And the first things you notice about it are the various ways it seems visually bottlenecked by its tablet version. Starships happens to actually be a mobile game-the kind that harks to those days of yore, when 'mobile' equated to 'simplistic.' It released simultaneously on PC, Mac, and iPad, and in more-or-less the same form to boot. But in some circles you can still hear the old backhanded compliment being leveled at games like Sid Meier's Starships. I don't cotton to those implications, not anymore: Mobile games have achieved too much, broken too many molds. Drag a distracted finger across a screen a few times, and kill, conquer, level up…all between stops on the train. A sort of euphemism for alleging that a game was baser somehow, that in exchange for a shallow, compulsive high it asked little of a player save the odd microtransaction.

To make your team even stronger, there's the usual option of in-app purchases ranging from Dwarfs to Elves.'This would be good as a mobile game' was, historically, some pretty faint praise.

The smarter the moves you make, the more Action Points you win and the more special tricks and weapons you can accumulate in order to destroy your opponent and collect the crystals. Like chess, your aim is to protect certain pieces, in this case various crystals that are scattered around the board. Hero Academy is based on Action Points. From here you'll learn how to place units, attack and cast spells. It's therefore a bit trickier to get to grips with than traditional chess and it's recommended that non-iOS players follow the Hero Academy tutorial at the beginning. Hero Academy is like chess - but chess with lasers, guns, spells and other weapons.

Hero Academy combines strategy with fantasy to produce an intriguing and challenging board game. Hero Academy has been a big success on iOS and now fans can enjoy the strategy game on their Mac too. Softonic review The iOS strategy game now on Mac

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