You've read the review, now watch a couple of idiots stumble around in the trap-filled crypts and hidden passages of Dark Quest [$1.99 / $1.99 (HD)], a turn-based strategy game with a ton of old-school board game design flavor. Also, skulls. It has tons of skulls, one of which must be rubbed from time to time in order to satisfy a jerky wizard.
I know, I know, hold the phone: you have to rub skulls in this game? The review's going to fill you in the best, but, in brief, every dungeon in Dark Quest is a mission sent to you from an evil overlord-y wizard guy. As you move around these dungeons and accomplish whatever the wizard wants, he'll hit you up at random times and ask you to rub something called the Skull of Fate. When you do this either something good or bad happens. For the most part, it seems like the results are always BAD.
Anyway, we had a blast playing this game earlier today. Who knew wizards could be fun?
If it's one thing Brain Seal Ltd's Dark-Quest [$1.99 / $1.99 (HD)]Â is good at, it's staying close to its roots. In fact, some might argue that this old-school turn-based strategy succeeds in that regard a little too well. Still, as a relatively basic TBS Dark-Quest offers an enjoyable experience with plenty of missions, a party combat system, and a few twists to the standard gameplay that will either intrigue or frustrate you.
If you're familiar with old-school boardgame dungeons such as Milton Bradley's HeroQuest, Dark-Quest will probably seem intimately familiar. Like the classic board game, Dark-Quest's missions are based on pre-generated tilesets full of traps, enemies, and loot. Players have a pre-determined amount of turns to accomplish the board's objectives and escape. Each action, such as attacking, moving, or casting a spell cost a turn. The mission ends when all your characters exit the dungeon (thus signaling completion), die, or run out of turns. Besides its boardgame underpinnings, Dark-Quest plays most closely to a combination of a rogue-like and turn-based dungeon crawler.
The combination of genres makes Dark-Quest a bit deeper than one might initially suspect. While the mission levels aren't randomized, the loot isn't which adds to variation between playthroughs. In addition, the available weapons, spells, and abilities that can be purchased for each hero between missions add to the available tactics and reinforce the roles that each should play. While these are important foundational elements that Dark-Quest gets right in making it a good strategy game, it still felt a little bland overall.
Frustration is also added to the mix with the the skull of fate, where the antagonist wizard will randomly force you to enact a random status effect on you (which is typically negative). The concept is supposed to keep you on your toes as the wizard is constantly watching your party throughout the story, but it seemed unnecessary at best and a cheap way to ruin your mission at its worst.
While Dark-Quest does a good job with the basics of the game, some of its supplemental design decisions are questionable and can be frustrating. For example, each turn defaults to the Barbarian's actions, with the game's limited AI taking over for the other two party members if you don't manually select them before ending the Barbarian's turn. In theory, the AI should go a long way towards speeding up the gameplay and lets you focus on the Barbarian. Unfortunately, the AI is incredibly spotty, with my cohorts either not attacking enemies when they're in range, or doing dumb things like picking up cursed gold that cause health damage. A very recent update thankfully provided the option to turn off auto-follow.
Another questionable decision is the fact that the game does not allow you to save mid-quest. If the game remains in your device's memory you can return to it if you leave the App, but if it gets cleared, you'll have to restart the quest from the beginning. Granted, most of the quests are relatively short, but I still don't understand the lack of some kind of auto-save.
On one hand, there's very little in terms of originality with Dark-Quest, especially in comparison to the board games it gets its 'inspiration' from. On the other hand, it's still an enjoyable strategy game that offers a simplified old-school experience that isn't typically executed well on iOS. Thankfully, as mentioned earlier, the developers are listening to players and updating the game with changes. Assuming you can get by its relatively basic offering (as well as the incredibly simplistic visuals), Dark-Quest is worth checking out for genre fans.
My brain just collapsed on itself. Legendary game designer Sid Meier is back at it, and his latest project, a WWI-era aerial combat strategy game called Ace Patrol, is coming to iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch this May 9.
According to publisher 2K Games, it'll be a free-to-play title that'll tasks users with piloting a selection of "30 vintage and historical WWI aircrafts" through 120 single-player missions, apparently split across four campaigns. It'll also pack in a two-player competitive mode via Game Center or hot-swapping on the same device.
Basically, anything Sid Meier or his studio Firaxis makes is awesome, thoughtful and deep, so I'm pretty stoked to give this a shot. May 9th is pretty soon, so the wait won't be too long.
Time warp! Civilization creator Firaxis's turn-based strategy game, Haunted Hollow [Free], is available for download on the App Store. If you didn't grab it the first or bazillionth time it managed to see a release before yesterday, consider picking it up. It's a neat, bubbly competitive one-versus-one supernatural slugfest that tasks you with building up an army of monsters and scaring more townsfolk than your opponent. It's a pretty deep game that really forces you to consider the make-up of your monster army, as well as each move. We wrote about this pretty extensively last week.
If you're scratching your head still about the release -- yes, the game's "launch" the other week or so ago was the result of "testing error." This version of the game sees a few updates, mainly for polish stuff. Here's the launch trailer:
Two years, two Kickstarter campaigns, and lots of hookers and blow later, developer Warballoon has finally beamed up Star Command to the App Store. Do some screws still need tightening? Affirmative. Should you dive in immediately? Absolutely.
After designing and naming your avatar and ship, you learn the ins and outs of running your rig. Your spacecraft is made up of three types of rooms: weaponry, science, and engineering. You decide which types of rooms you want to build, then hire crew and assign them to rooms. Without crew to operate equipment, rooms cannot function. Rooms cost tokens to build, and some rooms, such as the plasma torpedo, require special ammo tokens to operate.
With the basics under your belt, you set sail for faraway planets and mix it up with your first band of hostiles. The goal of ship battles is to knock out the opposing craft's shields and sap their hull down to zero before they do the same to you. You wait for your weapons and defensive tech to charge up, then let fly with your chosen offense by playing quick time-like minigames such as stopping three spinning balls inside tiny circles and lining up vertical and horizontal sliders. Survive, and you earn tokens you can allocate toward more rooms and upgrades for your crew and equipment.
It's happening: War Balloon's sci-fi ship tragedy simulator, Star Command, is available on the New Zealand App Store. Basically, this is the first stop on its automated global release tour that will see the game finally released everywhere. For realsies.
Back in April, I took a look at a build that's pretty representative of the one you'll be checking out tonight. In a nutshell, Star Command is good. It's hard. But it's good. Here's what I mean:
At the top level, Star Command is a sci-fi simulation game that focuses on the real guts of an interstellar ship -- you know, the people, the facilities, and the technology that makes travel and battle possible. As far as feel goes, it's something of sci-fi slugfest where you find yourself limping out of every battle in a charred ship that's being staffed by a skeleton crew because everyone either (a) got sucked out of the hull, (b) got incinerated by phasers, or (c) died in a fire. I'm not really sure that this is the feel that creator War Balloon was ultimately looking for, but this is how it came across to us for the first couple of hours. And, spoiler, this is a pretty cool thing.
If you'd like to see more of Star Command, we've got your back. We've got twoTA Plays, and of course, that preview. We're working on a review at the moment, so stay tuned for that if you're on the fence.
Of course, if you want a reminder when Star Command hits, go ahead and add it to your Watch List on the TouchArcade app [Free]. You can also watch the game's thread on our forum.
Here's another Video Game Release Update: Mode 7 has revealed that Frozen Synapse is set to hit iPad this coming May 16. No price has been set, though Mode 7 is saying in a chat with Eurogamer that it'll be "competitive," whatever that means. An Android version will launch shortly after Synapse makes it to the App Store first.
Probably best described as a "turn-based tactics" game, Frozen Synapse has you assigning a squad of soldiers orders in an effort that basically boils down blasting everything in your path. This video from last summer should give you a solid heads up on what to expect:
The PC and Mac versions of Synapse have been received well, so I'm psyched to give my build of the game a go in the near future here. I'll get back to ya, though from all appearances it's also pretty good. Yay!
The wait is almost over: Star Command is coming to iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad on May 2. Yup, you read that right -- War Balloon's sci-fi battle and tragedy simulation game is coming later this week. As planned, it'll debut as a Universal app for $2.99. Also, it apparently won't support in-app purchases, which is neat.
If you haven't been in the loop, this celebratory launch trailer should get you up to speed in no time. Watch as the player's ship turns into a burning, useless husk! Note how hull breaches create vacuums and suck crew members out of their rooms! When things go bad in Star Command, they go real bad, man.
We'll continue covering the game, of course and should have a review and some other nice things ready around launch. But, anyway: hey, guys, Star Command! It's finally coming!
Dear Gut: you've made a lot of great assumptions and predictions in the past and while I still appreciate your abilities as soothsayer, trash compactor, and bile bag, you led me astray on Haunted Hollow [Free]. It's not a soulless or uninteresting free-to-play game. It's a solid strategy game that takes some actual brains to play.
You should give it a shot today, too, dear reader. It's available now wide as an actual release and the financial barrier to entry is as low as it gets: zero dollars. But what kind of game is it, you ask? In brief, it's a one-versus-one, turn-based strategy game that tasks you with building up a horde of monsters and taking control of a village by scaring the townspeople. The first player to get every building wins.
If you're a Powerman 5000 fan or just dig robots with clockwork parts, Diesel Tactics seems like a game to throw onto your Watch List. At the top-level, it's an asynchronous turn-based strategy game that tasks you with banging diverse groups of unit types into each other until someone wins. Basically it's Hero Academy, except with a steampunk-y twist. The art for this in particular is radical, distorting World War I and World War II imagery through its stylistic lens as it does.
Interestingly, Diesel Tactics will be incorporating a mission system into battle. These missions will "determine the victory conditions of a game," which makes us think that T-Go Co Games is maybe eschewing the traditional "kill everything" objective as the only route to a win in favor of stuff that, maybe, requires a bit more finesse. We're eager to hear some more about this.
Diesel Tactics doesn't have a firm release date, but it is slated to hit Android as well as iOS. Follow in it the TouchArcade app [Free], if you'd like.
Outer space. It ain't all that great because you can't breath in it, but the video games set in it are generally cool, so the pros and cons kinda shake out. Case in point: Space Age, the next game from The Incident [$0.99] creator Big Bucket. Described as "a love letter" to the games the two-man studio enjoyed while growing up, it's a real-time strategy mash-up with adventure and stealth game sensibilities. Peep these images:
"It's a lot bigger and more ambitious than The Incident and we really hope you're going to like it," Big Bucket's Matt Comi notes on our message board. Big Bucket has a site up for the game where you can sign up to get more info when it's available. There's also an official Twitter account that'll be pumping out news down the line, probably.
In that forum post, by the way, Big Bucket tossed out two videos of the game's systems in motion. In this one, you'll see some dynamic weather and a bit of dialogue. In this one, you'll peep how mineral harvesting kinda works.
Judging by those videos, we get the sense that this is a project that's still early, so gear up for a wait. We'll keep you posted on the game as it progress, so maybe add it to your watch list on the TouchArcade app [Free], yeah?
Mangomobile's free to play Kingturn RPG [Free] has been absolutely ripping up our forums since it was released last week, and per a quick note from the developers, while they're focusing on "smoothing out" Kingturn proper first, they have plans to bring both sequels, Kingturn RPG Plus and Kingturn Underworld to the App Store. Kingturn would be an easy game to skip looking at screenshots, as admittedly, the graphics do look a little basic- But in doing that you'd be missing out on some ridiculously deep strategy RPG action. How deep? Well, there's over 40 hours of gameplay spread across 67 battle scenarios, 700 items to loot, and 60 different skills distributed over 30 unique character classes. It even has that payment model that people are always asking for, in that you can snag the game for free, make sure you like it, then buy the rest via a single $4.99 unlock.
The two additional games in the series basically sound like Kingturn RPG but more. So, if you've somehow managed to burn through all the content already available, there's more coming soon. In the meantime, you can hang out in the upcoming thread, or add these two pseudo-sequels to your TouchArcade app [Free] watch list and we'll give you a heads up when they're available.
It seems like as poker surges in popularity games that utilize familiar poker mechanics to do non-poker-y things have been popping up all over the place. My personal favorite(s) still are Sword & Poker [$2.99] (and its sequel/expansion Sword & Poker 2 [$3.99]) but the recently-released Alice of Hearts [Free] sure is a worthy contender in this weird genre, especially at the current asking price of free. Like other poker battlers (That's a genre, right?) gameplay revolves around using cards from your Scrabble-like rack of cards and placing them on a grid to form the best hands you can. It sounds simple, and to some extent it is, but there's a surprising amount of strategy that goes in to these games as your opponent can also use these cards after you place them. So, while you might think you're super clever playing a three of a kind, you need to consider that you could potentially be giving your opponent the opportunity to counter with a full house.
So, Alice of Hearts is a totally competent poker battle game, but it actually kicks things up a notch further via the "Ego" system which essentially gives you multiple characters with different bonuses to play as. Additionally, if you've found yourself annoyed by the AI of other similar games, Alice of Hearts also has online multiplayer. At first look, the IAP systems powering the game seem fairly optional, allowing you to buy coins and various "premium" upgrades such as allowing you to have a wider stable of "Egos" to choose from with additional slots to store them in.
If you haven't yet tried a game with this sort of card battle mechanic yet, give this one a shot. These always seem to work really well on iOS devices.
We spent a whole bunch of time with Leviathan: Warships back at the Paradox Conference in Iceland earlier this year, but what once was a nebulous "Yeah well I guess this is coming to the iPad too at some point in the future" has firmed up quicker than instant Jello pudding with the just-announced release date of April 30th. The game is going to have a simultaneous release too, across Mac, PC, and tablets.
There's even a new trailer:
Our preview is really exhaustive, so if the trailer looks cool to you be sure to check that out as it's hard to pull one specific thing to quote as there's just so much to this game. If you're a strategy buff, keep an eye out for Leviathan: Warships, regardless of what platform you end up playing it on.
When we checked outTiny Troopers [Free]Â last year, there really wasn't much to critique with the simplified real-time strategy title. With streamlined controls, plenty of action, and a robust weapon and upgrade system, there was in fact a lot to love.
Fortunately, developer Kukouri has elected to not mess with a good thing when it comes to their follow-up release Tiny Troopers 2: Special Ops [Free]. Focusing more on refinements of the already established gameplay system, Tiny Troopers 2 offers more of everything we loved about the original and is an excellent sequel.
You've read the review, now watch a couple of idiots stumble around in the trap-filled crypts and hidden passages of Dark Quest [$1.99 / $1.99 (HD)], a turn-based strategy game with a ton of old-school board game design flavor. Also, skulls. It has tons of skulls, one of which must be rubbed from time to time in order to satisfy a jerky wizard.
If it's one thing 
