Category: Mobile Game Releases

Teeny Titans – Teen Titans GO! is a mouthful of a title, a great game, and one of the most successful premium games on the App Store. Grumpyface Games and the Cartoon Network are back two years after its release to bring us the next installment in the collect-and-battle franchise. A sequel always invites comparison to its predecessor. Is there enough new hotness to make it feel like a different game but not so much that it loses what fans loved about the original?

Teen Titans GO! Figure walks down the middle of that line like a tight-rope specialist. In the game we’re back in Jump City, but the figure-battling craze has cooled off and the game looks to be in trouble. Powerful forces are looking to shut the game down for good and the culprit seems to be…the Justice League? As a last gasp, new figures were just released which jump-starts interest in Jump City and puts the teen heroes on a path to save their favorite game.

The main quest line follows the fate of this game within a game and features a couple major DC heroes, Batman and Superman, along with a lot of other familiar faces. Naturally, there is also a whole host of new side missions to accept and new neighborhoods to explore. The city looks familiar but is rearranged and while many of the assets from the first game are reused, most of the content is new and is packed with the same tongue-in-cheek approach to collect-them-all games and the hero genre.

Now quests are great, but the figure battles remain the highlight of the game. Grumpyface Games didn’t try to fix what wasn’t broken here, and thankfully so. You can battle pretty much any character in the game and take part in figure-battling tournaments as well. Battles are still fast-paced, a lot of fun, and full of enough tactical bite to satisfy strategy gamers. You pick a trio of figures to go into battle against one to three opponents in a real-time showdown. Your goal is to defeat the other team by reducing each figure’s health to zero before they can do the same to you. Each side has a battle bar that builds up charge over time and each figure has three powers that fall somewhere on that bar. Powers deal damage, heal your team, and provide a variety of other support effects and the longer you must wait the more powerful they tend to be. This sets up some nice tension and key decisions: Do you pew-pew-pew with fast lower-damage attacks or do you save up your charge for one massive-damage hit?

Balancing your team of figures remains a strategic challenge. The game has six classes, and each has an advantage, and disadvantage, against one other class. When you have advantage your attacks do more damage, so making sure you go in with an advantageous crew is key. Figuring out an assortment of figures that work well in different trios and leveling them up remains a central part of the game and is definitely my favorite part of Teen Titans GO Figure.

So, what’s new in battle? Quite a bit. First, there’s a slate of new figures available, including fast-hitter Black Lightning, who quickly became one of my primary damage dealers. I had been worried I’d end up running with the same crew as in the first game, but this was not the case. Between all the new figures and getting some really good guys much earlier, hello Killer Moth, I ended up with a considerably different team of regulars to power through the game.

Teen Titans GO Figure not only has new figures, but also new powers, such as a blast of super-cold air that freezes your opponent’s battle bar and causes it to crack and fall to pieces, losing all progress made. It’s effective and adds a great tactical element to the game as you look to time it perfectly to maximize your opponent’s woe. There are also new tofu effects that are a lot of fun. Tofu are blocks that drop during combat and when you click on them you gain a bonus power that you can activate at will. Existing tofu did things like provide a damage bonus, regain health, and remove enemy effects. New tofu let you speed up your battle bar progress, create a shield, and freeze and break your opponent’s battle bar among other things.

Yet another big change to the figure-battling portion of the game is the introduction of accessories. Accessories are items you can add to a battle that provide a bonus. You must charge them by attacking and grabbing batteries that randomly drop like tofu and once ready, you can activate them and unleash more pain on your foe. Just a couple examples are a Lil’ Penguin that continually freezes your opponent’s battle bar, a Titan Coin that increases your team’s hit points, and Cyborg’s Waffle Shooter that fires waffles that temporarily block one of your opponent’s powers. Both sides get access to accessories and figuring out how best to use and play around them introduces yet another aspect to the game’s already compelling combat system.

Figure customization has also gotten some intriguing new features. The original game featured mod chips, which provided a nice bonus to a specific figure, as well as the ability to enhance each of the figure’s three powers to make them more effective. Teen Titans GO Figure includes both of these but has also introduced figure painting and power-order customization. Each figure has several different color-scheme outfits you can unlock with repaint tokens. At level 10 you can also customize the order of a figure’s three powers as well.

[embedded content]

Teen Titans GO Figure remains a premium game, but unlike its predecessor includes in-app purchases that include the ability to buy rare figures, extra repaint tokens, and eggs filled with a random assortment of figures, accessories, and repaint tokens. I’ve played through most of the game and I can attest that you don’t need to buy any IAPs and there’s no pay wall of any kind. All of what you can buy is relatively easily obtainable in the game. The IAPs might be really tempting for collectors and completionists who are impatient to collect them all but are easily ignorable for anybody else.

If you played Teeny Titans and are ready for more great figure-battling action, or enjoy the genre in general, Teen Titans GO Figure is an easy recommendation to make. The game is a great blend of old awesomeness and new hotness and does feel like a new experience, one that I am enjoying just as much the second time around.

Nick’s been excited about Pocket City for ages and won’t stop bugging me about it. “Joe, when’s Pocket City out?” “Joe, do you know how awesome Pocket City is going to be?” “Joe, can you please pay me my invoice, I can’t afford food this week.” GAWD.

Well, finally I can be left in peace: we reported at the end of June that Pocket City was available to pre-order on iOS and had a release date of July 31^st. Well, turns out iTunes was right; the city builder is indeed out today, and you can pick it up right now via the App Store or Google Play.

In case you haven’t heard of it before Pocket City is premium city-building game that re-imagines the classic genre with some surprise twists of its own. Here’s the feature list from the Google Play Store page:

• Build a unique city by creating zones and special buildings
• Trigger fun events like block parties, or disasters like tornadoes
• Complete quests to earn XP and money
• Unlock advanced buildings by levelling up
• Unlock new land with different terrain types
• Succeed by optimizing your cash flow, traffic, happiness, and more
• Enjoy a dynamic city with citizens, vehicles, animals and animated buildings
• Upload your city to the cloud to transfer to another device, or share with a friend
• Intuitive, touch-based city building
• Playable offline
• Play in portrait mode or landscape mode
• NO microtransactions

We’ve already got review code, so we’ll be bringing you more coverage ASAP. Nick will have some impressions for you in The Weekender on Friday, and I’ll make sure we get a full review up ASAP next week.

By Joe Robinson 30 Jul 2018

Welcome to the Weekender, your weekly look at the best new games, sales, and updates. We’ve got some great new gaming options, including two completely free and very fun titles. There’s also a smattering of sales including a rare sale on one of the best mobile games ever.

Out Now

Mind Cards (iPhone)

Mind Cards is a new solo card game in the same vein as TinyTouchtales classic hit Card Crawl. In it you must work your way through a 21-card deck in order to win. Some cards are monsters you must fight, and they deal damage which reduces your life. Some are potions that heal lost life. Some cards are food and replenish another of the game’s finite resources. You use food with every card you play. Some cards are gems which allow you to deal out cards to all open spaces. You can do this without gems, but it will cost life instead. Finally, there are special attack cards that hit monsters without taking damage. The goal of the game is to use every card without losing all of your life and it’s a fair bit harder than it sounds. As you play you earn gold and can unlock more special cards for use in future games. Mind Cards is completely free with no ads or IAPs, so if solo card games are at all your thing, there’s no reason not to check it out!

The Horus Heresy: Legions (iOS Universal and Android)

There’s a new CCG on the block, The Horus Heresy: Legions is Warhammer 40K’s entrance into the crowded market. Can they take a bite out of Hearthstone and others? It’s hard to know for sure and certainly time will tell, but the easy answer is probably not. The Horus Heresy: Legions features pretty-standard gameplay for the genre. You pick a legion which dictates card choices. You take on opponents and try to reduce their life to nil for the win. The only innovation I see is a guild system, which has the potential to be cool. I’ve always wondered why CCGs didn’t implement guilds as a way to keep players invested. Having a play group to test and play with is huge. It’s free with the usual IAPs, so easy enough to check out if you dig the IP or want a new CCG to play around with.

[embedded content]

Amethlion (iOS Universal and Android)

Amethlion is an explore/craft/survive game with an open world full of quests, dungeons, and mysteries. The graphics and music are a bit basic, even for the genre, but there’s a lot to explore, build, and you know, kill. Oh, and you can get pets. There’s a big update with new items, quests, and areas of the world to explore coming next Tuesday on iOS. The update is already live on Android. It’s not perfect but the developer seems receptive to feedback and the game is just a couple bucks.

[embedded content]

Nishan Shaman (iOS Universal)

Nishan Shaman is a rhythm game where you control Nishan’s spirit travels into the void on a quest. She protects herself from the dangerous in that place through a spiritual shield maintained through drumming, which you control. As creatures hit her shield you drum them into nothingness, protecting her as she continues her journey. It’s simple yet quite engaging. I was immediately nodding along with the music and smiling broadly as I drummed the monsters away. Nishan Shaman has a cool mythology and cultural elements, a great story, and beautiful graphics and music. Oh, and it is completely free. You should download it right now.

[embedded content]

Battleheart 2 (iOS Universal and Android) (Review)

Ok, so I may have been a little harsh a couple weeks ago when Battleheart 2 came out for iOS. I wasn’t, and still am not, a big fan of how little the game progressed in the seven years between the original and sequel. I may have discounted how good of a game it still is, for what it is. It’s out now on Android and I’ve played about 10 hours in the intervening two weeks. A good chunk of that was the co-operative multiplayer, which while unintuitive to set up, does work pretty well and is a fun addition to the game. You and a friend just pick the same room name and it connects you. Battleheart 2 is quite the grind fest, there’s no story to speak of, and it’s certainly not getting any awards for innovation, but, if you enjoy real-time action and slowly improving a party of adventurers you could do a lot worse.

Sales

Dungelot Shattered Lands (iOS Universal and Android): Free on iOS (Review)

One of the world’s better roguelike games, Dungelot: Shattered Lands features fun and challenging gameplay and a lot of persistent benefits to gain as you play to make the next run even better. It’s free on iOS and you should get it if you don’t already own it. 

Punch Club (iOS Universal and Android): $.99 on iOS

Tinybuild, the makers of the aforementioned, have their popular boxing sim on sale as well for just a buck on iOS. 

Crashlands (iOS Universal and Android): $3.99 on iOS (Review)

Now we’re talking people. Crashlands might be my favorite mobile game. It’s certainly my favorite explore/craft/survive game on mobile. If you love that genre as much as I do and haven’t tried it out now’s the time, it’s very rarely on sale, and $4 is a steal for this one. 

Kingdom: New Lands (iOS Universal and Android): $4.99 (Review)

Have you played the side-scrolling, genre-mashing Kingdom: New Lands? It’s part tower-defense, part city builder, part simulation, part puzzle, and all kinds of challenging. It’s also on sale for $5, half off.

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

A cursory glance at the promotional screenshots and you could be forgiven for dismissing Isle of Skye as simply a Carcassonne clone with a Scottish setting. Thankfully, although it shares the same tile-laying mechanic, Isle of Skye has many clever ideas of its own. So much so that the board game has won a host of awards, including the prestigious 2016 Kennerspiel des Jahres.

As clan chieftain, you expand your territory and strengthen your clan in the hope of being crowned King of the Isle of Skye. You do this by purchasing and placing landscape tiles. These tiles feature a mix of highlands, water and mountain areas and must be placed so that the different landscape types match. There are also roads to consider. These do not need to be placed so that they link to other roads, but to earn the maximum income, it is advantageous to have a connected road network. Tiles also feature a range of other point scoring opportunities, including livestock, ships and various types of buildings Finally, a small number of tiles contain scrolls that award bonus points at the end of the game for fulfilling certain requirements.

The first significant difference from Carcassonne is that each player works on building his or her own individual landscape. You may think that this would lead to a rather solitary gaming experience, with little interaction between competing players. Happily though, the brilliantly designed auction system ensures that the game feels both competitive and involving. Before we go to auction, however, we need some cash. Players earn a basic five coins per turn; additional income is earned from tiles that feature whisky barrels as long as they are connected to your castle by road.  There is also a catch-up mechanism that rewards extra coins to players who have fewer points.

With coins burning holes in our sporrans it is time to get trading. At the beginning of each round, all players draw three tiles. They then have to secretly choose one tile to discard and decide how much they are willing to pay for each of the remaining two. Then, in turn order, each player has the opportunity to use any remaining coins to purchase a single tile from an opponent. This works brilliantly, as you have to carefully set prices with the aim of purchasing tiles for the best possible price. However, set these too low and your opponents will snaffle them up. Furthermore, you don’t want to tie up too many coins in trying to secure your own tiles because you may miss the opportunity to purchase a tasty tile from another player. It sounds simple but setting prices can lead to some agonising decisions. Sometimes, you will be tempted to hang on to a tile that is not particularly useful because you know that it will appeal to an opponent. You can then attach a high price and take a gamble that they will bite, but you run the risk of being forced to cough up for your own overpriced tile.

Isle of Skye introduces plenty of variety, with a choice of sixteen different scoring tiles. Only four of these are used in each game and their point scoring potential should form the crux of your overall strategy. Before the game commences these four tiles can be chosen by the players or determined randomly. Not all of these tiles will be scored every round, so certain types of landscape tiles are going to be more valuable at certain points in the game. There is an interesting variety of scoring tiles, which require different tactics to exploit. Some have a spatial element, such as forming squares of four tiles; others will require you to enclose areas of particular landscape types. Then there are those that require you to have the majority of particular items such as ships or coins. The result is a pleasing diversity of scoring opportunities that makes every game feel different.

This isn’t a difficult game to learn and the interactive tutorial will soon have you up and running. To improve your strategy there is the option to watch games that have been played between the highest ranked players. At the start of the game your five coins will not go far, but with some shrewd financial management, you should soon see your income escalating. This will also mean that the landscape tiles will in turn rocket in price, which means that you constantly have to be aware of market trends.

The graphics accurately represent the table-top original and the screen layout works relatively well. All of the required information is laid out along the screen edges, with the central area reserved for your ever-growing kingdom. There are a few times when the interface feels a little unresponsive, like when you are trying to set prices, or get an overview of each scoring tile. I am not convinced by the background, which gives the impression that you are playing on a stained tablecloth. Also, the sound is rather nondescript, although mercifully it does hold back on the bagpipes. Most seriously of all, there appears to be a major bug that causes the game to freeze when playing a pass and play game. I encountered no such problems when competing against just AI opponents. Unfortunately, even at the highest difficulty level the AI does not put up too much of a challenge. In the auction, placing a value on a tile is dependent on so many different variables that creating an AI to challenge experienced players is tough. You are going to want to find some online human opponents to really get the most from this game. Thankfully, setting up an asynchronous online game is easy enough. This mode works especially well, as turns play quickly, and a single game doesn’t drag on too long.

If you enjoyed Carcassonne and are looking for something with more strategy and depth, then Isle of Skye is definitely worth considering even if the app itself isn’t as polished as other leading board game adaptations.

Note: By the time of publication, a recent update has ensured that the interface is much more responsive, sadly the issue with pass and play games freezing hasn’t been resolved.

Despite the fact that the original pick-up-and-play role-playing game Battleheart made its debut seven years ago, it’s hardly lost a lick of its charm. Unfortunately, follow-up Battleheart Legacy was bereft of much of the charm and pull of the first game, leaving players to tinker with Battleheart until Mika Mobile finally released a true sequel in Battleheart 2. Now that it’s available for iOS devices with an Android release to follow soon enough, it’s proven itself another formidable casual twist on classic RPG tropes that’s easy enough for even newcomers to enjoy.

Though the world of Battleheart 2 is rife with classic RPG classes such as mages and knights, it’s curiously bereft of any deep narrative. For that matter, it’s a fairly light application, launching quickly and offering a tutorial or a way for veterans to jump right into battle. The tutorial is the only way ahead of being thrust straight into battle to glean any sort of plot thread information, with a female ally relating that the “fair land” of Battleheart is “once again in turmoil.”

This sequel follows the assassination of the king that ruled over the realm from five years ago, which caused a bit of a shakeup in the kingdom. King Marcus apparently died without an heir, so the Capital has simply remained without a ruler the entire time. There are a dozen various noble houses currently vying to wear his crown, and while they’re all preoccupied with that, monsters and other creatures have invaded the countryside. While the useless Royal Guard sits by and does nothing, it’s up to you and a band of brave heroes to save the day and eliminate the advancing threats.

With that explained, it’s off to the races, so to speak. Battleheart 2‘s minimalistic menu lets you run off into battle, adjust your party, select gear and talents assigned to each character, or go online to enjoy some multiplayer matches. Available missions can be selected in any order from the map screen at your leisure. You can even choose to tackle a formidable boss fight whenever you think you can handle it instead of going in numerical order. Your first order of business, however, should be assembling four adventurers out of the dozen or so unlocked at the game’s start. You can choose from an interesting assortment, each with about a paragraph of unique backstory.

You can select a powerful Knight, a Cleric with the gift of healing, the Berserker with physical attack prowess, and even magicians like the Frost Mage, with various elemental magic that can deal devastating blows to the enemy at long range. Assembling a formidable party is what will ensure continued victories as you play through the game’s scattered missions, as you’ll need a healer or an equivalent, no doubt, and appropriate party members to provide for you in any situation. Foregoing any sort of healer isn’t a great idea, as you’ll soon find that all four party members are knocked out within a shockingly short amount of time. It’s up to you to continually change out targets that need healing, however, because party members often won’t simply swap over to the next fighter in dire need of a health boost.

It’s all part of the very important strategy you’ll need to employ as you take to the battlefield and control all four of your adventurers simultaneously. Using the game’s touch controls, you’ll complete a series of bite-sized battles where you fight off various waves of enemies. To control a character, you’ll simply tap on the one you want to control and drag it to an enemy or ally. You can also simply drag them to an empty spot on the map, and the character will head there in a hurry. Targeting allies with healing magic and buffs is simple, and the nature of the game means your actions will simply be repeated ad infinitum until the battle is over, or until you change something.

It’s a no-frills and intuitive system, though unfortunately sometimes your assignments don’t seem to take. For the most part, however, it’s painless to direct your characters. It can get a little frustrating when several enemies are clumped up onscreen and tangled up with allies, which can call for some strategic movement around the battlefield. Otherwise, since the game’s in 2D, it’s easy to change up the path of a character and get them to a more manoeuvrable space quickly. The situations in which you can’t, however, will often result in a few deaths that could easily have been prevented. Adding some sort of way to select characters beyond tapping on them would help make this less of an issue in the future, perhaps.

Each character also has abilities beyond their simplistic melee and primary attacks or buffs, and you can unlock additional skills as the game progresses. When you find the perfect combination of characters for your party, you’ll want to stick with them because of this system. Unfortunately, this leaves little reason to explore the other characters available at the onset when you find four heroes that work best for you, making for an adventure that will eventually devolve into a bit of banality.

There’s a good amount of automation happening in Battleheart 2, but there’s still plenty for you to orchestrate, meaning it’s not a game that wholly plays itself, like several others on the market. While it’s largely unchanged from the first game, it still delivers enough satisfying combat and great-looking environments to be worth buying into, especially if you’re jonesing for more of the same formula.

With that said, it’s the perfect way to kill some time while on your commute to work, waiting at the doctor’s office, or any time you want to jump into an RPG-flavored world without the lengthy introductions, lore setup, or being forced into character roles you don’t want at the onset. For RPG combat on your terms, Battleheart 2 delivers in spades.

By Joe Robinson 26 Jul 2018

If Nick were still doing his News by Numbers column, he’d be all over a stat like this. Turns out that Battle Royale game people won’t stop talking about rakes in a lot of money.

On mobile alone, Fortnite is reportedly making as much as $2 million USD a day average. Bearing in mind ‘mobile’ in this context just means the iOS version, since Android hasn’t landed yet.

The data comes via Sensor Tower, a business-focused website that likes to track activity such as this. Between the iOS version’s launch on March 15^th, 2018 and July 11^th (when Season 4 ended), the daily figure was around $1.2 million USD.

The new higher estimation comes from data pulled from the first ten days of activity for Fortnite’s Season 5 content. This new figure is 19% higher than what was spent on average during the first days of Season 4. Sensor Tower also states that the game’s all time high daily spend was on July 13^th (so a couple of days into S5), where it hit $3 million USD.

There’s still no word on when the Android crowd is allowed in on the fun, but we’re still expecting it to drop before the end of summer.

Racing drivers are notoriously difficult to work with. Their competitive personalities make them act like divas from time to time; while jealousy bubbles under the surface as teammates receive upgraded parts or preferential treatment. Losing hurts, but they hone their craft through driving practice as well as the team of mechanics and engineers constantly tweaking the cars. Winning is everything: without it, the money doesn’t flow, and this means everything suffers – from logistics, to R&D, even the coffee. It doesn’t all come down to the time on the clock or the position on the starting grid.

All of this requires a fine balance, and Playsport Games’ Motorsport Manager Mobile 3 includes every tiny detail you can imagine and a lot that you didn’t consider.

The journey to leading a racing team starts with personalising the brand, from the look of the avatar who represents the team, to the colours on the cars. A micro-transaction upgrades the game so that everything can be edited, recreating any year from any racing series you could choose by personalising names and teams, not just your own. The initial screen feels a little overwhelming to begin with, but the tutorials work hard to break down barriers.

The home screen is overflowing with sections which break down into further menus or sprawling maps which dictate the path of upgrades possible in the career. The HQ has three separate sections, for drivers, finance and research, all of which can be upgraded by investing cash and waiting a set number of races. This is also seen in logistics which determines how quickly you can move parts and cars around the world, offering bonuses to stats for controlling more warehouses or depots. At first, this idea seems more complicated than it needs to be, but it does really come down to tapping nodes that you believe will benefit your team in the long run.

You can also manage your drivers, allocating points earned from XP gained in races into traits making them better at certain things. Overtaking, defending on track, braking later into corners or even steady their focus to stop them from crashing as much. Sponsors are sought out for finances to trickle in and they supply not just money, but also influence, which can be spent on stealing ideas from other teams or sending your drivers on fan tours or PR courses to give the appearance of your brand a boost.

There’s a section for managing engineers who design new parts for the cars and mechanics who advise drivers during the races. Later in the game you can nurture young drivers or invest in the car for the following year. Seeing all of this, feels like being hit by a tidal wave of information, but it gets drip fed steadily over time allowing for new options to feel less obscure and more second nature. Bold tutorial screens accompany each new feature and help is always on hand via question mark buttons in each section.

The first season does feel like the developers have left the training wheels on – money seems plentiful, sponsors are kind enough to offer large sign-on bonuses which fund building new front wings for the single seater formulas or new brakes and spoilers for sports car races. As the game progresses, drivers demand more; showing jealousy if you offer a new part to a teammate instead of them and with this their performance on track will suffer. Contracts will expire and require careful negotiating so as not to test a driver’s patience – represented by two hands nearing closer to shaking as you choose signing fees, length of contract etc…

The small details of running the team are plentiful and should you choose, you could spend hours planning the best upgrade paths to benefit the team or scout new drivers and staff members who will design the best components for your cars. Over time, as your career lengthens, options will be offered to change formulas which all have different rules (these can be voted on using influence, too) and will tax your tactics during the races themselves, be it through refuelling mid-race or using Energy Recovery Systems and hybrid engines.

Which brings us to the actual racing. The different series vary in length of races and set up. Single seater plays more like a Formula One system, sports cars and endurance formulas require different thinking. The race overview shows the track, with the cars zipping around in a clear view, differentiated by colour and number, so your team sticks out. The lap times sit on the left side of the screen, showing which tyres everyone is using and how they’re deteriorating. The right side is dedicated to your drivers, allowing you to pit them when you feel best within the race, change their driving style, impacting wear on the tyres or the engine power which either guzzles or conserves fuel.

While you can’t quite get into the tiny details of driving, you can sway outcomes by pitting early and undercutting other teams or choosing different tyres which may allow for longer stints on track. Every second of the racing is tense as you watch the tyres degrade and wonder whether to pull in your driver or leave them out for longer. The car slowly wears down, too, which is like watching a ticking time bomb. The closer it gets to zero will mean either a crash or a retirement.

The most interesting aspect of racing is qualifying, where you’ll be setting up the car for the weekend. This is done by choosing cards and using up spanners on your mechanics gauge. You could choose a card that takes up 1-6 spanners or even 1-16, the result is random and might mean it takes up none of the gauge but still delivers a boost in car setup. But gambling too much might see all of the spanners used as you try for a big tweak leading to disaster and hindering your car more than anything else. It’s an interesting system that leaves a lot up to chance and certainly gamifies an aspect of play.

All of these details add up to a great experience that authentically replicates the life of a team principal. There’s stress when the cars break down or money becomes scarce after heavy investments and there’s pride when your set up cards boost the car to land you a one-two on the starting grid. A game made up of so many small decisions and menus allows for a surprising amount of excitement. Watching those small dots speed around the screen may not give the surge of pleasure a standard racing game would, but watching your team secure a win, leading to a championship is genuinely wonderful.

Minaurs is a bizarre experience. Featuring gnomish, subterranean, space-faring creatures who are just trying to save their species while righting the wrongs of the past, it asks you to be very patient as it reveals to you its depth and wonder. The longer you wait, the more you realize that it’s kind of just pulling you along on a ride that never gets very exciting.

You are one of the last free minaurs of your kind. The rest have been scattered to the stars and are lingering haphazardly in dangerous places in hopes for someone to come rescue them. You, with your sense of heroism and agency, conduct mining expeditions to dig them out of their potential graves, and maybe profit on the way. A mining expedition has multiple goals. To pass the mission and move on successfully, you have to find the specified number your incapacitated brethren in the caves below. On your way, you can also mine the some of the natural Resource growing in the many caverns.

You can’t just saunter into any given cave system all willy nilly – there are rules to be followed. Your hero minaur moves automatically, turning when he hits an obstacle he can’t climb over or swim through. These are usually walls for neighboring chambers, that can be reduced to rubble (or rebuilt) with a tap. Tapping the ground will open a hole that the minaur can fall through to reach lower levels, but he cannot climb back up to the level he fell from without some extraneous effort.

Put together, a round of Minaurs is a lot like a round of Lemmings, with your autonomous and diligent pawn trudging to a fate he doesn’t know, while you work the levers to ensure his trip is a success. It takes some strategic thinking to carve a proper path to the lost minaurs effectively, as they’re often on separate levels nowhere near each other. Navigating around natural hazards like choking gas, acid, and belligerent creatures adds tactical wrinkles that throw wrenches in your plans.

This seems more or less straight forward, but how things interact with you feels overly complicated. Your Resistance shield is a catch all buffer between you and bad things around you. Falling from tall heights or standing in poison will damage the shield, and if the shield is broken, you’ll start taking damage to your Energy Bar. Your Energy Bar is the currency you spend to build things and break things down, and without energy you’ll go unconscious. Both your Shield and Energy Bars regenerate and watching them both interact with wildlife and other dangers is a confusing sight, even if your character isn’t in any consequential danger.

For a game with so many instructions, it’s pretty tough to understand. Almost everything you do is punctuated by a tutorial menu, explaining the significance of this thing to the greater Minaurs ecosystem. But these screens then find themselves buried in the glossary, and paging through to get a refresher on a finer point of exploration is daunting. The prompts themselves are jarring, blasting into your face and completely pulling you out of the game, even if it’s just for a few moments. In some instances, they show up in rapid succession, becoming super annoying when all you want to do is watch your minaurs move from one side of the screen to another. At its worst, prompts will trigger sub-prompts, and suddenly you’ve drilled down into multiple Inception dream levels of tutorials.

Progression in the game is at a glacial pace. You have to rescue a certain amount of minaurs before you can move to a new planet, and that number can be needlessly high. The first planet requires 90 saved minaurs, and with each expedition having somewhere between 1-3 scattered across it, it will feel like an absolute chore to make the jump. As you rescue them, you’ll find maps to start Noble Minaur rescues or to drop into expeditions with large numbers of Resource to mine, but the process never changes much, and it gets old very quickly.

You’ll find as you explore, you’ll be gaining several different bars that are filling and shrinking without much fanfare. One of them involves the aforementioned Resource – this blue, iridescent stone – is what you spend to upgrade your skills and are a fee to go on any expeditions. You’ll get Resource as bonuses for finding minaurs, but you can also reap it from the land. I’ve never had a problem where I didn’t have enough Resource for something I wanted, and I spend very little time going out of my way for it.

Challenges pop up as you do things like gather and find wildlife. They each have specific goals like find a certain amount of Noble Minaurs or fall from a certain height X amount of times. When these goals are met, you are rewarded with a state boost and something called Prestige. Prestige is also gained every time you learn something new (every time one of those damned tutorials pop up). It serves as both a number to denote the progress of your knowledge of the Minaurs universe, and a gatekeeper for learning abilities. It never feels like anything more than wholly arbitrary.

Skills allows your hero to do things he couldn’t normally do without coaxing, like turning at will or not falling off of ledges for a short period of time. They don’t come very naturally – suddenly after reading enough tutorial menus your first set of them open up. That said, they do add a level of control to the process that makes the gameplay more active and gives you more of a reason to invest in the moment to moment stuff and not just your big picture path to victory. Unfortunately, they feel as convoluted as the rest of the game.

Minuars doesn’t look bad, but it can be hard to really appreciate the art direction because of how dark and monotone the color palette is. Greens don’t look much more vibrant or vivid than the browns do earthy or muted. There’s a twisted, jagged, Jim Henson’s Dark Crystal sort of naturalism throughout, which is charming. The animations struggle to give any of the characters and wildlife that same sort of liveliness.

All in all, Minuars is a solid concept bogged down by way too many systems, and the dreadful experience of learning them all. It also it far too long. That is to say, you spend far too much time doing menial things just to see something new, and to quickly realize that it isn’t all that different than the thing you’d already been doing.