September 02, 2022 by RSS Feed
Source link: http://appadvice.com/apps-gone-free
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September 01, 2022 by RSS Feed
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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/
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August 31, 2022 by RSS Feed
Source link: http://appadvice.com/apps-gone-free
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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/
credit : 148apps
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