"If there is an app for that"

Hoop Land review

June 09, 2023 by RSS Feed

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I am a big fan of sports games, but often avoid titles that lean into simulating real life sports. This is for a whole number of reasons, but the main two are that typically no simulation of real sports ever actually feels like the real thing and that I find most games like that are way more concerned with fidelity than actually being fun to play. In any case, Hoop Land doesn't have this problem. This retro-styled basketball game is a super arcade-y take on hoops and--despite being in beta--is perfectly enjoyable as is and is completely free to boot.

Balling in bursts

Hoop Land resembles sports titles from the 8-bit era, featuring simplistic sprite players running around a top-down view of a basketball court. In its current form, only exhibition games are available, so you just pick a team and opponent and get to hooping.

The controls are simple virtual buttons for passing, shooting, crossing up, etc. and offers some modern features by default, including an defense assistant that automatically has your character follow their man. You can, of course, take manual control at any time to attempt a steal, block a shot, or any other number of defensive maneuvers you'd like to do. With these tools, you just play basketball and try to outscore the opposing team before time runs out.

Champion of charm

In case you were wondering,Hoop Land is not a NBA licensed game, so all of its teams and players are made up. Although this might be a letdown to anyone who might want to play as their favorite teams or players, I actually find the work put into the team and character design for this game to be remarkably charming. There are definitely some teams that are clearly inspired by real NBA teams (like the "Boston Charms" and their four-leaf clover logo) but there are also a good number of original team concepts like the 80s neon-styled Miami Tides or my personal favorite team, the New Orleans Airmen. It's also worth noting the game has a "load league" option that lets you import data and make a league the way you see fit.

Similarly on the character front, there's a lot of identity put into each team's roster. Not only does every player have their own unique stats, but every player also has their own look. This not only makes Hoop Land a lot more visually interesting than it might otherwise be, but it also lets you put faces to names so you can identify your key playmakers and use them to your advantage without having to pause or call timeouts to look up player stats.

Team spirit

In its retro mold, Hoop Land obviously doesn't feel like a simulation of basketball, but the core game definitely feels true to the nature of the sport. Capitalizing on possessions and playing good defense typically make the difference between a win and a loss, and there's no apparent way to just kind of cheese your way around the game's AI opponents.

That said, there are definitely things I'd like to see added to Hoop Land as it gets out of beta. Something like a career mode would be nice, but even more than that some additional teaching tools, multiplayer capabilities, or just some better ways to look at team rosters and stats could go a really long way.

The bottom line

Hoop Land as a beta is not much more than a core of what looks to be a fuller experience. That said, what is already in the game is quite enjoyable and charming. Especially considering that it is free (with no ads or monetization, mind you), I highly recommend this retro sports game to just about anyone.

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

Legend of Keepers review

June 01, 2023 by RSS Feed

Dungeon-crawlers that have you play as the bad guys trying to beat the adventurers isn't exactly all that novel these days, but it is the tack taken by Legend of Keepers. This game has you playing as a big bad monster who needs to manage their own army of demons, skeletons, and other traditional dungeon monsters to stop waves of clerics, warriors, and their ilk in a game that feels like it's constantly stopping short of taking its ideas to satisfying places.

Monster manager

Legend of Keepers opens with a monster who acts somewhat like an HR representative introducing you to the game's conceit and mechanics. From there, she assigns you to projects that are some variation of protecting a certain dungeon over a period of time, during which you have the opportunity to recruit and train various monsters, procure traps, upgrade your own boss abilities, and--of course fight off adventurers that come by.

Most of this gameplay is purely menu-driven, with time passing by through a "schedule" where each week offers you a selection of buttons that you can choose to be the event of the week. Sometimes, these buttons offer you a choice between seeing a therapist to improve your staff morale or sending a cadre of monsters off on a business trip, and at other predefined points you simply choose between different sets of heroes to fight against, which then transitions to you the game's combat interface.

Teambuilding exercise

Combat is where Legend of Keepers puts all of your preparations to the test. In this mode, you get a predefined set of rooms to lay your traps and teams of monsters in hopes that with the ideal progression of horrors and dangers you can thwart any team that dares to challenge you. Typically, this involves placing a couple of traps and arranging two teams of three monsters. Occasionally, you'll have access to a midboss and some other environmental effects, as well.

Once everything is placed, you then get to watch the adventurers as they try to make it through your dungeon and even control your monsters in turn-based combat to leverage their abilities in an effort to either kill or terrify heroes such that they retreat. So long as your head boss doesn't get killed at the very end of your dungeon, you succeed and get to choose some rewards to upgrade your team's capabilities. From there, you have to rest while also upgrading everything to continue keeping up with the next adventurers who will come your way.

Clocking out early

On paper, I like a lot of what Legend of Keepers has to offer. Team-building, roguelike systems, management mechanics, and a little humor are all things I can get behind, especially in combination, but I found too often that this game doesn't really take any of its ideas far enough.

Perhaps this is because the systems in Legend of Keepers don't quite fit together all that elegantly. This is to say it can be hard to actually capitalize on synergies between monsters and traps because of how variable the game's elements can be. To account for that, it feels like the game doesn't really make them consequential, which ends up meaning you can get by doing just about whatever you want. This, in turn, makes the management decisions feel shallow, and there isn't enough variety to them or frequency of unique setpiece interactions with the HR monster at the beginning to really sell the humor that only ends up hanging out in the margins of the game.

The bottom line

Even when the component parts of Legend of Keepers are moving together in lockstep (an uncommon occurrence), it feels like it is missing a core. Or perhaps a better way to put it is the game seems like it knows that its systems don't line up well and therefore tunes the entire experience to allow you to muddle through it easily enough. It can still be entertaining in short bursts, but ultimately Legend of Keepers feels a bit thin.

Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/legend-of-keepers-review/

Lost Words: Beyond the Page review

May 24, 2023 by RSS Feed

Media about writers and writing usually rub me the wrong way unless actual writing is prominently featured and said writing is good. Either that, or have the words being featured be those of a child who aspires to be a professional writer. This is how Lost Words: Beyond the Pageframes its reflective story about loss, and--while I appreciate some of its ambition and clarity of thought--the game overall does suffer from some various little issues that detract from the experience.

Fact and fiction

Lost Words tells the story of a young girl at a pivotal moment in her life by alternating between journal entries and chapters of a fantasy story she is working on. You control an avatar of this girl as she hops from line to line in her journal or acts as the stand-in protagonist in her fantasy land.

Moving through both storylines involves some light platforming and puzzle-solving using a virtual joystick and two invisible buttons that allow you to jump or open a book of words that cast spells based on their meaning (rise, break, repair, etc.). Most of the gameplay is strictly a vehicle for storytelling, though, as there is constant narration throughout the experience that weaves together both worlds to explore love, loss, and coming of age.

Visual novel

One of the most striking things about Lost Words is its visual design. To be clear, I am not referring to the game's graphical fidelity but rather how the game often finds inventive and powerful ways to enhance the narration or words on the page through other elements taking place on screen. Changes in light, pauses in the action, and shifts of perspective lurk around every corner ready to pack an emotional punch into moments that might otherwise land with a thud.

These touches ended up being the primary driving force for me to see Lost Words through to the end, as the platforming can be occasionally buggy and otherwise pretty dull, the story itself is somewhat predictable in terms of its primary arc and otherwise erratic about getting from point to point, and there isn't a whole lot of experimentation happening when it comes to its puzzles.

Stilted stoytelling

For the most part, Lost Words gets away with having some lackluster writing as it is a story told from the perspective of a child. But this only really creates cover for the hackneyed prose and not other issues with the overall storytelling.

There are times when Lost Words seems to meander in circles unnecessarily before leaping to places seemingly randomly. The result is a pace that is hard to get a read on and can make the experience drag out. It also doesn't help that there are some various minor bugs in the game that can occasionally make events fail to trigger and narration lines bleed over one another. And then there's also an issue where a blank menu pops up between every scene in the game, presumably asking you to rate and review the game. I am not sure if its pop up frequency is on purpose or not, but in either case it is quite annoying and doesn't even work.

The bottom line

Despite all of the barriers that chop up the flow of Lost Words, I still found myself enjoying it. The visual touches used to enhance its emotional weight are done with a care that I'd like to see in more games of this nature, and the rest of the experience serviceable enough to make seeing its high notes easy enough to do.

Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/lost-words-beyond-the-page-review/

Torecower review

May 18, 2023 by RSS Feed

It's hard to follow up on something great, and Torecower is trying to do just that. The second release from the publisher that brought the fantastic SNKRX to iOS brings a title that tries to apply a similar formula of the breakout hit to a tower defense game. It's neat, but it lacks a lot of the inventiveness that came from the original game's unique concept.

Minimal mayhem

Torecower is a roguelite tower defense game where you place weapons around a central point in an effort to protect it from enemies that fly in from the edges of the screen. Much like SNKRX, the look of all of this action is boiled down to basic shapes like circles and triangles that also have color schemes to help inform you what they do.

Orange towers act as traditional gun-type towers, firing bullets in ways the resemble semi-automatic weapons, shotguns, rifles, and more. Blue towers fire projectiles in stranger ways or even loop them endlessly in circles around a fixed point. As these weapons kill incoming enemies, you also better be building yellow towers that collect the coins that fall out of them so you can continue building our your perfect defense.

Unclear upgrades

Between waves, Torecower pauses the action for a moment to let you spend a skill point in a preset upgrade tree that lets you make your existing towers more effective in some way. Some nodes on this tree do pretty straightforward things like upgrade damage for towers of a certain color or let you gather money faster, but some others it's not so easy to tell what their benefits are.

Part of this is a relative lack of explanation on the game's part, but you also just need to experiment with why certain upgrades would be important given the defenses you are building. As you progress and sink more time into Torecower, you are better able to parse what these upgrades do, especially as some of them are reliant on unlocking new kinds of towers before they do anything useful for you.

Every defense has weak points

Torecower seems like it has a lot of potential in borrowing the color-coded upgrade system of SNKRX, but this system isn't implemented nearly as well. There is no auto-chess-like matching of tower types to gain additional bonuses. Without other dynamic or random elements to force you to change your strategy, games of Torecower largely play out very similarly every time you start a new run.

It also doesn't help that Torecower has some odd bugs and control issues that can mess up runs. For example, if you purchase a tower but don't place it before a wave ends (a very easy thing to do as the game cannot be paused for building towers), that money disappears like you spent it but you are not given the chance to place the tower you bought. The tower placement controls are also really clunky, which can make this bug (and also just some strange tower placement in general) occur pretty often.

The bottom line Torecower is reminiscent of SNKRX in many ways but is a lesser game in nearly every respect. Tamping down on the bugs and control issues could edge this game closer to something recommendable, though I do see little reason to play this game when a better, more well conceived title is already part of my game library.

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

The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story review

May 08, 2023 by RSS Feed

I knew I was in for a pretty big experience when I downloaded all of the files for The Centennial Case and they totalled almost 15 GB. What I was not prepared for was just how wild of a ride I would be on. This FMV mystery game definitely puts its best foot forward, but some poor pacing and its own desire to fully explain every single interaction make playing large swaths of The Centennial Case pretty tedious.

Crimes of the century

The Centennial Case is a mystery FMV game that revolves around a young author who has been asked to untangle several different crimes and tragedies surrounding a mysterious family. She are brought into the fold specifically because of her ability to write compelling whodunnits, the thinking being that she can apply her logic from writing complicated mystery novels to try and solve some real-life murders.

Not long into the investigation, things go sideways and more crimes occur, and it's up to you--using various dialog trees and some deduction-based puzzle solving--to get to the bottom of each and every crime and uncover the truth surrounding this family. To make it through each investigation, you'll need to gather some observational clues and look and listen closely to character interactions to pick up on hints about the case to reach the correct conclusions.

Lengthy litigation

To help teach you about how the game works, the first case in The Centennial Case is relatively straightforward and ushers you along with tooltips and advice from other characters. Despite this relative hand-holding, the game does a great job of keeping things thrilling as it keeps doling out peculiarities surrounding this family that create intrigue about how certain crimes are tied together and what certain people's ultimate motives are.

In this early first case and the two or three that follow it, the way that crimes are laid out and the relations of the characters is all very clear, which makes the logical deduction sections of the game easy to navigate. In the back-half of the game, though, things get a lot more complicated and reveal the weaknesses of the game's UI. With the sheer number of scenes, characters, evidence, etc. the game really drags as it forces you to sift through this mountain of stuff to sort out the increasingly messy entanglements between characters, and it has a knock-on effect of making other aspects of the game that were once charming feel exhausting.

Just 100 more things

There's almost always a kind of hokey and awkward aspect to the acting in FMV games, and the performances in The Centennial Case are no exception. If you play the game with English dubbing (as the original performances are in Japanese), this amplifies the effect. I knew to expect this, but what I wasn't necessarily expecting was how hard The Centennial Case would leverage that tone to tell its own soapy and melodramatic story. This thing seriously has more twists, turns, and surprise reveals than just about any mystery game I've played, and the stilted acting almost heightens the ridiculousness.

That said, a big reason why The Centennial Case can fit so many surprises into its story is the fact that it has a lot of room for them. Just over the halfway mark of the game I thought I was in the final stretch, but the amount of things that you are tasked with figuring out in the final acts drag on and on and on. To make matters worse, some of the biggest surprises you can't possibly figure out based on the evidence alone so the game just railroads you into reaching those conclusions (and making all the sleuthing mechanics you're putting up with feel pointless as a result). The ride of the story is still entertaining, but it gets way too complicated and spends to much time trying to explain absolutely every little detail that I found myself just hoping that I'd reach credits by the end of a given scene.

The bottom line

The Centennial Case is certainly a meaty FMV mystery experience that can keep you entertained for a long time, but its complicated narrative and clunky gameplay definitely get harder to deal with over time. You have to have a high tolerance for FMV awkwardness and a lot of procedural explanations (which--while admirably thorough--make for a less appealing game) to truly appreciate it. And even then, certain things like pacing may still put you off of it.

Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/the-centennial-case-a-shijima-story-review/