"If there is an app for that"

Domingo review

March 15, 2023 by RSS Feed

There probably won't be a word game that ever catches fire the way that Wordle did in late 2021 and early 2022, but that doesn't stop attempts to innovate within the genre. For the past few weeks, I've been playing Domingo, which is an curious spin on Wordle's "guess the word"-style gameplay, but it isn't quite as good at making you feel smart and excited to share your performance.

Words within words

Domingo is a daily word puzzle game that gives you four incomplete words that you are tasked with filling in. The catch is that--even if multiple combinations of letters fit in the blanks--Domingo wants you to provide a full word in the blank. On top of that Domingo is looking for a specific word that falls into a category provided at the bottom of the screen.

So, for example, one of the incomplete words might be "Ami_le" with the category of the day being vehicles. For this puzzle (which was a real daily puzzle from the week I'm writing this review, by the way), you could solve it by typing in "cab" as a cab is a type of vehicle and forms the word "amicable." From there, you'd have three more words just like this within the same category to solve.

Free to guess

Domingo is designed primarily to be part of your daily ritual. There is a new puzzle every day that everyone has access to, including free players who do not unlock the app. Paying $2.99 simply lets you find and play puzzles of any category you'd like and also revisit the archive of daily puzzles.

This seems like a great deal, as I only really gravitated to the daily puzzle in my time with Domingo, but even that has a few quirks I'm not so fond of. First and foremost, Domingo has no real feedback system to let you know how you are doing at solving its puzzles. You have basically infinite guesses at filling in the blanks and no sense of whether you're getting close to solving it.

Puzzling design

Without a feedback system in place, Domingo truly does feel like a guessing game at times. Categories are very broad and can sometimes have solutions that use pretty obscure words. Your best bet at a solution is to figure out a list of possibilties for the complete word before looking to see if the letters you'd fill in the blanks with form words themselves, and then seeing if any of those words match the category. If you decide to play Domingo's hard mode, you have even less to go on as you aren't provided a category to work off of.

As a result, the game can feel like a lot of trial and error. At the end of the day, this is what a lot of games about guessing words boil down to, but Domingo doesn't feel like it provides enough tools to help you enjoy or get better at its brand of guessing. That was kind of the magic of Wordle, and--while I don't think every game needs to do what it did--Domingo could certainly benefit from taking a few steps in that direction.

The bottom line

Domingo's curious word challenges are easy enough to check out given the game's extremely fair pricing model. It feels nice when things click together and you can smash through a puzzle, but more often the game's dictionary and lack of feedback reduce sessions with it to a guess-a-thon.

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

Free Apps to Download TODAY ONLY 03/15/2023

March 15, 2023 by RSS Feed

Retro Twist - Mini Watch Games , iShrug: Kaomoji and ASCII Art , Blur Photo· and more

iPhone:

Scrollit 2X - Visual messenger ( $6.99 → Free ) AMAXIM APPS, INC ScrollIt 2X can be practical, but it can also be a lot of fun thanks to Emoji support. You’re able to pepper every kind of Emoji into your message text and have it displayed on iPhone. The speed of the scroll and the color of the text can be adjusted via sliders. The app also includes message history, and three message shapes to choose from.

Retro Twist - Mini Watch Games ( $1.99 → Free ) AlhoGames Retro Twist brings iconic games to your iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. The app includes 18 remixed games so you can spend hours killing time while reliving your childhood.

iShrug: Kaomoji and ASCII Art ( $0.99 → Free ) Pavel Dubov No matter how many sticker apps you have, there’s always room for original text art. iShrug is filled with more than 60 types of text art including everything from shrugs and emotions to animals and actions. Just tap to add to your message and send.

Blur Photo· ( $2.99 → Free ) Le Giang Nam Blur Photo· offers multiple blur effects to put your subject in focus. The app will automatically blur the background for you or you can use manual mode to finger touch the parts you wish to blur. Try the tilt-shift mode to make your photo look like it was taken on a shallow depth-of-field for an acceptably sharp effect. You’re able to zoom and rotate to make small adjustments. Final creations can be saved directly to the camera roll or to your favorite social media platforms.

Animals - Taxonomy ( $1.99 → Free ) Darren McNally Animal Taxonomy will teach you different facts and tidbits about all kinds of animals. There are six categories to choose from. The app is filled with impressive and vibrant photographs from all over the world.

Source link: http://appadvice.com/apps-gone-free

Beecarbonize review

March 14, 2023 by RSS Feed

Look, as much as I want to evaluate games on their merits alone, sometimes the price point for a game really tips the scales one way or another as to whether its worth engaging with. It sounds dumb, but so is the whole system that kind of forces us to think that way about things. Speaking of systems, that's what Beecarbonizeis all about. This real-time card game that tasks you with preventing a climate crisis is enjoyable for what it is, which is a surprisingly polished (though easy) game you can play completely for free.

Bee the solution

The only game I've played that resembles Beecarbonize's gameplay is Cultist Simulator. Instead of manipulating a game board that representes your quest to unleash unspeakable horrors on the world, you are in charge of managing resources to steer industry, ecosystems, people, and science to a sustainable future while being careful to manage your emission output and avert disasters.

All of this management occurs in real time, though there are buttons to pause the action (or speed it up). Resources get generated automatically by the four sectors, but you decide how to build out each of those sectors to maintain balance while working your way toward building a "golden" card, which represents a win state for the game and suggesting a viable path to real-world climate crisis management.

Adapt or die

For the bulk of a playthrough of Beecarbonize, you are simply waiting for timers to fill and add to a currency pool, which you can then choose to spend on a variety of things. Most often, you'll likely use your currency to create new cards under a particular sector. These new cards often speed up the production timer for the sector, but often have other effects attached to them. Some may increase or reduce your emission production over time, open pathways to creating new cards, or have some immediate effect once built.

As you build cards, you'll also need to expand your sectors to make space for this infrastructure to live. Otherwise, your investments might die or crumble. While all of this is happening, you also have to make sure you're holding on to currency that you can use to mitigate disasters, which appear randomly on a top row of the game board. These disasters can have effects like increased emmission output, loss of resources over time, or even an instant fail state. Balancing your production of resources, controlled use of emissions, sector growth, and disaster management are key to doing well in Beecarbonize and create a surprisingly dynamic experience even though there is so much down time in a play session.

Saving the world is easy beezy

I failed to prevent a climate disaster in my first go at Beecarbonize, but then was able to very quickly win the game outright from there. There is a little learning curve to the game, but I mostly lost that first try because all of its systems aren't fully explained. I'm fine with experimentation and--as became pretty evident after my first playthrough--there's not a ton to figure out in this game.

I'm mostly fine with Beecarbonize's relative lack of challenge, too. There's still some amount of satisfaction to be had in discovering cards and charting the game's idea of what progress in solving the climate crisis looks like, particularly since you don't have to pay or watch ads or anything to do so. My only gripe in the lack of challenge really is that it inherenltly suggests that getting carbon neutral and saving our planet is much easier than it actually is.

The bottom line

Beecarbonize is a fun little game, but mostly because it is free. If it put up any monetary barrier to access what it has to offer, I'm not sure it would be nearly as satisfying. It may have a somewhat overly simplistic view of the problem it chooses to be built around as well, but again that's also somewhat easy to look past due to the combination of its production quality and price tag.

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

Free Apps to Download TODAY ONLY 03/14/2023

March 14, 2023 by RSS Feed

ELUDO , WEATHER NOW ° - Local Forecast , Sismo Earthquake Monitor and more

ELUDO ( $2.99 → Free ) Perfect Hat Games LLC Each time you tap you score a point. You also spawn a shape after each tap. Be careful not to touch a shape or it will be game over. After ten taps a vacuum appears which clears the screen but it also acts as a point multiplier. The game is simple enough that everyone can play but incredibly difficult that it feels impossible to master.

WEATHER NOW ° - Local Forecast ( $24.99 → Free ) DeluxeWare WEATHER NOW° is a handheld weather station for all your weather needs. Check out detailed hourly and daily forecasts for any region across the world. The app has layered weather maps, radar animations, fast locations search, and highly accurate weather forecasting. The spinning 3D Earth image provided by NASA is hypnotizing and just an added bonus to this powerful weather app.

Sismo Earthquake Monitor ( $2.99 → Free ) Metromedya Digital Ad Agency Sismo Earthquake Monitor uses the built-in accelerometer in your device to detect vibrations in the ground. The app analyzes the vibrations and creates a vibration spectrum. You can display the waveforms in a variety of different views.

Snap Markup - Annotation Tool ( $1.99 → Free ) Raghvendra Bhargava Snap Markup allows you to grab a photo from the web, your library, or your camera roll. You’re then able to mark it up using a wide variety of tools including shapes, arrows, numbers, curves, and text. Snap Markup also allows you to draw freely with a wide variety of colors, blur and focus on sections of your photo, and crop photos.

Source link: http://appadvice.com/apps-gone-free

Free Apps to Download TODAY ONLY 03/13/2023

March 13, 2023 by RSS Feed

HELLMET , Leastimator - Mileage Tracker , Color Wheel and more

iPhone:

Leastimator - Mileage Tracker ( $2.99 → Free ) Hao Liu Leastimator helps you track the mileage of your leased car so you don’t have to pay astronomical fees on excess mileage. All you have to do is enter your lease length, start date, mileage allowed, and start tracking. The app will let you know your predicted mileage and update you on your status.

HELLMET ( $0.99 → Free ) Pronetis Hellmet is a vertical climber platform adventure game. The goal is to collect as many coins and keys as possible, discover hidden levels, and avoid hazards designed to kill you. Tap your way up through the 40 unique levels.

Color Wheel ( $1.99 → Free ) Roman Sevastyanov No matter the task, Color Wheel will help you find the right color. It includes eight different tools: Digital Color Wheel, Classic Color Wheel, Abstract Color Wheel, Color Picker, Color Mixing, Swatches, Gray Scale, and Golden Ratio. All of the tools include the ability to bookmark your favorite colors and combinations, which can be recalled and sorted in the Color Combinations section of the app.

Source link: http://appadvice.com/apps-gone-free