"If there is an app for that"

Loopy Wizard review

May 25, 2022 by RSS Feed

Jesse Venbrux seems to have a thing for emulating Michael Brough games. 2020's Seven Scrolls was surprisingly novel given how well it worked with a lot of the same basic building blocks of Brough's Imbroglio and P1 Select, but that charm is all but lost on Loopy Wizard, a mini roguelike that not only tries to essentially pull off the same trick again, but does so in a way that feels much more derivative.

Circular spellbook

Loopy Wizard is yet another dungeon-crawler where you control a character by swiping to have them move around on a 5x5 grid. On this adventure, you are a wizard that can blast magic bolts at enemies from any distance, but you can also add special skills to an odd spellbook that forces you to cast them at set intervals according to a clock-like arrow that rotates around the spellbook's spell slots.

Your goal is to earn points by killing monsters and progressing as far through dungeons as possible before dying, which is much easier said than done given the game's quirky spell system. Although it might initially sound neat to pick up the ability to poison creatures, for example, you may run into situations where the only creature available to poison is yourself.

Intricate incantations

There are a few wrinkles to Loopy Wizard's structure and spellbook mechanics that make it a bit more nuanced and replayable than it might otherwise be. This includes things like level progression which reset many of your spells before moving on to the next set of challenging enemies and the ability to drag spells off of your spellbook to activate them off-schedule and remove them from your rotating inventory of powers.

This gives players some additional agency in terms of being able to form strategies for success as opposed to simply having to rely on the randomness of spell drops, while also creating a difficulty curve that prevents you from constantly depending on a particular loadout of abilities that seem to work well together.

Arcane antics

Much like Seven Scrolls, a lot of the appeal of Loopy Wizard is in seeing how effective and wild certain combinations of powers can get while learning to use them to your advantage. The only problem here is a lot of the powers are repeats from the previous game and the circular spellbook isn't as compelling a gameplay hook as the "if/then" logic statements of Seven Scrolls.

It also doesn't help that Loopy Wizard is yet another very obvious riff on Brough's games. Even if it was the most successful and innovative approach to this kind of game (which--to be clear--it is not), producing two titles back-to-back that so closely resemble another creator's work doesn't feel like homage so much as it does imitation, and it would've been nice to at least see some more departures from Brough's specific game formula, even if it was just at the surface level (i.e. visual style).

The bottom line

Loopy Wizard is a neat little Brough-like roguelike, but it's not particularly innovative, nor do its new twists prove to be more compelling than those of the titles it's imitating. They are just different, and barely so. Depending on who you are, you could pick up Loopy Wizard and have a grand time. It's more single-screen dungeon-crawling with crude art and a wacky ability gimmick, and either you are happy with minor variations on that familiar formula or you ask for more. I'm sure at this point in the review you know where I stand.

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

Rocket Bot Royale review

May 25, 2022 by RSS Feed

Just like its name sounds like a hodgepodge of gaming terms, Rocket Bot Royale is a similar mashup of genres and mechanics where players parachute tanks into an arena and fight to be the last one standing. The result is a frantic little multiplayer game that is fun to play with casually but would be more fun if it wasn't so aggressively monetized and its matches lasted a tad longer.

Worms-meets-PUBG

Rocket Bot Royale is a multiplayer battle royale game where every player controls a tank. At the start of each match, 25 live players parachute off of a helicopter onto a battlefield where they can then proceed to arc rocket shots to hit other players, kill bot tanks, and even blast their own tank to jump around to other parts of the map.

The goal of each match is simply to be the last tank alive. In addition to destroying other tanks to better your chances, you also have to constantly pay attention to the rising ooze that slowly overtakes the arena. Any tanks that aren't able to stay above this hazard get automatically eliminated.

Platform and pulverize

There's a lot to pay attention to in any given Rocket Bot Royale, but even some of the longest matches don't take more than a minute or two. In that time, you need to manage your positioning, destroy bots, look for crate drops, platform, and even destroy bits of the environment to give you better positioning against your enemies.

The tanks in Rocket Bot Royale aren't particularly sturdy, so you need to avoid enemy fire at all costs. Luckily, your tank is surprisingly good at rocket jumping and sticking to any surface, even when completely upside-down. These dynamics create potential for some really wild highlight moments of destroying tanks in mid-air or flipping out of the way of enemy salvos, but these feats will most likely happen by accident unless you invest a lot of time mastering the game.

Military industrial complex

There are a few minor quirks with Rocket Bot Royale, like its strange default controls that don't get completely fixed by turning on the slingshot aiming function, but all of these pale in comparison to the game's true problem: how it is monetized.

There are a lot of very familiar free-to-play mechanics present in Rocket Bot Royale, like a battle pass, premium skins, etc., but there are also systems in place that intentionally place players on unequal footing in matches. Prior to every round, players can spend coins on special weapons to bring with them, and your menu of choices increases the more you level up your account. If you don't engage with this system, you're almost always at a disadvantage when entering a match. The game drops crates that anyone can collect to gear up, but matches don't really last long enough for a looting phase to feel like something you can feasibly rely on.

The bottom line

There are a lot of ideas happening in Rocket Bot Royale, and most of them are pretty compelling and enjoyable. The only problem is many of these ideas are so thoroughly smothered by the game's monetization systems and blisteringly fast match length that none of them feel like they get room to breathe and realize their full potential.

Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/rocket-bot-royale-review/

Square Valley review

May 25, 2022 by RSS Feed

Square Valley takes the idea of the city-builder and turns it into a unique puzzle game where the way players place specific features in relation to each other makes all the difference. It's a bit of an abstract exercise when comparing it to other city-builders, but your end results end up looking like well considered spaces the more you strive to score big points. It's an elegant merging of strict mechanics and player creativity that feels substantial and satisfying, despite a few missing convenience features.

Puzzle place

At its most reductive, Square Valley is essentially a worker placement game. You have a pool of items to place on a 9x9 grid, but you draw from that pool as if it is a deck of cards. These items are features you'd find in a rural village like houses, windmills, trees, farm animals, etc. Depending on how you place these items, you can score different amounts of points, and those point totals can change based on how these items are placed in relation to one another.

For example, you can score more points for houses if they are placed along a roadway, and windmills score big if you surround them with wheat fields. Every feature you have at your disposal has a clear explanation of its scoring rules and you can also tap on existing features in on your valley map so you can always double-check how new placements might affect them. Games of Square Valley end when you hit a turn limit, which varies based on the mode and/or level you are playing.

Valley variety

It doesn't take too many rounds of Square Valley's standard chapter-based mode for the variety of features to place on the map to explode. Different breeds of animals, variations on residences, and even blights like haunted buildings or predators make sure you're always encountering some new kind of challenge while trying to score big with the items at your disposal.

Luckily, Square Valley maintains a solid line of logic in how practically all of its features work so building with them or around them starts to feel somewhat intuitive, even when working with them for the first time. Through the lengthy primary mode, nearly 50 levels are divided into three chapters that differentiate themselves by land type (valleys, plateaus, islands), all of which require some alternate strategies and creative thinking to score well enough to move on to the next challenge.

Hamlet hardships

The balance of all of Square Valley's various pieces is remarkable in how it both manages to consistently provide satisfying challenge while also--when played well--produce village landscapes with walled-in city centers, witch huts buried in the woods, and farmland that sprawls out by livestock pens. Even if you don't want to ride the slow ramp of unlocked features, Square Valley lets you roll right into a Sandbox Mode where you can mix and match all of the rules and items to set your own challenge or compete in a daily challenge to compare your score against other players using the same map and elements provided to you.

As great as all of this is, there are a few annoying aspects of Square Valley's design. The most glaring of these issues is that the game doesn't suspend or save your sessions, forcing you to either sit and play through a full puzzle map or risk having to restart it from the beginning when you come back to the game. There's also a few building features like walls and rivers that aren't entirely clear about how the rules of how "painting" them onto the map work, and can lead to situations where a ton of your planned out moves can go to waste because a wall can't run alongside a plateau, for example.

The bottom line

By and large, Square Valley is a highly compelling puzzle game that captures the spirit of city-building in a pretty flexible and fun package. I just wish I could pop in and out of it a little more easily. Despite this (and a small handful of rulesets that could be a smidge clearer), Square Valley is well worth checking out.

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

We'll Always Have Paris review

May 25, 2022 by RSS Feed

There are a lot of narrative adventure games about relationships and romance, but there aren't many that consider the idea of trying to love someone who isn't quite sure of who they are. We'll Always Have Paris examines a relationship well past its prime and what happens to a loved one with dementia in an experience that is as moving and surprising as it is brief.

Old love

We'll Always Have Paris tells the story of Simon, a retired chef living out his golden years trying to keep himself busy. One thing that occupies a lot of his time is Claire, his spouse of fifty years, who seems to experience episodes of dementia. In addition to tending to her, Simon has his social circle to keep up with and a young grandson to bond with.

Over the course of this game's one-day story, you help guide Simon through a set of errands and activities that stir up some bygone memories and tell you a little bit more about Simon and his life with Claire. Much of this narrative unfolds in a fairly linear fashion with you either buttoning through text prompts or performing some light environmental interactions like rubbing a foggy mirror with a towel or choosing groceries to buy as Simon's internal monologue and interactions with others drive the story forward.

Beauty in brevity

It's almost a challenge to break up We'll Always Have Paris into multiple play sessions. The game is intentionally easy to get through in a single sitting (as noted by a text box at the start of the game). Say what you will about the value proposition of games you can play through in less than an hour, but the amount development that occurs over Simon's seemingly ordinary day is perfectly paced and the primary reason the game feels cohesive and satisfying.

We'll Always Have Paris is surprisingly efficient with its dialog and exposition. Small responses to questions or items in the scenery all play their part in building a fully realized world and past around Simon, and the sparse visual style and melancholy piano soundtrack all do their part to effectively set tone and make meaningful contributions to what ends up being a pretty emotional journey.

Uncertain recognition

The story in We'll Always Have Paris is its main selling point, and it's well worth the asking price. If you are looking for a game with more puzzle elements or even branching paths to explore, this is not the game for you. In fact, the worst moments in We'll Always Have Paris come whenever it tries to challenge you with environmental interactions.

This is to say it isn't always entirely clear what kinds of actions We'll Always Have Paris wants you to do. Sometimes you need to tap items, and at others you need to drag them to certain places. This kind of inconsistency without instruction can lead to moments where you're correctly identifying the objects you need to use, but can't advance because you aren't putting the right kind of touch on it. These create points where you can stall out or otherwise slow the pace of a game that is very much interested in keeping you moving through it without much downtime.

The bottom line

We'll Always Have Paris is a wonderful story and experience that is able to delight, surprise, and move you in a remarkably short period of time. It doesn't always strike the balance it needs to between storytelling and interaction, but for the most part it lets you swiftly enjoy everything it has to offer.

Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/well-always-have-paris-review/

Knotwords review

May 25, 2022 by RSS Feed

Zach Gage has made some of the best word games you can play on your phone, and what I'll confidently say is the absolute best logic puzzler you can find anywhere in Good Sudoku. Considering this, and perhaps the cultural phenomenon around the daily web challenge that is Wordle, it makes a lot of sense for Gage's latest work to combine wordplay with some placement mechanics in a way that feels like an evolution of the crossword puzzle into a form that honors logic over knowledge.

Letter logic

Knotwords is a puzzle game with challenges that look awfully similar to crossword puzzles. A grid of intersecting blank boxes greets you at the start of every level, and it's your goal to fill every one of them in with a letter so that every string of two or more letters makes a valid word, both when reading across and down.

Unlike crosswords, though, Knotwords gives you the letters you need for every box. Chunks of blank boxes are subdivided all over the puzzle board, and in the top left corner of those clusters is every letter you can use for those boxes. Depending on how these sections of boxes are divided, these letters could contribute to a single word, or multiple ones in various directions, and you won't know fully if you've used them correctly until you've played valid words in every direction in the puzzle, which is how you complete each challenge.

Good guessing

Completing Knotwords puzzles definitely involves a little bit of experimentation, but it is far from a pure guessing game or trial-and-error ordeal. The monthly puzzlebooks include clues about the word types you'll be solving for, there's a built-in hint system that can offer crossword-like definition prompts for individual words across or down, and by default the game gives very clear feedback by scribbling out words that are not valid and highlighting letters you use in clusters too many times.

Even without any of these things (many of which you can turn off), the ways in which Knotwords subdivides its letter clusters and lays out its levels makes any error in word creation or letter arrangement something that is easy to identify within a small area of the level, which allows you to work on correcting mistakes without feeling lost or like you should just start the entire challenge over again from scratch.

Fun for a spell

In case the term "monthly puzzlebook" threw you for a loop in the previous section, let me finally explain Knotwords's structure. This is a game that is designed to be a daily exercise as opposed to being something completable. As a result, Knotwords features a variety of modes, though they are all meant to be followed and played over time. The monthly puzzlebooks are just that--a set of puzzles for the month that you can complete at your own pace, but change out every month. There are also two different daily challenges, one of which is a normal Knotwords puzzle and the other is a "Twist" mode that tells you how many vowels you can use in each row or column to complete the puzzle.

Knotwords is a free game, but to unlock features like the Twist mode, additional puzzlebook challenges, a higher hint capacity, stat tracking, and additional color schemes, you can opt to pay $11.99 once or subscribe to the game for $4.99 per year. The game itself is perfectly enjoyable and offers exactly what it advertises without paying anything, so the purchase options feel more like ways to dive deeper into the experience rather than a way to make the game playable as intended.

The bottom line

For my money, I might sooner recommend some of Gage's other games ahead of Knotwords, but that's less a knock on this game as it is a testament to this developer's excellent body of work. The nice thing here is you don't have to actually spend anything to enjoy Knotwords at its core, so make sure to pick it up and give it a try.

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