Category: Game Releases

It’s hard to openly encourage people to take an idea and re-purpose it. There’s a dangerous grey area where developers don’t do quite enough reinterpretation. You end up with something that’s akin to cloning. There are famous cases of this, especially on mobile marketplaces. Pirates Outlaws clearly has Slay the Spire in mind, and even though it doesn’t copy much more than the basic premise, it could have definitely learned more from that superior game.

As a pirate captain, your goal is to sail the dangerous seas, stopping at islands, coves, and settlements on the way to fight rivals or spend your loot. Each of these locations is a hub for either a fight against creatures of buccaneers, an event to dig for treasure or explore mysterious forest, or a shop to buy relics and heal up. Every stage has a final island, with a boss just waiting to steal everything you just earned.

There are lots of ways to potentially die on your way to that island. It’s a real grind to get there, and it may take a few runs before you even get to the first boss for the first time. But after battling your way up, killing enemies and gaining more abilities and items to get stronger, that first time you do it can feel super rewarding.

But it will be the last time you feel such accomplishment.

Partially because of the combat. It features the deck building methods of Slay the Spire, but it lacks the same sort of depth. The hand size is capped at five cards, and as that isn’t a problem in and of itself, I always felt like I was a draw away from the play I actually wanted. You have to toss your entire hand every turn, so there is no holding on to a card to wait for a potential combo in future turns. Anything you do has to be drawn into. You have a starting deck of around 10 cards, so you draw through it quickly. But since you can’t edit the deck at will, you really have to just deal with your probabilities until you hit a couple of islands and win some more cards. It’s hard to develop any real strategy until mid-way through a stage.

Card interactions aren’t as robust as Pirates Outlaws’ inspiration either. Knowing how to juggle your limited ammo (see: mana) while attempting to make interesting plays can be thought provoking. Most of the time, it’s just doing some quick math and figuring out how to do more damage than you take. When the odd brilliant play comes along, you feel like Jack Sparrow, outwitting his enemies with guile and gusto.

I often found myself just having to accept taking errant damage from early enemies while feeling like I had no agency in the matter. Part of that is just the nature of card games, of course. But the starting deck for the starting class, the Gunner, seems to lack much room for error. There are other classes, but you’ll play dozens of games as the Gunner before you can ever play them. Unless you’re willing to pay for it.

At the end of each run, on top of the experience you gain towards new cards, you get gold and repute. Both of these currencies can be spent on new chapters to play in, card packs to add to your collection, or heroes. But you don’t get nearly enough on runs to ever reasonably unlock even the cheapest secondary hero. It takes several runs to get comfortable with getting past the first stage consistently, but you’ll only bag just under 100 gold after beating the first boss. You’ll need to do that over ten times to unlock the Swordsman.

These other characters are diverse enough in passive skills, decks, and other metrics that being able to pick and choose between them at will would really help diversify what often feels like limited tactical gameplay. The struggle it takes to stack the necessary amount of gold to buy them – and in some cases, the repute to use them – is such that it discourages the want to stick with the game for the sake of experimentation. 

Or you can drop a real world dollar or two for an instant infusion of in-game gold and buy it outright. It’s hard to not feel just a little insulted by how blatantly this game is compelling you to participate in its IAP scheme. All that said, the game is only a one US dollar, and the biggest gold pack will set you back five. You’d have to buy two of them in order to have enough gold to have access to every hero you can spend it on and still won’t be able to unlock them all, as one can only be purchased with real money (another five dollars). You have to love the grind to get a lot out of Pirates Outlaws, because I don’t see any reason to pay $16 dollars for this game when the one it’s riffing on is just a few dollars more on Steam.

It’s a crying shame too, because it looks great. The animations and card effects are weak, but the bold colors of the environments and characters pop. The enemy designs are evocative and interesting, even if they are also just sort of static. The menus are well laid out and easy to read. The cheese in the trap at least looks delicious.

But I can only recommend Pirates Outlaws if you really want to pour a lot of time into it. It’s wickedly unbalanced both in combat and economically, and only the strong willed can survive to see it plunder. The learning curve is relatively low, but moments of true progress seem to only come so few and far between. Caving in and spending more money on the game just to speed up that process is just salty icing on a sour cake.

You know something is ‘serious business’ when Activision wakes up and decides to get involved. With the release of games like Fortnite and ARK last year, console-like FPS experiences on mobile are getting more and more mainstream attention.

The fact that Activision announced Call of Duty: Mobile last night at Unity’s GDC Keynote speech is more proof that this is an up-and-coming genre, at least amongst the Free-to-Play crowd. As far as we’re concerned here at Pocket Tactics, I’ve long held the belief that these kinds of games offer way forward in trying to escape the more cynical free-to-play trappings, but so far the results have been mixed.

Of course, it also depends if you like Shooters in general. Before now it’s not been a ‘big’ genre and in many ways it still isn’t, what with Fortnite pretty much dominating the show at the moment. I used to play Call of Duty when I was younger but I later switched to Battlefield, and more recently, Rainbow Six: Siege. Still, one can see the appeal of a real attempt to bring this franchise to mobile devices in the same way Fortnite did.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoWJGdqmBVQ?controls=0]

The trailer doesn’t giveaway much – most of it is actually from the third-person perspective, which isn’t helpful, but it seems to be using in-engine footage (and you see some first-person stuff here and there). It looks pretty decent, all things considered. Activision have partnered with Tencent for the project, and the game is built in Unity, if that matters to you.

Looking at what’s been said, Call of Duty: Mobile is probably going to be a kind of ‘greatest hits’ amalgamation of maps, weapons, abilities etc… from all the COD games, and the free-to-play nature means that there’s probably going to be a longer progression path to unlocking a lot of these features (compared to the premium games, anyway). Real-world currency unlocks are likely, or at least, in-game currency will be available for purchase. Call of Duty has always been a robust franchise when it comes to the PvP experience so, provided they don’t get carried away perhaps it won’t fall down the ‘Pay-to-Win’ trap door that befalls others.

No word on a release date but pre-registration is available for both iOS and Android users on the official website. We’ll be keeping an eye on this one for the moment and we’ll let you know if we hear anything else.

In space, no-one can hear you puzzle. They can’t hear you scream, either, as you draw up a new hand of cards, only to find the critical command you need to execute isn’t among them. Nor can they hear you swear as your latest run ends in ignominious failure. Again.

This is Assembly, a new digital adaptation of a card game from independent publisher Wren Games. The original could be played co-op or solo but on mobile you’ll only get the latter option. Good job there’s still plenty in this cunning puzzle game to entertain you.

The premise is that you’re on a malfunctioning satellite and need to use its glitchy systems to assemble an escape craft. In practice, it means you’re looking at a ring of twelve room cards. To win, you’ll need to get the matching module token in each room and lock it into place. The catch – of course, there’s a catch – is that when you deploy a module you get a random one and it’s placed in a random room.

Deploying modules is one of the commands you can issue each turn. A hand of three command cards you hold, drawn from a small deck, limits your choices of actions. You draw up after playing a command card but it’s a bitter bonus as cycling the command decks is also the game’s timer. Run through it three times and you’re dead. Other commands at your disposal involve moving those randomly-placed modules around. The simplest one swaps the position of any two. The others all rotate the ring of room cards either left, right or in the direction of your choice. 

The random placement of modules and of drawn commands is the key that makes this simplistic setup blossom into a strategy/puzzle game. It sets up a fascinating tension. Sometimes you’ll get lucky and deploy a module where it needs to be, or where you can easily move or swap it. More often you’ll have more work to do to get it where it needs to be. The question is: how much randomness are you willing to risk?

For example, you want to push out modules if you’ve got the right cards for it. But on each reshuffle of the command deck, all the room blueprint cards swap around randomly. So there’s no point in moving them round close to when the timer expires. But the same command card that adds modules to the game also locks them in place. So push your luck too much and you won’t have the commands needed to benefit from any luck you might happen to attract.

Instead, it’s all about keeping a balance while praying to the RNG gods to give you a break. You’ll need to assess the card deck, timer, and module position and decide whether it’s worth swapping or moving cards around. You also have other choices at your disposal for emergencies. You can discard your whole hand to choose any command. And you’re also given a role, a one-off special power. Noah the Systems Engineer, for example, can lock three modules instead of the usual one.

Wren Games is a small studio who built this app themselves and it shows in the presentation. It’s functional but effective. There are a couple of annoying interface niggles, like having to dismiss the tutorial boxes every game. Sometimes the game allows you to select, but not carry out, illegal plays. The worst is the rotation dialog box whose unhelpful arrows make it look like rooms are rotating when in fact it’s modules that rotate. These are minor irritations but compounded by a lack of an undo button. Such frustrations are quite minor, though, when each game only takes around five minutes. 

Despite this, Assembly does a surprising job of launching you into deep space. The ice-cold orchestral soundtrack and starfield background help a lot. But the theme meshes well with the straightforward mechanics. That makes it a tasty choice for bite-sized puzzling. Much of the joy comes from figuring out strategies to reliably beat the game, of course. Once you get there a choice of difficulty levels and the random factors provides decent replay value. It’s got all the pieces needed to assemble a satisfying conundrum to set yourself.

It’s been an interesting week as far as looking into the future goes – between potential Pokemon Go successor Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, and this morning’s news that a big PC mod is being ported to mobile, I’m hoping the free-to-play space will get its act together and give us some half-decent experiences for a change.

Until and if that happens though, we’ve got you covered with reviews of premium games like Card Crusade and Heroes of Flatlandia. Board games especially are getting better and better, with more on the way. We’ve already got reviews of Assembly and Tides of Time waiting to drop next week, but that’s just scratching the surface of what 2019’s got in store.

Meanwhile, in mobile gaming…

Out Now

Stardew Valley (iOS & Android) (Review)

Probably the biggest highlight of the week is the news that Stardew Valley has now finally hit Android. Make sure you check out our review for our full thoughts on the game, but just in case you’ve not heard of this before it’s a game where you spend your time either tending your farm or exploring a dungeon for crafting materials (for the farm). There’s some relationship building thrown in there for good measure as well. The mobile version specifically now enjoys some platform-suitable improvements which the android version is getting from the off. 

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHUqhYslji4?controls=0]

Battle Fleet: Ground Assault (iOS Universal) – Full review coming soon!

Mythical City Games return with another entry in their turn-based strategy/war game series Battle Fleet with a land-war focused entry, Battle Fleet: Ground Assault. Owen was rather luke-warm on the previous entry, 2014’s Battle Fleet 2, and Wargamer.com’s Bill Gray reviewed this latest entry on PC last year. He was a bit on the lukewarm side as well but then this is a heavily abstracted experience – it only features tanks, for starters, and is definitely more on the ‘arcade’ end of the war/strategy spectrum. Still, it does some interesting things with hidden movement and range finding, and I always thought it seemed more suited for mobile audiences.

The iOS version is priced at an incredibly premium $9.99, so we’ll try and get you a full review as soon as we can to see if this one measures up to the rest of the genre, but for the curious here’s a gameplay trailer:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poMVUBQ6bO4?controls=0]

Cartoon Network Arcade (iPhone)

Cartoon Network has put out some decent enough mobile titles, all things considered. Last year’s Teen Titans GO! Figure was especially engaging, and once again shows what you can do with a popular IP if you’re not just out to make a quick buck.

The Cartoon Network Arcade isn’t a game per se, but an app that features a collection of mini-games based around popular IP, and there’s an collectables aspect to it as well. There’s also supposed to be some interactivity features with regards to getting unlocks while watching a show at the same time. The app is free so it doesn’t cost you anything to explore if for yourself, but we felt it was worth a mention given how well CN treats mobile gaming at the moment.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7JLT6rZ8Y0?controls=0]

Updates & Pre-Orders

Holy Potatoes! A Spy Story!? (iOS Universal)

Daylight Studios have entertained many a mobile gamer with their charming blend of deep, action-filled games and potatoes. It’s been over a year since Holy Potatoes! We’re in Space!?, and now the developer has released a new title on PC – Holy Potatoes! A Spy Story!?

Desktop warriors aren’t the only ones who get to enjoy this new spudtastic experience however – the game will be coming to iOS on March 28^th. Pre-Orders are available now, if you want to spend the $4.99 on it now, otherwise the game (and our review), will drop at the end of the month. Not sure if it’ll be coming to Android, so far only Holy Potatoes! A Weapon Shop!? Has crossed that divide.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVQaFRNDIoM?controls=0]

Fortnite (iOS & Android)

Those still keeping up with the mobile version of Fortnite might be interested in the changes that have come in the recent 8.10 patch. As well as adding in a new vehicle (The Baller, which looks like… well, a ball), vending machines and a new map marker, this update has also change the competition pool.

Now, mobile and Switch users are lumped in together, instead of Switch users competing against their console brethren. I’m not so sure this is doing mobile users any favours – reports suggest the Switch and mobile versions are basically the same, but I would have thought the Switch interface was closer to a controller than it was a mobile touch device. Time will tell, I guess, but if you suddenly start winning/losing more, this may be why.

Sales

Lots of sales on either one app store or the other this week, which is a shame, but let’s round up what we have:

Codito Development (All items $0.99)

These guys are having their own catalogue sale on iOS at the moment, and you can get the following games for just a buck:

Meanwhile, there are two games we spotted going cheap on Android (but not their iOS counterpart) that you may be interested in:

Strike Team Hydra (Review): $0.99

Hydra was Wave Light’s most recent game prior to the release of Shieldwall Chronicles, which we enjoyed. It’s the developer’s usual tactical RPG flair, but with more sci-fi. 

Planescape Torment (Review): $5.99

Not sure why Beamdog chose to discount this game specifically, but there you go – half price on Android. Did you know they’re working on a digital adaptation of the Axis & Allies table-top wargame?

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