Category: aabb

Interplanet starts off as a clever outer-space clash-like. Then it swerves when you realize your army is just a bunch of heroes, slowly leveling up. Then it goes nuts and turns into a persistent guild vs. guild conquer-the-galaxy.

The bases are very creative. Every building needs to connect through tubes, eventually to your HQ. Buildings come in different sizes, and 60-degree 3-way connectors exist, so things aren’t on a grid. There’s a real art to putting things where you want, connected. There are 2 races. The non-human one uses 5-way connectors — their bases are very geodesic-looking.

As a space game, everything attacks from longish range but it’s balanced nicely. Your “tough” spaceships still fly in front of your offensive ones, and about the usual number of defensive guns come into range as you advance. For spells, every ship has a 1-use special. Tough guys get a 6-second shield, archer’s get a mega-shot, the missile-ship launches a wide arc of doom. Traps are wonderful. You have 2 or 3 space mines, and that’s it, but the explosions are huge and deadly. Luckily the mine-sweeper special skill disarms mines in a large radius (as all skills, it has 1 use).

The army limit is funny. At first you have the basic point limit, allowing more and more ships. But there’s a hard limit of 15. I’m not sure what harm an army of 25 small ships would cause. But once you hit 15, all you can do is replace your cheap ships with more expensive ones. Now we’re in the problem area. The newer ships you get are simply better visions of tough-guys and archers. There’s not a lot of variety.

And we’re finally at the real problem. It’s a hero game. Your ships don’t die, and need to be leveled-up and upgraded from C to B to A to be useful. It takes lots of time and space-gold to get a useful ship. You’re locked into using your 15 good ships in every attack (I tried easy raids with 15 cheap-o ships. Died too fast without getting much loot).

The game is old-school about how often you can attack. Damaged ships need time to repair. At mid-level destroyed ships take 12 minutes, and at least one ship is always destroyed. It’s a 12-minute wait between battles. It also costs money, lots of money. A fully destroyed fleet will bankrupt you.

The game has some minor silliness. The buildings, even the guns, look alike – lots of shiny grey. I think they realized this too late, so now defensive buildings have crisp icons over them during attacks. Weapons also have a paper/rock/scissors mechanic against types of armour. You can’t do much with it though. It’s best ignored. The gold-targeting “goblin” spaceship doesn’t even have the weapon type that hurts gold vaults more.

There’s a really cool feature allowing you to fly your base next to a planet. Normally you’re in black, empty space. If you build and upgrade the planet-finding building and do a day-long planetary survey, you can move your base. All you have to do is beat the computer-controlled base guarding it. Once there you get bonuses to production for a few days. You see the bonuses in advance, so you get into a cycle of researching a few candidate planets before you have to move again. The art is beautiful “majesty of space” 2.5D style. Finding a planet is worth it for that alone.

Eventually, you unlock Conquest Mode. It’s a different game. There’s one big map where every guild fights over the best planets. You bring in your spaceships but they’re completely different: the stats are different, attacking a planet takes hours of travel, and battles are text reports. It’s another version of Game of War:Fire Age. As usual, the strongest guilds camp out on the best planets, getting the best spaceship equipment, pilots, and so on. You need to keep on with the clash-like part since ships come from there. So now you’re playing 2 different games at once. I don’t see the point. How many people want to mix a 3-minute casual action game with an ultra-competitive action-less one?

I should have known there was a problem early on. The game showers you with free gold. That’s always a bad sign. After a full month I had upgrades I couldn’t possibly steal enough gold for, except for the saved-up free gold packs in my mailbox. When a game isn’t interested in having you just play it that’s a sign they know it’s not fun.

“Cloud Raiders : Sky Conquest” isn’t the most fun game — the troops are the same as CoC. But they added interesting stuff, good and bad.

Their base-defense mini-game has 4 stages, with a break in-between. You’ve got 3 special defensive spells and are allowed to deploy your army. After an attack you’ll probably need time to retrain killed troops. The second is the same, but the third wave includes a unique pirate boss (a pauses mid-attack announces its arrival). The fourth stage is a counter-attack — you attack their pirate base using your normal army. That’s a fun little story. But you’ve got 24 hours to complete them all or you get nothing. It can be too much of a commitment.

There’s another defense mode they call a “Titan Invasion” — a single huge monster attacks. When you finally beat it, you go to a screen showing you’ve passed 1 out of 5 stages. You can pay real money to collect your winnings now, or keep going (which realistically will be next week, since it’s tougher). That rubs me the wrong way. I understand that games need to monetize, and there’s nothing wrong with unlocking a new way to spend cash. But they should be more clear about it.

I really like their new reserve idea. Every so often the game gives you random troops for free, set aside in a “reserve”. They last for a few days, then vanish. Sometimes they’re troops you normally wouldn’t use, but they’re free and you can’t save them for later.

All games try to push you into joining a clan. The idea is you’ll make friends and play the game longer. Some force you to join, but most try to impress you with the benefits. Cloud raiders idea was giving you 25 wall sections and 3 traps for joining. I’m not sure that really works, since it won’t encourage you to stay there. But it sure is creative.

The aesthetics are great. Instead of evenly spaced fake-random junk to clear, it comes in realistic clumps — some grass around bushes or trees. There’s lots of whispy fog drifting over — you’re an island floating over the ocean, in the clouds. The elixir is even named “clouds” with collectors pulling it out of the air. When you change island skins there’s a lovely animation showing floating pirate ships lifting buildings and dashing to your new home. It’s really impressive.

The walls use hand-made pictures. A stand-alone wall section is a big post. Line them up and the posts are replaced by a log-fence picture. There are hand-drawn T-sections and 4-ways. The ends parts of long wall sections slope down into the ground. Two touching wall sections, along, makes a low berm. Just beautiful. 30-year-old ACSII maze-games used that trick: “the picture is based on what other walls you touch”. It’s nice to see someone remembered it.

Something I really didn’t like: the game starts out showing you how the Beacon spell works — the thing where you can make all troops walk to a spot, usually to regroup them to another side of the base. But it’s a consumable. After you cast it once, it’s gone. You can’t use it in any more battles until you somehow get more. The only way seems to be with gems. The other annoyance is a beautiful tentacle rising from the ocean, shaking gold out of a chest. Tapping it brings up the daily gem deal. After choosing NO there’s a second window with Cancel/Skip. It turns out that Cancel cancels skipping, which returns you to the previous Yes/No screen. When you tap it by accident, the proper sequence is “No, Skip”.

This is advertised as cross-platform: Android, iOS, Windows and FaceBook. It’s from 2014. Was cross-platform a new thing in 2014? Were Windows games still big then? The studio, Game Insight, is based in Lithuania. Was Windows big then in Europe?

People love army tanks. They’re tough, fast, and do high damage at a long range. If your clash-like is modern or futuristic it’s gotta have tanks. But a clash-like can’t have realistic army tanks. The amazing thing is we can make something that’s nothing like a tank, call it a tank, and players will agree it’s a tank.

The problem is that in a point system, everyone instinctively thinks of units pound-for-pound effectiveness. A tank doing the damage of 10 men but costing 20 is a low damage unit. That’s not just math. Your last army had those 20 soldiers and you can clearly see the tank is killing at 1/2 the rate.

You can make a deadly, tough unit — costs 6 but has the damage of toughness of 10. All you need to do is give it some horrible drawback. But tanks only have advantages. Their high speed is nice, and long-range is a huge advantage. They suffer in rough terrain, but clash-likes don’t have terrain. You can’t have a unit that’s above-average in every area. It’s a super-troop that ruins the game.

To make tanks fit into a point system, we’ll need to give them drawbacks. We’ll change their speed from fast to slow. That seems crazy, but treads feel slow and everyone’s seen war movies where a tank crawls along city streets. Next we’ll give them low damage. We have to make a big cut somewhere. We preserved toughness and long-range. It turns out that’s almost enough to make them feel like tanks.

We use the rate-of-fire trick to make tanks shots feel stronger. Instead of firing for 50 damage every second, they fire for 100 damage every 2 seconds. That’s the same low damage, but when they first drive up to something and deliver that double-strength hit, it feels strong.

The net result is a group of tanks slowly rolling to within long range of a building, then slowly knocking down its health. The tanks are taking very little damage in return. Then slowly moving a bit to the next. These tanks feel like an unstoppable force. The entire effect is so … well … barely acceptable as an army tank, that it’s widely copied.

Despite the terrible name, publisher and theme, Empires&Allies is a nice-looking, innovative Clash-like. Even when the end-game gets spendy, it does it in an interesting way.

It looks nice. The theme is near-future military, so you get machine guns and a howitzer; but also orbital lasers, flying drones and mechanical crabs. The crabs pause then pounce onto your tanks. The stealth-fighter-shaped drones fly over their targets and cicle as they fire. The infantry have some grenadiers mixed in with the rifles. The beefy half-tracks zippily accelerate, overshoot and make 2-point turns. They leave little tracks on the ground. Your area-affect missile tanks arc shells directly over the target which then burst straight down in a cone of sub-munitions. Explosions rock nearby trees.

The buildings are a bit smaller than normal – your base looks like a little desert outpost. They also do a nice job making it so you can spot defenses and tell them apart. I don’t even hate the dialogue. Most military-themed games are boring rah-rah. Here, one of the rotating “new troop was built” messages is a sarcastic “nice base.” Cracks me up.

Mechanics-wise, Conquest&Empire is Boom Beach. But it has the usual improvements: a button to retrain all dead troops at once, selectable sub-groups for the “move to here” flare (which always costs 1 energy.) There are walls, but very weak – good for directing attackers into the gaps.

The absolute best new feature is the roving patrols. Plenty of clash-likes have defensive troops with a detection radius, usually pretty weak. E&A gives you 4-5 sets, with the option to put them on a long winding patrol (it’s just a toggle: patrol or stand around) and they’re fairly strong. They actually matter. The crabs slaughter armour, including heroes. But they do little to infantry and can’t hit fliers. Patrolling infantry is good for that. Patrolling tanks can survive your spells and have the longest range.

The NPC missions have you conquering earth, starting in Africa, occasionally retaking areas and fighting very tough bosses. Oddly in a Boom Beach clone, it uses a Nexting system to attack players, which means you can attack as much as you like. Looting uses a funny mix. It’s basically clash-like – a 3 star system and you only get loot from the buildings you destroy. But you get nothing if you lose. You have to get at least 1 star to get any loot at all. You never a get a free shield, but you can make one. Attacking other players gives parts which can be used to build various things. Making a shield item takes about an hour, and you can save them.

End-game gets funny. You build and collect lots of power-ups and are expected to use them before attacks. One provides a day-long 10-point increase to starting spell points. Each of the 5 troop pads can be powered-up (they change to an “Alpha” version of that troop.) An event gets you 15 minutes of a free mega-spell (for 15 seconds you can use a machine-gun or laser on the enemy base. It’s almost a mini-game.) There’s a massive area nuclear blast spell (you get 5 uses for joining a clan, not sure how to get more.) You can enable free repairs for your hero (see below.)

Defensively, you can build and enable a stealth field (you can be attacked, but part of your base is hidden.) You can drag a pretty substantial day-long power-up onto a defense. And, I’m not sure what these even are, but sometimes a helicopter drops rediculously tough defensive troops (even on NPC bases.)

I haven’t gone all-out on power-ups. It seems as if an active free player can regularly make them. But realistically this game requires $5/month to always have them on.

The heroes are interesting. You can use one at a time, from a choice of 3. They unlock mid-game (you have to win about 30 battles against other players to get the currency to unlock the first one. Then even more for the rest.) The tank hero has a big, regenerating shield. The sniper hero has a longer range than any defense (but the anti-tank patrols will cream it, and it walks very slowly.) The last hero flies. On defense the hero you select can wipe out swaths of attackers with its special (the game plays a very distinctive warning tone when you scout a base with an active defensive hero.) But heroes don’t auto-repair, and repairs cost a lot. You can’t really afford to keep a hero on defense. Of course, if you somehow can you’ll do much better.

The heroes also level up by fighting, which is always a problem. Items double the experience gain or simply give a pile of free experience. My level 6 sniper hero can solo NPC bases which would otherwise be darned tough. I’d imagine being able to somehow power-level a hero gives a huge advantage.

But all-in-all this is worth it for a month or two of free play. Then it looks like a pretty good game if you’re prepared to spend a few cups of coffee a month on it.

Then, lastly, it’s from Zynga. Zynga is famous for inventing FaceBook games that spam your friends and give gems for filling out credit-card applications. And for being worth a ton of money until everyone hated those tricks and they weren’t. I suppose they’re just another publisher now, but it’s not a name you expect to see on an actual game.

War Reign is a nicely done Boom Beach-style clash-like. Besides some new ideas, it has 3 fully different races; elves, humans, and undead; completely different buildings, troops, spells and leaders. No one does that. The StarWars clash-like has 2 sides, but it pretty much had to. But 3?

Each race gets one passive defensive building. For undead it’s a pustule that explodes when destroyed. The humans’ is simply very, very tough. The elves’ heals other buildings. For traps, humans do damage, undeads do a percentage of the defender’s health, and elves also slow you (I think). The undead mortar does less damage but creates nasty grubs that love to chew on tough guys. Humans get a slow, hard-hitting cannon; the elves version is machinegun-like thorns; undead instead have an “Eye of Mordor” which slowly ramps up damage on 1 target until it dies.

Undead troops include cheap skeletons and wraiths that gain power as skeletons die. The first offensive undead spell summons more skeletons, while the second allows troops to heal by doing damage. If you want a healer unit or a blast spell, play humans or elves. Elves have the game’s only haste spell. Likewise the undead leaders can summon skeletons and heal through damage. Human leaders aren’t so odd, but have the only area-of-effect attack.

A problem with all this racial variety is the small troop selection for each. I have just 4 troops types unlocked and only use 2. It appears you can separately play as each race, but that seems like a lot of work.

A really clever feature is defensive spells for the now common “defend” mode. Undead have one to weaken attackers, toughen buildings, summon skeletons, and lure nearby invaders to one building. It works great, they recharge as invaders die, turning defending into a much more active game.

You win by killing the HQ – every other building instantly explodes. Attacks come from one side, so the HQ is usually at the rear. At first you can use the Beacon spell to run around for an easy win. But once everyone knows what they’re doing, defenses are extremely tough. And you can’t find easier people to fight — the game presents 5 players a day, at about your level. There’s a prize for 5 wins. That takes me about a week. Mitigating the impossibility of winning is that losers get to keep anything they steal. There’s a special item you only get from attacking other players, which is the main reason to beat your head against that wall (metaphorically – the game has no wall defenses).

The area with computer bases has the same difficulty problem. Boom Beach style, they become more and more difficult. Fine at first, but ramps up fast. Some of them look like misprints — huge interlocking fields of guns larger than you’ve ever seen. If you somehow power through, you need to beat stages 2 and 3 without replacing any of your losses.

Most of that isn’t necessarily bad. It’s a tough game, and there are plenty of attack plans and fast thinking spell use that might beat an impossible opponent.

Lastly, this game is from “SmileGate Megaport”. That doesn’t sound right, but it’s a South Korean computer game company and that’s their real name.

Clash of Glory: Mech War isn’t a great game. You know that from the name. But it’s strange enough to be interesting.

There are no troops. All you have a small preset group of mechs, unlocking another every level or two. Attacks use this same 3 or 4, every time. The first is the only hand-to-hand one. But it’s not especially tough and dies quickly. A usual, the main danger is the enemy’s defending mechs (which are the same as yours).

Damage to your robots sticks around after each battle. They heal 1-at-a-time in their building. There isn’t even a queue — you need to come back an hour later and manually begin repairs on the next. But it’s not that bad since being injured doesn’t stop them from attacking again.

The hand-to-hand mech is your “leader”. I think you’re suppose to spend forever upgrading its levels before doing anything else. Maybe that makes it tough enough. It has 2 weak spells — a brief 10% buff to attack. Yay! There are 10 more but they need gems to unlock. I think you can make your original spells useful by using more gems. A weird rule is the leader can’t attack when it’s injured. But it gets to heal in it’s personal hero-house.

You normal mechs don’t have as much room to upgrade, but they can get 3 pieces of equipment in a funny tournament. A new map with 2 special bases pops up for a single day. You and other players are supposed to fight back-and-forth over them. At the end you get equipment based on how long they were occupied and how many times they were retaken. I had trouble beating it the first time. Luckily, I never met anyone else there.

Then there’s other little bits of weirdness. You get a list of attackable people, which doesn’t seem to change on its own. I attacked one guy several times a day. To build a Clan Castle to join a clan, you need “book pages”. I couldn’t even find out how to get those things.

Giants are the first place where you realize Clash-likes are puzzles. Your first troops are warriors and archers. Those work well as a team. Next come goblins. They have no role in your warrior/archer army, but aren’t supposed to. Goblins are for the alternate “steal more, kill less” strategy. So goblins make sense. Then come giants.

It seems you’re meant to replace 5 warriors with 1 giant. The warrior’s job is to stand in front, sucking up damage. They did that pretty well until the defenders got area of effect mortars. That’s where giants come in. They’re basically mortar-resistant mega-warriors.

But then you notice giants target defensive buildings, which is not helpful. When you try to attack a bunch of gold mines, your giants walk sideways towards a cannon, exposing some of your archers. Possibly worse, giants can walk too deep into enemy territory, needlessly getting shot to ribbons. Defense-targeting is not a helpful ability for your attack strategy. Giants are also slow. Not a little slow; slow-slow. The archers can get ahead of them. It’s almost as if they don’t want you to blindly swap giants for warriors.

After a while, you figure maybe you’re meant to take advantage of giants’ new defense targeting skills. A mass of giants could take out only the cannons, making the area safe for archers. But there’s another problem. Not only are giants slow, they do very low damage. Their toughness makes up for it, but the slowness runs out the clock on your attack. Another problem, giants move to the currently nearest defense, sometimes making a zig-zag path through. When the skip even one cannon, your archers are in trouble.

It’s not that giants are bad. It’s that they don’t have any one thing they’re meant for. You’ve got several clunky attack strategies to choose from. That’s the point. A game that told you which army to make would be boring. Or at least the army part would be.

Almost to mock us, the game eventually hands out the perfect meat-shield. But the Pekka costs a massive 25 warriors. Now it’s too tough and expensive for what we need. Plus, by that point in the game we’re beyond that attack plan. It’s yet another unit that is probably useful, but has no one obvious purpose. That’s what makes the game fun.

“Pixel Starships” from about 2016 is a slug-a-thon between fully customizable space ships. You’ll mostly be designing your ship with however many lasers and missiles and such. It has a small clash-like component — builders, generating gold and energy, stealing, upgradable vaults — but the game is old-style 1-on-1 spaceship battles.

Star Squad seems to be inspired by that, but is more clashy. You get a limited amount of rooms, unlocking in clash-like Town Hall style, with plenty of space to arrange them on your spaceship. You have an even more limited number of crew, and only they can fire weapons. Suppose you have 2 lasers rooms and 1 crew. One laser can fire. But when it’s destroyed, the crew member walks to the other. That’s more interesting than it sounds since missiles have an area effect. Fighting another player is still just a 1-on-1 spaceship battle, but it’s more active.

It borrowed the map idea from Boom Beach, as so many other games did. You upgrade a radar, which allows you to see more spaces around you, which have more and stronger enemies and special stuff. They did a nice job copying the computer bases. These are allowed to completely break the rules, since it’s fun. One of my favorites computer ships has only weak lasers and 2 crew to fire them, but there are 12 laser rooms. Every time you blow up a laser, you get a break as she walks to the next. If you can arrange it, a very long walk.

In WarHammer 40K: Drop Assault, I look forward to watching the Ads.

If you haven’t had the pleasure, in the last year it became possible to put 30-second watchable video Ads on a mobile game. By possible I mean it’s now simple for a game-maker to get paid for them. Several services do all the work of contacting advertisers, handling the money and giving you a few simple commands to play Ads in your game. They even check whether the entire thing plays. It’s a real Ad, too – takes over your screen and can even show a “Download now” App Store button.

These days, a completely free game doesn’t need to sell you anything. It can play an Ad every 30 seconds or make you watch one before every round. Even higher quality freemium games often have you watch an Ad to get the daily bonus, or use “you’re out of energy – watch an Ad for more?” It’s all pretty clumsy.

Clash-like WH40K:DA does Ads brilliantly. It has: limited Ads, two clever ways to use them, lets you decide whether it’s worth it, and puts them in a place they make sense.

Ad method one is to reduce a build time. This is great since it’s rare and can’t be abused. You can watch 1 Ad/building and the reduction is a percent of the total build time. For a 15-minute build time you can watch 1 Ad to reduce it by 2 minutes. For a 16-hour build it’s 2 hours. The genius is how usually there’s no point, so it doesn’t feel mandatory. But rarely you open the game, see your long build is close to done and spending 30 seconds to finish it off seems like a good deal.

The other way to watch an Ad is to get 50% more stuff after winning a battle. This is extra-genius. You’re in a good mood after a win plus you could use a 30-second break. You feel like you earned the Ad. It doesn’t feel like a task because there’s a limit. You want to save the Ads for the bases with really big pay-offs. Even if you make only 1 attack you can look at how much you got and decide if 50% more is worth it (the game is still a clash-like – many bases have no loot and you just wanted to clear it off your map).

There is one more thing to use Ads for – the thing everyone does. On the world map you can watch an Ad once/day to get gems. That’s boring, but limited Ads still makes it a little interesting. Maybe you have 3 big attacks you want to increase, but you also want the gems – oh, the dilemma.

Star Squad Heroes uses the same Ad-after-a-battle trick, but it’s for a bonus chest, which isn’t the same at all. You just need to quickly win any three battles to get them all. The fun part, which is gone, is deciding how to spend your Ads.

 

A funny thing is that we had Ads in free games, back on the internet. Then they want away with mobile games — we didn’t know how to add them. And now they’re here again. Way back in 2000 free browser game ArchAge had a stat called “Luck”, which you gained by clicking on Ad links. They were just banners to read; I think the page got a few pennies per click, but it felt very much the same.

I enjoy Clash of Zombies for its incoherence. Clearly it has a zombie theme. It’s also science fiction — your base is a crashed spaceship which the upgrades are repairing. It also has comic book superheroes. If you’re looking for the eloquent way they combine, you can stop. Mechanics-wise, you might assume it’s a boring clone, but it tries some new things, including a new idea for monetizing.

As for the zombie theme, your 3rd resource is Survivors. The generator is a radio tower calling people fleeing from zombies to come towards your camp. That’s cool, but it means you’ll later be spending humans. In the mini-game where you defend your base, the computer attackers are zombies. You can capture some of them for 1-time use later. That’s the only way to use zombies in your attacks. Out of all the heroes, only 5 are zombies. Except 1 is really a mutant from Resident Evil, another is Stitches the blobby hulk from World of Warcraft, and the last is zombie president Trump. The cut-scene at the start shows a base being overrun with zombies and tells you to rescue some guy from it. I never saw anything more about that.

Sci-Fi-wise, the whole base is futuristic. Defenses are blasters and lasers. One troop have an energy blade and one is a robot. The dragon is a huge anti-grav pod.

Idea-wise, it’s a mixed bag. Some seem pointless. “Arena” mode has you attack one base it picks, for Arena points. They give weekly prizes. I don’t think that adds much to the game. You can attack a computer base where the HQ has about ten million health, using all your heroes but no troops, and the damage you inflict stays. There’s a second defense mode where you’re attacked by only heroes, not troops. Nothing wrong those things, but they’re not all that fun.

As for good ideas, defense mode allows you to assign builders to repair buildings under attack. It’s somewhat fun, it gives you something to do while you watch.

The defensive buildings have customizations, unique to each type: a stun chance, damage over time, power-up nearby defenses, and so on. That’s some nice extra effort. But they can only be bought with special currency which can only be bought with cash. That’s pretty much the worst thing to do in a Freemium game — a big, obvious “I bought this and am better than you”.

I suppose once you have superman fighting zombies on an alien planet in the year 2300, you’re not expecting the rest of the game to be a well-crafted masterpiece.