Category: Game Releases

New game releases.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Vectary 3.0 Released

Vectary is an online 3D application we covered late last year.  Since that video, Vectary 3.0 has been released with several UI changes, new features and massive changes to their subscription model.  The primary new features of Vectary 3.0 include:

  • An Updated and streamlined user interface
  • New getting started tutorial
  • New deformers (Symmetry, Bend, Array, Boolean, Twist, Stretch, Spherify)
  • New parametric primitive generation.
  • Dark mode option

You can read more about the new features in the Vectary blog.  Perhaps the biggest change to Vectary is the new subscriptions, which are both more limited in the free form and vastly cheaper for the Premium plan.  Details of the new subscription tiers:

image

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgvMANtWaLA&w=853&h=480]

GameDev News

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Review: Gem Rush (Board Game)

If you want to consign your game to anonymity and a life of wandering aimlessly in the darkest depths of the App Store, then naming it Gem Rush should do the job nicely. To be fair, the horribly generic title is inherited from the physical board game, and in the world of tabletop games, the words ‘gem’ and ‘rush’ can actually be mentioned in the same breath without everyone’s eyes glazing over. Gem Rush does actually task the players with wandering dark depths. However, this is because the players are dwarves and we all know that they like nothing better than exploring underground caverns and collecting treasure.

Gem Rush is a game for one to seven players and can be played either cooperatively or competitively. At the start of the game, all of the players begin in the central cavern; the rest of the mine is unexplored. The starting cavern has several exits but to pass through one of them you will have to pay the correct combination of gems. Pass through an exit and the next room will be revealed. The dwarf who discovered the new room then has the option to rotate it to confirm its final orientation. Some exits will only require a single gem to pass through but score just one point. Other exits may require the player to spend half a dozen gems but the points rewarded will be far more impressive. The first person to reach the target score (which is usually twenty points but can be changed) is declared the winner.

Gem Rush 1

You begin the game with four cards; each shows two different treasures, most of which will be coloured gems. You want to try and use your cards as efficiently as possible. If an exit requires a blue and a black gem, then playing a single card that shows both a blue and a black gem is the optimum way to go. You may have to spend two cards, one with a blue gem and one with a black but in this case, the other two depicted gems will be wasted.

Apart from gems, your cards may show other treasures. Diamond dust is a wild resource and can count as a gem of any other colour. Orichalcum has the potential to score extra points, whilst echoglass will copy the colour of another gem that was played at the same time. Finally, warp stones will let you immediately teleport and build at an exit of your choice.

Gem Rush 4

All of the caverns have a special ability; some of these, like the mine carts, are free to use and let you rapidly move around the mine. Usually, your dwarf will have only three movement points, and later in the game when the mine expands in size, mine carts are an effective way of getting around. Most of the other special abilities will end your turn but they do offer ways of acquiring more gem cards. Some allow you to keep drawing from the deck until you uncover treasures of a specific type. Then there are rooms that require you to exchange treasures for different ones. Others are blind draws from the card deck and some are even more risky, causing you to draw a set number of cards and only keeping cards of a specific type.

This may mean that you end up empty-handed, which will have you knotting your beard in frustration. Overall, there are a wide variety of rooms and as the map expands you will have a satisfying range of options. The gem currency system is definitely more luck based than in a game like Splendor.  There is certainly less opportunity for forward planning, but this unpredictability forms a big part of Gem Rush’s charm. 

Gem Rush 2

The cooperative game introduces a time limit, as at the end of each turn three cards are removed from the deck. This means that you have twenty-five turns to score as many points as possible. It works well enough; you can even invite AI players to help you out. However, it still feels like a missed opportunity to add some much-needed interaction to proceedings. Maybe if the players were allowed to swap cards or combine their abilities like in Pandemic it would have been more interesting.

The interface is very professional, allowing the user to spin and zoom the map to their heart’s content. It obligingly facilitates your actions; finding the quickest routes and automatically selecting the correct colours when you play echoglass cards. Graphically the game remains close to the board game. Discovering new caverns and watching the mine network grow in size feels very satisfying. The black gems can be difficult to make out and the icons are a little small. Thankfully, tapping on a card will bring up a full description of the room’s power so it isn’t really a big issue. The weedy music is more of a let down; it plays on a short loop and quickly becomes tedious. One glaring omission is that after the decent tutorial, you are left high and dry, as there isn’t a separate breakdown of the rules. I do not want to have to watch an entire tutorial just to clarify a single rule.

Gem Rush 3

Even on the most difficult of the three levels, the AI doesn’t really put up that much of a fight. You will either want to play locally against friends or sign up to play online. Games can be either competitive or cooperative, and you will find an impressive range of options. You can choose to play real-time games with a range of different time limits. Or, you can play asynchronously with either twelve or twenty-four hour deadlines. It is just a pity that the online side of the game is so sparsely populated at the moment.

Gem Rush is easy to pick up and play, with games taking less than fifteen minutes to complete. The app has a comprehensive range of options and worked without any problems. Not many games have both cooperative and competitive modes of play, although some more content such as a campaign mode for the solo player would have been appreciated. The lack of player interaction and fairly high reliance on luck means that some turns can pass without you being able to accomplish anything. However, the game remains fun and satisfying with the last few turns growing increasingly tense.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

HoloLens 2, Azure Kinect and UE4 Support Announced

Today at MWC 19 in Barcelona, Microsoft announced the second release of their HoloLens augment reality headset.  Costing an eye watering $3,500 or $150/month, the HoloLens is not a mass market or consumer device.  The HoloLens 2 includes improved sensors, a better display, improved ergonomics and more.  The Microsoft blog describes the 3 pillars of HoloLens 2 development:

Immersion is greatly enhanced by advancements across the board, including in the visual display system, making holograms even more vibrant and realistic. We have more than doubled the field of view in HoloLens 2, while maintaining the industry-leading holographic density of 47 pixels per degree of sight. HoloLens 2 contains a new displaySide view of sleek black HoloLens 2 system that enables us to achieve these significant advances in performance at low power. We have also completely refreshed the way you interact with holograms in HoloLens 2. Taking advantage of our new time-of-flight depth sensor, combined with built-in AI and semantic understanding, HoloLens 2 enables direct manipulation of holograms with the same instinctual interactions you’d use with physical objects in the real world. In addition to the improvements in the display engine and direct manipulation of holograms, HoloLens 2 contains eye-tracking sensors that make interacting with holograms even more natural. You can log in with Windows Hello enterprise-grade authentication through iris recognition, making it easy for multiple people to quickly and securely share the device.

Comfort is enhanced by a more balanced center of gravity, the use of light carbon-fiber material and a new mechanism for donning the device without readjusting. We’ve improved the thermal management with new vapor chamber technology and accounted for the wide physiological variability in the size and shape of human heads by designing HoloLens 2 to comfortably adjust and fit almost anyone. The new dial-in fit system makes it comfortable to wear for hours on end, and you can keep your glasses on because HoloLens 2 adapts to you by sliding right over them. When it’s time to step out of mixed reality, flip the visor up and switch tasks in seconds. Together, these enhancements have more than tripled the measured comfort and ergonomics of the device.

Time-to-value is accelerated by Microsoft mixed reality applications like Dynamics 365 Remote Assist, Dynamics 365 Layout and the new Dynamics 365 Guides applications. In addition to the in-box value, our ecosystem of mixed reality partners provides a broad range of offerings built on HoloLens that deliver value across a range of industries and use cases. This partner ecosystem is being supplemented by a new wave of mixed reality entrepreneurs who are realizing the potential of devices like HoloLens 2 and the Azure services that give them the spatial, speech and vision intelligence needed for mixed reality, plus battle-tested cloud services for storage, security and application insights.

Building on the unique capabilities of the original HoloLens, HoloLens 2 is the ultimate intelligent edge device. And when coupled with existing and new Azure services, HoloLens 2 becomes even more capable, right out of the box.

HoloLens 2 will be available this year at a price of $3,500. Bundles including Dynamics 365 Remote Assist start at $125/month. HoloLens 2 will be initially available in the United States, Japan, China, Germany, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Australia and New Zealand. Customers can preorder HoloLens 2 starting today at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/hololens/buy.

In addition to the HoloLens 2, Microsoft also announced the release of Azure Kinect, an updated and more powerful version of the Kinect motion sensor previously bundled with the XBox 360/One. 

The Azure Kinect DK is a developer kit that combines our industry-leading AI sensors in a single device. At its core is the time-of-flight depth sensor we developed for Front and side view of compact silver Azure Kinect DK deviceHoloLens 2, high-def RGB camera and a 7-microphone circular array that will enable development of advanced computer vision and speech solutions with Azure. It enables solutions that don’t just sense but understand the world — people, places, things around it. A good example of such a solution in the healthcare space is Ocuvera, which is using this technology to prevent patients from falling in hospitals. Every year in the U.S. alone, over 1 million hospital patients fall each year, and 11,000 of those falls are fatal. With Azure Kinect, the environmental precursors to a fall can be determined and a nurse notified to get to patients before they fall. Initially available in the U.S. and China, the Azure Kinect DK is available for preorder today at $399. Visit Azure.com/Kinect for more info.

Epic Games were also on-hand to announce Unreal Engine support for the HoloLens 2:

Epic Games today announced that support for Microsoft HoloLens 2 will be coming to Unreal Engine 4 starting in May 2019. The announcement was made during an onstage presentation by Epic Games Founder and CEO Tim Sweeney during the Microsoft keynote at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.
This development has been highly anticipated by augmented reality (AR) communities across entertainment, visualization, manufacturing, design, and education. In a future release, Unreal Engine will fully support HoloLens 2 with streaming and native platform integration. Unreal Engine support for HoloLens 1 currently enables streaming to the device.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVFJPcoajsM&w=853&h=480]

GameDev News

Posted on by — Leave a comment

The Weekender: Atypical Edition

This week’s update is a bit wordier than usual, mainly because the usual format didn’t seem to fit what limited information, I have to share this time around. Before we get on to the main event, one bit of news I will share because it came in my Inbox today.

Feral Interactive are currently hard at work porting Tropico over to iPhone. Things seem to be coming a long well, because yesterday they shared a few screenshots over twitter. We really enjoyed Tropico when we reviewed it last year, and hopefully iPhone users will get to enjoy it soon as well.

Meanwhile, in the world of el presidente mobile games…

Out Now

There’s actually nothing definitive I want to highlight this week. Perhaps I’ve not been as in-touch as I normally would have been (had some days off), but nothing seems to have jumped out at me.

A few of the other sites seem to be talking about Immortal Rogue, which to be fair does look good and will be going on our ‘To Do’ list. The only thing is, according to the App Store page the game was released at the end of January. Google Play doesn’t give me enough information to determine when that version was released, so it’s possible this week marks the appearance of that version.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_w4uN-nhwM4?controls=0]

On our end, I’ve got people reviewing Knights of the Card Table, Wars Across the World and the digital adaptation of the Gem Rush board game.

Addendum: This completely slipped our mind, but Shieldwall Chronicles from PT favourites Wave Light Games released on iOS today. We’ve got this on our review list as well, so stay tuned!

Updates

Star Traders: Frontiers has updated again this week with lots of tweaks and balances – if you’re interested, they’re actually working towards the eventual release of Carrier-class ships in the game, with accompanying fighters. Again, even if you don’t use Steam, we highly recommend keeping an eye on the official Steam page, because a lot of information as to the current road-map and what goes in every update is posted there.

Other than that, Evolution has had a few updates and tweaks since launch. A lot of major issues, especially on Android, have been solved one way or another (the minimum specs for Android devices has been raised for the moment, for example), and they’re working through the rest of the outstanding issues as well.

Sales

Elder Signs: Omens (iPhone, iPad & Android): $0.99

A previous candidate on our Best Board Games list, Elder Signs is now down to a buck on iOS, a little bit more on Android. Note that there’s different app entries for the iPhone and the iPad version of the game, so make sure you buy the right one.

Crashlands (iOS & Android) (Review): $4.99

One of our favourite action RPGS and Diablo-like games is enjoying a small reduction, if you’ve yet to give It a try yourself. Please note that it has been cheaper in the past, typically $3.99 but in 2017 went as low as $2.99.

Cat Lady: The Card Game (iOS & Android): $0.99

This is a simple and engaging card game adapted from a physical game of the same name. It’s down to just a buck – not the most ‘serious’ of experience, but good for some casual fun.

Wars Across the World (iOS Universal): $0.99

A more serious war game, the base game for this is currently down to just a buck, although we’re unclear as to how much content you actually get. At the time of writing there’s ten IAPs consisting of individual scenarios. We’ve actually got a review in progress if you want to wait, but so far, our reviewer has been quite impressed with what he’s played.

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

Posted on by — Leave a comment

New DLC Available – Galactic Civilizations III: Retribution Expansion, 10% off!

Galactic Civilizations III: Retribution Expansion, all new content for Galactic Civilizations III is Now Available on Steam and is 10% off!*

What started as a crusade has become a war of retribution. Your civilization has uncovered powerful artifacts, discovered how to construct hypergates, encountered two new major civilizations, and much more in this exciting expansion to the award-winning space 4X game.

*Offer ends February 28 at 10AM Pacific Time

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Review: A Few Minutes of Glory

As high concepts go, a text-based real-time strategy game might not sound like the most obvious of mash-ups. A Few Minutes of Glory may look like it dates back to the dawn of the computer age but it is still an intriguing proposition. First of all, you build a medieval army by gathering and spending resources. When you are confident that your army is strong enough, you send them into battle against the AI controlled opposing force. It may sound like Age of Empires without the graphics but each game only lasts for a maximum of four minutes, even less if you play in fast mode. The victor is the first side to earn ten glory points or to have the most glory when the time runs out.

There are four resource-generating buildings, which produce food, wood, gold and stone. Food is needed for basic military units, wood for ranged units, gold is required for advanced military units and stone can be used to construct defensive structures. You may also use wood to build new production buildings, the snag being that the cost increases with each new building. Each production building will produce one resource every second.

A few minutes of glory review 4

Players begin the game with access to five randomly determined military units. To construct one of these units simply tap the box next to it and pay the relevant resources. You will then need to deploy the new unit to either an offensive or defensive role. Constructing walls and towers can further enhance defensive capabilities. Units fall into one of three overriding categories; infantry, ranged and cavalry. There are a total of fifteen different units, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Some of the more eclectic types include camels that are great at giving enemy cavalry the hump and monks who have the ability to convert enemy units.

Before battle commences the attacking force has the opportunity to ransack the local countryside for some additional resources. Next up is the combat screen, which displays a breakdown of the opposing forces. In each round of combat, units attack in order of their initiative values and will target a randomly determined enemy unit. The chances of success are calculated by comparing attack strength against the defending unit’s armour rating. There is a handy reference list of all of the units and their initiative attack and defensive values. If the attacking side wins then they are awarded two glory points, whilst a defensive victory only earns one point of glory. After a battle, the attacker has to wait around thirty seconds before they are allowed to initiate another assault, which gives their opponent a bit of time to recover. If either side is vastly outnumbered then they will get a substantial fury bonus added to their attacks. As further consolation, the production buildings of the losing side will be increased by one level because a fear of further defeat makes the population work even harder.

A few minutes of glory review 2

If the timer runs down to zero before either side has managed to earn ten glory points then a final mass battle takes place. The defensive and offensive units on both sides join together, with the winning side earning between two to six points of glory. The potential to earn so much glory in a single confrontation can swing the entire battle.

As the saying goes, one battle does not win a war. The ultimate goal in A Few Minutes of Glory is to win the war by being victorious in ten consecutive battles. After every successful fight, you will have access to a new power; these include resource building upgrades and improved units. Beware though, because a single defeat will bring your civilization crashing down and you will have to start all over again.

A few minutes of glory review 1

I have regularly settled down for a game of A Few Minutes of Glory, hoping that something would click. Unfortunately, I always came away feeling that I was missing something. On paper, the interplay between the abilities of the different units sounds intriguing. However, it often feels like you are poking around in the dark, throwing your limited choice of troops into battle without any real idea of how things are going to turn out. The presentation is so sparse that I could not shake the feeling that I was just toying with a spreadsheet. It is a criticism that has been leveled at the Football Manager games, but at least then the smart presentation and licensing agreements managed to hide this from the player’s view.

In a world of endless sequels and thinly disguised copycat releases, I admire the developer for trying to create something different. I like how the rules try and give a thematic reason for the design decisions. For instance, the inflationary cost of production buildings is explained in terms of the increasing scarcity of available land. I like the variety of units, the fast pace and the tough challenge (even the game’s developer cannot beat the AI on the hardest difficulty level).

A few minutes of glory review 5

Unfortunately, A Few Minutes of Glory feels like an intriguing concept transformed into a pretty dull game. It amounts to watching your resources increase and then clicking on boxes to purchase units. The decisions never feel interesting or involved and it soon becomes repetitive. The heart of A Few Minutes of Glory is the battles and these really need to be represented in a more satisfying way than just a scrolling list. The results flash by so quickly that it fails to build any sense of tension. I don’t expect fancy graphics; a little atmospheric flavour text describing the flow of battle would have done the job. As it stands, the battles feel very anticlimactic. Calculations are made, numbers flash across the screen and then you are told whether you have won or lost. It is then back to gathering more resources, buying more units and doing the whole thing all over again.