Short reviews, games
Oct. 19th, 2015 11:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackMachi Koro
What do you call board games with cards instead of a board, like dominion? I, in defiance of etymology and bowing to convenience, call them "board games", but I know that can be misleading.
Anyway, ghoti got liv this as a present and the three of us played once and it was really cute. It's like dominion in that you collect increasingly costly cards, which help you get MORE cards costly cards, building a small Japanese (?) town until you reach a winning condition. But in this case, instead of shuffling your cards into a deck and doing "choose five", it's like Settlers -- you roll a die (or two), and cards generate money if they have have the number shown (divided into groups of "get money if anyone rolls that", "get money if you roll that", and "get money FROM someone else IF they roll that".)
I've yet to see what strategies work, if it's broken in any way, but the mechanics seem really good: like dominion it's self-balancing in the sense that if one card is far-and-away too good you could remove that one. For now, all the supply cards are available each game, but you could easily do what dominion did and print expansions and play with a subset of the cards you think make an interesting combination. It would be even easier to make your own, if you wanted to, as there's no need for them to mix with the others when shuffled in.
Cut the Rope, for android
I played this all the way through and it is Annoyingly Addictive. Both in the sense of having good puzzles, where each set of levels introduces a new element, and spends enough time to develop it, but also judiciously re-uses ones from earlier when they'd make sense. It does well in making a reasonable variation in possibility from a small number of elements, that you spend time wondering "I know how all these bits work, how do they work together" not just "i have no idea, what am I obviously supposed to do here?".
But also in the sense of being cluttered with free-to-play addictive intrusive thieving level-up type stuff which undermines the gameplay.
Soul Hunters
Agh, I love the idea of this, it's a mash-up of Magic the Gathering and World and Warcraft and a 2-d beat-em-up -- you level up heroes with a variety of abilities in multiple different ways, and defeat levels (and various arena combats etc which I've not looked at) by having your heroes run through the level defeating three waves of foes, ending with dark versions of heroes. The heroes mostly fight on automatic, making the strategy focus on levelling them up, not fighting well, but there is the interactive component of choosing when to use their ultimate abilities, which charge up at varying speeds. And then they collect stuff, which helps them level up.
It does everything to present the _idea_ of strategy, with zillions of knobs you have to tweak. But most of them are not really decisions, just "click X to get Y". And it's crammed to overflowing with freemium stuff. I don't know if there is or isn't strategy at the higher levels, but I need to get out fast before I find out.
But it's a shame, because lots of little details are really well done. There are zillions of characters to collect (and alas way too many are over-sexualised) but the idea of mixing and matching them is intriguing. And I liked imagining them chatting over a camp fire. The elf-knight with the six-foot sword -- everyone has ripped off tolkien, but more for "elves which are good at everything, but especially forests" and less for elves who ride to battle in bright array. Where does he come from? Is there a knightly order? The floating purple death who grows to twice their height and eviscerates enemies with a giant glowing scythe, do they enjoy chatting to the others over dinner? Do they enjoy feeling a touch of camaraderie?
And there's a plot, which is aggressively bland "fight dark version of heroes, now do that again in 20 different scenes, now do it while pursuing, now do it while fleeing, now do it in some other way which is mechanically exactly the same". It's like, someone mashed up every possible fantasy cliche and wrapped it around a scam, but they got people to polish all the bits of it enough really good ideas came squeezing out of the cracks...
What do you call board games with cards instead of a board, like dominion? I, in defiance of etymology and bowing to convenience, call them "board games", but I know that can be misleading.
Anyway, ghoti got liv this as a present and the three of us played once and it was really cute. It's like dominion in that you collect increasingly costly cards, which help you get MORE cards costly cards, building a small Japanese (?) town until you reach a winning condition. But in this case, instead of shuffling your cards into a deck and doing "choose five", it's like Settlers -- you roll a die (or two), and cards generate money if they have have the number shown (divided into groups of "get money if anyone rolls that", "get money if you roll that", and "get money FROM someone else IF they roll that".)
I've yet to see what strategies work, if it's broken in any way, but the mechanics seem really good: like dominion it's self-balancing in the sense that if one card is far-and-away too good you could remove that one. For now, all the supply cards are available each game, but you could easily do what dominion did and print expansions and play with a subset of the cards you think make an interesting combination. It would be even easier to make your own, if you wanted to, as there's no need for them to mix with the others when shuffled in.
Cut the Rope, for android
I played this all the way through and it is Annoyingly Addictive. Both in the sense of having good puzzles, where each set of levels introduces a new element, and spends enough time to develop it, but also judiciously re-uses ones from earlier when they'd make sense. It does well in making a reasonable variation in possibility from a small number of elements, that you spend time wondering "I know how all these bits work, how do they work together" not just "i have no idea, what am I obviously supposed to do here?".
But also in the sense of being cluttered with free-to-play addictive intrusive thieving level-up type stuff which undermines the gameplay.
Soul Hunters
Agh, I love the idea of this, it's a mash-up of Magic the Gathering and World and Warcraft and a 2-d beat-em-up -- you level up heroes with a variety of abilities in multiple different ways, and defeat levels (and various arena combats etc which I've not looked at) by having your heroes run through the level defeating three waves of foes, ending with dark versions of heroes. The heroes mostly fight on automatic, making the strategy focus on levelling them up, not fighting well, but there is the interactive component of choosing when to use their ultimate abilities, which charge up at varying speeds. And then they collect stuff, which helps them level up.
It does everything to present the _idea_ of strategy, with zillions of knobs you have to tweak. But most of them are not really decisions, just "click X to get Y". And it's crammed to overflowing with freemium stuff. I don't know if there is or isn't strategy at the higher levels, but I need to get out fast before I find out.
But it's a shame, because lots of little details are really well done. There are zillions of characters to collect (and alas way too many are over-sexualised) but the idea of mixing and matching them is intriguing. And I liked imagining them chatting over a camp fire. The elf-knight with the six-foot sword -- everyone has ripped off tolkien, but more for "elves which are good at everything, but especially forests" and less for elves who ride to battle in bright array. Where does he come from? Is there a knightly order? The floating purple death who grows to twice their height and eviscerates enemies with a giant glowing scythe, do they enjoy chatting to the others over dinner? Do they enjoy feeling a touch of camaraderie?
And there's a plot, which is aggressively bland "fight dark version of heroes, now do that again in 20 different scenes, now do it while pursuing, now do it while fleeing, now do it in some other way which is mechanically exactly the same". It's like, someone mashed up every possible fantasy cliche and wrapped it around a scam, but they got people to polish all the bits of it enough really good ideas came squeezing out of the cracks...