#pocket tactics

[tearsofrefugees]

We. The Refugees: Ticket to Europe tells gaming’s most ignored story

The Pocket Tactics team loves finding indie gems for Switch and mobile, and We. The Refugees: Ticket to Europe is our latest find from Digit

[n0wak]

Victory dance. We’ve only done these games of the month round-ups a couple of times, but this month we have a first: two PT contributors chose the same game. Twice. When I poll the writers for this feature, everybody responds individually so as to not prejudice anybody else on staff, and in August and September we got all unique choices. But this month we found ourselves in enthusiastic agreement about a couple of games. Paint it Back iOS Universal, free Interview with creator Edward Brown, 1 October Paint it Back sank its blocky black teeth into me about fifteen seconds after the second training level began. It’s a puzzle game similar to Minesweeper or Sudoku: you have to study the board full of numbers and deduce which is the next safe move. The whole thing has a kooky painterly theme and a layer of polish befitting Popcap itself. That makes sense since the developer Edward Brown is ex-Popcap, and it’s clear when he left he took all the charm and elegance with him. This is the best kind of puzzle game because you never need to resort to mad, flailing trial-and-error. The answer is always staring you right in the face. If you get stuck, you’ve got only yourself to blame, never the game. Thus the game’s enjoinder to “paint only what you know to be true.” If I painted only what I knew to be true of Mr. Faraday he’d be in jail by nightfall. [I've got the key to your safe deposit box, FYI -- ed.] Or perhaps they’d nab me for violation of obscenity ordinances. Lucky for us both, Paint it Back’s 30-plus levels are more pleasantly themed, though “conjoined twins in a turtleneck” ought to ring a bell, yes Owen? –Phil Scuderi   Paint It Back, as you’ve already heard, adds a dash of personality and whimsy to picross, an otherwise dry exercise. I’m not ashamed to admit that it put my legs to sleep on the toilet multiple times. I have only two things to add: first, the attention given to the method of fastforwarding through the opening cutscene warms my heart right down to the cockles. Second, as a result of this game I have learned that it is impossible to gift an in-app purchase, which is the only problem I have with the pricing scheme the esteemed Edward Brown eventually settled on. Upon reflection, I am a little ashamed about the toilet thing. –Kelsey Rinella Pandemic: The Board Game iPad-only, $6.99 Review: Pandemic The Board Game, 7 October After playing it for a month now, Pandemic has yet to lose its shine. This is truly a great boardgame port, and one that deserves to be mentioned in the same breath with apps like Agricola, Eclipse and Carcassonne. I love playing solo controlling all 4 characters, I love the visual and audio effects, and I just enjoy the hell out of trying to save the world. Even after 20+ games, there is still that tension that comes up when you have several fully infected cities and one bad card draw can cause an avalanche that will send you to, yet another, defeat. Every game, win or lose, has an epic feel to it. What more can you ask for from a game that you can finish in 10-15 minutes? –Dave Neumann   The first time I booted up Pandemic and saw how pedantically it replicated the board game it was based on, I prepared myself to hate it. In Pandemic the Physical Cardboard Game, little wooden cubes represent the diseases infecting the world’s cities, and in Pandemic the Digital iOS Game, they’re still there. I mean, come on — you’re making a video game. You can literally choose anything to represent those terrifying diseases, and you’re using cubes. It’s a testament to how exceptionally well-crafted the rest of the game is that those cubes do indeed become terrifying. I’ve been playing Pandemic as a solo game almost non-stop this month, and it’s possibly the most cinematically dramatic iOS game experience of 2013. Imagine if they didn’t have the cubes. –Owen Faraday 10 iOS Universal, $0.99 I have a love/hate relationship with puzzle games of this style. I dislike the often strict solutions where you’re not deducing a puzzle as much as the puzzle designer’s thought process, but I do enjoy the occasional “a-ha” moments when the entirety of a level’s existence and all its possible outcomes is visible in your minds eye. This Sokoban meets drop7 puzzler follows a lot of conventional design patterns but it’s a great, if still incomplete, little package for a commute or a minute of spacing out. – Mike Nowak Owen Faraday Pocket Tactics’ Games of the Month: October 2013 Pocket Tactics Pocket Tactics -

Pocket Tactics’ Games of the Month: October 2013 http://ift.tt/1f8bnN3

[n0wak]

Just like bulls-eyeing womp-rats in your T16 back home. Quite a motley crew of picks for games of the month this time ’round: two super-hardcore sims, one slightly less hardcore sim, a platformer, and an app that isn’t even a game — but a tool for playing other games. Meta. Our September games of the month await you below. Tell us what you’ve been playing this month in the comments. It is, after all. Small World 2 iPad-only, $9.99 Part of what I love about Small World 2 is that it makes me forget about winning. As much as it’s a territory control game where players try to cobble together something resembling a strategy from the scraps of random chance, it’s also a game where seafaring giants fight against bivouacking wizards while an ancient race of flying dwarves fades in the background, and I often find myself focused more on imagining the political backstory for these bouts than on, you know, points. So I also kind of suck at it. Regardless, Small World 2 is storytelling–flash fiction, even–and, consequently, Everything I Love About Games. Though it’s a shame there’s no “Tragic Hubris Aiding the Downfall of A Civilization” bonus. –Sean Clancy We ain’t outta here in ten minutes, we won’t need no rocket to fly through space. SimpleRockets iOS Universal, $1.99 Android, $1.99 Review: SimpleRockets, 13 September 3… 2… 1… liftoff! We have lift—wait. Oh no! Whose idea was it to build an asymmetrical rocket? It’s spinning this way! Run! As you can see I’ve been playing SimpleRockets again. It’s a rocketry sim with accurate orbital mechanics, and unlike real life it makes launchpad disasters fun. It’s the closest thing to Kerbal Space Program that we’re likely to see on mobile; anything more complex would demand a sit-down PC interface. SimpleRockets simulates all the planets and even some of their moons. Games on this scale always prompt me to deep thought. Our universe is such that it can simulate itself inside itself. Whoa. –Phil Scuderi IBM Presents: You Make The Call. Pro Strategy Football 2013 iPhone, $4.99 Review: Pro Strategy Football 2013, 20 September If one of the purposes of gaming is escapism, then PSF 2013 is creating a better fantasy universe than anything else I’ve got on the go right now. More fanciful than Warhammer Quest. More esoteric than 868-HACK. In my PSF-created alternate reality, you see, the Giants have a winning record. In our review of PSF, one of the comments suggested that this tactics-oriented sim might turn football into a turn-based wargame — and that’s spot on. There’s no reflexes being tested here, just wits — it’s the perfect mobile device football game. Developer Kerry Batts is working on new features, with a Universal update coming next. –Owen Faraday I nearly picked this one myself. –ed. Tactical Space Command iPad-only, $4.99 I’ve spent most of the month sitting outside Tactical Space Battles like it’s the greatest Golden Corral in the America: everything I want is inside, in utterly daunting quantities. I’m nowhere near able to describe its depths, but I should mention how impressed I am at the number of systems which are modeled and will chug along doing perfectly well on their own, but which you could mess with if you wanted to. I like being able to effectively select the level of complexity of the game at will; it makes learning the basics easier and gives me opportunities to understand even those systems I’ll rarely or never directly control.  –Kelsey Rinella Wouldn’t you like to be a level, too. I Am Level iOS Universal, free Android, free My phone is, by current pace of technological depreciation, an antique, but it’s an antique that’s always with me on the daily commute. When I don’t have the iPad or a le Carré novel it’s there for me with music and the occasional bouts of hardcore Drop7. It can’t handle too much beyond that so there’s much that I don’t bother to try these days. IAmLevel’s Speccy appearance made my phone say “I can handle this” and the combination of pinball videogame crossed with a puzzle platformer appealed to me as much as its initial free price. It’s a simple game that makes the most of its ideas — hey, a platformer that’s actually playable with a single tap — and provides some nice commuter reprieve from the frustrations of Drop7′s inevitable walls of 1s. –Mike Nowak   CardWarden iPad-only, $1.99 The CardWarden isn’t a game in and of itself, but it allows you to play card games that aren’t currently available on iOS, and this month that’s what I’ve been using my iPad for. After receiving Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, I started a project where I scanned every card in the game and imported them into CardWarden, and I’ve been playing Pathfinder on my iPad ever since. Not only is being able to play great games like Pathfinder or LotR: The Card Game on my iPad amazing, but the entire process of scanning cards, importing them, and sorting them into decks is as therapeutic as bagging up wooden and cardboard bits after you first open a physical board game. I was skeptical of getting games to work in CardWarden at first, but I’m a convert now. No way I’m deleting this off my iPad any time soon. –Dave Neumann   Owen Faraday Pocket Tactics’ Games of the Month: September 2013 Pocket Tactics Pocket Tactics -

Pocket Tactics’ Games of the Month: September 2013 http://bit.ly/18kiLlG