"If there is an app for that"

Vlobs review

March 22, 2023 by RSS Feed

I'm always on the lookout for a puzzle matching game that isn't just a recycled version of the same match-three mechanics that I've seen so many times before. Vlobs is exactly that. I'm not sure that the finer points of its matching mechanics are all that intuitive--which can lead to some frustration, but I do appreciate the game for delivering something original and generally well conceived.

Colors and dots

Vlobs starts out simply enough with a blank chess-like board. Your goal is to drop colored orbs onto the board in such a way that you can link and eventually clear these orbs while making sure to leave room for more orbs to place. The only catch is that each orb also has a certain number of dots on it and you can only connect orbs of the same color using ones with dots on them and you can't clear those connected orbs until there are no dots left on a chain of connected orbs.

Writing it out like that makes it sound completely confusing, but it's a surprisingly easy-to-grasp concept. In no time you can make extended strings of orbs to clear, and in doing so you'll level up which eventually makes some changes to the board like expanding its size, adding obstacles, and more. All the while, Vlobs will serve up a larger color variety with orbs that have increasing numbers of dots on them you'll have to deal with before being able to score.

Learning the hard way

This unique puzzle design makes Vlobs feel pretty refreshing for what is essentially still a matching game. The trade-off of innovating in such familiar territory is that there is a learning curve to understanding exactly how the game operates, especially since the tutorial doesn't fully cover the situations you can run into that can doom a run to failure if you make one false move.

Things like what happens if you drop an orb next to multiple same-colored orbs with dots on them, how to manipulate certain obstacles, or the fact that there are powerups that you have to memorize the icons of to understand how they work can lead to frustration, particularly when encountered deep into a run. It's hard to tell how intentional these design decisions are, but it would be helpful if the game had some options to undo your last move or at the very least label powerups so you don't accidentally choose the wrong one after coming back to the game after some time away.

Portability pros and cons

If you play Vlobs for long enough to score 20,000 points in the game's normal mode, you gain access to a "Stressful" mode which challenges you to place and match orbs in order to keep filling up a timer that keeps counting down. If the timer runs out (or you fill up the board), you lose.

Both modes of Vlobs play beautifully on any iOS device you might own, which is to say the game looks and plays great in landscape and portrait orientations. Unfortunately, that's about where the game's mobile-friendliess stops. There is no iCloud syncing and if you close the app mid-run you can't resume it. Luckily, any given session with Vlobs is usually pretty short, but it still would be nice to at least resume a run on the same device you started it on if you get a phone call or otherwise distracted with other things.

The bottom line

Vlobs injects some much-needed freshness into the matching puzzle genre. It may not always be entirely clear about its rules and it has some limitations as to its mobile-friendliness, but there's plenty to enjoy about it regardless.

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

How We Know We're Alive review

March 20, 2023 by RSS Feed

One of the things that can doom a game story is its pacing. There's always a balance that needs to be struck between saying what needs to be said narratively and the degree to which developers want you to engage with a progression of mechanics and systems. This isn't really a problem for How We Know We're Alive, as the mechanical part of it is mostly strolling through a small town. This results in a story that moves at the swiftness it needs to to be impactful.

Horrible homecoming

How We Know We're Alive is a story about a young woman who is taking a break from her busy life in Stockholm to return to her hometown. The circumstances from this visit are rather tragic, though. As you learn almost immediately after taking control of the game, you are there to visit the gravesite of a childhood friend on the anniversary of their death.

What proceeds from there is a brief story that provides some insight into this friendship and what ultimately led each character to where they are now. It isn't a typical journey either. Where many games that center around this kind of storytelling often opt to be rather meditative or even abstract, How We Know We're Alive keeps its focus on the characters and their interactions with each other, even as they get rather contentious.

Beauty in bluntness

A big part of How We Know We're Alive draw is its art. The somewhat minimal pixel-art in the game looks really sharp with the help of fantastic lighting effects and an effective soundtrack. As you play, this beauty extends through the game's writing, though perhaps not in the way you immediately expect.

Now, with How We Know We're Alive being a game you can easily finish in a single sitting, I'll stay away from spoiling anything, but what I will say about the writing is that it isn't particularly subtle or delicate. That lack of subtlety has a purpose though, and when it reveals itself the payoff is definitely worth it.

How to judge

To get specific about How We Know We're Alive's length, we are talking about a game that easily wraps up in under an hour. For some games, that might feel like a bad value, but this game makes the most of every minute and--in fact--would likely be quite off-putting if the story it tells got stretched out to any additional length.

The value of How We Know We're Alive is how it uses what little it has so effectively. It wants you to pick apart each little thing that happens and serves them up in a way that you can't help but do so. In many ways, this all feeds in to How We Know We're Alive's story, which may not be especially complicated, but otherwise is rather compelling.

The bottom line

Even within the realm of storytelling games (or "walking simulators," if you must), How We Know We're Alive is a bit of an outlier. It is remarkably concrete and economical in ways that both ground the game in comparison to others but also allow its specific story to work effectively. The story itself is also somewhat refreshing in its perspective, despite being pretty straightforward.

Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/how-we-know-were-alive-review/

Domingo review

March 15, 2023 by RSS Feed

There probably won't be a word game that ever catches fire the way that Wordle did in late 2021 and early 2022, but that doesn't stop attempts to innovate within the genre. For the past few weeks, I've been playing Domingo, which is an curious spin on Wordle's "guess the word"-style gameplay, but it isn't quite as good at making you feel smart and excited to share your performance.

Words within words

Domingo is a daily word puzzle game that gives you four incomplete words that you are tasked with filling in. The catch is that--even if multiple combinations of letters fit in the blanks--Domingo wants you to provide a full word in the blank. On top of that Domingo is looking for a specific word that falls into a category provided at the bottom of the screen.

So, for example, one of the incomplete words might be "Ami_le" with the category of the day being vehicles. For this puzzle (which was a real daily puzzle from the week I'm writing this review, by the way), you could solve it by typing in "cab" as a cab is a type of vehicle and forms the word "amicable." From there, you'd have three more words just like this within the same category to solve.

Free to guess

Domingo is designed primarily to be part of your daily ritual. There is a new puzzle every day that everyone has access to, including free players who do not unlock the app. Paying $2.99 simply lets you find and play puzzles of any category you'd like and also revisit the archive of daily puzzles.

This seems like a great deal, as I only really gravitated to the daily puzzle in my time with Domingo, but even that has a few quirks I'm not so fond of. First and foremost, Domingo has no real feedback system to let you know how you are doing at solving its puzzles. You have basically infinite guesses at filling in the blanks and no sense of whether you're getting close to solving it.

Puzzling design

Without a feedback system in place, Domingo truly does feel like a guessing game at times. Categories are very broad and can sometimes have solutions that use pretty obscure words. Your best bet at a solution is to figure out a list of possibilties for the complete word before looking to see if the letters you'd fill in the blanks with form words themselves, and then seeing if any of those words match the category. If you decide to play Domingo's hard mode, you have even less to go on as you aren't provided a category to work off of.

As a result, the game can feel like a lot of trial and error. At the end of the day, this is what a lot of games about guessing words boil down to, but Domingo doesn't feel like it provides enough tools to help you enjoy or get better at its brand of guessing. That was kind of the magic of Wordle, and--while I don't think every game needs to do what it did--Domingo could certainly benefit from taking a few steps in that direction.

The bottom line

Domingo's curious word challenges are easy enough to check out given the game's extremely fair pricing model. It feels nice when things click together and you can smash through a puzzle, but more often the game's dictionary and lack of feedback reduce sessions with it to a guess-a-thon.

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

Beecarbonize review

March 14, 2023 by RSS Feed

Look, as much as I want to evaluate games on their merits alone, sometimes the price point for a game really tips the scales one way or another as to whether its worth engaging with. It sounds dumb, but so is the whole system that kind of forces us to think that way about things. Speaking of systems, that's what Beecarbonizeis all about. This real-time card game that tasks you with preventing a climate crisis is enjoyable for what it is, which is a surprisingly polished (though easy) game you can play completely for free.

Bee the solution

The only game I've played that resembles Beecarbonize's gameplay is Cultist Simulator. Instead of manipulating a game board that representes your quest to unleash unspeakable horrors on the world, you are in charge of managing resources to steer industry, ecosystems, people, and science to a sustainable future while being careful to manage your emission output and avert disasters.

All of this management occurs in real time, though there are buttons to pause the action (or speed it up). Resources get generated automatically by the four sectors, but you decide how to build out each of those sectors to maintain balance while working your way toward building a "golden" card, which represents a win state for the game and suggesting a viable path to real-world climate crisis management.

Adapt or die

For the bulk of a playthrough of Beecarbonize, you are simply waiting for timers to fill and add to a currency pool, which you can then choose to spend on a variety of things. Most often, you'll likely use your currency to create new cards under a particular sector. These new cards often speed up the production timer for the sector, but often have other effects attached to them. Some may increase or reduce your emission production over time, open pathways to creating new cards, or have some immediate effect once built.

As you build cards, you'll also need to expand your sectors to make space for this infrastructure to live. Otherwise, your investments might die or crumble. While all of this is happening, you also have to make sure you're holding on to currency that you can use to mitigate disasters, which appear randomly on a top row of the game board. These disasters can have effects like increased emmission output, loss of resources over time, or even an instant fail state. Balancing your production of resources, controlled use of emissions, sector growth, and disaster management are key to doing well in Beecarbonize and create a surprisingly dynamic experience even though there is so much down time in a play session.

Saving the world is easy beezy

I failed to prevent a climate disaster in my first go at Beecarbonize, but then was able to very quickly win the game outright from there. There is a little learning curve to the game, but I mostly lost that first try because all of its systems aren't fully explained. I'm fine with experimentation and--as became pretty evident after my first playthrough--there's not a ton to figure out in this game.

I'm mostly fine with Beecarbonize's relative lack of challenge, too. There's still some amount of satisfaction to be had in discovering cards and charting the game's idea of what progress in solving the climate crisis looks like, particularly since you don't have to pay or watch ads or anything to do so. My only gripe in the lack of challenge really is that it inherenltly suggests that getting carbon neutral and saving our planet is much easier than it actually is.

The bottom line

Beecarbonize is a fun little game, but mostly because it is free. If it put up any monetary barrier to access what it has to offer, I'm not sure it would be nearly as satisfying. It may have a somewhat overly simplistic view of the problem it chooses to be built around as well, but again that's also somewhat easy to look past due to the combination of its production quality and price tag.

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

EISEN review

March 10, 2023 by RSS Feed

If you're familiar with Hideki Hanida games, it should come as no surprise for me to say that EISEN is a fascinating-but-barebones experience. As I noted in my review of his last game, his output can sometimes feel more like a proof-of-concept than a game, but that can be ok if those concepts are compelling enough. Unfortunately for EISEN, though, I'm not sure this mech survival game has enough going on at its core to make up for its odd design and inelegant appearance.

Shoot to survive

EISEN starts with very little introduction. The game boots straight into the cockpit view of a mech and instructs you to hit a button and pull a lever to get launched right into the action. There is no other starting menu, settings, or anything. Once you hit the ground, your machine gun starts firing automatically and it's up to you to use the left side of the screen to control your mech's movements and the right side to aim at enemies as they appear.

Your goal is to stay alive as long as possible by defeating enemies, avoiding damage, and leveling up to unlock new weapons and abilities to keep up with the ever-increasing number and power of enemy combatants. The start of every run almost feels like a gallery shooter as the only things to target are non-attacking spheres but within a few minutes you need to have gained some significant upgrades to take down opposing mechs and turrets if you want to survive for any significant amount of time.

Short stints

Any typical run of EISEN generally runs just a few minutes, and it seems impossible to last much longer than that as the quantity of enemies and the amount of projectiles they fire your way seem impossible to weave between. Upon death, your score gets totalled up and you can dive in again. There's no roguelite elements with unlocks between runs or even any other menu element. Once you tap past the score screen you're right back in a new round of play.

Each new run gives you a new opportunity to experiment with combinations of abilities you unlock as you level up. These abilities include passive bonuses like increases in damage or movement speed and also new weapon types altogether like a shotgun, cannon, sawblade, and missiles. In theory, the variety of these upgrades seem like they'd add a lot of replayability, but in practice runs feel too short for any particular upgrades to feel particularly impactful.

Lack of weight

It's kind of surprising how light EISEN feels considering it is pitched as a mech "simulator." Aside from having a cockpit view and some pretty slow movement, the game otherwise feels like a very typical action shooter experience, though played in portrait mode on your phone. There isn't really much to manage aside from trying not to get hit, and there's no kind of redemption mechanics allowing you to repair yourself or otherwise add some kind of wrinkle to the gameplay.

As a result, a lot of EISEN just feels like a test of how well you can circle strafe. In my time with the game, I kept hoping that if I extended a run long enough something would happen, some mystery would reveal or a new system would open up, but this never seems to happen. It just seems to be a shooter variation of Vampire Survivors, but without any of the progression.

The bottom line

EISEN feels like the first misstep in Hideki Hanida's mobile output. His previous games share similarly odd design philosophies and a focus on capturing a specific concept, but the difference here is the concept of "shooting gallery but you're a mech" isn't all that compelling and the leveling up system layered on top doesn't have much depth to it.

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