"If there is an app for that"

Wreckfest review

November 28, 2022 by RSS Feed

As its name implies, Bugbear's Wreckfest is all about vehicular wreckage. With an impressive physics engine and detailed modeling, everything from the ride-on lawn mowers to giant harvesters smash up really nicely. As cool as all of it can look, though, Wreckfest rarely feels very good, which is the core issue with the game and overall experience.

Smash em' up

Wreckfest is largely set up like a very typical racing game. You start with access to a limited set of vehicles to choose from that you can take into single races or use in a single-player campaign, and as a result of participating you gradually build up currency and earn unlocks that give you access to more vehicles and customization options.

The primary twist (and what Wreckfest hangs its hat on) is that in all of these events focus on your ability to shunt other drivers into walls, force them to spin out, etc. There are also some events that aren't even races, but rather are like a demolition derby where everyone drives around an arena hitting each other until only one driver is left with a driveable vehicle.

Detailed damage

Along with the encouragement to smash up the competition, Wreckfest rewards you with some impressive damage modeling to bend, scrape, and peel off nearly every facet of every vehicle until they are barely recognizeable. Even on mobile devices, the level of detail on display to show this destruction is really impressive, though your mileage can vary with regard to frame rate and rendering resolutions depending on what model device you're playing on.

Speaking of details, Wreckfest also offers an array of customization options beyond visual fidelity. Each car can be tuned to pretty exacting specifications, and can also be decked out with a lot of different paint options. All told, there's quite a bit to sink your teeth into and this mobile version doesn't really seem to compromise all that much if at all.

Look vs. feel

As impressive as Wreckfest looks, I do find its gameplay a bit disappointing. Massive multi-car wrecks can look incredibly impressive, but those don't come along that often because bumping and driving in this game doesn't feel all that good or impactful. There's just not a very good sense of speed in the game, so it constantly feels like you're crawling along, and this gets reinforced by impacts that only occasionally feel violent and fast.

It also probably doesn't help that Wreckfest seems to be a bit buggy. In my time with the game, I had moments where the gas pedal stopped working or cars just clipped through each other instead of colliding. These bugs were few and far between, but they did hamper what was already shaping up to be a somewhat underwhelming driving experience.

The bottom line

I don't know if it's the kind of realism Wreckfest is chasing or just some technical issues, but the game could stand to add some arcade-y "oomf" to its collisions. Or some speed. Anything, really. Outside of being a pretty good-looking game with highly detailed modeling, the racing experience of Wreckfest is rather dull.

Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/wreckfest-review/

OPUS: Echo of Starsong review

November 22, 2022 by RSS Feed

In broad strokes, OPUS: Echo of Starsong seems like an all-too-familiar type of game. It's primarily a visual novel with anime stylings set in a sci-fi universe and you play as a ragtag group of space salvagers. That said, the way this game approaches and delivers this concept is so incredibly nuanced and intentional that OPUS: Echo of Starsong ends up feeling unlike anything I've ever played before.

Echoes of the past

OPUS: Echo of Starsong tells the story of Jun, a disgraced noble of the East Oceaners, as he reflects on his life. In his younger years, he was set to inherit and steward the lumen caves belonging to his clan, but an incident resulted in him being exiled. The beginning of Jun's recollections start shortly after said incident when Jun has a chance encounter with a witch named Eda.

This sets off a series of adventures with Jun and Eda, and over the course of them you pilot a ship across the stars, exploring caves, chasing the past, and learning a lot more about the lore and characters inhabiting OPUS: Echo of Starsong's world.

Deep space song

If it isn't clear to you so far in this review, OPUS: Echo of Starsong has a lot going on narratively. Despite the tropey sci-fi setup, every little thing in this game has its own way of expressing itself just a bit differently than you might expect. For example, to hunt lumen (the most valuable treasure in this universe) everyone has to rely on individuals called witches who are gifted with the ability to resonate with lumen by singing.

At first, some of the decisions around how the world works seem arbitrary, but as the story unfolds, you learn why everything is set up and presented in the way that it is, and the payoff is a really rich and immersive story that spans years and feels much larger and deeper than most storytelling experiences you can find on the App Store.

Mechanic management

OPUS: Echo of Starsong isn't just a game where you read and listen to characters to unfold a story. Although that is a large part of the game, there are interludes where you are piloting your ship among the stars, exploring lumen caves, and more. These sections of the game are not nearly as engaging as the main narrative, but they do some important work around extending the universe.

Random encounters in space and routine expeditions into non-story-related lumen caves always reveal some other hidden facet from the world of OPUS: Echo of Starsong, while also giving you as the player room to breathe between what ends up escalating into some pretty intense storytelling. On top of that, they give you more things to look at, and OPUS is such a fully-realized and beautifully rendered world that this is something you will likely want to do.

The bottom line

On mobile, it is rare to see a game strike the specific balance that OPUS: Echo of Starsong does between gameplay and storytelling. This alone makes it a unique experience, but the degree of craftmanship and care put in to creating its world pushes this game beyond feeling like an interesting oddity into a truly special game you owe it to yourself to play.

Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/opus-echo-of-starsong-review/

DYSMANTLE review

November 10, 2022 by RSS Feed

When DYSMANTLE initially came out, I bounced off of it pretty quickly. A directionless open world zombie game just wasn't really gripping me in that moment, but I made plans to go back and check it out eventually. Fast-forward to now where the game has recently been updated with a new expansion and I can hardly keep my hands off of it. DYSMANTLE is a pretty amazing title, and the Underworld DLC is a welcome addition for new and old players alike.

Surviving solo

DYSMANTLE is a survival and crafting game where you play as a man emerging from a subterranian shelter years after the onset of the zombie apocalypse. All of the underground supplies have been exhausted, so you have to fend for yourself by foraging from the leftovers of civilization to craft tools, cook food, make clothes, and forge weapons to fend off hungry zombies.

This probably sounds all too familiar. It feels like this exact kind of game has been done time and time again. Where DYSMANTLE creates an edge though is in its balance of survival systems. All of the mechanics that usually annoy me in these games aren't there. There's no hunger or thirst meters, weapons can't break, and your inventory is a smart balance of managing the limited amount of space in your backpack to figure out what to dump into crates at campsites scattered across the map, which have unlimited storage. On combat, DYSMANTLE also keep things simple, making the wade through zombie encounters thankfully pretty short but definitely challenging at times.

Wasteland wanderer

There isn't a whole lot of story or direction to DYSMANTLE. You simply emerge and then essentially need to figure things out. There are, of course, some tutorial markers near the opening area that teach you the basics of crafting and combat, but those are easily missable as the game opens wide open almost immediately. As an example of this I came across a prompt telling me how to dodge roll around hour 10 of the game. I simply hadn't walked in that direction yet!

This lack of direction can feel frustrating and probably contributed to me putting down the game upon release. It doesn't take a whole lot of time to find tons of things to do, though. Foraging, finding new campsites, and activating towers that reveal regions are almost always an easy thing to pursue, and along the way those can give way to quests, boss fights, finding hidden treasures, and discovering all kinds of new layers to the game that you might not otherwise know are there.

Underworld update

Everything I've written about to this point applies to the base DYSMANTLE experience. With the Underworld update (available for $4.99), the game adds a whole new subterranean area to the game along with new quests, enemies, gear, and more. You can stumble across the entrance to this area at any point in your journey, and it adds a ton of mystique to the game on top of more stuff to do. It's not the easiest region to work through if you haven't crafted or upgraded a lot of gear, but its opening area unlocks a lot of gear blueprints and provides easy forage points for rare materials that can accelerate your progress even if you are just starting the game fresh.

This kind of design is what ended up selling me on DYSMANTLE. Its world feels organic, mysterious, and conquerable at all points of the game. Even though there is some designed gating of areas, DYSMANTLE does a great job of giving you plenty of actually fun things to do and explore without feeling too restrictive or grindy. Underworld gives you even more of that plus some bonus features like an island home base for building up your dream outpost, provided you make it that far.

The bottom line

DYSMANTLE's survival-based gameplay works in large part because of how even-handed 10tons is with its mechanics and systems. Nothing feels foisted upon you, but the amount of things to discover behind walled-off areas or frozen wastelands motivates you to gather and craft materials that let you explore them. This is how all survival crafting games should be.

Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/dysmantle-review/

Isle of Arrows - Tower Defense review

November 04, 2022 by RSS Feed

Tower defense games are generally a hard sell to me because there is a core design problem to solve with this genre: the death spiral. At any point in your tower planning and wave management, it's possible to make a move that has doomed you to failure well before you've actually hit a game over screen. Different games have different ways of dealing with this issue, with my favorites virtually eliminating it. Isle of Arrows comes nowhere close to solving the death spiral problem, but its design is still fascinating enough that I keep picking it up to try and master it.

Tiles and towers

The primary twist Isle of Arrows adds to its brand of tower defense is a system where you construct the level you are playing on as you clear waves. When you aren't watching your fortifications shoot arrows, cannon balls, and more at swarms of enemies, you are offered cards that you can place on the level to add additional features it.

Sometimes these cards are new towers or path cards you can use to extend how far enemies need to go before reaching your defense point. Beyond that, the cards can also be less direct features like a garden that provides a small currency bonus or "flag" tiles that build out more tiles on the island you're playing on.

Building balance

This wrinkle gives Isle of Arrows a whole second layer of strategic depth. In addition to trying to optimize a path that only ends in death, you have to make room for it. The only problem is, this game isn't kind about giving you what you need so much as serving up a limited selection of things you have to try and make work.

You can make the enemy path as long as you want, for example, but unless you manage your currency to be pulling down and placing towers along it you will eventually get overwhelmed by the enemy hordes. At the same time, there are a lot of bonus tiles you can add to your island, but doing so cuts down on the real estate you have to work with, and if you want to accelerate any of those plans you have to manage your currency efficiently. It's a lot of juggle at once, but Isle of Arrows gives you all the time you need between waves to ponder your plans.

Perplexing progress

Isle of Arrows has a few different modes to engage with (including a daily challenge), but they all boil down to essentially the same idea: Survive through as many waves as possible. The game's difficulty curve practically ensures you can't do this on your first try on the game's campaign mode, though (presumably) gives you all the tools you need in the daily challenge. It's also worth mentioning there's a third "gauntlet" mode that unlocks once you've cleared a campaign that also has all cards unlocked by default.

I say failure is almost certain at first because Isle of Arrows definitely has a problem with death spiraling which is exacerbated by the fact the card unlock system in the campaign mode, which is unambiguously this game's primary mode. Access to every other mode is tied to progress in the campaign, so not only will your first few forays into the game likely put you in situations where you just know you don't have enough coins to cycle cards and get your defenses up to snuff, but after you fail you get shown some tools that probably will make it easier to get further next time. All this can be demoralizing, but I somehow find the experience compelling enough to keep diving back in to see if I finally have the player knowledge and cards to clear the next hurdle.

The bottom line

Isle of Arrows has all of the design features that would prime me to be turned off by it, but its unique take on tower defense charms me nonetheless. Anyone looking for a deeply strategic tower defense game offering something genuinely new in terms of concept will be more than satisfied with it.

Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/isle-of-arrows-tower-defense-review/

Monster Train review

November 01, 2022 by RSS Feed

I have been eagerly awaiting a mobile port of Monster Train since the game originally released on PC in 2020. Roguelite deck-building games tend to draw me in over and over again in part because they feel perfectly suited to touch play on the go, such that whenever a celebrated one releases I cross my fingers hoping that it comes to the App Store. Now that Monster Train is here, I can say it is a fantastic deck-building game that scratches a somewhat different itch from others like it on iOS, and its mobile iteration isn't perfect but totally serviceable.

Railroad to hell

Monster Train has an incredibly dumb and fun video game premise: It's about driving a train to hell. You and your demon army are the last hope at reigniting the fires of the underworld, and all that is standing in your way is a legion of holy warriors intent on destroying you and your train.

You start the game with a very modest "crew" and a few powers to defend your train, which are all represented as cards in a deck. Each stage of Monster Train has you drawing cards from this deck and playing them to stop waves of enemies from ascending all three levels of your train and attacking the engine powering your locomotive.

Trainhopping tag-alongs

As you clear levels in Monster Train, you are immediately rewarded with items like gold, a choice of three random cards, and more that you can use to morph your deck from its basic default state into an optimized angel-killing machine. Also between levels you get a view of your progress to hell that includes branching paths with additional rewards attached to them as well. You can access shops to spend gold to remove or upgrade cards from your deck, open chests with artifacts that provide passive bonuses for the rest of your run, or even make stops at randomized points of interest with mysterious consequences attached to them.

You'll need to take advantage of all of these opportunities to upgrade your deck, as your enemies grow rather quickly in strength. Identifying good card combos and ways to reliably access them is key to performing well in Monster Train. It's not likely you'll win on your first run, but death is all part of the process. When a run ends, you build up experience to unlock more cards on future runs and can restart again with a different combo of decks and modifiers to play with.

Model train

The sheer number of interlocking systems at play in Monster Train really make it feel endlessly replayable. There are so many different variables and all of them work together in a surprisingly harmonious way such that every run feels like it has potential to be a winner while still feeling deeply strategic and challenging. If the standard run ever starts to wear thin, you can also take part in daily challenges or even races against other players online to keep things feeling fresh or add another layer of challenge.

As a mobile port, Monster Train is mostly immaculate, but I did notice that boss enemies that float on the edges of the screen are cut off (mostly on tablets) such that you can't always see their stats in a way that you might need to if a run is coming down to the wire. The touch controls themselves are also fine, but slightly more clunky than expected. Generally speaking neither of these things are particularly bothersome, though they are worth pointing out.

The bottom line

Monster Train is a fantastic deck-building roguelite that is easy to play repeatedly over a long, long period of time. I plan to keep it installed for a good, long time even though the port isn't 100% perfect.

Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/monster-train-review/