Playing it now on iPhone 4S

Presentation and design means a lot to my first impressions as it says a lot about the amount of thought and effort that has been put into the game I’m about to play. The interface in Block Fortress is clean, minimal and concise; there’s no fluff, and this well-planned craftsmanship permeates throughout the entirety of the experience. This is a game that knows exactly what it is about and hands you all the right tools to play with its world. And it’s great!

Gameplay

For many it might be inevitable to compare the visuals to those of the father of modern cubism : Minecraft. That’s the game that started the genre of building things with cubes after all, at least in the minds of most. But Block Fortress is not Minecraft, and while I’m sure the developers were initially inspired by it for some of the ideas here, Block Fortress uses cubes because that’s the most appropriate building blocks for its gameplay. That gameplay is twofold: You build and then you defend what you built. If you succeed in defending your fortress you get to build some more and defend against stronger waves of enemies. That’s the basic premise, but as usual the devil’s in the details.

The two phases of play

The first phase is the building phase, where you can fly around in peace, select whatever blocks you can build and place them however and wherever you want. You can destroy placed blocks without any penalty in this mode. This is also when you choose the load-out for your character; what weapons to equip and what blocks you want to be able to place while in the action phase. You have 4 item slots you can set to weapons or whichever blocks and structures you are able to build. The catch is that once you start the action phase, you can’t switch out any of these blocks or weapons until you’re done with the round.

The second phase is the action phase, where you are stripped of your wings and your movements adhere to gravity. Enemies will now arrive from the direction(s) indicated on your map, which is visible in both building and action phases so you know what to prepare for. You can also use your equipped weapons now and take part in the fight directly, however you are also mortal and can die. If you die you fail at the round and your game is reverted to the building phase.

After a successful action phase the level of difficulty increases and you are returned to the building phase to improve on your structures. The direction from where enemies will arrive might also change, which forces you to make small or big changes to your design depending on how you structure your defenses.

The maps you play on are randomly generated with six different themes; Green Hills, Jungle, Snowy Hills, Rocky Mountains, Tropical Islands and Tidal Cliffs. Every theme differs in variations of elevation, amount of water and visuals. They also give out one of the three different special minerals.

Building with a purpose

In Block Fortress, building structures with blocks serves a specific purpose: To defend your Barracks against enemy Goblocks that invade a randomly generated map from one of four directions (or multiple simultaneously, later on). With few exceptions, Goblocks attack your walls first, as they cannot climb over them. Ranged enemies will likely shoot at your turrets or lights if they can reach them. All blocks are destructible and serve to hinder the invading Goblocks from reaching you and your Barracks for as long as they’ll last. Any remaining damaged blocks, structures or turrets regain all their hit points at the end of the action phase, with the exception of your barracks, which must be repaired manually by spending minerals.

Your Barracks is the first structure you place when you start a new game, and it cannot be moved afterwards, thus making its initial placement a deeply strategic decision if you want to. There are a multitude of variables to consider: How many ore nodes there are close to it, determining the ease at which you can gather resources early on; if there are cliffs or waterfronts nearby, which can slow enemies and leave them exposed for your turrets; and elevation, which can have positive and negative effects on your defensive options.

Your barracks can be upgraded three times, unlocking more and more options in terms of what structures and weapons you may use. These upgrades are not global, meaning they’re a strategic option local to each individual saved game.

The blocks you can place come in different materials that have varying costs and hit points. You can also place varying turrets, like a machine gun, a plasma cannon and a mortar, to name a few of the many turrets available. Every turret has its own strengths and weaknesses (plasma is armor piercing, for example), and their rate and range of fire vary greatly. Additionally you have special structures, like a farm block (that grows and can be eaten, which is the only way to restore your own hit points), a mining drill, power blocks to power your turrets and structures, and lights to illuminate when darkness falls. Again these are only a few of the available special structures.

Everything you build requires one or both of the two available resources; $ or minerals. Minerals are mined with the mining structures and acquired at the end of each turn, while $ are earned both by picking them up during play after defeating enemies, and at the end of a round.

Permanent upgrades

What makes Block Fortress so enjoyable is the execution of all of these ideas. Surviving a round of invaders and continuing to build your fortress is just the beginning: After each successful round you’ll be awarded with a few special materials of either the blue, green or white sort. These materials can be spent in the Craft menu of the game, where you can purchase and attach permanent upgrades to the various blocks, turrets and structures in the game. There are upgrades that increase the range of your blocks (increased attack range for turrets; increased reach of power from power blocks); increased rate of fire; self-powering; being able to shoot in the dark without the aid of a light source, and so on and so forth. There is a great deal of variety here, and you are free to choose which upgrades you want on what, and also how many.

The cycle of progress

At first I was focused on seeing how far I could get, which wasn’t very far; failure is guaranteed but serves as inspiration for some new design. You can create as many saves as you want, so I naturally created new saves in the different maps when I hit a wall of difficulty in one, to explore the areas the game had on offer. After a while I had earned quite a bit of special materials, so I visited the Craft menu to see what was on offer. And then I had an epiphany; the game is not only about making a great fortress: It’s about upgrading your favorite tools so you can conjure completely different setups, exploring new solutions possible only after you’ve made those changes to the tools at your disposal. When you make a turret self-powered, the options of where you can place it change dramatically. If you upgrade the plasma turret with three range of fire upgrades, suddenly its reach is increased by 75%; its use is changed drastically.

The genius is that all of these possibilities sink into your mind naturally as you play the game; in the beginning you play with the tools given to you, and you get to know them intimately. You’ve witnessed their strengths and weaknesses, explored what placements work well and which do not. But then you change the tools, molding them into configurations so that they work how you want them to. It’s no longer about building with an assortment of predefined tools; pretty soon you’ll find yourself tweaking the tools themselves, reshaping them into something that is uniquely yours.

All of this would have been for naught if it wasn’t for the generous save mechanic that supports this cycle of experimentation. While in the building phase, you can save at any time. You can save to multiple files, too. You can create a new save after every successful round if you want. Maybe you’d like to play the same round over and over again for the rare minerals because it went exceptionally well; you can. Any permanent craft upgrade you’ve made becomes available to all existing saves as well, so if you hit a wall with your designs, you can come back once you’ve made upgrades you believe will make it work out.

A manual save system in this day and age might seem outdated, something that doesn’t belong in this world of automated cloud synchronicity . And in most cases it would actually be a bad idea. But in this case, it’s the right tool for the job, because it becomes yet another way for you to play the game how you want. It’s a necessity, really, and I’m glad that the four brothers over at Foursaken Media were bold enough to implement it.

The controls

As with all touchscreen controls, the comfort zone will vary greatly. I’ve read comments saying that the game is unplayable on anything smaller than an iPad Mini, while I’ve personally been enjoying it with very few issues on the much smaller iPhone 4S. My main gripe is the one I’ve always had with the hardware; holding it in my hands muffles the speaker unless I’m careful. It’s a real annoyance that no software can solve, sadly.

The controls on the screen are fairly simple and vary between the two phases of play.

Build phase controls

In the building phase, you’ll have an up and down arrow on the bottom right of the screen. These increase and decrease your elevation when clicked. The bottom left of the screen will show a virtual joystick when you hold your finger down, which moves you forward, backwards, right and left. On the bottom center is a row of 6 construction related buttons; a selection button, four customizable slots and a delete button. On the upper left there’s a map of sorts that indicates from which direction(s) enemies will invade, and also which direction you’re looking. Clicking this will start the action phase. On the upper right is a button to open the building inventory. Sliding your finger anywhere else on the screen turns your viewpoint around.

Action phase controls

The controls for this phase are mostly similar to the building phase with one exception; the bottom right arrows to control elevation are replaced with a trigger button, which will fire your selected weapon when clicked. If you keep your finger pressed after clicking the trigger button you’ll keep firing while looking around, which works surprisingly well. Between the time I started writing this and publishing it, an option was added to change the speed at which you look around individually for looking and firing weapons, which fixed a small complaint I previously had about this.

When you have a block or structure selected in the construction row, you place it by clicking in the 3d landscape. Holding your finger pressed you’ll see a grey square indicating where it will be placed when you lift your finger from the screen. While far from error proof, the fact that you can remove blocks you placed in this phase with no penalty means that a screwup or misplaced block is undone with a click of the delete button and the offending block. It’s not ideal – I’m sure a mouse and keyboard would be seen as an ideal control scheme, but even in Minecraft you’ll end up misplacing blocks from time to time – but since you can undo with little effort the problem is mostly nonexistent.

While touchscreen controls are still far from a good substitute for physical joysticks and buttons, what you get here is arguably the best solution you’re likely to find to this challenge. It works, and it works well. I’m sure people with bigger hands than mine will struggle playing this on an iPhone, but this would be a pre-existing problem with any game requiring the use of two fingers on the screen at once. I haven’t tried the game on an iPad yet, so I can’t speak for how well the controls work on one, but the layout remains the same.

In conclusion

Block Fortress takes the concept of sandbox gameplay and combines it with block building, tower defense and first person action, wrapping it all in a bundle that becomes a new kind of experience altogether. Its mechanics are meticulously crafted, allowing you a dazzling amount of freedom in how you choose to play the game. The experience is greatly polished and it’s the kind of game that gives you faith in a platform that sees a vast inequality between the few great, mostly mediocre and vast wasteland of utterly forgettable experiences.

Most importantly, Block Fortress is a ton of fun. It embraces experimentation with confidence and succeeds in creating an experience that it can call its own. With three game modes, six map types and the aforementioned vast configuration options of your available tools, the game will likely last for as long as you can stay interested in concocting new and devious plans of destruction defense.

Play it if you can.

Have a great day!