free-to-play | Mohammad Moshtaghi

MARVEL Strike Force

Wed, 02 Jan 2019 12:00:00 -0700

After reading a particularly deep and persuasive Game Informer opinion piece, I decided to download MARVEL Strike Force as a way to take occasional breaks from the stress of planning our wedding. In a polished experience centering on collecting and upgrading MARVEL characters, I soon found myself assembling five-character teams of heroes, villains, and minions whose compositions rivalled even the wildest Cinematic Universe crossovers to date. My early game mashup team of Spiderman, Elektra, Crossbones, Luke Cage, and an unnamed S.H.E.I.L.D. Medic was soon taking on the likes of Ultron, Hydra, and other players' amalgamations in an effort to — as always — save the world.

The campaign offers a barebones and comic-book-absurd explanation of what’s going on: a new villain named Ultimus (who was invented for this game) has a Conversion Device that he uses to corrupt heroes and villains alike to join his cause. Ultimus conveniently also has the ability to open interdimensional portals, so he makes a habit of converting whole armies of Avengers, Guardians, Hydra, Kree, etc. in his ongoing conquest of the multiverse. Naturally, our dimension — and specifically, our Earth — contains Nexus portals that guard the way to all other dimensions, so Ultimus sees our dimension as his prize. Conveniently, our dimension’s Nick Fury secretly started a S.H.E.I.L.D. division called S.T.R.I.K.E. to monitor and defend against inter-dimensional threats, hence the whole “Strike Force” thing. So, in a classic “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” narrative, our dimension’s heroes and villains team up under the Strike Commander (that’s you) to fight Ultimus and — cue the heroic fanfare — save the multiverse!

I’m just going to get this out of the way now: MARVEL Strike Force’s main story (and many side- and event-stories) are terrible. The writers can’t seem to decide if they’re self-aware of how silly the whole setup is or if they take it very seriously, which leads to almost all the characters delivering similar, melodramatic lines. Even characters who were created to leverage our cracking suspension of disbelief (like Deadpool and Star Lord) fall flat. That being said, MARVEL Strike Force is primarily made up of its many well-executed variations of the same core, turn-based strategy gameplay, and the forgettable story is really just there to tie everything together.

With that negative aside, let’s talk about a bunch of things MARVEL Strike Force does really well. First, as hinted at before, it has a lot of different game modes. And somehow, almost all of them feel enjoyable and distinct despite not being terribly different from one another. For example, the Campaign mode tasks the player with using different subsets of characters (only heroes, only villains, only characters from space, etc.) to play though a sequence of levels. In the Arena, players fight for better ladder rank by pitting their best five-character team against those of higher-ranked players. In Blitz, players use their entire collection of characters to win as many battles as they can in the period of a couple days. In Raids, players work with their alliance to collectively complete a map of difficult battles.

You might be thinking “Okay, we get it, every mode is basically a different framework for battles. Doesn’t that get old? Why play all the different modes?” The best answer I can give is that MARVEL Strike Force’s many modes enable and encourage progression in a way that is exceptionally better than many of its free-to-play peers. In order to explain how it does this, we need to understand how characters are upgraded. First, a character has to be unlocked by collecting some number of that character’s “shards.” Some shards can be obtained through completing/replaying Campaign levels, while others come as rewards from orb drops (MARVEL Strike Force’s equivalent of a loot box). Once a character’s been unlocked, they can be upgraded in five ways:

Stars: Gaining additional shards periodically increases a character’s star level (up to star level 7), which increases the character’s power.
Red Stars: Random drops that dramatically increase character power (and the one and only pay-to-win feature of this game).
Level: Players can spend gold and “training modules” to increase the character’s level, which maxes out at the player’s level (which is increased by gaining XP).
Abilities: Each character has up to three active abilities and one passive to use in battles, and each ability can be upgraded using “ability materials”.
Gear: A character’s stats (health, damage, armor, etc.) can be increased by upgrading their gear, which can be obtained from Campaign levels.

This may all feel overly complicated, but the reality is that these convoluted systems encourage players to engage in everything the game has to offer, all while rewarding that engagement with tangible and meaningful upgrades to their characters. Being a free-to-play game, this approach helps players remain relatively competitive without having to empty their wallets. (There’s one necessary caveat to this point: for those who do want to shell out some cash, the in-app purchases in MARVEL Strike Force are stupidly expensive).

The second free-to-play sin that MARVEL Strike Force neatly avoids is unnecessary grinding (especially for free players to progress). Instead of making you play Campaign level over and over again, for example, beating a level without any of your characters dying unlocks an “auto-win” of that level, where you can simply spend Campaign energy and immediately get the rewards (shards, gold, gear, etc.). With a tap of a button, I can auto-win a level ten times, a task that would usually take at least 10 minutes. Other small details like this one really add up in a way that makes me feel good about playing (instead of worrying that I’m falling prey to time-sucking strategies the developer may be employing).

The meta-game has pretty severe balance issues (at the time of writing, Defenders and S.H.E.I.L.D. teams have been essentially unbeatable at the highest levels of competition for months) and the main UI is unnecessarily cumbersome, but if you’re looking to play with a wide cut of MARVEL’s roster for free in a pretty friendly community, I’d be hard pressed to find a better recommendation than MARVEL Strike Force.

Notes

As of writing this review, I’ve been playing MARVEL Strike Force for 6.5 months, have been in two alliances (other than the default one), have reached the maximum level (70), and am easily completing Ultimus V raids. I have not completed any of The Dark Dimension. Alliance War was added after this was written.

Bugs

Occasionally, after certain updates, battles can hang indefinitely, where either the AI never takes their turn or the player is never presented with their actions. This is usually fixable by force-quitting the game and restarting.

Blendoku 2

Sun, 17 Dec 2017 12:00:00 -0700

Blendoku 2 is an excellent example of a free, mobile puzzle game done right. Based on the deceptively simple concept of sorting colors, Blendoku 2 offers great depth of content and innovative mechanics to a mobile puzzle scene overrun by match-three spinoffs and their ilk.

Gameplay is straightforward: a crossword-like board is presented with a small number of colored tiles already filled in. Players must then place the remaining colors into the correct spaces so that the resulting board follows some sort of color gradient. Variants on this basic formula include “Keyless”, where the original board has no preset tiles; “Decoys,” where some tiles are red herrings and not part of the end configuration, and “Clones,” where a color corresponds to multiple spaces on the board. Completionists can challenge themselves to beat levels faster than the world average time and do so perfectly, avoiding putting any colors in incorrect locations. Achievements accompany these feats and more (and all are possible without payment).

Levels are organized by difficulty. The base game, which is completely free, includes generous amounts of content: 150 “simple” levels, 150 “medium,” 100 “hard,” 100 “master,” and 50 bonus “thanks” levels. This was more than enough to provide a satisfying experience, and interested players can more than double the number of levels by purchasing level packs. Monetization, per usual, comes from ads played between levels.

There are a variety of other game modes and perks to discover throughout the game, including a multiplayer versus mode, “painting” levels, a “color IQ” test, and a daily challenge level. These are all nice enough experiences, demonstrating the developers’ abilities to strike a near-perfect balance between providing abundant content and remaining focused on their core gameplay. As a result, Blendoku 2 feels full without trying to do too much.

All in all, Blendoku 2’s commitment to simplicity in design and mechanics combined with its plethora of free content makes it a must-try for puzzle lovers.

June's Journey

Wed, 25 Oct 2017 12:00:00 -0700

Hidden object games moved from their old dwellings in children’s sections of newspapers to new homes on touchscreens in the early iOS era, and every generation of the operating system sees a new app iterate over the same mechanics. More of the same isn’t always bad — it’s nice to have new apps with refreshed graphics to replace aging legacy games that are no longer supported — but nevertheless, newcomers must somehow justify their existence. June’s Journey had a promising plan to do so: wrap classic hidden object gameplay in a mystery story and toss in some city building-esque filler as a bonus. But it ultimately commits too many sins of other free-to-play, casual games to remain enjoyable, and a poorly executed progression system subjects players to numbing repetition.

The setting is fairly simple. June is a British WWI veteran nurse with a knack for quick thinking and insightful observations. Upon learning that her sister and brother-in-law were murdered, purportedly in a murder-suicide by her brother-in-law’s own hand, she travels to New York to find answers. Your mission quite literally becomes June’s: find hidden clues which steadily reveal more of the mystery, bringing you closer to the only answers that will make sense of the violence. As an aside, the family estate has fallen into some disrepair, so coins and resources gained from completing levels can be put towards decorating and renovating dilapidated structures.

The progression system is superficial, to say the least. Each hidden object scene can only be accessed after the player reaches the corresponding player level. Player level increases with flowers, a strange disguise for a typical XP/leveling system. But instead of earning flowers through playing levels and finding objects (which one could argue is the whole point), flowers are rewarded for buying decorations and upgrading buildings on the estate. This creates an illogical and contrived system of currencies: playing levels rewards coins and materials, which in turn are used to buy decorations and building upgrades, which in turn reward flowers that sum to higher player levels, which in turn unlock new levels one-by-one. If that sounds unnecessarily complicated, it’s because it is. Very little is gained from each currency exchange, and binding a player’s story progression to the number of trellises built and bushes planted can only be seen as a ploy to make content last longer.

The joy of a hidden object game is in finding things. There’s nothing wrong with adding extra elements to the gameplay; a good story is a boon to any game, and rewarding players with an increasingly sprawling and beautiful estate to mark their time investment is quite nice. But when grinding for levels and resources reduces finding hidden objects to memorizing where on the screen to tap, there can be no arguing that June’s Journey lost sight of its core gameplay which should have remained its soul.

We Were Here

Sun, 16 Jul 2017 12:00:00 -0700

In this two-player, cooperative, escape-the-room-like adventure, players take the roles of the Librarian and the Explorer. The two begin the game stranded in an unspecified snowy region, and upon discovering and entering a foreboding castle, they are knocked out and placed in separate rooms, connected only by a pair of walkie-talkies. The Librarian is primarily responsible for supplying information to the Explorer, who in turn navigates deadly traps and dimly lit mazes to reach new areas. By piecing together visual clues from both players' environments, puzzles are solved cooperatively, opening doors to new challenges.

For a free-to-play game, this was a surprisingly enjoyable and well-constructed experience (albeit a relatively short one, with an imperfect run taking roughly two hours). The crux of the gameplay rests on using voice-only communication to navigate inherently visual puzzles, which are fairly high-quality. Each puzzle balances complexity with difficulty in a pleasing way, and remains sufficiently independent of the rest, ensuring that each sequence is fresh and surprising. Even so, the overall experience was cohesive, rewarding attention to detail even when the details weren’t immediately relevant. Making the roles unique gives the game replay value as well; even though both players know the puzzle solutions after one successful run, switching roles gives a satisfying “ah, that’s what you were confused about!” kind of feeling.

The graphics are lacking in polish, but this is hardly a complaint given the game is free. In some senses, the lower quality textures add to the experience; I don’t really like horror games, but the use of creepy atmospheric elements and the ever-present sense that my partner was in danger was enough to create the right amount of suspense.

My real complaints are lodged against the bugs we encountered in our play-through, which (as of Update Five) required my Explorer to kill himself so we could restart from the checkpoint. This sort of broke the feeling of the overall experience, as death became a necessary means to an end instead of something worth fearing.

Finally, as a matter of opinion and not of critique, I wonder if the story could have offered any more resolution than what was hinted at in the final theatre sequence. Who was the shadowy figure that placed us here? What drives it to such strange games of mind-over-matter? And what does it want with the one left behind?

Bugs

As of Update Five, the introductory video has audio buffering issues. The chess puzzle has a couple bugs: the librarian often drops the film reel for no reason, and it is possible to get the film reel to play its spinning animation on the table itself if the Explorer applies the power too early.

Heroes of the Storm

Tue, 03 Jan 2017 12:00:00 -0700

Note: This review reflects the state of Heroes just after the Nexus Challenge and the Feast of the Winter Veil 2016.

Heroes of the Storm is a MOBA that felt fresh and exciting at the time of its debut, pitting itself against the genre giants Dota 2 and League of Legends. It offered many maps with varying level design and side objectives which added to the standard formula of tower/base pushing, and — if nothing else — provided Blizzard fans a battleground on which characters from all their favorite games could slash, shoot, claw, hook, and magic their way to victory.

Heroes does many things well. Its gameplay is, at worst, a well polished MOBA experience. At best, teams move between mercenary camps, team fights, and side objectives with fluidity, emphasizing just how natural the game has made it for players to act as a unit, rather than individuals. XP and levelling is done as a team, so excessive farm management or kill-stealing are nonfactors. Mounts allow for quick traversal of the map, which is an engaging alternative to stocking up on teleport scrolls in fear of not being able to assist your team in times of need (Dota 2) or, even worse, walking on foot back to the action after every death (Overwatch). In a similar vein of encouraging cooperation and limiting toxicity, the lack of an all-chat stops players from flaming their opponents. Aesthetically, every character is reconstructed with love and integrity to their original game representations, and the worlds, music, and announcers feel right at home in the Blizzard universe.

Player progression is satisfactory. In what effectively reduces to grinding, players gain XP for their account and per hero by playing matches. A small amount of gold is also earned at the end of each match, and can be used to buy heroes from the roster and certain items from the shop. Quests provide a more substantial source of gold revenue, but also err on the side of grinding instead of skill. Compared to compendium challenges in Dota 2 which push the player to actually do something (e.g., “stun for a total of x seconds”), “play 8 games” feels like a grab for time. Still, the promise of being able to unlock the full roster of heroes and a limited variety of cosmetics (e.g., a hero’s “master skin” at level 10) offers some reward for an otherwise repetitive structure.

Repetition is hardly the mark of a bad game, however. Instead, Heroes fails most notably in its inability to provide the player with a meaningful representation of what all that repetition has summed to. The statistics hardly even deserve that name; they simply count how many games and kills a player has achieved with each hero, and win rates per map. Match histories only display whether it was a win or a loss, with no details on how the player performed, what talents were selected, or even the gamertags of the other players involved. There is no doubt in my mind that this data is available to the developers (as such data is often a driving force in informing hero balances), so including it in the UI seems like an obvious area of needed improvement for the Heroes team.

Today, in a post-Overwatch, MOBA-crowded gaming scene, Heroes struggles to find its place. Several of its most innovative elements such as mounts and talents have been copied by other games (Paladins and Dota 2: The New Journey, respectively). Its “statistics” are laughably barebones, especially for a Blizzard game. Yet its gameplay remains highly polished and its community relatively non-toxic, establishing Heroes as a place that’s inviting to return to from time to time.