Auralux (from developer War Drum Studios) is a simple strategy game in how you play, how it looks, and how far it goes. There are plenty of these ‘cell domination strategy games’ out there, but Auralux remains one of the highest rated on Google Play (if not THE highest rated), sitting at a 4.5/5 star rating at the time of writing this article.
The goal of Auralux is that you are competing against AI players to dominate a full field of spaces and ultimately clear their influence off the map. The following are some screenshots from the easiest, post-tutorial level of the game to show you how it looks. You are always playing the blue sun. NOTE: Allegedly, all suns are based on images taken from NASA.
All the fields look similar to this, although you may compete with two OR three AIs a time. Every second, your sun(s) generates a movable piece that will be used both to defend and attack. You can swipe your finger over the screen to encompass a specific area of these pieces to send out, or you can simply click a sun to move all of them at once.
If your sun has a white halo, or two white halos, around it, that means you can upgrade it. You tap on the sun and then tap it again, and all pieces within the circle when you tap it are sucked into the sun. After the blue meter below the sun fills, it upgrades. The highest amount of times you can upgrade is twice (dependent on how many white halos it has), and with each upgrade, you generate one extra piece per second, up to three.
This is all important to know, because those little pieces are everything. When you attack, or are attacked, those pieces collide with your competitor and both sides lose pieces. If you have more than the attacker/attackee, you will come out ahead. If you don’t, you might fail the attack or you will lose your sun. In many of the levels, it’s recommended to upgrade and expand only slightly to start building up numbers, and the game will give you hints and suggestions to allow the AI to fight one another while you gain strength.
So now, we come down to the PROS and the CONS of the game.
PROS:
Auralux is an engrossing game with musical cues during your attacks. You can change the background music to different types: synthetic, acoustic, vocal, or percussion. I tend to prefer synthetic myself. It reminds me a little of the XBox Kinect game, ‘Child of Eden’. That’s probably just me, though.
Levels can last anywhere up to twenty or thirty minutes, although time sort of flies when you’re playing this game because you’re so engrossed, waiting for the perfect time to strike, while worrying about being struck. Needless to say, it’s a good travel game.
It also comes with different difficulty types: easy, medium, hard. Although there is one normally level called Triad that most reviewers to the game dev itself claim is the hardest, and I tend to agree. If you reset the match, or lose the match, you’ll be offered a hint to ‘ignore the center sun for now’. Most people agree this hint is nonsense.
All in all, think of this type of game as something of a new take on tower defense games.
This is a good game to play while traveling. I really, really like it… except for a few things.
CONS:
Because I am a broke individual, my game reviews come out strictly from the side of a free user. Some games provide you very little as a free user, and some provide a lot. To the credit of War Drum Studios, they don’t weigh Auralux down with ads, but they also only give free users EIGHT levels to play, and then you have to buy more if you’d like them. Fair enough, although it’s disappointing that once you master how to defeat all eight levels, you don’t have any further to go if you don’t have money to spend. This isn’t me demanding War Drum Studios give us anything, as they’re certainly not entitled to, but it’s still disappointing. Especially because I’ve gone through many other games much like this, and Auralux is still the best.
Now, during gameplay (this will tie into the above here soon), the particles/pieces used to attack and defend move… very… slowly… which contributes to the amount of time it takes to play one level.
You have the option to purchase what’s called a ‘Speed Mode’, which increases speed of those pieces movements, and consequently makes it much more difficult. That alone costs .99c USD. (All currency here will be USD.)
If you just want new levels and don’t care about speed, you can purchase one of eight different level packs, each containing five new levels, for .99c.
You can buy a special package for $2.99 that includes the speed mode, Orion, Vela and Lyra packs. So for $2.99, you’ll get fifteen new levels and they’ll be able to move faster.
Some people consider this expensive, although honestly, it seems reasonable in this day and age of microtransactions.
IN CONCLUSION:
So yes, my only complaints really boil down to me having nothing to offer but lint. The game has yet to ever crash on me, it keeps me entertained, and is even a good game to play while trying to get sleepy at night since the music and sound effects aren’t obtrusive at all. You don’t need the music if you don’t want it, but it’s pleasant to hear.
I highly recommend Auralux if you like simple game play, yet want a little bit of a challenge in figuring out how best to utilizes the few tools you’re given to win battles!
