Devils Attorney game Review

Devils Attorney Review Score:

Devil’s Attorney, a turn-based strategy game with a litigious theme, has been released by 1337 Game Design and is now available from the app store. Chock full of humor and RPGish elements, Devil’s Attorney is cleverly entertaining and a real treat for mobile gamers.

Devil’s Attorney Review Pros:

• Polished cartoon presentation with a great courtroom vibe; influenced by ’80s style and packed with humor
• Soundtrack is outstanding, intro song is infectious, and voice work is terrific
• Controls are simple to use
• RPG elements add great depth

Devil’s Attorney Review Cons:

• Love the game, but hate the name
• At times, it feels a little too easy, but the experience trumps the challenge

The attorney in question is Max McMann, a charismatic defense attorney charged with helping his clients beat the system and regain their freedom after they find themselves in all manner of hot water with the law. Whereas most turn-based strategy games take a shoot-first, ask-questions-later approach, Devil’s Attorney takes a more cerebral, questions-only approach as you launch judicial-specific attacks (interrogating the witness, tampering with evidence, epic speech, etc.) to wear down the prosecution’s case and take advantage of justice’s blind eye. Additionally, you can make moves that strengthen your own case or mitigate the damage caused by your opponents. Cases play out over the course of several rounds, starting you with 9 Action Points to purchase the tactics needed to poke holes in the opposition’s case, eliminating pesky witnesses, damning evidence, and slimy lawyers one by one.
 Once you’ve used up your AP, the prosecution inflicts damage to your case. You go back-and-forth until one side claims victory. If you win, your client gets off and you receive a tidy sum of money for your troubles (including bonuses for quick dismissal), which you can use to purchase new duds or swanky items for your apartment. After all, that’s what it’s all about, right? These living quarter upgrades and personal improvements give you new skills to use as you battle it out in front of the bench for subsequent scofflaws. Personal gifts also enhance the tactics you’ve already acquired.

Graphically, the cartoony presentation is terrific, clean and appealing. Your tactics appear in a scrollable list on the left half of the screen, with a short explanation of each item’s effect and the number of Action Points required to use it. Your AP total is at the screen bottom, and your case strength appears at the screen top. The opposition is listed on the right half of the screen, with credibility ratings at the left of each item and a damage indicator listed underneath.
If you can reduce the credibility to zero, they drop out and bring you one step closer to winning. Reduction of damage and the elimination of damage enhancers is key to swift victory. There is little animation other than some funny cut scenes with goofy banter between McMann and the prosecutors.
The soundtrack is catchy and the voice work is outstanding. The intro song is a major highlight and a bear to get out of your head once you’ve heard it. Humor is plentiful, providing levity and quirkiness that permeate throughout the game. Controls require you to tap on a tactic to select it, then tap on a prosecutor, witness, or piece of evidence to attack it.  A small pop-up indicates how much damage is inflicted, as most attacks have a value range that’s broad enough that you never know whether or not an attack with have a significant effect or not.

Replay value is somewhat low, as there really isn’t any need to replay cases that you’ve already won, nor does there appear to be any way to go back and do so. There are a ton of cases to work through, and deciding which upgrades to pursue and which gifts and accessories to accept can create varying experiences that should bring you back for more. It’s a surprisingly deep, superbly polished, and devastatingly addictive game that took us by surprise. A universal app for $2.99, Devil’s Attorney is a fantastic 5-Dimple stud.

Devils Attorney game Review Video

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Dominant Species game Review

Lots of strategy; worker placement “algorithm” works well for computer play Useless tutorial; no asynchronous multiplayer; interface obscures important information Dominant Species is a good game stuffed into a box that’s too small for it.
Mother Nature may be red in tooth and claw, but that doesn't mean she can't enjoy a good strategy game every once in a while. That means Dominant Species should be right up her alley, assuming she can figure out how the game works.
Dominant Species is an iPad conversion of a strategy board game published by GMT Games. It depicts Earth shortly before the last Ice Age, with arachnids, insects, amphibians, birds, reptiles, and mammals competing to survive and prosper as glaciation overtakes the land.
It's a nasty, brutal struggle of... well, of placing pawns, moving little cubes around in hexes, and drawing cards. The game is a little abstract that way. In the board game world, Dominant Species is known as a "worker placement" game. You have six pawns, which you use to choose the six actions you want to do during the round. Each action is a simple event within the game, such as adding a food source to the board or scoring points. You have many more choices than you have pawns, and you can do the same action more than once if you like.

Crocodile vs Rhino, only on Nature's Pay-Per-View
Worker placement games work a lot like computer programs, with the players calling the subroutines that will help them to score the most points and win the game. This makes worker placement games easy to adapt into computer games, but it also makes playing the game feel a lot like programming a computer.
In the case of Dominant Species, playing the game feels a lot like programming a computer without a reference manual. The rules are not difficult, but the tutorial does almost nothing to help you learn them. It shows you how to place your pawns and move your creature pieces, but it never tells you how the different game events work, or why you should choose them. You learn a little bit about the mechanics and nothing about the strategy, which means you're likely to spend your first game flailing around and wondering why you’re losing.
The only way to really learn the game -- assuming you don't have a friend to teach it to you -- is to read through a long and sometimes opaque manual. You’ll find the most important part (what the various events you can choose actually do) several clicks deep.

If you squint hard, you can pretend they're ripping each others' heads off
The game also hides important information in the menus at the upper left corner of the screen. This isn't a fatal flaw, but it's a big difference from other board game conversions like Ticket to Ride, which makes sure that everything you need to know is right there on the main screen.
Once you've learned the game, you'll appreciate the strategies that are available. There are many ways to win, and each type of creature has its own subtle strong points.
On the other hand, you'll also notice more little flaws. Once you've started taking an action, for instance, you can't undo or cancel it. That’s inexcusable in a game that can be lost with one misplaced tap.
The lack of asynchronous online multiplayer also limits the game's long-term appeal, though that would be a difficult feature to implement given the game's structure.
Dominant Species is not a bad game. In fact, it's a very good game. But it’s difficult to learn and presents a lot of information crammed into a counter-intuitive interface. If Mother Nature ever does play this game, let's hope she's not easily confused, or that she's in a forgiving mood.
After all, it's not nice to fool with Mother Nature's strategy gaming...

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