Category: Mobile Game Releases

I’ve tried to be a bit more proactive this week, although I spent the first couple of days with Glen and Sean to help teach them about Pocket Tactics and its’ legacy. They’re already very excited to get stuck-in, but they’re spending these next couple of weeks doing a lot of boring admin work.

In case you don’t know what I’m talking about, make sure you catch up on my post from Tuesday going into more details about what the future holds for Pocket Tactics. The header image is from Door Kickers: Action Squad.

Meanwhile, in mobile gaming…

New App Releases

I haven’t seen anything massively exciting released this week that we haven’t already covered, have you? There’s a new Orangepixel game on the way later this month – Snake Core – which you can pre-order now on iOS, but we’ll talk more about it closer to the time.

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App News & Updates

Something not everyone might think about amidst the growing Covid-19 situation is the effect certain games have on our lifestyle. Sure, Esports events and game conferences are being cancelled, but what about games like Pokemon GO that almost require you to go outside?

Will, Niantic have definitely been thinking about it themselves, because they recently announced to Polygon that they’re implementing a number of chagces which will allow their players to enjoy the game without having to go outside as much. The main changes coming include:

• More habitats, so that more Pokemon can be encountered at home.
• Incense packs have been reduced in price by 99% and last an hour.
• Incubators can hatch eggs twice as fast
• Several real-world community events have been cancelled or postponed.

Niantic postponed a Harry Potter event as well, and they’re not the only ones trying to make changes to help deal with the situation. Discord, for example, have offered increased functionality even for non-paying users to help with the increasing number of people working from home.

I’ve actually been kind of interested in checking out Games of Thrones: Beyond the Wall ever since I heard about it last year. Sure, it’s likely going to be a free-to-play gacha game, but hey, I’m a sucker for the Night’s Watch. We haven’t really heard or seen much about it in recent months, but Behaviour Interactive are in the midst of a press tour and have confirmed it will be released on iOS first on March 26th, with Android following on April 3rd. Pre-registration is open for both.

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We’ve got a decent new game announcement this week as well: Door Kickers: Action Squad is a 2D side-scrolling platform/action game released late 2018 that’s a spin-off from 2014’s Door Kickers. It’s finally coming to mobile (having gone everywhere else first). You play as one of six different SWAT troopers sent into one of 84 different levels to deal with whatever situation has arisen – rescue the hostage, disarm the bomb… if you squint, it’s like a 2D solitaire Rainbow Six: Siege.

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Pre-registration/Pre-Order is available for both iOS and Android. The App Store hints at a release date of April 8th, 2020, but that could change of course.

Singapore is the place to be if you want to get your hands on Legends of Runeterra before anyone else. An eagle-eyed twitter user has spotted that Riot’s own collectable card game offering has soft-launched on the Google Play store over there. We’ve not been able to find out if it’s landed anywhere else yet, but it seems to also be in the iOS app store in the region.

Last but not least; I know we don’t really cover PUBG much here, but the mobile version just got a colourmind mode in a recent update, which is neat.

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App Sales

A handful of games on sale this week you might be interested in – haven’t thought about some of these games in a long while! All of the discounts listed below are available on both iOS and Android.

• Friday (or Freitag) by Friedemann Friese is one of the more understated digital board game ports to come out during my time so far. It’s a modest card game, and this is a modest digital version of that game, and you can pick it up for $1.99. 
• Cosmic Express is one of our favourite puzzle games, and it’s now down to its cheapest price yet – also $1,99.
• One of Orangepixel’s earlier classics, Sir Questionnaire is back down to $1.99 for the first time since May 2019. This is the official ‘best price’ right now, so if you haven’t picked it up yet this is your chance. 

This isn’t technically a discount, but as of earlier this week the XCOM-like squad tactics game Xenowerk Tactics has gone ‘Free-to-Try’. You can download the game for free and play through a trial, and then the full-game unlock has been turned into an IAP. That IAP is still currently $6.99, however. 

Seen anything else you liked? Played any of the above? Let us know in the comments?

Symphony of the Night launched on the original Sony PlayStation (PSX) in an era that seemed to hail the end of 2D games. With Mario gone three dimensional the previous year and the Legend of Zelda soon to make the switch, releasing a 2D platformer seemed incredibly shortsighted. But Konami knew exactly what they were doing.

Of course, Symphony of the Night quickly became a cult hit and is now a frequent contender for the top of “greatest games of all time” lists. It launched not one but two well-received trilogies on Nintendo handhelds and became grandfather to its very own subgenre: the ‘metroidvania’. As the indie revolution arrived, the freedom, creativity, and room for narrative that the metroidvania formula offered within a 2D space led to an explosion of games in this style.

Where would modern indies be without Cave Story and Shadow Complex?

Emerging from this indie scene, mobile gamers have seen some phenomenal ‘metroidvania’ and metroidvania-inspired titles. Underwater variant Aquaria, beautifully animated Dust, criminally underrated Dandara, rougeish Dead Cells, the fantastic mobile exclusive Grimvalor and even Apple Arcade game Shinsekai. The continuous, iterative gameplay of the genre makes it a great fit for hardcore gamers playing on mobile. It is now the perfect time to revisit the game that inspired them all: Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.

Presumably as part of a promotion for the third season of the surprisingly good Netflix anime series, Konami has just dropped a mobile port of Symphony executed by the experts at Dotemu. The version hitting mobile is the same one that came with PSP title The Dracula X Chronicles. Compared to the PSX original, it has an ‘improved’ script and voice acting that loses some of the original’s b-movie jankiness (including the infamous line: “What is a man? A miserable little pile of secrets!”) Players who remember the original may be disappointed, but overall it’s for the best. You do also get the option to play as Richter or Maria from the start.

Other differences from the classic are refined item menus that function with touch controls and higher-resolution text and (static) artwork. In terms of live assets, the game’s pixels are chunkier than the retro games that have lifted its style. Played on a larger screen, you may be surprised by how few tiny squares the original animators had to work with. That said, the animation holds up. It’s incredibly detailed and lifelike for the era, and a masterclass for today’s pixel artists.

Gamers without dedicated controllers will be stuck with on-screen controls, of course. These are not ideal – you have a simple touch pad rather than the more-intuitive swipe-anywhere controls used by games like Dead Cells. The jump button is easy to hit, but the various attack buttons are fiddly-er. There are a few allowances made to touch gamers: hotkeys are available for the spells and transformations, although one does wonder why it’s still d-pad-up+attack to use special weapons. The touch controls are also not customizable for sizing and position, which is a weird oversight for an experienced developer of emulated classic games to make.

The game works best with a dedicated controller, naturally. One bizarre choice is binding the map to a flick (in any direction) of the second analog stick, especially when L2 is just sitting there doing nothing.

But the game itself? It’s still incredibly good. You have a massive, varied castle map that’s literally twice as big as you think and packed with details that tell you a story without the need for lengthy cutscenes. It’s challenging, but not frustrating, with plenty of secrets for hardcore gamers. Combat, especially boss combat, requires thought, skill, and judicious use of your abilities. There’s some light RPG elements in building your stats and finding new equipment. Yes, there are ways to break the game and make Alucard incredibly overpowered, but honestly that’s part of the fun. This version is even enhanced with the ability to instantly continue from the last room you entered rather than get dragged back to the last save point. (If this gets you stuck in a tight spot, you can reload from the last hard save.)

At a mere three dollars at launch, this is definitely the cheapest Symphony of the Night has ever been, unless you fancy scouring garage sales for the original CD-ROM. Even with the poor on-screen controls, I’d say it’s worth trying at that price. If you missed the original, it’s a chance to experience one of the pillars of a now-trending genre. If you remember it fondly, that’s a small price to pay for the waves of nostalgia you’ll feel from hearing That Music and fighting That Boss again. If you do have a controller, you have no excuse. Get this game now. Maybe if enough people buy it, a port of Rondo of Blood will be just around the corner! 

Today we’re talking about multiplayer games, whether they be on iPhone (or iPad), Android or Windows Phone (lolz). There are fairly significant games out there that you can play with your friends locally, and then vast, massively multiplayer experiences that you can play online. Granted, a lot of these venture into Free-to-Play territory but it’s come to a point where we can’t ignore them.

What are the best multiplayer iPhone & Android games?

• Mucho Party
• Fortnite
• Identity V
• Clash of Clans
• Heads Up!
• Spaceteam
• Hades Star
• Talisman: Digital Edition
• Arena of Valor 
• Triple Agent
• Worms 4
• Words With Friends 

Presented for the curious, here is a list of multiplayer iphone & android games across all types, as well as local party games to help liven up a gathering. For those of you who’ve been paying attention, yes this is similar to the ‘Best Party Games’ feature we had – as an experiment I decided to ask Michael to give it an overhaul with a new focus. Enjoy!

Mucho Party

Developer: GlobZ
Platforms: iTunes, Android
Price: Free (effectively a trial with limited games), $3.99 one-time IAP for full unlock.

Sample a sumptuous variety of mini-games with inspired and easily-digested twists with goofy facial reactions, and deft touch controls. Your player avatar has an oversized head with a handful of emote options which are customizable: just snap a few photos of your mug with exaggerated expressions and mild hilarity ensues. Yes, the new Mario Party is a classic return to form but Mucho Party is a really nice substitute available for the price of a song. A hidden gem.

Fortnite

Developer: Epic
Platforms: iOS, Android
Price: Free

Fortnite fever shows no chance of breaking anytime soon; the game continues to generate its own hype through cross-overs and events like Thanos’s brief appearance or the sudden appearance of that black hole. It has crafting and the Battle Royale last-man-standing appeal. This phenomenon came from nowhere and isn’t going anywhere for the foreseeable future. Both it and PUGB (Player Unknown Battlegrounds) are still the golden standard for Battle Royale games, and until Apex launches on mobile, I don’t see them being unseated.

Identity V

Developer: NetEase Games
Platforms:  iOS, Android
Price: Free

One hunter chases four innocents across a gothic manse while the would-be escapees struggle to find and solve puzzles. The asymmetry and creepy-cute aesthetic make for a thrilling and iconic experience. The devs are always experimenting with new play modes (like the 8v2 for starters) and the hunt-or-be-hunted setup is a timely mix of the survival- and battle-royale games so en vogue these days. Add in a splash of progression (skill trees, new and unusual characters, cosmetic unlocks) and you have a winner. 

Clash of Clans

Developer: Supercell
Platforms: iOS, Android
Price: Free

Clash of Clans is an august title dating all the way back to 2012. Supercell’s launched a billion other projects since and they all have similar DNA: easy core gameplay loops with short bursts of required activity and an addictive structure. Oh, and they’re all free-to-play with boosts and shortcuts tucked not-so-discreetly away behind a paywall. Clash is the original and still among the greats, though it has some issues with plateaus and top-level play, the ramping up to the endgame is still a delight.

Heads Up! 

Developer: Warner Bros.
Platforms: iOS, Android
Price: $0.99, Free (android). Optional IAP to unlock extra category modes.

Heads Up! Was a victim of its own success for a time. The game is dead simple: a word appears on screen and is held above the guesser’s head. This same guesser is assailed by clues from teammates until the guesser finds the right word or phrase . Cycling through words quickly to rack up a high score, switching up the guessing role amongst team members. Heads Up! has one simple advantage over every other game on this list: it doesn’t need a surface to work. Works just as great standing or crammed together in a vehicle. Anywhere with good sight lines is fair game for Heads Up! short of a hall of mirrors. It’s so good that it’s cliche, at risk of getting played to death and forgotten. In case you’ve never given it a chance with a bored group, do.

Spaceteam

Developer: Henry Smith
Platforms: iOS, Android
Price: Free

Masquerading as chaos and nonsense, Spaceteam never fails to gin up a riotous good time. Navigating the reaches of space takes technical know-how and precise coordination, and Spaceteam spoofs these facts of spacetime-travel by splitting up instructions from control panels. Someone knows which button to press, and where, but the orders and details are deliberately turned into techno-speak-gibberish. Jabbering, giddy gibbons sharing gibberish…in space. Seriously though, the game works wonders for those improvisational types who thrive on chaos and unprecedented social situations. Oh, and it allows for cross-platform play between Android and iOS.

Hades’ Star

Developer: Parallel Space Inc.
Platforms: iOS, Android
Price: Free

Hades’ Star has a persistent, dynamic and massive world whose contours are shaped by the collective actions of the players. In this respect, it’s like a bite-sized EVE Online, though a tad simpler. I’ve always found that vast settings make the crawl of real-time games more palatable, like with Subterfuge. Situated in outer space, the 4X stages of explore and expand take a good amount of time, but that deliberation is the best part of Hades Star.

It suffers from a little free-to-play structure in its later stages, I guess, but it isn’t really a game which makes sense to binge, so the premium currency of ‘crystals’ is for those who want to play faster on their own terms. A little-known treat for fans of MMOs, 4X or the outer reaches of the universe.

Talisman: Digital Edition

Developer: Asmodee Digital
Platforms:  iOS, Android
Price: $3.99, $3.49. See here for an extensive DLC guide.

Talisman is a wild time and a mess, digital or analogue, but it’s markedly tidier and every bit as much of a caper on the good old ‘pad. Collecting magic artefacts, spells and literal pieces of fate and destiny as the hour grows late. It’s a classic and epic game, but also well suited to casual meet-and-greets, too. Because each turn’s decisions are relatively simple and straightforward, players can banter, chow down or otherwise divert themselves without hampering the flow of the gameplay at all.

Arena of Valor

Developer: Tencent
Platforms: iOS, Android
Price: Free, IAP for cosmetics and other unlocks

Deliberately as evocative of League of Legends as possible, this one is a good game with a few caveats. First, the monetization is not especially burdensome but hard to ignore. Secondly, the controls work pretty well but since the Switch version came out they feel second fiddle, in terms of responsivity. Still, you can experience a polished and mature MOBA with respectable mechanics, tutorials and matchmaking. It’s not quite as vibrant a scene as it used to be, but Arena of Valor is still a rush to play.

Triple Agent

Developer: Tasty Rook
Platforms: iOS, Android
Price: Free

Triple Agent is a mixture of chaos and order, of ineffective backstabs, liars giving useful tips and honest fools botching the naked truth. It’s a find-the-betrayer style party game, just like Mafia and Werewolf, but what sets it apart from its ilk, aside from a whip-smart app and panoply of extra optional win conditions, is the total miniaturisation of the experience. One device is passed around to dole out identities, clues and the final elimination vote. The group at the end of the chaotic play session collectively eliminates one person, and if they were a Good Guy the Bad Guys win and vice versa. Really fresh interface and game design take on an old standard.

Worms 4

Developer: Team17
Platforms:  iOS, Android
Price: $4.99

Worms are good for the earth, enriching the soil and setting the fields for a rich harvest next season. Worms from Team 17, on the other hand, spend all their lives trading quips and aiming impractical and ultraviolent weapons at each other. Carpet bombs, napalm, the holy hand grenade, anything and everything is an instrument of death in Worms. The terrain is destructible too, and the only ‘loot crate’ drops are just in-game goodies and not a euphemism for scummy monetisation. This is a premier zany 2D shootout, decades old and no worse for wear.

Words With Friends 2

Developer: Zynga
Platforms: iOS, Android
Price: Free

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Whoof, Words with Friends is a veritable dinosaur, dating back practically to the first days of the iPhone itself. It is an excellent multiplayer game because it accommodates all kinds of time commitments and skill levels. Yes, it’s a duo affair but so good it bears repeating. A simple word game gets even better with asynchronous play and friends list integration, so that when a moment of creative insight strikes, you can quickly convert it into a witty and devastating turn of phrase. It’s like texting, but with a score attached.

Other Party & Multiplayer Game Recommendations

• Royal Adviser
• Soul Knight
• Psych
• Mysterium
• Legends of Andor

What are your favourite multiplayer games? Let us know in the comments!

By Joe Robinson 10 Mar 2020

It’s not been a terribly interesting week, but I’ve made do the best I can – lots of behind the scenes changes going on at the moment, which I’ll be talking more about next week hopefully. We’ve got a few reviews in the pipeline but as we head towards the end of the month don’t expect much in the way of new features. I’ll be ticking things over with news in the interim.

Meanwhile, in mobile gaming…

New App Releases

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (iOS & Android)

Castlevania is back in vogue at the moment thanks to the Netflix show, but we were genuinely surprised when we’d heard that one of the best entries of the series, Symphony of the Night, had dropped on mobile as a premium port – with controller support, no less!

It’s dirt cheap as well at $2.99, and the game is pretty much as it was back in the PS1 days, with a new ‘Continue’ feature being added by Konami, as well as Game Center achievements on iOS. There hasn’t been a new mobile trailer released as far as we’ve seen, so the below is from when the game was ported to the PS4.

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Other new releases today include War Tortoise 2, which is exactly what it sounds like (an on-rails Idle Shooter where you’re on a tortoise. Free to Play). Interestingly, Motorsport Manager has returned, only this time as online free-to-play game Motorsport Manager Online. I was thinking the other day we were overdue for a new entry in the series and it seems like rather than going down the annual release of other sports franchises, they’d try their hand at the free-to-play MMO world instead.

We’re not sure how it stacks up vs. the premium games, but we’ll try and find out. If you want to try it for yourself it’s available on both iOS and Android.

App Updates & News

Star Traders: Frontiers got some new updates over the past couple of weeks – a new crew class was added called the Blade Dancer, and this week a new blade weapon type was also added. ‘Straight Blades’ use quickness instead of strength as the primary stat, and have a higher piercing chance. This week’s update also closed the loop-hole where you could get a negative jump-cost stat and generate fuel by hyper jumping between systems. Crafty.

Mario Kart Tour has also received a few quality of life improvements ahead of the official release of multiplayer early next week.

App Sales

Football Manager Mobile & Football Manager Touch are at least 25% off on both iOS and Android.

It’s not much, but Bad North is also discounted by $1, which is still the cheapest it’s gone since launch. Kingdom: New Lands is 50% off, as is Star Traders: Frontiers.

Seen anything else you liked? Played any of the above? Let us know in the comments.

By Joe Robinson 05 Mar 2020

By Joe Robinson 04 Mar 2020

When I was brought on as head coach of the Cleveland team, it was out of desperation. It was a tragedy of a team that couldn’t muster a winning record. No veteran players in their right mind would have wanted to be traded there. Rookies lived in fear that they would be drafted there, ending their career before it started. Cleveland football was a disaster.

Now, six years later, fans enthusiastically pile into the stadium every game to power our team into the playoffs. We have a consistent, league leading offense that can score on any drive. Rookies come to Cleveland looking to become a franchise player and lead this team to dynastic greatness. We’re no longer an afterthought, we’re inevitable. Next stop: the Retro Bowl.

This isn’t the engagement I’d expect from such a small game. Retro Bowl aims to create an American football simulator to rival that of genre juggernaut, Madden. It can’t possibly compete with that entire video game empire, one who’s entire look and feel is so influential that the real life sport has been jacking it’s style for years. But when you consider it’s scale, and the platform it’s limited to, Retro Bowl is special. It has no peers when it comes to mobile football games – including the Madden ports and downscaled efforts that pepper the App Store yearly.

Where it succeeds is it’s clever mix of team management simulation and focused gameplay. Before the games, you manage things like team rosters, player morale, coaches, and facility quality. This kind of granular micro-management can be tedious though, so Retro Bowl only includes the things that matter. Your team has enough players to field for a full game, but you only manage the stars. Keeping a select few players happy and healthy is enough to keep all the random no name role-players in line.

I find that this mimics lots of sports mentality pretty well. On real football teams, everyone is an individual, of course. But anyone who isn’t an analyst will rarely weigh the strength or potential of a team using anything but how good their standouts are. The New England Patriots are synonymous with QB Tom Brady and not Kicker Steve Gostkowski for a reason. Possible proliferation of the sports-forward mentality that reduces people to mindless human capital aside, Retro Bowl can be appreciated for being realistic about how we interact with sports with this design choice.

These star players can also improve while on your team. They gain experience every time you play, and leveling up allows them to raise some stats up to a projected maximum. When new players come to you via draft or trade, they’ll have two ratings – one for what they are now, and one for what they can potentially be. There’s a lot of strategy in managing this simple roster season to season. Do you keep the solid 3 star player knowing that that is as good as they get? Do you trade them for a 2 star that can become a 4 and a half in a couple of seasons? How does your salary cap fit into this?

When it’s time to hit the field, Retro Bowl takes a lot of shortcuts, as well. You have two options on every play: throw the ball to a receiver or toss the ball to a running back. By dragging back on the screen, you’ll see the trajectory of your throw, and can aim the pass at will. After the ball is caught, you can avoid defenders with quick swipes up or down, or swipe forward to dive for more yards. All of these things work reasonably well, and are modified heavily by the player’s stats. A running back with low stamina can juke way fewer times before they start running at a snail’s pace. A quarterback with low throw accuracy has a short trajectory line, making it hard to predict exactly where the ball will go.

This scaled down system is fun and simple. You can’t move your QB around the pocket during a play, but watching your receivers struggle to get open while feeling that encroaching pressure of a defensive line caving in successfully translates that pocket pressure that makes big plays so satisfying. How reliable things like catching and fumbling are depends on the quality of your players, but more than once have I had a really good wide receiver have a ball just bounce off of their helmet while they stand wide open down field.

That sort of randomness is everywhere in Retro Bowl. For example, you can’t call your own plays. At the beginning of a play, you see patterns laid out for you, and you can only choose to throw it or run it. There’s no telling how the game has come to call this play. Does it take into account the defense? Does having a better offensive coordinator determine what kinds of plays get called? I think taking the minute elements of play calling out (audibles, play action) is fine, but being locked into a play that looks no good, without any understanding of why it was called and no option to change it, feels bad. Especially if you only have average offensive tools at your disposal.

There’s also absolutely no defensive plays. Defense is played out via a series of text boxes that give you a gist of how the rival team’s drive is going. The success of your defense is determined by how good your overall defense is. That’s determined by the quality of your defensive players and coordinators. But it always feels like a crap shoot. When opposing teams have average or higher offenses, you’ll do best to assume that every time they have the ball, they’ll score. It reminds me of blackjack, where your best bet is to assume that the dealer’s face down card is a 10 at all times. Gambling also feels bad.

The stripped down features and mechanics are a good way to translate football sim experience to the small screen. The extreme lack of information and abundant RNG make for a game that is hard to fully engage with. All that said, if you want football in quick doses, and that head coach management experience from the big boys on the go, you’ll be hard pressed to find a better alternative than Retro Bowl.

Picross is an old grid-based family of logic puzzles, rather like a mixture of Sudoku and Minesweeper. You fill in boxes to create a ‘pixelated’ image based on the numbers marking each row and column. A ‘5’ in a row means there are five filled boxes, one right after another, no more, no less. The rules are simple but the consequences aren’t. Picross had some mainstream success over a decade ago when it became part of the Nintendo DS’s large and diverse catalog (while popular, it never had the breakout appeal or sales of say, Nintendogs).

It’s always been a solid option. By adding a generic fantasy theme filled with magical potions, a standard bestiary and youthful heroes, PictoQuest attempts to give Picross a facelift. It tries to give a great puzzle form some pizazz to lure in new players. Reader, even for a puzzle-lover, the results are mixed at best. PictoQuest is a mashup of many conventional videogame ideas shoe-horned into a classic puzzle format. It’s pleasant enough and mildly challenging for newcomers, but ultimately derivative.

The game is structured around short levels with different enemy types. If you were just looking at screenshots, you’d be forgiven for thinking this was an RPG, or at least RPG-inspired, like PuzzleQuest was. (It isn’t either of these things, sadly). There are health bars for both you and the foe, but they are false symbols. A match is over when the picture is complete: the enemy is KO’d when the puzzle is completely filled in, no more, no less.

For your trouble, you get a little gold after each level. Any mistakes or long pauses mean the enemy attacks you, depleting your health bar. So in PictoQuest both speed and accuracy are important, which makes for a stressful learning environment. A little focus and concentration can make for better puzzle solving, but the real-time pressure can actually incentivize leaps of logic and deductive guesswork…which are punished by the skimpy, 3-heart health pool. Picross should be about the sure thing, the iron lattice of logic. PictoQuest can be beat with hectic tapping, magic items, and repeating a level over and over to just imprint the unchanging image grid on your brain.

The game’s different regions have pretty decent difficulty scaling, in terms of the raw complexity of the puzzle grids themselves. The purist approach dictates that logic puzzles should be approached methodically with an eye for chains of consequence. If a column says ‘8’, then the centermost six spaces must be filled. Most progress is made through the process of elimination, marking ineligible spaces X to narrow the field of possibilities. It’s the thrill of a crossword, or Sudoku, or any other activity where a mind can observe a pattern at work and unravel its consequences. There’s the vast wasteland of the empty puzzle at the very start, the slow build towards minor clues and victories, then as momentum peaks and the final few holdouts fall into place. Not exactly your typical gamer rush, but still a respectable and perfectly fun activity.

The puzzles themselves have been well-selected and ordered; the fancy ones come a great deal later. This smooth curve is undermined by the fact that the actual game mechanics are counter-intuitive and distracting. There’s plenty of stick and little to no carrot. It’s like asking someone to do as many pushups or squats in sixty seconds while turning a blind eye to their position and form. It encourages sloppiness and creates cognitive dissonance by tasking the player to improve at every metric simultaneously. Bosses will have progressively weirder twists and hit harder while the puzzle grid gets larger and the hints get less generous. It’s an ambitious challenge, but one that never actually feels hard. It creates obstacles and inconveniences rather than honing and refining the primary mechanic, and for this reason alone, PictoQuest is a letdown.

To enliven things, one-time consumable items can reveal tiles, restore hearts or freeze enemies, for a small gold fee. The game has no other tools to ameliorate the challenges it has set: it’s purely sink or swim. I can get behind a tiny set of rules, in the right circumstances it’s actually fantastically liberating (see: Miracle Merchant), but here the bonus effects feel hokey and tacked-on, as if someone tried to take a dollar-store puzzle booklet and make it come to life with the most hackneyed of video game tropes: a quest to save the kingdom. The fantasy theme and magic mechanics are merely window dressing, but also manage to be irksome and invasive.

There’s no great injustice in this: it’s not as if Picross puzzles are some holy grail, the pinnacle of the form which will tolerate no bastardization. Puzzles and high fantasy settings aren’t strange bedfellows by any means (see: Puzzle Quest and Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes). But the limited gameplay makes the bare-bones nature of Picross puzzles feel a tad dated. For example, because each level is just a static layout, it could be brute-forced with a good memory and multiple failed attempts. It’s like two fun things decided to merge together haphazardly and the result is worse than either half separately.

The visuals are clean and bright, and the UI is nice, especially the greyed-out effects used to update the hint sections of the puzzle as they’re completed. The music strikes a clean balance between dynamism and peace: somewhere halfway between a battle theme and an elevator ditty. That, along with the note-taking system make for a thoughtful digital Picross experience, if only PictoQuest would stop pinging my character’s health bar. It also has critical hits and misses, for some god awful reason that is devoid of any informed statistics or player input.

PictoQuest is ‘gamey’ like microwaveable food is a meal: only just enough to do in a pinch, but never to be praised beyond the fact it is quick and cheap. Its sole saving grace is that all the gimmicks and stylish distractions are built upon a rock solid core of Picross, and the pixelated images do have some retro gamer appeal, if you’re feeling nostalgic or indulgent. Still, taken altogether, it’s a mightily mediocre experience, so in all honesty unless you’ve been craving this particular brand of puzzle, just stay away.

You might be interested in knowing that the new Editorial team for Pocket Tactics starts next week, with the full site relaunch dropping on March 31st. This means that, after today, there are exactly four Weekenders left under my watch. I’m not sure what the new team will and won’t decide to do content wise, but I look forward to finding out.

In that regard, there will be some additional communications from me in the coming weeks as to what exactly is coming to happen come the end of March, and what that will mean for you as readers. Stay tuned.

If you’re wondering why this is dropping today: I’m on holiday tomorrow and rather than skipping another Weekender, I thought I’d just bring it forward a day. The Header image is from Final Fantasy 3.

Meanwhile, in mobile gaming…

New App Releases

Bit of a dry one this week, with the only real release of note is the mobile port of DryGin’s ‘medical malpractice’ simulator Bio Inc. It’s launching on Android today, with an iOS version coming soon.

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The only other games of note to turn up this week was another The Quest expansion, Hero of Lukomorye V, and side-scrolling shoot em-up Aces of the Luftwaffe.

App News and Updates

What a coincidence that, amidst an international medical emergency, as one medical-themed game arrives, another one vanishes (sort of). The developers of Plague Inc. reported today that their virus simulator has been removed from the App Store China for including “content that is illegal in China as determined by the Cyberspace Administration of China”. They’ve released a statement on the situation here.

Speaking of the Coronavirus, it was revealed recently that EVE Echoes’ official release was going to be delayed because of the current situation. They haven’t decided on a final release schedule yet.

In other news, Asmodee have put out a call for more game studios to get in touch to adapt their library of over 250 boardgame properties to digital. It seems that Asmodee Digital, despite trying to publish every digital board game under the sun, isn’t up to handling the task on their own.

In terms of game updates, a few things of note:

Imbroglio has received a large balance update, as spotted by TouchArcade. You should go to the iOS page to get the full rundown of what’s been changed, but the main thing to note is that the leaderboards have been refreshed to account for the patch. Your old scores are still saved though, so any unlocks remain.

As we reported last week, DOTA Underlords’ first official season was imminent, and we can now confirm it has officially kicked off. It has a Battle Pass, a new City area to explore, additional game modes and lots more. The update is pretty hefty, so beware.

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Last, but not least, the recently released Dark Souls-like RPG Pascal’s Wager has gotten an official content roadmap for the rest of 2020. First up is a major free patch landing tomorrow that will add a ‘Casual Mode’, as well as Japanese Subtitles. Next up is a New Game+ mode in March, followed by the Android release around May time along with another content update

App Sales

Only a couple of games worth talking about this week. Final Fantasy III’s iPad and iPhone version (separate entries in the App Store) are both half price at $7.99, while This War of Mine has plummeted down to $1.99 for the first time since the end of December.

Seen anything you liked, played any of the above? Let us know in the comments!