Anyone remember Space Hulk and Space Crusade? Those awesome board games where you either played heavily armoured super soldiers or wacky and weird alien hordes, on the galactic equivalent of a dungeon? Herald of Oblivion is a phone app that simulates all the thrills of facing a horde of aliens, but in a way that most of us haven’t a chance to experience.
Tinman Games are app developers who specialise in turning old-school gamebooks into handy phone apps that you can play on the bus. Games Workshop is a world famous manufacturer of toy soldiers that also happen to write games. A few years ago Games Workshop commissioned The Path to Victory series, a set of gamebooks. One of these was Herald of Oblivion, the plot of which sent a squad of Imperial Fist space marine into the heart of derelict space ship in order to blow it up.
Of course, as soon as your marine and his squad boards the Herald of Oblivion, he becomes separated from his colleagues and has to fight his way past countless aliens to rescue his buddies. On the way, your hero has a whistle stop tour of all the cool monsters from the 40K universe, and then gets to murder them horribly.
The app version of the book vastly improves on the original. The book version required endless dice rolling. This has been replaced with a green ‘wireframe’ interface that is a sort of combat minigame, and highly atmospheric. You take turns to select weapons and strike at the alien threat in a variety of interesting ways. You quickly work out which strategy works best for each thing. The adventure is essentially a set of ‘mini’ missions, that all have an impact on each other. Do one mission one way and you’ll lack vital information that you need for the next mission, but have a really cool weapon, and so on.
The game is easy to play and highly addictive. It’s apparently the first part of a planned series (the original book was a one-shot), so we’re really looking forward to the sequel.
LEGACY OF DORN: HERALD OF OBLIVION / AUTHOR: JONATHAN GREEN / DEVELOPER: GAMES WORKSHOP / PUBLISHER: TIN MAN GAMES / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
