"If there is an app for that"

Journey of Greed review

September 07, 2022 by RSS Feed

Oftentimes, multiplayer games are fun because they have this incredibly detailed sense of balance that keeps you wanting to outwit and outplay your opponents. Some other games--like with Journey of Greed--the opposite is true. This deck-building pirate game is conceptually compelling, but a primary reason I've enjoyed it as much as I have is because of how I can manipulate certain game mechanics to win handily just about every time I play.

Loot for the longest

Journey of Greed is a digital board game of sorts where four players compete as pirates in journeying between landmarks and trying to loot as much gold as possible. Everyone moves together one space at a time, but each player has a deck of cards they can play a card from each turn and can make decisions at select spaces to mitigate or take on more risk to balance their survivability and their overall score.

In a way it kind of feels like a competitive version of Slay the Spire, though instead of combat you only really have to worry about events or cards played by other players that damage your health. At any point, players who are still alive can retreat to bank the gold they've built up, but they won't be able to earn more gold until other players retreat or hit one of two "rest" spaces where a new round of play begins. On the final "rest" space all collected coins are tallied from each round and whoever has the most wins.

Breaking waves

This push-your-luck style of game mixes with a collectible card game where players can choose different characters who have their own innate strengths and weaknesses in addition to special, character-specific cards you can load your deck with. To further the customization, each player also has a deck of location cards that serve as the pool for random events as you move across the board.

The blend of gameplay mechanics and systems here is really neat, but I discovered very quickly that playing a specific class a specific way has essentially allowed me to not only win practically every match I've played, but do so by a gigantic margin. While this has somewhat taken the air out of some of the variety that Journey of Greed seems to offer, it has also allowed me to rack up a ton of free-to-play currency to unlock more cards faster and makes for a game experience that feels akin to its inspiration. Slay the Spire is all about finding ways to abuse character and card synergies, so why not also allow for that in a multiplayer game?

Sail free

As a game with collectible card game elements, Journey of Greed's monetization is predictably built around collecting and opening card packs to further customize your decks. In my time with the game, I haven't seen much reason to ponder investing, especially since ranking up from wins grants a good chunk of currency and I've been doing that quite a bit.

So far, it doesn't seem like spending money helps all that much, or--if it does--I just haven't encountered paying players. In my last five games I've won by more than double the score of the 2nd place player, and I keep returning to the game to see how long I can replicate this level of success and perhaps even optimize my deck to take my leads higher.

The bottom line

Although Journey of Greed doesn't appear to be a very carefully balanced game, I have been having fun exploiting that fact in a game format that is an interesting blend of genres or mechanics. I can see how the same experience might not be as enjoyable to other players, especially if you're the one being beat, but I am finding enough satisfaction in this free-to-play multiplayer game to keep playing because I don't feel like I have to keep up with it by grinding a bunch regularly or otherwise paying.

Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/journey-of-greed-review/

Dexter Stardust review

September 02, 2022 by RSS Feed

I have some ambivalence in sorting out my thoughts about Dexter Stardust. On the one hand, this point-and-click adventure makes a lot of the right decisions when it comes to pacing, voice acting, puzzle design, etc. but on the other, it's missing some core features and relies heavily on cliche cultural stereotypes to flesh out its characters. I definitely enjoyed my time with it, but there was almost never a moment where I felt entirely comfortable playing.

Serialized adventure game

Dexter Stardust is an adventure game that centers around a young space courier named Dexter. He works for his uncle delivering all kinds of space tchotchkes across the galaxy, but has a somewhat mysterious past that slowly comes to a head across the game's individual episodes.

As the scenes of these episodes play out (with full voice acting, I might add), you inevitably run up against some obstacle, like guards who don't want to let you in somewhere, seemingly uncrossable gaps, and more where you have to put your wits to the test and combine different items you've gathered and deploy them in the right moments on the right things to push the story forward.

Taco truckers

The sci-fi world of Dexter Stardust is whimsical and doesn't take itself too seriously. It imagines an intergalactic society full of disposable blasters, vending machine s'mores kits, and floating taco stands in space. These features bring life to the Dexter Stardust, and with each episode of the game presenting itself like an episode in a sci-fi TV show, there is plenty of room for Dexter and other characters to play off of these gags in entertaining ways.

Dexter Stardust gets a little less entertaining with some of its world-building primarily around expressions of Hispanic culture. Dexter, his uncle, his crewmate, and several other characters in the game are clearly of Hispanic descent, but their characters seem built around cartoonish cliches like loving tacos and wearing sombreros. In fairness, Dexter Stardust seems intentionally set up to capture a campy and cliche tone, but there are just too many times where the game seemingly goes out of its way to flatten the identity of characters by repeatedly referencing just a small handful of surface-level cultural objects and exports.

Hints of greatness

When Dexter Stardust isn't pounding you over the head with dialog about how much Dexter enjoys tacos, the game mostly shines. Its puzzles are clever without being overly complicated or strung out, and the episodic structure helps keep the scope of any given mission pretty reasonable even if you don't know what to do. For adventure game fans, there are also a ton of great references and easter eggs to other adventure classics that are fun to encounter along the way.

All that said, I do kind of wish Dexter Stardust had some kind of hint system. Despite the mostly reasonable puzzle design, there were a few times when playing where I flat-out could not figure out what I was supposed to do, and the in-game list of objectives and trial and error of item combining was not helpful. This is endemic to point-and-click adventure games to a certain degree, though many modern titles have addressed this shortcoming with some form of hint system that can let you move forward without having to consult a guide.

The bottom line

Dexter Stardust is clearly an adventure experience made with a lot of love and heart. There are some frustrating things about it, though, and unfortunately they don't exactly hang quietly in the background. As long as you are ok with that, there's a lot to like here.

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

Tightrope Theatre review

September 01, 2022 by RSS Feed

Tightrope Theatre is a platformer full of micro-levels where you pilot a jester on a unicycle as they try to complete an array of increasingly complicated and dangerous stunts. It feels nice to control and offers up some decent mechanical variety, but there are times when its tiny challenges will test your patience.

Hop to it

Unlike some platformers that take you on some grand adventure, Tightrope Theatre's conceit is that you are a circus performer. As such, you are constantly confined to small performance areas that usually consist of tightropes, bumpers, barrels, spikes and more with your task being to get from a starting platform to an ending one.

All of these levels are condensed such that they all fit comfortably on a single screen, with no scrolling or other camera movement necessary to let you see your starting point, the goal, and everything in between. This condensed nature also means levels are so tightly compacted that there's only really one path through a level that you simply have to make sure you execute on.

Go with the flow

A big breaking point for platformers is how well they control. This is doubly true for an experience that asks you to thread some pretty narrow needles as Tightrope Theatre does. Luckily, your ability to steer your unicycle feels nice and tight despite the fact that there is a bit of momentum to your movements (seeing as you're sitting atop a wheel and all that).

The controls are also quite simple, which helps for a touch screen platformer. You just have directional buttons for left and right and a jump button that you can tap for short hops or press when you need to get enough airtime to clear gaps.

Practice makes perfect

Across all of Tightrope Theatre, there aren't special powerups or more complicated abilities you earn as a performer. Instead, the collections of levels get built around different environmental features, asking you to master each one across 60 individual levels before moving on to the next one.

As the challenge ramps up in Tightrope Theatre, you can find yourself dying a lot, but the game knows this and luckily auto-restarts you so you hardly have any downtime. If you fail a level too many times, you can also take advantage of a skip button that allows you to keep making progress to see the game through to the end.

Tightrope Theatre is a free game, with the only purchase available for it being a $2.99 fee to remove ads. This is a welcome and recommended purchase if you plan to play the game in its entirety, as ads really disrupt the flow of the game. Even with removing them, though, Tightrope Theatre can feel a bit tedious as its challenge ramps up while the tools you're given to overcome them remain unchanged.

The bottom line

Tightrope Theatre doesn't try to do anything too ambitious, and for the most part that's fine. Its levels are generally clever and varied enough to keep you entertained even if you basically do the same things through all of them. That said, you can certainly run up against levels that feel too tedious to master, and the skip button--while appreciated--doesn't fix that problem so much as it steps around it.

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

Pocket Skate review

August 30, 2022 by RSS Feed

I have a big soft spot in my heart for action sports games. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater was a seminal series for me growing up in a lot of different ways and I'm always ready to take a look at something that takes some inspiration from it. Pocket Skate is one such game that very much operates in this arena, but doesn't quite feel like it comes together to satisfy in the same way.

Stunt and score

Pocket Skate is a skateboarding game where you get to use a specific location as a playground for stunts and combos for all of 60 seconds. Your goal on its face is simply to score as many points as possible by linking together and landing various kinds of air tricks, grinds, and manuals, though some locations offer up sub challenges like "wall ride the lockers" or "do a 900 on the vert ramp."

You control your skateboarder using one side of the screen to steer the direction of your board and the other to propel your board forward via taps, doing ollies by swiping off the ground, and initiating air tricks by swiping in the air. There are also more complicated maneuvers like grinds and transfers that are managed similarly to give you just about every kind of skate trick you can think of at your disposal.

Touchy grind

This concept for a skating game is 100% sound (After all, it is the basic template of a Tony Hawk's Pro Skater title), but the way you control your skater can prove more meddlesome than feels necessary. Tapping to kick your board in particular seems like an odd decision that can lead to accidentally jumping when you don't mean to and other control issues.

There's also the fact that Pocket Skate only has a handful of skating venues and only one of them actually features additional challenges beyond trying to score big. Even if you are just trying to up your score, there are things to work toward like unlocking new tricks to do and new skaters to control. These incentives don't feel as fulfilling to do if you aren't also trying to complete sub challenges, though, which can lock you into repeatedly skating in one area in particular.

Simple skater

Outside of one minute runs, you can also free skate, which just places you in its locations with no time constraint. Outside of that and a training mode (which doubles as the in-game tutorial) though, there's not a whole lot here.

To be clear, Pocket Skate doesn't have to be some sprawling, fully-featured skating game to grip me. But, what is in the game needs to have enough substance and variety to it to keep me wanting to play and replay it, and I'm not sure that between some of the odd controls and limited challenge opportunities that it does that.

The bottom line

Pocket Skate follows a very promising template of how to make a compelling skating game, but its small scope gives the few issues it has very little room to hide and very few opportunities to look beyond them. So, despite being largely competent, Pocket Skate's minor wrinkles prevent it from being the smooth ride it ought to be.

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

Papers, Please review

August 29, 2022 by RSS Feed

I had never played Papers, Please until about a month ago when it came out with an updated interface for phones. It's strange to play a game that has been so thoroughly discussed and celebrated for years. That said, it seems like most folks happen to be right. Papers, Please is an incredible game that has a vision that is so stark and well-defined that it hits hard even on smaller screens and all these years later.

Immigrant investigator

Papers, Please puts you in the position of a border officer for the fictional nation of Arstotzka. For the most part, this job is pretty straightforward. You are given instructions each morning about the proper protocols for letting individuals into the country and then you get to decide whether or not to let in people based on said protocols.

Even at its most basic, this routine is surprisingly fun and varied, though it doesn't take long for Papers, Please to start complicating the kinds of checks you need to be doing, as well as reconsider whether you should be doing everything you're being told to do.

Deliberate dilemma

Something I'm sure others have lauded Papers, Please for (but is worth restating now) is just how elegantly the game puts you in a moral quandary. A lot of games tend to give you freedom of choice to be a "good" person or a "bad" person or otherwise just offer up two bad choices to make. In Papers, Please, though, it's pretty clear that your job perpetuates an unjust status quo, but the wages from that job are what allow you and your family to survive.

This puts you in a position where you're constantly asking yourself to what degree you should or should not obey orders, and this kind of decision-making feels like it has been rising ever closer to the surface of our cultural consciousness since its release. This is to say I'm not sure I've played a game that feels as prescient as Papers, Please feels, even though I am coming to it almost ten years late.

Scrutinize the small stuff

On phones, Papers, Please does feel slightly cramped, but definitely more than playable. I had a few instances where I got citations because pictures didn't match up with people's faces even though they looked right to me, but that didn't stop me from reaching the logical conclusion of my playthrough.

I also didn't feel quite as efficient in processing folks as I might on a bigger screen, but I can't tell for sure because I haven't tried the game elsewhere. I would play it on my iPad but that locks to vertical orientation and I'm not a fan of playing games on a tablet that way.

The bottom line

Unsurprisingly, a game people have lauded for years turns out to be as good as they say it is. Playing Papers, Please on a phone is mostly good, too. If you haven't played it, Papers, Please holds up extremely well. I had a hard time sitting down and playing it for more than one shift day at a time, but that's just a testament to how well it still delivers its message.

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