iPad: Warp gate reviewed

Day four of iPad ownership, other than going to Medieval times last night with the wife and kids (where I was spotted with the iPad and generated some interesting nerd envy) I have pretty much spent all my time on the pad. I played a couple of games from Freeverse and will review them here. The first one I picked up was warp gate.



When demonstrating the iPad to people who come into my office asking, "So? What do you think, was it worth the wait?" this is the game I pop open. The graphics are amazing, the UI is very intuitive and the buttons placed so that when holding the pad in two hands your thumbs can hit all the critical buttons.

The Good:

- The games graphics are amazing.
- The brief tutorial at the beginning of the game takes any guess work out of what you need to do.
- The starter quests are interesting and lead you down multiple paths allowing you to develop your character in one of three directions.
- The mining is genius, for anyone who played eve online in the early days, and wondered why they were paying 14$ a month to sit with a puny laser aimed at an asteroid 24 hours a day, you'd love this. You basically deploy a bot on the asteroid, and it mails you gold wherever you are in the galaxy. Might actually be too easy, and they should think about limiting the number of droids you can "control" to 10 or something...
- The news feature allows you to run trade routes and scope out deals.
- If you are horribly impatient, for 1.99$ you can buy an advanced ship with higher capacity for armament and cargo, and yes, I did buy it though there was a problem in shipment and I have yet to receive it.

The bad:

- The starter quests dead end pretty quick and you are stuck trying to get to systems that you can't access because their warp gates are locked for unknown reasons.
- The battle sequences are very short and automated. You basically have the ability to fire your weapons, but your ship does everything else.
- The bad guys hit really really hard.. making most fights last less than 5 seconds. Ideally a battle should last 30 seconds, giving you enough time to think, you know, maybe I should run from this fight...
- You're alone... Horribly, Horribly alone... This would be a very interesting game if you could get into a section that was MMO and fight it out with a friend. Of course the positive side of that is that it doesn't need an internet connection to play.

All in all, this game has me captivated, so much so that I interupted a raid in WoW last night to regale everyone about how cool it was, what? I was dead at the time? Warp gate is a cross between Eve for the graphics, and Trade Wars (does anyone even remember that game?) for developing trade routes and finding the deals that will make you the most money with the least number of jumps. I just have to remember to put the game down and review Castlecraft for tomorrow.