#hardcore droid

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The minimalist graphics blend clean, simple icons with black-and-white stock photography. It’s a great look, monochrome with occasional splashes of red, stark and dark without being gory. As I gathered materials, food, and the occasional weapon, I spent a lot of time running back and forth, because you need so much stuff to build improvements, but you have only a little-bittie carrying capacity. You can upgrade it, for a price, but I’ll get to that later. Each location is measured in hours from your home, and if you’re out after dark, the frequency of zombie attacks increases. Plus, you’ll need to rush home to sleep and eat (you can only eat in the apartment. Apparently I’ll eat found cans of meat, but only at my kitchen table).

Roll-to-attack combat systems usually remind me of good times playing tabletop, but inBuriedTown, I wasn’t able to make any attacks. Zombie encounters were just watching them scroll past, telling me how much damage I’d given or received, and hoping I wouldn’t die. You’ll want a ranged weapon, so that you can read text about zombies being destroyed before you read text about zombies reaching you. I couldn’t find out how many hitpoints the attacking zombies had, but I’ve played enough RPGs to know that if dealing 5 damage is good, 10 damage is better.

(via BuriedTown Review | Hardcore Droid)

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(via Rick and Morty Hit Android and iOS with Pocket Mortys)

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Recently I put Rebuild 3: Gangs of Deadville on my phone to play during quiet times at work. (Eventually I’m going to write you a post about my current job, and the hilarious moments as a Mandarin-speaking, er, a Mandarin-understanding white girl working in a Chinese restaurant, but I have been busy with classes and said job, so here are my thoughts on zombie strategy instead.) I picked Rebuild 3 because I really liked Northway Games’ Rebuild.  I’m not really a zombie fan, but luckily I was assigned to review it for Hardcore Droid. and really enjoyed playing it. I jumped at the chance to write a Rebuild strategy guide, too, and then here’s a long interview I did with Sarah Northway, also for HD.

Rebuild 3 is still about a band of survivors reclaiming the world after a zombie apocalypse. Survivors can be assigned tasks for the day, like scavenging for supplies, repairing the power plant, crafting materials, or of course killing some zombies. This creates that addictive just-one-more-turn feeling we all love in Civ, but Rebuild adds character development and narrative to the usual strategy game experience. Oh, and I mean the old-fashioned kind of strategy game, where you apply strategic thinking to taking territory or planning attackings, not the appointment-style kind of “strategy game” where you have to wait in real time for development of buildings and units, or when you’re prompted to spend real money to get necessary resources. There’s no premium currency, daily check-ins or click-and-wait here.

New survivors can be rescued from zombie territory, or they can make their own way to the fort and ask to join.  Adults can immediately be put to work, scavenging, farming, killing zed or whatever the band of survivors needs. Lost childen can also be rescued and assigned an adult guardian to look after them. I found a lost little girl and adopted her, and it was the cutest part of the zombie apocalypse. There’s a particular trait that makes a survivor enjoy caretaking, and both genders are equally likely to have this trait. (My aesthetic is buff zombie-slaying dudes looking after cute lil babies. What?)

Survivors come with a randomly generated name, appearance, and outfit, but, as you play, you can give them a weapon and an offhand item for extra stats, and they’ll earn perks every so often. These perks are great, blending character backstory and stat improvements, but I had such fun discovering them that I don’t want to say anything else about them.

The pilot was named Meg! I didn’t name her that! Yay!

Players can rename survivors, but definitely don’t take too much care with this because survivors, especially soldiers, don’t always have a long life expectancy. I actually felt really sad when some of my survivors died, especially if they’d been with me a long time, or they were born in the fort, or I got them killed doing something too risky.

My first Rebuild boyfriend got annoying. He kept asking me when we were going to commit to each other, so I felt him behind when I went to the next city.  NOT GOING TO MARRY YOU, APOCALYPSE BOYFRIEND! Except I met a new boyfriend in the next city and I decided to marry him. Moving on…

As your survivors reclaim territory and grow their base, they’ll encounter zombies and as well as other groups of humans. Gustav the trader is back, and so’s the biker cult from the first Rebuild. The Government, a new faction devoted to reestablishing bureaucracy in post-apocalyptic Canada, really reminded me of Maia Sepp’s An Etiquette Guide To The End Times.  Factions can be friendly or hostile, and relationships will be affected by your fort’s government choices. I had to the run the Last Judgement out of town a few times because they wanted our women to stay off dangerous tasks.

The tech tree is the weak spot in a really great game. Well, the tech itself is great, with clever names for useful upgrades. But in each new city, there are new available technologies to research, while the tech tree resets to zero, so players need to re-research technologies they already had. I was annoyed that I couldn’t research anything cool early on, and I couldn’t even see greyed out future techs in early cities. It also made no narrative sense that my engineers all forgot how to make zombie traps or watchtowers every time we went to a new city. Why, engineers, why?

Overall, Rebuild 3 is a great strategy game mixed with an open-ended, post-apocalyptic storyline.

Come for the Zombie Slayage, Stay for the Survivor Stories appeared first on Simpson's Paradox

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Knights of Pen & Paper 2 Behold Studios can DM for me anytime. Reviewing sequels can be rough, because what can you say the second time around? Sometimes a sequel’s just like buying the first one again. Or worse, some sequels are a sad attempt at recapturing what worked in the original. Fortunately for me, Behold Studios’ Knights of Pen & Paper 2 manages to keep all of the original game’s silly D&D love the balance of  battles with fun monsters, and the steady stream of meta jokes while squashing the typos and crashbugs that dogged the first game. In Knights 2, you’ll plan your party and choose an RPG class, adventure race, and high school archetype for each character. Sure, you can min-max stats here, since archetype, race and class all provide unique bonuses, but  I thought it was  more in the spirit of the game to make silly combinations, and then send my cheerleader paladin and hipster dwarf out to explore Spawn Point Village and Nearby Cave. You’ll be able to unlock further character classes, like a ninja, cleric or barbarian, by completing missions later in the game. Party editing and character rebuilds can be done from the tavern because that’s just how tabletop games go. You’ll be planning the party’s battles as the DM like in the original Knights, and you’ll be the players fighting those battles as you set off on your tabletop RPG adventure. Battles are turn-based, in true D20 style, with each hero or enemy performing one action on his turn (or her turn. Knights 2 includes many fully-clothed ladies as PCs and NPCs), according to an initiative role.

Knights of Pen and Paper 2 | Best Android RPG

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A few weeks ago, I covered the browser version of Enchanted Cave 2 for my students, so I was pretty excited to review this roguelike treasure grab for adult gamers over on Hardcore Droid. Lots of meta-jokes for RPG gamers, and silly items to loot!

Enchanted Cave 2 opens in a typical RPG town, full of townspeople sharing the requisite warnings about the boundless dangers and wonderful treasures found in the nearby cursed cave, but this is not quite an RPG.  I quickly discovered that the cursed cave is a randomly-generated dungeon of treasure and death, perfect for roguelike exploration. Adventurers battle their way through, looting bags of cash, weapons, armor, and crafting ingredients (like unicorn poop or exploding limes).  If you let your adventurer run out of health, he’ll die in the cave, never to be seen again. More importantly, you’ll lose all the gold, loot, and skills you’ve acquired in that dungeon run, so keep an eye on the all-important health bar. This gives a great tension to battles, and makes those healing potions incredibly precious.

via Enchanted Cave 2 on Hardcore Droid

Exploding Limes and Fractal Cabbage appeared first on Simpson's Paradox

[megsclips]

Enchanted Cave 2 opens in a typical RPG town, full of townspeople sharing the requisite warnings about the boundless dangers and wonderful treasures found in the nearby cursed cave, but this is not quite an RPG.  I quickly discovered that the cursed cave is a randomly-generated dungeon of treasure and death, perfect for roguelike exploration. Adventurers battle their way through, looting bags of cash, weapons, armor, and crafting ingredients (like unicorn poop or exploding limes).  If you let your adventurer run out of health, he’ll die in the cave, never to be seen again. More importantly, you’ll lose all the gold, loot, and skills you’ve acquired in that dungeon run, so keep an eye on the all-important health bar. This gives a great tension to battles, and makes those healing potions incredibly precious.

Enchanted Cave 2 on Hardcore Droid

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I recently played and loved the web version of Enchanted Cave 2, and covered it for Youth Digital’s students, so I jumped at the chance to review the new mobile version for Hardcore Droid. I really love doing reviews for the kids, but naturally, game reviews for kids aren’t as in-depth as magazine articles, so I’m really looking forward to writing a longer piece for gamers on this cute and evil roguelike adventure.

Anyway, I started playing the mobile version, but figured I didn’t need the mechanics explained by the cave guard. He clearly did not appreciate me skipping the exposition.

Enchanted Cave 2 appeared first on Simpson's Paradox

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New piece up on Hardcore Games.

After the first dungeon, where my biggest challenge was finding my way, the second dungeon became almost impossibly difficult. (The party wipes were not helped by a small bug that caused the game to hang or lag on the Load Game screen, or by a larger one that crashed the game when I returned to town with one unconscious party member. Ugh.) Since E does an all-out attack, the only time I really messed around with the awkward combat menus was when I wanted one of my spellcasters to use a particular spell. Pretty soon, I felt like I was just armoring up, hitting E, and hoping for the best.

Overall, the creative monsters, dungeon crawl theme, and general art styles reminded me of a Dungeons and Dragons handbook, but as I played, it turned out to be one of the D&D editions that required pages of errata and half a dozen house rules to be any fun.

via Elminage Gothic Review on Hardcore Games

Sometimes Nostalgia’s Not Enough For a Successful Game from Simpson's Paradox

The post Sometimes Nostalgia’s Not Enough For a Successful Game appeared first on Simpson's Paradox.