#Contra returns controller support tv

The card battles are brilliant, with surprising depth – you can even customise your cards with stat-boosting stickers and rename them in honour of your favourite cricketers etc – and joyously cartoonish artwork. I hope they massage some of the issues, but this is still a great iPhone RPG.Ĭheerful, simplified take on the Magic: The Gathering concept, in which you construct a deck of ‘Power Pets’ cards and do battle with your rivals. The parry/block system is as solid as I’ve ever seen in a first-person RPG, there are masses of weapons and armour to buy, craft and upgrade, and I love the way it works in both landscape and portrait, in different but equally viable ways. The control system falls between two stools (joypad is better for manoeuvring, touchscreen for navigating menus) the Normal and Hard towers are fairly easy, but I reached level 40 without once seeing the item needed to unlock the next category I don’t entirely trust the autosave, which once lost a cool axe I’d recently picked up, yet you can’t manually save and it appears to be super-demanding on the processor, murdering my iPhone 11 Pro’s battery and making it quite warm.īut there’s so much to enjoy. Highly enjoyable and compelling, despite a litany of small complaints. You’ll need to learn by doing, but it’s worth the effort: the action is tense and the atmosphere well realised through sound and visuals.įirst-person, grid-based dungeon crawler in the style of Legend of Grimrock or Eye of the Beholder, but with a single character rather than a party.

The idea is to find and destroy a requisite number of ‘spirit anchors’ and then escape the level a continuously spawning collection of Lovecraftian monsters (the equivalent of Genestealers in Space Hulk) do their best to prevent this.įirst impressions were a little baffling: the stats and dice rolls and even view controls (it’s a two-finger horizontal swipe to rotate, not the traditional twist gesture) were probably explained in the tutorial but there’s too much to take in all at once. You control two or more characters, each of which has three action points per turn that can be spent on moving, shooting and searching for items. Stranger Things-inflected survival horror board game that isn’t great at explaining its rules and mechanisms – you could really do with a nerdy friend to talk you through it all – but is a lot of fun once you catch the drift. The eccentric visuals and phenomenal music, the Limbo-style silhouette deaths and sinister collectibles: it all adds up to a game that draws you into its world and gives additional motivation to progress. There are some real head-scratchers, and a terrific sense of satisfaction each time you work something out.Īs puzzlers go Creaks has an unusually well-defined sense of narrative flavour, which forms an integral part of the experience rather than background fluff. But don’t underestimate the thought and developmental pedigree that’s gone into this. That’s a simple premise, and there’s a pleasing purity to the gameplay. On each level/scene, you have to clamber up and down ladders, manipulate lights and bully the various monsters into positions that allow you to continue onwards.

#Contra returns controller support tv

Apple TV owners have complained, too, that there’s no support for local ‘couch’ multiplayer on a single device.īased on the look and the maker’s reputation I expected this to be a point-and-click adventure, but it’s pure puzzle action. The Quick Start option is a brilliantly easy way of starting a game with three AI opponents, but my only quibble is that it’s a lot harder to set up a game with other humans: there’s no online matchmaking function, with the onus on you to find fellow players on Twitter, in real life etc and swap party codes. And the more dots you eat, the faster you move, which gives the game a thrilling natural acceleration. For a start, you retain control after being ghostified if you then manage to catch one of the remaining Pac-Men you switch roles and you’re back in the game. If one of you is caught by the non-player ghost, or by a fellow Pac-Man goofing on a power pill, you turn ghostly yourself when only one Pac-Man is left, that player wins.Ī simple setup, then, but it’s got more nice touches than a Swedish masseur. This stone-cold multiplayer classic pits four Pac-Men against one another in a fight to the death.