Category: Reviews-HowTos

Wherever Word travels, Excel cannot be far behind—and at long last, Microsoft has allowed the number crunching favorite to follow the money trail straight into the App Store with a touchscreen version built just for iPad. Microsoft Excel for iPad ends years of suffering with less-powerful third-party solutions that have been all too happy to encroach in Redmond’s absence. Like Word, Excel for iPad is in most respects a superior effort over the venerable Mac application, offering an impressively clean user interface that doesn’t skimp on features.

In particular, the iPad touchscreen is put to great use here with a customized keyboard expressly designed to make data entry easier. Why include the entire alphabet when entering numeric data? Excel for iPad switches between the two with only a tap, which is also all it takes to leap from sheet to sheet within a single workbook. Switching between Home, Insert, Formulas, Review, View, and Table modes is equally easy.

We had no problem opening a variety of file formats (including CSV and legacy XLS), although in many cases we were prompted to convert and save an entirely new version before being able to edit. Excel for iPad is free to download, but you’ll need to purchase an Office 365 subscription to actually do anything beyond viewing. A new Personal plan makes this cheaper than ever at $69.99 per year for one computer and tablet, although we’d still like to see Microsoft introduce a cheaper mobile-only option priced at $49.99 or less.

Subscription grievances aside, Excel for iPad only truly stumbles when it comes to file management and output. Like Word, there’s currently no way to print or save to PDF, and both apps suffer from spotty OneDrive cloud file sync, which is unfortunately the only option available. We frequently discovered duplicate saved files, particularly after opening on the Mac side and then returning to iPad.

The bottom line. When it comes to actually getting work one, Excel for iPad is another home run for Microsoft, although the company needs to go back to the drawing board when it comes to actual file management.

Nearly six years into the life of the App Store and we’re just now getting a realistic, licensed Major League Baseball simulation—but R.B.I. Baseball 14 doesn’t resemble the feature-crammed, richly complex affairs seen on home systems. Instead, it pulls both inspiration and its moniker from a popular ‘80s/‘90s console franchise, and grounds its gameplay in the simplicity of that era while modernizing only the visuals. The result is expectedly very accessible and easy to get into, but also skimps on a lot of things that make baseball video games enjoyable and worth playing more than a couple times.

R.B.I. Baseball 14 loops in all 30 of the modern major league teams, but only some of their players—the starting lineup, a couple of bench guys, and a few pitchers. Your interactions are similarly scaled down on the diamond. When batting, you’ll have only swing and bunt buttons, plus the ability to move your batter around the box; thus getting a clean hit is all about timing and positioning. Power, on the other hand, consistently eluded us during play—the A.I. opponents were smacking homers over the wall a lot more often than we ever did. On the mound, every pitcher has the same arsenal, unfortunately: a standard toss, a hard fastball, and a floating knuckleball of sorts. You can guide the ball a bit with the virtual stick, but there’s no noticeable distinction between players.

Which gets into the main issue with R.B.I. Baseball 14: It’s a serviceable barebones sim, but it lacks the flavor of the game. The players’ faces look close enough to the real thing, but don’t display any personality or unique mannerisms, and hurlers are essentially identical on the mound. Even the stadiums are barely differentiated, and you see almost nothing beyond the field itself—no views of the exterior or aerial shots. Wrigley Field has the right dimensions, but lacks ivy or bleachers; it’s just green walls and a splotchy mess of pixels beyond.

Fielding is challenging, baserunning is rigid and awkward, and the simplified overall approach means repetition takes hold quickly. But it’s the lack of modes that makes for a difficult long-term recommendation. The season mode is dry and offers no game simulation or even management options, otherwise you can take on single games or jump right into the postseason. Without deeper hooks, multiplayer of any sort, or even a little pomp to the presentation, R.B.I. Baseball 14 feels entirely predictable—which can make a 162-game season feel very long indeed.

The bottom line. R.B.I. Baseball 14 is fundamentally fair, but the too-streamlined approach and lack of common modes make for a foul lasting impression.

David doesn’t pull any punches. Its blissful, serenely sparse world is populated by multitudes of terrifying two-dimensional shapes, all hell-bent on snuffing the life out of your little box-shaped hero. All you have in your defense are wits and agility, along with a special projectile ability that takes a few seconds to charge. David’s physics-driven rumination on the struggles of life feels almost poignant at times, and its abstract design works mostly in its favor—but the game is also extremely difficult and not for the easily frustrated.

Each of the eight main levels—and another that you can unlock later—is designed to fit its theme. In Anger, a writhing mass of floating white diamonds pursues your hero, periodically firing gleaming darts that hone in on your position. Anxiety puts you in a maze suspended above an altar that shoots dozens of glowing squares upwards. Flee, meanwhile, starts you off defenseless and surrounded by danger, as a mass of ovals gives chase through a winding path.

The dominant emotion through everything, though, tends toward frustration. Each level can be played on one of two difficulties: “Okay” gives you seven hit points, while “Very” leaves you with just one. It’s enough of a challenge just to survive in either mode, but on top of not dying, you’ll need to exterminate your foes by shooting out charged particles—which have only a short range and loop back around to you like a boomerang in a beautiful display of color. Charging a shot involves tapping and holding on the center-point of your avatar (and optionally dragging toward a target), and everything slows down while this happens, granting precious time to plot an escape route away from danger.

Both the tilt and touch screen controls work well for changing direction, though the need to constantly tap the jump button to move higher—something you’ll have to do while charging shots, as well as in normal play—makes the game feel in moments like patting your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time. It gets easier with practice in the Arena mode, which also features a points-based progression system separate from the main game, but David never stops being excruciatingly hard. Thankfully, that difficulty manages to work in its favor, acting as a touching metaphor for the trials of life and the herculean effort it can take to triumph over adversity.

The bottom line. David presents an abstract, dangerous world that’s as tough as it is beautiful and surprisingly emotive.

If you approach Trials Frontier as a Trials game (capital “T”), then you’re in for disappointment. Although the game broadly echoes its console counterparts, its soul has been ripped out and replaced with the festering guts of a stinking freemium business model, and then spray-painted in mobile-friendly colors and cuteness. Yes, this is still a physics-oriented bike-balancer, set across ludicrously difficult-to-traverse tracks, but it lacks refinement and elegance. Also, it’s now largely about taking on missions from demanding cartoon characters, larger-than-life, over-the-top, hazard-filled courses (with explosions and fire and more explosions), and that encroaching sense that if you don’t spend some money on in-app purchases very soon, the game’s going to slam the door shut in your face, often and repeatedly.

For anyone who’s never gone near a Trials game, this is a trials (small “t”) effort that at first holds up fairly well against existing similar iOS titles that beat the series to the App Store. The controls balance on a knife-edge between irksomely twitchy and reasonably solid (and so are probably quite well suited to the genre), levels are short, and the game has a decent amount of character lurking. Initially, it’s quite good fun—if frustrating—nursing your cartoonish bike to the end of cartoonish courses, in order to appease the cartoonish demands of cartoonish folk lurking in the game’s central hub, a cartoonish saloon.

But even the most enthusiastic newcomers are likely to soon feel ground down by Trials Frontier. Races require fuel, which is initially in plentiful supply but after a couple of hours’ play becomes scarce, unless you’re willing to fill up the tank with acquired gems—or, of course, just buy more gems with real money. Occasional head-to-head races against robotically scripted A.I. require powerful enough bikes, and upgrades cost coins and take time to add. Again, loosening your wallet can alleviate grinding, but a few hours in, the costs become prohibitive to all but the most obsessive players.

Worse, though, is the fact that success in missions requires specific items to be acquired, and these are “won” by way of a spinning wheel at the end of each race. Fundamentally, then, you’re forced into a kind of Groundhog Day scenario, racing the same tracks again and again in order to secure a prize on the basis of pure luck—and not whether you heroically managed to cross the finish line within the tight time limit demanded to win a gold medal. 

Eventually during testing, one of the saloon people cheerily mentioned there was a new object outside to investigate. We had a look and it was a slot machine, adding yet more randomness to the game and coming with its own countdown timer. It was at about this point that we realized Trials Frontier is presumably just a big joke, trolling iOS users en masse. 

The bottom line. If you can deal with the business model, or are happy to waste a few hours before abandoning the game entirely, Trials Frontier is pretty, fairly playable, and reasonably fun. But stick around and the veneer is soon stripped away to reveal endless, soulless grinding to appease cartoon simpletons.

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.

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