Category: Game Releases

Sigma Finite Dungeon is a difficult game to hate, if you have any affinity for tactical turn-based rpgs. As a focused expression of mechanics, it’s a no-frills dose of gridded goodness. As literally anything else – something visually impressive or narratively curious – it fails.

Part of the initial disconnect in my first several runs was just getting over the fact that there was no story. TRPGs are well known for them, and some of the best are often hoisted among some of the best video game stories ever told. That there really was nothing here but a basic “kill the guy at the end of the dungeon” trick felt weird. You definitely get over it, but not before reminiscing over the Final Fantasy Tactics and Ogre Battles of yesteryear.

There is a certain brilliance in stripping the genre down to its basics. As the best roguelikes are want to do, you start to gain a real appreciation for the core pillars of the genre’s they help deconstruct. TRPGs, even with rousing narratives, tend to be very systems-forward engagements, so I was surprised to find that they could even be isolated and manipulated the way they are in SFD.

Starting with a hero character with its own special class, you’re tasked with delving through eight floors of procedurally-generated dungeon in order to slay the dark elven god at the very bottom. On your way, you will hire allies, collect weapons and armor, fight various types of enemies, and try not to die. If you, the hero, is killed in battle, then the game is over.

None of this sounds all that new, but every system you interact with is both completely transparent and almost fully customizable or interactable. All of the six classes of characters you’ll run into can be upgraded into higher, more specialized forms. There are no gear restrictions to each class, but the sorts of special abilities you’ll learn while using certain weapons will be limited. Sometimes, it’s not a terrible strategy to deck out one character in heavy armor and a shield, while giving the rest of the squad bows to attack monsters from a distance. It encourages you to try something weird to fit a playstyle, or to discover a whole new one.

For all of its freedom, it could be more forthcoming as far as guidance and tutorialization. There are a set of screens that point out important HUD and menu options that serve as a help guide, but most of the nitty gritty you’ll learn by doing. As a game reliant on replaying it a bunch to learn how it ticks, there’s still a limit to what you should know going in and have to learn on the fly. And even speaking to what they do outline, I wished SFD found a more engaging way to teach you the ropes, instead of sending you the equivalent of PDF files to study yourself.

How characters are geared largely determines the abilities they can learn by leveling up, but for the main hero, you can find many opportunities to teach him things he wouldn’t have normal access to, even further diversifying your team’s capabilities. This doesn’t extend to your hirelings, which is a bummer. You buy their attendance from one of the assortment of shops you may find on your journey, where they are populated at random. You’ll have a hard time having back to back runs with identical team composition, which is par for the rogue-like course.

Navigating any giving dungeon floor involves a lot of tapping. You tap on the floor. You tap on crates. You tap on lanterns. Exploration is very mind numbing, as you spend much of the time just touching stuff and hoping gold falls out. The randomized rooms don’t even bother making much of a labyrinth to navigate. Rooms are often full of objects that look like someone reached into a bag and just tossed whatever was in their hands at it. I found myself wishing there was no exploration at all. If 70% of the rooms are going to just be empty, why even let me aimlessly tap around them?

The ones that aren’t empty are full of monsters. This is where the real action happens, and where the game most resembles every other member of the genre. Characters all have movement ranges (in squares) determined by their class. There are action points, magic points, attack templates determined by weapon, etc. The things this game does like all the others isn’t the interesting part. It’s the goofy stuff SFD lets you do outside of it that’s cool.

For me this usually starts and ends with the push mechanic. Any character and shove moveable objects or units into squares or obstacles next to them. If I want a character who would otherwise be a square away from range on an enemy to get in close, I might have the previous guy in line push them. If I want to hit an enemy on the other side of a friendly without risking full weapon damage on them, I push my buddy into him. Push monsters into spike traps, or on buttons that activate flame traps on their own friends. Push crates into unwitting skeletons and watch them explode. I can’t tell you how much mileage I got out of such a little mechanic.

This is mostly to do with how so much of the map can interact with each other. In small ways, of course, but all the small ways equal a menu of big ways that make every battle a tactical smorgasbord. SFD doesn’t have unlockable secrets that change the gameplay or add options to some sort of meta tally like other roguelikes – these little encounters are the reason you re-roll and start again after an untimely death.

That said, the replayability of SFD suffers because of its severe lack of goals to reach outside of the main line. As roguelikes have evolved over the years, they’ve all found ways to keep you playing that don’t involve just beating the game. It’s disappointing to see SFD not heed this pattern, and it might be hard to see anyone staying engaged after finally beating the last floor.

There are some elements of other tactics games that are whole missing from this one, as well. Backstabbing is a thing, but that’s one of the few ways to gain any positional advantage over the enemy. There’s no elevation or flanks to use to your advantage. Nor is there cover options to mitigate ranged attacks. The numbers and chances to hit on your profile are, more often than not, the only sort of damage you’ll do.

People won’t be sharing screen shots of the game either. As the hand drawn sprites are individually cool, the sum-of-their-parts areas they create are visually bland. The menus are basic and ugly. Character sprites are pretty one note no matter what gear you deck them out in. Monster sprites, on the other hand, look great and are easily the best visual elements in SFD.

As a whole package, Sigma Finite Dungeon feels like an illuminating, if unfinished, experiment. There is a very good set of basic tactical elements that make playing the game a good time. I just wish there was more here that would keep me playing for a long time, or a presentation that didn’t make me feel like I was QCing the thing instead of playing it.

By Dick Page 24 Apr 2019

Solar Settlers is an extremely well-built machine, a solitaire optimization puzzle par excellence. To prove the suitability of an ever-changing set of planets, colonists (‘the player’) will explore, mine and terraform (or aquaform, or geoform) said planets until they are settled and this pocket of space thoroughly domesticated. This project must happen in a set number of turns, and in general the game becomes a question of building an engine to get those enterprising folks into their new homes. Then the engine is actually, to fine-tune the metaphor, rather like a multi-stage rocket, with each step having its micro-objectives, trajectory and fuel requirements. Oh, and it plays in about twenty minutes, full of crunchy decisions and easily-crunched small numbers. It’s a grand game to fit in your pocket.

It is clever, in a way that greatly recalls the creator’s previous game, Minos Strategos. But whereas the latter’s elaborate card formations and position requirements meant always settling for sub-ideal (but still technically ‘optimal’) choices, Solar Settlers has a much more finely-tuned mechanical foundation. The system of planets is represented by a series of cards, with the homeworld dead center. Every game starts with one homeworld, three citizens and an open field of possibilities. Move to an adjacent card and explore a nearby one. This takes hydrogen. At the end of the turn, any unsettled citizen will need one unit of oxygen to live.

Upgrades and a few other effects often require metal, which is comparatively rarer than other resources but also very effective in its niche. Cards can be discarded for resources but are generally more useful for planning upgrades to planets. Some upgrades produce resources each turn, others offer enhanced movement or just settlements. Oh, and there’s a ‘military’ resource as well, but this is only used as a skill-check on exploring the outer edges of the gameboard. The center is cozy and easy to rapidly develop, but the outer fringes will need military presence to keep them defensible from threats (that’s the thematic explanation, anyways).

You need to be ambitious ramping up the workforce and exploration early, but then there’s a turn towards sustainability. Workers generate resources by activating planets but also require oxygen to live and fuel to get into a useful position. Not to mention the game’s central twist: to win you must remove workers from the board by settling them. So there’s a natural production curve, but its inflection points are particularly interesting, especially for a game this short. Do I double-down on metal this turn and stockpile it for later, or do I explore that top tile in hopes it’ll be a gas giant I can instantly upgrade into a cloning chamber for free bodies? The layout makes it almost like a city-planning game, with efficient pathing and build order rubbing up against the imperfect circumstances of random draws and uncertain tile discovery.

It is vast. There are so so many cards and mechanics to unlock through a persistent experience system. And there a seven total races, each with unique starting planets and bonus goal cards which radically change game strategy. There’s an insect species which benefits from stacking upgrade over upgrade to create huge nesting spires and a reptile species which gets extra oxygen and other bonuses from exploring with the rare mechanic of ‘de-exploring’ tiles.

The others I still haven’t unlocked yet, unfortunately, but it seems like they’ll only get weirder and even potentially harder to use from there. The baseline vanilla Humans are kinda like training wheels in that regard. The game’s variety of cards and species gives it huge replayability, but the payout curve for experience per play is a little stingy. It would take thirty hours or more of play to unlock everything, which is a little excessive for a game without a campaign, just a variety of very good standard single player modes. On the flip side, the unlocks are all distinctive and rewarding, easily memorized which is essential for a game like this. Just like a stage magician has their favorite deck of cards to manipulate for legerdemain, the player will have certain combos or cards (planets) they know like the back of their hand.

It is scalable. With every victory, the difficulty ranks up, which means more people have to be settled in less time. Just as each game has a production curve, the game overall has a slow-paced learning curve, wherein new techniques or tools are slowly doled out and incorporated into the player’s repertoire. With early levels, mistakes or misunderstandings won’t ruin a player’s chance of victory, but starting around level ten and upwards, the margin for error shrinks significantly. As a solitaire-style game Solar Settlers has introduced elements of uncertainty and randomness to keep players on their toes. What this means in practice is while a certain combo is mouth-wateringly efficient, the opportunity to implement it might not be practical in a given game depending on the randomized layout and card draws, so the best choice in a given moment is always slightly different.

This player likes to be a stick in the mud, though, having found tried and true approaches and more or less sticking with what I’ve decided is my bread and butter. A brief spurt of early exploration and card draws to create some bonus production, then using the same few cards for endgame settling. Rather than purely incentivizing variety, the game simply makes repetition sub-optimal to force versatility at higher levels of play. In multiplayer worker placement games like Agricola, players are forced into sup-optimal choices later because of direct competition for slots; here, imperfect knowledge means making calculated gambles between the ideal and the provisional. I usually dig these kind of trade-offs immensely, but here it’s a little grating. Maybe if I had newer cards faster I’d be more eager to experiment and risk failing, but because I know I need to have perfect wins over and over to see the ‘full’ game, I’d rather play it safe to shave off hours from my personal quest to unlock everything the game has to offer.

When my mind kicks into gear with an optimization puzzle, sometimes it feels less like a concerted effort of higher brain functions and more like a lizard brain reacting based on highly patterned stimuli by merely regurgitating what I know works. Seek red planet early, park one worker on it. A bunch of small heuristics my mind invisibly constructs and then uses to make playing Solar Settlers a smooth flowing experience, the kind that gives real pleasure and steals away hours without much notice. It’s been given consistent support and updates since its release with no sign of stopping, and is a great game to have on rotation. Don’t be a completionist or perfectionist and you’ll enjoy Solar Settlers a great deal.

Ancient Egypt has always been a popular setting for games. It is hardly surprising, as with its distinctive art and lavish customs the Land of the Pharaohs is a rich source for game designers seeking inspiration. However, a quick look at the app store reveals that the most popular Egyptian-themed games devote themselves to matching tiles, playing slots or dressing-up princesses. Thankfully, Egypt: Old Kingdom takes a more scholarly approach. As an incarnation of the god Horus, your task is to work alongside the pharaohs in order to overcome the mighty Seth.

Seth is a bit of a pain and as the god of chaos, he is eager to unleash a catalogue of disasters upon the land. We begin our journey in Memphis, but this is Egypt, not Tennessee, so the job is to build pyramids rather than Graceland. However, it isn’t wise to attempt to run before we can walk like an Egyptian. The Old Kingdom was around for hundreds of years and before we can even think of building mysterious pyramidical buildings we will need to first establish our tribe.

Initially, Egypt: Old Kingdom seems rather complex and intimidating; it feels like a crash course in ancient Egyptology. However, settle into the game’s steady flow, and it soon becomes clear that the game isn’t actually that daunting at all. The tutorial introduces you to the bare basics and then leaves you to discover the rest as you play, but that’s OK because the range of available options never becomes too intimidating. It turns out to be a Civilization-style game that does away with a lot of the micromanagement aspects and instead focuses on the deployment of your workers.

At the beginning of the game, the map is shrouded in fog and you will want to send out workers to explore new areas. When a worker is sent to a new region their choice of actions will be limited by geographical constraints. Hills are great for constructing barracks, new homes and numerous other types of buildings. Fertile floodplains will yield a choice of extra crops. Some areas will already have resources that you can gather or packs of wild beasts that you can either hunt or worship.

Success depends on efficiently acquiring and managing supplies of the game’s six resources. Food enables you to feed and increase the size of your population; spend ten food and you will be able to place a new worker. The chief sources of food are cultivated fields and fish from regions near the Nile. Production points are mainly used for constructing new buildings; workshops will help you increase your production. Luxuries are usually acquired through trade; they keep your population happy and help pacify angry neighbours. The game’s abstract approach extends to military strength, which just like any other resource is represented by a single number. An effective way of improving your army is by building barracks. Culture points can be used to make new discoveries, with advancements following the usual technology tree approach. For instance, once you have established the local cults advancement, your people can then discover tomb building, which is a great way of improving favour with the gods. Favour points allow you to worship the various gods, each of whom will provide you with a time-limited bonus.

After a few turns, your people will stumble across other tribes. Now you will have the option to forge new friendships or make new enemies. Peaceful options include setting up a simple trade agreement and maybe greasing a few palms. Once relationships get really good you will be able to assimilate the people into your society. Aggressive options include subjugating a tribe in battle or launching a raid but remember that enemies have long memories and they can unite against you. Combat is very simple, just challenge a tribe and wait for five turns, then the army levels are compared. There are no differing units or tactics, but you can call upon the favours of some gods to enhance your combat abilities.

It is odd that the version of the game available depends on your device. On Android, you can download the game for free. This lite version gives you the opportunity to dip your toe into the Nile by playing through the first 50 turns. If you want to see more then you will need to pay to open up the rest of the game. On iOS the lite version seems to have been replaced by a full version that requires a one-off payment.

In the full game, the number of options available is very impressive. Games can be set up that follow the course of history, or you can create your own history in the appropriately named sandbox mode. You can add more micromanagement elements, reduce the influence of the gods in various ways and make things even tougher by limiting your options to save progress. Conspiracy theorists may like to try a game in which the human race is enslaved by aliens, whilst B-movie buffs can create a game in which evil mummies are invading the world. The later options sound like fun additions, but they do cheapen the authenticity of the game. Otherwise, you have to admire the amount of background research that the developers have incorporated. The end result is a richly thematic game that is also educational in an entertaining way. There are even optional quizzes that test your new-found knowledge of all things Egyptian.

Egypt: Old Kingdom has simple but still very thematic graphics. The easily identifiable icons ensure that the screen remains uncluttered whilst the neat animations show at a glance what each of your workers is up to. The full game lasts 300 turns, this seems like a lot, but as there isn’t that much micromanagement to worry about, you can often burn through turns at a rapid rate. Events drive the narrative forward; some of these will be small random incidents like an attack from a pack of hyenas. Others are based on specific historical happenings and the fallout of not dealing with these can be very harsh. Some may feel that the way that these scripted events push you in a certain direction make progress feel too linear. Others may find that the random events are too frustrating; an unexpected famine can really set your plans back. Sometimes these events can be mitigated, for instance, if you have the resources, you may be able to build damns before a flood hits and so avoid the loss of key buildings. Of course, you can always use the options to play a more open-ended game at the expense of historical flavour.

If you have even a passing interest in Egyptology then Egypt: Old Kingdom comes highly recommended. The streamlined civilisation building works well, although Civ veterans may find the range of control too limiting. The main choice appears to be between focusing on using military strength or diplomacy to bring the other tribes under Horus’s wing. With only six resources to worry about, it is easy to quickly assess how much you are producing and spending without the need for complicated menus. Furthermore, since the options in each region are limited by geographical constraints, the range of choices never becomes overwhelming. In fact, the exhaustive historical setting can make the game seem deeper and more complex than it actually is.