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Halo Wars 2 has been released and while some people have leapt at the chance to try it, others aren’t so sure. Halo isn’t generally an RTS series and Halo Wars itself wasn’t loved much, so the sequel has some ground to cover. Also, RTS games and consoles aren’t generally a match seen a lot.
Now a demo has been released for Windows 10 on the Microsoft Store so you can try before you commit money. It comes with both the opening mission of the single-player campaign as well as Blitz mode which combines a card game with RTS elements. It’s strange but people who have bought the game seem to enjoy it.
Be warned though, if you decide to download the demo you’ll need to have a chunk of memory free for it – 17GB. Chunky for a demo sure, but the full game just received a 10GB patch so the game itself is fairly large as well.
So give it a try if you’re curious. Maybe you’ll discover to your surprise that a console-RTS works fairly well after all.
However, there are also a few campaigns coming to an end that seem to be in trouble with 45 hours to 4 days remaining and a long way to go. These are Xenosis, Daymare: 1998, SmuggleCraft and FictionSphere. There are also two that have concluded having failed to raise enough and these were Aegis: Innocence and Deep Forest. The team behind Aegis say that the game will still be developed, just slower and have linked to a Patreon that can be donated too if you still want to support the game. Deep Forest’s team has made no update though.
First up we have a tabletop games set in the near future.
In the near future, big cities have been abandoned and now play host to a new type of sport – giant killer robot battling! This game is a board game with figures that uses a deck of cards to play the game. The game is for 2-4 players and involves some dice-rolling, and building your mech to take on your opponents’ mechs. Each team plays with one heavy hitter and three support unit in a bid to eliminate your opponents’ bots, or reduce four skyscapers to rubble first.
GKR: Heavy Hitters have already met its $100,000 6 times over. It still has 11 more days to run.
Next we have a game with a save-the-world central plot.
ENTROPY sets you as one of many creatures jettisoned from their world with the collision of many universes. Now you must be the first to locate and piece together the four fragments of your world so you can return home. The game is a card game, and can have up to 5 players at once. Each player has a hand of actions, but must be careful not to play the same action as another – that results in a cancellation ‘clash’ and only the reset card can refill your hand of spent actions. So if your reset clashes, you’re stuck!
ENTROPY has a AUS $4,000 goal, which it has met already with 6 more days to go.
Next up we have a game that apparently adapts itself to your actions.
An action adventure game set out in the wilderness, Pine’s boast to fame is that the ecology of the world around you is affected by the actions you take in-game. This world never had humans reach the top of the food chain and now Hue, your playable avatar, must seek out a new home for his nearly depleted tribe. You can choose to fight or befriend other species, which will also evolve or devolve along with the ecology as well as learning moves from you with its AI.
Pine has made €35,787 of its €100,000 goal and has 28 days to go.
Finally we have a game inspired by Chinese mythology.
This is actually an additional to another game, Monkey the Roleplaying Game, and indeed has a pledge level for backers of that campaign to allow them to get this new book cheaper. The Mandate of Heaven contains a story taking place in three locations inspired by Chinese myth – The Western Heaven, Chang‘an capital of the Tang Empire and the Ten Courts of Hell. This is also a special campaign that is running for just a week.
The Mandate of Heaven has a £2,000 goal and 5 days to go. It has made only £626 so far.
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.
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.”
