The Last Game review
October 05, 2023 by RSS Feed
Sometimes a game doesn't have to be super deep to be enjoyable. For $ 2, The Last Game offers up some generic roguelite shooting action all without taking itself seriously or ambitiously, and honestly it is probably better off that way.
Shoot and loot
The Last Game is a dungeon-crawler where you move between arenas killing everything in your path with mostly a projectile weapon of some sort. There's no particular story, and the opening signpost when you begin a run that thanks you for playing the game, apologizes for not really having a story and finishes by saying "let's just say you're here to defeat the big villain, ok?"
Once you have cleared a room, you then get to choose between two different paths that are labeled with the kinds of rewards or advantages they might grant. You may choose a room to earn some coins, or gain some kind of powerup. Some rooms even let you deposit items for use on future runs or ask you to sacrifice some of your health or other items for a chance at a rare perk to help your fighting ability.
Uncover and unlock
It won't take long before you are able to clear The Last Game in full. It's only three different dungeons with bosses at the end, and the game's challenge rises as you go but doesn't feel insurmountable even if you didn't build a particularly impressive loadout for your character. All told, a full clear of the game takes about 30 minutes at most.
Once you beat The Last Game, you then gain access to other character classes to play as and earn a lot of currency that you can spend at checkpoints between dungeons to aid you on subsequent clears. From there, there is still quite a bit to uncover as The Last Game has challenge modes that ask you to beat the game in certain ways or using certain characters that can keep you occupied for a good long time.
Nothing to break, so nothing to fix
There isn't much more to The Last Game than this, but it plays well and gives you a quick burst of roguelite action which--though generic--is still rewarding and fun. Well, actually, the game supposedly has four-player co-op, but it's all local co-op using controllers so I haven't been able to test it.
The nice thing about being so basic and generic by design is that The Last Game sidesteps a lot of potential problems by simply not having those features in the game. That said, I do wish that some of the humor from the in-game signs was sprinkled into the experience, and that there was some more visual variety, particularly around character classes, but having things like that would feel like minor bonuses as opposed to adding missing features.
The bottom line
Sometimes you want to turn your brain off and play a familiar and friendly video game that still has a little bit of depth to it. Despite mobile feeling like the perfect place for this kind of game, they are actually quite hard to come by! The Last Game is very much a game like this, though, and serves up some quality and straightforward roguelite action.
Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/the-last-game-review/
credit : 148apps
Tangle Tower review
October 02, 2023 by RSS Feed
The latest re-release of a previous Apple Arcade exclusive is a quirky mystery adventure game about a curious family living on an isolated estate. Tangle Tower puts you in the shoes of a detective duo that has been called to uncover who murdered the most promising young member of an odd and eccentric family. It sounds dark, but Tangle Toweris colorful, curious, and charmingly presented while also being a well paced and logically sound detective experience.
Curious case
Tangle Tower begins rather abruptly with the arrival of Detective Grimoire and his partner, Sally, arriving at the eponymous estate. After briefly learning the control basics, you get ushered up to a crime scene where a teenager named Freya Fellow has seemingly been murdered in front of her mother while painting a portrait of her.
This kicks off an adventure where you wander all over the Tangle Tower estate, finding clues and asking members of the Fellow and Pointer families about them and each other, and slowly unraveling what happened to Freya. You do all of this through fairly conventional point-and-click adventure game controls, though there is some innovation with the way Tangle Tower smartly draws its scenes to make clue-gathering feel intuitive and guides you through procedural breakthroughs via informal quips between the detective duo.
Dialog detective
Although the method for controlling Tangle Tower is very much like other adventure games, the way in which its story unfolds is much more dialog-focused than other titles I've played in this genre. True to detective work, a lot of the game consists of taking down statements and combing through evidence together, and most of the game's challenge (or rather, gating) comes from finding the right things that lead to breakthroughs in logic or reasons to revisit less-than-honest statements.
This plays directly into Tangle Tower's strengths as its character design and voice acting work are top-notch, and the writing overall is very clever and charming. On top of this, the way everything is written is done so carefully that it is rare to ever feel the need for a hint or guide as to what to do next, as everyone's dialog guides you along in a way that keeps you on track without ever feeling like it's just telling you what to do next.
More than murder
Tangle Tower is a very story focused game and a "whodunit" to boot, so I can't go too far into how things play out without potentially spoiling things, so I'll just say that the game has some good twists and turns that will take you places you weren't expecting by the end. If, for whatever reason, you find yourself getting hung up on what to do next, the game does conveniently supply a hint system that keeps things generally vague enough to guide you to your next step without outright telling you what to do.
As mentioned in the opening, Tangle Tower is a re-release of the Apple Arcade version of the game onto the App Store and it feels exactly the same as it did behind a subscription service. One thing to note though is that--where some Apple Arcade games retained old cloud saves that worked with the re-release--that is not the case with Tangle Tower, meaning that if you started the game previously on iOS you'll have to start at the beginning in this version. As somewhat of a silver lining, it's not like Tangle Tower is a terribly long game and it plays best while everything about the case is still fresh in your mind, so starting over is recommended regardless.
The bottom line
Tangle Tower was one of the best titles on Apple Arcade while it lived there, and this App Store release is essentially the same great game but now available for a single purchase. Its innovative dialog-heavy approach to adventure game design is still a satisfying and refreshing experience, even years after its initial launch.
Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/tangle-tower-review/
credit : 148apps
The Isle Tide Hotel review
September 20, 2023 by RSS Feed
Wales Interactive has fully entered journeyman status in the world of FMV game development, putting out the vast majority of these kinds of games I've encountered on the App Store. I have said before (and will say again) that I find their releases most successful when they tighten their scope and lessen their stakes below "saving the world" or "solving the conspiracy" levels and focus on telling a more grounded story. The Isle Tide Hotel absolutely does not do this and suffers for it, and on top of that it contains performances and happenings that feel little more than strange just for sake of it.
Every body to the hotel
In The Isle Tide Hotel you play an absent father investigating the disappearance of his teenage daughter. Evidence to her whereabouts point you to a mysterious hotel that contains a lot of strange staff and guests. I don't want to spoil anything about the actual story as that's the core of these games, but almost immediately you can see through what is going on and it's very predictable genre schlock.
Instead of more typical FMV games, The Isle Tide Hotel is somewhat nonlinear, giving you some options as to how to investigate. There are--of course--dialog options to choose in the midst of video clips, but also times where you are in a room and can choose where to move to, who to talk to, etc. These are somewhat limited segments of the game, though, which helps prevent this already slowly paced game from feeling even slower.
Too many pieces
By the time I got through The Isle Tide Hotel, I found myself somewhat bewildered at what had happened. Everyone in this game has a strange manner about them and says or does at least one thing that doesn't really seem to make sense. The sense I get from the game is that I'm supposed to search for meaning behind these occurrences by playing the game again, but I am not curious in the slightest to go back through the game and figure things out.
Although I think it's nice for a game to be built around replayability, having a story-based game require you to replay it to understand the story is a step too far. I'm of the opinion that games with branching storylines should tell complete stories across all of its branches instead of just offering a lot of incomplete pictures that you have to piece together yourself.
Don't trust the tide
Part of the reason I am not interested in what might lay behind other playthroughs of The Isle Tide Hotel is because of the game's strange pacing that makes what is generally a pretty short game feel like it takes forever. Beyond that, though, I've been down this path before with games from this developer and have not really found the satisfaction I was looking for.
The game does itself no favors either, as it doesn't actually encourage players to replay the game outside of showing some menu items that aren't revealed unless you figure out how to unlock them with replaying. There's no hint of how significant these items might be, nor does it even plant questions into your mind about what you might want to uncover. If there was something in The Isle Tide Hotel that suggested what I might be able to figure out I may be more enticed to start the game again, but my assumption based on past experiences is that there's a reason for this: there isn't all that much to actually discover.
The bottom line
The Isle Tide Hotel is an FMV game that is just trying to do too much beyond what FMV games are good at. It adds more video gamey elements that clash with having human actors performing them, doesn't allow its actors to act like humans, and seems designed solely around the idea of someone playing it repeatedly to see everything that is in it. To all that I say "no thanks."
Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/the-isle-tide-hotel-review/
credit : 148apps
Motorsport Manager 4 review
September 14, 2023 by RSS Feed
The Motorsport Manager games are far and away the management titles I've put the most time into on mobile. They are sharply designed and do a good job of teaching you about some of the nuances and excitement of racing that exist outside of sitting in the driver's seat. In playing Motorsport Manager 4, though, I found myself racking my brain trying to understand how this game is significantly different from Motorsport Manager Mobile 3, and I didn't come up with much.
Driving decisions
In case you haven't played one of these games before (or can't figure it out from the title), Motorsport Manager 4 is not about actually driving race cars. Instead, you manage an entire racing team operation, which includes charting out race day strategy but also extends beyond the track to driver contract negotiations, research and development, sponsor management, and more.
Most of this is completely menu-driven outside of the actual races themselves, where you then get a view of your races in real time that you can pause at any point to issue commands like calling for pitstops, pushing tires to the limit, and even things like managing the Energy Recovery System (ERS) for each driver.
Deja vu!
Motorsport Manager 4 is the slickest presentation of all of this managing action yet, but outside of its newfangled look, there's not a lot in this game that feels all that different from the last single-player entry in the series. There are some additional systems for sure, like an expanded race team staff to include strategists and some more store options to buying parts for your race car, but they feel like slight expansions to things that have already been in place as opposed to anything transformative.
I sort of get the rationale for being so incremental with a sequel. After all, Motorsport Manager Mobile 3 is a fantastic game and it strikes a great balance of feeling deep without ever getting too technical or overwhelming. That said, this is also what I said about the last game with regard to Motorsport Manager Mobile 2. This game feels like it does even less to progress the mechanics and systems at play here, and it would have been great to see some more dynamics added or just some more ambitious experimentation instead of another very safe and incremental release.
Where the rubber meets the road
So at this point you may be wondering if you should play Motorsport Manager 4. As someone who was playing the previous release on and off as recently as this calendar year, I can safely say that I am glad to have another game to dig into. Even with all of the similarities, the fresh visual presentation and having just a few more tools to play with is enough for me. The thing you have to keep in mind about this assessment though is that I love these games. I generally do not tire of them and find the upgrade path through racing leagues up to the big time meditative and fun, even if it does end up feeling like a bit of a grind.
If you've tried the other games and didn't quite feel that way about them, there's almost certainly nothing in Motorsport Manager 4 that is capable of changing your mind. If you've haven't tried any of these games before, then there's no reason not to jump in here, and--as I've said--I think they are among the best management games on mobile. On a final note, I do want to address the game's in-app purchases just to say that they are invisible to me. I don't know what they are, where I would go about purchasing them, and how they would help me do anything I haven't already been doing to play the game, so have no fear about this being a game that wants to just further monetize players.
The bottom line
Once again, Motorsport Manager 4 is an incremental step forward for an amazing series. It's still great, but the series is definitely starting to lose its shine.
Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/motorsport-manager-4-review/
credit : 148apps
Dawncaster review
August 30, 2023 by RSS Feed
Dawncaster is a deck-building roguelite that released for mobile devices back in March of 2021. Why am I writing about it now, then? Well, for starters, I somehow only recently became aware of it. Secondly, the game recently updated to add over 160 new cards for free for all players, making it basically a new game. And finally, I am taking it upon myself to write this not-so-timely review of Dawncaster because for the past two weeks it has been basically the only thing I've been playing and I'm still blown away by the things I am discovering and its ability to bring me back in for another run.
Classy combat
Conceptually, Dawncaster is nothing new. It's a fantasy roguelite deckbuilder where you play as a hero who fights all manner of evil creatures to level up and fine-tune a deck of combat abilities that thwart even the most powerful demons. Along the way, a quest unfolds and there are also other random events outside of combat that can help or hinder you all along the way.
To help guide your deck-building choices, you start each run by choosing a class along with some starting cards and abilities. At first, these class distinctions don't feel super different, but the further you get into a run and gain access to more cards, equipment, talents, etc. the way you play each class (and even the different deck types within a single class) varies quite dramatically.
Perfectly portable
Reading this, you may be asking yourself what makes the different than just playing deck-building heavy hitters like Slay the Spire or Monster Train? The answer for me lies in Dawncaster being a mobile-first title. This game packs all of the same punch of its higher profile competition, but it does so in a portrait-mode package that reads and plays beautifully and smoothly at 60 frames per second while also being easy on your phone's battery.
In addition to its technical performance and presentation, Dawncaster is designed to have combat encounters that take just few minutes while still retaining the depth and strategy of other games it takes inspiration from. This makes it a game you can dip in and out of throughout the day as you creep your way through a grand adventure, but also one that plays fabulously for long stretches.
Draw and redraw
I am not sure how Dawncaster felt before it dumped 160 cards into its library recently, but playing it now I've gone on at least 30 runs and have seen about 75% of the cards it has to offer and only scratched the surface of its more challenging content like the Sunforge. Every new game still feels like a world of possibility, and that's just from playing the game's base quest (you can bolt on three expansions to for $4.99 each).
As high as I am on Dawncaster, though, I do have to acknowledge some of its shortcomings. The first is that--as far as its roguelite design goes--you can screw over your run very easily and you might have to play for upwards of an hour from that point to even realize it. Dawncaster can also really feel like a game where your success is extremely luck dependent, though I fully acknowledge that some of that feeling may fade as my skills at the game develop over time. In either case, though, my overall feelings are ok with these design choices simply because of how easy it is to dive back in to Dawncaster to try and master the game all over again.
The bottom line
I won't try to sit here and tell you that Dawncaster is better than whatever your favorite roguelite deck-builder is, but I can say with a reasonable degree of certainty that Dawncaster is the most mobile-friendly one I've played. It feels just as robust and varied as other games like it, but done in a way that makes it so easy to hop into no matter where you are or what you are doing.
Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/dawncaster-review/
credit : 148apps
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