Warhammer Quest on iPad

I have a few friends who play Warhammer, and despite liking the general premise of the tabletop game, I just can't get into it. At its most fundamental level, it requires gobs and gobs of patience. Patience has never been my strong suit. So when I heard that there was a new IOS game coming out loosely based around the Warhammer table top game, I decided that I needed to give it a try. iPads can do math, measure distances and uhm...paint figurines a hell of a lot faster than me, after all.

What I ended up getting for $5 was not quite what I was expecting. Warhammer Quest is pretty far removed from the table top game, playing much more like a classic turn based strategy game such as X-com or Final Fantasy Tactics. While it's not nearly as complex as either of those titles it still has decent amounts of charm and polish along with a well thought out rule set.

After completing the tutorial, players are given four characters and tasked with exploring dungeons to gain loot. It's not a complex plot, by any means, but at least it's honest. What does your group want? Uh...some like...gold and stuff. Maybe some swords. Armor! definitely shiny new armor! It's not really important. What is important, is that players are tasked with killing lots of green skinned orks in order to level up and eventually reach the state of badassitude that all self respecting adventurers aspire to achieve.

Strangely, while an overarching plot is essentially missing, the writing is generally very high quality, particularly for a five dollar iPad game. Many of the quests are accompanied by a nice little story about a stolen lute or a missing child. Normally I dont go for reading RPG lore, I am after all, too impatient for table top games and therefore can't be bothered much with reading either. However in the absence of a singular plot line, these little flourishes really add to the atmosphere and the over all immersion.

The presentation of the game is excellent. Yes I know, I said that about Grid 2 and Call of Juarez as well, but this time I really, really mean it. First of all, it looks great on the retna display of newer generation devices. It's honestly the only iPad game i've ever played where I immediately noticed that the game was running in a very high resolution. The lighting and the atmosphere are also spot on. The tone of the game is fairly dark and it doesn't pull any punches with regards to violence. However dungeons are never dreary, they never grated or tired me out with overly dull color schemes. Character portraits are beautifully rendered and the world map somehow hits all the right aesthetic marks, taking just a couple of hints from old pirate treasure maps. Enter a town, and players are treated to a nice little CG movie where the town literally rises out of an open book, looking a bit like the game of thrones intro. .

Gameplay could be described as solid but not out of this world. The systems in place work well enough, and the game is challenging without feeling too unfair, but the actual mechanics of the combat feel somewhat dated. Things are done on a square grid instead of a hex, which in it's self is no big deal, but it further simplifies what is already a fairly simplistic game. As a delivery method for an immersive fantasy, the gameplay does its job just fine, but it's not particularly innovative.

Unfortunately there appears to be quite a few in app purchases available in Warhammer Quest for iPad. I'm not against IAP when they're done right and unobtrusively, but Warhammer Quest at times feels like an incomplete game. Three character classes are unlockable at three dollars a piece, while a substantial portion of the map costs another five dollars. This leaves players in the awkward position of frequently earning items that are only usable by pay to play characters. Coins are also purchasable, but seeing as how there are random, totally unavoidable events that leave the player much lighter in the wallet, I wouldn't suggest buying them.

 

Warhammer quest is a good game. It marries reasonably fun gameplay with a fantastic sense of style and immersion. It is probably not going to be my new addiction however. There are still just a few too many holes in the over all experience. For my five dollars I suppose I shouldn't expect much, but I just keep yearning for a slightly more complete game, especially considering the immense attention to detail. Still, it's hard not to recommend the Warhammer Quest, for all its faults and foibles it at least doesn't force you into hours of painting dainty little figurines.

Warhammer Quest, $4.99 in the app store.

History of Byzantium Podcast

A year or so ago I discovered the History of Rome podcast by Mike Duncan. It was pretty dang amazing. It starts at the beginning and goes chronologically through history eventually ending at the fall of Roman empire. What made it so compelling was the way it was presented, feeling almost more like a story than a bunch of boring old history. It was also well researched and clearly a work of love, so that helped as well.

However history doesn't end with the fall of the Roman empire, and thankfully Robin Pierson has taken up the story where Mike Duncan left off, continuing the history of the Roman empire after it split. It is great fun for anyone who is a casual history buff like myself. Here's a link where you can find more information.

http://thehistoryofbyzantium.com/

And of course a link to the History of Rome podcast' webpage.

http://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/

Grid 2 Review

I purchased a copy of Grid 2 last night and spent a couple of hours with the game. I'm a pretty big fan of console racing sims such as Gran Turismo and Forza. At the same time I can get into and enjoy more casual racing games such as the Need for Speed series or Burnout. Grid 2 nicely intersects these two genres feeling at times both simmy and arcadey.

The second installment of the Grid series takes players on a tour of various racing series' with a slick interface and lots of hand holding. This is both good and bad. It feels very polished with a strange disembodied ghost-voice telling the player where to go and what to do. At the same time, it feels awfully restricting. The game will let you stray from it's chosen path but it sure wont be happy about it. A good example of this was my total inability to find a simple practice mode available for all of the tracks. I had to settle for a 1 on 1 race with an opponent set on "very easy" in order to practice on certain courses.

The game runs beautifully on my PC making me realize just how old my PS3 and Xbox 360 are. Graphical effects are pretty and crash the cars enough and they begin to disintegrate in interesting ways. Entire front fenders can be dislodged. Of particular note, are the absolutely gorgeous sound effects in this game which rival anything I've ever heard coming from a racing game. Various pops and backfires sound great, the rev-limiter sounds perfect and driving next to a cliff or a wall produces an appropriate echo. The game just has extremely high levels of fit and finish in the graphics and sound departments.

The physics are more of a mixed bag. This game is NOT a simulation, cars take corners much faster than they have any right to. Setting up a good clean line with a minimum of tire scrub will not net the fastest lap times, a much better strategy is to attack every corner like a hero with lots of tire smoke while avoiding understeer like the plague. Slide that rear end out, because it'll only make you go faster. Until you spin of course. Balancing this arcadeyness is a surprisingly complex physics engine. There is a very real feeling of weight transfer that really effects the way the game is played. The handling model is nice and consistent and once you learn the rules, there's a lot of fun to be had experimenting and playing within them. The game feels like it's exaggerating real life physics, rather than throwing them out the window entirely.

And Grid 2 is challenging. I originally set the difficulty up to maximum and was immediately destroyed. I turned it down to "hard" which worked well for a while until I hit a certain type of race, at which point I was once again utterly destroyed. Now i'm playing the game on "normal." Who knows, maybe i'll eventually end up switching to easy just to complete my steady march of shame.  It's generally the good type of difficulty though, I always feel like I could go faster or do better after every race.

The races feature a huge amount of variety, rarely are they a straight up race. This is another one of those things that can either be annoying or a boon. It's harder to get bored but there are a couple of modes that are frustrating. There are also a couple of modes that feature about 30 seconds of driving, not in it's self a bad thing, but somewhat annoying when you have to stare at 30 seconds of loading screen on either side of the race.

Grid 2 also earns a special gold star in my heart for it's track design. There are some standard real world race courses, but much of the game takes place in cities or in the countryside. These tracks would more accurately be described as maps, as they each feature multiple layouts that only sometimes repeat each other. The four countryside maps each feature at least one six plus mile point to point race, which is very cool in my opinion. The city maps also feature a cool trick: there is a game mode where the course actually changes it's layout every lap, a very cool innovation to keep players on their toes.

Grid 2 is a good game. It's not without it's frustrations, but on a very fundamental level it's evident that a lot of hard work and love went into it's creation. If you're into cars but dont care about absolute realism, the game is a blast. If you just want to go fast, the game caters to that as well. It will really only disappoint those who must have realism at all costs or those who want to play in a sandbox. Otherwise the polish and the grins are just too hard to ignore.

Call of Juarez: Gunslinger

I picked up Call of Juarez: Gunslinger the other day on a whim. It was recently released on Steam and has been out for Xbox Live long enough that I was able to find a few reviews. I've played the game for a few hours and I'm happy to say that I've been pleasantly surprised by the experience.

Gunslinger should not be confused with a AAA first person shooter. At full MSRP, Gunslinger cost a cool $15 (er...plus tax) making it a budget game. However the graphics and presentation are both ultra-slick displaying a surprising amount of polish. The aesthetics are cohesive and the over all look and art direction are both top notch.

However as I said earlier, Gunslinger is not a AAA first person action title. It's short, for one and the gameplay never really tries to compete with the Call of Duty games. Call of Juarez: Gunslinger is at it's heart an arcade game. In fact it reminds me more of Virtua Cop or Time Crisis than it does any modern shooter. Rather than emphasize tactical action, the game put's a premium on lining up shots and accurately picking off enemies one at a time.

The game is set up to feel like an old timey shooting gallery, with bad guys in bandannas popping up from behind cover to take a few shots and then retreating back to reload. Enemies will never try to flank you and rarely move around, once they've found cover. There will, however be a ton of them, making the game far from a walk in the park.

All this effort would be wasted if the game didn't have solid mechanics. Luckily Gunslinger features some of the best shooting around. Guns feel like actual guns, weighty, mechanical and appropriate for the late 1800's. There's lots of kick and one bullet is often enough to finish off a bad guy. Head shots pretty much always equal a one-hit-kill and the rifle can one hit enemies from much further than most games. The trade off is that there are virtually no automatic, or even semi automatic weapons. The pistols are all revolvers, the rifle is lever action and the shotgun is double barreled.

This means that accuracy is the name of the game. Line a shot up before taking it, because missing costs precious time. Gunslinger further encourages accuracy with a combo system that builds bullet time and experience points. Kill enemies within 5 seconds of each other to start a combo, the bigger the combo the better the price.

XP isn't meaningless either. There is a fairly simple skill tree with three different classes encouraging different types of combat. The level up system isn't quite as deep as something like Farcry 3, but it's enough to allow for some interesting options (akimbo sawed off shotguns anyone?)

If you're looking for the next Metro, Bioshock or Call of Duty, stay away from Call of Juarez: Gunslinger. It will disappoint with its simplicity and lack of multiplayer. However if you're looking for a nostalgic arcade shooter romp that requires plenty of skill, Gunslinger might just scratch your itch.

Geoguessr

Well, hooray for the internet. I found one of the best time wasters ever, in the very awesome GeoGuessr. The premise is simple, it opens a random Google street view map, which can then be navigated and traversed like normal. The one rule is no zooming out. You must then mark on a small map where you think the camera is. Points are awarded based on distance. That's all there is too it. But it's addictive, ohhhh soo addictive. Unfortunately my one complaint is that the game seems to have a large, but none the less finite number of start locations, so replay value isn't endless. Still it's a whole bunch of fun.

http://geoguessr.com/

Star Command for iPad

I'm not the only one who's been looking forward to Star Command for a long time now. The game has been teased on numerous occasions for what seems like forever. I've waited and waited and the game finally came out the other day. I immediately downloaded it for the princely sum of three dollars and have since then spent several hours playing it.

Star Command hasn't been everything I'd hoped it would be, but it's still been a pretty fun experience. I think most of the disappointment comes from having it built up in my mind for so long. I've been stoked about this game for well over a year. Some of my disappointment also stems from having played a whole ton of FTL. Star Command is not the somewhat deep roguelike experience that FTL is. At the same time, I never expect Star Command to be so incredibly cheap. There's no way I can't recommend the game at a sub five dollar price. It's not perfect, but it's much better than it's price would imply.

Star Command places the player on a very Star Trek like space ship, charged with protecting humanity, exploring new worlds and generally kicking ass for Jesus, or in this case earth. The first thing that struck me about the game is that it's not a roguelike, which is to say it's not all about getting as far as possible, dying and then restarting. It plays much more like a strategy RPG. If the player dies, he or she can just re-load their saved game. This will happen pretty often because Star Command isn't easy.

As captain of a starship, the player is charged with building various rooms on their starship, hiring crew members, choosing where those crew members will be placed and generally blowing stuff up. This last part is the main focus of Star Command. Players will not be able to talk their way out of fights. They will be attacked constantly, and though the script is clever and often makes me laugh, the plot its self is extremely linear.

The meat of the gameplay then, involves battling other space ships. Battling space ships is done by firing weapons while simultaneously killing the numerous boarding parties that inevitably beam aboard in the heat of battle. Ship to ship weapons are on a timer, when the timer fills up, the player can push a button to activate a mini game. These mini games determine the effectiveness of the weapon and are actually one of the strong points of the game. After several hours of play i'm still only able to reach maximum efficiency about one in every three tries. Stopping boarding parties is much more difficult. Boarders can only beam aboard when the player's shields are down, but this usually happens within the first ten seconds of a battle. They then beam aboard in an infinite number of waves, separated by a timer, until shield power is restored. In order to repel boarders, the player must send their own crew down to fight them in phaser to phaser combat.

This battle system effectively means that there is always too much going on at any one time. This is a good thing and by design. However, touch screen controls can sometimes get in the way. AI pathfinding is OK at best and moronic at worst. Maddeningly, once an AI crew member is selected it must then be deselected or moved before anything else can happen. This doesn't seem like a big deal, but when I click on a crew member to move them, and then quickly change my mind (remember there's always too much going on at any one time) I must then take the extra step of deselecting the original crew member before anything else can happen. This leaves me often selecting a crew member, immediately realizing i want a different crew member and then clicking on said other crew member. Instead of selecting this second crew member, I end up accidentally moving the first crew member over to where the second one is standing. Very frustrating. Multiple crew members can not be selected at the same time, so it can take a few extra precious seconds to move a large group of crew members someplace else in the ship. Orders can not be given while the game is paused. Things end up being about 80 percent difficult by design and 20 percent difficult by...er...lack of design.

This would make Star Command a pretty average game if it weren't for the aesthetics. I love the graphics, the character design is great and the animations are top notch. The sound effects when clicking through menus are just perfect. Even just saving a game is somehow incredibly satisfying.

The designers have promised future updates including the ability to send away parties to planets. That sounds just dandy. If they can improve some of the more awkward elements in the UI while they're at it, Star Command might just become one of my favorite mobile game experiences. As it is, it's merely recommendable. Far from perfect but at a price that's too good to be passed up.