Category: News

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.