Blood Singer series (Cat Adams)

This is book 7, “All Your Wishes”, in a series billed as “paranormal romance.” That’s code for “straight-up romance with a werewolf instead of a pirate” but the blurb made it sound like more than that. Besides being book 7, where a decent series might have gone bad, it’s by only one of the original two authors.

The overall backstory is that magic and science have coexisted for a long time. Stores sell real magical charms, there exist combo magi-tech items, police forces employ mages, anti-vampire fences are common, magic is taught at college, and so on. Fully integrated and has been that way forever, so that’s fun.

The main character is a 1/2-vampire, 1/2-siren (and 1/2-human?) detective, running her agency out of a former church. Her best friends and employees are a werewolf, a wizard and a ghost. Nothing special there. Going against tradition, she’s generally happy with her appearance — vampires are a sexy pale and siren’s are naturally beautiful. But at least she has personal problems: sirens magically bring out the catiness in other women. 1/2-vampires need to frequently eat gross baby food and smoothies, use lots of sunscreen, and they lisp horribly when their fangs pop out. She was turned into one by an attack and is not happy about it. She’s also cursed.

Her boyfriend is a sexy mage with strong hands from a family of powerful mages, and also mobsters. They start off with a big unspecified argument that sounds like it could be trouble — maybe about children. But he’s gone the entire book visiting his dying mother, then is out of the picture. We never find out what the argument was about. The extent of their romance is her calling him to ask if his mom is dead yet. In the 1-year-later epilogue she gets together with a cute, minor character with whom she previously had no sparks. I’m guessing the absent writing partner handled the romance parts.

The plot starts with a client being told to contact her by his oracle, then being told to take the case by her oracle. As everyone knows, you can’t ask oracles too many questions. That goes for readers, too — she just has to help the guy, OK? In case you’re wondering, she solves the case by doing something else her oracle told her to do.

The plot involves some super-evil wizards from a previous book, including an evil wizard ghost sworn to kill her (also from a previous book) led by a super-powerful demon. We never find out their plot, but they free a super-powerful genie for it, who, shocker, gets out of hand and possesses the main character’s body. It either wants to go home, or to free a bunch of other evil genies (in the book, it’s the first — it’s a genie serial-killer of other genies and wants to kill the judge who sentenced it; but the book jacket says it wants to free an evil genie army).

At the very end, she wins by realizing she has friends. Literally just realizing. She suddenly remembers she has siren telepathy, which she has been using through-out the book, and reaches out to all of her friends at once. That gives her the strength to shake off the genie control. Then she executes the plan she made with the only female genie-keeper and her young son (who hasn’t yet grown into a swaggering jerk of a man). The stupid male genie-keepers were all “you’re not an initiate and are the wrong sex. You can’t do anything”. That’s why diversity is important.

Various secondary events are crammed in:

  • Her main evil ghost enemy dies after her heart stops in an unrelated matter (her death was it’s Unfinished Business.) After constantly being reminded of how lethal wizard ghosts are, this is the first time we see him. He just shows up, says “I was actually just hanging around waiting for someone else to kill you, and they did,” and poofs away. Just in case readers notice that she’s had her heart stopped several times before, her friends ask her “haven’t you had your heart stopped several times before?” and she explains this was extra-stoppy, so fooled the ghost in a way the previous heart-stops couldn’t.
  • We very briefly meet a guy from a previous book, just so we can see him dead later.
  • After she wins, it’s mentioned in passing that the main group of genie-keepers were all murdered elsewhere. Why? She already won, so it’s not part of the plot. Maybe it’s to avoid fan fiction using them?
  • Also after winning, we go back in time (she’s literally taken back in time) to see her boyfriend get killed by the mob (remember the one she briefly talked to in chapter 1? That guy). I feel like she could have watched a video, or maybe since the story was over, done that at the start of the next book?
  • Immediately after winning, a good genie, who had been calmly watching them fight the evil one, pops up and brings her werewolf friend back to life (he died one page ago, which inspired her to fight harder.) Those wacky genies and their rules.

The book respects the rule where we have to learn more about the world. We get professional magic-using hitmen. We learn demons can appear without being summoned if they time it exactly when a ghost dies, since that makes a tunnel from here to the otherworld. Genies are new to the series, and we learn genie-keeper powers come from being part genie. If you use mental telepathy in an airport, we learn the TSA has magic to spy on it. Then we get a nice teaser: her mom is not just a siren, but a siren queen, and she’s been summoned for important sea-princess business in book 8.

Traps

Traps are what clash-likes call 1-shot defenses. They’re not all that exciting. The most interesting thing is how they don’t count as buildings for percent destroyed or gaining manna. The basic trap is a 1×1 landmine. Many clash-likes don’t use traps at all — what’s the point of a defense that destroys itself? But if you’re going to have them in your game, you may as well think about what kinds.

We have a few types of traps aimed at big, tough troops. The huge 2×2 bomb is obvious. The 1×1 “kill X points of troops” trap is sneakier. It has no radius, and goes off all at once, so almost always hits 1 thing, hopefully something big. It hardy seems worth having. If your game has human and machine troops, you get to use an anti-tank mine which only tanks trigger. That gives weak humans a little boost, so is nice.

For some fun traps, a spring can launch troops a few spaces away. People enjoy these, including picking the direction. Area freeze traps are fun — frozen troops being shot at looks neat and feels clever. A variant is the distraction trap — something tough pops up that nearby enemies must stop to kill.

The last interesting trap is a “kills X” which lasts until it’s used up. Maybe a pit. They’re obviously strong, but there’s not as much element of luck. Still, it’s cool having more and more troops vanish into it.

Visible traps work much better than one would think. They can discourage attacks from a weak side. A fun thing is having area-affect spells also explode visible traps, giving attackers an option waste a spell on trap-clearing. You also don’t need to worry about someone unfairly learning where your visible traps are, a problem with hidden traps.

The most oddball thing about traps is needing to hand-reset them. That seems insane since destroyed buildings come back for free. But it’s done. I think the main reason was sending a notice — “you’ve been attacked. Log in to reset your traps”. A game sending you a phone notice was cool back then. But people got sick of it a long time ago. We can safely have traps spring back to life along with everything else.

I’ve gotta say, Boom Beach-style traps are probably the best. You get a big pile of small bombs, visible, and one upgrade upgrades them all. Traps are fun to spread around, but how many types do we need?

[Game]Rival Kingdoms

This may have been the best clash-like ever made, and then the worst. It was innovative, made every battle exciting, and was managed by a team that that understood how to push events and contests. But the second team didn’t understand clash-likes and quickly ruined the gameplay. First, what made the game great:

They started by clearing away all of the reasons not to attack. All troops are free, not even a training time. Shield nonsense was replaced by you being attacked every six hours. Spending an attack token shows just one opponent. The combined effect was that when you opened the game, all you had to do was push the attack button and think about how to beat the base it showed you.

The new winning-streak mechanic make it exciting. Your opponents start easy, gradually become more difficult, then nearly impossible, then you lose and it starts over. That gives a nice variety of mostly challenging battles. Even the worst player gets a few wins. But even trying to beat the super-tough bases is surprisingly fun. You know you’re supposed to lose, but you could win and sometimes you do.

You can solely focus on winning fights because the game takes care of you. Longer streaks increase your rank, bumping up the difficulty to where you lose more. A problem in there games, but not here. The loot at high ranks is that much better. The penniless enemies problem is somewhat fixed. Your second important resource, rings, comes from wins (again, much more at higher ranks). Beating a low-gold base is worth it for the rings.

They did a fabulous job with your “hero”. Instead of a Barbarian King, you get a flying dragon. It’s pretty much the same except that every 30 seconds you can “sweep” it to a new spot, tailing frost or fire over a swath of buildings. That’s just fun: useful, but not overly powerful and looks beautiful. The game uses real 3D models and particle effects. It feels like a dragon.

The spells are incredibly varied and original. They come locked in preset groups of 3 but there are lots of them. One wizard can give troops a 50% damage boost in a radius, give them heal-by-doing-damage, and freeze one enemy building. With work you can get a combination of the 1st two. Meanwhile another can summon skeletons that explode on death, make 1 target take double damage, and … this needs to be seen to make sense … cover a dozen buildings with a slowing, damaging poison which can crawl to new buildings. That’s not even close to the oddest.

On defense they have the usual, but added one very customizable defense. You can choose to have each spell tower shoot an area blast, or freeze, or slow-acting anti-healing poison. Or it can fire a fast single-target blast. Or it can heal your buildings, or merely create a small destructive aura around itself. Or it can fire a slow but lethal confusion spell, causing the attacking troops to turn on themselves.

Five wall posts making a curved wall

The game also fixed how walls work. Instead of blocks which need to touch, you get posts which grow connecting walls over several spaces, including diagonals. They’re much easier to place and looks great. But the real innovation is making walls weaker. Walls in a normal clash-like are so strong that they dominate your strategy. Weaker ones here let you play around with them (the 1-sided V setup is very clever, and works fine. Some people love it).

Even with the changes, it’s very recognizably a clash-like. A town hall unlocks new buildings. You upgrade defense and offense with your 5 builders. Even your sweep timer is decreased by upgrading the dragon nest building.

That terrific design went downhill fast. Over a few patches the new team flailed with over-buffs and nerfs until the only viable army was damage-resistant soldiers and too-strong healers, backed by archers. Over-buffed spell towers were the only problem, which forced everyone to use the anti-spell-tower wizard. It was a weird slow-motion crash.

They couldn’t figure out a way to fix the problem with winning streaks: what do you do with players near the top? They have no impossible opponents. Streaks might never end. So at high rank, streaks are out and something else is in. At first, top rank players could go into a special challenge mode. You were attacked much more until you were knocked back down, gaining extra-bonus loot for how long you lasted. That was removed and replaced with just picking an easy opponent. The game turned into a sleep-fest.

Then a bug nerfed air defenses. Dragon could sweep without fear, single-handedly winning (the actual trick is complex, but it became common knowledge as players watched their replays). Players loved it. The bug was left unfixed. In fact, a later spell had an exploitable bug which fully healed your troops (it wasn’t a heading spell). Players flocked to it. It went unfixed. Meanwhile they figured out how to import the brutal monetization common in regular mobile games. More and more events required big spending or skipping school for 2 days, for new items unobtainable any other way.

Rival Kingdoms is still pretty good up through mid-game. Some of the underpowered wizards were even fixed. But the best thing I can say about it now is that you can’t copyright general game ideas. At least one other game stole its improved “post” walls. More clash-likes now have events and areas open only on certain days. I’m hoping a new one steals the way Rival Kingdoms did winning streaks, because I’m sick of passing on bases that look really fun to fight, except I don’t want to wreck my army.

[Game]Gates of War

Plarium, who distributes this one, likes to make mash-ups. Gates of War is a clash-like jammed with a PvP and an RTS adventure. The class-like part is a mess, but has some fun ideas.

In most clash-likes you’ll get a building that can pop out troops when enemies get too close. In this game your gets lots of defensive troops, individually placed in any free space. That seems pretty cool, except for how the usual area-of-effect spells easily kill them. That’s probably why other games learned to hide them in buildings.

In most other clash-likes, troops can flow around buildings. Here there’s no gap. Touching buildings form a wall. For no good reason, non-weapon buildings, even gold vaults, are super-tough, about 10x tougher than your defending guns. So they make a pretty good wall. But being a futuristic game, most troops can fire over them. The “walls” only stop certain short-range troops from getting near enough. Attacks are stationary shootouts. Nearly everything has very long range, and you can hand-move your army (using the thing where you select a big square). Move them all into range and keep targeting the guns (which you can do in this game). Win or lose, it’s over quickly.

Bizarrely, you unlock new troops and upgrade them through single-player non-clashy adventures. You lead your troops through a large map, avoiding some things, picking up friends, with specific objectives. I keep losing one because the hacker I’m supposed to protect keeps dying. It’s one of the main things you do in this game. Oh, there’s also a head-to-head PvP area.

If you want to sort-of play 3 types of games at once, I guess Gates of War is OK.

[Game]Battle Islands

The really unique thing about Battle Islands is it has combined land, sea and air fighting. I wish I liked it more.

In a really slick move, attacking armies are trained in a barracks, a harbor and a hanger, each with it’s own troop points. Attacking armies will always be land, sea and air.

Your base is several islands. You start with 1 and get more as you level up, which must be connected (the game adds a little bridge when you move them close enough). Not only will enemy ships be sailing around, bombarding the coasts, but you have deep-sea oil wells, plus your defensive harbor with boats that come out when the enemy gets too close.

The units are the usual mix of attack priorities, but more-so — fighter planes prefer other air targets, but can hit anything; submarines can only torpedo other ships (I assume they are very good at it), battleships prefer to bombard land defenses, sailing around the islands to reach them. And the enemy force will always have all those things to target. It seems like you have a lot of interesting choices.

Each building comes with its own walls (if you want to play it, tap a building’s “reinforce” button). Sandbags at first, then adds really pretty concertina wire across the top. Put 2 reinforced buildings together and the bags combine into a pretty ring around both. It looks like it was fun to program. But it misses the point of walls. The fun part is deciding how to arrange your limited supply. If every building has walls, it’s the same as making all buildings a little tougher.

The cutest thing: troops come in 5-man landing ships. You don’t do anything to get them. When you tap to place an infantry unit, it places up to 5 in a free landing ship. It can be fired upon and can sink, killing the occupants. But that’s fine, since you can upgrade them.

One change I’m not sure I love is having only one resource: “supply”. With 2, there’s always one you currently care less about than the other. Having 1, with your only goal to get more of it, just feels funny.

I can’t believe this is a down-side for me, but the art and theme are oppresively bland. Generic, Americanish WWII troops and buildings. Functional, flat islands. I should like the Quonset huts, corrigated steel and muddy tarps over the machine-guns. But there’s not a hint of backstory or personality. The escorts look like P-38’s, the bombers look like Liberators, in a generic way. The effects for the sea are terrific, but feel wrong. I’ve never been attacked, so that might be part of it.

This game might have a lot of potential for really involved attacks. And maybe it opens up and gets busier with another town-hall level or two. At the very least, someone should rip-off the air/sea/land idea.

[Game]Dawn of Gods

This game looks as if it were made by a committee. It has so much stuff slathered on, and doesn’t seem to understand how a clash-like works.

Deep down, it’s a collectable hero game. You quickly get to use 4 heroes at once, which is a lot. You’ll upgrade and level and merge the heck out of them, which will take months or years unless you spend. They also defend your base, so now you’re invincible. The $5 starting buy sets the tone — it includes an “epic” hero which can carry you for several levels. The theme is mythic gods — heroes come in Greek, Egyptian, Norse, and Misc (things such as the Archangel Micheal). There are a lot, nicely drawn, with abilities that sort of make sense. But only the best heroes matter.

The troops are broken, in that they’re boring. The giants are fast and do decent damage. As soon as you get them, use an all-giant army (as back-up for your heroes). The next giant-like troop is better in every way – replace your giants with it. Same for the next. Making an army is boring, and so is attacking. It’s actually worse. You keep troops unless they die, and you don’t need to win to keep the gold you loot. Combined, you attack with your entire army on a weak side, then hit Retreat when it gets tough.

They started to do a very clever thing. Instead of Flying they have Stealth. Wraiths have Stealth, can go through walls (instead of over — cute, right?) and the elves in archer towers have the keen eyes to see them. Seems cool, except Wraiths are very weak, there are no more stealth troops, and they add flying troops later anyway without telling you who flies or who can shoot them.

Then they adopt the generic game thing where you give piles of meaningless daily activities, with lots of currencies to play with (I counted 6, not including gold and elixir). There are daily Quests, daily “events”, a daily login reward, 3 daily chests on a timer, the standard daily random hero chests, and more you need to see to believe. There’s another quest system where you send your heroes on mission. Whew.

It may have started as a decent game. It’s somewhat playable now. They clearly put lots of work into the troops, buildings and such. But then they put more work into the stuff that ruins it.

Fixed series, Linda Grimes

So here’s the plot of the one book in this series I read: the main character has a pregnancy scare, but it could be due to her magical powers, so she puts off taking a test. Afer the funeral of a murdered relative, she has to make all these excuses for why she can’t drink anymore, then more to her mom at home for why she isn’t guzzling coffee.

After beating up a guy trying to kidnap her, her boyfriend finally helps her take a test. It’s positive and he freaks out and runs. Then she stays with her mom after bad guys kill another relative and burn down her apartment, and there are all these cats from a third murdered relative.

Later she gets blood all over herself from killing a bad-guy, so the other man who might be the father of her baby takes her home and lets her wear his clothes. She tells him about the baby, and he’s excited about being a dad, and they bang.

But then she finds out her boyfriend only freaked because of a dark secret about his own mom. He asks to marry her, even after they find out she’s not really pregnant, and they almost have a courtroom marriage with their new bodyguards as witnesses (the first bodyguard was lost in another bad guy attack.)

Then they both get kidnapped by a different guy who’s kids are being held by the Mob, so they use their magical powers to rescue the kids and catch those badguys. Back at home, Mom has even more cats from murdered aunts. Then her boyfriend proves she can count on him, by helping capture the main bad guy. Finally, she and the other guy who wanted to marry her agree to stay friends. The End.

As you may have figured out, this is just a straight Romance novel. What should have given it away for me was the traditional romance cover: woman in front, two male models flanking, both a little too close to her. The publisher is TOR, which doesn’t have a specific romance division.

What’s interesting is how a Romance author decided to borrow from Urban Fantasy Detective. The secret world part is that some people can shape change, but only into people they’ve met. But, the ability to copy a particular person is an Aura, and you can show an Aura you know to another shape-changer. Even that tiny amount of detail is still more than Romances need. I think it’s touching.

Dresden series, Jim Butcher

The Harry Dresden series is a neat counter-example of why it’s the urban fantasy female detective romance genre. He starts out the same as the women: a broke wizard/detective who protects humans from monsters. Along with werewolves and necromancers we get three crazed sub-types of vampires (blood, sex, and, uh, torture?). The whole fairy world thing has plenty of detail, plus demons and so on.

Then onto the story. He’s a junior member of the Wizards’ Council and resents it. Hmmm…a female character would have fought for that bit of recognition and ability to contribute. The stories focus much more on the main baddie: Harry doesn’t visit his mom, check out his sister’s possibly seedy new boyfriend (he has no family), or find a clue while searching for a spaghetti recipe in an ill-fated attempt to cook for a new love interest. In fact, he doesn’t worry about maintaining his friendships and normal life since he has neither. He’s more of a traditional burnt-out gumshoe. Back to the friends, he doesn’t even get out much to talk to contacts for info. There’s a magic skull in his basement for that.

His main problem solving skill is blasting things with magic. He has both kinds — fire bolts and force bolts. That’s his defining character trait (Harry Dresden — as in the city that was famously firebombed at the end of WWII — and he’s a fire mage. Tasteless, but makes its point) Otherwise he rushes towards the most obvious clue and is easily distracted by anything shape-changed into a curvy body (of which there are lots). Like all true men, his magic is powered by rage. Sure, female detectives experience rage but it makes them do something unlady-like — not merely punch harder.

All-in-all it’s a huge difference. The Dresden series is about a stereotypical schluby male. It’s mostly an action series. Nothing wrong with that. The author sure goes all-out to develop the secret world and to follow up in future books. But it makes you realize how much the “real” UFDR genre is about how women can fight monsters as well as men while being true to 3rd wave feminism.

Agent of Hel series, Jacqueline Carey

The backstory for the Agent of Hel series is that Niflheim, home of Helheim and the underworld ice-goddess Hel and her dog Fenrir, also popular in 1980’s Marvel comics, is now in Wisconsin. A big chunk of the North country is Hel’s territory as far as secret magical things go. Newly chosen to represent Hel is a sweet, charming 20-something woman who doesn’t really understand her job. She’s supposed to resolve disputes and in general make sure nothing supernatural bothers Hel. Despite this all being Norse myth, we get the usual hodge-podge of non-Norse monsters.

As you’d guess, she’s bad with boyfriends and extremely insecure, especially that she’s just faking her new adulthood. She doesn’t really have any powers except for her “Agent of Hel” badge, but is secretly a half-demon (Norse mythology doesn’t have demons, but whatever.) The town is pretty much Stars Hollow from Gilmore Girls. Lots of friendly people, many of whom know magic and are glad to help; or brew tea; or just talk since everyone knows everyone else.

We get a lovely minor plot involving a misunderstood “Monsters Inc” type creature which is supposed to be harmlessly frightening kids. We get another which takes lots of careful listening to witnesses, help from her friends, and having to trust a guy with whom her relationship may be going too fast. The main plot gets violent near the end — big rockets, mercenaries, and an exploding giant monster — but it’s really the result of an argument between the bad guy (the bad woman, it turns out) and her husband, which our heroine helps smooth out.

Something that snuck up on me: Hel has given her a unique magical relic dagger. She just tucks it away. Much later, she realizes it’s meant to be flashed like a badge. It never occurs to her that she could, you know, stab people with it, since violence never solved anything.

Devious Dr. Jekyll, Viola Carr

This is another steampunk mashup in a “League of Extraordinary Gentleman” vein. The heroine is a free-lance police investigator who sometimes changes into her alternate aggressive form because her father is “Dr.Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” and she inherited it. Changing shape instantly heals her, but her “Miss Hyde” form is extremely impulsive and constantly second-guesses herself.

Besides Dr. Jekyll, this swings for the fences in mash-ups. Jack the Ripper is in love with her; real-life computer pioneer Ada Lovelace is a robot who runs the secrete police along with an immortal Sir Isaac Newton. Her boyfriend is merely a werewolf secret policeman. Bad guy #1 is “A Picture of Dorian Grey”, while future bad guy#2 is an evil version of reclusive government mastermind Mycroft Holmes.

The plot follows the rules pretty well: lots of personal problems, some are clues; stupidly impulsive behavior which sometimes advances the plot; romance which also advances the plot; worries about money. She even gets to attempt to reconcile with her partly estranged father.