Review: Outwitters

Review by Daniel Nenadovic

One Man Left gained quite the reputation from its iOS release of Tilt to Live, which exemplified the principle of being easy to learn but difficult to master with incredibly simple tilt controls and addictive action gameplay. Despite having almost no barrier to entry for even the most casual of gamers, Tilt to Live develops into a complex and strategic experience rather quickly even as it maintains its fast pace. 

Outwitters is an entirely different genre and pace of game. It's an asynchronous multiplayer turn-based strategy game accompanied by charming cartoon visuals on iOS. And it once again exemplifies that crucial element of being simple on the surface but opening into wide possibilities.

Check out the trailer right here or in the inexplicably small viewing window below (I really do need to work on figuring out how to make videos appear larger on Blogger).

Before I go any further, know this: you need to try this game out if you enjoy turn-based strategy at all. It's free, and the good kind of free, too. Download it here. 

What's so great about this, then? To start, many games that are advertised as free are heavily restricted until you pay money, but Outwitters is free in the best sense. You pay nothing, download the game, and are presented with no advertisements. You get one of the game's factions, the Scallywags, to play for free against any and all opponents. The Scallywags are at least on par with the two factions that you can unlock for money. Each faction is only differentiated by its own visual style and a unique special unit. The free Scallywags, for instance, can build the Bombshell, a slow-moving artillery critter.

And you can enjoy the game with the Scallywags entirely for free. It's awesome and there's not really any need to put any money into this game if you don't want to. If you find yourself enjoying it enough that you want to expand your strategic options just a tad and play with a different set of visuals, then you can unlock either the Adorables (think cute stuffed animals) or the Feedback (robots) for $1.99 each. Alternatively, you can purchase the Uber Pack for $2.99, which includes both the Adorables and the Feedback AND any other future teams that One Man Left releases for the game. A bit of a steal, that one, though these are limited-time release sale prices, so I'm not sure what they'll be once the sale is over.

The game is either local pass-n-play or online asynchronous multiplayer-only, which might be a turn-off for some, but there are a wide range of players diving in right now so even complete strategy newbs should settle into a competitive niche. You'll win some, you'll lose some, and that's just the nature of the beast when you're dealing with a large multiplayer pool. The asynchronous multiplayer works well for the most part, but it does have some inherent problems which I'll dive into later on.

Outwitters' central mechanic is Wit. Wit is your resource for everything in the game. If you want to build a unit, you need to spend Wit. If you want to move, you need to spend Wit. If you want to attack, you need to spend Wit. Special abilities? Yup, spend Wit. However, you only get so many Wit points per turn. Even when you increase your Wit generation by capturing neutral spots on the game board, you're only gaining a few Wit points of advantage over your opponent. 

Wit can be saved for future use in between turns, but that's easier than it sounds most of the time. You will NEVER have enough Wit to do everything that you need to do, which means that you're going to have to prioritize very carefully. Wit adds just enough to the standard turn-based strategy game to freshen the genre up perfectly.

Your goal is to destroy your opponents' headquarters, and to do this you'll generally employ five different units shared between all factions (though each faction's version looks unique). There's the Runner, a frail but fast unit best employed for recon and precision strikes on weak targets. Vision and tactical precision are both incredibly important aspects of Outwitters, so don't underestimate the cheap scout. The Soldier is a balanced option with a bit of everything at an effective price, sturdier and packing more of a punch than the Runner but slower and pricier. Medics are fragile but can heal and boost your other units to greater feats. Snipers are pricy, fragile, and terribly slow, but are also capable of dealing quite a bit of damage from long range. The last core unit, the Heavy, is a pricy, slow, very healthy beefstick that dishes out as much damage as the Sniper but at close range.

Those core units present a very delicate game. Your most powerful options are also usually your most vulnerable ones. That holds true with the special unit for each faction as well. Every one of them is relatively fragile, but is also capable of entirely changing the course of a game on its own.

It's turn-based strategy beauty incarnate, and the game's cartoon aesthetic presents a charming counterbalance to the intense thought that will go into every move you make in an effort to utterly annihilate, say, an army of teddy bears and pink elephants (if you're fighting the Adorables). The music is also wonderful, with an entirely whacky and upbeat vibe that helps pull the entire strange experience together into undeniable awesomeness.

There are some problems with the game, and some of them are significant. It's had some problems with notifying you when it's your turn with push notifications, so it's not a bad idea to load Outwitters up to check your games list just in case somebody is waiting on you to submit your turn. Considering that the very idea of using push notifications for asynchronous multiplayer is to eliminate that guess work, that the system is currently experiencing difficulties is a shame. The developers have already put a good deal of work into fixing the push notifications issues and hopefully they'll keep going until there are none.

The game also crashes sometimes on my iPhone when I load it up or load up one of my games in progress, though it has never crashed for me in the middle of actually playing. This is definitely frustrating but happens infrequently.

The last problem is one that is inherent to asynchronous multiplayer: you have to wait for your turn. So the game plays out at a slow pace even when you're involved in multiple sessions. And losing players frequently won't bother to surrender or finish the losing game out, so you'll be stuck waiting seven days four days for an auto-victory to flag and clear that game from your list. It's a minor problem considering that you can have many games going at once, but some may find it an annoyance nonetheless. 

EDIT: While I was typing this review up, One Man Left patched the 'auto-forfeit due to inaction' time down to 4 days, which should help alleviate the above problem with Outwitters. Yay!

Hopefully these problems will be worked out rather quickly. Given One Man Left's track record with Tilt to Live and their consistent communication through Outwitters' news system, I don't doubt that any issues will be alleviated swiftly.

And again, the game is largely fantastic. It is the most fun I have had with a multiplayer game in a long time, and it is the good kind of free to play. Download it now.