Welcome to News by Numbers, where we highlight some of the can't-miss mobile gaming news each week.
Lost Portal: version 1.1.1
It's no secret how much I like Lost Portal. The next update for this excellent Magic-like role-playing __game has been submitted to Apple and is due any day now. It adds some small tutorials to walk you through the different screens of the __game as well as a way to edit player details—portrait, color affinity, name, and difficulty level—after a game has started. The biggest deal there, at least from my perspective, is being able to increase the difficulty setting once you've got enough cards to make more competitive decks. Lost Portal is available on iOS and is absolutely worthy of your time and money.
Demon's Rise 2: 2 new characters
Demon's Rise 2 was released earlier this month. A fast-following update brought two new character classes to the game late last week. The Feral Ogre is a big, brutal, tank type that looks like it could give my boy Garn Bloodtooth a run for his money. Tenaclid Overmind is, well, I guess a Mind Flayer with face tentacles and mind-control powers. I do enjoy stun effects…looks like I'll need to start an alternate game. Good thing there are twenty-four save slots.
If you want to know more about Demon's Rise 2 I just reviewed it.
The Walking Dead: Volume 3
Telltale's third season of the popular Walking Dead game series is called A New Frontier and will be released on December 10. The game will put you in control of Javier, new character trying to hold his family together in a the post-apocalyptic world as well as a teenage survivor named Clememtine, who must fight to protect her own family. With this version, both iOS and Android versions will drop the same day and will cost $4.99.
Hades' Star: iPhone 5, iPad 4, Android 4.0.3 (or higher)
I first mentioned Hades' Star in this column back in October. It is a very promising mobile MMO where you colonize planets, build your economic and military might, and expand ever outward. There is a strong social component as well, both cooperative and competitive. The game is now entering alpha testing and looking for testers. If you're interested in making this one great go here to sign up. To find out more about the game head here.
Sony: 6 Playstation games
Nintendo is not the only console-game company eyeing the mobile platform. Based on information from Takashi Mochizuki, a Wall Street Journal tech reporter based in Tokyo, Sony is looking to bring up to six Playstation games to iOS and Android by March of 2018 for the US market (likely sooner in Japan). Sony plans to announce the first of their mobile games, and the companies it will partner with to develop them, on December 7th.
Strike Team: 12 different space marines
Speaking of Demon's Rise 2, the developer, Wave Light Games, is currently working on a new turn-based tactical RPG. It is inspired by XCOM and will have a sci-fi flavor, rather than fantasy. You will select a crew of space marines from twelve different options. Your team is aboard a ship that has responded to a distress call. A disabled battleship is the lone survivor of a fight with an alien fleet and needs help fast. Like the Demon's Rise games, Strike Team will also be tactics heavy and make use of the morale system and terrain effects (like cover). The focus will be on action points for movement, attacks, and other abilities. Strike Team will be a premium game and should be out around Q2 of 2017.
Ragelaw: 16 story missions
Pascal from OrangePixel Games, maker of Space Grunts, is hard at work on a new game. Rageclaw is an open-world adventure game set in a world inspired by Mad Max. In addition to up to sixteen missions that advance the primary story line, Ragelaw will include all kinds of sub-missions as you explore the world. The example Pascal provided in this dev update is "you find a garage, you enter it, it will offer you to fix your car or build you a new one from scraps. Your mission: find enough scraps." Pascal is creating Rageclaw in part for busy gamers. He says it will be perfect for short bursts of gaming and confirmed for me that it will certainly be possible to make progress, and die in battle, in under five minutes.
Hearthstone: ∞ Jade Golems
Ok, not really infinite, but you could end up with a whole bunch of very large creatures with Hearthstone's latest build-around-me mechanic. The Jade Lotus gang is joining the game as part of the Mean Streets of Gadgetzan expansion and their leader, Aya Blackpaw, has built an army of Jade Golems. This is represented in the game by a bunch of cards that summon a Jade Golem. The most interesting thing about the mechanic is that each summoned golem improves upon the last, getting a +1/+1 stat bump over its predecessor. It permanently changes the numbers so the army of golems is not vulnerable to silence effects.
That's it for this edition of News by Numbers. If you've got a news item worth sharing send it our way to Nick's Twitter account, @MrVigabool and it may show up in a future edition.
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