Right now there are a lot of games being ported over from mobile to Steam for the PC market. This isn’t a bad thing, especially if the game happens to be a genre that works well on both a mobile and the PC platform.

Beasts Battle is a turn-based strategy game that was developed and published by the same studio, Greenolor Studio. The game costs £1.59 on the UK store, and $1.99 on the US and for that you get a very simple little game. You take the role of a character building and dispatching an army of animals into battlegrounds with opposing animal armies. You expand your army by completing the levels, letting you move onto new levels, earning you gold to purchase more soldiers and unlocking new types of soldiers.

The strategy of this game comes in the choices you make both in building your army and in dispatching them in the levels. do you choose to spend gold on a new stack of soldiers to fill your extra army slot, or to boost your depleted stack of existing warriors? Do you then split that bolstered stack to cover more ground and gain an extra attack or keep them as one to make sure your single blow hits much harder and your opponents do much less damage on their own hits? What animal soldier do you choose to fill that last slot with? These are all choices the game makes you decide on before each battle.

I think this is an alright game. It has a nice art style, although somewhat baffling and requiring you to actively check what it is you’re using or indeed fighting against. I mean the Turtles (your first type of soldier and big melee fighters) look like turtle men, but the bulls and the cats are much harder to determine just what they are on a first look. The game does provide little hints and tips when you first encounter a situation, and the things it doesn’t cover you can usually figure out pretty fast with a little trial and error.

However, the gold you spend is usually lost if you spend a lot, go into a battle and then lose. You then need to go back and grind for more gold, just to be able to rebuild enough to progress and that’s a little irritating. It wouldn’t be so bad if the game was different enough each battle to make you not mind replaying through levels but… it’s just not. If I can compare it to another game I’ve reviewed with a similar method of level progression, Forge of Gods did it much better. Both games have a similar army building mechanic, advancing to meet and defeat your enemies to progress. However, FoG also has ways to earn resources outside of the battles; you can capture, summon and evolve your creatures to improve your army. Beasts Battle… just has the fighting. And buying to replay over and over. Which doesn’t keep your interest too long unfortunately.

Over all, Beasts Battle is not a bad game. It’s just not really excellent either. Still, at such a low price if you want something you can play quickly, this might be one to look into. Oh, and it’s available to play online as well.

6/10

Times move on, economics change and so prices eventually go up. The same it seems applies to Hearthstone prices… but only in non-US markets it seems.

The price changes were announced by Blizzard and will be coming in from March 22nd, and will affect the prices of Hearthstone card packs, adventure wings and arena tickets. Right now, a lot of non-US players are not very happy, but nowhere is less happy than the UK which has seen rises of 20 to 50 percent more on prices compared the the EU’s flat 11 percent change. Of course, the UK is one of the few EU countries which kept its currency when the Euro came in, and last summer just over half the country voted to get the UK out of the UK aka Brexit. So this might be why.

Here are the EU and UK prices with the older price in brackets:

EU

• 2 Packs – €2.99 (€2.69)
• 7 Packs – €9.99 (€8.99)
• 15 Packs – €19.99 (€17.99)
• 40 Packs – €49.99 (€44.99)
• 60 Packs – €69.99 (€62.99)
• Adventure Wing – €6.99 (€5.99)
• Arena Ticket – €1.99 (€1.49)

UK

• 2 Packs – £2.99 (£1.99)
• 7 Packs – £8.99 (£6.99)
• 15 Packs – £16.99 (£13.99)
• 40 Packs – £44.99 (£34.99)
• 60 Packs – £59.99 (£47.99)
• Adventure Wing – £6.99 (£4.99)
• Arena Ticket – £1.99 (£1.49)

As you can see in this chart put together by redditor War_Master_WM, purchases now cost more in both markets than they do in the US, whereas previously they had been slightly cheaper. Right now the US market prices are NOT changing which has done little to calm down the European and other players.

“We regularly look at our pricing around the world, and from time to time we make changes such as these to align with local and regional market conditions,” Blizzard wrote on Battle.net. “The price of the Un’Goro prelaunch bundle offer will not be affected by this change and will remain the same until launch.”

Since the beginning of its lifetime, many of the players of the huge spacefaring game Elite: Dangerous have been wondering and asking where the series’ antagonistic alien race the Thargoids were. Back in January one player might have had first contact, with his ship being yanked out of jump only to be approached and scanned by a weird flower-shaped ship before it vanished. A few other players have had similar encounters now, but so far nothing much has happened although players had a feeling that this wasn’t going to be all they’d be doing.

Now Frontier have shown off a new, short trailer (the “Unknown Trailer” that features one of the strange alien vessels and the atmosphere is distinctly unsettling. The trailer shows a few human ships landing on a planet and exploring the surface before the alien ship comes up behind them and the ‘signal’ is lost. Of course, anything could have happened after that but the overall tone and ambient noise makes it seem that whatever happened, it wasn’t good for the human crews.

Interesting times ahead for Elite: Dangerous players ahead it seems. Hopefully Frontier will release more information or someone will have a much more interesting encounter with a flower ship soon in-game.

So by now you’ve probably heard that id Software and Bethesda are bringing about a new game in the Quake series called Quake Champions. We’ve already had a few trailers and some details about it, but now we know how much the game will cost.

Esssentially Quake Champions will be free-to-play, with one of the titular Champions available for free – a Champion called Ranger. However, the other Champions will not be free and you’ll need to pay for them. Creative Director Tim Willits told Polygon that in order to get access to the other champions, players will need to buy a Champion Pack to the roster if they don’t want to spend time grinding up to unlock them.

“At its core, it’s a free-to-play game with the option to buy the Champion Pack and just get in and play with all the Champions. There are a number of Quake players that just want to play their Quake, right? And they are familiar with the business model of our previous games, and they are totally fine. ‘I want to buy the game. I want to start playing. I want to have access to all the Champions.’ But then we also understand that we want to get as many people into the game as possible, especially outside of North America and Western Europe, where we have a massive fan base. So we want to have the flexibility to have a free-to-play option for those people.”

If you don’t want to make a payment, it will be possible to unlock the other Champions with the in-game currency (called Favour) for a set amount of time. However paid and free players will be sharing the same games, so it remains to be seen if the players who can afford to purchase the Champion Pack will have an advantage or not.

Quake Champions will be running a closed beta in the coming weeks.

Twitch is fast trying to establish itself as the go-to place for all a gamer’s needs. Most famous for its streaming platform, two weeks ago Twitch revealed its plan to start selling games with some of the money made going back to their partner streamers, and now they’re planning to tackle the voicechat world.

Currently with Discord as one of the big players in that field, Twitch acquired Curse, another big player, last summer. Now they’ve announced that Curse is going to be enhanced, rebranded and then relaunched as the Twitch Desktop App. This means that as well as containing the features that Curse had before, screen sharing, voice and video calling, and community server creation; the Twitch Desktop App will contain features from Twitch. These will include whispers, activity sharing and eventually a game library filled with games purchased through Twitch which will only be accessed through this new Desktop App rather than the Twitch launcher that already exists as had been previously thought.

Seems that Twitch are planning to emulate Discord and indeed that’s their plan; they want to make sure that a stream’s community “can thrive even when the streamer is offline.” The Twitch Desktop App will enter into public beta testing on March 16th and will be available for download at twitch.tv.

For more information, check out the post on the subject made over on Twitch’s blog.