This post is brought to you by Game Insight.
If you’re a fan of base-building strategy games, there’s a good chance you’ve been playing Cloud Raiders on your mobile phones and tablets in the last few years — but you might not know that Cloud Raiders recently made the jump to the Mac App Store. We’ve been playing it on Mac, and as a geeky crew of gamers, we’re impressed.
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A gorgeous game, optimized for Mac displays
After playing games of this genre pretty much exclusively on an iPhone, the first thing that surprised us was how incredible the game looks on a 5K display. Game Insight tells us the Mac version was optimized for Apple’s high-end displays, and it shows.
Everything is big and beautiful in a way that just doesn’t come across on a smaller device. Portable strategy might not spring to mind when you think of the games you’d like to see optimized for a big screen, but when you see Cloud Raiders on a giant Retina screen, the fit is pretty shocking.
Cloud Raiders gets defensive
Photo: Game Insight
If you haven’t played it, Cloud Raiders is a top-down, real-time strategy and defense game set in a world of sky fortresses and pirates. Its lovingly crafted level and character designs, animations and HD polish really help bring the game’s world to life.
A few gameplay factors distinguish Cloud Raiders from other games in the genre. Chief among them is its approach to playing defense. Other games typically take a “set it and forget it” approach, with the player sitting back, watching as whatever defenses they’ve built up try to handle an attack, and hoping for the best. By contrast, Cloud Raiders gives players a hands-on role in defending their flying fortress from enemy raiders, like placing troops and firing cannons in real time to help fend off enemy attacks.
It’s a tad disappointing that this participatory defense is limited to the game’s “player versus environment” (PvE) campaign, but it would be difficult and distracting to engage a player every time they come under attack by another player. On the upside, this highlights another of Cloud Raiders’ defining elements: a super-solid single-player experience.
Single-player campaigns are common enough even in base-building games built mostly on player-versus-player gameplay. But where most games tend to use PvE mode as a way to ready players for the real meat of the experience (taking on other players), Cloud Raiders’ PvE remains as much a core element of gameplay as PvP. For a base-building veteran like this author, the Cloud Raiders emphasis on single player is actually quite refreshing.
Play Cloud Raiders on Mac today
In addition to souped-up graphics, Cloud Raiders for Mac offers another perk: beta access to Cloud Raiders: Survival Arena, an upcoming game mode. Survival Arena is a new twist on the Cloud Raiders experience: a tower-defense game featuring the familiar buildings and troops from the core game. The Survival Arena beta is available on Windows and Facebook, too.
If you’ve managed to miss Cloud Raiders in any of its previous releases, you can now give it a look right from the comfort of your Mac. And if you have a 4K or 5K display, that look is going to be a sweet one.
Cloud Raiders is available now on the Mac App Store. Versions for iOS, Android, Amazon, Windows, Windows Phone 8 and Facebook are also available. Learn more by following Cloud Raiders on Facebook and Twitter.
