My iPhone and iPad was my new gaming platform. (Shadow Cities and The Walking Dead)
Like I mentioned in my previous blog posts, my iPad was one of the only things I could actually interact decently with as an interface to both my PC and iOS apps. It was just much easier to poke and drag on a touchscreen than toil with a mouse/keyboard or console controller. I looked for iOS games beyond just the plethora of dinky casual games that I could play on my iPad. I found two games that saved my sanity and kept me entertained.
The first one is called Shadow Cities. It's a geo-location based augmented reality action RPG. Basically, you pick one of two mage factions, and engage in building structures, destroying spirit beings, leveling up, learning new action skills, slaying enemy mages, etc. There was some semblance of a skill build in the game to boot. Casting spells was easy to manage one-handed. You essentially draw the shape corresponding to the specific spell. So you can imagine my amusement when I found out that I can interact and play this game easily. I picked the Architect side out of the two factions available primarily because the other faction was the top choice of the two and seemed like the good guys. I thought I picked the evil faction. But there's hardly any difference between the two other than picking a side and picking green or yellow/orange as a color. This was an iPhone game and had no iPad version. It ran decently enough on iPad. So when I was out, I would play the game on my iPhone. When I was at home, I'd fire the game up on my iPad instead.
The game's world took place in a virtual replica of your actual geographical location. Since I live in Makati, my home base in the game was in Makati. I found it amusing that my Mage could astral project (essentially warp) to other friend mages around the world. So from the comfort of my own home, I have travelled to the US, France, Japan, South Africa, etc. All the street names and locations were all Google maps accurate. I also found it amusing that my mage's starting location when I log into the game, would be relative to where I am in real life. So if I was in Mall of Asia, for example, my mage would start in the Mall of Asia area in the game when I log in.
The game even had raids. The game had normal spirits (esentially mobs) of different house/types and sizes (amount of HP). The raids came in the form of these huge spider looking spirits that required at least 20-30 mages to kill. The spiders were essentially the largest form of those spirits and were regarded as bosses in the game. There was no way you could down a spider on your own. So you really had to make friends with other players of your faction. When a spider gets taken down, a random 1 or 2 mages that participated gets a spider token. When you earn enough tokens, you get to unlock spider sigils to change the look of your mage in ingame chat. Not a big deal cosmetic wise at all. But it was valued by all players in the game. The rest of the mages that were not awarded spider tokens get experience for the spider kill.
The game also facilitates wars between mages of the two factions. Enemy mages that are located near you can prove troublesome as they can start attacking you and your structures on their own or en-masse with 50++ enemy mages. So you have to call for help with your comrade mages when a war in an area erupts. Killing enemy mages was quite satisfying to say the least.
Even when my hand already recovered, I continued to play the game until my mage reached max level (Level 22). I invested so much time in the game, that I felt I needed to keep playing until I hit the endgame. It felt good to hit max level just like how it would feel like in any MMO or action RPG that I've played.
The game was waning in terms of revenue for the developer for quite some time before I started playing the game. I was sad to learn that the developer made the decision to close the game down. The game closed down back September of this year based from the comments of the Facebook fan page.
I'll get into the Walking Dead game on iOS after the jump.