Category: News

Many years ago, there was a bit of a trend for computer game companies to include a novella with their latest big release. Whether the main reason for this was to enrich player immersion or to help justify the ridiculously large boxes popular at the time is a moot point. Space Leagues may not include an actual novella, but it does have a very wordy background story. If you opt for the long version, then you may want to settle back with tea and biscuits. There is a shorter version, or you can just stick with my even more abridged account – Evil is decimating the universe, which leads to surviving galaxies setting up space leagues to ensure the development of superior combat strategies.

Space Leagues is a fantasy sports management game, in which the sport involves bashing the bejesus out of the opposing team. The first team to eliminate all of the opposition players by draining their health bars to zero is declared the winner. If both teams still have active players when time runs out, then the match is declared a draw. There are four leagues, each with ten teams, who, during the course of a season, will play each other twice. The team that finishes top in each of the lower leagues is promoted, whilst the bottom-placed team is relegated.

Each team is made up of a group of oddball characters, from giant tics to steam-powered golems and pretty much everything in-between. There are over 120 unique characters in the game, which are rated in terms of strength, speed, charisma, intellect and toughness. Before each match, you select five players and allocate their roles. Smashers charge recklessly into battle using their brute force to dish out powerful melee attacks. Strikers attack with speed and cunning, freely roaming the battlefield to identify vulnerable targets. Charmers are the equivalent of magic sponge wielding physios, using healing spells to rejuvenate battered teammates. Blasters use their superior intellect to avoid direct combat whilst peppering the arena with fireballs. Finally, thumpers use their massive constitution to absorb damage, protecting weaker members of their team from attack.

Matches are initially very confusing affairs, being closer to a barroom brawl than a sporting event. The unanimated player graphics are very basic with the action being viewed from above. This means that in spite of player names and the use of coloured auras to identify opposing players, the action tends to merge into a confusing mass scrum. Eventually, you will be able to recognise your established players and have a little more idea whether or not you are winning. After a few games, you may even be able to pick up a few tactical hints. You may realise, for instance, that your blaster is getting thwacked early on because you don’t have a good enough thumper to protect her.

After the match, the otherresults in your league will be displayed. You will then be presented with a drama to resolve. It seems that your team is always bitching about something or someone, and your assistant doesn’t help, tossing in his own snarky comments to further fan the flames of unrest. In one situation, a player was complaining about a minor injury, or “boo-boo” as he insisted on calling it. Do I give him a dressing-down for being a wimp? Keep calm and tell them to toughen up? Sympathise and buy them a lollipop? If I’m too harsh his morale might dip, but although a lollipop may cheer him up, there is a big risk that the rest of the team are either going to lose respect for their sucker of a manager or begin queuing to discuss their ailments and favourite sweeties. These situations are full of humour and how you interact with their demands will impact on the individual’s morale and that of the team as a whole. Well this is the theory – no matter how mean I tried to be there did not seem to be a discernible impact upon team performance. Unfortunately, much like Murder She Wrote reruns, you will soon see the same dramas playing out again and again. Even the funniest ones begin to grate when you have to sit through them for the tenth time.

You also have a financial budget, which will provide you with the funds to buy new players and offer established ones new contracts. Your scout does his best to uncover promising stars of the future, although, he is never actually gushing in his praise. You will usually have a choice of three new recruits and only a rough idea of their overall ability. Getting a new player to join isn’t always that simple. You make them an offer and then follow their thought process as they mull over the offer. Some ambitious types will weigh up the chances of actually winning a trophy, others could just be thinking that they are badly in need of a comfort break. This all sounds quite involved until you realise that it is made redundant by a glaring oversight. A squad of just five players never suffer injuries and these players will improve as soon as they start winning games. Have more players in your squad and injuries will occur, causing experience points to be spread among a larger pool of players. So, stick with five established players and apart from renewing contracts, there is nothing else to worry about.

Space Leagues sets the scene well, being full of humour and quirky characters. Together with the Danny Elfman style soundtrack there is definitely a Nightmare Before Christmas influence. The interactions between the players and management are definitely the game’s highlight, but even these become stale after a short time. The biggest problem is that the strategic elements do not have enough depth to maintain interest. The lack of a squad overview screen means that team selection requires way too much flicking back and forth. You cannot scout the opposition, so you end up going into games blind, meaning that nine times out of ten the best strategy is to ditch any ideas of finesse and just stick to a team made up of smashers and strikers. Grind out a couple of seasons in the lower division to improve your players and your team will begin to rise through the leagues with relative ease. Sadly, by this you point, you will probably be ready to move on to something more rewarding.

This is the story of a brad named Bard who became a … no, sorry, it’s a bard named Bradbarian who … wait, a barbarian named Brad who became a bard. That’s it. He hung up his steel axe for a golden six-stringed axe and has an axe to grind with the monsters trying to destroy his home’s precious Town Crystal, which, as we all know, was the centrepiece of any medieval municipality.

Bardbarian is a really cool mix of tower defense, action RPG, and bullet-hell shooter. Since Brad the Bradbar… Bardbarian has tired of busting skulls over shredding riffs, he doesn’t do any fighting himself, preferring to summon a party from the town to support him. Each party member has a slightly different ability, from pure DPS to area-effect to healing, which makes up the strategy part of the game. More important, though, is the action.

All the baddies shoot projectiles, so that’s where the bullet-hell shooter gameplay comes in. You’ve got to dodge the incoming fire, not only to stay alive but also to build up your stun ability that only charges after five untouched kills in a row and is vital to bring down the larger groups later in the game. Overall, the bullets are slower than in your average space-shooter, and they start pretty well spaced. However, in Bardbarian, you also have to drag along your party of warriors and keep them from getting hit too, which can be an impossible task when a half-dozen goblins are shooting death-flowers at you. Weaving your party through incoming fire is a major part of the gameplay, so much so that one upgrade (it’s Body spray, hah!) helps you tighten up the group to make them harder targets. The controls are a solid swipe-anywhere control stick that is precise and easy to use even as the gameplay becomes more frantic. There are also two bonus modes that get rid of any strategy elements whatsoever and go pure arcade.

The game has a great cartoony art style with floating limbs like Rayman that may have been chosen only because they are easier to animate but are still working really well in this game. Enemies and bullets are easy to spot and distinguish, even on tiny devices. The music is good fun too: pounding heavy metal riffs that will pump you up but won’t bother you when they repeat or get stuck in your head later in the day. Each of Brad’s buffs and summons will let loose a squeal of a solo, but even those are varied and fun enough to not be a drag after the hundredth time you hear them. The sense of humor is goofy in that very online sort of way (strips of delicious bacon are your healing pickups, for example) but never obnoxious.

You make progress by collecting gold each run through the campaign and upgrading Brad’s abilities, the troops, or the town itself. Some of them make bigger change in the gameplay than others, like the pet that will snag pickups for you. Most of them are just iterative numerical upgrades that make your party faster or stronger, without changing the fundamentals is a big way.

Despite all the loot and upgrades, it’s difficult to feel like you are making real progress in Bardbarian, mostly because the playing field is identical every game. Once you finally do beat a boss and unlock the next chapter, you can feel free to start your new game from the checkpoint. However, you’ll be at a major disadvantage, because your troops will start at their base level (admittedly, this base level can be upgraded) and your stockpile of notes will start at zero too. It’s very difficult to make any more progress from that point, so a better idea is to start your new game all the way over from the beginning. Of course, your higher-level allies and buffs will (albeit slowly) make mincemeat of the initial waves of enemies but putting up with the boredom will net you piles and piles of gold and notes that you can use to push forward once you reach a level that’s challenging. That leaves the game feeling very grindy, because your best strategy is just to take it easy until you can upgrade your stuff enough to survive the higher-level enemies. It’s just a slow race to make your numbers bigger than the bad guys.

Whether you enjoy the game will depend on how much the core bullet-dodging gameplay sinks its hooks into you. If you have a blast weaving your party around the slow but soon overwhelming bullets you won’t mind facing the same enemies over and over to make a little progress. If you’re looking for a deeper strategic tower defense or RPG experience, this is not your game. There’s a free-to-play version of the game for Android, so if that’s your platform, you’re lucky to be able to try before you buy. It’s actually too bad that the iOS version is premium only because the real test of a game like this is whether it’s genre-bending scratches your itch or not, because the rest of the design just isn’t that compelling.