Greetings and welcome back fellow strategists and gunners. Hope you have kept your wits sharp and your trigger-finger ready to go, because we are going back into Interplanetary for some more planet-bombardment action. The folks at Team Jolly Roger Games have made many improvements to the game since we last looked at it, including graphical fixes, network improvements, more weapons of mass destruction, a tech tree and research mechanic, a working spying mechanic, and other improvements and goodies. I have been purposefully keeping myself in the dark about the game’s development, so that way each iteration can become more of a surprise for my next skirmish. Boy I must say, they really have made some great strides since my initial preview, which you can read here if you haven’t already.

The first topic I wish to talk about is possibly the biggest and most influential of them all, the spying mechanic. Previously you could view your opponent’s planet and see where all cities and developments have been placed, allowing precision-based weapons to take a huge advantage and dominate the weapon selections. With the recent changes, you no longer have all that info readily available. In order to view possible enemy weak points, you must construct buildings which will allow you to view planet infrastructure. Depending on your planet’s level of intelligence – the number of spy buildings you have – the possible targets available range from a couple low-value locales up to the entire planet. To keep away prying eyes, you can counter by building “cloaking” or counter-intelligence buildings in order to hide your planet’s infrastructure. This feature alone adds much more strategic gameplay and flow to the system, as players are no longer just racing to get the biggest and best guns. Priority is now split between getting your planet ready for conflict and keeping your cities and important structures hidden, creating both an arms and intelligence race.

Along with intelligence comes the research aspect of the game. You now need to research technology in order to access the bigger and more advanced weaponry. No longer are you able to build missiles and laser weapons right from the get go. Now you must allocate time in order for research to be done. This is done via a simple tech tree, where various tech and bonuses can be researched and applied to your advantage. Techs include giving permanent boosts such as more power production or spying levels as well as the ability to manufacture one of the two new weapons of massive destruction.

Now we are getting to the juicy parts of the new additions, the new weaponry. A new laser and artillery weapon have been added in the form of the ‘Solar Laser’ and the ‘Asteroid Diversion’ respectively. Once I noticed these weapons in the tech tree, I just HAD to acquire them and give them a shot (pun intended).

FIRE THE LASER!

The Solar Laser is a satellite parked in the sun’s orbit which focuses the sun’s power into a giant solar death ray, obliterating anything you set its deadly sights on with pinpoint precision. I couldn’t help but feel like an evil genius, pinky to mouth, when I set loose the focused wrath of the sun onto my enemy.

As cool as the Solar Laser is, I felt that the Asteroid Diversion was more “in tune” with the sci-fi nature of the game. As the name implies, the Asteroid Diversion weapon takes an asteroid from the local asteroid belt and diverts it to a course of your bidding, into say perhaps a nearby planet that you dislike. Nothing beats the sight of an asteroid hurtling out of space at full speed and slamming right into your enemy’s precious home planet. Numerous blockbusters and B-movies have been made on that premise, and now it is in your hands to unleash upon your foes. So set an asteroid loose on that pesky planet and whip out some popcorn for the show (3D glasses not included).

Recreate a B-movie disaster film on your enemy’s home planet

While all these additions are great, I have merely touched upon a few of the major updates to the game. Many other improvements have been made to the game such as improved multiplayer networking and graphical fixes, all showing that Team Jolly Roger have been putting a lot of effort and love into this project. I was blown away by my first look into the game many versions ago, and the current build they have on offer is no exception to that statement. I look forward to the next iteration of the game. If the additions they have made so far are any indication of the future trajectory of the game, we are in for an Earth-shattering (pun intended) release once the full game is out.
You can check out Interplanetary on Steam Early Access for those interested in some tactical fun. Let’s get those guns primed and lasers flying!

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

In Turf Raiders, you play as the leader of a horde of blue kitty commandos (they look more like squirrel…bear…things to me, but hey! Still cute!) on a mission to collect energy cubes known as gluons which power your defenses against the diabolical red dog hoards. In order to do this, you and your enemy take turns playing cards that have a variety of abilities, such as summoning units to the grid-like field, moving your own or your opponent’s units, or even getting rid of your opponent’s units! Each part of the grid yields certain items, such as gluons or cash which is essential to being able to play cards at all. In essence, Turf Raiders is a tactical area control game in a vein similar to the classic board game Risk.

Despite its strategic leanings, Turf Raiders is simple and easy to learn. After a few tutorial levels, the player is thrown right into over forty different missions which all feature different field layouts and enemies that get increasingly aggressive. While it’s a free game, there is an in-app currency that allows you to buy ‘Perks’: one-use items such as extra cash or cards to give you an edge over your opponent. I found that I usually had enough of the currency available that I didn’t really need to opt for actually buying more.

Turf Raiders feels like a game that appears simple but actually hides complex and engaging strategy beneath the surface. If only this were true. The game is awkward, teetering on the edge between something casual and light and something deeper, something that I need to sit down and consider. There are elements which are annoyingly slow, such as having to touch the screen every time both my opponent and I draw a new hand.  The cash as the beginning of my turn takes way too long to auto-gather to me. I end up just touching on the little sprites myself to have them available faster. These are, admittedly, minor grievances, but the constant touching for aspects that should be automatic wore down on me. It was tough to continue in this war of attrition, having to convince myself to play the next mission and deal with the weird slowness of it all.

I like cute games with adorable characters, but maybe Turf Raiders was also a little too cute for me. The bouncy music became repetitive, speeding up to a stressful crescendo at odd intervals, leading me to eventually turning it off. Overall, I was saddened that Turf Raiders became an unpleasant, tedious experience for me. Perhaps some tightening up of certain mechanics and a little more variation in music and animations would improve the experience, but for now this is a game I’d rather skip.

Turf Raiders Card Battle is free and available in the Google Play Store. You can find more information on the developer’s website.

Overall Rating: ★★☆☆☆ 

What does this score mean?

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

So the story goes, an organization of scientists, in an effort to expand their knowledge, creates the “Chronova Device”, a tool that would enable them to unlock the universal ‘real-time’ and introduce it to their turn-based world. But, as these experiments often do, everything goes wrong, and a vortex sweeps them up from their world. Now it’s up to you, in your little orange “Nova-111″ starship, to rescue the crew.  Will your harmless research vessel be up to the task?

The player will be faced with a series of obstacles, such as alien enemies and puzzles. Your vessel won’t be completely helpless, as collectible upgrades and abilities will allow it to defend itself and fight back. As you advance, the world will slowly shift from turn-based decisions to making the player react in real-time environments. And gosh, what environments they are. If you’re not already interested, the visuals should definitely hook you. The game simply looks splendid, and the character portraits are to die for, really. The mix of pixel and painterly styles makes the levels truly shine. And the music ain’t too shabby either, apparently being dynamic and suiting itself to your individual play style.

Though no set date has been announced, Nova-111 is supposed to be released some time later this year for Windows, Linux, and Mac. To find out more, visit Funktronic Labs’ website for the game. You can also follow the developers on Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr.

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

This was part of my experience with Quest of Dungeons, a 16-bit, turn-based RPG which tasks players with navigating through multiple levels of a ruined mansion to find a magical lantern that has been used by a powerful sorcerer to steal the light from the world. The artistic styling is everything you’d expect from a roguelike game, the controls are smooth, and I didn’t encounter any bugs or glitches (which is hard to say about a lot of indie games). However, the repetitiveness of both combat and level progression dragged down an otherwise entertaining experience as I kept waiting for another element to emerge and provide a new challenge.

Players can choose between four characters: The Warrior, The Wizard, The Shaman, and The Assassin. The Warrior relies solely on melee combat to defeat enemies, while The Assassin is able to take out enemies from afar with his bow. Both characters are able to implement a variety of special abilities to do area damage, increase stats, and deal extra damage for a time, but these abilities are rarely more effective than their standard attacks. The Wizard and the Shaman both rely on magic and spells to defeat their enemies, but they do so in different ways. The Wizard’s abilities focus on direct damage, while The Shaman uses black magic to weaken and disorient his foes before moving in to finish them off. The enemies all rely on melee attacks and aren’t much of a challenge on the two lower difficulties. On the hardest difficulty, you’ll need to rely on both skill and luck to survive as the enemies take more hits to kill and large groups will surround you if you’re not smart.

As I progressed through the procedurally generated levels, some enemies would taunt me and my character would occasionally remark on his surroundings, but there wasn’t much of a storyline or plot to follow. I know first-hand the difficulty in programming a linear story in an otherwise non-linear environment, but the lack of a cohesive story outside of the singular main objective didn’t provide much incentive to explore the entirety of a level. The occasional quest and boss would pop up, but the quests simply tasked me with finding and killing a “special” enemy, and the boss battles lacked the formality required to be considered a true “Boss Battle”. If it wasn’t for my loot-happy, “completionist” OCD, I would have descended through the mansion with reckless abandon, defeated the sorcerer, and grabbed that lantern in an hour or two.

If you’re looking for game that’s fun, easy to jump into, and offers plenty of incentive to replay the adventure using each character, Quest of Dungeons is perfect for you. Quest of Dungeons provides a great, retro-style gaming experience that will bring back fond memories of past eras, but some repetitiveness in its combat and lack of story prevent it from living up to it’s full potential.

Quest of Dungeons has been Greenlit by the Steam community and is tentatively scheduled for a February 2014 release on PC, Mac, and iOS. To see the game in action, check out the website or watch the trailer below.

Overall Rating: ★★★☆☆ 

What does this score mean?

This game was reviewed using a pre-release build provided by the developer for that purpose.

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Ever wonder if there is other life out there in the cosmos? Perhaps some civilizations are exploring the vast reaches of space, or even at war with one another. What if, during such a war, an errant shot from a planet’s defences missed its target and hurled itself out into space? Perhaps that very shot is coming into our own solar system, hurtling towards Earth, with us unaware of our impending danger. At least, that is what I was thinking when I made a huge miscalculation while playing the pre-alpha build of Interplanetary by Finnish based studio Team Jolly Roger Games.

Bombardment!!

Interplanetary is a hard science fiction, turn-based strategy game where you use artillery weapons from your own planet in order to blow up a rival planet. If you have ever played Tanks or Scorched Earth back in the day, it is very much like that, but on a much larger and complex scale. In this game, you must first build up your forces before you are able to begin chucking warheads across the solar system. There is strategy involved as you must manage a multitude of things such as building material, power, planet defences, planet armaments, and of course, your population. Your “life” comes in the form of cities; you must protect them at all costs while at the same time attempting to bombard your opponent’s cities into a smouldering crater. Do that, and you win. Simple right? Nope!

While attempting to destroy that one pesky planet, you must account for things such as planetary orbit, gravity wells, travel time, and other planets and planetoids as well as their respective orbits and gravity. While you do get a guide showing you how your shot will travel, it only takes into account the current state of the system. You must predict how your aim will be affected by other planets and the gravity of the local sun in order to get a shot to land perfectly. Science! Ballistics! Math! …My head hurts.

With skills you can make curved shots around the sun.

The pre-alpha version only comes with multiplayer at the moment, and AI opponents are not integrated yet to my knowledge, but it is planned for a future release. I loaded up the hot seat multiplayer and began playing a solo game. Although LAN and online support is there, I have yet to try them out.

Build up your planet.

Playing both planets did little to stifle my “strategy” since fired rounds may behave in unpredictable ways due to planetary influences. So due to this, playing both sides on a solo game still made things a little challenging. Before I knew it, hours had flown by, and I was still in the midst of a great war, firing shells, missiles, and even laser beams. This reminded me a lot of Scorched Earth where my aim, or lack thereof, can make games last quite a long time.

I am extremely impressed with this, considering it is only a pre-alpha build; it has quite a lot of gameplay and core mechanics already down pat. It is already a strong build in its current state – more than enough to convince any fans of artillery-type games or science fiction buffs. Team Jolly Roger have many plans for the future of Interplanetary, and I for one am looking forward to future builds and releases. Definitely keep an eye on this title in the future, and one in the sky for one of my off-the-mark artillery shots.

I may not be able to hit the planet next to me, but I guarantee the neighbouring solar systems have fear in their hearts whenever they hear my name.

Check out the Interplanetary website
Team Jolly Roger’s Website

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

While everything from wide-open strategies to environmental manipulation to 22 character classes to challenging AI has been implemented already, the game still needs some fleshing out on the artistic side of things. That’s where the Kickstarter campaign comes into play. Stern is trying to raise $25,500 for the following purposes:

• Hiring a sound designer to create all of the sound effects for every last button click, movement, attack, character death, item usage, and action in the game.  Estimated cost: $12,000
• Hiring a composer to flesh out the game’s soundtrack with more music.  Estimated cost: $4,000
• Hiring artists to create more art: tilesets, destructible objects, character portraits, NPC sprites, and a second gender for each character class.  Estimated cost: $4,000
• Promoting Telepath Tactics* at PAX East.  Estimated cost: $2,000
• Hiring a web designer to build a proper website* for Telepath Tactics.  Estimated cost: $1,000

As you can see, a lot of these items are aimed at giving the game the kind of polish that takes a good game and makes it great. As with all Kickstarter campaigns, Sinister Design is offering their backers something in return for their much-needed funds. While the usual rewards like a copy of the game or listing in the credits are available, some of the more notable rewards include having your likeness placed in a dramatic scene, appear as an in-game villain in the single-player campaign, and getting the chance to design an in-game mission or multiplayer mode.

Sinister Design is doing fairly well with its campaign, having raised over $9,000 at the time of this article’s publication. There’s still a long way to go, though, and less than two weeks to reach that goal. Readers intrigued by the video below can contribute to the cause directly through the Kickstarter page which also includes links to the alpha demo.

© 2012 – 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Terraform from Holgersson Entertainment is a turn-based strategy/puzzle game that challenges players to physically alter planets by using a variety of tools and the weather itself. Although the sheer number of variables involved in the gameplay can be overwhelming at times, Terraform is enjoyable enough in both its premise and presentation to keep players coming back for the next challenge.

Play begins in tutorial stages descriptively named “University” in the game. These levels introduce players to the general premise and mechanics of the game. Early on, each level provides a new lesson which then culminates in an exam at the end of each year. There are five virtual years in all that are spent going through these University stages before the story advances. While I like the fact that they place the instructional stages within the context of a virtual school, after a couple dozen of the 30+ University stages it can begin to get as wearisome as the real thing. Although players will be immediately applying what they’re being instructed on, the fact that the University is such a large portion of the game may induce learning fatigue while waiting to see how the story opens up. It’s a double-edged sword though, as I feel all of the instruction is necessary in order to succeed. Terraform continues to introduce new tools and rules throughout the entirety of the game, but the bulk are taught early on.

Goals and mechanics start off simple enough in Terraform…

Each hexagonal tile map starts with each tile occupied by some natural landform, whether it be soil, a tree, a hole, etc. A variable number of spaces on that map must be converted or returned to a particular state within a specified number of turns. Tools are introduced one by one to the player, along with an explanation of what effect they will have on the environment. Basic weather patterns like rain or excessive heat, as explained by the instructor, will affect the state of the map and can even bring on larger scale weather phenomena like hurricanes or fires. Once the player has finished performing operations for a particular turn, he  must choose to kick the game over to the next turn and see how their actions unfold in the world. The effect is not quite Rube Goldberg-esque, but it’s still interesting to see rivers flow or settlements demolished based on one action performed or left undone. Thankfully the game grants unlimited retries and a few undo turns on each map, because there are bound to be unintended results.

It’s fairly easy to catch on to the goals of Terraform, but the turn-based structure can take some getting used to as you must anticipate how changes to the environment will spread when you advance to the next turn. Terraform is a difficult game, and players who aren’t accustomed to failing may get frustrated even on the earlier levels. Each level does include a hint, but even the hint is just a general guideline, not specific information on which turn to perform which actions. In terms of strategy involved, I believe Terraform is a good match for players who enjoy chess. The ability and patience to picture the game state multiple turns ahead of time is a huge advantage. I must stress that I don’t believe the difficulty is a detriment to the enjoyment of the game – though it certainly is a pain for review deadlines! Instead I feel like it makes the game more like a crossword puzzle in the sense that it’s something players will want to come back to for a new challenge every day, rather than play in a binge gaming session.

… but eventually you’re going to need hints and a committed brain to succeed

The presentation quality of the game is adequate in most areas and quite excellent in a few cases. While playing the game, the UI contains pretty much everything players will need, and this helps avoid frequent trips to the menu. Options to undo turns when mistakes are made and even an option to change music on the fly are present. Speaking of music, the songs range from ambient to soaring, the latter of which nicely set the tone of a player reshaping planets. I just wish there were more track selections than the three or four included. The visual design is pretty simplistic in nature. I would prefer higher-res images for the various map tiles. But because there are so many of them, I understand why more detail would be difficult to see in such small, repeated spaces. For a good chunk of the early game, there’s not much to the story aside from the instructor who guides the player through the educational process. Later on, there are cutscenes and dialogue exchanges thrown in with other characters to advance the story. It would’ve been nice if these started a bit earlier in the game to draw the player in.

Terraform is a solid puzzle game and I think it will be fun for most gamers once they get used to the pacing. Like a fine wine it should be sipped rather than gulped. In playing this way, I believe gamers will find real enjoyment in tying together cause and effect as they transform one planet to the next. The ability to upload your scores to a leaderboard and an unlockable level editor are added incentive to keep playing. For those interested in picking up Terraform, it’s currently available through Desura, GamersGate, and Holgersson Entertainment’s online store. Any way you choose to purchase, it’s not a bad deal for a game that will likely provide many hours of brain-intensive challenges for those tough enough to move mountains.

Overall Rating: ★★★★☆ 

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

© 2012 – 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.