by A.J. Coltrane

Marvel Puzzle Quest:  Dark Reign uses Bejeweled-style tile matching and skins it as a superhero combat game.

To put it another way, you match (say) red tiles. After you’ve matched enough red tiles you can power a superhero ability, such as Iron Man’s Repulsor Blast — doing a great deal of damage to one target. Match a bunch of blue tiles and Black Widow will be able to heal allies. Spider Man can stun the opponent for a few turns given enough green matches. Other abilities include things like board manipulation, or placing counters on the field that blow up after a few turns, or… it’s a long list.

And it’s fairly addictive.

Heroes can get more powerful over time. Most of the loot rewards are either ISO-8 (experience points, basically), which is spent to level up the heroes,

or

“Covers”, which grant new heroes, or improve existing hero abilities. Naturally, the better covers are also more rare. Basic Iron Man is common, but somebody like Spider Man is pretty rare. To some degree you have to do the best that you can with what you have.

There’s a fairly long “story quest”, and each story “node” offers 3 or 4 potential loot drops, so to maximize the payout it’s a good idea to replay the nodes with the phat loot (or those that reward good covers). There also seems to be a never-ending deluge of new PvE and PvP content — In contrast to many other forms of online PvP, Marvel Puzzle Quest has you fight another player’s team, but not the players themselves. This is nice because you don’t have to wait on your opponent to move, and there’s none of the usual smacktalk. I can always do without the waiting and the smacktalk, so I like the way they’ve implemented PvP.

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This was an “automatic download” for me. We’d gotten a ton of hours out of the original Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords and Puzzle Quest: Galactrix on the PSP. Challenge of the Warlords worked much the same way, except that it was skinned as a high-fantasy (swords and sorcery) questing game. Puzzle Quest: Galactrix was hexigonal, and featured starship combat.

I threw a little bit of money at this one to unlock additional slots for heroes ($20). It’s possible to pay without playing, but it will take a while to unlock a bunch of slots and have a good stable of heroes. I decided I liked the game enough that the devs deserved some money for a product that I enjoy. I’m ok with that on a limited basis.

Having said that here are two tips if you’re dead-set on not spending a dime:

1)  ONLY spend Hero Points (coins) on additional hero slots. Important tip!

2)  In Bold — Heroes I’d Keep If I Didn’t Want To Spend Money And Roster Space Is Tight:

1-Star Heroes (common):  Iron Man, Storm, Black Widow. I got good mileage out of Juggernaut too. Every 1-star hero will get outgrown eventually. After a month of frequent gameplay I’m only using 2-stars.

2-Star Heroes (uncommon):  Thor, Storm, Black Widow. (Storm and Black Widow are more powerful versions than the 1-stars.) If you have extra room then Ares, Wolverine, and Magneto are supposed to be solid. I think most casual players are using some combination of these six 2-star heroes.

3-Star Heroes (rare):  Ragnarok is supposed to be good, as are Spider Man, Thor, Black Widow, and Magneto. I only have a couple of these covers, it’s going to be a while before they’re actually powerful enough to be playable.

4-Star Heroes: None, it’ll take too long to get the covers to be worthwhile.

Here’s a link I’m using for recommended builds. It predates the last big nerf, but a good starting point to minimize “wasted” covers.

 

Highly Recommended.

by A.J. Coltrane

Bad Piggies. If you’re not already familiar, here’s a pic:

It’s another physics-based game by the same folks that created Angry Birds. The object is to build a very silly machine and pilot it to the finish line. Crossing the finish line in one piece is optional, usually. The vehicle in the picture above features two drive wheels, two fans to help push, a little engine in the back, an umbrella to pull things along, and pop bottles for extra “oomph” when needed. Will that build work? As likely as not, yes. Oftentimes you don’t know until you try. I’ve had some strange looking stuff succeed when the obvious solution failed.

It’s free. There are tons of popups that are easy to click through. I’d guess that the pay version removes the ads. I got a bunch of hours out of Bad Piggies before sort of hitting the wall a bit — the challenges can get very challenging.

It’s a little silly *and* can be sort of brain-twisting. If you liked Angry Birds, or you just think that building fanciful machines might be fun, give this one a download. Highly recommended.

by A.J. Coltrane

I’m always looking for a good free game to play on the cell phone. Emphasis on “free”.

Galaxy On Fire 2 HD fits that bill. It’s a space opera/ combat/ trading game. You can fly your ship to many different star systems, shoot space pirates, and mine asteroids. You can trade with, and run missions for, the inhabitants of the space stations that you come into contact with. Better ships can be acquired. Weapons, armor, and many other ship components can be upgraded as well.

There’s a main quest storyline to save the universe from hostile aliens. (Of course.) If you don’t want to do that you can pick up mini-quests at space stations. “Kill the dread pirates.”,  “Escort the freighters”, “Bring me some possibly-hard-to-find materials”. Fortunately there aren’t any “Kill Ten Rats” quests. The quests are mostly all quick and relatively engaging.

Combat can be fun. Even “very fun”. Though sometimes the opponents are super over-powered and the game will suggest that you upgrade your ship. I tried that. It doesn’t often work. I’d suggest that you just run away and go find other opponents that you can beat up.

The mining mini-game is just ok, though it’s about the only reliable way to make money at the start of the game. After getting some money together I was able to leverage it into fleecing the locals when they wanted to trade, so no more grindy mining for me.

That’s the good.

The less good:

1.  The main quest storyline is predictable, dumb, and fringe-sexist. I’ve seen young teenagers write better stuff.

2.  Even though I put off the main storyline in an effort to get the biggest, baddest ship that I could — I still won the game with a mid-range ship. If I chose to I *could* log back in and make more money and eventually get the nasty ships. Maybe I’ll do it if I’m stuck in the car at some point with nothing else to do. Maybe. I’m going to guess that it’s possible to win the game with only a marginal ship upgrade, if any. Opportunity lost.

3.  For no good reason that I can ascertain, there are four different “factions”, arranged in two pairs. Doing a quest for one faction will shift your standing towards them and away from the opposing faction. That means that I can’t just run whatever quest I see, I have to be continually balancing my faction standing. It’s an unnecessary complication that doesn’t add anything to the game.

4.  The game crashes. A lot. After a while I made a point to save every time I docked at a space station. I’d guess the game would crash about after every 3rd save…every 20 minutes or so. No better way to break immersion than to be continually fiddling with the save game slots.

—

Summary:  Galaxy On Fire 2 HD has gotten very good reviews. It’s on a lot of the “best games” lists. The price is right, and I got many hours of gameplay out of it.

It’s a “very good” game.

It may just be that my expectations are too high for free mobile gaming. Mostly Recommended.

by A.J. Coltrane

Title:  Small World  — “It’s a World of SLaughter After All”

Game Type:  Irreverent High Fantasy-Expansion/Territorial acquisition. Vaguely reminiscent of games like “Risk”. (Well, there’s a board with a map, and you’re trying to take it over. The similarities end there.)

Number of Players:   2-5

Complexity of Rules:  Medium

Time to Play:   80 minutes

The Concept:   It’s a silly (and tiny) fantasy world, populated by Flying Giants, Merchant Skeletons, Commando Halflings, Seafaring Ghouls, and so on. The mix of races and special abilities are randomly paired together each game. The players then “draft” their race and try to occupy as much territory as possible. When a race has been stretched as thin as it can go, or has taken too many casualties, then the player will put that race into “Decline” (retire it) and draft a new race, re-entering the fray with fresh troops. Game length is 10 turns or less, depending upon the number of players.

Why I Like It:  The silly approach to high fantasy is handled well. The artwork is well done. Selecting the races requires thought and a critical eye for the race/ability combos that may be advantageous at the moment. There’s a nice mix of strategy and somewhat chaotic gameplay — if you play with your brain turned off you likely won’t win. It’s fun to rampage across the countryside, wiping out your friends’ troops as you go. It’s also fun to yell stuff like “Pillaging Ratmen!” or “Alchemist Trolls!”, and have the whole table groan.  Once everyone gets the hang of it the game moves right along.

Boardgamegeek page here.