The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Another iOS game I’ve been playing, one that is pretty fantastic, is Rainbow Six: Shadow Vanguard. It’s a Gameloft joint. I never know what to think about Gameloft. Their games are normally solid, but they’re also normally complete fucking ripoffs of console IP. Still, this one is licensed and it is really great.

I’ve been thinking of the game as SWAT 4 Lite. This game has most of the fun parts of SWAT 4 (looking under doors, planning attacks, clearing rooms, ordering your squad) without all the tedious parts (being incredibly difficult, following police procedure) which were cool to include in SWAT 4, but make it a game I will never play for fun. Basically, you get thrown into various scenarios around the world and your squad of three people (I guess the other three people of the Rainbow Six are backups in case you die? I dunno.) has to infiltrate buildings, rescue hostages, diffuse bombs, and so on.

The graphics in this game look fantastic for iOS. They’re basically of an early PS2 sort of quality. They’re not as pretty as, say, Infinity Blade, but this game is doing a whole lot more than Infinity Blade, what with tracking two companion AIs around with you and all the enemies, so I think it’s really good visually.
The game also has really slick presentation. When you peek under doors, the enemies are having funny or relevant conversations, which is a nice little touch. Your mission briefings and guy in the ear guy does a great job of being a tired veteran of this sort of thing. All of the icons on the screen make basically perfect sense without having to decipher them. (I knew, for instance, what the “Flashbang and Clear” icon meant before the tutorial told me.)

The controls, however, are shit. I’m sorry, but emulating dual analog shooters on the touchscreen just DOES NOT WORK, no matter how much you want it to. You just cannot do any sort of twitch shooting and moving in this game. Luckily, the game knows this, and this isn’t a twitch shooting kind of game. It’s very methodical, with a majority of the kills coming from ordering your teammates, if you’re playing right. They also layer on a fuck-ton of auto-aim, which helps a lot. When I first started the game, I thought the controls would be a dealbreaker, but as I learned that normal FPSing wasn’t the focus of the game, I really changed my tune. They did a good job of making up for the flaws in playing a shooter on an iPad.
The only other control thing that seems a little wonky is the cover mechanics. You can only get into cover at certain points, but the game is sometimes kind of picky about what distance from them you have to be to get into cover. It’s normally not a life-or-death thing: you’re normally getting into cover by a door before you tell your team to breach, for instance. Still, it’s a bit frustrating, and I kind of wish they would have made that as sticky and forgiving as the auto-aim for shooting is, as then you could take a little more active role in taking out bad guys without getting yourself killed, if you were the sort to want to do that.

The game has an EXP system that unlocks weapons a la Modern Warfare, because that’s a thing all games must have now. It’s inoffensive, but also mostly useless. I don’t know. I haven’t switched from the assault rifle I started with, because of course I want an assault rifle. It’s flexible. If I took a shotgun, I wouldn’t be as good as sniping from cover. These unlocks carry over into the deathmatch multiplayer, which I’m sure is pretty bad and I haven’t even pretended to be interested in. The game, however, does have co-op through the story, which is crazy and seems like a feature nobody would use, but I guess for the like 2 people who both own this game and have iPads in the same room or whatever, that would be pretty damn sweet.

I’ve played 5 or 6 of the missions so far, and I really had a lot of fun. I bought it on sale for a buck, and I don’t know if I’d quite bite at the $8.99 I think it normally sells for. But this is Gameloft: next time they have a sale, probably around Thanksgiving, it’ll be a buck again. When it is, you should really consider picking it up. It’s just a really polished, really fun game. I was surprised I enjoyed it as much as I did, and I’m glad I picked it up on a whim.

Before I get started, I decided to add an iOS category today, which I should have done a long time ago, as I know some of you probably don’t give a shit about the iOS games I talk about. This took forever because I had to go and label all my old blogs, and I don’t know if you know this, but I have written a ton of stupid blogs! Anyway, I hope that’s useful. Then again, I doubt anyone uses the categories, but eh, whatever. It’s sorted and shit, right?

Anyway, today I want to talk about Hospital Story. No, this isn’t a game by Kairosoft, the people who brought you hits like Game Dev Story and Hot Springs Story. They really want you to think it is, though, with the icon looking pretty well exactly like those Kairosoft games. No, this is a fairly useless microtransationfest that probably isn’t going to hold your attention more than 15 minutes. Still, it’s free, so maybe 15 minutes is enough.

I downloaded this game because I often click on the little ads that give you free Tower Bux in Tiny Tower because 1) I want free Tower Bux, 2) It takes like 2 seconds, and 3) I want to support the people who made that game, because it is so awesome, and I assume they get money for people who agree to take a look. Hospital Story was the first game on there that really seemed like it might be fun. I thought maybe this would be someone else’s take on the Kairosoft sim model, and I was interested to try it.

Basically, the game goes in rounds. People come in the top of your hospital, and they need various treatments. You have a little electric machine, and little heart monitor, a strange machine that looks like a hand, and some sort of brain scanner. You drag the people to the machines, then tap on them to send one of your workers to do the procedure. Many patients need multiple types of procedures, so then you drag them to another place, tap on them to send a guy, and so on. Finally, after they’re cured, they’ll go to the desk, and, you guessed it, you have to tap on them to send a worker over to take their money. A game day is maybe a minute or two long, and then you can upgrade your equipment and hire more workers or whatever before going at it again. The game also gives you experience points, and you level up, but these levels seem to do absolutely nothing besides show up on the top of the screen. I don’t know why there’s an EXP system besides the fact that games have EXP systems, I guess.

This game is all about microtransations. You can upgrade your stuff with the in-game money, but hiring most of the staff requires “Medi-Points” which, as you can probably guess, they’ll be happy to sell you. They give you a few to start, which is enough to hire a few people and not be totally screwed, but it is really frustrating. They do have one thing I found smart, though: they have this weird thing where you can elect to watch commercials to get small amounts of Medi-points. Instead of forcing them on you, it’s voluntary, but they reward you. I could really get behind this sort of model as an alternative to paying, but the returns just aren’t any good. I had to watch like 7 commercials to get enough Medi-points to hire one of the cheapest nurses, and that was only with the bonus points they gave me for starting the game. I’d be doing that for an hour or more before I’d be able to buy, say, the Cat Doctor. It’s just not worth it.

As you play through the game, patients start coming in faster and faster, and you have to scramble to get them all taken care of. This might be a cool little arcade game, if for the fact that basically the only thing that makes it possible to do the numbers they throw at you is having enough staff. If you don’t have enough, you’re screwed. If you do, it’s a cakewalk. And, of course, you have to hire new workers with Medi-Points. Yeah.

Once the game picked up speed, I had fun with it for a little while as a time-waster, but it’s nowhere near deep enough of a game that anyone would ever think to spend money on it, and their little “watch ads” thing, while smart, just doesn’t give enough of a return for you to even want to try it. It’s free, sure, but there’s no reason to try this game.

I was cleaning up installs on my 360, and it occurred to me that I never actually wrote about Half-Minute Hero: Super Mega Neo Climax. Which seems like a huge mistake. And since this is a day to NEVAR FORGET, I guess I best not forget to write about it, and give you a review.

While some of the things they took out of the game are stupid, overall, it’s a really great game and a worthwhile purchase if you didn’t play the original.

The premise, if you’ve never caught it, is that there’s a spell going around that destroys the world and takes 30 seconds to cast. You’re a really fast person, so you’re recruited by the greedy Goddess of Time to stop the Evil Lords who are trying to cast the spell. So you run around and do everything you’d normally do in a JRPG, but you only have 30 seconds in which to do it.

Let me just be clear: the premise is still awesome. They get to make fun of and play off of genre tropes, all the while making a game that actually doesn’t play much like a JRPG at all, but is instead this weird, timed puzzle game. You have to balance grinding for experience, buying items and completing quests with finishing the overall quest of the map before your time is up. You also have to balance when you can afford to pay the Time Goddess to give you back your 30 seconds and plan your routes through the map accordingly.
There’s a ton of thought put into the game, and a ton of love, and it really shows. There are usually at least two or three ways to solve the major problem on each map, and many of them cause the story to branch off in a completely different direction, leading to completely different levels. Each level has special titles you can earn by performing crazy stunts in the levels themselves, and even wanting to replay each level to get enough money to collect all the equipment in each stage really gives you multiple ways to play every single level. I’m not a completionist, but I was enjoying the game so much that I got every ending, every branching story path, every piece of equipment, and every party member, and I wasn’t bored of the game replaying those stages again and again. There’s just plenty of variety in what you can do to tackle them, and the game normally rewards you for trying to complete a mission a different way. The game is also great about letting you know what you could have done, with the little caravan at the end of each level telling you about hidden items and paths you might have missed and might want to try out.

This version of the game has some problems, but the visuals aren’t one of them. People were wary about the redrawn art style, so of course, the first thing I did was turn on the original, pixel art. However, it sucked: on an HD screen, the pixels are blown up so much that you can’t tell what anything is supposed to be representing at all. The redrawn, HD graphics, however, have a ton of character and look really nice. You lose a sense of where the grid is in the game with them, but that’s just about the only problem. They are way better.
The real problem is that this version strips out all the minigames from the original and replaces them with lackluster versions of the normal gameplay. In the original, you eventually unlocked stories about other characters. One was kind of tower defense, where you summoned monsters. One was a shooter, and so on. They all still had the whole 30 second thing, but they were some variety. In SMNC, this is just replaced with normal game maps that have the same plot as the levels in the original PSP game. The main mechanics are strong enough to carry the game. I love those. But having different sorts of gameplay would have made these characters seem different, made the Hero of Time seem more special with his speediness, and generally would have worked well. Especially when they went out of their way to make sure the original graphics were in this version, it just seems stupid that they did away with that.

Still, it wasn’t about to keep me from enjoying it. The game really hooked me, and I’m glad I randomly bought it in a moment of weakness. I really did just about everything you could in the game, and had fun the whole time. (I didn’t beat Hero 3, because fuck, that shit is CRAZY and I don’t have enough patience to practice that to get it right, even with a guide.) If you missed this originally and the second time, think about going back and grabbing this. It’s a damn fun and creative little game.

What have I always said is the surefire way of getting me to buy a game on iOS?
That’s right, Asynchronous Multiplayer.

Ascension has that, which is plenty of reason to buy it on its own. However, it’s also a pretty awesome deckbuilding game, in the way that Dominion is a “deckbuilding game.” I like it. I mean, it’s no Tanto Cuore, but then again, what is?

I described the game the other day as a combination of Dominion and Race for the Galaxy. It’s certainly more Dominion than Race, but hear me out. A game of Ascension ends when all the “honor points” are depleted. These work basically like VP chips from Race. Cards in your deck are worth honor points, and you pick up honor points from the pool when you defeat monsters (or when a card effect tells you to). The person with the most honor at the end of the game, counting cards in their deck and their pile of points, wins.

There are two currencies that are emptied at the end of the round that cards can give you. They can give you money (I think the game calls it Runes? But it’s money.) or they can give you attack power. With attack power, you can kill monsters, take their honor bonus from the pool, and get whatever extra effect the monster has. With money, you can buy more cards to put in your deck. Unlike Dominion, there’s a set of five cards dealt at random from the deck in front of all players. When one is bought or defeated, a new card is drawn from the deck to replace it. I really like that. It makes the game feel much, much more dynamic than Dominion’s “pick some decks and that’s what you get!” There are also, of course, three cards you can always buy: a Cultist that you can kill easily, a Mystic which gives you more money, and a Heavy Infantry which gives you more fight power.

The deck is broken up into cards of four factions: Enlightened, Lifebound, Mechana, and Void. Each type has it’s own path to victory, and you’ll probably want to specialize in at least one during the game. Enlightened is Money-based, but has cards that let you kill some monsters automatically to help out with it’s lack of attack power. Lifebound is extremely Money-based, but has cards that let you basically buy honor. Mechana is very flexible, having many cards that let you pick between money and attack, and also loves Constructs, cards that stay in play and have continuous effects. Void is extremely attack oriented, and focuses on letting you thin your deck as a side bonus to many of its cards.

Again, the game feels really dynamic. You get into points where, say, no players are focusing enough on attack, so the stuff you can buy or fight is all monsters, and you have to make that choice if you want to try to diversify into attack power, or just wait it out. Similarly, you have to decide whether you’re going to force a strategy or try to just play it by ear. This stuff feels very Race to me, where you’re trying to read the board and the cards you’re getting to see what the other players don’t want so you can find your own niche and path to victory points. You get that, but Ascension is much simpler and faster to play than Race. It’s a smart little game, and totally worth five bucks because, you know. Asynchronous multiplayer, motherfucker.

Ugh what do I write about ugggggggh… List of topics, save me!

Tested does all these Apps. Sometimes they are of a week? Anyway, they talked about this game called Continuity 2, which seemed pretty clever, and was a buck. As you know, that’s all it takes for me to buy an app. Thus, I bought the app.

Apparently this is a sequel to something? I haven’t played the first. But the game itself is pretty straightforward. You are a stick figure dude. You have to run and jump to collect coins, get a key, and use that key to unlock the exit to the level. But, of course, there’s a twist. The level is made up of sliding block panels. You can zoom out and rearrange them as you’d like in order to get around the level. You can also change the level’s gravity by rotating your iDevice about. Basically, it becomes kind of a puzzle in figuring out how you can slide and rotate things to get to all the coins before you leave. Since, in order to make a working path, the walls have to match up on both sides of a tile, you don’t have as many options as you think you have, and you have to think about when to use what.

The controls are fine. You double tap to zoom in or out, hold to the left or right of your stick dude to walk, and swipe up to jump. Since the game doesn’t require quick reflexes or pixel-perfect platforming, these controls work perfectly. You’re never accidentally jumping off a ledge or anything. The rotation sometimes takes a bit longer to kick in than I’d like, but that’s probably an issue with the hardware more than anything.

You never die. If you kill your stick guy, he just respawns. The objective is to complete the stage as fast as possible. Each level has goal times you can work for, or you can just work to make sure you get all the coins on every level, as many are options and are harder to do than just getting the key and leaving. That’s mostly what I did.

That’s seriously all there is to this game, though. It’s very much “What you see is what you get.” I’ve played a lot of levels, and while they got more complicated (more tiles and more rotation required) they never really mixed up the formula or gave it a twist. It could have used one! But for a dollar, I definitely got my money’s worth. I do kind of wonder what the first one was like. This game is really very simple, in both visuals and gameplay. How could this be an evolution of something else? Is this just a level pack? I have no idea.

I really, really enjoyed Alice: The Madness Returns.

Trust me, I’m as shocked as you are. I watched the quick look and it looked visually interesting, at least. It also got decent reviews. I figured I might as well rent and try it. That’s what Gamefly is for, right? When I got hooked on it, though, I was shocked, but I enjoyed the whole game, really. Alice isn’t going to be Game of the Year or anything, but if you like 3D platforming, this is really quite a fun time.

The plot is that basically, Alice is seeing an odd doctor to attempt to make her forget the death of her family. However, the treatment seems to be having ill consequences: Wonderland is being destroyed as her memories are wiped clean. Alice, tired of this bullshit after seeing what this process is doing to her Wonderland, sets out to recover her lost memories and save Wonderland from the Demon Train thing that’s tearing it apart.

Most of the game is platforming, but it’s not frustrating at all. Alice is incredibly mobile. She has basically a quadruple jump, and you can hold down the jump button to do a Princess Peach Float in between the first three jumps. This lets you save yourself from jump miscalculations most of the time, and for when you don’t, the game has really good checkpoints that keep you from losing too much progress. You’ll also find little secrets, like shards of memory, hidden about behind breakable walls or secret passages you must shrink to get into. Par for the course for this genre, certainly, but the shards of memory are really interesting! There is another collectable, bottles, that don’t do anything, and any time I found one of them, instead of a memory shard, I was pretty displeased. I guess they just didn’t have enough voice overs recorded to make them all memory shards? It’s a shame. There are also little challenge rooms you can find that give you Rose Paint, the game’s version of a piece of heart, if you complete the challenge. This challenge can be anything from a “survive waves of enemies” challenge, a harder version of a minigame you played in the game, or a riddle. Honestly, I wish more of them would have been riddles. It fits the whole Wonderland thing better, and the riddles they did have were pretty cute.

Other than the platforming, there is combat, which is really well done. It is really skill-based, and while I set it on Easy, which I believe just made every enemy drop tons of health which was fine by me, I still had to learn it and figure out what I was doing to succeed. You really have to prioritize enemy targets and figure out who in a group to take out first. You also have to learn when to dodge and when to attack, and what weapon works best on what enemy. It’s fast-paced, enemies don’t seem to be damage sponges in general, and it’s a lot of fun.
The weapons are also pretty cool. You have the Vorpal Blade, a bloody knife that is your quick melee. You have the Hobby Horse, my favorite, which is this gigantic horse head on a stick that you slam to the ground hard, and is your heavy melee. It is incredibly satisfying. Alice wields it in a completely badass way, and it makes satisfying noises as you smash people with it. You have the Pepper Grinder, which is basically a machine gun, only it works on a cooldown and doesn’t have ammo. The last weapon is the Teapot Cannon, which is kind of a grenade launcher that requires charging, so it takes awhile to fire, but can be good at taking out enemies with multiple weak points or a group of weak enemies. While I found myself using the Hobby Horse and Pepper Grinder for most situations, all weapons had a place and they were all useful.

The game is both polished and not. The game is fairly long, and every room has brand new horrors and oddities to look at. They do a good job of showing a descent into bad stuff in most areas, with them starting tame, but a little off-putting, and then ending with them being flat-out creepy by the time you’re done with an area. I even took some bad cell phone shots of some of the statues, because I was so impressed with how they looked. Also, because they were naked lady bugs.
In addition, the music is fucking FANTASTIC. It is very low key and just there to create ambiance, and it doesn’t really get very busy. But it sets the creepy tone perfectly. For example, listen to the fight theme. I love this. You’ve got the evil ruin she’s fighting with the war drums, feeling very sinister, but on top you have these bells, kind of innocent and light, representing Alice herself. Love it.
At the same time, there are parts where the game is a bit buggy or off. I kept bumping into tiny invisible walls on things like stairs, so I had to jump up them instead of just walk up them. There seems to be a glitch with the Teapot Cannon that freezes you in place sometimes after using it. You can fix things by jumping, but it is a bit annoying in combat. Many of the minigames seem a bit odd and out of place. There are several Guitar Hero-like sequences for no reason I can discern which feel very pasted into the game, for example. The doll-head-roll minigame near the end of the game is particularly odd in it’s inclusion, and is, unfortunately, really frustrating to do. That part of the game probably frustrated me more than all the rest combined. There was also only one boss fight, at the end of the game, which is odd, because it seems like there were several parts that were SUPPOSED to be boss fights, but the area would just end. As I said, oddly rough in some parts, but it didn’t ruin the game overall for me at all.

Finally, the plot is not particularly subtle. But frankly, I like that. I feel if the game was trying to go super deep with metaphor and shit, it would have felt very fake, forced, and “Look How Clever I Am.” It’s all in front of you, and somehow, that makes it more fun. There are clear relationships between Wonderland and the real world as you see it, and even Alice knows that Wonderland is a level of escapism that helps her cope and deal with the world, because there she is powerful. I figured the game would fizzle out at the ending, but it didn’t. Alice wins and solves her problems both in Wonderland and the real world in a very satisfying and believable way.

I highly recommend Alice as a rental or bargain bin purchase if you can stomach platformers at all. I never expected American McGee to make a good game, but this is quite a solid product that’s worth your time. I found it really worth mine.

I’m still playing Tiny Tower. Like, every single day.

Why?

1. I’m still seeing new things.
Tiny Tower has nice pixel-style visuals. I like it. It looks cool. They put a lot of time and effort into making all those floors look really neat. Plus, there are a TON of them. At the time of this writing, my tower is currently 76 stories tall. There has, of course, been no repeats in the types of floors. Even stuff like the various apartment floors, which could easily have been repeats, are all distinct and different looking. And I know, from looking at the list of desired jobs and at friends’ towers, that I have not seen a whole lot of stuff yet.

2. Progress is really well thought out.
I really like that, even though my tower is huge now, and I’m bringing in a ton of money, my progress is thought out enough that I can still proceed. In most free to play games, you eventually hit a point where proceeding without paying is a tedious mess. The game is basically screaming at you to give them money, and lots of it. Tiny Tower doesn’t do this. Progress is still about the same: I can make enough to build about one floor a day. I could certainly build a lot faster if I didn’t, but I don’t have to. Since the game is so casual, a floor or so a day feels like perfect progress to me. I like it.

3. Availability of “For Pay” Content.
Tiny Tower loves to give you Tower Bux, the thing you can pay money for. It gives them to you quite often. It’s extremely nice. As long as you keep your spending of them to a minimum, you don’t have to be shut out of key features just because you didn’t pay, like upgrading your shops. Personally, I use my Tower Bux to move tenants into apartments (because that takes FOREVER without it) and upgrade shops that require a lot of constant attention: I only really check the game twice to three times a day, and shops that require me to constantly be fiddling with them are less desirable. Thankfully, they put in that feature so I could upgrade them and have to worry about them less! And because they’re so nice about giving me Bux, I can use that feature sparingly to increase my enjoyment of the game.

4. Inability to Lose Progress/Low Time Commitment
If I forget to check Tiny Tower in a day, I don’t lose progress. Everything I’ve done is still effective. My tower doesn’t rot, my wares don’t spoil. I can not touch the game for days, and it won’t punish me for it. Sure, I’ll be making less money and progressing slower, but I won’t be kept back. I won’t have to climb back up to where I was.
Because of that, and my upgrading strategy, I can play the game when I wake up and when I go to bed, as I have been, and not feel like I’m fucking it up. I can play this game on my terms. Many of these games try to set the terms for you. Tiny Tower makes suggestions of terms, but doesn’t stop you from making them yourself. I appreciate that.

Tiny Tower really is great. Some people hate this kind of game on principal, and that’s cool. Don’t play it. But I easily would have dropped a few bucks on this game. It’s just fantastic, and even better that it’s free. If they offered something to buy that wasn’t just the ability to do what I am doing but more, such as, I don’t know, a pack of new shops or something, I would probably buy it to support them.

I have no idea what to write about, so let’s look at the ol’ list of Blog Post Topics and see what the oldest one on there is.
Duel of the Planeswalkers 2012?
Alright.

Also known as Magic Roster Update 2012, this sequel to Duel of the Planeswalkers is… well, it’s okay. It certainly gives you access to more interesting decks right off the bat, like a super-annoying Vampire deck and a Metalcraft White Equipment deck. Instead of feeling like you’re playing with the most basic starter decks, like the first game, it feels like, instead, you’re playing with really solid preconstructs. Personally, I do feel like that’s an improvement, though it does make the game feel more unbalanced than the first. Some decks just seem to have little to no chance against others. Since I tend to like to just play my favorite deck and want to rake people over the coals if I’m playing against an AI opponent, that leads to unfortunate fights where my deck is just really, really ill-suited to the opposing deck. I could switch to another, but you get bonuses for sticking with one deck in the form of unlockable cards, so it makes you want to stay with just one.

Once again, you can’t actually build decks in the game, but in general, the customization is less stupid. In the first one, you couldn’t remove cards that were in the base deck, which was dumb, as many cards in the base deck were just obviously filler until you unlocked the better cards, and that made sure you always had a deck larger than 60 cards, which really sends the wrong message to new players. In this one, you’re basically building a sideboard of sorts for that deck, and can remove or add cards from the total collection of deck + sideboard however you want.

To be honest, though, this game didn’t keep my interest much at all when I got it. I don’t know if I was just in one of my Magic downswings or what, but I just didn’t want to keep at it and push through when my choice of deck seemed to have no hope. I was also very disappointed it didn’t have a 2-Headed-Giant campaign like last time. While I’m sure almost nobody used that feature, I thought it was awesome, and found it very fun when I played it with friends. It’s a missed opportunity, and part of the reason I bought it was because I assumed it would be there. I’m also sad that you unlock new game puzzles during the little campaign, instead of it being a separate mode. I enjoyed just playing through all those puzzles last time around. It was the first thing I did.

If you didn’t buy the first one, this is the one to buy. It’s inoffensive, and you pretty well know what you’re paying for. I just couldn’t get into it.

Twitter was all like “Oh man, Quarrel is like Boggle and Risk put together, oh man, Quarrel is so awesome you should play Quarrel!”
So, you know, I downloaded it.

First off, let me just say that the versions of the game are stupidly misleading for no reason. The game called “Quarrel” is just a demo. “Quarrel Deluxe” is the actual game. I just played the demo, though. It was fun, but I couldn’t see myself playing it enough to be worth five bucks because of issues.

Quarrel is a very good looking game. All the characters have lots of, well, character. They hop around and throw letters at each other. You also fight opponents with little animated expressions and reactions, which is nice. The gameplay really is exactly what it sounds like: Boggle + Risk. Each troop you have is one more letter you can put into the word. You spell words instead of rolling. The person who has the highest point total word wins the fight and takes out the other side. Point ties go to whoever entered the word the fastest. Winning gets you “treasure” which you can use at the beginning of a fight to call in an extra dude. You do troop movements like Risk, and you get one guy on each controlled territory at the end of every turn.

All that is fine, but it just didn’t catch me. When you can lose because you aren’t faster than an AI opponent, that takes a lot of fun out of playing against the AI, at least personally. The game doesn’t show me a countdown clock or anything, so I really don’t know how fast the computer is. The game even has a little mini game to play while the computer players are fighting each other. Why not just skip those fights? I don’t know. It’s a weird decision.

But the real problem is lack of multiplayer. I’m not talking about in the demo, that’s fine if it doesn’t have it there. But the full version doesn’t have any multiplayer either. This game would be fun as shit against actual opponents, but not being able to have any just makes the game a moot point. You can beat an AI that’s intentionally being stupid, and you will fail against an AI that always knows the highest value word because it’s an AI. It’s not a challenge. It’s just kind of a timewaster. Against real people, speed becomes a fun element. Against real people, strategy becomes more important. Against real people, this becomes and awesome game.

But it’s not there yet. Play the demo if you want. It’s free, and you’ll get some fun out of it. But goodness, I can just not see the full version being a purchase you can make without very, very robust multiplayer options.

I was always a Street Fighter person, and never a Mortal Kombat person. Never really gave a shit about that series. However, that new remake came out, and with Giant Bomb going on and on about how it has an actually good single player story for some reason, as well as friends at work just being huge Mortal Kombat fans, I really felt like I had to try it. So, you know, Gamefly to the rescue!

I didn’t make it through the story mode.

I’m not saying the game is bad, I just lost interest! I think the game seems really good. There’s no doubt there’s like a million fucking modes in there, as well as strong online play and plenty of characters to work with. They’ve got, you know, all your favorites. If you have favorites. I don’t have favorites. Their use of a modified EX/Super meter seems to work well for the game.

But yeah, I just… I don’t really get Mortal Kombat. None of the characters seem fun to me. They are born of a time when I didn’t really care about blood and gore and shit, you know? I’m sure people with that nostalgia would love the shit out of these guys, but I just don’t have that. I especially don’t get why the moves are like they are. The Giant Bomb guys said the moves were easy to pull off, but man. Maybe it’s my years of Street Fighter, but I just can’t tap on directions like buttons like the game wants me to do. I had trouble with a lot of the moves, and I’d always end up only being able to use one or two. Personal problem, I’m sure, but it just seemed to go against what I think a fighting game is.

Really, though, the reason I didn’t finish the story mode was that it was too hard. I just wanted to see the stupid-ass story, you know? But I had it set to the easiest setting, and sometimes matches just would not let me mash. When they throw in those 2 on 1 matches, even the braindead level of AI becomes a huge problem, because you just can’t fuck up. If they land an X-Ray on you, it’s kind of over, and since I didn’t know the characters and shit, I wasn’t really equipped to dodge X-Rays. I didn’t want to have to redo fights. I just wanted to see the stupid plot. Eventually, though, I had to try, and I just wasn’t interested.

It’s not really the game’s fault, though! It’s trying to be a challenging, cool fighting game with a challenging, cool story mode. They are appealing to fans something HARDCORE and I could not be any less of a fan of Mortal Kombat. But good on them for making an amazing game for a series I, and I’m sure many others, had totally wrote off. It’s just not my thing. It’s on the way back to Gamefly now.