Weekend Price Drops: I’ll Buy That For A Dollar Edition

Faster, Pussycat.

What is a mobile video game worth? Quite a lot, say Square Enix, who are stubbornly sticking to their gunblades on mobile game pricing strategy. Their iOS port of PS2 JRPG Dragon Quest VIII launched back in May at the price of $20 — it’s on sale this weekend for the very first time at $15, still a vertigo-inducing price tag by App Store standards. It’s tempting to look at Squeenix and see a doddery old man complaining that kids these days listen to their music too loud and expect their games to cost a dollar.

Cas Prince of PC game developers Puppygames recently wrote that game prices are dropping so precipitously that the rich and diverse ecosystem of game creators we’ve come to enjoy is in danger. That long post includes apparently self-immolating statements like “[customers] are worthless to us[.]” But hear him out.

“Once upon a time, back in the early 2000s or so, games would sell for about $20 or so. Some developers did really well at that price point -– I mean really well. Most of us didn’t do that well, and made beer money, but we carried on making games anyway because that’s what we liked to do, even if nobody wanted them. When we got a customer we were able to treat them like royalty.”

“Then came the Humble Bundle and all its little imitators. It was another cataclysmically disruptive event… You’ve sold 40,000 games! But you’ve only made enough money to survive full-time for two weeks because you’re selling them for 10 cents each.”

Obviously, Prince is talking about one- and two-man indie studios here, not publishing behemoths like Squeenix. And casting Squeenix as the defender of the “premium”-priced game is problematic when the other fork of their mobile games strategy is pushing free-to-play bilge. But at least Square Enix have resisted the temptation to rip out Dragon Quest’s spine and turn it into a freemium cyborg like Namco did with Tales of Phantasia.

I wonder sometimes about publishing this (mostly) weekly price drops post. Am I aiding the forces pushing game prices down? I love getting a game for a dollar as much as the next guy, but many of the games I love can’t be sold profitably at a price point that low. I don’t know. I’ll keep doing it out of inertia for now, but I’m open to the notion that there’s something better to be doing on Saturdays.

Right, so… Dragon Quest VIII. Originally released for PS2 way back in 2005, it’s widely considered one of the best JRPGs of its generation and is so stuffed with content that you could conceivably start playing today and ride side-quests straight into 2015. We didn’t review it here, but Kill Screen‘s Erik Fredner was of the opinion that the gameplay hadn’t aged very well. Your mileage will vary based on your appreciation for JRPG grinding.

Dragon Quest VIII is on sale for $15 and it’s a Universal app.

The beautiful, hypnotic surreal puzzle game 2 Dreams is free this weekend — it’s a creation of Marcel-André Casasola Merkle, who designed the Coding Monkeys’ Rules. If you enjoyed last year’s Puzzle Game of the Year runner-up Device 6, you should give this a shot.

2 Dreams is gratis, iOS Universal.

You can now find out for free if our first impressions of the iOS port of medieval RTS Stronghold 3 were on the money. Judging from the abysmal user reviews, I figure they were. But it will only cost you precious, precious time on this mortal coil to find out this weekend. Stronghold 3 is iPad-only.

Terry Cavanaugh’s instant classic lo-fi indie platformer VVVVVV (is that the right number of Vs?) is on sale for a dollar. This would be the man’s definitive game if it weren’t for Super Hexagon. VVVVVVVV is iOS Universal.

I never got around to trying the beautifully designed puzzle game Strata when it came out last September, but I intend to remedy that this weekend. You layer ribbons atop one another to match a given pattern, which sounds soporifically relaxing. On sale for one dollar.

Pocket Tactics’ Games of the Month: August 2014

They’re big-boned.

Once a month, the PT staff gather around the Official Pocket Tactics Ouija Board and Comcast Customer Service Help Line and (after making the traditional offerings of ASL chits and Vimto) commune with the animistic spirits of the App Store to divine their favourite games of that lunar cycle. This past August, the rituals were particularly draining: not only were there a slew of important releases to choose from, but the App Store spirits kept erroneously rejecting our submission. After the jump, Pocket Tactics‘ favourite games of August.

Rules

Review: Rules Rules rules. I have become hypnotized by unicorns and spacemen and little bugeyed monsters. Sometimes my brain rebels, shuts down and refuses to remember what the color green looks like. It decides it would not like any more rules thank you very much and goes on strike. But soon I will purge it of its anarchist tendencies, leaving only Rules. I have seen 53 levels so far, but I am determined to go further. Tapping tiles until there are no more edicts left to learn. I must know the rules. I must obey the rules. I must become the rules.

–Jacob Tierney

Heroes of the Revolution

Review: Heroes of the Revolution Heroes of the Revolution isn’t the best wargame on the App Store by a good stretch (that’s still Panzer Corps by my reckoning) and I cataloged its shortcomings in my review: an unbalanced endgame andslightly tedious animations chief among them. But who cares? Heroes’ Cuban Revolution setting is totally fresh for digital hex-stompers, and there’s some genuinely clever ideas in the gameplay. And I bet you’ve never played a wargame with a Latin guitar soundtrack before. Somewhere in the foothills of the Sierra Maestra, developers GamerNationX are planning their next coup. I can’t wait to see it.

–Owen Faraday

Star Realms

Review: Star Realms One card game managed to knock Hearthstone (yes, I mentioned it again) out of the lead for me in August: Star Realms. While not a perfect implementation on iPad, the game still works and works good enough to play and play and play. The solo campaign gets silly hard, the online multiplayer games are great, and it’s a simple enough game that I’ve been packing in tons of pass-and-play with the kids. Star Realms is proof that a great game can survive a suboptimal port, and it’s destined to stay on my ipad for a long time. Well, at least until Galaxy Trucker, Sentinels, Pathfinder, or 7 Wonders arrives.

–Dave Neumann

80 Days

Review: 80 Days Well, it has to be 80 Days now doesn’t it? Not just because it’s an adventure game about, and paced just as well as, a good race. Not only because it’s sharply written, yet doesn’t feel the impulse to inundate the player with as much of that clever writing as possible (rather, you choose how much story you want, weighing nighttime Berlin strolls and political activism against suitcase-packing and hunts for a decent shaving kit). And not simply because it has the most delightful way of derailing one’s plans in the final quarter of a journey (inevitably in the Americas, for me). No, I adore 80 Days in large part because when I play it in front of other people, they want to watch. Choosing a Trans-Siberian route over airships from Rome feels like picking out a particularly good episode of a cult TV show to impress friends with. Maybe a bit selfish, but hell, I like having some validation every time I mutter a defiant “prick” at Phileas Fogg and his damned prickish–and damned lovely–journey.

–Sean Clancy

Catchup

Holla, ain’t no stoppin me

Review: Catchup I know I ought to appreciate abstracts, but what I most enjoy in a game is the use of elegant systems to convey a theme. The greater the ratio of fidelity to a complex system to rules overhead, the better I tend to like a design. Catchup doesn’t even attempt to satisfy my strongest gaming craving, and yet I feel excitement every time I see the badge saying it’s my turn in a game. It’s like rediscovering excellent vanilla ice cream after years of trying all sorts of tarted-up frozen confections. It’s such pure gaming goodness, without dissonance or unpleasantness of any kind. In this analogy, I’m pretty sure Blood Bowl is Rocky Road.

–Kelsey Rinella

I got pig iron, I got all pig iron: Steam coming to tablets next year

I got cows, I got pigs, I got sheep, I got mules, I got all live stock [Image by John Moller]

Martin Wallace is one of those board game designers who’s work is criminally underrepresented in the digital medium. Sure, you can play Brass in a browser (and it works great), but where are the native apps of his other classic board games? Why can’t I play Automobile, Tinner’s Trail or Liberté? More importantly, where is his magnum opus Age of Steam or its slightly streamlined cousin Steam?

The answer is over at iOS Board Games where they’ve snagged an interview with Alex Yeager of Mayfair Games indicating that Steam is coming next spring/summer to tablets, presumably both iPad and Android.

Steam is a pick up and deliver game in which players must build networks of rails between cities and then deliver cubes from one city to another. The trick comes in supplying cities with goods that they actually want and having both a rail system and locomotives that are capable of delivering each good. Make no mistake: Steam is beefy. It will be the heaviest euro game available for digital, surpassing even the robust Agricola in terms of complexity. That said, it’s also incredibly rewarding and one of my favorite board games ever.

Check out the interview with Alex Yeager of Mayfair Games after the break.

Papers, spasiba: ALFA-ARKIV is a document thriller unlike any other

Death is not the end in Carcosa.

We didn’t talk about ALFA-ARKIV when it came out a couple of weeks ago because I had seen a few screenshots and, frankly, I couldn’t quite figure out what it was supposed to. Now I’ve played it, and I still don’t quite think I know. But I am deeply intrigued by it.

I’ve sunk about 45 minutes into this thing, and I don’t want to make any judgements about its quality yet. Hell, I don’t know if it’s a game. In ALFA-ARKIV you’re a hacker who’s stumbled across the document drop of a Chilean revolutionary who’s trying to unravel a mystery about the lone survivor (and purported accomplice in) an Islamic extremist suicide bombing in a Russian puppet state. Who is she, and why did she survive?

The gameplay, such as it is, consists of poring over the documents in the cache, looking for clues that you can relate the AI-controlled people you meet in the in-game chat. Sometimes you’re looking at official police incident reports, sometimes hand-scawled diary entires, and occasionally videos: surveillance of suspects and propaganda reels from ISIS-like mujahideen. The production is slick and ALFA is trying hard to cast a convincing spell. The app acts like a new OS for your device, trying (like Republique did) to present you with a plausible portal to this game’s universe from your couch.

This is not a game to be played on a coffee break or while waiting for an elevator. It’s as demanding of your attention as an interactive fiction game like 80 Days. I can’t say yet how interactive it is, though — maybe there’s some puzzles waiting beyond the point where I jacked out — but I do know that ALFA-ARKIV is a absolutely unique experience. It’s not remotely afraid to tangle with touchy contemporary issues like surveillance and Islamic extremism. How insightful it is on those matters I don’t know just yet. But it’s got moxie for even attempting.

ALFA-ARKIV is iPad-only and it’s free to try; there’s an IAP to unlock the whole game after an introductory segment. Watch the trailer below.

Not just another Mötley Crüe tribute band: Heavy Metal Thunder coming to iOS next week

You had me at Mr. Wiggles

As a teenager, I dealt with my insecurities and troubles the way most teenagers in the 80′s did, I grew a spectacular mullet. This has absolutely nothing to do with Heavy Metal Thunder, the new app from Cubus Games, even though it sounds like it should. Seriously, Heavy Metal Thunder sounds like a terrible set you’d see at the county fair, headlined by Warrant or Faster Pussycat. That said, I did have a pretty awesome mullet.

Instead of a app that lets you hire a one-armed drummer or replace your lead singer with a pale imitation who only got the job because he can’t drive 55, Heavy Metal Thunder is a sci-fi adventure that puts you in charge of repelling an incoming alien invasion. After saying it out loud, I guess the whole sci-fi thing does sound a lot better, especially since Heavy Metal Thunder is interactive fiction in the same vein as the gamebooks from Tin Man Games or inkle. Honestly, the screens and trailer for this one look a lot closer to Tin Man’s take on digital IF.

Heavy Metal Thunder releases on September 3rd, so we can probably expect it next Wednesday night. I’ll be spending the weekend playing the hell out of this one, so I should have a review ready at launch.

Trailer after the break.

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Smart me up: Smarter Than You releasing on Sept. 25

Never get involved in a land war in Asia

Everyone here at Pocket Tactics should be familiar with Luca Redwood’s work. Not only did his last game, 10000000, win puzzle game of the year back in 2012, but the rogue AI, M.E.T.I.S., from his latest game and set forth a challenge that the readers of Pocket Tactics blew apart.

Well, the game that spawned M.E.T.I.S., Smarter Than You, is slated to hit the App Store on September 25.

Smarter Than You is asynchronous Rock, Paper, Scissors which involves lying, bluffing and basically doing your best Vizzini impression except you’re doing it against people all over the world whom your never actually met. If that’s not enough, Luca’s added a crazy monetization scheme that involves giving tips to other players who you enjoyed playing against. Somehow, Luca gets a cut. Or something. Even he’s not quite sure if it’s going to work. Otherwise the game will be free to play. Yes, it’s a free-to-play, social game and I can’t wait to try it out. What’s happening?

Trailer after the break. See you on September 25th. Or, maybe I won’t. Or maybe that’s just what I want you to think.

Out Tonight: The Nightmare Cooperative, Appointment with F.E.A.R., Bioshock, Tiny Tower Vegas, and more

I knew I was over-dressed.

From the Pocket Tactics New Release Assessment Centre and Horse Racing Tip Emporium high atop Mount Hexmap, the report has just arrived via PT HQ’s elaborate pneumatic tube messaging system: it’s a pretty decent Wednesday night. Also I have some hot horses for tomorrow’s 4 o’clock at Saratoga. Email me about those.

There’s three ports you’re going to want to investigate: two from other gaming platforms, and one from the pulpy world of books. But there’s also more made-for-mobile games that may catch your fancy. A lot of lighter stuff this week, but interesting. Trailers and chat after the jump.

We’ve been waiting for Lucky Frame’s The Nightmare Cooperative since we first learned it was coming over from PC back in July. The makers of the unique music-making tower defense Bad Hotel have created a fantasy tactical puzzler that borrows its movement philosophy from Threes. Clancy is slaving away in the PT writers’ dungeon on a review as you read this.

The Nightmare Cooperative will be $3 when it releases tonight at midnight where you are, or 11pm Eastern in the US of A. It’s an iOS Universal app and I strongly encourage you to watch this droll trailer for it.

Appointment with F.E.A.R. is the next gamebook from the reliable Tin Man Games, makers of the Fighting Fantasy series of mobile interactive fiction titles. Based on a Steve Jackson book from 1985, you’ll be squeezing into the leotard of one of Titan City’s costumed superheroes to defeat an array of villains. A few weeks ago I talked to Tin Man’s Neil Rennison about this game, which he calls Tin Man’s most ambitious release yet — that interview will be right here tomorrow.

Appointment with F.E.A.R. is out right this very second worldwide for three dollars on iOS – it should be out on Android soon.

I’m not holding out a huge amount of hope for 2K’s iOS port of the instant-classic shooter Bioshock, not because I doubt the quality of the port, but simply because I’m fairly sure a game like this isn’t going to control well on a glass touchscreen — something I groused about at length a couple of weeks ago. I’d love to be wrong, but as long-time readers can attest, I AM NEVER WRONG. Except that one time about the Mayan Calendar but we’re all glad about that, aren’t we? Exactly.

Bioshock is going to be $17 when it drops later as an iOS Universal app. I’m told it will be 1.65 GB installed, so start deleting cat photos if you want this. 2K is also advising that you’ll need a pretty muscular device: iPad 4th gen/iPad Mini 2nd gen or newer, or iPhone 5 or newer.

The literally dreamlike Back to Bed is a surreal puzzler that appears to be smoking similar hallucinogens as this year’s breakout hit Monument Valley — we first spotted it in April. I think I might even prefer the Dali-style look of this one, as a matter of fact. It was included in the student showcase at the IGF in 2013.

Back to Bed is out at midnight and it’s four dollars. iOS Universal.

Moms and dads might want to check out Turret Alert, which is based on Oh No! It’s An Alien Invasion, a children’s show of which the Faraday nieces are fond. It’s an arcade shooter made by Nelvana, which PT readers closer to my age might remember as the producers of the Care Bears and the notorious Star Wars Holiday Special. How things change.

Turret Alert is two bucks and it’s out right now. No IAPs in this one so you can leave it with the young ‘ins and not fear for your wallet.

Almightree is a 3D puzzle platformer from prolific publishers Crescent Moon that looks to me like Q-Bert meets the Legend of Zelda, which sounds like a combination that’s 20 years overdue. The publishers of Ravensword tell us that there’s over 100 puzzles in this thing.

Almightree is two bucks later tonight. iOS Universal.

Tiny Tower Vegas is the latest offering from Nimblebit, the makers of too-pleasant-to-hate F2P time wasters like Pocket Planes and Disco Zoo. I’ve played it a little and I can tell you that it’s every bit as polished and charming as all of Nimblebit’s previous stuff. Imagine a challenge-free Yoot Tower that takes itself not remotely seriously and you know what you’re getting into. This kind of game isn’t in PT‘s wheelhouse but I find Nimblebit’s stuff incredibly soothing, actually.

Tiny Tower Vegas is free, of course. Out later tonight and it’s iOS Universal with a cloud saving system that links your phone’s tower to your iPad’s.

https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/tiny-tower-vegas/id871899103?mt=8

Holding out for a hero: Sentinels of The Multiverse gameplay revealed

The greatest super-power of all? Getting rid of fiddliness. [Image by Grant Holzhauer]

Sentinels of the Multiverse is a comic book that tells stories of super-villains, each with their own dastardly plot, and the small group of heroes who ensure they don’t succeed. The difference between Sentinels and other comics is that Sentinels isn’t a comic book, but a game played entirely with cards. Even so, what you take away from a good game of Sentinels isn’t the mechanisms of the game, but the stories that it creates. For example, there was that time Omnitron killed off The Wraith and Legacy but Ra managed to defeat him on the last turn, just before succumbing to death himself. Or the time that Haka and Bunker were about to kill Baron Blade, but the evil Baron managed to build another Mobile Defense Platform just in time to save himself and, in turn, knock the heroes out of the fight.

Every game of Sentinels has stories like these buried in it, if you’re willing to look past the individual cards and see the narrative that the card combinations can create.

We’ve known about the digital port of Sentinels from Handelabra Games for over a year now, but until Gen Con we hadn’t actually seen any real gameplay. Sure, there were glimpses of the interface and some environment graphics thrown at us, but nothing really meaty. That all ended last week, when Handelabra revealed a trailer showing the game in action. I had the pleasure of playing the game while at Gen Con and I wasn’t disappointed. In fact, I cannot wait to play some solo games while running 3-4 heroes. I play that way quite a bit at home but, even with Handelabra’s Sentinels Sidekick app, keeping control of all those heroes and the villain by yourself can be a bit overwhelming. On a tablet? Dreamy.

After the break, take a look at some gameplay for yourselves. Sentinels of the Multiverse is expected this Fall for both iPad and Android tablets.

Renewed offensive: Open Panzer update adds new scenarios and Android edition

Hiss tanks.

You might think you love Panzer General, but I promise that you don’t love Panzer General as much as Nicu Pavel does, who has been working on his free open source remake of SSI’s PC strategy classic for over two years now. In some cultures, Pavel is now legally married to Panzer General.

Back in January, Pavel brought the web-based Open Panzer to iOS, but this week has arrived for Android devices. “It’s also available on Google Chrome and FireFox OS,” Pavel told me, “but I don’t think it matters for many.” Nope, I don’t think it does either. What about Chumby, though?

Given its HTML 5 roots, Open Panzer doesn’t feel quite like a native app, but Pavel has stuffed it with content like a Zimmerit-covered Thanksgiving turkey. There’s a ton of campaigns in this turn-based operational level wargame, including the just-added “Great Patriotic War 1942-1945″ (Soviet side, 20 scenarios) and “Das Reich (1939-1945)” (Germans, 32 scenarios). It’s not as nice to look at or touch as Slitherine’s Panzer Corps for iPad, but you can’t beat the price.

Pavel’s planning his next update already: Open Panzer 3.0 will be ticking with a new AI and a new weather modelling system.

Halting probability: This is what Out There Omega Edition will look like

Now even more full of stars.

Gallic indie gaming hero Michael Peiffert sends across the above screenshot of the forthcoming Omega Edition of his extraordinary space exploration adventure Out There, and gosh that is pretty. The Omega Edition was announced back in July and will deliver an entirely new engine and expanded content to the game sometime later this year.

That screenshot “shows perfectly the direction I’m taking for the graphics improvement,” Peiffert told me. “Light use of 3D and lighting effects with hand-painted and much more detailed textures.” This will surely be 2014′s most-guilded lily, as Out There was already one of the most visually impressive games in memory. No word if the new engine will enhance the game’s suffocating sense of loneliness or induce a deeper sense of wonder, but the French have that technology, you know.

Read my review of the game from February to learn more if Out There passed you by earlier this year. Still no hard-set release date for the update (which will be free to existing owners of the game on iOS and Android) but it smells close.

Flat Earth society: Gameplay video of SettleForge, an original iOS board game

Hexes from heaven.

You have never played an empire-building game that takes its genre quite as literally as SettleForge does. This game is Carcassonne as played by the Olympian gods: it’s a solitaire digital board game where you create a kingdom one tile at a time, trying to place tiles that synergize to win the trust of your people.

Developer Andreas Mank told me last week that this is his first original design, but he’s worked in the games industry for some time; his portfolio includes work on Jowood’s PC fantasy RPG Spellforce 2. I played a preview build over the weekend and the game is still pretty rough and full of placeholders (plus the in-game text is a mix of English and German and my Deutsch is nicht so gut) but it already sports what is quite possibly the most beautiful art I’ve seen this year.

At the start of each game, you’re given three missions from your populace (pretty presumptuous of them to drop a to-do list on the guy who’s busy creating the bloody universe) which you fulfill by placing tiles in the right places — hunters need forests to stalk around in, miners need mountains, and so on. Not all tiles can live happily together and some more advanced tiles require prerequisite links to be present — you can’t have a jeweller without working diamond mines and metal smiths. Most of all, you have to be strategic about your placements so as to not paint yourself into a celestial corner.

SettleForge has been in development for three years and will ship this winter for iPad, the devs hope, and it’s going to be a proper game. “We hate in app purchases and we decided to create a game that we love to play ourselves,” Mank told me. Righteous.

Watch a gameplay video after the jump, and remember — this is a work in progress. You can follow SettleForge on Facebook for more frequent updates.

Crank up the quality on this one — it’s a little blurry by default.

Charlie does surf: Vietnam ’65 submitted to Apple

I was trying to make a statement about the duality of man, sir.

I’m no Nate Silver, but I do know that two data points isn’t sufficient to declare a trend. But I sure hope that the twin occurrences of Heroes of the Revolution and the forthcoming Vietnam ’65 are the harbingers of a wave of in mobile wargames in non-traditional settings. I love WWII, man (I’m writing this while wearing my Carl Spaatz spats and the room is lit with my Operation Torch torch) but I’m dying for for some non-European hexes to stomp.

The devs behind Vietnam ’65 kindly wrote in to tell us that their turn-based iPad game has been submitted to Apple and is due out in the next couple of weeks — you might remember it from when Neumann wrote about it here in April.

It’s not just the setting that has me interested in Vietnam ’65 — it’s also the unique-sounding gameplay. Playing as the US Army’s 1st Air Cav, your job isn’t just to militarily defeat the North Vietnamese Army, but to ensure that the local villages don’t turn against you. If you don’t keep the NVA away from civilians, you’ll start to lose the hearts and minds of the people in your area of operations, which will give the Viet Cong guerrillas a foothold on the map. It sounds like it could be a counterpart of 1950s Cuba wargame Heroes of the Revolution (which I reviewed a couple of weeks back) where you played the guerillas.

I’ll let you know when this one launches, but until then there’s gameplay video and screenshots below.

The lay of the land.

This dry cleaner at the PX uses way too much starch.

Holiday re-run: Winning Blimp tell us about Stratolith their unabashedly analog RTS

PT ‘s off today for the summer bank holiday in the UK. This feature, which reveals the inner workings of  Winning Blimp’s still-forthcoming iPad RTS Stratolith originally ran on March 24th of this year.

The time has come to push the button.

A couple of weeks ago we saw the trailer for Stratolith for the first time. What grabbed me right away about Winning Blimp’s forthcoming iOS & desktop game was how much effort had obviously gone into the game’s presentation. A third of the screen is taken up by a big skeuomorphic control panel that would feel right at home in the worn-in blue collar sci-fi universe of Alien. You can’t ask for nicer window dressing for a game.

“Actually,” developer Bear Trickey told me, “everything you see there is functional. Every control you see in the screenshots and in the trailer has meaning and utility.” Oh. Oh, wow.

Stratolith is an analog game.

Winning Blimp is two men: Full Sail University game design instructor and programmer Bear Trickey and graphic designer/music composer Alex May, who’s worked as an industrial designer. If Stratolith’s controls look plausibly like real metal-and-bakelite things that you can reach out and touch, it’s because May actually designs things like that.

“Most our games come from these conceptual kernels,” Trickey tells me about a week ago as he’s getting ready to head out to GDC. “Mosaique was a game that we wanted to feel like popping bubble wrap. That’s why it’s a very light, colourful game.

“With Stratolith there’s a couple of things we wanted to capture. First is a game where all the action is happening off-screen. You’re experiencing it through an interface, this gadget-y panel thing. Alex really likes software synthesisers for making music, and we love the aesthetic of those.”

Some of the stars of Stratolith.

In Stratolith, you’re sitting in the object at the center of the radar screen in front of you: the Stratolith itself, a floating city suspended in the sky. The Stratolith is under attack from drones that you see on the radar. Using the console that occupies the right side of the screen, you can hack drones to take them over, then use your new minions to repel the attack on the station.

“[Alex and I] played text-based MUDs and roguelikes where all the graphics are just ASCII characters, so maybe you’d be super-pumped to see an ampersand show up. So that was our guide for Stratolith. How much emotion can we evoke from really simple symbols? Our challenge to ourselves was, ‘can we make a game where people get really excited when they see a number change, or a triangle appear on the radar?’”

To immerse you in the fiction and make that control panel feel like it’s right in front of you, Trickey and May have made one hell of a ballsy decision. The entire interface is diegetic: there’s no control metaphors, there’s just the actual knobs and buttons that control the drones. Think about how hard RTS games try to make the interface disappear and get out of your way. Stratolith is brazenly pushing in the other direction: mastering the interface is half the game.

“We want to have a real cinematic, sci-fi look to the game interface,” Trickey says, “but everything had to be functional. And it is. Every control you see in the screenshots and in the trailer has meaning and utility. There’s very little ornamentation in the game.

“When you hack an enemy drone, for example, you’re trying to make the opposite wave [on the oscilloscope] that you see. Like wave cancellation in high school physics, you’re making an equal and opposite wave.”

Kenneth, what is the frequency?

Trickey hopes that not relying on automation and laying the controls out in front of the player as he and May have done will encourage autonomy and experimentation.

“Each drone has 4 basic commands. You can attack another drone, you can move to a location on the radar, you can have it dock with the Stratolith. You can also have it ram another drone, which will definitely kill the other drone but at the cost of yours. You can also re-route power. So if you hack an enemy drone, you can boost its attack or movement capability at the cost of something else. So if you absolutely need a drone to get somewhere quickly, you can boost its velocity at the cost of its weapons strength. Drones also have their own special commands, so one might be able to jam radar or another might repair other drones.”

This is going to alienate as many people as it excites — Stratolith is like a flight simulator as much as it is a strategy game. But Trickey doesn’t mind. He’s got a very particular audience in mind for the game.

“I think that people who really like strategy games like the ability to craft their own strategy down to the very tiny details,” he tells me.

“With Ambi-ON and Mosaique, everything was procedurally generated. But with Stratolith, it’s a game with a clear beginning and a clear end. The more you play a stage, the better you get at it. That’s part of giving the player as much room as possible to tweak and adapt your strategy. So right now we’re deep in making stages and it’s all going to be hand-crafted so it’ll take more time.”

Stratolith is coming this winter. You can keep tabs on Winning Blimp on Facebook and Twitter.

We both go down together: The Nightmare Cooperative comes to iOS this week

My grocery co-op in Brooklyn was just like this.

Finally, a game developer that understands why we play mobile games: to insulate ourselves from the fiery love of our families and to block out the excruciating beauty of the natural world. Nightmare Cooperative’s trailer invites us to do exactly that on August 28th, when the PC game makes the jump to iOS as a universal app, just as we foretold back in July. Android is in the works for some future date.

Nightmare Cooperative is a puzzle roguelike where a small village has started a commonwealth scheme to rid itself of a troublesome nearby dungeon. The unique twist here is that when you move one character in your party, you move them all. Lucky Frame’s music toy/tower defense game Bad Hotel has been delighting players and confounding TripAdvisor search results since 2012, and this is the Scottish studio’s first game since — I expect greatness.

Watch the trailer below.

Weekend Price Drops: One Of These Things Is Not Like The Other Edition

It’s a mystery, detective.

This installment of Weekend Price Drops is unusual for a couple of reasons: first, there’s more good games on sale than there has been in recent memory, and second, there’s a game in here that isn’t any good at all. A mystery!

After the jump, if we crack this case I’ll approve your transfer to Homicide.

Third Eye Crime isn’t the bad game in this list. On the contrary, our man Tierney regards this as the definitive stealth game on mobile, giving it a 4-star review back in June. You play as psychic art thief Rothko, an a game that is itself is a work of art, with a colourful Frank Miller-on-shrooms style.

Third Eye Crime is free and iOS Universal — it’s usually three bucks.

Ace Patrol: Pacific Skies is obviously not the bad game on the list — I’m starting to run out of ways to praise this WWII turn-based dogfighting game. After releasing four different iOS games last year, Firaxis have been awfully quiet on the mobile front in 2014. I wonder what they’ve got up their sleeves.

Ace Patrol: Pacific Skies is two dollars, down from the usual five. iOS Universal.

How about SideSwype? Prolific puzzle maker Radiangames puts out so many products that surely one of them is crap? Nope, SideSwype is just lovely, actually, combining block-sliding and match-three into a typically garish aesthetic that would look bad on the MCP from TRON.

Normally two bucks, SideSwype is free this weekend. It’s also on Android, but it’s not on sale there because — true story — once you drop a game’s price to free on Google Play, you can never make it paid again.

Keith Burgun’s deconstructed 4X game Empire might be divisive, but it’s definitely not the bad game. Au contraire, I thought it was one of last year’s most interesting constructions — it’s Civilization, but with a tiny band of villages that are never safe, built in a world that is hostile to them. Read my review from last fall, but bear in mind that the game has been bestowed with a lot more content since then.

Empire is a buck, down from from three.

Is Square-Enix’s Hitman GO the bad game? It’s from a big publisher and it’s a long-in-the-tooth franchise that may well be post peak — but no. Hell no, actually. Hitman GO is fantastic, and one of 2014′s most original games. It’s a puzzle game, which is a first for that franchise, and it’s extraordinarily clever and there is no more beautifully designed game on the App Store this year. It just received a whole new level pack in a recent update.

Hitman GO is two dollars, down from five. I highly recommend it, and you need not fear the in-app purchases listed on the iTunes page. Those are just early unlocks of content you can unshackle by playing. Also on sale on Android.

Ah, the list has ended. So through our powers of deduction we may conclude that the bad game is Star Trek: Trexels? Boy it sure is. I spent a thousand words saying so earlier this year in my review but man, Trexels is a complete and utter waste of a valuable license. It’s your prototypical free-to-play rock garden where you push the occasional button and get periodically prompted to dump more money into it, but dressed up with the veneer of your favourite TV show.

Why do I devote any space to it here? Because the opening of the game features George Takei himself doing the “Boldly go” speech, and that’s absolutely worth eating some of your bandwidth to hear. Trexels is free.

The Great Mistake? iPad board game adaptation Stalag 17 arrives mysteriously on the App Store

What do they call a mole in Scotland?

How adventurous are you feeling today? Hawk-eyed PT reader dwtheriault spotted a new game that crept onto the App Store this week: Stalag 17, an iPad-only adaptation of the eponymous tabletop card game about planning and executing an escape out of a Nazi POW camp — with online multiplayer to boot. That is weaponized catnip to the average reader of this newspaper, but hang on a second.

This game arrived with no media alert of any kind, the app developer has no other games on the App Store, and the link to the game’s support page in the App Store description lands on a webhost’s holding site. So this is the iOS gaming equivalent of buying some stereo speakers out of the back of a guy’s van in a Ralph’s parking lot at 2am.

I haven’t had time to explore this but DW bravely took the plunge and he reports that the game is good. The concept and theme are fantastic, and the source material has a respectable score on Board Game Geek. So if you’re feeling brave, dive in. Also, if you’re the developer of this thing, I have two pieces of advice for you: 1) sort out your website, and 2) email me.

An aside: of all the myriad things Apple will reject a game for, having a dead support page is apparently not one of them. Odd.

After the jump, a video of BGG playing the physical card game at Essen in 2011.

Double-clutch: Turn-based multiplayer racing sequel Racer Feud 2 is in the works

The original Racer Feud used a lot of default iOS app chrome, which was… quaint.

Long-time readers may recall Racer Feud, a turn-based motorsport game for iOS from 2012 that was based (a little too closely, at first) on the classic tabletop game Formula De. Even with a slightly wonky UI and no single-player, the game garnered a small but loyal fan base — it was even being discussed in the comments of yesterday’s Motorsport Manager review.

I spoke yesterday with developer André Lind, and he told me that Racer Feud 2 is in the works. “It’s really, really early in development,” he said — so don’t expect an ETA anytime too soon.

“What I can tell you though is that it’s a complete rewrite of Racer Feud,” Lind tells us, “and it’s taking full advantage of what iOS 8 can do, sporting Apples new 2D game engine. So yeah, it will be iOS 8 only!” If you loved the original Racer Feud, it’s time to ditch that iPhone 3G.

Lind also said that player-created race teams will be a feature, as will an in-game tournament system. Motorsport Manager developer Christian West has told us before that multiplayer is unlikely for his game, so Racer Feud 2 might be your best bet for competitive rubber-burning in the near future.

Shellshock: World of Tanks Blitz sees 6 million players — British tanks and Android edition coming soon

A good plan, violently executed.

As regular readers and my team of beleaguered therapists know, I love World of Tanks Blitz. Most mornings I strap on my ivory-handled revolvers and cavalry boots for a couple of matches before I get to work. I’m also working on a children’s show spec script for Thomas the Tank Tank that I’m hoping to sell to PBS. So yes, I love World of Tanks Blitz. I was so stoked by its brilliant combination of thrilling action and historical nerdity that I was inspired to write a strategy guide for the game, which is not an extremity to which I am frequently moved.

I’ve been talking to WoT makers Wargaming.net for the past couple of days. They’ve told me that in the weeks since Blitz went live, the armoured combat shooter has seen over 5.5 million downloads, a number that goes a long way towards explaining why the queues are so short when you want to jump into an online match. They were showing off the nearly-finished Android build of Blitz off at Gamescom last week, so that number will only increase, no doubt.

Clearly, the experiment to bring their PC experience to mobile has worked out pretty OK, so I sought out Blitz producer Dmitry Yudo and interrogated him about what we can expect to see in the game in the near future.

Here’s the big news: British tanks are coming soon — in the next few weeks I’m told. That means my beloved Matilda will soon be in Blitz. Read on for more.

“Hey Owen, is it possible for you to write a WoT Blitz article without also posting a brag shot of how good you are at it?”
No.

When should we expect the first major update to Blitz?

Update 1.2 for World of Tanks Blitz is ready to release on our side. We sent it to Apple for review on August 11, which usually takes about two weeks. So it should be approved and ready to play within the next week or so.

The key content features will include a new desert map and tier VI–VIII vehicles. Among principal gameplay improvements, you’ll find a quick auto-aim control that enables/disables “Auto-Aim” directly in battle.  It will work independently for arcade and sniper modes. [Owen's note: that's going to make higher-tier light tanks a lot easier to play.]

We’ll also present a reworked battle tutorial with added realistic grass, animated trees, and improved tanks. In future updates these visual improvements will be added to all maps. Update 1.2 will also allow World of Tanks Blitz to work in background mode for up to three minutes (connection to server will be kept, so players will be able to minimize the app).

Will there be British, French, Chinese, and Japanese tank lines in Blitz this year?

We can confirm that the British tech tree will be added to the game in the near future.

Is the game performing up to your expectations so far?

We are still gathering numbers and information from the first month after launch, but we are really happy to see some remarkable figures straight out of the gate. World of Tanks Blitz was downloaded from App Store more than 5.5 million times, reached top three in the App Store in 50 countries, has averaged an overall score of 4.5, and has an average playtime of 60 minutes a day per player.

Daggone Robert E. Lee.

Will we see camo and other tank customization in Blitz?

We have camouflage and other customization included in upcoming plans for World of Tanks Blitz.

What about clans for Blitz?

Introduction of Clan Wars is among our top priorities for the game alongside the upcoming Android release and the introduction of Missions. Clans will follow shortly after the launch of mobile tanks on the Android platform as a part of future major updates.

All the right angles: Legend of Grimrock coming to iOS

It’s gotta be better than Coldfire Keep.

Finnish developers Almost Human sent around news today that PC hit Legend of Grimrock is coming to iOS. Grimrock kicked off the renaissance of first-person party-based dungeon crawlers (FPPBDCs?) a couple of years back, and it got universal praise from critics, including at RPS. Milennials might not believe this but there was a time in RPGs when you could only turn in 90-degree increments — and we liked it that way! Nothing interesting has ever happened at a 45-degree angle to where you’re looking, trust me.

There’s no release date for this venture yet, but the screenshot above suggests that it’s more than just a fanciful wish at this point. We’ll dispatch a raven to Finland to see if Almost Human want to talk more about it.

After the jump, the trailer for the PC version of Grimrock, which will be at least broadly similar to the iOS version.

Review: Motorsport Manager

Don’t be fooled by those cartoon faces.

Motorsport Manager is a game that’s almost every bit as sexy and exhilarating as the sport it simulates. It’s possibly the year’s the most complete gaming package on iOS: beautifully designed and deceptively deep, while still being easy to drop in and out of. It’s so close to perfect that it feels churlish to point out what few flaws it has.

Amazingly, it’s the product of one solo developer — former Hello Games man Christian West — but it has the slick confidence and polish of a game made by a hundred-man studio like Sports Interactive. I’m blown away by that and I’d probably feel a lot better about my own work ethic if turned out to be a lie, and “Christian West” was a nom de développement for a whole crew of chemically stimulated maniacs.

With its cute cartoon faces and toy-like tilt-shifted graphics, you might be under the impression that Motorsport Manager is a casual little Kairosoft sim, and you could probably play it that way and enjoy yourself. But underneath that cherubic exterior is a lean, mean hardcore racing sim.

Nigel pops up periodically to give you a peek at subtleties in the game’s simulation that you might have missed.

Motorsport Manager simulates the world of open-wheel auto racing, in which you are the owner of a two-car team. West (not being a Emirati sheikh or Scrooge McDuck) hasn’t sprung for any official licenses, so the game’s universe is entirely fictional, with a ladder of racing leagues that culminate in an analogue to Formula One at the top. Win the constructor’s championship trophy in one league and you’ll be offered the chance to move up to the next level, where competition is stiffer but the prizes bigger.

In these streamlined days where simulation games are often just nicely-decorated escalators to victory, Motorsport Manager is full of wonderful details and tactical challenges. Your responsibilities range from lining up contracts with sponsors to hiring and firing drivers and development directors — all of whom have different ratings across several different skills. You can invest in a young driver program to develop your own future Nigel Mansells and invest in your team’s infrastructure to give your car design engineers a boost.

The game creates a wonderful feeling of inhabiting a living, breathing world. You can lowball your Number 1 driver with a penny-pinching contract, but she might refuse it, lowering her morale and affecting her on-track performance. Your every decision will be jeered (and occasionally praised) by your team’s fans on an in-game Twitter.

Don’t be scared by the plus sign next to the bank balance — there isn’t even one IAP in the game, just a single chance to earn a couple of bucks by liking MM on Facebook.

The technical aspects of modifying your cars is very simple and probably a bit too simple. You’re never really presented with any meaningful trade-offs for your decisions, and as long as you put some of your profits into development, your cars’ stats just keep going up forever. It would have been nice to have to choose between installing an intake that improved acceleration but reduced top speed, for example. As it stands, your cars just get blandly better without ever developing a personality of their own.

But that’s off the track. Motorsport Manager’s true brilliance appears when race weekend starts. Every race on the calendar has two phases — qualification and the main event. West has spared us little of the complexity of real racing strategy.

On the track, you confront a lot of different decisions. Remember, you’re not the driver, just the boss, so you’re never turning the wheel yourself, just offering instructions. On qual day, you have to decide how to set up your team’s cars, choosing between a low-drag high-speed setup or a scheme that favours cornering. You’ll get some advice from your engineer, but he isn’t always right, and inconsistent drivers may turn in different lap times. Factor in that you have a limited amount of time to complete your qualifying laps, and qual day turns into a racing pressure cooker.

Opt to race in the American competition and you’ll get to drive some of those ovals my countrymen are so fond of.

Race day is even better. There’s no fuel calculations to worry about, but you do have to consider tyre wear. You choose between hard, soft, and wet tyres — soft being generally faster but less durable, but under certain weather conditions that relationship inverts slightly. If the forecast tells you that it’s going to start raining in two minutes, you can order your 5th-place driver to push hard and ignore tyre wear (because you’re going to have to pit for wet tyres after it starts pouring), or you can stay out and see how long you can get away with racing on the tyres you’re on, knowing that most of cars in front of you will pit soon. There are safety cars, collisions, and mechanical failures to take into account as well. Races are packed with tactical conundrums, and executing a smart race plan and pulling out a victory over a faster team is a real fist-pump-in-the-air-”oh-sorry-sweetheart-did-I-wake-you-up?” moment.

My one and only tinge of disappointment with Motorsport Manager comes from how tissue-thin the game’s world is. As vibrant and buzzy as it all feels at first, you start to bump up against the sides of the aquarium after a while. Everything here is generated at the moment that you need to see it, and nothing is permanent. At first you’ll notice that all of the cars in a race finish when the car on the lead lap does, even if they’re not on it. Then you’ll fire a driver and note that he doesn’t go get a job with your rivals, he just vanishes into the ether. Competitors don’t even stay between seasons — if you opt to stay for a second year competing in the American Racing League, you’ll see all new teams and faces there. Motorsport Manager is a Truman Show, and that’s a shame, because half of what makes auto racing so exciting is the rivalries that build up between the owners, drivers, and teams.

Raining in Glasgow. I told you this game was realistic.

But that’s a quibble, relatively speaking. Even the relatively uninteresting research-and-development side of things doesn’t detract from how exciting the races are. If you cut Christian West I’m pretty sure petrol comes pouring out. The game generously holds your hand with frequent advice pop-ups, so non-fans need not stay away, but auto racing enthusiasts will really appreciate West’s eye for detail. His passion for auto racing is everywhere in this game, and Motorsport Manager is quite possibly the best sports sim on mobile as a result.

Overcome by the vapours: Nival announces Etherlords, an F2P take on the classic strategy series (UPDATED)

Conquering fantasy realms and preserving netted butterflies.

Nival Interactive have revealed to us that their next game will be the mobile debut of the long-running Etherlords series. Simply titled Etherlords, it’s going to be a PvP-focused with 60-second battles and collectible creatures. It’s also going to feature a world-building mechanic that they told us was inspired by Carcassonne, which is not a bad sheet of music to crib from.

Russian devs Nival have long been the most loyal bannermen of turn-based strategy on PC. Even when big publishers clung to the notion that strategy games “weren’t contemporary“, Nival were unabashedly cranking out the turniest of turn-based games. Stuff like Silent Storm and King’s Bounty — the latter series having so many installments that I’m starting to worry that it’s a Von Neumann machine.

But on mobile, Nival have been bitten hard by the free-to-play bug. Their mobile flagship from earlier this year, Prime World Defenders, was stuffed with in-app purchases like Supercell‘s Thanksgiving turkey. No doubt that Etherlords will suffer from a similar affliction, but Nival themselves seem to feel a bit sheepish about this. Their press materials for Etherlords promise that the game won’t have any energy-limiting mechanics that stop you from playing if you don’t cough up the cash — which just makes you wonder where else the monetisation will be hiding.

I love Nival powerfully — they made me a fan for life with sci-fi/WWII tactical candybox Silent Storm — and I wish they’d just make a proper mobile game. We’ll do our best to give Etherlords a fair shot when it drops for iOS on September 4th.

Trailer below.

UPDATE: Nival got in touch with one correction and a bit of reassurance.

First, they want to clarify that this Etherlords game isn’t being considered a part of the the PC franchise, but rather a game inspired by it.

Second, they wanted to assuage fears about the free-to-play aspect. I’ll let them speak for themselves here.

“In Etherlords [monetization] will be really soft. It’s context-based offers, for example, it won’t be stuffed with in-apps.”

There you have it. Though while I’ve got your attention, Nival — how about Silent Storm for iPad? No IAPs, charge $10. I betcha we’ve got a few thousand people hanging around this site alone that would buy it.

Out Tonight: Motorsport Manager, Ancient Battles: Hannibal, Max Gentlemen, Letterpix and more

Safety car’s out — no overtaking until midnight.

Motorsport Manager has set hearts a-flutter around here like an open-wheeled Mata Hari. Part of its allure must be because it’s resurrecting a long-dead genre of racing management sims (Microprose RIP), but another aspect of the appeal is the game’s beautiful tilt-shifted aesthetic. It’s drop dead gorgeous and looks like a Tyco slot car set designed by Jonny Ive.

After the jump, let’s watch the Motorsport Manager trailer five hundred times and will the clock to spin towards midnight a little faster. Oh yeah, and all of tonight’s other new releases, too.

Motorsport Manager is a wonderful light sim in the mould of Football Chairman, and if you like autosport at all then I recommend it to you. Read my hands-on preview for more details, but I suspect that if you’re the audience for this game, then the trailer below will tell you everything you need to know. It’s a one-man production, believe it or not.

Motorsport Manager will be $5 when the App Store refreshes in your country; 11pm Eastern in the US, midnight local time on other shores. It’s iOS Universal. Full review right here tomorrow.

I’m fond of Hunted Cow’s light wargames, though I’m always wishing their tactical scenarios would get a little bigger in scope. Ancient Battle: Hannibal squarely addresses my desires by marching out the biggest maps I’ve seen yet in a Hunted Cow game, and getting to play as everyone’s favourite Carthaginian (sorry Dido) is just a bonus. I’ve messed with a press beta of this and though I haven’t fully sunk into yet it, it looks promising.

Ancient Battle: Hannibal will be a buck later tonight, iOS Universal.

Hannibal, Hasdrubal, Mago, Harpo, Chico, and Zeppo.

Letterpix isn’t your everyday word game — like an heirloom tomato or a Fantastic Four member, it has an exceptional origin. The game’s designer is no one less than Mike Elliott, the respected board game designer behind Quarriors!, Thunderstone, and Star Trek: Fleet Battles. Elliot is starting his own game studio, Leiden Labs, from which Letterpix is the first offspring.

In Letterpix, you will compete with other players (or AIs) to find words on a word search grid and uncover hidden images. It’s free and iOS Universal, out worldwide later tonight.

What’s in the box?

Horror adventure Organ Trail was one of our favourite games back in 2012, and developers Men Who Wear Many Hats are releasing their first major new game since then tonight. Max Gentlemen is “an extreme manners simulator” with many, many, many hats in it. Many hats and the collection thereof. It’s quite arcadey but it’s also absolutely free for some mind-boggling reason, with no monetisation at all. Perhaps MWWMH have discovered the secret to a cashless utopian economy and Max Gentlemen is the means by which they will reveal it to us.

Or maybe it’s just fun. Max Gentlemen is free later tonight on iOS, and it’ll also be on Android at some point tomorrow. Do yourself a favour and watch the delightful trailer.

Another free word game. Wordrix is a word puzzler with 72 levels of time-attack… word puzzles. These games are hard to write descriptions for.

Wordrix is free, with IAPs for power ups. It’s out worldwide right now.

Hey, I found Doctor Who’s real name.

Finally, BoxPop is out. Again. Remember this one from last week? It didn’t actually launch then for some reason, but now it’s here.

BoxPop is free when it releases later tonight. It’s a chess-inspired light puzzle game.

Based on a 9th-century analysis of chess, we’re told.

Review: Star Realms

The final frontier

Deckbuilding has long been the one board game mechanic that never quite lived up to its promise. It was born from the out-of-game experience every Magic player had of building a killer deck but, in practice, never really felt like that. Instead, games like Dominion and Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer use deckbuilding as a means to create a euro-style victory-point generating engine. Compare the feeling you get when your newly crafted Paladin deck in Hearthstone wipes out some poor hunter in ranked play versus the lack of a rush you get as you use a newly crafted Dominion deck to purchase another province. Somehow deckbuilding, an activity closely associated with the most Ameritrashy of genres, had been turned into a euro-styled efficiency engine.

Star Realms changes that. Here is a deckbuilder that actually feels like you’re building a weapon to smash someone in the face with. It feels like Hearthstone, only the deckbuilding takes place while you’re playing instead of outside the game. It’s incredibly simple, and yet layered enough that you can build satisfying combos that are guaranteed to make you grin as you put them together in your hand.

Stop me if you’ve heard this: 5 cards reside in the “trade row” and are available for purchase using one type of in-game currency. The second type of currency can be used for combat. Sound like Ascension? Well, Star Realms plays a lot like Ascension, actually. One of Star Realm’s currencies is Trade which allows you to buy a card from the trade row and, much like Ascension’s Mystics and Heavy Infantry, Star Realms has Explorers, which are always available and can be always be bought if you can’t afford anything else. The second currency is called Combat and can be used to attack but, unlike Ascension in which you use your strength to attack other cards, here you’ll be using your Combat to smack your opponent right in the soup coolers. That brings up Star Realms’ third currency type called Authority, which is a fancy word for player hit points. Get your opponent’s Authority to zero, and you’ve won the game.

Spoiler alert: this mission will feel like just about every other game of Star Realms.

The brilliance of Star Realms is how it builds on this simple system. Whereas some games will dump novella-length prose on cards to create diverse effects, Star Realms ingeniously uses a faction system that allows cards to have multiple effects based on other cards in your tableau. You know how, in some deckbuilders, that the best strategy is often to just buy the baddest card you can afford each turn? Not here. In Star Realms you need to select cards based on which other factions you have in your hand because faction powers only proc when another card from that faction is also in play. It’s these faction bonuses that create massive damage dealing combos later in the game. If you simply buy whatever costs the most trade, your deck will be a mish mosh of different factions and you’ll get crushed.

The other great innovation Star Realms brings to the table are Bases and Outposts. Similar to Constructs in Ascension, these remain in play and offer both a faction for pulling off combos as well as their own special effects. On top of that, each one has an Authority value that allows it to be attacked by your opponent. In fact, Outposts have an aggro mechanic in which they must be attacked before your authority can be targeted. In effect, they act like a shield to prevent damage to your authority total. What makes them even more powerful is that they cannot be whittled down. They can only be attacked with enough Combat to destroy the Base or Outpost, which add to their longevity and value.

Yes, I just played a combo that gives me 42 attack in one turn. Players start with 50 Authority. I’m awesome.

The digital version includes three levels of AI for solo play that are fairly competitive. I’m not ashamed to admit I lose to the hardest level of AI (and medium level, every now and then) and the easy level is perfect for those first few games while you get your bearing. There is also a single-player campaign that exists. It’s not as engaging as playing a real human (how could it be?) but certain battles can be challenging, so it’s good to have something else to do when you don’t want to play online. Of course, why wouldn’t you want to play online? The app has a robust online system that supports asynchronous play, but doesn’t have the timers and bells and whistles we’re used to with games from Playdek.

In fact, that’s really the only negative thing I can say about Star Realms. The iOS version feels like a PC port instead of a native app. Take a look at the Ascension interface and compare it to the UI in Star Realms. One of them looks like like a professionally made app and the other one looks like something I would have thrown together in CardWarden just so I could play the game digitally. It’s not terrible, it’s just not very polished. Triggering powers on the iPad is clunky, as is zooming on cards. Playing on a PC is pretty wonderful, but the move to the iPad wasn’t quite as successful and the move to iPhone is fairly abysmal.

Um, yeah. About that whole, “I’m awesome” thing…

That said, I played Star Realms yesterday for about 3 hours straight on my iPad and never once thought about the UI or bemoaned the fact that I need to touch-and-hold to zoom in on a card. Once you get used to it the UI is fine, if underwhelming. It would take a lot of fail to make a digital version of Star Realms not work, and the app isn’t even close to that threshold. Star Realms is a fantastic game that deserves to be played as much as possible, which is exactly what the app allows you to do. Who could complain about that?

Star Realms was played on iPad Air and iPhone 5 for this review.

Review: The Manhattan Project

I understand why plutonium and uranium are crucial fuels for a nuclear weapons program, but shouldn’t there be a third column for coffee?

The Manhattan Project bought tickets to the prom before asking anyone, got rejected, then went stag. That is, development on the digital adaptation of the highly-regarded tabletop game was already quite advanced by the time the Kickstarter campaign to fund it launched. Said campaign came up quite short, which left developer Domowicz Creative Group with strong feedback that polishing the app to their satisfaction was unlikely to pay off. In the face of that disappointing reality, they’ve taken pity on those fans of the game who saw the functional prototype in the pitch videos and have tidied up their existing work enough to make it available to the public, albeit in a less ambitious state than they had hoped.

If you’re familiar with Agricola or Lords of Waterdeep, you’ve seen the worker placement mechanic at the core of this game. It’s been a hot mechanic in modern boardgame design for a few years, in part because forcing players to compete for jobs produces subtle but constant player interaction while allowing conflict-averse players to focus on building their own engines of points.

The Manhattan Project innovates on this model substantially. This isn’t the bucolic live-and-let-live world of Agricola; as befits the theme of a high-stakes race to build nuclear weapons, you can deliver your opponents’ nuclear programs a fiery setback with bomber airstrikes, or steal their secrets with spies. You also have a level of control over the allocation of your workers which would make Oppenheimer (or Sammereza Sulphontis) envious. What you don’t have, sadly, is a polished app.

“Nothing harmful–low levels of gamma radiation.” – Erik Selvig

In The Manhattan Project, bombs play the role of Lords of Waterdeep’s quests: they’re how you score points. The first person to get to the point threshold for the number of players in the game wins. You start with mere laborers for workers, but can train engineers and scientists, which you’ll need to design (that is, draft cards for) and build bombs, and to more rapidly mine yellowcake and make money, which themselves can be used to make the necessary fissile materials for your bombs and take some of the other actions in the game.

Beyond the explosive theme, none of that’s all that new, really. Worker placement games often revolve around cascading sequences of resource development with different relationships and levels of risk and reward. Nor is it all that unusual that, in addition to the main board, you can build your own buildings which others can’t use (unless that dude working in your yellowcake mine is actually a spy, secretly shipping off your precious ore to a rival nation).

What is new is that, while you can only use one location on the main board per turn, you can use as many of your own unoccupied buildings as you like. Your workers only return to your hand when you spend an entire turn doing nothing but retrieving them. So the game largely revolves around getting a set of buildings which let you make what you need to build the bombs you draft, and carefully timing when it’s worth retrieving all your workers vs. getting an extra main board action before starting the cycle again. Also, if you seem to be doing that too effectively, your opponents may bomb your carefully-constructed assembly line back to the stone age. No, not Stone Age – that’s just the most focused and accessible of the worker-placement games available for iOS. Ahem.

My pile of workers and slightly misaligned buildings would like to know how your neurotic tendencies are doing today.

All of that is great. It’s a tremendous game design, nicely evocative of its theme without excessive frippery. The adaption is, bluntly, awful. The AI is permanently set to “paste eater”, the interface wastes a great deal of space yet requires zooming and panning, it’s arbitrarily literal to no purpose, and there’s no tutorial. There appears to be no way to negotiate, even in multiplayer matches, which is an explicit part of the boardgame with binding agreements. There is no matchmaking, nor even a game browser–you literally have to know the name of the game you wish to join before you’re allowed to join a (synchronous-only) multiplayer online game. Feh.

Critically for those who don’t arrive with knowledge of how to play board game, there is no interactive tutorial in The Manhattan Project. In 2014, this is the bare minimum that we’ve come to expect from digital board game adaptations, and its absence will be a further deterrent to building up an online multiplayer community for the game — probably a fatal one.

Fans of the excellent boardgame now have a highly portable option for playing The Manhattan Project which basically works. Faint praise, admittedly, but this adaptation’s many flaws can largely be laid at the feet of the conundrum facing post-gold rush Kickstarters. If you don’t put much work into the pitch, potential backers may doubt your ability to follow through. Put in enough work to have a workable prototype, though, and you both accept a great risk and will severely disappoint those who covet that prototype should the campaign fail. Release the prototype, and you risk looking incompetent, but fail to, and draw the ire of those most zealous (and generally outspoken) fans. If that doesn’t leave you disheartened enough, think about the fact that many developers still prefer Kickstarter to the conventional publisher model.

The Manhattan Project was played on an Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer for this review.

Ensign Pikov Andropov reporting: Interstellaria reveals new features

Coming in hot.

Here’s a true story you can use to delight your friends down the pub or stall for time in your next hostage negotiation: the iconic transporters in the original Star Trek were a cost-saving measure. It was originally planned that the Enterprise would land on the planets it visited, but building additional sets and matte paintings to show Big E on the ground was another big cost for a show that was already prohibitively expensive to film. That’s why Gene Roddenberry and Co. came up with a magical sci-fi whatsit to be able to check out the planet-of-the-week without making CBS executives want to self-harm.

Our man Coldrice has been labouring away on Interstellaria over the past year, and he has no martini-swilling CBS executives to coddle — so the latest feature he’s revealed is planetary landings.

It’s been a while since we last talked about Interstellaria. This is a hugely ambitious game that looks like Terraria if it had been produced by the makers of Starflight. The game will feature a huge universe of hand-crafted planets to explore with your customised crew and ship, while you negotiate and trade with friendly aliens and tangle with hostile ones. It looks extraordinary, though it’s still a long way away — Coldrice deemed the latest release to be Alpha 0.4, and he told me that there’s still a long way to go before launch.

Interstellaria is planned to be out next year sometime on iOS and Android, some time after the desktop release. New video and more gifs after the jump. Keep tabs on the project on its official website.

These are gifs — click on them to animate.

The cephalopod pod.

Afrika Bambaataa’s favourite ship.

What’s in the box?

Dungeon master: Boss Monster for mobile currently Kickstarting

Dungeon Envy [Image by Dylan Wolf]

Boss Monster is already a Kickstarter success story, having successfully Kickstarted a cardboard version of the game back in 2012. Actually, Brotherwise Games didn’t just succeed at that Kickstarter, they slaughtered it, raking in $200K more than their initial funding goal. Well, Brotherwise is back on Kickstarter to bring the now published cardboard version to iOS and Android.

If you’re familiar with games like Dungeon Keeper you’ll have an idea of how Boss Monster plays. You and your opponents each play a boss monster in a video game and need to construct a dungeon to lure in annoying do-gooders and destroy them. Everything in the game is done with a fantastic 8-bit art style, and everything about the game is reminiscent of old NES platformers from the 80′s.

The intention of Brotherwise is to include both single player against 3 levels of AI as well as online multiplayer. The Kickstarter is already more than 50% funded, and they still have 24 days to go. There are pledge levels that will get you the app and the cardboard version, if what you see looks interesting.

Video of the Boss Monster digital prototype after the break.

Viral fever: Frontier Worlds is Plague Inc with more than one bug

Go west, young nanomonstrosity.

Given the enormous and enduring popularity of James Vaughan’s Plague Inc, it won’t surprise you to learn that I get a lot of pitches for clones of his cataclysmic infectious disease simulator. Plague Inc is a horrifying zen rock garden of a game — most of the time you’re just watching it happen, waiting for another million people or two to succumb to your virus and fill your DNA point coffers so you can afford to enhance your bug with a new symptom.

Frontier Worlds: Origins is the first game I’ve seen yet that makes any meaningful enhancements to the Plague Inc formula, and it does it by adding more infections that you’re trying to out-compete with yours.

Frontier Worlds is set in the far future where corporations are jostling to be the first to colonise newly-discovered exo-planets. This is a gung-ho capitalist future, so that colonising isn’t being done with unreliable robots or expensive humans; the pioneers of tomorrow are hardy, adaptable microorganisms.

Your bug starts on the world map with microbes from several other companies. As in Plague, you get periodic subsidies of DNA points that you can use to adapt your nano-settlers: make them photosynthetic on sunny planets, or more ferocious in direct competition with other bugs. Once a game really gets going it starts to look like Conway’s Game of Life, but in this case you have the ability to stick your finger in the petri dish and nudge the results.

I doubt Frontier Worlds is going to dethrone Plague Inc: the UI lacks feedback on what immediate effects your choices have, and the human-free sci-fi setting saps the game of emotional impact. But turning a planet into a petri dish full of weaponised bugs is a damned clever idea.

Frontier Worlds is two bucks on the App Store — there’s also a free version that lets you play on one planet and unlock the rest with a single IAP. Watch the trailer below.