Multiple armies will be available for players to command in either 1v1 or 2v2 matches. Each army will feature units that fit within the classic roles of Infantry, Ranged, Cavalry, and Support. Substantial Games is trying to make every unit in the game as unique as possible, like the Berserker who constantly regenerates health, or the “Puglings” who spawn a new Pug every time they kill an enemy unit, to help ensure that no two battles play out the same.

Matches are won by eliminating the opposing army, or by controlling Points of Capture (POCs). While complete annihilation is the most likely way you’ll win or lose a match, be on the lookout for crafty players who seek to control all of the POCs on a map, which will result in an immediate victory.

The Ember Conflict has a lot of potential to offer an engaging and innovative mobile gaming experience, and I’m looking forward to getting my hands on a playable demo in the future.  A release date hasn’t been announced yet, but the developers are aiming for Fall 2014. Until then, you can check out some screen shots, enjoy the amazing concept art, and sign up for updates on the game’s website, www.emberconflict.com

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Tower of Elements 2 has so many elements smashed up against each other that I’ll be impressed if they all work together seamlessly. The game combines classic city building with real-time strategy combat that mixes together match-3 puzzles and tower defense. All things that sound right up my alley, honestly.

The city building has everything you’d expect from the genre. You choose a continent on which to build your city, with each of the three having its own advantages and disadvantages. From there, you have a variety of building types to choose from, resources to manage, citizens to allocate to different jobs, and policy decisions that affect both your city and your troops on the battlefield.

Actual combat takes the form of match-3 puzzles. Match the runes and elemental bolts blast out from your tower and hit oncoming foes. Other aspects of tower defense games are included, such as building barriers and deploying troops. There will also be a good bunch of challenging bosses to take on, as well as a bestiary from which to view and play around with the various enemy types you encounter. Really, it all looks like a ton of fun.

Having already gone over its goal, Tower of Elements 2 is a safe campaign to pledge towards. $10 is the minimum amount you’ll have to pledge to get a DRM-free copy of the game for PC, Mac, or Linux along with a Steam key if the game is Greenlit. The Kickstarter is getting pretty close to its first stretch goal, which is one that’s actually pretty cool: an alternate board layout. It’d definitely be worth it to unlock this goal as it’d really increase the replayability of the game overall.

Anyway, go on over to the Kickstarter page and pledge towards the game. You can also vote for Tower of Elements 2 on Steam Greenlight, follow its development on Twitter and Facebook, and find out even more on the developer’s website.

© 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Machines at War 3 is a real-time strategy game made by Isotope 244 in the vein of Command & Conquer. It’s a sequel to Isotope 244′s last game, Land Air Sea Warfare. You collect minerals and harvest power to build units and structures to crush your enemies. Unlike LASW, MaW3 comes with online multiplayer, a campaign mode, and infantry units.

The best thing about MaW3 is the size of the battles. There are over 130 different land, sea, and air units, each with its own strengths and weaknesses, and you can command thousands at a time. I had a few battles that were absolute chaos. I can still hear their screams.

I didn’t find the tutorial very helpful. It didn’t explain hotkeys, which was really frustrating. It took me the whole tutorial and a few missions of the campaign before I figured out some essential controls like how to make a hotkey for a group of units and how to move them by clicking on the mini-map. The campaign could have had the tutorial built in, and still kind of feels like it does. The first few missions are nearly impossible to fail. It’s a good thing, too, because I was still reacting very slowly to enemies I came across.

I didn’t know there was a way to attack an enemy on sight until I looked it up on the Wiki page. That means my units would have to finish going to the exact spot I clicked before they started firing at enemies, giving the enemies a nice head start. That’s something that should be covered in the tutorial. Hotkeys should be displayed when you hover the mouse over actions, but they aren’t. I had to go out of my way to figure that stuff out.

The default controls are confusing. For some reason, instead of right-clicking to move, you left-click – unless you’re using the mini-map, then you have to right-click. Yeah. What’s brutal about having left-click as move is it’s also what you use to select units. So, if you accidentally click and drag when you’re trying to move units, you’ll deselect them. It happened to me several times. Thankfully, you can change the controls in the options menu. This didn’t fix my issue with clicking and dragging though.

I found structures were often more useful than units. Minerals are automatically generated, so units are disposable, and as such, they die quickly. Defensive turrets seemed like a much better investment. When I skirmished the computer (and lost), I noticed the AI would creep up on me with buildings, not just units. I lost a lot of good men and women just trying to command the area around my own base.

I would recommend learning the units before you get into multiplayer. There is a unit index, which is handy, but I find it’s best to just play and get a feel for it. You begin to learn how fast certain units move, how much damage they do, and what support they need. Pay attention to the speed of units. I lost so many wasps, because they’re so much faster than other units and they’d arrive at the battle well before their ground support. Oh, the humanity!

MaW3 was programmed by one person, James Bryant. His hard work pays off with some great details, like how terrain gets scorched during fights and it stays scorched throughout the game. Unfortunately, and perhaps unfairly, I couldn’t help comparing it to games like StarCraft, to which it can’t possibly hold up. It’s important to mention MaW3 isn’t supposed to hold up against StarCraft. It’s a throwback to games like C&C, but when I play a game that’s similar, like this one, I really notice how well done StarCraft is.

I played the Windows version of this game, and I can’t help but feel like it would be better on iOS (which it is due for release on later this year). It doesn’t give off that impression that every second counts, so I think it would be more suited to using your finger to click through options. It’s also worth mentioning that LASW was a huge success on the App Store.

You can buy MaW3 for Windows and Mac right now, right here!

Overall Rating: ★★★☆☆ 

What does this score mean?

This game was reviewed using a copy provided by the developer for that purpose.

© 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Eufloria

A disembodied voice commands you to plant trees and spread seedlings around a white, featureless universe. ‘Go forth and multiply’ is the command, and you’re tasked with establishing a presence on big round asteroids found all throughout space. But you’re not the only plant life form in the world, and so you’re challenged to fill the emptiness and not to surrender to the other plants who are encroaching on your property.

It might not be fair to compare Eufloria to other RTS games. It’s not aimed at the market that plays Warcraft, Starcraft, or any other imitator. Abstraction is the order of the day, in that every mechanical component of an RTS is stripped down to the most basic presentation. Units are ‘seedlings’ that look like dots until you zoom in on them, and even then there’s very little customization to do. Bases are ‘trees’ whose function differs depending on where you build them, and again you can’t otherwise customize the type of base that gets built.

The main strength of Eufloria is also its most glaring weakness, in the way that information about your success or failure is communicated. By centering combat around bases only, it becomes very easy to evaluate how well you’re doing. Units are always associated with a base, and while they can travel from one base to another they don’t actively engage enemies except in the context of attacking or defending an asteroid. So moving your cursor to an asteroid immediately tells you how many of each unit are present and whether you’re winning or losing. While that makes for efficient play, it also robs the game of the nuance that’s unique to the genre. Without the complexity of customization, without the build-up and gathering of varied resources, the whole affair becomes a binary, black-or-white decision making process. That will divert but not hook new players, and will do nothing to retain veteran RTS gamers.

Other RTS experiments on consoles have produced deviations from the standard play format that might some day come together in a transcendent game. Tom Clancy’s Endwar has a method of geographic delineation similar to Eufloria. Robocalypse had a unique icon-based command system that hasn’t been imitated. And Sega’s Stormrise has a imperfect but inspired method of moving units around. Eufloria will be considered another one of those stepping stones in the long run. There’s a demo you can try first before you decide if it’s worth the full $9.99.

© 2011 – 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.