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[AzyWng]

Into The Dead 2 just came out quite recently - a game about running past zombies and not into them.

Gameplay's a lot different than it was in the first game - instead of picking up weapons you get ammo for them, and you start with two guns at once. Additionally, the guns can be upgraded to kill zeds more easily, fire and reload faster, and hold more bullets in a clip.

Additionally, the game is no longer quite an endless runner anymore because each section has an end that the player is supposed to reach. Once they reach the end of a section in the story mode they can loot one of three bags (two of three if they watch a video and three out of three if the player pays twenty gold after opening the second bag).

All in all, I like the game so far.

[Aoi]

Underhand is a resource-balancing card game. As far as I can tell, it's free, no ads, no restrictions, and should be playable offline. Every turn, an action card is drawn and there are up to three decisions you can choose from. In a rather bland example, you can choose to trade 2food>1money, 2money>1food, or skip. Some cards will spawn other cards, based on your decision. Play continues until a win or loss condition is met, with the deck being shuffled as necessary.

The "wrapper" for all this is that you're in charge of some evil cult trying to summon ancient gods; the resources are money, food, cultists, prisoners (often interchangable with cultists), relics (often part of a win condition, expensive, and acts as a wild), and suspicion (a penalty card). Have >15 resources (including suspicion!), run out of food, or >4 suspicion and you can draw conditional cards.

The win condition is summoning a god-- and you get bonuses for the next round depending which god you summon, all of which have different requirements. I've picked up two (plus tutorial freebie) so far, though it seems the potential summonable gods on a given round are based on what you currently have unlocked.

There's a few different lose conditions I've seen so far, but none of them felt entirely unavoidable and arbitrary which is good; all of them were either self-inflicted or came with a warning. Get a police raid without 2cultists or 3money? Game over. But you knew that was a risk when you had >4suspicion. Forced into a bad situation and had to insert "Wrath of the Gods" into the deck? Well, you know it's coming, so better scramble to deal with it. The game doesn't even let you pick a loss when you have the resources to continue, and the insertion of game ending cards is fairly clear from the name, so you can choose accordingly. (Unless you thought "Wrath of the Gods" was going to be helpful...)

[sambojin]

Just gave Underhand a quick go. It's really quite good.

I kind of got stuck with almost no resources, but almost made a comeback after a big loop of "bribe children into becoming cultists", use children to fight off police raid due to suspicion raised, eat the leftover one (there's a questchain for cannibalising a cultist or prisoner when you're short of food, once it's started it doesn't matter whether you have food or not, chow down for quest progression), slowly get some money/food/cultists, repeat.

I ate and sacrificed SO many cultists that game. Almost finished the main expedition quest, until I got wrath of god'd, only one cultist short of being able to sacrifice my way out of it.


Anyway, this seems to make for funnier stories than Reigns, just due to the gameworld/background it's in, and because of the higher chance of repeated actions really typifying that run. Yes, you will do terrible things. But, they're funny because of how often you do them.

The little audio police reports really add to the flavour and humour of the setting.

So yeah, I second Aoi's recommendation. It's worth a quick spin for a laugh.

[Aoi]

It's actually a local radio host; when you get to the left god on the second row, you'll probably get really sick of hearing him talk about the bees knees and the cat's meow since it takes a minimum of like 9 shuffles to summon that god-- assuming you know exactly what you need.

Overall, it's actually quite simple once you know what the cards are; the trick is to survive when you haven't figured that out yet.

Spoiler: "One of the less obvious gods..." (click to show/hide)

Also, if you keep going down the cannibal route, you get another god, that's actually really useful.

[sambojin]

Yeah, finished god 1 (jungle expedition) and the second cannibal one as well. Got tripped up on the second one due to losing my relic through greed just before I summoned him, got rid of the wrath, and started the whole quest chain again. Successfully. Fortunately I had a really easy bunch of cards to just keep looping through.

[Aoi]

Hah, yeah; I've found that Greed is the main thing to avoid. As long as you can balance your in/out, everything else comes easily. Even suspicion becomes just another tool to manage your deck, not a threat.

I ended up in a failure spiral when I was going after the whale: A card forced me to go over 15, then I got Greed which took 3 relics and my last food, then the final step of the whale showed up, which I couldn't pass, so I had to take two Wrath of the Gods, then a few cards after the shuffle, I drew the cannibalism card, had to eat one of my prisoners, then Wrath of the Gods came up, and I was short one person. It was kind of a perfect storm.

[sambojin]

Yeah, just got to the end of that myself, and lost it (I figured 2x wrath is essentially game over, so I conceded). I guess it depends on if you draw disease or not on how hard it is (or whether you knew about twin relics needed, though the other "out" might be easy enough depending on when you get diseased/have to pay for doctor in that cycle. Especially with cannibal prisoner robbing).

It also seems to be a 50/50 on the whale showing up before that, so you might be cycling a bit through the deck anyway. Same with the shop-front quest, except there you have to blow off some suspicion instead of just going on a recruitment drive near the end.


(goddammit that was easy the second time through. No disease, no maggoty food, only the tax man to worry about. It was harder getting rid of cards than it was to get the required sacrifices. There were no relics, but it was all smooth sailing. One whale, well fed )

[Aoi]

You can guarantee at least one relic each game with the lower-left god and by following the tea shop route to the final choice; middle-left and upper-left gods have a chance of spitting one out (as well as lower-left, again). You can also get them randomly from raiding rival cults, if the Necronomicon shows up, or if your deck has the relic auction.

They seem to come in bursts. In one round, I had 7 relics. I had to use a few as prisoners. XD

[sambojin]

Having a bad time on the tea shop so far. Just got tax man, infestation, disease and sacrifice to the gods. Sat on 4-7 cards for ages. Aeromancy does seem to help with the suspicion, just don't go too far with the rain path. Hurricane is instant lose if you don't have a relic or cultists to sacrifice when it comes up (I had neither, just wanted to see what it did). Still a fan of the cannibal blessing most so far, because it's all optional, but very useful.

[Aoi]

Too much sun does the same thing, though you do get a message from the radio guy about the drought, so it may be worth trying once.

Spoiler: God Commentary (click to show/hide)

I like Beginnings, for the guaranteed relic.
Rhybaax is useful since you can convert 2p>2c, or get 2c+1s... which isn't a bad deal, since you can turn around and do -2c-3s in a raid, if you really need to.
Wiindigoo's great; free food and money! Combo it with Rhybaax, and you can just turn your p>c and do it all over again.
Jhai'ti... Assassination is powerful, but there are better ways to -s in my opinion. Tea is kind of RNG, so hit or miss.
Kekujira... I tried once and didn't like; not sure about its intricacies.
Yacare I'd always take-- one of them gives you a chance of food, money and relics, the other is a free foresight that also lets you discard cards in exchange for -1f. (Byebye, Wrath of the Gods and Tax Man!)
Cthulhu has Yacare's foresight/discard ability in exchange for -1m, but the other ability is awful in anything short of an emergency-- 1r>5m or 1r>5c.

So I guess my ideal setup would be finish the previous run on Rhybaax for his free bonus, and take Beginnings, Wiindigoo and Yacare.

I've also learned that you can permanently block yourself out of every god except for Wiindigoo, leaving that the only avenue to a win. I kind of wish that wasn't possible, and you could continue after summoning one, so you could aim for a 'perfect' run, with all of them summoned without a game over.

[sambojin]

Been playing a bit of Solomon's Keep, a simplified twin-stick diablo-like. Basically, you're a wizard, there's an evil wizard, you have to go and kill him. Pretty good graphics (if slightly too zoomed in for my liking), good sound, and fairly good controls (although I've run up and down the stairs many times accidentally).


All in all, a nice little loot-and-zap-em-up. The skill system on level up is slightly randomized on a one-of-three system (you can get a skill that makes it one-of-four), the spells feel pretty good with nice add on skills available to each of them (chain lightning, exploding fireballs, multi-magic missiles and freezier frost breath) and the enemies feel just varied enough to make it interesting, considering they're mostly all in the undead theme so far.

You can get stymied on build options with no mana or HP-up skills appearing for ages, poison is just bloody annoying, and chests are an absolute hassle until you get telekinesis (honestly, pick this every time. It saves a LOT of messing around, but as a skill tax, at least it's a useful one).

There's secondary skills, like explode-a-room, freeze-a-room, or teleport-out-of-a-room, with longish cooldowns and high mana costs, but they're all very powerful. They're essentially your "special", and don't need many skill points into them to be absolute lifesavers.

But all in all, it feels fun. Can be played on perma-death, has various challenges available (no potions, completely random skills, etc), and is quite nice whichever spell route you take after a few skill-ups. So far lightning seems grossly OP compared to the other spells, but it might taper off a bit. Item wise, +2 damage items seem to be the kings of all, because mana-less damage boosting is just plain good, no matter what skills you use. +100% experience seems OK too, so you can stay miles above the curve, and not really mind any skill taxes that don't up your damage output or when you get a bad selection on level-up.

I've only played a little (up to the level 8 poison dragon boss, which is easy, but also a pain) but I'm liking it so far. Probably worth a few playthroughs to try out each main spell and maybe a few combos. It's been around for ages, so I'm glad I finally got around to playing it. Nice when you want to let your hair down and blow stuff up quickly, with just enough roguelikeness that you don't mind a few deaths. I'll probably mostly play hardcore, because otherwise it just feels like grind progression or repeat-until-not-dead. But it's worth a look if you like fairly slow twin stick shooters, that also have occasional faster moments.  Free to play with ads, or you can IAP them away for about $5 or so. The gold IAP might ruin your experience, or might not, depending on how much choice you want at the beginning of a run. I'm still f2p, and I haven't felt like that has hindered me at all, even slightly.

[sambojin]

Been playing a bit of Event Horizon too. More or less the combat bits of Star Control 2, with the ship customization bits of Stardrive. I haven't played much of it, but it is almost exactly what I wanted in a game. OK, the options seem a bit limited at the start, it's randomized on each playthrough so you can get item-screwed, and the graphics can be a little bit hard to work out where you are and which way you're facing at battle start. But it's nice, and shows heaps of potential.

There's a big learning curve (the tutorial teaches you nothing useful at all, or anything really), there's no story what-so-ever (you're this person, kill everyone and blow up their starbases seems to be it), and until you know what stuff does  you'll make many errors. There also seems to be a bit of a progression hump to get over, possibly many, with a fairly obvious "you can IAP that away" thing going on. The IAP prices are either fair ($1-2), or skewed as hell in some countries, with the $5-10 US "support the project" option costing $30 Aussie dollars or 30 UK pounds for some idiotic reason. So, yeah, not paying that.

But it's Stardrive+SC2, which is what I always wanted in a game. You don't actually seem to be able to lose either, and there's tonnes of eventual progression and power available too. Just make sure you level up into the ship slots path, not so much for the hangar slots, but because it's the quickest way of getting bigger ships. And without bigger ships, you're going to have a hard time down the track. A few good, high level ships is where it's at (ship levels increase damage and HP, so matter a lot long-term). Knowing what is good to research helps a lot too.

Apparently earlier versions were a lot more free-form on fleet building, so if you find a .apk of one, you might have a lot more fun without the hoops to jump through. If I find one, I'll tell you how it plays.

At the start, making your scout into a jouster is probably the best thing to do.  Rip the shield off the red ship and put it on your scout,  add the Dart sidekick to the scout, fill it with weapons, and make sure the shield and any weapons are all on fire-group #1. Now you have more firepower and a shield to block damage as you zip back and forth shooting when close, jousting all the early enemies down. A bit more armour and some fuel cells to round out the design and you're set. The free auto-targeter makes a world of difference, and having a pulse m2 and a small plasma on the Scout (and a small pulse on the dart) means there's not too many enemies that will completely block your shots early on (you have kinetic and heat damage). You'll get better weapons and ships eventually, but a jouster makes the early stars near your starbase a cakewalk. You could probably do the same with the Raven and its torpedoes, but high fire-rate and auto-targeting makes it a lot easier to do with the Scout.


It's worthwhile persisting with, even if the learning curve seems steep. Once you work out how to do stuff and what stuff does, it's a great little game. Think of it like DF. You don't really know shit all about the interface, until you do. You don't know what stuff does, until you do. Then it's all really simple. Way simpler than DF, but nothing was explained to you, just like DF. There's also a pretty comprehensive wiki online, so you don't have to go in blind on ship purchases, etc. Watching a few ads for free stars (in-game currency) is probably recommended, just for an easier start on tech options. I haven't seen an ad in-game other than on program start, so I'm fine with it. Actually threw a bit of money at it ($4 for 40 stars), because there's no way in hell I'm paying $30 for it, no matter how much potential it has.


((items can be REALLY variable. Started a new run, got a challenge star near the starting starbase. Using an Eden or some other saucer ship (360 degree auto-targeting laser ship, think the Leylou from SC2. So easy as). Got some random crap, but got a shield capacitor as well. Not great, but so very powerful at this point in the game. My jousting scout is now pretty much impervious to every early game weapon other than torps or missiles. So I rewarded the RNG with the IAP above ))

((oh, and remember that your first ship slot (the one with the Scout in it) is actually a destroyer slot. I didn't realize this until someone on the forums mentioned it to me. So if you want an early ship purchase, go for it. You don't have to level all the way down the ship slots path just to use it. You do eventually, but there's some quite nice stuff available early on. I bought a Leech mk2 for mine for 22 stars at an early smugglers base. It's slow, but those bombs nuke everything early on (basically chargeable AoE 360 degree firepower), and the fusion beams are pretty good too. Has late game potential with a black hole generator as well apparently. The Egg supposedly isn't bad either, and the Falcon is amazing for a destroyer if you want to pay for it (plus it can take heavy m3 satellites, and you'll have the stars to just buy them from smugglers bases alongside a built-in auto-targeter if you do decide $10-30 dollars is worth it). Anyway, bigger ships are inherently better, mostly, so grab one asap. At least you won't waste all your exp on the scout))

[sambojin]

I went a bit "download happy" on shoot'em ups this weekend. So here's a few that actually ended up OK. I've never even looked at them before due to their crap names, or that they're new, but they're all not bad. They're mostly retro'y or voxel'y graphics wise, but they're all nice in that they offer instant gratification but with long-term upgrades available. Also all with plenty of free options to just try stuff out. I hate leveling pointlessly. Just give me the death rays early, so you can make it hard but fun....


Galaxy Bug is essentially Galaga. Or more like Galaga '90, in that there's plenty of weapon options available and a boss every five levels. And I love me some Galaga. Can get missiles on your main ship/wingmen, or split shot for the incompetent at aiming (which I am). Seems pretty generous in that I have a lvl5 legendary split shot ship, and wingmen, in under 24hrs. It's like you've got the mega weapon lite going all the time. Anyway, it's good. Only up to lvl25 so far, but I haven't played that much. Anyway, it's staying on my phone forever.....
(you can scroll the shop items horizontally, so there's heaps of stuff to buy. Grind past game level 20, and get a legendary ship of whatever weapon type you like. Saves pouring credits into something crap)
Nice in that you can scale yourself way back for a more "pure" experience if you want, or go flat multi-everything from the word go. They give you all the options. Even p2w ones, that truthfully, I may use at some point. But you get one of each ship, wing man, and plenty of gubbins to try out, which in my opinion makes it a good shooter (I tend to judge shooters by the "Tyrian" standard, not the "requires skill" standard). It's Galaga, but it's fun.


Noah [DANMAKU shooting] is an artsy bullet hell, that isn't really that hellish. Nice aesthetic, and a fair few ship upgrade options. Haven't really sunk my teeth into it yet. Still, if you like something a bit more abstract, this is a good one. It also has the advantage that it's a Japanese game, so you get to watch all the bullshit awesome jap game ads at the end of a playthrough (honestly, it's worthwhile downloading just for this. Everything in-game is easy to understand, even if the graphics are LSD'ish abstract lineart, and then afterwards the ads are just a weird added trip-out to bring you back to "reality"). You will want some more nice, calming 60's style LSD straight afterwards.....
Are you addicted to the surrealism, or what's in the box? You know you're going to click the box anyway, so you may as well come into it in the right frame of mind.


Pixel Craft is, umm, a retro shooter. Kind of. It's more like a modern shooter, but with purposely coarse graphics. Plenty of powerups, and actually quite good looking in its own way. Plays rather well. Only tried two ships, but no doubt there's plenty of play there. It even has the ShooMachi -shipsize thing available, which makes me think it might be good. I'll have to play more to see.


Retro Shooting is a voxel'y shooter, with a nice array of ships to choose from, and a constant stream of powerups chucked at you each level. Think Raiden, but with voxels, and you'll have your missiles and max firepower before half the level is over (each level is a thing to its own, but they throw available firepower at you straight away) . Nice, well defined bullets and powerups, so you'll never confuse one for the other. Again, plays well, and gives you enough instant gratification to make you want to burn through another level.

These are all some of the better shooters I've played recently. Honestly, I've trawled through some absolute crap over the years, with either stupid business models or just plain bad gameplay. These are all average-good, leaning towards good-great. Plus, they're all pretty much free, if you don't mind watching a few ads.

There's also a few good diablo-likes and action roguelites that are new, but I'll wait a bit to bother posting them, because they may deserve a more thorough run down.



 

[Aoi]

Look Your Loot

Ignoring the slightly odd looking title, it plays a lot like Card Thief if you were a fighter instead of a thief.

You have cards on a 3x3 grid, mostly composed of shields, traps, monsters, fireballs and barrels. Shields act as temporary HP, traps deal direct damage but alternate between active/inactive, monsters deal damage when you attack on a straight HP basis, fireballs damage adjacent cards equal to their power (good if it's a monster, bad if it's a shield or HP potion) and barrels are random, but start strong and get weaker over time (which plays directly into one character's specialty-- barrels will always have something good).

It's really simple, conceptually, but works out quite well.

There is one really annoying mechanic though; bosses leave chests behind when killed that often have interesting effects inside (double adjacent card power, explode in a + shape, etc) but there's an unlock timing minigame involved too.

Your starting character is also the most powerful one, in my opinion: Shields only lose 1hp if the monster's weaker and shields gain 1hp if you pick up a weaker shield.

Edit: After getting to 10+ bosses on each class other than Battle Mage, I'd have to say that the starting class' power drops off later on; dealing with bosses that have 20+HP means you'll be constantly breaking shields and be whittled down by trash. On the other hand, the Paladin's shields act like fireballs so there's never a drop off in power.

Edit, update: The game is still under active development (I think it's actually still flagged prerelease) and things have changed a lot since my original post; Battle Mage is now the OP class since fireballs get infinitely stronger (like 10 damage after 12 bosses, enough to oneshot every normal enemy), they still get to use shields, and they can destroy boss chests with impunity (which is actually a pretty good idea, contrary to how the game seems to present it).

[MCreeper]

"Sorcery!"  . Absolutely awesome, though sometimes too easy and have some annoying "You thought you have a choice? No, it's just   
for show/remnants of the gamebook/you can't do this, because you will destroy the plot by doing this" moments. Especially second part, especially the "end". Still totally worth playing.
We talk about all android games here, right? I don't think it will fit on smartphone, too little screen.
Oh, and i just remembered that not's not only on android. Damn.
Just for fun, some deaths of me

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

You are trapped in a house by living blob of garbage and filth. What do you do?
Throw a fireball!
Where?
In a wall!
Sorry, it's not a Space Quest. You was eaten.

That one was totally serious. Yes, i really tried to solve the problem by throwing fireball in a wall.

The same as above.
What do you do?
Summon another one!
Blob emerges from your mirror, and emerge, and emerge, and emerge, until there is no more place to emerge, and you was eaten by not one, but two blobs!

This was on purpose. But i laughed for 5 minutes straight after it. 
This is in second part. In third part i died in pretty embarassing way. I was killed by a bat. Seriously, what threat a BAT, even if it is half-metre tall, can be to a battlemage that killed bandits, and manticores, and ghosts, and can slaughter crazy amounts of goblins alone? No threat. Bat have 8 hp (or was it 6?). PC have max of 18-20 hp. I had 14-15 at this time, and you can easily beat opponents much, much more powerfull than that from first try. Yet i still died. Just wasn't able to do anything to it. Later i killed the same bats with no trouble.