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Tag: Strategy

  • King’s League: Odyssey Review
    Reviews
    • iOS
    King’s League: Odyssey Review

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    The King has put forth the call for the mightiest in the realm to contest for a spot at the Round Table! The path will be difficult, but fame and glory awaits the one bold and powerful enough to seize the opportunity. From humble beginnings, you must rise through the tournaments, forge your legend across the land, and lead your party to victory in a game that's both simple to play and surprisingly complex.King's League: Odyssey is quite the thing. It starts off simply enough, with hazy shades of something from Kairosoft, requiring you to recruit a small band of knights, mages, and archers, who sally forth to complete quests, conquer villages, and take part in monthly tournaments. But before long you'll find yourself clearing out dungeons, laying siege to larger, tougher cities, upgrading your facilities, specializing your troops, and more; and yet it happens so gradually and it's all so easily accessible that you won't even notice it happening until the first time you get clobbered and realize that you need to actually think about what you're doing."The game plays out in monthly cycles, the days ticking off inexorably (unless you're in a menu) toward the tournament battle at the end of every month. You begin with a single knight and enough money to recruit one or two cohorts: another knight, a warrior, or perhaps an archer or a wizard. Each character has four ability-determining stats that must be trained as often as possible, but training is limited by points, which are awarded in very limited quantities at the beginning of every month. While training, you can also embark upon quests, which earn you gold and sometimes crystals that are used to increase your character levels, earn specialized abilities, and upgrade your facilities. But you can't be training while you're questing, so you don't want to be questing all the time - and since questing also takes time, you sometimes have to take a break to ensure that you can attend the monthly tournament.
  • Eon Altar Preview
    Upcoming
    • Android
    • iOS
    Eon Altar Preview

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    Eon Altar is one of those ideas that immediately makes you wonder why somebody didn't think of it ages ago. As most such ideas are, it is both ingenious and remarkably simple: a tabletop/video game RPG hybrid, played with smartphones that are linked to a central tablet serving as the "game board," through which the story is told. The machines crunch the numbers, handle the character management, perform the virtual dice rolls and more, but the experience is more akin to an old-school pencil-and-paper RPG session - the best of both worlds.Eon Altar supports face-to-face gaming in groups of two to five, with each player accessing the game through an iOS, Android, or Windows smartphone. Each phone in the group is connected via Wi-Fi to a tablet or PC which displays the game world, combat, and other cinematic aspects of the action, and also saves the progress of the campaign, which will unfold episodically over nine modular "adventures." Each adventure contains enough content for at least three sessions, and will be released every four to six weeks after the game launches.""Once we are finished [with] our first story, over nine adventures, we'll evaluate and see where we want to take it - whether we'll continue the same characters in further adventures within Eon Altar itself as further campaigns in the same structure and engine, or if it'll be time to do an overhaul of the game itself and evolve it into an Eon Altar 2," Edward J. Douglas, the Co-Founder and Creative Director of Vancouver-based Flying Helmet Games, said. "It will really depend on where the technology is at and how players enjoy using it. It moves so fast! Our world is large and we have a lot of story planned after this first campaign, lots of challenges ahead for these characters."
  • Mush Review
    Reviews
    • PC
    Mush Review

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    On paper, Mush should be fantastic. You are a crewmember aboard a spaceship, and each other crewmember is also a player online. You're tasked with working together to keep the ship safe and stocked, while venturing out to surrounding planets to gather information, resources, and whatever else you can find. But here's the catch: there's an alien disease spreading throughout the ship, and you have no idea who has turned.A great idea indeed, and one that I was eager to jump straight into. Unfortunately the proof lies in the execution, and this isn't so well thought-out. Clumsy, slow-moving free-to-play action means that it's difficult to truly immerse yourself in the drama, and eventually you end up just bounding around the ship every so often, completing a couple of menial tasks here and there that aren't exactly what I'd describe as exciting or fun.The game starts off pleasingly enough. You choose a character, get plopped onto the ship, and are then shown the ropes, from keeping yourself fed to manning the turrets and taking down enemy ships. This is all told from an isometric viewpoint, with the various rooms on the ship separated up as to show what you can see at any one point.Mush is a semi-turn-based style affair. You're given action and movement points, and once these have run out, you then need to wait for the start of the next "cycle" - i.e. 3 hours of real time - before you can make another move. Hence, it's all about making the best of your actions, and preparing yourself for what you hope to achieve in the next round.
  • Boom Beach Preview
    Upcoming
    • iOS
    Boom Beach Preview

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    How do you follow-up a hit like Clash of Clans? If you're developer Supercell, you think long and hard about what made the formula work. Then you do it again, but better. You learn from your mistakes. You tweak, you perfect - and when all is said and done, you deliver a game like Boom Beach to the App Store.Sneaking in a Canadian soft launch late last week, Boom Beach takes the winning ideas of Clash of Clans and fuses them with some changes that players have been clamoring for. It's not uncommon to hear players mutter things to themselves like "why do my surviving troops disappear after a battle?," "why can't I tell my troops where to go?," or "I'm never going to get further in the single player campaign - I'm absolutely stuck!"At the very least, frustration like this have plagued my own Clash of Clans experience from day one. Boom Beach is quick to address such problems: surviving troops return to your landing craft, ready for your next assault. Once you unlock signal smoke, you can give your troops an indication of where you want them to go. The single-player campaign offers plenty of freedom, letting you pick and choose from a variety of battles. In its changes, Boom Beach feels like a checklist of solutions to the little wriggles that bothered players in their last game.
  • Backyard Monsters: Unleashed Walkthrough
    Walkthroughs
    • iOS
    Backyard Monsters: Unleashed Walkthrough

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    Backyard Monsters: Unleashed is a strategy game from KIXEYE. You'll build a base, assemble a team of creepy monsters, and attack other players' bases. Gamezebo's quick start strategy guide will provide you with detailed images, tips, information, and hints on how to play your best game."
  • Backyard Monsters: Unleashed Review
    Reviews
    • iOS
    Backyard Monsters: Unleashed Review

    By

    What was once a Facebook game is now a self-contained mobile experience. Backyard Monsters: Unleashed from KIXEYE is an upgraded version of the Facebook combat simulation game Backyard Monsters. The game has made the transition to the portable world without losing anything, bringing iOS gamers one of the most organized, satisfying, and hilarious freemium strategy games around.Backyard Monsters: Unleashed's setup will be familiar to anyone who's played a combat strategy game in the past: run your village, build and upgrade buildings, raise an army, go forth and conquer. Your little piece of property is a backyard surrounded by greenery. By placing resource generators, defense and miscellaneous structures, you can turn your tiny village into a sprawling war factory. One that's nigh invulnerable from neighboring backyards' attacks!"To go from zero to hero, Backyard Monsters: Unleashed spreads currency requirements out across four different types of resources: sticks, stones, putty, and goo. The first two make enough sense, as both are used to build basic and advanced structures, respectively. Goo is needed to spawn monsters, and it also serves as a currency for entering battle. Putty is used to construct certain buildings as well as to unlock new monsters. From what we can gather, monsters are basically just carefully shaped piles of squishy goop that live in stick houses. Doesn't stop them from being fierce on the battlefield, though.In addition to the resources above, Backyard Monsters: Unleashed also features "shiny," the game's "hurry-up" currency, along with an optional in-app purchase of an additional builder to let you work on more projects simultaneously. All resources are earned through normal play and as post-combat spoils, but you can also refill them with a quick microtransaction.
  • Super Roman Conquest Preview
    Upcoming
    • iOS
    • PC
    Super Roman Conquest Preview

    By

    After spending a collective 16 years at storied game developer LucasArts, the studio behind games like Full Throttle, Sam and Max Hit the Road, the Monkey Island series, and of course a truckload of Star Wars titles, Matt Boland and Tim Temmerman found themselves cast adrift when George Lucas sold the ranch to Disney, which sadly decided to shut it down. Rather than move on to other big studios to work on other big games, they decided to roll the dice on the indie life, combining their love of history and older strategy releases like Myth II: Soulblighter and the SNES cartridge King Arthur's World into a new project called Super Roman Conquest."We settled on Rome as a setting for the game because Tim and I are both big fans of history, especially the history of Rome," Boland explained. "I'm a HUGE fan of Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast and he did an excellent multi-part podcast on the fall of the Roman Republic called, 'Death Throes of the Republic.' It's a ridiculously fascinating and engaging narration of everything that went into the eventual collapse of the Roman Republic and rise of the Empire. These people lived in a governmental system shockingly similar to our own in the United States and faced many of the same problems we do today. After listening to Hardcore History, I honestly felt a strong connection to these people who lived thousands of years ago and wanted to create a game that could serve to highlight some of these similarities for people who maybe weren't aware of them.""On the surface, Super Roman Conquest looks like more like a side-scrolling arcade game than anything else, but it is in fact a strategy game. It won't feature territory management, taxation, or other such components found in strategy heavyweights like Crusader Kings; instead, the intent is to allow fans of the genre to "scratch the itch" without getting bogged down in multi-layered menus and obtuse UIs."We want people to be able to pick up Super Roman Conquest and enjoy themselves, but also want more experienced users to use the tricks they've learned to manipulate the various systems we've built," Boland said. "Essentially we want the gameplay of SRC to boil down our favorite strategy games to the essence of what we feel are their greatest strengths: epic, tactics-filled battles and dynamic, game altering decisions."
  • King’s League: Odyssey Preview
    Upcoming
    • iOS
    King’s League: Odyssey Preview

    By

    Remember the days when all of the greatest computer games were simply Flash-based experiences that you could play online? Well a lot has certainly changed in the gaming world since then, but one thing that's managed to stay the same is that amazing Flash games on the internet are still as prevalent as ever! And the best part is that with all of the recent innovations in mobile technology, more and more fantastic web-based Flash games are being ported right onto your touchscreen device; and the next one in line will be none other than King's League: Odyssey from Gamenauts and Kurechii Studio.King's League: Odyssey is a full-fledged iOS port of the top three strategy Flash game on Kongregate, which also earned the popular gaming portal's coveted "Game of the Month" award for April 2013. Blending equal elements of resource-management and role playing gameplay, the iOS version will take everything that players know and love of King's League: Odyssey and make it shine for the touchscreen. The upcoming mobile release is said to completely revamp the world of the modest Flash game with sparkling HD graphics, and brand new mobile-exclusive content including additional dungeons, characters, enemies, and quests.In the game, players are tasked with training recruits from a number of medieval class systems, such as Lancers, Berserkers, and Hunters, as they set off to conquer enemy towns and cities to acquire new resources and make their name resound across the kingdoms. With each new town that players ransack, they'll be able to upgrade the strength of their training facilities, and as a result, level-up their units to hold their own in battle in the increasingly difficulty kingdom leagues. In addition to the main storyline, King's League: Odyssey also offers a handful of optional side quests, as well as the punishing Battlethon mode, which is certain to separate the boys from the kings!