Category: Game Releases

Welcome to the Weekender, your weekly look at the best new games, sales, and updates. This week features new games and sales across five different genres of games… which means there’s something for everyone!

With Gamescom dominating the industry at large these past few days, we thought we’d have a more low-key week: check out our reviews of One More Button and Holedown if you haven’t already. Otherwise, we gave our guides to the Best Rougelikes & Best RPGs on mobile a bit of a dust off. Also, did you hear? Reigns is getting a Game of Thrones spin-off! 

Out Now

One Hour One Life for Mobile (iOS Universal and Android) – Full Review Coming Soon!

One Hour One Life for Mobile is a multiplayer survival game where you have to stave off starvation and the cold and craft what you need to survive. Time passes quickly, and the game occurs over many generations. A year happens in a minute and birth to death in one hour, so there’s no time to waste. Civilization has collapsed, and it is up to you, your descendants, and other players to rebuild it. It’s each generation’s job to make things a bit easier for those to come by crafting necessities and securing superior shelter and equipment.

The game is adapted from the original desktop version of One Hour One Life and it’s a really cool idea. I like how each generation builds on the next, not just for your particular family but for everybody playing the game in aggregate. It’s an intriguing micro/macro dichotomy.

Unfortunately, the controls are too finicky for my liking. You do a lot of swiping in one direction or another and it is easy to do the wrong thing. I found myself making multiple attempts to do basic things and needing to do a fair amount of positioning of my avatar a well. I’d wager it gets better as you get used to it, but I’d prefer that controls weren’t an acquired taste. Also, since the game is online multiplayer you can’t wander away from the app for long. If you do you’ll come back dead (from starvation or having disconnected from the game). This isn’t a huge deal if you can make time for good-sized, uninterrupted play sessions.

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Powerless (iOS Universal)

Interactive fiction meets simulation in Powerless, an “interactive doomsday simulator.” The source of the doom is the sun. A coronal mass ejection is hurtling toward earth and when it hits our atmosphere it will disable electronics the world over. It’s into this new world a host of characters awake, and you are put into their shoes to work through a variety of crisis like delivering a baby or landing a helicopter. It’s a compelling post-apocalyptic world and has an interesting variety of characters you can get to know and develop. Worth a look if you’re into the genre.

Rome: Total War (iOS Universal) (Review)

One of the greatest RTS/turn-based strategy games ever is now available on the iPhone. The app is universal, so you can play on either and share games across them, and the developer videos look great. Unfortunately, the universal part isn’t working on my account for some reason, so I’m unable to provide any impressions or comparisons to iPad. I’ll drop something into next week’s Out Now if I can get it sorted out.  

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Front Armies RTS (iOS Universal and Android) – Full Review Coming Soon!

Front Armies is a premium real-time strategy game with simple graphics and good but not great gameplay. The limitations are it’s not terribly deep and you can only play against the AI or local multiplayer. Still, it’s not a bad game and is relatively inexpensive. 

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Sales

Project Highrise (iOS Universal and Android: $2.99) (Review)

Skyscraper simulator Project Highrise puts you in charge of the growth and management of a building. You decide how to grow—office space, shops and restaurants, hotels, and more—and work to attract visitors and keep your tenants happy by offering the right mix of amenities. It came out earlier this year and is on sale for the first time.

Transistor (iOS Universal: $2.99)

Supergiant’s RPG hit, sci-fi title Transistor, is on sale for $3. You wield a weapon of extraordinary power as you fight through a futuristic city in this action RPG.

Chrono Trigger (iOS Universal & Android: $6.99)

Yet another great example from our list of best RPGs, Square Enix’s classic dungeon-crawler CHRONO TRIGGER is 30% off. 

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

A quick news bulletin for you this morning – those of you who were excited by the prospect of playing quirky city-builder Tropico on your iPad will definitely be interested in what we’ve got to share with you.

Feral Interactive have put out a gameplay video showing a direct iPad feed. You get a good look at the menu, the graphics and how the interface handles – especially with the touch inputs registering as little circles – which is cool. It’s just shy of fifteen minutes in length, and we’ve embedded it below for you:

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Yesterday, the developers released the long awaited iPhone port for Rome: Total War, making that a fully universal iOS game. Unfortunately Nick wasn’t able to get the iPhone version to download in time for today’s Weekender, so we’ve got no hands-on impressions for you.

Tropico for iPad is due out later this year, before the end of Autumn.

The developers of Reigns & Reigns: Her Majesty could be bringing us a Game of Thrones-inspired sequel/spin-off/license game in the near future.

Our eagle eyed brethren over at Pocket Gamer spotted a tweet from the official Reigns account yesterday afternoon that was nothing but an image – a map of Westeros (as imagined by the TV Show), rendered in the familiar art style of Nerial’s innovative narrative game.

pic.twitter.com/Ibk7tWyAr1

— Reigns (@reignsgame) August 21, 2018

There’s really nothing else to say without needless speculation, although PG noted we’re approaching the 1 year anniversary of Reigns: Her Majesty’s release date.

What do you guys think? Would you get behind a Games of Thrones skinned reigns? Do we think this is officially licensed or perhaps just inspired? Answers on a post-card!

Mobile puzzle games are a dime a dozen. Many take the path of least resistance, despite the genre being one of the most open to innovation and new concepts. That’s why One More Button stands out despite its simplicity. It takes familiar mechanics and turns them on their head to make for a fun, easy-to-understand, and challenging

One More Button is the sequel to the mobile title No More Buttons, a hand-drawn platform-based puzzler with an intriguing control scheme. It’s more of the same interesting design, and could nearly be called the same game, just an extension of the original. With that said, it’s a great twist on typical ‘move this there, now stand here’ formulate that all-too-often permeates on-the-go puzzlers.

The premise is extremely simple. You play a small yellow creature with one eye looking to reach a level’s end goal. There’s only one problem: There are small bright yellow blocks in your way with lots of different arrows on them. They represent the directions your character can move in. The game doesn’t make this explicitly clear at the beginning, so before you start tapping around trying to figure things out, it can be a bit confusing if you didn’t play the first title.

You’ll notice that there’s no on-screen controls to move your character, and you can’t just tap where you want it to go. That’s because there aren’t any traditional controls. Each maze-like level instead finds you tapping on those yellow blocks with arrows on them, because those are also the controls. Pressing on one of the blocks with a right arrow will move your character right, and so on. It’s an interesting deconstruction of puzzle controls that tie up the very way you control the game as part of each stage as a whole, and it’s a refreshing change of pace because of it.

The goal of each level is obviously to reach the exit the end, marked with a block with a lock on it. This is achieved by pushing around the arrows themselves onto special areas on the map with the outline of where the buttons should go or figuring out how to push the blocks away and into areas where they aren’t blocking your path. It’s quite simple to get accustomed to early on as you’re getting your bearings, but then the game throws quite a few curveballs into the mix to keep you on your toes.

Once you’ve become adept at clearing out paths with its rather unorthodox control scheme, it’s time to tackle special unlockable areas and blocks that require you to flip them around, as you won’t be able to slide them on their designated spaces if they’re pointing in the wrong direction. Luckily, tapping on a button offers precise moves, if a bit frustrating since you’re always going to be searching where the other directional controls are with each puzzle setup. But this setup completely deconstructs the way typical mobile games approach control, which is the most admirable part of the whole thing, and something you’ll come to appreciate as you play.

If you make a mistake, unfortunately, you’ll have to simply restart the entire level. There is no undo button for your last move, so if you find that you’ve pushed a block all the way it can go to the bottom of the screen accidentally, it’s stuck there. It’s prudent to try and remember the moves you’ve made because of this, which can be a bit frustrating in later levels. There’s no real strategic reason to exclude a ‘rewind’ step, so it’s strange that the only option is to erase all progress.

While there are also plenty of levels and mazes to solve, each level isn’t very large, and only takes a few minutes to complete. This isn’t so much a negative, but a hope for longer, more complex mazes in any future content instalments or sequels. Since you’ll have to restart levels several times using the ‘undo’ feature, you’ll be spending plenty of time in each one, anyway.

One More Button is a fun experiment in changing the way players approach and think about puzzle games as well as the way they’re controlled. It’s not absolutely perfect in its execution and could use a bit polish for any future iterations, but it’s a fun diversion for a few minutes at a time while waiting at the doctor’s office or on your commute.