Author: Joseph Leray

Compared to most popular collectible card games, Blizzard’s Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft is relatively straightforward. Simple rules make it incredibly welcoming to new players, but they also allow for elegant strategies and varied tactical possibilities. Unfortunately, as a free-to-play game, Hearthstone runs into the same problems that have long plagued tabletop card games: it’s hard to get worthwhile new cards without breaking the bank.

Based in the same universe as World of Warcraft and the real-time strategy entries, Hearthstone’s battles see two opponents square off, each armed with a deck of 30 cards and 30 hit points. During each turn, you’ll draw a card from your deck, play an attacking creature (called a minion), and gain a mana crystal. Eventually, someone runs out of hit points and the match is over. It’s a pretty basic premise, but it creates a nice balance between short-term tactics and long-term planning—the cards you draw may be unpredictable, but your mana rate is steady.

Some cards have special abilities, too: “Taunt” forces the opposing player to focus on one minion until it dies, while “Charge” lets a minion attack faster than usual—and some spells can raise and lower your minions’ health and attack stats. Hearthstone boils down to trading blows back and forth, but complexity and strategy are derived from how these special powers interact with each other. Eventually, you’ll unlock enough cards to start building your own decks, full of cards that play well together.

Hearthstone is primarily a multiplayer game, broken into two modes. There’s ranked play, which uses a matchmaking system to pair you with an opponent of roughly equal skill, and the Arena, which allows you to build a deck from a randomized supply of cards. Ranked play encourages deep knowledge of one character and one deck, while the Arena focuses more on breadth and flexibility. A turn in the Arena lasts until you’ve lost three matches, at which point prizes—usually a card pack or two—are doled out based on your performance. Arena is easily Hearthstone’s better mode: it exposes players to a wide range of cards and play styles and encourages quick thinking, whereas using the same deck over and over can begin to feel rote eventually.

There’s a tension between these two modes, however. To build a competitive deck for ranked play, you’ll need plenty of powerful cards, which Blizzard is happy to sell: two packs of five Expert cards cost $2.99. A more cost-effective route is the Arena, which is also hidden behind a paywall: 150 in-game gold, or $1.99 in real cash. Here’s the catch-22: you’ll need plenty of high-level experience before an Arena run becomes profitable, but you’ll need plenty of cards to build a deck strong enough to climb the ranked ladder to get that experience. Hearthstone’s crafting system lets you create particular cards using another currency called Arcane Dust; unfortunately, Dust is usually obtained by dismantling other cards in your collection. Any way you slice it, you’ll need to spend hard-earned resources to become a competitive player.

The bottom line. Beginners and mid-range players will find that Hearthstone provides a wealth of easy-to-learn tactical card battling for free, though high-level play isn’t cheap.

Despite its flashy neon lights and comic book-style interstitials, Flashout 2 is a pretty straightforward sci-fi-tinged racer: you’ll zoom around a futuristic track, earn cash, upgrade your podracer, and repeat. Here’s the catch: each hovercraft comes armed with a machine gun, rockets, and mines, and a quick trigger finger is often the difference between first and last.

As is often the case with touch-based racing games, controls are a sticking point for Flashout 2. Thankfully, developer Jujubee offers several different options, each of which has a sensitivity slider, but turns still prove frustrating—when tilting, you’ll have to make an elaborate gesture to make it around a tight curve, while you’ll have to extend your thumb halfway across the screen with the virtual pad to do the same. The virtual button configurations suffer for placing the brakes too close to the weapons and controls, but they’re still the most precise option of the bunch.

Once you get the hang of things, though, Flashout 2 becomes a competent, if insubstantial anti-gravity racer. The dozen-odd tracks are sufficiently curvy and dotted with power-ups, ammunition, boosts, money icons, and alternate routes. Unfortunately, all of the locales look and play alike, and while the hovercraft are certainly fast, they feel weightless and airy; you don’t hug corners as much as you careen though long straightaways. This actually makes for decent combat—you’ll weave in and out, trying to avoid enemy targeting while vying for position—but racing purists will find Flashout 2 flighty.

Despite the presence of in-app purchases, Flashout 2 handles its money deftly. Before each race, you can purchase a complement of shields, speed boosts, and weapons. Buy too little and your better-equipped opponents will fill you with bullets; buy too much and your hard-earned cash goes to waste since you can’t keep weapons from race to race. By setting the economy up like this, Flashout 2 encourages thriftiness and utilizing each track’s generous ammo and money caches to stay stocked. From there, you can save for big-ticket improvements or buy a new hovercraft outright.

The bottom line. Flashout 2 is fast and slick, but its combat and upgrade systems stand out more than its racing elements. There are more substantial sci-fi racers on the App Store, but Flashout 2 is a fun, lightweight diversion.

The nuances of Formula One racing are mostly imperceptible to the layman. It’s all angular momentum and downforces; a system of geometry, physics, and engineering in which minute adjustments have outsized effects. As a result, a game like F1 2013—the latest of Codemasters’ annual racing series, brought to Mac by Feral Interactive—tends to require technical precision and strict execution.

F1 2013’s controls are delicate, subtle, and responsive, leading to daring passes and disastrous spinouts in equal measure. Career Mode plops rookie drivers at the beginning of a standard 19-race season, setting them up with both a team and the potential for a more lucrative contract if they perform well enough. This is obviously the centerpiece of F1 2013, and it’s where the game’s rigid demands are most keenly felt. At best, an ill-taken hairpin turn may add half a second to your time; at worst, you’ll earn a blown tire or a 10-second penalty for cutting corners. A perfectly driven curve is highly satisfying in the moment, but these imperfections add up: it’s possible to race well—but not perfectly—and still not meet your team’s goals at the end of a 22-lap race. Given the effort and time it takes, ho-hum results are frustrating.

It doesn’t help that F1 2013’s tutorial is a slog, despite not covering enough of Formula One’s subtleties and quirks. Good luck sussing out the intricacies of qualifying, or how to best take off after the green flag. Fortunately, Codemasters has packed in a few features to make F1 2013 somewhat more approachable and inviting for newcomers. Opponent A.I. and driver assistance mechanics—including automatic braking and track overlay with optimal course and speed information—are fully customizable, and the Flashback system makes a welcome return: you can effectively “rewind” a race several seconds in order to undo a crash or penalty. 

Mid-race saves are a particularly considerate addition to the F1 series: standard races last dozens of laps and can take up to half an hour to complete, following at least another half-hour of qualifying procedures. Other game modes, such as Grand Prix (a customizable 10-race series) and Scenario Mode (a series of specific, in-race challenges) thankfully offer shorter, three-lap races and benefit as a result: these modes are more compact and less punitive, and they cut away a lot of the pre-rendered cut-scenes and filler that make Career Mode so unenergetic. Scenario Mode in particular is punchy and digestible.

Despite the promise of cross-platform online features with the PC version (released five months prior), F1 2013’s multiplayer lobbies were almost always empty in our testing. However, one of the game’s more pleasant surprises is local split-screen multiplayer action. Having a friend to race against certainly doesn’t make the game any easier, especially if you’re both relatively new to it, but misery loves company.

The bottom line. Navigating the tension between laser-cut simulation and players’ desire to have fun and succeed is an unenviable task, but F1 2013 comes closer than ever to succeeding. For those willing to practice, F1 2013 is technically impressive and robust.

(Editor’s Note: We initially tested F1 2013 with OS X 10.9.1 installed, which was the listed minimum and recommended version on Feral’s website and launch materials, and experienced occasional mid-race crashes. Feral has updated the minimum spec to 10.9.2 on Steam—as it offers significant performance boosts for video cards—and says that it is updating all storefronts with that information. We played a considerable amount more of the game after updating to 10.9.2 and did not experience any additional crashing issues. While Feral says that F1 2013 is playable on OS X 10.9.1 for most players without problems, we’d recommend updating to take advantage of the performance enhancements and hopefully avoid the crashing issue we first encountered.)

Crystal Dynamics’ Tomb Raider reboot (newly ported to Mac by Feral Interactive) is a game about searching: for ancient relics, forgotten tombs, and undisturbed grottoes, yes, but also for the self-assurance necessary to transform from a shy archaeologist into a brutal killing machine. Lara Croft’s baptism in blood — her own and, often, her enemies’ — takes place on a fictionalized Yamatai, a hidden Japanese island full of pristine forests, snowy mountain ranges, and a sect of violent cultists who worship the shaman-queen Himiko.

The first several hours on Yamatai are tense and painful: shipwrecked, alone, and impaled by a piece of stray rebar (the first of many graphic injuries she’ll sustain during her sojourn), Lara searches for food and shelter before taking her first human life defending herself from a disturbingly touchy-feely scavenger. Tomb Raider’s introspective sobriety doesn’t last, though: it soon turns into a full-scale action-adventure, complete with gunfights, explosions, and undead samurai. The combat is fun, but the game never thematically recovers from the abrupt tonal shift and exaggerated body count.

Tomb Raider is at its best when its focus is on climbing and exploration. Each area of the island is dense with nooks and crannies, extensive cave systems, and sprawling vistas, hiding any number of collectible ceremonial fans or tribal masks. Lara has an armory of climbing tools at her disposal, but it’s the sheer wealth of ledges, handholds, rock faces, rooftops, and zip lines that give Tomb Raider its sense of wonder and momentum. It’s easy to get lost in the simple joys of traversal and movement, and the game’s action sections — a chase scene set in a burning temple, for example — greatly benefit from the solid framework of Tomb Raider’s climbing mechanics. 

When fighting becomes necessary, it’s anarchic and desperate: Lara can’t shoot from the hip, has limited melee options, and her dodge-rolls are graceless and haphazard. There’s a sense of unwieldiness to Tomb Raider’s mechanics that gels with Lara’s revised origin story, but extended fight sequences dominate the second half of the game and wear out their welcome. With Tomb Raider’s eye for dramatic camera work and punchy set pieces, Crystal Dynamics could have cut half of the fight scenes and still come out with an action-packed game. Thankfully, Lara’s stealth abilities are both safer and more satisfying, the chaos of battle replaced with the sharp twang of a taut bowstring.

Curiously, the traditionally single-player Tomb Raider sports full-featured multiplayer options as well. Paired with a full compliment of modes, characters, and unlockable upgrades, Tomb Raider’s loose combat makes multiplayer combat frenetic and chaotic, but it’s competently executed and fun. Good luck finding matches, though: the multiplayer is Mac-to-Mac only — plus the Mac App Store version doesn’t offer it at all — and just a couple weeks out from release, the servers are deserted.

The bottom line. Tomb Raider doesn’t always play to its strengths, but even its weakest moments display a developer with a keen eye for fusing stealth, exploration, and gunplay. Most series would do well to be rebooted in such fine fashion.

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