Cryptract Review
November 21, 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 21, 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 21, 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 21, 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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Tap and Dash Through a Bizarre World in Orbia
November 21, 2020 by RSS Feed
Orbia (Free) by JOX is an action arcade game that tests your one-touch dashing skills. If you enjoyed other games like AZ Rockets and Lichtspeer, but want a world like Badland 2, then you'll get a kick out of Orbia.
When life gets too much (and boy has it been lately), I just want to sit down and enjoy some mobile games while in the comfort of my fiancé's arms on the couch. Usually I turn to puzzle games for these moments, but sometimes I want a game that tests my reflexive skills. For these moments, I like arcade games, and Orbia is one that fits the bill nicely. Even though Orbia has been out for a while, it slipped my radar until now. And I'm glad I discovered this hidden gem.
Lichtspeer
Noodlecake Studios Inc
AZ Rockets
Itatake AB
BADLAND
Frogmind Oy
BADLAND 2
Frogmind Oy
Visually, Orbia is beautiful. The game carries a fairly minimalistic aesthetic due to the softly colored backgrounds with serene landscapes and scenery. The targets you're dashing towards are simple circular outlines, sometimes with power-ups inside. Your character, a cute white fuzzball with glowing eyes, along with the enemies (dark evil versions of you in various sizes) are rendered in 2D and pack in a lot of personality in small packages.
There are various skins that you can come across as you play, which change your character's appearance and grants special abilities, and they all look unique and distinctive from each other. Animations are smooth and fluid, so there is no issue of lag or choppiness on my iPhone 8 Plus. Orbia also has a soothing and ambient atmospheric soundtrack that is immersive, so it's delightful to listen to as you play.
Even though the end goal is to get as far as you can in the game, there are still levels, and you can jump back to any completed level if you wish. Orbia features four different worlds with their own scenery and baddies to watch out for. On top of that, there are a ton of stages in each world to complete (the first one has 400 alone), so it should be enough to keep you busy for a while. Other chapters can be unlocked by spending crystals (in-game currency) or meeting other requirements, such as liking their Facebook page.
The goal in Orbia is to get as far as you can, and to complete each stage, just dash to each target unscathed until you get to the next level. Easy, right? Like plenty of other games, Orbia sounds easier than it looks.
To dash, all you need to do is tap anywhere on the screen. You don't have to worry about tapping on your target, since it would obstruct your view of obstacles. This one-touch control scheme lets you play the game with just one hand, so it's great to play anywhere. However, there are bad fuzzballs surrounding each target, and you must time your dashes right so you don't touch them, because otherwise, it's game over.
The game starts out easy enough, but things get trickier as you go. You'll encounter multiple orbiting layers of bad fuzzies, and they rotate at different speeds. Or there are large ones that are harder to avoid, rotating belts of them, and more. It's all about timing here, so just look for the opening and take it.
Sometimes you'll find power-ups in the targets that help you out in the long run. Things like shields protect you from a hit automatically, so you survive a bit longer. Other items let you dash faster, making it easier to get through tight openings. These boosts get activated when they're needed, so you don't have to think about additional controls besides dashing. They also pop up fairly frequently, so you may get a few items before a run ends.
Orbia also rewards players who are able to consecutively dash to targets without pausing. When this happens, you get a speed boost, and more crystals are awarded to you. Plus, it's fun to see how quickly you can complete a stage just for kicks.
As mentioned earlier, there are skins to unlock for your character, which add not only a dash of color, but grant you special talents too. For example, you can get faster dash speed, change your size, increase the time for bonus items, and more. Each skin is locked to the area that you find it in though, and more can be found on select stages. There are a ton of skins to discover and unlock, so it adds to the replay value.
Since Orbia is a free game, there are occasional banner and video ads. However, they don't necessarily get in the way, but could still annoy some people. Fortunately, there is an in-app purchase to get rid of ads if you so choose. Additionally, some skins are locked behind in-app purchases, and they also have pretty good bonuses as well as getting rid of ads too. However, some of the prices for these are pretty high, which I didn't like.
An orbital ascent.
The Good
Orbia is a gorgeous game that's relaxing and challenging at the same time. The simple and clean graphics are great eye candy, and the colors are definitely soothing and complement everything nicely. The music is whimsical and delightful to listen to. THe gameplay is simple enough for everyone, but still proves to be a nice and welcome challenge for all. The one-touch controls make this the perfect kind of pick-up-and-play game to try when you're just waiting around somewhere. Plus, there are hundreds of levels and a ton of unique skins to unlock that boost your game.
The Bad
Personally, Orbia has a lot of good stuff going on, but the free part does bug me a bit. The ads, while not intrusive during the game, do get annoying over time. At least there are ways to get rid of them. But that brings me to another point — some of the prices for the skins are ridiculous. One costs $20, and while it pretty much gives you godly bonuses, I just think it's too much. Plus, I'm not a fan of how each skin is locked to the area that you get it in. I think giving players the option to use any skin in any chapter grants more freedom.
The verdict
Despite my qualms with the game's in-app purchase skins, I'm finding Orbia to be a fun game to play when I have some downtime. The game's visual style is beautiful to behold, and reminds me a lot of games like Badland. I found the music to be tranquil and soothing too, which is always welcome for me these days. The one-touch controls are fantastic, and the gameplay itself is challenging, despite looking easy on the surface. It's one of those games that is hard to put down once you get started.
Orbia is available on the App Store as a universal download for your iPhone and iPad for free. There are in-app purchases.
9.1
OVERALL
Game Controls 10
Replayability 9
Graphics 9
Sound/Music 9
Gameplay 8.5
Orbia
JOX Development
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