LifeAfter Review: Bringing Zombie Games Back From the Dead?
November 21, 2020 by RSS Feed
Zombies are definitely coming back from the dead in 2019. Resident Evil 2 recently reminded us how much we miss claustrophobic corridors filled with bloodthirsty undead while Days Gone looks set to be one of the biggest games of the year.
NetEase is leading the zombie resurgence on mobile though with LifeAfter, a post apocalyptic survival game that combines the action and tension of PUBG with the craftiness of Minecraft.
The game pulls no punches right from the start, with you involved in a tense gunfight on the back of a pickup against some alarmingly fast undead. After fighting them off the pickup crashes, sending you flying into the wilderness.
Cue a terrifying chase sequence in which you’ll outrun the undead long enough to meet a fellow survivor who teaches you the basics.
You’ll scavenge for resources to make a simple machete before locating your adorable doggie companion who leads you to a hut. Safety at last? Not quite. The zombies find you and force you to run again, at which point you witness some kind of giant mutated creature that could swallow you whole – and then some.
You’ll then meet a few stranded survivors, beg them to let you fix and use your helicopter, then make a quick escape by air. Well, you would if that giant mutant didn’t pluck it out of the air and chuck you into a river, at which point the real adventure begins.
The Good
We were first impressed with the robust character customisation options, which greet you as soon as you open the game. We could create any type of character we wanted, including face, hair, and clothes. Heck, you can even customise your pet dog, from its breed to the colour of its fur.
LifeAfter doesn’t get in the way of you playing however you want to either. Right from the bat you can choose whether or not you want to complete the tutorial. You can then either start your story solo, or send a friend an invitation code that allows you to play together over the internet. Not only that, but a friend can join you at any time within the game with a simple tap of a button, so you’re not limited to the option you pick at that moment.
The presentation is also top notch – and that includes the menu screens. All of the options we mentioned in our previous paragraph? You tweak them on a rustic table in first person, which is a nice twist and helps seat the scene right from the beginning. The in-game graphics are also very impressive, reminiscent of a PS3-era action game. That’s likely to ensure LifeAfter works on as many devices as possible, as you get the feeling that it could have been bumped up to PS4 level if NetEase wished it.
Console-style games are often difficult to pull off without a controller on mobile, but we reckon NetEase has done the best they could. The virtual buttons are kept to a minimum, with a joystick, shoot, crouch, and swap weapon buttons. There’s even some nifty context-sensitive buttons that only appear when you need them, like reloading or opening doors.
Finally, we were impressed with the crafting system, which was kept mercifully simple. In another nice presentational touch, your character actually whips out a tablet device whenever you try to craft something. Here you can see all of the recipes you can craft, and the resources that you need to craft them. You can filter these by types, like Tools, Weapons, and Ammo and swap between a simplified, or more complex, menu.
You can also queue up to five crafting items at once, freeing you up to get on with more fun activities like slaying zombies, setting up defenses, and scavenging for resources.
The Bad
While LifeAfter is a generally impressive experience – particularly on mobile – there’s an unmistakable level of oddness that stifles the immersion. There are some lovely animations for actions like chopping down trees or picking away at rocks but then other simple actions go entirely without. Cutscenes that end on a dramatic note like falling out of a helicopter into a river lose their impact when you just appear by the side of the river as nothing happened.
This extends to the combat too. While there are some wonderful melee animations, they lack any real impact. The same goes for guns. If you hit a zombie with a shotgun right in the face, you expect some level of gore or, at the very least, for the zombie to react to it. Many times though, our zombie continued to shamble forward unscathed for a few seconds before it realized it was actually dead this time.
Very few people are likely playing this for the story, but those that do will likely feel disappointed at the dialogue. While we really appreciate the effort NetEase has made to give us dialogue options, the actual text itself is unrealistic and, quite frankly, bad. More effort could have been put into the translation, which would probably have helped.
The Verdict
LifeAfter is an impressive survival game that is well worth playing for fans of the likes of Minecraft or PUBG. It successfully transports these types of experiences onto mobile, though not without a certain level of oddness.
8.1
OVERALL
Replayability 8.2
Game Controls 8
Graphics 8.3
Sound/Music 8.1
Gameplay 7.7
LifeAfter
NetEase Games
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Creative Destruction Review
November 21, 2020 by RSS Feed
If the mobile app stores have shown us anything, it’s that originality really isn’t that important. There are countless spins on every genre, and what matters isn’t which game came first but which ones are most fun.
Fortnite is a good example. Having taken its inspiration from battle royale forerunner PUBG, it has spawned its own legions of imitators. Creative Destruction is one of them.
That means it sees you parachuting onto a large island and duking it out with 99 other players to be the last person standing. There’s only one island, but many different terrains, and the chances of spending more than one game out of 100 in the same area are miniscule.
Reducing those chances even further is the fact that the playable area on the map shrinks during each match as an unsurvivable cloud gradually closes in. This diminishing circle of territory is different every time, meaning Creative Destruction always feels fresh.
You start each match with a Destructor - an impressive looking rifle that nevertheless is only good for demolishing and constructing buildings. To get anywhere you’ll need to find weapons in buildings, chests, through supply drops, and by killing other players and looting the stuff they leave behind.
There are the usual classes of weapons, including pistols, SMGs, assault rifles, sniper rifles, bazookas, and grenades. You move with the right of the screen and look with the right, as per every shooter on a touchscreen.
On top of the default solo mode - the iconic battle royale - you can play in Duo, Squad, and Fireteam modes, and for the next few weeks (until the end of April) there’s a Duo driving mode too.
This sees you either driving a vehicle around the island or hanging out the back of it with a gun. The prize? Bumblebee. Yep - in conjunction with Hasbro, developer NetEase has added everybody’s favorite first gen Transformer to Creative Destruction, and if you play your cards right (i.e. kill everyone) you can even drive him.
The Good
Creative Destruction is a surprizingly robust Fortnite competitor, with vibrant graphics, silky smooth performance, and well-balanced gameplay.
The building mechanic in particular stands out. To build a structure, you first need to assemble material by destroying houses, cars, trees, and anything else that will succumb to your Destructor’s rays.
Then you can immediately create a number of different structures, including a floor, a wall, a share shelter, and ramps going either up or down, with the tap of a button.
These buildings aren’t intended to be permanent. Instead, they affect the way you fight, giving you ready platforms to scale and shields to erect to improve your odds in battle. You can almost think of them like Elsa’s magical ice powers in Frozen - your Destructor gives you a means to change the shape of the battlefield on the fly.
But the structures you create are easy to destroy - much easier than in Fortnite - so shootouts are fluid, dynamic affairs in which you’re constantly balancing cover and elevation with the need to remove your opponent’s cover and actually shoot them.
Fortunately, thanks to the shrinking map and the inclusion of landmarks that naturally attract players, you’ll always see action in Creative Destruction, and the final shootouts are often tense affairs.
The Bad
For all that Creative Destruction is a fun addition to the battle royale genre, it doesn’t much that’s original to the table. If you’ve played Fortnite or PUBG, you’ve pretty much played this too.
Of course, that’s not necessarily a problem. It’s a new map, a new setting, and a new experience. The addition of Bumblebee helps elevate things, too, giving you something extra to chase beyond loot and glory.
But given the level of polish we’d have liked to see some more character and innovation too. Check out the game for yourself here if you live in Europe and Japan, and here if you’re based elsewhere.
The Verdict
Creative Destruction is a slick, polished, playable take on the battle royale genre, and if you’re tired of Fortnite and PUBG but still up for a spot of battle royale action this should fit the bill - as long as you’re not looking for something that’s radically different.
8.2
OVERALL
Replayability 8.5
Game Controls 8.3
Graphics 8.1
Sound/Music 8.2
Gameplay 8
Creative Destruction
NetEase Games
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MU Origin 2 Review
November 21, 2020 by RSS Feed
It’s a wonder the coders at Webzen find time to sleep. Over the last couple of years they’ve rolled out an impressive number of content updates for RPG MU Origin, taking it all the way up to version 7, and yet they’ve somehow found time to make MU Origin 2 as well.
This latest addition to the MU franchise - which started life as a web game back in 2001 - doesn’t take any major risks. In fact, its overriding priority is to give you the smoothest, easiest RPG experience possible. How you’ll feel about that depends on what kind of gamer you are.
The word that best describes MU Origin 2 is “streamlined”. In that spirit, you get just three character types to choose from at the outset: Dark Knight, Dark Wizard, and Elf. And it’s just a short hop from picking an avatar to taking on story quests.
These are dispensed by NPCs with an endless supply of odd jobs to dish out, normally involving the killing of monsters. Once you accept a story quest, by simply tapping a prompt on the left of the screen, you automatically towards the action.
You automatically kill the enemies you find there, too, though returning to the quest-giver to receive your reward seemingly constitutes a new quest.
Naturally, there are non-story quests too. These are designed to keep you moving in the right direction, progress-wise, by encouraging you to make use of modes and features as they become available, such as the Guild, the dungeons, and the Auction.
There are also daily quests, and innumerable kill quests. Interestingly, these involve not only killing ten of X monsters, but killing waves of monsters by travelling around and finding them on the location map. A single quest can see you terminating over a hundred monsters, all without touching the screen.
MU Origin 2 has a definite autopilot vibe, and that partly extends to the RPG admin. For instance, when you pick up an item a button appears allowing you to equip it right away, without going into your inventory, and you can transfer an item’s enhancement level to a new one too.
The Good
However, MU Origin 2 is not entirely an autopilot affair. While the opening few hours are more than usually streamlined, eventually you’ll need to start paying close attention if you want to get anywhere.
That point comes at around level 150. The first 100 levels fly past in a haze, as you romp invincibly through all the battles the game has to throw at you. Your Zen (the game’s most abundant currency) is seemingly never-ending, and you level-up at breakneck speed.
But things start slowing down after that. Upgrading your skills gets more expensive as the level gets higher, and you acquire more skills to boot, so you start running out of Zen. And the pace of your levelling up slows too, which often means you can’t take on story quests until you’ve scraped together some more XP.
This in turn forces you to make some decisions - about how to spend your limited Zen, and which activities to engage in to help you progress the fastest. Do you jump into an event like the EXP Dungeon or the Guild Battlefield, or do you take on a simple single-player dungeon or Infinite Tower instead?
Or you can throw off the shackles entirely and just explore the areas of the MU continent that you’ve unlocked so far. Movement is handled with a virtual stick on the left while your skills are arrayed on the right. Using these inputs you can maraud around Atlans, killing fishy things, or Devias, killing yetis.
There’s a rich variety of monsters to kill and environments to kill them in, and while technically the visuals are only so-so the designs are interesting and varied.
The Bad
Presentation is not a generally strong point for the game, with tiny, poorly localized text and ropey voice audio leaving a bad taste. As stated previously the game can feel like it’s on auto-pilot at times.
The Verdict
MU Origin 2 is not revolutionary, but it’s worthy of the MU license. While there’s plenty to keep you busy, and all the staples of the mobile RPG genre are here, you’ll enjoy it most if you like your RPGs fairly lightweight.
8.6
OVERALL
Replayability 8.6
Game Controls 8.4
Graphics 8.8
Sound/Music 8.4
Gameplay 8.6
MU ORIGIN 2 -WEBZEN Officially
GAMENOW TECHNOLOGY LIMITED
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Dungeons & Zombies Review
November 21, 2020 by RSS Feed
Dungeons & Zombies is exactly the kind of title you’d expect at this time of year: a cutesy, vaguely spooky twist on an existing casual genre, to capitalize on the Halloween festivities.
However, scratch under the surface and you’ll find an altogether tougher proposition than first impressions might suggest. Like a midnight triple bill of scary movies, Dungeons & Zombies is not for the faint of heart.
The gameplay is based on Sokoban, a puzzle genre in which you have to slide things around on a grid. In this case, the thing you’re sliding is a little girl, and the grid is a series of dungeons.
Every dungeon contains its own features and hazards, such as pillars, pools of water, and - most pertinently - zombies. The aim is to navigate the features, avoid the hazards (i.e., the zombies), and reach the stone staircase that takes you to the next stage.
If left undisturbed, zombies are perfectly harmless. Unfortunately, you can’t venture into the same row or column as a zombie without alerting it to your presence, at which point you have just one move to get out of the way. As long as you move out of that row or column, the zombie will skate past you and stop at the next obstacle it meets.
Unfortunately, you can’t escape a room if a zombie happens to be facing the exit, so the game basically involves using the natural inclination of the zombies to dart, with a slight delay, in your direction to shepherd them out of your path and away from the exit.
In the first few stages you’ve only got the zombies to worry about, but the game soon adds further elements - brains that attract zombies, pulling them away from you for one move; piles of bones that you have to remove by directing zombies at them, and fires that are impassable to you, but not to zombies.
There are 120 dungeons to complete, though only 60 of these are available with the basic download. You have to pay for the other two sets of 30.
The Good
Dungeons & Zombies is difficult, but it gives you lots of tools for getting around tricky stages. For one thing, there are solutions, step-by-step guides to completing stages in the fewest possible moves.
You get five of these, and they refill over time. And if that’s not enough, you can buy packs of five for 99p, or watch an ad in exchange for one.
For another thing, you don’t need to unlock the majority of stages. The first 18 are open, with the remaining 12 becoming available when you get 25 stars. This means you’ve always got somewhere to go if you’re hopelessly stuck.
Of course, the best solution is the one you work out for yourself, and in time you’ll get the knack of Dungeons & Zombies, however impenetrable it seems at first. The trick is to work out where you need the zombies to end up, and then work backwards from that point.
The Bad
While Dungeons & Zombies is definitely a challenging and fairly original puzzle game, it could do with a few more elements to keep it interesting. Brains, bones, and fires are all introduced fairly quickly, and there are few surprises after that.
If you’re after a casual gaming experience - a hypnotically relaxing puzzler like Candy Crush - you may find Dungeons & Zombies a bit of a shock. While developer Manic Player has provided ways to relieve the frustration, it should arguably have been a bit easier in the first place.
The Verdict
Dungeons & Zombies shouldn’t be mistaken for a throwaway casual puzzler. Gamers looking for some light, Halloween-themed relief are in for a shock. However, if you’re brave enough to take on a proper puzzle gaming challenge, you should definitely give it a try.
8.1
OVERALL
Game Controls 8.5
Graphics 8
Sound/Music 8.1
Gameplay 8.1
Replayability 7.8
Dungeons & Zombies
Jacek Zielinski
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Skilli World Review
November 21, 2020 by RSS Feed
Before the smartphone revolution, trivia contests were something that most of us watched rather than took part in. We tuned into game shows and shouted answers at the TV, with no prospect of recognition or reward for our general knowledge prowess.
Those days are behind us now. There are dozens of apps that let us participate in quizzes every single day, against other players, for real cash prizes. Skilli World is the latest to have caught our eye.
Set in a region of space where chunks of land are floating and, improbably, supporting human life in tropical resort-style settlements, Skilli World contains four main modes of play, three of which are available around the clock.
There’s the tutorial, which you can hop into whenever you like without restrictions, and there’s the 1v1 Friend Hut and the General Party Hut, which you can only play after you’ve linked your bank account to the app and made a deposit. More on that later.
Finally, there’s the main event, the Daily Mastermind Tournaments, which take place at the same time every day. These are often themed, so that one day you might be answering questions about Game of Thrones and the next you might be tested on your knowledge of South Park, or Friends.
For every themed quiz, more or less, there’s a general knowledge one too, so if you consider yourself an all-rounder you’ll have plenty of opportunities to strut your stuff. DMTs consist of up to 15 questions, and the answer to all of them is either True or False.
Skilli World’s distinguishing feature in the trivia genre is its unusual pay to play model. While most trivia games are free to play, but dangle lives in front of you as a way to monetize, Skilli World does things the other way around, letting you accumulate lives for free but charging you $5 to enter a DMT.
The Good
According to developer Under The Tree, Skilli World pays out more per player than its rivals. It would say that, of course, but it seems to have some supporting evidence.
For instance, during the app’s soft launch phase it was downloaded 4000 times, and its players managed to collectively win $30,000 - a highly respectable average. In total the app has given away $100,000 in prizes.
This is purportedly thanks to the restricted player numbers. While some of Skilli World’s major rivals might have a prize pot of $3000, there could be more than 100,000 players competing for it. By contrast, a maximum of 300 Skilli World players might compete for a prize pot of $1000.
On cost, too, Under The Tree claims that it represents better value than its rivals, since those games charge extortionate amounts for lives, or for in-game currency with which to buy lives. Of course, you don’t necessarily have to use those lives - you’ll just stand less of a chance of getting into the prizes if you don’t.
In any case, the variety of questions and the simple True/False format make Skilli World a fun trivia app, even if you stick to the prizeless and free tutorial mode.
The Bad
Whether or not you prefer Skilli World’s way of doing things will likely be a matter of personal preference. Under The Tree’s perfectly valid arguments about player-to-prize ratios will fail to convince you if you lay down a cool $5 and crash out after the first question. At least those other apps let you fail for free.
In that sense, Skilli App could do with more modes that don’t require you to enter your bank details and deposit cash up front. While we’ve got no reason to question the offer that Under The Tree is making, some players will be hard to convince, and it would be nice if the app contained more for those cautious souls.
Overall
Skilli World is a polished, accessible, innovative trivia app that gives you a genuine chance of winning some cash - as long as you’ve got the knowledge. Make use of the free introductory DMT to establish whether you’re in with a chance.
8.3
OVERALL
Replayability 9
Game Controls 8
Sound/Music 8.5
Gameplay 8.2
Graphics 7.9
Skilli World-Real Money Trivia
Under The Tree Ltd.
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