Duel of Champions (MMDOC): Introductory thoughts

I like to pronounce it MMMdock.

I've played a fair number of card games over the years, and the rise of the "f2p" CCG market has interested me. I have a MTGO account but after a run of trying to enjoy it a couple years back I realized that magic, online, is just not really a good translation. A friend has dragged me kicking and screaming back into real life Magic, which is actually great since we happened to bumble into a comic store in Oakville - a one Comic Connection - and the store is just fantastic, with a really great location and an awesome owner. So I do actually play Magic via Duels of the Planeswalkers and now in real life, but not on MTGO, because it's awful. I've had conversations with other players and many of them agree that regardless of the convenience of drafting without pants, MTGO is simply too terrible a platform to sink money into. Not that everyone feels that way.

Anyway so I do get the card playing bug here and there, and the MMDOC thread has floated around on the front page of Games on SA for a while. I'd read bits and pieces of the thread for a while, and recently it came up that the game would be launching an 'easier to get into' new base set with a new format centered on that set. Figuring what the Hell, I finally installed the game and gave it a try. This is a review of the game before the new base set launches and I'll explain why I started playing

I should mention that yes, there is a HoMM sucks now tag and yes, I have found Ubisoft's attempt at the franchise rather miserable. I haven't tried 6 yet, but the dev videos made it look somewhere between awfully generic, pointless watered down and incredibly weeaboo. I've played about a thousand hours of HoMM3 and I've always found it sad that the franchise has been treated so cruelly, but I'm not going to hold it against this game. Or even six, really, it just hasn't been cheap enough to bother playing a game that is supposedly super buggy.

I do admit that I really don't understand why they bought the IP only to basically use little beyond the name. MMDOC doesn't remind me, IP wise, of Homm3 at all.

The Secret of Success is Card Work: Clickr

I actually played Clickr well past the point of getting my cards, but somehow it just sounds like a pun name suits a silly little game. Clickr was on my wishlist, on Steam, for a long time before a friend bought it for me for Christmas after I bought them a game a day for a week or something. Steam sales are good for buying but they're really good for gifting!

Clickr is a very simple to learn puzzle game that relies on little more than three button presses. First and foremost is 'the clickng' which allows you to remove most pieces from the playing board with a click of the mouse. Your goal in doing so is to produce four squares of the same color, which join up to become a clickable big square that generates points. The game also allows you to rotate the board, with gravity always obeying whatever down currently is. There is little more on the basic level than this, you can also get 'turn squares' which increase points, chain combos and some game modes have 'block' and 'star' pieces which behave slightly differently. There's a fair amount of depth in the core gameplay even if the basics are very, very simple.

Presentation wise Clickr appears to me to be rather, well, Asian in origin with very cute graphics and an adorable sound track filled with happy noises. Apparently the studio behind the game is from South Korea, which wasn't my first guess, but I won't post my first guess since it kinda shows how poor I am as a white canadian man at telling different cultures apart. I digress; the game is smooth looking, the interface is good and like I said it is filled to the brim with large amounts of cute. My only real complaint with the art style and presentation lies with the skin feature. The game allows you to reskin it to your pleasure, but there's only three skins, which it could have used more!

In terms of content there really isn't a "basic" Clickr game. You open with puzzle mode, which is actually far more cerebral than it appears at first blush. I didn't really notice until stage 21 (which, if you buy the game, you'll probably notice as well) as to what is going on. After that you get battle mode and push mode, which are sort of "vs" game modes against the AI. Battle mode requires paying attention to the other player far more than push mode, with rewards for timing your stars and minetraps against the AI's wave of forces. It's a good extension to the main game, and fun in its way. Lastly there's a puzzle mode that centres more around turning than clicking, which is referred to as IQ mode. IQ mode feels like a more nuanced shifting block puzzle.

Each of the main modes will have a handful of additional tweaked modes based on them, such as a battle mode where you don't get stars but get tons of stones to make mines with instead. Most of these game modes are slightly different, but don't really offer a big enough change up to really make you enjoy a mode you've grown tired of.

Regardless, if there is one complaint about Clickr it ties back to why I had the game on my wishlist in the first place. I don't really go in for puzzle or match games. I really liked Bejeweled 3, but I only played it for a week or two before getting tired of it. You know who does like Bejeweled 3 a ton? My mother. So I've been looking for other puzzle games to put on her computer, and Clickr unfortunately does not fit the bill. There really aren't many casual modes for this game and the relaxing content dries up after the first hour. Past that, it isn't a casual game, and after a while success required something like 2 clicks per second. I'm not really fretting, it was never for me and I did have fun with it, but it's not casual enough to gift to my mother.

There's nothing really wrong with clickr, other than being a bit too hard, but if you're looking for another match puzzle game to fiddle with, it's a well made title with some cutesie graphics and a silly sound track. The presentation is good and the game, while simple, is pretty good.

Fresh from the bundle farm: Guacamelee!

I don't really know if Guacamelee! is made by individuals of a Mexican pursuit, descendent or what not. As with many individuals born so far north of anywhere humans should actually choose to live, Mexican culture comes through the filter of an entire country of homogenization, leading me to only two conclusions: Mexicans have a flair for colors that require seizure warnings, and delicious. (the country in that example is the one between, in case you misunderstand)

I can not, unfortunately, eat Guacamelee! but I can describe it as Mexican Luchadore Super Metroid. Or maybe just Super Luchadore Mextroid? That sounds racist. Forgive me. Really, Super Metroid is one of my favorite games of all time, given I did play and beat the original Metroid as a small child and the basic design philosophy is likely to be one of my favorite of all time. Later Metroidvanias don't really hold up to me, becuase Metroid and Super Metroid both had this feeling of exploring an alien world.

Guacamelee! certainly isn't a classic - I'll set the tone right here, Super Metroid is a classic and Guacamelee! adds things to the model which flatly worsen the game to no real benefit in many cases - but it's amazingly charming and the art/music are (maybe?) culturally inspired by Mexican motifs, which gives you this really unusual and outlandish feel. Outlandish to someone born where there's two feet of snow still on the ground I mean. Many of the Super Metroid abilities are translated into this crazy wrestler world, with things like the bizarre Maru-Mari having a unique but equally bizarre version in this game. Not gonna spoil it, because it took me a moment when I realized what it was and I was very amused.

Grinding on that tower like a pop music video: Prime World Defenders

I'm a big fan of Tower defense games as what I mentally refer to as "coffee games". Games you can pour your first copy of coffee and then play while you slowly savor your home-brewed, fresh ground steaming beverage. As such, this is going to slant this review in sort of a weird manner, because Prime World Defenders is a tower defense game that gained things by losing it.

PW:D is made by Nival Entertainment, who I don't know overly much about. I believe "Prime World" is a brand for their grouping of products, though I haven't looked into any of the other ones there's at least two more. Nival apparently did some of Heroes of Might and Magic V, which I found incredibly boring. I have something like a thousand hours logged in HoMM3 and quite a few in HoMM4 even, so I was rather surprised to find HoMM5 incredibly dull and not at all what I was looking for. I'm not going to hold it against Nival though, since I have no idea how much of it was their fault. Ubisoft continued to plow on, with the next developer further simplifying odd elements of the game and adding weeaboo shit. Do you really think people who have trouble with turn based strategy games have trouble with things like hexes and the fact there's multiple currencies? People don't have trouble figuring out how different monies work. We're capitalists. Money is 90% of what we do!

Anyway, as I said, Prime World: Defenders is a tower defense game, but with something of a twist that takes over a great deal of its gameplay and resources. That twist is free to play style grinding, though as far as I can tell there are no in application purchases in PW:D. Maybe f2p is the wrong description, but it feels like someone had some good ideas vis-a-vis f2p CCGs and then grafted those ideas onto a tower defense game.

It's sort of interesting because whether or not you like this game likely starts and finishes right from the question of whether or not you can appreciate a very upfront and obvious skinner box. Actually, to be frank, the game is probably a hybrid of the core gameplay of a tower defense with the addictive spicing of a Diablo game on top of it. Does that sound good?