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The Forest of Doom Review

July 12, 2013August 9, 2020 Matt Thrower 2 Comments

It’s one of the great ironies of modern gaming that the venerable format of paper gamebooks has made such a huge comeback on mobile devices. And riding the crest of this coolingly nostalgic wave is Tin Man Games. Authors may come and go, designers may build peculiar experimental magic systems into their apps, but the steady Tin Hand ensures a pleasing experience no matter what the content.

Their gamebook adventures engine improves with every release, making combat faster and the interface smoother. And I’ve always loved the eye for detail that goes in to their wonderful collections of achievements and book art, always with knowing winks to consumers of nerd minutiae hidden amongst the titles and the pictures.

Their latest game is a digitisation of hoary Fighting Fantasy title Forest of Doom, originally authored by Ian Livingstone in 1983, before he became officially omniscient in the world of gaming and the engine is as brilliant as usual. They’ve even added an auto-map function which is an absolutely joy, as I’ve always wanted to see a physical map of my path through a gamebook but am just too lazy, or maybe just too excited to keep turning the pages, to bother.

But sad to say that whatever mechanical innovations it provides, this latest jaunt into Fighting Fantasy land isn’t up to the quality of their other recent releases. It’s not the fault of the developer, but, bizarrely, that of the author. When signing the franchise rights over to Tin Man, he insisted this be one of the early releases. This is somewhat inexplicable, since it’s one of the weakest in the original run.

Forest of Doom is a no-holds-barred trip down into the worst excesses of 80’s adventuring. The overarching plot, which involves collecting pieces of a magical hammer to save a Dwarfish kingdom, is right out of fantasy boilerplates 101. The forest itself is just series of sequential encounters with mythical creatures with little to string them together into a meaningful whole, and few clues toward making good choices in the decisions you’re offered.

I have to admit that a part of me did enjoy this return to straightforward adventuring, written before the days when every monster needed a motivation and every dungeon a scientifically plausible ecosystem. But it wears thin with time. Especially when you discover that the book has an utterly nonsensical looping structure should you make it through the forest without collecting all the items you need.

And that map, that wonderful auto-map that so excited me when I first began to explore the forest, ends up inadvertently adding to the woe. Because the best I can tell the book never allows you to turn south. So if you make a wrong turning and miss a location you know you need, you can’t go back to find it. The map taunts you with its prescience, showing the desired location in all its glory, but the text just won’t let you get there.

I think I’m right in saying that the original Forest of Doom was the very first Fighting Fantasy book I ever played. If so, I would have been nine at the time, which makes me thankful I wasn’t old enough to care about its literary shortcomings and went on to enjoy many other books in the series. But my modern day experience chimes with my recollection: I don’t remember it being as good as most of its peers with their imaginative settings and cunning puzzles.

I also remember it being easy, but that’s clearly something I made up. Or, more likely, without puzzles to stand in the way I just cheated my way through the whole thing. But the book does have a reputation amongst series fans for being relatively straightforward, so Tin Man have packed the hardest difficulty mode with a welcome tougher ending. At least it’s welcome until you actually try to get through it. My word; but it’s certainly a fun addition.

It’s a testament to the brilliance of Tin Man’s engine that I got engaged enough by the book to bother trying again on the hardest setting once I’d seen it through on an easier one. They’ve made the experience entertaining in spite of the weak book beneath it. But this is one for genre fans only: most gamers would be better off picking up their frankly superb conversions of Blood of the Zombies or Trial of the Clone, or their cracking in-house commissioned Assassin in Orlandes. And if you’ve not tried a Tin Man gamebook before, you really should do just that.

Fighting Fantasy Blood of the Zombies out on iOS & Android

October 17, 2012August 4, 2020 Matt Thrower 4 Comments

Tin Man Games, esteemed purveyor of the finest Gamebook Adventures to the owners of iOS and Android devices the world over, has today released their first Fighting Fantasy gamebook conversion. It’s the latest in the series by franchise founder and current Eidos President Ian Livingstone, Blood of the Zombies. The title will tell you most of what you need to know about the story. I have it on good authority that the next Fighting Fantasy book up for the mobile treatment is the aged classic House of Horror. Spotting a theme here? So watch Tin Man for a (presumably human) smorgasbord of gory gratification in the near future.

Judge Dredd: Countdown Sector 106 Review

August 10, 2012June 22, 2022 Matt Thrower Leave a comment

I have never been a particular fan of the famous 2000ad comic, in spite of it being a central fixture in the life of most British boys and indeed nerds. But I can’t say the same for its central character, Judge Dredd. I’ve devoured the stand-alone trade paperbacks of his exploits many times over, and played the related board games many more. So you can imagine my delight when I heard Tin Man Games were bringing a Dredd gamebook to iOS, and the further delight when they offered me a copy to review.

Countdown Sector 106 posts you in the boots of the famous lawman himself, drafted in to help out with routine patrols in a sector that’s suffering a shortage of personnel. I have to say that I think the set-up is a bad choice. For starters casting the player as Dredd himself immediately sets the bar very high indeed in terms of writing and story. And Judge Dredd is famous for busting psychotic cursed earth gangs and extra-dimensional psychic entities, not doing routine patrols. Of course we all know Dredd has to do grunt work some of the time, but building an interactive adventure around his everyday experiences? Not such a great idea. You get to feel like you’re a judge in Mega-City, but at no point do you get the sense that you’re the epic man Dredd himself.

The issue is compounded by the writing style. Author Nick Robinson claims himself as a big 2000ad fan and it shows: his tale skillfully weaves in all sorts of mega-city tropes from colloquial language to the likely contents of department stores. Unfortunately he seems to think this familiarity is a substitute for strong characterisation and pacy, colourful writing. Too often the narrative lies flat and lifeless on the page, and it fails utterly as regards the political and darkly humorous overtones for which the comic strip is rightly famous.

However, Mr. Robinson has done a bang-up job when it comes to plotting a course through the numbered paragraphs of the book. The options you’re presented with are often numerous and always help to bring home the dilemmas that Dredd’s everyday activities would present him with as regards juggling the collection of evidence with the need to apprehend perps and a healthy dose of self-preservation. The good choices are subtly hinted at but rarely obvious and the overarching plot does a great job of tying together a disparate bunch of flavourful events into a coherent whole, allowing you to experience many of the delights of Mega-City without feeling like you’re being railroaded.

One issue I have had with all the Gamebook Adventures series is the combat system which is clumsy, overly protracted and prone to wild swings of fate. Countdown Sector 106 uses the same system for hand-to-hand fights but introduces a new shootout mechanic for gunfights. It’s based on a single dice roll and so is much faster and cleaner. It’s also frequently used to present the player with tough risk management choices: they can attempt a difficult gunfire role to take down all the antagonists but risk leaving them all alive, or try a lower value roll to to take down one or two and leave the rest for melee combat. The system works really well, and I hope to see it replicated in future titles.

Another thing all the Gamebook Adventues that I’ve seen appear to have is a good achievements list. This isn’t something I’d normally find worth mentioning, but with gamebooks on mobile devices I’ve found it to be a big incentive to really explore the title, tick all the boxes and thereby get maximum value from the book. The usual suspects are here, including a worthy nod to an icon of British geek culture, and you can also collect the artwork you’ve found in the book, all of which is of the high quality you’d expect from a famous comic strip character. But there’s another neat addition specifically for this book: the perp record sheet. This not only tracks which criminals from the book you’ve successfully hunted down, but gives you a portrait and a short biography for each one that you’ve caught and sent to the cubes. For a budding judge, it’s hard to imagine a better motivation for replaying the book.

Countdown Sector 106 doesn’t endear itself with its bland paragraphs and flabby writing, but once you’re stuck in it more than redeems itself with pacy moments, background colour, a thrilling plot and challenging decisions aplenty. It’s a great way to whet your appetite for the upcoming Dredd feature film, and a welcome return to gaming for one of Britain’s finest exports.

Judge Dredd Gamebook Hits iOS

August 2, 2012August 2, 2020 Matt Thrower 2 Comments

Tin Man Games, having published the most successful series of gamebook apps on iOS so far and fresh from winning the licensce to release actual Fighting Fantasy books, continue their run of form with a brand new Judge Dredd book to whet our appetites for all things Mega-City in advance of the new film later this summer.

Casting you in the boots of the legendary lawman himself, Countdown Sector 106 features additions to the well-worn gamebook adventures mechanics to mimic the sorts of fast-paced firefights you’d expect.

Written by a long-time 2000a.d. fan this looks to tick all the boxes for a quality experience. But there’s a full review in the pipeline, so I can let you know for sure once I’ve had the chance to play through it.

Temple of the Spider God Review

March 2, 2012September 10, 2020 Matt Thrower 1 Comment

You may recall a couple of weeks back that I was eulogising over the possibilities of seeing old-fashioned game books being given a new lease of life via tablets and smartphones. And some of you were kind enough to point out that although the traditional franchises in this sphere such as Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf had been slow to get with the times, there was one company, Tin Man Games, who were doing exactly what I’d been asking for and making all-new game book apps. They were kind enough to supply me with a copy of one of their latest releases, Temple of the Spider God, so I could see for myself whether or not I was right in thinking the format would work extremely well on mobile devices.

If you’re not familiar with game books, the concept is pretty straightforward. The book is divided into a large quantity of numbered paragraphs. You start at paragraph 1, and at the end of each paragraph you’re normally presented with a series of options, each of which has its own numbered paragraph to turn to. Sometimes the choice is restricted depending on whether you can leverage some simple game mechanics to win a fight, pass a skill check or on a decision you made earlier in the book. In this way you make choices to progress on a variety of paths through the book to your ultimate goal. If you are familiar with these sorts of books you’ll be right at home here. Indeed I was pleased to see the occasional nod to veterans, such as the fact the game still displays choices that are blocked off so you can get some idea of what else you might be able to do or what’s gone wrong with your path. Might seem like a tiny thing to a new player, but the nostalgia value of little touches like that is immense. And while it’s a legitimate worry that the game book format itself is out of date, and something to be enjoyed for nostalgia value alone, the app does a pretty good job of putting that concern to bed.

Temple of the Spider God was written by veteran Fighting Fantasy author Jonathan Green, and his experience shows. It’s pulp fantasy, but that’s what you expect in a gamebook: you didn’t come here looking for the intellectual reward of uncovering the next Tolkein or the new Thomas Covenant, did you? And for pulp, it’s very well written and serves the central purpose of feeding the imagination and conjuring thrills and excitement from the dry medium of text on a screen. Several times I felt my pulse start to rise at critical points in the story, and that’s no mean feat for what’s essentially an unresponsive medium. The are a variety of well executed illustrations to add to the sense of adventure and exploration. Although the book gets the vital basics of text and art right I was a bit disappointed that it didn’t make better use of the multi-media capabilities of the device. Audio consists of a pleasant enough soundtrack and the occasional rattle as you throw some dice, but where are the screams of defeated enemies, the rumble of approaching monstrosities or the buzz of tropical insects as you hack your way through the trackless jungles of the book? There’s also no attempt at novel approaches to puzzles and the like that make use of the touch screen or behind-the-scenes tracking or hidden information.

While the author may have done a bang-up job of constructing his prose, I’m a little less impressed by the manner in which he’s constructed encounters in the book. There are several places, including the very beginning of the book, where you face back-to-back fights. This in itself wouldn’t be problematic but the mechanics of the series were partly borrowed from Risk: you roll offensive and defensive dice, compare the highest of each and the higher number wins. If the attacker comes out on top, damage is equal to the sum of all his offensive dice. It’s an extremely chaotic system that’s prone to big swings of fate: one bad roll against a powerful enemy can kill you. It also has a push your luck element to gain bonuses which revolves around a “Fitness” statistic that also gets checked against from time to time in the story, making a high Fitness score a near-essential pre-requisite for success and yet Fitness is determined at the start of the book by rolling one dice and adding six. Again this isn’t so much of an issue in itself but combined with those back to back fights it becomes a problem. Imagine, right at the start of the book, thirsting for excitement and adventure, you have to face off against two reasonably tough enemies with no breathing space in between. It’s easy to die, or to end up in a state in which further combat is inadvisable. It’s certainly exciting, but rather than slaking your thirst for adventure it can leave the player frustrated. In paper format you could easily cheat and bypass difficult fights if you got bored so this wasn’t a problem. The app, rightly, forces you to make legal choices and stops cheating but again it feels a bit like the author was still treating the e-book like a purely text exercise and forgetting about the changes that transition to electronic format entails.

The app does offer a solution to this, although it may not be immediately apparent, and that’s its interconnected bookmarks and difficulty system. You can choose from three difficult levels that offer you incrementally smaller numbers of bookmarks to use. A bookmark just allows you to mark a re-spawn point in case you die. On the easiest setting you get a maximum starting 12 Fitness and 50 bookmarks, making it trivial to slot one in before a fight so you can restart if you die or take too much damage, and another in right afterwards if you’ve beaten your enemies without a hitch. That solves that problem. The higher settings give you ten and three bookmarks respectively and are much more challenging. If you want to try and beat the book on these settings then obviously it helps a lot to have some knowledge of where the toughest points in the story are, and that encourages replay value.

You’re also inspired to play through the book more than once by the inclusion of a set of achievements for you to tick off. This is pretty standard fare in mobile games nowadays but here it really works wonders. Replay value was a bit of an issue with the original paper format books, I rarely felt the need to work through all the different paths once I’d beaten the book. But the achievements here are cleverly designed to encourage you to do just that: it’s impossible to get them all in one play through, and I suspect it would take a goodly number, each focusing on a different story path, to tick off the whole lot. It really helps to encourage you to go back to the game repeatedly, and is ably supported by another clever idea which is the addition of book illustrations in the achievements gallery: if you want to see all the great artwork, you’ll have to keep on working through the different story arcs that the book can provide.

On the whole, Temple of the Spider God makes me feel like I was justified in thinking game books were ripe for re-invention as e-books. It’s a good read, and a fun experience. But there’s one thing we haven’t mentioned yet, and that’s price. Most of Tin Man’s books retail at $5. That doesn’t sound a lot and, given the peculiar logistics of actually having to author a book as well as a usable app, it’s probably a fair price. But ultimately at that price point, the books are competing against retro classics like GTA3, Pirates and World of Goo. It’s in the same price bracket as fully-fledged, critically acclaimed RPGs such as Rimelands and Across Age. And although I had a good time with Temple of the Spider God, price for price, those other games look better value. This is partly why my initial exploration of the space focused on re-publishing old classics which could be done very cheaply: original content costs. At a dollar, even two, I’d eat up game book apps like there’s no tomorrow, but $5 may be a stretch too far. Interestingly it seems that Tin Man may be aware of this: their latest offering Infinite Universe has a adopted a variant of the freemium model whereby you get the first chapters for free, and pay in-app for the remaining content or unlockable extras. I can see that working better, even if you ultimately pay the same if you want to see the final conclusion of the book. And with luck, I’ll have a companion review for the new book for you in a couple of weeks.