Category: Game Releases

Racing drivers are notoriously difficult to work with. Their competitive personalities make them act like divas from time to time; while jealousy bubbles under the surface as teammates receive upgraded parts or preferential treatment. Losing hurts, but they hone their craft through driving practice as well as the team of mechanics and engineers constantly tweaking the cars. Winning is everything: without it, the money doesn’t flow, and this means everything suffers – from logistics, to R&D, even the coffee. It doesn’t all come down to the time on the clock or the position on the starting grid.

All of this requires a fine balance, and Playsport Games’ Motorsport Manager Mobile 3 includes every tiny detail you can imagine and a lot that you didn’t consider.

The journey to leading a racing team starts with personalising the brand, from the look of the avatar who represents the team, to the colours on the cars. A micro-transaction upgrades the game so that everything can be edited, recreating any year from any racing series you could choose by personalising names and teams, not just your own. The initial screen feels a little overwhelming to begin with, but the tutorials work hard to break down barriers.

The home screen is overflowing with sections which break down into further menus or sprawling maps which dictate the path of upgrades possible in the career. The HQ has three separate sections, for drivers, finance and research, all of which can be upgraded by investing cash and waiting a set number of races. This is also seen in logistics which determines how quickly you can move parts and cars around the world, offering bonuses to stats for controlling more warehouses or depots. At first, this idea seems more complicated than it needs to be, but it does really come down to tapping nodes that you believe will benefit your team in the long run.

You can also manage your drivers, allocating points earned from XP gained in races into traits making them better at certain things. Overtaking, defending on track, braking later into corners or even steady their focus to stop them from crashing as much. Sponsors are sought out for finances to trickle in and they supply not just money, but also influence, which can be spent on stealing ideas from other teams or sending your drivers on fan tours or PR courses to give the appearance of your brand a boost.

There’s a section for managing engineers who design new parts for the cars and mechanics who advise drivers during the races. Later in the game you can nurture young drivers or invest in the car for the following year. Seeing all of this, feels like being hit by a tidal wave of information, but it gets drip fed steadily over time allowing for new options to feel less obscure and more second nature. Bold tutorial screens accompany each new feature and help is always on hand via question mark buttons in each section.

The first season does feel like the developers have left the training wheels on – money seems plentiful, sponsors are kind enough to offer large sign-on bonuses which fund building new front wings for the single seater formulas or new brakes and spoilers for sports car races. As the game progresses, drivers demand more; showing jealousy if you offer a new part to a teammate instead of them and with this their performance on track will suffer. Contracts will expire and require careful negotiating so as not to test a driver’s patience – represented by two hands nearing closer to shaking as you choose signing fees, length of contract etc…

The small details of running the team are plentiful and should you choose, you could spend hours planning the best upgrade paths to benefit the team or scout new drivers and staff members who will design the best components for your cars. Over time, as your career lengthens, options will be offered to change formulas which all have different rules (these can be voted on using influence, too) and will tax your tactics during the races themselves, be it through refuelling mid-race or using Energy Recovery Systems and hybrid engines.

Which brings us to the actual racing. The different series vary in length of races and set up. Single seater plays more like a Formula One system, sports cars and endurance formulas require different thinking. The race overview shows the track, with the cars zipping around in a clear view, differentiated by colour and number, so your team sticks out. The lap times sit on the left side of the screen, showing which tyres everyone is using and how they’re deteriorating. The right side is dedicated to your drivers, allowing you to pit them when you feel best within the race, change their driving style, impacting wear on the tyres or the engine power which either guzzles or conserves fuel.

While you can’t quite get into the tiny details of driving, you can sway outcomes by pitting early and undercutting other teams or choosing different tyres which may allow for longer stints on track. Every second of the racing is tense as you watch the tyres degrade and wonder whether to pull in your driver or leave them out for longer. The car slowly wears down, too, which is like watching a ticking time bomb. The closer it gets to zero will mean either a crash or a retirement.

The most interesting aspect of racing is qualifying, where you’ll be setting up the car for the weekend. This is done by choosing cards and using up spanners on your mechanics gauge. You could choose a card that takes up 1-6 spanners or even 1-16, the result is random and might mean it takes up none of the gauge but still delivers a boost in car setup. But gambling too much might see all of the spanners used as you try for a big tweak leading to disaster and hindering your car more than anything else. It’s an interesting system that leaves a lot up to chance and certainly gamifies an aspect of play.

All of these details add up to a great experience that authentically replicates the life of a team principal. There’s stress when the cars break down or money becomes scarce after heavy investments and there’s pride when your set up cards boost the car to land you a one-two on the starting grid. A game made up of so many small decisions and menus allows for a surprising amount of excitement. Watching those small dots speed around the screen may not give the surge of pleasure a standard racing game would, but watching your team secure a win, leading to a championship is genuinely wonderful.

Minaurs is a bizarre experience. Featuring gnomish, subterranean, space-faring creatures who are just trying to save their species while righting the wrongs of the past, it asks you to be very patient as it reveals to you its depth and wonder. The longer you wait, the more you realize that it’s kind of just pulling you along on a ride that never gets very exciting.

You are one of the last free minaurs of your kind. The rest have been scattered to the stars and are lingering haphazardly in dangerous places in hopes for someone to come rescue them. You, with your sense of heroism and agency, conduct mining expeditions to dig them out of their potential graves, and maybe profit on the way. A mining expedition has multiple goals. To pass the mission and move on successfully, you have to find the specified number your incapacitated brethren in the caves below. On your way, you can also mine the some of the natural Resource growing in the many caverns.

You can’t just saunter into any given cave system all willy nilly – there are rules to be followed. Your hero minaur moves automatically, turning when he hits an obstacle he can’t climb over or swim through. These are usually walls for neighboring chambers, that can be reduced to rubble (or rebuilt) with a tap. Tapping the ground will open a hole that the minaur can fall through to reach lower levels, but he cannot climb back up to the level he fell from without some extraneous effort.

Put together, a round of Minaurs is a lot like a round of Lemmings, with your autonomous and diligent pawn trudging to a fate he doesn’t know, while you work the levers to ensure his trip is a success. It takes some strategic thinking to carve a proper path to the lost minaurs effectively, as they’re often on separate levels nowhere near each other. Navigating around natural hazards like choking gas, acid, and belligerent creatures adds tactical wrinkles that throw wrenches in your plans.

This seems more or less straight forward, but how things interact with you feels overly complicated. Your Resistance shield is a catch all buffer between you and bad things around you. Falling from tall heights or standing in poison will damage the shield, and if the shield is broken, you’ll start taking damage to your Energy Bar. Your Energy Bar is the currency you spend to build things and break things down, and without energy you’ll go unconscious. Both your Shield and Energy Bars regenerate and watching them both interact with wildlife and other dangers is a confusing sight, even if your character isn’t in any consequential danger.

For a game with so many instructions, it’s pretty tough to understand. Almost everything you do is punctuated by a tutorial menu, explaining the significance of this thing to the greater Minaurs ecosystem. But these screens then find themselves buried in the glossary, and paging through to get a refresher on a finer point of exploration is daunting. The prompts themselves are jarring, blasting into your face and completely pulling you out of the game, even if it’s just for a few moments. In some instances, they show up in rapid succession, becoming super annoying when all you want to do is watch your minaurs move from one side of the screen to another. At its worst, prompts will trigger sub-prompts, and suddenly you’ve drilled down into multiple Inception dream levels of tutorials.

Progression in the game is at a glacial pace. You have to rescue a certain amount of minaurs before you can move to a new planet, and that number can be needlessly high. The first planet requires 90 saved minaurs, and with each expedition having somewhere between 1-3 scattered across it, it will feel like an absolute chore to make the jump. As you rescue them, you’ll find maps to start Noble Minaur rescues or to drop into expeditions with large numbers of Resource to mine, but the process never changes much, and it gets old very quickly.

You’ll find as you explore, you’ll be gaining several different bars that are filling and shrinking without much fanfare. One of them involves the aforementioned Resource – this blue, iridescent stone – is what you spend to upgrade your skills and are a fee to go on any expeditions. You’ll get Resource as bonuses for finding minaurs, but you can also reap it from the land. I’ve never had a problem where I didn’t have enough Resource for something I wanted, and I spend very little time going out of my way for it.

Challenges pop up as you do things like gather and find wildlife. They each have specific goals like find a certain amount of Noble Minaurs or fall from a certain height X amount of times. When these goals are met, you are rewarded with a state boost and something called Prestige. Prestige is also gained every time you learn something new (every time one of those damned tutorials pop up). It serves as both a number to denote the progress of your knowledge of the Minaurs universe, and a gatekeeper for learning abilities. It never feels like anything more than wholly arbitrary.

Skills allows your hero to do things he couldn’t normally do without coaxing, like turning at will or not falling off of ledges for a short period of time. They don’t come very naturally – suddenly after reading enough tutorial menus your first set of them open up. That said, they do add a level of control to the process that makes the gameplay more active and gives you more of a reason to invest in the moment to moment stuff and not just your big picture path to victory. Unfortunately, they feel as convoluted as the rest of the game.

Minuars doesn’t look bad, but it can be hard to really appreciate the art direction because of how dark and monotone the color palette is. Greens don’t look much more vibrant or vivid than the browns do earthy or muted. There’s a twisted, jagged, Jim Henson’s Dark Crystal sort of naturalism throughout, which is charming. The animations struggle to give any of the characters and wildlife that same sort of liveliness.

All in all, Minuars is a solid concept bogged down by way too many systems, and the dreadful experience of learning them all. It also it far too long. That is to say, you spend far too much time doing menial things just to see something new, and to quickly realize that it isn’t all that different than the thing you’d already been doing.

Welcome to the Weekender, your weekly look at the best new games, sales, and updates. We’ve got a bumper crop of new releases to review, including two of the better games so far this year, at least in my book. Let’s check them out.

Out Now

Teen Titans GO Figure (iOS Universal) – Full review coming soon!

The sequel to one of 2016’s best games, and one of the most successful premium games on the App Store, Teeny Titans Go – Teen Titans Go has arrived. It’s named Teen Titans Go Figure and, well, at least it’s a little less of a mouthful. It has the same overall gameplay as the original, you run around Jump City collecting figures, completing quests, and taking on all comers in real-time figurine battles. The battles remain fast, fun, and tactical and still hinge on bringing the right trio to each fight and swapping them in and out to use their special powers as the situation dictates. There’s plenty new as well with a new main story line, side quests, city layout, new figures and powers, and new tofu battle effects.

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Teen Titans GO Figure is a premium game but also offers in-app-purchases, which is also new. The IAPs are to buy rarer figures using real-life money rather than fake in-game money. There are also repaint tokens to change the look of figures and some other cosmetics. I’ve ignored these IAPs entirely and haven’t found any issues proceeding well into the game. You can still find plenty of figures at the various stores and put together a powerful cast of characters. 

Overall Teen Titans GO Figure keeps what is great about the original and adds enough new stuff to make it feel like a different game. If you enjoyed the original or like real-time battlers in general definitely pick this one up.

Motorsport Manager Mobile 3 (iOS Universal and Android) – Full review coming soon!

I know nearly nothing about motorsports. I know there are Formula 1 cars and stock cars and could probably tell you which is which if quizzed with some pictures. I went from this state of near ignorance to pondering pit-stop strategy differences between regular and endurance races within a couple hours of playing Motorsport Manager Mobile 3. It’s the third installment of what might be the best sports-management simulation franchises in the history of the tablet. Like its predecessors the game not only looks great but entertainingly covers every facet of managing a racing team from hiring engineers, mechanics, and drivers to building and buying vehicle parts, to managing sponsors and the team’s budget, to of course, the racing. So, if you’re into sports simulations, or sim games in general, Motorsport Manager Mobile 3 is well worth the purchase. Like me, you’ll be anxiously watching colored dots speed around the track in no time.

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Isle of Skye (iOS Universal & Android) – Full review coming soon!

Asmodee Digital’s latest tabletop to digital transformation, Isle of Skye, snuck onto Android earlier this week. Isle of Skye puts you at the head of one of five clans battling to rule over an island. To claim victory, you must develop your territory and trade resources wisely. The game features a single-player mode as well as asynchronous online multiplayer. We were caught a bit unawares with this one so no gameplay impressions this time around, but we’ve got Matt Skidmore on the case and should be able to bring you our full review next week. 

Lost Portal: Primeval Expansion (iOS Universal) (Review)

Premium solo CCG Lost Portal is one of my favorite iPhone games of all time and it just got its second batch of new content, the Primeval Expansion, which includes 40 new cards as well as a new town and four new dungeons in which to adventure. The game also got an update to the forge to help create cards you already own more easily, such as the dual-aeons which make multi-colored decks much easier to run. Another nice change is that card merchants return to a town, with their wares, to make them easier to track down later.  If you’re fan of Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons and haven’t picked it up, I highly recommend Lost Portal. If you’ve already got the game and want even more awesome the Primeval Expansion is a great addition to the game. 

Hags Castle (iOS Universal and Android)

Hags Castle is a first-person, three-dimensional dungeon crawler where you play as the warrior champion of a wizard named Greypoo. Yes, Greypoo. This Greypoo fellow requires you to defeat the witch of Hags Castle, though first you have to power your way through the many, varied, and dangerous denizens of the castle. You move through the game step-by-step and turn 90 degrees at a time by pushing the large movement buttons, which is a little weird because I kept wanting to use the usual touch controls. When you find stuff to fight combat is real time and relatively basic. It’s mostly about timing strikes correctly and backing up to avoid attacks if desired. The game is interesting if not compelling and I do like that you can easily play one-handed. Something to play while you wait for The Elder Scrolls: Blades, perhaps?

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Reigns: Her Majesty – Free Expansion (iOS Universal and Android) (Review)

Long live the Queen! As long as you can live, anyway, in Reigns: Her Majesty. The popular and entertaining sequel to 2016’s genre creating title Reigns. Now, the queen has more of everything in the form of a big content update. This expansion has added 200 cards, 3 new characters, and unfortunately for her, 5 new ways to die. Reigns: Her Majesty is on sale for the first time for $1.99 to celebrate the new content. 

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Dereliction (iOS Universal) – Full review planned

Dereliction is a real-time, squad-based combat game where you control a team of space marines looking to reclaim an abandoned spaceship from alien creatures known as the Dross. Gameplay is tower-defense like and you’ll position your team and give high-level orders to best deal with waves on incoming Dross but don’t have direct control. You need to move your team, airlock by airlock, across the ship in order to secure it. Between fights you get to upgrade your marines and better equip them to deal with tougher and tougher foes. The UI is a bit rough around the edges, and positioning units exactly where you want them can be pretty finnicky, but the design is definitely interesting. I like the idea of building tactical advantages by controlling doors to filter foes through choke points and setting up crossfire to take Dross down quickly. I haven’t played enough to tell how deep Dereliction is but it’s worth a look for fans of real-time tactical combat games. 

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Sales 

Reigns (iOS Universal and Android): $1.99 (Review)

The original Reigns is also on sale, a rarity since its release a couple years ago, to celebrate new content for the queen. 

Space Grunts (iOS Universal and Android): $1.99 (Review)

If you want to feel like you’re playing an action game—complete with camera-shaking explosions—within the safe confines of turn-based tactics Space Grunts is for you. It’s a must-own for any roguelike fan and is currently half price. 

Beholder (iOS Universal): $1.99 (Review)

If you’re ready to make some tough choices in a grim, dystopian future, now’s your chance. Beholder, a game where you run an apartment building and must spy on and rat out your unpatriotic neighbors, is on sale for its lowest ever price (normally $5). 

Bardbarian (iOS Universal and Android): $1.99/$2.49 (Review)

Real-time-strategy game Bardbarian features Brad the Bardbarian who gathers warriors to lead around defending his village from waves of tower-defense-like attacks. 

Sunless Sea (iPad): $5.99 (Review)

Sunless Sea—Failbetter Game’s beautiful game of isolation, discover, and death—has also dropped to its lowest ever price, down from $10. It’s a weird game of life on the sea and full of things like sentient icebergs, mutiny, betrayal, and cannibalism. We gave it four stars and you should check out the review for more. 

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

Hardback is a deckbuilding card game, which, if you’ve been living under a rock for the past ten years means that each player starts with a similar set of basic cards and gradually builds an individual deck by buying cards from a common pool. It makes the meta-game of buying cards for a collectable card game into the actual game on the table.

The twist with Hardback (and Paperback before it) is that cards are letters that can only be played as part of dictionary words. At first glance, screenshots might make it look like a word puzzler similar to Bookworm, but, of course, you shouldn’t judge a hardback by its preview images.

Playing Hardback like a pure word game is a great way to get trounced. You can play endless nine-letter deep cuts from the OED for peanuts while your opponent scores a ten-point “OFF” combo four times in a row to win the game. Hardback is fundamentally a deckbuilding game where high scores are built around adding cards to your deck that interact well with one another. The big difference between Hardback and a deckbuilder like, say, Ascension, is that plays rely on combining cards into words, so it can be a bit harder to build a reliable point-generating system. As with most deckbuilders, there’s very little interaction with your opponents. The players share a pool of buyable cards and occasionally a card played by one player can be shared by others, but this doesn’t make a huge impact on the gameplay.

If you played the previous game Paperback, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is how Hardback plays differently from Fowers Games’ previous title. The biggest and probably most elegant change is that the use of wild cards has been totally replaced with the simple ability to flip any card in your hand into a wild but losing that card’s points. This gives you a lot more flexibility in building words, shifting the focus on the game from word-building to clever management of cards’ special abilities and their influence on other cards in your hand and deck. Scoring has also changed in a way that puts focus on the special abilities: instead of buying points your cards can generate two different kinds of currency, one for buying cards and one for winning the game. A final change is the ability to draw a limited number of additional cards from your deck that you must use in your play, which lets you build bigger and higher scoring words if you are clever enough.

If you wished Paperback had more of a focus on building a deckbuilding-style ‘engine’ then Hardback is the game for you. On the other hand, if you are looking for a pure deckbuilder, you might find Hardback frustrating. Plays are not made of set groups of cards but can vary wildly based on the randomly-available cards, your own vocabulary, and the very limitations of the English language. The gameplay becomes a bit shaggy rather than purely tight like a classic deckbuilder.

Thematically, the game is a bit less on point than Paperback. Gone are the lurid pulp fiction covers, which were the most entertaining part of the graphic design for the previous game. Replacing them are varying font choices representing genres of books (Horror, Romance, etc.) that serve as ‘suits’ for matching card abilities. These can sometimes be hard to read and look to similar to one another–the font for the Horror-genre Y is very V-like for instance, and the style of the Adventure cards is a bit too close to the appearance of the generic cards you start with.

The mobile adaptation is well-coded, with only a few annoyances. I hit one game-breaking bug where a zoomed-in card wouldn’t retreat back into the screen to let me play, but I could easily restore my autosave to get out of it. Some buttons were less-than-responsive and more than once I tried to hit confirm only to accidentally close the popup. It does not play very well on very small screens, because the cards have a lot of information that is presented with very tiny icons. There’s a lot of screen real estate unused, so I wish the designers could have been more economical with the GUI. However, it is certainly playable, and it’s easy to zoom in on individual cards, albeit with the occasional interface hiccup. The AI is acceptable, but a good player will quickly outpace it. Pass-and-play and online multiplayer will offer more challenge.

Basically, Hardback is what it advertises on the cover: it’s a combination of a deckbuilder and a word game. If either of those elements is a turn-off for you, or you aren’t interested in a game that dilutes the elements of one genre with another, then Hardback won’t be the game for you. But, if you like both, the combination is definitely fun and interesting, and this mobile adaptation is worth the price.