle up close to your ship; shoot them three times and there’s every chance they will tumble off the back of the screen.
Here’s the clever bit: there are also rockets in between the enemies. Shoot these, and they destroy the chasing pack. It’s here where you get points, not from shooting the enemies initially. So, you need to build a peloton of opponents, and then fire an RPG into them. Keep your enemies close, but not TOO close. It’s clever and fab in equal measure.
Cast N – 3/5
The One Button Games 5-in-1 collections have a bit of an Achilles’ Heel, and that’s their commitment to simplicity. That even spreads to the tutorials, or the complete lack of them. That becomes a problem if the game isn’t immediately clear what it’s doing, which is where I found myself with Cast N. I had to read the Xbox Store to understand what was going on.
Cast N is a fishing game, and holding the A button will cast your line. The longer you hold it, the further the line goes. That line sinks as if it’s got a heavy lure attached, and it picks up any fish that are caught on the line, and not just the hook.
The complication is that – Crystal Maze-style – you are only meant to catch the blue fish, not the red ones. The more red fish you collect, the higher the water level reaches, and you can merrily drown yourself if you’re not paying attention.
A one-button fishing game feels like a no-brainer, and while Cast N doesn’t feel like a true fishing game – catching fish on the line feels initially odd – it has a more-ish effect. You just need to know what you’re doing first. Cast N isn’t particularly clear what it wants from you.
Hopping P – 3.5/5
Hopping P is pure chaos. It doesn’t let you master it, and it doesn’t put you in any state of flow (like Pump Press or Cast N does) – but it’s bonkers, and there’s a place for that.
In Hopping P, you are a circle on a pogo stick, bouncing about waywardly while X shapes on pogo sticks also bounce around. If you touch one of them, you explode, so it’s best to give them some distance. You will keep bouncing in one direction until you press the A button, which switches from left to right. You can do this mid-air, and it’s your only tool for avoiding spontaneous combustion.
Perhaps borrowing from PAC-Man, there’s also the titular Hopping P, which is giant and acts a bit like the yellow mouth’s power pill. Now you can eat all of the enemy X’s, getting a hefty score as you do.
It’s almost impossible to predict the trajectory of the Hopping P and the pogo-sticking X’s, particularly when you are bouncing yourself, so it becomes a chaotic free-for-all. You do the best you can, but mostly you are pogoing by the seat of your pants. Which, for a short period of time, is quite fun, actually.
Foot Laser – 3.5/5
It wouldn’t be a One Button Games 5-in-1 collection without an endless runner of some kind, and Foot Laser is that game. You’re legging it in one direction, and enemies are heading towards you. There are short ones, tall ones, and flying ones. Luckily, you have a beast of a jump, as you can tap A for a small jump, but you can also double-jump to get some serious air. And whenever you jump, you fire Iron Man-style repulsors from your feet which kills whatever you leapfrog over.
Foot Laser is a game about knowing which jump to use and when. If you double-jump over shorter enemies, then you might come back to ground too late and plough into a taller enemy. You need to make smaller jumps when seagulls fly overhead. It’s about reacting to the enemies ahead of you, and choosing your jumps accordingly.
Foot Laser loses a half mark because I’m not a fan of its ‘drop to ground’ system. You can double-tap A to almost instantly to drop yourself to the floor, which is handy for approaching seagulls. But I found it a finicky mechanic: I’d accidentally trigger it rather than a double-jump, and combinations of it and quickfire jumps are hard to pull off. It’s not the most elegant.
Lazer Fortress – 4/5
Last but not least is Laser Fortress, which I’m tempted to say is the best of the collection. It’s not particularly clever, but it’s a firehose of dopamine, and that’s often what you want from your one-button game.
Lazer Fortress makes you a completely over-powered laser. If your laser touches an enemy it dies immediately, and you don’t even have to aim: it’s a homing laser, because of course. So, little trains of enemies hurtle towards you, and you can just tap and hold the A button to toast them.
A little like Cast N, however, there are goodies mixed in with the baddies. You’re meant to kill the red creatures, but not the blue ones. Since your laser is a homing laser, and it will merrily home onto friends, you need to be careful when you trigger it. And that’s it: you need to be timing your button presses with the colour of the trains that approach you.
If it has a weakness, it’s that the power-balance is in your favour, which puts it on the easy side. I unlocked all the achievements for the game on my first go, which damaged the replay value. But I will be damned if I didn’t have a great time playing it.
A Consistent Collection
The peaks in One Button Games 5-in-1 vol. 8 aren’t necessarily as high as in other collections, but it has consistency in its place. Every game in this collection is worth playing, and there’s nary a complaint to be had about any of them.
As with other One Button Games 5-in-1 collections, there’s a lack of replay value – some games feel ‘done’ after ten minutes – but the few minutes you have with each game will be sweaty, panicked and fun.
Important Links
One Button Games 5-in-1 Vol. 8 Adds Five More Bite-Sized Challenges To Xbox And PC – https://www.thexboxhub.com/one-button-games-5-in-1-vol-8-adds-five-more-bite-sized-challenges-to-xbox-and-pc/
Buy from the Xbox Store, for Xbox Series X|S – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/one-button-games-5-in-1-vol-8/9pl9r3qrcqx6
Buy for Xbox One – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/one-button-games-5-in-1-vol-8-xbox-one/9n3nprmmvp8v
Buy for Windows PC – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/one-button-games-5-in-1-vol-8-windows/9p6d38mcjqxd
