Category: Mobile Game Releases

Welcome to the Weekender, your weekly look at the best new games, sales, and updates. We’ve got a bumper crop of new releases to review, including two of the better games so far this year, at least in my book. Let’s check them out.

Out Now

Teen Titans GO Figure (iOS Universal) – Full review coming soon!

The sequel to one of 2016’s best games, and one of the most successful premium games on the App Store, Teeny Titans Go – Teen Titans Go has arrived. It’s named Teen Titans Go Figure and, well, at least it’s a little less of a mouthful. It has the same overall gameplay as the original, you run around Jump City collecting figures, completing quests, and taking on all comers in real-time figurine battles. The battles remain fast, fun, and tactical and still hinge on bringing the right trio to each fight and swapping them in and out to use their special powers as the situation dictates. There’s plenty new as well with a new main story line, side quests, city layout, new figures and powers, and new tofu battle effects.

[embedded content]

Teen Titans GO Figure is a premium game but also offers in-app-purchases, which is also new. The IAPs are to buy rarer figures using real-life money rather than fake in-game money. There are also repaint tokens to change the look of figures and some other cosmetics. I’ve ignored these IAPs entirely and haven’t found any issues proceeding well into the game. You can still find plenty of figures at the various stores and put together a powerful cast of characters. 

Overall Teen Titans GO Figure keeps what is great about the original and adds enough new stuff to make it feel like a different game. If you enjoyed the original or like real-time battlers in general definitely pick this one up.

Motorsport Manager Mobile 3 (iOS Universal and Android) – Full review coming soon!

I know nearly nothing about motorsports. I know there are Formula 1 cars and stock cars and could probably tell you which is which if quizzed with some pictures. I went from this state of near ignorance to pondering pit-stop strategy differences between regular and endurance races within a couple hours of playing Motorsport Manager Mobile 3. It’s the third installment of what might be the best sports-management simulation franchises in the history of the tablet. Like its predecessors the game not only looks great but entertainingly covers every facet of managing a racing team from hiring engineers, mechanics, and drivers to building and buying vehicle parts, to managing sponsors and the team’s budget, to of course, the racing. So, if you’re into sports simulations, or sim games in general, Motorsport Manager Mobile 3 is well worth the purchase. Like me, you’ll be anxiously watching colored dots speed around the track in no time.

[embedded content]

Isle of Skye (iOS Universal & Android) – Full review coming soon!

Asmodee Digital’s latest tabletop to digital transformation, Isle of Skye, snuck onto Android earlier this week. Isle of Skye puts you at the head of one of five clans battling to rule over an island. To claim victory, you must develop your territory and trade resources wisely. The game features a single-player mode as well as asynchronous online multiplayer. We were caught a bit unawares with this one so no gameplay impressions this time around, but we’ve got Matt Skidmore on the case and should be able to bring you our full review next week. 

Lost Portal: Primeval Expansion (iOS Universal) (Review)

Premium solo CCG Lost Portal is one of my favorite iPhone games of all time and it just got its second batch of new content, the Primeval Expansion, which includes 40 new cards as well as a new town and four new dungeons in which to adventure. The game also got an update to the forge to help create cards you already own more easily, such as the dual-aeons which make multi-colored decks much easier to run. Another nice change is that card merchants return to a town, with their wares, to make them easier to track down later.  If you’re fan of Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons and haven’t picked it up, I highly recommend Lost Portal. If you’ve already got the game and want even more awesome the Primeval Expansion is a great addition to the game. 

Hags Castle (iOS Universal and Android)

Hags Castle is a first-person, three-dimensional dungeon crawler where you play as the warrior champion of a wizard named Greypoo. Yes, Greypoo. This Greypoo fellow requires you to defeat the witch of Hags Castle, though first you have to power your way through the many, varied, and dangerous denizens of the castle. You move through the game step-by-step and turn 90 degrees at a time by pushing the large movement buttons, which is a little weird because I kept wanting to use the usual touch controls. When you find stuff to fight combat is real time and relatively basic. It’s mostly about timing strikes correctly and backing up to avoid attacks if desired. The game is interesting if not compelling and I do like that you can easily play one-handed. Something to play while you wait for The Elder Scrolls: Blades, perhaps?

[embedded content]

Reigns: Her Majesty – Free Expansion (iOS Universal and Android) (Review)

Long live the Queen! As long as you can live, anyway, in Reigns: Her Majesty. The popular and entertaining sequel to 2016’s genre creating title Reigns. Now, the queen has more of everything in the form of a big content update. This expansion has added 200 cards, 3 new characters, and unfortunately for her, 5 new ways to die. Reigns: Her Majesty is on sale for the first time for $1.99 to celebrate the new content. 

[embedded content]

Dereliction (iOS Universal) – Full review planned

Dereliction is a real-time, squad-based combat game where you control a team of space marines looking to reclaim an abandoned spaceship from alien creatures known as the Dross. Gameplay is tower-defense like and you’ll position your team and give high-level orders to best deal with waves on incoming Dross but don’t have direct control. You need to move your team, airlock by airlock, across the ship in order to secure it. Between fights you get to upgrade your marines and better equip them to deal with tougher and tougher foes. The UI is a bit rough around the edges, and positioning units exactly where you want them can be pretty finnicky, but the design is definitely interesting. I like the idea of building tactical advantages by controlling doors to filter foes through choke points and setting up crossfire to take Dross down quickly. I haven’t played enough to tell how deep Dereliction is but it’s worth a look for fans of real-time tactical combat games. 

[embedded content]

Sales 

Reigns (iOS Universal and Android): $1.99 (Review)

The original Reigns is also on sale, a rarity since its release a couple years ago, to celebrate new content for the queen. 

Space Grunts (iOS Universal and Android): $1.99 (Review)

If you want to feel like you’re playing an action game—complete with camera-shaking explosions—within the safe confines of turn-based tactics Space Grunts is for you. It’s a must-own for any roguelike fan and is currently half price. 

Beholder (iOS Universal): $1.99 (Review)

If you’re ready to make some tough choices in a grim, dystopian future, now’s your chance. Beholder, a game where you run an apartment building and must spy on and rat out your unpatriotic neighbors, is on sale for its lowest ever price (normally $5). 

Bardbarian (iOS Universal and Android): $1.99/$2.49 (Review)

Real-time-strategy game Bardbarian features Brad the Bardbarian who gathers warriors to lead around defending his village from waves of tower-defense-like attacks. 

Sunless Sea (iPad): $5.99 (Review)

Sunless Sea—Failbetter Game’s beautiful game of isolation, discover, and death—has also dropped to its lowest ever price, down from $10. It’s a weird game of life on the sea and full of things like sentient icebergs, mutiny, betrayal, and cannibalism. We gave it four stars and you should check out the review for more. 

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

Hardback is a deckbuilding card game, which, if you’ve been living under a rock for the past ten years means that each player starts with a similar set of basic cards and gradually builds an individual deck by buying cards from a common pool. It makes the meta-game of buying cards for a collectable card game into the actual game on the table.

The twist with Hardback (and Paperback before it) is that cards are letters that can only be played as part of dictionary words. At first glance, screenshots might make it look like a word puzzler similar to Bookworm, but, of course, you shouldn’t judge a hardback by its preview images.

Playing Hardback like a pure word game is a great way to get trounced. You can play endless nine-letter deep cuts from the OED for peanuts while your opponent scores a ten-point “OFF” combo four times in a row to win the game. Hardback is fundamentally a deckbuilding game where high scores are built around adding cards to your deck that interact well with one another. The big difference between Hardback and a deckbuilder like, say, Ascension, is that plays rely on combining cards into words, so it can be a bit harder to build a reliable point-generating system. As with most deckbuilders, there’s very little interaction with your opponents. The players share a pool of buyable cards and occasionally a card played by one player can be shared by others, but this doesn’t make a huge impact on the gameplay.

If you played the previous game Paperback, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is how Hardback plays differently from Fowers Games’ previous title. The biggest and probably most elegant change is that the use of wild cards has been totally replaced with the simple ability to flip any card in your hand into a wild but losing that card’s points. This gives you a lot more flexibility in building words, shifting the focus on the game from word-building to clever management of cards’ special abilities and their influence on other cards in your hand and deck. Scoring has also changed in a way that puts focus on the special abilities: instead of buying points your cards can generate two different kinds of currency, one for buying cards and one for winning the game. A final change is the ability to draw a limited number of additional cards from your deck that you must use in your play, which lets you build bigger and higher scoring words if you are clever enough.

If you wished Paperback had more of a focus on building a deckbuilding-style ‘engine’ then Hardback is the game for you. On the other hand, if you are looking for a pure deckbuilder, you might find Hardback frustrating. Plays are not made of set groups of cards but can vary wildly based on the randomly-available cards, your own vocabulary, and the very limitations of the English language. The gameplay becomes a bit shaggy rather than purely tight like a classic deckbuilder.

Thematically, the game is a bit less on point than Paperback. Gone are the lurid pulp fiction covers, which were the most entertaining part of the graphic design for the previous game. Replacing them are varying font choices representing genres of books (Horror, Romance, etc.) that serve as ‘suits’ for matching card abilities. These can sometimes be hard to read and look to similar to one another–the font for the Horror-genre Y is very V-like for instance, and the style of the Adventure cards is a bit too close to the appearance of the generic cards you start with.

The mobile adaptation is well-coded, with only a few annoyances. I hit one game-breaking bug where a zoomed-in card wouldn’t retreat back into the screen to let me play, but I could easily restore my autosave to get out of it. Some buttons were less-than-responsive and more than once I tried to hit confirm only to accidentally close the popup. It does not play very well on very small screens, because the cards have a lot of information that is presented with very tiny icons. There’s a lot of screen real estate unused, so I wish the designers could have been more economical with the GUI. However, it is certainly playable, and it’s easy to zoom in on individual cards, albeit with the occasional interface hiccup. The AI is acceptable, but a good player will quickly outpace it. Pass-and-play and online multiplayer will offer more challenge.

Basically, Hardback is what it advertises on the cover: it’s a combination of a deckbuilder and a word game. If either of those elements is a turn-off for you, or you aren’t interested in a game that dilutes the elements of one genre with another, then Hardback won’t be the game for you. But, if you like both, the combination is definitely fun and interesting, and this mobile adaptation is worth the price.

Back in the 1980’s the Fighting Fantasy books were a true phenomenon. These choose your own adventure tomes with their distinctive illustrations and atmospheric branching narrative enjoyed incredible success.  In addition to selling millions of copies, they also gave many their first taste of fantasy role-playing games. This may not be the first time that the series has made an appearance on mobile devices, but Nomad Games have taken a different approach, maintaining the core plots of the books but replacing the page turning with a map and a deck of cards.

The main frustration with the Fighting Fantasy books was that death often felt arbitrary, take a right instead of a left and splat; it was back to the character creation sheet and a return to page one. Well, there was another option – cheat. Yes, I’m ashamed to admit it but like many others, I often backtracked my fatal decisions and selected a different option. Stuffing my fingers between the pages to mark my progress to the extent that I was using up digits faster than a drunken knife juggler. At the time, I didn’t even feel that guilty, convincing myself that if the story could so easily send me to my doom then I needed some way to level the playing field. In spite of the frustrations, I loved these books and have fond memories of spending hours lost amongst their evocative black and white drawings and twisty-turning passages.

The long-windedly entitled Fighting Fantasy Legends Portal consists of a trilogy of linked stories, with access to the latter ones being reliant on success in the earlier parts. The trilogy begins with Deathtrap Dungeon in which your adventurer will take on the challenge of the Labyrinth of Fang. Designed by Baron Sukumvit, the labyrinth is brimming with fiendish traps and fearsome creatures, can you be the first to survive and earn the reward of 10,000 gold pieces? The twist is that you are not alone in your quest as five other contestants, including a dour barbarian and a dark assassin, also have their eye on the prize. Trials of Champions is the second part, it begins with a murder mystery and a few rounds of gladiatorial combat before you even reach Fang Labyrinth 2.0. The final part of the adventure, Armies of Death, sees Agglax the Shadow Demon amassing an army of undead warriors. Our hero must travel from Fang with his band of veteran fighters to take on this new threat. Along the way, you will need to acquire the powers required to defeat Agglax, but do not take too long about it because his power grows ever stronger.

At the start of each adventure you choose a character class; Rogue, Paladin or Chaos Warrior and select a difficulty level. In a nod towards the sensibilities of modern gaming, the difficulty level determines how many chances you will have to complete the story. Thus, you will begin the game with three, six or nine lives. Die and you will lose one of your lives and be forced to return to the dungeon entrance. However, you restart with full health and all of your equipment and experience gains intact. You also won’t replay any of the main set pieces that you may have already overcome.

Before entering the dungeon, you must allocate points between three statistics. Skill determines your likelihood of success in combat and other actions like leaping pits. Luck determines such things as your chance of avoiding traps and finding valuable items. Stamina reflects how much damage you can take. Finally, you get to select a special skill. Naturally skilful and naturally lucky characters have a chance of automatic success when taking a skill or luck test. Alternatively, your adventurer could choose to be resistant to curses, have an increased knowledge of traps or maybe they are a quick learner. 

During the game you will have to make numerous rolls.  The number of dice you roll is determined by your ability rating in either skill or luck. All dice are six-sided and at the beginning of your quest, they will each have five blank faces. If my maths is correct this means that each die only has a one in six chance of achieving a successful roll. As your level increases, you can modify the dice; each die has the potential to be improved twice, thus increasing the chance of success to 50%. However, adventurers can also suffer long-term injuries and curses, which will affect your dice and may lead to you automatically failing.

The action is viewed from a forced overhead view with some moody graphics, a rousing fantasy themed soundtrack and a smattering of sound effects. Icons clearly show the directions you can move and the items you can interact with. As you progress through the story you will encounter several set pieces that remain true to the books, but there are also random encounters that are drawn from a deck of cards. These may lead to you having to fight a monster, finding an item, discovering a trap or triggering a special event.

Even making allowances for numerous deaths, the stories do not take that long to complete, but as well as the overriding quest there are also numerous sub-quests to keep you interested. In a neat touch, after completing the game you get to learn the fate of the various characters that you encountered and helped during your journey. Completing every quest will certainly take some time and for the completest, there is also a codex of monsters to compile.

The experienced designers have clearly made a sterling effort to reinvent Fighting Fantasy for a modern market. It sticks to the winning mix of tense combat, interspersed with classic riddles and puzzles. The modified dice system is fast paced and works well. It can lead to some nail-biting moments as your handful of dice ricochet across the screen before tethering, tantalisingly on the edge of success or failure. However, the game can be frustrating – there are still those instant death situations, made worse by having to restart from the very beginning every time you die. Granted, with the extra life failure isn’t as harsh as it used to be but having to trudge back from the entrance every time you fail feels like one trait from the past that is best left there.

By Joe Robinson 18 Jul 2018

Out of the Park Developments make some pretty decent baseball games. They have their main franchise on PC, Out of the Park Baseball, which they’ve also adapted to mobile in the form of MLB Manager. The former is celebrating a new release on steam in the form of Out of the Park Baseball 19.

To mark the occasion the developer are discounting their other baseball titles, including MLB Manager 18 which is the latest iteration of the mobile franchise. We currently don’t have our own review (something we’ll fix ASAP), but here’s the official blurb for MLBM 18 if you haven’t come across it yet:

MLB Manager 2018 features a living world that uses the same realistic simulation engine found in Out of the Park Baseball, the best-selling and best-rated baseball management game of all time. Each MLB team in the game features its actual 40-man projected 2018 Opening Day roster. The player ratings are based on the ZiPS player projection system created by famous baseball analyst Dan Szymborski.

You’ve got until the end of Friday, July 20^th to pick up the game at a 60% discount on both iOS and Android.

We’re on a power trip and no-one can stop us. First we told you what the best Board Games were, then we dared to dream of what the best turn-based strategy games might be. Now we’re here to conquer a new genre – card games (although not counting CCG/TCG types).

Below are a wide variety of excellent examples which aren’t simply trying to be another Hearthstone. Some have excellent single player campaigns with persistent upgrades and unlocks, or customizable decks. Others skew towards the heavily-instanced, unique-runs roguelike approach, and then there’s digital adaptations of many of the excellent deck-building or other types of card games that exist. Between these extremes, there’s something for everyone.

Exploding Kittens

Developer: Exploding Kittens
Platforms:  iOS, Android
Price: $1.99

A game of hot potato with a nitroglycerine-infused feline escalates until every player save one has met their maker. Fiery kitty death and simple humor belie a take-that game which puts everyone immediately at each other’s throats. Hostility and sabotage are the name of the game, because each player has only one life to live, and one defuse card to keep that hairball from becoming a fireball.

The game is a childish, cartoonish pastiche of obvious joke made too hard too often, but despite the unapologetic unrefined everything, it remains one of the best guilty mindless pleasures around. If you ever need a reason to froth at the mouth and fling spittle at your fellow humans over fictionally threatening cats, look no further: Exploding Kittens is simply an excuse to have a good time, a cheeky pretext. Irksome, shameless and perfect it its base way.

Guild of Dungeoneering (Review)

Developer: Gambrinous
Platforms:  iOS, Android
Price: $5.99

With Guild of Dungeoneering you come for the game, stay for the jokes. The sing-song plot is doled out over each of the game’s regions and challenges, and while the class system isn’t strictly balanced, the overall arc of the regions is. A single play session will eat up a bit of concentration and a bit more of time, sometimes even the better part of an hour in the later stages, but even the basic encounters feel fresh, engaging and vital to ultimate success. Diverting but finite in its appeal, the Guild of Dungeoneering is not a calling for all gamers but is a welcome and refreshing quest whose expansions add more flair and mechanics to extend the main storyline.

Card Thief (Review)

Developer: Arnold Rauers
Platforms:  iOS, Android
Price: 2.99, free

Card Thief: Get in, get rich, get out. The story of a heist plays out with endless variety, thanks to Card Thief’s intermingling systems of light and shadow, directionality and position. These systems are intuitively taught through appealing sound and visual design, and the game rewards deeper understanding of the basics and their complex interactions by giving the player more finicky toys to play with. In short, an unstinting challenge to sink your teeth into, with a razor-sharp core idea enlivened by a pastel of special effects and alternate thieves.

Card City Nights

Developer: Ludosity
Platforms:  iOS, Android
Price: $0.99

The characters are idiosyncratic, the game-within-a-game conceit a little cheeky but still refreshing, the consistent tone humor-ish, deadpan. Beating certain keystone characters unlocks their signature, ultra-powerful cards whose effects even jive with that character’s personality. In other words, there is a correspondence between writing, characterization and deck archetypes between. Never quite a rollicking good time or agonizing head-scratcher, the deckbuilding and collecting (yes, there are boosters, no nothing is truly ultra-rare) of Card City Nights makes for an easily enjoyed and easily binged experience.

Lost Cities

Developer: TheCodingMonkeys
Platforms: iOS
Price: $3.99

Good ole’ Reiner Knizia can always be relied on for some arithmetic fun. His success and sheer number of gaming hits with staying power can partly be attributed to a creative knack, but it also comes down to a large and prolific output, along with thorough playtesting. Players finance archaeological expeditions, building stacks of colors with cards numbered two to ten. Each of the five colorful expedition must have cards played in ascending value, with skpping permitted. So playing a tenner to start would doom an expedition, because at the game’s end any expedition is worth the sum of its cards, minus twenty, multiplied by the presence of any extra finance cards ($$$). Simple, right? The other half of the game is the push-and-pull with players drawing and playing cards one at a time, sometimes opting to discard cards into a common area rather than play them. Boring to explain, easy to play. Tense and fulfilling to win.

Developer: Jerome Bodin
Platforms:  iOS, Android
Price: $3.99, $4.49

Frost stands out from the other members of this list on two fronts. Firstly, for its palette, which is as frigid as monochrome as you’d expect. Secondly, because its gameplay is survival-based, not just thematically but actually. Gathering supplies, fending off nasties and keeping the elements at bay take every possible trick the cards will give you. Better performance will net you better tools, but unlike other games, Frost’s best rewards are a sense of security and temporary respite. In other words, the game won’t see you chasing exhilarating high score or excitement, but rather staving off the undesirable. Loss aversion, the fear of breaking a fragile equilibrium, the game daring you to take only appropriate risks when the phrase is a hollow oxymoron. The game rewards you with the chance to keep playing, keep exploring its stark dangers and bag of tricks.

Star Realms (Review)

Developer: White Wizard Games
Platforms:  iOS, Android
Price: Free, with content parcelled out as IAP ($4.99 for the full set)

Star Realms marries the level of expansion and customization of a TCG with the bite-sized crunchy decision-making of a deckbuilder. Its combat elements and faction-specific combos make for a serious nostalgia trip for those looking to revisit memory lane without first collecting, collating and crafting a custom deck just for the occasion. Star Realms’ many expansions, rapid-fire gameplay and clear iconography make it a compelling addition to the game enthusiast’s roster and an easy must-have.

Meteorfall: Journey (Review)

Developer: Slothwerks
Platforms:  iOS, Android
Price: $2.99

In the happier sessions, Meteorfall ends with a successful final showdown against the aptly-named Uberlich. Working backwards from that ultimate battle to the four starting characters is much more challenging than the squidy art and breezy interface might suggest. Its fight-or-flight decisions and journeying remind me of FTL transported to a fantasy setting, with cards. Okay, so the likeness is weak, but the juxtaposition of richness and minimalism are what really matters here. Seriously, Meteorfall is a wolf in cartoon clothing.

Race for the Galaxy (Review)

Publisher: Temple Gates Games, LLC
Platforms:  iOS, Android
Price: $6.99

Perhaps the quintessential engine-building card game, Race for the Galaxy is one of the more aged members within this best-of list, debuting originally in 2007. Its longitudinal sense of strategy and complex combos quickly made it a favorite amongst players. Along with this hefty strategic challenge,  the unique simultaneous action selection mechanic enlivened the game with some bluffing. Barring the official release of Dominion for mobile, Race for the Galaxy represents a classic, yet innovative take on a victory-point race. The app runs like a dream and offers stiff competition and solid multiplayer.

Reigns: Her Majesty (Review)

Developer: Devolver Digital
Platforms:  iOS, Android
Price: $2.99

Alright, it’s true: the cards in Reigns: Her Majesty only combine to create game paths and branching outcomes later on, but this sequel to the swipe-to-rule-them-all motherload of simple-yet-satisfying game, Reigns, deserves to be on this list because it has mastered what every good card game needs: flashpoint moments. The bite-sized binary decisions, served one-by-one in Reigns, amass weight, consequence and difficulty, not merely because of narrative investment but also because of a chain of causality. Much ado about something anyone who’s tried the game already knows, or more importantly, has already felt.

Hall of Fame

We’re keeping the list pretty tight at the moment, but there’s way more than ten excellent card games to celebrate, with more on the way all the time. Every now and then we’ll rotate games out for other games, but we don’t want those past greats to be forgotten. Below is a list of previous members of this list, lest we forget:

• Calculords
• Pathfinder Adventures
• Solitairica
• Flipflop Solitaire

What would your list of the best (non-CCG) card games look like? Let us know in the comments!

By Joe Robinson 16 Jul 2018

Welcome to the Weekender, your weekly look at the best new games, sales, and updates. We’ve got a few new releases to go over and a whole lot of sales. Let’s get to it!

Out Now

Battleheart 2 (iOS Universal) – Full Review Coming Soon!

Battleheart was one of the first real-time strategy gems in the App Store, and remains a fun game, if a bit dated. It’s seven years later and Mika Mobile just released a sequel on iOS and…well, not much has changed. Battleheart 2 definitely took the if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it approach and features the same real-time, squad-based combat of the original. While it is true Battleheart wasn’t broken, it definitely needed some freshening up. Unfortunately, there’s no advancement of game mechanics or a new, compelling story within which the action takes place. In fact, there’s not much of a story to speak of, and combat consists of cycling through a few repetitive fights until you’re ready to take on a boss. Once you beat him it’s off to a new area on the world map to rinse and repeat.

Combat that felt fresh seven years ago will leave many feeling a bit bored these days. Characters and enemies still sedately trot from place to place in Battleheart 2, which makes micro-managing four characters easier, but is far from the pace of today’s RTS titles. The graphics, sounds, and effects are also about the same as they were seven years ago in the original game, and while reusing some assets is certainly to be expected Battleheart 2 lacks the polish and pizazz of many of its contemporaries.

The biggest change in the sequel is supposed to be the inclusion of a cooperative multiplayer mode. Mika Mobile cites the ability to split your party among up to four players, each controlling their own hero. This sounds really cool and lots of ways to make use of this spring to mind, but I can’t figure out how it works. You pick a region and are asked to select a room name and once you’ve done that, nothing really happens. Maybe if two or more players enter the same room name something happens but I wasn’t able to test it and I shouldn’t have to guess as to how it works.

The bottom line is that Battleheart 2 is a new game with more of the same. This will appeal to many fans of the original, and there’s certainly something to be said for nostalgia, but for the rest of us there are better options out there.

Fighting Fantasy Legends Portal (iOS Universal and Android) – Full Review Coming Soon!

Fighting Fantasy Legends’ Portal brings three more books from the legendary writing duo Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone to mobile life. It covers the Deathtrap Dungeon trilogy—Deathtrap Dungeon, Trial of Champions, and Armies of Death—three adventures full of choices, tests of luck and skill, cards to collect, and of course combat. The gameplay is similar to the previous Fighting Fantasy Legends adventures by Nomad Games. You move through the adventure making decisions about which way to go and what to do at certain points.

There are a number of event locations throughout where you stop and draw a card from a deck full of monsters to fight, treasures to claim, traps to bypass, and other events. Fighting monsters and surviving traps and other trials are all dice dependent. You have a bunch of six-sided skill dice and luck dice. You start out with one success on each die and are able to improve them over time. When you’re faced with a challenge you have to get a certain number of successes out of your dice which varies based on difficulty. It’s a fun system but obviously prone to chance, both positive and negative, so keep that in mind if you’re not a fan of big luck swings. Fighting Fantasy Legends’ Portal is a lot of fun and Nomad Games has once again done a great job evoking the feel of the old-school books. If you’re a fan of those books, the first game, or the RPG/Adventure genre definitely check it out.

Nightmarium (iPad and Android) – Full Review Coming Soon!

Nightmarium is a tabletop game about bringing nightmares to life in the form of creepily combined monsters. You assemble head, torso, and legs from four different fearful genres and unleash them upon your foes. The first player to Frankenstein up five creatures of doom wins. The game is fast and simple to understand with some relatively simple tactics. It’s good for those easy-breezy gaming needs but won’t satisfy a hard-core strategizing itch. It also only offers pass-and-play multiplayer, no online action, so it’s more of a tabletop-game replacement at this point.

Trism II (iOS Universal)

The App Store turned 10 years-old this week and Trism launched on its very first day. It became a star on the fledgling store with its bright colors, easy touch controls, and intuitive gameplay. It’s sequel, Trism II, launched this week into a vastly different App Store, one overflowing with puzzlers and games in general. It’s much tougher to stand out so Trism II introduces weird RPG/adventure-like wrapper with walking and talking triangle people, the trisms. You pick a hero and adventure through a world rescuing trisms and defeating bad guys through beating levels of the puzzle. The puzzle gameplay is a bit different as well, rather than sliding rows of the triangles you tap to add new ones to blank spaces and attempt to match up three adjacent same-colored triangles in order to remove them. I found the early game pretty easy and the adventure story a bit distracting, but then I prefer my puzzlers to be largely unhybridized. If you’re into puzzle/adventure mash ups Trism II may be right for you.

Sales

Warbands Bushido (iOS Universal and Android): Free (Review)

Warbands: Bushido is a digital collectable card and miniatures game with a look, feel, and play style that evokes tabletop miniature war gaming. It’s also free right now on iOS, though it does have in-app-purchases.

Medieval Merchants (iOS Universal): $.99

Hanseatic League trading sim Medieval Merchants has been around since 2013 and is hitting a mere $.99 for the first time ever. It’s only been on sale one other time, so act now if you’re interested!

Dust and Salt (iOS Universal and Android): $.99

Text-based adventure, turn-based combat…Dust and Salt just came out last May, looks quite intriguing, and is on sale for the first time for a mere $1. That’s probably worth checking out, right?

Knights of Pen & Paper (iOS Universal and Android): $.99

Old-school meta-RPG Knights of Pen & Paper is down to its lowest price in four years, just a buck.

Asmodee Digital Sale

A large selection of Asmodee Digital games are on sale this week. We’ve only linked to the iOS store below, but the discounts are also on Android as well.

MLB Manager 2018 (iOS Universal and Android): $1.99

Act as GM and coach and lead your favorite baseball team to success in MLB Manager 2018, on sale for the first time for $2.

The Quest Games

Classic role-playing game The Quest and the Islands of Ice and Fire expansion are both on sale. Check out our five-star review of The Quest and then get going with some old-school adventuring.

Planescape: Torment (iOS Universal and Android): $3.99 (Review)

Classic post-apocalyptic RPG Planescape Torment is normally $10 but on sale for 60% off.

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

Fortnite’s Season 5 has officially arrived and it’s ready to cause a ton of sleepless nights. Along with the various map changes, new cosmetics, and mechanics, Fortnite’s fifth season comes with a host of weapon balances. While many of the alterations won’t drastically impact the game as a whole, it will give mobile players a more enjoyable experience. Epic Games has also added in a mobile-specific feature for those looking for a more convenient way to shoot as enemies.

Want some tips on how to play Fortnite on mobile?  Or how about a guide to building?

The biggest balance came in the form of a damage tweaking to the Silenced SMGs. Both of these weapons never saw a ton of play on consoles, despite their potent ability to quickly kill someone. Given precision aiming on a phone is quite tricky, the SMGs are one of the best weapons you can carry into battle. Here’s a quick look at the patch notes for these guns:

• Tac and Silenced SMG environmental damage now correctly matches player damage.
• Changed the damage drop-off profile for the Suppressed SMG to be the same as other SMGs.
• Fall off starts at 24 meters from 28 meters.
• Damage reduced to 80% at 35 meters from 85% at 47.5 meters.
• Damage reduced to 65% at 50+ meters from 75% at 70+ meters.

This is going to make the Silenced SMG a bit weaker in most medium range engagements. Ideally, this should be swapped too when someone rushes you or if your shotgun needs to be reloaded. The 80% damage reduction at 35 meters isn’t a steep decline, but it’s enough to make the weapon less viable on mobile. If you do have a choice between a Silenced SMG and Tactical SMG, make sure to pick the latter. It’s much better for quickly taking out opponents with burst damage and can drop at a higher rarity.

Epic games have also added a unique vehicle to the game that will certainly help with traversal. Called the All-Terrain Kart, this golf cart is capable of holding four people and can quickly zip across the map.

• All Terrain Kart (ATK)
• The new All Terrain Kart (ATK) has room for your entire squad.
• Get a speed boost after drifting.
• The roof acts as a bounce pad.
• Work together as rear passengers to leap over obstacles with the All-Terrain Kart (ATK). Lean back and release at the same time for a higher jump.

While it’s easy to view this item as a novelty, the ATK has a lot of potential – especially for mobile players. One of the biggest issues many new and veteran players face is fluidly moving across the map. This will typically end with players wasting a ton of resources, not having enough time to loot, or getting separated from their squad. Thankfully, the golf kart alleviates many of these problems and can even present some unique opportunities to secure kills.

Unlike its console counterpart, Fortnite mobile players don’t have the fastest reaction time due to the game’s UI. This makes it quite easy to drive towards an enemy, get out, and kill them before they can react or set up a proper defense. It’s also useful since players driving it are way harder to hit since precision aiming on a phone is very tricky. Even though this cart will cause some mischief on the PC, it will absolutely define games on mobile.

Finally, we need to look at the changes directly made to the mobile version of Fortnite. Epic has introduced a new mechanic that allows users to automatically fire at enemies by holding their finger down. Below are all of the patch notes that are specifically for the iOS version: 

• Autofire has been added as an option on mobile platforms. Enabling this causes the player’s weapon to automatically fire when the reticle is over an enemy that is within range.
• Players will be given the option to select their preferred fire mode after launching. All players can change their preferred fire mode by navigating to Options, Custom HUD Layout, then choosing the ‘Select Fire Mode’ option and confirming their selection.
• Tap-to-fire.
• A dedicated fire button.
• Autofire.

Bug Fixes

• The Thermal Scoped AR now has the proper visual effects on all devices.
• Vehicle passengers can now detonate Remote Explosives.
• Entering build mode while holding the “fire” button will no longer adversely affect your ability to build in the future.
• Health and Shield numbers will no longer be displayed as your own while spectating. 

Having another way to fire your gun is certainly a welcome addition, even if it has limited application. If you are going to use Autofire, make sure it’s with weapons like SMGs, shotguns, Miniguns, and LMGs. Any type of rifle should still be fired by tapping so you can control the bloom and have better accuracy. Overall this is a smart decision that will certainly alleviate some frustration and it can be turned off if you don’t like it. While this update doesn’t fix some of the major problems in the mobile battle royale genre, it’s definitely another step in the right direction.

Let us know in the comments how you’re getting on with the game now that Season 5 has landed.

By Collin MacGregor 12 Jul 2018