"If there is an app for that"

Temporal War review

July 20, 2023 by RSS Feed

If you know anything about Game Stew as a developer, it's probably pretty surprising to see screenshots of Temporal War, their latest release. Outside of being released on iOS, it's a game that bears very little resemblance to their house style of somewhat surreal pixel art arcade titles. I am all for games going out on a limb to experiment and try to find new ways to engage and entertain players, but Temporal War feels like a huge miss as it seems to be relying wholecloth on randomness and what I suspect is AI-generated art to create its appeal.

Card war

Temporal War is a card game themed around a very generic red army vs. blue army global conflict. Your role as the blue army commander is to fight back against the red army occupying forces in Taiwan through recruiting units (i.e. cards) that you use in customized decks to play a very simple tactical card battler.

Matches of Temporal War involve lane-based combat where cards across the play area from one another attack each other and deal damage based on the number value of the card. After each round of combat, a new card from each side's deck is deployed at random before you can arrange your units in lanes and attack once again. Combat encounters end when one side is able to punch through lanes of cards to deal enough direct damage to the enemy player and deplete all of their health points.

Random recruiting

There are some nuances to Temporal War's combat, like cards with special abilities and some random events that can affect both combatants in the heat of a battle, but probably the biggest gameplay twist the game has to offer is what I refer to as "card permadeath." This is to say that if a unit from your deck gets defeated, that card is no longer available in your army any longer and you have to rely on other cards to keep your fighting forces strong.

This is a theoretically compelling idea for a card game, but it ultimately just ends up propping up a grinding mechanic. Winning fights rewards you with points you can use to draft new cards, all of which are randomly rewarded to you. Speaking of randomness, that seems to be a big throughline for Temporal War, and it ends up taking a lot of agency away from you as the player. There's a random system for getting new cards and a random draw to get the cards you want on the playfield, so all you are really left with in your control is how you choose to build your deck and how to rearrange whatever subset of them you draw for combat. This is to say that you aren't completely at the mercy of chance, but it plays what I'd say is way too much of a factor in the overall game.

Art-ificial

Casting aside Temporal War's mechanics for a moment, perhaps the biggest bummer about it is the game's overall style and presentation. Not only is its art lacking in the personality that oozed out of their previous titles, but all of it also looks... wrong.

At first glance, the comic book illustrations look pretty sharp (though generic), but taking any longer look at any piece of art in the game immediately makes it read as AI-generated. There are drawings of planes that have helicopter rotors, radar huds that just have muddy nonsense shapes on them, and even the tutorial guide is a woman with a tie seemingly growing out from underneath her shirt and eyes that don't look in the same direction.

Now, I can't actually confirm if the art in Temporal War is AI-generated (Game Stew were very vague in their response to me when I asked them about it), but if it's not, it hews so closely to it that it is distracting and disappointing nonetheless. If it is AI-generated art, then I think there are dubious implications (at best) for this game to cost money. In any case, Game Stew lost a lot of what made their games stand out on the App Store in this shift in style, and it doesn't help that the game itself is somewhat middling.

The bottom line

Temporal War is a pretty generic and forgettable card game to the point that the most notable thing about it is how suspiciously AI-generated its art looks. Regardless of whether it is or not, this game feels like a step backward for one of the most dedicated and distinct developers still committed to mobile gaming.

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

Roto Force review

July 18, 2023 by RSS Feed

Action games are notoriously hard to nail down on mobile, but you can get a long way with a distinct and stylish presentation and design. Roto Force has got to be one of the coolest-looking games I've played this year, but I never quite got sold on how its action feels using a touchscreen. With a controller, Roto Force's unique design clicks into place, but without one, it looks far cooler than it feels.

Rounds of rounds

Roto Force is a retro-styled twin-stick shooter where you play as an intern for a fighting force that wants you to venture in to dangerous locales to take down bosses for a variety of tenuous reasons. Each of these environments is comprised of wave-based challenges that take place within an enclosed arena that you are mostly glued to the wall of.

To make it through these waves, you need to shoot and kill all the enemies that appear using any one of the unlockable weapons available to you. Beyond simply strafing and shooting, you also have access to a dash move that can launch you across the open space of the arena, protect you from certain kinds of projectiles, and pop bubbles containing powerups.

Slyly stylish

The most appealing thing about Roto Force is definitely its overall presentation. Its pared down use of colors, especially when applied boldly to each in-game location, makes its pixel art stand out while also keeping the hectic action easy to follow.

Roto Force is also quite a clever game, with some wry humor in its sparse writing and some fun mechanical surprises that are best discovered without being spoiled. Don't take any of this to mean that Roto Force is as light an experience as it appears, though. The game can be quite tough in spots and--in fact--measures your performance one each environment based on how many times you died across its checkpoints.

Floundering for feel

As cool as Roto Force looks, though, I found myself wanting it to feel just as slick when actually playing it and found that nearly impossible without using a bluetooth controller. Even with the variety of control customization options--and even some accessibility tools that let you adjust game speed, damage, etc.--I couldn't quite find a setup using touch that prevented me from making accidental dashes or other errors that hampered my experience.

I realize this may not be true for other folks who pick up the game, which is why it's such a good thing that Roto Force is available as a free-to-try title. Players can try out the first world of the game completely for free before considering the $ 4.99 purchase to unlock the full nine worlds to fight through.

The bottom line

I really like the concepts and design decisions that went into creating a game like Roto Force. I just don't think it quite fits on mobile all that well. Of course, there is a way to make the game feel good using a controller, but that still limits the appeal of buying the game on the App Store.

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

Fireball Wizard review

June 29, 2023 by RSS Feed

Fireball Wizard is about as straightforward in concept as it is in its title. It's a game where you play as a wizard, and (surprise!) they can shoot fireballs. With this basic, primary tool, you weave your way through brief platforming levels that don't feel too unlike mini Mega Man stages. It's a fine game for anyone looking for some new platforming challenge, but is far from feeling particularly special.

Jump, shoot, cast

Armed with your wand, a spellbook, and double-jumping abilities, Fireball Wizard has you pilot a little pixelated wizard through stages that can typically be completed in a few minutes. In these levels are typical fantasy enemies like skeletons, blobs of goo, bats, etc. as well as environmental hazards like fire pits and spikes.

The goal of these levels is simply to reach the exit, though killing enemies rewards coins that can be used on upgrades and there is a secret area in each level that can grant more rewards. At the end of each level, there is a bonus mini-game that can give you even more coins before placing you back in an overworld where you can revisit old levels, go upgrade your wand, play some mini-games, or move on to the next challenge.

Tricky spells

As you move through Fireball Wizard, you also gain access to non-fireball spells to add to your spellbook. You can activate your spellbook at any time in-game, and doing so pauses the game while you choose what to cast. These spells almost all have a corollary to platforming powers you've seen in previous games. For example, there's a freeze spell that can destroy walls that you were previously not able to move past and a spell you can cast mid-air to do a "stomp" move through breakable blocks below you.

There is some novelty to this spell book mechanic, especially since some spells can be useful outside of their initial context. The aforementioned freeze spell, for instance, can also freeze enemies, which can be useful for plucking pesky bats out of the air or avoiding fast attacking enemies. I sort of wish these spells had more consistent or wider use cases than they do, but the extent that they have multiple uses is also kind of neat.

Bosses and bugs

Every tenth level in Fireball Wizard is a boss stage that puts your abilities to the test before unlocking a new area. These fights are the most challenging combat encounters in the game, but they definitely feel familiar to anyone who has played a game in the vein of Mega Man before. Otherwise, Fireball Wizard levels are full of the same level design gimmicks that you've also very likely seen.

Despite these levels only taking a short time to complete, I found Fireball Wizard to test my patience. Dying in a level forces you to restart it from the beginning. Deaths come mostly from very fair attack patterns or hazards you can read and react to, but since all of the game feels like something I've played before, it was nonetheless frustrating. I also encountered a bug with opening the spellbook at the same time as finding a secret area, which renders the entire game unresponsive, thus adding occasional other reasons to have to restart levels.

The bottom line

There isn't anything fundamentally wrong with Fireball Wizard. It rearranges common tropes of platformers into one that works in its fantasy setting and on smaller screens. It isn't perfect, but it works well enough, It just also doesn't really take many risks or add anything else to its formula to make it stand out.

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

Bumballon review

June 22, 2023 by RSS Feed

Over the years, the App Store has seen some ingenious design go into the humble one-touch platformer. I'd even go as far to say that some of these past titles are some of the best platforming you can find just about anywhere. Due to this stiff competition, games like Bumballon have a hard time standing out. Despite a decently charming aesthetic and intriguing concept, this game has just enough working against it to make it hard to recommend over alternatives.

Balloon bouncer

In Bumballon, you play as a duck-like creature who launches out of cannons to blast through environments has super speeds. Your only way to control this creature is by tapping to make it inflate and float slowly along like a balloon. You only have a limited time to be inflated, though, with the idea being that most of the time you'll be shooting through levels in mere seconds.

As you fly through the air, any number of things might come in to view to knock you out of the sky. Deadly creatures, walls, and other hazards you have to play around and try to time your flying just right so that you don't careen into them and die, which would force you to start the level over from the beginning.

Duck death

It doesn't take long for Bumballon to become a pretty serious test of your reflexes. Once you get to the end of the first world (of seven total), you'd have to be pretty lucky to make it through a level without dying at least once. The speed at which the game moves and the way you only have such limited control of your character means you can expect to die quite a bit before clearing levels moving forward.

I don't usually have an issue with platformers that are punishing like this, but Bumballon's flavor of it has a couple sour notes. The first is that there are many times where you can identify your doom well before you even reach it, as sometimes a mistimed launch can't even be saved by the one control option you have. The second--and perhaps most important--reason I don't have much patience for dying and retrying in Bumballon is that restarting levels takes a bit too long. By my estimate, viewing the death screen (which also keeps a tally of your increasingly embarrassing death count and tapping to try again takes a few seconds, when it should really be an instant restart.

Quacky quirks

Outside of the core design decisions of Bumballon's gameplay, there are a couple of other things that rub me the wrong way. The first is that the game is a little buggy, particularly when it comes to its sound. During almost every play session, the game sound completely stops, which can be quite distracting, especially if in the midst of a challenging sequence.

Also, the game's free-to-play model--while generally pretty standard in most circumstances--makes the punsihment of death even more excrutiating. Having an advertisement add further delay to the retrying process ruins what is already a pretty sluggish sense of momentum, which is key to making a challenging one-touch platformer feel replayable and less frutstrating than it would otherwise be.

The bottom line

There are just a few too many things that make Bumballon bothersome to play. In light of no quality alternatives, that may well make it worth picking up, but that is definitely not the case. There are myriad other high-quality platformers you could be playing that deliver what Bumballon in a slicker and better designed package.

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

Coffee Golf review

June 21, 2023 by RSS Feed

There have been quite a few attempts to develop games that double as a sort of daily ritual in the wake of Wordle, but I'm not sure many have had all the requisite components to compete at this level. After spending a few weeks with Coffee Golf, though, I am prepared to say that this daily golfer is probably the closest I've seen anything come to recreating such a winning formula.

Golf club

Coffee Golf is a casual golf game that serves up a unique landscape with five different holes on it every day. With three clubs at your disposal, you can chart your own path through the course in an effort to take as few strokes as possible. Once you've completed the course, your score is tallied, you can get some limited information on how you measured up against other players, and share your score easily by copying your scorecard to post an emoji-laden readout of your performance.

Outside of the nonlinear structure, Coffee Golf doesn't get too off-kilter with its brand of golfing. Course obstacles are standard sand traps and trees, and your clubs are the familiar basic tools of a driver, wedge, and putter. You control your strokes through dragging and releasing on the screen, with longer shots typically being less accurate than short-game strokes.

Routine exercise

If you spend even a small amount of time with Coffee Golf, its similarity to Wordle is easy to see. Each time you boot the app, you see the day's course and start, with no other menu options or alternate modes around to distract you. Also, each course just takes a few minutes to complete and your shareable scorecard is just as colorful, clever, and fun to share as Wordle's.

Where it departs--obviously--is in the actual activity, but I have to say I quite like the feel of Coffee Golf's swing mechanics and it feels more immediately like a game of skill than Wordle. Where the latter always starts as a pure guessing game, the way you decide to approach holes from your first tee-off in Coffee Golf has an impact on the rest of your performance on the day's challenge.

Free swinging

Coffee Golf is a completely free game, but it does offer a single, odd in-app purchase. For $ 3.99, players can unlock "unlimited play" which allows you to replay the day's challenge as many times as you want. This means that paying players can try to change their score after already playing the course, which feels somewhat antithetical to the kind of "once per day" design principle of the game and ones like it.

I can see why someone might want this feature, as Coffee Golf does have an element of randomness to its shot accuracy that can occasionally really throw off a day's score. That said, managing swing variability feels like a core "risk vs. reward" system that creates the challenge of the game in the first place. Personally, I couldn't see using unlimited play as all that rewarding as I'd know that my first attempt is really my true score, but if someone wants to pay for that option who am I to say otherwise?

The bottom line

This is all to say that Coffee Golf is a high quality, fun, and free daily golfer. It is just frictionless enough to making daily play incredibly easy while also maintaining a sense of challenge to drive you to improve. Because of this, I plan to keep golfing over my morning coffee for a good long time.

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