Yep, I’m having fun with Ace Patrol, as you may have seen in my previous post, it’s a light single/multiplayer, World War I strategic combat game. Airfights consist of up to 8 combatants, four per side, and vary depending on aircraft, pilot skill, and game difficulty level.
Basically Ace Patrol is a turn based World War I air combat game — in the style of the old Avalon Hill games from late in the last century. You move your aircraft a hex or two at a time during your turn, maybe shooting, and then your opponent does the same.
Actually Ace Patrol kinda reminds me of Richthofen’s War in some of the missions and turn mechanics.
Unlike Richtofen’s War, turn progress happens much quicker with missions unfolding in a campaign sequence mirroring major battles of The Great War.
I’m not going to write a full-up review as the world-wide release of the game doesn’t happen until May 9th. For some reason, the Canada iTunes store was selected to test-launch the title so is available there currently. So I’ll just touch on a few of the things I found interesting about my brief play with the game.
Jaunty music — I rather liked the soundtrack. Cool music and, if you stay on the store or other static menus, you hear some sort of aviation background chatter and noise after the music ends.
Good graphics — the aircraft are kinda cartoony, but overall it works. The map is rendered nicely and the animations are pretty smooth.
User Interface — the 3d rotation around your aircraft and the battle is intuitive and essential to understanding what’s happening in the flying furball of combat.
Four nations and campaigns — An abridged British campaign comes free with the game. The complete British campaign and three others are available as in-app purchases.
The turn-based movement mechanic forces you to think a few turns ahead and attempt to anticipate the flow of battle.
Single and multi-player through turn handoff or local network play.
So yeah, to summarize, Ace Patrol is fun, and yeah, I’ll be playing it quite a bit more, and perhaps investing in some of the additional content through the in-app purchases.
Whoops! Almost forgot the price breakdown of some of the in-app purchases, followed by a cool gameplay video ( 20+ minutes!)
Looks like there’s a one-time-only event scheduled for this weekend. Given my lack of participation in the recent Halloween event, I’d better make sure I’m on hand to represent.
Guild Wars 2: The Lost Shores is the title of it, and judging by the trailer, it looks to be very very ‘interesting’.
The Story So Far…
Actually it’s pretty good. Standard adventuring fare, but being published in 2010, brings many of the game improvements into the story-line. Guards have rifles. The world map has changed. They fear Dragons again.
I’m hoping we’ll see the introduction of the Engineer
Niggles.
Ok, it’s an eBook, downloaded from iTunes. Which means it’s got DRM. For me that’s a problem as I like to read on different devices. I prefer my Kobo, but occasionally will read on my iPad or iPhone, depending on the context.
Last week ArenaNet announced they’d be running a brief ‘Stress Test’ for of their upcoming (and awesome) Guild Wars 2 MMORPG. It starts in a couple of hours, and is only going to run for part of the day, today. And, it’s only open to people who have pre-purchased Guild Wars 2 and registered their account.
So, yeah, I’ll be there. In my case, I’ll be running the test on my Macbook Pro, running VMware Fusion to host a Windows XP session. We’ll see how that goes!
There are those who eagerly anticipate online gaming events. And then there’s the rest of the world. I kinda fall into the first category.
This past weekend I participated in such an event — the first Guild Wars 2 open beta test. Basically it was two and a half days of fresh Guild Wars goodness! But first a little background. … More
Yep, I’m having fun with Ace Patrol, as you may have seen in my previous post, it’s a light single/multiplayer, World War I strategic combat game. Airfights consist of up to 8 combatants, four per side, and vary depending on aircraft, pilot skill, and game difficulty level.
After checking out 
User Interface — the 3d rotation around your aircraft and the battle is intuitive and essential to understanding what’s happening in the flying furball of combat.
