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13 games released in 2008 and reviewed here, best first.
13 reviews
A two-person Hungarian studio's June 2008 Armor Games debut asked a simple question of the maze tower-defense format Desktop Tower Defense had just popularised — what if the upgrade path wasn't the tower, but a gem you could pull out, combine, and throw as a grenade — and built a persistent wizard-levelling meta-game around the answer that outlived Flash itself.
7.5 / 10
Bennett Foddy's 2008 ragdoll sprinting game reduces a 100-metre dash to four keys mapped directly onto muscle groups, and the resulting near-impossibility is the entire point — a joke about video game control schemes that outlived the punchline to become a genuine design influence.
7.5 / 10
A four-day joke about achievement bloat, built by Armor Games' first employee, that turned "do 100 arbitrary things to a blue elephant in one room" into a bigger hit than anything with actual level design that Armor Games shipped that month — and that got a real Steam re-release with real achievements fifteen years later, which is funnier than anything in the original script.
7 / 10
A one-man Flash arena brawler about hitting blobs with an oversized sword, saved from disposability by a 110-medal award system that turns every fight into a checklist worth chasing — and still running today, cleanly, in Ruffle.
7 / 10
John Cooney's 2008 Armor Games launcher sent a fictional nation's mascot hedgehog into space on a giant slingshot, added mid-air steering and an upgrade shop most toss games of the era didn't bother with, and became the template a string of later Flash launchers — including Learn to Fly a year on — visibly borrowed from.
7 / 10
A Flash puzzle-platformer where every spike, saw and falling safe is the goal instead of the hazard, built by Jesse Venbrux as the third entry in a franchise that started life as freeware on Windows a few months earlier — which means half of what looks like a fresh idea here is the series repeating its best tricks for a bigger portal audience.
7 / 10
A free 2008 Flash tower-defense-in-fatigues that lets you spend forty-odd options on bunkers, snipers and airstrikes — then punishes exactly the players who build the strongest defence with the German army's harshest possible response, wave after wave, forever.
7 / 10
A 2008 Armor Games release that took the lane-battler shape Age of War had just popularized and rebuilt it around actual WWI escalation — riflemen give way to gas, then tanks, on a schedule that mirrors the real war — while a patched-out tank exploit and a campaign with no branching keep it a well-drilled genre entry rather than a genre-definer.
7 / 10
A two-phase Newgrounds boss fight built as an in-joke about Tom Fulp's vow not to shave until The Behemoth finished Castle Crashers — a fan tribute by BoMToons, not a Fulp production, that turned out tight enough to be voted Newgrounds' game of the month anyway.
6.5 / 10
A three-week Newgrounds precision platformer from October 2008, built by one artist and one first-time Flash programmer, that quietly became the prototype for Super Meat Boy — and is worth judging on its own, rougher terms rather than as a footnote to the console game it grew into.
6.5 / 10
A June 2008 Box2D artillery puzzler that asks you to launch floppy stickmen at a "HERE" button in as few shots as possible — polished enough to spawn three numbered sequels, a remake and a level pack, but built on a golf-style scoring idea the game itself barely uses.
6.5 / 10
The third entry in one developer's own stick-figure siege series adds a 40-day campaign, hireable gunmen and a James Bond-themed cheat menu on top of the click-and-shoot base defense of Storm the House 2 — a competent, sometimes buggy refinement of a formula that never really changes shape, and one with no save button for a three-hour run.
6.5 / 10
A three-minute Newgrounds combo brawler from November 2008 that swaps Mario's jump-stomps for a fighting-game input scheme, wins on the strength of that one idea, and has nothing else to offer once the novelty of hitting Bowser wears off.
6 / 10