There are times when it’s not possible to access the gaming PC, be it a hardware failure, summer vacation or a trip to family. In my case, the last two weeks was house repairs, which means the PC was hidden deep under furniture from the other rooms.
How to play EVE Online in such a case? Well, if you have a laptop with a separate video card, then you’re lucky. But what if you’re only left with an iPad?
Well, you won’t be able to play EVE on it yet, but there surely are some other great AAA titles available.
First game I’ve played when my PC was unavailable was…
World of Tanks: Blitz
That’s right, Wargaming made an excellent port of their flag game, World of Tanks for Apple iOS. It plays great and while it’s easy to learn, it is very hard to master. It’s worth mentioning, that the game is not an exact 1-to-1 port from PC. Game rules and the content are a little different.
First, there is only a Random Battle game mode, where during a seven minute match, two 7-player teams try to blow the other team up, or conquer “the base”, whichever comes first.
Visuals are a little different, too. WoT: Blitz looks much like older PC version of WoT, but considering this game is running on iPhone or iPad, visuals are simply excellent.
Unfortunately for PC WoT players, all the progress that you’ve made on PC will not transfer to your tablet, mainly because there are only three Tech Trees: German, Soviet and US. The amount of available tanks is smaller, too.
World of Tanks: Blitz is free to play, just like it’s PC counterpart, so in order to start playing, you don’t have to pay. If you are willing to support Wargaming devs for their hard work, you can choose between buying premium tanks (which are usually faster, but weaker than their free counterparts), adding premium time (+50% to exp and rewards), or converting experience points earned by premium tanks to so called “free experience” that can be used to unlock more “free” tanks on the Tech Tree. If you don’t want to pay, that’s ok, you don’t have to.
To sum up, you get a great quick fix PVP tank game, that looks much like it’s PC counterpart, that you can play when your gaming rig is inaccessible.
What was the other game? You’ve guessed it right, it’s…
Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft
Hearthstone is a digital Collectible Card Game by Blizzard, set in the Warcraft universe. This game is a complete port of the PC version. The cards you bought or unlocked on your PC will wait for you on your tablet. The same applies to progress and stats. When playing the game online, you play against both tablet and PC players.
Visuals are amazing and besides some textures being in a slightly lower resolution, the game looks exactly identical to the PC original.
The game has several playing modes, but all of them, even single player, require a network connection. You can test your deck and level the basic cards by playing against AI, you can play against other players in Casual mode, or in Ranked mode, where each win gives you a “star” (and a set of stars make a rank), and each loss above rank 20 takes a star from you. The last mode is “The Arena” which is nothing else, but a draft tournament. You choose your cards from a random pool and compete against other players.
Hearthstone is free to play, and you can buy additional cards either completely free by using in-game “gold” or with real money. The same applies to Arena entrance fee (150 gold or 1,79 EUR).
Is Hearthstone fun? Is it challenging? 20 Million players think it is.
Wrapping up
As you can see, tablet games are already catching up to what’s available on the PC. I hope a mobile client for EVE becomes available at some point (even with reduced set of things that a pilot can do).