Tower defence
Dec. 13th, 2013 09:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livAfter I posted complaining about the shrinking market for casual games sold on the model where you pay a few quid once to get a complete, playable game, lots of you made helpful suggestions. Now my play queue is longer than the time I have available for gaming, which is a much better problem to have, so thank you all very much!
There was considerable discussion about Plants vs Zombies 2, which to my great annoyance has been released as free to play, making it a vehicle for trying to screw money out of the player for in-app purchases. Contrary togreen_knight's scathing review, some people expressed the opinion that it's still playable even if you don't spend lots of money on upgrades. So I decided that since it's "free" anyway, I'd give it a go and if it turned out to be obnoxious, I could always delete it. Electronic Arts isn't a company I really love, but I reasonably trust their games not to contain malware, so I wasn't going to harm my phone by installing and then deleting a game.
Plants vs Zombies 2 is in many ways a decent sequel to the original and brilliant Plants vs Zombies. Same quirky sense of humour, very much the same gaming mechanic but with just enough new features and little tweaks to keep it interesting. I like the plant food mechanic where the zombies drop power-ups for the plants. And I like some of the new plants and the zombies' special powers are probably more varied than the original. Most of the mini-games are better than those in the first version. Crazy Dave is unfortunately still present (his ableist portrayal was my least favourite aspect of the original PvZ), but somewhat less prominent.
The in-app purchase stuff is not as obtrusive as I feared; there's little danger of accidentally ending up at a purchase screen and there aren't too many in-game ads telling you to buy stuff. But the game is noticeably unbalanced, there are too many levels that are basically unplayable without powerups, and too many levels and plants that are behind pay to open locks. I don't really love the touch gesture power-ups; they are too transparently a way of paying to make the levels trivially easy, as you can basically kill large numbers of zombies instantly each time you activate one. In the game's favour, you do get random drops of keys so you can unlock the gates eventually (but it takes a really long time to save up enough keys to progress). And you can earn enough in-game money to pay for the touch gesture power-ups if you're stubborn enough to grind through the easy levels lots of times. So it's not impossible to play through the game without paying real world money, it's just slow and annoying. Even with that, I almost like the game enough to want to spend money on something just to show support, but I really don't want to encourage this horrible free-to-play / IAP business model, so I'm not going to do so. For a free game it's a lot less bad than I feared, though.
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alextfish recommended Kingdom Rush (among a great list of other suggestions, many thanks, Alex!) Since KR was in the recentish Android Humble Bundle, I decided to try that one first. And OMG it is a seriously brilliant tower defence game. Brilliant. I am utterly addicted to it. It has a lovely little story line, fairly basic swords-n-sorcery but adding a bit of a saga structure which enhances the game. And both the monsters and the towers are incredibly cute (without being big-eyed pastel coloured animals style cute); the art is really gorgeous. The gameplay is just perfectly balanced, I've found pretty much every level a decent challenge, not frustratingly impossible or boringly easy. The towers have absolutely great mechanics and there's some great trade-offs between speed, power, range etc. And you buy power-ups with in-game currency, which actually make the game more fun because you can use them judiciously to get out of tricky situations, but they don't just obliterate all challenge. Because KR isn't trying to screw money out of you, they have put effort into balancing the gameplay rather than the opposite, and it makes all the difference.
I generally dislike the trend for games trying to squeeze more playing hours out of the same content by awarding extra stars for repeating levels, but in KR I find myself really wanting to replay levels to earn all five stars, because the star awards are actually meaningful challenges. And because you can spend the stars to improve various abilities which again improve game-play rather than unbalancing it. I like the heroes from a gameplay point of view, I really dislike them from a cultural sensitivity point of view, because they are very much ethnic stereotypes and even worse, the non-European ones speak in "comedy" broken English. And guess how many female heroines there are out of twelve options? But if you can live with that it's an amazingly good game. It's a bit faster than PvZ but not so fast that it's all about lightning reflexes, indeed for me it's exactly the right balance of long-range strategy and fast-thinking tactics (but not fast-clicking, particularly).
I was all set to go and spend money on the sequel, which is under £2 for iPhone or Android. But the reviews inform me that Kingdom Rush Frontiers is all about the in-app purchases even though it also has an up-front cost. *SIGH* So they're not actually getting any more of my money. But I can certainly offer a recommendation for the earlier game, the Humble Bundle is over now but it's still only £1.23 and I would say really good value for that money. I would certainly rather pay pocket money for a really well-balanced game, than get a free game like Plants vs Zombies 2, which should have been good but has been deliberately broken in order to bully you into paying for it.
In other zombie news, I am very much enjoying Zombies, Run to make my regular running less boring. I was hoping for gamification, but in lots of ways it's more an interactive story than a game. Very good and engaging story, though, and innovative in the ways it could really only be played on a smartphone. And I am having far too much fun with Terraria; the recent big update has added a lot of interesting, playable content to the game as well as tweaking the balance in ways that are almost all improvements. One of the things I really like about Terraria is that it's fun and engaging without being addictive; it's pretty non-linear, but effectively you can choose a particular task or quest, carry it out and then stop. I've played over a hundred hours (!) not because it's manipulating my brain's reward pathways to have just one more go, but because it's just enjoyable. It's somewhat expensive for a casual game on Steam, but it's also quite often on sale.
There was considerable discussion about Plants vs Zombies 2, which to my great annoyance has been released as free to play, making it a vehicle for trying to screw money out of the player for in-app purchases. Contrary to
green_knight's scathing review, some people expressed the opinion that it's still playable even if you don't spend lots of money on upgrades. So I decided that since it's "free" anyway, I'd give it a go and if it turned out to be obnoxious, I could always delete it. Electronic Arts isn't a company I really love, but I reasonably trust their games not to contain malware, so I wasn't going to harm my phone by installing and then deleting a game. Plants vs Zombies 2 is in many ways a decent sequel to the original and brilliant Plants vs Zombies. Same quirky sense of humour, very much the same gaming mechanic but with just enough new features and little tweaks to keep it interesting. I like the plant food mechanic where the zombies drop power-ups for the plants. And I like some of the new plants and the zombies' special powers are probably more varied than the original. Most of the mini-games are better than those in the first version. Crazy Dave is unfortunately still present (his ableist portrayal was my least favourite aspect of the original PvZ), but somewhat less prominent.
The in-app purchase stuff is not as obtrusive as I feared; there's little danger of accidentally ending up at a purchase screen and there aren't too many in-game ads telling you to buy stuff. But the game is noticeably unbalanced, there are too many levels that are basically unplayable without powerups, and too many levels and plants that are behind pay to open locks. I don't really love the touch gesture power-ups; they are too transparently a way of paying to make the levels trivially easy, as you can basically kill large numbers of zombies instantly each time you activate one. In the game's favour, you do get random drops of keys so you can unlock the gates eventually (but it takes a really long time to save up enough keys to progress). And you can earn enough in-game money to pay for the touch gesture power-ups if you're stubborn enough to grind through the easy levels lots of times. So it's not impossible to play through the game without paying real world money, it's just slow and annoying. Even with that, I almost like the game enough to want to spend money on something just to show support, but I really don't want to encourage this horrible free-to-play / IAP business model, so I'm not going to do so. For a free game it's a lot less bad than I feared, though.
alextfish recommended Kingdom Rush (among a great list of other suggestions, many thanks, Alex!) Since KR was in the recentish Android Humble Bundle, I decided to try that one first. And OMG it is a seriously brilliant tower defence game. Brilliant. I am utterly addicted to it. It has a lovely little story line, fairly basic swords-n-sorcery but adding a bit of a saga structure which enhances the game. And both the monsters and the towers are incredibly cute (without being big-eyed pastel coloured animals style cute); the art is really gorgeous. The gameplay is just perfectly balanced, I've found pretty much every level a decent challenge, not frustratingly impossible or boringly easy. The towers have absolutely great mechanics and there's some great trade-offs between speed, power, range etc. And you buy power-ups with in-game currency, which actually make the game more fun because you can use them judiciously to get out of tricky situations, but they don't just obliterate all challenge. Because KR isn't trying to screw money out of you, they have put effort into balancing the gameplay rather than the opposite, and it makes all the difference. I generally dislike the trend for games trying to squeeze more playing hours out of the same content by awarding extra stars for repeating levels, but in KR I find myself really wanting to replay levels to earn all five stars, because the star awards are actually meaningful challenges. And because you can spend the stars to improve various abilities which again improve game-play rather than unbalancing it. I like the heroes from a gameplay point of view, I really dislike them from a cultural sensitivity point of view, because they are very much ethnic stereotypes and even worse, the non-European ones speak in "comedy" broken English. And guess how many female heroines there are out of twelve options? But if you can live with that it's an amazingly good game. It's a bit faster than PvZ but not so fast that it's all about lightning reflexes, indeed for me it's exactly the right balance of long-range strategy and fast-thinking tactics (but not fast-clicking, particularly).
I was all set to go and spend money on the sequel, which is under £2 for iPhone or Android. But the reviews inform me that Kingdom Rush Frontiers is all about the in-app purchases even though it also has an up-front cost. *SIGH* So they're not actually getting any more of my money. But I can certainly offer a recommendation for the earlier game, the Humble Bundle is over now but it's still only £1.23 and I would say really good value for that money. I would certainly rather pay pocket money for a really well-balanced game, than get a free game like Plants vs Zombies 2, which should have been good but has been deliberately broken in order to bully you into paying for it.
In other zombie news, I am very much enjoying Zombies, Run to make my regular running less boring. I was hoping for gamification, but in lots of ways it's more an interactive story than a game. Very good and engaging story, though, and innovative in the ways it could really only be played on a smartphone. And I am having far too much fun with Terraria; the recent big update has added a lot of interesting, playable content to the game as well as tweaking the balance in ways that are almost all improvements. One of the things I really like about Terraria is that it's fun and engaging without being addictive; it's pretty non-linear, but effectively you can choose a particular task or quest, carry it out and then stop. I've played over a hundred hours (!) not because it's manipulating my brain's reward pathways to have just one more go, but because it's just enjoyable. It's somewhat expensive for a casual game on Steam, but it's also quite often on sale.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-12-14 02:37 am (UTC)It's even more racist than Kingdom Rush (nadir was when some dark skinned "native" baddie keeps tossing helpless blonde ladies into a volcano causing fire to rain down on your barracks troops unless you kill him first), mind you, but as a playable game it's fantastic and I enjoyed getting more of the same thing I enjoyed in the first KR. If you enjoyed the original, you'd enjoy the sequel.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-12-14 11:26 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-12-14 11:41 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-12-15 11:42 am (UTC)I liked Kingdom Rush too.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-12-14 12:01 pm (UTC)That reminds me that there's a casual game I played a great deal a few years back called Fragger, one of the things I liked best about which is that it has a nice twist on the 'replaying old levels' idea.
I wonder if I should have recommended it in your previous post, though since you mention a dislike for killing things, perhaps it would fail on that count. It's an Angry Birds style of game, in which you sit at a fixed point hurling projectiles around the level in an effort to destroy a number of targets, and score points for doing so with few projectiles and/or in style. But unlike Angry Birds the theme is explicitly military: your character is a helmeted grenadier, and throws grenades at ... well, they stay perfectly still and they look like target dummies, but OTOH they go 'oof' when a grenade strikes them directly and their eyes rove frightenedly around when they're about to get blown up. So it could well fail your killing-enemies criterion. But I'll describe what I liked about it anyway, in case you do like the sound of it, and/or in case someone else says 'and here are nine other games with the same property!'.
The thing about Fragger as opposed to Angry Birds is that it's possible to treat it as a puzzle game. It shares with AB the need to master the angle/power controls to aim your shots well, and also the rather annoying feature that when you muck up the 4th shot you have no alternative but to redo the previous 3 from the start with no record/playback feature and no help but muscle memory (though OTOH this can mean you are challenged to find a way to do things without requiring pixel-perfect precision), but it differs from AB in that it has more ... qualitative challenges, in which the question is not 'how can I most efficiently bring this structure down?' but 'how on earth can I get a grenade into that part of the level at all?' – you'll be presented with targets behind impassable walls as often as not. Lying around the level will be assorted puzzle pieces, such as rockets which fire with a fixed direction and strength if triggered by the nearby blast of a grenade, and in some levels the puzzle becomes 'in what order do I make the rockets trigger one another?' with the angle/power mechanic being relegated to a trivial UI detail of how you trigger the ones you can directly reach. Then again, in other levels precise aim becomes an important factor, and in some levels you have to think carefully about which kind it is.
And the reason I mention it, in the context of your comment about replaying levels, is that one of the ways in which it rewards you for completing whole level-sets is to give you extra in-game abilities (e.g. a button to detonate a grenade at a time of your choosing, as opposed to the standard fuse mechanism that only blows up once it's landed and stopped rolling around). And if you then go back over the old levels and ask yourself, 'Can I do this a lot better than I did last by using the new ability?', often the answer is yes, and often figuring out just how to do it is an entirely new puzzle. Sp a lot of the levels are two puzzles in one, and manage to be freshly challenging in spite of the fact that you've returned to something you've already done, with abilities that ought in principle to only make it easier.
Also, the scoring system is more subtle than it looks at first. Several times I noticed quirks of the rules that gave me more points than I expected for a certain thing, and then had good fun going back over all the levels to find opportunities to deliberately exploit those quirks for a higher score. Perhaps that works less well if you're observant the first time round, but for me, I found it gave me another pile of fresh challenges out of the existing levels.
(Since I've already compared it to Angry Birds, it's also worth mentioning that it has hundreds of levels instead of a couple of dozen.)
(no subject)
Date: 2013-12-14 07:22 pm (UTC)A friend recommended Candy Crush Saga, so I downloaded it, to find that not only is it pay-to-play, it's _terribly_ unbalanced and you can solve later levels with either a shitload of luck or a fuckton of upgrades.
I bailed out at around level 85. I've heard from people who got to level 420+ - all without paying - but you'd have to spend an awful lot of time failing again and again and again - not because you're making mistakes, but simply because the cards are not falling in your favour.
And so, when I came to a level where you really could not do anything other than hope that the gods of gaming were on your side, I decided 'sod this' and deleted it from my phone. Which, on the one hand, I regretted a little - when it was playable it was filling the 'let's do a couple of rounds' slot very nicely (and because lives are limited and only regenerate over time, you actually have to stop after a few rounds) but overall, I'm happier.
And I've made the decision that I won't suppert this model anymore. Either I can buy a game, or I can't. No more games optimised for paid content.