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Nov 30th, 2012 at 15:11:07 - Faster Than Light (PC) |
FTL is also a refreshingly difficult game. I have not been able to beat it on the “normal” difficulty and just barely able to on “easy”. Combat is absolutely frantic. You target different points on the enemy ship with your weapons in hopes of damaging vital systems and eventually forcing them to surrender (or destroy them, if you are the vindictive sort). Every ship has a set of systems housed in the “rooms” of the cutaway. Stuff like shields, weapon controls, sensors, engines, life support, etc. If that room takes damage, so does the component the room controls. This leads to very strategic gameplay, I’ll often find myself focusing first on the enemy’s shield generators before moving on to try and disable the weapons systems.
Of course the enemy is also targeting your own system, that’s where the crew comes in. Crew members can man stations to add bonuses to your weapon cool down, shield recharge, and evasion chance. When things get damaged you can allocate crew members to repair them mid-battle. This makes maintaining your own ship an almost Sisyphean task when you are under fire, because often times crew members abandoning their stations gives the enemy the time they need to repair themselves.
Take these complicated combat mechanics and crew juggling, and then add in things like boarding actions, fire, and oxygen deprivation. That’s where the difficulty comes in. Luckily you aren’t expected to conform to real time, hitting the space bar freezes time in case you need to breathe, or plot.
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Oct 30th, 2012 at 21:30:02 - Faster Than Light (PC) |
FTL (short for Faster than Light) is a starship RPG/crew management game made by Subset Games earlier this year. The player is put in command of a top-down cutout of a spaceship, complete with crew. The player acts as the hand of god, directing the crew members to work different stations on the vessel to add bonuses. For example: the ship’s shields recharge faster if the shield generator room is staffed.
The goal of FTL is to guide the ship through a gauntlet of hostile star systems in order to reach your home base and warn them about the Rebel’s progress. The story is told in bits and pieces through your various interactions with the rest of the world. The player navigates through space by “jumping”, travelling faster than light for brief periods. The ship is jumped between beacons scattered throughout the system, and must recharge between jumps. In essence, you are travelling between little event nodes. While the drives are recharging the player is faced with hostile environments, enemy combatants, and even moral choices. Do you surrender one of your crew to the slavers or risk losing the whole ship in a shootout? Do you try to help the ship in distress in hopes of a reward or is it just another rebel trap?
As you progress through the game you get ample opportunities to upgrade your ship and your crew. You collect scrap from wrecked vessels or as payment for services rendered/bribes received. Gameplay is short, each game lasting a few hours at most, but in that time you cultivate your ship from a run of the mill cruiser to a well-tuned war machine. Add or remove weapons, layer shields, install exotic parts like cloaking devices or teleport assault bays: there is a surprising amount of ways to go about making war.
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Oct 24th, 2012 at 19:13:58 - Tank Hero (iPd) |
While idly cruising through the app store I came across a game called Tank Hero. I downloaded the free “lite” version to give it a try, the only difference being the number of levels offered. The free version gives you fifteen levels to battle through.
Tank Hero has the feel of an old school arcade action game. A little joystick is mapped in one corner of the touchscreen to control your movement and your little tank shoots at any point on the screen that you tap. The shots travel just a bit faster than the mobs, and bounce once off of the walls. Each level puts the player into a small arena with enemy tanks; if you win then they have the option to advance to the next level. The levels have walls that are designed to encourage tankers to bounce their shots in interesting ways rather than just running and gunning. As you move up, there are more barriers and more types of enemies to fight, so the game does actually get pretty challenging.
The game isn’t too much fun by itself, but the scoring system is its saving grace. At the end of each level you are awarded a score based on accuracy, kills, and remaining health. Certain amounts of points earn you medals, which do nothing but show your mastery of that particular level. This seems silly at first, but it gave the game an impressive amount of replay value. I beat it in twenty minutes, but spent a few extra hours trying to earn gold medals. Overall I’d say it wasn’t a waste of my time, but I’m glad I didn’t shell out for the full version.
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Oct 1st, 2012 at 13:01:49 - Towerbloxx (iPd) |
Towerbloxx is timing/puzzle/strategy game developed by Digital Chocolate for social media/mobile devices. The player is in control of a crane that continually hoists new floors of a building up onto a growing tower. When the screen is tapped, the crane drops the section you were holding and a new piece appears in the arm of the crane after a brief moment. The pieces sway back and forth in the wind on the end of the hook, and so the player is trying to time their drop just right so that the piece will land safely on the top of the last one. As the tower gets higher, it too begins to sway back and forth, making the timing of the drops more difficult. If a piece lands inadequately, it and nay other precarious pieces below it fall off the tower and the player loses one of their four “hearts”. The towers are finished once they reach a predetermined height based on their colour(except in the quick game mode), or the player runs out of hearts.
Score is kept based on how many people “live” in the tower. Each floor gives a set amount of people, but a skilled builder can increase the amount of tenants through careful and rapid placement! Whenever a piece lands perfectly on the one below it, it triggers a bonus population multiplier for a period of time. Subsequent perfect pieces within this time limit bump up the multiplier as well as reset the timer. This puts pressure on the player; the timer is generally long enough to drop two more quick pieces, so the player must decide whether or not they want to be careful to extend the time, or cash in with a few quick drops at x2 Population. There are also special pieces that have balconies; if these successfully land on the tower they will increase population.
Once a tower is built (in build city mode) the player is asked to place it on a grid that represents a developing city. As population grows via tower placement your city will gain new types of taller towers that you can build. This is where the strategy comes in, because every tower has a very specific set of rules regarding its placement. Red towers need to be adjacent to blue ones, green need to be adjacent to both red and blue, and the coveted yellow tower needs to be touching all three to be built! These requirements only exist for the construction however; the prerequisite towers can be replaced later. This makes for a spatial puzzle of sorts that makes the player think ahead and plan how they can maximize the population of their city.
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fishspit has been with GameLog for 12 years, 2 months, and 18 days |
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