Category: Mobile Game Releases

By Joe Robinson 13 Jun 2018

Sir Questionnaire is on a quest, a quest that rather unsurprisingly, involves responding to questions. Don’t worry; you will not be needing a brain the size of a planet as each question only has two options.  Run or fight? Head left, or right? Buy or don’t buy? Search or move on? Your answers will help determine your progress in this rapid roguelike adventure.

Sir Questionnaire himself is not your typical dungeon delver, being a rather elderly gent who sports a topper and monocle. However, do not let these cultured sensibilities fool you, since our hero is more than happy to exchange the posh surroundings of the Kit-Kat Club in favour of a dank dungeon. He swaps his dapper cane for a sword or spell-casting wand without so much as raising an eyebrow. Before entering the dungeon, Sir Q must first choose a quest. These are randomly generated and arranged into three levels of difficulty. An easy quest may have you searching for a couple of skulls, whilst a difficult one may require the demise of a handful of fearsome orcs. The advantage of completing a more difficult quest is that when you eventually die or actually defeat the final boss, you will start the next game with many more items already in your inventory.

Each level of the dungeon has a set of randomly generated rooms that Sir Q has to make his way through. He will be grabbing loot, killing monsters and, in a nod to the modern world, taking lots and lots of photographs. He may prefer a walking stick to a selfie-stick but there are plenty of photo opportunities here, enabling our hero to fill his albums with pictures of all of the monsters and items that he encounters during his journey. Indeed, completing the collection is a big incentive to repeatedly return to the dungeon’s depths.

Battles are turn-based and handled with the minimum amount of fuss. Most monsters only take a hit or two before exploding into a satisfying splatter of blood or goo. As well as equipping a weapon, Sir Q can also have a shield at the ready, alongside other items such as magical rings. During combat, you are free to swap and change items in your inventory or recover health without fear of being attacked. Sir Q has several characteristics that can help him defeat enemies. These can be improved as his experience grows. His attack ability will determine the damage he inflicts with melee weapons and increases the durability of an equipped shield. Meanwhile, his magic rating increases the damage inflicted by magic weapons and also the longevity and power of magic items. A high agility rating will increase his chance of hitting fast moving enemies such as spiders and also improves the likelihood of him fleeing combat without being hit. His luck level has an impact in numerous ways, such as improving the chance of finding rare items or of selecting the most favourable option. Finally, his craft skill increases the durability of equipped items and alchemy enhances the value of coins.

The graphics are displayed in a small window and the resolution is so low that at first glance they look a bit of a mess. However, much like those magic eye puzzles, once your eyes get accustomed to the style you begin to work out what is going on and realise that they do have a certain charm. I felt like I was playing an early Gameboy Color game. Sound consists of some dramatic battle music and a hilariously over the top booming voice that introduces you to some of the dungeon’s many denizens and events. The action can be viewed in both portrait and landscape modes. The portrait mode works best with phones whilst landscape is ideal for larger devices. Landscape mode does reduce the size of the already small action window, but this provides enough extra space to also include the inventory on just a single screen. This is quite handy as swapping between weapons and equipment is something that you will be doing on a regular basis. All equipment has a limited lifespan, so you don’t want to damage your best weapon taking out a weak enemy when a rap from your trusty walking stick would be just effective.

During the time that I have been playing the game, the designer has already added a load of new content. In fact, these updates have come so thick and fast that I feared I would never actually finish the review. Each one has ushered in significant improvements, resolving many of the game’s teething problems and added some impressive new features. There is now a range of achievements and additional objectives that will unlock new character classes. Some monsters are more sociable, sometimes showing up in groups, rather than just singularly. They also have different traits, such as being exhausted, or deadly. This really helps add some extra variety and interest, especially as the monsters themselves are a rather generic bunch of the usual dungeon inhabitants. In the first version, you could encounter and defeat the boss after only a few levels, which was all a bit of an anti-climax. Now, the boss tends to lurk on much deeper levels of the dungeon. I like the fact that you stand a good chance of actually winning – most roguelikes tend to be hard as nails, and your inevitable death is often down to running low on supplies and health, which is a pretty dreary way to go.

Even after a few successful runs, Sir Questionnaire maintains interest with both the photography task and several secrets to unearth. There are numerous special rooms such as altars and throne rooms, each with their own secrets. Also, some monsters will react if you drop specific items in their vicinity. These secrets can be discovered by experimentation and listening to the odd characters you encounter. The new additions really add to the game and with more updates on the horizon the future looks really promising. 

For some, Sir Questionnaire will be just too casual and undemanding to maintain interest. The decisions are simple, and the constant switching of inventory items can also get a little tiresome. However, for the rest of us, this is without question a spiffing release. The developers, Orange Pixel, are making a name for themselves for producing condensed fast-paced roguelikes. In many ways, Sir Questionnaire feels even more stripped back than Pocket Tactics favourite, Space Grunts.  They have again managed to capture that magic ingredient, producing a game that it is both quick and compulsive, as you rapidly move from room to room with the tap of a button or two. Sir Questionnaire serves up progress and rewards in a quick and addictive flurry of activity.

By Joe Robinson 11 Jun 2018

It’s not often that E3 throws up anything truly interesting on mobile, but you can always count on EA to do something in this space. This year, they announced a new 1v1 competitive real-time tactics mobile game in the form of Command & Conquer: Rivals.

Now, it IS a bit of a shame that a franchise with as storied a history as C&C’s now has to be used to give a new mobile game some legs, but if you look past that to what Rivals actually IS, there’s some potentially interesting dynamics at play. Here’s the official overview video that EA put out (don’t watch the EA conference segment, it’s awkward AF):

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The objective is ultimately to destroy the enemy’s base, but you do this by taking control of the missile silo in the centre of the map (although you can also attack directly). This is in turn achieved by owning at least 2/3 of the launch pads surrounding the silo. When you own the majority of the points, the Silo will tick up. If you lose control, the opposing team keeps your progress and when the Silo ticks up to completion, a missile will launch at whoever isn’t in control at the time. Rinse and repeat until your enemy’s base is destroyed.

Beyond this, you choose a faction, a commander (they all have different special abilities) and then six unit types you want to take into the field. This potential for variety means there’s going to be a meta to contend with, and how well EA balance’s it will determine how much potential the game will have. Tiberium does feature as the key resource, and both sides generate it at the same rate unless you deploy harvesters, but these can be attacked and destroyed.

Rivals shares a lot of key-points with another game we tried last year called Mini Guns. We ultimately didn’t end up reporting on it in any great detail as we weren’t 100% sure on the business model, but the core gameplay loop was actually pretty solid, and a lot of dun. The tactical problems presented by Rivals, and the constant jockeying of position over those control points could give rise to a genuinely fun strategy experience. You just have to look past the hallow shell that is now Command & Conquer.

If you are genuinely interested in giving Rivals a shot, you can pre-register on Google Play if you’re an Android user or go directly to the game’s website to pre-register as an iOS player. There will be a pre-alpha launching sometime soon, although only residents of the US and Canada will have a chance to be invited in.

Engadget has a hands-on preview that you can read that gives a bit more insight – it’s going to be free-to-play (unsurprising), with the micro-transactions revolving around the purchase of “more diverse and powerful units”. Doesn’t sound promising but then you can earn those same units via grinding, according to the article. Mini-Guns did something similar but you bought ‘packs’, which had a couple of minis that could be of any rarity, so it wasn’t a direct money-unit transaction.

We’re not going to rule it out just yet, but the key things to pay attention to will be that business model and how they take it, and then the ultimate balancing of abilities and units so that there is a healthy and accessible competitive meta.

After nearly 19 years, we’re finally going to be getting that successor to King of Dragon Pass. A-Sharp’s Six Ages: Ride like the Wind has been on our radar for a while, but progress has been slow going up. Finally, we can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

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A press release that dropped last night informed us that Six Ages will be launching on iOS on 28^th June for $9.99. Pre-orders will be available from June 21^st.

Six Ages: Ride Like the Wind takes the elements that made KoDP unique (the mythic setting where you can visit the gods, multiple-choice decisions with consequences, advisors with personality, a generation-spanning story, story elements that recombine for replayability) and remixes them. Play is both simpler and richer (for example, you’ll get to make more decisions in combat), and the UI was designed with attention to mobile devices (the menu puts more information at your fingertips, and all artwork is high resolution).

Your device will need to have iOS 9 or later running, and A-sharp mentioned that the game is being developed for “other platforms”, which will materialise later in the year.

Welcome to the Weekender, your weekly look at the best new games, sales, and updates. We’ve got a few games to check out, a whole bunch of sales, and a couple great updates heading into the weekend.

Out Now

7 Wonders: The Cities (iOS Universal and Android)

The digital adaptation of the 7 Wonders board game got its second expansion since release. The Cities expansion is $1.99 and introduces black cards, which represent city ruins, along with new leaders, 2 additional wonders, and 4 new guilds.

Space Leagues (iOS Universal) – Full review coming soon!

In Space Leagues you play as the General Manager of a team in a fantasy combat league. You hire players, set roles (tank, blaster, striker, and so on) and the roster, and watch your team win or lose in weekly combat. Your goal is to win and win a lot, thus climbing all the way up to the premier league. Your door is always open to your players, unfortunately, and they come to you with weekly drama. Your reaction could push them to a season-best game or make them utterly useless. It’s an interesting take on the sports simulation genre.

Physics Box (iOS Universal)

More a sandbox builder than game, Physics Box lets you tinker with gravity, anti-gravity, thrust, and more. You can even build your own pinball game if so inclined.

Shuyan Saga (iOS Universal)

Shuyan Saga is a graphic novel and video game rolled into one. It’s set in a martial-arts infused fantasy universe and follows Shuyan, a princess with a passion for Kung Fu, as she defends her kingdom from the Guer horde. You follow the story, as you might read a graphic novel, with various pause points for you to make a decision or engage in combat. The art and music are both quite good and help set a good atmosphere for the tale. The story itself isn’t particularly original, but certainly akin to what you might find in a good comic. Combat is pretty simple, you pick high or low strikes and set up different combos, but there does seem to be some character progression and enemies seem to be scaling up. The individual books have been out for a while, but you can now unlock the full story for $3.99.

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Sales

Threes! (iOS Universal and Android): $2.99 on iOS

One of the most-popular mobile puzzle games, Threes!, is on sale for half off. Threes is one of the first games, and maybe the most successful, to use the slide to combine/grow mechanic. Check it out if you dig that type of game and don’t have it already.

D&D Lords of Waterdeep (iOS Universal and Android): $3.99 (Review)

Dungeons & Dragons based board game D&D Lords of Waterdeep is available for a solid discount on both the App and Google Play stores. You play as a masked Lord of the city and must out wrangle your opponents to recruit adventurers to complete quests and thus increase your political power.

Planescape: Torment (iOS Universal and Android): $5.99/$3.99 (Review)

Classic post-apocalyptic RPG Planescape Torment got this special “enhanced edition” about a year ago with remastered music, updated graphics, and a new user interface. It’s normally $10, but right now you can grab it for $6 on iOS and $4 on Android.

Antihero (iOS Universal and Android): $2.99 (Review)

Digital board game Antihero came out for mobile earlier this year and does a great job delivering engaging turn-based tactics in a Victorian style setting. It’s also on sale for the first time ever, other than the introductory price. You can grab it for 3 bucks, down from five.

Evoland 2 (iOS Universal): $3.99

Also on sale for the first time ever is video-game nostalgia simulator Evoland 2. RPG your way through video game history (again) for just $4.

2K Games Sale

2K Games most notable mobile games are on sale for a couple bucks off each.

Updates

Sir Questionnaire (iOS Universal and Android)

Brand new roguelike dungeon crawler Sir Questionnaire is getting an update sooner than expected due to the discovery of a rather nasty bug. It adds fire and water dragons and improved outfit options.

Minecraft (iOS Universal and Android)

Minecraft has added a bunch of new fish including pufferfish, tropical fish, cod and salmon. You can whip up a trident and go swimming and collect fish in your bucket. There are nine ocean biomes packed with kelp, icebergs, blue ice, coral, sea grass, sea pickles and more. Oh, and there are now swimming animations.

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

By Joe Robinson 07 Jun 2018

By Joe Robinson 07 Jun 2018

I have never been good at pool, partly because I was never in reliable proximity of a pool table in my formative years. As I got older, it became easier to get a rack going as there seems to be one stuffed in the corner of every bar in America. These days, though, my pool agnosticism is a choice. Ultimately, I find easier ways to embarrass myself for the cost of any given game.

But Pocket-Run Pool has me rethinking my entire relationship with billiards. Since it graced my iPhone, I’ve YouTubed pool competitions. I’ve watched trick shot exhibitions. Zach Gage developed this game because he couldn’t find a pool app he liked. Unbeknownst to him, he introduced me to a new hobby.

I’m setting myself up for failure, because there’s something wholly unique about this pool experience. Gage has developed this knack for turning the puzzles in the back of your Sunday papers and those games that come pre-installed on your computer into this unbelievable concept that no one knew they needed.

Pocket-Run doesn’t dramatically change the concept of eight-ball, just as Flipflop Solitaire didn’t completely overhaul the classic procedures of Patience. You still rack up a triangle of balls and use a cue ball to knock them into pockets. Good players still think shots ahead, computing both how they will sink what’s in front of them, and where their cue will end up post shot to sink what’s left.

From there, the liberties start. Firstly, there are only ten balls with numbers spanning from 2 to 13, omitting 5 and 11. There’s no required order to sink these in, nor are there solid or stripe restrictions. Everything on the table, save for your cue ball, needs to find a pocket to call home. Maybe the biggest, most “a ha!” of changes, that make pool suddenly the most infatuating single player game ever, is that each pocket has a score multiplier.

When you sink a ball, it’ll get multiplied by the number the pocket shows, from a measly 1x to a mighty 10x. Every time you sink a ball, the pockets rotate clockwise. Now, not only are you trying to control the board based on ball contact, but also based on how you can anticipate the most valuable scores will be.

Every time you ‘scratch’ the cue ball, you’ll lose one of your three lives. Altogether, pool stops looking like an indoor sport, and takes more the form of a puzzle. It seems strange, considering his gameography, that he’d dabble in a parlour room game until you realize it’s just another way to sneak a brain-teaser into an unassuming entertainment staple.

The actual act of aiming and shooting is its own meta version of borrowing an established concept and tweaking it into something that makes too much sense. You rotate your cue by dragging your finger around the ball. An outline of your shot will project itself forward. When the ghostly ball makes contact with another ball, a smaller line will predict its path to a lesser degree. This secondary line gets bigger and smaller the most solid the impact with the cue ball, making your aim more or less accurate depending on the angle you choose to play it.

When it’s time to shoot, you tap one of the arrows and a cue pops in from the side. With a swipe of your finger, the cue thrusts, and the ball is let loose. How fast you swipe will determine how hard of a shot you produce. There’s no minute details like cue ball English to speak of here, which is a good and bad thing. You don’t have a great deal of control of how your cue ball moves after you shoot. You can’t reliably get it to stop on contact or manipulate it in different directions. Its absence does take the pressure off of you when shooting though. Not having to worry about all that stuff means you really just get to swipe and move on, letting the balls fall as they may.

The randomness doesn’t stop there. You have no control over the rack position during breaks. When your scratch, you have no control over where the ball goes. The latter can be devastating when you’re deep in a round of Standard Run, the game’s main mode. One scratch can put you out of position for a big score, and without the ability to try to influence your cue ball during your shot, any given exchange becomes a crap shoot. It’s possible to work around, if some of the outrageous scores on the leaderboard are to be trusted. A novice may have a hard time coping with that fact.

There are other, even more puzzle-y modes to try your hands at. The Break of the Week gives players a table of already arranged balls and tasks them with making the highest score possible with them. The static features and the endless re-playabilty make this one of the most engrossing parts of Pocket-Run. After a set a score, I’m always returning to try and find a new sequence to try and push it to the next level. Experimentation can lead to breakthroughs in your technique that can travel back to Standard Run.

Insta-Tournaments are like hyper versions of BotW. It begins with a pre-set break, but you only have one attempt to set your best score. Once you sink all balls, or run out of lives, that is your contribution to that rack. New Insta-Tournament racks spawn every few minutes, so you’ll always have a new chance to make a mark.

They spiciest mode in Pocket-Run is High Stakes, where you bet tokens that you’ll win your game. Your pay-out multiplier varies based on your score. Score less than 500 pts on the 1000 token table, and you’ll actually lose money. The variation doesn’t end there. After your break, you take a spin on a wheel that will further modify your game with crazy variables. Adding a time limit or randomly changing the sizes of your balls even further creases the game of pool into some happy perversion of it that I’m all in for.

Ironically, Pocket-Run Pool’s greatest trick is that it makes me wish I could regurgitate this in the physical world. I want to run down to my local watering hole, take the cues out of patrons hands, and show them that there’s been a better way to play this game the whole time, and it was right under our noses.

Aristotle, the hero of Minesweeper Genius, takes a rather literal approach to mine disposal, whipping out his broom to sweep the surroundings for deadly devices. He is a peculiar little character, so proud of his superior brainpower that he keeps his smarts in a glass dome that is attached to the top of his head. The silly plot concerns aliens and scientific experiments, but sweep this aside and you are left with a smart update of a game that has its origin’s in the earliest mainframe games of the 1960’s and 1970’s.

The most well-known version of Minesweeper dates back to the early 1990’s, when it came bundled alongside Solitaire with Windows 3.1.  It may not have had the same mass appeal as solitaire, but countless hours of productivity were wasted by those bored office workers, who wanted something a little more tactical than just arranging playing cards. Better still, the unobtrusive graphics, consisting of a small grey grid, were much less likely to catch the eye of a wandering manager.

Actually, Minesweeper Genius has just as much in common with number puzzler Sudoku as it does with its original namesake.  Aristotle begins each level placed in a grid, the exit will be marked but the rest of the spaces will be unexplored and could contain deadly mines. You can infer which spaces are safe from the numbers that appear along the edges of the grid. These reveal how many mines are in each row and column. On each level, Aristotle gingerly makes his way from square to square. He is never allowed to backtrack, and should he tread on a mine then he is returned to his starting position.

Minesweeper Genius consists of thirteen islands, each with ten levels apiece. Upon completing a level Aristotle will be awarded a star rating and the next level will unlock. Sometimes, after completing an island, a number of optional advanced levels will also become available.  As you progress, more features familiar to those who played the original minesweeper will become available. From the second island onwards, you can flag squares that you think contain mines. Simply press on a square or drag your finger across multiple squares to place flags. The third island introduces radial indicators; these appear in certain squares at the beginning of some levels and display a number that signifies how many of the adjacent spaces contain mines.

To spice things up, the game also introduces a range of special squares that trigger as soon as Aristotle steps on them. There are ones that allow Aristotle to belie his advanced years and leap over a square. Others will slide squares from one end of the grid to the other or swap entire rows and columns. All of the special squares in a grid must be triggered in order to successfully complete a level.

My initial impressions of Minesweeper Genius were extremely favourable, the graphics are clear, the controls responsive and the puzzling initially feels very rewarding. It is obvious that the developers have spent a lot of time polishing and refining their game. It is also commendable that the game offers a generous amount of levels and comes as a complete package, with no extra purchases required. Unfortunately, after playing for a while things began to go downhill pretty fast. Some of the issues are easily remedied; the background music soon begins to grate, but it can be switched off, as can the annoying sound effects that have Aristotle nodding off and snoring after only the briefest period of inactivity. The old dear’s desire for frequent naps may initially be mildly amusing, but I soon felt like grabbing his broom and whacking him over his stupid fishbowl head.

Unfortunately, the game’s biggest issue is not one that can be so easily resolved with the flick of a switch. Minesweeper Genius really suffers from a lack of variety and challenge. Each island follows a similar pattern, starting on small grid layouts that gradually increase in size. It soon begins to feel very formulaic, even the graphics hardly change from island to island. Minesweeper, like Sudoku, is all about making inferences from the limited information on offer in order to build up a complete picture. A large part of Sudoku’s appeal is down to the leaps of logic that you have to make in order to arrive at the correct conclusion.  In comparison, the decisions here are much more straightforward and consequently less satisfying.

So, whilst you may initially think, wow, that’s a neat twist on an old classic, Minesweeper Genius soon becomes a bit of a slog. It may make a neat casual game that you can play on your daily commute, but, in the long-term, the repetitive gameplay is a big disappointment. I’m no puzzle genius but still managed to cruise through the first sixty levels with ease, racking up a complete set of three-star ratings. Even at this relatively advanced stage it wasn’t really getting any more difficult. It seems that the game is too obliging and eager to help you succeed. This is largely down to the fact that the puzzles aren’t individually designed but procedurally generated.

Initially, this seems to be very neat and clever, an insurance against player frustration. Yet it turns out that it also makes things too easy, even the special squares that should really add some extra challenge turn out to be a big disappointment.  You would think that switching around the grid would really increase the challenge, but actually, the special squares just feel like they are just a point on the board that you have to reach. No matter how drastically they change the layout you can be assured that there will always be a valid move. Consequently, there is never any need to think further ahead than your current move, which is never that taxing, even if you are not a genius.