Reviewing card games is always tricky for me. As I've mentioned in previous card game reviews, I've been playing Magic: The Gathering on a competitive level since the earliest days of the game which gives me an entirely different perspective on card games from most gamers. People on our forums are having a fantastic time with Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer [$4.99 / Lite], and from a technical perspective it's absolutely fantastic, but all this really does is make me wish that we could finally get iOS ports of some of the better card games out there.

From a technical standpoint, there's really not much more you could ask for. First off, the game is universal and plays great on both the iPad as well as smaller iOS devices. I find myself preferring it on the iPad since the increased screen real estate really lends itself to games like this, but it's just as good on the iPhone. The touch interface works great with card games, as anyone who has basically played any card game on an iOS device could tell you, and Ascension is no different. There's options to make the game run as fast (or as slow) as you'd like, multiple levels of AI, and even online multiplayer via Game Center.

The actual game of Ascension is a somewhat refreshing spin on fantasy-based card games in that instead of building a specific deck that you use in battles, you're building your deck on the fly from game to game. Players start the game with identical basic decks of ten cards consisting of two militia cards which provide the "power" resource and eight apprentice cards which provide the "rune" resource. Using power and runes you're able to interact with a common pool of cards to either acquire new cards for your deck or defeat monster cards. Most actions you do in the game award different amounts of victory points, and at the end of the game, the player with the most victory points wins.

Like most card games, Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer is infinitely easier to explain visually. The good news is, Ascension started its life as a physical card game, so there's no shortage of incredibly detailed videos on how the game works. Here's a particularly fantastic one from Tom Vasel of The Dice Tower:

There's some things that I really like about Ascension. Similar to Dominion, it's really cool how each game starts off totally fresh. Unlike games where players have decks they've built themselves, no one can enter a game with a stacked deck filled with the best cards. Everyone has access to the same card pool, and there's a decent amount of variety in the deck building strategy you can try to follow from game to game. If you have an opponent that did something interesting with how they built their deck, you can try doing something similar the next game. As someone who has invested thousands of dollars into specific Magic decks that I've been more or less locked into playing through entire set rotations, this is just awesome.

But with the good, there's a hefty amount of bad. First off, the card art is laughably terrible. It seems like placeholder art that just never got refined, and some of the card art flat out looks unfinished. I'm not sure if this is intentional or not, but there is an incredibly odd contrast between how great Ascension is as an iOS game from a technical perspective and how poor the art is. It's easy enough to overlook, but the art totally jumps out in your first moments with the game which leads to some incredibly mediocre initial impressions.

While I really like the nature of these types of deck building games, Ascension is entirely too random, especially with more than two players in the mix. It's virtually impossible to follow any kind of deck building strategy, as you're faced with two layers of randomness: The cards you draw, and the cards that are drawn off the communal deck to replace other cards that have been acquired/defeated by other players. Instead of being able to follow a game-wide strategy, you're faced with focusing on tactics on a turn by turn basis resulting in often disjointed decks and just buying/defeating whatever cards you can that turn.

Lady luck can be a cruel mistress, and sometimes the seemingly awesome deck you've built can be rendered entirely useless based on a series of horrible card draws to the common pool. For instance, one viable deck building strategy involves focusing on cards that generate power to spend slay monsters which can generate a considerable amount of victory points. However, if you hit a unlucky streak of cards in the common card pool with other players being slow to acquire them to get fresh cards on the field, your whole deck stalls out without any substantial monster cards to kill. Also, the high levels of randomness can often let one player in a game get an incredible lead in victory points, making even attempting to finish the game bordering on fairly pointless.

Asynchronous online multiplayer seems incredibly promising, but Ascension is faced with the same problem that so many similar games fall victim to: It can be difficult finding people to play with. I've managed to get a few games going, but a (seemingly) small player base combined with the length of the individual games doesn't lend itself at all to available random matches with people that will play games to completion. When the stars align and you do get into a four player online game, it's a ton of fun, but as soon as a single player becomes unresponsive the entire game grinds to a halt.

At the end of the day, the developers did an absolutely fantastic job porting Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer to iOS devices. I'm not sure what if anything they could have been done differently to make the game better, as all of my issues with Ascension are directly linked to the source material and are shared with the physical version of the game as well. I almost think it's biggest downfall is how precise of a port the game is.

Regardless, if you're interested in fantasty-based card games I'd highly recommend at least giving the lite version of Ascension (which is also universal) a try. As mentioned at the start of this review, I'm fully aware that my outlook towards card games in general might be a little more hardcore than most out there, so you might find my complaints to be not much of an issue for you. Either way, the lite version will give you a great idea whether or not the game of Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer jives with you, if it does, definitely grab the full version.

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There's a lot of enthusiasm around Kairosoft right now and rightly so. The studio has just released another banger in the form of Pocket Academy [$3.99 /�Lite], a cutesy school simulation game that puts you in the shoes of administrator, planner, and coordinator. Prior, it wooed us all with two other simulation games, Game Dev Story [$3.99 /Lite]and Hot Springs Story [$3.99 /�Lite]. Because of the language barrier, we don't get to talk to the studio as much as we'd like, which is why we're just as surprised as you when a new game hits the US App Store.

Those surprise drops and relative quiet periods of non-Kairosoft news might be at an end � Kairosoft is starting to talk to the US audience as a whole. The studio has set up a Facebook page and it's currently doing its best to keep fans interested by letting slip some neat bits of news.

For example, the studio plans to release and translate its games in order from oldest to newest, with the exception of Pocket Academy. In Japan, this was a numbered follow-up to the original, but the studio deemed it too close to its source material to warrant release of that original in the West. Also, it looks like the next game set to hit the US will be Department Store Story, which looks like a Tiny Tower [Free] meets Game Dev Story kind of simulation game.

There's a few more choice factoids buried within the page, but as you'll see, some things are… being lost in translation � a common problem in dealing with Kairosoft that we discussed in-depth on our podcast the other week.

Check out the page if you'd like. Also, check out those Game Dev Story 2 (for PC) screens! My heart is about to thump out of its chest in hot anticipation of the iOS version.

[Image via Kairospot.net]

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Firemint has been teasing their upcoming line-drawing-centric cheese-stealing stealth game Agent Squeak for quite some time now. The vague release date of "2011" has since transformed into the slightly less vague "summer 2011" and the game has a new name. SPY mouse is going to be Firemint's third "big game", and has been in development for two years

Give the teaser trailer a look:

I've seen the game a few different stages of its development at various conventions, and regardless what they're calling it, I think people will love it. The real question is, will it be the next Flight Control?

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Secret Sauce's QuBIT [$0.99] is a great game I'm glad to have discovered. The development team is an offshoot of Ideaworks Game Studio, best known for quietly bringing other companies' intellectual property to the small screen with games like Call of Duty: Zombies [$4.99] . Given how well this, their first foray into original games, works, I'm already eager to see what they'll bring us next.

That's not to say QuBIT is flawless. I've seen high-score racers that have slicker graphics and fewer problems. But this one does three things very well: it expertly combines racing with color-matching elements, it offers up a high-score chase that's worth mastering, and it brings in a pounding electronic soundtrack that makes the whole package feel more compelling than it has any right to feel.� Let's just say my interest is piqued.

You control a mining robot sent to collect obscurium, brightly colored crystal deposits that form on an alien world. These can be collected by smashing headfirst into them while you go on your merry way, but you can't just collect everything you see. You're expected to collect the ones that match the colors of your QuBs, the colored blocks that orbit the robot. If your QuBs are red and yellow, you need to collect a red crystal and a yellow crystal, triggering a combo and allowing you to move on. Anything else will interrupt your combo and weaken your robot. As you smash through crystals, the wave meter fills up, and when it reaches the top, you'll get a new, harder set of QuBs to match. Fail to make a combo for too long, and your robot runs out of energy and is unceremoniously extracted.

Because the entire game is built around these QuB combos, you'll find a lot of room to improve from your early forays into obscurium collection. Early on, you might be satisfying just reaching a certain wave before losing your robot. From there, you can try to complete all the waves, and then to get perfect combos in every bonus section. You can go even deeper to master boost timing and the use of plasma rails. Your successes don't only show up on the Game Center leaderboard, they're also quite visceral � you move faster as you do better, and the music builds up to stronger beats. Make sure your headphones are plugged in for this one.

There are three control methods to choose from: tilt, directional buttons and a left or right slider. Tilt is the default, and surprisingly it's also the most comfortable control method. Usually I'm not a fan of tilt controls for racers, but it works here. And frankly, the other controls aren't great. The directional buttons feel oddly stilted, and the sliders are too touchy � even at lower sensitivities. There's also no Retina support, and the game is currently only playable on iOS 4.3 or higher. Thankfully, an update has been submitted to drop that requirement down to 4.2.6, and Secret Sauce is working to build in support for second-gen devices.

QuBIT doesn't come loaded with game modes, and it would be nice to see more added in the future. That said, there's something to be said for a game that does one thing and does it well. The competition for high scores is intense, both on the leaderboards and in our forums. There are also achievements to earn. But while I'll sometimes return to a game just to watch my score rise or to see those achievement pop-ups, QuBIT makes me want to improve my skills � and it leaves me feeling well rewarded when I do.

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