Review: Crunch Time!

For some time trading card games were really popular.  And then their popularity was seemingly replaced with poker and gambling.  And now with the release of Hearthstone it’s popular again.

So with anything that becomes popular that are streams of copycat killers trying to come around and slay the top rung player.

Crunch Time! has no chance in hell of ever being a slayer of anything.

One of the golden rules with a market dominated by free games is that if people are going to pay for something, they have to be paying for a premium experience.  This is not the case with this game.  It actually offers far less than a free title would.  It’s entirely possible that the market for card games is too full of games that offer a lot for free and that little fish have no room to jump in.

Crunch Time! is a trading card game that has absolutely no trading cards.  There is nothing to collect. There are no decks to build.  There is no style or strategy.  What you get instead is a game that focuses entirely on randomness and removes strategy from the title.

Each player is given five cards to start.  Cards can either be “Talent” or Abilities.  Talent compose of video game developers, designers, sound guys, and testers.  Each has either 2 or 4 turn setting.  When a 2 turn setting is used it goes to your game.  The goal is to collect completed talent who are working on some part of your game.  As their numbers tick down they get added to your title.

To slow this process down you use ability cards.  Ability cards come in many ways and are the part of the game that most suffer from balance issues.  Some cards can shut down production of only a certain type for one turn, those are fine.  The ones that shutdown production for 2-3 turns are not.  They shut down production of all types and can be “countered” with situational cards.

Another rather over powered card is the Publisher Contact.  This full on removes a single end goal from your score and sets you back several turns.

You must have 5 cards in your hand at all time.  So if you expel 5 cards, you get 5 cards.  If you have 5 cards, you only get 1 card for the next turn.  It drives you to burn through as many cards as you can in order to win.  If an opponent gets 5 publisher contact cards, you just lose the game.

The randomness in the game is the major decider of whether or not you win.  If you get everything you need you win.  If you don’t your opponent wins.

Your opponent is always the computer.  There is no multiplayer…. of which multiplayer is essential for this sort of game.

It does have a leaderboard but the leaderboard is private only and only refers to you and computer high scores.  Because of that it’s basically useless.

In today’s day and age I doubt this game is even good enough to be on a mobile app.  It has some neat ideas, but it’s just missing a lot to make it a worthwhile purchase.

The irony is that they (the developers) are well aware of these limitations.  When you go to their website they talk about how they are going to add all of these features into the sequel.  And there in lies the problem, they’re not willing to invest in their own product. They’re not willing to make a great game, they’re only willing to sell this cheap tacky half game until the full one is ready.

Because of this is will never ever be a worth while purchase…. and honestly anyone who buys the second one is just supporting a morally bankrupt person.

Review: Blood and Jade

War Tune is clearly the weirdest marketed game out there.  They market it as a sex game when clearly it’s just a fantasy adventure game.

So from the makers of War Tune (R2) comes Blood and Jade.

So does Blood and Jade improve on the formula or is it more of the same stuff?

One of the things that came across as odd to me was how much automation Blood and Jade had.  It felt like at times that the developers of this game built this giant browser based MMO and then turned around and also made the most intelligent botting system possible.

You start the game and click on a name under a quest.  You sit back and your hero kills 65 enemies.  Then he runs back and turns in the quest, you hit “Complete” and he will automatically begin whatever the next quest is.

I’m not even all certain that this qualifies as a game in any way.  I think it might just qualify as a hobby or an activity.  Absolutely everything is setup to be automated.  So you use only one move at a time and you use whichever one you select.  You equip your items but if they’re clear upgrades the computer will automatically put them on.

So I popped on Netflix and started watching old Justice League cartoons while leveling up and one second I’m level 5 and the next I’m level 45.  By the time I’m completely finished with two season of the Justice League I’m wondering what the value of this game is.

I can honestly say this game is the single biggest waste of time I’ve ever been apart of…

Review: Battle Space

Released about a year ago I’m guessing this game made some buzz…. because now it’s in beta for all European languages.  Or maybe it didn’t make a buzz and they are expanding it in other languages because otherwise it’s a dead duck.  The servers are split into the older patch and newer patch.  Only about 150 players play on the older patch.

The game characterizes itself as an “MMORTS.”  But that’s hot it characterizes itself.  I’d call it a time management game.  There are no real time battles and the massively multiplayer online function of this game is largely non-existent.

It would be like saying The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot is an MMORTS.

But oh well.  If you’ve never played a browser based game… boy are you in for a surprise.

This game has you build fleets, upgrade attributes of said fleets (ship type, individual ship upgrades) and level up commanders.

As far as a browser based game goes, this one seemingly has more to it.  It is very complicated and has more factors to worry about.

Much like this kind of game you gain resources, spend them, and you have limits.  These limits can be overcome by money.  The further you go in the game, the longer things will take.

So why play this game?

Well… because you can attack other players and steal their stuff.  You also get hooked in the idea that your stuff can get stolen.  You end up having to balance acquiring assets with defenses and a fleet because people can steal your stuff.

Of course which such low server populations… it’s really hard for this to happen.  Theoretically it should cause you to be as insanely overprotective as you are in Epic Quest for Mighty Loot.  But it just doesn’t happen here.  You end up just freely expanding not worrying about anyone attacking any of your planets.

On top of this you are limited in the planets you can attack by “flags.”  These “flags” are automatically earned every 12 hours…. or you can buy them.

Hence the game is… yes you said it… buy to win.

Everything takes a long time in this game and in a game about pacing the guy who pays money to increase his pace will win more battles.

Of course none of the battles are live.  They are all done behind the scenes without you getting to see it.  If you could see the battles, even if they were automated it might be better to actually just see a battle.

The social elements of this game are pretty dead.  you join a “Union” and do union events together but you really don’t have to interact with each other.  Because you are in this giant disconnected universe  it becomes really hard to help each other.

First Impressions: The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot

Ubisoft is pumping out the free to play titles like mad.  With three browser based games, a co-op RPG, a free to play shooter, they now add in this free to play dungeon siege game.

Maybe a rant about dungeon siege games.

I think one of the failures of dungeon siege developers is that they’re always trying to make and re-make classic dungeon sieging games like Stronghold and Lords of the Realm.  What you end up getting is crappy half done games like Citadels and Stronghold 3.

Instead these studios are afraid of innovating and giving us something new.

Leave it up to big corporate Ubisoft to be the innovators.

The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot is a twist on the dungeon builder genre.  Instead of building a castle you just get one.  You simply design the shape of it.  You deploy traps and minions to defend your keep from people.

This makes it closer to a Tower Defense type game, a perfect fit.

People will show up in your castle and have to get through your traps and minions.  The better designed the harder it is for them to beat your castle.

Here’s the kicker.

Let’s say they get through.

They get 10% of your total gold.

To be fair it’s done on a timetable and if they can’t get through in time they don’t get the money.

It means that you can design your castle simply around slowing people down, as opposed to beating them outright.

There’s a flip side to this of course.

It means you invade other people’s castles and steal their gold.

With the gold you can invest in new gear, items to use while sieging, level ups, traps,minions, and walls.  You level up, you level up your castle and you progress to get bigger and stronger.

The more gold you are earning the more you will need to spend to protect it.  Every time you die in their castle you give them 100 gold.

The revenue model of the game is purchasing premium coin in order to get bigger badder minions and traps to make your castle more secure.

But Ubisoft also announced they will be rolling this system back because it ruins the game.

The game has a weird app on Facebook.  It counts how many chickens have been slain and the numbers are ridiculous.  The top chicken killer of this week has 82,000 kills… that’s insane.

But it makes a lot of sense.

My daily morning routine is I wake up, turn on my computer, take the dogs out for a walk, feed the dogs, make breakfast for me and my girlfriend, walk the dogs again… and then I play games.

Well the morning I got this game I decided  I would play this game for a few minutes, just turn it on and I’d make breakfast shortly.

Well 30 minutes later I realized my girlfriend would be eating cold cereal.

Completing people’s dungeons takes about 3-20 minutes depending on how difficult they are made.  But you always feel like going going and going.  The idea that your castle can be raided by people really hurts over time.

They can take a maximum of 10% of your fortune per day… meaning that if you don’t play for ten days you will be broke.

Ouch.

The game is definitely fun and you’ll get tones of value out of it.  The downside is it uses Facebook-like hooks to keep you playing… which doesn’t entirely make sense without a mobile component.

Review: Fortuna

From Perfect World International is Fortuna, the studio’s first attempt at a browser based game.

Upon loading it up you select between three houses.  I chose Di Medici because they are of course super cool.

One thing to note about this game is there isn’t quite a social mechanic to it like there is in Anno Online.

Just get used to that always being empty World Chat in a game that clearly should have a massive one.

The main problem (and lack of social interaction) has to do with the fact that the game is really straight forward and has little to no complexity.

To start you build buildings.

Buildings have a build timer that can be sped up by using gold.  Gold is a resource you get from completing quests and can be purchased.  Alternatively you can use a “VIP Card” to speed the building even more.

Once you build a building you can access it by clicking on it.

A menu will open for the building.  This one happens to be hero recruits, more on that later.

Each building requires resources to make.  To get resources you go to the farm.

The farm produces all of the resources and you simply click on stacks of resources to get them.  There are shorter higher gain buildings that require you to play very frequently and higher leveled buildings that require you to play less frequently but less collection rates.

Alright on to the army.

Armies are organized in front and back rows with three columns.  Each army can have a hero who has a special ability.  There are six types of units including knights, archers, and mounted knights.  Each has a strength and weakness and so for battles you’ll find yourself coming back here to mix and mash what you need to win the fight.

Fight?  Yes fight!

Fights are automatically decided as enemies run into each other.  The general position of troops determines who they attack and how they flank.

To add a little “spice” to the game there are arena battles against other players that you can do once every 10 minutes.

The whole point of the game is to do quests found on the left hand side of the screen and progress through the levels.

The game features no story and no purpose, you just level level level.  There is no co-op type content and honestly… it goes no where.  It is a giant game in which your only goal is to get to the next level.  I got to Lord Level 5 before I finally called it quits and realized there was nothing deep about the integration of this game.