Armello 12+

Corruption spills through the land of Armello, the once Nobel king slowly dying as the rot spreads through his veins Four heroes from the might clans compete for the throne, whether through sheer might, a sly trickery and treachery or through incantations of the arcane arts.

Armello takes quite a while to get to grips with but once your there no two games are the same, strategically speaking, opening up more options.

Armello is a some what difficult game to like, due to its many quirks and designs, while they all have there purpose and help make Armello a more tactical and challenging game, they sometimes annoy the player, one such example is the vision ( mentioned earlier in some else’s review) , if you want to see what you are doing and zoom out , the map is covered in clouds obstructing the view. The player needs to ‘navigate’ around a zoomed in map forcing you to pay attention.

I have spent many hours on Armello and I love the game, tedious as it may be I will continue to play it, even though new content is substantial later on App Store, and I would definitely recommend giving it a good try.

I played this on Steam when first released and forgot why I didn’t continue to play. This is a board game where you are forced to play zoomed in to a small area of the board. It is not possible to zoom out and get an overview of the whole board to efficiently work out a strategy.

It’s an odd design decision forcing you to scroll around a lot and generally feel disorientated and frustrated in trying to get all the information you need to plan your move. I would understand this more if you were limited in how far your character could see across the board but this isn’t the case. It’s just made awkward to see all the information available to you. It is possible to zoom out slightly to a view which could potentially be more helpful but this is bizarrely blurred out making it a struggle to make things out and unpleasant to look at.

I understand from the Steam forums these are deliberate design decisions made by the devs but their arguments don’t add up to me. I really think they need to look at this again, it seems to alienate a lot of people from an otherwise very promising looking game.

There just aren’t enough games out there like this - turn based, board RPG. There’s the somewhat retro Talisman and the clunky-buggy-but-fun The Otherside but easily the best of these is the magnificent Armello.

I first encountered this on the XBox but it had been a welcome addition to my iPad as I can now do local multiplayer with other iOS users in the house.

Although it’s basically a freemium model app the extra characters and features are not stupid money. Budget about 15 bucks and you’ll have most of what you need by way of DLC sets and whatnot.

My only gripe (that didn’t cost a star on this review as I hope it can be resolved easily) is that the whole board goes blurry and cloudy if you zoom out too far but if you play while zoomed in it creates a sea-sick inducing lurch as the camera follows gameplay.

I’d probably like to see some extra win methods and larger board options added as well, oh, and perhaps more terrain varieties with their own characteristics.

This doesn’t suggest the game is lacking as it is superb as it is but you’d certainly get my dollars for DLC of that calibre.

Keep going!