Haha well I already knew that gave it a spike (Hence all the posts "I bought this because of the 5 star review")
Tried the free version on Android and found it is my kind of game! Been hopping between this and Deep Dungeons of Doom. Great roguelikes!
Damn this game is good. Reminds me of the other excellent chess-alike game Ending (buy Ending now, all of you) and that is a good thing. Only that this is more user friendly than Ending. And its endless it seems What a great purchase. I love it. 5 stars.
Agreed, awesome game. And the achievements are hard, but rewarding (I drool when I think about that wizard beam ability haha)
You could try ignoring the alters while playing through the levels and get the score up, though it would be good if you could skip a number of levels and get immediately deep stuck in it.
Hoplite, 868-Hack, Dungeon Raid... LOVE Hoplite. Haven't played a game this much since 10000000 and Dungeon Raid. I have 868-Hack...any others you guys can suggest? Those are my most played iPhone games ever.
Also I've never played final fantasy tactics. If I like hoplite would I like FFT even if it's much more complex?
The 3 you mentioned are some of my favourite iOS games too. Nothing will beat Dungeon Raid imo… Lots of other people like Puzzle Quest and 100 Rogues/Trials, but I could never get into either. Ive tried to get into FFT a few times but I always give up after 20 minutes because it feels too slow and clunky, I don't know if this is a problem with the game itself, or the iOS conversion, or just me. Might and Magic Clash of Heroes seemed nice but it crashed too much on iOS7 to be playable, I don't know if they have fixed that yet. Zaga-33 is the previous game by the guy who made 868-Hack and is definitely worth checking out (imo its not quite as good, but it is still very good) Pixel Defenders Puzzle is a lot of fun, as is Battleheart if you haven't played it already.
Fantastic game. A couple scoring questions. (1) How does the score multiplier work past floor 16? (2) Is there a reason NOT to continue to each floor past 16 if going for a high score? Do you lose the bonus multiplier (or does something else bad happen) if you die in the later levels instead of taking the portal home?
I am not completely sure how the multiplier works, but the answer to your second question is part of it. When you continue on past depth 16, each time you risk dying and losing both the victory and turn bonuses that factor into the final multiplier. This is a huge penalty (the multipliers ive had are usually about 1.6). This is part of what makes me love the scoring so much, perfect balance of risk/reward. I hope leaderboards are in the works
I'm really late to this thread because I updated to iOS7 late and then only discussed Hoplite with Lord Gek over iMessage, but this post needs to be answered in detail. This game is about two things, getting a high score and getting all the achievements. If you're not interested in those two then you're playing the wrong game. Recovering the fleece is not "beating the game", it's just one of the 16 goals the game sets for you. Some of the achievements are incredibly difficult, like Demon Partisan. That one is a game within a game. And the scoring is very streamlined, I'm not sure how you would like for it to be jazzed up. It's good that you said "imo", because that's entirely the point. You have barely seen what the game has to offer because you haven't attempted the tougher challenges. Things like bash, energy upgrades are extremely useful and one of the best perks in the game is a two heart sacrifice, the Flying Sandals. The sacrifice penalty is what makes the risk/reward mechanic work as these perks are much more powerful than the standard ones. A Superior Energy can be wonderful in conjunction with Flying Sandals. Again, you don't need to use these things because you're only aiming for the lowest rung by merely returning the fleece at depth 16. I have had to use very different builds depending on which achievement I was attempting. For Speed Run I used a high energy and mobility build, for Demon Partisan I used a high fortification build, for Flawless I used a heavy Bashing build, for The Depths I used a Wizard Beam build. Victory is only one of the goals, not the final one. I've most certainly sunk more than 6-8 hours into this game because some of the achievements are soul crushing. Now that I have the amazing perks that come with these achievements, especially the oh so delicious Wizard Beam, I can aim for truly epic high scores. So far my highest score is 151, the one I got for The Depths and my quickest run is 143 turns. There's no real need for consecutive run scoring, but I wouldn't mind it if that was added. Even without it the scoring works perfectly fine. And again, the game is not challenging for you because you are aiming for the easiest goals. It didn't last as long as it should because you only played a very small part of the game. I would love to hear how deep you get with your favorite build, a high fortification build becomes useless later on because you can't pray beyond depth 16, you are only healed one heart per depth by the Fleece. And again, simply returning the Fleece or going deeper is not the sole aim of the game. Try getting Speed Run, Demon Partisan, Flawless, The Depths and Atheist, then you will the discover the true beauty of this game.
The newest update adds two more achievements with unique skills, absolutely loving the fact that they're still adding content. I may never actually fulfil the criteria to unlock them but it's always good to see after-release support! Definitely one of my favourite iOS games of all time! Oh and they've updated it with iOS 6 support so hopefully a few more people can get to try it
You know I keep watching this thread and I love chess not so keen on most rougelike games though and generally could care less about high scores and achievements I just play for fun. But considering it's such a poor week for releases I might pick this up later and see if I do enjoy trying to do high scores and getting the achievements.
The new achievements and skills are pretty sweet. One of them is relatively easy but the other one needs some special perks like Protection or Shielding Bash. I'm really surprised Wizard Beam was not nerfed in the update, that perk is super op. Maybe the dev recognizes the difficulty of the Demon Partisan achievement.
iOS 6 support does not work for me. It says it's supported now in the changelog, it also says so in the app's descriptiion in the Store. But when I try to download the game on my iPod Touch 4, it still tells me that I have to install iOS 7 (which the iTouch 4 does not even support). EDIT: I bought the game when it came out on my iPad 3, if that matters...
