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Mobile Gaming Archive

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iOS Review: Battleloot Adventure

By
Don Parsons
– April 20, 2012Posted in: Mobile Gaming, Reviews

After playing Battleheart on my iPod, I longed for a similar structure but with classic RPG elements. On paper, Battleloot Adventure sounds just like that; lots of quests, different character classes to level up and manage and an assortment of equipment to arm yourself with. The perk here is the turn-based battle system, as opposed to the drag-and-attack nature of Battleheart.

Battleloot starts you off with a warrior-class and quickly introduces the mechanics. Combat is simple and starts with you tapping who you wish to use, and then double-tap who you wish to attack. Defense can be increased by tapping the character being attacked and they will parry. The caveat is that you only have so much energy, which is used for parrying and combo attacks. But in the grand scheme of things, the control system is genuinely easy to use (Note: I generally don’t like controls in iOS games.).

Once you have multiple characters in your party, you can use your energy to chain attacks together. While it depletes your energy, you also gain stars for doing so which are handy once you have unlocked skills. With the assorted character types being assigned a color, and the Pokemon [Water] > [Fire] > [Grass]  approach being used, combat is a matter of matching your party’s strengths against the weaknesses.

The problem with this becomes apparent after an hour or so of play. You can only have three members in your party and there are four class-types. If a class is not weak against anything in your party, battles become drawn out annoyances. In Battlehearts, you picked your party based on preference and skills. In Battleloot, you struggle through a battle mad that you didn’t pick your Rogue-class because all you ran into were Warriors.

Skills in Battleloot are rather bland and un-inventive. The Knight, instead of having some devastating physical blow, heals some HP each turn  instead. That is the payoff for reaching level five. While the Knight helps defend other units, he doesn’t personally take damage during this so it seemed rather moot.

The rest of the aspects to the game are rather pleasant. Graphically, the cartoon characters pop out of the vibrant backdrops while dancing back and forth. The sound effects are ear-catching, and never really got old. The large over-map drops you into a more detailed area map where you accept your quests. The characters have little quips that are entertaining, though the story is obviously not supposed to be taken seriously. It all presents itself in a whimsical way that shouldn’t be ignore because of the few problems I mentioned before.

For a limited time, Battleloot Adventure is on sale for $0.99 USD, so it may be worth grabbing now. Despite the shortcomings, it was an enjoyable adventure that was worth the money. An added bonus is the fact that weapons and gear all change your overall appearance. Battleheart stole my heart for a much longer period of time, but I don’t regret picking up this turn-based variant at all.

Pros:

  • Beautiful, eye-catching visuals
  • Turn-based RPG, unlike every-other action-RPG on the iTunes Store
  • Weapons and armor change your look

Cons:

  • Combat gets tedious
  • Skills are rather lackluster

Score: 3/5

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Review: Law & Order: Legacies

By
Chris Scott
– February 7, 2012Posted in: Mobile Gaming, PC, Reviews

Note: This review was done using the PC version of the game. It is also available on iOS platforms.

Adventure games, once thought of as a relic of days gone by have been rejuvenated over the past several years by Telltale Games. Their success in the genre is no accident as they combine a volatile formula of great writing, easy to understand gameplay, and strong iconic characters set in beloved franchises. This makes their games stand out from the standard fare the rest of the industry releases.

Telltale’s approach to adventure games lends itself perfectly to the long running franchise, as such Law & Order: Legacies makes perfect sense. For fans of the series, Legacies will follow the movements of Detective Rey Curtis. Curtis retired from the NYPD in 1999 to take care of his terminally ill wife but has now returned to his old job working new cases. Legacies is about more than just the new cases, there is a deeper story underneath it all involving Curtis and his ex-partner, Lenny Briscoe, and a case that the two of them were never able to close out.

As someone that never really watched the show outside of a couple episodes here and there, it all seems pretty convoluted but I expect longtime fans of the show will appreciate the references to past cases and nostalgic touches that are sprinkled throughout. However, as great as the overarching story may or may not be for people, when it all comes down to it, Law & Order: Legacies is a game and it has to succeed on its gameplay merits.

The structure of Law & Order: Legacies is that of its television counterpart. Each case is an individual episode, complete with a cold opening revealing the nature of the case, and a television styled opening credits sequence. The first half of each episode focuses on the police investigation while the second half focuses on prosecution of the suspect and the courtroom drama that accompanies it. The two different approaches juxtapose each other quite nicely.

Police investigations task the player with interviewing suspects and witnesses while also investigating crime scenes. The interviews generally consist of Curtis and his partner asking questions and trying to discern the truth from the answers. While there is no set direction the interviews are forced to go down, the game certainly seems to want you to go in a particular order and sometimes this order does not make logical sense which can break the flow of the conversations. While this may seem like a big deal, it honestly did not detract from my enjoyment at all.

Interviewing suspects and witnesses delivers the sense that you are truly the lead detective on this investigation. Unfortunately, investigating crime scenes does not give you that same feeling. Crime scene investigations are nothing more than elaborate photo hunts complete with a counter of how many turns you have left to find what you are looking for. It is not particularly awful, in fact as a photo hunt it works, but when a game like L.A. Noire has blown the doors off of simplistic investigation, I can only feel somewhat disappointed that Legacies does not do more with its investigations.

Once the police investigation is concluded and the detectives have fingered a suspect, it is up to the District Attorney’s office to do their magic. In a lot of respects, the courtroom drama plays out like the detective interviews but with some added twists that makes this section of Legacies the most enjoyable aspect of the game. That twist of course is the ability to object to the defense team’s line of questioning.

Being able to object is not, in itself, a big deal but needing to know when to do it and why you are doing it is. There is a great feeling of tension that comes from making those decisions and it benefits the game greatly. If your case is going well, the defense may ask to come to the table and present you with a plea deal. Depending upon how strong your case is you can push for a stiffer sentence or roll the dice and let the jury decide. Even more interesting is that sometimes there are strategic reasons to accept a plea deal, such as when I accepted a plea deal from one defendant in return for his testimony against another. Simply put, it is highly satisfying.

Aside from the gameplay being strong, the one thing Law & Order: Legacies had to get right was the look and feel of the show. Each episode lasts about an hour and each case is unique offering something new to the player. From a graphical standpoint, Legacies is highly stylized but I think it works quite well. However, the voice acting is top notch and sounds authentic making the experience that much more engaging. And one certainly cannot forget about the iconic theme song and sounds that are worked to full effect in the game.

As engaging and fun as a lot of the game can be, there are some things that just fall flat and sadly take you out of the experience. Once such issue is that during both the police interviews and the courtroom examinations the game will ask the player trivia questions in relation to the previous line of questioning that have no impact on the investigation as a whole. It just feels like fluff. Another issue is the scoring system, which seemingly seeks to remind you that you did not do that case as perfectly as you could have. It is a problem many people had with L.A. Noire and I feel Law & Order: Legacies suffers even more for it because there is a score sheet for every segment of the game.

Fortunately the problems with the game do not overly detract from the experience and Law & Order: Legacies delivers a solid gaming experience at a budget price.

Pros:

  • Looks and feels like Law & Order
  • Cases are unique and interesting
  • Courtroom drama is finely crafted

Cons

  • Crime scene investigations are simple photo hunts
  • Weird trivia questions that have no bearing on the outcome of the case
  • Scoring system consistently reminds you that this is a game

3 / 5

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iOS Review: Zombieville USA 2

By
Don Parsons
– November 4, 2011Posted in: Mobile Gaming, Reviews

When a new App takes the top selling game position on the App Store, I usually buy it. I also usually don’t play it more than once, so I never write a review for it. That cycle finally changed a few days ago when I purchased Mika Mobile’s newest release, Zombieville USA 2. I took an interest in this developer with their Battlehearts title, a fun little RPG with a simple combat mechanic that worked. And while Zombieville USA 2 was addicting at first, it has its flaws.

I can’t compare this game to the first one, as I was never overly interested in buying it. But with Halloween coming, I couldn’t help myself. You start the game, and it gives you a brief tutorial, and then you are on your own. The first level is very simple, with one type of zombie coming at you, and never really many at a time. But half the point of the game is to collect loot in the form of cash dropped by both zombies and breakable items.

Each stage gets progressively harder, and has a timer. Once the timer reaches zero, a helicopter comes in to save the day. You are given a score, and told how much money you made. Common sense tells me that the higher the score, the more money you will get, but I finally put that theory to rest when I scored one of my highest scores on the second level, and only walked away with $200. So all those minutes trying to chain together as many kills as I could to get a higher score were a waste.

One of the fun parts about the game is spending cash to buy better guns, equipment, skills, and then upgrading them. Zombieville USA 2 is only one mechanic away from being an awesome little zombie-shooting RPG, and if they added a level up mechanic so that your now-useless score actually meant something, this game would take a whole new twist down an awesome path.

Upgrades inflate for both weapons and skills. This is fine, but when you are only bringing in $200-$500 a round, it gets to be painstaking to upgrade things. And for certain things, the damage increase doesn’t seem to have an effect that can be noted. It took the same amount of handgun shots with the first damage increase, and even the handgun skill, as it did without. But you can’t pick which weapon upgrade is next, so in order to get the “Extra ammo” perks, you have to soldier through and spend that hard earned cash on things you don’t want/care about.

The controls are probably my biggest gripe, but also a universal gripe. I think touch screen “sticks” are flawed in general, and one reason I fight that iOS games will not replace the 3DS/PS Vita (but that’s a whole different argument). At times, my left thumb would slide just a little too much, and my character would stop. Shortly afterwards, I was either severely wounded or dead. And the three buttons for your three preloaded weapons, I would accidentally click one of the other three because they are so close together. So in the heat of combat, tapping my handgun button rapidly would randomly bring out my fireman’s axe. It’s an issue I can’t ignore, but again, something all games that try to use the traditional approach to controls is going to suffer from. But, I’m sure it could have been worse; tilt controls anyone?

If you don’t want to play the generic redneck-style character provided, you can pay $100 to purchase a new one, but they don’t have any in-game effect outside of looking (possibly) snazzier. I, personally, chose a SWAT member which looked like a stunt double for Samuel Jackson.

The graphics themselves look great. As you can tell from the screenshots, it has a very cartoon aesthetic to it, which gives it more a charming appeal. Killing cartoon zombies with a cartoon incarnation of Samuel Jackson is pretty epic.

On of the plus side, this is a perfect little mobile game, much like other Mika Mobile titles I have played. When waiting on someone, or if I am the passenger in the car, I can play a few levels and be done with it. It does have that addictive quality in the beginning, but once I realized the score had little to do with my progress, it became much easier to put down. But for the mere price of $1, it is a solid app, and one I will continue to play off and on I’m sure.

Pros: Weapon upgrades, good mobile-style game with short rounds, charming graphics

Cons: meaningless score, money doesn’t collect fast enough, controls

Score: 3/5

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Hunters: Episode 1 Review [iOS]

By
Don Parsons
– August 14, 2011Posted in: Blogs, Don's Blog, Mobile Gaming, Reviews, Staff Blogs

Generally speaking, when you buy an iPhone game you really don’t know what you are going to get. You can read the description, look at screen shots and get your hopes up; only to be smashed with a game that is fun for about an hour or so. With Hunters: Episode One, a $0.99 app on the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad, you’re getting far more than an hour’s worth of play time.

Set in the future, this game isn’t about story. Instead, it is about putting you in the role of a squad of mercenaries who take contracts for money. What little story you get in the beginning of the game, you will quickly forget as soon as the tutorial is over and you begin outfitting your crew with weapons, armor, and set out on your first mission.

Hunters is a turn-based strategy-RPG game, with your standard loudouts. You have a melee style of weapon (hammers), short range guns (shotguns), mid-range guns (SMGs), long range guns (assault rifles), and special guns that you have to level up before you can use; like rocket launchers, flamethrowers and sniper rifles. The armor you wear defines your movement. Light armor gets five moves, medium armor gets four moves, and heavy armor gets a mere three moves.

After the brief, but full, tutorial, you are given your first selection of missions. This is the games shining star, the thing that makes it stand out from other games in the genre I have played on iOS. Rodeo Games, the developer, sends out five new contracts every 24 hours. Each contract has a primary objective, and a secondary objective, and passing each will net you twice as much money in the end. Much like the freemium game Gun Bros. and it’s “Bro Ops” challenges that change daily, this has been what keeps me coming back each day. Instead of a set story and path, I’m given a brief introduction to the world and what’s going on, and then I can pick and choose which contracts I want to take up and which ones I will ignore.

Finishing a contract gives you money, of course, and experience is gained by doing attacks. So that hunter on your team that doesn’t get many attacks in or kills is going to progress slower than the one who is rampaging through the map. Killing enemies will also sometimes drop spoils, which could be a weapon, armor, or money.

As you level up, you are offered to upgrade your weapon and armor, and at certain level points you are given a point to progress through a skill tree. These happen slowly, but are exciting none-the-less. Each skill you get can drastically change how a character plays. For example, with my melee hunter, his first skill is “attack again if the first hit misses”. So if I miss the first swing, he swings again and usually gets a one-hit kill, saving me an action point. Two of my other hunters are “scouts”, and get two extra AP for the first two turns.

The controls in the game are generally great, with a few complaints. Sometimes the camera pans out during the computer attack, and when you pinch-to-zoom, if you don’t keep your fingers still, it will rotate the camera. Most people this probably won’t bother but I prefer my camera to be exactly straight and not cock-eyed. Besides that the controls work just great. Double-tap a square to move, double-tap an enemy to attack, etc.

For the price, it’s hard to find another strategy-RPG that can deliver what Hunters: Episode 1 packs into it for a whopping dollar. The app also contains Gamecenter leaderboards and achievements, for all my fellow achievement hunters. Any fan of the genre should pick this up without hesitation. The pictures don’t do it justice, and is one of the reasons I held off so long on buying this game.

Score: 4/5

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iPhone Review: 9mm

By
Magnus Risebro
– July 15, 2011Posted in: Blogs, Magnus' Blog, Mobile Gaming, Reviews

John Whoo?

If a 10 year-old were to watch (and completely misunderstand) Training Day, listen to a few hundred hours of 90’s gangsta rap, and then be given the task of writing and directing a videogame,  the ensuing product would likely resemble 9mm – the newest chapter in Gameloft’s epic quest to emulate big console experiences on smartphones.

However, where most of Gameloft’s previous attempts at this were rip-offs of major franchises  – so blatant, discussions between lawyers were bound to have occurred – 9mm actually refrains from photocopying a specific title. Well, at least in the aesthetics department. Make no mistake, in gameplay terms, 9mm is Max Payne, only dumped into the world of GTA: San Andreas and coated in gallons upon gallons of the most artificial and fattening cheese. But at least the hero is not called “Jax Rayne”.

No, you are John Kannon, a name that earns its golden spot in the Subtlety-Free Hero-Names-Hall of Fame right, alongside Speed Racer. John “Loose” Kannon, as he is known, is a COP ON THE EDGE. He patrols the suburban ghettos of Los Angeles, where stereotypical racial-minority gangbangers breakdance on the pavements, guns in hand. John refers to this area as his “turf”. He dons a leather jacket over a hoodie, and wears his police badge like a Bun B wears a gold chain. Every fifth word out of his mouth also happens to be that lovely four-letter synonym for “fornicate”, so you know he’s a tough one.

"Are you the ****ing **** that wrote my ****ing terrible dialogue?"

Kannon, during what appears to be his usual schedule of kicking down doors, diving in slow motion, and shooting up crackhouses, comes across big stashes of dirty money and a new drug that has been “on the streets” lately. Being the above-the-law badass the game wants us to consider him, Kannon and his team of undeveloped, equally badass archetypes decide to more or less keep the dough for themselves. And thus the delightful plot of 9mm kicks off. A story of police officers who refer to unoffending civilian women as “that hoe”, told with clichés so hamfisted “ham-armed” would be a more appropriate term.

I’m not the type to enjoy bad stories “ironically”, but in its opening cinematic alone, 9mm pushed me past the point of groaning, to giggling hysterically at every vocal exchange in the game. Kannon, for one, sounds like he is voiced by a middle-aged suburban dad, and hearing him deliver golden lines like “it’s raining bacon, motherf***ers!” is a cringe-inducing joy. As 9mm coughs up one crime-film stereotype after another, it’s hard not to be pleased.

But the majority of the time spent in 9mm will not be in cutscenes, but rather in the process of Max Payning gangstas to death — something the game does competently. The touch-controls, while inevitably never feeling truly comfortable, are cleverly designed, offering balanced amounts of control and simplicity.

And “simple” neatly describes the gameplay, too. Not being bothered with offering a multitude of mechanics and gameplay elements, 9mm gives you three short hours of slow-mo-diving run’n’gun-action only interspersed by obligatory quicktime events.

Something rather refreshing about 9mm’s gameplay is how it never cops out (no pun intended). There is little filler to speak of here. Backtracking, key-hunting and trawling through lots of identikit corridors are luckily all absent from the game, leaving the best 9mm has to offer on display at all times.

The problem is, that “best” is hardly great, and manages to get woefully repetitive by the game’s hurried end. Though the game feels polished enough and the shooters decently powerful, there is little depth to the combat. Most confrontations are a matter of running and shooting, then slow-mo-diving into cover as you wait for your health to refill. This procedure nicely solved most of the games challenges.

As (hopefully not) unintentionally hilarious John Kannon’s tale was, when 9mm’s end credits rolled, accompanied by licensed hip-hop music, I was left feeling decidedly unexcited by the game. Besides the short campaign, there is a twelve-player multiplayer mode with weapon unlocks and level-ups, because as we all know Call of Duty 4 made it law that all shooters must feature this. However, the mode is not worth much discussion,  standard deathmatch and team-deathmatch, the latter called “cops ‘n’ ganstas”, are all that feature, and the gunplay mechanics are not engaging or deep enough to provide motivation to play more than a couple of matches or unlock the range of firearms.

In the end, I can only recommend 9mm to bad movie-fans who attribute little value to their time and money. If you are a gamer looking for a hardcore experience on your iDevice, there are far better options out there.

 2 out of 5

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Puzzle Agent 2 Review

By
VTV Staff
– July 11, 2011Posted in: Mobile Gaming, PC, Reviews, Tramell's Blog

Platform: PC, iPad, iPod Developer: Teletale Games

 

Once again, we fill the shoes of the mild mannered Special Agent, Nelson Tethers of the FBI’s Puzzle Research Division. After a foray into Scoggins, Minnesota investigating the shutdown of the eraser factory that supplies the White House, Tethers discovers things aren’t quite right in the town. With their obsession with puzzles and these gnome like creatures, some inhabitants worship the ‘Hidden People’. After unraveling the mystery, Tethers manages to get the factory up and running again, but things aren’t quite finished. People are still missing, and the “Hidden People’ are still out there. In Puzzle Quest 2, we head back to Scoggins in search of the truth and finishing the case one and for all.

Puzzle Agent 2 functions less like point-and-click adventures it borrows its mechanics from, and it truly embodies the puzzle experience. Puzzles range from furniture reorganization, where players have to organize furniture to make a patch while blocking opposition; lock slicing, where players must  draw a line that will cut through all object barricading a door, to a fast paced match sequences.

When starting a puzzle, a description of the situation and rules associated with the puzzle is presented. It is paramount they be read, because the game can be a bit unforgiving when scrambling for the perimeters of the puzzle. In one puzzle, I had to make sure I got exactly fifty flyers across branching streets where a bandit could steal the papers on any three of the five routes. I came up with a flawed and uneducated solution. Since I didn’t read the rules thoroughly, I ended up doing quite poorly.

The game actually requires the player to be intelligent and intuitive, making the game challenging in the best ways. Some puzzles are built around mathematics and formula, as well as properly dissecting pictures to determine their order, and on one occasion, guiding three objects to three different destinations all at once via an intricate strategy. The various puzzles kept the experience fairly fresh with the exception of a few repetitive ‘arrange the room’ bits. And though the game seeks to challenge its players, there is an accessible hint system that is paid for with “gum” found in game.

The environment contributes greatly to the setting of Scoggins, a seemingly unimportant mountain town that is a ripe hot-bed for long kept secrets. The characters that make up the town bring it to life: the dutiful yet unhelpful Sheriff Bahg, the mysterious repairman Randy Scruffman, the charming  Korka, and the motherly Mrs. Garret all set the tone. With the corky dialogue, the mysterious sightings and unique discoveries constantly has that “something isn’t quite right here” feel that brings the story to life.

The game isn’t completely genius, though. I would have loved to see them do something with the replay feature for the puzzles. At any point in the game, players can go back and review a puzzle they’ve completed, but I would have loved it if they adding in some randomization and extra challenge. This could even spell out a great system for “100-percenting” the game.

In any case, Teletale Games creates another gem with Puzzle Agent 2. It stays true to what it is — a quirky, entertaining puzzle solving adventure. If you like puzzle play or if you’re just a fan of point-and-clicks, this game does not disappoint.

4 out of 5

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Rainbow Six: Shadow Vanguard Review

By
Magnus Risebro
– March 22, 2011Posted in: Mobile Gaming, Reviews

iDevice FPS games whose App Store descriptions brag about a “Console-quality experience” rarely offer what they promise. Such titles, largely including Gameloft’s past shooter offerings, copy the bullet-point aesthetics of current-gen shooters, but when it comes to gameplay, bear little resemblance to them. On the surface, Modern Combat 2 featured near-identical visual and sound-design to Modern Warfare 2, but was a thrill-free corridor crawl once you got over the excitement of almost playing Call of Duty on your phone.

So when it was announced that a Rainbow Six title was heading to the App Store, I was immediately wary. If it was hard to bring the linear intensity of Call of Duty to mobile devices, converting the input-heavy and substantially more complex Rainbow Six seemed damn close to impossible.

And while Rainbow Six: Shadow Vanguard has a number of flaws holding it back, the core game actually succeeds in mimicking its console counterpart better than any other FPS on the App Store.
The story is the usual terrorists-get-super-weapon fare we have all become as accustomed to as breathing oxygen, but is presented withsurprising authenticity: Characters complaining about the European Union’s bureaucratic ways and Congolese rebel enemies talking about how they “would like to go to school one day” paints the eventsof the game in a believable light, despite the age-old premise.
The feeling of real-worldliness hardly elevates the plot to greatness, but spares it of potential sighs during the cut-scenes. At its core however, the plot is still an excuse to travel the world, booting down doors and introducing terrorists to newly formed holesin their bodies, and here the game fares quite well.

Shadow Vanguard plays very similarly to the Vegas games; you control the leader of a three-man team, locking to cover, gunning down foes and ordering your two sidekicks to open doors, take cover, or kill enemy soldiers of their own. Annoyingly however, you cannot give individual commands to your teammates, resulting in them constantly sticking together like a pair of Siamese twins. It is forgivable given that individual command options would further fill up the already-cluttered touch screen, but it nonetheless is a handicap for the player. Worse still is the fact that you must be right beside your teammates to order them to breach doors, making the multiple-entry-point room-clearingof Rainbow titles past a rare opportunity.


However, the lack of tactical options for the player seldom leads to frustration, as two things balance it out: One, the sheer amount of lead the player can survive having pumped into his body (old-school Rainbow fans who cried out at the regenerating health in Vegas willhave a spastic fit over this game) and two, the thick enemy AI.

Rainbow Six troopers must have been called in to the game’s missions solely for their superhuman resistance to bullets, because any three-year-old could outsmart these pinheads. They do not seem to notice when their buddies fall to the floor in front of them shortly following a cloud of red liquid emitting from said buddies’ heads, and their tactics consist either of running towards you whilst firing or of popping in and out of cover like Whack-A-Mole.

But for all of its flaws, Rainbow Six: Shadow Vanguard remains thoroughly entertaining throughout the 4-5 hour campaign. Missions are often designed with a degree of non-linearity, offering multiple paths through a level, guns feel nice and weighty, giving of a satisfying “BANG” or “RATATATA” when fired, and the cover-based shooting is solid – despite feeling a bit like picking on schoolchildren half your age.

As redeeming as these nice touches are, nothing saves Shadow Vanguard from the pits of mediocrity like its Co-op mode:
Every part of the campaign can be played with up to three people (online, bluetooth, or local wi-fi, with friends or randoms), and it is this feature that justifies the game’s $7 price tag. The strategic opportunities so gravely missing from singe-player are fully present with multiple players; flanking maneuvers, watching each other’s “six”and the aforementioned multiple entry-point room-clearing are all made possible in this mode. Sadly, there is no player chat of any kind when online (cue teammates running into alarm-triggering sensors not realizing stealth being critical to the mission at hand), but this issue is negated by playing locally.

As a feature that can only have been incorporated for marketing purposes, there is also a pointless ten-player death match mode, but everything about it is bland and has been done better in other iDevice shooters. Other Gameloft ones, no less.

Rainbow Six: Shadow Vanguard is far from the most polished or visually impressive FPS available in the App Store, but its advanced level-design and brilliant cooperative mode add the spice, substance and console-likeness that its peer mobile shooters so acutely lack.

3 out 5.

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Dead Space iPhone review

By
Magnus Risebro
– February 4, 2011Posted in: Mobile Gaming, Reviews

With multiple animé films, comic books, an admittedly good Wii spin-off, an awful XBLA title, and now, the king of disguised marketing tat,  the phone game, it’s not hard to make the accusation that EA has prostituted the Dead Space brand for all its worth. So naturally, it was with a cynical attitude that I booted up Dead Space on my iPhone 3GS one tuesday morning.

But after having been hooked to the point of delaying this review as a consequence of re-playing of the game, I can tell you exactly what my own pre- playthrough words taste like.

That being said, my own words were easily munched down compared to those that will have to be swallowed by certain other individuals, namely the cynics who claim that “hardcore” titles can’t work on the iDevice.

iDead Space (as I will hereby refer to it) completely murders this notion. Using an intuitive system that features close to no on-screen buttons, iDead Space’s controls just work. At no point do they become a barrier between the player and the game’s intended experience.

And what an experience it is. Set a few hours before Dead Space 2 kicks off, iDead Space takes place on The Sprawl, a metropolitan space station built around a Saturn moon. The game stars the anonymous Codename: VANDAL who is an operative for the Church of Unitology, a fanatical religious cult players of the original Dead Space will be all too familiar with.

Beyond that snippet, I shall reveal no more about the story, but suffice to say, it does an above-decent job of telling it’s tightly focused, novella-like story despite a narrative dry spell during the middle third, a problem the original Dead Space suffered from as well.

Come to think of it, damn near all of iDead Space’s flaws are shared with it’s console counterpart. On one (strategically dismembered) hand, it’s quietly impressive that the Dead Space experience has been transfered to the iDevice to such a full extent that criticisms leveled against the iPhone game match those leveled against the home-console counterpart. On the other, the samey-looking industrial corridors on The Sprawl grow just as weary on the eyes as they did on the Ishimura.

For better or worse, the game contains just about everything you might know, love or hate from Dead Space: “Strategic dismemberment”, monster closets, jump scares, flickering lights, hallucination scenes and and the upgrade system all make some well-translated appearances here.

Surprisingly, the game also features a realistic physics engine, and while the box-hurling action is not quite up to Havok standards, using kinesis to manipulate objects opens up opportunities for some creative necromorph killing, and, playing on Hard mode, using this as an ammo-conservation method is often critical.

Besides, there is something primally satisfying about killing things using nothing but iron crates.

Before I played it, I had mediocre expectations about iDead Space, and though I had considered the possibility that it might be good, I had no idea that it would be so very…Dead Space, which is either brilliant or terrible depending on your opinions on said game. Nonetheless, it is a polished, well rounded adventure of a calibre never before seen on the AppStore.

4 out of 5.



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Infinity Blade Review

By
Magnus Risebro
– December 12, 2010Posted in: Blogs, Magnus' Blog, Mobile Gaming, Reviews, Staff Blogs

Oh, Unreal Engine 3, you just seem to pop up everywhere, don’t you?

It seems your sharp-as-a-knife but slow-loading textures can be found in a third of the games released nowadays.

And as Cliffy B rolls himself another 100 Dollar bill-cigar and blasts off in his Lamborghini with the words “Bigger, Better, more Badass” painted on the side, you now arrive to the iPhone too.

Infinity Blade is the much-hyped iDevice release running on Epic Games’ widely-used engine. The graphical demo released earlier this fall ensured a stream of buzz regarding the game’s visuals, and us internet folks were as pumped as our little geek hearts would allow for a proper console-experience on a handheld.

The truth is, Infinity Blade is anything but. This is a bite-sized, “five-minutes-on-the-buss”-style game, disguised in snazzy graphics. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, but the game falters in other areas.

Before I get ahead of myself, let me explain what little story there is:

The hero arrives in the chamber of the God-King (who was apparently not satisfied with being a king and decided to add “god” to his title) and attempts to defeat him, however, the God-King quickly kills our hero using his mythical “Infinity Blade”. This somehow shapes destiny so that the hero’s son will arrive in the God-King’s castle twenty years later to trying to take down his father’s killer. Should he fail, his son will make another attempt, and so on.

Time spent playing Infinity Blade consists mostly of fighting enemies, one at time. This is done through a combat system that has you swiping the screen to slice at your foes, and tapping on-screen buttons to dodge and block.

Although this is quite entertaining at  first, one quickly realizes that every baddie is fought in the same way; figure out when and how they attack, then dodge/block/parry until you get an opportunity to slice back.

There is no subtlety involved, as every said opportunity will be announced with big text saying “BLOCK/DODGE/PARRY BREAK” signaling when it’s time to run your fingers over the screen again.

Between the fights, there exists two things:

Cutscenes, mostly of the protagonist strolling along, and pathetic attempts at exploration, the latter of which go like this:

Your hero stands, looking about. You “drag” the screen about to find bonus items and alternate paths. However there are no real opportunities for finding said paths, only once can you truly choose your way, and even then does selecting one path merely skip a portion of the other.

It’s disappointing, because Infinity Blade’s graphics are truly jaw-dropping, and being able to properly explore the wonderfully-designed castle environments (as one could in the tech-demo!) would have been fantastic.

In addition, Infinity Blade has another major issue: it’s one level long, although the word “long” has no place in a sentence describing this game’s length. Eight to ten fights and a bunch of short cutscenes are all that stand in the way of finishing our hero’s quest. Seeing the credits (Sit through them for a strange “plot”-twist) takes between twenty to sixty minutes depending on how often the God-King sends you back to the start for another attempt.

However, Infinity Blade is not a complete failure, there is a somewhat clever character-customization system that allows you to purchase more shinily-textured gear and assign points to various character traits as you level up.

This is obviously designed with many playthroughs (or rather, a meatier game) in mind, as it is impossible to hit the level cap on the first run through.


Also, despite a near lack of any story-exposition, the game succeeds in conveying an almost mythical atmosphere, you really get a feeling that defeating the God-King is the hero’s prophesied destiny.

This is probably thanks to the moody music that mixes dark bass synths with the traditional fantasy-orchestra fare. Some brilliant visual design also helps set the mood, the castle setting is masterfully crafted, with huge halls and bridges overlooking planes far below. Not to mention the enemy design, which makes excellent use of Unreal 3’s potential for intricate texturing (prepare for some convincingly bulging veins!).

It’s ironic that a tech-demo was released pre-launch, when the final product feels like an unfinished build polished up, with a leveling system slapped on for good measure.

Supposedly, more levels will be released for Infinity Blade in the future, and perhaps this will improve it, however, I can’t rate games based on promises.

Infinity Blade might match console-quality in the graphics stakes, but has more in common with a play-and-forget flash game at heart.

2.5 out of 5.


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Space Miner Blast

By
Adam Carlson
– November 13, 2010Posted in: Mobile Gaming, Reviews

The first thing I saw on the screen when getting ready to download this game was the green price button in the corner on iTunes.  Normally when I see that button for game applications, I usually have to think for a while before clicking it.  I was able to put away all of that indecision; that price sticker said “Free”  so I just went ahead and clicked it without another thought. I was happy that it was free, but I was also very skeptical.  Free games are usually free for a reason (they usually suck), so I didn’t put my expectations very high.  This is why I was so impressed when I played the game for the first time.  It was actually a pretty damn good game.

Space Miner Blast put simply is a modern version of the old arcade game “Asteroids”.  What’s not simple about it is the graphics.  “Asteroids” could of kept a person occupied for a little while, but with Space Miner Blast a gamer could easily spend tons of time playing.  Gamers could waste away lunch breaks, boring meetings, or even entire evenings on this game.

The object of the game is similar to “Asteroids” in that you fly a ship around blowing up rocks.  The twist that make the game fun, is in the collections of ore/items from destroying those rocks.  The game keeps score by showing how much ore you’ve collected during each level. As the levels change, the amount of debris does to. Eventually you’ll find yourself blowing up bigger rocks as well as being pursued or shot at by other more dangerous enemies.  I also enjoyed the fact as each level gets more difficult, sometimes you’ll get the option to upgrade parts of your ship to keep the playing field even. You have to view tiny ad on the bottom of the screen while each level loads which is annoying, but if it keeps the game free I am all for it.  You’ll definitely want to take breaks after so many levels though.  After a while you’ll have so much going on that “blinking your eyes” will actually become a hindrance. The controls are touch based due to it being available for iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad.  You get basic turn, thrust, shoot, and bomb capability which allows for little to become complicated.  Once you get the hang of turning the ship and using the thrust to move around, everything else is easy and you’ll begin moving up levels in no time.

I really enjoyed how much this game had to offer even when it’s free.  When you play the basic free version, you only get one type of ship which in itself is enough.  Venan Entertainment thought ahead for this though and has allowed users to have the option to purchase other types of ships.  Also if you purchase anything in the game, the ads will disappear which is a nice feature. Also unlocked with any content purchase, you get to take advantage of the Retina Display for the iPhone 4. This is supposed to up the look of graphics even more. I don’t own an iPhone 4 though, so I can’t say this for sure. i wouldn’t pay for more stuff when it’s good without paying. But if your all about better graphics and individuality, it’s available to purchase at the beginning of the game.

I encourage you to take a chance at being entertained for free, and play Space Miners Blast. You can get a hold of this game from the iTunes store for “Free” for the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad.

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