"If there is an app for that"

Card Crawl Adventure review

August 03, 2022 by RSS Feed

It's always exciting when a game from Tinytouchtales releases. Since 2012, Arnold Rauers has been using this moniker to collaborate with artists to put out one of the most consistently praise-worthy lineups of releases you can find anywhere, particularly on the App Store. This is all a wind up to deliver the probably not-so-surprising news that Card Crawl Adventure, the newest game from Rauers et al, is yet another great card-based roguelike that is well worth playing.

Crawly thief

If you've played Tinytouchtales games before, the easiest way to describe Card Crawl Adventure is as a mashup of Card Crawl and Card Thief. If that doesn't mean anything to you, first: go play those games. Secondly, it essentially means that it's a card game where you build your own deck of cards based on a character class and mix that in with a dungeon deck to create a grid of face up cards you can trace a path through to activate abilities, defeat monsters, unlock treasure, and escape to your next challenge.

If that sounds really abstract and a little confusing, you'd be absoltely right to think so. Despite a reasonably coherent tutorial, Card Crawl Adventure's early-goings definitely feel like a trial by fire where you have to learn the precise nature of how a rich, interlocking set of ability types and systems interact the hard way.

Charmingly challenging

Even if you find yourself getting stopped early in your quest repeatedly, it's hard to fight the allure of trying again. Some of this magnetism certainly comes from Card Crawl Adventure's art style. More than that, though, the overall presentation of dungeon-crawling is so whimsically framed such that your adventures show you playing this card-based game across the table from the bosses and barkeeps contained within the decks, which is then set against the backdrop of a cozy tavern full of unique patrons ready to take a turn at the game.

Once you start clearing dungeons and have seen most of the card variety there is in the game, Card Crawl Adventure continues to open up and offer new challenges thanks to an achievement system, "Weekly Crawl" leaderboards, a "Cursed Mode," and a unique scoring system that only celebrates how much gold you've managed to collect and not spend across your journey.

Valuable variety

Card Crawl Adventure is listed on the App Store as free with in-app purchases, and you can enjoy almost all of the modes I've named in this review without spending any money just fine. It is only when you want to permanently unlock access to any additional character classes beyond the Scoundrel, participate in the weekly leaderboard challenge, or gain access to an equippable item that makes the game get easier as you fail runs that you are asked to pay any money. All of these items are offered a la carte, so you can spend as much or as little as you want to get the exact unlocks you want.

There is plenty to play with using just the Scoundrel on the free journey to let you know if you want to pay to unlock more variety. These purchases are well worth their asking prices if you want a deeper experience with Card Crawl Adventure, but it's nice that the initial download is free so you can test out if you can decode the somewhat arcane rule system ahead of buying in to the experience.

The bottom line

Card Crawl Adventure is easily the most ambitious release from Tinytouchtales. As a result, it does ask you for quite a bit of patience and perhaps even some trial-and-error before you can really start to wrap your head around it. Once it does, though, Card Crawl Adventure is immensely rewarding, particularly if you opt to unlock everything it has to offer.

Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/card-crawl-adventure-review/

Pawnbarian review

July 28, 2022 by RSS Feed

Just when I feel like I've seen every ingenious variation on the roguelike dungeon-crawler, games like Pawnbarian come along and surprise me all over again. This game mixes chess with deck-building, and serves this combination up with a huge amount of variety that all but ensures it will stay on your phone as a go-to game for a good, long time.

Movement melee

Pawnbarian throws you into dungeons comprised of tiny floors fashioned after a quarter of a chess board (i.e. a 4x4 grid). Your hero character appears on this board facing up against all manner of enemy creatures, and your goal on each floor is to defeat these foes in as few turns as possible to maximize rewards you spend on upgrades before facing off against a final boss.

To do this, you pick cards from your hand to move and attack. These cards primarily consist of chess piece icons, and the icon on the card dictates how you can move across the board. For example, if you select a card with a knight piece on it, you can move in the unique L-shape of a knight in chess. If you happen to move onto a space with an enemy on it, you defeat them. After selecting two cards to conduct moves and attacks, your enemies then take their turns where they make their attacks and move about the board.

Card complex

Using cards to make chess moves against enemies that follow their own unique rulesets sounds complicated, but Pawnbarian puts these pieces together so elegantly that everything feels intuitive. Even when stacking on mechanics like cantrips, poisoned squares, and a customization system for adding shields, increased range, and other unique properties to your chess-piece cards, your bird's eye view of the action gives you all of the information you need to anticipate, read, and react to situations regardless of how hairy they get.

This elegant UI is useful when playing Pawnbarian's free version, but is an essential element in allowing for the full version of the game to contain all of the complicating features (including additional character classes, difficulty modes, and dungeons) you gain access to after a single $ 6.99 purchase. The full version of the game even contains characters that don't use traditional chess pieces or don't move upon using cards in certain circumstances. All of these variables allow you to essentially fine-tune the exact kind of game and difficulty curve you want to play under.

Stark strategizing

Presumably in order to keep the game from having too many distracting visual elements, Pawnbarian is quite stark in its presentation. Your play screen is perpetually awash with a plain, dark blue background upon which about five other colors combine to show you the board, your hero character, enemies, cards, etc. This is to say it isn't the flashiest game out there, though I will say the black and white line art for all of Pawnbarian's characters is surprisingly expressive.

Another thing to note about Pawnbarian is that it can be a really tough game that asks you to show some restraint and consideration on any given turn. Some of this has to do with just how many different variables you can be playing with at any given time, but even if you are just playing the free dungeon and character, you may have to take some time to tap and hold on enemies to read exactly what kinds of traits they have to fully understand what you're up against. I could see this as frustrating for players who want a faster-paced experience, but that's simply not what Pawnbarian offers up.

The bottom line

The way that Pawnbarian injects chess into a dungeon-crawling roguelike experience is totally brilliant and unexpected. What's more is its core mechanics hold up through essentially all of the time it takes to have mixed and matched the dizzying amount of interchangeable parts packed into the game. So, even though it may not be the most eye-catching game you could be playing on your phone, Pawnbarian is certainly one of the better titles to release on the App Store as of late.

Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/pawnbarian-review/

Westurn: Turn Based Showdowns review

July 27, 2022 by RSS Feed

Sometimes competitive games revolve around a metagame with tier lists comparing certain strategic choices that have the highest odds for success. Other games, like Westurn: Turn Based Showdowns, are almost all about mind games. This showdown dueling game has you staring down opponent avatars and making simple choices in hopes that you can anticipate what your foe is thinking to come out the victor. It's a fun dueling game that--despite being free-to-play--is well balanced and enjoyable.

Guessing game

You can probably guess from its title that Westurn: Turn Based Showdowns is a wild west themed game. In it, you choose an alien avatar who then stands face-to-face with another player and has to choose whether to load their weapon, fire it, or try to block an incoming shot. On each turn, you only can choose one action, with your goal being to eventually take your enemy's health down to zero.

This may sound like a pure guessing game, but like any seasoned rock-paper-scissors player knows, there is definitely a way to intuit and read player behaviors to anticipate moves and react to them. It also helps that Westurn has systems that limit players from simply firing or blocking constantly on every turn, which allows you to better zero-in on what your opponent might be trying to do.

Quest in the west

Westurn seems pretty clearly geared toward multiplayer competition, but the game also features a single-player campaign where you work your way through stages of AI enemies before facing a boss. Trying to predict a computer's strategy sounds like it could be pointless or uninteresting, but Westurn manages to make it work somewhat by giving these lifeless enemies some behavior traits and special abilities that keep you on your toes.

Completing quests earns you in-game currencies in Westurn, which you can then spend on powerups that can aid you in online matches or special cosmetic items that can change the appearance of your gun or bullet shield. Free players can only earn a limited amount of this currency though through a gating system for reward redemption on top of ads that regularly breakup the action.

Wild and free

Thankfully, players can opt-out of ads and earn unlimited currency in Westurn by simply paying $ 2.99 once. There are other purchases for increased shop currency amounts as well, but all of that feels unnecessary as the primary annoyance of the game is definitely the ads as opposed to any kind of lopsided pay-to-win balance.

Although there are some powerups that paying players may be able to have more access to across matches of Westurn, you earn plenty of free chances to use these same powerups and can only use one per match. Unless you are planning on trying to grind your way up the ranks of the game's leaderboard by playing continuously over long periods of time, the free-to-play rate of powerup availability is reasonable feels like it has a negligible impact on overall game balance.

The bottom line

Westurn: Turn Based Showdowns is a fun free-to-play dueling game that feels refreshingly fair. It isn't the deepest or most strategic way you can be competing with other players, but it is entertaining to try and see if you can pull over some mind trickery on others, regardless of whether you spend money on the title or not.

Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/westurn-turn-based-showdowns-review/

Blacken Slash review

July 22, 2022 by RSS Feed

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The more abstract a game is, the more it has to sell you on its premise and find smart ways to communicate information to you as a player. Blacken Slash, a roguelike dungeon-crawler where you play as a computer journeying between nodes in cyberspace, definitely accomplishes the former with a cool neon geometric style, but struggles at times to help you master its systems and mechanics with some unclear messaging and menu design.

Computer combat

Blacken Slash is a level-based game where you play as a iridescent pyramid that battles against foes like orange prisms and teal cylinders on a dark grey gridded battlefield. These shapes are mere representations of an interior digital space where you use cpu cycles to activate scripts that attack and disable other units.

Sounds riveting, right? Or more like... confusing? Don't worry, Blacken Slash is a lot less complicated to play than it is to describe. Every level is really just a turn-based combat field where you are given an objective that you can usually complete in a few turns. Sometimes it's to kill every enemy unit in the level. At others, you need to survive for a set number of turns or reach a pre-defined point in a limited amount of turns. After each level you complete, you get some currency and perhaps some loot you can equip to make your computer stronger before moving on to a new level with tougher challenges.

Custom rig

Every run of Blacken Slash starts out dead simple by giving you a basic script that allows you to spend a cycle (i.e. action point) to move or attack an enemy next to you. Just from completing a few levels, though, you can suddenly be piloting a heavily armored mortar machine or an elusive teleporting and pushing cpu. It all just depends on what kind of random gear drops you find from the enemies you fight.

The delight of Blacken Slash is in discovering the kinds of scripts and circuits you can pick up to customize your computer to create inventive and fun ways to overcome the game's micro levels. The challenges themselves are also creative and force you to consider more than just maximizing your damage or survivability. You don't always have to rely on chance to make sure your computer works the way you want it to, either. Blacken Slash has a unique "archive" system that allows you to bank select gear to use it on future runs, though you have to earn a currency to archive items and doing so usually has a steep opportunity cost against other benefits like healing your computer between levels or getting rare equipment.

Neon nonsense

Although the game uses basic geometric shapes for most of its art, Blacken Slash makes great use of color and other effects to keep its aesthetic from looking too basic or stark. Your adventure itself also comes to life through some basic text communications between you and other cpus that give you some direction in your questing. All this is backed by a smooth synth-based soundtrack that really reinforces a sense of that you're battling your way through a digital ocean of sorts.

My only gripe with Blacken Slash is that some of its systems and iconography could be better at letting me as a player know what is going on. I can't tell you how many times I accidentally ended my turn early, or got struck by cyber lightning, or replaced the wrong piece of equipment in my loadout, all because of Blacken Slash's obtuse UI. All of this gets exacerbated when you get closer to death on a run because the game has a color drain effect that desaturates the whole game as you lose health. It's a cool effect, but in turn it makes it harder to differentiate between item rarities and other color-coded objects. Some of these issues smooth out as you get more familiar with the game or are otherwise easily reversible in the moment, but they still feel like unnecessary pain points in what it otherwise an enjoyable experience.

The bottom line

The abstract dungeon-crawling in Blacken Slash trades on its ability to mix and match its various components into bite-sized chunks of action. For the most part, it's really successful at doing that while also establishing its own unique style and brand of cool. You shouldn't let a couple confusing visual design choices stop you from picking up this game, especially since there is a lite version you can pick up to try for yourself before deciding to buy.

Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/blacken-slash-review/

Jade Order review

July 13, 2022 by RSS Feed

If you have a fondness for Square Enix's GO series (i.e. Hitman GO, Lara Croft GO, Deus Ex GO), Jade Order should look both familiar and intriguing. This turn-based puzzle game definitely has some clear inspirations, but those touch points are pretty well worn territory at this point, and it takes a lot more than a dark sci-fi aesthetic to make a game like that feel fresh.

Move point puzzler

The core idea of Jade Order is to serve up single screen puzzle stages where you control a character that can only move between predetermined waypoints, or nodes. Your goal is to link together the right sequence of moves between points to accomplish an objective that opens an exit that you can then proceed through.

For the purposes of Jade Order's story, you are controlling a warrior who is supposed to be lighting some beacons while avoiding death from alien creatures roaming along these points on stages. This is all basically set dressing though, as the story seems only deep enough to give basic context to its art design and mechanics, keeping the focus of the experience on serving up different kinds of challenges to complete in each level.

Power play

If you aren't familiar with the GO games or others like it, don't worry: Jade Order has a very gentle ramp of tutorials with levels that teach you how the game works. Each stage has multiple challenges you can complete, with the only required one being to kill enough creatures to unlock the gate before going through it.

The further you get into Jade Order, the more complicated these levels can get, and in turn the game grants you special powers you can and must deploy stragetically to succeed. Some powers let you force individual enemies to move before you do, while others can let you teleport across gaps, for example. The only constraint on these powers is you have to collect a certain item within each stage to use them, which can lead to levels where the goal is quite clear, but the method for how to reach it can get pretty convoluted.

Slow to evolve

There's no big issues with Jade Order, per se, so if you are just fiending for another node-based movement puzzler, this game could really satisfy. That said, I'm somewhat down on the experience as a whole because it doesn't shake up its challenges enough (even with powers) to make it feel like a fresh experience and there are a bunch of little things that I wish were different about it to make it a smoother-playing game.

For starters, Jade Order can be a little hard-to-parse on smaller screens. The detailed pixel art looks awesome, but I found locating certain items or indicators on my iPhone SE screen troublesome at times. I also wish Jade Order was a little snappier when it came to undoing moves or restarting levels. As a game that requires a certain amount of experimentation and trial-and-error, I wish there wasn't a delay (however slight) in rolling back a move or retrying a level fresh. Between these things and the somewhat long and slow ramp up to getting access to powers, the game can definitely feel like a drag.

The bottom line

Jade Order runs into that age-old problem where--in taking inspiration from some truly remarkable titles--it has to wrestle with how playing it will constantly remind you of something else you could be playing instead. Perhaps if it were a bit cleaner and snappier (or perhaps differentiated itself a bit more) this puzzler could stand toe-to-toe with something like Lara Croft GO, but instead it just lives in its shadow.

Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/jade-order-review/