Orange review
April 14, 2023 by RSS Feed
After making games about green, red, yellow, black, blue, and pink, Bart Bonte has released yet another set of 50 puzzles inspired by yet another color: Orange. While I'm not sure this game quite reaches the levels of creativity found in his last color-based outing, Orange is nevertheless a fun little puzzle game.
Orange you curious?
As with all of his previous color puzzle games, Orange is a series of single-screen puzzle inspired by and stylized around a single color. In the case of this game, it means solving puzzles using traffic cones, basketballs, eponymous fruit, etc. and often also having to manipulate or spell out the word "orange."
Most of these puzzles have completely unique mechanics governing how you reach a solution, though some ideas get recycled with additional kinks added to them to keep them fresh. Each of these puzzles usually takes just a few minutes at most to complete and a lot of the game's appeal is the novelty of discovering what the next orange-inspired challenge will be.
Pondering the orange
I'm typically impressed with Bart Bonte's ability to capture a feeling or a vibe associated with the colors for his games, but with Orange, I couldn't quite dial in on a specific tone. Where Pink was whimsical and loud and Green was more meditative and calm, Orange doesn't quite feel like it has its own distinct flavor.
I think some of this affects the overall puzzle design, as well. Some of the challenges in Orange can feel somewhat obtuse. This has been an issue in previous games as well, but it feels the most pronounced here, which can leave you scratching your head on puzzles that seem designed for you to punch through with relative ease.
Color compare
Just as with all of the other titles, Orange is free-to-play and allows you to play through the whole game without spending money. Free players get served ads if they decide to use Orange's in-game hint system, though ads can be removed from the game from a straightforward $1.99 in-app purchase.
The hint system--as always--is great at indicating how to proceed through puzzles gently without just giving answers away. Unfortunately, though, I found myself needing to use these hints quite a bit to make it through Orange for the reasons I mentioned earlier.
The bottom line
Orange is another quality entry in Bonte's color puzzle series, though it does feel perhaps like a step back from what I enjoyed about previous titles. There's a slight lack of confidence here that makes it just a little less impactful than others, though with it being free you can find out easily enough for yourself whether you agree.
Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/orange-review/
credit : 148apps
Voice of Cards: The Forsaken Maiden review
April 12, 2023 by RSS Feed
The Voice of Cards series is kind of odd in that it is based around a dedication to gimmicks that don't meaningfully change the core of the games all that much. These titles all want to emulate a grand fantasy adventure using nothing but tabletop game pieces, like cards, counters, and even a game master to narrate the whole tale to you. Outside of these things, the games are essentially a small scale role playing game, which is mostly a good fit for their arrival on iOS, though at least The Forsaken Maiden has a few issues that makes it less than ideal for mobile play.
A fetching quest
Voice of Cards: The Forsaken Maiden takes place in a fantasy world comprised of island villages that are each home to a maiden who is responsible for keeping these communities safe. There is some not-entirely-clear threat that the world is constantly defending itself against and the arcane rituals and ceremonial magic of these maidens keeps that threat at bay.
The Forsaken Maiden follows the journey of a silent maiden named Laty who finds herself having to journey with her attendant to the other islands to help other maidens perform their rituals. In meeting these characters, you build up a party of adventurers who fight in random battles, level up, and customize their ability sets as they uncover more about the evil forces perpetuating the need for maidens and their magic.
Card-based but conventional
The entire story of The Forsaken Maiden plays out through the use of cards and narration by a fully voiced storyteller. This doesn't mean that this game (or the other Voice of Cards titles, for that matter) are deck-builders or have any other card game mechanics or conventions. There's no card drawing or collection to speak of at all. The closest The Forsaken Maiden gets to being like a card game is how its ability cards cost a certain amount of tokens that you accumulate over the course of a fight (as opposed to having mana pools or anything).
Otherwise, The Forsaken Maiden plays almost exactly like a very conventional role-playing game. You explore an overworld to wander between locations, interact with key characters, and fight in random battles and boss fights. As a sort of smaller scale game, I will say I appreciate this game's sense of pace. Getting through The Forsaken Maiden should take less than 20 hours, and throughout there is no real need to grind out experience or money at all.
Onerous on-the-go
On paper, it makes total sense to bring a game like The Forsaken Maiden to mobile. With the streamlined storytelling and straightforward card combat, it feels like it should be exactly the thing you might want to bust out at a moment's notice while out to take a few steps toward the ending credits. Unfortunately, though, this isn't quite the case, and The Forsaken Maiden's relatively unwieldy mobile design only gets worse the longer you play it.
The first roadblock to making this game easy to whip out is a long inital load. You can bypass this if you can manage to keep the game suspended, but it still means every time you start it anew you've got to wait almost a minute to actually play it. As you play, there are also times where the game either hasn't optimized the touch areas of menus or certain buttons just don't work, to the point that late-stage abilities aren't even selectable. These things didn't put a huge damper on making me want to see the game to the end, but the long drawn-out sequences of fights with uneven difficulty and no ability to save between really did. I got through to the end and was satisfied by the conclusion, fortunately, but I can't see myself wanting to revisit the game for any of the side quests or other unlocks I received upon beating the game the first time.
The bottom line
If I had to sum it up, I'd say The Forsaken Maiden is a solid rpg up until around the last act of the game, where it simultaneously makes some design missteps and loses all sense of mobile friendliess. Before you reach that point, the problems with the game's mobile port are apparent but it's much easier to look past them and just enjoy the swift-moving rpg playing out via cards and narration.
Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/voice-of-cards-the-forsaken-maiden-review/
credit : 148apps
Water 2050 review
April 05, 2023 by RSS Feed
I like a good management game to dink around on, particularly on iOS. Water 2050 is extra appealing to me because it also has a noble cause. As a game developed in partnership with the Water Environment Federation to alert players to issues surrounding water pollution, it highlights a challenge that we face in the real world and frames it as a tough but surmountable challenge. While I do like the game's messaging and most of its core concepts, Water 2050 is unfortunately pretty rough around the edges and therefore isn't easy to recommend.
Purify the pollution
As its name suggests, Water 2050 takes place in the not-so-distant future, where you are in charge of running a city which--among other things--has a very polluted water system. There's a helpful little engineer named Martin who helps guide you through the ins and outs of running the city, including assigning objectives to help you try and reverse the tide of pollution that threatens the existence of your populace.
You have to balance your pursuit of cleaning up water with a lot of other city management requirements, though, like producing enough food for people to eat, maintaining city happiness, and deciding how to handle emergencies, be they natural disasters, organized protests, or something else entirely. Luckily, you don't just have to manage things how they are. Due to some special research, you also have the power to temporarily travel through time to 2023 to help you take preventative measures that affect conditions in 2050, though you also have to manage the past version of this city and balance your ability to jump between time periods with everything else needed to keep everyone alive and healthy.
Simple solutions
Given the focus of Water 2050, your goal is very clear, and--although there are things in the game that distract from water purification that you have to deal with--getting to the win state of the game is very simple. By reducing pollution, balancing your resource intake, and prioritizing water collection and cleaning you'll eventually have the looming threat of polluted water under control.
The more I think about this, though, the same is true for the real world about addressing any kind of existential threat. If people collectively could just look a little further beyond their own personal or otherwise short-term desires to recognize and respond to a problem we all need to fix, it could get done. Unfortunately, it's not so easy to just ignore corporate influence or otherwise manage a whole city like it's a game about water purification. But still, Water 2050 gets its point across and has some neat information about modern water conservation technologies baked right into the game's tech tree.
Rough waters
Water 2050 isn't a game that goes on endlessly. Provided you are able to manage successfully for long enough, you'll eventually research enough tech to filter and/or gather an amount of clean water that outpaces the rate at which it gets polluted. From there, you can then venture forth to another city to save.
Unfortunately though, I don't actually know what happens at this point, as just before I reached the threshold to do this, the game bugged out and gave me an ending saying I ran out of clean water when I had nearly 100% clean water reserves. This would've been a surprising end to my playthrough, but it was almost expected given some of the things I encountered while playing. Time warps bugged out to give me extra turns, I tapped into random events populated with place-holder graphics and text, and sometimes my resources would rise and fall at random between turns. All of this was annoying but manageable up until this end point, but the game-ending bug was particularly frustrating, especially since I had no way of resuming my game from an earlier state at that point.
The bottom line
I wish a game like this with a pretty basic but effective message was built a little bit better. It's hard enough to sell people on a game that might be seen as preachy from the outside, but it's even more difficult when the game doesn't work properly. When it is flowing along without issue, though, Water 2050 is an enjoyable little management game. It's just too bad the game is littered with bugs big and small basically all throughout the experience.
Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/water-2050-review/
credit : 148apps
Brotato review
April 03, 2023 by RSS Feed
Brotato is only difficult to write about because of how easy it is to get sucked into. More than once already when trying to start this review I've opted to just try another run of this arena-based roguelite instead. It's a very tough game to pull yourself away from, but at the same time Brotato is one of plenty of these kinds of games you could be playing. To be fair it's a good one of those, but it doesn't do anything I'd say is particularly original.
Potato guns
In Brotato, you play as a potato that somehow is very good at using all kinds of weaponry. In most cases, you can equip up to six different kinds of weapons, which can be anything from standard firearms to ethereal blades, and try to survive wave after wave of alien enemies that swarm around and attack you.
Each wave lasts a limited amount of time, and--provided you survive--you get to spend any currency you collect from defeated enemies on upgrades that should better prepare you for the next wave of enemies. All you have to do for combat is steer your potato, and they do all the attacking themselves. All of the upgrades in between are menu-driven and play almost like a puzzle game where you are trying to optimize your spud into the ultimate killing machine given some randomization and the tools at your disposal.
The humble spud
If this all sounds familiar, it's likely because it is. This exact kind of gameplay gets dressed up in different ways and iterated upon constantly. There does seem to be a new wave of games like this coming out off of the success of Vampire Survivors, which is probably the newest and most well-known game of this type at this time of writing. Part of what made that game get so much recognition though is just how differently it approached so many aspects of the arena-based roguelite, which is something that Brotato doesn't really do.
This is a much more traditional experience, where every upgrade really matters and your skill at controlling your potato is the key between a successful run and one that ends prematurely. Provided you make it deep enough through waves to create a pretty formidable potato, all is not lost if you catch a stray bullet. Brotato has a ton of unlocks to discover based on different ways of experimenting with builds and achieving certain milestones, which adds a lot of the much-needed variety that keeps run after run of Brotato compelling.
Pocket potato
The original version of Brotato launched on Steam back in September, but this mobile version is fairly faithful and mobile-friendly. Action-oriented titles--particularly ports--are not usually easy to handle on touch screens, but the simple and straightforward control scheme here makes things manageable. That said, Brotato is a fairly tough game, so making sure you're on your toes piloting the virtual joystick is a must.
On smaller screens, some of the stat screens can feel a little smushed or get hidden so you have to reference things more often than you might like, but otherwise Brotato feels complete and good on iOS. It even has built in iCloud support allowing you to carry unlocks between devices and a way to resume runs if you have to close the app for an extended period of time.
The bottom line
Brotato is a lot like if a video game was a potato. It's basic and expected, but can surprise you with its versatility. There's a reason it's a staple food. Much in the same way, Brotato is an all too familiar kind of game, but that kind of game is good for a reason and it's executed very well here.
Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/brotato-review/
credit : 148apps
PARANORMASIGHT: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo review
March 30, 2023 by RSS Feed
All through playing PARANORMASIGHT: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo, I was holding multiple, conflicting thoughts in my head. This horror mystery game is novel and inventive, but also spends a lot of time being pretty flat with its characters and story. Throughout the journey, there are also some genuinely surprising twists, but the way in which they are deployed makes you feel less like a detective and more like someone who is just ushered along from surprise to surprise that you can't see coming until it's too late. In any case, I did enjoy the game, but more than that it gave me some perspective on why other mystery adventures don't operate the way PARANORMASIGHT does.
Cursed crime-solving
PARANORMASIGHT: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo is a little diffilcult to explain because of its dense setup. It takes place in the Sumida ward of Tokyo some time in the 80s, and it revolves around a set of characters interested in investigating an ancient ghost story about seven different curses that people can inherit and use to perform a seductive form of forbidden magic.
This investigation starts out innocently enough, but descends into a dark and complicated web of unearthing each curse-bearer's past and current motivations for using their curses for their own gain. As you weave between these stories, you'll do some light puzzle solving, but way more often than that you'll simply be tapping on people or your surrounding environment to prompt the next wave of text that pushes you further along a path of the story.
Choose a path
Some of the most interesting points of PARANORMASIGHT are when the game asks you to critically think and reflect on what you've already discovered about these curses to figure out how to pivot the story in a direction you want it to go in. The only problem with this though is this trick isn't deployed very often, and the few other more "mechanical" puzzle-solving moments of the game are so poorly implemented that they can feel like the game isn't behaving correctly.
This issue is compounded by the controls of this iOS version of PARANORMASIGHT, which are mostly fine for tapping to talk or swiping to look around environments, but way less so when asked to do anything remotely more complicated. In some ways, it feels like PARANORMASIGHT couldn't bring itself to commit to more puzzles, but the ones it leaves with you are very inconsistent in quality and can sometimes lead you to think you're stuck or the game is broken.
Full, but missing some flavor
There's certainly a lot of story to dig into with PARANORMASIGHT, especially if you opt to pursue all of the game's endings, but even after discovering them all I felt a little disappointed by the game. Sure, I was compelled enough to keep playing, but a lot of its reveals feel like their buildup and payoff are in the exact same scene, and something about the character design and dialog reads as a little flat. I think the game looks great and the characters are cool, but without any voice-acting and additional incidental dialog revealing much about each character I felt like I only got a taste of who they are instead of an actual understanding.
In a lot of ways, PARANORMASIGHT justifies why other visual novel games that I have enjoyed seem to go out of their way to tell unrelated side stories, use caricature, and drop a ton of hints about what may come later. It's because that stuff works. As goofy as a lot of those games end up being, they end up feeling like mysteries you can solve on your own before reaching the end and allow you to intuit things about characters that you wouldn't be able to do if they just stuck to the main story script. I'm not saying PARANORMASIGHT does none of this, but it definitely doesn't do nearly enough of it.
The bottom line
PARANORMASIGHT: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo is an enjoyable ride with mystery trappings, but it doesn't actually feel like something you can puzzle out on your own. This is fine, but it can also feel like a shortcoming when comparing it to other titles that seem to have an easier time making their stories come alive.
Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/paranormasight-the-seven-mysteries-of-honjo-review/
credit : 148apps
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