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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.

Dungeons & Zombies

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

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

FREE

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.

Skilli World-Real Money Trivia

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

Skilli World-Real Money Trivia

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

Skilli World-Real Money Trivia

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

FREE

Skilli World-Real Money Trivia

Under The Tree Ltd.

Source link: http://appadvice.com/reviews

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Cryptract Review

November 21, 2020 by RSS Feed

Cryptract isn’t a title that rolls off the tongue, but that hasn’t stopped the game finding a massive audience in its native Japan, where its full name is Genjuu Keiyaku Cryptract. After four long years, the mobile version of Cryptract has finally arrived in the West. Was it worth the wait?

Cryptract

For the most part, yes. But before we get into the whys and wherefores, here’s the backstory.

Cryptract sees you playing as the ruler of a fantasy kingdom that has been attacked by a mystical creature and its army of minions. You’re left with no choice but to take up arms and send this beast back to the underworld (or wherever it came from).

That means getting into an endless succession of turn-based battles with squads of monsters. There are campaign battles, side missions, a tower, beast battles, and much more, all of it conforming to the same tripartite format.

The combat itself is equally familiar. You can take up to four units into the field, plus a friend - a character borrowed from another player’s army to lend a bit of extra firepower. Each unit has a basic attack and a skill, which can be an attack or something more wholesome, like healing or discovery.

There’s also an auto button, and you’ll spend most of the game with this button activated, since the game’s AI can handle combat perfectly well for the most part.

Instead, you’ll concentrate on strategy - creating the strongest possible party using the best possible combination of units. You can have up to ten parties ready to deploy, all of them suited to different battlefield conditions.

Winning is not just a matter of stuffing your strongest, starriest, most levelled-up units into a party. Each unit also has an elemental attribute, such as wood, fire, and water, and these interact with each other in different ways. Fire beats wood, water beats fire, and so on.

To give yourself a tactical advantage you need to ensure that the party you send into battle has the right combination of elemental attributes to defeat your opponent. As the saying goes, never bring fire to a water fight.

The Good

Cryptract

While it’s not exactly groundbreaking on the gameplay front, Cryptract does what it does very well. The gacha system is fair, there’s always a battle you can win from the huge selection of missions available, and your progress through the campaign always feels steady.

But Cryptract’s undisputed ace card is its well-written and impeccably localized text. The campaign and side missions are all introduced by segments of an unfolding narrative in which characters have inner lives, anxieties, and motivations. You carry these with you into battle.

The side missions in particular add an extra layer to Cryptract, padding out the main story with neat little subplots that exist not to change the course of events by to add color and depth to the gameworld and place your actions in a larger context.

The presentation is in a storybook style, too, with entirely 2D graphics and fairly modest animation Cryptract is about words at least as much as pictures, which is refreshing.

The Bad

Cryptract

There’s relatively little in the way of innovation in the world of fantasy RPGs with gacha mechanics, and Cryptract is no exception to this rule. Over time the game can become grindy, with you having to watch battle after battle in order to earn orbs to summon new units.

Cryptract is better balanced than most, and there’s plenty of fun to be had in tweaking your parties to try and get through a particularly rough mission or beast battle, but grind will get you in the end.

And if you’re a fan of technically impressive 3D RPGs you may find yourself underwhelmed by Cryptract’s deliberately modest presentation.

The verdict

There are plenty of gacha-powered fantasy RPGs to choose from, and in gameplay terms it can be hard to tell them apart. Cryptract makes an effort with a strong sense of narrative and exceptional localization.

It’s a well-balanced RPG, too, thanks no doubt to its years of playtesting in Japan. If you’re on the lookout for a new gacha RPG, Cryptract is a solid prospect. It may look modest, but it’s polished in the right ways.

8.1

OVERALL

Replayability 8

Game Controls 8.2

Graphics 8.4

Sound/Music 8.1

Gameplay 8

FREE

Cryptract

lionsfilm

Source link: http://appadvice.com/reviews

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StoryCut - Review

November 21, 2020 by RSS Feed

With the popularity of video clips, video editing tools on mobile are not in short supply. Such apps are often swamped with new features, including rich filters, special effects, cute stickers, variable speeds, rough cuts, and even adding recordings. It can often all be a bit much.

In that case, is there a video editing app that is powerful and comprehensive enough to cover all the features provided by existing video editing apps? The answer is – yes, StoryCut is the only video editing app you need on your phone. So if you’re a big fan of clip creation, try StoryCut, which allows you to quickly finish what you want and share it on your desired social media platform.

If you are an amateur, StoryCut also customizes the clip sizes suitable for various social platforms, such as Tik Tok, Instagram, and YouTube - so that you can share the clip with one click after making it. StoryCut has standard editing functions, such as video cut and filters. It’s worth looking at the features in StoryCut that are absent from most editing apps.

PIP

StoryCut - Video Editor &Maker

PIP (picture in picture) allows you to merge images with a video. When we tried to overlay an image of a starry sky with my portrait, we saw an incredible double exposure. Using the green screen matting feature, we placed a video in a Jurassic Park scene, and created a Hollywood-style effect.

Keyframe

StoryCut - Video Editor &Maker

Keyframe is a dominant feature of StoryCut, a feature previously only available in professional clipping tools on the PC. In this feature, you only need to set a few keyframes to make any material move according to the trajectory you set. For example, if you want the object to move in sync with a moving car, you just need to add two keyframes. This feature can even achieve special effects like those seen in science fiction movies.

Effects

StoryCut - Video Editor &Maker

StoryCut offers a vast number of popular effects for short video platforms. Add an old TV frame to the video, or a gold dust effect can give you a dreamlike image. There are also some split-screen effects you can utilise.

Speed

You might think that video speed adjustment is a regular feature - but StoryCut can increase the speed by eight times, with many similar apps only offering half that. We imported a video of some skateboarding and got amazing results after adjusting the speed and combining it with the reverse play function.

Adjust

StoryCut contains 18 fine adjustment parameters, which can make up for the shortage of filters, saving the poorest videos that even filters cannot do anything about. I imported a video taken on a cloudy day with poor lighting, for example, but found that even with a filter, I could not get a nice color. Then I turned on the image quality adjustment. After a series of parameter adjustments, including brightness, sharpness, contrast, saturation enhancement, and color temperature reduction, the video looked brand-new, just like the image quality of a movie, and the clarity was significantly improved.

Very satisfactory results were obtained.

The Good

As detailed above, StoryCut has everything. You can perform every edit imaginable, and the interface is intuitive

enough to allow you to do it in no time at all. It’s entirely conceivable that you could have a video or slideshow with sound effects, cuts, transition, custom audio, double-exposure effects, and picture-in-picture ready in under five minutes.

For the most part, the effects and filters are tasteful and stylish, too, so StoryCut will let you turn out productive, high-quality content at speed. Curious prospective video editors could easily spend hours experimenting with all the tools and functions on offer, some of which are surprisingly advanced.

While tools like Instagram and your phone’s camera software will enable you to apply basic filters and stickers and so on, none of them contains anything like the depth of functionality available in StoryCut. In that sense, the app emphatically earns its place as an advanced, bespoke video tool.

The Bad

StoryCut can recognize voices to generate subtitles. With one tap, you will see subtitles auto-generated from the voices in your clips. For now, this feature is only supported on Android, but we hope the dev team will implement this feature on iOS sooner so users can also enjoy the ease of subtitling that the app provides.

Check out StoryCut via the App Store (and Google Play) and also its official site, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube channels.

Overall

StoryCut is a comprehensive and intuitive video and picture editing app. VIP users will get the most out of it, as long as they don’t mind being subscribers rather than owners, but anyone looking for a richer alternative to Instagram should check it out.

8.3

OVERALL

iPhone Integration 9

Lasting appeal 8.1

User Interface 8

Is engaging 8.2

Does it well 8.3

FREE

StoryCut - Video Editor &Maker

Wenzhou XunChi Digital Technology Co., Ltd.

Source link: http://appadvice.com/reviews

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MovieMusic Review

November 21, 2020 by RSS Feed

Music is a more powerful storytelling tool than most people realize. It’s the vital seasoning that makes every movie, TV show, advertisement, and internet video meme work how it should, manipulating your emotions in exactly the right way.

MovieMusic | Music For Videos

The problem is, using an existing piece of music involves paying exorbitant fees or drawing on classical pieces that everybody has already heard a trillion times.

MovieMusic aims to solve that problem for you by providing a library of compositions that you can dip into for every conceivable dramatic context.

These tracks, which have been written by a company of jobbing professional composers and performed by a live orchestra, tend to be around a minute long. They fall into 70+ albums, with titles like “Attractive”, “Badness”, “Excitement”, “Light”, “Christmas”, and so on.

The tracks themselves have titles too. In the “Love” album, for instance, you’ll find “Bond”, “Bliss”, “Longing”, “Intimacy”, and more. Each album contains 30 tracks, meaning there are over 2000 in all.

There are a couple of chapters of Orchestral Tools as well - subtle accents to create mood rather than full-blown musical compositions.

The first two tracks in each chapter are free, while the remaining 28 cost 99c a pop. The reason MovieMusic is able to sell its music so cheaply is that the files are restricted to a bitrate of 128kbs, and the tracks are licensed for personal, non-commercial use. So if you’re looking for a cheap way to score your next Hollywood project, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

The Good

MovieMusic | Music For Videos

MovieMusic is simple to use and it works surprisingly well. The Christmas music sounds Christmassy, the Comedy music sounds suitably quirky and upbeat (think Curb Your Enthusiasm), and the Disgusting music, somehow, sounds disgusting.

A bit of imagination is required when it comes to the individual track names, such as “Baking” (“Bright pizzicato helps show off the intricacies of the expert in full flow”), but on the whole MovieMusic provides snippets of music that intuitively belong in their categories and do what they’re supposed to do.

Every single one of the app’s 2000+ tracks is in the same key and tempo, too, so you can in principle blend them into a seamless orchestral score. It’s very clever.

This really helps when navigating the 2000+ tracks, as does the simple preview - or “audition” - facility that lets you listen to each track in full before deciding whether to spend money on it.

It’s also worth mentioning that each track in MovieMusic has three versions: Cinematic (the default), Intimate, and Modern. While the quality levels of the different versions naturally vary according to the track, in general we find that Cinematic is the one to go for.

MovieMusic has a seamlessly simple interface. You just choose a chapter, pick a song, and tap the play icon to listen. Once you buy and download a song you’re given the option of sharing it via iMessage, WhatsApp, Mail, or even opening it in iMovie or another video-editing program. It couldn’t be easier.

The Bad

MovieMusic | Music For Videos

While MovieMusic’s interface is intuitive and easy to use, its presentation is functional rather than enjoyable.

You could argue that the same applies to the music itself. This isn’t a criticism of the compositions, all of which sound polished and professional. But the wall-to-wall orchestral arrangements don’t reflect the breadth and variety of music right now.

There’s a bit of digital percussion overlaid on the tracks in Modern mode, but few other nods to contemporary musical styles. If you’re looking for a traditional sound, it’s perfect. Otherwise, you may struggle to find what you’re looking for - even in the Technology chapter.

Overall

MovieMusic is a slightly odd proposition. While asset libraries are usually for commercial use, this one is just for fun.

But it’s a fun tool that will add a pleasing sheen to your personal and non-commercial YouTube videos. It’s incredibly easy to use, too, and it contains a generous supply of musical morsels.

8.4

OVERALL

User Interface 9

Lasting appeal 8.4

iPhone Integration 8.5

Is engaging 8.1

Does it well 8

FREE

MovieMusic | Music For Videos

Gothic Projects

Source link: http://appadvice.com/reviews

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