"If there is an app for that"

Free Apps to Download TODAY ONLY 11/11/2024

November 11, 2024 by RSS Feed

PassLock - Password Manager , Up Slide Down , Yard Sale + and more

PassLock - Password Manager ( $29.99 → Free ) Minal Patel PassLock - Password Manager is an easy way to store and manage passwords. The app uses an advanced Autofill feature making it super convenient to add new passwords. You can store other data like bank account info, credit card details, and more. The app uses advance encryption to ensure your data is secure.

Up Slide Down ( $0.99 → Free ) Digital Hole Pvt. Ltd. Up Slide Down provides the perfect distraction in moments of downtime. It features a collection of nine different sliding puzzles, each with a different theme. The general objective is to slide the tiles into the proper order as quickly as possible. You’re able to preview the required order of the tiles at any time, and monitor the number of moves and time taken at the top of the screen.

Yard Sale + ( $49.99 → Free ) Andrew Sidorchuk Yard Sale + acts as a POS for managing yard sales and garage sales. Easily create a catalog of the items you’re selling. They will then appear on the check out screen so you can quickly find the product and add it to a customer’s cart. You’re able to override prices as needed.

Home Remedies for Hair Care ( $99.99 → Free ) Karuwa Apps Home Remedies for Hair Care has everything you need to get your hair looking and feeling its best. Find the latest trends and styles and learn how to recreate them at home. You’ll also be armed with the most effective tips, tricks, and treatments for every hair type. This app has all your hair care needs covered so you can achieve the look you’ve always dreamed of.

Habit Tracker - Successly ( $99.99 → Free ) Graeme Cox Habit Tracker - Successly provides you with an array of tools to hit your goals in life. Improve your daily routine and get personalized recommendations on where things can be done more efficiently. Track your progress over time with charts. This will help you visualize where you are, where you came from, and where you’re going.

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

Children of Morta review

October 24, 2024 by RSS Feed

I've been playing and writing about mobile games for long enough to remember a time where there were essentially no good controllers available for the platform and few--if any--PC and console releases coming out on the App Store. All of that has changed, of course, and we're now at the point where it feels like there's a new clutch of ports coming out every week or two. There seems to be an interesting knock-on effect with all of these non-mobile games coming to the App Store: mobile ports are getting less and less mobile-friendly.Children of Morta is definitely part of this trend. Despite otherwise being a serviceable dungeon-crawler, so many aspects of this game were clearly not tuned with mobile in mind in 2019 and weren't subsequently tweaked for this 2024 re-release on the App Store.

Crawling chronicles

Children of Morta is a fairly run-of-the-mill roguelite dungeon-crawler at its core. You choose a level, choose a hero, and try to get as far as you can without dying. Along the way you find all kinds of collectibles and currencies, some of which empower your character for that run only and others that can unlock persistent upgrades to make future runs easier.

Where this game chooses to forge its identity is in its lore and storytelling. Each character in Children of Morta is part of a family (The Bergsons), and this family is fighting off ancient evils that threaten the land both through adventuring to awaken gods that can help them, and also through their own camaraderie. This shows up through different vignettes between dungeon runs and also sometimes during them. Some of these narrated sequences simply act to introduce some new upgrade treadmill you've unlocked, but others just help to give dimension to the world and its characters or even offer up some bespoke setpiece. It's a nice touch that keeps its run-based nature from feeling so nakedly repetitive.

Mobilized mess

When I first fired up Children of Morta on my iPad, I quickly realized two things. First, there is no way the touch controls (with zero customization options, by the way) are up to the task of allowing me to overcome this game's default difficulty curve. And second: It's pretty difficult to see a lot of little things on the screen that can make or break an entire run--even on one of the larger iOS displays available!

As a result, I spent the vast majority of my time with the game playing with a controller and training my eyes to pick up on smaller traps or attacks that come from underneath you. This mostly solved the problems, though I still found myself having some runs end abruptly for reasons that are still not apparent to me. The whole experience felt very much like just playing a console or PC game on a mobile device, which--while cool in its own ways--is a compromised experience. Simply give me a bigger screen (or even resolution options of some kind?) and Children of Morta is suddenly a much more enjoyable game.

A battle of bugs

Beyond the apparent lack of considerations for bringing Children of Morta to smaller screens, there are bugs in this version of the game that are pretty annoying to deal with and some other pain points that make it feel even more compromised than it already is. The main offenders here are a bug that sometimes cuts the audio of the game to the point that an entire cutscene plays with no sound and also no subtitles, for some reason. There's also an issue where the game pauses every time you unlock a Game Center achievement.

Outside of bugs, it would be nice if Children of Morta was able to save the state of a run somehow if the app crashes or you have to spend some time away from the game doing something else with your device, but that is sadly not a feature here. Nor is the multiplayer that is present in other versions of the game, though there is a menu item indicating that it should be making its way to the game at some point.

The bottom line

Despite all these issues, I still enjoy playing Children of Morta. It is very far from anything I would call a great experience, but there's enough going on in its combat design and storytelling that I feel compelled by it. Just know that if you do pick it up you'll have to wade through a lot of compromises, unless... you know.. you just buy it on some other platform.

Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/children-of-morta-review/

Unforeseen Incidents Mobile review

September 27, 2024 by RSS Feed

Probably the most fascinating thing about Unforeseen Incidents is the way the context surrounding its subject matter has shifted so dramatically since its original release in 2018. Outside of that, it's a solid point-and-click adventure game that does a few innovative and refreshing things but also falls into the same classic pitfalls the genre is known for.

Point and click fever

Unforeseen Incidents is an adventure game in which you play as a handyman named Harper who lives in a town beset with a mysterious illness known as Yelltown Fever. It is unclear what brought the illness about, but it is deadly, has no known cure, and has set off quite a bit of civil unrest.

Suffice it to say, some things happen in Yelltown that set you on a quest to discover the mysterious origins of the fever. The only thing standing in your way is a set of puzzles that largely involve the quintessential task of finding, combining, and/or exchanging items with your environment and the game's cast.

Pre-pandemic pandemic

The overall story in Unforeseen Incidents has plenty of twists and turns, and--given that since its release a global pandemic has actually ravaged this planet due to widespread political failures--it all bends into a narrative arc that feels like it comes from another universe. Without giving anything away, the big reveal of the Big Bad Conspiracy at the end almost reads as hopeful compared to what has happened in real life. It's still bad, but arguably better than what we got (complete denial and apathy).

All along the way, Unforeseen Incidents is a treat of clever writing and character quips. Even in these one-liners, exposition points, and incidental dialog, there's an interesting throughline about community tribalism with implications that I'm not sure I agree with, but feels like something the writers were intentionally going for while writing some legitimately funny jokes. I am not sure I can say something like this about a lot of other games, though I wish I could!

A practical man wants practical solutions

What excited me most about Unforeseen Incidents when I first started playing it was its down-to-earth puzzle design. In addition to its tasks being somewhat straightforward, they all also felt in line with Harper's character as a handyman. You start the game by fixing some wiring and eventually get to car repair and even radio triangulation. It's neat stuff that is all mechanically satisfying and tangible in a way that lets you always see what your next step needs to be.

Unfortunately, Unforeseen Incidents strays away from this kind of puzzle design for certain segments of the game and they just feel awful by comparison. There are hallucination sequences, vague directions, and--in the case of the game's final puzzle--sometimes both, and they lead to frustrating results. That final puzzle in particular is such a far cry from so many of the other puzzles in terms of practicality that I was convinced it was bugged. I almost wish it actually was, because I maintain that the solution is bullshit.

The bottom line

Will I let a few bad puzzles tarnish my entire perspective on this game? Well, yes. But I will also say that despite those glaring and frustrating flaws Unforeseen Incidents is quite enjoyable and has more to say than a lot of other adventure games I've played.

Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/unforeseen-incidents-mobile-review/

Balatro review

September 27, 2024 by RSS Feed

As soon as Balatro made its initial splash earlier this year, my initial thought (which I'm sure many others also had) was "this would be very nice to have on a phone." Well, now it's here, and it's definitely nice. Do yourself a favor and pick up Balatro so long as you don't mind holding your phone sideways.

I will not describe how Balatro works

That opening paragraph is about all I have to say about what Balatro is. If you want to read a good writeup about it, might I suggest this piece by Chris Person over on Aftermath. As for the port, it's a bummer that the game came to mobile and doesn't have some kind of portrait mode, and it seems like the touch controls just track your finger as if it was a mouse cursor, but hey, it works.

Now with all of that out of the way, I want to talk about why Balatro is so good. And I don't mean this in the way that every multi-layered roguelite develops its own brand of sticky gameplay loop that makes it hard to put down. No, I mean why does this game--with its one looping song and playing cards aesthetic--stand out in what is now easy to classify as a veritable ocean of high-quality run-based games.

I will instead talk about why I think it works

The answer, to me, can be boiled down to one word: preparation. In many great roguelites, players learn how to twist tactical advantages into an overarching strategy to clear some of the game's hardest challenges. This is also true in Balatro, naturally (and it is perhaps the most successful title I've played at facilitating this mentality), but the game feels almost equally prepared to thwart you.

In almost every one of these games I've played, either the thresholds for success are so narrow that every run feels like you're scraping by or so wide that you can blow the whole game wide open if you know what you're doing. Balatro, quite fluidly, is extremely capable of both. It feels incredible to put pieces in place such that suddenly you are clearing blinds by orders of magnitude with single hands, but you cannot enjoy this success forever. Balatro has more than enough tricks baked into its own challenge systems that it will almost certainly catch up to you, sooner or later. Combine that with a gambling aesthetic (and mechanics) and some tempting ways to mutate each run, and it's no wonder time disappears every time you play it.

Also a note about Apple Arcade

The only other thing worth addressing in this review is Balatro's split availability on iOS. It seems Apple has fully abandoned the notion of timed exclusivity for Apple Arcade and so both Balatro and Balatro+ released at the same time. For my money, I would stay away from Apple Arcade, a service that has altered what it set out to do significantly since launch, removed over half of the amount of games currently released for it overall, and reportedly does not treat developers well.

If, for some reason, you have Apple Arcade, having access to Balatro is great. What's even better is that if your subscription lapses or Apple Arcade removes Balatro+ from its offerings, the paid version in the regular old App Store is there and your progress tracks between them. What it doesn't do is sync with any non-mobile versions of the game, so perhaps if you already played it elsewhere you might want to take that into consideration.

The bottom line

If you've reached the end here and are wondering what my score has to do with these words, I guess I can break it down here: Although Balatro looks great and is clearly very well designed, I do in fact wish there were some more options to make this mobile version friendlier for the small screen. There are other games that do Balatro's thing with enough of the same kind of flair while also adapting better, and if I'm going out of my way to play the mobile version, that is more important to me. Outside of the hype surrounding this game--which will fade--it shakes out to feeling like another great game to add to a pile of similarly great games.

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

Resident Evil 7 biohazard review

August 09, 2024 by RSS Feed

Capcom has now ported three fully-fledgedResident Evil games to iOS, and--although none of them are especially high watermarks in the series--RESIDENT EVIL 7 biohazard is probably the best of the bunch. Despite having a lot of goofy "we did this bit to show off VR" moments and a back half that plays like a different, less appealing action game, there's still plenty to like about Resident Evil 7 overall.

Mobile marauder

Resident Evil 7's been out for almost eight years, so you probably have a sense of what the game is (or can find out pretty easily). With that in mind, I'll start with how it plays on mobile: fine. Or, at least about as fine as the other Resident Evil games on iOS have played. It is about the same level as impressive and has the same amount of somewhat screwy technical issues that crop up on rare occasions.

In my experience with this game, I had two noteworthy bugs I ran across. The first is an audio bug that is very similar to the one I recorded for my impressions video of Resident Evil Village. The other was a late-game lock-up that would happen when trying to reload a save, which seemed to coincide with an iCloud backup timeout problem. Both of these bugs were annoying, but relatively easy to work around, which is to say that if you have the hardware that can run this game, you should be fine.

Comparing corpses

I say at the top of my review that Resident Evil 7 is the best title between it, Village and RE4 Remake because it actually feels like a survival game, its controls mesh the best with the kinds of actions you're asked to do, and it does the most actual scaring of the three. On the flipside, if you are just looking to shoot a lot of gross enemies and barrel through bombastic setpieces, then it's pretty easy to make the case that Resident Evil 7 is actually the worst game of the lot. It just depends on what you are looking for (and, for the record, I think Village is the most preposterously over the top, action-wise).

To call Resident Evil 7 a subdued survival-horror game, though, would be an overstatement. Although this one starts with a very focused and refined approach to the genre, it flies off the rails just like every other Resident Evil game does. That's just what these games do. In its defense, I'll say that Resident Evil 7 does seem somewhat at odds with doing this, as it shows at least some restraint around its bigger encounters by not making them pure gunfights.

Two names, two games

As is now clearly the standard model for Capcom with these releases, you can download and try out part of Resident Evil 7 for free and opt to pay $19.99 for the full game. For titles that push hardware and are basically only playable with a controller, I think that pricing games this way is a boon for players who need to figure out whether they actually want to (or even can) play games in this format.

What I don't love about this model for Resident Evil 7 in particular is that the first half and the second half of this game feel like two fairly different experiences. The game's opening that has Ethan investigating a rundown property in Louisiana is where this game really shines. Everything beyond that (and there's quite a bit of it!) feels forced and a lot more generic. It ends up giving the impression that Capcom knew--rightly--that they couldn't make a 10 hour game out of the Baker property, so they decided--wrongly--to just bolt a bunch of other stuff onto the end of it instead of just making a shorter game.

The bottom line

My feelings about RESIDENT EVIL 7 biohazard are almost perfectly summed up by the opening moments of booting the game. Before you reach the game menu, there's this opening cinematic that plays set to a cover of "Go Tell Aunt Rhody." Choosing a centuries old folk song that has decidedly creepy vibes is a really inspired and evocative song choice, but this performance of it is so melodramatic and over-the-top that it loses all of its impact. Looking back on my time with RESIDENT EVIL 7 biohazard, it's fairly easy to see this pattern of excellent decision-making getting kneecapped all over the place. It makes for an uneven, and sometimes frustrating--experience, but one that is nonetheless easier to enjoy than its less-inspired counterparts on the App Store.

Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/resident-evil-7-biohazard-review/