Game: Gang Lords

So much of Gang Lords seems derivative. Players collect a menagerie of character cards, upgrade and evolve their forces, and create a team of the most powerful gangsters they can find so that they can decimate the opposition. It's a lot of the kinds of things we've seen before, really. The thing is, while it's a familiar setup, the actual gameplay feels refreshingly complex.The management side of things in Gang Lords should feel pretty familiar to many freemium gamers. Cards can be leveled up in the usual manner: by sacrificing low-end feeders and spending a little in-game cash. Evolutions require fully leveled cards and special supplemental evo cards. Other players can be recruited for a fight so that their Leaders can join in the fun. And, of course, there's an energy mechanic that prevents players from picking too many fights at once."The fights are something else entirely, though. Two gangs square off on opposing sides of the screen and players have to make careful use of their characters in order to come out on top. There's an admittedly familiar rock-paper-scissors mechanic at play that allows Green cards to trump Blue, Blue to trump Red, and so on; but there's a lot more to it than that. Each gangster has a set number of turns they have to wait between attacks, and this value can vary greatly. At the same time, players can sacrifice a card's turn to "support" another, giving it an attack/defense boost and knocking one turn off their activation counter. It's this support mechanic that makes a huge difference in how one tackles each fight.