The best iOS game this week - Sid Meier's Starships
Infinity and beyond
Okay, so a lot of iOS games come out each week. In the past seven days we've seen the likes of crowd-sourced music game SongArc, jump scare sim Five Nights at Freddy's 3, and space race strategy game Buzz Aldrin's Space Program Manager.
But let's say you only have the cash to buy one. What should it be? Well this week, we're gonna recommend the iPad-only Sid Meier's Starships.
This is a monster sci-fi strategy game from the man behind Civilization and Alpha Centauri, where your job isn't so much to blow everyone up and claim galactic domination for yourself: it's about seeking peace across the universe.
Of course, you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. And, likewise, you can't forge intergalactic peace without destroying a few battleships. So the game is still filled with intense, scrappy, tooth-and-nail skirmishes on grid-based battlefields.
And best of all, the ingredients for the fights - the maps, victory conditions, and foes - are procedurally generated so you don't have to deal with scripted enemies, and you can play the missions multiple times through.
Our reviewer Peter liked it a lot, and said "Starships is an excellent large scale strategy game, that's nevertheless pleasingly bite-sized". It might be a little pricy at £10.99 / $14.99 but this is a huge game, delivered day and date with the PC version.
Wait! I only have an iPhone!
Oh, you're a menace aren't you. Yes, Starships is brilliant but I suppose it is exclusive to the tablet-sized vessel in Apple's fleet. So if you're only rocking an iPhone, maybe you should try… Card Crawl.
This is a tightly designed little game about making judicious use of a handful of cards, so you can wipe out a dungeon master's 54-card deck without losing all your hit points.
You can only carry three cards at a time, so you better make sure you have a good hand when the upper row is suddenly filled with spiders, trolls, and bats.
It's a little like Dungelot in that it makes a roguelike simple and straightforward, but no less tricky and no less addictive. It also has terrifically personable art, a deck-building meta game for better replayability, and no in-app purchases.
Harry gave it a Silver and said, "some might find their interest waning after they've won a few rounds, but there's a surprising compulsion here, generated by the random nature of the deck of cards, that could well get its claws into you."
