Review: Dungeon Rushers

Hardly flushed with success, toilet cleaner Elian has decided that it is high time for a career change. Fed up with destroying 99.99% of known germs he has decided to try his luck at stamping out 100% of dungeon denizens. So, swapping his toilet brush for a more appropriate weapon, he ventures through the dungeon-dwelling skeletons, goblin filled mountains, enchanted jungles and ancient pyramids that make up the world of Dungeon Rushers.

Each dungeon consists of a grid of tiles that are viewed from an overhead perspective. Elian travels from tile to tile, revealing traps, monsters and treasures in his search for the exit. The tension mounts as your health levels drop and the way out remains elusive. Traps can be disarmed if you have the right skills and enough stamina. This may mean a character dashing in all gung-ho to take one for the team or a more sensible disarming approach. There are other locations that may bless your party with improved statistics or curse them with detrimental effects such as drunkenness.

Sooner rather than later you will bump into some monsters and the action will switch to a side-on view. The turn-based combat is very straightforward - up to two ranks of opposing forces face each other with speed determining the order of attack. Characters have standard attacks and more powerful special actions that eat into their limited supply of mana. To target a character in the second rank requires a ranged attack and if your health points are running a bit low you can decide to guard in order to reduce the chance of being hit or alternatively, you can drink a potion. Overall, combat is a bit of a slog; there is not really that much scope for tactical maneuvering or subtlety, you cannot for instance defer your attack for later in the round.

Each dungeon will have three bonus targets, such as completing the level without using potions or ensuring that every last enemy is eradicated. Complete all three targets and you will be able to tackle the dungeon again in heroic mode for even more rewards. In total there are 69 hand-designed dungeons with a heroic version for each, plus eight mansions that have five randomly generated levels each.

You will have probably gathered by now that the life of a dungeon rusher is a tough and lonely one so it makes sense to team up with other like-minded individuals. Elian soon bumps into other characters that he can enlist, expanding his fledgling party to a team of up to five. These fellow fortune hunters are a strange bunch. There is the axe-wielding Thorgrim who has an interest in figures, not of the statuesque Amazonian warrior kind but those that appear in account ledgers. Or maybe you prefer the lute-wielding bard, whose playing is so bad that it physically damages enemies. There are a total of ten different characters to unlock as you battle your way through the campaign and each character has their own unique skills development tree.

During the course of your adventures your inventory will soon end up collecting more bits of string and interesting shaped rocks than a schoolboy keeps in his pockets. At this point you may wish to visit the workshop and get the various craftsmen to make some shiny new items. As the craftsmen complete your commissions they gain experience and will eventually be able to make even shinier things. This presents an interesting decision - do you for instance focus on getting your jeweller to craft a range of artefacts to enhance his skills as quickly as possible, or do you spread your commissions equally between the blacksmith, alchemist and other craftsmen?

Whilst the humour and quirky characters help distinguish Dungeon Rushers from a host of similar dungeon crawling games, it is the ability to construct your own dungeons that really make the __game stand out. Much like the classic Dungeon Keeper the simple-to-use level editor allows creative sorts to construct their own dungeons, placing enemies, traps and treasure.

When you have had your fill designing your own dungeons, you can investigate arena mode and delve into some levels that have been created by other players. Sadly in my experience, although these player-generated dungeons are ranked for difficulty, they aren’t that much fun to play as they are usually loaded with really tough encounters that highlight the repetitive nature of combat. Battling your way through these dungeons earns blueprints that can be used to enhance your dungeon building capabilities. They can be invested in your architect’s office to increase the number of rooms in your dungeon, the bestiary to provide access to more powerful monsters or the engineering office to allow you to place more traps.

The well-crafted 16-bit style graphics hark back to the golden age of Super Nintendo role playing games. However, the retro style font could be easier to read and has a disconcerting way of scaling to a smaller size as you are reading. There are a few graphical glitches and problems with interface windows overlapping and I found that the __game crashed a few times when I was working on my latest evil dungeon creations.

The main problem with Dungeon Rushers is that much like the hard working toilet cleaner you will soon fall into a repetitive rinse and repeat rut. After the first few dungeons have been conquered, a point is reached where you have to repeatedly grind through depressingly familiar, previously explored dungeons in order to level-up your party, which really highlights the game’s lack of variety. The problem is further compounded by the tortoise-like speed at which the characters level up and the scarcity of useful equipment finds. It would have been some consolation if combat had an optional automatic mode so that you didn’t have to oversee every aspect of each battle.

Despite the fact that the only IAPs on offer are just cosmetic costume changes the difficulty in making progress makes the game feel like it is working on a free to play economic model that is trying to persuade you to spend real world cash to progress even though there is no option to do so.

Review: Guild of Dungeoneering: Ice Cream Headaches Adventure Pack

If you missed it first time round, we here at Pocket Tactics like Guild of Dungeoneering. We like it so much that it earned one of our (not so) fabled five-star reviews back in July 2016. Since then, Irish developer Colm Larkin and his studio, Gambrinous have been developing a name, with GoD even making an appearance in Danny O’ Dwyer’s excellent No Clip series, where the famed games journalist discusses the growing development scene in Ireland.

For the uninitiated, GoD is a dungeon crawler with rogue-like elements. Control of the character is stripped from the player; instead, you create the world with a random selection of cards each turn, which automatically guide the character in a particular direction. These cards can contain pieces of the environment to build, enemies, or treasure, and you can use these while aiming for whatever the main objective of the level might be.

Since its release, GoD has seen two expansions: Pirates Cove, and Ice Cream Headaches - which expanded upon the original __game with extra characters, enemies, and items, with the latter recently making its way to iOS and Android.

Combat is turned-based; with each character holding a unique selection of cards that can be expanded on as you progress through a dungeon and equip your character. Attacks can be both magical and physical, and can be defended against with the correct colour shield. It’s not revolutionary, but it is effective, and there is a decent level of tension when you make it to the end of a dungeon to face off against the boss. Cards can be earned by defeating enemies and collecting loot, which is for the four slots in you inventory – head, body, offhand, and weapon.

The __game is wrapped up in a charming visual style that is reminiscent of a hastily scribbled Dungeons & Dragons drawing you’d find in the back of a teenage student’s book. Between the visual style, the theatrical musings of the bard who narrates your victories (and failures), and the overall tone of the game - it has distinct feel that separates it from other dungeon crawlers.

This brings us to the new expansion; the… ice cream (yes) themed adventure pack brings 21 new quests, 24 new items, and 30 new enemies, many that come with a wintery/snowy feel to them. The best new enemy is the ‘commendable snowman’, who has several other forms from ‘abominable’ to ‘objectionable’, and their designs are suitably hilarious. Your motivation for taking on these brand new enemies? It’s far too warm and you need to send your minions out to find ice cream. Excellent.

Three new characters are introduced – the Yodeller, the Snowitch, and the ice Cream Monk, each come with their own traits: the Ice Cream Monk trades off not holding any weapons in either hand for an extra physical hit, while the Snowitch starts off with one point of favour.

Favour, you may have just asked, is a new mechanic added to GoH. When placing tiles, you may come across a Rune, place an enemy down on this tile, defeat that enemy, and you have earned yourself a Favour with the Fates. You can use these points to manipulate your deck, like removing the top card from either yours or your opponents hand and shuffling it back in, to burning useless cards altogether. Problem is, their implementation - while heavily focused on in the advertising for this new expansion - feels somewhat like an afterthought in the game. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t do a great job of going into detail about their usage, and the random nature of how they work (besides on Snowitch) meant I didn’t pay as much attention to them as I feel Gambrinous would have liked me to. I feel that one of the few, but most glaring issues with GoH has been the lack of detail instructing new players on the game’s mechanics. Though this has never been a game breaker, I do think that an extra effort to inform the player with a better introduction to these mechanics would help out, and would compliment the easy-to-approach visual style.

The added expansion of new items is a welcome addition, as it varies up the battling system, which is still the weakest aspect of the game. By no means terrible per se it just lacks in depth. Tactical prowess extends as far as ‘use blue shield on blue attack and sometimes use red shield on red attack’ – but it fits the childlike simplicity of the presentation - like two children diving into the kitchen cupboard, using a saucepan for a helmet and a wooden spoon as a sword. With that said, the new enemies are absolute blighters for causing status alignments – particularly freeze, which makes all but one card your hand usable for that go, and seeing as victory can be earned (or lost) in the space of one round, freeze is the proverbial ‘ice cream headache’ to deal with.

The original release was released with marginal stability issues, and Ice Cream Headaches only goes to strengthen this foundation, as with over seven hours playing time, the game has yet to crash on me, and running any additional apps showed no slowdown.

This expansion feels like an attempt to address two issues: a lack of levels, and marginally thin gameplay. Gambrinous have accomplished the former and have started to fill in the (minimal) cracks for the latter. The fabulous thing about all of this extra content is that it’s an entirely free update, and whether you are a fan of some of the new features or not, nothing added breaks the original core gameplay. For anyone who is late to the party, the price of the app increases with each expansion – so you should get on board before another ten expansions are added (which I would highly approve of).

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.