Ring of fire: The Ember Conflict coming next week

For all this conflict, the Ember Isles don’t look so bad.

Real time strategy and touchscreens go together about as well as mint and ice cream. Seriously, if you enjoy either, you’re a monster and you need to be stopped. The only RTS game on touchscreens that managed to not completely suck was Autumn Dynasty and its sequel, both of which turned out to be very good. So, it’s probably a good sign that upcoming RTS, The Ember Conflict uses those two games as its starting point.

The Ember Conflict will have you drawing lines across the battlefield, leading your armies into war. The really cool bit about Ember, however, is just how much you can customize your units before you send them into the meat grinder. There are over 60 different bits of gear you can outfit your units with, which allows you to tailor them to fit the kind of play style you prefer. Also, battles are only a couple of minutes long, so it should be a perfect fit for mobile.

Look for The Ember Conflict to come to iOS Universal on June 4th.  iPad trailer after the break.

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Future tech: There’s AAA mobile games on 2K’s roadmap

Now that’s what I call a feature window.

Of all the major game publishers, 2K have been the most faithful ally of the premium mobile game. That’s not to say Tammy Wynette faithful. There’s no shortage of free-to-play games coming from 2K studios, but unlike EA (who haven’t released a non-F2P game since you could smoke in restaurants), 2K have been stocking their stall with a lot of good old fashioned pay-once-get-a-game fare.

Not all of it has been brilliant, deathless stuff. Bioshock‘s controls (as we predicted) demanded too much juggling for a touchscreen, Civ Rev 2 was lacking in ambition and Starships wore out its welcome too quickly. But those are missteps I’m willing to overlook for XCOM and Ace Patrol. Of all the AAA publishing houses, only 2K seem to realize that there’s a big audience for traditionally-priced games on mobile devices.

And that strategy seems to be paying off. On their Q4 earnings call earlier this week, 2K’s parent company Take Two called out mobile as an area of excellence for the group and suggested that they’re in the mobile games fight for the forseeable future. “As mobile devices (particularly tablets) become more powerful and increasingly ubiquitous,” said CEO Strauss Zelnick, “there will be even greater opportunities to leverage our portfolio and deliver triple-A entertainment experiences to an ever wider audience.”

In case you don’t speak CEO, that means Take Two want to bring more of their brands to life on mobile devices — and in a high-spec way. Could AAA games on mobile mean that we’ll see a full-fat Civ on tablets? XCOM lead Jake Solomon said back in 2013 that 2K and Firaxis were considering it.

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Slightly peeved Max: Dark Future racing to digital

I’m here for the guzzoline.

A future that is a dystopian wasteland? Check. Souped-up cars? Check. Gangs racing and killing each other? Check. Dude strapped to the back of a truck with a guitar/flamethrower? No? Okay, so Auroch Digital‘s newest game isn’t an exact copy of the Road Warrior or Fury Road, but it’s damn close. Dark Future was an obscure 80’s board game from Games Workshop (something that Auroch is quite used to developing), that featured a lot of cars and a lot of death, not always in that order, and Auroch is bringing it to us sometime in the winter of 2015.

Surprisingly, even though I was a total dork in the 80’s, I had never played Dark Future. Apparently I wasn’t a cool enough dork, because this game looks pretty great. In the game you build vehicles using a point system and then race them on tracks that change with each play through, trying to blow stuff up. No idea how close Auroch’s digital take will hew to the original, but they are stating that it will be a “turn-based strategy game, played out in simultaneous real-time action.” I’m picturing something like Frozen Synapse.

Nothing else to report at this time, we’re not even sure what platforms they’re targeting. Considering that both Chainsaw Warrior games made it to PC, iOS, and Android, we’ll assume this is going the same route.

Oh, and the trailer is pretty amazing. It’s a teaser, so no actual gameplay is shown, and yet it made me want to strap a rocket launcher to my minivan. Check it out after the break.

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Out Tonight: Battles of the Ancient World II, The Top Spot, and Capitals

Wait a tick, aren’t we from Battles of the Ancient World I?

HexWar is becoming the next Slitherine in that we can’t go a week or two without announcing a new game from them. Hell, today we already talked about their upcoming Infection: Humanity’s Last Gasp and Battles of the Ancient World I was in Out Tonight only 2 weeks ago.

This week it’s the creatively titled Battles of the Ancient World II, which uses the ruleset created by Decision Games and engine built for the first volume that was just released for iOS earlier this month. This second volume includes battles such as Issus, Metaurus, Carrhae, and Idistavisus and if you know what those are without looking them up, you’re too damn smart to be reading anything I wrote, so I’ll understand if you leave.

BotAW2 has 5 campaigns, not including the tutorial, as well as 3 levels of AI. There’s over 50 different units, flanking attacks, and everything you’d expect in a HexWar title.

Look for Battles of the Ancient World II to release at midnight for iOS Universal and cost $3. No trailer for this one, yet, so instead you’ll find a trailer for BotAW1 after the break along with the rest of tonight’s releases.

The second game is one of those 5-minute puzzlers that work so well on our phones. This one is called The Top Spot and it’s being published by Chillingo. The goal of this one is to tap each spot on the screen from the topmost down to the lowest one. Unfortunately, you can’t tell which is above which without moving them so that they overlap. I don’t know why, but watching the trailer for this one sold me. I’m usually a sucker for these anyway, but something about the dots all orbiting the screen and whatever looks damn cool. The only downside I can spot (ho-ho!) is that it’s free to download, which could mean a paywall at some point. Guess I’ll have to give it a shot to find out. The Top Spot will be available for iOS Universal tonight at midnight.

Our last game tonight is Capitals from NimbleBit. We looked at it last week when it soft launched in Canada, and we were told it would be coming on May 21st. Usually, that means midnight tonight, but I’m not sure if a soft-launched game like that will spread from the New Zealand App Store like all the others. So, check for it tonight, but it might not actually go world-wide until some time tomorrow.

Capitals is a head-to-head word game that involves not just being able to spell, but also some tactical maneuvering as you attempt to take over your opponent’s space and, eventually, their capital. It looks a bit like Letterpress, which is a good thing. It, too, is a free-to-download game which isn’t surprising considering it’s from NimbleBit. It will be released world-wide for iOS Universal.

As usual, tell us what we missed. I’m guessing there’s at least a gem or two I didn’t stumble across.

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Bring out your dead: First look at Infection: Humanity’s Last Gasp

Red is good, right?

When we think of HexWar, we don’t usually think of board games. Sure, they’ve ported some war games from their cardboard origins to the digital realm, but war games are in their wheelhouse. This June, they’re spreading their wings a bit and heading into unfamiliar waters, porting a traditional board game to the digital realm. The game in question is Infection: Humanity’s Last Gasp from Victory Point Games.

Infection: Humanity’s Last Gasp’s plot is similar to the excellent Pandemic: save humanity from a modern plague. Unlike Pandemic, which has you traversing the globe and fighting disease in the trenches, Infection puts you in the lab, fighting the disease on the molecular level. I’ve gotten my latex covered hand on a preview build of Infection and, from what I’ve seen thus far, we’re all in for a treat.

Upon first inspection, Infection: Humanity’s Last Gasp looks a bit more like a puzzle game than a board game. Your screen contains a petri dish full of hexes that are filled with different strains of the disease that’s decimating humanity. Your goal is to build the antibodies that will combat the disease by harvesting and incubating proteins. It might sound dull, and if that’s all you were doing, it might be. Luckily, you also need to purchase lab equipment and scientists to help along the way and the game keeps punching you in the gut to make sure you don’t get cocky.

Not how I remember my microbiology classes.

Each turn of Infection involves harvesting proteins from the lab and using 2 of them to help build antibodies. If you complete an antibody for one of the strains in your petri dish, you can eliminate it from your dish and earn some cash. You can also go shopping on your turn and pick up lab equipment and scientists who all have special abilities which make your life easier.

I’ll take one of those, three of those….

After you’ve placed your proteins, it’s the game’s turn to kick you in the ass. First, you check to see if the disease spreads, killing more and more of humanity. If this happens too many times, humanity is destroyed and you lose. You then check to see if the strains you have in the petri dish mutate. If they do, more strains will be added to the dish, or strains that were there might change to another strain.

During this time, events will also trigger off that can both help and hinder you. Things like scientists unable to work that round or lab equipment that is working especially well. You’ll learn to both love and hate these events.

This is one of those events that we love.

From there, the player turn begins again, repeat until you’ve won or lost the game. Like all good cooperative/solo games, Infection offers many ways to lose the game, and only one way to win. Winning occurs if you find antibodies for all the strains currently in your petri dish. Losing happens if humanity is wiped out, if you run out of proteins and cannot build any more antibodies, or if your petri dish is completely full at the end of your turn.

The game is presented with that Tron-like glowing blue that we’re become accustomed to from games like XCOM or Pandemic, and it really looks and sounds nice. The UI is well done as well, using sliding trays on the left and right side of the screen to keep the main screen uncluttered.

Trays pop out from the sides, making everything easy to see and understand.

Where the game currently falls down is in the tutorial section. There is a short tutorial, but it still took me several plays–and a downloading of the game rules from the VPG site–to fully figure out what was going on. The problem wasn’t so much that I didn’t know what was going on, I just don’t know why certain stuff was happening. For example, every turn there is a dice roll to determine if the disease spreads. In the digital version, I wasn’t aware of the dice roll or what was actually causing the spreading to occur. I would hire scientists whose power was minimizing the chances of an outbreak, and yet the outbreaks would still occur. Nowhere was I told in the digital version that the scientist was giving me a +2 to a die roll and what roll I needed to succeed or fail. It can be frustrating to not know how your choices and actions are fully affecting the gameplay.

Starting a game is also a bit tricky. You’re given a lot of options, but no real description of what they do. For example, I didn’t realize that a bacterial disease was considered “easy” while the viral was “hard”. You can also change different molecules and select distinct viruses, but I wasn’t sure what any of that meant in relation to what kind of game I was going to be playing.

Don’t get cocky, kid.

HexWar is still a few weeks away from submitting the game to Apple, so perhaps there’s still time to make the board game aspects a little more apparent. Even with these few gripes, I’ve really been enjoying my time inside this world, and I think HexWar has a real winner on their hands. Games take around 15 minutes to complete, and I can guarantee that no one is going to walk away feeling the game is too easy. This game is a bear to win. It’s doable, and there’s a bit of luck required to pull it off, but even during crushing failure, it’s fun to try.

Expect Infection: Humanity’s Last Gasp to arrive sometime around mid-June and it will be available for iOS Universal as well as PC/Mac. Android is a possibility, but that’s going to be down the road a bit.

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Review: Atlantic Fleet

The most English scene in the world: it’s raining on a battleship called Nelson. Below decks the crew drink tea and feel a sense of general embarrassment.

Back in 2012, WWII naval combat sim Pacific Fleet turned me into a narcissist boyfriend from a Nick Hornby novel: I couldn’t get enough of the game, but I also couldn’t stop cataloging its faults. Read my review from a couple of years ago and you can see me oscillating between opinions like a manic depressive garden sprinkler. I’d spent hours engrossed in Pacific Fleet, but the longer I played it, the more I realized that it wasn’t a game so much as it was a toy for history nerds.

Pacific Fleet was structured as a linear set of challenges for your customizable flotilla. Sink these two transports. Now sink a transport and a destroyer. Next two destroyers. This is the same basic structure as Angry Birds, which (while delightful) is no one’s idea of a strategy game.

A couple of years later, Atlantic Fleet arrives, flipping venues to the other side of the globe. No more Japanese, considerably fewer Americans, and the Brits and Germans taking over. Atlantic Fleet retains the endlessly playable turn-based combat of its predecessor, but now it’s been fitted with a thoughtfully designed open-ended strategy game superstructure. It is just about everything I could have wanted from a Pacific Fleet sequel, turning my weird, “it’s complicated” infatuation into a straightforward love affair.

Atlantic Fleet features a camera that pans underwater, letting you see submarines and surface ships that have involuntarily become submarines. Given Killerfish’s propensity for frequent game updates, you can probably expect to see rubber-necking whales sometime this summer.

Killerfish Games have shown some admirable restraint with this sequel. They’ve broken nothing that was working before, which means that the one-more-go combat model from the last game arrives slightly improved but entirely recognizable. This is a turn-based game of 1940s-era naval combat. You give navigation orders to your boats then aim your ships’ guns and fire for effect. Did you miss? Everything here is manual, so adjust your gun elevation and traverse and try again next turn. Capital ships come with radar that will help you direct your fire, but your radarman’s suggested shooting formula isn’t always perfectly accurate, and doesn’t take wind into account either.

It’s a nakedly simple formula, but Atlantic Fleet is full of toys that let you tweak those rules. Bring a carrier to a fight and you’ll get dive bombers and torpedo bombers you can use in place of guns — but carriers are fragile and have to be husbanded carefully, lest a stray shell put a hole in your flight deck and ground your aircraft. There’s submarines as well, which are slow and vulnerable to depth charges but can only be spotted by destroyers. New additions to the combat model include smoke (which counteracts enemy radar at the cost of not shooting that turn), starlight shells (which improve accuracy at night) and torpedo salvos that let you spread torpedoes across multiple bearings.

Reach out and touch someone.

If that sounds like an intractably complex sim… it’s not. Respectful as it is of history, Atlantic Fleet is more interested in producing a war movie than a documentary. Shells impact on hulls with a Michael Bay-esque verve and damaged ships sink quickly and dramatically. The game has been given a dramatic visual facelift over its predecessor and each ship has a detailed visual damage model that lets you see invidual turrets and radars getting knocked out. If you want some post-work catharsis from an easy fish-in-a-barrel scenario, lobbing high-explosive shells at cruisers and watching them turn into 200-meter Roman candles, you can do that. But if you want to play it as a cerebral tactical sim, you can do that too.

Atlantic Fleet’s other big new feature is “Battle of the Atlantic” mode, where you can play as the Royal Navy or the Kriegsmarine in a persistent, open-ended campaign. This dynamic campaign gives you limited resources to use in a campaign to keep the seaways safe for your shipping. Here, the details of each engagement become truly important, as every shell you fire is one less shell in your stockpile, and if you lose a ship it’s gone forever and needs to be replaced from your finite reserves. Playing each scenario for keeps like this injects some serious weight into Atlantic Fleet.

The key to good dive bombing is to wait until you think you have the perfect shot. Then wait a little longer. Try to remember the name of your first grade teacher. Then wait a little more. Order a takeaway curry. Then release.

The finishing touch on top of all of these elements is Atlantic Fleet’s canny AI, which seems to be as attached to its ships as you are to yours. The AI is ruthless about pressing an advantage, but when you take the upper hand it will do its best to sail out of range and disengage, surviving to fight another day. I had a delightful afternoon last weekend with Atlantic Fleet where a scenario about sinking the Scharnhorst forced me to adapt my battle plan over several replays as I realized that I needed to disable her engines to keep the speedy battleship from auf weidersehening from the lumbering battlewagons I’d brought to the fight. The tactical model that underpins Atlantic Fleet is a remarkable balance of movie-style action and detailed simulation, and that creates a lot of emergent fun.

Good night, and good luck.

For all the myriad improvements and enhancements of the Pacific Fleet pattern, there’s still one patch that needs more attention. The game’s UI is serviceable but never inspired, and there’s a few places (like the Battle of the Atlantic mode main screen) where deciphering the interface icons starts to feel like reading Mayan hieroglyphs. I also harbor slight fears about the game’s learning curve — would I have taken to it so quickly had I not spent so much time submerged in Pacific Fleet? I’m not sure. There’s no tutorial, only a few screens comprising an in-game manual, and even that leaves some aspects of the game gnomically underexplained.

But to knock the game unduly for those failings would be churlish. If the true test of a game is how much time you spend playing it, then Atlantic Fleet is probably the game of the year.

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Even a blind squirrel: Bezier announces Castles of Mad King Ludwig coming for

Broken clock, blind squirrel. Choose your own cliche.

This doesn’t happen too often, but we were right! Last Monday, we speculated on what Bezier might be bringing to iOS and Android due to a rather ambiguous tweet. Our speculation pointed directly at the Castles of Mad King Ludwig, a Suburbia-like game that involves building a castle instead of a city. Today, Bezier tweeted the answer and it turns out that Castles of Mad King Ludwig is the game currently under development.

We don’t know much about it, other than it’s coming in Q3 of this year and will have a lengthy single-player campaign, much like Suburbia‘s but, we’re promised, “better“. We do know that it’s coming for iOS and Android and both phones and tablets.

As usual, as we find out more we’ll pass it along. After the break, watch Joel Eddy’s review of the cardboard version of Castles.

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Review: Knights of Pen and Paper 2

I hate math.

We generally think of grinding in an RPG as the boring part and yet, Blizzard has made billions creating games in which running around and fighting is really the only thing to do. Both World of Warcraft and Diablo center around grinding in order to become a more powerful character, usually by finding more powerful loot.

Knights of Pen and Paper 2 follows suit, although I’m not sure the developers really get what makes those other games so successful. There, grinding is a means to an end, and we put up with it because that end is mighty shiny and also bonks monsters really well. Knights of Pen and Paper 2 ditches all that fancy loot and interesting character development which leaves us with just the grinding. This shouldn’t be a secret, but grinding without a carrot dangling somewhere in front of me just isn’t very much fun.

KoPP2 is, at its core, a digital RPG and doesn’t deviate too far from its roots. It’s presented with a wink and a nudge to convince you that it’s so meta, but it ends up doing what it’s poking fun at other games for doing. The premise is that we’re participating in a tabletop RPG both as the players and the game master, and that everything happening in the game is occurring in the imaginations of those players. It’s not a bad premise, and it makes for a few fun moments as they poke fun of the entire genre, but in the end it’s an RPG in which you control characters and fight monsters with the intention of becoming more powerful, and the game master’s role is largely irrelevant.

It’s just like Game of Thrones, but with less nudity.

The game master doles out the adventure that deals with saving the realm of Paperos (ho-ho!) from the Paper Knight who is trying to use 2nd edition rules while the world was written for 1st edition rules. I think it’s trying to be a meta-commentary on the edition wars that have ravaged tabletop gaming, and particularly D&D, over the last decade. It succeeds in the end, I guess, by declaring that editions don’t matter as long as your having fun. The problem is, by that point, I wasn’t having any.

The main problem with KoPP2 is that it devolves into doing the same thing over and over again for hours with no real change. What you’re doing is combat. Everything in this game comes down to fighting. The problem is how damned boring the combat becomes. At first the combat is fun and tactical, but as you level up you realize that every combat becomes the same. Even the end game boss battles were like every battle before them, only they took an age to finish. The problem comes in the fact that each character has four abilities. That’s it for the entire game. As you add skill points to each ability it increases minutely. Thus, once all the skills have a point or two in them, you’ve seen everything the game has to offer. There’s nothing new and leveling up becomes a ho-hum experience in which you’ll get to add 1-2 more damage to an attack or spell. If you’re creating an RPG and leveling up is something that bores the hell out of your players, you’re doing it wrong.

Robin HUD. That’s supposed to be funny, I think.

There’s also a palpable dearth of loot in the game. Every now and then you’ll get some loot from combat, but nothing that you couldn’t just buy from the store. Magic items exist, but you have to craft them from the junk you earn in combat. Even then, I was only ever able to craft +2 and +3 weapons and armor which, to be honest, never made combat feel any different. Another way to get loot is by searching an area. You spend gold to roll dice and collect successes. It’s like playing a slot machine. You hit the button, dice roll and you’re told how many successes you have. When you’ve accumulated enough successes, you get some special loot. Again, most of it is stuff you can buy in the store, but every now and then you’ll find some super sword or staff. Again, once I equipped these items, combat didn’t appear to be any different than it was before.

Searching for loot. Nothing like a visit to the slots.

RPGs exist as a sort of power fantasy. You start as a weak nobody and propel yourself to greatness and near godlike power over the course of a game. KoPP2 is lacking that sense of advancement. The items you find don’t feel like they make a difference, and your abilities never advance beyond what they were at level 4 or 5. Sure, numerically they advance, but you never feel like you’re getting more powerful.

What held the original KoPP above the average was its use of humor. Unfortunately, it’s not working in KoPP2. I don’t think I even chuckled at the references within the game this time around, although the Square Root of Evil did make me smile. Beyond not being funny, some of the design choices, like having you fight variables—literally letter “x” to the “y” power—were downright annoying. Maybe one fight like that would work, but having to repeatedly do it over the course of 4-5 battles? Blech. The entire game felt like that second hour of playing Munchkin. Sure, these cards were funny for the first half-hour, but now they just make you mad and want to hurt someone.

This goes on forever.

The game’s not entirely terrible. I did play through the bitter end, just to see what would come next, but it really felt like a slog. Even some of the features outside the game, such as decking out your game room or buying things from game magazines, felt tacked on and didn’t make a real difference. Just another way to spend gold.

So many places to go, but the only difference between them all are the graphics.

Speaking of the in-game gold, there is an option to purchase more of it via IAP if you wish, but I didn’t find it necessary at all. Eventually you’ll be crawling in the stuff, so if you can be patient and don’t need anything fancy right away, you’ll be fine.

In the end, Knights of Pen and Paper 2 isn’t a terrible game. It’s not a good game, either. It’s just there. It’s basically grinding for 8+ hours with nothing to really show for it and, unlike its forebear, doesn’t even have the humor to hold your interest all the way through.

This game was reviewed on an iPad Air.

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Home screen dungeons?: Desktop Dungeons coming to tablets

Wait, there’s an option to desecrate altars?

Desktop Dungeons was released for PC/Mac back in 2013 to major kudos, leaving those of us who prefer gaming on our iPads to wonder when we might get a taste. The answer is now, apparently, because Desktop Dungeons is heading to iPad and Android tablets this month.

Desktop Dungeons is a perfect fit for mobile in that it’s a roguelike that you play in short bursts, usually only a couple minutes at a time. Each session has you running into a randomly generated dungeon, killing and grabbing loot and getting out of there. Returning back to town unlocks new classes, powers, etc. If you can’t tell, I haven’t played it, so I’m going off of what I can find online. I might pick it up on PC, though, because the saved games should sync, allowing me to pick up and continue where I left off on my iPad once it comes to tablets.

The mobile version of DD will have some minor changes to the UI to accommodate the touchscreen, but otherwise will have 100% of the content of the PC version. The tablet version is the Enhanced Edition, which offers new classes as well as online Daily Dungeons which will have results posted in daily leaderboards.

Look for Desktop Dungeons to hit sometime this month. Trailer after the break.

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Out Tonight: Knights of Pen & Paper 2, Gamebook Adventures 10, and more

Get ready for the edition wars

Tonight’s big release is the sequel to 2012’s Knights of Pen and Paper, a game so subtle that I’m shocked it doesn’t come installed with a lampshade on its head. Yes, it’s the cleverly titled Knights of Pen and Paper 2, and it’s bringing Munchkin-style humor back to your iDevice.

The entire conceit of the game is that you not only control the PCs, like other RPGs, but you also get to control the DM and control the adventure in different ways. This one ups the game a bit from the last version with all new 16-bit graphics, a new combat system, randomized dungeons, and more.

The official release for this one is tomorrow, but I’m guessing it will hit the App Store tonight. That said, it doesn’t appear to be showing up in the New Zealand App Store, so you might have to wait until tomorrow to pick it up. That’s not the worst thing, as my review should be going up late tonight or early tomorrow, and we’ll let you know if it’s worth your $5. It will be released for iOS Universal as well as Android.

Check out more upcoming titles after the break.

Say what you will about Tin Man Games, but you can’t say they don’t stick to their guns. In the wake of what might be the most innovative interactive fiction released for digital, they’re going to do what they always do: create digital gamebooks that hearken back to the 80’s. That’s not a terrible thing–I’ve yet to play one of their books that isn’t well done, and some of them are the best interactive fiction I’ve ever read–but it does seem hard to pick up an old-school gamebook when I have the Sorcery! series or 80 Days sitting on my iPad’s home screen.

This month’s release is Gamebook Adventures 10: Lords of Nurroth, and if you’re familiar with Tin Man, you know what to expect. A solid gamebook with automated character sheet, bookmarks, etc. This one takes place around Orlandes, which we’ve seen before in other gamebooks.

This one is already out for Android, and will be hitting for iOS Universal tonight for $3.

No video with this one, so I’ll just leave this here so you can see what you’re missing.

That’s not a knife. That’s a knife.

Having never played the original Heroes and Castles, I wasn’t aware that the world was clamoring for a sequel. That seems to be the case, apparently, as Heroes and Castles 2 is coming tonight. Heroes and Castles is a 3rd-person real-time strategy, tower defense style game, and the sequel is more of the same. Monstrous armies will break themselves along your walls while you summon armies of elves and dwarves to help fight them off. It sounds cool. Not too fond of RTS, but the trailer does show swords big enough to make Blizzard shake their heads in disbelief. Just sayin’ that the swords are big, people. Someone’s going to have to sell me on this one before I pick it up. Any fans of the original out there?

It’s coming tonight for iOS Universal, and should cost $2.

The last game tonight is actually an older iPad game that’s getting released for iPhone. Rebels and Redcoats from Hunted Cow and HexWar was released exclusively for iPad back in November of last year, but now you can buy it again as a separate iPhone app. I know you guys love it when that happens.

You can probably guess what you’re getting with this one: single player campaign, tons of missions, tons of units, etc. Pretty much everything you expect from a HexWar game. We never got around to reviewing this one back when the iPad version came out. Maybe getting on the small screen will get our butts in gear.

While the iPhone version will be out at midnight for $5, you can pick up the iPad version right now for $8. No video for this one, either. Screenshot will have to suffice (and, yes, I copied the same one from November).

If you squint your eyes and shake your laptop it’s just like a YouTube video

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S-Y-Z-Y-G-Y: NimbleBit’s Capitals coming next week

I got one, T-O-Y-L-E-T. I’m awesome at spelling games!

NimbleBit is one of the few mobile developers who have achieved AAA status, making anything they announce an automatic news story. Unfortunately for us, most of their offerings are light simulations that are offered for free with a built-in paywall. They’re not bad games, hell, I’ve sunk more time than I’m happy admitting into Tiny Tower and Pocket Planes, but they all eventually require you to sit and wait or buy some in-game “bux”.

Next week, they’re breaking from their simulation background and bringing a head-to-head word game to the App Store which looks to be a bit like Letterpress, and a bit like Kindo. In the game, you’re trying to capture your opponent’s capital and, to do so, you spell words which nets you more territory and inches you closer to victory. It looks really good but, this being NimbleBit, it’s also going to be free to download. We’ll have to wait and see what kind of IAP scheme they have going on in this one.

Or maybe we don’t have to wait. Capitals was soft launched in Canada today, so anyone north of the border can download it and give it a shot. If you manage to snag it, let us know how high the paywall is.

Capitals will release world-wide next week, on the 21st. Trailer after the break.

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To boldly go: Pixel Starships another try at mobile starship management

Not exactly LCARS, is it.

If we were keeping score of how starship simulations are going on mobile, I’d have to say that the home team is taking one on the chin. Sure, FTL is a fantastic game, but that’s not really a simulation. I’m talking about other notable failures like Star Command and Trexels, which put you in charge of modifying a starship, then drop the ball with hackneyed, boring play. We’re still holding out hope for Tiny Trek, which is currently in early access on Steam and should be coming to iOS sometime this year. Into that crucible steps a newcomer, SavySoda, with Pixel Starships.

Because the title contains the word “pixel” they’re legally obligated to have 8-bit graphics. Don’t let that scare you off, however, because looking at the trailer, I hardly noticed. Instead, I’m intrigued by the cutaway side-view of the starship with turbolifts and transporters at the ready. It appears that not only will there be ship-to-ship combat, but sending away teams over to other ships will also be an option. The game is going to be an MMO, so dealing with other humans will be the name of the game.

The trailer looks far more martial than I like my Trek, but hopefully we’re only seeing a small portion of what SavySoda has in store. The expected release isn’t until late 2015/early 2016, so they have some time to polish it up.

Check out the aforementioned trailer after the break.

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It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad app: Bezier Games teases mobile news

Mysterious and inscrutable.

While Bezier Games might not be a household name, we’re all somewhat familiar with their work. Primarily a board game publisher, the last couple years have seen them expand to the digital realm. Not only have they pushed out helper apps for their games, like One Night Ultimate Werewolf, but they’ve also released the full-blown boardgame Suburbia for iPad and Android.

This morning they used Twitter to tease something for mobile, stating that the full announcement will be coming next week. Lucky for us, however, clues were left behind, detailing what might be on the horizon. Specifically, the background of the Android/Apple logos looks suspiciously like the walls of another popular Bezier title, Castles of Mad King Ludwig.

Castles of Mad King Ludwig is similar to Suburbia in that tiles are bought and placed in order to maximize scoring. Instead of each player building a metropolis, however, here you’re each building a castle. It differentiates itself from Suburbia with the role of Master Builder. Each turn one player is the MB who sets the prices of the available tiles for the other players, who then pay the MB to build those rooms in their castle. The MB picks last, and pays the bank, so the dilemma comes with deciding which room you want and pricing so that it isn’t bought by the other players. Of course, if you price rooms too high for everyone, then they can pass and you won’t make any money.

Suburbia was developed by one-man wonder, Jeremiah Maher who also programmed It’s Alive for iOS. Will he be in charge of getting Castles of Mad King Ludwig out the door as well? Is the new game even going to be Castles of Mad King Ludwig? We’ll know in a week.

After the break, watch Tom Vasel review Castles of Mad King Ludwig for The Dice Tower.

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Review: Legend of Grimrock

Really need to lay off the shrooms

As far as reviews go, this one might be the easiest one I’ve ever written. After all, Legend of Grimrock originally released for PC and Mac back in 2012. It currently holds an 82 on Metacritic and had enough praise heaped upon it that a sequel was released last year (which has an even higher score on Metacritic).

So, if you came here wondering if Legend of Grimrock was a good game, the answer is, yes. It’s fantastic. I played through it on PC and have had a couple days now to really sink my teeth into the recently released iPad version. The real question then becomes, how does Legend of Grimrock work on a tablet.

Wonderfully.

Legend of Grimrock is a throwback to the RPGs of yesteryear. I’m talking about those classic RPGs in which your entire view of the dungeon was first-person and about the size of a postage stamp. Games like Bard’s Tale or the SSI gold box games come to mind. Probably it’s closest ancestor are the beloved Eye of the Beholder games that, to this day, conjure up images of dying repeatedly to a group of beholders. To be honest, however, LoG’s real progenitor are those wonderful, early Gygaxian D&D modules with their two-tone, blue and white gridded dungeons. Dungeons where monsters and traps abound, doors hide riches or destruction, and everything comes in tidy 5-foot chunks.

Not a curved wall to be found.

I spent a good part of my childhood creating dungeons like that on sheets and sheets of graph paper, filling them up helter-skelter with whatever creature from the Monster Manual caught my eye, which usually meant it would scare the crap out of my friends. This is why LoG is so good. It hearkens back to a time when dungeon crawls were just that, and not a prelude to some epic world-saving story that involves 100 hours of play time, fetch quests, and trying to score with NPCs. LoG is simple and straightforward and it’s a breath of fresh air, even if it’s the same air we were breathing 30 years ago.

The plot involves your party being found guilty of an unnamed crime and dropped into the Grimrock dungeon as your sentence. Ostensibly, your free and considered to have paid your debt to society at this point, but now you’re trapped at the top of a very deep, very dangerous dungeon from which none have escaped. Until now, of course, because that’s exactly what you are going to do.

From there, everything is pretty straightforward. You explore the dungeon, discover levers, secret doors and puzzles, and fight monsters. Your goal is to keep moving down in the dungeon, but each floor becomes its own little ecosystem, its own version of the minotaur’s maze that you’ll need to solve to move on. It’s these puzzles and secrets that make the game what it is. Monsters are fine, and combat can be fun—especially once you get a mage up to speed—but the heart of the game are the traps, levers, and buttons you need to not only find but then figure out what they do. There are hidden buttons on walls, statues you need to interact with, and walls that move when objects are put in the correct place. It’s as if one of my old D&D modules has come to life.

Abandon all hope…

The presentation of the game is excellent. No simulated 8-bit graphics in this one, instead we get everything in crisp high def. Everything looks fantastic, from the monsters to the dungeon walls and doors. In fact, the atmosphere of the dungeon itself is so well done, that there were times I couldn’t believe I was playing on an iPad. The sound is absolutely wonderful, even with the iPad speakers. You can hear the shuffling and slithering of creatures as they move in the darkness, which creates a strong sense of dread.

If there’s a downside to how realistic Almost Human tries to make the dungeon environment, it’s the hunger and light situation. Players get hungry and have to eat, or starvation will make them completely ineffective as you move forward. This isn’t too much of an issue, other than you need to carry food around with you in case someone needs lunch. Inventory space is already at a premium, so it becomes a hassle in the long run. Light is a hassle as well. Someone better be carrying a torch, or the world goes dark fast. Considering how many torches you find, and the eventual other means of light you uncover, the system could have been scrapped and I would have been fine with it. Again, it’s just another thing to clog up inventory spaces early in the game.

Need a healing potion? Make your own.

Like those pen and paper dungeons of old, nothing in LoG is created on the fly. Treasure is placed where it’s placed, so on your second run through the dungeon, you’ll know exactly where that Icefall Hammer can be found. That is, of course, if you find it on your first try. Likely you won’t. There are so many secrets that there’s no way to catch them all unless your using one of the many walkthroughs you can find online.

Totally not part of a puzzle. Just hanging out.

Like in just about every RPG, your characters will level up and gain new powers as you progress. Each level you’re granted new skill points to deploy, which will open up new abilities as you add them to each skill. The most interesting—and frustrating—class is the mage, which uses magic based on the elements and a grid of runes. As you progress, you’ll find scrolls indicating which rune patterns will cast different spells, but I’ve found that you need to focus on a couple of elements rather than spreading out your skill points, or you’ll never cast the more powerful spells in each class. This is a bummer when you’re dumping points into fire and ice spells, but keep finding scrolls for high-level earth spells.

For iPad, the UI was revamped, moving character information to the bottom of the screen. Movement is done via control buttons, which works fine on the touch screen. The characters’ hands have been reduced to only having one hand “quick slot” visible as opposed to two on the PC version. At first, this was an issue until I realized I could simply put objects in my off hand on the character’s inventory screen. The game is smart enough that if the object in your “quick slot” hand disappears, the off hand object will then appear in the quick slot.

Legend of Grimrock was released for PC/Mac way back in 2012 and has already had praise heaped upon it. The iPad version isn’t going to sour anyone’s opinion of the original game. It’s a nearly perfect port of a classic PC game, something we haven’t really seen since Firaxis brought us XCOM. If you’ve never played Grimrock before, put this game on your home screen now. If you’re a LoG veteran, I think I would still recommend the game. I’m having a blast with it, having forgotten where much of the good loot was hidden and having to backtrack to find it. Simply put, there’s not a better RPG on the App Store right now.

Legend of Grimrock was reviewed on an iPad Air.

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A new saga: Narborion Saga gets an update

Not sure who or what this is, but I like it.

Late last year we had a newcomer to the digital interactive fiction scene, Liber Primus Games. Their first effort was Narborion Saga which was different from other gamebooks in that it was loaded with IAP. You needed gold to buy bookmarks and other stuff within the app which immediately put Narborion Saga behind the 8-ball. Why bother with an IAP scheme to get decent interactive fiction when there’s so much other great stuff on the App Store?

Apparently Liber Primus heard the complaints, for when the second chapter of the book arrived the IAP had disappeared. Sure, there was a one-time IAP to unlock the full game, but that’s a far cry from buying an in-game currency. The sequel also introduced some other innovations, like a grid-based combat system and the ability to import physical miniatures into the game. Today, Liber Primus updated the first chapter to be more in line with the second. The first book no longer has any in-game currency, just the one-time $6 IAP to unlock the full game. They also brought the grid combat and import options into the first game as well.

The game is free to download for iOS Universal and Android, so it’s probably worth a look now that the paywall has been dismantled. Trailer after the break.

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Out Tonight: Legend of Grimrock, Battles of the Ancient World, and more

Two skellie pics in one day? Getting lazy.

I thought we already had the week’s biggest release last night when Grim Fandango hit the App Store, but tonight is bringing a few surprises that may even eclipse that LucasArts classic. Tonight we get the role-playing game that everyone thought would revitalize a genre, but didn’t. Unless you count its sequel. I’m talking about Legend of Grimrock, which hearkens back to the RPGs of old such as Eye of the Beholder and Bard’s Tale.

Like those games, Grimrock puts you in charge of a never-seen party of adventurers as you explore a Gygaxian maze one square at a time. Your goal is to escape the prison of Grimrock dungeon, exploring each level looking for loot and stairs ever downward. Each level has its own twists, puzzles, monsters, and traps, and each level feels like a triumph when you finally find the way out. Throughout the dungeon are new weapons, armor and treasure that will help in your journey as you level up. It’s all standard RPG fare–they didn’t reinvent the wheel, here–but it’s done in such a wonderful style and the design is clever enough to keep you coming back. I’ve played the PC version when it came out and it’s fantastic, and we can only hope the iPad version fares as well.

You can pick up Legend of Grimrock tonight for iPad and it will run you about $5.

More of tonight’s releases after the break.

Our second game of the night is from HexWar and is the latest game from their collaboration with Decision Games. This one is called Battles of the Ancient World I and–SPOILERS–it involves ancient battles. I’m pretty sure that this is a digital version of 1992’s Four Battles of the Ancient World, which means the four scenarios available are Arbela, Cannae, Pharsalus, and Teutoburger Wald. The game has high definition graphics, three levels of difficulty, and over 50 different unique units. It’s a war game, and it’s HexWar so you know it’s not rough around the edges.

You can pick up Battles of the Ancient World I tonight for iOS Universal for $3.

Our last game tonight is one we talked about yesterday, Dive For Honour: Cold War. This is a submarine simulation that lets you pilot 12 different subs in either a single-player campaign or online multiplayer with up to eight players in 4v4 deathmatches. The game promises a realistic simulation, but it looks more Hollywood from the screenshots. Either way, diving and shooting torpedoes can’t be too bad.

Dive for Honour is coming for iOS Universal and will cost $3-$4.

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Galaga to go: Galactic Nemesis brings a real Galaga successor to iOS

Spiders from Mars

Growing up in the 80’s, I spent many an hour in the arcade closest to whatever store my mom was driving us to. She would shop while my brother and I would drop quarters way too fast, and would eventually need to beg her for more money. Never learned to pace myself, and I also never got good enough that a dollar would last more than 10-15 minutes. This was mostly due to games like Defender and Galaga, which were way too hard for an 11 year-old to master.

You remember Galaga, right? A riff on the classic Space Invaders, but instead of just marching across the screen, these aliens swooped right down at your ship and shot missiles. It’s been tried on a touchscreen in the past, with little success. The issue is the control scheme which requires a fire button as well as other buttons for special abilities. Buttons and touchscreens do not mix well. Galactic Nemesis from CS54 simplifies the control scheme and, in the process, has created a fantastic Galaga clone for your iDevice.

The controls are simple: touch the screen. Your ship will follow the same route as your finger, allowing you to actually see your ship instead of obscuring it under your sausage-like digit. As for the problem of having a button to fire your weapons, they just removed it. No button. Your ship just fires in a never-ending stream while your finger rests on the screen. There are small buttons to the side for special weapons or shields, but those are used infrequently enough that it doesn’t cause a problem. You have several ships that you unlock and upgrade along the way, and each level has different challenges for you to aim for to unlock more coins to upgrade or buy new ships.

The aliens are diverse enough that you’ll learn to hate them in short order (I’m looking at you, blue spiders), and the graphics and sound are straight out of 1981.

I know that Galactic Nemesis isn’t the kind of game we usually post about here at Pocket Tactics, but I’ll be damned if I can’t stop playing this thing. It’s taken over all of my “couple minutes to kill” moments on my iPhone, and it plays even better on the iPad. You can pick it up for iOS Universal for $2.

And now, the corniest and most cringe-inducing trailer in video game history. After the break, of course.

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Here comes the sub: Dive for Honour coming this week

My grandfather was on a submarine during WW2. I have a feeling he’d disagree with this being a realistic experience.

Not since the early 90’s have submarines been this in vogue. Last week we posted about the Sean Connery version, Atlantic Fleet, and now this week it’s Denzel with Dive for Honour: Cold War. Well, to be fair, Atlantic Fleet is more than subs, but managing to get two articles with submarine images within a week of each other? That’s got to count for something.

Dive for Honour is a sub-only game with a single player campaign as well as up to eight-player multiplayer via a 4-on-4 deathmatch. Along the way you can choose from up to 12 different subs to pilot. Or drive. Or whatever it is you actually do with a sub. The developer, ECC Games, also promises “realistic maneuvering” but I’m not sure how possible that is on an iPad.

Whatever. It still looks pretty cool, and more sub games is a good thing, right? Look for Dive for Honor to hit the App Store tomorrow night and check out the trailer after the break.

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Review: Coup

Some early bugs, like this poorly positioned window which obscured 2/5 of the data, have been quickly addressed by the developers. Banana & Co., I tip my monocle to you.

Very briefly, Coup is free-to-play Diplomacy in a bottle. Banana & Co have adapted the highly successful tabletop card game into a beautiful app with some fetching (and all-new) art, and have responded to user feedback very quickly, but “free-to-play” is to “game” as “venomous” is to “puppy” around here. A dash of “pay-to-win” before the dreaded “free-to-play” makes that venom lethal. Contrariwise, when you’re indulging in paranoia, scheming, and (simulated) assassination, you’re basically role-playing a fictional villain anyway, and lethally venomous puppies mix adorable and badass in an endearingly batty way.

Coup, like Love Letter or Werewolf, involves players using a relatively limited set of options in a pretty streamlined ruleset to make deductions about one another while successfully hiding their own information. Alliances can form and break quickly, and there’s an art to managing coalitions which relies on subtle cues. Much of that can’t translate to a digital game where you can’t see your opponents, and the Coup app has had to make some sacrifices to keep games of a manageable duration, notably limiting the number of players and removing the Foreign Aid action. These compromises make Coup very different in person vs. on the multiplayer-only app. Though there are fewer options for negotiation, and only limited communicative options (more available for a reasonable fee!), where Coup succeeds is in evoking the same desperate hope Diplomacy does when you’ve put in your orders and you’re waiting to find out whether your erstwhile ally guessed you’d turn on him. Uh, I mean, whether you, a loyal ally to the bitter end, have been stabbed in the back by a treacherous “friend”.

I want to make fun of people who paid a dollar to be able to say these ten things, but I’ve felt the desire to yell at people to play faster strongly enough that this is a high horse I’ll stay off.

You start Coup with two role cards from a deck with three copies each of five roles which give certain options. Each turn, you choose one action from a menu of six which includes choices like steal two gold, collect three gold, or pay three gold to make someone else discard a card. Most of these actions can be blocked. However, both most of the actions and all of the blocks can be challenged–if you are challenged and have the relevant card, your opponent discards one and you shuffle your card back into the deck and draw a replacement; otherwise, you discard. There’s a fine balance between taking the most useful actions (hoping no one will challenge them) and obeying the limits of your cards, with levels of bluff and counter-bluff. Communication is limited Hearthstone-style to a small pre-set menu of mots juste.

While this structure offers lots of opportunities for really enjoyable plays, like luring someone into challenging you when you have the card you claimed, it also has a comical variety of monetization schemes which put one in mind of kitchen sinks. First, there are ads you can pay to remove. Second, there’s a currency called “Rep” which you must pay to play, and gain for winning games. Though more is deposited weekly and the payouts are fairly generous, should you run out you can either watch additional ads for free Rep, or pay real money for it. Third, you can buy cosmetic alternative card faces, including several which have been associated with various editions of the physical game. Fourth, you can buy packs of additional pre-set phrases to use in manipulating your opponents. Fifth, you can buy a one-time “Spy” upgrade, which lets you look at the statistics on another player or hide your statistics from other spies. The last of these strongly smacks of pay-to-win, though a generous mind might consider it no worse than the advantage some players have over others in the real world of remembering others’ past behavior unusually well. The communication options might also matter, but in practice, I’ve seen relatively little use of the in-game communication, and it’s difficult to learn much of anything from it. Oh, and it bugs you for a five-star rating often enough to make teenaged significant others look secure.

The game also rewards you for lying successfully. I’m going to say that the utter joy this brings me comes from strong morality and a contrary nature, rather than just me being a dick.

From the perspective of a licensor, Coup is just about the perfect iOS adaptation: it’s polished, with some genuinely interesting value added (including probably my favorite game art in memory and a satisfying achievement system), and introduces the game very well without making a physical copy seem superfluous. Unless your tolerance for free-to-play nonsense is very high, Coup won’t become a mainstay of your gaming life, but it’s an eye-pleasing way of trying out the game only to discover that it would be so much more well-rounded in person. With limited communication and low player counts, the negotiation element falls in importance somewhat below the luck of the draw, and it’s a simple, relatively random five- or ten-minute diversion. In person, though, the mind games available to talented players would be so fascinating I’d be happy to be losing just to get a good seat from which to watch.

Played on an iPad Air.

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Action stations: Atlantic Fleet submitted to Apple for approval

Got hope for the living, got prayers for the dead

Old school PT heads will recall Pacific Fleet, the iOS turn-based WWII naval combat sim from 2012. In its original incarnation, Pacific Fleet wasn’t a brilliant game, but it was like that Woody Allen joke about bad food and small portions — I couldn’t stop playing it.

Creators Killerfish Games have been hard at work on sequel Atlantic Fleet for the past couple of years, and developer Paul Sincock sent me a preview build of it this morning. It’s a hugely ambitious evolution of the ideas in Pacific Fleet, and it’s being submitted to Apple today.

You still fight small-scale turn-based battles on the high seas, but the combat now ladders up to a Battle of the Atlantic campaign mode where the results of your fights effect the course of the whole war. Playing as the German Kriegsmarine or the British Royal Navy, you earn renown from successful sorties which you use to buy historically accurate ships to bulk up your fleet — but ships you lose in combat are gone for good. “Damage and ammo usage is permanent, too,” Sincock told me. “Overall it gives the game that ‘X-Com’ tension.” He just said the magic word, y’all.

Atlantic Fleet will also have single-battle scenarios and a simplified campaign mode that plays like the campaign from the original, in case you’re after a lighter experience. Atlantic Fleet will be available as an iOS Universal app for $10 in the next week or two, and it’s coming to Google Play as well.

Watch a video of the new night combat in Atlantic Fleet after the jump. 2015 hasn’t been all that for premium mobile games so far — maybe Atlantic Fleet can start turning that ship around.

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Cut the green wire: Wire Defuser comes to iOS/Android

The red, shiny button.

There’s something about the high-tension and life or death stakes that has made the defusing of explosives somewhat of a trope. Pretty much every cop or spy movie has had that scene. You know, “which wire do we cut” while an LED display ticks down the seconds until KABOOM, although disaster is narrowly avoided with only a second or two remaining on the clock. It’s a great setup and would seem to be a perfect setup for a video game, which is where Wire Defuser comes in.

Wire Defuser has you defusing bombs (not wires, what’s with that title?) by flipping switches, pushing buttons, and spinning wheels. In other words, it’s completely realistic. All you need to do is follow the directions on the screen and you’ll move onto the next level. It’s somewhat of a dexterity game, and when I first saw it I thought it somewhat resembled the fantastic SpaceTeam. After playing it a bit, I can confirm that it’s nothing like SpaceTeam and I’m an idiot for thinking so.

The entire crux of the game is to hold buttons for a specified time while also flipping switches and basically hating yourself for being a klutz. If your play sessions are anything like mine, you’ll end up with fingers in an unworkable pretzel while still not having enough digits to flip a switch. It’s frustrating, but in a way that makes you want to finish a level and get those damned three stars.

The game is free to download for iOS Universal and Android, and the only IAP involves purchasing “kits” that let you disable buttons or switches during a level, or skipping a level completely. I haven’t found a level yet that I couldn’t complete without using these kits, although there are over 80 levels as you progress so maybe later they become mandatory. Apart from the optional IAP, there are occasional ads that pop up, but nothing to invidious.

Check out the trailer after the break.

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