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[MonkeyHead]

Polytopia.

This may have been around a while, but I have only recently discovered it and sunk a lot of idle time into it. Think a scaled down Civ variant with streamlined play. You start with one city which generates "stars" - read resources - which can be spent on growing the city via exploiting the terrain (generating more stars), on units for exploring/fighting, or on techs which open up better units, other ways to exploit terrain, or further techs. You can see literally all the game has to offer after a few playthroughs if you are experienced with 4x game play, but its fast pace and replay value offers a lot.

[sambojin]

^This. Can't wait for online multiplayer (apparently the dev is looking at ways of implementing it. He's worried it'll make the game too long. It's usually 20-60mins a game, so you can usually fit one in on a long lunch-break).

I'm not that good at it, but it's quick and fun. I can even recommend paying the few dollars for the extra races, not so much for the different starts, tech paths or number of opponents, but because the graphics are so damn cute.

If it ever gets different map types, sizes and has a slight re-balance pass (navigation ships are probably a bit too good right now), I'll be playing this forever. It's already pretty good as is, even if I can't get a decent score to save myself.

It's got a tiny 3.5mb footprint on your phone anyway (60mb on SD), so you may as well have a copy of it on there permanently.

[Wiles]

I tried Battle for Polytopia but I couldn't get into it. It didn't really have enough meat for me to enjoy it as a strategy game. There are a lot of things to like about it though. The art style and UI are nice and fit small screens. The game length is also suitable for mobile play. I appreciate the business model as well, it's free to try and if you like it you can unlock races for a small fee.

[sambojin]

I ended up buying the paid-for characters in Soul Knight for !!science!!. They all seem pretty balanced so far. The Paladin is super tanky with heaps of regenerating armour and a bullet shield, but when you screw up you're still dead (and you don't have much ammo, so choose wisely). The Vamp's life leech bats should keep you shooting and stabbing for ages, but I haven't got the feel for it yet (only did one quick run). And the Engineer's turret is probably on par with dual wield for extra damage output, but with an even longer cooldown (although it draws aggro sometimes as a bonus too).

They're balanced in the sense that I've got an idea that the initial Knight character and the cheapest in-game currency buy, the Rogue, are probably the two most powerful characters. Double fire rate or dodge roll is very handy. But they've all got their pros and cons and playstyles, which is good to see. Only the Alchemist feels weak, just because DoT poison isn't as good as bullets (but you can cheese some rooms with it).

Figured the purchases would help out with development costs on what's shaping up to be an absolute gem of a game. I'm a cheap bastard, but I'll pay for quality stuff in genres I like. Cheap one-off purchases are fine with me if they add longevity or content or playstyles to a game. But I'll only buy stuff if I didn't *need* to. I consider it a worthwhile purchase if the game is already good and beatable without it, with few exceptions.

[sambojin]

Well, Soul Knight has been released for public consumption. 500k downloads already, so yeah. I still reckon a fully maxed free character is better than any bought one, so there's that. "Balanced". It just needs more than 3 worlds for level content. But it's free and fair.

(for fucks sake, buy the weapon crate after getting more than fuck diddly levels into it. You'll never "just have" the bad pistol again. And so on and so forth on all the comments I've read about the game. It's remarkably well made, free-to-play even. Not even a "git gud" response, just a "play it for more than six 5-minute runs or so before commenting" thing. Bleh. People. Learn to dodge. There's a circle under your feet. The cheapest in-game collectable currency Rogue character even has "dodge roll" as a skill, just like Enter the Gungeon! Fucking fish rolling pukes.......
The starting character, the free one that you begin with, is probably the most powerful character in the game. To learn with, and to kick arse with. If you don't like dodge rolling, but you can vaguely (auto)-aim. There's even a fucking Wizard that's free (3000 in-game thingamies?) that chain lightnings everything and has fuck-tonnes of ammo, if you really can't aim but just want to pick apart stunned enemies, all with very few hitpoints left after said chain lightning, with any damn weapon you want. Literally clears everything but the first boss for you. Holy fuck.
The Knight is my go-to character, then the Wizard, then the Rogue. Because they're really fucking good, but I'm pretty bad at this sort of game. I bought all the others, so I know. I do not fuck around with min-maxing, and these are the best ones. They're free. The rest is flavour for fun. Buy the Paladin if you're not sure. It's fucken awesome, but it plays differently to Rogue dodge-roll or Knight tank'n'gank. Like it should. PtW my arse.......
/rant)


Protip 1: run INTO bullets, not away from them. If there's heaps of bullets you can't dodge, backing directly away only gets you hit by lots of them, not just one. If you actually can dodge them all, do it. But if you can't, "armour/health dodge roll" most of them by going forward/sidewards into the smallest part of the group/barrage of them. At the very least, go sidewards and backwards, just not directly backwards. Walls save you sometimes, but that's only because they made you go sidewards from you backing into them. Just like in Enter the Gungeon, but without the dodge roll button or aiming. The amount of people that dodge directly AWAY from bullets (ie: backwards, ensuring their i-frames/dodge does nothing for them) in this or EtG is ridiculous. That's why you die. Learn to dodge INTO bullets. Or sidewards and forwards if directly forward isn't a go'er. If you're a Rogue with actual dodge roll, this goes double. Forwards or sidewards = 1 hit and i-frames. Backwards alone = death.

Protip 2: There's melee in this game. If you're close to something, you stop firing and swing at them. *ONCE*. For pitiful damage, but rather quickly. And you don't fire or swing again until you release and press the fire button again. The controls didn't stop working, you just did a melee attack because you were close to enemies. Important: The controls work fine, but you did melee stuff. So keep hitting the attack button! It makes you shoot or hit stuff more! So whenever you're near something, you should be *rapidly* tapping the fire button as quickly as possible. Mashing it. It doesn't matter if you melee swing or shoot, just keep tapping that button and you'll live far longer than if you just kept holding it down like you're the auto-fire king. Tap to kill! And live! Possibly love too, but that's your problem.
People at the doorway? That's a mashing. Enemy wave teleporting right in on you? That's a mashing. Gun not firing quick enough? That's a mashing too.
Keep pressing fire quickly, and all your troubles go away. Yes, even with bows/fish/ion cannons. If it's not working properly, you're not hitting the fire button quickly or often enough (or you really are possibly too close to enemies too often. Or you have a laser fish. Or a fusion drill, but if you've got a fusion drill, charge time is probably the enemy's problem, not yours).
There is a reason for this. Melee attacks can block or reflect bullets with the right timing! Even melee attacks you didn't want to do! But honestly, mostly it's mashing and moving. Keep hitting fire until you start shooting again. Hooray!

[Frumple]

... y'know, I'm trying to like that game, and it's doing a fair amount that's attractive. But gods fuck twinstick on a touch pad is bloody misery. You talk a lot about moving around, samb, and if I was using kb+m or even a controller, it's talk that would resonate with me. But this thing isn't kb+m or a controller, it's a touchpad virtual twinstick and I regularly spend like ten seconds or more trying to shoot a goddamn crate that's right beside me, never mind actually trying to dodge bloody bullets. Damn mess even has me regularly miss shots, and the game has friggin' auto-aim. Charge weapons are also just kinda' clunky, firing wise, which means they usually might as well not exist 'cause the ruddy UI is going to make them not work a quarter of the time.

If there's a PC version of that thing I'd love to hear about it. As is I'm wondering how long it's going to take me to get frustrated enough I either delete the thing or break out bluestack or somethin' and play with a control setup worth even a single shit. Made it to the second boss a time or two, but every run is as unpleasant as it is enjoyable, and it's regularly causing me to question if the game's actually worth the time.

[Folly]

Final Fantasy Brave Exvius is giving everyone 11 free rare draws this week, in celebration of 20 million downloads. Great opportunity for new and returning players.

[Aoi]

How did Gumballs & Dungeons manage to only get one mention on the forums, and only as a comparison to another game in this thread two weeks ago?

Cons:
Energy-based system (Note: Rather generous, unless you're intentionally burning it.)
Connection required*

The easiest comparison would be to Runestone Keeper, which was featured in a Humble Mobile Bundle some months ago, but with a vastly larger and more interesting metagame, plus a boatload more polish. A more distant comparison would be to Desktop Dungeons, in general concept.

For people unfamiliar with either, it's basically a tile-based top-down dungeon dive with basic RPG stats with each floor being a 5x6 grid things to kill and loot to snag. The contents of a tile are unknown until opened, and, once opened, you can interact with whatever's concealed in it, whether it be taking an item, attacking a monster, it being empty, etc. Keep going until you finish the dungeon or die. Different sets of dungeons have their own unique effects. Levelling within the dungeon is done by advancing upon a branching upgrade tree, of which you can pick five per run. In traditional roguelike fashion, you start off with a fixed degree of strength, use whatever you find, and (outside of metagame elements) lose it all upon completion/death.

The metagame is where things get really interesting-- there's a LOT of room for progression here. There's some 150 different units, divided among four factions, and you can take two allies with you into each run. On top of that, each one also has a global passive and an in-party effect, and its own stat growth. Combo that with the different monsters and traits of each dungeon...

*If your connection drops out, you're reverted to the start of the floor you're on. Which can also be used to scum. It's pausing system is pretty robust though, and errs on the side of courtesy, which is nice for something mobile.

[sambojin]

It's gotten a few mentions in the thread. As said, it's only real downfalls are online connection needed and the "energy based system" (I've never played seven missions back-to-back and thought "damn you!"), and there are "timers" on stuff kind of (well, kind of. There's some time-lock on some stuff).

It's a really good game. All the P2W/IAP stuff is kinda irrelevant on just the fun of playing (you don't need to be a p2w boss to progress, but you can be), and it's very well done on the puzzle/roguelike'ish'lite/whatever-you-call-this genre stuff. I wish I had room on my phone for it right now (but it saves my progress with googlePlay, so I know I'll be coming back to it). It's one of my favourite games, by far.

[JimboM12]

Star Wars Force Arena got a new patch a few days ago that really help F2P guys like me and I can recommend it to people who like Star Wars, MOBAs, Clash Royale or any combo of these.

It still helps to purchase packs if you're a whale but now daily free packs are boosted in what they give you a bit and now have a visible timer on when you receive them. You can still earn your daily play packs, which have been upgraded from a bronze level to a gold pack level but also while earning them get these tickets to get a daily (or just spaced out by a half day or something) credit pack which has a random amount of credits. You can also now trade uniques for uniques for 2k credits every 24hr, trading legend to legend is the same price but also 24hr locked and there's no more unique to legend trading. Also, leveling your heroes/legendaries is way cheaper and it appears there's a higher chance for silver level packs from winning matches now instead of bronze all the time except when you sacrifice the necessary amounts of Mountain Dew to the RNGod and get a silver or gold. Some unit balancing went on but they added turret repairers which are annoying and will probably get balanced because units are permanent until they die and these repair units are stack-able, so you can drop like 3 and continually repair any push unless an AoE gets em or you take them out personally.

Though, I could just be praising the game because the free plat pack they gave for the maintenance period to existing players gave me Krennic's Death Squad Leader, so I'm now kinda biased, but it does show that they listened to the most common of the issues people mentioned on the reddit and that bodes pretty well.

[LoSboccacc]

gonna drop a couple suggestions before going for a rant:

egg inc ain't bad as far as incrementals go
motorsport manager is great fun for a couple season if you liked the old microprose classic have a look at it, it does plateou after a while


now for the rant: u do all classic get the p2w treatment? looking at you roller coaster tycoon. damn you and the whales enabling the forever grinding business model.

also, anyone knows good games that can be played with a bunch of friend on a single device? most boardgame ports are shite, so I'm stuck playing with my s.o. carcassonne and yathzee.

[BigD145]

Ticket to Ride has a good port. Bounden is good for two. Condado, aka San Juan. Pandemic. Police Precinct.

Boardgame adaptations often suffer from info overload on small devices. Too much to keep track of on different screens. You end up ignoring your opponent and suffering for that.

[LoSboccacc]

my problem with boardgames is their reliance to dices, games like that always port badly, as most of the dice rolling excitement gets taken away. I play yathzee only because my gf likes that, but it's painfully evident you're at the mercede of the bad rng. you are also in real life yathzee, but still the phisicity of throws make up for it a little. least carcassonne averages luck out by the sheer number of tiles, somthere's that.

will definitely try tiket to ride. police precint sounded interesting but is unavailable on my store. thanks a bunch anyway 


sadly there are little precious few games that took an idea and developed it for the different medium, as did strategery, which is the best non risk port if any risk on the store.

[MoonyTheHuman]

Cell lab.

Its a puzzle game based around designing a species capable of completing a challange.

[BigD145]

World of Yo-Ho is an interesting merger of board and phone but is very poorly documented. It doesn't even try to explain itself. Can be played with one shared device.