New game releases.
Product Release – Valve
10:10am
*Offer ends Friday at 10AM Pacific Time
15 Oct 2019
Paradox have been cautious players in the mobile space, preferring to dabble and experiment rather than charge head-long into the fray. They’ve tried narrative-driven experiences like Hearts of Iron: War Stories & Crusader Kings: Chronicles, they helped bring Prison Architect to mobile (before buying the IP rights out-right), and they’ve even been doing experiments with Chinese developers as we saw at PDXCon last year.
Now, with PDXCon 2019 on the horizon the popular strategy publisher have announced a new mobile project – Stellaris: Galaxy Command:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lkbynv8Abg?controls=0]
The trailer doesn’t give anything away, although we know a bit more from the press release. While not used directly, it basically reads as being an ‘MMO Strategy’ game set in the Stellaris universe. Here’s the official blurb:
…a sci-fi strategy mobile game based on the worlds of Stellaris. In the aftermath of a devastating, inter-dimensional invasion, the victorious galactic community must now pick up the pieces and rebuild their civilizations. Players are given control of their own orbital space station in a persistent, player-driven world to aid in the reconstruction of their space empire. However, the war was not won alone and it will be up to the players to make alliances, negotiate and directly impact each others’ recoveries in this unique Stellaris adventure.
And, just so we’re all on the same page, here’s the feature list as it was sent to us:
- Alliances in a persistent, player-controlled universe: Take part in a massive, persistent world controlled entirely by players. Forging alliances is key, and the galactic map changes based on the actions of you, your allies, and your rivals. How you build and expand your empire, tax or trade with others, and construct defensive structures will have real consequences for other players.
- Space Station Management: Take charge of your own orbital space station as one of many enterprising individuals committed to making their mark on a rebuilt galaxy. Expand your station, research new technologies, and extend your influence throughout the stars.
- Ethics: Lead your empire with ethics that define your civilization and its guiding principles. Your decisions in-game can influence your ethics, and the consequences of your actions will have ramifications not only for your station, but also for the entire alliance.
- Powerful Fleets: Establish your fleet and flex your intergalactic military might. Expand your fleet, arm it with the latest technology, and work together with allies to take control of entire galaxies.
- Mysteries of the Universe: Rebuild galactic civilization after a near-catastrophic interdimensional alien invasion, making new discoveries and writing your own story along the way.
- Galactic Strategy in Bite-Sized Bursts: Designed for short play sessions, you can check on your station, fleet, and alliance throughout the day. Make sure your station is constantly researching and expanding and your fleet is building up and rearming to deal with new threats.
- An Authentic Stellaris Experience on Mobile: The definitive space strategy comes to mobile with visuals, characters, and an original storyline that fans of Stellaris will find intimately familiar and immersive.
So not Stellaris on mobile then (boo) but close enough? Maybe? It sounds like it could be similar to Hade’s Star, a free-to-play MMO strategy game that Nick used to talk about a lot. We were actually going to cover that more in-depth earlier in the year, but they apparently broke it so Nick told us not to bother. If you read our sister site Strategy Gamer, there’s a game we’ve covered there as well called Starbourne that’s also getting traction a the moment and seems to be of a similar design.
The’s zero mention of business model, although the game is available to play in beta in Sweden, Canada Australia and New Zealand. That means it’s free-to-play for now, at least, but I’d be surprised if they do make this a premium title. There’d be no point doing a game that wasn’t actually Stellaris that you had to pay for, so my money is that this will be freemium. How far they go down the micro-transaction rabbit hole will depend on who they’ve been talking to.
So not, the Stellaris game we need, but maybe it will be alright and tide us over until Paradox feel confident enough to just give us Stellaris on mobile. If Civilization can do it, I’m sure they can too.
Stellaris: Galaxy Command is available for pre-registration on iOS & Android, with a beta available right now in certain territories. And Sweden. Always Sweden.
Another day, another deck-builder, but does Aeon’s End have a sufficient number of tricks up its wizard-y sleeves to stand out in a crowded market? The first attention-grabbing feature is that Aeon’s End is a cooperative game that can be played in pass and play mode with up to three other players, but also works equally well with a solo player controlling a maximum of four mages. These mages have learned mastery over energy breaches, allowing them to cast powerful spells. One small problem; the breaches have also permitted the Nemesis to come a-calling. This guy wants nothing more than to destroy your home of Gravehold, and to slaughter a few mages along the way.
There are three types of cards in Aeon’s End; gems are the game’s currency, spells are used to inflict damage and relics have a range of special powers. At the start of each game, a supply of nine available cards is determined. You are free to either choose at will, select from a particular theme, or even go for a completely random set-up. This supply is selected from a range of 27 different options and, much like Dominion, this market will contain the same set of cards for the entire game.
Whilst in many similar games, currency is only used for buying cards, in Aeon’s End it has other uses too. The currency, a resource known as aether, can be used to open additional breaches, thus allowing the mage to prepare more spells. Or, it can be used to charge a mage’s unique power. These extra choices really add to the decision-making process, making players think carefully about the best way to distribute their limited resources.
Deck-builders are usually characterised by more shuffling than a Post Office queue on pension day. The physical chore of shuffling doesn’t affect us lazy digital gamers, but the resultant randomness certainly does. In Aeon’s End, when your deck is exhausted, you simply flip your discard deck and continue playing. It doesn’t sound like a big change, but it does provide the opportunity to plan future turns and prepare some killer combos. It also means that extra thought is needed when deciding on the order to discard your spent cards. If this isn’t enough to think about, there is also the option to keep unused cards in your hand for use in future turns.
Another area in which Aeon’s End excels is in the wide variety of set up options. Each game will pit the mages against one of four different nemeses. My personal favourite is the Prince of Gluttons who gobbles up the supply of cards faster than Pacman can munch dots. Or, maybe, Crooked Mask, who has a nasty habit of shuffling your deck whilst adding a few nasty corruption cards for you to deal with. All four fiends are not averse to playing a barrage of nasty cards, whilst also throwing a few henchmen into the fray. To up the tension even further, the power of each nemesis increases as the game progresses. Much thought has been spent on the design of all four nemeses, they are distinctly different and offer their own challenges. At times, their powers can feel a little harsh, but never unfair.
Another twist that adds to player anxiety is the way that turn order is decided. Aeon’s End does away with predictability by randomising the order at the end of each round. The turn order deck is always composed of four player cards and two nemesis cards. So, if you only play with one mage you will be getting four turns each round. This can impact on how you coordinate the actions of your mages. Especially since mages first have to prepare spells by allocating them to an open energy breach. Only on the following turn is the spell energised and ready.
There is a roster of eight mages, each with their own set of ten starting cards. These will be a mix of aether crystal cards, weedy spark spells and, more interestingly, one unique card.
Jian’s moonstone provides her with an extra aether which can only be used for purchasing gems. A specified set of five of these cards will make up the mage’s first hand. Xaos, for instance, begins with four crystals allowing him to buy a decent card from the supply on the very first turn. Mages also have a special ability that needs to be fully charged before use. Returning to our friend, Jian, she can use her black mirror ability to enable any mage to cast a prepared spell twice.
Aeon’s End has a lot of on screen information to keep track of which means that the game is a tablet exclusive. Even on larger tablets, the artwork is often sacrificed to squeeze everything onto the screen. There are also a large range of tiny icons to decipher which is a barrier to learning. Thankfully, a tap and hold will bring up a card in full detail, also giving you a chance to admire the illustrations. There is certainly more going on here than in many other card games, but it doesn’t reach Twilight Struggle realms of complexity. Developers Handelabra are a safe pair of hands, as their work on Sentinels of the Multiverse and One Deck Dungeon testifies. The lack of online options is a tad disappointing, but this is still a top-notch conversion.
Aeons End is a wonderful game, the control that it offers over deck management is especially worthy of merit. The cards seem to be very well balanced with no absolute stinkers or overpowered abilities. Variety is also a big plus, each mage feels distinct and each nemesis requires a different approach. There is a generous amount of content, with challenging difficulty levels, a choice of 27 different types of market cards, four nemeses and eight mages.
Humble are running another Bundle of interest to game developers, this one is the Developing Your Own Games by Springer bundle. A massive collection of e-books by APress covering a huge number of game engines and technologies. As always it is broken into tiers, if you buy a higher value tier you get all of the lower value tiers below it as well.
The tiers of this bundle consist of:
1$
8$
15$
As always with Humble you can decide how your money is allocated, between the publisher, Humble, charity or if you so choose (and thanks if you do!) to support GameFromScratch by using this link. Learn more about the bundle in the video below.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hb4WNehj7wM&w=853&h=480]
The Diligent Engine just released version 2.4. The Diligent Engine is an open source cross platform rendering library that abstracts away the details of working with underlying technologies such as Direct3D, OpenGL and Vulkan. The Diligent Engine is open source under the Apache 2.0 license and is available on GitHub.
Details of the release:
You can get more details of the release in the release notes available here. We recently did a hands-on video of the Diligent Engine in action available below.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnraZP-Pv-k&w=853&h=480]
The Unigine Engine has existed for well over a decade and has been used heavily in the engineering, military and scientific markets as well as powering several popular benchmarking applications. With the boom in indie game development and game engines, Unigine was rarely if ever used and most of that came down to it’s pricing. Recently however, Unigine started offering cheaper monthly subscription options as well as a 30 day trial.
Unigine is available for Linux and Windows using OpenGL and Direct3D and can target those platforms as well as many VR headsets including the VIVE and RIFT. Games are programmed using your choice of C++, C# and/or their own UnigineScript language. Unigine also ships with a fully functioning editor and complete asset pipeline.
In the following video we go hands-on with the Unigine game engine, taking a look at the coding experience, editor and ecosystem available.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxedhnHwm0g&w=853&h=480]
Phaser 3.20 was released today. The open source 2D game framework gains a few new features including improved Spine support, a more consistent Pixel Art game mode configuration as well as support for video playback. Additionally the release contains several smaller new features, dozens of fixes and improvements.
Phaser is available on Phaser.io, which also includes excellent documentation as well as over 1,700 code examples to learn from. The Phaser project is open source under the MIT license and is hosted on GitHub.
You can learn more about the 3.20 release on the Phaser Patreon page available here. You can also learn more by watching the video available below.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v28kOI7ACSQ&w=853&h=480]
It’s been a bit of a mixed week – I’ve been trying to go back and look at some historically performing content and see what I can do with it, as well as testing the waters with things like the CoD Mobile guide, and skimming some stuff off reddit. The Mario Kart Tour Challenges article is still proving quite popular at the moment, so you may see that float to the top of the article list quite regularly.
Happy to say though that with most of that out of the way, I can start refocusing on some of our favoured topics. Quite a few games have been released recently that are more relevant to the core readership, so will be getting reviews sorted for them pronto.
Just as an FYI – I’m going to be at PDXCon next week from Thursday, so end of week posts might be a bit sporadic. It’s also unlikely that they’ll be a Weekender update next week, but if anything mobile focused comes out of the event I’ll be sure to write it up.
There’s actually been a couple of new Apple Arcade games releases over the past week or so. We’ve updated our master list and added a ‘new’ tag to the newcomers, so check them out if you’re still looking for new games to try. We’re a little bit behind on our reviews, but we’re sticking with the batch-approach for now.
You know what? I’m really, really glad this game exists. I noticed the other day we’d only reviewed four games between August/September, but after some digging I realised that’s about right, because there’s been nothing in the premium space worth covering lately. Xenowerk reads like it was made for us, and from what we’ve tested so far it’s a pretty decent real-time tactics game. It’s single-player only, but you control a squad of mercenaries who work for a corporation, and it’s basically your job to clean up their messes. It involves squad development and base management and all that XCOM-like goodness.
It’s free to try on Android – you get to play the first part before paying the full price as an IAP to unlock the rest of the game. On iOS it’s premium up-front. We’re going to try and get a full review on the table ASAP for you.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVXqyk3S6SY?controls=0]
It’s been a strangely good week for strategy gaming on mobile, with Versus: Unfriendly Friendly also releasing this week. We’ve already got Michael working on a review so hopefully that will drop next week. Versus is a real-time strategy game that boats outlandish factions and units and ‘fast-paced’ action. There’s a 29 level solo campaign, and you can play head-to-head against someone on the same device, which sounds interesting.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ny1TNTSIeg?controls=0]
And yeah, there’s another free-to-play gacha battler game, this time based on the Digimon franchise. It’s called Digimon ReArise (iOS | Android) I’ll be honest guys, I’m kinda burned out on this stuff at the moment so we’re going to wait and see with this one. If it proves popular maybe we’ll look into it in more detail but I’m not in any rush. Here’s a trailer anyway:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WD5ttx_QEJc?controls=0]
A few things to update you one, some of which we accidentally forgot about:
MMO’s are an odd prospect on mobile – for the longest time, the term was appropriated by developers who made trashy F2P games, but as mobile tech improved it’s now quite possibly to put actual, ‘legit’ MMOs onto mobile devices. Black Desert Online is a fairly popular Free-to-Play MMO that’s been around for quite a few years now. It’s managed to walk that line between given players worthwhile content to engage in, and offering a business model that sustains them. Their freemium stuff is mainly cosmetics, although you can buy some shortcuts. I played it on PC for a spell and I actually had quite a lot of fun with it. The only thing was I didn’t think it facilitated party-play that well, but it may have improved since then.
We’ve known it was coming to mobile since E3, but what I forgot to mention a couple of weeks ago is that pre-registration is now available on iOS and Android. The mobile version is due to land in December 2019.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rrIBXJWOuQ?controls=0]
Playstation recently updated their core PS4 Firmware to Version 7.0 this week, and with that came an update to their Remote Play app. The nuts and bolts of this latest update means that Android users beyond Sony Xperia phones can now get in on the action, and iOS users can now use their Dualshock 4 controllers with the app.
For Android, you just need to be running Android 5.0 or higher although if you have Android 10 installed, you can also get in on the Dualshock action by connecting your controller to your phone via Bluetooth.
You’ll need to have iOS 13 to be able to use your controller on that end of things. You’ll also be able to choose whether or not the on-screen controls remain visible as well as choose whether or not to lock the orientation.
Ticket to Earth isn’t the only game to seemingly get a fourth episode update this week. The Trese Brothers have taken a break from constantly updating Star Traders: Frontiers to release the “final” episode for their Heroes of Steel RPG, the Siege of Sur-Relliar Glacier.
Here’s the full change-log, if you’re still interested in playing this game:
- Epic end-game conclusion to the tale of the 4 Harbingers
- Battle across 7 new brutally challenging dungeons and maps
- Lock blades and magic with multiple major bosses across the climactic siege
- Face 15+ new monster types — Ice & Fire Drakes, Orcin Ravagers, Thorn Shamans, Unrequited Blades and more
- Loot 100+ new amazingly powerful weapons, armor and magical gear across the final dungeons
- Once beaten, you may invoke a New Game+ mode to replay the final dungeon and bosses again! (and again!)
- Fixed all issues with late-game bows named “FIX ME” and crafting out of Fierhold
- Fixed crash with “Great Flats” level loading in some situations
Only two sales of note this week:
Seen anything else you liked? Played any of the above? Let us know in the comments!
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We liked Ticket to Earth when it first launched in March 2017. In fact, it was one of Matt’s highlights for the whole year. There was only one problem… it wasn’t finished. A four-part story that only launched with one part, people were understandably nervous that they may not get everything they were promised if they bought into it too early.
It seemed a bit touch and go as well: Episode 2 released five months after launch in August, but Episode 3 didn’t land until December 2018. Now, ten months later and over two years since the original mobile release, Ticket to Earth’s fourth episode has landed as part of the free updated that dropped yesterday. If you’ve never heard of this game before, let’s start out with a trailer:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-R8ZjwIDJc?controls=0]
Ticket to Earth is essentially a turn-based tactical RPG/Puzzle game, with some very innovative mechanics connected to how yo move around the battle-space and what it means. It’s on our list of essential turn-based strategy games on mobile, so that should tell you something.
Now that Episode 4 is out, we’re interested in seeing what Robot Circus does next. We hope whatever it is, it doesn’t take two years to complete. If you end up trying out Episode 4, let us know what you think in the comments!
Ticket to Earth is available on iOS and Android for $3.99/$4.99 respectively.
