Warpgate for iPad

The galaxy is a messy place and I’m stuck smack in the middle of it with nothing but a crap shuttle, a few credits, and a functioning pair of balls between my legs. I’m currently in Nation Earth States territory, an amalgamation of several systems controlled by humans with a distinctly militaristic attitude. There’s a few other factions out there controlling other chunks of the galaxy and sooner or later I’ll have to deal with them, befriend them, fight them, or outrun them, but I’ll manage none of it in this shuttle.

My weapons are more like pea shooters and my top speed is pathetic. I could do a bit of trading between the N.E.S systems but the real money is from trading cargo between the systems controlled by different factions. With that in mind I ditch my current N.E.S sponsored mission and rescue a pair of stranded religious nuts from the Ecclesiarchy who are trying to spread their gospel on N.E.S planets. Getting them out of the system was easy enough; out run a pair of N.E.S ships and warp gate the hell out of there. Now the Ecclesiarchy think I’m on their side, fighting for the one true God. The truth is I fight for the credits. I’m sure I’ll find a lucrative enough reason to betray the Ecclesiarchy soon enough. I don’t like religious fundamentalists anymore than I like military states that persecute them. Frankly, I’m aiming to become a pirate. Pirates are a small faction with only a few systems but we share a basic philosophy: get rich any way you can. So I’ll push forward, making temporary friends, betraying old alliances, gaining access to the various warp gates that will inch me closer to the Pirates’ territory. The galaxy is full of rumors of Alien technology, ways to jump to the center of the galaxy, some even say you can find God out there among the clouds. Maybe I could make a profit on that somehow…

This is Warpgate by Freeverse, a game that at times can be so engaging you feel like you’re getting sucked into a narrative of your own creation. This is the ultimate sandbox. A small universe in your iPad/iPhone. This is one of those rare iOS games that will run down your battery. That’s not to say there aren’t problems with Warpgate, some of them fairly irksome.

It will become immediately evident that traversing this massive galaxy can be a little time consuming even with those handy warp gates scattered everywhere. Traveling from Sol to Alpha Centauri takes only a few moments but traveling from Pluto to the Moon in an average ship is an exercise in patience. It’s just so slow! Not in the real, scaled to our solar system way, but in a “I’m squeezing a game in while I wait for the bank teller, so hurry the hell up” way.

At first navigation felt intuitively simple; you tap to move to a spot or swipe to send your ship off in that direction. There are indicators of what’s in the system at the edge of your screen and tapping them sends your ship toward them. The problem is that the indicators only tell you if the object is a planet or warp gate. If you’re not familiar with the system you’re in you have to tap out to the map screen and tap on the system you’re in and then tap “view system” to find the planet or warp gate you need to head to. This would be tolerable and useful if plotting a course in the map screen caused your ship to auto-pilot to that location when you backed out of the map screen, but it doesn’t, only the path you need to take is highlighted. Which means taping on every red highlighted warp gate manually, one after the other. This gets annoying very quickly since a great many missions involve being turned into a gopher. Some alien needs X amount of Y which is obviously not available in the star system he’s in. So off you go through five systems just to buy his 20 tons of Core Diamonds. It would be infinitely better to just choose your destination on the map screen and have the ship auto pilot to that location unless you interrupt with some input or are attacked.

Which brings me to my next quibble, and it’s a big one: the combat system sucks. At first it just seemed simplistic, but as you progress to fighting multiple enemies it starts to feel like button mashing. Combat consists of your ship centered on the bottom of the screen with one button for every gun you have (ten in my case). The battle starts and you attack an enemy ship by tapping the icons of the guns you want to fire. You can have a menagerie of different weapons each with their own damage and refresh rates. Once fired the icon turns red, then yellow and finally green indicating you’re ready to fire another shot. You can also control the position of your ship with the accelerometer, but this is so horribly imprecise it usually ends up with my ship spinning in circles. Eventually I realized if I just tilted my ship away from the enemies and kept firing I would fly away from the action and increase my odds of survival. With multiple enemies you get a column of icons on the right side that you can tap to switch between enemies, since the action is such a cluster fuck to begin with I never bothered. I’d just fire all my weapons, tilt my ship away and keep my eyes glued on my shield indicator. If it dropped too low I’d tap on refresh shields to shunt the power from my “green” weapons to replenish my shields. I really wish there was more to it than that, but there really isn’t. If you have poor weapons you rarely survive fights.

With most games saying the navigation and combat suck would pretty much be the end of the review. What else is there, really? Thankfully Warpgate is infused with a wonderful sense of humor, clearly written by geeks who grew up watching and reading the same sci-fi I did. There are references to everything from Star Wars to Firefly in system names and the easily overlooked news feed on each planet. This is a game that was evidently a labor of love and I can’t help but cut it some slack. Maybe I spent too much time playing Ambrosia’s EV: Nova on my 12″ PB but this is exactly the sort of game I can truly get lost in.

Warpgate is worth your time. Hopefully someone at Freeverse takes a gander at my review and gets fixing things and turns this into the best game for the iPad/iPhone.

(I played the iPhone and iPad versions of this game and while the iPad version is beautiful to look at, the iPhone version plays just fine scaled up. If you want to play on both your iPhone and iPad and don’t want  to buy two versions, buy the iPhone version and use the handy sync feature to keep your game in sync between both devices.)