The idea behind the TouchArcade Game of the Week is that every Friday afternoon we post the one game that came out this week that we think is worth giving a special nod to. Now, before anyone goes over-thinking this, it doesn’t necessarily mean our Game of the Week pick is the highest scoring game in a review, the game with the best graphics, or really any other quantifiable “best" thing. Instead, it’s more just us picking out the single game out of the week’s releases that we think is the most noteworthy, surprising, interesting, or really any other hard to describe quality that makes it worth having if you were just going to pick up one.
These picks might be controversial, and that’s OK. If you disagree with what we’ve chosen, let’s try to use the comments of these articles to have conversations about what game is your game of the week and why.
Without further ado…
Adventure Company
The problem with the action-RPG genre on mobile is that too many games follow the same formula. This is awfully apparent if you play the games one after another. But while the games themselves aren’t bad, they all can feel kind of formulaic, particularly in their structure. They’re not bad games, and the well-formed structures that they have ensure that there’s not a lot of clunkers in the bunch, but sometimes it feels like there’s not much of a ceiling for these games. Thankfully, Foursaken Media has arrived to the genre, and delivered a game in Adventure Company that’s rather original and worthy of being Game of the Week.
Adventure Company‘s premise is that you are controlling an entire company of heroes, and so you’re using your resources to upgrade stats and items for all of them. So many RPGs that make you play as one character lock you into one choice, often early on when you don’t get much of a chance to experiment. That’s not what Adventure Company does. You get the feeling of being able to level up and customize a whole host of characters over time, with branching character classes to mess around with. It’s a deep system that’s very satisfying to play around with. You can switch around between the different heroes on a whim, and the game has no problem letting you swap between ten different heroes at once! And because of the deep customization, you can figure out the perfect army of heroes to keep deploying into battle.
The other thing is that the game has a unique mission structure: you have all sorts of branching paths for one, and levels often have different segments. This is where part of the idea of having a large army comes into play: you have all sorts of different regular and bonus objectives, and some units are going to make it easier to unlock the bonus stars that net you permanent upgrades. You have a lot to do in this game, and can thankfully avoid ever getting stuck for a long time by having so many branching paths to go down.
Really, I think this game is a great example of why Foursaken Media is such a perpetually intriguing developer, and why I think their games get such great reception. You can certainly criticize the games for how they play. War Tortoise (Free) was a game I enjoyed conceptually, but in practice I didn’t really have a great time with it. All is Lost (Free) I highly recommend, and Heroes and Castles 2 ($1.99) while not my favorite, is a solid game no matter what. But what all these games have in common is that they’re ambitious for mobile games. They’re not trying to be just common, formulaic mobile games. They’re trying to be bigger, more involved experiences with depth that stand out. And sometimes Foursaken manages to make flawed games, but that’s part of what makes them interesting! They have such interesting approaches to games, and you know a Foursaken game when you play it. That’s a quality to celebrate.
And Adventure Company really does a great job at standing out from other action-RPG games. It’s free-to-play, and has video ads and IAPs, yes, but it’s avoiding a lot of the more common elements you see. And it feels like the game is actually the core of the experience, instead of the vehicle that drives the structure, which is the actual money-maker. Here, you want to upgrade your heroes and get to advance further because of the core game, not just because of some external gacha structure.
The game itself is a ton of fun, but I haven’t talked about the best part. Foursaken smartly put in a logo creation feature in Adventure Company. It’s a bit low-res so you can’t do anything too crazy – I remember painstakingly recreating the Texas Tech Double-T in Mario Kart DS back in the day – but I decided to celebrate the ultimate corporation in Adventure Company, Arby’s, with a crude representation of their hat logo:
No matter what happens, death comes for us all and the sun will one day consume the Earth. Until then, play Adventure Company and eat Arby’s.
