Pocket Tactics Games of the Month: July 2014

Watch how you go.

Now it may look like we totally forgot about June in our monthly Games of the Month roundup, but taking advice from the Pocket Tactics Accounting Department and Theoretical Agricola Scoring Institute high atop Mount Hexmap, we temporarily relocated PT HQ to a dimension where June does not exist. For tax purposes, you understand.

After the break, Kelsey, Tierney, Neumann, and Owen weigh in on their favorite games from July.

80 Days

Review: 80 Days

I spent a good portion of July inciting mutiny on a Pacific steamer en route to San Francisco from Singapore. Some of July was spent in airships, navigating between the bustling ancient cities of the Middle East. I can’t even begin to explain how I got from Agra to Madras in only a few days. Along the way I met artificers, soldiers, laborers, sailors and businessmen. I rubbed shoulders with the elite and the unwanted and all during that time kept looking forward to my next stop as I traveled around the globe. Did I make it in the titular 80 days? Does it matter? The fun of 80 Days is definitely in the journey, and not the end result and, while I don’t think Inkle Studio’s sprawling new interactive novel is perfect, I found it to be a fantastic way to spend a lazy summer day.

–Dave Neumann

I spent a while wringing my hands yesterday about the great lengths to which some publishers are going to muscle console game genres onto tablets. A much better use of everyone’s time is to celebrate stuff like 80 Days: purpose-built for touchscreens and ideal for enjoying on a tablet. If 2014 has produced a better exemplar of how good iPad gaming can be, I haven’t played it yet.

–Owen Faraday

Bicolor

Review: Bicolor

Bicolor is not a game I expected to be my favorite game of the month when I reviewed it. The puzzles are mostly very easy, solvable using only a few simple heuristics which become clear very early on. Two things have kept it on my mind: first, the design focus on allowing players the opportunity to find elegant solutions which tie the whole puzzle together. That warps the experience of play in some tremendously rewarding and un-game-ified ways, and Bicolor is the clearest example of that phenomenon I know. Second, my four-year-old son loves it. I can’t really explain that, but he just plugs away at it until he solves the puzzles, and his joy when he succeeds would melt ice in winter.

–Kelsey Rinella

I am Jacob’s crippling indecision

News: Paint it Back update
Review: Hoplite
Review: Storm Casters

July was a busy month for me, a month for dipping into a handful of old favorites rather than plunging into a single title. I’ve been playing quite a bit of the surprisingly-excellent Storm Casters which manages to commit many of mobile gaming’s deadly sins while still remaining a fun, frantic action game. Hoplite remains amazing in its ability to capture an almost cinematic sense of combat and movement within its simple turn-based system. And Paint it Back‘s surprise update provided me with a welcome return to a favorite puzzler.

–Jacob Tierney