Warhammer Quest for iOS is here (if a bit buggy)

I posted a while back about about the Warhammer Quest iPad App, which is now out. I've had it a couple of days (despite only getting the email today!) and early indications are good. It's quite old school but that's actually part of the appeal, and it doesn't look too old school.

The game is a little buggy (and not just because of the giant bats, rats and spiders) but the occasional crash is not a problem as it saves progress after every turn with iCloud so a quick restart sorts it out. Gameplay might be a little repetitive, with fairly standard fare of visiting settlements, picking up quests and using the spoils to upgrade the skills and equipment of your party of warriors. It's good, though, and the quests are short enough to make it ideal for a quick go now and again without (necessarily) being sucked in for hours - ideal for a mobile device.

As with Hunters 2, Rodeo Games have made a good-looking game with a simple but effective combat system. Well worth the £2.99, I think. The iPad is the perfect medium for turn-based tactical games and I look forward to more of its ilk from the genre. (Particularly X-Com!)

Hunters games bode well for Warhammer Quest iPad adaptation

I'm a bit of a fan of turn-based tactical games and, in my youth at least, Games Workshop. I've also been on the look out for decent iPad games. I was therefore excited to see that Rodeo Games are adapting Warhammer Quest as a turn-based tactical game for the iPad! It was originally due to be released last month but, despite being in beta testing, has not yet appeared. I have therefore been keeping myself amused with the previous Rodeo Games offerings, Hunters (HD) and Hunters 2. The former is free and good to try out the general idea and controls but Hunters 2 (still a bargain at 69p) is well worth the extra investment.

In both games, you are in control of a group of Mercenary "Hunters" and can partake in a number of different daily missions. It's all fairly standard stuff for the genre but looks and plays very well. The tactical mission controls are simple enough to be picked up easily but there is enough variety of mission, enemy, weapon and armour types to develop your own tactical style and keep things interesting.

Your Hunters gain experience and money is earnt to upgrade weapons and armour etc., which also keeps the game developing and extends its life. Hunters 2 had the added bonus of a series of story-based campaign missions. This was good but was over a bit too quickly. Hopefully, once Warhammer Quest is completed, they will bring out an update for Hunters 2 with additional campaign missions and maybe some new enemies.
All in all, it bodes well for the Warhammer Quest App and I will be keeping an eye out for it.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown being developed for iPad

X-Com: Enemy Unknown has been announced for iPhone and iPad. That should ease some of the competition for the TV in our house!

X-Com: Enemy Unknown - rebooted and better than ever

If I had to pick my favourite video game series, it would probably have to be Grand Theft Auto. If, on the other hand, I had to pick my favourite computer game of all time, it would be UFO: Enemy Unknown. This was an old PC game from 1994. I remember having the demo long before the actual game and playing it over and over again. It wasn't a big demo, placing you in command of half a dozen poorly armed (and unarmoured) X-Com troops at an alien "terror site", trying to save the civilians from a greater number of better armed aliens - and, above all, trying to survive.

The demo was excellently balanced - challenging but possible - which in part accounts for how I could play it over and over again. The game itself was amazing, despite some minor irritations like having to equip your squad from scratch for each mission - tedious when the number of soldiers you could deploy increased. It also seemed a bit cruel sending out the rookies in nothing but their grey jumpsuits!

The best thing about UFO, though, was the atmosphere. The tactical missions oscillated between the nervous tension of Alien and the gung-ho craziness of Aliens. (Helped in part by one of the most fearsome aliens (the "Chrysalid") looking like the Alien and even turning hapless victims into zombies that would (not much) later hatch into fully grown Chrysalids.) The soundtrack fed the tension and as the game progressed, the aliens got ever more powerful. They would also react to squad movement as you discovered them. Nothing quite made one jump like an unlucky soldier stumbling on a heavily armed foe who gunned him down instantly - a scream and then darkness as the line of sight granted by the now-deceased was lost. Storming UFOs was particularly dangerous (at least until you could make your own doors with advanced explosives).

UFO spawned quite a few sequels, which improved various gameplay components - X-Com: Apocalypse probably has my favourite tactical combat system of all time - but none of them ever re-captured the atmosphere (or scary aliens) of the original. Until now.

X-Com: Enemy Unknown for the PS3 has gone back to basics and rebooted - nay, perfected - the series. Squad size is strictly limited, harking back to that very first UFO demo, although I am glad to see that the raw recruits at least have a bit of standard body armour this time. (Not that it's of much help against the alien plasma weaponry.) The old isometric turn-based tactical missions are back but with a reworked (and better balanced) control system and much improved graphics. It may not be the most realistic game in the world (would you really only send six soldiers to take on the alien menace?) but that matters not because whatever it lacks in realism, it has one thing in abundance: fun!

The old atmosphere and fear for your soldiers is back - enhanced by having so few - and whilst the visual range of your troops is unrealistically limited, it makes for a much tenser and trickier playing experience. No longer can a bunch of marksmen sit miles from the action and pick off all the aliens with impunity. (Well, snipers can to some extent, but I'll get to that.) Instead, you have to stalk your foe, flitting from cover to cover and trying to outflank them, whilst they do the same in return.

I won't give anything away about the plot but another thing that has changed is that the game is a little more story driven, with a few more key advances and events that occur along the way to keep things progressing. A couple of other changes have made even bigger improvements in my book. One is the diversity of missions: in addition to the alien abductions, "terror sites" (rescuing civilians) and UFO missions, there are now hostage rescues and bomb defusing missions too. Even terror sites have had a facelift and now you have to actively seek out and save civilians before the aliens get them.

The biggest change, though, is in the soldier experience and upgrade. The older games featured different stats that improved with experience and depending on the balance of a particular soldier you would choose whether (s)he was best suited for heavy weapons or sniping. In the new version, there are four different classes that your soldiers are assigned to once they have a bit of experience: sniper, assault, heavy or support.
As well as giving them access to different weapons and equipment, the different classes of soldier also develop different skills as they get promoted through the ranks. There's sometimes a choice of two skills you can give them at each stage - so each soldier gets customised to some extent. (You can fully customise them in terms of name and appearance too if you wish.)

These skills really add an extra tactical dimension to the combat. Many of them have "cooldown" periods between use, so you have to select your moment. (Some weapons too are single shot.) Above all, they really let you tailor your squad to your own combat style - and, to some extent - to the mission.

One last change worth mentioning is that the game is over much faster than the original, which is good. I have already completed it once on the entry-level difficulty (unlocking a few more options for the next game) and never reached the occasional boredom of the original when hunting down another small UFO whilst waiting for the more exciting missions. Highly recommended.

Alien interference

Blogging is temporarily suspended due to an alien menace. Details to follow.

Carcassonne: still the best board game in the world

Today, we cracked out Carcassonne for the first time this festive season.

For anyone not familiar with Carcassonne, it's a tile-laying strategy game in which you build up roads and cities and score points for having more of your men (or "meeple") associated with them when they are completed. In my opinion, it has the perfect balance of strategy and luck. The tiles are drawn at random, and so a lot can hinge on getting the right one at the right time. At the same time, however, there are clearly strategic moves to be made. Playing with more then two players can even lead to some interesting cooperative behaviour - and occasional back-stabbing - as temporary alliances form over shared goals. You can obviously sabotage other people's strategies too (a favourite move of mine is to hijack other people's cities) but I don't leave a game of Carcassonne feeling as picked on as after a game of "Settler's of Catan". I also think that the length of the game is just right. "Puerto Rico" is another great game by the the same people (I think) but I always end a game feeling like it was over one or two turns too soon.

Today, we had a bit of a rare occurrence: a finished game without any holes in the middle! When you lay tiles, roads have to match road, cities match cities and fields match fields, so clearly if you get a hole where a specific tile needs to go, you will not always come across it. Normally we play with "The River" expansion, whereas today we just used the basic starting tile, so that might have contributed to the tightness of the layout. Anyway, the end result was quite pleasing, if such things please you. (They please me!)

I'm obviously not going to go through the rules here. (See the Carcassonne Wikipedia entry for a summary. In reading this entry, I just learnt that they have changed the rules for farmers and fields, plus there's now an iOS Carcassonne App, which I will have to check out!) Suffice it to say that if you like board games - or someone you know does - and you are short of Christmas present ideas, you can do a lot worse than getting a copy of Carcassone.

If you already have Carcassonne, I can recommend a couple of the expansions, which are particularly good: Inns and Cathedrals and Traders and Builders.