King's Bounty: The Legend

Been sitting on this for a while. Recently I wanted a turn based strategy game so gave it a try.

Overview

I did not care for the game. Combat was slow and boring. The story didn't engage me. Perhaps I was in a foul mood when I played. I wanted a hard-core strategy and this game was far too light.

Sam and Max

When I was younger I really enjoyed the LucasArts Sam & Max game and I've been enjoying the Telltale games so I bought the big Sam and Max bundle.

Overview

Sam and Max is a series of about 15 games from Telltale. They tell the story of a large talking dog named Sam and an ultra violent rabbit named Max. It's a typical puzzle game. Most of the game involves clicking the screen to move Sam around and clicking on objects to see what they do. There is also a lot of dialog. The major appeal of the game is the humor.

Opinions

I liked the game well enough to finish, but it was a close call. The humor was fine but I didn't find any hilarious moments like I remembered from the old Sam & Max Hit the Road. The puzzles are not as clever as Lucas Arts games and not as engaging as Telltale games. Some of the puzzles were too obscure and I had to either grind through them or read spoilers.

Conclusion

These games are dirt cheap so there isn't much penalty to try it. You might adore the humor. I'm going to at least give the second one in the series a look.

Realm Grinder

A few years ago Cookie Clicker came out. It was the first "real game" of that genre that I had seen. Since then a variety of grinder type games have come out. I usually avoid games of mindless clicking, but Realm Grinder seemed to have some strategic depth to it.

Overview

The setting is generically fantasy based, but that's a thin veil for the underlying mechanics. At the start, you click on the screen to earn gold which is spent on buildings and upgrades. Buildings mostly just provide income per second although when upgraded they can provide other bonuses. The upgrades do all sorts of things, but basically affect how quickly you generate gold and faction coins.

Goal

I'm not sure there is a final goal of the game although it wouldn't surprise me. Perhaps the goal is to see how often you can reincarnate. There is the opportunity for personal goals like, "try every race" or "beat every challenge".

Stages

The game has discrete stages, although they feel more like cycles.

Runs

The runis like what you would expect out of a single game of this type. You click some, build buildings, try to find an efficient path to generate more income, and eventually you quit when you just can't meaningfully increase your income. For a game like Cookie Clicker, you are done. You might start over to find a more optimized strategy, or you might lament wasting time on a pointless pursuit. In Realm Grinder, you don't quit, you abdicate.

Abdication

As you play the game you earn gems. These gems are meaningless until you abdicate. Abdication basically resets the game and you start over from scratch. You get a boost, however, in the form of trophies and gems.

Trophies are basically achievements. Some are purely grinding like "build 10 farms". Others involve difficult challenges like "build exactly 1 of each building". Some require special circumstance like "build a church on Sunday". Trophies have a tangible benefit in that one of the most productive buildings in the game gets a bonus based on the number of trophies you earn. This means that the more you play, the easier it is to get gold.

The real boost comes from gems. Each gem you earn is a global 2% bonus to production. That means if I earn 100 gems my first game, after I abdicate all my buildings will produce an extra 200% more. A typical goal is to earn 20 to 100 times as many gems as you started your run with, so you pretty quickly are earning 1,000,000% or more on your buildings. 

Reincarnation

The goal of abdicating is to get enough gems to reincarnate. When this happens, you lose all of your gems and get some reincarnation bonuses. These bonuses include extra production multipliers and access to additional features, like challenges and new races. Each reincarnation requires many more gems than the previous one.

Strategy

At the basic run level, there is the minor strategy that all clicker games have. Do you build a building or an upgrade? Do you focus on upgrades click rewards or passive production? I find this fairly minor and uninteresting in Realm Grinder, at least past the first run. 

More interesting strategies come from deciding which race to play for a given run. It might depend on how many gems you have, because some races do well in a low-gem run while others do better with high-gems. You also might choose a race depending on how long you have to make your run -- if you plan to abdicate in 10 minutes you want a different race than if you are going to let the game run overnight. Also, your level of activity is important. Angels cast a lot of spells, but that requires paying constant attention to the game. Other races do well with moderate interaction as long as you can poke the screen every few minutes. The undead race give bonuses for the game running offline, so you might choose them if you start a game before going to bed. In addition, you might choose a certain race to get a trophy.

Final Thoughts

When I first started Realm Grinder, I expected a pointless clicker game. Instead I was surprised and amused at how much thought went into turning a pointless clicker game into a strategy game. It's similar to how I feel about all the match-3 evolutions out there. If you are looking for a free mindless time-waster, Realm Grinder isn't a bad choice.