Turn-basedStrategy
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XCOM: Enemy Unknown now available for iOS
The long-awaited XCOM: Enemy Unknown has finally arrived on the App Store for a premium price of US$19.99. This is Firaxis' turn-based strategy hit from last year (in my opinion, one of the best games of 2012), translated to the iOS platform in full. The controls have been tweaked just a bit to work with the iOS touchscreen, but otherwise this is the full game, featuring a base that you can upgrade at will, soldiers that you can outfit with bleeding-edge technology and terrific turn-based skirmishes against aliens of all kinds. The graphics, I believe, have been slowed down just a bit, and Firaxis does recommend that you use an iPad 4 to play (and they even say to turn off other apps that might take up cycles in the background). So that could be a pain, especially if you have an older device. Still, this is a modern PC game, and we're getting it here in full form on iOS, so it's hard to complain about that. It's nice that this is a full premium release. You spend one price and get all of the game's content with no IAP or freemium twists at all. XCOM is a great game from a company that is well worth supporting.
Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions updated, on sale for half price
Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions arrived on iOS a little while ago, and it's long been lauded as one of the best tactical strategy games out there. And there are two good reasons you should check it out right now if you haven't yet. First and foremost, the game just got updated. There are now better graphics in the game than ever before, all meant for higher resolution Retina Displays. The update also adds improvements to the game's animations, and iCloud integration has been improved as well. Square Enix says it's not quite working correctly on the iPhone just yet, but it should soon, and the iPad works just fine. And additionally, to celebrate the update, the series is also on sale (which is even more important when you consider how rarely Square Enix drops prices on its games). The iPhone version is down to $7.99, and the iPad version is only $8.99, both still pricey, but both half off of their usual costs. If you've been waiting to play this one, there's your chance to grab one or both.
Daily iPad App: Frozen Synapse simulates some very impressive turn-based strategy
Frozen Synapse has been a successful title on Steam for a while now -- it's a turn-based strategy game, with the twist being that you're a sort of tactical AI, running these battles on simulations and hardware rather than in real life. As a result, the big draw of Frozen Synapse is that while, like many other tactical strategy games, you are guiding a series of soldiers around turn by turn, these turns are actually simulated, and you can test them out and repeat them as many times as you like before playing out the "prime" sequence, and running the real thing. The pacing of the game is pretty perfect, then. Frozen Synapse has now been ported to the iPad, and the touchscreen gives you a whole lot of flexibility over what commands you can give your little soldiers: Just double tap on the screen to set up waypoints for them, and then you can drag those points around as needed. You can then run the simulation to see what happens, but of course your enemies don't always behave in the real world as they do in the sim, so it's up to you as commander to make sure you've planned for any contingencies in the various scripting you've passed out to your troops. Frozen Synapse is simple once you figure it out, but the UI allows you to do a lot with the little guys you control, and as a result can be fairly complicated. Still, there's lots of helpful tutorial videos included, and the good news is that there's no shortage of content for the game. In addition to a full campaign, you can also play instantly created skirmishes, or five different multiplayer modes. Frozen Synapse is available for a premium price of US$6.99, but that's much cheaper than the Steam version still goes for. If you're a tactical strategy fan, this one is a don't miss for sure.
FreeCiv now playable in browsers, including on iOS devices
FreeCiv is one of my favorite open-source projects out there. Civilization is one of my favorite games, and FreeCiv is an open-source version that you can download and play for free. The latest update of the game has added an HTML 5 version, which means that you can now load up and play FreeCiv right in any compatible browser. And that includes mobile Safari, which means you can now navigate to play.freeciv.org on one of your iOS devices, and play the game at will. Pretty excellent. There is no version of FreeCiv in the App Store, unfortunately, though there has been a port to Android just recently. And Civilization Revolution has been available on both iPad and iPhone for a while now -- it's a simpler, more accessible version of the 4X strategy game. Firaxis has just recently stepped up its efforts on iOS, so it's possible that we will see a more full, official version of Civ arrive on the iPhone before too much longer. Or wait -- what if they ported Alpha Centauri? Drool. But until then, FreeCiv will have to do. If you have never had a chance to play, the game manual should help you out.
Witching Hour adds multiplayer into Ravenmark Mercenaries
Last year, Witching Hour Studios (a team that's grown to about eight people now) released Ravenmark: Scourge of Estellion, a turn-based strategy title that felt way bigger than the little iPhone's screen it played on. The gameplay is complex (there are lots of units to control and every unit counters and is countered by another), but it's also very impressive, featuring big-scale battles and a story to match. Ever since Ravenmark arrived, fans have been clamoring for multiplayer, and last week at GDC I met up with Witching Hour to see Ravenmark: Mercenaries, a new entry in the series that adds the ability to play against other humans, along with lots of other very impressive features. The multiplayer is obviously the headliner here. The Witching Hour guys say the first game was really "stepping blocks" leading up to a multiplayer game, so obviously it was front and center when they started work on this one. It plays out just like the standard Ravenmark match, with players getting to field two different armies, and taking turns two at a time, passing them back and forth. As the guys showed me during the GDC meeting, moves are made almost simultaneously asychronously, and you can rewatch turns as much as you like to see how the battle is going down. In addition to the actual battles, each player gets to make their own battle standard flag, which is then carried by an actual unit in the multiplayer skirmishes. That's a fun touch -- not only does it provide a bit of customization, but it adds strategy as well, as the battle standard carrier conveys a number of extra powers and benefits (while he's alive, at least). In addition to the multiplayer options, there's also another long singleplayer campaign to play through, and units can now be leveled up. Players can also gain commander levels, which add new abilities to the mix, and give player commanders a little bit of personality ("Cold-blooded" or "hot-headed" are two of the commander attributes players can earn). And if the full campaign and all of the multiplayer isn't enough strategic battling for you, there will also be "contracts" to play out, which are daily skirmishes available against a certain enemy. Finally, Witching Hour is planning to deliver this content in a few different ways. Much of the buzz around mobile titles these days says that free-to-play games are the way to go, but that's not what Witching Hour found with Ravenmark. After releasing the first game both as a full package for a premium price of $9.99, and a free-to-play version with episodic content, the team found that more users wanted to simply go for the whole-package premium version. In fact, the team says they even saw a lot of users downloading the free version, and then buying the full version rather than picking up all of the same content episodically. So the same deal will probably be available with Mercenaries. In addition to a standard premium game, the team is also thinking about offering a "collector's edition" version, with extra content for an even higher price. And they're convinced that their biggest fans will be willing to pay for it, just because their most dedicated fans love the game so much. We'll have to see how that plays out. Ravenmark is a very impressive series, and Mercenaries looks like a more than worthy addition to Witching Hour's work so far. It is expected to be ready for purchase sometime this summer.
Tilt to Live devs return to iOS with accessible turn-based strategy in Outwitters
One Man Left is the two-person studio behind the very popular 2010 iOS release Tilt to Live -- and that's all the two developers have ever released so far. Alex Okafor and Adam Stewart are finally ready, however, to show off their brand new title, and I got to play with it briefly last week at GDC. The game is called Outwitters, and it's a strong right turn from the arcade frenzy action of Tilt to Live. Instead of bullets flying everywhere, Outwitters is turn-based strategy that takes place on a board of hexagons, with three different factions battling it out over time. Players can play as the Scallywags, the Feedback, or the Adorables, and each faction has a number of different units (including one faction-only unit each -- the Feedback, for example, have a floating brain that can turn units against their team) to pit up against each other on the game's various battlefields. Turn-based strategy is often overly complex, but Outwitters smartly keeps things quick and relatively easy. You're given a number of resource points per turn, and you can use those points to move around, attack, or summon new units to the board every time your turn comes around. Those points can be saved up over time (so you can save up for a special unit), and there are also special spots on the board which will grant you more points as you hold them, so conquering parts of the map will help out a lot. The gameplay itself is sort of similar to Robot Entertainment's recent release Hero Academy, and yes, One Man Left did do a little bit of forehead-slapping when Hero Academy arrived right in the middle of development on Outwitters. But the game is definitely different enough: The boards are bigger, and there's a fog of war, which means there's no "undo" option. In Hero Academy, you can try as many turns as you like before registering your moves, but in Outwitters, it's think first and then move for good. I played a little bit of the pass and play mode, but there is an extensive online component, with unranked and fully ranked play across a number of different leagues. One Man Left has really gone the extra mile for online play, so there will likely be no shortage of competitors to match yourself up against. Just like Starcraft 2's league system, you can start in the Fluffy League, and rank your way all the way up to the Super Titan League, so if you're into the game, you can play Outwitters for a long, long time. The title will be free to download, and then (similar again to Hero Academy) players will be able to pick up packs of maps and extra teams for an extra fee, or be able to just buy the whole shebang in one go. Outwitters seems excellent, and of course we'd expect nothing less than the makers of Tilt to Live. Turn-based strategy probably wouldn't have been my first guess when thinking about a followup from these guys, but nevertheless, I'm looking forward to the game's release in a few months.
Daily iPhone App: Ravenmark: Scourge of Estellion
Turn-based strategy warfare is a genre that's surprisingly easy to come by on iOS -- there are a lot of games out there that let you pit various forces against each other in a turn-based battle. But it is hard to come by a really great example of one of these on the App Store, and fortunately Ravenmark: Scourge of Estellion does it right. This is the first game from a company called Witching Hour Studios, and as their website says, the title shows that they're trying "not so much to make a quick buck," but to actually set up a story and a world that feels epic even on the iPhone's little screen. Ravenmark feels exactly that. The story and lore feel super solid, and the tactical gameplay uses a sort of expanded rock/paper/scissors system that plays well and offers up all sorts of engagements to command. Various troop types do more damage to others (ranged defeats infantry, for example, but ranged can be beaten by cavalry), and troops can be joined up into sets of one, two, or three, each with their own abilities and special functions. If you've never played a turn-based strategy game, this one might get you into it. It's relatively simple, though obviously can get more complex over time (and there's plenty of depth here to explore over 15 missions, if you do want to get into the nitty gritty of tactics). The graphics are clean and smart, and while the interface does kind of boil down to a series of menus, it's still simple enough that it's easy to direct your troops to where they need to go. There's no RPG elements, really, other than an really deep ongoing story, but this game doesn't profess to be an RPG, so it works just fine (for now -- it definitely feels like there are more games to be set in this world). In fact, the only issue with Ravenmark is that it is so short, and it's constrained only to the small screen for now. But both of those issues are set to be fixed with a free update by Christmas (with new content and a universal version), so if you're interested in either dipping your toe into turn-based tactical strategy, or just really want to play a very well-done and polished example of the genre, this one's for you. It's available right now for US$2.99.
PC Gamer takes on weeks-long GalCiv battle
People on the internet generally don't enjoy reading long articles. We understand. You've got places to go, people to see, episodes of Heroes to watch. Who has time to actually scroll through several screens worth of writing when there's so much to do?That being said, we heartily recommend that you set aside a few minutes and read through PC Gamer's epic account of what is likely the longest game of Galactic Civilizations 2 ever played.How long exactly? The "Gigantic" sized match has been going on for 16 days now and is just beginning to show signs of an imminent ending. Besides being routinely laugh-out-loud funny, Tom Francis' running account captures the intricacies of interstellar diplomacy, taxation, genocide, despotism, popularity rankings, and extremely foolhardy military planning in a form that even people unfamiliar with the game will find interesting. Go ahead and read it. That status report will still be there in fifteen minutes.[Via Kieron Gillen]
