After allowing us to subsist on the merest scraps of information about the recently revealed iPad-bound Sid Meier’s Starships, devs Firaxis are letting it all hang out at PAX South. At a panel there, Uncle Sid himself played through Starships live, showing off a big chunk of gameplay.
When we scrutinized the few available screenshots a couple of weeks back, some PT readers saw the influence of Ace Patrol, Sid Meier’s Pirates, and Civilization. Clearly, Starships is borrowing ideas from those games, but after watching the video, it’s not easily pigeon-holed as a spiritual successor to any of those. Starships is most definitely its own freaky space animal.
What really grabbed my attention in this video is the “Shore Leave” mechanic (jump to around the 45-minute mark to see that specifically) — it’s a totally fresh approach to the way turn-based games play. Your crew’s stamina is a push-your-luck system: you can take on almost as many missions as you like, but the further you push your crew, the worse they perform in combat. When you grant your crew shore leave, the other empires in the game play their turns. That’s a very cool idea.
The whole video is after the jump. I’ve been in touch with 2K about release dates and the possibility of an Android port — I’ll hear back about that soon, hopefully.
Hat-tip to Jon S.
If you want to cut straight to the gameplay, jump to about 30:00.
Owen here, covering Out Tonight while Dave gallivants around San Francisco on a press trip. Or at least, that’s what he told me he was doing. Dave, you better not be lollygagging out on the Best Coast. No lollygagging, Dave.
This week’s releases are very, very sexy, people: Slitherine’s early modern warfare game Pike & Shot is making the jump from PC to iPad tomorrow. Not tonight, strictly speaking — Slitherine will pull the release lever tomorrow morning, but I’ll be sure to let you know when that is.
There are other releases worth looking at for the night owls who want to watch the App Store tick over at midnight. Let’s chat about ‘em and watch videos after the jump.
So Pike & Shot–as I said above–ain’t coming tonight, but tomorrow. I was a major fan of this on PC (as I discussed at length in my hands-on preview from September): it’s a game that takes the hardy Battle Academy engine and morphs it to suit a radically different era of warfare. Instead of tanks and GIs, you’re dealing with massive tercios of pikemen, mounted pistoleers, and winged hussars (who don’t actually have wings but take that up with the Poles). It’s not just a re-skin: the mechanics and gameplay are fundamentally different, and the scenario design is better than top shelf — it’s the super nice stuff they hide under the bar. Watch for this tomorrow.
There’s no gameplay video of this yet on iPad so here’s Craig J’s remix of “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy” instead. Watch for this on iPad tomorrow — I’ll give you a holler when it’s up.
Prolific publishers Crescent Moon have already given us the closest thing to a Bethesda-style first-person open-world RPG on touchscreens with Ravensword Shadowlands. Tonight they’re going to try and best that with Exiles: Far Colony. You’re an “Elite Enforcer”, trying to save a distant human colony that’s been infected with a lethal virus. Maybe they should have sent an Elite Pathologist?
This thing looks very, very sharp, so if you’re not opposed to playing first/third-person games on a touchscreen, this just may be worth your time. Exiles is already out on Android, and it’s out on iOS at midnight wherever you are, or 11pm Eastern in the States. iOS Universal app, $5.
Indigo Prophecy (AKA Farenheit) was the first release from idiosyncratic French game dev David Cage to get much buzz — and it got a lot of buzz. If you know anybody who likes Indigo Prophecy, you’ve already heard an earful about it since 2005 when it first released on PC and consoles. Cage is big into creating interactive cinematic experiences — you might be more familiar with his later stuff like Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls (the latter of which starred Juno and Jesus from Last Temptation of Christ, sort of). Cage’s games are adventures that had really unusual gesture-centric controls on console, which makes me think that touchscreens might be the perfect platform for his stuff.
Indigo Prophecy is $10 tonight at midnight. It’s iOS Universal but it wants no less than 6 gigs of space, so start deleting pictures of your family and animated gifs of cats right now.
Finally tonight, there’s The Witcher Battle Arena, which is a MOBA based in the same universe as the PC/console RPGs and The Witcher Adventure Board Game. We’re probably not going to review this one (most PT staff members think that MOBA is a lesser-known Hutt) but Matt Thrower liked it plenty.
Witcher Battle Arena is already out: it’s on iOS and on Android for free, with IAPs. Sad face.
Up until now we’ve only seen screenshots of Mi-Clos Studio’s forthcoming expanded edition of Out There, but today we can see it in motion and hear it, too. Besides the overhauled graphics engine and the new content, Omega Edition will feature a moody electronic soundtrack composed by Siddhartha Barnhoorn — surely one of the greatest names in games development, right up there with Bear Trickey.
You can get early access to the PC, Linux, or Mac editions of Out There Omega Edition later today when it goes live on the Humble Store — buying a desktop version will net you a free Android version as well. The mobile editions will be out “soon”.
From “Disobedient Objects”, a collection of art from protests and demonstrations currently showing at the V&A in London.
January is always a slow month for new game releases and this year follows suit. There’s been a few eyebrow raisers. The much-buzzed-about Hero Emblems is, like a levitating Gilbert Gottfried, something I can admire without wanting to spend a lot of time with. Clancy has given the highest possible recommendation to Hadean Lands, but it’s the sort of thing you have to be in a very particular mood for.
But there are a hell of a lot of good games just over the next hill. I’ve been knuckle-down in some projects I can’t tell you about just yet (wait until I do) but I’ve found the time to mess around with some very promising pre-release betas for games that are nearing launch.
The Curious Expedition is a short-session adventure game that plays a bit like a Victorian Strange Adventures in Infinite Space and it’s conceptually perfect for tablet gaming.
I’ve played the iPad beta of Ultimate General Gettysburg and it’s very impressive so far — necessarily nowhere near as pretty as its PC counterpart but it’s a sharp wargame that anyone with fond memories of Sid Meier’s Gettysburg will adore.
And over the weekend I got in a little time with the recently-revealed Title Challenge, which is exactly as advertised: a low-complexity football management sim does for the beautiful game what Motorsport Manager did for auto racing.
So don’t fret, people. There’s a lot of worthwhile stuff coming — I’m not even getting into some of the other games I’ve seen because it’s movie night here high atop Mount Hexmap and I think I’ve almost got my lady wife convinced about watching the Director’s Cut of Das Boot. Almost.
Sunday links, anyone?
Sign of the times: meth-smuggling drones. Could have milked a good Breaking Bad arc out of these.
Before Steve Hogarty tells you his impressions of PC puzzler Infinifactory, he needs to make some disclosures. Deliriously funny.
“The Sun is a star. Is the Moon really a planet?” QVC presenters struggle mightily with some cosmological questions. (via Jon Ingold)
The future of language: by 2115, 90% of the languages spoken today will be dead.
Apple hardware rumour du jour: out-sized iPad “Pro” that includes a stylus.
Here’s a handy meditation aid: 100 minutes of rolling seas, shot from the bow of a container ship.
The original Mushroom Wars did what many thought–and still think–is impossible. It created a viable, and enjoyable, real-time-strategy experience on a touch screen. Today, the sequel to Mushroom Wars has arrived for iOS Universal and it takes the fungal feuding to space.
Mushroom Wars: Space! (their exclamation point, not mine) continues the story of the original game with a single player campaign that spans more than fifty new missions. It also has an improved multiplayer mode that allows for battles with up to 3 other people. Other than that, it appears to be much of the same which isn’t a terrible thing when the original was a pretty damn good game.
Mushroom Wars: Space is available right now for iOS Universal and is free to download. The previous game had a bunch of IAP, but Clancy didn’t complain about it so I’m not sure that it’s an issue. Proceed at your own risk. It should be coming out for Android shortly.
The colony is located on the desert planet of Nottatooine.
Doesn’t it seem strange that the Pocket Tactics RPG of 2014, Dream Quest, is closer to being a board/card game than a traditional RPG. Heck, even over at 164 we had to give the RPG award to an actual board game port. For some reason, traditional RPGs and tablets just don’t seem to mix very well. Sure, there are some, but when you look at the amount of RPGs available for PC and consoles, the iOS RPG landscape seems barren.
Crescent Moon has been one of the developers trying to put an end to that. With their open-world, 3D RPGs like Aralon and Ravensword, Crescent Moon has been trying to bring the feel of huge RPGs such as the Elder Scrolls series to iOS for years. Next week, they’re trying again with the release of Exiles: Far Colony which is a sci-fi RPG that looks pretty fantastic.
Exiles tells the story of a colony on a far-flung planet that becomes enslaved by a corrupt government and, I’m guessing, your attempt to save the day. The game offers 3 different classes for both male and female characters, a huge open world and vehicles to explore it with, and huge alien battles. The trailer looks pretty fantastic, and you can catch it yourself after the break.
I was planning on introducing Dragon Quest V’s release tonight by giving a lengthy dissertation on its history, gameplay and other wonderful features, but then I went and looked it up. Let’s just say its Wikipedia page is a fine example of tl;dr. That’s about as far as my research carried me, so I’m just going to admit that I know nothing about Dragon Quest V. Or even Dragon Quest 1-4, for that matter. I’m guessing there’s a lot of big fans of the game who are ready to chase me with torches to an old windmill right about now.
Luckily, tonight I’ll have the ability to familiarize myself with Dragon Quest V, as it’s coming out for both iOS Universal and Android devices. They’re charging $15 for it, so it must be good, right?
Check after the break for more of tonight’s releases.
Invertical Touch isn’t just the name of a new sexual position in my soon-to-never-be-published novel, Midnight Blogger. No! It’s also a new game published by Hunted Cow! Actually, it’s an old PC game developed by Oxygen Addict, but reworked for touch devices. It’s a platformer where you maneuver a cube through a maze of black and white paths which change depending on which color your cube currently is (which, strangely, isn’t too far from what’s in my novel). Invertical Touch is for iOS Universal and will run $1 with no IAP. Not a lot of screenshots available for this one, but I did manage to track down an old trailer for the PC game. Might not be exactly what you’re getting with the touch version, but is should give you a pretty good idea.
Conquerors Dice looks like it might be a roll and move game, and maybe even a Monopoly clone, but with battles. Or something. I’m not sure of anything other than it has dice. I think. Maybe? Yes, definitely. I have a trailer, which doesn’t really help all that much. There’s a screenshot on the iTunes page that says, “Get all the strong men ready to win the battle,” which should be enough for anyone to pull the trigger on this one. It’s for iOS Universal and Android and it’s free. We’ll have to wait and see what the IAP looks like.
Skyward is a puzzler that looks a little bit like Monument Valley and a little bit like Edge. It’s an Escheresque, dexterity puzzler in which you’re trying to get a disc through a maze by tapping at the correct time. It’s pretty and could be a good time. This one is for iOS Universal and is also free, with no word on any IAP.
World of Tanks Blitz has been a lot of fun since it arrived last summer, but it’s lacked one thing — just one. Something that no game can be truly great without. Most of you by know have guessed the obvious: I’m talking about British tanks.
Yes, ever since Super Mario first stomped on the turret of a Koopa Krusader tank and the Space Marine from DOOM BFG’d a CacoComet, WWII British tanks have been an essential part of any great video game. And finally, with the arrival of the British heavy tank line, WoT Blitz is complete. No further updates are required.
Version 1.6 of our 2014 Action Game of the Year adds nine new tanks that complement the British light/medium line rolled out back in December. These new wagons include my favorite tank from the PC version of the game: the Matilda. The Matilda is slow, but she’s got nigh-impenetrable armor and the top gun is low on firepower but has an unmatched rate of fire. Basically, the Matilda is World of Tanks’ model for a successful life: let attacks bounce right off you and keep firing away — eventually you’ll succeed.
Screenshots of every new tank, plus the new map “Castilla” after the jump. If you’re just getting into the game today, you might find my World of Tank Blitz noob guide to be useful reading.
The British heavies line starts with the Vickers Medium Mk II, which is a bigger target than a blasphemous cartoonist.
The Medium III is a little better (great guns) but its greatest virtue is that it leads to the Matilda.
The Churchill I is the Tier V tank that follows the Matilda. You didn’t sell your Matilda, though, right?
The Churchill VII is ungainly but almost unkillable. The other team will have to hunt you en masse like a mammoth.
The Black Prince is the most advanced Churchill and a lot quicker than it looks.
The Caernarvon is a post-war tank and the first British heavy to feature sloped frontal armor, which the French had figured out in 1935. Come on, Brits.
The Conqueror has a fantastic set of guns to choose from and smells like teen spirit.
The FV215b is the top of the British heavy tier and the point at which the Brits apparently gave up on cool names for stuff.
Here’s the whole British heavy line from front to back.
One of the better games that didn’t get the Pocket Tactics review treatment last year was Super Glyph Quest. It’s an RPG in the same vein as Dungeon Raid or 10000000, which means it’s a mashup of RPG elements and a Match-3 puzzler. Super Glyph Quest seems more RPG-ish to me, though, having actual maps to explore and quests to unlock and conquer. Also, the Match-3 portion of Super Glyph Quest is a much deeper experience than the other games, as you mix and match elements trying to create some massive damage combos. I really should write that review, eh?
On Thursday, Super Glyph Quest will be getting an update that brings in the characters Ida and Totem from Monument Valley. They’ve been redrawn and plopped into the SGQ world along with certain new quests in which you’ll bump into them. That’s not all that’s coming in the update, however. You can also expect other new quests, new monsters, even more characters, and more gear.
Super Glyph Quest is available for iOS Universal and will run you $3. Check out the new trailer after the break.
Paper is the most important item in Hadean Lands. That’s odd for a text adventure, especially one wholeheartedly classic in form. More important here than hidden keys, improvised rope ladders and hackneyed riddles are ideas—rituals and obscure geological information, specifically—and ideas are written on paper. (Ideas are also occasionally free-floating energy halls invisible to the naked eye. But you’ll figure that one out pretty quickly.)
Hadean Lands is a game about alchemy, where progress is measured primarily through the acquisition of knowledge. The genre-standard march of soon-to-be-unlocked doors and “impenetrable” safes is nothing but a series of trifles next to the synthesis of pure elemental forms. Rest assured you’ll need to assume sure-handed mastery over the elements in order to… well, unlock bigger, more impressive doors and safes.
This is to say that Hadean Lands’ greatest thrills come from achieving comparatively minor tasks in convoluted, subtly magical ways. As a greenhorn junior alchemist–or “swabbie”–on the planet-hopping (possibly dimension-hopping) Unanswerable Retort, your unnamed avatar is hardly a skilled pseudoscientist. Fitting then that the first ritual Hadean Lands throws your way is a cleaning ritual, written as half-lesson, half-chore by some passive-aggressive superior who expects nothing of you but delight for an opportunity to follow instructions. And, strangely, delight you will, if only because there’s much left unexplained between how a ritual should work, on paper, and how a ritual can work—especially when taken into account next to every other odd bit of information you’ll pick up exploring the Retort. The best part of knowing the rules is being able to bend them.
Now in principle any given ritual is already solved once you have the necessary formulas and alchemical reagents. Speak the appropriate words (presumably mind-bending stuff like “the categorical imperative” or “the Hermetic sealing”) at an alchemical workbench (“bound”) or retort, while using the right ingredients, and, hey, now you’re removing tarnish from a pair of calipers or setting hunks of gold on fire.
No, go to Moses Hightower, of Police Academy fame.
The devil’s always in the details, though, and Hadean Lands loves to admonish you for forgetting the little things. Odor is key to many rituals, for example, but so are contaminating odors, which means walking around with ten different uncapped fragrances and reeking of a Yankee Candle store explosion will tend to bork up your magic, as will trying to perform certain rituals in areas which, you know, smell. Other niggling details to watch out for: not waiting for a potion to simmer, not performing a ritual within the right “environment” (which is kind of like, mood, man—stick some moon stuff around and it’ll feel all… spacey), not remembering whether a ritual follows Greek or Chinese symbolism, not phlogisticating your electrum, or not speaking the word of entension before adding the saline solution even though your instructions don’t mention that until you’ve already poured the stuff in and, oh, crap, now it’s all worthless. Just… crap.
If Hogwarts magic, with its user-friendly single-word commands and ergonomic wand-based interface, is Mac OS, then alchemy as presented by Hadean Lands is definitely Linux, with a high barrier to entry and a somewhat elitist set of core users ready to laugh at you on Stack Overflow in the mechanica lab. (Oh, and Windows… is probably some sort of blood magic that bites you in the ass with ironic wish fulfillment.) But, taking this conceit a bit further, one realizes that Lands’ alchemy—like a good shell script—is meant to be adaptable as well.
This is the core mechanic in Hadean Lands: modifying rituals to suit new purposes. The game can throw a lot of information at you at once, and much of it can seem useless until you realize that every minor fact or half-remembered lecture (rosemary generates a “resinous” environment, orichalcum has a planetary association with Venus) has the potential to interact with every other ritual and fact you know. A simple example might be modifying a brass-specific spell (yes, they’re that specific) to work on iron objects instead. Or, reversing a key word in a ritual to flip its effect. Simple enough. But wrap your head around this one—direct quote here: “… that the form or structure of a thing may be joined to the spirit or essence, thus replicating the thing itself, is the foundation of modern practice.” Oh, yeah, sure, everyone knows that. It continues: “But to apply it recursively, parsing the structure and spirit of the spirit itself, requires the utmost care…” Well, sure, that makes—ahh! Why are my wood chips on fire? Kill process kill process, CTRL-C dammit!
Ah, yes, the hilarious “Master Rector” joke. Heh. Ha. (Alchemy students don’t get out much, as you’d imagine.)
To be fair, it’s hard to actually screw up badly enough in Hadean Lands to cause lasting harm. Make a mistake during a ritual and you’re not going to conjure up some homicidal Fantasia brooms–your spell will fail is all, wasting some of the Retort’s scant few resources, perhaps. This is where Hadean Lands’ second main mechanic comes in: at any point in the game you can choose to reset, warping to the starting room with the Retort back to the not-quite-pristine condition you find it in at the game’s opening. This isn’t a cheat—rather, it’s a side-effect of the odd magic affecting the ship, presumably the same bad mojo that’s trapped the rest of the crew and blocked off sections of the ship with impenetrable “fractures.”
Furthermore, this reset is seemingly necessary to advance through Hadean Lands. The trick is that, while the ship and your inventory go back to square one, the knowledge you’ve acquired remains locked in your unnamed ensign’s noodle. So if you burn through all the various wood chips in the pyrics lab trying to create elemental fire, yeah, you can reset. More importantly, though, you could exhaust a resource in order to get your hands on some ever-valuable paper with a key ritual on it, reset, and then use the same resource to perform the ritual you (past you?) just learned.
Hadean Lands is an endlessly clever experience. Clever not just in terms of the puzzles—though the few half-reported early-game examples above should convince you of that—but as a user experience as well. The game’s parser tends towards generosity when it comes to performing basic actions, and doesn’t get into the semantics of “place vs. put” or “jump vs. dive,” though it will quite humorously scold you for trying to “use” something. (A sample: “The command ‘use’ is vague. Try a more specific action. Notes are for reading, dials are for turning, levers are for pulling, and so on.”) Much more welcome is the game’s allowance for auto-solving rituals and puzzles you’ve already completed. After your first breath-holding potion, you can just type “perform breath-holding,” and Hadean Lands will hook an alchemist up, no hassle. The same goes for rooms you’re capable of visiting and items you’re capable of finding; a simple “go to X” will suffice if you’re retreading steps after a reset.
The eighth distilled essence of mineral oil. Eighth. As in eight. As in there are at least SEVEN MORE to memorize.
Gosh, it’s difficult though. And a game that, for all its cleverness, can still present you with those niggling text adventure dead-ends that aren’t brought about by failing to understand a puzzle so much as failing to notice the mention of a (hugely important, unlocked) closet in the middle of a room’s “look around” text. That’s a minor complaint. The game is, again, just through and through clever. But… since Hadean Lands is already so challenging on its own terms, it really stands out when the ages-old idiosyncrasies of the text adventure genre clash with Hadean Lands’ novel alchemy mechanics. If you’re passingly familiar with text adventures and interactive fiction, though, those hang-ups shouldn’t be too frequent.
Speaking of… this past year was a good one for interactive fiction. Specifically a kind of interactive fiction that, in form and content, distanced itself from the grues and “GO WEST” calls of text adventures past. Let Hadean Lands be the obsidian to something like 80 Days’ marble, then, or the earth to its aither. While so many good, new interactive fictions deemphasize puzzles and “gaminess” in exchange for storytelling moments, Hadean Lands is an faithful attempt to perfect a genre born in 1974 with ADVENT. You could say all text adventures are interactive fiction, but not all interactive fictions are text adventures, and Hadean Lands is a big “T”, capital “A”, state-of-the-art Text Adventure. GO TO: PLAY.
Developer Richard Berger got in touch to tell us about Arnhem: Airborne Assault, an Operation Market Garden wargame that’s coming to iPad and Android tablets next month. Readers with eidetic memories will recall him as the maker of abstract strategy puzzler Critical Mass from 2013.
Arnhem: Airborne Assault has apparently let its subscription to GQ lapse and is taking fashion advice from back-issues of The Grenadier — but underneath the utilitarian look is a decidedly full-featured operational wargame. There’s four scenarios, over 100 different units of 7 types (from HQ units to arty), fully modeled fog-of-war and logistics, and nitty-gritty tactical mechanics like entrenchment and unit morale.
There will be AI for single-player (only German AI for now — the Allied AI is still in development) and both online and pass-and-play multiplayer on the same device. AAA is in beta right now — watch a trailer for it after the jump.
So: a new Sid Meier game was announced earlier today. When I’m dictator, days like this will be international holidays but in the dark interval until then we’ll just have to make do.
Gather your family around the iPad, friends, because I’ve been on an expedition to find every single morsel of information about Sid Meier’s Starships that’s available for public consumption. Nothing has escaped my Sauron-like gaze, and I’ve got it all waiting for you after the jump.
Perhaps you mean side-suto.
Side Meier? Is that a Dutch Judo move? Who cares, Owen?
To quote the younger Skywalker — I care. As should you. Sid Meier’s oeuvre is a catalog of some of the greatest computer games in history: Civilization, Railroad Tycoon, Pirates!, and Silent Service for starters. The man is on a very short list of the world’s greatest living game designers. If an asteroid was going to hit the Earth and we could only put two humans on an escape pod, I’d put Oprah and Sid Meier on that thing.
So what’s he making this time?
Sid Meier’s Starships, an “adventure-driven strategy game” for iPad, Mac, and PC. It’s being developed by Sid’s studio Firaxis. Here’s publisher 2K’s official description.
Take command of a fleet of powerful starships in this adventure-driven strategy game from legendary designer Sid Meier. Travel to new worlds, completing missions to help save and protect the planets and their people from dangerous Space Pirates, to powerful Marauders and other hostile factions.
Your ships travel through a randomly-generated galaxy, using diplomacy to collect allies and combat to subjugate enemies. The ships are “fully customizable” and the galaxy is full of missions and quests.
So is this a big, epic game like Civ?
It might be epic, but it probably won’t be too big. According to Polygon, Starships will be download-only — the lack of a boxed retail release suggests that it’ll be a $10-$15ish game like Ace Patrol Pacific Skies, the WWII turn-based dog-fighting game Firaxis released in 2013. There’s nothing wrong with that at all. We loved Ace Patrol around here, and I personally played it for months.
Wait a second — how do we know it’s actually being designed by Meier? He’s still got his moniker plastered on Sid Meier’s Civilization and he hasn’t designed any of the games in the series since 1991.
Well, publisher 2K Games told Gamespot that “Starships was developed by Meier and a small team at Firaxis”, and that fits nicely with what we know about how Firaxis works these days.
There’s a big team working on an XCOM or Civilization-sized project, and then there’s a smaller team working with Sid on less resource-intensive games like Ace Patrol. “I got the urge to do a game with a smaller team that we could do in a quicker period of time”, Sid told PC Gamer back in 2013. “With a lower budget you can take more chances and do things that are a little more risky.”
The name is also a pretty good clue about Sid’s involvement. The man has a million virtues, but a knack for catchy names is not among them. Civilization, Pirates, Dinosaurs. Sid names his games like store brand potato chips, and “Starships” fits that pattern neatly.
Finally, we know that Sid’s had sci-fi on the brain recently. Firaxis had an in-house game jam late last year, and the game that Uncle Sid cobbled together was called Final Burn. It was not about a burrito dinner gone wrong, but rather “a set of intergalactic explorers looking for a way home”. Sound familiar?
Sid Meier’s Vogon Constructor Fleet
This sounds like a 4X game, like Civ.
Yeah, it kinda does! Sid told Eurogamer Deutschland that “there is a galaxy layer, where you decide where to send your fleet and when you get to the planets there will be actual tactical missions, where you send your starships to either fight bad guys or escort somebody for example.” And if you look at one of the screenshots in particular, you’ll notice that the planets are producing resources, borrowing their resource icons from last year’s Civilization: Beyond Earth.
And check this out, from that same interview:
“There is what we call the population victory, which is to control more than half of the galaxy,” he explained. “For this, you travel form one system to another, helping them out with their problems and let them join your federation. So, by doing good throughout the galaxy, you expand your federation.
“There is a science victory, where yours will be the leading civilisation in terms of technology and science. Then there is the classic Civilization domination victory, in which you eliminate your opponents. There is also a wonders victory, if you want to focus on wonders. So, there are various ways to win.”
Sounds a lot like Civ.
Wow! A real 4X game on iPad?
Yes, but there’s also an adventure aspect: “[Y]ou take this fleet into the galaxy and in each star system you visit, there will be some sort of mission, a problem to solve, some way that you can help the people living there. After solving these missions, they become part of your federation.”
And then of course, the tactical combat.
“The key elements are designing and building your own starships,” Meier explained. “Develop different kinds of weapons, stealth abilities, armour and shields. Put all the different pieces of a ship together in different ways, to get different kinds of ships. Some will be fast, others will be powerful, some are used for stealth, and your role will to be the admiral of this fleet. Build a fleet of a few very powerful ships or one of many smaller ships, there a lot of variations.”
So that makes it sound like Ace Patrol with a strategy layer sunroof.
Maybe, but on Twitter, Firaxis producer Pete Murray has gone out of his way to tamp down that particular notion.
@EaglePursuit More going on in combat & strategy layer. Only thing it shares with AP is hexes and similar-looking combat gamescape
— Pete Murray (@FXSPeteMurray) January 19, 2015
Oh there's one more similarity with Ace Patrol. Firing angle is important.
— Pete Murray (@FXSPeteMurray) January 19, 2015
Honestly, those are the only similarities I can think of after much time playing Starships
— Pete Murray (@FXSPeteMurray) January 19, 2015
So this isn’t a pure 4X game, but it’s clearly more than just sci-fi Ace Patrol, too.
So this is a spin-off from Civilization: Beyond Earth, then?
Yup. Sid told Gamespot that this was “the next chapter” of that game. As I mentioned above, a lot of the user interface icons we’ve seen come straight from Civ: BE, and Eurogamer DE was told that “you will recognise some of the [faction] leaders from Civilization: Beyond Earth.” We’ve also seen the “affinities” from that game–imperial ideologies–show up: a couple of the released screenshots refer to “Purity” and “Supremacy” fleets.
That Hutama guy still owes me a favor.
I heard that game wasn’t great.
Well, it wasn’t great. But it wasn’t bad. Anyhow, this is a completely different animal.
Owen, I’ve been traumatized by in-app purchases and I now assume that they’re in every-damn-thing until proven irrefutably wrong. Am I wrong?
I think you’re wrong. Nothing definitive has been said, so I’m reading tea leaves here, but I sincerely doubt that there will be any IAPs in Starships.
Firaxis experimented with IAPs in their first mobile games, Haunted Hollow and the first Ace Patrol. Lots of people (including me) kicked and screamed about the presence of IAPs in those games, and it seems like Firaxis took that feedback to heart. Ace Patrol follow-up Pacific Skies featured no IAPs at all, and neither did the Firaxis-branded Civilization Revolution 2 developed by 2K China.
That hasn’t stopped 2K from stuffing their other games full of IAPs, but it sure seems like the publisher gets that the audience for Firaxis’ kind of strategy games is not the same audience that’s happy to pay for in-game consumable tchotchkes. Sid himself has voiced discomfort with IAPs in the past. Thank goodness. I could be wrong. But I doubt it.
You’ve had a lot of time to perfect that Cylon detector.
You’re going to bore us to tears with like, 10 more posts about this game between here and when it comes out, aren’t you?
One of the more famous episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation was called “The Inner Light” and told the story of Captain Picard living an entire life—family, kids, career—inside his head in the span of about 20 minutes.
Choice of Robots is kind of like that. You, probably, won’t end up sobbing and knowing how to play a Ressikan flute [worked for me –ed.] but you will feel as though you’ve experienced something a little greater than a 30-minute gamebook. Starting as a young graduate student and carrying well into your old age, if you live that long, Choice of Robots has a scope unlike any other gamebook I’ve ever read.
Teaching robots by showing them xkcd seems like a good idea
If you’ve never played a Choice of Games gamebook before you need to prepare yourself a little before you jump in. The presentation of their gamebooks is somewhere between Excel and a command prompt, which can be quite a shock to those of us looking for a Tin Man or inkle Studios experience in in our gamebooks. There are no images anywhere in the book, and the screen is laid out in multiple panes that are either filled with text or red bars that indicate your current standing with the other characters in the book. It’s a bland and uninteresting interface, but you’ll find yourself becoming attached to it fairly quickly. The ability to see, on the fly, how your choices affect each character is a fantastic form of feedback that you don’t get in other gamebooks. Another bonus? You can totally play this while sitting at your desk at work, and everyone will just assume you’re working on the latest TPS report. Try pulling that off with 80 Days.
Character creation is closer to The Elder Scrolls than Sorcery! or Lone Wolf.
When it comes to story, I don’t want to spoil anything so I won’t give specifics. Let’s just say that the game can spread 40+ years depending on the choices you make along the way. You’ll face graduation, love, wars, family, and fame over the course of your imaginary lifetime, and all of it is tied to the robot that you create at the beginning of the gamebook. The writing itself is fine, and in some places fantastic. There are parts where the writing fails, however, and that’s particularly at the end. The endings I’ve seen have all wrapped up faster than an 80’s sitcom. I’m guessing that at over 300,000 words already, they basically told the author to wrap it up, already. This makes the end of the story seem very much like an “The Eagles are Coming” scenario which is fine, except I just lived an entire lifetime in your book and I feel like I deserve an ending that doesn’t feel contrived. Then again, some of the other endings were fine, so maybe it just comes down to making poor decisions on my part.
Check that off the bucket list
All that said, Choice of Robots is all about the journey and not the destination and, as a gamebook, I’m hard-pressed to find better ones out there. Most gamebooks don’t get more than 2-3 reads from me, whereas CoR is already on its fifth. Each time I’m learning new things and making new choices. There’s a great amount of freedom here. Freedom to choose who you want to be, not just in gender and sexual orientation, but the kind of citizen and person you would like to be, at least for a short while.
If you’ve never played a Choice of Games gamebook before (like our 2013 IF GOTY Runner-up, The Fleet), start with Choice of Robots. Where the presentation falls short, the depth of the story is such that you won’t miss the pretty pictures. It’s truly a fantastic gamebook, and one I would recommend to anyone.
After their big mobile offensive in 2013, I’d been wondering why Uncle Sid & Co at Firaxis had been so quiet in 2014. Well here’s what they’d been beavering away at in secret: Sid Meier’s Starships, just announced for desktops and iPad, coming “early 2015″.
Like the wonderful Ace Patrol games, Spaceships is designed by the hand of Sid Meier himself, creator of Civilization and Railroad Tycoon and too many other strategy classics to mention. It’s set up as a spinoff of last year’s (slightly underwhelming) desktop 4X Civilization: Beyond Earth. According to the details that Firaxis have given to Gamespot, it sounds like Uncle Sid’s Star Trek fan fiction: you travel the galaxy amassing an armada of upgradeable, customizable ships while you win new allies to your cause and get into turn-based battles with the aliens that don’t want to play ball. Procedurally generated maps and “dynamically generated tactical combat” (?) make it sound as though replay value was a big priority.
I have never failed to play a game with Sid Meier’s name on it and I certainly don’t intend to start now. I’ll have more details as soon as I can prise them out of 2K. There’s a trailer below and more screenshots over at Gamespot.
Earth Primer isn’t a game — it bills itself as “a science book for playful people”. It’s a richly detailed geological simulator that lets you play with the processes that drive the planet. To me it feels like a throwback to those exciting days when the iPad was new and there were digital pop-up wonders like Pennant trying to make tablets into a platform for a different kind of book.
Nostalgia aside, Earth Primer looks lovely and has a remarkable pedigree: dev Chaim Gingold was the designer behind Spore’s creature creator, which anyone who played Spore will agree was the best part of that game — the last thing Maxis produced before it disappeared into EA’s maw and came out changed.
Earth Primer will be out for iPad in the next month or so. It’ll require iOS 7 or better. Watch the trailer below.
When I was a kid, my first two wargames were purchased from an infrequently-disturbed bottom shelf at the Salvation Army charity shop. One of the two has since become the answer to an unfairly difficult trivia question ( James Clavell’s Whirlwind) but the other was–by chance–a bona fide classic: Advanced Squad Leader.
Whirlwind was a mystifying jumble of chits comprising a game about mercenary helicopter pilots in Revolutionary Iran. I didn’t get the game at all, but I thought the map of Iran and the helicopter chits were pretty neat.
Advanced Squad Leader was also a let-down at first — to my exasperation it turned out to be just a rulebook with no pieces. When I overcame my pre-teen indignation and sat down to read it, I was mesmerized. Here was a game of WWII combat that simulated individual infantry squads in excruciating detail. It blew my mind. It was nothing like the video games I played with my friends, which rewarded reflexes and hand-eye coordination, qualities that my Little League coaches noted that I possessed in no measurable quantities. ASL was about patience and cunning and moxie, which I did have — or at least, I thought I was more likely to develop. I promptly flipped those Whirlwind chits over onto their blank sides and inked them up into ersatz ASL counters.
ASL became a kind of religion for me. I took me weeks of poring over the enormous rulebook for its obscured truths to become clear to me, and I preached the virtues of the game to every neighborhood kid I could wrangle into sitting down for a tutorial. Re-readings of the rulebook and new gameplay situations led to moments of revelation and doctrinal revision. It was probably six months before the version of Advanced Squad Leader being played in my neighborhood resembled the intended gameplay, but my fellow converts and I carried on playing it for years.
John Hill, who designed the original Squad Leader (from which ASL descended) and many other notable wargames, passed away last week at the age of 69. Even if you never played Squad Leader or its immediate offspring, you’ve probably played a game that it influenced. Squad Leader’s attention to low-level tactical detail was unique for its time. The game sold hundreds of thousands of copies and spawned tournaments, meet-ups, and mailing lists all over the world. It inspired game designers like X-Com creator Julian Gollop and attempts to translate it into a computer game gave us Atomic’s Close Combat and Combat Mission.
Lift a glass for John Hill tonight. And I’ll see if I can’t find my make-shift ASL counters the next time I’m at my parents’ house. (Hat-tip to Michael B. for passing on the news.)
Sunday links after the jump.
Since this is the first Sunday Almanac since I ducked out to get married last year, I have a biblical deluge of links here. Have at ‘em.
75 years of Blue Note album covers. The next time we remodel Pocket Tactics I’m just going to send the designer the Page One album cover and say, “make us look like this”.
NASA’s tourism posters for exoplanets.
Dolphins like to get high on puffer fish toxins. (If I had written an article about this, the title would have been “Puffer, puffer, give”.)
A cartoon diary of life in LA County jail.
Brilliant anecdotes from The Wire‘s sound editor.
Caribou (whose Our Love was one of my two or three favorite records of 2014) made a 1,000-song YouTube playlist to give to people who ask him what kind of music he’s into.
The decline and fall of Glasgow Rangers, the once-mighty Scottish football club who now play against semi-pro teams in front of tiny crowds.
Concept art from the Alien sequel that Neil Blomkamp didn’t get to make.
More Alien: what if the Xenomorph is actually a tragic hero?
Robert Heinlein, L. Sprague de Camp, and Isaac Asimov chilling at the Philadelphia Naval Yard, 1944.
More Asimov: endorsing Radio Shack’s Tandy computers in 1982.
“Missing parrot turns up minus British accent and speaking Spanish”.
There’s a good idea floating around somewhere in orbit over Free Trader. The concept is potentially delightful — it might be taken from a 23rd-century reality TV show. In a bid to pay off your starship, you’ve four months to accrue and deliver four increasing amounts of Vectorium, be it by trade or trouncing unsuspecting merchants. The pride of ownership awaits the crafty at the end of a jump-ridden frolic through the stars. Frolic is too jovial a word for the reality of Free Trader, though — it leaves my FTL drives decidedly unspooled.
“I’ve made some special modifications myself. For example, our Defense is 5.”
Free Trader is a card game where the action takes place across six phases. Each phase, players snag cargo to sell across an expanding number of systems. Every turn demands a new planet card be placed on the table, with a mandatory jump in order to offload goods and keep the Vectorium currency flowing. Free Trader is a harsh mistress: it uses a single currency for every action. Planets that are further away have a heftier jump cost in Vectorium, which can hobble an early game if the cards don’t come up in your favour. Smuggling illegal goods is more lucrative, potentially, but carries the risk of being sprung by system police if such an event card pops up, wherein the hot cargo is removed and a fine paid either in cash and/or ship modules.
Combat is the main rub, with players being set upon randomly by pirates or interstellar Invaders. It’s a dice-centric affair, with modifiers being applied to weapon and defense tallies as they roll off the randomised conveyor belt. Sadly, it’s as flavourless as the trading.
The dreaded Pirate 2.
Once you’ve got that down, there’s little else to do but manage the Vectorium pool and hope you don’t get gouged by the hyperspace tollways. The four discrete trading goods find a smidgen of market variation across the planets, but there’s little here for the Hanseatic pretender — there’s too much randomness to ever feel like you’re ahead of the market. There’s a flaccidity to Free Trader and the absence of thrills makes this less space opera and more space public-access TV.
I gather Free Trader started life as a humble tabletop solitaire print-and-play affair, and it certainly shows in the presentation. I’m not hugely fussy when it comes to eye candy, but the game’s presentation is one heck of a missed opportunity. After being greeted by a refreshingly brief transition from menu to game interface, Free Trader is excruciatingly utilitarian. Outside of the woozy, rolling wash of dark space synthesizer forming the single-song soundtrack, there’s not much to soak up or pour over. Card art captures the imagination in the same way video card box art did back in the late Nineties, with characterless CG globs done sixteen different ways across the game’s compliment of events, ships and planets. Many other games have made the crossing from tabletop to digital and come away enriched by the process, but Free Trader gains nothing from being an app.
Remember last year when our collective jaw dropped over the first screenshots and gameplay video of Ultimate General Gettysburg? The PC version of the American Civil War RTS from veteran Total War modders Game Labs came out on Steam in October to near-universal acclaim, and the promised iPad edition is now just around the corner.
Lead dev Maxim Zasov has been in touch to tell us that beta is fully underway and that iPad launch isn’t far off. There’s even a new gameplay video of the iPad version right here after the jump. It doesn’t look quite as nice as the PC specimen, but to complain about that would be like pouting over getting a 1970 Corvette instead of a ’63. It’s still stunning to watch, with ragged lines of infantry charging over hills and rifle volleys filling the air with gunsmoke. UGG seems to have twin goals of creating a satisfying strategy experience but also replicating the atmosphere of 19th-century combat — presentation is not usually a high priority in this genre.
With the future of Shenandoah’s Gettysburg in doubt (the studio appears to be in hibernation following its acquisition by Slitherine last year — most Shenandoah devs we know became former Shenandoah devs right before the buy-out) this is the only new American Civil War game on our radar for mobile this year. But I don’t think we’ll be needing too many more.
Watch the video below. Last time I checked, there was an Android tablet edition on the cards — I’ll see what I can find out about that.
Since late last year we’ve been keeping an eye on indie digital board game SettleForge, a Populous-meets-Carcassonne jump-off from former EA Phenomic developer Andreas Mank. In it, you’re creating the universe and placating your finicky mortal subjects by ensuring that you arrange the world optimally: wood-cutters need to be near forests, but the nobility doesn’t want to live next to those noisy lumberjacks. NIMBYs — even on the first day of creation.
Mr Mank tells us that he’s just about ready to share this thing with everybody — but he needs more iPad beta-testers. And he’s very sensibly decided to recruit from the ranks of Pocket Tactics readers, swollen as they are with smart, attractive, board game-loving people.
If you want to get one of the 10 SettleForge beta slots that we’ve got to dole out, just post a comment here and tell us which of your New Year’s Resolutions you haven’t broken yet. We’ll pick ten of those at random on Monday and get you hooked up with a beta build.
In the meantime, check out a new gameplay video of SettleForge after the jump. Unlike the previous videos of the game it’s in HD, which finally does justice to the in-game art.
I knew from the moment that I saw it in my inbox that I was going to write about Detective Case and Clown Bot in: Murder in The Hotel Lisbon. It doesn’t matter what it’s about, or what sort of game it is. It could be a hidden object game about Dutch tulip horticulture. Who cares. Look at the name again. Read the name. Bask in the name.
As it happens, Detective Case and Clown Bot in: Murder in The Hotel Lisbon is a comedy adventure game, which is right up our alley. It released for PC last year, and Portugese studio Nerd Monkeys (they’re good at names, this lot) have just ported it over to iOS and Android, where it will be available next week on the 22nd.
The title characters must solve a murder in this point-and-click adventure, interviewing witnesses and piecing together clues. I’m not going to attempt to out-do this description from the devs:
A strange murder has occurred in the Hotel Lisbon, a man committed suicide with 14 stabs to the back while at the same time he peacefully drank his coffee. This case with contradictory facts was too complex for Policeman Garcia to solve, so he decided to hire the only detective duo in town capable of solving it: the mythical Detective Case and the unmistakable Clown Bot. Together, they will solve a network of love relations so complex and so intricate, that it would take at least 14 clairvoyants, 5 apocalyptic sect prophets who can predict the end of the world and 3 of those gypsies that can read the palm of your hand just to guess the final outcome.
That is one finely cut jib. Maybe I should get these cats writing for PT. Watch for DCaCBiMiTHL next week — in the meantime, here’s a trailer.
“Interactive novella” PRY is free right now on the App Store. Actually (and this is my bad) it was free yesterday, and it’s free right now just because the App Store hasn’t updated yet. I missed the email until now. Sorry.
Dave wrote about PRY last year while I was off getting married: it’s an interactive fiction game with some unusual mechanics — you manipulate the very text to explore deeper within the story of an American serviceman flashing back to his experiences in the Gulf War. There’s clearly something to it as the game is an IGF finalist for narrative design this past week.
I’m going to try this myself, and it sounds like you should too if you’ve got a couple of hours to sink. Watch the trailer after the jump.
The code is more what you’d call “guidelines” than actual rules.
While January is typically the slowest month for new releases on the App Store, that doesn’t mean that we have nothing worth talking about. For example, tonight we have a big release from renowned gamebook developer Tin Man Games. Bloodbones is a Fighting Fantasy gamebook written by Jonathan Green and follows your exploits as you hunt down the evil undead pirate, Cinnabar, after he killed your family. If you’ve played any of Tin Man’s previous Fighting Fantasy books, you know what to expect: a solid story with good writing, great illustrations, and a dice-filled combat system.
Bloodbones is already available on Google Play and Amazon, and will be hitting the App Store tonight.
Check after the break for more of this week’s new releases.
Bear Winter is a game in which you’re stranded alone in the woods and need to see how long you can survive. It’s uses Match-3 style gameplay in which you need to collect resources to help you stay alive, and arrow to help you fend off the bears when they come sniffing around. It’s already out for Android on Google Play and will hit iOS later tonight. Just a warning: the game is free to download and the IAP includes “coins”. Hmmm.
Revolus – Orbital Dash is another puzzler, but it’s not like any other puzzler I’ve seen before. You are a thing orbiting another thing. So far, it sounds really enthralling, no? The non-oribiting thing moves along a path that is covered with spikes, and you have to adjust the orbit size of the orbiting-thingee as you move along the path to avoid the spikes. Make sense? No. No, it doesn’t. Just watch the video below. This one is hitting the App Store tonight and is free to download. No hint on what the IAP in this one looks like, though.
The last game for the day is Socioball from Yellow Monkey. Here you drop tiles to build a path to get a ball to travel to an end point on each map. As you can see in the trailer, it starts out ridiculously easy, but ramps up considerably as more and more tiles that you can place are added. You can also create and share your own puzzles via Twitter. This one will hit the App Store tonight and should cost $3.
Now that 2015 has started to resolve in the viewfinder of the Prognosti-Scope at the Pocket Tactics Haruspex School and Off-Track Betting Emporium high atop Mount Hexmap, we can finally reveal our most keenly-awaited games of 2015. And let me tell you — this is one hot list.
Our 2014 list didn’t do so well — of our 8 picks, only 2 managed to come out on mobile, with a third out on PC and waiting in the wings for iPad. This year will be entirely different — we’ve taken on a highly reputable mystic as a contractor and he’s vetted all of the following choices, which are guaranteed to ship this year. Yessir.
After the jump, the seven games that we here at PT are looking forward to the most in 2015.
Twilight Struggle
Cold War simulator Twilight Struggle pits two players in a head-to-head test of brinksmanship. As the US or the USSR, manipulate smaller nations and fight proxy wars without tipping the world over into open nuclear conflict.
We say:
I was smitten when I first met my wife. Nine years later, I finally convinced her to date me, so it is perhaps no great surprise that my affections are uncommonly stable, and that the game I look forward to most eagerly in 2015 is the game I most hoped would arrive in 2014.
It’s not just me, though: Twilight Struggle still sits atop the Board Game Geek rankings, as it has for years, though board games are undergoing an unprecedentedly creative period. It’s the jewel in publisher GMT’s crown, makers of some true titans of recent tabletop gaming history. And it’s being developed by digital board game superstars Playdek, too, which basically makes it sound like 2014’s LeBron James just got traded to the 1995 Chicago Bulls. Or Lionel Messi, for those of you who like your sports stars named after model trains, joined, um, Barcelona. Because Playdek adapting Twilight Struggle is as unfair as a team fielding two Messis.
–Kelsey Rinella
If Twilight Struggle isn’t at the top of your personal Most Anticipated list for 2015, then you’re dead inside. Seriously, how can you not be drooling over the combination of the single best 2-player board game ever created and Playdek, the makers of all things wonderful? I’m so looking forward to this that my gaming partners and I have stopped playing our current online games of Twilight Struggle. Why struggle (ha!) with the current clunky means of playing it when we should reach the board games equivalent of the Elysian Fields sometime this summer? Hurry up, Playdek, I need to let some nukes fly (while my opponent is the phasing player, of course).
–Dave Neumann
Confession: I have never played the board game Twilight Struggle. But, oh, oh I want to. How could I not?
One of the most nebulous, sprawling and complicated conflicts in human history, one which still casts a shadow over the modern day, condensed and pinned down onto a bunch of cards and area-control mechanics. Politics! War! Treachery! Kitchen appliances! If those things do not cause your heart to beat-a-faster in your chest, you are a strange creature here at Pocket Tactics. And yet, Twilight Struggle is a big, ambitious, exclusively two player game with an intimidating theme, and by its nature exacerbates the board gamer’s own perennial struggle – finding opportunity to play.
So in swoop Playdek, the guys who you wish made every iOS board game, to save a troubled production. Twilight Struggle, whenever you want, against whoever you want, delivered with the unobtusive grace of a veteran maitre d’.
–Dave Lane
I enjoying taking up contrary positions for the sheer sport of it (ask me why The Happening is a great film one of these days) but in the case of Twilight Struggle, I can only agree with the critical consensus: this is the best board game on Earth. Playdek can’t possibly finish it fast enough. Except me to take a week’s vacation when this thing launches. You’ll know where to find me if you really need me.
–Owen Faraday
Read more: Twilight Struggle interview with Playdek
***
Subterfuge
A slow-playing multiplayer RTS that takes days to finish a game. Launch fleets that take real-time hours to reach their destination while you scheme with your allies — or prepare to back-stab them.
We say:
A throwaway criticism of our digital age is that we have a wealth of communication options and, yet, it can often seem like people aren’t truly talking to one another. Tab out to that one photo of a bus packed with total sheeple (but, like, just normal folks) hypnotized (or maybe planning a date or ordering some dumplings) on their portable idiot boxes.
Subterfuge, the Neptune’s Pride-inspired game of diplomacy and backstabbing from Ron Carmel and Noel Llopis, promises to be the game to ruin this ill-conceived stereotype. Not that the game’s deep-sea mining conflicts (designed to be a bit less demanding than Pride’s space war, where ace commanders lose sleep to launch the perfect strike) will bring out the warm and fuzzy in players–just the opposite. Still, when you collapse in a teary pile on the 5:15 back home because your supposed alliance is actually a den of thieving traitor-weasels… well that’s probably a conversation. Or some extra legroom, at least.
–Sean Clancy
Read more: Noel Llopis & Ron Carmel Interview
***
forma.8
Little-lauded indie studio Mixed Bag have a keen eye for aesthetics and a knack for finely-tuned controls, which sets our expectations high for 2D exploration game forma.8.
We say:
The tiny two-man Turin Mixed Bag games have a stellar follow-up planned for the beautiful (and under-rated) shooter Futuridium. Forma.8 promises a subtle, alien twist on the Metroidvania concept as players take command of a lost terraforming probe in a forgotten corner of the galaxy. Though being deployed across a range of platforms, forma.8 should sit very well on tablets. The art is crisp and if the music accompanying the trailer ( is any indication of what’s to come, the soundtrack will be a right bottler.
Forma.8 has me very intrigued, besting Most-Anticipated contenders like Subterfuge and even Unsung Story. A lone drone drifting through the catacombs of a distant world has the capacity to join games like flOw, Aquaria or the PSM Eufloria spin-off, Adventures. With its Another World aesthetic and a mysterious aura, I’m gearing up to get lost.
–Alex Connolly
***
Sorcery Part 3
Spellshocked.
Following up their critically adored 80 Days, Cambridge-based Inkle return to the series that made put them on the interactive fiction map: Steve Jackson’s spellsword gamebook epic Sorcery.
We say:
Our admiration for interactive fiction auteurs Inkle knows almost no bounds. They haven’t come onto the IF scene as much as they’ve driven a truck through it, demolishing our expectations for what game-books can do. Part 3 of Steve Jackson gamebooks that the series is based on isn’t the highest-regarded of the series, but Inkle have injected so much new life into parts 1 and 2 that it’s hard to imagine they won’t be able to do the same again. Inkle have told us that this installment will have the highest degree of freedom of any of their work to date — “This is the Sorcery! version of an open-world game,” Inkle’s Jon Ingold told us, “one stuffed with stories.”
–Owen Faraday
Read more: Inkle on the making of Sorcery
***
Through The Ages
Aging gracefully
This Civilization-style 4X board game is a huge hit on the tabletop, but it’s been through a notoriously drawn-out development for mobile. Our man Dave has faith that it’s going to be worth the wait when it ships.
We say:
Through the Ages was originally scheduled for a 2014 release by the newly formed digital group at Czech Games Edition, but it has since slipped until late 2015. Normally, I’d be outraged and slightly worried that it’s turning into vaporware but not this time. CGE stopped development on Through the Ages last year to put their entire focus on getting Galaxy Trucker out the door. How did that go? Well, it won the Best Boardgame of the Year award just a couple weeks ago. Seeing the quality that CGE put into GT only makes me want TtA even more. Through the Ages is one of the best board games ever created (currently #3 on BGG) and takes the 4X concept popularized by Sid Meier on the PC and moves it into an epic card game. I’ve personally seen what CGE is doing with the port, and I’ve seen it in action, and fans of the board game as well as newcomers are in for a real treat when this one hits late in 2015.
–Dave Neumann
Read more: Through the Ages designer Vlaada Chvatil talks about Galaxy Trucker for mobile
***
Mini Metro
This subway-themed puzzle game has been a hit on Steam Early Access since late last year. The sleek visual design is matched only by its clever gameplay that summons forth your inner traffic engineer. Bet you didn’t know you had one of those.
I learned to my detriment last year that Mini Metro is one of those games where a five-minute coffee break quickly turns into “shit I’ve missed my train”. As appealing as chocolate, as addictive as crack — Mini Metro is straight-up dangerous. I fully expect that this insidiously smart and elegant game is going to conquer the world this year.
–Owen Faraday
Read more: Mini Metro included in IGF finalists
***
Gary Grigsby’s World at War: A World Divided
Axis of Awesome.
A World War II wargame of a scale heretofore unseen on mobile, World at War is coming to iPad via venerable publishing house Slitherine — hopefully sometime this year. The player leads one of the major antagonists of the war, directing troops, producing weapons, and researching new technologies. It originally came out on PC in 2006.
We say:
Gary Grigsby has never seen a wargame design that he didn’t think he could make bigger. In grognard circles, the man is synonymous with gigantic globe-spanning monstrosities that take weeks, if not months, to finish a single scenario of. World at War is (believe it or not) one of Grigsby’s more accessible titles, despite covering every theatre in WWII.
There’s a lot of open questions here: how well will the touchscreen interface cope with the tomes of information necessary to play the game? And will the AI (never a strong point in Grigsby’s titantic scenarios) be up to the challenge? And if not, how smooth will the online multiplayer be? If Slitherine can pull it off, though, this will immediately become a must-have wargame on iPad.
–Owen Faraday
Read more: Slitherine’s next mobile releases detailed
Developer Ger Kelly has been in touch to tell us about Hipster CEO 2, a sequel to his 2013 iOS business sim that he’s planning to release in February.
The original Hipster CEO had a cute idea at its core: it looked like a business productivity app and it basically was one — albeit for your fictional business. For me, its downfall was that it was too committed to the notion. You didn’t get very much feedback about why or how you were succeeding or failing, and the near-complete absence of graphics made Hipster CEO so bland that it was normcore before that was even a thing.
Kelly tells me that he’s taken a lot of that criticism on board: the new Hipster CEO 2 does indeed feature more art (“Getting back to my 8-bit roots!”) with a style heavily inspired by Nimblebit. There’s also “simplified and easier-to-understand gameplay”. But the biggest change is downright (forgive me) disruptive.
Hipster CEO 2 will sport online multiplayer, letting you invest in other people’s startups or attempt to sabotage them by poaching their staff or planting negative news stories in the press. Hipster CEO always ran in the background while you weren’t playing it, but now it will feel more like a slow-play multiplayer game akin to Subterfuge or Neptune’s Pride.
Watch for Hipster CEO 2 to hit iOS next month — in the meantime, there’s two more screenshots below.
Didn’t I see you guys in Pocket Planes?
Definitely not our most exciting screenshot this month.
