Category: Game Releases

A colony ship crash-lands on a hostile planet, leaving the crew struggling against the odds to survive. With the passing of time, the chance of rescue diminishes so the colonists disperse and establish their own factions. Generations of survivors have eked out a living, but there is a limit to the barren planet’s resources and tensions between the competing factions are high.

Nomads of the Fallen Star is a sci-fi adventure in which you take on the role of the leader of a motley bunch of scavengers on a quest for fame and fortune. Initially, there are only two members in your team, a grizzled veteran who goes by the name of Varon and a young woman called Iona, who has a talent for chemistry. This unlikely duo must traverse the land, trading between the numerous settlements and completing missions whilst unravelling the background story as they go. As their reputation grows, they will be able to purchase better equipment and recruit new members.

From the onset, it is obvious that Nomads is a port of a PC game. Indeed, it has the look and feel of a PC game from the previous millennium. The font is tiny, the icons minuscule and the character portraits blurry and non-distinct. However, let us not be too harsh, this is the work of a solo developer and the PC version has attained plenty of positive feedback. Unfortunately, even if you are prepared to overlook the rather off-putting presentation, Nomads of the Fallen Star’s ropeyuser-interface isn’t so easy to excuse.

You will spend a lot of time watching the various factions, militia and caravans trundling slowly across the landscape. On one level, it is easy to admire the machinations that are whirling away in the background creating the sense of a real living world. However, when you just want to get from A to B it quickly becomes immensely frustrating. You have to scroll the map using a little virtual joystick that is nestled at the bottom left-hand corner of the screen. Release the joystick and the screen flips back to centre on your party. It is a system that feels both clunky and irritating. When you are used to navigating maps by tapping and dragging, it feels positively archaic. Furthermore, you have to constantly switch between input modes to either confirm orders or find out additional information. There are other problems too, such as an exit button that doesn’t appear to do anything and an abort mission button that is all too easy to accidentally press. Overall, it feels like an interface that has been shoehorned into a touchscreen device instead of being designed from the ground up.

Combat is a little macabre as you manoeuvre your units, represented by disembodied heads, around a rudimentary grid. You can then use your action points to initiate numerous attacks. The tiny icons aren’t really distinct enough so the first few battles are even more confusing than they need to be. It is especially tough at the start of the game when you only have two team members and limited equipment. Because the game is so open-ended you can find yourself involved in some hopelessly one-sided battles, and with no option to quit you are forced to see things through to the bitter end. You can pep up your team by taking some performance-enhancing drugs, but the lack of terrain features means that the best tactic is usually to wait around on the left of the screen until the reckless enemies charge into range.

If you are a true sadist then you can play with the permadeath option turned on. However, this game is so tough that any sane souls will probably select the option where death only returns your adventurers to the last settlement that they visited. When you start playing it seems like everything is stacked against you; shortages of food and water, strict mission deadlines and overpowering opponents all serve to frustrate. To be fair the game does give advice, but you have to really pay attention and read everything carefully otherwise you may miss some crucial hints. The vast amount of information that is thrown at the player can feel overwhelming and you soon realise the need to narrow your focus to a few specific goals. Unfortunately, there isn’t an option to make additional saved game files. This seems odd given the open-ended nature of the game, which encourages exploration and experimentation.

This all sounds very negative, but in spite of these concerns Nomads of the Fallen Star still has some really neat ideas. The combination of trading and squad-based combat works well and the music is wonderful, flowing from the beautifully eerie to the pulse-poundingly rousing. In some ways, Nomads is a tremendous achievement, not since Genesis has such a massive living world been created by a single pair of hands, although I’m betting that it took considerably longer than seven days to complete. The butterfly effect has been incorporated into the game with much thought and skill. For instance, a caravan carrying ale is ambushed on route to a local mine.

The miners go on strike, causing supplies of ore to dwindle. In the meantime, metal prices soar and supplies of weapons and armour are hit. The local militia grow ill-equipped and unhappy.  Law and order begins to fall apart and raiders take the opportunity to fill their pockets with ill-gotten gains. To make matters worse disillusioned militiamen desert and join raiding groups. Yet, the number of caravans risking journeys has fallen, forcing the raiders to attack the outposts themselves. All because a few miners had dry throats and you didn’t get the crucial supplies through in time.

It is a shame that the dodgy interface and unforgiving introduction are likely to deter all but the most resolute of gamers.  Nomads of the Fallen Star tells an interesting story set in a dynamic open-world of warring factions and economic hardships. There is so much to discover, like crafting, trading, scavenging, developing your faction and characters. After the initial hurdles, the game opens up and you can begin to appreciate the ambitious scope.

If you find the concept intriguing and you have the patience to take on the tough challenge then I strongly recommend that you give the PC version a try. Playing on a larger screen with mouse control rectifies many of the game’s frustrations, leaving you free to explore the planet without having to constantly wrestle with the interface. If you insist on playing it on mobile, then tablet is probably the best way forward – the interface issues get exacerbated by smaller screens.

Roguelikes and card battlers have been having a ‘moment’ for years now. Early classics like Hoplite and Dream Quest were ground-breaking in their canny mix of challenge and simplicity. Anything halfway decent becomes common, and these sort of games were something truly special. Lose sight of the lineage, forget the forefathers, though, and you’ll be pleasantly shocked by the quality of recent roguelikes.

Chief among these is the recently-released Dimension of Dreams, standing apart like a very good fusion of the aforementioned games. It takes some familiar mechanics while totally inventing its own card pool and class system, and while the progression is slow and the difficulty perhaps slightly over-tuned, it is great and by all signs will only get better.

Don’t let the 3D art style fool you; this game’s action unfolds within turn-based battles interspersed with overland travel on a 2D grid. Three levels filled with shops, mystery events, treasure chests and monsters. After every battle, you gain experience, gold and most crucially, the chance to add a new card to your deck. That’s the big picture, macro-level strategy of managing health and coins as long-term resources, but the game’s chief challenge lay within those battles. Each turn, the player draws two (or sometimes more) cards and has a few actions to spend playing those cards. There are four color-coded categories of cards: red for offense, blue for defense, green for utility and purple for status effects.

The game’s combos and effects largely revolve around these colorful card types. For now the game has three classes, roughly corresponding to that holy trinity of warrior, rogue and mage. (With the ‘mage’ being more of a ‘holy cleric’ sort). As an example, the rogue-type Demon Samurai has plenty of dodge, critical and poison-based keyword effects.

If all this sounds curiously parallel to Slay the Spire, that is quite accurate and, moreover, quite deliberate. But the variety and detail of both class mechanics and enemy traits are unique to this game and reminiscent of Dream Quest’s utter ex nihilo creativity. In lieu of attributes or spells, player characters have equipment and relics, the former selected from a fixed pool of options every third level, the latter purchased from shops or awarded after boss battles. The synergy between these relics and the deck’s own archetypes becomes a delicate chance for the player to apply their wits. So it possesses the requisite opportunity for a first-rate mind to distinguish itself.

The game’s not a dreamy playpen, though, and has plenty of practical constraints to limit theoretical min-maxing. This tension is necessary because roguelikes are also about building the most elegant, efficient machine out of whatever scraps are available. On this front, the game is a wee bit scanty with its options, I’d say, a little bit beyond the norm of what’s ‘fair’ to make the average run winnable through wise decisions alone. There are so many different viable deck archetypes, but only a few of them thrive in the early stages of the game where it is most crucial to build momentum. So there’s a bit of false richness here, insofar as things like a Parry-based warrior archetype simply isn’t going to cut it at max difficulty, barring some exceptional events.

One more criticism is about those same ‘events’ and the unusually high-variance nature of the level-up rewards. When landing on an event space, a short vignette of text spells out a situation then presents the player with two possible reactions. Some of them are totally binary outcomes, with one ‘right’ choice giving a pure reward and the other pure punishment. This is titillating storytelling but bad gameplay, to present an opaque risk with zero information and no trade-off decisions. And the quality of these boons also varies wildly, from trivial passive boosts to a free level-up. Oh, and upon levelling up, your character can very rarely gain extra draws or energy, which are x10 more effective and useful than, say, three extra max HP. So the game’s not as finely tuned as it should be in these edge cases. Best fix would be to tell the player possible odds upfront for random events and lessen either the swingy wide-ranging level-up options or somehow make them more uniform.

The criticism above sounds harsh & dire, but these deficiencies only stand out because the rest of the game is so nice and polished. There are ten levels of difficulty, with each one throwing a new monkey wrench into things. The scaling here is pretty much ideal; so far, the best I’ve managed is the eighth. (The scalable challenge mode is also pretty much a direct call back to Slay the Spire). There are already three classes to start, with another three in the pipeline and two others coming later down the road. The game is only a dollar because these other classes are locked behind either ‘loot boxes’ or instant payment unlocks.

Fortunately even the ‘box’-based reward system is tastefully implemented. Each class has exactly 50 boxes available for purchase for in-game currency earned after each run, and each box will contain one of those 50 things to reveal. So what is random is the order in which things become available for the player, but everything is guaranteed to become available after the whole lot is purchased. Because the game is excruciatingly difficult right now, this might still mean a 10-hour crusade to unlock the next class without shelling out more cash, but any roguelike worth its salt ought to make 10-hours (5 runs or so) melt away in light of the player’s focus and enjoyment. Flow-state, basically.

Honestly, aside from the wonky difficulty in early stages, the wacky random events & level-ups and rather generic 3D models (which make the game a battery-chugger), the game is a treasure, and one that’s only bound to improve with further balance tweaks and content. Needs a few bugfixes, too. It’s neither wholly derivative nor original but remains a roguelike to watch and try if you’ve the slightest interest, and for this price it’s a steal.

Here is the current list of IAPS for the game:

• Hero: Samurai $2.99
• Pre-order Mage Heroes $5.99
• Hero: Paladin $2.99
• Demon Samurai Key Pack $3.99
• Gladiator Key Pack $3.99
• Gladiator Dream Pack $19.99
• Paladin Key Pack $3.99
• Paladin Dream Pack $19.99
• Demon Samurai Dream Pack $19.99
• Revival Coin x6 $2.99

Studio des Ténèbres made Frost, a deckbuilding solitaire survival card game that was very well-received, especially on this site. That’s why I was excited to look at their latest: Mini Gal4xy. In addition to its clever interpolation of “4X” into the title, the core idea of a simplified space 4X game for mobile is a great one. With isolated star systems there’s no need for a complicated map, and sci-fi fluff gives you lots of flexibility in terms of making techs and units that work well but make sense in the universe. What’s more, the game appears really polished, with a great Saturday-morning cartoon look. Unfortunately, a lot of the other parts don’t show nearly as much polish.

In my first game, the decision points I was presented with in the parts of the game I was able to play were pretty dull. Unlock certain technologies and you can unlock certain exploitation slots on planets that let you get more resources. The planets are randomly generated and connected and the tech tree is procedurally generated too, not consistent from game to game. Since everything is random, it’s simply a matter of pattern recognition. The nearest planets require such and such tech unlocks. Those techs are behind these other techs. Save your resources, colonize those planets, rinse, repeat. If you somehow end up with a pile of the wrong resource, just swap it at 3:1 with any other resource. Playing a whole turn takes seconds because there are so few decisions to make. 

It’s a game of optimizing your response to a procedurally-generated puzzle. What’s more, there’s no AI to speak of. You get to choose the “barbarians” (in Civ terms) that you’ll steamroll over to unlock new planets, but you don’t actually fight any other empires. Instead, the name of the game is maximizing your point totals through careful development. Score high enough, and you can unlock new techs, rules, and alien races for your next go round.

With such a significant reliance on random chance, you get situations that feel unfair pretty frequently, and even your greatest accomplishments can feel unearned when the map was laid out in your favor. In one game, the procedural map locked me into a corner where the only planet I could colonize was locked behind a technology at the end of the tree, and the tech to colonize from my ships wasn’t much closer. Cue turn after turn of slowly accumulating science points one by one. Obviously, that game was one of my lower-scoring ones.

Luckily, Mini Gal4xy starts to become more interesting once you’ve unlocked a few more technologies and a few more alien races. The races, in particular, take a page from the playbooks of Cosmic Encounter and Endless Legend by being dramatically different in their abilities and play styles. The Nomads don’t have a home base and their ships are built unarmed but with colonizing capabilities. The Fermulons start without a ship but can explore neighboring planets by building an Observatory. It’s an interesting challenge figuring out how to adapt to the limitations and take advantage of the strengths of each race, especially when they seem to break what you understand to be the basic rules of the game.

Understanding the basic rules was another problem, though. Despite the simplified gameplay, a lot of things are not explained and I often had questions that the game’s icons could not answer. There’s a tutorial, but it doesn’t explain that the dots above each planet will light up when you can afford an improvement there, or why enemy ships sometimes attack your ships in system and sometimes wait for you to make the first move.

With improvements to the interface and more carefully-crafted procedural generation, Mini Gal4xy would definitely be worth your time just for the fun of figuring out how to make the limitations of each race bend to your favor. Unfortunately the game takes a third strike from persistent and occasionally game-breaking bugs.

Mini Gal4xy has a hard time with changes of focus, often being dumped from memory and reloading after the app has been closed for only a short time.  Beyond that, sometimes just fighting a battle or ordering a ship to move will freeze the game, requiring a forced app closure. When I first started playing, these crashes would also erase my save game, rendering the game functionally unplayable, but a recent patch has corrected this particular bug (while significantly delaying the completion of this review!) Entering battles is still risky, not because my ships are outgunned or my enemies tenacious, but because battles still frequently cause freezes. Force quitting from these freezes sets you back to the beginning of your turn. This is particularly annoying when the only way forward is to fight, and that is literally impossible.

There’s good ideas here. The basic systems are solid enough to handle alien races with dramatically different starting points, and a score-attack mini space 4X game is a great concept for mobile. This one’s just not quite ready to launch.