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The [Android Games] thread
Aldo
Hippo HoorayRegistered User regular
Hippo HoorayRegistered User regular
Gaming on Android devices, both smartphones and tablets and whatever else you can run Android on. Also discussion about controllers, cases and whatever other peripheral devices you have hooked up.
But mostly discussions and updates about awesome new games. As most of us have been gamers in the Golden Age Before F2P mobile games, we tend to focus our attention on games that you can just buy and play or titles that don't punish you for not spending money. Obviously there's lots of great games, but here's a list of relatively old games that will run on just about any low to midrange phone:
Perhaps we could generate a new list? And: where do you get your Android gaming news from? I just follow reddit.com/r/AndroidGaming and there's always a few recommendations in my friendly local gaming magazine.
But mostly discussions and updates about awesome new games. As most of us have been gamers in the Golden Age Before F2P mobile games, we tend to focus our attention on games that you can just buy and play or titles that don't punish you for not spending money. Obviously there's lots of great games, but here's a list of relatively old games that will run on just about any low to midrange phone:
Dizzen wrote:Another Case Solved. It's a match 3-or-more puzzler much of the time, but there's objectives within that, and the main cases have other game elements as well. Free with in-app purchases, but that's just for more candy, the premium currency that you can earn in the game.Good android games:
-The room. Neat puzzle/problem solving game
-Broken sword 1, Broken sword 2 - neat remake of the old games
-Ridiculous fishing - its vlambeer goddamit!
-Incredipede - build a machine made out of flesh and bone, and see it scramble across the screen!
-Middle manager of justice - double fine game.
-Rymdkapsel - nice RTS/tower defence lite.
-Epoch - fairly simple action game. Good looking though!
-Bridge constructor - build a bridge. Somewhat detailed physics simulator.
-Jetpack Joyride - one of the more polished constant runner games. F2P, but the free version is very playable!
-Blood of the zombies - a choose-your-own adventure made by CYA ian livingstone!
-Robotek - glorified slot machine dressed up in a tactical game, but a very polished one!
-Machinarium - nice adventure game (old click-click-click type).
-Osmos HD - a bit hard to explain. action/puzzle game where you are a blob trying to eat smaller blobs. Free demo.Both the Kingdom Rush games (first one, second one) are great if you like tower defense. Some IAP but I doubt I spent more than $10-15 for the both of them.
Galaxy on Fire 2 is pretty fun. It's basically an Elite space ship style game. I think I spent 5$ on it so far and I'm not seeing anything where I'm going to have to fork over a bunch of money any time soon.
Plants vs. Zombie 2 is free and they just added stuff. The IAP is pretty optional if you're good at the game.
Major Mayhem is a good little rails style shooter. Don't think I have spent anything on it TBH.
Reaper was some good fun. It's a premium title but IIRC it's pretty cheap. Sort of a sidescroller RPG. Kind of hard to explain though.Yeah, and there's still a ton that ya'll didn't mention.
Tactics: Greed Corp, Worms 2,
Racing: Need for Speed Most Wanted
Puzzle: SpaceChem
Casual: TripleTown
Arcade: Tilt to Live 2, Aaaaaaaa!, Raiden Legacy, Super Hexagon
Card: CardCityNights
Roguelike: Ending, Hoplite
???: Spaceteam, Anomaly 2, Hundreds, Spider: Secret of something something
Also Aquaria, which you can't get any more apparently?
A significant number of awesome games debuted Android ports in Humble Android Bundles; it's worth keeping an eye on them.
Also, also! I paid my $10 and am downloading the beta of Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition onto my Nexus 7 AT THIS VERY MOMENT. The developer says to wait for a few more updates before trying a full playthrough, but one guy says he did a speed run of the main quest without any show-stopping issues. Excitement!
Thanks to @Dizzen for the OP
Perhaps we could generate a new list? And: where do you get your Android gaming news from? I just follow reddit.com/r/AndroidGaming and there's always a few recommendations in my friendly local gaming magazine.
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3DS Friend Code: 2165-6448-8348 www.Twitch.TV/cooljammer00
Battle.Net: JohnDarc#1203 Origin/UPlay: CoolJammer00
Been seeing a lot of a game called Warriors of Waterdeep appear in ads a fair bit when I browse Facebook. Seems like there's a soft-launch for Canada for the game which started at the beginning of June, so hopefully that means a full launch is imminent.
If you're familiar with Waterdeep and the reference, you know it's a D&D game, and it's made by a company I've never heard of (Ludia?) but it is an officially licensed WotC product.
The game's mostly solo - no friend or co-op component to the game yet, or if they'll even have anything at all remains to be seen. You start with a pre-set Cleric and Wizard, and quickly recruit a couple of other classes to round your party out at 4 members. Again, classes/characters are pre-set, and while I would've liked being able to create my own party, or at least a main leader to represent me, it's really not such a big deal.
As you complete dungeons (usually 2-4 rooms that act as waves of enemies, sometimes with secret rooms in between them) you earn a pack of cards that gives you gold and equipment pieces. You'll never earn equipment for a class/character you don't have, but if you have recruited 5 characters, your benchwarmer might earn a piece randomly from the pack. The equipment is what gives your characters new skills.
Boots/Leg armor = Movement activated skill
Helm = Command skill 1
Accessory = Command skill 2
Weapon = Unlimited attack skill
Body Armor = No skills, bulk of character stats
Wonderous Item = Passive skill
Movement skills always have a chance to activate as you move around the 4x4 battlefield. When you start a dungeon/enter a new room, monsters and unmovable terrain can occupy any of the top 12 spaces, with your party taking up the bottom 4. Some characters gain abilities from their equipment that let them attack from 2 or 3 rows away. Some monsters can attack from the very back row, so starting out, you usually have to advance a ranged character one row up, or melee 2 rows up to get that creep in the back.
All command skills have a cooldown period, with the weapon being the unlimited attack option (wizard and ranger can always attack from 2 rows away with their basic attack). All attack skills have a chance of adding extra effects, such as extra damage, bleed, AC/ATK buffs or debuffs, etc. The passive skills are just that - at the start of the turn, they have a chance to trigger. Barbarian to start with has a great passive of being able to heal damage at the start of her turn, for example.
The game has the progressive equipment scale of common/rare/epic/legendary, and some slots have multiple pieces per tier. The Cleric starts with boots that give a chance to heal a random party member, but quickly gets new boots that are stronger (statwise) but the skill gives the Cleric a chance to remove all debuffs. Not as useful, but do you want to keep wearing low level boots? Because you get packs of cards very often in the game, you'll get a lot of dupe equipment, and that means leveling up your gear. It costs more gold and requires more dupe cards as you level up each item consecutively, but it helps to keep that item competitive among your "stronger" equipment.
There is a lot more to this game, but as it's not fully released yet, I'm hoping they'll make a few changes to what's existent. Currently, there is a gold/XP cap that resets per day. This needs to go away as soon as the game launches, or I doubt people will want to stick with it. There is also a challenge mode of running the dungeon with monsters getting progressively stronger as you clear more rooms, and every 4 rooms you fight a boss where upon winning, you get the option to take your accumulated loot and run, or keep trying for the next tier. As of now, when you quit the challenge, you get a chance to have the chest upgrade to copper/silver/gold/??? which unlocks on a timer (or you can spend premium currency gems to unlock right away). The chance of upgrade is criminally low, though, and doesn't seem to improve much if you progress further. I have cleared 16 rooms often and usually just end up with a basic chest that unlocks in 3 hours. I've had maybe 10 copper chests, 1 silver and 1 gold chest each. I've probably run the challenge dungeon well over 55-60 times since the game soft-launched.
Steam: TheArcadeBear
Another addition to the series is hero monkeys. They're basically a tower you can only have one of on the map, and they don't have upgrade paths. Instead they automatically level up while placed on the map and increase in power and gain abilities like supporting nearby towers, activated abilities that deal damage or reduce cooldowns on other tower's activated abilities, etc. You choose the hero monkey you want to use before a match, and you still have to pay to place them down like any other tower. There's currently four heroes and each one plays pretty differently from each other.
There's not a ton of content for it yet, but the devs are going to add more maps and more tower types like they did with the previous games so it's definitely worth checking out. Plus it's cute as shit
So for example, that Archer trait that makes skull matches give a % chance to kill... Does this trigger as long as I'm using Archer? Or do I have to be "part of the troop" by having a weapon in the team?
You have a deck of 30 cards and four in your hand and a 3x3 grid. So does your opponent. You play creatures onto the grid and they attack from front to back top to bottom in sequence. The aim is to deal damage to your opponent. Every turn your mana limit increases you can use better cards
So rather like a stripped down MtG.
It's mostly PvP but there are lots of PvE levels you can play too that are more like puzzles
The art is decent (and startlingly similar in style to Kingdom Rush) and the translation is charmingly terrible
The slight issue is that while there's a lot of depth to building synergistic decks it's very pay to win with rare cards just being outright better. You can get these without paying but it's slow and when you get crushed three times in a row by people with fancy decks it can be very frustrating
I play a lot of euro style board games and I always get exited when a dev translates them to mobile:
Onirim (A brilliant solitaire game. Digitizing it removes a ton of shuffling)
Brass (the best game that I would never want to bring to a table in real life.)
Evolution (omg don't make me play the trailer again)
Lords of Waterdeep (the introductory worker placement game)
Pandemic (A co-op game I dislike in real life. Digitizing it at least speeds up the pace of RNG punching me)
Galaxy Trucker (Like FTL but with dexterity mechanics for chaotic ship assembly. Its hilarious even when you lose and your ship gets sliced in half!)
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
It is a very slow tutorial, as urahonky noticed as well. There's a serious case of feature bloat (with submenus with 6 options in every direction), so they spend a lot of time trying to go over every feature. Thankfully they are pretty much to the point, with a set up of flavor text; what the submenu does; how you do it; why it's useful. Usually with a free goody tossed in for your efforts.
With these kind of games my main concern is with the base gameplay (and why I still fire up Gems of War daily): what are you actually doing, besides managing your shit in your kazillion menus? In this case it is a pretty standard version of JRPG (pokemon, SMT) gameplay, where your 4 demons are pitted against a few waves of demons. Depending on SPD stat you go first or the enemy goes first. Every demon has a few different attacks with a specific damage type and all demons have a table of weaknesses/immunities that is always displayed on screen. You get 4 actions per turn, but gain extra turns with scoring crits or hitting weaknesses and lose actions for missing or hitting immunities. Every demon has a %chance to talk to you, by selecting the right conversation options and/or giving them stuff they'll join your roster.
Now, Dx2 is hitting my GOTTA CATCH THEM ALL nerve pretty hard. There's 160 demons in game, with a lot of them just joining you through battle, you can spend resources to summon more and you can make more by combining 2 demons. Obviously there's also a shop and that's where it gets foggy. So far I haven't felt like I *needed* to spend money, but I'm sure they'll find some novel way to fuck this up. I don't mind spending a few bucks on a game I enjoy, but I hope it isn't required to continue to have fun with it.
Another hallmark of mobile gaming is also present: an energy system. So far it is generous, but I'm not sure how that's going to pan out. There is also an auto-battle system, to further annoy the fuck out of me. I can only tolerate that shit when I can just ignore it.
Main selling point so far is the beautiful art of the game, NPCs are animated beautifully and all demons are in 3D and are in higher detail than I have ever seen them before. One cute feature that's supposed to be hidden somewhere is AR: you can make selfies with your demons. Cute, right?
I'm only like 2 hours in, so I'm just scratching the surface. Thankfully I have already found my perfect demon.
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
Goose. You silly goose!
That's Hamsa and he is the steed of Brahma.
Steam: TheArcadeBear
Mara is present, and also there is an AR aspect, kind of like Pokemon Go, and I'm sure you can figure out what that combination means.
Shin Megami Tensei.
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
:winky:
Steam: TheArcadeBear
......
I just got it. Fuck.
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197970666737/
Sadly, the game doesn't seem to want to run on BlueStacks, and it looks like it has an annoying "device transfer" system instead of seamless play on multiple devices.
1. It uses an energy system. Kinda lame at first, but just about every supply chest you find walking around has 1-5 energy anyway.
2. You can build stuff on the map. You need to build safe zones for survivors. You drop survivors off at different types of safe houses.
3. It's card based. You collect weapons/heroes/perk cards. Once you get enough of a particular card you can upgrade it to the next level.
4. They have Raider fights that are essentially light gun games (IMO).
All your favorite heroes are in the game. Glenn and Carol are my favorites and used frequently. There's a clan system, and chat.
There are 4 types of encounters:
- Kill zombies: You tap the screen to shoot zombies and kill them. Awarded with cards.
- Help Survivor: Kill zombies to save a survivor. Survivors can be turned into 1 of 4 different types of Safe Houses to 'pull' a random, new card.
- Infestations: Kill 3-4 (probably more, I've only seen 4) stages of zombies. At the end you get a nice cache of cards. These infestations regenerate after 8 hours.
- Raider battles: A light-gun type game (it's stationary) where you shoot at raiders with a team of heroes. Generally weapon cards drop.
I'm having a lot of fun with it. It's something to do while walking around at work. If anyone's interested I could make a thread and we can start our own clan.
Our first game is now available for free on Google Play: Frontier: Isle of the Seven Gods
Yeah I can see that. Luckily if you're in an active clan you can complete the clan quests and get even more goods. Not sure if that's a new thing added or not, but they offer some variety to playing. Like requiring you to use a specific hero or gun. I'm liking it so far, but I've only been playing about a week.
The core gameplay loop is actually pretty good, and I like a lot of the ideas (bring people to [not Trading Post] for cards to upgrade, bring them to Trading Post for cash / farm infestations, upgrade, repeat) but, like... I just don't have the patience, I guess. I had fun right up until that exact point though.
Times like this I wish they remade the Where in the ____ is Carmen Sandiego series.
Steam: betsuni7
Nah that seems like a fair assessment of the game, honestly. However I played Pokemon Go religiously for over a year and a half. I then got bored of flicking pokeballs at Pokemon and finally put it down. When I saw this get released it scratched the itch to be different enough from Pokemon Go that it's not entirely mindless. Plus you can play while driving, so if my wife's driving us somewhere then I can login and get things done.
@Heartlash "geo challenge geography quiz" is the best, imo.
Ive been heavily engrossed for the past week+ with no signs of slowing down.
Thanks so much, grabbed it today and played during my commute. Love the combination of game types.
Our first game is now available for free on Google Play: Frontier: Isle of the Seven Gods
Steam | XBL
I made it to Texas and ordered another, but something is off. Its now tough to press things. What could have been different between the first and second?
Is it fine without the case?
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197970666737/
Yes.
Perhaps it gets better with time?