'Fates Forever' Review - An iPad MOBA Built to Last Posted: 15 Jul 2014 10:00 AM PDT Fates Forever [Free (HD)] is a MOBA. This isn't so much a description of the game's genre, as it is acknowledging what the game's intent is. It's a MOBA for iPad – and it's meant to make as few concessions as possible toward providing a full-fledged MOBA experience. What this means is that the game isn't really meant for pick-up-and-play sessions, but it stands out because of it: it's a limited-compromise game that can be played for hours on end on an iPad.
Fates Forever doesn't monkey around too much with the MOBA structure: it's a 3-on-3 game, about advancing on the enemy's base, destroying their towers by using critters which advance down the north and south lanes, as protection from towers' damage. And of course, taking out enemy critters so that they don't get to your towers is important. As is taking out the opponent heroes, for the extra experience and so that there's one less powerful enemy attacking you temporarily, with longer respawns as the game goes on. Powers can be attained and upgraded with level-ups, though these powers won't affect towers and bases. What I've done is to describe pretty much any generic MOBA that is out there, and while certainly Fates Forever has its own little tweaks from countless other games, these differences are just the natural differences between games in the same genre, not a radical departure from any formula. Now, this isn't a game meant to be played in short bursts. Rounds certainly feel quicker than most MOBAs: 15 minutes is a good expectation. But I've had matches go for almost half an hour. This is a game meant to be sat down and enjoyed on the couch, not to be picked up on a whim to just kill a couple minutes or even if you have 15 minutes, because a match can go indefinitely. It's built against that, but it certainly is a possibility.
And that's the interesting thing about Fates Forever: is it a problem that it's not really built for typical mobile play sessions and experiences? Perhaps not – this is one of the few games where it's possible to sit back with an iPad, and get an extended, cohesive experience that does as little sugarcoating as possible. It's the rare full experience that can be enjoyed on an iPad. Just because it's an iPad game, doesn't mean that it has to be a quick experience. Tablets are meant to be used for longer amounts of time. So why not have a game that can be played for a long time with it? The lengthier sessions do limit when and where the game will be played, but not in a bad way, just through its nature. Controls-wise, everything can be done with one finger, with the exception of recalling to the base, which is done by tapping and holding with two fingers. Abilities are triggered by tapping on the left side of the screen, and ones that require aiming involve tapping and dragging from the center of the character to aim them. Tapping a spot will move there, tapping an enemy will get in range to attack them, with some auto-targeting of enemy mobs. The game can get a bit hectic, so it's nice to know that it's generally smart about attacking because you can't micromanage every single enemy you attack. The only issue with the controls is that if you are going left, it's possible to accidentally trigger abilities, while, say, frantically escaping from an enemy hero to the safety of a tower.
The online play generally works well: sometimes the game is unstable during peak hours, when menus will be unresponsive and finding a game will be functionally slow, but once in-game, I've had few issues. There's options for voice chat, to party up with friends, and post-game chat, though no in-game text chat as far as I could tell, so unless you're using voice, you might just need to play intelligently and hope teammates will do so as well. The game does a great job at getting players into the game, with an involved tutorial that explains the game's nuances. Then, it's not possible to get to PVP matches until level 5, requiring that players get acclimated to the game through bot matches and online matches of a team of humans versus bots. This means that in PVP, everyone should know what they're doing, but it can be a bit of a slog to get to PVP. As well, bot matches can lead to different expectations of how games will go, because bots are not human, of course. They don't act the way that humans do. So prepare for a bit of a change when getting into actual PVP matches. Fates Forever is free-to-play, and not pay-to-win at all. The monetization comes through permanently unlocking new characters, using either slowly-accrued soft currency through playing games and completing missions, or by buying hard currency to get them outright. That's it, but the characters don't come cheap. There is a $19.99 option to unlock all the characters and a few future ones (a value claimed to be worth $84.99), and the smallest hard currency pack is $4.99. If you're paying, you're paying decent chunks of cash for a mobile free-to-play game – but it's quite possible to not pay at all. Several characters are available for free, rotating out periodically. And of course, playing again and again to buy them all is an option.
Fates Forever is ultimately quite the fun game, and that's because, well, it's a MOBA and it doesn't go too far outside the beaten path of what the genre has dictated. But it's novel in part because it's a full-size MOBA that can be played on an iPad, it doesn't worry too much that mobile games are 'supposed' to be shorter experiences. It nails the thrills of the genre: getting multi-kills on enemy heroes, watching as a seeming defeat turns into a thrilling comeback, marching into the enemy base slowly and steadily. Building out the perfect item set with your character, be they more of a tank, or perhaps a ranged character. Everything that has made this genre so popular is here, but on an iPad, and with making only the necessary acquiescences to what the device is, and perhaps playing a bit quicker than established games. But it goes to show that just because a game is on the iPad, it doesn't have to be an 'iPad game' – it can just be a game that is played on an iPad. And this is a worthy MOBA, on an iPad.
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'Out There' Gets Free "Ω Edition" Expansion Later This Year Posted: 15 Jul 2014 09:00 AM PDT I have a confession: I never finished Mi-Clos Studio's engrossing space-travel roguelike Out There [$3.99]. After days and days of dying, tinkering, and learning, I finally had a manta ray-shaped ship with the right mixture of technology and raw materials, capable of jumping vast distances through uncharted space. I'd made contact with several different alien species: some hostile, some friendly, all inscrutable and mysterious. Eventually, I came to a three-pronged crossroads and, not knowing who to trust, became paralyzed by indecision, my lone star-wanderer doomed to unending stasis. Eventually, Mi-Clos updated the game, which (accidentally, I'm sure) rendered my best saved game incompatible. That's a downer ending, but the subtle, excruciating balance it took me to get even that far left quite the impression—I'm confident saying that Out There is a great game, even though I don't know how it ends. The TouchArcade hive-consciousness agrees.
Sensing that I lack the mental fortitude to try again, Mi-Clos announced a substantial free update to the game this morning, hoping to entice back into the inky, expansive darkness of space. According to the game's updated website, Out There: Ω Edition includes new ships and aliens, a new ending, and 50 new narrative interaction. A "new graphic engine" is also in the works, apparently, but without any new screenshots or trailers, I can't begin to speculate on what that might entail. iOS users who already own Out There will receive this update for free, but the re-mastered Ω Edition is also heading to PC and Mac. The game is working its way through Steam Greenlight, and $10 and $15 pre-order bundles are already available. The extra fiver is for Siddharta Barnhoon's expanded soundtrack, but if you'd rather stick to iOS or save a few bucks, the App Store version is much cheaper. Mi-Clos hasn't announced a release date yet, but the new content will be available at Gamescom 2014, which takes place next month. Out There: Ω Edition is, presumably, impending. |
'Transworld Endless Skater' Review - A Beautiful Trick That Wipes Out on the Landing Posted: 15 Jul 2014 08:00 AM PDT Transworld Endless Skater [Free] is a game that should be really great. It's essentially the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater series, but repurposed as a lane-based endless runner. Sure, that's what Tony Hawk's Shred Session sounds like, but that's more of a simplified experience. And after playing Transworld Endless Skater, I can see why. To try and transplant that formula as closely as possible to a mobile-friendly format is a Herculean challenge, and one that this game mostly fails at.
It becomes apparent with the controls: there are three main actions, grabs, flips, and grinds, with ollies of course. Each of these commands is set to a section of the screen, where it's possible to swipe in one of eight directions to pull off different tricks. One of the quadrants is set to move in between lanes. The swipes for each trick becomes a challenge because tapping and holding on the flip or grab sections is the way to crouch for an ollie, and then it becomes about swiping for the trick, and often holding to keep it going. There's also the ability to tilt the device sideways to spin in the air. It winds up all being overly complicated in use, and difficult to use properly, the gaming equivalent of patting your head and rubbing your stomach.
But oh does the game change when an MFi gamepad is used. The controls now copy Tony Hawk's Pro Skater almost identically, except with the triggers used to switch lanes. Use A to ollie, Y to grind, B and X to do grabs and flips, modified with the joystick to do different ones. It feels natural, and it makes sense, and my scores are at least two-to-three times better with a gamepad than they are with the virtual controls. It's night and day: with the touchscreen, an extremely frustrating game. With a gamepad, an intuitive experience that feels like the perfect mobile skateboarding game. There's just got to be some way to make the virtual controls feel better than they do now. There are two levels in the game: campus and rooftops, each of which has a fixed course to run through that loops around. See, the goal is to score enough points to extend the timer, which then sets a higher points threshold to extend it again. So the game becomes about starting to chain together better tricks, whether they be in combos or incorporating longer spins in the air, which are worth massive points. It winds up being a great formula, one that rewards players for getting better, while keeping session lengths short. And that feeling of pulling off an amazing trick, or stringing together a series of flips and grinds for a massive amount of points? It feels so good.
The game is free-to-play, with the ability to buy upgrades for the default skater, literally named Eddie Genericson, with 5 pro skaters also available who feature higher stat potentials. Additional tricks can be bought, and a second level, Rooftops can be purchased. Yes, only having two levels makes Transworld Endless Skater feel a bit limited. Cred and bucks are the soft and hard currency – there's a cred tripler IAP which I highly recommend. The $4.99 IAP to remove ads and triple cred, along with the $6.99 one which unlocks Rooftops immediately, are well worth considering. Video ads play after each level without the ad removal. They don't remove the incentivized video ads, which give 1 buck for each ad watched. Bucks can be earned occasionally in-game too. The bucks aren't really necessary as pretty much everything can be bought with cred as well. Amusingly, there's multiple video ads services in play here, trying to get every cent possible from the video ads. Mercifully, there's no energy system, which would feel like a poor fit as it does in many games of this kind, but I give SuperVillain Studios credit for not putting one in. In another potentially-odd monetization decision, boosts must be unlocked before being used, and then cost money for each use. Why? Good question! Really, the game is just full of oddities about it. Some of the video ads display in a tiny window on the iPad. There's no total score display during a game, just how close to the next target. The checkpointing in levels is odd at times, with some very long stretches between checkpoints if crashing. The interface is confusing at times, with things like the "Next" button after a game just being retry – and the game making it a bit hard to upgrade the skater after each round, which seems like a poor decision as far as monetization and user experience goes.
Really, Transworld Endless Skater exists at two wildly-differing extremes. In one case, with a gamepad, what we've got is a mobile-friendly adaptation of the classic Tony Hawk's Pro Skater gameplay. There's a reason why Neversoft was memorialized in flames, and why Robomodo, who worked on Tony Hawk's Pro Skater HD speak of the game in reverent tones. It just takes a gamepad to unlock. Without one, this is a game that just does not work the way it should. Seriously, this is an MFi gamepad killer app, but without one? Skip this, wait for the global Tony Hawk's Shred Session and when you see something that feels simplified for mobile, realize it was for a good reason. |
'Pyramid Solitaire Saga' Guide - Tips For Winning Without Spending Real Money Posted: 15 Jul 2014 07:00 AM PDT If you're tired of matching colored blocks, vegetables, candies, bubbles, and so on, King's Pyramid Solitaire Saga [Free] can make for a nice change of pace, while still offering you many of the things you would expect from a game developed by the Candy Crush Saga [Free] giant. The most familiar thing it offers up is an often maddening level of difficulty. As I noted in my review, sometimes you can make all the right moves and still come up short thanks to the heavy luck element inherent to most solitaire games, but that doesn't mean there isn't any merit to playing with strategy. While it's hard to make much of an absolutely terrible draw of cards, there are plenty of cases where the difference between winning and losing rests on making effective moves. Having poured a fair bit of time into this game, I've once again put together a bunch of tips to help you along the way. Plan the order of each move carefully. There are a few different goals in Pyramid Solitaire Saga, but no matter what you're trying to do, using as few cards as possible will never work against you. Make sure you check all of the cards so that you can choose the biggest combo sequence possible. If you're holding a four and you see a three, a two, an ace, two fives, two sixes, and a seven, if all other things are equal, you should go for the five-six-five-six-seven combo. Removing more cards with fewer draws is a big key to winning.
The key to a high score rests in combos. Of course, having cards left over, especially wild cards, will give a nice boost to your score, but if you really want to hit the three-star tier, you're going to have to set up some long combos. If you have a choice between leaving a wild card on the board to be tallied up after finishing or using it to keep a good combo going, you should always use it. Similarly, as long as it doesn't mess up your main goal, picking up non-essential cards to lengthen your combos is always a good idea. Try to save a couple of wild cards until you're nearly finished. They're really your only defense against an unlucky draw. Most stages give you a couple of wild cards on the board, and you'll always have one in your hand. Don't be shy about using them if you need to, but that old idiom about keeping an ace in the hole hasn't stuck around for nothing. Although it doesn't really make a difference, it certainly feels better to fail earlier than to have one card left and not be able to remove it. Make good use of your Blue Stash. The Blue Stash lets you keep a card to use later, but it's important to remember how it works. You can put a card in there simply by tapping on the Stash, and take out by tapping on it again. Putting it in will shuffle you to your next card. Taking it out will replace the current top card, causing it to be lost to the discard. If your Stash is occupied, you can't put another card in there without first removing the original card. If any cards are unknown, it's always better to have something in the Stash than nothing at all, but if you can see what's left on the board, don't keep a useless card in there. You might want to save something useful and not be able to because you've got something wasting space in there.
Keep your goal at the heart of your strategy. When you're matching cards and making combos, it's easy to get caught up in trying to clear every card off the board, something you almost never actually need to do. If the mission is to clear the gold cards, focus on the cards you need to get out of the way. Spending a bunch of cards just to open up one wild card is generally not a good idea, and spending a bunch of cards just to earn a few more points is a terrible plan. If you need to remove a key block to get at a gold card, make sure you get to it as soon as possible. Remove vine cards over regular cards. The path to the goal is a straight line if you think about it carefully. Take note of any extra stipulations beyond the main goal. You always need to earn a score of at least the one-star level. Some levels ask you to pull a blue card, make a sequence of a certain number, or a combination of the two. One of the trickier conditions asks you keep five cards left in your deck. It's important to note that one, because you're essentially out of cards when you have five left, but the game won't remind you that you've lost until they're all spent or you think you've cleared the stage. Get sequences out of the way as soon as possible. As mentioned, many levels require you to remove a certain number of cards in a row without discarding. If you wait too long to do this, you're not going to have enough cards left on the board to pull it off. The best thing to do is to unveil any wild cards on the board that you can, put a card in your Stash, and then go for it. Use up any wild cards to keep your combo going, and don't forget that you can use your stashed card without losing your combo. Squash those gold scarabs. Whenever you pull certain cards in a stage, usually the gold ones, a scarab will move across the screen. Make sure you tap it to get the extra points it offers. Some of them move pretty quickly and if you're spacing out, you might miss out on some points that could make the difference between passing the stage and failing. Be ready whenever you pull a gold card. Following this advice will help you out as you trek your way through Pyramid Solitaire Saga. The stage layouts may change, and the game might throw new obstacles or wrinkles at you, but the essential strategies are always the same. Find the straight line to success, and don't get too discouraged when the game deals you an unwinnable situation. Even if you can't win, you still get a chance to practice your strategies, which will help you win the next time. The key, as ever, is having patience and making careful moves. |
'Buzz Killem' Review - Bill's Daddy Throws A Slightly Better Party Posted: 14 Jul 2014 05:00 PM PDT No, gentle reader, you are not seeing double. Though it shares a surname and a great deal of assets with early summer's Bill Killem [Free] from Everplay and Chillingo, Buzz Killem [Free] is a completely different game that takes place in the same universe. Rather than the timed running action of Bill, this game puts you in control of Bill's father, Buzz, in a stage-based arena battling action game that will feel instantly familiar for fans of Super Crate Box [$1.99]. This isn't the first time Everplay's name has been attached to an arena battler, of course. They also acted as the publisher for FireFruitForge's awesome melee action game Spell Sword [$0.99], and there are certainly elements of that incorporated into Buzz Killem's design as well. The game opens with a cute cinematic that tips its hat at a couple of popular iOS games. Buzz and his son Bill are out fishing together when Buzz gets a call about some alien activity. He invites his son along, but since he has other plans, Buzz has to go it alone. You shouldn't expect a story-heavy game here by any means, but the game does do a nice job of setting up each of the game's four stages with a humorous conversation between Buzz and his commanding officer. It's just enough to give the game a bit of context and character without overdoing things. Aliens are here, and Buzz means to greet them, but sadly, he only speaks two languages: English and bullets, and like many bilingual people, he definitely favors one over the other.
Each of the game's four stages offer up a variety of missions you have to clear, in sets of three at a time. To unlock the next stage, you have to finish up a certain percentage of the current stage's missions, and there's no way through them but to do them. Buzz starts with little more than a peashooting pistol to his name, but defeating enemies will earn coins that you can use to power up weapons you own or buy new ones. In the usual style for this genre, you'll always start with your basic gun, but enemies will often drop weapons crates that will give you a random gun from the ones you have unlocked. There's also quite a hefty selection of items that can be dropped once you've unlocked them. However, these aren't unlocked with coins, but rather by gaining levels from killing alien scum. Once you've earned them, you can power them up using your coins. Gaining levels also earns you access to a large selection of disguises, most of which riff on games, movies, or other pop culture symbols. These disguises change your character's parameters, so it's worth unlocking and trying them all. The controls and the way the world works are very similar to Bill Killem, along with the enemies. You can double jump and shoot, and enemies can be killed indirectly by pushing objects onto them. There are several types of enemies, and the longer you play, the more deadly they become. Apart from your basic pistol, every weapon in the game has a limited amount of ammo, and once it's spent, you'll go back to that default pistol. The stages are fairly big for a game of this type, usually scrolling in several directions for at least a screen or two. That means that, unlike similar games, you can't see where all the enemies and power-ups are at any given moment, so you have to keep moving to make sure you aren't missing anything.
The missions are challenging enough to give your fingers a pretty good workout, and the stages themselves are different enough from one another to provide incentive to open them up. The last two stages are pretty visually exciting in a way, adding nicely to the game's atmosphere. The game's economy is a bit more sluggish than I'd prefer, with things getting very expensive before you're even off the first page of the shop, and while the game does sell coins as IAP, there's no doubler available. If you want to unlock and upgrade everything in Buzz Killem, you're in for a grinding long haul. The game is fun to play in and of itself, but in these kinds of games, a lot of the fun comes from unlocking new toys, and it just takes too long to do that as you progress. There's also a bit of a problem with the hit boxes on some of the enemies, making some of the unlockable weapons more of a hindrance than a help. Almost anytime I picked up the chainsaw, I ended up frantically running around trying to burn its fuel as fast as possible, since it has a very hard time hitting the flying enemies. In addition, while I love the big size of the levels, it's all too easy to fall to your death simply because you didn't see where the bottomless pits were versus areas you could just scroll down to. Falling down a pit is instant death in this game, and it's an incredibly frustrating way to go.
If you enjoyed Super Crate Box or Muffin Knight [$0.99] and are looking for something new that doesn't stray terribly far away from that concept, you'll probably have a good time with Buzz Killem. The sheer amount and variety of unlockables puts both of those games to shame, and the coin and experience systems ensure you'll be making steady progress even if you're not very good at the game. It's a lot less intense than either of those two games thanks to its roomier stages, lending it a slightly different feeling while still maintaining a very familiar core. It's not the most original thing you'll play, but if you're up for some straightforward alien homicide, Buzz has your back. |
'Hero Siege' Getting Cross-Platform Online Multiplayer in Upcoming "Karp of Doom" Update Posted: 14 Jul 2014 04:00 PM PDT Panic Art Studios' Hero Siege [$2.99] is a frantic dual-stick shooter that released late last year. That initial version was fun, but certainly rough around the edges. Panic Art worked diligently to iron out its issues with many updates over the course of the last six months or so, and what we ended up with was a dual-stick shooter that we enjoyed very much, but felt that there was "tons of potential for Hero Siege to be more than what it is." Well, according to a post from Panic Art in our forums, some of that potential will be realized with a beefy update heading to the game adding tons of new stuff, chief among them cross-platform multiplayer. Here's a recent trailer dishing out all the details of the new update.
Hero Siege is currently available on Steam and PlayStation Network in addition to iOS and Android, and once the update hits, the online multiplayer will work cross-platform between all versions. The update is dubbed Karp of Doom and should be available in the Steam version of the game later this week, with mobile and PSN getting the update sometime in the near future. Also, some of the performance issues that have plagued the game since its release as a result of being made in the Game Maker Studio software have been fixed up, so it should be an even more solid release once the update hits. When we get word on when Karp of Doom will be hitting the iOS version of Hero Siege, we'll let you know. |
'Sky Force 2014' Update Will Add Stage 8, New Tournament Levels and Some Fixes Posted: 14 Jul 2014 03:00 PM PDT One of my favorite scrolling shoot'em ups got a fancy modern remake this year with Infinite Dreams' Sky Force 2014 [Free]. It took the original game and gave it a massive graphical overhaul, as well as many other bells and whistles that come with modern mobile gaming like online leaderboards and tournaments. This remade version turned out really phenomenal, but Infinite Dreams still has some more planned for Sky Force 2014. They've posted some new screens in our forums for the forthcoming Stage 8, which you can see in the screenshot on the left while the screenshot on the right is from a cutscene that'll play just prior to the boss battle on that stage.
Stage 8 will feature a new tower type which you can see in the screen above, a sort of spinning plasma windmill of death. Pretty cool. In addition to the new stage, this update will add a couple of new Tournament Stages and will fix the price drop and VIP rescue notifications that currently don't do anything if you act on them when they show up on your device. The update is finished and was submitted to Apple about a week ago, so it should be showing up pretty soon. In terms of a traditional arcade shooter (aka not a bullet hell shooter), I'd say Sky Force 2014 is right up at the top on iOS, and I'm looking forward to the new stage. If you haven't tried it out yet, it's free, so there's no reason not to give it a download. |
Tuesday 15 July 2014
Touch Arcade
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