Hero Mages is a top-down perspective, turn-based tactics game by D20 Studios. At first glance, it looks a little bit like one of the battles from Telepath RPG: Servants of God, but with a three-unit cap and a more traditional fantasy setting. Upon closer examination, however, one can see that it strongly incorporates CCG elements that change the flow of the game considerably. Here is how the developers describe it:

Hero Mages is a game of strategy that plays just like a board game. A 13×11 grid represents the field of battle. A roll of dice determines the results of combat. A deck of cards represents the power of magic.

At the start of the game, each player is dealt a hand of seven cards and assumes command of a team of 3 heroes consisting of 1 Mage and 2 Guardians. These heroes are represented on the game board as animated models called “units”. The concept of the game is simple: players take turns moving and attacking with each of their units in an effort to eliminate all of the opposing heroes. The player with the last surviving team of heroes is victorious!

Units possess diverse statistics and abilities that give them distinct strategic advantages within the game. Your Mage is your most powerful unit. In addition to having four unlockable special abilities, mages are the only unit that can cast spells. Spells are potent magical abilities that allow you to empower your units with strength, unleash the fury of the elements upon your foes, manipulate the battlefield, and create additional units called “creatures”. Leverage the powers of your units and spells to develop creative ways to dominate the battlefield.

Here is a trailer:

You know, it’s funny: I thought I was so original when I started developing a game like this last year. But apparently I’m just one of two or three studios that had that idea. After years of getting almost no games like this, we are soon to have an embarrassment of options. That said, only Hero Mages is out right now. Since it’s free, why not pop over to their site and give the game a try?

Also: they just announced an Android version of the game that’s in progress. Here is a peek at that.

Misfortune is a single player online RPG, in which you find yourself lost in a strange city. The story unfolds slowly through a series of short unique missions and strange events.

Two things I like about Misfortune: the art is quite nice, and you will frequently encounter text-based vignettes as you explore. You will seldom have more than one or two choices during these events, but some of them involve ability checks with branching results, which I appreciate.

The game uses a grid-based first-person perspective, and has a definite dungeon-crawling vibe to it even though you spend all of your time traversing city streets. The game runs in real time a la Dungeon Master, but you play only a single character.

Unfortunately, there is a noticeable lack of variety to the missions themselves, as well as the environments where they take place. Dungeons are generally fairly linear and simple to navigate, and lack any significant traps or puzzles. Moreover, you cannot return to areas once you’ve cleared them. I would not be surprised to learn that these missions and their associated dungeons are randomly generated. Combat literally plays itself out for you: the only interaction required of you is to click on each enemy once to target it. To put all this another way: there is no challenge to navigation, and battles are almost entirely devoid of tactical complexity. This might be a nice, gentle introduction to RPGs for the new player, but there really isn’t enough there to keep an old hand at the genre occupied.

Misfortune is free to play, though it relies on certain tricks common to Facebook games of the Farmville variety (e.g. limiting you to a certain number of missions per day and prompting you to post things to your friends’ walls when you finish quests or gain achievements). Even moreso than the last browser-based RPG I posted about, this feels like something Zynga might release. Whether that is a good thing or not, I leave to the reader’s judgment.

Still, the game is free, so you might as well give it a try. Below are some screenies showing what it looks like.

Caravaneer has been around since 2007, when Dmitry Zheltobriukhov created it as an homage to the Fallout series. One part post-apocalyptic RPG and one part economic simulation, Caravaneer doesn’t quite fill Fallout’s shoes, but it does stand up quite well on its own two feet.

In Caravaneer, the world as we know it has ended. Global warming has reduced civilization to a few scattered cities dotting a vast and dangerous wasteland. Food is scarce. Cars are a rare luxury. Gangs attack travelers, looking to kill them for the goods they possess and the pack animals they use to carry them.

It is difficult to talk about “what you do” in Caravaneer, because the game is incredibly open-ended. While various people will give you objectives with the goal of having you influence the balance of power in the wasteland, you can pick which faction you want to support, or simply ignore all of them altogether, focusing instead on building your personal wealth as a caravaneer. In fact, you don’t even have to be a caravaneer: you can choose to play the game as an outlaw who attacks other caravans and steals their goods. The sheer variety of ways you can choose to play is pretty astonishing, and in some regards it far exceeds the original Fallout games.

As in Fallout, shops carry a wide array of armaments that have different weight, range, damage, and accuracy stats. Melee weapons deal damage based partly on your Strength stat. Guns require ammunition, which you must buy separately. Shops have limited inventory. Once a shop runs out of the type of ammunition your gun uses, you must find more elsewhere, or else use something different to defend yourself.

Shops don’t just carry weapons and ammo. They also sell medical items and water canisters of varying sizes. You’ll be needing those. In some respects, Caravaneer plays a lot like the old Apple II classic The Oregon Trail. Survival is a real concern, much more so than in Fallout, and it’s not just enemies that can kill you. Fail to stock enough food and water before you set out into the wasteland, and you will die. Get sick without having medicine on hand, and you will die. You can buy pack animals and hire people to travel with you. They also need food, water, and medicine. Fail to plan for their basic needs, and they will die too.

Aside from shops, you can also visit the marketplace. Every town in Caravaneer has an economy, with certain goods that it produces and certain goods that are in short supply. Your most basic means of earning money in the game is to buy goods where they are cheap and sell them where they are in high demand. You’ll find yourself planning routes through the desert in order to maximize the money you make from each trip. Later on, you’ll need to read news updates about changes in the economy of the wasteland in order to adapt to new shortages and surpluses.

Combat in Caravaneer is turn-based. Each character has a number of Action Points available to use during his or her turn, based on upon his or her Agility stat. Everything you do uses Action Points. Moving one space uses an Action Point. Firing a gun uses Action Points. Reloading uses Action Points. Many weapons have alternative attack styles. With guns, for example, you can try aiming your shots for an extra Action Point or two in order to eke out an accuracy/damage bonus. (Unfortunately, you can’t aim for particular body parts the way you can in Fallout.)

While Caravaneer clearly draws from the Fallout well (and in some areas, goes well beyond what Fallout offered), it unfortunately fails to capitalize on some of Fallout’s most memorable features. One of them is thematic. Caravaneer lacks Fallout’s ironic use of 1950s America, with its hopelessly naive view of the future, as a backdrop. This is unfortunate, because that backdrop gave the Fallout games tremendous narrative weight. In the 1950s, many people believed that consumerism would deliver them the good life. In Fallout, we discover that instead, it delivered a nuclear holocaust. The drive to claim dwindling natural resources in order to keep mass production alive has literally brought about the end of civilization. Fallout doesn’t let you forget that bitter irony for one second, from the opening cut scene of a still-functioning television in a bombed-out apartment building still showing advertisements for now-useless goods, to the cities you visit with walls quite literally built out of bombed-out cars and ruined merchandise. Caravaneer has nothing to offer of similar gravity: all we get is a wall of text at the very start of the game blaming global warming for the state of the game world, and then the matter is promptly dropped.

Theme isn’t the only narrative area where Caravaneer disappoints. While Caravaneer is very good at delivering a great open-ended experience that demands you to think of how best to survive and exploit the strange, brutal world you now inhabit, it simply doesn’t have very many characters or narrative situations to flesh out the story. There’s enough there to give you context and provide you with different roles to play in the game world, but you won’t be meeting any particularly memorable people or learning much about how the world got that way. For the most part, Caravaneer depends on you to fill in the gaps yourself through role-playing, constructing your own story by making choices about what to do and how to survive.

The Verdict: 4/5. While it can’t be recommended to people seeking a narrative-driven game, Caravaneer’s open-ended gameplay and unique simulated economy make it a fun and rewarding RPG for detail-oriented, strategic players. There simply isn’t anything else quite like it.