This week’s releases are juicier than last, but nothing like the clown car weeks of early November, with highly anticipated titles busting out of the windows and trying to shout over each other for attention. Colt Express is the strategy showpiece of the week, but Swap Sword is an actually-fresh take on the RPG match-three genre, and Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney is here for everyone who always thought that Perry Mason should be remade as a goofball anime.
Pistol packin' mama, lay that pistol down... no-one's in range.
Colt Express
Ever wonder why there are so many Westerns with incompetent train robbers? It turns out that the problem was that they had to program their heists several actions in advance from a limited set of cards! That explains so much. Colt Express offers chaos in the same vein as Richard Garfield’s Robo Rally: like that game, you could agonize over the possible interactions of predictable and unpredictable moves, but you might have more fun playing by the seat of your pants and laughing at the results. Asmodee digital made a great call presenting their award-winning tabletop __game as the antics of cartooned boardgame pawns come to life: it’s lucid, snappy, and light hearted. They may have missed their junction on networked multiplayer, however, as at present online play is (ahem) a trainwreck. Look for a full review from Nick soon.
Draw, pardner. Colt Express is available on iOS and Android.
Max? Is that you? Dang, the years haven't been kind, have they?
Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney
Yup, it’s an honest to Judge Mathis Phoenix Wright Apollo Justice DS __game on your smartphone! You most likely either already bought it or couldn’t care less, but in case you’re on the fence, Capcom split the game up into Telltale-style chapters, so you can test the legal waters for a buck or, in pounds sterling, about the price of a cuppa at an underground newsstand. My first impression is that this is just as with any other game in the Phoenix Wright Apollo Justice seried, there’s a whole lot of tapping along with the silliest courtroom antics this side of My Cousin Vinny, but not nearly as many birds as in some courtroom games.
Did you know that they made a Phoenix Wright/Professor Layton crossover game? That game’s not available on iOS, but this one is.
Gooble-gobble, one of us!
Distraint
Distraint is a odd little PC horror game that just might be a homage to A Christmas Carol: you play as a junior lawyer evicting destitute tenants from a decaying and clearly haunted apartent building, and occasionally have encounters with the equally creepy senior partners at the firm of Marley, Marley, & Marley (names have been altered to protect the reference reference). Highly stylized and atmospheric, Distraint suffers from extreme letterboxing on mobile, along with unremarkable item-use puzzles and possible overuse of inky darkness. If you’re looking for an original scare, however, it’s definitely worth a look.
Distraint is add-supported (with a removal IAP) on Android.
Damn! We're in a tight spot!
Swap Sword
Archeologists have found evidence of the first Match-3 game, Berocked in the Nile river delta, on primitive “flash players” dating back over 70,000 years, and it's a well-known fact that the code of Hammurabi was written “because Dungeon Raid was really cool, but what the heck is D3 doing, anyway?.” So when I say that Swap Sword is a fresh take on the roguelike Match-3 game, that’s really something. It’s not even that Swap Sword is the first such game to place the player’s avatar on the gameboard, it’s the way that roguelike move-to-attack mechanics and familiar swap-to-match are skillfully merged in this retro-pixilated game from the folks who brought us the Astronaut-toasting game Sunburn. Matching monsters with their own eggs to eliminate then, swapping the hero with wall tiles to create defensive ramparts, producing a massive cascade that backfires, leaving the player surrounded by monsters… huh, didn’t see that one coming.
Available on iOS, Swap Sword is.
You're welcome, fish-skeleton Satan!
Attack Heroes
I couldn’t figure out what this game was about, so I gave it a shot and now I’m even more confused. Attack Heroes is a Chinese indie game set in the three kingdoms period. It looks like a fighting game, plays like JRPG combat, feels like it should be FTP, but there are no timers, paywalls, or IAP of any sort, and has won a number of awards for its graphics, which consist largely of gratuitous attack animations. The odd design decisions and high cultural barriers make it actually kind of interesting as a psychedelic experience, if you’re into that sort of thing.
Attack Heroes is bewildering on iOS.
A number of games that were previously only available on iOS saw their debut this week, including The Battle of Polytopia, aka Super Tribes, aka Zach loved this game. Sinister puzzler Human Resource Machine, Svankmajerian adventure Samorost 3, and ARPG/twin stick shooter Leap of Fate also made the, ah, leap.
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