Joining right at the start of a party I might have been the only player for a while, so even if I couldn’t tell Miley Cyrus from Cyrus Vance I was still racking up bonus points for being in first place every time. You compete against other players in brackets based on your level, and as I was starting off only the most popular categories had more than 50 people playing them the hinterlands of jazz, blues and reggae were very sparsely populated.
![gamepad companion guild wars 2 gamepad companion guild wars 2](https://www.playonlinux.com/images/apps/med/2135.jpg)
The top player (occasionally top 3) on the leaderboard at the end of the it gets a badge, with tokens, power-ups and XP distributed to everyone else.
![gamepad companion guild wars 2 gamepad companion guild wars 2](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/3JMhQJoLaso/maxresdefault.jpg)
#GAMEPAD COMPANION GUILD WARS 2 ANDROID#
It’s very cross-platform, with Android and iOS clients as well as Windows, but it’s not so much of a “kill five minutes” mobile game – tenths of a second can make all the difference to your score, and of course you need to be listening intently.Īs well as head-to-head matches there’s a Party Mode that pits you against up to 300 other players in themed parties (60s, 70s, 80s, pop, rock, etc etc) lasting 24 hours. SongPop is the newest kid on the block in my rotation, though the oldest game as it approaches its tenth birthday I played the original incarnation on Facebook, then took about nine and a half years off before getting hooked again. I tend towards flavour-of-the-month decks in ranked battles but it gets a little stale doing the same thing each time drafts, unranked battles, the PvE campaigns, or training mode allow for much more experimentation, and are better venues to tackle the daily missions that give a small amount of currency for playing with certain nations or using certain unit types. KARDS hasn’t hit the one year mark yet, and slips in and out of rotation a little it can still be enormously enjoyable, but also enormously frustrating when you hit certain decks and/or have bad luck with your draws. As an idle game it’s well suited to starting up and leaving it to tick along in the background, occasionally popping back to slightly tweak a formation or start a new adventure, and there’s no shortage of additional elements to progress – character levels, achievements and so on that, like MPQ, slow right down at higher levels to ensure there’s always something to progress. It also has a regular release of a new character per month, with options to acquire older characters, and I’d just finished unlocking everyone before the event that introduced their 100th champion – the Dungeon Master from the old cartoon series.
![gamepad companion guild wars 2 gamepad companion guild wars 2](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/AyHcobjYfT0/maxresdefault.jpg)
Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms has just passed the one year mark since I started with it. Characters range from one to five stars in power, and while I’ve unlocked all of them I haven’t got any 4* character up to maximum level let alone a 5*, it’s calibrated to really slow things down in those higher levels so there’s no danger of ‘completing’ it. There’s something about matching 3 things that remains strangely compelling, with the powers of the characters to mix things up a little and the ongoing levelling and unlocking for a sense of progress. It’s my mobile game of choice for killing five minutes when waiting around, or when half-watching something on television or half-listening to a call. There’s a regular drumbeat of new character from across the Marvel pantheon to unlock and level up after a couple of years I worked my way through the whole backlog, and now keep pace with the newcomers. I’ve been ticking along in Marvel Puzzle Quest for four years now, also a pretty decent run for a match-3 game. Each month a set of historical decals are made available with various challenges, typically getting a number of kills or a certain score with appropriate vehicles, and I’m finding those are a perfect hook – achievable in a sensible amount of time, and a nudge to play various different countries and vehicle types to mix things up. New vehicles are frequently added, now pushing well into the 1980s, but thankfully my Second World War focus means I can happily bimble about the lower tiers where it doesn’t take hundreds of hours to nudge up a progress bar. The oldest faithful is War Thunder, I’ve been regularly playing over nine years now which is pretty staggering.
![gamepad companion guild wars 2 gamepad companion guild wars 2](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/pWJx_y0AVOs/maxresdefault.jpg)
Some combination of those seems to be the key to holding my attention long-term, so I thought I’d do a little compare and contrast. They’re all free-to-play, though, so share many of the persistent elements that tends to bring – rewards/unlocks, achievements/badges, daily/weekly missions, experience points and resulting ranks/levels. I’m currently juggling an assortment of regular games, quite different at first glance: a combat vehicle simulator, a match-3 puzzle game, an idle dungeon crawler, a collectible card game, and a music trivia game.