TurnBasedStrategy
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Daily iPad App: Leviathan Warships features sweet, turn-based boat warfare
First of all, go enjoy the wonderful trailer for this game. If you're not sold on Leviathan Warships (US$4.99 on the App Store) after watching that, then I'm not exactly sure what else you want. Leviathan Warships is a turn-based naval strategy game. Your job is to guide a series of ships through watery battlegrounds, leading them turn by turn against your opponents. The game is similar to Bungie's Crimson: Steam Pirates, in that you guide ships around by dragging them, but it's much more complicated. You can aim each ship's guns separately, upgrade your ships as you see fit and take on co-op and multiplayer battles in addition to the main campaign. The whole package is impressively thorough, and in that sense, the trailer is dead on. In fact, there might be a little bit too much here to play with. Those looking for a casual title will find Leviathan Warships overwhelming. But the $4.99 price is fitting -- enough to signify the game is substantial, but still cheap enough for anyone interested to jump right in. Leviathan Warships is highly recommended for sure.
Daily iPhone App: Rune Raiders charges into turn-based combat
Rune Raiders isn't a new app -- it came out a little while ago and has been updated a few times (and you can actually play a version of it online in Flash). But I was looking through the App Store for a few good turn-based games recently, and Rune Raiders has been stealing more and more of my playtime. It is indeed a game you play by turns, where you control a small party of square-shaped soldiers, who move upwards on a grid-based battlefield, fighting a series of enemies who are also represented by tiles. Each of your heroes (and the enemies you face) have various abilities and uses, and each of those abilities has their own range and strength of attack. You can push your party to the right or left or forward, or simply move them at will around the bottom of the screen. Of course, every move takes up a turn, and the game progresses in this way, with you trying to make the fewest turns to keep your heroes alive and bring them to the end of the level as quickly as possible. The whole thing is governed by a currency system (supported by in-app purchases), and unfortunately, the system is a little wonky -- if your characters die during, you can spend some more money to get them back to life. That's a little more annoying than it has to be, I think -- I wish the devs here had come up with some other way to keep characters going than simply asking you to pay more money. But if you're smart with your moves and the strategy behind them, it's completely possible to get lots and lots of gameplay in just by using and earning the in-game currency. There's also a rating system for each level, and you open up different heroes as you go along, so there's plenty of replay value as well. Rune Raiders is a free universal download that's available right now.
Daily iPhone App: LostStar Tactics does turn-based strategy right
LostStar Tactics is a brand new game from developer James Pawliuk, and it features one of my favorite types of gameplay. It's a turn-based strategy RPG title, so the goal here is to take a series of characters through a run of battles, controlling their movement and actions from turn to turn. There's lots of fun depth and complexity here -- each character's action is controlled by a deck of cards, and leveling up and completing matches provides more actions and more cards to play with. The difficulty curve is well-done as well -- the game starts off very easy, but each level has quite a few difficulty levels to explore through, and there are lots of options for progression of your various troops. The interface can be a little confusing (and unfortunately this app is iPhone only for now, though it would really benefit from the iPad's larger screen, I think), but the game is a lot of fun, especially if you're a fan of turn-based strategy. LostStar Tactics is available for $1.99 right now.
