Category: Game Releases

It seems EA is going through a period of introspection at the moment. Not only are their games now returning to Steam (starting with the new Star Wars game), they’re also not even doing a Battlefield game next year. Lots of news regarding their recent earnings call have been surfacing around the web, and normally it wouldn’t apply to us as EA’s track record on mobile hasn’t been amazing…

… except they’ve now decided to bring Apex Legends to mobile.

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

What is Apex Legends? It’s basically Fortnite, except it’s made by someone else (the dev team who made Titanfall, if that matters). It’s actually done really well for itself in terms of carving out its own slice of the  Battle Royale Pie that’s basically defined 2019, and it now seems to be one of EA’s most lucrative properties.

Andrew Wilson, EA’s CEO, confirmed during the earnings call that they’re going to focus more on live-service games, and that Apex Legends specifically is going to become a long-term franchise for them, and that includes taking the game to “mobile, new platforms and new geographies.”

Blake Jorgensen, the CFO and COO for EA, was a little more specific. They’re looking at doing this new roll-out in the 2021 ‘fiscal’ year, which actually starts on October 1st, 2020. That means we should hopefully see Apex Legends on Mobile towards the end of next year.

Whether that means just iOS, or iOS and Android is anybody’s guess, but Fortnite’s done very well for itself on mobile platforms so there’s no reason why Apex shouldn’t do the same.. As far as free-to-play games go, Battle Royales are actually incredibly tame – the action and core mechanics are all free, and it’s mainly just about buying avatar skins to express yourself.

I don’t expect we’ll hear more on this for a while, but if there is any new information we’ll keep you informed.

By Andrew Smith 29 Oct 2019

Bad North has a comically understated name and ‘tastefully’ understated gameplay to match. It manages to be as interesting as possible while remaining extremely simple, or rather, clear-cut. Moving ever eastward, the player sends groups of nordic soldiers to islands to escape an encroaching hoard. As they move along, rewards will bulk up the makeshift army with reinforcements, equipment and veterancy upgrades.

This is a short campaign with roguelike elements and it strikes a nice balance between duration and progression. The real-time-with-pause control scheme is brisk yet effortless, and the replayability is fair. While not entirely novel, the game is extremely refined and well-balanced. It’s a real keeper with staying power.

Buyer buyer: this review’s stout recommendation only goes into effect once they squash some truly vile bugs in the current version.

As a style philosophy, minimalism means maximum engagement; nothing comes between the individual and the pure experience. Bad North is minimal because it presents itself as directly to the player as possible, with little extra narration or theme, simple readable graphics and design. More than anything, the combat is easy to navigate and understand. Waves of invaders land on the shores and move to raze the buildings and their inhabitants.

Your forces play defense, scuttling from space to space to slay the invaders before this happens. Each island is procedurally generated, with a unique mixture of terrain, enemy composition and potential rewards. Your rag-tag band of soldiers will be built up provisionally; roguelikes are about assembly and flexibility as much as hardcore strategy.

To spice things up, there are archers, pikemen and swordsmen as unit classes, and a smattering of active abilities. Each has its place, both in the heat of battle and also as part of a larger campaign strategy. Archers excel at range, pikemen from a stationary position, and swordsmen as jack-of-all-trades. The enemies come in analogous forms, as well as some beefy mini-boss types and meatshields. What you see is what you get: no real numbers or stats obscure combat, so watching the action become the primary source of intel and feedback. It’s liberating.

The game also scales incredibly smoothly. It has three difficulty settings initially, along with an unlockable Very Hard setting for the masochists. Additionally, the challenge of the islands ramps up at such a goldilocks pace, throwing out perks and curveballs with equal measure. A given island will only take a few minutes to clear, but these pebbles build up to a mountain of a campaign. It makes me nostalgic for the bygone era of well-made Flash games you could play on the web.

Bad North has that same sense of flow as FTL or Binding of Isaac, with the nagging urge to just push things a little further. Stretching forces thin when island-hopping gets more loot, because commanders must recharge after a fight. Once a fifth commander joins, or one gets a jug letting it fight every turn without pause, the player can try to snap up smaller islands on off-turns by deliberately using a smaller fighting force. The encroaching fleet only advances when the player pauses to let their troops, recharge, see, so you can effectively move twice with a little luck. Suffice to say there are edge cases where the player can take on extra risks for a little boost.

90% of this game’s fun factor come from the attention paid to its balance and pacing. The gameplay is good but, let’s be honest, hardly groundbreaking. All these disparate elements combine to offer a game that is decently challenging but feels breezy. Casual, even. The hard modes just means turning up the heat; changing the difficulty through degree and not by introducing new mechanics. It makes the acceptable margins of performance narrower, demanding the same skill set turned up to eleven. ‘Harder’ just means utilizing better technique, not really finding creative solutions.

The game is direct to a fault. The movement and terrain are easy to assess at a glance, and if anything they are too forgiving. Still, theirs is a subtle influence. The travel time and pathing sometimes create chokepoints which archers can exploit. If the troops are too close to a landing party they get stunned by the boat’s impact. The Archer’s range is contingent on elevation, so a high perch means unilateral firing power. Larger houses heal troops to full health faster. These small flourishes of mechanics are all the game has to offer. All this is just to say that micromanaging the units second-by-second is pretty much mandatory beyond a certain point.

Now for the caveat emptor. This is a very buggy release, at least by my reckoning. There are fairly common reports of unfixable crashes and fail states which ruin runs part of the way through. It appears to be something where the system gets stuck on a particular island generation and just cannot load it. Oh, and I witnessed some broken textures. Because the most common bug often makes the game unplayable past a certain point, everyone needs to wait until they patch this sucker out. I finished a campaign in around three hours but also had to abandon some.

Bad North is a gorgeous and chill game. Strangely enough for a game about the bleak, inhospitable north, it would make a perfect game paired with a leisurely vacation somewhere indolent and sunny. The matches are short and the campaign is only medium-length. It taxes the fingers more than the gray matter, honestly. It wears its influences smartly, and polishes more than it innovates, but is still an engaging and thoughtful experience. Unfortunately the buggy release state and slight repetitiveness of additional runs mean that Bad North has gone south. Visit it again before the Solstice and I do believe it will be excellent once more.

Editor’s Note: In Michael’s notes, he mentioned that this game would score a 3/5 with bugs, 4/5 without bugs. Since all indications point to Raw Fury hard at work on fixing these issues and it not being totally wide spread (I didn’t encounter them on Android, for example), I’ve gone with the higher score on the assumption that these issues won’t be for much longer.

The sheer volume of games available via Apple Arcade has meant that we’ve had to try and take a different approach to coverage. Richard’s ‘Arcade Roulette’ was an idea we came up with that would allow us to look at a range of games all at once, but in less detail than what would be typical.

After-all, if you’ve already committed to paying the subscription, you’ve got 80+ games at your finger-tips you can try out for free. If you’ve not, our bet is that you don’t necessarily need full-reviews of every game in order to sway you one way or the other.

Apple’s very committed to getting themselves to 100 games as part of their initial line-up, and at the pace they’re going it’s not going to take them long to get there. At least four new games have been added to the service over the past few days, and we actually managed to try out a few of them before they were due to go live.

Consider this a ‘bonus’ episode of the review roulette – please note that I wasn’t able to give them a full work-out like Richard would typically do. I was only at the event for about an hour, but here are some initial impressions anyway to help you decide whether these one are worth your time. I haven’t decided yet if I’ll keep these in the potential pool for a full Roulette entry, so they may turn up again with a more comprehensive overview (and a score).

Monimals

Monimals at first glance seems like a bit of a run-of-the-mill game, but it’s got some interesting additional applications it hope will earn it a bit more longevity on devices.

It’s a puzzle/platformer where you must navigate a sound jack underwater through levels to try and find ‘Monimals’, creatures that embody a single musical note. There’s the usual array of hazards and light level manipulation, with a ‘boss’ fight in the end that can help you win the monimal.

Each Monimal represents a single note or sound across lead guitar, bass and drum, and as you collect them you can then jump into the game’s ‘other’ mode and use the collected monimals to create your own music. It’s a simple drag and drop interface that lets you place a sound and define its length, as well as other typical tools you’d need for something like this. You’re not likely to create masterpieces, but you can create some pretty decent tunes. You can also have those songs play in the background as you go back into the ‘game’ part and find more monimals.

The developer’s have said that players will own the IP rights to everything they create within the app, but that it’s against the terms of service for someone to recreate a piece of music that already exists. They don’t sound too keen on trying to police that though, and they’re also working on ways for players to be able to share their music amongst themselves online.

Lifelike

This one stretches the definition of the term ‘game’, but it was still a really neat little app that I can actually see being great for young children. You are in charge of a little dot – the Diver – and you’re able to use simple swipe controls to guide it around a sparse open space inhabited by brightly coloured creatures that look a bit like swarms of fish.

The whole game is partly inspired by the lead designer’s experience with diving, but it also uses meditative techniques to give a very calming and relaxed experiences as you wander around. You can ‘discover’ a species by hovering over a specific point, and then that swarm will start interacting with you. Sometimes you can lead them, sometimes they lead you. There are lots of different levels, species and music to experience.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cB651Y4gG5c?controls=0]

This one’s the least ‘game-y’ of the three, but I really appreciate how colourful the swarms are, and the way they move and flow about the map is quite mesmerising.

Hogwash

This one was definitely the most ‘fun’ of the three. I don’t want to say ‘enjoyable’ because given the breadth of apps available, something like ‘enjoyment’ is actually pretty relative to both a person’s tastes and the intent of the app to begin with (e.g. Lifelike).

This was definitely one you can imagine sitting down with some friends to have a couple of rounds. It’s got that ‘party game’ feel, even if it doesn’t quite support the numbers for it, being limited to only four players. One person plays as a farmhand, the three as pigs. The pigs need to run around the game map, getting themselves dirty, and then trying to make the Farmer’s prized possessions so dirty they can’t be cleaned.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dgy1qyUcDYg?controls=0]

The farmer, armed with only a simple (tho, unlimited) water hose, must chase after the pigs – they can wash clean anything that hasn’t been ‘maxed out’ in terms of dirt, and they can also try and catch the pigs and hogtie them (only another pig can free them). If the farmer catches all three he wins, otherwise it becomes a kind of ‘top score’ determined by how dirty/clean everything is, and then either the Farmer or the Pigs win.

It’s good clean (dirty?) fun, and has both a single-player mode against an AI (which is no slouch) and online multiplayer.

Make sure you check out our master game list to keep on top of new & upcoming releases!