Steel Story (Game Review)

While playing Steel Story, I had a sudden insight. Even though they don't play exactly the same, Steel Story has some similar concepts to tower defense games. Most tower defense games set up gun turrets alongside a path, bad guys come down the path, and (hopefully) your turrets blast the bad guys before they get to your home. I reviewed Age of Barbarians which I felt was a very well done but typical tower defense game. Plants vs. Zombies is probably the most well-known tower defense game.

But on the surface, Steel Story is a physics puzzle game, where you must place certain items, watch them fall, and if you placed things right, avoid bad things. Sort of like you were the pigs and you had to build your house so the angry birds couldn't get you (great idea for a game). But in reality, they feel the same. You do something, you wait, and you see the results of your actions. Different from arcade games, shooters, etc.

Well, Steel Story is a story about protecting cute little robots from a big robot that's trying to hurt them by squirting water at them. But it has the best help I've ever seen, especially for writing games to be played in non-English-speaking countries (which includes a large part of the Firefox OS world).

Instead of telling you, they show you with a cute two-page cartoon sequence.

Here's the first page:

 

You see robots in a factory with an boss robot telling the little robots what to do and feeding them oil. All is well. 

But, a pipe burst!

 

The boss robot is hit with water and it drives him crazy and the robots run away, afraid of the water.

But the confused boss pursues the little robots and spits out red water balloons. Your job is to help the cute little robots by dropping a few well-chosen objects from above. The objects bounce around and your goal is to have the objects cover the little robot so the water balloon doesn't hit them.

Here's an example:

The boss robot is moving from left to right across the top of the screen. I've dropped two wheels and a triangle in such a way that the falling water balloons won't be able to hit the little robot at the bottom left (above the left gear). Different screens have different layouts and objects, and the puzzles are sometimes tough. Essentially I had to try different techniques until something worked. 

So, Steel Story is a puzzle game, a physics game, a water balloon defense game, and in general fun. The art is really great and the help is really smart. This is an example of a nearly-perfect game that will keep you amused on a phone. Each round just takes a minute, but that's what phone games are all about.

Made with a modified Box2D game engine and another framework called Squire (created by the Steel Story creators, True-Token). Squire looks interesting as a game engine and they have a bunch of cool examples at http://true-token.com/squire/demos/.

All, in all, a great little game showing off the power of HTML5 and what can be on Firefox OS!

Cost: Free

Genre: Physics Puzzle (or Balloon Defense)
Score: 5 (out of 5)
Tested on: ZTE Open (Firefox OS)
Get it at: Firefox Marketplace

Age of Barbarians (Game Review)

This game was a pleasant surprise for me. I had played a tower defense game a few years ago and didn't like it that much. Well, things are different for me and I'm more interested in games that aren't World of Warcraft (ha ha).

Age of Barbarians is a nice, well-done tower defense game that works. At first it was easy to play except I kept not doing so well, and then I tried again and got hooked after a few plays.

The goal of the game is to defend your village from barbarians (the cool guys with horns on their helmets). You have arrows and cannons and they have lots of barbarians (and some of them are on horses). Oh, and you have a spellbook, which makes it more interesting.

The directions were pretty good, and given in three parts:

Place buildings to protect your village. Here is where the strategy comes in, and  the "just one more go" takes place and you try to figure out what to do. I put my towers near my home village and failed. You want to spread them out!

You have a path that the barbarians will travel on, and you build towers at certain spots along the way, using wood, stone, and other stuff. You can upgrade or make towers. Each time you survive a wave of barbarians, you get more building materials, so you can fight off larger waves.

But just to make the game more interesting, you get a spell book that can make the game more complicated. For example, you can get a spell that can make the invaders slow down. Click on the spellbook, click on the spell, click on the invading group, and they slow down! This adds more fun and I like it.

Here's an example, in the third village I'm defending. I have a main hut on the left edge, three smaller huts filled with archers, and three invaders who are about to be cut to pieces on the upper right corner. 

The spellbook is on the lower right, the scores for how well you are doing is on the upper right, and if you hit the pause button at the top right, you can choose to replay, quit, or try a different village if you've unlocked it.

The game seems very well balanced and well thought out. The developers, Double Duck, have been around a year, but have created 40 games and prototypes, 100,000 lines of code, and shipped 26 games! Visit them at http://www.doubleduck.co/  They have released 5 games for Firefox OS and I'll be looking forward to the rest of their products. I think this is a perfect game and is the kind of game I want to see more of on Firefox OS: good game play, variety, helpful instructions, nice art!

According to their web site, they produced this game using Haxe, an open-source multi-platform game language (http://haxe.org/) and also CreateJS, both of which look very interesting and are impressive for producing a lot of games in a hurry! For now, myself, I'm most interested in playing games on Firefox OS and making games from scratch, but I know that many people are using all kinds of cool tools!

Cost: Free

Genre: Tower Defense
Score: 5 (out of 5)
Tested on: ZTE Open (Firefox OS)
Get it at: Firefox Marketplace