Assaultaire :: Tomatl :: News

The game I played most this week: Pyromania

Tanks Behaving Badly :  Assaultaire

Assaultaire is getting a lot of attention on the various sites, and after playing it I can see why. It’s one of those overhead scrolling combat games where you drive a tank around and take out targets. If this sounds a lot like My Little Tank, a game Astraware released a couple of months ago, the premise is the same. While Assaultaire doesn’t quite have the cute graphics and no-nonsense game play of MLT, it’s much more sophisticated and is likely to satisfy those wanting more depth and flexibility in their arcade shooters.

Assaultaire uses a top down scrolling interface. The player’s tank is centered at all times, and the rest of the screen rotates as you move and turn. The movement is perfectly smooth, although all the vehicles (including the player’s) are a little smaller than they should be and often hard to see against the gray background. The game’s visuals seem to work pretty well for it, although the explosions are a little more pixilated than I’d like them to be.

While your primary goal is to take out enemies, you have a variety of ways to get the job done. For starters, your tank has three default weapons, ranging from a predictable machine gun to a rocket launcher to a mortar. This range of weapons allows you to attack enemies from a fair distance or up close, depending on your style. Your tank also has numerous attributes ranging from speed to the firing rate of each of the built-in weapons. These attributes can be freely boosted (via bonus points) when the player reaches a certain number of points (much like in an RPG). They can also be freely adjusted for strategic reasons. For example, if you’re at a mission requiring you to simply blow up a whole bunch of targets, you can simply cut down on your speed and load up on armor and firepower.

For missions requiring more precision (say, taking out a certain target within a limited time frame), you’re better off kicking up your speed at the expense of everything else. Each attribute is controlled by a slider, and you’re given quite a bit of flexibility over how your tank will perform. A nice feature is the ability to change these settings at any point during a mission.

As for the missions themselves, they try to avoid the idea of blowing up everything in sight and give the user a lot of opportunity to fiddle with the tank settings in order to find the best compromise. As with MLT, the enemy tank AI isn’t the greatest, and they’ll simply fire away when they see you. If you’re good at dodging bullets, the enemies aren’t too hard to take out unless they’re in large numbers.

One of the best things about the game is that, like in a real tank, the turret and movement controls are independent. The way it works by default is that the D-pad controls the movement of the tank, while the turret and weapons are controlled by the stylus. This makes it possible to fire sidelong at an enemy and even shoot volleys as you’re running away. With the good 3D engine and the variety of weapons, the game plays very well. Sometimes, interesting tactical situations emerge, but don’t expect a great deal of strategic challenges in Assaultaire—it’s still an arcade game at heart.

While the core game plays pretty well at the default settings, Assaultaire has some extra features that add icing to the cake. The game’s difficulty can be adjusted via independent sliders controlling the overall speed of the game and the strength of the enemy. A number of graphics features can be toggled for those playing the game on slower devices.

Once you finish the game’s primary campaign (or if you want a change of pace), three minigames are included: Incoming! (Missile Command, sort of), Sabotaire (like the old Atari 2600 game Combat), and Maze Hunt (find a target in a maze). Another game I’m looking at, Air Islands, also has a few mini games included. I think these are a good idea and should be included with more complex titles so that gamers get the best of both worlds.

Assaultaire probably won’t offer much to strategy gamers. However, if you like action games, especially those that require you to do a little tactical planning, the game delivers the goods.

Thinkin' Like an Incan: Tomatl

Tomatl is a strange little tile-matching game from a Belgian company called Kyuran’s World. It’s apparently based on an old game called “Tomatoes” that was played by the Incas. The idea is pretty simple. You’re given 72 stones, divided into six colors and six different patterns.

The goal of the game is to arrange all of them on the board so that each piece is next to another with the same color and/or pattern. Because the number of available spaces is limited (and gets more so as you play), some thought is required in planning your moves. One nice feature of the game is that, for each move, tapping the screen and holding will highlight all possible moves.

While the idea behind Tomatl is unique, I have to admit that the game play doesn’t grab me. The graphics, while not terrible, are less than remarkable. The game has no sound. Placing a tile so that I have room for the next doesn’t appeal to me for some reason. I think it’s because, apart from the next tile, you never really know which tiles are coming up (they become available in random order). I don’t really get a sense of satisfaction after completing the game—there’s just something about it that seems a little counter-intuitive and hard to get into. At the end of the game, you’re presented with a code that you can enter at the game’s Web site that will rank your score. That’s a nice feature, but I don’t see too many people doing that with this type of game.

Tomatl is freeware (as of version 1.3), and I have to give the developer credit for creating a unique title and allowing people to enjoy it for free. That being said, Tomatl isn’t the most exciting free game I’ve played, but it’s competent. Had the basic idea and execution been jazzed up a little, I think it might’ve been an interesting title. As it is, the game is worth checking out as long as you don’t have high expectations.

News: PocketGamer.Org Facelift

Those of you who follow the Pocket PC gaming scene know that one of the main sites I visit to keep up with everything going on is PocketGamer.org, which, along with PDArcade.com, do a great job of covering the gaming side of Pocket PCs. After years of the same basic design, the site recently got a facelift. The various content areas are divided a little more clearly, and overall, the site looks a lot cleaner. Gone are the messy numbered page links at the bottom to access older news. You can now search through new releases and updates on a dedicated page with a search feature (a similar page exists for reviews). Overall, the site looks a lot better and a bit more modern. I have a few ideas on how they can improve it even more:

• Format the pictures consistently by either placing them on the left or right of the article. (Right now, their random placement makes the page look a bit cluttered.)
• The screenshots should always show the actual game play and never the title screen.
• Each item’s category (news, updates, reviews, offers, under development), should be highlighted more clearly.

Discuss...

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