Cryptract Review
November 20, 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?
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
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
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
Cryptract
lionsfilm
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StoryCut - Review
November 20, 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
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
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 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
StoryCut - Video Editor &Maker
Wenzhou XunChi Digital Technology Co., Ltd.
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MovieMusic Review
November 20, 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.
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 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
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
MovieMusic | Music For Videos
Gothic Projects
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Athenion: Tactical CCG Review
November 20, 2020 by RSS Feed
Athenion might not have the pedigree of some other deck-building card games available for mobile, but that shouldn't put you off. This is a game that's packed full of bright ideas, fresh new gameplay modes and enough content that you can lose hours of your life to.
Battles take place on a 4x4 grid, and see you taking it in turns with your opponent to lay down cards. You draw up to five cards from your deck of forty at the start of every turn.
These are the units you're playing in the fight, and they range from hulking monsters to flighty fairies, from magical trees to fearsome undead dragons.
Your cards have arrows on them that you show you which direction they can attack. You'll also notice a bunch of other numbers on the cards. These let you know the hit points a card has, how powerful its attack is and how many soul points it grants you.
Those soul points let you attack your opponent and they're the key to victory. The first player to lose all of their own hit points is the loser.
There's a lot more going on than that though. For one thing you need to pick from one of six different factions before you even get to the fights.
These factions have different strengths and weaknesses and figuring out which of them best suits the way you want to play is the first step of a pretty long journey.
Different factions have different special moves as well. Some let you link together cards to make them more powerful, others are all about sacrificing weaker units to create pockets of dark magical energy. One lets you build giant rock walls that you can use to protect some of your units or power up others.
There are single-player challenges, regular events and much, much more as well. You're never short of something to do in Athenion, and the pace of the matches lets you get a lot of them in in a single setting.
The Good
There's a staggering amount of depth to Athenion. It's going to take you a good while to get to grips with the basics and once you've done that there are layers and layers to peel back. Every time you win you'll figure out a new strategy and every time you lose you'll be trying to find a way to right that wrong.
The game looks amazing too. The cards all sport a brilliant anime art-style and you'll want to collect all of them just so you can check them out. The speed of the fights is a massive plus too - they deliver huge chunks of tactical action in the sort of short-blast sessions that are perfect for mobile play.
On top of that there's a brilliant community to the game, and you never have to wait long to find an online battle. There are a number of different modes that let you practice with different decks, take part in intriguing events and fight it out in ranked and casual multiplayer matches.
The Bad
There's a pretty steep learning curve here, so if you're not in for the long haul then you might be better finding your card-based fun somewhere else. Even when you've got the basics down you've still got a lot to learn and it can be punishing to come up against an opponent who knows more than you do.
There are also a lot of currencies, crafting materials and other rewards to figure out. The game does tell you what they do, but the tutorials are pretty brief and you're left on your own for a lot of the time to try and get to the bottom of things.
Overall
Athenion might not be the easiest game to understand, but once things start clicking it becomes something really rather special. There are some brilliant ideas here and they're woven into a bright tapestry of gorgeous visuals and wonderfully paced mobile play.
It won't be to everyone's taste, and it's fair to say that some players are going to put it down before they've even got to the good bits, but this is one CCG that it's well worth sticking with.
8.2
OVERALL
Replayability 8.1
Game Controls 8.2
Graphics 8.7
Sound/Music 8.2
Gameplay 7.8
Athenion: Tactical CCG
ZERO-bit Company Limited
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Sdorica - Sunset is an Excellent RPG From Rayark
November 20, 2020 by RSS Feed
Sdorica -sunset- (Free) by Rayark is a role-playing game with dashes of strategy and matching-puzzles. If you enjoyed other games like Terra Battle 2or Fire Emblem Heroes, then you'll get a kick out of Sdorica.
When I was in high school, I was introduced to JRPGs by my group of friends and I fell in love. Everything from the anime art styles to the dark and intricate, though usually cliché, stories, to the combat system — I loved it all. I'd end up spending hours playing these games because I had all the time in the world back then, and not many worries. But now I'm an adult with responsibilities, so time is short. While I still love JRPGs, I just don't have as much time for them like I used to. So when there are mobile JRPGs that provide a bite-size experience, I'm down.
Rayark is a fairly popular developer, and they've made some other great games like Cytus (I reviewed the sequel), Implosion - Never Lose Hope, and VOEZ. I've played most of their iOS releases so far, and have thoroughly enjoyed them. They pump out quality games, so when I saw that Sdorica was a role-playing game, I knew I had to check it out. Even though it's a free-to-play title, it does things incredibly well, and the usual annoyances with F2P games is not found here, surprisingly.
Terra Battle 2
MISTWALKER CORPORATION
Fire Emblem Heroes
Nintendo Co., Ltd.
Cytus II
Rayark International Limited
Cytus
Rayark International Limited
Implosion - Never Lose Hope
Rayark International Limited
Visually, Sdorica is one of the most beautiful F2P games I've seen, but I'm not surprised since this is Rayark, after all. Sdorica has a heavily anime-inspired art style that JRPG fans will appreciate. The game is packed with anime cutscenes that reveal the story in each chapter, and the character sprites during gameplay are rather cute and "kawaii," as they say. The character renderings for gacha pulls and portraits are incredibly stylized and detailed, and the game world is stunning, no matter what quest you're doing. Animations are smooth and fluid during scenes and gameplay, and I didn't have many issues with choppy frame rates on my iPhone 8 Plus. However, I did notice that there's a bit of a lag when going through the menus, and there's more loading screens than I'd like.
Aside from art and gameplay, one of the other reasons I enjoyed playing JRPGs back in the day was for the soundtracks. Sdorica has a whimsical and atmospheric soundtrack that fits in with the entire fantasy theme, and helps set up the mood and tone of each story chapter. It's a delightful soundtrack to listen to, so I recommend using earbuds to be fully immersed. Sdorica also features Japanese voice acting for the spoken dialogue, which I enjoyed. All of this put together makes Sdorica feel like a triple-A title, which is surprising since it's free and quite frankly, packed with content.
When you start up Sdorica, you may have to download some game data before you're able to dive in. This can take a few minutes depending on your connection speed, but it's well worth it. Sdorica features a tutorial in the beginning that walks you through the ropes of how the game works, and new element menus, but once you get started, it's hard to stop. Plus, that game data download is pretty large because there's a ton of content available from the get-go, and the best part is that there is no energy system. Yes, you can play this game as much as you want during each session without having to worry about running out of energy and timers. For a free-to-play game, that's pretty much unheard of.
Most of your time will probably be spent in Sdorica's story mode, but there are special events, abiiity and training quests, and region exploration missions. However, regardless of which mode you play, the setup is still the same. You pick your team from your available roster (characters can be unlocked through the story or earned from gacha pulls), and then head into battle. Each stage consists of about three waves of enemies that you must defeat before the stage is cleared. While it sounds easy, Sdorica's unique gameplay mechanic breathes some fresh life into the tried-and-true turn-based formula.
Each character in your roster may only be assigned to one of three positions in battle. When you tap on the spot you want to fill, it shows you which characters can go there. Sometimes though, like in certain story and event missions, certain characters must take part, so that slot becomes locked. But if there's no lock, then you're free to choose who you like.
Sdorica's roster is a mix of magic users, damage dealers, and tanks. So ideally, the magic users go in the back, the damage dealers in the middle, and the tanks up in the front lines. You can even have up to two advisors, which are extra slots for a character but they just have unique advisor abilities, rather than take part in the battles themselves.
Battle in Sdorica is an interesting mashup of turn-based RPG combat and match-three puzzle. At the bottom of the screen will be two rows of colored orbs (white, purple, and orange). You can tap on a single orb or gather up two or four (in a square formation) with a swiping gesture to have one of your team members perform an action. The action depends on who you're using, but actions are always a melee or magic attack, support moves, or healing. Before you make a match, the game tells you who will do the action and what they'll be doing.
Enemies have number counters on them — this is the number of moves you can make before they attack. Sometimes they'll also have unique traits or abilities, and you can view this information by long-pressing on them. If an ally falls in battle, don't worry — you can still resurrect them by getting enough resurrection orbs. But you won't lose them permanently, thankfully, and they still get experience if you win.
Once you clear out all of the waves, then that quest is cleared and you'll get your loot. Each completed stage nets experience for your team members, as well as your own Watcher level. There may be other rewards, such as character minerals for evolving them, crystals (premium currency), or soul energy.
The Soul Energy is what you need to "invest" in your roster, raising their level up to become more potent in battle. If you have all of the required materials, you're able to "resonate" them, which means evolving into their next form. The crystals are used for the "infuse" section, where you can take a chance with character pulls or get materials.
Sdorica -sunset- is an insanely good JRPG that's full of quality.
The Good
Sdorica is an excellent mobile JRPG that is rich in story and has unique gameplay. The graphics are also beautiful, insanely detailed, and character designs are amazing to look at. The music is well done, and the voice acting is just icing on the cake. Even though this is a free game, there are no ads, no limitations on how long you can play, and there's ample opportunity to get the premium currency without paying a dime. It's also jam packed with content, so I can safely say that this is one game that I will be playing for some time.
The Bad
There's a lot of good stuff to be found in Sdorica, but I found the slight delay between menu selections and loading times to be a tad annoying. Sometimes I think the game froze, but it's just taking it's time with my selection is all. Hopefully this slight delay is fixed in future updates to be more responsive. Still, it's a small nitpick I have with the game, but it's tolerable considering how good it is.
The verdict
While I'm not usually a fan of free-to-play RPGs, I think Sdorica is one of the exceptions. Rayark did a fantastic job with this one, from the visual art style and sound to the interesting battle mechanic and tons of content for free, no strings attached. They also give you a ton of goals to complete for free premium currency, so the in-app purchases for more are more like a way to say thanks to the developers for making such a good game. It's completely optional and not necessary to play the game, but I can see myself spending a few bucks in the future to just support Sdorica. I highly recommend giving this game a chance if you're a fan of JRPGs.
You can find Sdorica -sunset- on the App Store as a universal download for your iPhone and iPad for free. There are in-app purchases.
9.8
OVERALL
Replayability 10
Graphics 10
Sound/Music 10
Game Controls 9.5
Gameplay 9.5
Sdorica
Rayark International Limited
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