Category: Game Releases

By Joe Robinson 30 Jul 2018

Welcome to the Weekender, your weekly look at the best new games, sales, and updates. We’ve got some great new gaming options, including two completely free and very fun titles. There’s also a smattering of sales including a rare sale on one of the best mobile games ever.

Out Now

Mind Cards (iPhone)

Mind Cards is a new solo card game in the same vein as TinyTouchtales classic hit Card Crawl. In it you must work your way through a 21-card deck in order to win. Some cards are monsters you must fight, and they deal damage which reduces your life. Some are potions that heal lost life. Some cards are food and replenish another of the game’s finite resources. You use food with every card you play. Some cards are gems which allow you to deal out cards to all open spaces. You can do this without gems, but it will cost life instead. Finally, there are special attack cards that hit monsters without taking damage. The goal of the game is to use every card without losing all of your life and it’s a fair bit harder than it sounds. As you play you earn gold and can unlock more special cards for use in future games. Mind Cards is completely free with no ads or IAPs, so if solo card games are at all your thing, there’s no reason not to check it out!

The Horus Heresy: Legions (iOS Universal and Android)

There’s a new CCG on the block, The Horus Heresy: Legions is Warhammer 40K’s entrance into the crowded market. Can they take a bite out of Hearthstone and others? It’s hard to know for sure and certainly time will tell, but the easy answer is probably not. The Horus Heresy: Legions features pretty-standard gameplay for the genre. You pick a legion which dictates card choices. You take on opponents and try to reduce their life to nil for the win. The only innovation I see is a guild system, which has the potential to be cool. I’ve always wondered why CCGs didn’t implement guilds as a way to keep players invested. Having a play group to test and play with is huge. It’s free with the usual IAPs, so easy enough to check out if you dig the IP or want a new CCG to play around with.

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Amethlion (iOS Universal and Android)

Amethlion is an explore/craft/survive game with an open world full of quests, dungeons, and mysteries. The graphics and music are a bit basic, even for the genre, but there’s a lot to explore, build, and you know, kill. Oh, and you can get pets. There’s a big update with new items, quests, and areas of the world to explore coming next Tuesday on iOS. The update is already live on Android. It’s not perfect but the developer seems receptive to feedback and the game is just a couple bucks.

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Nishan Shaman (iOS Universal)

Nishan Shaman is a rhythm game where you control Nishan’s spirit travels into the void on a quest. She protects herself from the dangerous in that place through a spiritual shield maintained through drumming, which you control. As creatures hit her shield you drum them into nothingness, protecting her as she continues her journey. It’s simple yet quite engaging. I was immediately nodding along with the music and smiling broadly as I drummed the monsters away. Nishan Shaman has a cool mythology and cultural elements, a great story, and beautiful graphics and music. Oh, and it is completely free. You should download it right now.

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Battleheart 2 (iOS Universal and Android) (Review)

Ok, so I may have been a little harsh a couple weeks ago when Battleheart 2 came out for iOS. I wasn’t, and still am not, a big fan of how little the game progressed in the seven years between the original and sequel. I may have discounted how good of a game it still is, for what it is. It’s out now on Android and I’ve played about 10 hours in the intervening two weeks. A good chunk of that was the co-operative multiplayer, which while unintuitive to set up, does work pretty well and is a fun addition to the game. You and a friend just pick the same room name and it connects you. Battleheart 2 is quite the grind fest, there’s no story to speak of, and it’s certainly not getting any awards for innovation, but, if you enjoy real-time action and slowly improving a party of adventurers you could do a lot worse.

Sales

Dungelot Shattered Lands (iOS Universal and Android): Free on iOS (Review)

One of the world’s better roguelike games, Dungelot: Shattered Lands features fun and challenging gameplay and a lot of persistent benefits to gain as you play to make the next run even better. It’s free on iOS and you should get it if you don’t already own it. 

Punch Club (iOS Universal and Android): $.99 on iOS

Tinybuild, the makers of the aforementioned, have their popular boxing sim on sale as well for just a buck on iOS. 

Crashlands (iOS Universal and Android): $3.99 on iOS (Review)

Now we’re talking people. Crashlands might be my favorite mobile game. It’s certainly my favorite explore/craft/survive game on mobile. If you love that genre as much as I do and haven’t tried it out now’s the time, it’s very rarely on sale, and $4 is a steal for this one. 

Kingdom: New Lands (iOS Universal and Android): $4.99 (Review)

Have you played the side-scrolling, genre-mashing Kingdom: New Lands? It’s part tower-defense, part city builder, part simulation, part puzzle, and all kinds of challenging. It’s also on sale for $5, half off.

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

A cursory glance at the promotional screenshots and you could be forgiven for dismissing Isle of Skye as simply a Carcassonne clone with a Scottish setting. Thankfully, although it shares the same tile-laying mechanic, Isle of Skye has many clever ideas of its own. So much so that the board game has won a host of awards, including the prestigious 2016 Kennerspiel des Jahres.

As clan chieftain, you expand your territory and strengthen your clan in the hope of being crowned King of the Isle of Skye. You do this by purchasing and placing landscape tiles. These tiles feature a mix of highlands, water and mountain areas and must be placed so that the different landscape types match. There are also roads to consider. These do not need to be placed so that they link to other roads, but to earn the maximum income, it is advantageous to have a connected road network. Tiles also feature a range of other point scoring opportunities, including livestock, ships and various types of buildings Finally, a small number of tiles contain scrolls that award bonus points at the end of the game for fulfilling certain requirements.

The first significant difference from Carcassonne is that each player works on building his or her own individual landscape. You may think that this would lead to a rather solitary gaming experience, with little interaction between competing players. Happily though, the brilliantly designed auction system ensures that the game feels both competitive and involving. Before we go to auction, however, we need some cash. Players earn a basic five coins per turn; additional income is earned from tiles that feature whisky barrels as long as they are connected to your castle by road.  There is also a catch-up mechanism that rewards extra coins to players who have fewer points.

With coins burning holes in our sporrans it is time to get trading. At the beginning of each round, all players draw three tiles. They then have to secretly choose one tile to discard and decide how much they are willing to pay for each of the remaining two. Then, in turn order, each player has the opportunity to use any remaining coins to purchase a single tile from an opponent. This works brilliantly, as you have to carefully set prices with the aim of purchasing tiles for the best possible price. However, set these too low and your opponents will snaffle them up. Furthermore, you don’t want to tie up too many coins in trying to secure your own tiles because you may miss the opportunity to purchase a tasty tile from another player. It sounds simple but setting prices can lead to some agonising decisions. Sometimes, you will be tempted to hang on to a tile that is not particularly useful because you know that it will appeal to an opponent. You can then attach a high price and take a gamble that they will bite, but you run the risk of being forced to cough up for your own overpriced tile.

Isle of Skye introduces plenty of variety, with a choice of sixteen different scoring tiles. Only four of these are used in each game and their point scoring potential should form the crux of your overall strategy. Before the game commences these four tiles can be chosen by the players or determined randomly. Not all of these tiles will be scored every round, so certain types of landscape tiles are going to be more valuable at certain points in the game. There is an interesting variety of scoring tiles, which require different tactics to exploit. Some have a spatial element, such as forming squares of four tiles; others will require you to enclose areas of particular landscape types. Then there are those that require you to have the majority of particular items such as ships or coins. The result is a pleasing diversity of scoring opportunities that makes every game feel different.

This isn’t a difficult game to learn and the interactive tutorial will soon have you up and running. To improve your strategy there is the option to watch games that have been played between the highest ranked players. At the start of the game your five coins will not go far, but with some shrewd financial management, you should soon see your income escalating. This will also mean that the landscape tiles will in turn rocket in price, which means that you constantly have to be aware of market trends.

The graphics accurately represent the table-top original and the screen layout works relatively well. All of the required information is laid out along the screen edges, with the central area reserved for your ever-growing kingdom. There are a few times when the interface feels a little unresponsive, like when you are trying to set prices, or get an overview of each scoring tile. I am not convinced by the background, which gives the impression that you are playing on a stained tablecloth. Also, the sound is rather nondescript, although mercifully it does hold back on the bagpipes. Most seriously of all, there appears to be a major bug that causes the game to freeze when playing a pass and play game. I encountered no such problems when competing against just AI opponents. Unfortunately, even at the highest difficulty level the AI does not put up too much of a challenge. In the auction, placing a value on a tile is dependent on so many different variables that creating an AI to challenge experienced players is tough. You are going to want to find some online human opponents to really get the most from this game. Thankfully, setting up an asynchronous online game is easy enough. This mode works especially well, as turns play quickly, and a single game doesn’t drag on too long.

If you enjoyed Carcassonne and are looking for something with more strategy and depth, then Isle of Skye is definitely worth considering even if the app itself isn’t as polished as other leading board game adaptations.

Note: By the time of publication, a recent update has ensured that the interface is much more responsive, sadly the issue with pass and play games freezing hasn’t been resolved.