Prepare for Loads of Pixels and Plenty of Deaths in 'Combo Queen', Out Now Posted: 27 Jan 2015 12:00 PM PST Pixel art fans might want to check out a game which came out last night, Combo Queen [$1.99]. Not to be confused with the recently-released Combo Quest [$0.99], this is a game that's similarly about rhythmic, tap-based combat. You have to tap on enemies with a certain rhythm in order to do damage to them, with a pattern that speeds up with each hit in succession of three hits. Mastering this timing, along with the timing of enemy blocks, will be the key to success. It's a game with a rough learning curve, as there's not very generous timing windows to hit enemies.
The game does eschew in-app purchases, but does have an upgrade system: you do more dmaage upon leveling up, and can buy weapons with different effects, powerups to help do more damage or take less, new outfits, and a book to increase the combo sequence to six hits. None of the rewards come easy, so if you pick this one up, prepare to practice, and expect no shortcuts. Good luck, future queen of the combos. |
'Adventure To Fate: Battle Arena' Review - Playing To Its Strengths Posted: 27 Jan 2015 11:00 AM PST Last year when I reviewed TouchMint's Adventure To Fate [$2.99], I suggested in the review title that if the game were boiled down much more, there wouldn't be anything left. Apparently, the developer took that as a thrown gauntlet, because the follow-up to the game, Adventure To Fate: Battle Arena [Free], manages to trim the concept down even more. Remarkably, it does so without losing any of the things that worked well in the first game, making for a more smartly-paced game all-around. Fans of the original title should be very pleased, while those who felt that it was a bit too grindy might be happy about certain cuts. Don't be alarmed by its free price tag, it's one of those good ones that makes you wonder how the developer plans on making any money. The story goes that the hero of the first game was successful in rescuing the missing king, though it cost him his life. Battle Arena takes place 100 years later, where in honor of that brave hero, a tournament is being held for all who wish to participate. The challenge is to fight your way through multiple battles in each combat arena, working your way up through the ranks until you reach the final battle. Each zone offers a shop that sells equipment and items, portals to the zones before and after, and a storage area that you can't immediately make use of but is the key to breaking the game in the long run. New to this installment is a crafting system that allows you to used dropped parts from enemies to construct weapons, armor, potions, and more.
One thing that hasn't been cut is how simple it is to pick up and play when you only have a short bit of time to fill. In fact, that aspect of the game shines even brighter this time around, since you don't have to even remember which direction you were walking in. You just head to the arena, pick a fight, and get on with it. Since the game progresses from fight to fight, it's all too easy to fall into the pattern of having just one more battle before you stop. If you do one more fight, you might be able to level up, or maybe afford a new armor piece, or maybe craft a new weapon. You're always on the verge of improving your character in some way, which is a great quality in any RPG. Just as in the first game, you can mix and match various races and job classes to create your character. New to this game are professions, which determine the type of items your character can craft. Some of the more powerful jobs, races, and professions are locked from the start. You can unlock them using Fate gems, which you can earn in-game or buy from the game's IAP shop. The gems are also used in certain crafting recipes and to replay cleared stages. These gems are pooled between all of your characters, so you can do multiple playthroughs with different characters to earn more of them if you're feeling pinched. There's apparently an update on the way that improves the rate you earn Fate gems and adds a gem doubler, but even in its current state, it's not that bad unless you want to unlock everything immediately. Even the priciest item, access to the vault storage, can be earned for free simply by clearing the game once.
The battles themselves are turn-based affairs and are generally quite brief. You once again only control one character and can face off against up to three enemies at a time. There are plenty of buffs, debuffs, status ailments, and other things to consider, though as in the first game, winning battles is more about how well you prepare than how well you fight. Fortunately, the game is more carefully structured around that sort of system this time around. The battles offer just enough variety to keep them interesting, while the planning stages are immensely satisfying. Since the game is just a big series of battles with little in between, it can feel a bit grindy if you play it for a long stretch. That said, I'm not sure a person is actually meant to sit down and bang the game out in one playthrough. The difficulty actually gets pretty intense in the later stages, so you have to make full use of everything at your disposal. At the moment, that includes watching ads to get a blessing that boosts your stats for the upcoming battle. With the balance on the gems being rather generous, it's clear the game in its current form is meant to be supported by its ads. You can watch ads to gain the aforementioned blessing, to score bonus loot from battles, or to replay cleared battles in lieu of paying the gem fee. Once you reach a certain level, you'll also see banner ads during battles. The upcoming update will apparently allow you to buy an IAP to remove the ads if they bother you too much, but you have to get really far into the game as it is to see any ads you didn't choose to.
Once again, presentation is a weak link, however. The game uses the Oryx sprite set that any developer can license and use. It's not a bad looking set of sprites, but I think a few too many iOS developers have used it, giving the set a generic feel. I suppose there aren't a lot of choices out there, though. The music is mostly recycled from the previous game, and I'm still not a big fan of it. The UI is again a bit clunky and not very intuitive, and from a visual standpoint clashes with everything else. The game provides all of the information you need, but it's sometimes a real chore to get at it. The shops in particular could use a real overhaul. I'd love to be able to compare shop items to the gear I currently have equipped without closing out of the shop, opening my inventory, and memorizing everything I'm carrying. If there's a way to compare equipment without doing that, I certainly couldn't find it. Adventure To Fate: Battle Arena is an excellent sequel to the first game. It cuts some of the stuff that didn't work that well, doubles down on its strong points, and adds a bunch of new things for players to play around with. That it does all that while shifting from a premium model to a free-to-play one while still maintaining a fair balance is nothing short of a miracle. To be honest, after the first game, I expected TouchMint to go bigger with the concept to improve it, but the developer instead went smaller and still came up with a much-improved game. It's not going to satisfy gamers looking for a big RPG experience, but as a streamlined take on RPG combat and character growth, it's a strong one. |
'Out There: Omega Edition' Public Beta Begins Today, New Trailer Released Posted: 27 Jan 2015 10:24 AM PST It was just about a year ago that Mi-Clos Studio launched their haunting deep-space survival game Out There [$3.99] to critical praise, including our own 5 star review and Game of the Week nod. In July of last year the studio announced that Out There would be getting a huge revamp dubbed the "Omega Edition" and along with that it would be expanding to PC, Mac and Linux. Just last month, Mi-Clos revealed the first images of Omega Edition and detailed some of the changes and new features that it would include. Today the beta version of Out There: Omega Edition has launched and Mi-Clos has released the first trailer showing off some of the new features in the game, including the slick new graphical engine.
The new visuals add a ton of life to the game without diluting that awesome sci-fi graphic novel feel that Out There does so well. If you're interested in getting in on this new beta version, you'll need to pre-order the desktop version over at the game's official website or at the Humble Store. That will grant you instant access to the beta on PC, Mac or Linux, and as a bonus they'll throw in a free copy of the original game on Android. Neat! iOS folks will just have to hang tight for the time being, but rest assured that once Out There: Omega Edition is complete it'll be released as a free update to the existing game in the App Store. |
Crank Up the Generators: 'Five Nights at Freddy's 3' is Coming Soon Posted: 27 Jan 2015 10:00 AM PST Well, if you like Five Nights at Freddy's [$2.99], then do I have good news: another sequel for the game is in the works. While Five Nights at Freddy's 2 [$2.99] released just a few short weeks ago, developer Scott Cawthon is teasing Five Nights at Freddy's 3 with a new teaser trailer recently released. The teaser isn't promising too much out of the ordinary for the franchise: more creepy animatronics, including a new creepy-looking bunny that's coming after you. Check out the teaser below:
While it's pretty clear that Scott Cawthon is capitalizing on the series' current popularity by putting these games out within short time frames, if I struck gold with a major hit franchise across multiple platforms, I'd probably be cranking them out too, if it meant I could be financially set for life. Plus, given that the game is perfectly set up to throw new wrenches in the formula and messing with players' expectations, there should be more to look forward to for fans of the hit horror series. |
'Ambition Of The Slimes' Review - A Lot Of Charm Goes A Little Way Posted: 27 Jan 2015 09:00 AM PST Ambition Of The Slimes [Free] appeared on the App Store worldwide a few months back, but until recently, the only language it offered was Japanese, making it tough to play for people using every App Store except Japan's. An English patch was promised in the notes, but after a few updates came with no sign of a translation, I had assumed the developer meant it in a 'someday' kind of way. Apparently not, however, as the game's most recent update finally opened up the game to English players. So, as I promised back in the first article I wrote about the game, I'm here to give the game a proper review. Certain games achieve a level of success within their genre such that they become the template for games that follow. Those games that follow might come up with an interesting twist of their own that brings them success, and that twist is highly likely to end up as part of the template. In the strategy RPG sub-genre, at least as far as Japanese developers are concerned, the two big genre-definers are Nintendo's Fire Emblem and Yasumi Matsuno's Tactics series. Fire Emblem sort of tripped into creating a sub-genre when Intelligent Systems crossed RPG mechanics into their successful Famicom Wars. Many highly derivative games followed, the most famous of which in the West is probably SEGA's Shining Force [$0.99]. When Matsuno followed up on the rather unorthodox Ogre Battle with a more typical (read: Fire Emblem-like) type of strategy game, he skewed the viewing angle, mixed in heavy story elements, and created Tactics Ogre. That game was essentially reworked with Final Fantasy IP to create Final Fantasy Tactics [$13.99 / $15.99 (HD)], which is probably to date the most famous and successful Japanese strategy RPG in the world.
There are heavy traces of both games in Ambition Of The Slimes. Obviously, at a glance, it looks a lot like the Tactics games. It uses the same three-quarter overhead view and even allows you to fuss with the camera in similar ways. Its gameplay nuts and bolts are more closely patterned after Fire Emblem, however. For example, you move your entire team one after another, followed by the enemy moving their entire team, and so on. There's also a version of Fire Emblem's weapon triangle, albeit a bit more simple. Each character has one of three elements, each of which is strong against one other element and weak against another. If you remember Battle Beasts, first of all, congratulations, we're probably from the same generation. The elements in Ambition are exactly like those, with fire beating wood, wood beating water, and water beating fire. I've never understood that middle relationship, by the way. They always pitched it as wood floating on water, which doesn't seem much like it's beating it. Well, that's neither here nor there. The game ends up being very straightforward as a result, with type advantage tilting into the damage equation so heavily that you really can't ignore it. The only other thing you need to keep sorted is your relative height compared to the enemy. The character with the high ground will do more damage. If you combine the two advantages, you'll probably defeat the enemy in a couple of hits. Elements also figure into the game's most unique gameplay addition. Technically, you're playing as a group of slimes who have had enough of humanity's destructive ways, but if you've played any of the Dragon Quest games, you know that slimes are almost pathetically weak. They certainly wouldn't stand a chance against a well-armed team of adventurers. Even here, in a game where they're the heroes, that remains true. Your enemies will make incredibly short work of any slimes they're able to directly attack.
The slimes have an ace up their, er, goo, however. If you can manage to get your slime next to an enemy unit, you can attempt to take it over by sliding down its throat. The more powerful the enemy, the harder it is to take over their body, and I don't need to tell you that a failed attempt will leave that particular slime in a very bad position. To help with that, certain slimes have abilities they can use to make the enemy more susceptible to being controlled. Additionally, if you manage to match your slime's element to the human they're taking over, you'll end up with boosted stats. Slimes come in all three elements, but they also come in many different types, as well. The basic blue slime doesn't offer any special benefits, but he can slow down the enemy by oozing them. You'll come across slimes who can warp around the map, ones that can increase their host's stats in various ways, and even slimes that can survive being chopped in half. All of this elemental matching makes each level a sort of puzzle that you need to unravel. Generally speaking, the odds are heavily stacked against you, but if you make smart moves and capture the right enemies with the right slimes, you can win. Each of the stages can be played on multiple difficulty settings, with harder difficulties throwing stronger enemies in greater numbers on the map. The reward for playing on higher levels, beyond simple satisfaction, is to increase your odds of a rare slime joining you after. Whenever you clear a stage, a slime will want to join your number. More powerful slimes have a smaller chance of joining, but clearing the stage on the highest level improves the odds. You're going to need a good group of powerful slimes if you want to make it through the game, so it's worth trying to earn them, even if you might have to come back later with a more powerful team to do it. Now, while you can amass a pretty large army of slimes, one of the things that makes the game challenging is that you have a hard limit on how many you can deploy at a time, and that number is often quite small. Of course, if you like, you can break the game wide open if you're willing to open your wallet.
Let's talk about the IAP in Ambition Of The Slimes. It comes in three different flavors, and each of them allows you to switch off the ads from the options menu. The first type, and the only non-consumable, is the Slime Box. For $1.99, you can increase the maximum amount of slimes you can have in your army by 10. You can buy up to two of these, if you're so inclined, giving you enough room for every slime type in the game and then some. The next kind of IAP is the Sortie +1, a consumable that allows you to send an extra slime above the regular limit to one battle for one time only. These come in packs of three for $0.99, so I suppose if you're looking for the best and cheapest way to simply kill the ads, this is the way to go. The last IAP item is the Anti-Fatigue, a consumable potion that resets a slime's fatigue level to zero. They come in packs of various sizes for $0.99, $1.99, and $2.99. Every time you use a slime, they get a little bit fatigued, and if they hit their limit, you can't use them again until their fatigue gauge goes down. It will go down over time on its own, or you can pop one of those IAP items to knock it down to zero. The farther into the game you go, the more fatigued your slimes will get from each battle. You can always field different slimes while fatigued slimes rest, which makes the Slime Box a more enticing purchase. Honestly, as monetization goes on a free-to-play game, what's here isn't all that bad. All of the stages are possible to beat with the regular sortie limit, you can juggle slimes to get around fatigue, and no matter what you buy, you can shut off the ads. The flip-side of that is that if you don't buy anything, you're going to have to deal with ad banners showing up fairly often, even on top of battles. My recommendation is to try out the first few levels after the tutorial, and if you're having fun, sink a couple of dollars into a Slime Box. The game is worth it, and it's nice to have extra room for more slime buddies.
The game's art style is pretty strange, perhaps befitting the theme of the game. It's deliberately retro, along with the music and sound effects, but when opponents clash, you get a nicely-detailed still image of the characters involved. The animation for taking over an enemy is especially weird, with their mouths gaping wide open while the slime jams itself down their throat, as a loud swallowing sound effect plays. The off-kilter graphics and chip-tunes lend the game a goofy vibe, a feeling that is oddly supported by the game's weak English translation. You can sort of parse what characters are saying if you think about it, but I'm guessing that it's the work of a machine translator, and not a very good one, either. Lucky thing for the developer that bad translations are also nostalgic for English gamers, right? The strange atmosphere somewhat elevates Ambition Of The Slimes beyond its otherwise very plain take on strategy RPGs. Taking over enemies is certainly novel, but once you've done that part of each battle, the rest plays out in disappointingly typical fashion. I should also mention that I'm not personally a big fan of strategy games that work too strictly like puzzles. Part of the fun in games like these is coming up with your own ways to win, but with how weak your slimes are on their own and the damage calculations' heavy reliance on element/height bonuses, there's generally one particular solution for making it through the later maps. There's a certain enjoyment from discovering that one solution, but I generally prefer these kinds of games to be more open-ended. All that said, Ambition Of The Slimes costs nothing to try and I can honestly say it tries harder than most to stand out from the pack. It's worth looking into for that alone, and you might just find it gels with you a little better than it did with me. |
Check out the Winners of the 20th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition in 'Frotz' Posted: 27 Jan 2015 08:00 AM PST These days graphical fidelity in video games is somewhat of an arms race between developers- particularly as Apple made it even easier via iOS 8's Metal to squeeze every last drop of performance out of modern devices for those "console quality" jaw-dropping visuals everyone is always going on about. But, what about playing games with no visuals besides text? That's the way things used to be in the early days of computer games with 1975's Adventure kicking off the genre of interactive fiction. I'd say the Zork series might be the most recognizable to people, particularly due to the popularity of the grue, introduced with the following simple line: "It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue." Decades later, it spawned what might be one of the most popular nerdcore songs (at least that I know of, anyway) "It Is Pitch Dark":
Anyway, why this is relevant today is I recently stumbled across the winners of the 20th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition. This is a particularly interesting internet rabbit hole as once you drill down to the competition itself you're met with a shockingly vibrant community of authors, judges, and developers of various software suites and utilities that are still keeping the life blood of this scene pumping. Cooler yet, all of these pieces of interactive fiction work in the iOS IF client Frotz [Free]. If you're curious about this year's winners, or any other winners, you can just load 'em straight inside the app via the Interactive Fiction Database. Total newbies to interactive fiction should check out this guide, as there's a bit of a learning curve but if this sort of thing grabs you there's quite literally a limitless amount of (often totally free) content to consume. |
Atlus's 'Shin Megami Tensei' Goes On Sale For Half-Price Posted: 27 Jan 2015 07:00 AM PST It's been just under a year since RPG fans were treated to the first ever official English release of Atlus's Shin Megami Tensei [$3.99], the game that launched the brand Atlus built its company around. It's a great port that mixes various pieces of different remakes to create the ultimate version of the game, though its UI in portrait mode sure does look strange. It was on the RPG Reload list of the best iOS ported RPGs of 2014, owing largely to its unique atmosphere and teeth-gnashing challenge level. There's really nothing else quite like it on iOS, and now you can own it for just $3.99, half the usual price. That's an excellent deal for a game that offers more than 50 hours of awesome demon-catching action. If you're looking for more information on the game, you can check out my review from when it released in March of last year. While it's not the first time the game has been on sale, it's not exactly frequent with its price-drops, so RPG fans should probably jump on this if they haven't already. The only drawback with this version of the game is that it's an iPhone app, so iPad players will have to use the dreaded zoom. A Universal update seems quite unlikely at this point, too. Luckily, the game supports both portrait and landscape, so it's quite comfortable to play no matter which way you like to hold your device.
I'd like to say this sale is a prelude to an English version of Shin Megami Tensei 2, but there's been no word of anything like that out of Atlus. At the very least, putting the game on sale shows they haven't forgotten about it, so hopefully they're at least considering English versions of the other two Shin Megami Tensei games that are already on the App Store in Japanese. For now, you can get started on the road to the Tokyo demon apocalypse with this excellent game. Hee-ho! |
'Radiation Island' From The Developers of 'Battle Supremacy' Coming This Week Posted: 27 Jan 2015 06:05 AM PST While you might not know Atypical Game by name, you definitely know their games they've released on the App Store. They're the dudes behind Sky Gamblers: Storm Raiders [$4.99], Sky Gamblers: Cold War [$4.99], and Battle Supremacy [$4.99]. All are great games with some awesome graphics which are perfect for showing off what iOS devices are capable of. This week they've got a new game on the way called Radiation Island. Check out the teaser:
It's a survival open world adventure game set in an "eerie alternate reality." Players will hunt for food, treasure, equipment, and weaponry to survive in a dangerous world filled with radiation, harsh weather, and of course, mutant zombies. It's giving me a bit of a Fallout vibe, and I hope that's the kind of thing we're looking at here. Either way, there's not much time before it shows up on the App Store. Keep an eye out for Radiation Island along with all the other iOS releases tomorrow. |
Developers: Join Us in the Great GDC iOS Sticker Swap 2015 Posted: 26 Jan 2015 02:05 PM PST We're just over a month away from GDC 2015, or, what's basically the busiest week of the year for us. Jared and I will be on the scene meeting with as many developers as we can, and we'll be having a party at some point during the week. We're still ironing out the details on our meeting schedule and when the party will be, but I've had quite a few people suggest that the theme of our party be sticker trading again. If this is your first GDC, basically what happened is a couple years ago is we threw a party with the whole idea being you get stickers made of your app icon and trade them with other developers at GDC for a sticker of their app icon. It was awesome, and basically everyone dumped their bag out when they got home and had a pile of stickers like this:
34 days (as of this writing) away from GDC is the perfect time to start thinking about what kind of stickers you want to get made and getting the process started. As far as where to get your stickers made, Sticker Mule is the best place I've found. I've personally gotten thousands of stickers made through them, and their quality is always consistently great. Additionally, another nice thing about them is they've got actual humans that you work with during the proofing process. If you've used Cafe Press or other similar services online, they just print whatever you send them in a nearly fully automated process and it's entirely possible that your order of 1,000 stickers could look totally wrong. With these guys, you've got to approve the final proof and you can work back and forth on how you specifically want it to look with things like should the sticker be edgeless, do you want a border, or other stuff like that. I don't have any kind of killer coupon this year, but if you click through our referral link you'll get $10 off your first order and we'll get $10 credit to put towards whatever TouchArcade swag we get made up. The 2" x 2" rounded corner sticker is perfect for app icons, and is what you see in the photo above. I've also had both die cut and kiss cut stickers made through them and they've all turned out rad as hell. At this stage in the game with so many developers having so many different app icons now,. maybe sticker sheets with all of them makes sense?
Our GDC sticker swap party this year won't have any kind of invite list or anything, everyone will be welcome who is in San Francisco and has anything to do with iOS gaming (including local gamers who just want to collect some stickers). We'll announce more details soon on our GDC plans, but as mentioned before, with how many people have asked me to do another huge sticker making drive and sticker swapping event, who am I to say no? If you're going to GDC, drop a comment on this story and let us know what day works best for our party. It doesn't look like anyone has claimed any particular nights yet, but I don't want to step on the toes of anyone who is either hosting (or attending) other parties with expensive venues or anything like that. The best part about the TouchArcade parties is they're ultra-low key so we can just do it whenever! Previous years we've done it on both Tuesday or Wednesday, so either of those days will probably work again this time around. |
Choice Provisions' 'Destructamundo' Destroys the Galaxy on Wednesday Posted: 26 Jan 2015 01:31 PM PST Choice Provisions, the former Gaijin Games, are releasing their next game this Wednesday, January 28th on iOS as well as Steam. Destructamundo is the second in their series of "Mini Visions" following the fantastic Woah Dave [$0.99] late last year, and after a false start release a few weeks ago. This is a game of chain reactions, where you have three bombs per level to destroy everything in the level's planetary system. There's a number of fuses on each planet, with different types getting involved over time, including different planetary shields.
It's to your benefit to try and destroy everything with one bomb, as you can then collect the resource triangles which are spread around the level in a similar chain-reaction way. Doing so can unlock weapons like mines that help with the destruction across the various levels, so it's worth trying to play for more than just completion. The game's got 72 total levels and will release for $1.99 on iOS without IAP. If you're a fan of puzzle games and chain reactions, this is worth checking out on Wednesday. |
Tuesday, 27 January 2015
Touch Arcade
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