"If there is an app for that"

Lifeline: Beside You in Time review

June 28, 2022 by RSS Feed

Lifeline: Beside You in Time is the fourth game in a text adventure series by 3 Minute Games. It follows the adventures of Taylor, a lone interstellar explorer who has a knack for getting into predicaments that only you, a remote companion known as a Lifeline, can help guide him through. You don't need to know any of this background to dive straight into Lifeline: Beside You in Time, an approachable and kind of silly choose-your-own adventure that hangs its hat on its real-time pacing.

Space station story

Beside You in Time wastes no time throwing you into the action. The game opens with a text exchange between you and someone asking you if you had lost track of two astronauts. This kicks off an adventure where you find you are speaking to a space station AI that happened to have found Taylor and a companion floating unconscious in their cargo bay.

As a lifeline, you don't have direct visuals or control of this entire adventure, but as you talk to the station (and eventually the astronauts) you have agency in determining their next moves and uncovering how Taylor wound up where he is, who he is with, and what secrets lie in wait upon the station.

Real-time restarts

One of the unique aspects of the Lifeline series is the pace at which they are told. Beside You in Time is like previous entries in that--by default--the game has built-in pauses to the story where you are left with no option but to wait. This is often a result of something story-related, like Taylor needing time to perform a task or get some rest after some harrowing experience, for example.

When the action resumes, you get a push notification on your phone, and the proceeding events play out in reaction to the choices you have made in terms of driving Taylor and his journey forward. Sometimes, you'll have made wise choices that let your progress toward your end goal get ever closer, though others could result in Taylor getting seriously injured or killed. If you reach any of these dead ends, Beside You in Time provides a checkpointing system that lets you rewind and make different choices until you reach your own satisfying conclusion.

Writing choices

The pauses in Lifeline: Beside You in Time give a somewhat satisfying pacing to the game, allowing you to play it in substantial chunks over the course of a few days. This adds a somewhat realistic feeling to the game while still feeling convenient (as you don't have a time limit on when you need to make decisions by). That said, it feels like all of this is set up to create some amount of tension or suspense, but I felt very little of either through my playthrough of Beside You in Time.

A lot of this has to do with the quippy dialogue that undercuts most of the game's drama. Characters in life or death situations may get a little punchy (especially in campy genre fiction), but the writing here never really switches out of that mode for long enough to bring gravitas to the game events.

It also doesn't help that some choices in Beside You in Time can lead to pretty random outcomes. I started the adventure running into several death endings fairly quickly and it seemed mostly as a result of me trying to get more information about an option which triggered a decision I wasn't prepared to make. The checkpointing at the beginning of the game in particular is no fun to deal with as early deaths force you to start the whole game over again. Luckily, once I bumbled my way through the opening scene I had no trouble then proceeding directly to what seems to be the best ending without any other problems.

The bottom line

Lifeline: Beside You in Time is an entertaining text adventure that feels oddly weightless. Perhaps its stakes are easier to grasp with prior experience with the Lifeline series, or maybe this is the kind of thing you want. In any case, I somewhat enjoyed my time with it, even though the early fail states were bothersome and I never really felt connected with Taylor in any meaningful way.

Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/lifeline-beside-you-in-time-review/

Hero Emblems II review

June 23, 2022 by RSS Feed

In the time since posting my review of the first Hero Emblems game, I found myself feeling somewhat out of step with most other mobile enthusiasts. The match-three rpg had some neat combat ideas but it was wrapped in a pretty dull fantasy setting with very poor writing. Those that celebrated the title did so by praising the strength of the puzzle combat as a panacea for the rest of the game's weaknesses and appreciating it for being an IAP-free experience. Fast forward seven years and Hero Emblems II feels a lot like it's going to play out the same way. This follow up title lands almost a decade later with some updated visuals, but otherwise feels all too familiar.

It's a match

Hero Emblems II fashions itself as your typical fantasy role playing game. You follow a group of adventurers comprised of a warrior, priest, etc. and what starts as a simple quest to retrieve an item leads them to discovering an amnesiac elf in need of help. This kicks off a long, meandering quest where progress forward involves a lot of turn-based match-three puzzle combat.

Along the way, you'll meet other adventurers to add to your party, and by mixing and matching your abilities you can take down any number of spiders, skeletons, wizards, etc. that stand in your way. Much like the first Hero Emblems, the story here is not worth the price of admission. In addition to being very cliche, the same localization issues from the previous game erase much chance of finding charm in these characters or nuance in how the tale plays out.

Swapping it up

Instead of story, puzzle combat is again the star of the show in Hero Emblems II, and boy is there a lot of it. For the most part, the basic rules of the original Hero Emblems remain intact here, though there are a few twists that make Hero Emblems II conceptually deeper than its predecessor. In this game, each party member has their own life bars and your squad of four can tag out with other heroes in the midst of a battle.

Characters also unlock passive traits as they level up, some of which trigger when you swap them into a battle. This, along with access to customize what kinds of abilities party members can trigger on matching certain numbers of their emblems, allows for a somewhat granular level of customization that I'm not sure I've seen before in a puzzle rpg. My only issue with these systems is that they only sound impactful in theory, while in practice I found myself using most of the same strategies I used for the first game over and over again and not feeling like many new skills really changed any party member's role or function all that much for the majority of the game.

Swap some more

To add to the disappointment of Hero Emblems II's customization system, most of your ability to play around with it is limited by how much gold you've accrued on your journey. In order to afford new gear and abilities for your party, you'll definitely have to grind through dungeons multiple times, which makes Hero Emblems II's already somewhat lengthy combat format feel like a slog for long stretches. You won't necessarily have to grind for all the new gear you encounter, but some uneven difficulty spikes can and will eventually force you to get on the currency grind.

For some, this might be exactly what you want. To its credit, Hero Emblems II gives you a ton of match-three combat with some somewhat interesting systems layered in and some goals to aim for outside of its hard to parse story, all without ads or IAPs. This makes it a decent companion for a flight or to occupy the back of your brain as you watch tv on the couch. As a main event, or a game you want to really sink your teeth into, though, it leaves quite a bit to be desired.

The bottom line

Overall, if you enjoyed the first Hero Emblems, this sequel will probably serve you just fine. It very much feels like more of the same, but with some more customization options and updated visuals. None of these changes feel meaningful enough to change the core of its match-three combat, and outside of that the series continues to struggle in making any of its rpg trappings compelling.

Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/hero-emblems-ii-review/

Abandon Ship review

June 22, 2022 by RSS Feed

The influence of FTL is still holding strong as evidenced by games like Abandon Ship. This game takes all of the roguelike elements of ship and crew management from Subset Games's breakout hit and moves them from the stars to the high seas. There are other ways in which Abandon Ship tries to establish its own identity but most of them aren't very well implemented making for an experience that constantly reminds you of an older, better game you could be playing instead.

Captain Cthulu

In Abandon Ship, you play as a sea captain on the run from a group of seafaring cultists. You start with a crew of a handful of prisoners you freed in your escape and a very basic ship, with your ultimate goal being to stay ahead of your pursuers. Along the way, you sail in open waters, have sea skirmishes with pirates, and can stop off at ports to upgrade your ship, hire new crew, etc.

Along the way, it's also clear that these cultists are more than just fanatical worshippers. The world of Abandon Ship has some occult and monstrous secrets lying in wait, which mostly borrow from the realm of Lovecraftian horror and its derivatives.

Clunky cartography

For the most part, anyone familiar with FTL and the games that have already imitated it will be pretty familiar with how Abandon Ship works. You sail to a location on your map, and while there something or some things happen that you need to react to in order to move on. Abandon Ship is a little different than other titles like this in that each point of interest is like a small open world map that you sail through in real-time. This is to say you might see an event that seems like a battle and decide to take that on first before hitting the port to repair, though you have to weigh these options against the time it takes to explore the map and the ticking timer of when the cultists might arrive to try and recapture you.

All of this works... ok, but none of it looks or feels particularly great. The polygonal visuals are all pretty rough, as are the parchment-textured dialogue boxes and overlay UI elements that highlight events, units, etc. None of it feels super cohesive and functionally certain things like sailing around the map or scrolling through menus don't quite work the way you want them to. Because of the real-time nature of the game, this can create some problems, though Abandon Ship does handily provide a pause button that you can use at virtually any time to queue up commands or just assess your current status.

Test the waters

If you're curious about Abandon Ship, the game is a free-to-start title, giving players about 15 minutes of time with it before offering a few different options to pay and unlock several different campaigns and modes. Despite its brevity, this demo does give a good window into the way it looks, feels, and controls, and your comfort with those things are primarily what will affect your overall enjoyment of it. The stories from the campaigns and the level of randomized events are all serviceable with their main hook being their repeatability and your ability to strategize around completing them, and there is plenty to do even if you only pay into the main campaign unlock and not the others.

I enjoy the time I spend with Abandon Ship, but I can also never shake the feeling that I could be playing any number of games of the same mold that find more elegant and appealing ways to offer this kind of survival/combat/management/roguelike experience. Since all of these games are built around replayability, it's also hard to think of these older games as something that have been exhausted and can't be returned to. So, unless the high seas backdrop or Lovecraftian aspects of Abandon Ship speak to you in particular, I'm not sure there's a whole lot else this game offers that's better than what can be found elsewhere.

The bottom line

Despite some rough edges, Abandon Ship is a perfectly serviceable roguelike in the vein of FTL. The only problem with this is it's not different enough from other classics in this genre, and what it does do isn't quite up at the level of games that came before. This makes it a decent pickup if you really just need a new-looking kind of this game or cultist and pirate aethetics really speak to you personally. Luckily, if you're not sure, the opening demo version of the game is rather informative of what you can expect from the full game.

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

Diablo Immortal review

June 18, 2022 by RSS Feed

In playing and then reading about reactions to Diablo Immortal all this past week, I've been feeling like everyone's talking about a different game. All of the pearl clutching about a free-to-play game having a high ceiling on just how much money you can put into it feels incredibly out of touch, even anachronistic, with regard to the current gaming landscape. What makes conversations about it even stranger is that there isn't even a good reason to even think about giving a cent to Blizzard for Diablo Immortal. This mobilized version of one of a gaming giant's beloved franchises is a finely tuned social space with Diablo stuff shoveled on top of it. It is very good at being exactly that save for some pacing issues that have absolutely nothing to do with it being a free-to-play experience.

Yep it's Diablo

To back up a second, the Diablo games are dark fantasy rpgs where you pick a character class (e.g. Barbarian, Wizard, etc.) and go on dungeon raids where you use all kinds of class-specific abilities to kill tons of hellish creatures while loot and gold fly out of them. You then use this loot and gold to make your character stronger while also leveling up, unlocking new skills, and the going out to fight even stronger creatures.

Diablo Immortal does all of this just fine. Perhaps the most notable departure from the series's core formula is the way it exports some of the most powerful and unique ways to customize your character from a system like a skill tree onto gear which you have to grind through repeatable dungeons to find and power up. It's hard not to view this change cynically as it clearly creates a situation where leveling up alone doesn't allow you to play your character the way you want, but in the grand scheme of what Diablo Immortal ultimately is (more on that later), it doesn't feel as nefarious as it sounds.

Follow the path

Another way in which Diablo Immortal somewhat departs from the Diablo mold (at least from the first two games, anyway) is that it isn't just a straightforward and linear story game. In fact, if you are curious about playing Diablo Immortal for its story, I recommend you steer clear. There is a campaign to play through, but it is mind-numbingly boring and has some experience-gating that forces you to do a bunch of other side activities to be able to keep working your way through it.

As for these other activites, there's an almost overwhelming number of things to do, but you don't really get a full taste of what they are, why they matter, and how they impact your character until you've dumped a lot of time into the game already. Until you get to around level 40, Diablo Immortal feels extremely aimless. There's not really a whole lot to do except follow the literal footstep paths drawn by your quest log to do a lot of the same repetitive actions over and over again without feeling like you're getting particularly stronger or facing challenges that ask you to play differently.

Talk about loot

As you start entering the late stages of character leveling, you are invited to prepare for a co-op raid, and this is one of two modes in Diablo Immortal that provides some significant challenge, provides a meaningful goal for players to work toward, and isn't a pay-to-win hellscape like the game's competitive multiplayer mode. Once this happens, leveling certain kinds of loot, equipping different kinds of abilities, and even working together with players in your party actually starts to feel like it matters.

Outside of that, there are still a ton of things to do that can grant rewards, and those rewards now suddendly feel like fuel to burn toward achieving raid readiness. Many of these activities are somewhat rote and repetitive combat trials, but there are also some interesting social events to take part in, like The Shadow Assembly, which is a player gathering of an in-game secret society you have a win a lottery to get into.

It wasn't until all of these kinds of options opened up alongside a clear goal to work toward that Diablo Immortal made sense, but even now as I plan to continue playing it, I'm definitely more drawn in by the ways in which Diablo Immortal smartly encourages social interaction and play more than the actual actual actions I'm performing at any given moment. The way Diablo Immortal auto-suggests grouping up with players close to one another working on the same quest, or allows queuing for certain game modes no matter where you are in the world, or even how you can so seamlessly add or drop yourself from a party are the kinds of innovations that excite me most about playing it. In this way, Diablo Immortal feels way more satisfying as a social space where play happens than the majority of the core Diablo tasks you're constantly incentivized and asked to perform.

The bottom line

Diablo Immortal is a fine social rpg with a pacing problem. It weaves together some the most intricate, fascinating, and innovative systems for interacting with other players I've ever seen (particularly on mobile), but buries a ton of it under what are somewhat flat but otherwise serviceable action rpg combat and progression systems. None of it feels meaningful until you are finally given a goal, and once you're there, it's a pretty fun upgrade treadmill with monetization that will only bother you if you want to try and compete with people who can happily afford spending an unreasonable amount of money to feel a sense of false superiority in a video game.

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

Diablo Immortal review

June 18, 2022 by RSS Feed

In playing and then reading about reactions to Diablo Immortal all this past week, I've been feeling like everyone's talking about a different game. All of the pearl clutching about a free-to-play game having a high ceiling on just how much money you can put into it feels incredibly out of touch, even anachronistic, with regard to the current gaming landscape. What makes conversations about it even stranger is that there isn't even a good reason to even think about giving a cent to Blizzard for Diablo Immortal. This mobilized version of one of a gaming giant's beloved franchises is a finely tuned social space with Diablo stuff shoveled on top of it. It is very good at being exactly that save for some pacing issues that have absolutely nothing to do with it being a free-to-play experience.

Yep it's Diablo

To back up a second, the Diablo games are dark fantasy rpgs where you pick a character class (e.g. Barbarian, Wizard, etc.) and go on dungeon raids where you use all kinds of class-specific abilities to kill tons of hellish creatures while loot and gold fly out of them. You then use this loot and gold to make your character stronger while also leveling up, unlocking new skills, and the going out to fight even stronger creatures.

Diablo Immortal does all of this just fine. Perhaps the most notable departure from the series's core formula is the way it exports some of the most powerful and unique ways to customize your character from a system like a skill tree onto gear which you have to grind through repeatable dungeons to find and power up. It's hard not to view this change cynically as it clearly creates a situation where leveling up alone doesn't allow you to play your character the way you want, but in the grand scheme of what Diablo Immortal ultimately is (more on that later), it doesn't feel as nefarious as it sounds.

Follow the path

Another way in which Diablo Immortal somewhat departs from the Diablo mold (at least from the first two games, anyway) is that it isn't just a straightforward and linear story game. In fact, if you are curious about playing Diablo Immortal for its story, I recommend you steer clear. There is a campaign to play through, but it is mind-numbingly boring and has some experience-gating that forces you to do a bunch of other side activities to be able to keep working your way through it.

As for these other activites, there's an almost overwhelming number of things to do, but you don't really get a full taste of what they are, why they matter, and how they impact your character until you've dumped a lot of time into the game already. Until you get to around level 40, Diablo Immortal feels extremely aimless. There's not really a whole lot to do except follow the literal footstep paths drawn by your quest log to do a lot of the same repetitive actions over and over again without feeling like you're getting particularly stronger or facing challenges that ask you to play differently.

Talk about loot

As you start entering the late stages of character leveling, you are invited to prepare for a co-op raid, and this is one of two modes in Diablo Immortal that provides some significant challenge, provides a meaningful goal for players to work toward, and isn't a pay-to-win hellscape like the game's competitive multiplayer mode. Once this happens, leveling certain kinds of loot, equipping different kinds of abilities, and even working together with players in your party actually starts to feel like it matters.

Outside of that, there are still a ton of things to do that can grant rewards, and those rewards now suddendly feel like fuel to burn toward achieving raid readiness. Many of these activities are somewhat rote and repetitive combat trials, but there are also some interesting social events to take part in, like The Shadow Assembly, which is a player gathering of an in-game secret society you have a win a lottery to get into.

It wasn't until all of these kinds of options opened up alongside a clear goal to work toward that Diablo Immortal made sense, but even now as I plan to continue playing it, I'm definitely more drawn in by the ways in which Diablo Immortal smartly encourages social interaction and play more than the actual actual actions I'm performing at any given moment. The way Diablo Immortal auto-suggests grouping up with players close to one another working on the same quest, or allows queuing for certain game modes no matter where you are in the world, or even how you can so seamlessly add or drop yourself from a party are the kinds of innovations that excite me most about playing it. In this way, Diablo Immortal feels way more satisfying as a social space where play happens than the majority of the core Diablo tasks you're constantly incentivized and asked to perform.

The bottom line

Diablo Immortal is a fine social rpg with a pacing problem. It weaves together some the most intricate, fascinating, and innovative systems for interacting with other players I've ever seen (particularly on mobile), but buries a ton of it under what are somewhat flat but otherwise serviceable action rpg combat and progression systems. None of it feels meaningful until you are finally given a goal, and once you're there, it's a pretty fun upgrade treadmill with monetization that will only bother you if you want to try and compete with people who can happily afford spending an unreasonable amount of money to feel a sense of false superiority in a video game.

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