"If there is an app for that"

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/

Bossgame: The Boss Is My Heart review

October 31, 2022 by RSS Feed

It's always been easy to be cynical about mobile games generally, and it's only gotten easier as time goes on. Fewer premium releases seem to come out each year, and those select few often tend to be ports, sequels to known quantities, or titles locked behind subscription services. Bossgame: The Boss Is My Heart is (refreshingly) none of these things, and is also a unique and special blend of genres that makes it one of the most compelling mobile experiences I've come across in a long time.

Boss-killing gig

Bossgame: The Boss Is My Heart is a game about a couple who work together as devil hunters. This profession is cheekily presented as a kind of gig work for a fantasy city that has other similarities to our modern society. When these two aren't actively in combat they like to hang out at the local "chill and grill" restaurant, flirt, and try to find their way through life.

This results in a game that has a lot of quirky text-based dialogue vignettes that punctuate boss fights where you control both characters through a few simple tap controls that let you cast spells, swing swords, and block attacks as you work your way through fights with robots, devil knights, local politicians, and more.

Combo combat

Action gameplay on mobile devices can be tough to make feel good, but Bossgame: The Boss Is My Heart makes it look easy. Your own controls are pretty simple, but every boss has unique and creative attack patterns that make every fight a fresh and novel combat puzzle.

Your characters have light and heavy attacks, but also a stamina meter that allows them to block. If one character gets knocked out, you can use your other character to revive them. Chaining together enough hits can also let you use a special move that stuns bosses for a few seconds so you can wail away on them. There aren't any rpg or progression mechanics in Bossgame: The Boss Is My Heart, but since every fight is several minutes of bespoke combat design, it stays satisfying and compelling throughout.

Head and heart

In addition to Bossgame: The Boss Is My Heart's smart combat design, the game is also quite endearing. The story is a relatable tale told with characters that like to quip at each other, but also feel like real people with real feelings.

I could see some players getting invested in this game purely for the story, and if that's the case, Bossgame smartly includes a ton of options to customize the game's combat difficulty so you can tune it to your liking. Things like auto-blocking, battle speed, and even invincibility are all at your fingertips to ensure you can see then adventure through to its end without frustrations.

The bottom line

Bossgame: The Boss Is My Heart is one of those games you can tell is made with a lot of love. You can feel it in how the characters talk to each other, how each boss fight is designed, and the smart customization controls. I am not sure I'd change anything about it, and I hope to see more smart and original releases like this on the App Store.

Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/bossgame-the-boss-is-my-heart-review/

N-GON review

October 26, 2022 by RSS Feed

Lots of mobile games focus themselves on being as legible and accessible as possible to encourage play on-the-go. I won't say N-GON can't be played while out and about, but I will say it has such an extreme visual style paired with some simple mechanics that can be hard to deploy just right unless you are giving the game your full attention. It makes for a satisfying, hardcore-feeling experience, but one that you might not always feel drawn to play as a result.

Smeared shooter

N-GON is an arcade-style shooter where you control a ship as it flies through the void of space, shooting at all kinds of enemies. Your ship and enemies are all represented as simple geometric shapes that reminds me of early arcade vector graphics like Asteroids or Tempest.

This sounds like a very straightforward and simple concept, but it's complicated by two important factors. The first is that you can double-tap on the screen to fire out a magnet that attracts your own bullets so you can arc shots. The second is that there's a ridiculous amount of glitched-out effects and screenshake that gives N-GON a tremendous sense of speed and the feeling like the game itself is bursting at the seams to even function.

Gate hopping

Progress through N-GON is fairly linear. Each level or "gate" consists of several waves of enemies that enter the screen from all sides and killing them all or simply surviving through their attacks gives a brief moment of respite before encountering another wave. Your ship can take two hits, and you can regain a hit between gates. If you die, you can choose to restart from the gate were on or the entire game from the beginning.

The beginning stages of N-GON play out like a very simple shooter, requiring very little of the player beyond some basic maneuvering while your ship fires away. After clearing the first few gates, though, enemies start showing up with shields and special attacks that will test your skills at angling your shots via your deployable magnet while also dodging through a chaotic mess of special projectiles.

Tricky triangulation

It's when the difficulty ramps up that N-GON suddenly becomes a game where you think "oh, maybe I should sit down and use two hands to play this." Between the visuals vibrating half-way off the screen and the quick reflexes needed, there is very little that feels casual about the experience.

For anyone who may be overwhelmed with the visual chaos, there's probably not a whole lot here for you. There are no options to scale back any of the game's stylization, so if you have photosensitivity or just want a more visually clean experience you are out of luck. At the same time, though, I'm not sure N-GON would feel like it would have nearly the same sense of thrill without its extreme aesthetics. The "bullet magnet" mechanic by itself doesn't feel substantive without feeling like you're also on careening out of control at all times.

The bottom line

It's probably fair to say that I enjoy the sensory experience of playing N-GON more than whatever I'm actually being asked to do. It's a totally serviceable vertical shooter, but the special sauce that gives it its identity is the way it looks and feels.

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

EverCrawl review

October 21, 2022 by RSS Feed

I'll be the first to admit that there's a combination of buzzwords that can get me excited about a game. EverCrawl being a pixel-art, short-session, portrait-mode roguelite is one such combination. But these traits alone can't make a game feel like it has staying power. Unfortunately for EverCrawl, there seems to be little substance lurking beneath its enticing surface.

Quick crawl

EverCrawl is a dungeon-crawler where your goal is to take a hero as far as possible past monsters, traps, and more without dying. Doing so is much easier said than done as you can only move in forward directions across a four-lane corridor and encountering any enemy directly in front of your lane or in the lane to either side initiates combat.

The entire game is turn-based, which can help you plan out your moves, but even with all the planning in the world it is very likely that you will meet your end early and often, particularly when you first start playing EverCrawl and only have access to the lowest level of basic hero classes.

Grind it out

The early-goings of EverCrawl make your runs very short, like a handful of minutes at most, allowing it to fit pretty easily into any gaming regimen. As you keep doing these runs, you'll get better at the game and at the same time you'll accrue coins that you can spend on upgrades to heroes you've already unlocked and experience toward unlocking new color palettes and hero classes you've yet to unlock. All of these things work to extend your individual play sessions with EverCrawl, though still keeping overall run length pretty short.

The only problem with this is the road to earning all of EverCrawl's unlocks is pretty long and seems to require a lot of repeat play where very little changes between runs. This might not be a huge problem for a game that has a lot more dungeon and enemy variety or other systems at play, but EverCrawl's tiny scope starts to feel repetitive very quickly if you aren't at a point where you can unlock the next thing to switch things up.

Tough and unfair

You can definitely get better at EverCrawl to the point that--without a new unlock--you get significantly further in runs than you have before. The game doesn't really do you any favors in accomplishing this, though. It takes a long time to figure out how EverCrawl's world works because its rules are not entirely consistent. Enemies can walk over traps without getting hurt but can get hit by other enemy attacks, for instance.

Figuring out all of these nuances is all part of the game, but almost all of them suggest an intention of unfairness as an effort to keep you grinding to unlock and upgrade all the character classes. So, despite my ability to potentially overcome these things, each new discovery ends up working like a disappointing discovery to a game that already feels like it has a lack of depth working against it.

The bottom line

I don't mind roguelites that encourage replayability through persistent unlocks, but you have to make the game feel good enough that you want to replay it even without having a new unlock to play around with. EverCrawl can't clear this hurdle as its only compelling features revolve around the unlock system that is tedious to work your way through.

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

Kraino Origins review

October 21, 2022 by RSS Feed

Throwback-style games can be hard to get just right. Sticking to old design principles can make a game feel too simple or obtuse, but if you add in too many modern twists suddenly you're making something that just looks old. Kraino Origins doesn't have these problems, though. This platformer feels like it dropped out of a Super Nintendo and satisfies mostly because of its varied and interesting level design.

Skeleton with a scythe

Kraino Origins fits right into the same mold of tons of 16-bit era action platformers. You play as a cartoonish skeleton with a scythe who--through a brief intro--you learn was apparently reanimated to a weapon to be used for good. In practice, this means running through levels full of zombies, vampire bats, mermen, and more until you get to a boss who you then cut down with your trusty scythe.

Things are similarly straightforward in the control department as your tools for beating these levels include just a jump, attack, and mid-air attack button. Oddly, Kraino Origins contains one other control button, but it is never explained in the game's opening tutorial and also doesn't appear to do anything (more on that later).

Level lord

The simplicity of Kraino Origins wouldn't work without some great level design backing it up. Fortunately, every new stage in the game is full of new enemies and hazards, most of which follow a "tough-but-fair" logic that establishes an almost Mega Man-like difficulty curve. This is to say you will likely die a few times on your first encounter with new enemies or bosses, but learning and adapting to these situations is all part of the fun.

On dying, Kraino Origins sprinkles a few checkpoints across each of its levels that you spawn back to if you take three hits. Death also causes you to lose some collectible treasure which mostly just seems to be an arbitrary measure of "score" on top of overall progress through the game. There is no apparent limit to the number of times you can die, but the distance between checkpoints is such that you need to prove a legitimate degree of proficiency with each level's new tricks to make it through.

Devil in the (lack of) details

On top of gathering treasure and killing bosses, Kraino Origins also has some hidden collectibles in levels and branching paths to discover. These things add to the game's replayability and contain some significant rewards for the curious that make progress forward a little easier. If you ever get tired of the color palette in Kraino Origins, you also unlock new filters as you progress through the game that are fun to use.

The only thing I'm a little perplexed by in Kraino Origins is how it hides so much information from the player. In true throwback game style, it's easy to never learn (or learn by accident) that there are special powers you can unlock and collect or a merchant hidden in certain levels who can sell you upgrades. Also, it seems that Kraino Origins left at least one move out of its touch controls, as playing with a bluetooth controller allows you to do an additional scythe-spin attack that you can't perform otherwise.

The bottom line

There's a lot to enjoy about Kraino Origins, but you have to have the patience to go and find all of it. It is fortunately very upfront about what kind of game it wants to be, but even then there are secrets hidden beneath the surface that are easy to miss and can very well sour you on the experience if you do.

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