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
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