AstroNest - Nest of the Best!

AstroNest: The Beginning is a mobile space strategy/combat game by AN Games, a company of games developers in Korea.

In a nutshell, you run your own task force of combat space ships, built and supported by a number of colonised planets, in an effort to win the war between the Federation of Terra and the Alliance of Neos. I won't talk about the lore in the game, suffice to say there is some, but mainly it's all about getting the best ships to fight other ships.

Here's the main screen where all the stuff happens

The game has a good mixture of management and combat, neither being too complicated whilst being detailed enough to make you give some thought as to how you want your fleets of ships to form.

Do you want fleets purely composed of small but fast moving destroyers that can take the battle to the enemy? Or perhaps larger ships loaded with missiles that can sit at the back and pound away?  Or do you prefer a mixture?

Tactics such as fleet formations also come into play, allowing you to arrange your ships to get certain bonuses.

Also key are heroes.

I'm convinced that the two guys are related. Or are maybe identical twins and one of them has been time travelling.

Heroes are put in charge of your planets, and of your fleets. You have to get the best heroes for their speciality - there's no point putting a combat expert in charge of managing the gold resource on your home planet, just as an economist doesn't want to be giving orders on the flagship of a cruiser fleet.  Heroes gain experience over time, and also be improved by training or by what are called "Trons", accessories that give them further improvements.

Your planets have various facilities that support your fleets, such as providing gold and mineral that pretty much pays for everything else, energy to allow your fleets to grow in number, and research to improve your ships and heroes.

There's more complexity to the game, but that can be picked up if you go into detail.

Of course the thing I've not talked about yet is the combat.

Here we go! For black & white viewers, my ships are on the left.

For all you muck about setting up your fleets, when you hit that button to fight, it's all taken out of your hands and you have to helplessly watch as your ships either destroy the enemy or get blown apart. Happily however losing your entire task force doesn't actually make any difference, all those ships magically appear again afterwards, ready for another go.

Uh oh... missiles incoming...

Time for revenge!

And that's how it is done!

As with any free-to-play game there are built in restrictions to slow down your play (which can be overridden with the application of cold, hard cash) but to be honest I haven't found any problems with playing it for free so far - although it should be noted that I'm only level 20 out of 100, so my feelings may change. Nevertheless, it's a pleasure to play a free game which doesn't have adverts crawling all over it, and which navigates that difficult path for mobile games of being playable on a small screen yet complex enough to remain entertaining.

I also liked the tutorial built into the game - unlike most tutorials whilst it gives you clear pointers as to what to press and what to do, you're not actually bound into doing exactly what it says. Once or twice I actually found better options than what the tutorial was suggesting for me, and it was flexible enough to let me carry out those better options instead of making me stick with whatever it wanted.

AstroNest: The Beginning is available on both Apple and Android devices, if you do give it a try feel free to send me a friend request (I'm on server Sirius, name Thog (#352945) and I'm on the side of the Alliance of Neos)

Going into the Darkest Dungeon...

I've just started playing a new game, called Darkest Dungeon.  Darkest Dungeon's core material isn't new - take a team of heroes into a dungeon, spank some monster bottom, collect goodies and haul ass out of there like the gangsta's that you are.

But, it gives a rather interesting twist, through the use of stress.

Cheerful looking place, your village, isn't it?

Because, after all, could you go into a dark dungeon, fight a group of undead monsters (or worse), fall in traps, blunder around unable to see because your last torch has run out, without feeling a bit uneasy?  I get scared by the threat of spoiled fruit being thrown at me, so going into a dungeon would leave me unhinged to say the least.

And in this game your heroes go through the same stresses.  Sometimes they scare each other - one particular hero of mine has the ability to turn into a damage-dealing monster, which sounds great, except that it promptly scares all my other folk, sometimes tipping them over the edge.

Here we are looking around a dungeon.  Nothing could go wrong, could it?

As time goes on, your characters pick up bad (and good) personality traits, some of which are obviously undesirable - for example, being prone to stress, so combat scares them even more, to more esoteric ones, like being open to delusions or turning to the dark side.

Oops - here's a pack of undead.  Luckily we've surprised them, so hopefully we'll get to give them a slap first.

At times you almost feel like you're running a mental hospital, as half of your warriors are busy resting up, recuperating, or just getting plain drunk to take their mind off what they saw in the dungeon, while the rest of your guys are braving the dungeon to try to get some money to treat the others.

Old Captain Beaky lobs some smoke at the bad guys.  That'll sort them out.

In the last dungeon I went through before writing this blog post, of my four fighters, one was at death's door (which basically means if she got hit one more time she was dead, and in this game death means death, that character is GONE), one was Paranoid and accusing the others of being traitors, one was Abusive and telling all the others just what he thought of them, and the last one had somehow gone Courageous and, despite being stood right at the back of the group, was doing his level best to inspire the others to shut up and get back to killing monsters.

And my cheeky little robber turns his little pistol into a blunderbuss, to give everyone a good hammering.

There are one or two very minor UI issues where it could be slightly slicker, but nothing that detracts from the enjoyment of the game.  

All dead - time for some loot!  That was easy...

The graphics are good, you become engaged with your characters and want to make sure that they pull through, essentially it keeps you coming back for more.  In short, if you like RPG / adventure style games, but you'd like to try something a little different, it's well worth a shot.