News By Numbers - 27th February, 2017

Welcome to this week's edition of News by Numbers, where we highlight some of the can't-miss mobile gaming news each and every week.

Legend of Grimrock: $1.99 (iOS)
Old school RPG Legend of Grimrock is currently on sale at 50%. Dave Neumann gave this one five stars back in 2016 when the __game came out, so if you've been waiting for the best price or are in the market for a new RPG to dive into, now's your chance!

Heaven's Vault: 3rd Inkle franchise
After creating 80 Days and the Sorcery! series Inkle's efforts in the interactive-fiction genre are well worth tracking. On Friday, they announced a brand new game, Heaven's Vault. The __game is an interactive graphic novel and their "most ambitious, beautiful and complex game to date."

It is a story-driven game that follows an archaeologist named Aliya Elasra who specializes in the lost places and forgotten history of the Nebula. She discovers a secret that propels her into an adventure. Inkle is nowhere near mentioning a release date, but Heaven's Vault appears to be worth waiting for.

Fire Emblem Heroes: 6 new heroes
Nintendo has added six new heroes from prior Fire Emblem games to Fire Emblem Heroes: Eldigan, Lachesis, Reinhardt, Olwen, Klein, and Sanaki. There's also a new paralogue story, The Sibling Bonds. Check out Mark's review of the game for more on Nintendo's free-to-play offering.

Mildly Interesting RTS: 10 maps
Mildly Interesting RTS is a simple, fast, and free real-time strategy game with a enough tactical challenge that kept me more than mildly interested. It just came out a couple weeks ago and has already seen two updates with additional content. On February 16th two maps were added: Challenger and A Path Beyond.

Last Wednesday brought another update with two new maps: Showdown and the Grid as well. Version 4.0 also adds a tactical nuke option that works on a timer, just like the reinforcements option. The game is free for now, but may become premium down the line. I recommend picking it up if you have an iOS device and like the RTS genre and we've got Mark working on a full review as we speak!

Lara Croft GO: 25 new puzzles
Lara Croft GO is a tactical puzzle game that has received quite a lot of critical acclaim, including our own 4-star review. On Friday the PC version of the game added Mirror of Spirits, a free expansion, that also marks the final chapter of the game. The update is meant to celebrate twenty years of the Tomb Raider franchise and, as such, The Mirror of Spirits is meant to evoke Croft Manor and Lara's run ins with her own doppelgänger and should make it to mobile devices as well.

Hearthstone: 50 packs for $50
Blizzard has officially announced that Journey to Un’Goro is the name of its next expansion. The set will feature 135 cards that take us on an adventure into the wildlands of the Un’Goro crater. Things might get a bit…prehistoric, and plants may attempt to eat you. Journey to Un’Goro should be out in spring and you can get all of the details here, including the usual pre-order special of 50 packs for $50. Here's to hoping dinosaurs and primordial elementals shake up the Standard metagame something fierce.

Minecraft: 122 million sales
Minecraft is undoubtedly one of the greatest success stories in the history of video gaming. It very recently passed the 122 million mark in terms of copies sold across all of the various platforms, including Pocket Edition, worldwide. Adoption is also off the charts with 55 million monthly players on average, that's 45% of the total downloads.

Google Play: 300 million new Android devices.
Google took to GDC 2017 to talk Android. They touted the platform's serious growth in the markets of Brazil, India, and Indonesia citing 300 million new Android devices there. They also announced some changes to the Google Play store at GDC 2017.

The search algorithms are getting tweaked to favor player engagement more and sheer download numbers less, which should help indie games get more "front-page" exposure. Another change will allow developers to run their own sales whenever they choose and show the sale price next to the regular price in the storefront, which has been shown to drive sales.

Unity Mobile Games: 16 billion downloads in 2016
The massive metrics of 2016 continue to pile up. In a talk at GDC 2017 Unity's CEO made mention of the fact that mobile games using the Unity engine were downloaded 16 billion times in 2016. This is a 31% increase on 2015, a huge spike in downloads consistent with what we've learned about how prolific last year was in mobile gaming.

That's it for this edition of News by Numbers. If you've got a news item worth sharing send it my way on Twitter @MrVigabool and it may show up in a future edition.

Out Now: GDC Edition

Welcome to this week's edition of 'Out Now', where we take a look at all of the game's released this week and put forward our top picks.

The __game Developer's Conference (GDC) has been underway in San Francisco all week, which means all kinds of announcements and previews of things to come for the gaming industry. It also means a relatively slow week for new releases, as many of the people who develop and market newly launched games are fully immersed in the convention. We've still found a few games worth a look…a match-three variant, a competitive puzzler, a Risk-like __game of world domination, an old friend ready for new devices, and a sandbox game about escaping prison.

Tavern Guardians (iOS)

Tavern Guardians is a match-three game with a monster slaying theme. You choose one of four different unlockable heroes—Paladin, Gunner, Mage, or Berserker—each with a bevy of special abilities. Your hero will act as guardian for a series of taverns, a noble pursuit no doubt. Ale and wine need defending too! You match symbols to strengthen the tavern walls, increase your health, recharge special powers, call on archers to help fight the monsters, and acquire gold with which to upgrade your  hero. While not wholly original, it is a fast and fun match-three variant with a ton of items and about 50 monsters to fight. The different character classes aids in the replay value as well. This one is worth a look for fans of the genre.

 

Black Blue (iOS and Android)

Blue Black is a graphics light puzzler with a competitive streak. Each level displays a pattern and a series of dots. You take turns with your opponent placing colored dots on the game board and, when done, watch as the dots are connected and the pattern is traced. The player with the most line real estate, so to speak, is the winner. You can take on the AI or another person via pass-and-play. The game is very clever and fairly challenging and only a buck for 70 levels. Android users can try before they buy as well. Check out the quick trailer to see the gameplay in action. 

Attack Your Friends (iOS and Android(?))

Attack Your Friends is a turn-based competitive boardgame of world conquest. Up to three friends (or random strangers) can play and the goal is to build up and expand your power in an attempt to dominate the map. Combat is dice-based with Troop and Defense cards thrown in to provide various benefits. Cards are things like putting a two-turn shield on a region or laying down mines that take out one-third of an attacking force. There is an in-game chat system to allow for scheming against an opponent or outright taunting and smack talk. The game is asynchronous with push notifications that let you know when it's your turn to act.

The UI is far from perfect. I accidentally fat-fingered all of my reinforcements onto Madagascar on more than one occasion and it was the rare troop-placement phase where I didn't have to use the undo button (which undoes all placements, not just the last one). The game is also free-to-play with an in-game currency that you earn incrementally after every turn. You can, of course, buy more and therein lies a pay-to-win problem. You can buy those Shield, Mine, and other beneficial cards and really swing a game your way, if so inclined. Playing with friends this can be mitigated through some sort of fair play accord, but with strangers all bets would certainly be off. Attack Your Friends is basically Risk right down to the regional breakdown and living and dying by the randomness of the dice. If that appeals to you, this one is worth a look.

Legends of Callasia (iOS and Android)

We're fans of world domination game Legends of Callasia around these parts. Both the base game and the first expansion earned four stars from me last year and the game was our runner-up for multiplayer game-of-the-year in 2016. With the latest update Legends of Callasia is now playable on your Android phones, not just tablets. The game still features a meaty free trial so you can check it out before buying.

The Escapists (iOS and Android)

The Escapists has been out for a couple of years now on consoles and computers and has finally arrived in the world of mobile. The game is a pixelated strategy game that features an open world, role-play elements, resource management, and lots of crafting. Your goal is to bust out of prison (there's actually six unique prisons in which to play) through trickery or sheer force, although you can take your sweet time going about it. The touch controls were well implemented and in a lot of ways The Escapists feels like it was meant to be played on a tablet. 

That said, the game also features a virtual joystick for those who dig that type of control. The game is challenging and there's a lot to plan around from barbed wire and guards to roll-call, bed check, and work detail. You'll also need to craft the tools of your escape, which necessitates making use of the prison barter system, some outright theft, and of course hiding your contraband from nosy guards. My favorite thing about The Escapists, and any sandbox game, is that you can totally blow off preparing your grand escape and wander around doing other stuff. It's more than a little freeing and reminds me of games like Minecraft, Crashlands, and the Grand Theft Auto series in being relatively open ended.

That's it for this week - seen any other games you think should have made this list? Post about it below and we'll add it! Enjoy your weekend.

Hearthstone: Why We Must Fight Back Against Bad Brawls

Even the most casual Hearthstone player has likely dipped their toe into the game's Tavern Brawl mode. It's a great idea, in theory. Each week we get a new competition for which Blizzard have changed the basic rules. Some alterations are minor, such as double minion effects like Deathrattle, but it's also amazing how much they can change the game.

But there are also many that are quite extreme. These are often the most interesting and memorable. One popular brawl saw the __game go co-operative, with players combining against one super-strong minion. Another added free "gift" minions which turned into cards if you could destroy them. In these cases, the brawls were great because they offered new modes for Hearthstone while retaining the fundamentals. To win you still needed board control and clever tech plays. But the tech cards you needed were different to those that worked in the normal game.

This week's Brawl is somewhere in the middle. Each player gets one of three random decks, based on characters from the most recent expansion. The decks have cards from different classes, and each character has a unique power. They can be awkward to play, but offer lots of possibilities for synergies and plays that just aren't possible in standard decks. Good Brawls showcase Hearthstone at its best. They offer a break from the grind of laddering and questing, which becomes routine once the meta-game has settled. Yet although these are great fun, they're likely the most complex to create and test. Each brawl demands alterations to the __game engine, after all so there is lots of recycling of old concepts and designs.

The work involved may explain the most distressing aspect of Tavern Brawls: excessive randomness. Lots of chaos destroys the fundamentals of Hearthstone. You might get board control, and then it might get blown away by a lucky draw or play. Tech becomes pointless because it's unreliable. So it's a bit baffling to regular players that Blizzard has been open about its desire to add more chance to the game. And in the Tavern Brawl, that desire has reached its zenith. Or possibly its nadir, depending on how you look at it.

Last week saw the absolute pits. Players had to play with decks built from a small, random selection of powerful Legendary minions. It was just awful. If you were lucky enough to draw a bunch of Millhouse Manastorm cards you were gold. He's a cheap, powerful minion that can instantly lose you the game in standard, because he lets your opponent cast free spells. Here, with no spells and all legendary minions, there was no downside.

He wasn't the only card that was close to an instant win. There's a Priest card, Confessor Paletress, who summons additional legendary minions. This proved so powerful that many players chose Priest for the brawl in the hope of getting her. And on the flip side, of course, a lot of cards were entirely useless. So in short, whether you won or lost was pretty much random, and you could tell which way luck had swung for you on the very first turn.

This isn't the first time we've seen a very random brawl. The default fallback when Blizzard is out of ideas seems to be Randomonium, a game in which your whole deck is random. That's better than random legendaries because you can at least hope to pull of some good plays or card synergies. If you're lucky enough to have any synergies in your deck, that is. But being a bit better than the pits isn't a great claim to fame.

Some will say, "so what?" Because if a player doesn't like a particular brawl, they don't have to play it. Except they kind of do, because winning a brawl gets you a free card back. Which is often enough incentive to sit through multiple games of fury and frustration, losing because you didn't get lucky. But it's not reward enough to not make you angry at Blizzard for encouraging you to waste your time on what amount to boring, pointless dice-offs.

Perhaps the most worrying thing about Tavern Brawls, though, is where they indicate the game is heading. That much lazy design is worrying by itself. While it's nice Blizzard gave us an extra game mode with some extra free cards, you'd want the quality control to be higher. I'd prefer weeks with no brawl at all than having to slog through another tiresome random grind. Yet Blizzard don't seem to have learned that, in spite of widespread opprobrium from the community. And still they're pushing forward with more randomness and power swings in the main game.

We recently saw the official announcement of the new expansion, Journey to Un’Goro. Details are light but the description of two new mechanics isn't promising. Adapt lets you pick from a roster of powers like Taunt and Divine shield when you play a minion. That does at least provide choice and flexibility. Quest is a kind of "open secret" where you can get a powerful card for satisfying a set of conditions like playing seven Deathrattle minions. That smacks of stale game states, a threat your opponent can do nothing to counter.

At least the detestable Reno Jackson will finally rotate out of Standard play. And some of the changes that we got in the last patch are promising. It's good to see the nerf to the overpowered Small Time Buccaneer go live at last, although it's taken too long. And the unexpected increase in the cost of Spirit Claws shows Blizzard is willing to listen to the community, at least some of the time. Same goes for the much needed rank-ceilings meaning that as you hit multiples of five on the ladder you're guaranteed to start there next month.

Yet listening, it seems, only goes so far. Recently a notable pro player, Lifecoach, chose to publicly resign from competitive play. He cites a lack of mental challenge in the game as a key reason, and he's not wrong. But the really scary thing is that he's recently been working with Blizzard to try and improve the game. Whatever he saw convinced him nothing good was about to change. Maybe it was a slew of upcoming random Tavern Brawls.

Review: RPS Saga

I remember vividly as a child playing Alex Kidd in Miracle World. It was the first __game I ever played by proxy of being built into the first console I ever owned, the Master System. In the __game you battle bosses through the rather unconventional format of jan-ken-pon, better known to western audiences as rock, paper, scissors. With victory your opponent turned into a rice ball. On reflection, the game is kind of mental, but it was also my first introduction to the world of RNG – something I would not begin to understand till many years later.

You see random number generators are the blight of so many people that have played video games through the years. The sheer frustration of having your success determined by the luck of the algorithms, rather than your own skill can be a massive turn off for players.

This brings us to RPS Saga, a game that takes the concept of rock, papers, scissors, and stretches it out over the duration of its campaign. Describing the gameplay is going to be difficult for a whole review, because, well… it’s rock, paper, scissors. But developers Magic Cube do attempt to add a few bells and whistles.

Starting off in the overworld, you can pick between different opponents to face. They serve as the ‘end of the boss’ of a set of enemies who you face one by one. Between each fight you can upgrade your chosen character – leveling up stacks between characters using gold coins, but special moves are specific and use a different currency, which, as you can imagine, you earn a lot slower and can be purchased with real money.

The in-game mechanics work like a card game: there are three or four cards to pick from, which will either have rock, paper, or scissors, and you pick one the one you want to play. On the other side of the screen your opponent’s cards are laid out, giving you a fighting chance of deciding what they might play. This is where the two layers of RNG come into action, and what the foundation of the gameplay relies on. The problem is, an inherent issue with designing a game based around luck, and perhaps a bit of psychological warfare, is that creating an environment where playing against the AI feels like playing against a human is not easy - and if you want to argue that you don’t need the game to feel like playing against a human, fine, but then you’re playing against an algorithm - one that constantly seems to know what you are going to play, with victory most of the time coming from brute forcing your way through.

The cards laid out are random, fully eliminating any chance of building a strategy. You may be onto a winner, only to see three rock cards laid out for you, and three paper cards for your opponent. It is a frustrating experience that divulges quickly into hammering any cards you feel like, because none of it matters. There is no penalty for losing, so you can just start the fight again, choosing any card at random, and by the law of averages you will eventually win. RPS Saga is a game that strips the notion of consequence.

The one area where RPS Saga attempts to teach an old dog new tricks is with the aforementioned special moves. Each character can learn unique abilities, ranging from regenerating health to doubling up attacks. These abilities have a cool down period, so depending on their usefulness they can take anywhere from three moves and upwards to charge. With ten playable characters, you have plenty of room to find the playing style to suit you – not that it is saying much, as the core gameplay is mundane enough that it really doesn’t make much difference who you select. The cubes you need to obtain to purchase these skills take a while, so it makes the most sense to pick one character and put all your resources into them.

Magic Cube attempts to shoehorn a storyline into RPS Saga, establishing the main hero of Ashtan, as he tries to recruit his old friends to eliminate an ominous dark energy. The plot is woven into the gameplay between battles, with narrative that has not had the most efficient localization job. It doesn’t rival Zero Wing, but it does provide a few unintentional laughs along the way.

The game does have a few positives: graphically, Magic Cube flexes their muscle, showing off an area where they know a thing or two. Using a pixel-art aesthetic, the character models look great, the backgrounds have some nice touches to them, and the UI pops out. The whole thing costs less than a dollar/pound/euro, and does not feel designed in a way that pushes you towards its IAPs. There is a survival mode, which works pretty much how you would expect: you try to survive waves for as long as possible, gaining a little bit of health back after each win.

RPS Saga is by no means a bad game – it’s just a limited one… and dull. Magic Cube have attempted to do what they can to expand the mechanics of jan-ken-pon, but within ten minutes of booting up the game, you’ve seen everything that it has to offer. For its paltry cost, and if you are morbidly curious, perhaps it might be worth a look. Though considering we’ve already seen some excellent releases so far, you might be better off looking elsewhere.

Review: The Frostrune

The derogatory phrase "adventure __game logic" is used to criticize the tendency of adventure games to require absurd leaps in reasoning to solve their puzzles, to the degree it feels the player is simply guessing what madness the designer had in mind. The most notorious example of adventure __game logic was in 1999 's Gabriel Knight III: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned, coming at the tail end of adventure's heyday. In order to rent a moped, Gabriel was required to fashion a disguise by creating a false mustache--so far so sensible. This was accomplished not by, say, getting a Geraldo Rivera costume from a Halloween shop, but by using the only available source of natural hair--a stray cat--and attaching it to Gabriel's face with maple syrup.

But the final step was the real head-scratcher: the player had to draw a mustache on the id with a marker, because the person they were impersonating _had no mustache_!

But then this sort of adventure game died off, attributed by some to the rise of 3D graphics but by others to a suicide-by-obscure-puzzle-design. Now there has been something of an adventure game renaissance, driven by digital distribution, Kickstarter, and new touchscreen devices. Yet often, these new school adventures are criticized for being simplified and streamlined to the point of austerity. A masterful adventure game strikes a balance between the baroque trappings of verb lists and the economy of single-tap puzzle-solving. Unfortunately, The Frostrune verges too far toward the latter.

The Frostrune is a new school adventure game built for mobile with a theme of Norse myth. The player is a young girl castaway on the shores of a deserted village. She is shortly tasked with discovering and banishing the evil that brought ruin to these people. To do so, she will travel in first-person through several dozen scenes, gathering tools and magical items, and solving puzzles using the clues given in the environment.

The painted backgrounds effectively establish the desolate setting. Most compelling are the human-constructed spaces, which make use of traditional architecture and design and are filled with classical tools like looms and forges. The traditional Norse artwork that decorates these spaces gives them a unique feel, separating them from more generic medieval fantasy. The outdoor drawings are somewhat less successful; there are several branching paths through the forest that are not differentiated enough to keep sense of where one is.

The backgrounds are mostly static, with some animation like distant lightning flashes or flickering fires, but this is appropriate to the setting, an abandoned village. The art does a good job of directing the eye towards the available exits and touchable hotspots. Items that can be picked up are clearly separated by color or design, so there is little need to pixel hunt for a solution. Exits are also clearly marked with paths, so it is not difficult to see where the player can go. However, it is sometimes difficult to recall where one should go. Even after I understood that the "back" button at the bottom always sent me back to the previous screen, I would find myself getting turned around in an environment that is not really that large. Being unable to look from side to side hampers the sense of immersion that the artwork is otherwise quite successful at eliciting.

The interface is straightforward, consistent with any other tablet-era adventure game. Tapping on an item interacts with it. Using an inventory item is likewise simply a matter of opening the inventory, and tapping on the item and the place it is to be applied--no verbs are required, nor are inventory items used together.

The sound design is well-done and evocative, particularly the choice to have all voice acting in Norse with subtitles (eleven languages are available!). The sound is creepy and atmospheric in the spirit world and pastoral in the real world, a nice counterpoint to the ghost town the player explores. However, sound is not necessary to play the game, so if you don’t want to bother your sleeping partner with Old Norse chants, you can play on silent.

What story there is is delivered through these chants. There are a handful of ghostly NPCs that the player will interact with, where interaction is limited to hearing what they have to say and bringing them what they want. In a genre known for some of the most thoughtful narratives and compelling characters in video games, the lack of story here is glaring. Something bad happened, some people died. The player character arrived via shipwreck and will eventually find the big bad and beat it. But here there is no sense of threat or something being at stake, no dark secrets to uncover. The characters are purely transactional--they want something, you get it, they give you what you need--with no character arc. After gaining the ability to travel to the spirit world, the puzzles also lack a clear sense of progression; the player is gathering totems for an unclear purpose, and the final struggle comes out of nowhere and is resolved just as quickly.

Half of the puzzles amount to using the appropriate tool for a situation. When you need to dig, you need a shovel. To cut, a scythe. While this is initially refreshing, eventually one wishes for something a little more lateral. The remaining puzzles rely on the ability to see into the spirit world and more often than not take the form of locked puzzle boxes, where the combination is in plain sight somewhere else in the game world. Solving any of these puzzles is simply a matter of memory. Where could I use a pulley? Where did I see those painted figures before? There is no imagination required, no experimentation. On the few occasions where some might have been required, instead the game suggests exactly what you need to proceed—a late puzzle involving a necessary key magically frozen to a body might have required some creativity…if the player character didn’t immediately offer the solution upon interacting with the key.

A hint system is available, but poorly implemented. The game itself is very linear, so it would make sense to just have a button that offered a suggestion on where to look for your next step. Instead, tapping on the hint menu brings up a numbered list of hints, requiring you to scroll all the way down to find the most recently unlocked one. When I tried to use it, however, the most advanced hint was several steps beyond my current position - I had to read several hints backwards to find the relevant one, spoiling the next puzzle entirely. Closing a hint closes the menu entirely, so the player has to make their way back into the menu system and scroll all the way down yet again. Moreover, the hints are not really “hints,” which to me implies suggestions or questions that guide to the answer. The hints spell out what you need to do next explicitly—useful when stuck but not too much fun. Luckily I never again got stuck enough to go looking for help.

This is where I came to long for a little more adventure game logic. The Frostrune is just too easy, and it is easy because it depends only on memory and 'vertical' step-by-step reasoning. The adventure games of the 1990s were rightfully criticized for their incredible leaps required to solve their puzzles, but at least they stretched your brain--even if it was only to make you question the designer's sanity.

Because of its dull puzzles and half-baked story, It is difficult to recommend The Frostrune to anyone but die-hard mobile adventure gamers and/or people with a passion for Norse mythology.