If you’ve read any of my recent reviews of games that follow in this pattern, you can skip ahead to the next paragraph. This is just my general recommendation that you avoid picking up Dotemu’s conversion of Metal Slug 2 that at the time of this writing remains on the store. Yes, it’s a dollar cheaper. But it’s only a dollar, and I think the differences here more than make up for that extra buck you spend. This new version is not only likely to have a far longer future, but also is designed for modern devices and their displays, which are things we cannot say for the older version. You get more options and extra features with the new version, and greater compatibility with external controllers. Spend that extra dollar, you deserve the treat.

Metal Slug was likely a pretty big surprise to SNK when it released back in 1996. Nazca Corporation, the developer behind the game, was a team formed by ex-Irem employees who had left the company to pursue their ambitions. This was a seasoned bunch, having worked together on games at Irem such as Air Duel, Undercover Cops, GunForce II, and perhaps most famously, In The Hunt. Nevertheless, its first efforts as Nazca Corporation proper went far beyond most expectations. A pair of NEOGEO titles, published by SNK themselves: NEO Turf Masters and Metal Slug. The former is one of the finest arcade-style golfing games ever made, and the latter? Well, it soon became a staple of every NEOGEO MVS around.

SNK made what was for this time in its history a rare wise business decision: it bought Nazca Corporation lock-stock. You don’t want to lose talent like that. Its first mission as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the company was to follow up on the ultra-hot Metal Slug, a mission that it would more or less carry out for the rest of its unexpectedly short lifespan. But how can you top something as wild as Metal Slug without losing what brought people to the game in the first place?

Metal Slug 2 offers the same number of stages, with six in total. The game goes a bit more over the top with its themes than the first game, and there’s more variety in general. The playable roster has doubled with the additions of Fio and Eri. They play the same as the guys, but it’s nice to have the choice. There are a few new weapons, and one of the returning ones has been upgraded. The titular Metal Slug vehicles also see their selection expanded, with the SV-Camel, Slugnoid, and Slug Flyer showing up in set places during the game. The original SV-001 tank is here too, of course. There are some other fun extra bits in here too, like how your character can be turned into a mummy or how one of the prisoners will follow you around throwing fireballs after you save him.

All of this ambition comes at a cost, however. Metal Slug 2 is notorious for the severity of its slowdown when the action picks up. And pals, the action picks up often. It’s so bad that Nazca actually opted to revisit the game the following year, using the improvements of the engine of the then-in-development Metal Slug 3 to remove many of the technical issues plaguing the game. The team also added some new goodies in while they were at it, and that revised version became Metal Slug X. That is not this game, but I’m sure we’ll see it soon. This game is as it ever was, and that means you’re going to be running, jumping, and shooting through some molasses at times. History isn’t always pretty.

I think to a great degree Metal Slug X negates this game, but for the serious Metal Slug fan I think the differences can be interesting enough to make Metal Slug 2 worth keeping around. If you’re not into that kind of hair-splitting or aren’t planning to catch them all, you might just want to be patient and wait for Metal Slug X‘s ACA NEOGEO version. I imagine it will come in a matter of weeks, simply because Hamster and SNK don’t have too many other games to touch on at this point. From a gameplay perspective Metal Slug 2 loses to Metal Slug X in every way. On its own merits, it’s quite a lot of fun despite the issues. And hey, it’s not likely you’re going to have a second player on screen gumming things up even worse.

Yes, I have to bang my usual drums here. First up, playing this game with touch controls is not ideal. It can be done, and you’ve got unlimited credits to work with here so it doesn’t particularly matter if you keep on dying. But a challenging game like this really works best if you can use an external controller to play. If you have one, this is just as fun to blast your way through as it is on any other platform. You’ll probably have to go it alone, because multiplayer requires external controllers and a display you feel comfortable hunkering down around. Well, you could do a lot worse on iOS even with all this baggage in tow.

You get the usual ACA NEOGEO options here. Game settings, control mapping, virtual control adjustments, audio and video options, and so on. You can play the Japanese version with all the blood spurts or the Overseas version with all the sweat spurts, and you also get the usual Score Attack and timed Caravan modes. Those extra modes are pretty fun here, especially the Score Attack. This is a game you can get through on one credit if you practice enough, and it’s a good challenge to see how far you can go while accumulating the most points possible. You get your online leaderboards as well, allowing you to compare your feats with those of other players. The extras supplement the game well, even if the necessary sacrifices of the mobile format don’t.

Look, if you’re going to buy Metal Slug 2 on mobile, this ACA NEOGEO release is the one you want. And if you’re trying to collect all the Metal Slug games or even all of the Arcade Archives releases, don’t let me stop you. But even setting aside the usual issues with Metal Slug games on mobile, I have to recommend the average player simply wait for Metal Slug X to get a rerelease. It’s everything this game is and more, with the improvement of the egregious slowdown being no small favor. A good game, but one made largely redundant by another entry that will be here soon.

Thunder Ray comes from us by way of Purple Tree Studio, and if nothing else I will say that they’ve made a game that looks and sounds brilliant. It’s stylish, distinctive, and the designs for your opponents are fantastic. As well they should be, as this game borrows its theme (intentionally or not) from a would-be Punch-Out!! sequel that ended up making its way out on the NES under the title Power Punch II. It saw an expy of Mike Tyson named Mark Tyler taking on alien opponents across the galaxy after finding the competition on Earth insufficient. Thunder Ray uses an almost identical concept, and let’s give it some points for clearing the first admittedly low bar: it’s far better than Power Punch II.

The basic set-up of Thunder Ray will be familiar to Punch-Out!! fans, especially those who played the original arcade games or Super Punch-Out!! on the Super NES. You’ve got your boxer in the foreground, back to the camera and facing his opponent. Said opponent looms large in front of him and us, allowing them to be extremely expressive. That serves two purposes. First, it gives each opponent a lot of personality. You can see their facial expressions and body language change easily, and each of the eight opponents is different from the others in these regards. Second, it makes it easier to spot their tells. As in Punch-Out!!, it’s generally better to play reactively rather than proactively. Each fighter has their own patterns, and if you can learn how to avoid or block their attacks, you’ll be in a great position to reply in kind with your fists.

Since these opponents are (mostly) aliens, they’re not afraid to cheat in some creative ways. It’s humorous and makes every fight different, while also adding some character to the opposing fighters. In a bit of a change from the source of its inspiration, you’re not really aiming for knock-outs or to try to wear them down over the course of multiple rounds. These fights all go to three knock-downs. If you get knocked down three times, you’re done. If you can get them down three times, that’s your win. You can’t be saved by the bell here, so fight carefully. When you land your final blow, your opponents will often explode into a disgusting gory mess, so don’t play this one in front of the tots.

You’ve got a few moves of your own. Your normal punches come in four types, with high and low punches for your left and right arms. You can also charge up for some stronger punches, and if your meter is full you can attempt a ridiculously powerful super attack. As you play through the game this attack will be upgraded, allowing you to fill up more meters for more misery. Apart from your strikes, you can dodge in either direction, duck under attacks, and block. You’ll have to learn the attacks of each opponent to know which way to respond to their various attacks. On the easiest difficulty there’s a lot of room for error, but the medium and hard difficulties aren’t very forgiving.

So how does this all work on mobile? Regrettably, virtual buttons. Four directional buttons laid out in a frankly asinine way that makes it really hard to hit the direction you want, and four punch buttons that are more sensibly arranged. When your super attack is ready to go, an extra button will appear. I found the game really hard to play this way, and changing to the other control type in the options didn’t help at all. If the directional buttons were just laid out in a normal way, it would have been a lot better. Those who have external controllers will find a better experience that way, which makes sense given this game was originally designed to be played on a controller.

But let’s suppose you have that controller, or perhaps you get along with the virtual directional buttons better than I did. How is Thunder Ray in that case? Here’s the thing about Punch-Out!!: it’s more of a rhythm game than a boxing game. Give it a think, and you’ll probably see what I mean. And in a rhythm game, response time is everything. It’s why Punch-Out!! is one of the benchmarks for latency, and why you don’t see ol’ Parappa and Lammy show up as classic rereleases too often. A little lag can destroy a rhythm game. Those stellar graphics I was praising Thunder Ray for earlier? They include some really dynamite animations for both Ray and his opponents. They look great. But they are so animated that they take a while to come out, and you can’t interrupt them until they’re finished.

This leads to a lot of situations where you can see what the opponent is going to do but Ray hasn’t finished the punch you just asked him to throw, so you have to eat the hit. It’s very frustrating, and it forces you to try to anticipate what your foe might do even before they throw out any tells. You simply can’t trust Ray to take the offensive, and you also can’t put faith in longer combos. Again, you can get away with a lot on the lowest Rookie difficulty. If you want to have the least frustrating time with Thunder Ray, that’s where you’ll want to play. But you’re not playing the real game that way, and you’ll be done with it in a flash. Eventually you have to move up the difficulty if you want to keep getting some fun out of this, and that’s where the lag from being unable to cancel animations lets you down.

I don’t mind that Thunder Ray is somewhat light on content. With how much goes into these fighters, there’s a reasonable amount here for an indie studio. But with that being the case, it’s vital that what is here is polished to a shine. I think in terms of presentation, it’s fair to say Thunder Ray manages that. But it feels like the gameplay had to settle for being second place on the priority list when it should have been first. When the animations aren’t getting in the way, this is a fun game to play. The punches have great weight to them, the opponents are interesting to look at and satisfying to learn, and the way the different difficulty levels ratchet things up is good.

Unfortunately, the animations get in the way often. You have to learn to work around them. You also have to learn to work around the touch controls if you’re not using an external device like the Backbone One. Frankly, that’s too many things to have to work around in a game like this. I think the developer could address both of these issues, of course. If we had a better layout for the virtual directional pad or the option to place the buttons as we prefer, that would be great. If we were able to interrupt animations, that would be even better. Thunder Ray could be excellent with a few fixes. At that point, only its brevity would be contentious, and I think it could weather that.

I can only review the game in front of me, though. And that game is one that gets a lot of things right and a few things wrong. The things it gets wrong happen to be some of the most important things for a game like this, however, and that spells bad news for Thunder Ray. There’s some fun to be had with this game, but a lot of frustration comes with it. Not that spicy frustration that comes from Mike laying you out for the hundredth time, either. No, it’s the frustration of playing a game that gets so close to being a contender instead of a bum. Here’s hoping some updates can turn this one around so it can become a comeback kid in the future.

I’m going to start with what I liked about the game. Yes, it’s one of those reviews. First of all, the presentation is really nice. I don’t know the show, but I can see a lot of care went into recreating locations and making stylized versions of various characters. Most of the chess sets look great, though the designs of some of them make it hard to tell pieces apart at a glance. I respect the attempt to gamify chess, likely as a means to keep people playing through the learning curve of the game itself. Lots of coins to earn for doing various things, and you can spend them on all sorts of things. I think for someone who genuinely knows next to nothing about chess, this is an agreeable way to learn at least the basics. There’s plenty to do here as well, following Beth’s Journey through chess puzzles and matches against various characters. You can even hop online and play against other humans.

Okay, on to the rest. If I had to sum things up, I find myself unsure of who this is exactly for. I think it has to be fans of the show, but as I haven’t seen the show I can’t say whether the fanservice hits the mark or not. But in terms of chess players, I think it’s in an awkward space. It includes a ton of accessibility features that make it easier to win a game, for example, but if you were to move over to another chess game without those assists, you’d be lost. The game isn’t teaching you, it’s telling you. Sometimes it’s telling you the wrong things, even. The chess puzzles, normally a good source of learning a variety of strategies, are surprisingly limited in their scope. If you’ve played chess puzzles before, you’re not going to be terribly challenged by any of these. You’re also not going to pick up many useful techniques through them. Sometimes it does drop some useful techniques in the main game, but since it never properly revisits them or explains the theory behind them, it feels a bit pointless.

On the other side of the coin, the AI and overall progression is probably going to irritate experts, even if they jump to the highest difficulty right away. The game also really wants to help you, and there’s nothing worse than a pushy helper when you already know what you want and need to do. Okay, so maybe you just head online and play against other humans, count on the human element to sort things out? Not a bad idea, but there’s a big problem right now with the game that is magnified when you play online.

This game has a crashing problem. I tried it on multiple devices just to make sure it wasn’t just my phone, but no. Every so often, not every time but often enough to lose your trust, the game will crash in the middle of a match. If you’re playing against the CPU, it isn’t the end of the world. You can pick up where you left off. But if you’re playing against someone online, you’re pretty much done. The game never crashed during chess puzzles; only during matches and only once you get a ways into them. But that is a pretty serious problem for a chess game, I feel. I’m going to assume this will be fixed and not completely spike the game’s score for it, but I’m not going to ignore it either.

I’m not going to drag this one out too far. If you have Netflix it doesn’t cost you anything to try the game, and if you’re a fan of the show and somehow aren’t that familiar with chess, I encourage you to give it a shot. Queen’s Gambit Chess will assuredly teach you how to play the game, so if that is what you’re looking for you’re all set. But it will only take you so far, choosing to show you what to do instead of teaching you what to do. Experienced chess players will probably find it a bit unsatisfying overall thanks to the low level of difficulty and excessive handholding. Throw in some fairly serious technical issues in the current version that deeply affects multiplayer and you’ve got a game that struggles to find its own winning move.

Saurus was founded in 1993 and spent most of its brief life as a subsidiary of SNK. It was founded by employees of SNK’s Tokyo branch after it was shuttered, and more or less took its place all the way down to occupying its same office space. While it handled a lot of different tasks for SNK, including crafting NEOGEO Pocket ports of some of the NEOGEO’s biggest hits, Saurus is probably best known for its Shock Troopers series of run-and-gun action games. Well, outside of Japan anyway. Inside Japan, it’s probably more known for creating the Stakes Winner series of horse racing games. It’s possible you might remember them from Prehistoric Isle 2 as well.

Saurus’s first game on the NEOGEO console was Stakes Winner, and it was a solid success. One of the members of Saurus, Kenji Ishimoto, had been the planner on another earlier sports success on the system while part of SNK Tokyo: Super Sidekicks. Perhaps that experience led to him wanting to take a swing at a similar sport. Pleasure Goal is is meant to be a futsal game, even if some of the details don’t line up. The broad strokes fit. You’ve got five players on each side, and the field is a lot smaller than the usual soccer pitch. Close enough. Heck, the game’s Japanese title is simply Futsal. I rest my case.

Whatever you want to call it, this is a more compact take on soccer, and I think that’s actually a pretty good idea for an arcade sports game. Less space to maneuver means more players crashing into each other and shorter trips to the goal, which means more shots on goal. Look, I’m Canadian. The closer a thing gets to hockey, the better I think it is. Setting that aside, a more immediate and action-packed version of a popular sport should be a sure-fire win. I shall call it… “arcade-style soccer". Trademark it, Jared.

Pleasure Goal, unfortunately, was not a win. It’s not an especially poor game. The graphics are nice. The controls are responsive enough. Easy to pick up and finesse is but a button away if you know what you’re doing. The music is a short loop that will drive you bonkers before you even finish a single match, but such is life. You get a decent amount of time for your coin, even if you lose. There are lots of teams to pick from, which is nice. But despite getting a lot of the boxes checked, it just never quite comes together the way you would hope.

There are only two modes here, the Saurus Cup (for one player) and Vs. (this one is for two). I’d imagine most mobile players will be sticking to the first of those two, which sees you pick a team and try to work your way through the tournament brackets until you take home the cup. The CPU is… fine. Not too rough, though it gets a little wild once you get a few matches in. That’s about what you would expect, though. Imagine buying a $200 cartridge for your NEOGEO and rolling the CPU in one night. You’d then pull it out in front of your friends and bravely try to present it as being better than NHL ’94 on the Genesis, even though you know the truth. A tragedy in two acts.

So what about it doesn’t work, apart from it being a bit thin on things to do? Personally, I just didn’t find it very satisfying to play. The more compact play area makes it hard to set up interesting plays, and the way the goalkeeper reacts means the best tactic is often just to rush the goal with whoever gets the ball. Passing isn’t completely pointless, but it’s pretty near to it. The button assigned to tricks takes a lot of getting used to if you want to have any proper control over what happens, but in the end those fancy moves aren’t going to produce any better results than good ol’ goal charge.

Pleasure Goal works better with another human player, which is a revelation that I doubt is shocking anyone in the crowd. Except that one guy two rows from the back, but he was shocked when Mysterio turned out to be a bad guy in Far From Home. There’s no helping him. Anyway, with another human player you can enjoy the chaos a little better, and there’s more of a point to trying to show off with the tricky moves. The music is still maddening no matter what you do, though. But of course, the problem here is the usual one with these mobile ACA NEOGEO releases: you probably aren’t going to be able to pull off multiplayer.

The game supports external controllers, and that is what you’ll need to play with someone else. I’d probably advise using one anyway, as this game makes fairly extensive use of three of the four NEOGEO buttons during gameplay and it’s easy to mess things up with the virtual buttons. It’s not unplayable without a controller by any means, but using one will certainly make for a better experience overall. At any rate, you’re probably playing alone, which means you’re just challenging the Saurus Cup with various teams until you get tired of it all. Is that worth four bucks? It might be! Personally, I don’t know that I would have fed four bucks’ worth of quarters into this game. That’s sixteen whole credits, and I would probably have switched over to Metal Slug by my third coin.

Like I said earlier though, it’s not a horrible game. If you have an inclination towards arcade sports games, futsal, or just love that whole NEOGEO core experience, I think you’ll get a good enough time out of poking at this for a bit. I’ve played far worse sports games. I think that the more general audience and retro game fans who don’t have a “catch ’em all" mentality with the ACA NEOGEO line will be less enthused. It’s a very average game that adapts to mobile in a very middling sort of way, neither heaven nor hell but caught in that bland in-between. It’s incredibly forgettable, and its mobile incarnation carries on that tradition with grace.

ACA NEOGEO review boilerplate time! External controller support, check! Variety of options for gameplay, video, controls, and so on, check! Japanese and International versions included, check! Score Attack and Caravan Modes, check! Online leaderboards, check! Great emulation, check! I’ll stop the bit here to comment on those extra modes, because like with most sports games they really don’t work out well here. The five minutes on the clock in Caravan Mode is just about enough for a single game, which doesn’t leave a huge spread for potential points. Score Attack fares a bit better but it’s still not exactly a thrilling chase. These modes sometimes save these games, but here they’re just serving as checkmarks in some imaginary boxes. They’re here because all ACA NEOGEO games have them.

To sum it up, Pleasure Goal is okay. It is average. You can have some fun with it, but you’ll likely forget all about it by next Tuesday. As a mobile port, it is also sitting right in the middle of the line. It’s not ruined by touch controls and a lack of multiplayer, but it’s certainly worse for the wear. I think those who really enjoy arcade sports games will get a few days of light fun out of it, but there’s a reason its name doesn’t typically come up when people are talking about their favorite NEOGEO games.

Before Street Fighter II arrived and laid down the clear template that most 2D fighters would follow for the next few decades and counting, there was a lot of experimentation in the one-on-one fighting genre. Some were similar to Street Fighter II, treading in the footsteps of the likes of Yie Ar Kung Fu and Karate Champ. Single-plane action, usually with at least a couple of attack buttons and jumping mapped to up on the stick. But there were other ideas for how things could go, and one such was the arena fighter. In these games, you could move in and out of the screen in a manner similar to beat-em-ups like Renegade and Double Dragon. If there was jumping at all, it would typically be mapped to a button of its own. Games like Violence Fight and Pit Fighter used this style to varying degrees of success, and it wasn’t an incredibly unusual template to work from at the time. After all, scrolling beat-em-ups were all the rage. Maybe there was something to this third dimension of movement thing?

The thing is, by the time Aggressors of Dark Kombat arrived in 1994, this type of fighting game had become exceedingly rare. Well, outside of wrestling games, anyway. 3D fighting games would soon bring this kind of movement back into vogue, but we weren’t quite there yet. The closest to this mechanic being in play in a popular fighter was Fatal Fury‘s use of multiple planes. But the NEOGEO had plenty of conventional fighters at this stage, so why not try something different? That’s what ADK did with Aggressors of Dark Kombat, and I can’t exactly say it was wrong to try. Aggressors of Dark Kombat has a lot of issues, but it’s certainly distinct and it’s honestly not entirely un-fun.

There are eight different fighters to choose from here, mostly fitting the theme of street combat. You’ve got a button for punches, a button for kicks, and a button to jump. Fights take place in arenas that aren’t much longer than the usual fighting game stage, but allow the fighters to move in and out of the screen a fair bit. There are also sometimes weapons laying around that you can make use of, along with some destructible stage elements. Spectators might even toss a weapon in now and then, because people are like that. Players have access to a speedy dash by tapping or double-tapping the stick in the desired direction. Along with your standard array of attacks and special moves, you can also grapple your opponent by getting close and hitting both attack buttons at once and pushing any direction, like in a wrestling game. Matches consist of just a single round, but the fighters have multiple meters of health to work through.

As with many fighting games of the era, you have a meter at the bottom of the screen that fills up as you fight. This is known as the Crazy Meter, and when it fills up you can use your character’s Crazy Attack. If you land this attack on your opponent, you win. It doesn’t matter how much health they have left. Match over. This is where the aggression or intensity comes in, I suppose. This is a game that really does favor the aggressor, because if you can get your meter topped off first and catch your opponent off-guard, you win. Mastering grappling is also a key to victory, but even more important is learning how to escape from grapples. And this is where the first problem comes in with this game in its mobile form.

At some point, all SNK fighters become extremely frustrating to play in single-player. SNK bosses are a trope in the fighting game community for a reason. That usually kicks in with the final boss, though. You get to have your fun up to that point, and after that you really need to make no mistakes if you want an ending. Aggressors of Dark Kombat starts getting annoying a lot earlier. After you’ve gotten a few rounds in, the CPU opponent starts making use of those ever-so-handy grapples. The timing for countering grapples is very tight, and until you get it down pat you are going to hit a complete wall when this happens. Even once you do, it’s not terribly fun. This isn’t the greatest of fighters even when you’re playing against another human, but if you’re stuck with the CPU it’s really nasty.

That’s going to be the reality for most mobile players, though. Unless you have the extra external controllers and set-up for multiple players on a single device, all you’ve got is single-player. It’s really hard to recommend this game with that in mind. I’ll also note that those playing with virtual controls are going to have a real job ahead of them since the game relies heavily on things like light taps, heavy pushes, and dexterous use of the stick. Between the tricky touch controls and rude computer opponents, you’re going to be in for an unpleasant time. Those with an external controller can step around the control issues but still have to deal with the jerk CPU. Even flicking the difficulty settings down doesn’t help a ton. You just have to stick with it until you become an absolute pro Aggressors of Dark Kombat player. Something for the resume, at least.

Ah, it’s time for the boilerplate ACA NEOGEO talk. You get the usual array of modes here. The international and Japanese versions are available, with the Japanese one giving you some blood here and there for extra INTENSITY. There’s a Score Attack and Caravan mode with their own online leaderboards, though the game isn’t really well-suited to such things. As mentioned, you can use an external controller to play if you want. Hamster has loaded the game up with the typical options for video, controls, and so on. The emulation is spot-on. It’s hard to fault the effort here, it’s just that the game itself isn’t a great fit for the challenges of the mobile format. I really do wish some form of online multiplayer could be sorted though. Even local device-to-device wireless play would be welcome.

Aggressors of Dark Kombat is not a great fighting game, but it is a really interesting one. I recommend checking it out if you want to play something unusual in the genre, but I can’t really recommend this mobile release being the place to do so. It really screams for multiplayer, and the touch controls just aren’t up to the unique demands of the game’s quirky systems. The price is certainly more than fair, so if you want to take a silly punt on it I won’t tell you not to. But I think for most people, the cheap CPU opponents and awkward virtual controls are enough for me to advise giving this one a pass.

Let’s start with the premise. You’re the proud owner of a brand-new zoo. It’s not much of a zoo, mind you. You’ve got a hamster and a capybara. There’s also a bench, some vending machines, and a tree or two. It feels like perhaps you should have been a bit more prepared before opening your doors, but here we are. Hamster. Capybara. Vending machines. Bench. Let’s go. You wouldn’t think anyone would come to such a zoo, but people do. Your goal is to grow your zoo into something worthy of the name, filling your pockets with cash along the way. As you build, your zoo will earn stars towards a ranking. Your aim is reach five (and beyond), a job that will require you to check off a bunch of missions. Add more animals. Roll those campaigns. Earn those social media likes. Get. Paid.

I’ll be direct here: not much seems to have changed in Kairosoft’s world. And I suppose if it isn’t broken, why risk trying to fix it? Zoo Park Story could have come out seven years ago and it wouldn’t have seemed out of place in their line-up at the time. The visuals and sounds are similar, the UI is similar, and that familiar difficulty curve is here. A little slow, straightforward, and slightly challenging in the beginning, then you reach a certain point and the scales tip, giving you a comfortable cruise to the end of the game. You can actually mess things up in this one, which I suppose is new. But most likely, you won’t.

There’s actually a little bit more going on in this one that initially meets the eye. Obviously the main thing you want to do is add more animals to your park. A few of them will just roll in of their own volition, but most of them will be acquired the other two ways. First, you can just buy them from the Animal Hub. This will require you to either exchange items or Animal Points. The other way is by finding them and befriending them on expeditions. You’ll have to negotiate with them to befriend them, which involves tossing money, Animal Points, or higher regular food expenses. The latter is one way you can mess things up, by the way. Don’t throw your whole budget at a duck, is all I’m saying. Generally speaking, the more impressive the animal is, the more it’s going to cost you to keep.

Items! You can buy them with money, you can find them on expeditions, and people visiting the park will give you some now and then. In addition to using them to pick up animals in the Animal Hub, you can use them directly on the animals to improve their stats. The more friendliness they have, the more likes they’ll get on social media and the more customers they’ll attract. Upping their stats and improving their environment with decorations can also earn you more Animal Points now and then. Every animal has their likes and dislikes, and the boosts they’ll get vary based on that. Once you get more than one of each animal type you can merge their pens, and if they are of different genders there is a chance they will reproduce. As their friendliness increases, they’ll be able to interact with customers in new ways.

Aside from all of this, you can also run campaigns to attract visitors, add the occasional facility, and try to improve your zoo’s rank. You do that by completing specific missions, and they’re more or less things that will happen naturally as you play. At the end of each year, you’ll get a summary from a weird chimpanzee king and he’ll give you some other points you can exchange with him for various rewards. Compared to earlier games, Zoo Park Story feels like makes simple things unnecessarily complicated. There isn’t much depth here, and the pace can be really sluggish. All these extra currencies and mechanics do is make those basic tasks more convoluted.

I’m not sure if I just picked a bad one to jump in on or not, but Zoo Park Story just doesn’t click for me the way some of the older Kairosoft games did. Filling out the park just didn’t feel satisfying. My zoo didn’t feel like a proper zoo, and I felt like it was too penalizing to have the cool animals filling out the park. The road to success seemed to just involve jamming as many items as possible down the throats of the cheapest animals I could find. The game just didn’t expand out in as enjoyable a way as I hoped. The Kairosoft charm keeps things from being unpleasant, but this was probably as close to tedious as it gets for this kind of template.

No experiment should end after a single trial. I’ll probably look into the next couple of releases from Kairosoft before wandering off again, but I can at least say with some confidence that Zoo Park Story hasn’t made me rethink why I stopped reviewing this publisher’s games. It’s okay. If it was your first Kairosoft game, you would probably have a blast. But I feel like this concept could have made for a far better game than what we got here.

I’ve written quite a lot of reviews of these ACA NEOGEO games already, and I hope that one of the things I’ve managed to express is that this console’s early days were really bizarre and subsequently charming in a particular way. Before Street Fighter II laid out the path the arcade business as a whole would take throughout the 1990s, SNK didn’t seem to have any clear idea where to go with its new console’s library. Clearly, it wanted some games that would show off what the hardware could do. Beyond that, the library reflects a company throwing an awful lot of mud at the wall to see what would stick. Fatal Fury would show the way forward, but that didn’t come until deep into the NEOGEO’s second year of life.

The console was more than thirty games deep at that point, and we can see a lot of different kinds of releases in that early bunch. Sports games of various types are a given, and there were plenty of those. A couple of shoot-em-ups, a couple of platform games, a couple of beat-em-ups, a couple of puzzlers. But perhaps the most unusual of these early games was The Super Spy. It may also have been one of the more ambitious. You play as international man of mystery Roy Heart, who has been sent on a mission by the CIA to infiltrate a building that has been occupied by terrorists. Hey, I’ve seen this movie. This set-up could work for a bunch of traditional genres, but SNK decided to make a first-person beat-em-up.

For some reason, our boy Roy has entered the building armed only with a knife and a gun with twelve bullets in it. But worry not, as his martial arts skills are impressive. You’ll have to get used to them, as you’re going to be using them a lot as you make your way through sixteen floors filled with enemies. You’ll find weapons now and then by rescuing hostages that temporarily add some sizzle to the steak, and you can use your knife until it rusts from overuse (that’s not how that works at all), but most of your kills are going to be with your bare hands or well-toed foot. There is some extremely light exploration here as well, and I will say that this was all very dazzling to look at in this game’s time. Really big characters, decent scaling, lots of impact.

The hand-to-hand combat takes a lot of cues from Nintendo’s Punch-Out!!, with the ability to block and duck the attacks of your foes between your own swings and hooks. If you try to slug it out without making use of these features, you’ll end up emptying your wallet of coins in a hurry. You know, if you had to worry about that with this version. You don’t, you can feed virtual coins as often as you want to get through this sheer endurance battle of a game. But I beseech you to actually engage with that melee combat system, as if there is enjoyment to be found in The Super Spy it is through mastery of it. Once you get the hang of how it works, I dare say you might even start having some fun.

I wish I could tell you that fun lasts for the duration of the game, but we’re all too old to believe in faery tales. It gets monotonous after a few floors’ worth of similar-looking ninjas, and I’ll remind you that there are sixteen in total. Worse, things step into the realm of frustration a bit too often as enemies step out of the range of your dukes. Hope you saved some ammo. Once you learn the game and know when and where to make use of your limited weaponry, things can go a little brisker and more pleasantly, but I’m not sure how many people would set their minds to do such a thing unless they paid a couple hundred dollars for a cartridge.

Sounds like bad news for The Super Spy, then. Wrap it up, prepare a couple of stars, and we’ll all get on with our day. Except! Except Hamster has done what it usually does for its releases here, and one of those usual things actually makes The Super Spy a lot more interesting. The extra modes that the developer always adds are included here, complete with online leaderboards. That means you have a score attack and timed caravan mode to play, both of which limit you to but a single credit. And that in turn means that if you want to make any headway at all in these modes, you must come to grips with the game’s distinct mechanics and intentions.

It is in doing so that you’ll find that The Super Spy is a bit better than it sometimes gets credit for. Sure, beating the game is a bore and a chore, but I could say the same for Capcom’s 1942. Arcade games are so far away from their context here in 2023 (or whenever you’re reading this) that I think we sometimes forget that they weren’t necessarily meant to be beaten the first time you sidle up to the machine. You weren’t supposed to have infinite credits, dropping in another coin every time you fail instead of learning the game properly and building your skills. I’m not going to sit here and say The Super Spy is fine art, but I will say that if we appraise it under its original conditions, it’s alright. And Hamster’s stock extra modes force you to do that, albeit to an extreme.

I suppose it’s time to go through the normal bit. You can play with an external controller if you want, and honestly it’s a much better way to go about things if you have the option. The button layout isn’t especially complicated here, but the emphasis on dodging and replying with speedy timing can make the touch controls a little unreliable. You get a lot of options to play around with here, and we’ve already talked about the extra modes and online leaderboards. The emulation is good, but I’m sure we all expect that by now. A more bespoke set-up might have benefited The Super Spy, but I get how the whole business model works here.

The Super Spy is a game that is perhaps at its worst if you choose to play it by credit-feeding your way through its tedious campaign. I can understand why it wasn’t particularly well-liked by AES owners back in the day, and I similarly get why modern reviews don’t have a lot of nice things to say about it. But I don’t think it’s totally without merit, and the extra modes in this ACA NEOGEO mode make the game interesting enough to be worth tossing a few bucks at if you’re a curious retro gamer. It’s extremely Early NEOGEO Core, and if that sounds cool to you then I will give this a hesitant recommendation.

It’s not as though SNK didn’t have its occasional miss, particularly early in the console’s life. What makes Savage Reign‘s shortcomings so interesting is that the game came out in 1995, well after SNK and its development partners had figured this whole fighting game thing out. It is improbable that a game of Savage Reign‘s quality should come out at the time that it did, but it most certainly did. The idea behind it was sound, at least. Add another weapon-based fighter to the SNK line-up, with a modern flavor to contrast with the medieval Japanese Samurai Shodown series. Add in a new gimmick in the form of a second tier fighters could battle from. Like Fatal Fury but with boomerangs and dodge balls.

Yes, I said dodge balls. The weapons most of the fighters in Savage Reign wield are… unconventional to say the least. And that’s appropriate, because the characters are pretty unusual themselves. There doesn’t seem to be much of a consistent theme here, and it hurts the game’s identity. A cyborg, a cheerleader, a clown, a martial artist, an old guy dressed like a beach bum, a cop whose top is way too tiny with some Zangief-like chest hair, and a few other oddities populate the game’s ten-character roster. Each of them has their own stage that fits their specific theme, but it’s really hard to figure out how any of this fits together. And sure, none of this affects how the game plays. But that lack of consistency makes this game sometimes feel like a plate of leftovers from other SNK fighters at times, and it has a hard time standing out among the many other options the NEOGEO had to offer.

I don’t want this to sound like a total disaster, though. Savage Reign isn’t a bad game, and if it were the only fighting game you had around, you could do a lot worse. It looks good, with plenty of details in the backgrounds and well-animated characters. It does that characteristic NEOGEO zooming, particularly when you start hopping around to the second tier of each stage. The gameplay is functional enough, playing a bit like the earlier Fatal Fury games thanks to all the lane-hopping shenanigans. The weapons are mainly projectiles but get incorporated into melee attacks in some fun ways, and some of the stage designs handle their second tier in a very unusual fashion.

The issue with Savage Reign is more that this is a very average fighter that lacks a proper focus. There are a lot of different pieces thrown in here from other games, but they don’t really mix well together and it ends up feeling like an odd hodge-podge as a result. So too does the roster of characters, and again it isn’t really in a good way. I think there’s certainly room in the genre for a bunch of wacky misfits, but this game feels like it’s trying a little too hard to check things off of some list of awesome ideas someone had. Does it matter? Well, yes. It’s trying so hard to be so many things, it never really drills deep on any of its ideas. It’s about as shallow a fighter as you could find at this stage of the NEOGEO’s life, more akin to the kinds of things that came before Fatal Fury found its footing.

With all of that said, I think we have to look at the current context in which we are viewing Savage Reign. This is a low-cost mobile port, one that you will probably be mostly playing in single-player. It’s likely you are using touch controls, though there is of course external controller support for those who want to take advantage of it. My assumption is also that anyone who has read this far into a review of the mobile version of Savage Reign is at least interested enough in NEOGEO to have played all of the more famous fighters from SNK. So let’s see how that measures up, then.

Unlike NEOGEO console owners back in the day, you won’t need to justify a $150 cartridge purchase or whatever here. The last boss isn’t nearly as nasty as the usual SNK boss, and the wacky spectacle of it all makes for some amusing single-player bouts. The lack of depth means you can get by without too many fancy combos, which makes it easier to play using the touch controls. And this is certainly one of the less-celebrated fighters from SNK, which means you might not have played the wheels off of it yet. With all of that taken into account, I suppose I can’t tell you to completely avoid this release. It’s only a few bucks, and I expect you can get that much fun out of it.

The usual Arcade Archives boilerplate. You get a robust list of extras and options, including additional modes and online leaderboards. The emulation is sound as a pound. Is a pound sound anymore? I don’t know. But the emulation is good, is what I’m trying to say. You can only play multiplayer if you have an extra controller, as there are no wifi or internet play options available. You probably know this already, because I say all of this every time. It hurts every single fighter in this line-up that multiplayer is such a difficult thing to get going, but it is what it is at this point.

Savage Reign is incredibly mediocre by the standards of SNK’s NEOGEO fighting game line-up, and as with other ACA NEOGEO fighting games the poor options for multiplayer make this one of the worse ways to experience it. But you might find something endearing in its quirky nature, and there aren’t many fighting games that let you beat someone into unconsciousness with a dodge ball. I sure wouldn’t make this a high-priority purchase, but there may just be a few bucks’ worth of button-bashing fun for some of you here.

That’s a really difficult question to answer, and I suppose it comes down to a few things. First of all, I must admit that Top Player’s Golf is more realistic in its presentation than NEO Turf Masters is. If the over-the-top approach of the latter bothers you, there’s a chance you’ll find Top Player’s Golf more to your taste. There are also some out there who treat the Arcade Archives like a trip through history, and in that sense Top Player’s Golf certainly has a place. It was SNK’s second golf game after Lee Trevino’s Fighting Golf, one of just four launch titles for the NEOGEO in North America, and as previously mentioned was the only golf game on the console until 1996. It has its merits in that regard.

Then there are people who have already played the wheels off of NEO Turf Masters/Big Tournament Golf and are just looking for a new golf game to play. You’re less interested in whether Top Player’s Golf is better than NEO Turf Masters and more in whether or not it’s a golf game worth playing on its own merits. And you know what? I think it is. It’s not the best golfing game around by any means, but it’s fine. It’s a fairly low-effort take on the sport that might be the flavor you’re looking for. At the price these Arcade Archives releases go for, I think it earns its keep.

You’ve got three modes of play to dig into here. The first two are what you would expect. Stroke Play has you take on CPU opponents in a full course of 18 holes at one of two Country Clubs. Match Play is meant for two human players and you’re obviously not likely to be getting much use out of that with this version. The third mode is a little more unusual. Nassau Game can be played against the CPU or another human, and it throws some unique challenges into the competition. Amusing enough as a bit of variety. As mentioned, you’ve got two clubs to play at, and there are four different golfers to choose from.

The gameplay itself is as simple as it gets. Set your direction, choose your club (the game will always set you up with a reasonable choice if you don’t want to fuss with this), then choose Shot. A meter will pop up, and you can press the button to start your swing. Hit the button again at the desired amount of power, and that’s it. You can choose to have a caddie make recommendations to you if you like, and that’s certainly something to listen to the first couple times you run through a course. Indeed, those crisp voices were one of the ways this game flexed the new hardware. There’s also a bit of scaling when your shot heads into the air, and the colors are certainly quite rich for the time.

So yes, it’s fine. And the simple controls do suit mobile play very well, so that’s something in its favor. You can use an external controller if you want, but it’s totally fine with touch controls. If you want to play against another human, you’ll need to use external controllers for local play. No internet. I know I say it every time, but every time is some reader’s first time. Maybe if I keep complaining something will change. All the other usual Arcade Archives features are here, including extra modes and online leaderboards. The emulation is the usual high quality.

If you’re looking for a NEOGEO golf game to play, you should absolutely buy Big Tournament Golf. If you’re looking for a second NEOGEO golf game to play, Top Player’s Golf is decent enough. Just remember that it originally released in 1990 and that the six year gap between it and Big Tournament Golf was a massive one in terms of game design evolution. This is a simple, straightforward game of golf with very few frills and practically no depth. Maybe that’s okay sometimes.

Ghost Pilots arrived on the NEOGEO within the system’s first year, when SNK was still trying to find its footing with the hardware. Inspiration would arrive soon after its January 1991 launch. Street Fighter II hit in February 1991 with all the force of a raging bull, kicking off a fighting game phenomenon that the NEOGEO was able to benefit greatly from. In those early days, one of SNK’s secret weapons was a talent that had been lured away from one of its major competitors. Takashi Nishiyama is a man who shouldn’t need an introduction, but let’s go ahead and give him one.

Nishiyama is, perhaps, one of the more important figures in arcade gaming history. He got his start at Irem, and was responsible for two of its biggest early hits: Moon Patrol and Kung-Fu Master. He then made the jump to Capcom, where he was involved with games like Section Z, Trojan, Legendary Wings, and Street Fighter. Yes, the first one. Sure, it wasn’t a patch on its sequel, but we wouldn’t have that game without the original laying the groundwork. He was approached by SNK after he took his leave from Capcom, and started on two projects for the new NEOGEO system. Each would represent one of his genre specialties from his previous works, and one of the two would prove to be a critical, influential, iconic game for SNK. The other was Ghost Pilots.

Ghost Pilots is a vertically scrolling shoot-em-up for one or two players, though unless you have a couple of external controllers, you’re likely to be flying solo on this mission. The setting is World War II, and you’re up against a huge chunk of the Nazi forces. Your weapon of choice? A bafflingly sluggish seaplane, decked out with a standard machine gun and a limited number of one of a few different bomb types. The gun can be upgraded by picking up power-ups, and you can pick up extra bombs along the way. Basically, this is an attempt at doing a Toaplan-style shooter in a setting similar to that of Capcom’s 19XX series. With Nishiyama’s experience and the power of the NEOGEO, this should have been a slam dunk.

Well, even the best miss a shot now and then. Ghost Pilots is extremely dull. It’s sluggish. The power-ups are so vanilla they feel like they came from an early 1980s shooter. There aren’t enough enemy types to properly mix things up, and it only takes a couple of stages before you’re likely to tire of various colors of airplanes swooping in at you. The graphics are fine but hardly impressive for the era, with only the bosses really showing anything interesting from a design standpoint. After the first stage you get to pick between two routes, which is perhaps the one interesting thing Ghost Pilots does. Neither one is terribly exciting, unfortunately. It feels like a game that came a half decade too late.

We’ve got the usual extras from Hamster, doing their able best to give the game a raison d’etre. The Caravan and Score Attack modes are about as much fun as you can hope to have with this game, and trying to hustle your way up the leaderboards gives the game a shot in the arm it sorely needs. You have access to a bunch of options for the game itself, and if you have an external controller you can use it to play in lieu of the completely serviceable touch controls. As mentioned before, the game has support for simultaneous two-player action, but you’ll need an extra external controller for your second player. As usual, no online multiplayer support.

Despite the extra modes and high-quality presentation by Hamster, I have a lot of trouble recommending Ghost Pilots with any vigor at all. Sure, it plays fine. You can pass a few minutes with it if you need to. There’s certainly a decent bit of content here for a shooter of its era. But it just isn’t very enjoyable. Your plane is too slow and your firepower too plain, making the core gameplay feel dull. It’s all very repetitive thanks to the limited assortment of enemies and unimaginative stage designs, too. Is it worth a few bucks? I mean… maybe? It’s not trash or anything. But you can certainly find more enjoyable shooters for the same price, so I wouldn’t bother with this one unless you’re absolutely starving for a game of this sort.

Sort of, yes, and absolutely. I don’t like leaving questions unsettled for too long. When I wrote my review of Samurai Shodown IV ACA NEOGEO, I mentioned that it’s rare to find anyone that loves every entry in the Samurai Shodown series due to how inconsistent the games are in their mechanics and aesthetics. I think if you polled the masses, you’d see a lot of people citing Samurai Shodown II as their favorite, followed by a near-equal number of votes for IV and V Special. As far as the NEOGEO entries go, you’ll probably see the least number of people pulling for the original game and Samurai Shodown III.

Yet I think if you asked those same people what their second-favorite game in the series is, you’d see a lot more support for Samurai Shodown III. It’s a weird game by the standards of the series, one that its sequels largely set out to walk back from. That weirdness, however, is precisely what makes it stand out among its peers. Samurai Shodown III has a lot of ideas. Some of them are good, some of them are bad, and some of them are good but badly implemented. But there’s something to it. A charming flavor that calls to mind the likes of Bushido Blade, cutting down to the essence of pop samurai media. Samurai Shodown has always been characterized by how swift and brutal rounds can be, but Samurai Shodown III is perhaps the epitome of that ethos. It’s entirely possible for matches to be over in two or three strikes.

The character line-up is one of the reasons why a lot of fans tend to shy away from Samurai Shodown III. The roster is smaller than the previous game, with just twelve characters to choose from. It introduces a few new characters but cuts tons of fan favorites like Charlotte, Cham Cham, and Earthquake. Some of those new characters are a lot of fun to use, and they fit the game’s grittier, more realistic aesthetic better in some ways. It’s a bit hard to hash everything with the greater timeline of the series, and the game doesn’t seem particularly interested in storytelling relative to the other entries. Indeed, one of the things I don’t care for in Samurai Shodown III is in how few chances the characters get to show off their personalities compared to the other games. Story isn’t the biggest thing in fighting games, but in these ACA NEOGEO releases we’re largely relegated to single player so it does take on a slightly greater importance.

There are a lot of gameplay changes here from Samurai Shodown II, and some of them ended up sticking around in the series. There are more buttons dedicated to your weapon attacks, with just one serving as the kick. Throws are out in favor of shoves that leave the enemy open to a good slash or two. After picking your character, you can choose a grade that determines, roughly speaking, how balanced your offense and defense are. Pick the advanced grade and you won’t even be able to guard, with a permanently full Rage Gauge as a consolation prize. Notably, this game brings in the Bust and Slash system that gives you light and dark versions of each character, with slight differences in the movesets between them.

As I mentioned before, matches in Samurai Shodown III can be quick and nasty. You can sidestep attacks, counter-attack, and whip out unblockable slashes. Your Rage Gauge fills up like a shot glass under a Slurpee spout. You can block in the air now, which provides more incentive to take to the skies without fear. Some of these elements didn’t return for the next go-around, and it’s not hard to see why. Even a pair of evenly-matched expert players can feel cheated by how fast things finish, and if you’re up against the CPU your quarters can disappear so fast you’d think your wallet was the dimensional space from which all the uncles of the world pull the coins they pluck from behind children’s ears. And in true SNK fashion, the last boss is a complete and utter… holy smokes, is that Dick Van Dyke?! Sorry, I thought I saw something there.

That being said, we don’t have to worry about blowing all our quarters, do we? Through the magic of the Arcade Archives line, we only need to worry about the sixteen quarters needed to buy the app itself. After that, we can help ourselves to an endless supply of credits. Better still, we have access to those coveted difficulty options. Turn it all the way down and the CPU is only mildly rude. It’s okay, Shaun said you could do it. Go learn the ropes that way and then turn it up again as needed. ACA NEOGEO options are lovely things, and you’ve got the full suite of them here as usual. Not just difficulty, but also all sorts of other things. Tweak as you like.

Also similar to other ACA NEOGEO games, you can play the game with an external controller if you wish. I highly advise it as the motions you need to pull off in this game can be a real bear with the touch controls. You can still have some fun with virtual button bashing without a controller, but there are probably better games to play if that’s all you’ve got. External controllers are also the only way to play multiplayer in this version, and that’s a real shame because I think the particular charms of Samurai Shodown III are best brought out with endless credits and another human. I know I keep banging this drum, but I wish some other option could be figured out for multiplayer in these releases. Most players will have to get by with the CPU opponent, and I just don’t know that I would call that very enjoyable in this game.

Samurai Shodown III probably shouldn’t be anyone’s first Samurai Shodown game, especially in the ACA NEOGEO mobile line with its limited multiplayer options. But its quirky qualities do make it an interesting choice for a second Samurai Shodown game. Because of how much it divided the fandom, Samurai Shodown III saw a lot of its rough edges sanded down or completely cut away in successive entries in the series. That makes it rather unique, and I think there’s something to be said for that. Make sure you pack an external controller of some sort and a lot of patience if you decide to pick this one up, though.

I’ll come right out and say that I think luck favored SNK to an extent. While it turned out the occasional hit and had several popular games under its belt, at the time of the NEOGEO launch SNK was not a company known for turning out varied, high-quality games across numerous genres. It wasn’t exactly Capcom, Konami, Namco, SEGA, or Nintendo. In a lot of ways, the NEOGEO was a very reckless move for the publisher. SNK tried to put out games in all of the hot arcade genres, but in the early going most of its successes and failures mapped its prior strengths and weaknesses quite closely. The one major genre where it found success where it hadn’t before was in one-on-one fighting games. Fortunately for SNK, that was soon to be the only genre most arcade-goers cared about.

Burning Fight ($3.99) is a good example of the pickle SNK could have found itself in. The company knew it needed an answer to the likes of Double Dragon and Capcom’s then-recent hit Final Fight, and somehow Burning Fight is what it came up with. It’s not even a little shy about pulling from its competition, and it’s hard not to come away with a first impression that screams “dollar-store Final Fight“. The game enjoyed very positive reviews and reasonable success in its time, but retroactively it seems to have become something of a punching bag among the overall NEOGEO line-up.

Let’s roll with the idea that not every game can live up to the best in the genre, and it’s not really a reasonable expectation that it should. Burning Fight is, without question, not as good as Final Fight. It’s not fit to be mentioned in the same conversation as Streets of Rage or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Not many games in this genre are. But how is Burning Fight compared to the average side-scrolling beat-em-up? How does it compare to things like 64th Street by Jaleco or Tecmo’s arcade Ninja Gaiden? In that context, it looks a little better.

It’s a perfectly serviceable brawler, neither amazing nor terrible. You have three different characters: the fast but weak guy, the strong but slow guy, and the average guy. Fast guy and average guy even look like Guy and Cody. They walk through a fictionalized version of Osaka with a lot of charming details in the backgrounds, battling a variety of punks, suspiciously familiar pro wrestlers, and even the occasional vehicle. There are lots of destructible objects, and a rather impressive array of weapons you can pick up and use. Seriously, this game tosses weapons at you a mile a minute. The areas you fight in sometimes are so littered in weapons that you can get caught in a cycle of picking them up when you just want to punch a dude.

Your moves include punching a guy, kicking a guy, jumping, and jump-kicking a guy. You can also throw a guy, but it’s not as useful here as it is in most other brawlers. There’s also the standard super attack that costs some of your life, here deployed by pushing the jump and punch buttons at the same time. Not exactly an overwhelming arsenal, and you’ll find that any attempts to get fancy get shut down pretty quickly by your foes. They, by contrast, have all kinds of ways to come at you. Generally speaking, if they’re close enough to punch, you’ll want to punch them. If not, try to kick them. If they’re too far for that, you need to get close. Jump-kicks are rather hit or miss in this game with the way enemies can mob you and shut down your offense, but if you’re feeling frisky by all means give them a try.

The hits have a very peculiar feel to them that you can see in a lot of SNK’s beat-em-ups of the era. It doesn’t feel so much like you are landing strikes on your foes as you are attacking the air they exist in and causing them some form of psychic damage. That said, there’s a certain charm to it and it’s hardly a problem that Burning Fight alone suffers from. One of the secret ingredients to a great game in this genre is making sure the hits have impact. Capcom and SEGA sometimes made that look easier than I think it probably was.

You get five stages to battle through, and they take you through a nice variety of locales. Each one is at the very least capped off with a boss fight, while some of them also feature mid-boss battles. You can also find bonus areas in some sections. Enter these places and you’ll be challenged to destroy some objects in a certain amount of time, with extra points and life refills as your reward for success. It’s a little bit of spice you don’t see in many other games of the time, and while it’s just a small thing I do appreciate it. As mentioned, the background details in the game are really fun. The main characters are a bit bland in terms of animation and so are most of the enemies, but the game does have a few enjoyable touches like having enemies scale in from the background.

As with most games of this type, Burning Fight is almost certainly best enjoyed with a friend. Of course, this is the mobile ACA NEOGEO line, which means the only way you’re going to get a two-player game going is by connecting two external controllers to your device. Games like these really make me wish Hamster had some kind of online multiplayer solution, but what can you do? I will say that you can have a good time here even if you’re using the touch controls, as there really isn’t much need for precise inputs. You’ll probably have a slightly easier time with a controller, but it’s not like you’re going to run out of coins here or anything.

If you’ve played any of Hamster’s recent ACA NEOGEO releases on mobile, you’ll find the array of options and extras quite familiar here. You get the Japanese and international versions of the game, a Score Attack mode, and a timed Caravan mode. There are online leaderboards to compete on, which helps add some life to the game as there are actually quite a lot of interesting scoring opportunities in the game relative to some other beat-em-ups. Difficulty, display, control configuration, and other options are essentially the same as we’ve seen so far in other releases in this line, offering just about everything you would want to see.

Burning Fight is a very, very mediocre beat-em-up for its time. You can have some fun with it, but you probably won’t remember very much about it after you’ve finished it. Nothing it does elevates it from being more than the uninspired Final Fight wannabe that it is, but there’s a certain core pleasure to knocking around heads that is alive and well here. Hamster’s done its usual good job with the conversion, and it’s one of those arcade games that plays decently even with virtual buttons.

It’s a shame there isn’t an easier way to get a two-player game going, because that would add some mustard to a game that desperately needs it. Without that, Burning Fight is what it always was: a completely forgettable scrolling beat-em-up that nevertheless will help you pass an idle hour or so should you require its services. It’s not the kind of game the NEOGEO is known for, and it’s extremely fortunate for SNK that it never had to be. There’s no reality where this should be on your device before Streets of Rage 4, but there are certainly worse ways to get your brawling on.

Anyway, we’re looking at the usual things here. The general features of the ACA NEOGEO line are well-established now, and King of the Monsters is no different. You can play the original or overseas versions of the game, play in arcade mode, and challenge a score attack or timed caravan mode with online leaderboards. You can play with touch controls or use an external controller, and if you have more than one external controller you can play in multiplayer. A wide array of options are available, including difficulty, audio/video, save states, and more. Really, apart from implementing some kind of online multiplayer and maybe including the MVS version for kicks, you couldn’t really ask for more from Hamster here. Nothing unexpected there.

As to the game itself, it’s a fun one. It’s more of a wrestling game than anything else, which makes sense for when and where it released. You can choose one of six different monsters, most of which are pretty clear in their source of inspiration. Geon is a big dinosaur-like creature, Woo is a massive ape, Astro Guy is a giant-sized superhero, and so on. If you’re playing in single-player, you’ll battle the five monsters you didn’t pick as you make your way through a number of Japanese cities, ultimately doing a mirror match against your own monster. You then battle all of the monsters again but with the cities shuffled. Complete that, and congratulations: you’re the King of the Monsters.

Each character has an assortment of moves at their disposal, and you’ll need to use them to wear down your opponent before successfully pinning them. Yes, the giant monsters battle to a three-count fall. I guess everything has its own rules. Simple enough, and more than a little button-bashy, but it works. Unfortunately, like many other wrestling games of the era there really isn’t a whole lot of depth to the thing. A sequel would follow the next year that added a few new elements, but at the end of the day this series is more about immediate cheap thrills than long-term engagement. A rough proposition for a $150 cartridge, but not the worst thing for a few quarters here and there, or perhaps a few bucks on a mobile device.

It is, however, a game that benefits greatly from being able to play with other humans. Being realistic, most players who pick this up on mobile aren’t going to be equipped to do that. Most people playing on mobile will be enjoying it as a single-player affair, and I don’t know how long it’s going to leg out in that context. If you enjoy giant monsters and are fine with a glorified 1980s wrestling game with some of the most awesome set dressing ever, you can probably find four dollars’ worth of entertainment out of it. Something to fire up every so often when the memory of its repetitiveness fades and enjoy a bash or two.

All that said, the game isn’t too bad to play with touch controls should you have to do so. This isn’t a combo-heavy game with a bunch of tricky motions to bust out. The pace is deliberate enough and the controls simple enough that the touch controls are more than capable of keeping up. So if you happen to have fond memories of playing King of the Monsters alone or watching kids play it on Nick Arcade, you’ll get a decent enough experience here even if you don’t have a controller.

King of the Monsters may not be the best NEOGEO game, but it is assuredly an iconic one. The concept of taking a wrestling game and mashing it up with giant monsters is an entertaining one, even if the reality doesn’t quite match up to the image. It’s a game at its best when you have someone else to play with, but that’s not an easy thing to manage on mobile even if it is technically possible. Still, as a corny bit of action to fire up now and then, you could do a lot worse than this.

Let’s start with the good news. As NEOGEO games go, Zed Blade maps fairly well to touch controls. You’ll likely have a better time with an external controller, but it’s not terribly cumbersome to play it with the touchscreen. Hamster has kitted out this release similarly to the others in this line. You get both the Japanese and Overseas versions of the game, support for external controllers, multiple modes of play with support for leaderboards, and an embarrassingly thorough array of options to tweak to your liking. While none of this is new to those who have already dipped into the ACA NEOGEO mobile waters, there isn’t really anywhere else for Hamster to go here. It’s as full of a package as you could ever ask for.

Unfortunately, all of that is in service to a rather substandard game this time around. Zed Blade was the sole NEOGEO game from developer NMK, a Japanese company that kicked around from the mid-1980s to the end of the 1990s. This is normally where I would tell you what it is best known for, but none of its twenty or so games really made much of a mark. Its biggest success was probably the Game Boy title Rolan’s Curse, in as much as it is its only game that got a sequel. By and large, NMK paid for its daily bread by making middling shoot-em-ups for the likes of Jaleco and UPL. Zed Blade saw the developer joining up with SNK for exactly the sort of affair it tended to busy itself with.

The game launched in September of 1994 for the NEOGEO arcade hardware, so we’re well and truly out of the launch period here. While there were plans for the game to make the usual trip to the home version of the NEOGEO and the NEOGEO CD, nothing ever came of them. That’s typically not a great sign for the quality of a NEOGEO game unless there were some licensing circumstances at play. Indeed, Zed Blade didn’t exactly light the arcade world on fire. That’s not entirely its fault, mind you. Shoot-em-ups didn’t put butts in seats the way they once had by the time the mid-90s rolled around. But if any shooter was to do it, it sure wasn’t going to be this one.

Again, Zed Blade isn’t a bad game. It has a neat concept where you’re battling against a rogue AI that can cobble together forces from whatever is laying about. The soundtrack is quite good, as one would expect from the work of Manabu Namiki, who would go on (among many other achievements) to create the music for most of Cave’s legendary shooters. You get a lot of customization options, with three pilots available and a decent array of selectable weapons. You can choose your forward shot type, your rear shot type, and your missile type. There are three different options for each, and if you add in the pilot selection there’s quite a bit of variety here. Those weapons will also power-up as you collect icons, and there’s also a special bomb that you can use a limited number of times.

The visuals are nicely detailed, though the colors are on the blander side of things. The enemy designs aren’t very exciting in general, though some of the bosses are cool. For a 1994 NEOGEO game it really doesn’t have much graphical dazzle, but it’s not hideous either. There are eight stages of varying degrees of quality, with a few inspired bits sandwiched between a whole lot of overly familiar locales. It takes about a half hour to sail through the whole game, which is par for the course for many shoot-em-ups. As always, it comes down to the scoring system.

One of Zed Blade‘s quirks is in how you can rack up points. For the most part, it’s similar to other horizontal shooters of its era. Destroy enemies, grab power-ups, don’t die. But you can also earn points by hitting things that can’t be destroyed. So if you want to destroy the bosses quickly, aim for their weak spot. If you want to milk them for points, aim anywhere but. I’m not sure that it works, but I appreciate there was some effort here to do something different. It makes for an interesting Caravan/Score Attack, if nothing else.

The biggest problem with Zed Blade, apart from its bland visual style, is in how it plays. Your ship is just a bit on the big side, with a hit box to match. Depending on the character and weapons you choose, the game can feel like a slog with extremely spongy popcorn enemies until you get properly powered up. It takes a while before you feel like you’re commanding any real destructive force, and you always feel like you’re taking up an uncomfortable amount of screen real estate. This is one of those games where nudging obstacles and walls will blow you up, too. Mind the roof.

If you’re just looking for another arcade shoot-em-up, Zed Blade does the job. It doesn’t do it particularly well, and it probably won’t etch itself into your memories with any force. But it’s okay. For its part, Hamster has given it the same star treatment it has offered the other ACA NEOGEO titles. If enjoying Zed Blade is a thing you want to do, this is a classy way to do it. Those who are looking to collect them all will probably have fun playing through this once or twice. Those who are more selective will want to look elsewhere for their arcade kicks.

But launch titles tend to benefit from a bit of a halo effect, don’t they? Especially launch titles on flashy new hardware like the NEOGEO. NAM-1975 was indeed a cool-looking game, and there was a certain spectacle to it. You could say the same for most of the launch games, though. NAM-1975‘s popularity came from a variety of factors. First, its theme. Enough time had passed since the close of the Vietnam War that America was now looking back on it through the scope of entertainment. Platoon and Full Metal Jacket were big hits in the theaters. Tour of Duty was holding up its end on TV. It was only natural that video games based on the topic would also garner interest.

TAD Corporation’s Cabal had been a solid success only a couple of years before, bringing greater popularity to a relatively quiet branch of the shoot-em-up genre. Gallery shooters were enjoying a brief time in the sun as a result, and it’s likely no coincidence that SNK chose to have one at the NEOGEO’s launch. The last piece of the puzzle? NAM-1975 is just a really good arcade game. You shoot your way through six intense stages of action, picking up weapons, lobbing grenades, and rolling your way out of danger as best as you can. The graphics are great, and the digitized voices had a lot of impact at the time. It’s hard as hell, and it plays a nasty trick with its final boss, but such was the state of arcade games at the time.

If you’re unfamiliar with gallery shooters, they’re somewhat similar to a light gun shooter but without the light gun. You not only need to move your crosshair around, but you also have to keep your on-screen character out of the line of fire. If you’re shooting, you’re not moving. Part of the fun of games like these is in knowing how to balance your defense and your offense, and NAM-1975 certainly nails that aspect. You’re given a standard gun and a limited supply of grenades, plus the handy ability to dash and roll. You can collect new weapons with limited ammo, plus some more powerful bombs. If you keep your eyes peeled for hostages to rescue, you may even end up with a little temporary support.

Classic gallery shooters can be a little tough to play from a modern perspective. It can be tricky to handle the aiming if you’re used to things like twin-stick controls. It’s even weirder when you’re using touch controls. Everything in your instincts will make you want to touch to aim, but you’ll have to manipulate the virtual stick to move your crosshairs around the screen, all while being careful with those virtual buttons so that you’re moving your character when you want to. I can see why NAM-1975 was selected for the ACA NEOGEO treatment this early on, but it’s perhaps not the smoothest of transitions to touch controls.

Of course, like the other mobile ACA NEOGEO releases, this game has support for external controllers. If you have one of those, this game plays just as well as it ever did. Throw in all of the other features that come with this line, and you’ve got a nice slice of arcade action with plenty of options and extras to tinker with. For the price of a mere sixteen quarters, NAM-1975 is easy to recommend. You get both the Japanese and overseas versions of the game, a few different modes to play, online leaderboards, and if you scrounge up a second controller you can even enjoy the pleasures of co-op multiplayer.

If you don’t have an external controller, it’s a lot harder to get behind this release. It’s not anything that Hamster has done wrong, but just that the game isn’t a good fit for touch controls. No amount of love put into the package itself could change that. If you think you can wrestle with the touch controls and enjoy yourself anyway, then give it a shot. After all, you can keep feeding in credits to compensate for any mistakes, at least up until the point that you can’t. If you practice well enough you may even get the hang of it. But it’s clearly not the optimal way to enjoy this classic.

NAM-1975 can’t rely on its impressive presentation as much these days, but the core gameplay here remains as enjoyable as ever provided you have an external controller. If you’re stuck with touch controls you will most likely find this a rather difficult game to deal with. That’s on top of the game’s already sharp difficulty curve, which hits a nasty spike with the final boss. You can still enjoy it with virtual controls, but you’re most likely going to be fighting it the whole way through. A solid classic, a game with serious historical value, but maybe not the greatest fit for mobile.

As for the story… well, the game starts you out in a serious accident. There’s been an explosion and you, and (almost) only you, are left behind in the rubble. You get yourself up, dust off, and almost immediately meet one of the only other people in the game — Amber. Turns out, that’s a great thing because you two just so happen to need each other as you’re both trapped in different parts of the building and need to get out. It’s a lukewarm story at the best of times but luckily your partner’s voice helps to bring life to it as she narrates much of the world around you. As for you… you can’t talk because of smoke inhalation. The entire game. Some 5 hours or so. To tell the truth, it was a pretty weak way of introducing a necessary component to the game — photographs.

To get Amber to talk about things in the world, move components around like catwalks or big industrial equipment, and more, you’ll need to take pictures. This can be done endlessly and also serves to give more life to the setting. It’s simple and easy, takes only a second, and can never be done too much. The other big part of this first-person platformer is to use your SMP device. It’s basically a handheld-printer that can convert items to supplies and blueprints. You’ll go around the building collecting both blueprints and supplies to create what could’ve and should’ve been almost anything but is instead just a small handful of things. I was very disappointed the more I played as the majority of the things you’ll be making are just bridges and some rather uninspired pipes or other connectable objects. Because of this, the vast majority of puzzles are very simple and require little thought or effort.

The controls of the game are very simple. You’ll be using the left side of your screen to move and the right to move the camera. As such, it’s much like a controller, though it feels like it would be best as a VR game. I’d also recommend right at the start that you change your camera sensitivity up to at least 60% as I found myself hating the camera’s camel-like pace at the beginning. There’s also a few buttons like the picture and crouch but they’re just a tap and that’s it.

Glitches and errors are a very important aspect of any game for me and unfortunately, this one had a few that upset me greatly. For starters, there are times through the story where there’s a lot going on and you might just find it force-quitting on you. This is a minor annoyance as it almost always saves before these moments. There was one, though, that really grinds my gears. The ever-hated, game-breaking, “you-cannot-progress-even-though-the-puzzle-is-correct” glitch. It only happened once but, after I finished a puzzle, the game simply wouldn’t progress. Amber wouldn’t respond to me, I spent a good 40 minutes trying to change things, and only on a reset of the app and redoing the puzzle did it work.

There’s also the problem of a stark lack of hints and clarity in some areas. The ending of the game is particularly hard as there was almost no sense of what I was meant to be doing. I found myself fumbling more than once and, while difficulty is always welcome in any game, confusion and uncertainty is not.

The Bradwell Conspiracy does a lot of good, though. It introduces us into a relatively interesting story, opens up what could be a great mechanic for future games, and creates a character you’re invested in even though you’re never invested in your own at all. I wished for more the entire time and I very much am interested in a second game if there should be one. It’s a basis of a good game but that’s all it ever lives up to as the game is neither long nor varied. Puzzles and platformer aspects get stale far too quickly and I feel it relies too heavily on Amber which gives your own character just the status of Tool #6428.

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NOTE: The Bradwell Conspiracy is available on mobile exclusively as part of Apple Arcade, a premium gaming subscription service from Apple. Without being a subscriber to Apple Arcade you cannot download and play this game. Apple Arcade is $4.99 per month and does come with a free one month trial, you can learn more about it on Apple’s official website or by visiting our dedicated Apple Arcade forum.

No matter how interesting it sounds, though, Cure Hunters is a free game, which means it’s surely riddled with pay-to-win in-app purchases, ridiculous grinding, and forced ads, right? Unfortunately, while I haven’t yet encountered impossible enemies designed to force a purchase, the ridiculous amount of advertisements (the majority of which are unavoidable) is rivaled only by the amount of grinding required to unlock new characters.

Simply put, while there are only three possible in-app purchases, their absence is more than made up for by the prevalence of thirty-second ads. Although their placement seems to be mostly random, it’s safe to say that there will be an ad either at the end of a level, or the start of the following. These ads cannot be skipped. In addition to these ads, there are options to watch more to double the after-game gold coins earned, immediately gain fifty gold coins, or gain extra blue coins for guns, ammo, and health packs. While these optional ads would be bothersome enough on their own, adding full-screen, unskippable ads at the end of every level is just irritating. At least they aren’t banner ads, though.

The forced ads can, of course, be removed with any in-app purchase, which start at $1.99. These aren’t there to provide a sense of pride and accomplishment support the developers, and remove advertisements, of course. No, they give a varying amount of gold coins (up to eighteen thousand), the currency used to unlock new characters. While eighteen thousand coins sounds like a lot, it really isn’t—enough to purchase the two most expensive unlocks, and a little more besides. While that would take out roughly half the total grind, Cure Hunters is not relying on a wealth of content for its long-term replayability, but the desire of its players to collect all the heroes and their willingness to grind for them. This grind is just as tedious as it sounds, and it quickly turns the initial fun of blasting through levels into a time consuming slog.

Looking past the ads and grind, however, the game is fun. The platforming is solid, enemies (especially those jumping frogs) are difficult, and the satisfaction of beating a zone is well worth the frustration of getting there. While each character has its own starter gun (ranging from a pistol to what I can only assume is a rocket-powered cat!), additional armaments can be purchased between levels, as well as ammunition and health packs. These weapons can, supposedly, be upgraded as well; although I haven’t seen that option anywhere or otherwise figured out how.

Completing a zone requires finding and killing all enemies. Not difficult, for the most part, although the enemy combinations can at times be troublesome. The level design itself is not particularly complex—in fact, I would almost call it down right straight-forward—although that is somewhat made up for by the variety of levels available in each zone. While there are only two levels before a boss fight, those two levels are drawn from a pool of at least five maps for each zone, so it takes a fair bit of time to see them all. Each level usually features one, sometimes more, “secret” areas with a cache of crates containing blue coins (used to purchase weapons, ammunition, and health packs during a run), ammo, or sometimes even health packs. Finding them all is almost always worthwhile, although they can be a little risky to access. It is not uncommon for there to be traps blocking the path. Fortunately, the most common variety—a block of spears—can be destroyed with a bit of effort. Alternatively, a quick dodge through does the trick.

Bosses, on the other hand, are no laughing matter. They are hard, with a ton of health and a unique mechanic each. There is no randomness in how bosses are encountered, as there is when determining which levels are played—the first boss, for example, will always be an overgrown fly. They always have a set stage, and beating them with the starter gun is a tall order, though certainly not impossible. While the rest of the game is good, boss fights are definitely its strong point.

When I initially downloaded Cure Hunters I expected to get a hard, fast-paced platformer with a retro feel. And that’s exactly what it is. Unfortunately, it brought along some unwanted baggage: Ads, ads, and more ads with a dash of in-app purchases. While the latter was expected, and grudgingly accepted, the former was not. Even though it’s a free game, and even though the ads can be removed with a fairly cheap in-app purchase, ads are not great experience. Especially the unskippable variety. I want to play the game I downloaded, not watch an ad for another I probably don’t care about—if I wanted to do that, I’d open YouTube. Since they are integral to the game’s monetisation strategy (and somewhat more indirectly, the progression system), though, I would be astounded if they were removed.

As it stands, Cure Hunters is really a game for folks who want that retro platformer feel, or a challenging roguelite, but don’t necessarily want to pay for a ported oldie or a new game. For everyone else, the monetisation strategy will be a big red flag. Whether it’s worth downloading despite that… well, that’s up to personal preference and what you’re willing to tolerate.

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Jared has already detailed the subscription model, but briefly: the subscription is $2.99/month. If you bought the first episode, the second should unlock for free. For a limited time you can purchase the first two episodes for $4.99; otherwise, each episode sells individually for $5.99. This is where I had my first problem: I had to pay for a subscription to access The Secret, despite already owning the first episode. Still, I did it for the sake of… I don’t know, science? I also have a hard time with change so try to push through that, which is what I’m trying to do here. Each episode takes an hour or two to play through; personally, I find $2.99 is reasonable assuming one episode is actually released per month; otherwise, for an hour of playtime, $6 seems a tad expensive.

This episode centers around Rachel, who wakes up in a mysterious mansion filled with dark shadow monsters. She needs to avoid the monsters while solving puzzles with little to no mistakes, or the monsters will take over. The game is essentially a point-and-click adventure with puzzle elements. Rachel struggles with anxiety over being perfect at her job, and seems to sacrifice fun for the sake of it. Prior to her arrival at the Mansion, which was a last-minute call from work, she was in Hong Kong.

Whereas The Awakening involved astral projection, The Secret takes its cues from time travel. The supernatural is still heavily present, as mental illness manifests in physical forms that make life, and mere existence, seem impossible at times.

Radiant One: The Secret is completed through environment puzzle-solving. Think escape room plus shadow monsters. For example, in the first level Rachel has to find the key to a drawer (the right key, as there are several) to pry wood off a closet, take a spray bottle from inside to extinguish a fire and crawl through the fireplace to an alcove. The level continues like that, as do the later ones. The further you progress, the more difficult it becomes to avoid the monsters that have manifested from your mind.

At times, Rachel has to concentrate to do something. A white bar shows up at the bottom that you have to try and follow by touching the marked area and staying over it – the mechanic it reminds me most of is fishing in Stardew Valley. I call it the concentration bar because it appears when Rachel needs to focus all her energy on one task, but concentration is unpredictable and fleeting when burdened with anxiety and that’s represented by the movement of the bar.

The thing is, something is different. I struggled to pinpoint what had changed between the first and second episodes. Granted, astral projection was removed, and that’s something I had a prior interest in. But Rachel’s story is rooted in anxiety, and anyone that knows me on a personal level knows how much I struggle with perfectionism and anxiety, to the point I will avoid what I need to do for months (or even years) because I don’t think I can do it perfectly. Rachel’s fears echo what my own mind has told me.

In the end, I was able to pinpoint the difference. It isn’t the game’s change to an episodic/subscription model – it is the addition of micro-transactions. There is a premium currency for sale, gems. Gems can be used to be untouchable in a single level (five gems each time) or keep helpful Hank the cat around (20 gems). My question: why? Just, flat-out, why? This episode feels less immersive, and constantly having a bright gumbull machine asking you to spend real money removes you from the situation at hand and – oddly enough – gives you anxiety about whether it is needed or you can spend the money. So a game about mental health isn’t good for your mental health. Speak of ironic.

The next several episodes have been announced. Following The Awakening and The Secret are The Avalanche, The Eclipse, and The Enlightenment. We’ll see where the game goes after this, but I can say for certain that narrative is paramount and saves Radiant One: The Secret from being a total dud with this new model. The micro-transactions and confusing (possibly broken?) new episodic subscription/purchase model keep this episode from being what the first was. The connection isn’t quite there anymore. And that really upsets me, based on how much I enjoy and identify with both stories to date.

Ah, I love ominous opening paragraphs like that, don’t you? SEGA Heroes comes to us, I believe, from SEGA of Europe and Demiurge Studios, the same pairing that brought us last year’s Crazy Taxi Tycoon. The premise is sound enough. Put together a team of legendary SEGA characters and battle against groups of enemies in matching-puzzle gameplay. Use the resources earned from those battles to power up your team or get new characters, and try to tackle the next stage. Not the most original idea around, but neither was kart racing by the time the SEGA All-Stars got around to it, and that worked out fine.

It doesn’t hurt that SEGA’s current mobile group has a real eye for the deeper cuts from SEGA’s history. Sure, Sonic and his dubious pals are here, as they are going to be in any endeavor such as this. But he’s not your first character, and unless you decide to break the game by throwing money at it, he won’t be your fourth or fifth or tenth character, either. Instead, you start off with Blaze from Streets of Rage. You’ll soon be joined by Ax Battler from Golden Axe, Ai-Ai from Super Monkey Ball, and Amy from Sonic the Hedgehog. After that, players are going to earn different characters depending on their luck and priority, but you can expect to run into familiar faces from Phantasy Star, Jet Set Radio, and even the PlayStation 2 Shinobi games. At the moment, only a handful of games are represented, but they certainly aren’t all obvious ones.

In lieu of the variety of static art used by many games of this type, SEGA Heroes has each character rendered in a more or less uniform art style, complete with full animations for attacks, special moves, win poses, and so on. I can honestly take or leave the basic art style used here, but that’s a subjective thing so I’m not going to harp on it too much. At the very least, I love how the characters are animated and really appreciate that their special moves all fit so well. Ax Battler throws a bunch of potions in the air like a player who forgot that the A-button is for magic and not his basic attack, blasting the enemies with a dizzying earthquake. Amy whips out her Piko-Piko hammer and bops a foe on the melon. Joe Musashi leaps into the air and fires a fan of shuriken down on the enemy party. Each character has three special moves, so all of the abilities you’d expect to see are here.

The fanservice isn’t just limited to the player characters, either. The stage backgrounds and enemies are all drawn from various SEGA titles as well. Unfortunately, whether they didn’t want to use it or simply couldn’t, no classic SEGA music is included in this game. The newly-created tracks are certainly evocative of SEGA games, but it would have been nice if the soundtracks of the original games were included here. Well, at least you have Alis Landale and Gilius Thunderhead team up with Gongon and Gum to defeat Robotnik and Mr. Big. That counts for something in my books. When I consider the possibilities for the future, provided SEGA keeps on adding content, I feel a little giddy.

New characters are obtained by collecting character shards. You’ll find some of these as drops in certain clearly-marked stages. You can also buy them from one of the game’s few different shops, each of which has a rotating selection to offer at least once a day. Some shards will also be given as rewards for completing achievements, and this seems to be the easiest way to get Sonic on your team. Finally, you’ll also be able to pull some random shards out of chests. There are two chests that will pop four times a day each, with a cooldown timer that ensures you have to check in every so often if you want to get all the goodies. Shards are also used to increase a character’s rank, which makes them more powerful and allows them to enter more difficult stages.

Along with rank, various other aspects of each character can be improved. You can spend coins to raise their level up to whatever your current player level is. Collect materials and you’ll be able to upgrade their special moves. Every ten levels, characters will hit a cap, and you’ll need yet another type of material to bust through it. Some of these resources will be earned from chests, but your main source of them is to complete special event missions that rotate daily. I’m aware this is starting to sound complicated; regrettably I’ve just begun to explain all of this cruft. Each shop requires a different currency to buy things. The main shop takes coins, gems, or real money. You’ll get a fair amount of coins just by playing, though once you really get into the game you’ll go through them like water. Gems come at a slower pace, but you’ll get some through chests and completing goals. Real money, I leave to you to figure out.

The arena shop, meanwhile, wants arena coins. You earn those by playing the game’s arena mode, where you face off against another player’s team. Each attempt at the arena requires an arena key. You’ll be given three each day, and you can buy more using gems. As you defeat other teams, your rank will rise, which results in increasingly nice daily bonuses. Then there’s the survival shop, which takes survival coins. You’ll earn those by playing survival mode, which requires a survival key. Those replenish at a rate of one per day, or you can shell out some gems to buy some. Options everywhere. One good thing is that the event missions, arena, and survival mode do not use any of your stamina. Oh right, there’s a stamina meter in here, too. It refills dreadfully slowly, but most chests will drop some stamina into your gauge, which mitigates that a little bit.

That stamina is used for the game’s main story mode, where you’ll play through pre-set stages as you make your way through each zone. Each zone yields shards for two or three different heroes, and you’re probably going to be farming those quite a bit. You’ve got to keep your main team competitive if you want to get anywhere, and you’re going to need lots of shards, coins, and materials to keep up lest you hit a very hard wall. Luckily, the game offers a kindness in that once you’ve completed a level with three stars, you can simply farm it in exchange for the requisite amount of stamina at the tap of a button. This will drain your stamina in seconds, but at least you don’t have to spend your time re-doing the same stages again and again.

Because here’s the spanner in the whole works, even if you’re familiar with and can tolerate all of that stamina, key, gem, and material nonsense: the core gameplay just isn’t very good. It’s a painfully slow and simple variation on Bejeweled. You match one piece at a time in a playfield that’s really too small to offer a lot of strategy, then watch the pieces slowly fall into place. If you make big matches, you’ll earn a star piece, and if you match that, you’ll use a special move. Each character corresponds to a particular color, and making a match in that color will trigger their attack while also filling their super meter. Once that’s filled, you can tap their portrait to use their special moves. I just can’t find this kind of puzzle all that compelling in a post-Puzzle & Dragons world. Thanks to the small height of the playfield, I feel like my outcomes are determined far more by whatever faux-random routine the computer uses to chuck new pieces into the field than by anything I’ve done. And it’s just. So. Slow.

It’s too bad, because I can get around all that other jazz. It’s commonplace at this point, so whatever. I’ll go get your 25 red fleep-floops and sixty-three magic gems to raise my axe swing to level four or what-have-you, because that’s just how this stuff goes anymore. But I have to at least enjoy the battle portion, because otherwise this is just a lot of annoyance for nothing more than a few half-hearted strums of my nostalgia strings. It’s not that I hate the puzzle gameplay in SEGA Heroes, but it doesn’t do a thing for me. It’s something I deal with to get the goodies that allow me to collect my favorite characters, and I can’t help but feel that’s the wrong way around.

That’s why, in spite of how well I feel they handled the fanservice and presentation, I can’t recommend this game with much vigor. If you like SEGA, you might want to rotate SEGA Heroes in as your game to play when you only have a few minutes to kill and don’t want to put in a lot of effort. In that context, it’s innocuous enough, and every so often you’ll get to add Knuckles to your party, so that’s cool. But I wish the core puzzle gameplay had had half as much thought and attention to detail put into it as the monetization systems seem to have received, because then we might have something pretty great instead of a generic game with a lovely SEGA label slapped on the tin.

The way the original played was, and still is, super clever. You slide rows of triangles to make matches, and then as those matches cleared themselves from the board, additional tiles slid in based on the orientation of your iPhone. The amount of depth the game had with its strategy was really sort of shocking, as stringing together your best matches involved a lot of thinking of which direction you wanted triangles to fill in from- Which really was unlike anything else available at the time.

We were so captivated by the game we posted about it a second and third time, calling it “one of the better buys currently available on the iTunes App Store" once it finally launched. Where Trism really started to make waves was when developer Steve Demeter revealed that he had made $250,000 in two months. Before then, most assumed that things on the App Store were doing OK, but being an Apple platform it was super reasonable to expect that selling iPhone games would be a lot like selling Mac games: Sure, there was money to be made there, but it wasn’t anything to shout about. This truly was a tweet heard ’round the world:

Steve’s brief mention of the profits of Trism was effectively the gunshot signaling the start of the App Store gold rush marathon. Suddenly, iPhone development was no longer this weird niche thing, and seemingly overnight everyone announced their upcoming App Store title.

Before Demeter single handedly kicked off the rush to iPhone development, he actually announced two new Trism games in the summer of 2008: Trism 2 which woud emphasize multiplayer gameplay and Trism: Puzzle Master which would expand on one of the specific game modes inside of Trism. Nearly ten years later from this announcement, Trism II is now available on the App Store.

The truly odd thing about Trism II and what makes this review super awkward to write, is if the game had a year long development cycle and was released in the summer of 2009, it would have been an instant classic. Trism was still in the minds (and phones) of most iOS gamers (particularly as we included it in our 2008 best games list, and it constantly was featured by Apple) and a sequel which adds new power-ups, a storyline, an item system, and everything else would have been a complete revolution compared to the incredibly basic titles that were flooding the App Store.

In 2018 though? The only people left who remember Trism are the oldest of old school iPhone gamers and anyone who has read books or articles on the history of the App Store. With the clout of Trism largely washed away by the sands of time, all we’re left with is a relic of a bygone era of App Store gaming and a $2.99 puzzle game that’s just kinda-sorta of OK at best. Stranger yet, practically everything that made the original Trism unique or interesting has been replaced by a odd assortment of ancillary mechanics that seem to just be borrowed from other popular puzzle games of the last decade.

For instance, instead of the ultra-clever tilting mechanic mentioned earlier, new triangles just sort of slide in from the top. Instead of sliding rows around with swiping gestures, you’re just tapping to drop triangles into a hexagonal grid, nearby triangles disappear, and if you match enough of them (or specific patterns of triangles) special powered up triangles spawn which can clear out many more triangles: Sort of like how matching multiple blocks works in … basically every puzzle game released now.

The levels themselves are also awkwardly structured at times, with moments where you’ll actively need to avoid finishing a level because you need a higher score to gain enough stars to unlock the next. One interesting element of scoring is the combo system, where you increase your score multiplier based on how many matches of a single color you make in a row without matching a different color. I have enjoyed the strategic element of setting up massive chains of matches, but often there isn’t often a whole lot of reason to go to the effort unless you’re just chasing a high score.

The absolute strangest addition, however, is an extensive amount of dialog in the game. If you’ve played any of King’s games, like the recently released Diamond Diaries Saga there’s definitely some exposition to set the scene, but it’s more or less limited to “Hey, you, gather diamonds." “Cool, you’ve got enough diamonds to make this piece of jewelry, go get more." Trism II has an unbelievable amount of game-stopping text for a puzzle game, both intensely explaining somewhat obvious game mechanics and expanding on a story, and cast of characters, which largely just feels unnecessary and a little weird. Performance of the game isn’t great either, with odd loading screens here and there that pop up- Even on my iPhone X.

All that being said, Trism II is still an interesting piece of iOS gaming history. The game isn’t bad, it just feels odd to be released as a premium game in 2018 when the App Store is absolutely flooded with truly fantastic puzzle games (most of which are free). As we’ve mentioned many times on our podcast, the App Store is at a point where you really, really need to stand out to get any traction, and being yet another puzzle game that simply “isn’t bad" really isn’t enough.

This feels really weird to say, but if you haven’t heard of the Trism games, I’d just download the original. It works fine on iOS 11, although it hasn’t been updated for modern screen sizes so there are black bars. The tilting and sliding mechanics still feel unique, and the graphical styles and old school iPhone OS pop-ups give it a fabulous vintage flavor. Trism II is a bit harder to recommend, but if you’re among the many ultra old school iOS gamers still lurking around TouchArcade, it’s worth checking out just for the nostalgia blast and the sheer curiosity of playing a sequel to an iPhone classic that has been ten years in the making.

App Store Link: Trism II, $2.99

You play as some kind of space explorer with a little ship that doesn’t have much more than four walls and a shop. Each session has you docking with a massive, seemingly-abandoned ship that quickly reveals itself to be quite occupied indeed. With the doors shutting behind you as you progress through each zone, there’s nowhere to go but forward. Luckily, you have three weapons at your disposal. First, you can do a nifty double-jump that is basically the key to surviving any length of time. Second, you’ve got a shop that can provide you with upgrades if you have the coins for them. And finally, you’ve got… well, you’ve got an actual weapon, a gun. It’s not a great gun, but you can upgrade it and it has bottomless ammo. The shop sells an assortment of other guns, along with a couple of temporary power-ups. Once you’ve bought them, they will randomly appear during the game.

Now, as I mentioned, you’ve got nowhere to go but straight ahead. But don’t take that to mean that you’re rushed, as you can move forward or backward at your own pace. The ship is separated into zones, and as you progress into each one a wall will close behind you, but you’re free to run around in the current zone as you like. The thing is, though, that you’ll probably want to be moving forward as much as possible. This ship is positively loaded with traps and swarming with enemies, and the more you sit still the higher the chance that you’ll get dusted by one of them. It’s easy enough to take things slow and safe in the beginning, but once the exploding guys start showing up, you really need to shake a leg. When they blow up, they’ll take out a section of the floor with them, and depending on what else is going, that can easily be the end of you.

This is where Deep Space is at its most interesting. Enemies aren’t just dangerous because of their direct attacks, but also with how they interact with everything else. When a green worm explodes and leaves mucous everywhere, gumming up laser traps and gunking up the floor, it may seem like a boon. And it can be, but not if one of the aforementioned exploding chaps rolls along and makes a new pit in front of the goo. Jumping out of the slime requires you to jam on the jump button, making it tougher to time the necessary double-jump that will get you safely over the new window. Worms that fall on your head and temporarily take control of your character are generally just a minor annoyance, but if there’s an open pit, they can be deadly. On the other hand, if the floor is coated with slime, it’ll slow you down, perhaps allowing you to regain control before something really bad happens.

The weapons also have strategic value. While it’s certainly preferable to shoot down a bomber before he explodes right in front of you, he’ll still blow up where you drop him. That is, unless, you use the gun that encases the enemy in a bubble and floats them safely away. Since those guns appear randomly and have limited ammo, however, you can’t really guarantee you’re going to have the gun you need when you need it most. Still, it’s pretty cool when things work out just right. Bubbling up a bomber or using a grenade launcher to take out traps always feels good, and helps sell the cohesiveness of the game on the whole.

It’s not all sunny, unfortunately. There are a couple of issues that keep Deep Space from being as compelling as it could have been. The game uses virtual buttons for its controls, which wouldn’t be a big deal if it weren’t for the buttons sometimes not registering. Most of the time this is just a small hassle, but if the jump button doesn’t fire off the way you were expecting at a critical moment, it can mean the end of your run. The game also starts to hit a bit of a been-there, done-that feeling quite rapidly. There’s just not enough variety going on in the level designs themselves. For all the enemies and traps, you’re really only running down long hallways with small changes in elevation. The game is also pretty difficult, and it’s not always kind about things. With how busy the screen can be, it’s easy to miss retracted traps only to get stung by them when they pop out. Some combinations of enemies and traps can seem utterly cruel.

Basically, if you’re just looking to fill some time, Deep Space will do that. It’s really easy to pick up and play, and starting a new run is as zippy as you need it to be in this sort of affair. There’s a certainly mindless joy to scooting along shooting weird bugs and zombie-like aliens, collecting coins, and upgrading your gear. But if you ask more than that from the game, it starts to come apart. It’s just a little too frustrating, a little too repetitive, and a little too insubstantial to hold up to any sort of long-term scrutiny. The Game Center leaderboard support could conceivably help with that if you have a decent group of buddies to compete with, but the same could be said for just about any score attack game. It’s hard to give it too many kudos for that, in other words.

Deep Space has a few cool ideas that help put its nose a little above the water, but it’s a hard game to recommend with much enthusiasm. This is a very well-trodden genre, one where it takes a lot to really stand out. Deep Space just doesn’t have that zing, and in the end it becomes hard to stick with it for very long. Control quirks don’t help matters, either. If you’re just looking for something to pick up and waste a few minutes with now and then, this game will serve you and do so without asking for more money, but that’s about it.

Mirror Land tries to spin some kind of story around a world parallel to our own where people battle using special creatures called Fingermons that apparently come from our real world. Or something like that. There are evil clones, the hero has amnesia and can’t remember their surely uneventful past, and rivals a-plenty. The plot is rolled out in conversations that occur before and after completing story missions, events that become so spaced out over time that it was hard to remember how things connected. Not that it really matters. This isn’t the sort of thing you’re going to play for its story.

No, you’re probably here to collect monsters and do battle, and I can happily tell you that there’s plenty of both things going on in this game. The only way to earn monsters is through summoning, but there are a few ways to go about that. The splashy location-based summoning lets you call a monster using either easily-obtained coins or somewhat harder-to-come-by cubes. You can only summon once in any given location, at least for a certain period of time. It seemed to refresh after around a day. Your initial location when you start the game seems to be set as the home lab in-game, and monsters you summon near that lab will almost always be disappointing and mostly the of the same type. Head a little farther afield and you might find something interesting, though.

Most of your monsters will probably come from the standard summoning, however, which doesn’t involve your location at all. Instead, you choose which of the three types of summon you want to perform, pay the required amount of coins, and collect a random Fingermon whose rarity more or less corresponds with how much you spent. Basically, you can summon a pretty weak bronze character after every couple of battles, hang in there for a bit and get a more useful silver character, or wait until Lucifer dons a knitted sweater and nab a powerful gold character. Mirror Land contains no IAPs whatsoever, so the only way to fill out your collection of monsters is to grind those coins.

And grind you will, my friends. There are a lot of things I like about Mirror Land. It’s generally well-crafted, the summoning gimmick is neat, and the battle system is actually pretty fun and somewhat original. Battles play out sort of like the Active Time Battle system in many of the Final Fantasy games. Each character has to wait for a meter to fill up before they can do anything. Once the meter is full, you tap on them to use their action. If you tap just as the meter fills up, you’ll get a bonus. You can also tap just before an enemy strikes to block some of the damage at the cost of a bit of your meter. If you tap before the meter fills, the character will not only fail to act, the meter will also slightly drain. It’s lively, somewhat strategic, and surprisingly tense at times.

Unfortunately, it’s also the entire game. You’ll enter battles from a map screen, where you are presented with a random assortment of missions with different conditions. In this one, you can only use bronze monsters. Over here, you’ll have to fight one-on-one. Most of the time, you’ll have a few types to pick from, though they’ll occasionally collapse into a single mission that you’ll have to either pass or fail to get a new spread. The battles earn experience for participating Fingermons, experience for your hero, and either coins or cubes. Fingermons can only level as high as the hero’s level, and your regulars will usually cap out well before your hero gains their next level. Presumably the idea is to keep the players using an assortment of creatures.

The story is advanced by completing special story missions. These appear after you fulfill a certain set of requirements, like fighting a specific number of battles or summoning a particular amount of Fingermons. You can then tackle the story mission and should you win, you’ll be given the next set of requirements. Things move quickly enough in the beginning, but the further in you go, the more time-consuming it gets to satisfy those requirements and the more difficult the story missions themselves become. Some requirements ask you to summon using the location mechanic, so if you can’t go wandering around in the real world, you won’t be able to move forward. Mirror Land eventually devolves into a game where you grind battles to satisfy the requirements to make the story mission pop, then grind more battles to get to a high enough level to be able to beat that mission. Rinse and repeat.

Contributing to the problem is that the fundamentals of combat don’t change as the game unfolds. The same things that you do near the beginning are what you’ll be doing hours down the road. Watch carefully for each character’s turn to come up, try to tap them at the right moment, and hope your team is strong enough to outlast the other. It’s fine when you only need to do a few battles in a row, but when the game starts asking you to do twenty battles or try to level up to match enemies that are fifteen to twenty levels higher than you in order to proceed, it starts to feel like a genuine grind. A grind that demands your attention, mind you, so you can’t get away with doing it while you watch a movie or something.

The characters also feel like they’re not balanced very well. Faster Fingermons are definitely more useful than the rest, as any attack will drain some of a character’s meter and slow their ability to take their own turns. That goes both ways, so using slower Fingermons becomes a formula for frustration as you watch your meter slowly climb only to get knocked down with each swift strike. I picked up a speedy silver character early on who could punch well above her weight level-wise, while a higher-ranked character who was strong but slow tended to get beaten up by far weaker foes.

Besides leveling up through battling, you can also enhance your creatures by spending coins on their special abilities or cubes on ranking them up. Higher ranked characters tend to be a lot more powerful than their low-ranked cousins, though you’ll still want to keep an assortment of characters of each rank around for specific battles. Characters who are silver-ranked or higher have access to special abilities like drain strikes, attack buffs, and so on. They’ll use them automatically, but you can spend your coins to improve their effectiveness. Fingermons come in different types, with the usual system of each type having one type they’re strong against and one that they’re weak to. This doesn’t usually matter that much, but it can make a big difference in tough battles.

It’s not hard to imagine a world parallel to our own where Mirror Land was a free-to-play game with a stamina meter and premium-currency summons. I applaud the developer for not taking that particular route, but I honestly feel like the game works a lot like one of those kinds of affairs. You can run as many battles in a row as you want to here, but I wouldn’t recommend doing too many at once lest the game start to feel tiresome. You can dump your coins into a ton of weaker summons, but you’re probably best to wait until you can afford a shot at the best ones. Progress is slow and tedious, battle strategies don’t change a whole lot over time, and the story feels like a bunch of weak connecting tissue to provide some kind of context for rolling the same situations over and over again. I liked this game in the moment, but the longer I played it, the less I wanted to.

Mirror Land is better than I was expecting given this developer’s track record, and it can be quite enjoyable at times. But for a game that doesn’t try to extract any additional money from the player beyond the initial asking price, it sure feels structured like a game that does. The stop-and-start pacing and tremendous amounts of repetitive grinding required detract greatly from a game that could otherwise be pretty solid. There’s a decent game here, and it’s really only in the incidentals that it doesn’t shake out to be more than that.

Upon launching the game, players will be greeted by your basic game menu. Anyone who has played a mobile game prior should have no trouble figuring out what to do here. The game currently includes 3 episodes with 10 levels in each. When starting up the first level, players are taken to a cutscene that tries to explain why a (presumably?) ten year old child is fighting against dangerous plants and animals. Not activities I’d normally endorse for the regular run of the mill ten year old. Now here’s where it gets dicey. DON’T BLINK (this is where I high five myself for seamless integration of a Doctor Who reference). Should you blink, you will wish you could go back in time, because you will have no idea what has just happened. So I actually did go back and watch it again so I could figure out what was going on and it’s my job to write this and I felt a moral obligation to get the full story.

It starts out with some unintelligible words being mumbled (t-t-today, jr!) and players see a robed figure, who I named Evil Wizard, that goes around turning cute animals and plants into vicious creatures (it’s just his thing I guess). It then jumps to the ten year old child, who eagerly grabs a Norse-looking helmet and sword from a wall under a picture of someone who can only be assumed to be an ancestor of this kid. Off he goes, to fight evil that would almost certainly lead any strong man to death. Either the developers missed a few marks or they really wanted to help me develop my imagination abilities, because I might have made half of this up in my head. You tell me.

Players then start a tutorial, and this is where things get interesting. Cue the DRAGON GUIDE! Players are guided by a random dragon though the tutorial with no explanation of who this dragon guy is or where he came from. This is where you get to use that imagination to decide for yourself. The English translation in the tutorial can be a bit rough, but it gets the job done, and you’re on your way to playing the game. Like many other platformers before it, the goal of each level is to collect coins, and find the 3 stars hidden throughout the levels. Now if you’re worried about beating the timer, stop worrying now. The game lacks any sort of timed mode, and players won’t gain anything from completing levels quickly, which encourages a slower pace.

The controls are decent enough, with arrows to go forward or backward, a jump button, a melee attack, and a thrown weapon attack. There is not much of a challenge to be seen in the first 9 levels, and perhaps this is because the game is being marketed to a younger audience. If you do end up dying, you can spend in-game currency to rewind time, a neat feature in the game. Interestingly enough, when you reach level 10, you end up fighting the very same dragon that taught you the tutorial in the beginning of the game (you mad, bro?). This battle comes up short on intensity, and plays out rather slowly. After you have pummeled said dragon, you are magically friends again and a cutscene shows the player character and dragon literally ride off into the sunset. At the end of a level, the game shows how many coins are earned, and can double them by watching an advertisement. These coins can the be used to purchase various weapons/upgrades or costumes in the store at the main menu, something the game excels in.

Kidarian Adventures has a vast collection of items that can be purchased with either the coins collected in-game, or with diamonds, the game’s premium currency. The items will affect different stats for the character, like more health, better potion efficiency, or better chances to dodge incoming attacks. There are a great many items, and these range from Judge Dredd-esque costumes to throwable legs of meat. I mean who doesn’t use meat as a weapon?  Unfortunately, with all these great items, the game does a bad job of making you actually want to get them. For example, your health starts at level 3, and the maximum any costume in the game will raise it to is 5. This doesn’t give you much of a reason to keep playing, especially when I racked up enough coins to to buy all the top gear in less than a half hour. If the pre-release version of the game I played is any indicator, then Hard Slime is extremely generous, making it easy to purchase more than enough of whatever items or gear you want, simply by playing the game.

The game continues on at pretty much the same pace throughout, with tiny spikes in difficulty caused be certain types of traps, or large amounts of enemies in small areas. Increasing the difficulty was jumping on or near certain objects making my character “stick.” That coupled with some crashes was pretty tricky. With some polish, I think Kidarian Adventures has the potential to be a hugely successful hit. I had fun creating my own backstory to the crazy blank spots left in the story line. The upgrades and in-game extras were interesting to explore and the game play was intuitive. That being said, without refinement, what we are left with for a discerning mobile gamer is a game that, while having some nice art and a lot of customization, fails to live up to its full potential.

You star in Deep State as a young FBI agent of your own design, which could serve as X-Files wish fulfillment until you realize that horrible things tend to happen to the agents on the show. Along with your partner, you start off investigating a murder case that quickly takes a turn for the bizarre. An influential attorney is dead, but was it really her soon to be ex-husband who did it? Which one of the parents abused their child, and why is said child claiming he saw a blue monster before his mom died?

Like good episodes of the TV show, the first case leads you in one direction and then veers off in another, and the hidden object portions of the gameplay are well thought out in terms of how they fit into the story. So well designed, in fact, that you might not even ponder how you’ve played plenty of games like this before. You also get to sample other small mini-games in-between, with some levels featuring things like pattern matching, assembling torn pictures from their pieces, hunting for fingerprints, and even rudimentary combat sequences. There are occasions where it’s not that obvious what you are supposed to be doing, which wouldn’t be so bad except almost everything you’re doing in this game is racing the clock.

You have a partner, naturally, but whether you fall into the classic believer Mulder and skeptic Scully roles is entirely up to you. The narrative provides plenty of moments where you have dialogue choices that affect how the story proceeds (though their impact isn’t necessarily apparent right away), culminating in one big moment at the end of each level where you have to make a binary and difficult decision. Deep State gives you a rundown of how your choices align with all of the other players who have finished the same levels, which is a nice touch.

The issues with some of the game’s systems don’t really come into play as you complete the first episode, and it definitely is a fun and appropriate storytelling choice to package everything like it’s a TV series in its own right. It’s only when you make your way through the second episode that it becomes apparent how many forces are working against you, and we’re not talking about extraterrestrial conspiracies here.

(Although, one supposes you can’t entirely rule it out … )

For starters, there’s an energy system, albeit not a particularly restrictive one. Every time you tackle a hidden object scene, you have to spend some energy, including re-upping if you fail the scene and have to go through it again. By itself, not so bad, since you can ask friends for more energy and but more with the game’s premium currency.

You also have to go back through scenes more than one time to earn enough stars to advance the story. In the first episode, you barely notice this, but it becomes a much digger deal beginning with episode 2. Thankfully, the developers tweak each scene so the challenge is slightly different each time, by making you recognize objects only by their shape or name or rendering the whole picture black and white. It’s still a little frustrating to backtrack, and you end up doing so without the cool story bits you’re used to getting by that point.

But wait, there’s more. Occasionally, you collect evidence and have to wait for the results while it is being examined back at the lab. The first episode gives you wait times of under a minute, luring you into thinking this will be a minor inconvenience, even if experienced mobile gamers will know those timers are going to be longer as you go. Sure enough, the second episode presents one that lasts an hour … unless you pay $0.99 to skip it. That’s not so much building a paywall as picking it up and smacking you in the face with it.

Last but not least are the loot boxes. While working on your cases, you can earn lockers full of goodies like energy items, points boosters or in-game currency. They come in three tiers, the first of which can be opened for free, but the second requires premium currency and the third asks you for $1.99 in real money. That’s kind of a big ask, and even though the premium currency can be earned doing lots of different things throughout the game, there are so many things asking for you to spend it that even that starts feeling a little offensive after a bit.

By the end of the first of the game’s five cases (not counting the one you start with since that’s labeled as a prologue), I had already run into an hour-long timer wait, had two prize lockers I was never going to open since I wasn’t spending real money on them and was stuck having to replay two more levels at the hardest difficulty just to move on to the next case. Any one of these situations would be fine in any F2P game, but added together they made me question whether I wanted to continue seeking the truth.

That’s a shame, too, because The X-Files: Deep State is otherwise assembled from some quality parts, and it just starts to tease you with the involvement of Mulder and Scully themselves when it starts to wear on you. I can only imagine that Fox would find himself getting sucked into playing it for a while between weird encounters only to end up ranting about how “they" were out to get him by striking at him through his wallet. Even if you generally trust no one, you should heed my warnings before you get in too deep.

In all but the technical sense, however, Double Dragon lost its relevance well before the genre it popularized did. The game’s publisher, Technos Japan, knew they had a major hit on their hands and didn’t seem to know what to do with it. They rushed a couple of arcade sequels that drew increasingly little attention from players, and put together a couple of NES versions of said sequels that went in their own directions. The second NES game, Double Dragon 2, was fairly popular, but by the time Double Dragon 3 hit the NES in 1991 the writing appeared to be on the wall. Competition from the likes of Capcom’s Final Fight and SEGA’s Golden Axe had wrested the ball away from the poorly-managed Double Dragon series and the beat-em-up era of the franchise came to a close with the (again) rushed, somewhat tepid 1992 release Super Double Dragon on the Super NES.

The beat-em-up genre only had a couple more strong years ahead of it. Street Fighter 2 had released in 1991, and by and large gamers had turned their interest in co-op head-bashing into the competitive sort. Technos wouldn’t last much longer; the company folded in 1996 after failing to find much success in the 16-bit era of consoles. It wasn’t the end for Double Dragon, of course. A successor company named Million Corp was formed by ex-Technos staff and promptly scooped up the defunct company’s IP, including both Double Dragon and the Kunio-kun/River City brands that had once held such weight. Million wasn’t shy about licensing out the brands and collaborating with various third parties on new projects, so the series still popped up now and then. It was, however, the end of series creator Yoshihisa Kishimoto’s direct involvement with the games. He was sometimes brought in as a consultant, but he never got a chance to make another sequel to his own specifications.

Well, if you wait long enough, just about everything comes around again. Publisher Arc System Works acquired the Technos IP from Million in 2015 and got to work on reviving their most valuable brand: Kunio-kun/River City. But they didn’t forget Double Dragon. In the spirit of other retro throwbacks such as Mega Man 9 and New Super Mario Bros., Arc got in touch with many of the original Double Dragon team members to create a brand-new game that was decidedly old-school. Double Dragon 4 (Free) was announced out of the blue in late December of 2016, with a release on PlayStation 4 and Windows coming just one month later. In September of 2017 the game came to the Nintendo Switch with little fanfare, and it has now arrived on iOS with equally little warning.

On the one hand, it’s kind of amazing to get a new Double Dragon game from the original director, artist, composer, and programmer of the original games. But that’s precisely what separates Double Dragon 4 from other retro revivals, and may well be why it’s so very underwhelming. Most of these creators vanished into the shadows after Technos went bust, and while I doubt they stopped working in the industry entirely, you get the sense that they’re picking up not too far from where they left off. In Double Dragon‘s case, that’s not really a good thing. Remember, this is a once white-hot brand that prematurely died off because it fell behind its competition to a staggering extent. And indeed, Double Dragon 4 is full of the same kind of evolutionary dead-ends that hurt the series back in the 90s.

First of all, the game takes more after the NES ports than the arcade series. That’s not too surprising since it is known that Kishimoto wasn’t terribly happy with the results of the publisher’s strict deadlines on Double Dragon 2 and Double Dragon 3‘s arcade versions. Nevertheless, if you were hoping for something that looked like the arcade games or later games like Double Dragon Neon, you’ll want to park those expectations. There are a lot of new sprites, and almost all of the backgrounds are new as well, but there’s also a fair amount of recycling happening here. Linda’s Double Dragon sprite will appear alongside Burnov’s Double Dragon 2 sprite and some brand-new characters, and given the rather disparate styles of each of the NES games, it’s a little jarring in places. The backgrounds are also well beyond what the NES would have been able to do, but I think that’s mostly okay.

There’s a bigger problem than the visual cribbing, however. Double Dragon 4‘s design also calls back to those NES Double Dragon games, with many of its level layouts feeling like they were drawn from Double Dragon 2‘s style in particular. The first few levels are fine if a little linear, occasionally throwing in narrow platforms that you need to jump up or down to in order to proceed. The back half of the game has several platforming sections and other timing-based obstacles that are just as annoying here in 2017 as they were back in the early 1990s. Billy and Jimmy are beat-em-up characters, and as such are not really built for platforming. Trying to hop from a conveyor belt to a moving gear to another moving gear with the brothers’ clunky jumps is unpleasant, as are sections where you have to weave past and leap over heavily-damaging traps.

Granted, these are a very small part of the game’s 12-stage run. But I’m baffled as to why they’re here at all, let alone in such abundance. All I can surmise is that the developers were looking for ways to break up the brawling sections to keep the game fresh. That shouldn’t be necessary, mind you. None of the other genre greats felt the need to insert such ill-fitting sections in their games. They seemed to have confidence that the players would enjoy the battle encounters enough to carry the experience. This gets at another issue with Double Dragon 4, though.

While the player characters have a wealth of moves at their disposal and the enemy variety is impressive, few of the game’s encounters have much impact. Perhaps it’s due to the overly-linear nature of the level design, or maybe it’s that there’s no real need for any tactics beyond jump-kicking and punching enemies when they stand up. Likely a combination, I suppose. Even the bosses are lacking. They deal tremendous damage but they’re easily dispatched with the same techniques you use against every other foe. I lost more lives to the silly platforming segments than I did fighting enemies, and even with those irritating sections, I finished the entire game on my first attempt. Where’s the beef?

Clearing the main game unlocks Tower Mode, where you battle against groups of enemies in single-screen arenas with a single life. Your goal is to get as far as you can, and depending on how well you do, you’ll unlock new characters that you can then take into either Story or Tower Mode. Yes, that means you can play as Abobo in the main game if you want. It’s a fun extra, and some of the enemies have a surprisingly large array of moves to mess around with. The only thing that curbs the excitement is that no matter who you play as, you’re still going to have to take them down the same bumpy road. The platforming sections are especially dreadful with poor old Abobo. Poor guy can’t catch a break.

In some ways, this is a decent port. It runs well, and the virtual controls work nicely. The directional pad is big but accurate, and you get four virtual buttons that produce three types of attacks and your ever-useful jump, arranged in a sensible layout that results in minimal confusion. It’s lacking in other ways, sadly. There’s no iPhone X support, the file size is absurdly bloated (over 1 GB for this?), there’s no two-player support, and I don’t think it even has support for MFi controllers. Granted, it’s cheaper on iOS than it is anywhere else, with the full game unlock IAP set at $2.99. If you don’t have an iPhone X, don’t mind virtual controls, and just want to play Double Dragon 4, this will do you well enough.

Double Dragon 4 isn’t terrible, but it’s not very good, either. For better or worse, it feels like something the Double Dragon team would have cooked up in the early 1990s if they were making a NES-exclusive sequel. In doing that, it not only ignores the significant common-sense improvements the genre has made over the last twenty-five years, but also the very same advances its contemporary competition brought to the fore in the 16-bit era. I’m glad Kishimoto and company got a chance to revisit Double Dragon, but the result in many ways answers the question of how the series lost its shine to begin with.

Don’t get me wrong, though. ESWAT is not a bad game at all. What it is, is the very model of unremarkable. Serviceable. Fine, but almost entirely forgettable. It’s not hard to spot its inspirations both in theme and mechanics (Robocop meets Shinobi), but it never creeps out of the shadows they cast. Even in its time, it felt a bit stiff and outdated when stacked against other contemporary run and gun games like Contra. But it has a few really cool gimmicks and, while it certainly suffers somewhat from some afflictions it shares with many early 16-bit games, it’s a decent enough romp for action game fans. Perhaps most importantly for a 1990 game, it looks and sounds great next to the competition.

ESWAT: City Under Siege is using the latest version of the SEGA Forever emulator, and as such it offers similar performance and options to the last couple of games in the series, more or less. You can play for free if you don’t mind semi-frequent ads, or you can pay for an IAP to remove the non-SEGA ads and activate a couple of nice extra features. The helpful rewind feature is here to rub out the occasional stupid mistake, and you can save at any time. MFi controllers are supported for those who have them, and those who don’t can at least take advantage of reasonably customizable virtual controls. The emulation quality is decent enough at this point, I suppose, but some issues with audio, framerate, and screen tearing remain if you pay careful enough attention.

If you like Shinobi or Rolling Thunder and have an MFi controller, ESWAT can be a good time. An aggravating good time in places, but worth playing. It gets a lot harder to recommend this game if you’re not using a controller, unfortunately. Directly porting over games that were designed around a standard controller and fitting them with virtual buttons is never ideal, but it works better for some games than others. ESWAT isn’t especially demanding in terms of the number of buttons required. The game only needs the directional pad and three buttons to do its thing. One button fires your selected weapon, another jumps and activates your jetpack, and the third swaps your currently active weapon.

It’s that jetpack that causes most of the woes with touch controls. Maneuvering through the air is essential for survival in many stages, and you’ll need to hold down the jump button to stay aloft. You’ll frequently need to shoot while holding down that button, and at least for me, it gets pretty difficult to tap a virtual fire button while unfailingly holding down another virtual button with the same thumb. The margin for error in ESWAT is slim, with just a few lives and a few continues intended to see you through the game’s eight lengthy stages. You don’t even get the mercy of a free health refill after each level, so every hit really does count. The jetpack gives you more than enough of an advantage to see your way through with enough practice, but not when you can’t reliably control it. It’s especially critical for bosses, who tend to be child’s play when you can hang just above their reach and lob missiles at them, and unstoppable forces of frustration when you can’t.

Still, if you can deal with the virtual controls, there are some neat things going on in ESWAT. You play the first two levels as a regular police officer, with a tiny life bar and only a fairly weak pop-gun to protect yourself with. If you can clear those, you’ll finally be promoted to the rank where you get to wear the super-suit. Since you’ve played a fairly lengthy bit of the game without it, you can really appreciate its power in a way that wouldn’t be nearly as effective as if it had been given to you from the start. The suit allows you to take more hits, use the aforementioned jetpack to zoom around the screen, and choose from an assortment of cool weapons. Sometimes the advantages it gives you can almost feel unfair. Many enemies have no reply to your jetpack, even bosses. Unfortunately, the levels don’t really allow you to cut loose with your vertical capabilities. It feels like a wasted opportunity.

The game’s difficulty is terribly uneven in general. Your character is pretty big, the way many early 16-bit heroes tended to be, and not very agile on foot. He’s really good at catching bullets, and enemies like to suddenly jump out of nowhere to injure you with their touch. Losing a life is bad enough given the sparse amount you start with, but you’ll also lose your equipped weapon should an enemy take you down, forcing you to try and find it again. Depending on the weapon, that can lead to a Gradius effect where a single death can cause a downward spiral since you’ll be ill-equipped to survive long enough to power up again. The game is also fond of throwing hazards at you with little notice. Once you know they’re there, it’s not a huge problem, but the lost life points sting every time. Fortunately, the addition of save states allows you to circumvent the game’s sparse mid-stage checkpoints.

So where does that leave us? ESWAT isn’t an all-time classic, but it’s a decent game. It happens to be one that plays somewhat poorly with virtual controls, but if you have an MFi controller you don’t really need to worry about that. It’s a somewhat obscure title, and perhaps there are reasons for that, but I genuinely appreciate seeing games like this get re-released and given a little spotlight. I’m just not so sure that this port is going to show the game in its best possible light, and it frankly could use all the help it can get.

The game plays out on a 6 x 6 board where you need to place colored pieces in order to make a group of three or more. The pieces come in three different colors, and while you can’t control which color you’ll get when, you can at least see the next couple of pieces that are coming down the pike. The first piece can be placed anywhere on the board, but subsequent pieces can only be placed in an L-shaped pattern from the last. The goal is simply to reach as high a score as you possibly can. You’ll earn points with each match, and more points if you can make multiple matches in a row or matches with more than three pieces in them. Should you match five or more at once, you’ll get a super bubble that works like a wild card.

More importantly, matching pieces clears them from the field, giving you more room to work with. If you end up in a spot on the board where there are no empty spaces to move to from your current position, it’s a game over. Well, sort of. The game allows you to continue once without losing your score by either watching an ad or paying 200 Jems. You only get one, which keeps this feature from completely breaking the game. At the same time, I really don’t like it when score attack games give players a disadvantage if they don’t take the game up on some offer or another. You can also use Jems to pay for special power-ups that allow you to bend the rules a bit. It’s another layer of compromise for the scoring system, unfortunately.

To be fair, the game does dole out Jems at a fairly steady rate. You’ll get a handful every time you play, along with some experience. When you level up, you’ll get a big chunk of Jems as a reward. Leveling up also unlocks the various power-ups, so don’t plan on being really competitive until you’ve spent some time grinding. The problem here is that the rate at which you earn Jems is seriously outpaced by how much the game expects you to spend in order to be competitive. L Pop! is truly a game where you can pay to get ahead if you want, which makes it hard to recommend as a score attack.

That leaves it to sink or swim as a single player puzzle experience, and in that capacity, it’s okay. Not much more than that, but it’s fun enough. You have to use a lot of strategy to avoid painting yourself into corners, and if you keep yourself from going hog wild on the paid power-ups, the game is quite a pleasant challenge. If you’re looking for a game where you can play somewhat thoughtlessly and still do alright, L Pop! is not for you. You might be able to struggle through for a little while, but as soon as the third color comes into play, you’ll realize that every single move counts. When pieces appear that require you to match them twice to remove them, things really heat up. Fortunately, there’s no timer to worry about.

L Pop!‘s presentation is clean and professional, with a fairly simple UI and lots of little touches to make the game feel alive. It doesn’t really stand out in any particular way in terms of its visuals or audio, but I also can’t find much to complain about other than some slightly vague icons. Really, it’s in line with the game on the whole. L Pop! is a satisfied B-student. If you call on it to answer a question, it will probably be able to answer it, but you’ll always feel like it could do more than it is.

Nevertheless, I think L Pop! is worth trying out if you like the sound of the core mechanic. There is a lot of depth to it, and I certainly appreciate that you can’t just place pieces willy-nilly and get decent results. You can download it and try it out for free, with an IAP to permanently remove non-optional ads if you end up digging it. I just wish that it put both of its feet in either the paid or free-to-play camp. As is, it’s built like a paid game, but monetized like a free-to-play one, and that results in something that doesn’t satisfy quite as well as either.

Episode 1 Review

Episode 2 Review

Episode 3 Review

Episode 1: Hero in Residence Review

Hero in Residence begins with the gang from Season 1 all famous and successful after saving the world from the Witherstorm, and Lukas is writing a book about all those adventures. While the story starts with everyone (other than Petra) together again, the gang quickly parts ways as each one goes their own way, leaving Jesse alone to head to the mines and find Petra. This is where the story of the first episode starts in earnest, and Jesse follows Petra deeper into the mines as they try to capture a cute llama. On the way there, Jesse bumps into the most important artifact of the season, a glove on top of a pyramid, and that glove whispers Jesse’s name. And, of course, he can’t resist putting it on. And then all hell pretty much breaks loose.

While the first season had a pretty straightforward narrative—with the whole gang fighting against the Witherstorm—Season 2 has a hard time find its narrative focus, at least in the first episode. The glove is at the center of the narrative, with the artifact leading Jesse, Petra, and others to a hidden ocean temple filled with enemies and dangers. However, there are some digressions that might be tying into later events in other episodes but end up hurting Hero in Residence‘s flow. I’m hoping all the strands come together more neatly in future episodes, but overall I felt Hero in Residence was a bit all over the place in terms of narrative and character development.

Visually, Hero in Residence is probably better than the Season 1 episodes, and the fact that you get to visit an ocean temple, which you don’t do in Season 1, makes it visually distinct from what has come before. And I liked how falling water visually works like in Minecraft, which was a nice touch. I didn’t encounter any visual glitches—like the infamous Batman ones—but I did encounter a few slowdowns in fast action scenes, and given that I have the latest iPad Pro, that wasn’t very encouraging.

Speaking of the action scenes, Season 2 introduces a stamina bar that forces you to be much more careful when you take on mobs. In the previous season, you could swing away recklessly, but this time around you will end up panting and unable to swing if you just start swiping away at enemies. And you can even roll to the sides to engage enemies without taking damage. It all sounds fun, right? Well, the problem is that swipes don’t always register and, more generally, Minecraft: Story Mode isn’t Infinity Blade; the game engine wasn’t made for these kinds of action scenes, and I ended up dying quite a few times during battle scenes. I wish the game focused more on narrative and puzzles (to a lesser degree) than on fighting because that aspect of it really didn’t work well.

Overall, Hero in Residence didn’t deliver the same kind of entertainment Season 1 did, and I’m hoping the rest of the episodes give us a stronger narrative and fewer fight scenes. Telltale games are at their strongest when they give us entertaining and challenging narratives rather than puzzle and fight scenes, so I’m hoping to see more of that kind of a Telltale game in the next episodes.

Rating:  3/5

Episode 2: Giant Consequences

After a disappointing first episode that suffered from a lack of focus and a lack of understanding of the strengths of its current engine, Minecraft Story Mode Season 2 is back with episode 2, and I’m glad to say that it’s definitely an improvement over the season opener, even though it still suffers from some weird design decisions and an increasingly confusing control scheme. The first episode ended with the Admin threatening Jesse’s town in the form a giant statue, and episode 2 picks up from where the opening episode left. The threat of the Admin is much more immediate in episode 2, and that helps the episode find a narrative focus the previous episode lacked. Instead of jumping from place to place trying to set up the story, episode 2 spends most of its time in the Admin’s crazy “palace of despair," and it’s much better for it in terms of coherence.

Spoilers from here onward, so beware. After defeating the giant statue in a pretty good action sequence, Jesse finds himself victorious, but as is the case in this whole season so far, Jesse’s triumph is brief. Jesse and the group briefly believe that the Admin is gone, only for him to quickly return but not before casting Beacontown in endless darkness. And since this is the Minecraft universe, darkness means mobs. There is, of course, one way for Jesse to get rid of that darkness, and that way is, as to be expected, a quest. All he and the rest have to do is head to the Admin’s icy palace and destroy the huge clock at the top. And, as you would expect from an episode in this series, Jesse has to solve different puzzles and make all kinds of choices in order to reach the end and break that clock.

Speaking of the clock, episode 2 continues its metatextual kind of take on Minecraft, with, of course, the figure of the Admin as well as the clock, both of which come from outside the everyday world of Jesse and the rest of the inhabitants. You will feel like as if you’re just another Steve playing within a Minecraft world created by a human, and that’s a fun and interesting take on the game. Telltale has been doing a good job bringing into its stories ideas created not just by the game’s developers but also the game’s many players, and I like how the developer is now going one step further and making us players into someone else’s world.

And, true to form, the ending of the episode contains a major twist when we discover that Vos is really the Admin after all, which gave the episode a Matrix kind of vibe and made me wonder whether the Admin can take the form of any of the characters; that would be quite fun and unexpected. The Admin, formerly known as Vos, has some pretty clear ideas about the way a winner and a loser should behave, and when Jesse fails to conform with those ideas, he’s exiled to a jailhouse, and that’s where the episode ends.

There’s isn’t that much character development in the season so far, although Petra does seem to be struggling to find herself at a moment where the rest of the gang seems to be more confident in who they are. I do think the developers have some interesting ideas when it comes to how the series’ characters will evolve, but given that this is going to be a long series, we don’t get to see much of that evolution in one episode. Episode 2 does set up some interesting conflicts for later episodes, but it remains to be seen how those will play out.

As you can see from the description above, the plot of episode 2 is much stronger than episode 1, which makes sense given how the first episode needed to set the scene for the whole season. However, episode 2 suffers from some issues that will remind you of episode 1, namely some new clunky mechanics and the way some quick-time events are designed. Once more, Season 2 of Telltale’s Minecraft sees itself as an action/RPG and has you dodging enemy fire while trying to get your sword swings in without depleting your stamina. Yes, it’s as out of place in that universe as it sounds like. There’s a moment in the game where you have to fight three skeleton archers at the same time, and the camera is so bad that you’ll be getting hit by arrows from beyond without the ability to dodge or evade. It’s truly baffling why the developers thought adding these kinds of fight scenes to an engine as clunky as this one would be a good idea.

The other issue I faced was inconsistent quick-time events. There are moments where you have to tap an on-screen prompt as fast as you can and others (more rare ones) when you have to time those taps because of various obstacles. However, both prompts are exactly the same, so I found myself a couple of times tapping the screen when I should have waited, but the only way I would have known if I had to wait was to actually wait and see. Different prompts would have made navigating those scenes better. We talk about Telltale’s engine needing improvements, and with every episode of its various series, I feel that even more.

Some fun puzzles and an interesting storyline make up for some of the episode’s missteps, but I do wish the developers focused on what they know works in the Telltale formula and stopped trying to turn these games into something they are not. Minecraft is all about exploration, puzzles, and simple fighting, and the series should really stick to that.

Overall, I enjoyed episode 2, despite some clunky moments and unnecessary deaths. The story is starting to pick up nicely, and I like the sense of dread and darkness of episode 2; it’s definitely not what most would expect from a game about the Minecraft universe. I’m looking forward to playing episode 3, and I’m really hoping we see more story and less fighting.

Rating: 4/5

Episode 3: Jailhouse Block

Jailhouse Block, the third episode of the second Minecraft Story Mode season, is a peculiar one not because it feels too different from the previous episodes of the season, but because it made me realize something about season 2: there’s just too much violence in the game. Now, I’m not usually the type to make an argument that video games are too violent; there’s a place, I believe, for those kinds of games, and I’m fine with that. However, Minecraft has always been beloved for its sandbox nature, the ability to play the game as if you’re a warrior trying to kill anything in sight, or are just a builder focused on building your masterpiece, and anything in between. Part of what I enjoyed in the first season was how the writers pulled stories and ideas from the wider Minecraft community and didn’t focus only on the PvP side of the game.

Jailhouse Block, as well as the previous episode of these seasons, seem overly focused on the sword-swinging part of Minecraft, which, let’s be honest, was never the game’s highlight or the reason it became so popular. I talked in my review of the first episode of my disappointment with the addition of fighting mechanics to the game, especially since they were clunky at best, and wondered why the writers felt the need to emphasize that part of the universe over the exploration and building parts. Unfortunately, that tendency not only continued in episode 3 but actually got even worse, with the biggest portion of my playthrough consumed by clunky fighting sequences, including a boss fight that was probably the five most boring minutes I’ve ever had with the series. It’s disappointing that the writers decided to jettison most of what makes Minecraft so special for the sake of swinging a sword over and over again.

Jailhouse Block‘s setup is perfect for character-based puzzles and challenging decisions, but most of the actions you’ll take during the episode are just short interludes between fight and action sequences. I’d have much rather spent more time interacting with the hilarious characters jailed by the Admin in the euphemistically-called “The Sunshine Institute"—including an obvious Bob Ross stand-in who paints happy trees—than rushing from plot point to plot point, trying to (spoilers) rescue Prisoner X and escape the Admin’s prison. At one point in the story, one of your friends appears to be on the side of the Admin now, but instead of pausing on that moment for effect, the writers quickly resolve the tension with, you guessed it, a fight scene.

What I did appreciate in this episode was the humor that stemmed from all the euphemisms and the complex characters (the Warden convincingly oscillates between being on the side of the Admin and being just another prisoner). These complex characters make Jesse’s choices much trickier than usual because you don’t get a clear sign of what would work best for your character; do you want to try and game the system from within, or do you stick with the rest of your friends on principle? So yes, the episode has some interesting twists and turns and some choices that will surely have repercussions in later episodes, but the hectic pace and the constant push towards the action scenes took away most of the impact of those choices.

Visually and technically, the episode was another example of how Telltale is mastering the formula of turning Minecraft‘s boxy world into a lovely spectacle. I would sometimes forget that these believable characters stem from those barely moving box-shape characters in Minecraft, and that’s to the credit of the artists and animators at Telltale. However, all that mastery was undermined by the seriously clunky fight scenes, whose poorly-designed mechanics made me want to stop playing.

As you’ve probably figured out by now, I’m not happy with the direction of the current season. Minecraft is more than just boxy figures fighting each other. For me, part of the reason I consider Minecraft one of my favorite games is because it moves beyond the usual sword-swinging of other games and lets players be creative in a number of ways. And yet, the writers of this season insist on reducing that universe into a story where the hero has to constantly fight his way through his troubles. Add to that how the fighting mechanics are by far the weakest parts of this season, and you’ll understand why I’m puzzled by the decision to move them to the forefront. Let’s hope (beyond hope, I think) that episode 4 will do away with this emphasis on fighting and bring back a bit more of the spirit of Minecraft.

Rating: 3/5

To fully appreciate what Space Harrier 2 is and isn’t, we have to flash back to the launch of the SEGA Genesis. Through the 1980s, SEGA had slowly begun to dominate arcades all over the world thanks to their fun, visually-impressive line-up of pseudo-3D games that relied on sprite-scaling technology. Like many other game publishers of the time, they tried their hand at the home console market. As with just about every other challenger that wasn’t named Nintendo, they didn’t come away with much. In SEGA’s case, they had a lot of popular brands and high-quality games to populate a home system library with, but the hardware simply lacked the power to properly convey the experience of the arcade games. That didn’t stop SEGA from trying, mind you, and they got some impressive results from the relatively weak Master System hardware with ports like Space Harrier, Hang-On, and After Burner. But as well as these ports pushed the tech, they just couldn’t give players the same thrills that the arcade versions did.

Enter the Genesis, SEGA’s new 16-bit hardware that sold itself on the promise of bringing the arcade experience home in a way no other system ever had. A lofty claim, particularly given the level of arcade games at the time, but one that SEGA would do their best to back up. In Japan, they led the charge with two launch titles that built off of popular arcade properties. Super Thunder Blade was an adaptation of the popular 1987 chopper game, while Space Harrier 2 was billed as the true follow-up to the already-classic 1985 shooter. Both series had seen releases on the Master System, and to say that the Genesis installments blew them away in terms of the quality of their presentation would be a real understatement. This was closer to modern arcades than any other console around in 1988, no doubt about it.

Savvier arcade rats of the time surely spotted what hindsight has shown the rest of us. As impressive as these games were relative to the 8-bit attempts, they were still a far cry from the real thing. Remember when Disney was doing those direct-to-video sequels to their classic animated films? Sure, they were higher quality than the typical direct-to-video fare, but nowhere near the level of the films they were following up on. That’s sort of what happened here. Super Thunder Blade is almost laughable in how much poorer than the arcade game it is, both in terms of presentation and playability. Space Harrier 2 comes off a lot better, but it’s a clear downgrade from the first game in all respects.

Space Harrier 2 takes us back to the Fantasy Zone for more behind-the-back shooting. Our stalwart Harrier has traded in his Flash Gordon-inspired outfit for a red version of Biff’s 1985 jumpsuit from Back to the Future, but otherwise is more or less at the same things as he was in the first game: flying, shooting, running, and screaming in pain when anything hits him. The adventure consists of 13 stages this time around, 12 of which are regular stages with a boss waiting at the end of each. The 13th stage is a special one, as it challenges you to take on every boss in the game consecutively before facing the true final boss. While you can choose your starting point among the first 12 stages, you can only see that 13th stage if you finish all of them. Oh, and you only get five lives to do it with. It’s a tough challenge, but it can be done.

The default capabilities of the Genesis hardware didn’t include sprite scaling, so the developers had to fake it by making multiple sprites of varying sizes. It works okay, but since neither enemies, obstacles, nor projectiles are moving in the 3D space as smoothly as they do in the arcade original, it can be a little more difficult to track them. The result is that it’s unfortunately a lot easier to smack into an object or fail to get out of the way of a shot. The Harrier still only has one means of attack at his disposal. He can shoot straight ahead, and that’s about it. There are no power-ups or alternate forms of disposing of enemies. It’s a fast-paced shooting gallery through some incredibly trippy locales. This being a sequel, the locations are different and sometimes more interesting than those in the first game. The music is also different, and although it’s pretty good, I wish they had fit the iconic theme from the first game in here somewhere.

We’ve been up and down the road with the Genesis emulator SEGA is using in the SEGA Forever releases. It’s still not perfect, with the sound being notably off from what it should sound like, but overall it has reached the point where I think it’s good enough. The App tends to lag if you’re downloading anything in the background, but it’s otherwise not too bad on that front. As usual, you can play the game for free if you don’t mind watching ads between stages, or you can pay a one-time price for an IAP to remove the non-SEGA ads, enable added saving options, and allow you to play offline. Either way, you have access to MFi controller support, a couple of different graphical options, and the ability to re-position the virtual controls. Space Harrier 2 gets along really well with touch controls by design. There’s only one button to worry about, and you don’t have to be concerned about hitting precise points on the directional pad since the Harrier can move in every direction anyway.

Space Harrier 2 is an okay shooter, but it’s a Genesis launch title that really feels like one. It’s a good fit for mobile and it’s hard to argue with the price, so I’m glad it has once again been selected as part of the line-up. At the same time, I really would have preferred to see a port of the arcade original Space Harrier. Not just because it’s the better game, but also because it would show that SEGA is serious about expanding SEGA Forever beyond the titles that were already released on mobile ages ago and a few token Genesis games that weren’t. Until SEGA gets around to that stuff, I suppose games like Space Harrier 2 will reliably give you your nostalgic fix, if not much more.

The first game, Glyph Quest (Free), used a shareware-style model, allowing you to download the initial game for free and asking you to pay to unlock the rest of it past a certain level. There was a time when this kind of model was quite successful in the App Store, but its popularity had peaked well before Glyph Quest released. Worse, the actual interesting twists of the gameplay were fixed to levels beyond the free portion on offer, meaning that the game didn’t sell itself as effectively as it should have. We Heart Dragons decided to listen to the feedback from the hardcore fans of the first game when they were deciding on a monetization model for the follow-up, Super Glyph Quest ($3.99). They opted to make it a full paid title upfront, which is another genuine uphill climb on mobile platforms, particularly for a puzzle game. Little surprise then that it also didn’t catch on.

The gloves have come off with Glyph Quest Chronicles, though the balled fists underneath are still wearing woolly mittens. We’ve got a premium currency that is used to upgrade spells or shortcut equipment upgrades. Every attempted stage requires some stamina, which can only be topped off by waiting out a timer, watching an ad, or paying some real money. The difficulty certainly feels tilted towards requiring the player to grind for experience, gold, or materials. Even without that, the stamina meter is small enough that you often can’t get through a whole set of stages without running out. The Glyph Quest games have always had some issues with their difficulty curve, but this is the first time where you can open your wallet to get around that.

But what of those mittens, then? By default, the game includes a mechanic called a loyalty card. Each time you clear a stage, you get a stamp on the card. When you fill its eight spaces up, you get a little premium currency and a partial restore to your stamina meter. Replaying previously-cleared stages still earns you a stamp, and there’s no limit to the number of times you can hand in your card. You definitely won’t fill the card in one sitting by default, but every couple of sessions or so, you’ll get to take an extra try and spend a few gems. The game also sells a few useful permanent upgrades. One such IAP doubles your gold intake, which essentially ensures you will have fair earnings without much of a need to grind. Another IAP gives you a new loyalty card that only takes six stamps, letting you earn gems and partial stamina refills that much sooner. The game even sells you a handy bundle that includes both of these IAPs for $5.99.

I suppose the problem with that is that even with that better loyalty card, you still can’t play continuously. You’ll get an extra try every now and then, but you will most assuredly run out of stamina often. Watching ads is an acceptable deal for a refill, but it does feel a little odd to have to do that when you’ve already plunked down more money than either of the first two games cost in their entirety. If you want to completely escape the stamina restrictions, you’ll need to pay for Patron Mode. By spending $19.99 in total, Patron Mode will be activated and the stamina system will be completely disabled. You can do that immediately with a single IAP, or by cumulative purchases of other IAPs. That latter bit is quite friendly, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel the price was a touch high. Nevertheless, the option is there, and that’s not something many developers of free-to-play games bother to include.

I kind of hate that I’m five paragraphs into a review of a pretty fun game and all I’ve talked about so far is its monetization system. It really does color the entire experience of Glyph Quest Chronicles, though. The difficulty spikes feel more suspect. The in-game encouragement to buy items, upgrade gear, and power-up spells comes off more like a series of never-ending sales pitches as opposed to genuine advice. The fact that some critical upgrade materials are somewhat rare drops isn’t something I’m totally keen on at the best of times, but when the game allows you to pay your way past needing those materials, even I can’t help my imagination from wandering. Let me be clear that I don’t think free-to-play monetization is necessarily a bad thing. It can work, but there are just so many ways it doesn’t here.

The core gameplay is still as solid as ever. By matching numbers and combinations of different glyphs, you’ll cast a wide variety of spells to attack your enemy, heal your wounds, or throw out some buffs. While you start the game only being able to make small matches, you’ll grow in power considerably before too long. That opens up larger potential chains as well as special combination spells. You’ll eventually be able to summon powerful spirits who beef up your spells and are able to unleash a devastating attack before taking their leave. The game has some advanced techniques such as chaining and reversing for more damage, and if you pay careful attention you can even somewhat manipulate which colors of pieces appear on the board after you make a match. It’s a lot of fun, and although there aren’t any big changes to the formula this time around, a few new objectives and additions go a long way for the veteran player.

Your base of operations is a town with a number of different locations to tap on. There are pets to buy, various kinds of gear to forge, items to stockpile, and even upgrades for each individual spell. You can also check out the often-humorous descriptions of any monsters you’ve battled or spells you’ve used. Rather irritatingly, if you haven’t used a particular shop for a while, the game likes to hassle you to do so almost every time you duck your head into the town. This is probably fine in the early going when players need some guidance, but it never ends. Glyph Quest Chronicles likes to talk to the player, and it does so almost excessively. In combination with the new-found monetization, it comes off not so much as help as it does a series of desperate pleas. This time around, all of your quests are loaded up in a single menu. Rather than deal with NPCs, this works more like a checklist of achievements. Finish one off and you’ll earn some gems.

The stages themselves are more straightforward this time around too, albeit with a couple of extra twists to make things livelier. You’re working your way through a linear progression of levels, each one consisting of a number of fights against monsters. Some stages add a timer to apply some added pressure, while others decrease the number of fights by having the baddies pile up on you. You’ll frequently have to face off against powerful boss-style enemies, but don’t be too surprised to see many of them crop up again as regular foes later. As in the previous games, there’s a certain element of luck involved in your starting board layout, but once you figure out a couple of strategies, you can start manipulating how and where certain pieces appear.

Unfortunately, another similarity it shares with the previous games is the uneven difficulty. You’re going to hit difficulty spikes now and again, and that’s even assuming you know all of the little tricks to maximizing damage. The game’s bandage for this appears to be encouraging the player to buy and quaff health potions. That’s also not new, but it has never really sat right with me. It feels like a very inelegant solution to balance issues, and can create a downward spiral for players who haven’t bought the gold-doubling IAP. Grinding for coins to buy potions to properly try a stage again after failing feels bad at the best of times, but when you’ve got a stamina meter attached to it, it’s even more dreadful.

On top of that, the game also suffers from quite a few bugs. This review comes after the developer has diligently issued more than a few updates, and I’m still getting the occasional full-stop crash or lock-up. It’s frustrating enough as it is with its stamina system and random difficulty spikes, I don’t  need the game crashing mid-battle when things are going my way for once, too. The developers have been on this problem as quickly as anyone could be, so I’m sure it will be resolved in time. Still, I can’t review the future. The problems still exist in the present version, and that’s the only one I can really talk about here.

No one can say the developers of Glyph Quest Chronicles didn’t give other methods of monetization a fair try, so it’s hard to get upset at them for going in another direction this time around. Nevertheless, while the end result might be more profitable for them, the means to get there have resulted in a worse experience for the end user. I appreciate the many ways the team tried to soften the free-to-play blow, and I certainly like the many little improvements they’ve made to the mechanics, but it’s not enough to balance out the equation. There’s still a great puzzle game in here somewhere, but it’s never been harder to appreciate it.

RayCrisis ($4.99), the final installment in their Ray series of shooters, was one of their last arcade hurrahs. Released in 1998, it serves as a prequel to the stories of the first two games. You play as a hacker who makes a last ditch effort to get into the systems of a rogue AI and shut it down before it can cause even more damage than it already has. Your hacking takes the form of a space fighter, of course, and the AI’s antibodies look very much like the sorts of aliens you blast at in a lot of other games of this sort. Well, it was the late 90s. We were all very concerned with jacking into cyberspace and all that stuff. The stages reflect the AI’s present state of consciousness, but they too take on familiar forms: a jaunt through a desert, a wild ride through a city at night, and so on.

Time has seen RayCrisis lumped into the big ball of polygonal shoot-em-ups released in its era, so it’s easy to forget that this game was a bit controversial with shoot-em-up fans at the time. That’s owing to two odd decisions the developers made, most likely in an effort to breath some fresh air into the genre’s stale lungs. First, the structure of the game is different from most other shooters. You won’t be playing through every stage in a fixed order on any given playthrough. Instead, the same beginning and ending stages bookend a random selection of three out of the remaining five stages. The order isn’t fixed, but the levels are designed with modular difficulty in mind, so no matter how they’re served to you, the difficulty curve remains intact.

The second odd decision is the Encroachment mechanic. A prominent meter displays a percentage in the corner of the screen. That percentage continually goes up as you play, while destroying enemies knocks it down a little. If it reaches 100%, you’ll be whisked off to the final boss and given a bad ending. Even if it doesn’t, if you haven’t knocked it down to 20% or less by the end of the game, you’ll still get a bad ending. It’s extremely difficult to hit that target, so only the most skilled and experienced players will get to battle the real final boss and the good ending that comes with it. The iOS version of the game lets you pick stages if you want, but you’ll still have to work hard and do things the right way if you want to see the proper conclusion to the game.

If I’m to be completely honest with you all, I’m not a huge fan of the Ray series. I think the first game is decent but flawed, with a lot of cheap deaths and fairly vanilla mechanics. The move to polygons with the second game gave the series a distinguishing trait that it sorely needed, but the added cinematic flair introduced quite a few issues to the gameplay. Notably, the wandering camera and busy visuals can make it hard to gauge where shots are going and even where some enemies are hiding. That problem is magnified in RayCrisis by virtue of its demands that you destroy almost every target with great haste. You can’t afford to miss too many enemies, so you need to keep a sharp eye open at all times.

That’s easier than ever on the iOS version thanks to the clean high-resolution graphics. It’s essentially just rendering the arcade version with a higher resolution, but it looks really sharp in spite of the somewhat simple geometry at play. Just on the strength of the visual upgrade alone, I’m tempted to call this the best version of the game. I only wish it included all of the extras that were in the PlayStation port so that I could go all in on that statement. What we do get is a new remix mode that makes the game a little easier. The port also allows you to use an MFi controller to play, but the touch controls work well enough to make that a nice bonus rather than a necessity. It’s a great port of the arcade version, but not much more than that.

I suppose the problem for me is that RayCrisis is a short, mean-spirited, dull shoot-em-up. I won’t say it’s Taito’s worst, but it falls pretty low on the list. The PlayStation version had a lot of extras, and for good reason. The people in charge of that home version were likely aware that the arcade game didn’t satisfy some of the players, so they included additional playable ships and a special mode that lengthened the game in reply. The only benefits to the arcade version versus the PlayStation version were its slightly better graphics and its co-op multiplayer. Well, we got the graphics and then some, but this is strictly a single-player affair. Outside of the presentation, we kind of got stuck with the worst of both worlds. The all-too-brief, bland stylings of the arcade version, and the missing co-op from the home version. Not even a new music track from Zuntata is enough to make up for that.

The natural human desire to see sets completed meant iOS gamers waited five long years to see the Ray series come to a close on the platform. Only now in the end do I realize the sheer absurdity of waiting five years for RayCrisis, of all games. You could probably do worse than RayCrisis when looking for an iOS shooter. Taito on their worst day is still better than most, after all. Be aware, however, that this is a very short game that will only give up its last bit of content to those who punish themselves to the game’s satisfaction. I suspect most players will likely just die their way through the game’s credits in 20 minutes using endless continues and the hearty smart bomb attack, and never look back.

The concept is simple enough, and I breezed through the first few levels with just a little experimentation before going through my final “scoring" run. It felt fast and fun and a key strategy I tried to employ was to work my way back from the acute angles in the target shape and figure out from where lines and nodes would have to swing to get to those final resting spots.

This worked at first, but as the target shapes became more complicated and mechanics ramped up the game changed for me. I found myself unable to properly visualize the moves necessary to solve the puzzle and was left with a lot of trial and error (read: groping for a clue) to complete levels. I found it particularly difficult when nodes overlapped making unscrambling things tough to do without a great many unsuccessful attempts. In most cases I gave up on finding the optimal solution and just played the game as a “pass/fail," so to speak.

On the upside, noded is very attractive and I’m really drawn to its simple and clean graphical design. The musical accompaniment is also pleasing and worth keeping on if you enjoy a bit of a soundtrack while you play. The game also offers plenty of bang for your buck, with 80 levels to play through.

I struggled with this game, despite being attracted to it. Your mileage may vary, of course, but I wonder if the concept is just a little too abstract for the average puzzle player. If geometric puzzle games are your thing—or you’re a big-time puzzle aficionado looking for a challenge—noded will provide you with plenty of challenging levels for a very low price. Make sure to also swing by our forums and leave your impressions there.

The story of Onigo Hunter follows a princess named Lumiere who is looking for her father, the missing king. Many presume he is dead, so the race is on to see who will succeed him. All one must do to prove worthy of the crown is to open up one of the doors that seals off the various ancient ruins scattered across the world. It’s said only those of royal blood can do it, but that’s not stopping others from trying. The old king was last seen heading to one of the islands containing those ruins, but the official search has been called off. Only licensed hunters can travel out to those islands, so the princess puts out a request that is answered by a young man named Fain. Together, Fain, Lumiere, and her butler Sebastian set forth to find out just what happened to the king. They’ll be joined before long by the game’s requisite mysterious girl, an automaton named Rama. What’s her deal? What’s everyone’s deal?

So yes, the same old yarn on that front. We’ve seen far too many stories with far too many similar characters for any of this to be all that exciting, but in typical EXE-Create fashion, the story is told somewhat competently and the characters are a lot of fun. Not exactly an adventure worth remembering, but it passes the time well enough. It’s just the first of many familiar elements in Onigo Hunter. You’ll also recognize the musical style, dungeon exploration, weapon crafting, seed-planting, and IAP systems from some of their previous games. I’m noticing that with each new release, EXE-Create is including more and more elements that you need to pay premium currency to unlock. As before, you don’t need to buy any of that stuff to beat the game, but it’s certainly getting more conspicuous over time.

It’s probably easier to talk about what’s different. First, there’s no overworld map here. It’s just as well, as EXE-Create hasn’t done anything particularly interesting with those in a while. Similarly, there aren’t any explorable towns. You just get a map of the town with points of interest that you can tap on. The means of progression is a little different in principle, as well. Your hunter rank determines which areas you’re allowed to explore. You can earn points towards rank-ups by completing missions or capturing monsters, known in this game as Onigoes. There are mandatory story missions, but if your rank isn’t quite where it needs to be, you can always take on side quests to boost it.

The monster-catching mechanic is a decent idea, but it doesn’t work out to much in the end. In true Pokemon fashion, you’ll need to whittle down the monster’s life bar. You can then attempt to capture them using a special command. Captured monsters can be unleashed in battle through something called a Zenolith, buffing your characters and altering their elemental status. You can also fuse your captured Onigoes to create gear and items. What you can’t do is have them join your side in battle, which seems like a wasted opportunity to me. Capturing monsters adds a layer of tediousness even to battles against regular enemies, and the benefits from doing so barely outweigh the effort.

The battles could have used a little spice, too. They’re the usual turn-based sort with fight commands and special skills. One wrinkle is that your whole party shares one energy bar for skills. It doesn’t really change much in practice, though. I suppose one cool thing is that your equipment changes are visible on your characters, allowing you to create fashion nightmares as you see fit. The trade-off for that is that instead of EXE-Create’s nice sprite work, we get crudely-animated paper doll-style characters. There’s also that ugly side effect where most of your characters will be wearing the same outfits as each other throughout the game, rubbing out a lot of the visual variety for each member of the team. Still, it’s pretty neat to see all of your gear actually show up on your characters.

We’re left with the same business as usual, I’m afraid. Onigo Hunter has a couple of new pins affixed to its lapels, but in most respects, the experience is barely distinguishable from the other assorted EXE-Create games released by Kemco this year. It’s okay on its own merits. If you just want another traditional-style JRPG to stuff in your gob, it has a decent enough taste to it and will keep you chewing for a little while. Even the most tolerant of Kemco followers has got to be getting tired of this particular flavor by now, though. I know I am.

On paper, Principia seems like an appealing take on the simulation genre. You’ve got lots of moving parts to work with that seem like the sorts of things that would be fun to juggle in pursuit of success. There appears to be a lot of potential for replay value, since there are a number of CPU opponents in play who are working towards their own ends. It’s at least an idea that hasn’t been beaten to death in prior games. You might not be pushing little armies against each other, but the more familiar sort of warfare that these academics engage in could definitely make for some exciting drama. It’s even packed full of interesting scientific facts that you may or may not already know. I get to play as Isaac Newton and try to figure out what exactly light is while my rivals try to discredit me and get me tossed out of my research circle? Sure, that sounds great. You can feel the passion for the process of scientific discovery oozing through Principia‘s pores, even through a somewhat stilted English translation.

To the game’s credit, there are points where it’s all working well. You can definitely see what it’s going for. But more often than not, playing the game well doesn’t involve engaging with any of the game’s wider mechanics. It also doesn’t seem to require much skill or planning. Just keep doing your research thing, and it will all turn out okay. That’s fine for the first couple of playthroughs, since the process of researching is in itself somewhat interesting. But once you’ve seen all the text that those branches of research have to offer, the game can no longer support its own weight. In other words, the content in Principia is good, but the way it’s sewn together really isn’t.

You’ll start the game by choosing a scientist. Each of them has their own stats that represent their real-life specialties. You can increase those stats along the way, but that takes time, so you’ll want to choose someone who is at least competent at the first area you’d like to research. Depending on who you choose, you’ll start off in different locations and professions. You’ll also start with some resources, which can be used to purchase various types of apparatus to help you with your research. You can earn more resources in a number of ways. Your profession will pay a salary of some sort, published papers will earn you a big chunk, and other scientists may even wish to sponsor you. I never actually had an occasion where my resources felt insufficient. There aren’t that many things you need to buy and the money earned from publishing research quickly outpaces those needs.

Anyway, the first thing you need to do is choose your area of research. A tab shows you all of the currently available topics, with most of them gated off by stat requirements. Some topics will be relatively unexplored, while others might already have an authority in the field. If they’re the latter, you’ll be competing against someone who already has a head start, so it’s advisable to go for an open topic instead. If your stats aren’t high enough, you can always read books or attend lectures to increase them. You just need to be careful that in doing so you aren’t losing ground to the other scientists. Once you’ve selected your topic, you then head to your laboratory.

In the lab, you can conduct experiments, observe, or use your reasoning to try to make discoveries. Each action will push up your stats in that area, and when a certain threshold is reached, your scientist will have a revelation. At that point, you have to try to prove your theory, which again just involves spending some turns selecting the choice on the appropriate menu. Once you’ve taken it as far as you can, you can then compose a paper and submit it to the academy of your choice. A panel of academics will judge your paper and either accept it or reject it. If they accept it, you’ll earn some fame and resources. If they reject it, your scientist will be discouraged and have to go back to the drawing board. Some theories simply won’t be accepted no matter what, capping out at a relatively low level of completion. In that case, all you can do is go back to experimenting and reasoning to try and stumble on the next theory. Eventually, you’ll tap out all of the possible points. At that point, you choose another topic and do it all again.

It’s a slow process, and it’s unfortunately quite repetitive. There are no monkey wrenches or anything like that. You just put in the time, put your work to the test when you think it’s good enough, and if it’s not, put in more time on it. The only real interruptions come when your rivals try to discredit you. When this happens, regardless of the outcome of their challenge, your character will be left in a lethargic state. He won’t be able to do any experiments, observations, or reasoning until it clears. He can still compose papers or engage in other activities, however. That includes improving stats through various means, corresponding with other scientists to try and build or destroy your relationships with them, or even taking on new professions to increase your incoming resources.

Since the review of your research is done by your fellow scientists, the status of your relationships with them is important. If you anger someone sufficiently, they will almost always vote against you. Make too many enemies and you’ll have trouble getting published anywhere. Of course, you can eventually get the same power. Earn enough prestige for an institution and you might find yourself on the board or even as the president, wielding your voting power like a tyrant. If you decide you’re getting too big for your local pond, you can always pick up sticks and move to a new location. It doesn’t seem to matter all that much, mind you. You can build your fame almost anywhere as long as you keep plugging away at your research.

As your research on each topic progresses, your character will state the revelations he comes across. Sometimes, those revelations are obviously wrong, but it does a good job of illustrating the process of coming to a robust theory. It’s enjoyable to read these and see examples of how someone might think light travels at an infinite speed, for example. There’s nothing terribly advanced in here by modern standards, but you very well may have forgotten a lot of it from your high school days. Or perhaps, like me, you skipped those classes so that you could play more Virtua Fighter 2. In which case, you might learn something new here. These bits of the game were the most enjoyable for me, but they run out sooner or later.

With little challenge and no real need to engage with the game beyond the most basic of mechanics, Principia is all dressed up with no place to go. I had fun with it, to be sure. But I also found myself getting bored frequently, having to take breaks to avoid being ground down by the constant repetition. If you don’t mind that the game is fairly simple and have an interest in the topic, you might want to check out Principia. I want to give it a stronger recommendation than that, because the game has a lot of heart. I just wish the quality of its methods matched its passion.

Anyway, the set-up. You play as a thrall in an empire entrenched in long-term war with another country. We don’t learn much about them, except for the fact that they ride wyrms and are probably evil. Our team on the other hand rides gryphons, and are probably also evil if we’re being completely honest about it all. But those other guys like to burn down villages, that much we know for sure, so let’s just focus on their villainy for now. In our fine and just empire, there is a strict class system. At the top are the gryphon riders, the sexy and cool champions of all that is right. They deliver hot justice and witty punchlines from the backs of their impossibly fluffy cat-bird steeds. You are not a rider. Instead, you belong to the other class, whose members serve essentially as slaves to the empire. One wrong move and you’ll be sent to the front lines of the war, presumably to be converted to hamburger at the nearest opportunity.

You’re just doing your business one day when you happen to come into possession of a rejected gryphon egg. It’s just about to hatch, and if you don’t take care of it, the little gryphon will be put to its death for the crime of being a runt. Even though it’s punishable by death, you decide to hide the hatchling and take care of it. You’ll have some help from friends on both sides of the class divide, but you’ll need to watch out for some less charitable acquaintances who would cause a lot of trouble for you if they found out your secret. This early part of the game where you’re training your gryphon in secret, running around with your friends behind the backs of the authorities, has an entertaining Harry Potter-like feel to it. Of course, the secret inevitably comes out, and you end up having to prove both your worth and that of your gryphon.

Unfortunately, this is where Runt of the Litter starts to come up short. What is supposed to be an arduous, incredible journey is virtually glossed over. It feels like the story is in a rush to get to its third act. Which would be fine, except there is no third act. The ending comes abruptly, and an epilogue hits the main points of things that would have been really fun to play. No climactic final battle against a wyrm rider, no startling revelations, nothing. It feels very much like the story just gives up and goes home after the gryphon isn’t small, fluffy, and cute anymore. The romance options feel equally rushed, with the characters telling far more than they ever bother to show. It’s completely lacking in satisfaction all-around.

This pruned plot is made all the more frustrating by the fact that the prose itself is excellent. Kelly Sandoval does an excellent job of bringing the gryphons to life with evocative descriptions of their mannerisms and fantastic capabilities. Individual characters don’t get a lot of time to shine in the brisk plot, but the most is made of each encounter. While I would have preferred to see more things fleshed out concerning the motivations of certain characters and groups, I was able to get a great sense of the setting from the text. What is here is really quite good, but that only makes its abbreviated nature more disappointing.

I do have to give the game some credit for having a fairly substantial branch in the middle. Most gamebooks will have choices lead to somewhat similar results to keep things simpler, but a good-sized section of Runt of the Litter will be almost completely different based on one of your choices. There are also the more expected major differences in the endings that show up based on who you threw your lot in with and where your stats are at in the end. There isn’t much of a trick to finding all of the branches, as almost every choice is pretty clear about which direction it sends you in. As such, while you might want to replay it a couple of times to see most of what there is to see, there isn’t a whole lot of challenge involved with that process. That could be a good or bad thing, depending on your tastes.

Runt of the Litter makes a good impression while it lasts, but the overall experience feels like it’s missing some essential nutrients. It’s almost like I can see the lore that I’m craving sitting over on the counter, but it’s just out of my reach. The pace of the story starts moving a little too quickly for my tastes in the back half, and it truly feels like there should have been something more after the game’s second act. It’s a pleasant enough read and just about everything involving the gryphons is a joy, but it’s hard to give this one a strong recommendation when it feels like it’s lacking so much.

No, for my money, the hardest game in this series is that very first game, Ghosts ‘n Goblins. It’s pretty much the ultimate example of how cruel an arcade game could be in its pursuit of more of the player’s coins. Packed to the brim with nasty tricks, tough enemies, and a twist in its ending that has to be experienced to really grasp the weight of, Ghosts ‘n Goblins was so hard that you’d have an easier time finding decent Mexican food in The Pas than you would finding someone who could beat the game in the pre-save states era. Yet for how mean-spirited it could be, there was something about Ghosts ‘n Goblins that just clicked. Each stupid death only made you want to try again so that you wouldn’t have the indignity of “death by random purple bird" on your permanent record. Even if you never beat it, every inch of ground claimed was incredibly satisfying. Until the ending sends you back for another pass, anyway. That was just plain garbage.

The reason I’m stressing the game’s difficulty so much is that I’m not sure this was a wise choice for a mobile conversion. Ghosts ‘n Goblins is already incredibly tough with buttons and a stick/directional pad. Moving to touch controls adds another layer of frustration to Ghosts ‘n Goblins Mobile ($1.99) that pushes the game into the realm of the near-impossible. Seemingly cognizant of that reality, Capcom has tried to make things a little easier on players with a level select and a casual mode that relieves some of the burden. I would trade them in a heartbeat for MFi controller support and save states. Because the thing is, this is actually a really great port of the game from a technical standpoint. It looks, sounds, and moves more or less the way it should, and that’s great. If you think you can brave a touch-controlled Ghosts ‘n Goblins, you won’t be unhappy with the quality of the port here.

The wrapper around that port isn’t perfect, though. You get four different control options, which is good even if three of the four are awful. But every single time you start a new game, if you aren’t planning on using the default control scheme, you’ll have to go into the options to change it again. There are no options for resizing or even moving the virtual buttons, a feature that would be really handy. As mentioned, there is no support for MFi controllers included, and rather than allowing save states as they do in most re-releases of this game, they’ve added a feature that lets you start a new game from any of the levels you’ve already reached. Leaderboards and achievements are done through a Google Account rather than Game Center, so if you want to make use of them, you’re going to have to make or sign into Google.

As with the recent 1942 Mobile ($1.99), there are two modes of play here. If you want the original game in all of its glory, there’s a classic mode that gives you that. The new casual mode cuts back considerably on the number of enemies and allows you to double-jump, a feature that wasn’t originally added to the series until Super Ghouls ‘n Ghosts. That makes certain sections of the game a lot easier, and is something of an inspired addition even if it does break the game’s balance at times. One other nice extra is the ability to switch between any weapons you’ve picked up on your current run. Accidentally grabbed the torch when only the lance will do? No problem, you can go into the menu and change back if you want. These are good, sensible things to add to the game to make it more playable without changing its fundamental values.

But the thing is, they only address some of the game’s tough spots. There are plenty of cases where it’s not about having the wrong weapon, or too many enemies, or even tricky platforming. Sometimes it’s about being able to turn, duck, and fire your weapon with split-second accuracy, and that’s where the touch controls really start to bungle things. Reliable tricks that are absolutely necessary for surviving things like Red Devils and the boss encounters just don’t work as well or as quickly as you need them to at times. On top of that, the buttons themselves tend to obscure deadly threats, giving you less time to address them. In a game that requires cat-like reflexes to survive, having incoming attacks even partially hidden from view is a very bad thing. I feel like the game in this form is genuinely too hard to properly enjoy beyond the first few levels.

Ghosts ‘n Goblins Mobile is a technically-sound port of a good, classic game that really isn’t well-suited for touch-based controls. There are some quirks with the options that are likely to be addressed in a future update, but the biggest problem with the game is that it probably shouldn’t have been picked as a candidate for a mobile port to begin with. It’s already a severely difficult game, and adding even a little frustration on top makes it too much. That said, for the price of it, it’s hard to tell anyone not to buy it if they’re interested, but just be aware that you’re probably not going to get too far unless you’re incredibly stubborn or a virtuoso with virtual controls.

Where Realm Grinder tries to be different is its “good versus evil" spin. After roughly 30 minutes of tutorials you can make your choice — take your kingdom and continue on the path of good, or start building undead and demonic buildings. It’s a cool idea, especially since all of the icons, locations, and even the graphics change afterward, but really it’s just changing the fluff of what you click.

What I really like about Realm Grinder though, regardless of what side you choose, is its visual representation of everything. If you build something, even though it won’t show up in excess, it’s on your screen. There’s a sense of accomplishment when you actually see a Necropolis pop up, especially once you’ve acquired every building in the game and faintly recall grabbing each individual tier. There is some attempt to showcase good and evil as different styles (tapping and idling respectively), but they feel the same.

Of course the ride never stops and you’re constantly chasing the dragon of more and more money and more stuff to fill the screen with, just like tappers and other mobile simulators, but for a certain kind of person it provides a sense of accomplishment. That feeling is, granted, a little more short lived than a lot of other clickers out there.

Buildings still mostly do the same thing — earn you more money through natural generation when you’re not manually clicking the screen for a pittance of cash. Sure, working your way up to a Hell Portal is awesome, but after that it’s just a super Blacksmith when you’re not using spells.

Yeah, spells — or, more ways to click. They’re the only source of interaction beyond the money grind, and mildly change up how much cash you accrue or the behavior of certain buildings. So if you have a ton of Dark Temples for example, there might be a spell that enhances their output for a given amount of time, which ensures that it’s a good idea to build lots of those temples and manually check into the game during certain intervals when mana recharges. It’s a way to get you to keep coming back, basically, and even though you can earn money by having the game idle, clicking and interacting is always better.

But if you aren’t patient, you can spring for some microtransactions that are muddled with different pricepoints on top of a premium currency. You see, for $4.99 you can buy an item called the “Gift of the Heroes," which increases production by 25% and rewards by 15%, among several other bonuses. It also unlocks another upgrade. And from $4.99 all the way up to $49.99, you can buy Rubies too boost your production, or choose to fast-forward anywhere from 12 hours to five days. Given that there’s no real competitive element or pronounced battling or PVP, it’s highly unlikely that someone would be that impatient, but the option is there.

That said, the pacing and earn rate isn’t really all that bad. Even though I did hit a few walls where the next tier felt insurmountable, I just kept the game closed for half a day, came back, and moved up. It’s not a good thing when Realm Grinder doesn’t entice you to constantly play it (as many other clickers have), but one could argue that these types of games weren’t meant to be played around the clock. A prestige-like option of starting over with bonuses is also a plus once you feel like you’ve mastered all there is.

You could do a whole lot worse than Realm Grinder when it comes to picking up a time waster, but the developers could do a lot better in turn. With some tweaks, it could be one of the more compelling clickers on the market.

Red’s Kingdom is a sliding puzzle game, where you swipe to move protagonist Red in a diagonal direction to roll that way until a wall or object is hit. There are familiar puzzles, where you have to hit switches and roll using objects and tricks to get to where you need to go. The trick is that this all takes place in one giant interconnected world. Much like a Zelda or Metroidvania game, there are certain parts of the world that are inaccessible until you collect certain objects. You also get upgrades that help out with the enemies that you’ll face in Red’s Kingdom. It’s all a genius concept on paper: sliding puzzles are fun to play with, and you combine them with the satisfaction of exploring a world and getting upgrades. Seems like a winning combo, but the problem in large part is that sliding puzzles work really well in a particular context of being self-contained, where in a larger world, Red’s Kingdom fails to address adequately.

Red’s Kingdom doesn’t work as a game that you can come back to after a while. See, many of these puzzles require very particular solutions for how you have to move around, especially to avoid getting stuck. You can reset a room, but can’t undo a specific move if you get stuck. I like sliding-style puzzles, but a lot of the satisfaction is in figuring out the particular solution once and for all, possibly returning to get a more optimal one. In the context of Red’s Kingdom, these puzzles are less fun to play when you’re forced to backtrack, as you’re exploring a world, not just solving puzzles. Some collectables are part of the puzzle, so you don’t have to go through all the intricacies of a room repeatedly, but you’ll have to figure out how various switches work again. So, picking up the game, especially if you quit while backtracking, can be annoying, as you can’t just get your bearings and find your way to the next objective, you have to solve puzzles over again.

One possible solution would be for an easy way to move between rooms that you’ve already beaten. Right now, having to re-solve rooms in order to navigate the world gets to be quite annoying. I solved these puzzles once, why do I have to go through and do them again? It’s a bit aggravating, in particular when you pick the game back up after a while and just want to get to something new. Sure, this is something you have to deal with in pretty much any open-world game, but at least there, the act of retracing your steps is just mere tedium, and there are warps in Red’s Kingdom. But you have to instead work your way back through rooms you’ve solved already to get to those warps. Heck, even if warps were accessible from anywhere by the player, that would go a long way toward helping out with the annoyance factor.

Now, this might all be less of an issue if you’re the type of person that plays games in one sitting. This is a good enough game to sit down with on an iPad on a couch on a Saturday afternoon. Just keep at it, and you’ll likely have a good enough time. Granted, you can play this on Mac and PC if you prefer, and this game might be better there. But we’re talking about mobile gaming, a platform where stop and start play is a huge part of its raison d’être. I have significant issues with how Red’s Kingdom is structured, and it puts a severe damper on whatever enjoyment I can wring from the game.

The 2D and isometric perspective of Red’s Kingdom has some issues. The isometric perspective looks great, but it can make it tough to line up the proper line you’re going in, as you have to correct for the angle. The rooms are somewhat large, so it can be tough to tell the line you’re on, even on an iPad. There are some helpful lines especially with indoor rooms, but there’s another issue that arises. You can have certain spots obscured by scenery or objects, and because the game is 2D from a fixed perspective, you have no way to see around these spots. The music in Red’s Kingdom is fine at first, but it winds up being extremely repetitive. I wound up muting it and listening to my own music instead, because the primary track that plays grows too grating.

Red’s sliding is a bit on the slow side, which wouldn’t be a problem if it wasn’t for some timed puzzles where you have to make lightning-quick maneuvers to get Red to a spot triggered by a switch. If Red would get with the program and roll a lot faster, it wouldn’t be a problem. But it felt like on a few occasions I had to execute some lightning-fast maneuvers just to hit a narrow timing window. It’s not exactly fun to do that, especially when these might pop up in parts during transit through the world to find items.

It’s all a shame because I really want to like Red’s Kingdom. I still like the concept, as sliding puzzle games are just collections of single-level vignettes, and this game transcends that. When you dig into it, and get going with the flow of the game, there’s the spark of something brilliant and fun. And Red’s Kingdom is gorgeous to look at it. But the flaws are deep, that it’s tough to recommend despite its great looks and creative ideas.

So, even though I played the game without any serious issues, I can’t ignore that the majority of iOS players will have a pretty bad time trying to play the game, and that’s a great shame because the episode itself is an interesting take on the Batman myth and also brings some new tweaks to the Telltale formula. While you should keep the technical issues in mind, from here onwards I’ll be talking about the game without mentioning the load times because otherwise, this review would be pretty repetitious. Now, on to the rest of the review. And, of course, spoilers ahead.

Episode 1 Review

Episode 2 Review

Episode 3 Review

Episode 4 Review

Episode 5 Review

Episode 1: Realms of Shadows

When I heard that Telltale was going to do a Batman game, I wasn’t sure what to expect; the Dark Knight’s story has taken quite a few turns here and there and has plenty of villains to choose from. What I was expecting was a focus on Batman’s nightly escapades accompanied by plenty of quick-time events. Yet what Telltale delivered in the first episode, Realm of Shadows, is an interesting take on the Batman mythos with a focus not on what Batman does when the night falls but, rather, what Bruce Wayne has to deal with as he tries to navigate the corruption of Gotham City, a corruption that seems to have spread its tentacles from the organized crime all the way to the Mayor and everyone else in between.

What I enjoyed is that we don’t get a mopey, brooding Bruce wallowing in the emptiness caused by his parents’ demise (sorry Batman vs Superman fans) but a relatively lively Bruce who appears to have a strong sense of what Batman’s role is; he’s the instrument Wayne is using to bring order back to Gotham. There’s a pretty good balance between the two sides of the character, and that makes playing as Bruce intriguing. While playing as Bruce, I didn’t find myself impatiently waiting until I can get that suit back on again; instead, I enjoyed digging more into this character and the people he interacts with. Telltale fleshes out Bruce pretty well, which is necessary otherwise most players would have wanted to be playing as Batman rather than a “normal" guy. By giving us an interesting, believable Bruce, Telltale managed to create a sense of separation between the two sides of the character in the early parts of the story that worked to the benefit of the story as a whole.

That sense of separation is essential because it makes what happens next much more impactful. While the two worlds are initially kept quite distinct, Catwoman’s existence and her knowledge that Bruce is Batman ruptures that tidy separation and becomes the first sign that Batman’s world is seeping into Bruce’s and vice versa. I felt that the handling of Catwoman’s character was overall pretty good and even though it’s a character we’ve seen a million times, she still works well here as a constant reminder to Bruce that the suit doesn’t erase the identity of the one wearing it.

While Catwoman’s presence is like the pebble that starts off a tiny crack on a window, the news Bruce gets by the end of the episode cause that crack to rapidly expand and shatter Bruce’s sense of self and, as a consequence Batman’s sense of mission and purpose. A quick step back first. At the start of the episode, Batman foils a robbery at the offices of the very corrupt mayor. Bruce is also in the process of helping Harvey Dent become the next mayor, even though Dent isn’t exactly squeaky clean since he’s not above asking infamous mobster Carmine Falcone for help. While you can have Bruce play friendly with the mobster (or not), Bruce is still a relatively good guy, incorruptible in his sewer of a city because he has built his life on the clear cut good/bad dichotomy engendered by what he witnessed when his parents when gunned down.

Which is why when Telltale delivers the twist of the episode by having Falcone show Batman that the Waynes were neck deep into Gotham’s corruption, Bruce’s moral compass crumbles and he finds himself wondering who Bruce really is and, as a consequence, who Batman is. I enjoyed the twist in the often-told origin story that Telltale went with because it opens up different narrative avenues for the rest of the series from what we usually see in Batman stories. With the press and the police pressuring from all sides, trying to find out whether the Wayne’s are to blame for Gotham’s mess, your choices as Bruce become much more consequential. Add to that the tension between Bruce and Alfred, who appears to know much more than he’s said already and has been probably lying to Bruce, and you can see how Telltale cleverly takes two of the most stable things in Bruce Wayne’s life – his parents and Alfred – and twists them around into sources of doubt and conflict. A clever move that really made the episode tick for me.

Narratively, the episode worked for me overall. I liked the twists, I enjoyed the flawed – or possibly flawed – characters, and I liked that Telltale seems to be giving players a bit more time to respond than in other series, which lets me ponder some of my responses a bit more. I do wish the writers were a bit more cautious with the wording of some of the responses because there were times when one of my choices read quite sarcastic, but when I would pick it, my character would say it in a straight face. I know it’s difficult to ensure that tone carries clearly in the responses, but I do think responses could have been more transparent in terms of tone.

Telltale also added a detective mechanic that I found appropriate for a Batman game and a nice change from the usual tasks of picking responses and doing quick time events. When I had to investigate a warehouse, I got to go around examining clues and then linking them in pairs to recreate the events. It’s a mechanic similar to the game The Trace ($3.99), and I found it entertaining and hope to see more of it. And Batman also has a fun mechanic when it comes to taking down enemies, one that feels like a turn-based version of the PC Batman games. I enjoyed picking different ways to take down the enemies at Falcone’s headquarters and, again, it was a nice break from the narrative-heavy gameplay of the rest of the game.

Overall, I enjoyed the first episode of BATMAN: The Telltale Series both for its narrative twists and its new mechanics. I did encounter some issues with a few of my choices getting delivered in a very different tone from what I thought they would be, but other than that I thought it was solid in narrative terms and with strong voice performances. Now, in terms of all the technical issues and graphical glitches (like Selina’s legs disappearing at some points), I can’t help but feel that Telltale needs a new, more optimized engine because it’s risking turning many players away from its mobile products. These issues aren’t new and have been plaguing many Telltale series, and I feel they’re getting worse.

Nevertheless, those who can play it will enjoy this interesting take on the Batman mythos and the difficult choices that come with being Bruce and Batman. You can play the character as a knight in shining armor or as a vigilante barely skirting the limits of the law. Either way, I think you’ll enjoy Episode 1, Realms of Shadows; if you can actually play it that is.

Rating: 3.5/5

Episode 2: Children of Arkham

Bruce Wayne just can’t catch a break, and Telltale is to blame. Episode 2, Children of Arkham, starts right where the first one left off, with Bruce still reeling from what he’s discovered about his family and Alfred admitting that yes, all that’s been whispered – or even shouted – against the Waynes are more than based on reality. And this is where I think the best part of the series comes in; what does Batman do, where does he stand while the facade of the good, honest Waynes is being torn piece by piece and what’s left in its place is the image of a corrupt Thomas Wayne, a kingpin ruling Gotham relentlessly? Batman has made it his life’s purpose to stand up to villainy, defend the city of Gotham, and avenge his parents’ needless death. Batman is nothing without a clear sense of right or wrong, and Bruce is nothing without Batman; it’s easy to comprehend, then, how Telltale’s decision to mire the good name of the Wayne’s has given this Batman tale an intriguing dynamic that I’ve been quite enjoying. Spoilers follow, of course, but I haven’t spoiled the last big decision of the episode.

What makes this episode even more interesting is that the “bad" guys have made it their mission to take down the Wayne name, since they – rightfully – see it as a sign of injustice and lawlessness. What that leaves us with is Batman and Bruce fighting against men who are doing the work Batman would normally be doing – cleaning up the city – although admittedly, they are a tad more violent in their ways. I have a hunch we’ll get to see Batman suffer through an even bigger identity crisis as the series wears on, and I’m looking forward to seeing how Telltale will handle it.

As for this episode, after the revelation that Thomas Wayne was a piece of work (I won’t talk about his bad deeds here, but let’s just say that whatever was implied about him in the first episode might as well be a compliment), the dominoes keep on falling one by one. Penguin and his gang are out to clean the city – sorry Batman, someone’s took your night job – and Catwoman is on the list since she failed to complete her job in the first episode. Bruce’s attempt to warn her leads to probably the most bad-ass fight sequence in the history of Telltale, and one where the QTEs worked great. A truly enjoyable moment in the episode. You also get to decide how you want to play it with Catwoman; do you want to be proud and dismissive of her – even though there’s an obvious attraction – or do you lean in for a kiss and hope for the best?

As Bruce continues to untangle the web that his dad and his accomplices have woven, you get for the first time the choice between going in for a meeting as Bruce or as Batman. This was a great idea and highlighted the differences between the two characters both in terms of how they act but also how people around them react to them. I chose to go in as Bruce because I wanted to see whether being all suave and smart could get me what I wanted to know without having to use intimidation. You could go either way, though, and just the fact that I and many others chose to go in as Bruce is a testament to what a great job Telltale has done fleshing out this character.

The episode culminates in a rather cliche hostage situation-clock ticking kind of scene that we’ve seen a billion times. Yet Telltale handles it relatively well by having Batman work with Catwoman for the first time (bar fight aside). The revelations about the Waynes and the Children of Arkham drop one after the other just as the henchman do at the hands of Batman and Catwoman. A word about the Children of Arkham group, though. I thought it was a brilliant idea to name a group trying to eradicate Gotham’s corruption after the Asylum; it created an excellent diversion that made everyone think this episode would be all about Batman fighting against the usual Arkham baddies.

The episode concludes in a momentous decision that I won’t spoil, but it’s surely one that will reverberate throughout the rest of the series. I will say though that the developers play it well at the end and leave Batman and Bruce with impossible decisions on all sides. By doing so, they made me feel like I have quite a lot to say regarding which direction my narrative will go, and I think everyone playing this series will enjoy these big forks on the road more than in most other Telltale games. This series is really showing Telltale recipe’s strengths in creating captivating narratives with often anguishing choices.

A word about the technical issues that have so plagued the series. Episode 2 was better than Episode 1 overall, but I still had to deal with huge load times early on and with blurry text. I saw an update pop up yesterday that should fix the text issue and maybe improve the performance, but that came after I played the episode. Overall, if you have one of the latest devices, you’ll be fine; if not, I’m truly not sure you could play this series and enjoy it, which is a dreadful shame. Here’s hoping the performance is improved dramatically and soon.

Rating: 4.5/5

Episode 3: New World Order

Telltale’s take on the Dark Knight continues to entertain both for its predictable aspects but, especially so, for its unpredictable ones. The writers decided to give us a Batman tale that starts like many other Batman tales, including the appearance of Catwoman, but as the episodes unfold, the writers are taking us on a different path that stands out among most other Batman stories. And that’s why I’m really enjoying this series. Episode 3, New World Order, has shown me that the series is only going to get better as we go.

The ending of Episode 2 saw Bruce Wayne and the Wayne name rightfully under attack as the Children of Arkham reveal to the world Thomas Wayne’s despicable acts that led to him becoming wealthy and influential and, in turn, led to the birth of Wayne Enterprises. Knowing that the funds aiding Batman in his quest to clean Gotham were the product of awful crimes against both the people of Gotham and even family friends puts a taint on Batman’s identity that Bruce is having a hard time erasing. Although there will be spoilers in this review, I won’t reveal the huge twist at the end of the episode, even though it’s a big part of why I can’t wait to play episode 4.

A quick word about the ongoing technical issues the series has had. There was a patch released recently that has actually improved load times considerably as well as cleared up all the fuzzy text in the Codex. I’m playing on an iPhone 7, so I don’t know how the game runs on older phones and tablets, but for me it’s playing fine now. So if you were sitting this one out because of the technical issues, it might be worth giving it another shot if you have a good enough phone or tablet.

In my playthrough, Episode 3 starts with a brief glimpse at Harvey Dent’s transformation (or descent) into Two-Face, the famously-unstable villain. In a narrative where Bruce is fighting to come to terms with his own two-faced family and legacy, Dent acts as a personification of that inner struggle. Or to put it more simply, Bruce is now Harvey but without the scars. While visiting Dent at the hospital, Batman sees the Bat signal lighting up the sky for the first time, and we soon find out that it was Gordon’s idea because he needed all the help he could get. The use of the sign is pretty appropriate in this episode since you end up spending more time as Batman compared to the other two episodes.

New World Order constantly forces you to choose, and the first major choice you have to make is whether to save Dent from the Children of Arkham or help Officer Montoya get some of the poisonous gas out of circulation. Either way you go, you end up with pretty heavy consequences, and that’s part of what I like about Telltale’s take on Batman. The consequences for your choices are pretty severe and game-changing, and that’s something that’s more apparent to the player than in previous series. You know that if you don’t help Dent, something bad will happen, but you have to make a choice. It’s like the classic superhero dilemma where a villain forces a choice between saving A or B, and there’s no saving both.

Batman’s precarious position continues to get worse as Episode 3 unfolds since even his secret identity is under threat. With the Children of Arkham hacking Wayne tech, they’ve managed to use the same backdoor Batman has been using to keep track of all that’s going on in Gotham. Having the Children of Arkham use the same techniques that Batman is using and also having them both have the same goal of cleaning Gotham’s corruption (although in radically different ways, at least for now) makes the two awfully similar, which raises all kinds of questions about vigilantism. Telltale’s Batman and villains are only different in terms of degree, not kind, and that is a narrative complication that I’m enjoying quite a bit.

Speaking of villains who might or might not be villains, Catwoman has as always a highly-suspect role in all that’s happening, and depending on how you’ve treated her in previous episodes, there’s a chance for some romancing. However, the romance doesn’t last long since Harvey Dent catches Wayne with his pants down (literally), and this weird triangle (or is it a square) further pushes Dent off the edge. Although he isn’t that much of a factor in this episode, I have a hunch Dent will play a pivotal role in the next episodes.

In keeping with tearing down Bruce Wayne’s identity bit by bit, the writers take away Wayne Enterprises from the now-tainted Bruce and give it Oswald Cobblepot. It’s been an entertaining ride seeing Bruce Wayne fighting with his legacy and name, and I’m sure we haven’t seen the full effects of that struggle yet. You can choose whether to go down peacefully or put up a fight, but the end result is similar; Bruce Wayne no longer runs Wayne Enterprises. Although let’s face it, he wasn’t much of a CEO anyway. Losing Wayne Enterprises, though, is more than just a a matter of pride; that’s where all his gadgets come from, so this move further weakens Batman as well.

I won’t foil the big twist at the end, but let’s just say it continues the theme of Bruce realizing his view of the world and the people around him is way off. Where does that leave Batman and Bruce? Well, Episode 4 is titled Guardian of Gotham, and I suspect that title might need a question mark at the end. New World Order definitely delivered a strong narrative with more than enough twists to make your choices actually matter. I’m enjoying the series more and more, and I actually can’t wait to play through Episode 4. However, I’m starting to feel really bad for poor Wayne and that poor little bat.

Rating: 4.5/5

Episode 4: Guardian of Gotham

During the Batman series, Bruce and the Dark Knight have had to struggle against all kinds of enemies, but the most constant one has been lots of technical issues. I’m bringing this up because I saw an improvement in the technical issues episode after episode, but unfortunately Episode 4 was the worse of them all, even on an iPhone 7. While the load times are finally down to reasonable levels, this time around I had major choppiness issues during fights and quite a few instances when characters’ lips were moving but no sound would come out. I must’ve missed around six or seven sentences throughout the episode, which is a major problem when you’re playing a narrative-based game that’s all about responding to others. As for the action scene issues, I got my head busted many more times that I would’ve if I could see what was going on in time to react. So, it’s a bit ironic that in an episode that’s all about hacking and Batman facing tech issues, I was facing the biggest tech issues yet, and they of course affect the review score.

Okay, now that the tech issues are covered, let’s move on to talk more about Episode 4, Guardian of Gotham. If you remember the previous episode, Bruce went a tad haywire at the end because (spoilers) Vicky Vale – aka Lady Arkham – injected him with the poison that makes people do what they truly desire without considering the social consequences (quite similar to alcohol in that way). The result? Mr. Bruce Wayne starts Episode 4 in Arkham, stuck in there with many patients who are only there because Wayne senior arranged it so. In other words, neither Gotham nor Arkham is fond of Bruce.

Placing Bruce in Arkham was smart because in this space Bruce is no longer in control, a situation we hadn’t seen up to this point in the series. Yet I felt that the writers rushed Bruce out of Arkham too quickly and lost an opportunity to really play around with the new power dynamics. Yes, Bruce does meet the Joker – and he’s quite the character – but overall, Bruce’s Arkham residency was too brief. There are a couple of interesting choices to be made that I’m sure will have an effect in the final episode, but overall I wanted to see Bruce mentally tortured just a bit more.

Once Bruce is finally out of Arkham, he finds out that the city has changed a lot in his absence. The funny part of that is that it pretty much felt like Bruce was gone for a day at the most. Timeline issues aside, Gotham continues to turn on Bruce and we find ourselves in an interesting universe where Batman is much more liked than Bruce. I enjoyed this twist in the Batman mythos where Bruce and Batman change places in some aspects, kind of like Freaky Friday. Dent – or Two-Face by now – continues to convincingly spiral out of control and to hunt down Bruce, at least in my playthrough.

What I didn’t find that convincing was Lady Arkham’s violent turn. Part of what I enjoyed in the previous episodes was how the Children of Arkham were pretty much doing what Batman was doing but with more violent means. All they wanted was to clean up Arkham city from its corruption. But when Lady Arkham goes all berserk on her parents – at least as far as we know so far – she becomes just another crazy monster of the kind Batman always fights. By turning her into a crazed, eye-gouging menace, the series lost a complex villain and instead got a cliche one in its place.

The other big twist of the episode is how Penguin manages to take away Batman’s gadgets and use them on the dark knight himself. This was another clever idea on the writers’ behalf since we know that Batman is pretty much a man who’s better than normal humans because of superior training and high-tech gadgets. Again, though, I felt that the episode sped through the idea of a gadget-less Batman without stopping to give us a closer look of how a Batman without any gadgets would be and how different of a hero he would, or wouldn’t, be. I think part of the issue was the episode trying to do to much in too little time and ending up only skimming the surface of some very intriguing ponds.

Was the episode entertaining? Overall yes, but more because of the possibilities it created rather than the actual narrative it delivered. I wish I had spent more time in Arkham and more time running around without my gadgets. Instead, I felt like I was being pushed through the narrative too fast, barely stopping to smell the deteriorating daisies. Add to that the many and serious technical issues I faced, and it’s fair to say I wasn’t a big fan of Guardian of Gotham. It’s still an entertaining story, but it could have been so much better. Hopefully Episode 5 will end the series in a smoothly-operating bang.

Rating: 3/5

Episode 5: City of Light

After four episodes filled with intriguing narrative twists and very frustrating technical issues, we have reached the end of the road with Episode 5: City of Light. As much as I would like to just focus on the narrative and gameplay aspects of City of Light, I can’t ignore the serious technical issues I faced during my playthrough, and this time around it wasn’t just long load times, although those are annoying and break the flow of the action. Imagine running after the main villain of the series in the hallways of Arkham Asylum and having to wait 5 seconds every time you turn a corner; it’s hard to be immersed in the narrative in a situation like that.

In addition to long and frequent load times, City of Light had serious visual bugs that hindered my actions more than a few times. The most grievous was the “black curtain" one where objects and characters in the near-background literally cannot be seen . This issue would have been fine if Batman’s fight was against a black blob gradually swallowing Gotham city, but this visual bug concealed enemies and other dangers I had to react to. As much as I enjoyed the narrative and the entertaining twists and turns, I can’t ignore the fact that Batman: The Telltale Series was by far the worst-performing Telltale series on mobile, and that was truly disappointing.

Let’s move on to the rest of the episode now. As was to be expected, City of Lights is all about Batman finally confronting Lady Arkham – (spoiler) aka Vicky Veil – as well as Harvey Dent, who by now has slid straight into his Two-Face alter ego. Since this is at its heart a comic book storyline, I wasn’t surprised to see Alfred taken hostage by Lady Arkham; after all, this is a very common trope of the genre. Alfred’s absence should have prompted Bruce’s identity to unravel even further, but as was the case in the previous episode, the writers were in a hurry to move to the conflict part of the episode, so we missed the chance to see how Bruce would have acted after losing the only remaining member of his “family."

Speaking of people in Bruce’s life, Catwoman makes a brief appearance in City of Light, but it was a fleeting appearance, which was a pity. Selina was a very strong character earlier in the series, and I was hoping to see more of her ambivalent relationship with Bruce and Batman. Instead, I got a pretty predictable scene, but I’m happy there was some kind of an encounter between the two. Now I wonder whether Telltale will do another Batman series (my guess is yes) and whether Bruce’s relationship with Selina will continue where this episode left off (my guess is again yes).

One narrative move I did like had to do with my complain about Lady Arkham’s descent into a kind of madness in the previous episode. Initially, I liked Lady Arkham because she was a slightly-more violent version of Batman but had the same motivations. And then she went all eye-gouging mad and tore her mother and father to shreds, which made her seem like just another two-dimensional comic book villain, all violence and little complexity. City of Light takes us back to a more complicated villain by giving us the motivation behind her rage; a literally tortured childhood that transformed Vicky Vale into Lady Arkham. Better enemies make for better heroes and better stories, so I was glad to see this narrative turn in Lady Arkham’s character.

Another enemy that threatened Bruce and Batman in City of Light was, of course, Harvey Dent, and that confrontation had an interesting twist that reinforced one of the strongest parts of this whole series; the importance of Bruce Wayne. Harvey forces Bruce rather than Batman to face him, and because of that I had to use my words rather than my gadgets to disarm the situation. Well, disarm might be a strong word since I lost a few hostages along the way, and that was a pleasant part of the whole scene (in relative terms, of course) because it raised the stakes. As has been the case with most major scenes in this series, the buildup was long and tense but the resolution a bit too swift for my taste; I wish the pacing was a bit more even.

The final encounter between Batman and Lady Arkham takes most of the episode, but it has enough twists and turns to make it interesting. Yet I still felt the wheels moving towards the inevitable defeat of Lady Arkham. I would have preferred the possibility that she might actually escape if I didn’t make the right moves rather than just feeling the encounter was all about how she will end up perishing instead of whether she would. Having that doubt would have been great given the option to reveal your secret identity to Lady Arkham along the way; imagine if you don’t know whether she’ll make it or not and then having to decide whether to remove that mask. Still, overall the encounter was fun, despite the game occasionally failing to recognize my swipes, which resulted in Batman failing a few more times than he would have otherwise.

The ending definitely leaves the door open for another Batman series by bringing in the Joker, and I would definitely be up for it, provided it actually plays well on mobile. The narrative as a whole was quite entertaining, especially the emphasis on Bruce Wayne and his challenges. The pacing was off in quite a few occasions, but at the same time it’s not easy to pack all these events in 5 relatively-short episodes. So, I do understand why some moments were a bit on the rushed side. As a whole, Batman: The Telltale Series was another feather in the cap of the developer, but I can’t ignore the huge issues mobile players faced because they greatly affected my enjoyment and left a sour taste.

Rating: 3/5

Written by Ellen Cooper, Congresswolf establishes a world where werewolves are real and discriminated against by the rest of society. It’s an obvious expy for any number of socially marginalized groups in our real society, and to that end, most of the werewolves you’re going to meet are protestors who are not wolfing out all that much when you run into them. There’s a subplot that explores the mythical side of werewolves more, but it ends up being a minor sideshow for the real plot of the game. Don’t come here looking for a werewolf story with political elements. This is a story about politics that happens to have a few werewolves stalking about. You play as a campaign manager for a candidate for congress in the months leading up to the election. A renegotiation of werewolf rights is one of the issues at stake, but only one of several considerations you need to keep an eye on.

Since the game comes right out and says it, I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that your boss, the candidate in question, is a werewolf. He or she is hiding it, but it’s obvious almost from the first time you meet them, something the game hangs a lampshade on later. It’s possible for that to have an effect on the campaign given the prejudice against werewolves in the world of Congresswolf, but you’re more likely going to be busy deciding on ad campaigns, spinning gaffes, and buttering up the press than covering up for any full moon shenanigans. Maybe it’s immature of me, but I was hoping the supernatural aspects would take a larger part in everything. You’ve got a great title like Congresswolf that has me expecting some howling out of a sunroof on the campaign trail, but instead, I’m balancing budgets. Reality bites.

The campaign side of the game is fairly well-handled and ended up being more compelling than I expected. It’s deep enough that you need to pay attention to it, but not so deep that you’re going to stress out over every little decision. The most frequently-occurring element is making sure you’re splitting your money intelligently between fundraising, polling, and reaching out to the voters. If you don’t spend enough on fundraising, you’ll have even less to work with next month. If you don’t put money into polling, you’ll have no idea how your candidate is doing versus his or her opponents. Finally, if you ignore the voters, you do so at your own peril. Other events during the course of the story might require a sudden outlay of cash, which can throw a wrench into your budget plans.

It’s not all about the money, though. You’ll also be making a lot of traditional choices. Those include advice to your candidate on speeches, whether you want to run a clean campaign or a sleazy one, what kind of ads you want to run, and so on. Outside of the political circus, there’s also a mystery about who killed the previous campaign manager to resolve, and some romance options. Congresswolf is a bit vague about your character compared to the usual Choice of Games releases. You choose your name, but rather than choosing your gender and sexual orientation, the rest of the book is written in a way that avoids being gender-specific. It does an okay job of that, but the way it writes around the topic is a bit obvious in places. The romances are another sideshow to the campaign stuff, but I felt like they were given their fair time here.

I liked a lot of the parts that go into Congresswolf‘s whole, but for some reason, I’m left feeling quite indifferent about it after the fact. If I had to guess why, I think it’s because the game leans heavily on the job of getting your candidate elected, but doing that turns out to be relatively simple. I usually have to play at least a couple of times to get a happy ending in a gamebook from this publisher. While there were a couple of sour notes in the epilogue on my first playthrough, I handily won the election for my candidate and managed to help out just about everyone. I also think the werewolf side of the story could have been handled better. Even as an allegory, it feels underdeveloped. It’s like the author was excited to write about werewolves in the beginning, but ended up falling in love with the political campaign plot instead. The wolves and their story of human rights get shunted to a backburner, practically shooed off the stage lest they draw too much attention from the candidate.

As is the case with many titles from Choice of Games, the initial download for Congresswolf is free. That gives you a portion of the story, with the remainder unlocking after a one-time IAP purchase of $3.99. It’s a good pay model that allows you to see if you can get into the plot and the author’s style before having to put any money down, which is something I certainly appreciate. The game includes Game Center support for achievements, with the chase to complete them lending a nice bit of replay value to the whole affair.

While it’s well-written and even genuinely funny in places, Congresswolf ends up heavily emphasizing the ‘congress’ at the expense of the ‘wolf’. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but with the game leaning hard on the campaign management, that element has to carry the overall experience. Unfortunately, pulling out a victory over your opponent ends up lacking in challenge, leaving it all feeling rather empty. Maybe it’s just as well, though. Who could ever believe a story about politicians who are secretly monsters?

F1 2016 brings along all the current cars, drivers, and tracks, so that alone makes it a great game for those who follow the sport. Being able to race as Hamilton in the all-powerful Mercedes in Spa is definitely a treat you can’t get from other games. If you don’t follow the sport closely, you’ll still benefit by the licensing because the game’s 21 official circuits are pretty fantastic (well, almost all of them) and very fun to race in. The game offers a full Season mode, where you can race all 21 circuits in a row. You can do a full race weekend, which includes Practice, Qualifying, and Race Day. There are plenty of options in terms of how long you want spend in each mode; for instance, you can do an 8 minute or 15 minute practice, and a 1 lap or 3 lap qualifying session, or even a 3 round qualifying session. Race day is equally customizable, and you can do from a 1-lap race up to the full 100% race (usually over 60 laps). Although the 100% race is a great challenge, make sure you plug your phone in because this game goes through your battery quite quickly.

In addition to the Season mode, there’s also a Custom Season, where you can pick which races make up your season, a Quick Race on a single circuit, a full race weekend on a single track, Time Trial, where you race for leaderboards position, and a Weekly Event, which gives you a track and a driver and has you competing with others. As you can see, there’s no lack of ways to race in F1 2016, and since this isn’t a F2P game, all those modes are available all the time.

However, keep in mind that any mode that has you racing against the AI will frustrate you immensely. I’m a pretty decent driver in F1 games, so I know how to use the right racing line, when to brake, when to overtake, and so on. Racing against the AI makes me want to just go ramming all of my opponents off the track because they are completely dumb and race like they just had a bottle of whiskey and then decided to wear blindfolds. Let me give you some examples. The AI cannot drive in a straight line if you’re behind it; it keeps squirming as if the car is trembling and that makes overtaking it quite hard. Also, when you follow even fantastic AI drivers, you’ll see them repeatedly go off track at specific turns as if they still don’t know how the track works. If there’s an incident in the track (for instance a car that’s facing the wrong way), they will all literally stop behind it and wait as if it’s a red light in a busy intersection.

I could go on and on about all this issues, but I’ll just tell you my biggest gripe with the AI; it doesn’t know or care where your car is positioned in the track. The AI always wants to be on the racing line, and it doesn’t care if you are actually on the racing line or your car is currently between the AI car and the racing line. It will literally try to drive through you and go to the racing line, which results in you having to play bumper cars instead of actually racing. And it won’t stop trying to get to that racing line even if it’s currently crashing into you. As far as the AI is concerned, you don’t exist. I cannot even count the times I was driven off the road simply because I pulled a nice overtake but the AI failed to notice that I was actually ahead of it and simply took me out by clipping me from behind. I started playing the game with full damage on but soon had to switch it off because the dumb AI kept damaging my car.

And the AI is not the only issue; there are also many serious bugs as well as some weird design decisions. I have an iPhone 7 and yet the game stutters significantly when I go over kerbs. In a racing game like this one, you can’t afford a wrong move let along a big stutter. I have also been dropped on top of other cars in qualifying (you appear on the track rather than drive out of the pit box), which resulted in my car toppling over, I’ve had my car completely stop in the middle of the track with no button responding, and many more issues like this.

There are also some weird design decisions. When the game drives you out of the pit (you can’t drive it yourself), it often takes you on the wrong racing line and then literally stops you in the middle of the track before handing control over to you. Safety cars often end in all the cars stopping in the middle of the track in a nice line and you getting a warning for having parked in the wrong place, cars smoke like crazy when they brake, ehivh makes it hard to see the track, and many more similar problems. These are issues the F1 2010 PC game had (which was the first F1 car by Codemasters), and although I know the PC version of F1 2016 is supposed to be great, F1 2016 for iOS definitely feels like a first attempt at an iOS F1 game.

Now that I got all the negative aspects of the game out of the way, let’s talk about what works well in F1 2016. While the visuals aren’t the most amazing you’ve ever seen in a mobile game, F1 2016 looks pretty good and all the cars and circuits are reproduced in great detail. And the game sounds good too, including the wheezing of the turbo. The driving model is not a simulation by any means, but if you set up the sensitivity right, you can really nail those apexes and really enjoy the drive.

Yes, the game has always-on assists like keeping you from spinning when you put the power down too early or not letting you slide the car into corners, but it’s still fun for a game where you have to use the touchscreen to drive. The game gives you a few ways you can drive (gyro or touch) and a few assists to help you learn the ropes, but I wish braking was more of a slider than a button; it’s difficult to brake well after a long straight without locking the wheels simply by tapping. The control scheme isn’t bad, especially in some tracks, but a brake slider would in my mind be ideal.

As you can tell from the review so far, F1 2016 is a great game if you only want to do Time Trials but a pretty frustrating one if you like racing against the AI. Codemasters has always had a problem getting the AI to work right in its F1 games, so I’m not really surprised to see the AI in F1 2016 having all these issues. A game that offers 60-lap races cannot afford to have AI that spins you out of contention on lap 50 because it can be frustrating as few other experiences in gaming. Should you buy the game, then? As I said, it you enjoy solo racing, this is a very entertaining game that offers a lot of content in terms of circuits and weekly events. Just keep in mind that you’ll have a hard time doing wheel to wheel competitive racing. If you want to see what our forum users think of the game, head this way.

This is the kind of game that will divide players: some will stick it out through the timers and play when they can play, but most will get tired of having to wait constantly just to put a few (quick) matches in before running out of energy. And don’t expect a CCG that requires too much strategy and tactics since the game is too easy for too long and then ramps up fast. Overall, though, if you enjoy the characters and storylines of these shows, you’ll enjoy Animation Throwdown, at least for a while.

So, how does Animation Throwdown play? The game takes quite a few ideas from many other card games and creates an interesting patchwork of mechanics that while it will give you plenty to do, the seams don’t always hold together well. Cards have attack, defense, and – as you get better, more rare cards – various skills that might for instance automatically increase the attack of a random card or reduce the attack of a random enemy unit. Matches play like lane-based CCGs where each card fights the card opposite and if there’s no card on the opposite side, it damages the enemy hero. When your card’s attack is higher than the opposite card’s defense, the enemy card is destroyed and any remaining damage goes to the enemy hero. When it’s your turn to play a card, you can either play a card in an empty lane or play one on top of another card to create a more powerful combo card if you’ve already researched that specific combination.

The combo card mechanic is quite fun because of the crazy results you get when you put two cards together. In order to be able to play a specific combo – let’s say playing the Meg card on top of the Sports card – you first have to research it, and guess what? Each time you research a card, it takes time to get the research done. The early cards take just a few minutes, but as you start researching higher rarity cards, you’ll have to wait for hours for your card to be done. Timers, as you’ll see in the rest of this review, will be a very familiar friend as you progress in Animation Throwdown. Each card has many combos you can discover, and that is a huge part of the fun in this game since the combos are often hilarious and will remind you of various show episodes.

In addition to comboing, you can improve your cards by upgrading them using Power, which you get from completing quests and from recycling cards you don’t need. The upgrading mechanic is pretty simple as you’ll usually upgrade a card to Level 3 and then fuse it with another Level 3 copy of the same card to get a new, improved Level 1 copy of the same card. Then, the upgrading/fusing cycle begins anew. You’ll need to be upgrading your cards often not for the early stages of the game but for later on when things get tougher and you need cards with higher stats.

When it comes to actually getting new cards in order to research and upgrade them, you buy packs from the shop with the cheapest pack going for a 1000 and from there on getting better packs either for 6000 gold or gems. The game is very generous with its in-game gold rewards, especially early on (you’ll be hearing this phrase very often for a reason) since the daily quests are usually very easy to complete and you’ll also be getting gold quite easily but, of course, barely any gems. But you can only have 70 cards at a time in your collection, which means you won’t be able to just stockpile away without first recycling and comboing.

So, what do you do when you when you actually play cards against an opponent? Animation Throwdown offers two modes, Adventure and Arena. The Adventure is a campaign of sorts made up of 25 chapters split up between the five shows. The chapters have funny themes and if you enjoy the shows, you’ll get a giggle or two here and there. Each chapter has 3 stages, and you can play each stage multiple times for better rewards. Of course, playing a stage requires energy, with the later chapters requiring more energy per play. The other mode is the Arena where you play against other people’s decks but played by the AI instead of them. The positive is that there’s no waiting between turns; the negative is that it’s an AI, not another person. And, of course, it takes energy to play in the Arena, and it’s a different kind than the one the Adventure uses.

In the early stages of the game, both the Adventure and the Arena are way too easy and there’s really almost no challenge even without upgrading cards. I played about 10 chapters before losing even one match, and I think that’s by design. Same goes for the Arena; the challenge is minimal for a large chunk of it. You are also given plenty of all types of energy in the beginning, so it’s going to take a while before you actually have to wait for your Adventure or Arena energies to refill.

But then matches start getting harder as the opponents start playing better and more upgraded cards. And I started losing more and had to tinker with my deck more and upgrade cards more often, but I started running out of Power and couldn’t upgrade as much as I wanted to. I also couldn’t get enough coins and gems to buy better cards, which meant the AI had better cards than me. And on top of that, I started running out of energy and guess what, it takes a long, long time for the energy to refill. Put all those together and you know what it spells; paywall. As you can see in our forum thread of the game, most players describe a similar experience where the early stages of the game are too easy and then the timers kick in and you either have to stick with it and play just a bit every day or you pour in the money and play more.

The positive in this game is that there’s a lot of game time before the F2P shenanigans really kick in, and I felt that I got enough entertainment out of the game before having to deal with IAPs and timers. That might be enough for most players, especially for those of you who like to play a mobile game for a bit and then move on to other games. If you’re looking for a CCG challenge, this is not the game for you because of how easy it is early on and how random most of the skills are. Yes, there are some tactical decisions to be made like which card to play where and when to play a new card or combo an already-played one, but overall you won’t be playing Animation Throwdown to scratch your CCG itch; instead, you’ll play it for the fan service and for the giggles. That’s what I did, and overall I had fun. And then I hit the paywalls.

Nitrome is generally in a class of its own with this, particularly in the freemium circle. They somehow manage to mix up their art style with just about every release, and their approach to each game uniquely fits the mobile space. But with their latest offering of Magic Mansion (Free), a few of their typical pieces of the formula are askew.

Magic Mansion‘s intentions make themselves known almost immediately. Like many Nitrome games it brings back memories of a bygone 8-bit era, complete with detailed sprite work that looks like something straight out of a Nintendo project — albeit with its own look and feel.  Magic Mansion dials it a step further too with its monochromatic palette that looks a lot like a Game Boy game. It’s a little more pronounced of course, but if you didn’t grow up with a certain sense of nostalgia locked away in a special part of your brain, you probably won’t have any love for it. Nitrome knows the audience its going for and its commendable in that regard.

You can probably take one look at a screenshot and see that there’s no on-screen inputs, which would lead to the educated guess of “tap controls." Tapping is your only means of input as everything else is handled automatically, though you do have the chance to manipulate where you go as a result. For instance, jumping or bumping into an object will cause you to turn around, just in case you missed a coin pickup or need to avoid an incoming hazard. Beyond that you’ll climb ladders automatically and tap to dodge when you need to.

You’ll have a decent array of stuff to dodge too, because enemies show up with a variety of patterns (including low, mid, and high attacks), there are bullet timings to learn, and spikes to leap over. Blocks also exhibit an interesting wild card effect, where bumping one can reveal either a spike or a coin. It’s a muted risk-reward system in that I tend to avoid every block I can just in case, but when I’m on the verge of earning enough coins for an unlock, I go for it.  The jump timing takes some getting used to, make no mistake, but I found it to be pretty responsive after about an hour of training. Like most Nitrome games, it comes with practice.

The ad-supported model has the propensity to push it too far, but I think Nitrome manages to reign it in, and that includes Magic Mansion. If you’re having a really good run you can opt to continue on the spot for in-game currency (simply “coins," without any of the confusion involved with multiple types), or watch a video ad, which serves the same purpose. Dying is easy to do in Magic Mansion since all it takes is one hit, so it’s a little more frustrating than your average runner, but earning the 25 coins you need to get back into the action isn’t insurmountable at all.

Besides the power to buy coins you can pay $2.99 to get rid of ads entirely, and use coins to buy more characters. That’s really it — and like I was saying earlier, there isn’t really a hook involved in any way shape or form to keep people playing. I only kept going because of the visuals, sound effects, and the need to see more of the castle itself — which, while enjoyable enough, isn’t going to do it for most people outside of the most stalwart of retro fans.

At this point you’re better off just playing the incredibly similar yet superior Leap Day (Free). It has all of the same fixins like watching videos to continue and incremental rewards, but just about everything else is more enjoyable. With some tweaking Magic Mansion could get there, especially with its adorable designs, but it’s not there yet.

You play as Darius, a survivor of the Ark Europa who has been recovered by descendants of the people of Ark America. You’ve been in cryostasis for an incredibly long time, which makes a nice excuse for why other characters might need to lay the exposition on a bit thick. While the people of America found you, the rest of your people were nowhere to be found. Locating them is your first priority, but there’s another wrinkle in this tale. While the people of America have forgotten much of their history, your character remembers the sordid details of a raging war like they were yesterday. Without spoiling too much, Darius has a pretty hard time fitting in with the peaceful utopia of the new planet America.

Out There Chronicles is billed as the first episode of a longer story, and true to its word, it ends without resolving the main plot. Nevertheless, it does have a fairly satisfying arc of its own, and unlike many first chapters, the climax is suitably high-stakes. It’s quite a bit longer than it seems to be at first blush, as well. You might expect the whole game to take place on America, but it wouldn’t be much of an Out There game if you didn’t end up, well, out there, would it? You’ll meet quite a few characters along the way, and a few of them are given some reasonable development. Even a lot of the minor characters appear to have had a lot of work put into them, though I suppose that’s because there’s a chance they’ll reoccur in later episodes.

I continue to appreciate the way Out There handles aliens in its universe. While it’s expedient for live action entertainment to make aliens resemble humans with minimal or no alterations, there’s no reason why games should have to stick to that custom. The only things that look and act like humans in Out There Chronicles are the humans themselves. The other aliens you meet cover a wide variety of appearances and mannerisms. You won’t be able to communicate with most of them until you learn some of the local language, and even then, you’re going to have to do some interpretation. The alien language ended up being one of my favorite things about this game. When an alien uses a word you don’t understand, you can ask for clarification. The alien will try to explain with body language or gestures, and then it’s up to you to choose which word you think they mean from a short list. Whatever you pick will be substituted in for that word from there forward.

That’s just a small part of a much larger game, however. Most of the time, you’ll be doing the usual gamebook business of reading some text and choosing an action from a list. Where Out There Chronicles differs from the usual genre fare is that making a choice rarely locks you out of the other selections. There are some situations where you can only make one choice, and certainly plenty of branches where you’ll get a game over if you make particular selections, naturally. In general, however, the choices in this game feel more like navigating the dialogue tree of an RPG. You can ask as many questions as you like, pursue follow-up questions, and then return to the previous set to ask whatever else you want. This often makes it feel like you’re just hitting every button on the dash looking for the one that will let you proceed.

While the overall plot and character work is interesting enough, Out There Chronicles fumbles with the nuts and bolts of its dialogue. Just on a technical level alone, there are a lot of typos and grammar errors compared to other efforts in the genre. The writing struggles to give each character their own voice, and while I don’t doubt some fans will appreciate it, the game has a tendency to drone on a little too long about the minutiae of the universe. I’m not sure what it says that I enjoyed the simple translated dialogue with the aliens more than anything any of the humans had to say. The text isn’t as enjoyable to read as it needs to be, and it drags down an otherwise well-written plot.

The old gamebook bugbear of there being only one true path rears its head in an ugly fashion here, as well. In the early stages, it feels like you have options in front of you, and the game does a good job of guiding you where it wants you to go without doing so explicitly. As the story goes on, that illusion quickly fades, making it all too apparent that in most situations there is only one correct choice, provided your choice even matters at all. There are plenty of situations where different choices lead to the same outcome, and while it’s possible the game is keeping track of those decisions for a later pay-off, it’s certainly not reflected in this episode in any meaningful way. At most, all I could spot where a few situations that became no-win scenarios if you hadn’t taken a specific choice a few minutes earlier, which feels less like consequences for decisions and more like missing a critical item in a Sierra adventure game.

Out There Chronicles isn’t as cruel about that as those older games, at least. It saves as certain intervals and if you happen to get a game over, you’ll always be set back to a point where you can actually make a difference. This makes it easier to brute force the game, which will be a positive thing for some and a negative for others. There are a couple of situations where the correct answer is hard to suss out from the text, so I appreciated being able to just push my way through without worry occasionally. At the same time, it also made my decisions feel even less important than they already did. Knowing there is really only one route through the game and that you’re never at risk of losing any major progress essentially drains the tension and enjoyment from making decisions.

The main reason to replay the game comes from its rather large selection of Game Center achievements. Some of them are missable if you don’t make certain choices, and it’s impossible to get them all in a single playthrough. Whether it’s worth playing through a rather lengthy gamebook multiple times just to snag a few achievements is an exercise best left to the reader, but it’s at least something. I think fans of Out There might enjoy uncovering all of the lore, particularly since this is set in an earlier period where much of the foundations of the universe are being established. If nothing else, Out There Chronicles looks and sounds better than a lot of interactive fiction games.

Is that enough? Well, I suppose it has to be. I don’t honestly think Out There Chronicles is going to please many from the usual gamebook crowd in its current form. The choices lack weight, and the game is a little too obvious about the rails you’re traveling on. Structurally, it plays out more like a rudimentary adventure game, asking you to exhaust all dialogue options to try to find the key to the next lock. The main plot is interesting and the characters seem to have had a lot of effort put into them, but the English text could really use a few more editing passes. Ultimately, I think it’s best taken as an extension of the original game, but I think I’d rather just play that instead.

Gameloft are the purveyors of this interactive interlude. And interlude is what I would call it. Your time with this game will be brief, and probably fill the space between your time with other games. But at least you know it’ll have that extra level of polish and shine, and holy lord is the artwork in this generally fantastic. What this game is, at its core, is a hidden object game. But it’s more like a turbo hidden object game, or an arcade one. This doesn’t have that meticulous plodding pace or much of an atmosphere. For the most part, things aren’t hidden cleverly using shadows and lighting and color gradients. That does happen from time to time, for sure, but it’s more like a Where’s Waldo in which you pick a dozen or so objects out of a screen jam packed with 30 or 40.

With so many in each scenario, the objects are randomized every time, so the only way to get really good at a level is through repetition and learning the placement of everything. You’re scored on each level by how quickly you can complete it, how many hints you use, and how well you keep up your combo meter between finding things. It’s actually better when just starting out to find several items at once before tapping on any of them. You’ll run the time up, but you’ll get a better score from keeping a bonus multiplier going between items. You can earn 5 stars per level, but this is an accumulative thing. It doesn’t matter how high you score. You’ll need to play a level at least 2 or 3 times to get each star. Those stars are used within the more narrative focused adventure side of things. For each ‘Case’ or chapter, you’ll actually spend the stars you’ve earned to move the story forward.

The story of the game is concurrent with that of the show. You play as a double agent working in part for Reddington as well as the F.B.I. There will be several references and nods to the early part of the show, with you investigating familiar crime scenes in the wake of Elizabeth Keen and whatever antics are happening. The first time you play a hidden object scenario there will be special one-time items that advance the story forward. Pieces of evidence that you’ll have to analyze. This involves either a timer, as the lab analyzes something, or spending a star to play one of the ten mini-games. These are pretty basic but provide a bit of variety, as you put pieces of a ripped up note together like a jigsaw puzzle, or look at 4 different film negatives to find the one that’s different. Eventually, you’ll have to decide whether to hand an important piece of evidence or an actual person over to the F.B.I. or Reddington, allegedly strengthening your ties with one or the other. The game even shows you what percentage of the population made the same choice, just like a real adventure game. This has taught me that around 60% of the player base are total squares who side with the F.B.I. But I digress.

There are even interrogation scenes in which you need to find the contradiction in someone’s story. Out of 2 things that they say. It’s like baby’s first Ace Attorney game (Free). If you select anything incorrectly in any of the mini-games, it doesn’t halt your progress, but it does lead to you getting fewer rewards. I guess It’s time to dive headfirst into the, sadly, ridiculously egregious freemium stuff. Your main rewards in the game will be cash, gems, and experience. As you level up, you’ll get bonuses of currency and some extra energy to keep you playing longer, but nothing else seems affected. Cash is used to buy boosts for the hidden object game. One that gives you extra hints, one that starts you off at max combo meter, and one that makes your combo meter degrade. You can also use cash to partake in the daily mission system once you get around to unlocking it. You can choose to ignore these if the rewards aren’t worth the cash investment, but the harder and riskier they are, the better the rewards.

Gems, as always, are the perennial super currency of all mobile games. You use them to buy cash, energy refilling items, and to speed up the lab analysis timers. I went through the first two cases saving all of my cash and gems, just in case. And I’m glad I did, because on top of everything else, you have to wait 24 hours or more once you finish a case to be able to play the next one. This. Is. Just. Stupid. You can skip this wait with gems, and the price is affordable if you save all of your gems for these moments, but this is ridiculous. You see, as it stands, you can only play the hidden object games 5 times per session. You have 75 total energy and each session costs 15. Once you master a scenario it only costs 5, but that will rarely come into play. As far as I can tell you can’t raise your maximum energy. As an extra kick in the proverbial nuts, stars from earlier cases don’t carry over into future cases. I wanted to max out the stars in the first case to see what happened. Nothing. Nothing is what happened.

It’s just a shame, because everything else in this game is genuinely pretty great. The art and interface are top notch, the writing is pretty basic but has brief exclamation points of awesomeness (usually tied to Reddington being around), and the core gameplay is actually fun. I’m not a fan of hidden object games, but I enjoyed this spin on them. There are even alternate game modes, such as one in which you have a time limit and must collect as many objects as possible, and another that has you finding the items in a dark room with a flashlight. If you are OK with playing a game for 5 to 10 minute bursts only a few times a day, you might be OK with this. Because it’s not much of a time sink, I’ll probably keep playing it to see if it goes anywhere. I can recommend this game to you if, and only if, you are OK with freemium stuff. I will say that if you have friends to play with, you can send each other energy, which likely makes all of this much more tolerable.  If you’re interested in the idea of a fast paced arcade hidden object game or just a fan of the source TV show, it’s definitely worth a look.

As you can probably imagine, doing intricate chain combos and aerial raves aren’t going to work out so well on a touch screen, which is why it’s been adapted for mobile devices. Players will initially take control of Ragna, who is more than cool enough to show off BlazBlue‘s best aspects. Movement is done by way of a simple left or right virtual d-pad, and tapping the screen initiatives an attack. You can swipe down to slide attack, swipe up to do an upwards slice, and swipe to either side to do a dash attack. From there, players have the option to swipe in another direction to link attacks, or instantly switch directions. It’s fast, fun, and intuitive, and all of the action that happens on-screen will make you feel like a pro. There is a move-list, by the way, so it isn’t all just random tapping and swiping — there is a strategic element to it.

I used the term “beat ’em up," because really, although it’s connected by a tenuous story (mostly involving short interactions with other major characters), it really is more of an action game. You’ll move from zone to zone fighting other NPCs, mostly which are fodder. Occasionally players will face off against a boss character that might require some more finesse, but it’s usually on the simplistic side. That’s not to say it isn’t enjoyable, because I could spend hours looking at this art style, and the mindlessness of being able to move from stage to stage, upgrading your equipment and unlocking new abilities along the way feels great from a progression standpoint.

But when I stumbled across the IAP, I felt like I needed an accounting degree to figure it all out. Okay, here goes. Players will have to deal with energy, diamonds, coins, and yet another currency to earn everything they want. Diamonds will run you $1 per 50, roughly, and it costs 50 Diamonds to replenish your energy meter. That’s the first red flag. Then there’s the grinding element where players will need to replay levels to earn more currency to buy better upgrades and items, which is more than enough to put a lot of you off right there.

The real insidiousness lies with the VIP system however. To get in, players will need to spend a certain amount of money to rank up, which unlocks new privileges like more levels, unlimited uses of certain activities, more energy, and a greater earn rate. And here’s the kicker — to unlock specific characters, players will need to be at a certain VIP rank, since you can’t just buy them outright if there’s something you really want.

To make matters worse, there’s a daily sign-in bonus that heavily skews towards you registering and linking Facebook (or possibly risk losing data), and the top leaderboards are weighted to the point where most of them spend a lot of cash to constantly keep up. If you play all on your own and can resist the urge to pump real cash into the energy system, and you’re okay with just having half of the cast, you can go a long way with BlazBlue RR. Just be aware of all of the trappings and temptations within.

Despite all of the fluff involved, this might actually serve as a gateway for players to experience the core series. In that sense it does a great job of showing off the beautiful artwork, rocking soundtrack, and diverse cast of characters. If it even brings just one person into the world of BlazBlue, whether it’s by way of consoles or Steam, that’s a win.

Anyone familiar with the original 2-bit Cowboy ($0.99) by publisher Crescent Moon Games and developer Cascadia Games (who have now titled their mobile division ‘Retro Phone Games’) will know exactly what to expect from the sequel. You play as the eponymous law enforcer, whose task is to get to the finish of each level under the pretence of saving the land from the gang of miscreants who you jailed in the first game and have subsequently escaped. Echoing the core gameplay of the Mario and Mega Man series of old, the cowboy must jump over gaping crevices while avoiding or shooting enemies that get in your way, and who, upon death, release some coins that go towards a cumulative total. There are also certain quests that you can receive within a level that vary from killing a certain amount of a type of enemy in that run, destroying all of the barrels or crates Crash Bandicoot-style or collecting sheep, ducks and other helpless creatures that are on the loose in the desert. These challenges reward you with more money for your bank, which can then be spent on customisable cosmetic accessories such as masks, hats or even belts. While not particularly varied, these pursuits will push you to every nook and cranny of the environments you explore, and make the most of the twelve large and vast landscapes the game offers.

Even without these bonus hunt – which are entirely optional – the platforming action of the game is surprisingly varied and interesting, with some cleverly devised level design that prevents the monotony of jumping and shooting and attempts to refine the core principles the foundation of the game is based off. There are a varied array of environments, from caverns to lakes and even cliffs you are tasked to scale. The impressive use of verticality in the latter level was very enjoyable to undertake, and the ability to scale walls meant there was a degree of sequence-breaking that allowed you to skip large sections of platforming and even find some hidden caverns that rewarded you with more coins or potentially recovery items. Furthermore, with tight swimming controls (which are normally the bane of any platforming title, whether 2D or 3D), the underwater catacombs proved quite fun to swim around and find hidden easter eggs such as a sunken China ship, and in this case exploration truly was rewarded.

While these positives mean that any fans of the previous game in the series or anyone itching for a retro platforming fix may find the title essential, there are some flaws that made the experience exasperating rather than enjoyable for a large part of 2-bit Cowboy Rides Again. When the level design works it’s a delight, however when it doesn’t it becomes more than infuriating. For example, in a relatively early level you gain the ability to ride on horses (and later bulls), which is a nice way to change the tempo of the game. However, the horse gallops on a timer, and when the timer expires the horse vanishes into thin air. Normally this would be fine, but the reliance on the horse to undertake jumps that are vital for progress meant either significant backtracking to the stable if you were too busy collecting coins or defeating enemies to make the jump, or even worse being stranded on an island where you could not get back to a horse or even move on and so were forced to die and start the level again. The lack of checkpoints – implemented to try and recreate the difficulty found on older games – is a good idea in practice, although the aforementioned design oversights coupled with controls that are not entirely accurate and could end up not responding at the very end of a pivotal jump mean this difficulty is purely artificial and only adds further frustration to the title.

The Game Boy-esque all green graphics also prove to be a double edged sword for the game. Notwithstanding the fact that they are rather jarring (there’s a reason for the relative scarcity of monochrome retro games), they also end up blurring everything together and making it rather difficult to know where you’ve explored and where you haven’t, especially as most of the levels simply aren’t left to right and get particularly complex. There are some choices that aren’t simply the fault of the aesthetic, however. Certain crates contain explosives that will kill you instantly, and send you straight back to the beginning of a level. If there was any indicator which crates these were – such as a TNT graphic or anything like that – it would be fine, however they look identical to the ones which would give you coins or health. Of course, there’s the argument that you should simply be more cautious near crates, although it just led to me choosing to avoid them completely and not bothering with any of the crate-destroying quests. When you’re instantly blown up and killed on the tutorial level with no explanation or warning, it’s not a fantastic first impression.

My biggest issue with 2-bit Cowboy Rides Again isn’t any of these issues independently, but how, as a collective whole, they were all present in the previous game. The two are virtually identical, and essentially every positive and negative we reached in our previous review is still present, and in the latter case only amplifying the waning patience one can have with this series. The most irksome, lethargic and borderline offensive problem this game has is the music. For the vast majority of the game the soundtrack is identical, and even then is only a loop of a generic Western sample that is only a couple of minutes long. Considering the game is a few hours in length, hearing it over and over again is maddening and seems completely out of place with the era the game attempts to hark from. Worst of all, this is present in the first game and is actually the exact same music. Every criticism I have with this game also applies to the first, and I can’t help but feel the developers have been lazy with this release – making the same mistakes twice is somewhat forgivable, however essentially clicking copy and paste for all of them is not and, in my opinion, show a lack of respect to the fans that the series and the creators have gained over the years.

That being said, the things I liked about the game coupled with the nature of the criticisms laid out means I have great expectations for what Retro Phone Games can show us next, as it would not take much to turn 2-bit Cowboy Rides Again from a rather run of the mill retro platformer into a truly essential title. While the quests the game provides have very little incentive to pursue barring minor cosmetic purchases, if these are changed to upgrades such as different weapons and abilities in the vein of the Metroid series there would be more scope for exploration of the impressive levels the game contains. Following this Metroidvania theme, adding a map and even making all the levels into one large desert to explore would be fantastic, and coupled with some design fixes could make the series truly stand out. Therefore, based on the forum reception for the game, it’s likely fans of 2-bit Cowboy and retro gaming aficionados do not need my recommendation and will probably be enjoying the sequel already. For anyone else, whether you’ll find 2-bit Cowboy Rides Again to be an essential title is down to your own interests and most importantly the degree of patience you’ll be willing to afford it. Nonetheless, it will be very interesting to see what Retro Phone Games do next and whether it’ll be a bullseye or if it will just keep beating a dead horse.

It’s all good on paper, but in practice, Never Gone has a few big flaws that drag everything else down. The combo system is deep and gives you lots of room to improvise, but the emphasis on style often gets in the way of gameplay considerations. The framerate is smooth, but there’s a stilted feeling to the animation and movement that makes everything feel like it’s not working as intended. Powering up and customizing your character is enjoyable, but in the long run, the enemies outpace you so badly you’ll more or less have to grind if you want to survive. It’s a game that demands skill, but no matter how good you get, it still feels like you’re being nudged towards the game’s IAP currency, and that feeling only gets stronger the more you play.

Still, it’s not all bad. The visual design of the game is quite nice, sort of a twist of Devil May Cry and Castlevania. Your character’s attacks look really cool, and the combos have a good flow to them. While you can hack and slash your way to victory in the first few levels, you’ll soon find that you’ll have to learn how to block and counter-attack if you want to survive. It’s nice to see a game of this type that demands something more than hammering away at the attack button. Although the game uses virtual buttons, it manages to pull a satisfying amount of sophistication out of a somewhat simple layout. You’ve got a virtual directional pad that you can use to walk around or modify your attacks, and buttons for attacking, jumping, and blocking. Double-tapping in a direction on the pad will start a dash, and attacking quickly after a successful block will do a special counter-attack. There are quite a few moves to learn, and you’ll open up more as you progress through the game and level up your character.

Levels are fairly short, made up of one or more smaller arenas where you’ll face a set group of enemies. Every few levels or so, you’ll encounter a tough boss battle, and if you haven’t gotten your act together by then, that will be as far as you go until you do. That preparation entails making sure you have the best gear you can afford to forge or buy, spending skill points judiciously, loading up on consumables like potions, being of the appropriate level, and of course, learning the patterns of the current slate of enemies to minimize damage before facing the boss. If you lose, you can choose to spend some of your valuable gems to continue, or you can give up and head back to the map screen with nothing to show for it. If you’ve used up any of your consumables in the effort, they’ll still be gone, though.

Clearing a stage will earn you some goodies, though exactly what you get is subject to a bit of randomization. You can mitigate it somewhat by spending some coins before going in, but those are also a sunk cost, so make sure you can actually beat the level before you do that. Loot could include new gear pieces, consumable items, materials for crafting, or schematics for new equipment. Keeping your gear up to date involves a little bit of luck, then, or failing that, a fair bit of repetition. That’s just as well, I suppose, because keeping your level high enough to give you a fighting chance seems to involve more grinding as you go on, too.

It seems pretty clear that Never Gone was originally designed as a free-to-play game. In addition to the random material drops and poorly-scaled leveling, you’ll also be able to spend your money to open up chests containing random items, gatcha-style. Lives remain as vestiges of a possible stamina system, but seem to have no actual purpose to them at the moment. There are some powerful gear sets that require an absurd number of gems, the game’s premium currency. There are ways to earn those in-game, but it would take ages to gather up enough for certain pieces. It’s probably best to approach Never Gone as a free-to-play game with the upfront purchase cost essentially giving you unlimited lives. The balancing is definitely tilted against the player beyond what you would expect from a usual paid game.

If you approach Never Gone from that angle, and you don’t mind a solid challenge, you’ll get hours of entertainment out of it. Sometimes clunky, choppy, semi-functional entertainment, but entertainment nonetheless. It’s unfortunate that I have to qualify all of that, because there are so many things that Never Gone does well, but the ways it doesn’t measure up are all important enough that they diminish the overall experience significantly. At the very least, the developer seems to be very responsive to player feedback, which is encouraging. In terms of its core mechanics, this is probably one of the better side-scrolling beat-em-ups I’ve played on iOS in a while, so the potential is there if the tech and balancing issues can be sorted out.

Likely taking inspiration from the stylish retro aerial shooter Luftrausers, Pilots of the Dawn launches you into skyward skirmishes in a very story light and gameplay focused campaign. And by story light I mean there isn’t one. It’s more of an arcade game. The General character barks mission objectives at you with his CAPS LOCK key held down in all his well-crafted pixelated glory, but he is a man of very few words.  That’s OK. He’s a simple man in a simple game. So simple that you only have two functions. Turn your plane left. Or turn your plane right. No acceleration or air braking (You are always moving forward), no using different weapons or choosing when to shoot (you just spew ammo like the Heavy from Team Fortress 2), and no activating of special abilities (They randomly float down from the sky and are activated immediately upon contact)

In my head canon, every ship and plane has a dimensional doorway in their gun’s ammo chambers leading to a dimension made of bullets, because with a few tweaks, this could easily be a bullet hell game. Especially as you get on in campaign levels, buying and facing better ships that shoot even more. It’s all the customary stuff. Each new ship shoots one additional stream of bullets from 1 up to 6. You can also upgrade a ships handling, speed, and hitpoints using coins that you earn in game and from watching ads if you wish. Despite being heavily pixelated and silhouetted against the background, each ship almost gives off a 3D feel with all the angles used in their animation. Almost.

The campaign is short and simple one. 30 levels basically divided into 6 sections of the same 5 levels but escalating in difficulty. Every 5 levels you will: Destroy all enemies, survive for a certain number of seconds, destroy a certain number of enemies, protect your ally plane and destroy all enemies oh my god why would they do this to me, and defeat the enemy leader, or boss. The number of enemies in a level, or the number you need to destroy, often increases as the planes get stronger too. In the later survival missions you are basically trying to dodge raindrops with all the bullets on screen. But the real issue is with the escort missions. Your ally is often made of dumb, and will fly right over a gunboat spraying the sky with death. At least once I’m pretty positive I saw my ally crash into the rocks while still alive.

Your best hope in these missions, and in any mission really, is to get good random number generation, or RNG. Basically, to get good random power-up drops. The power-ups consist of double damage ammo, vastly increased firing speed, health, and a brief invincibility shield. Your ally might get lucky and run into health and shield drops, or maybe you can get fast fire or double damage and better keep bogeys off his tail. And yes, these things do stack. It’s possible to get fast fire and double damage, and basically clear the screen at will. The problem? Enemies can pick these up as well. They don’t really go for them, but power-ups will fall on them occasionally. Including bosses. So that giant behemoth airship you were already having a hard time against? It just got some health back, and it’s shooting twice as many bullets at you.

These triumphs and mishaps with random power-ups make for some of the most memorable moments and “oh crap!” situations in the game. The bosses are the other most memorable thing, boasting the most creative designs and following the philosophy of bigger is better. They are almost a reward for slogging through the previous four levels, especially at the end when the difficulty really shows its face. In addition to the campaign, there are Daily Missions that reward you 50 coins upon completion, and an endless survival mode. Again, this endless mode seems to largely be based on lucky power ups as you rack up more and more damage, but it can be pretty fun. Naturally Game Center leaderboards are present, along with Everyplay gameplay recordings for those cool unexpected moments.

This game is also, to be honest, pretty hungry for your money. You can buy every single one of the additional ships for a dollar apiece, and that’s no big deal, but the upgrades are. You are not going to get much money for upgrades from play. Like almost none. That is, unless, you voluntarily watch a 15 to 30 second advertisement for 50 coins, the same reward as the Daily Mission. Unless you want to grind endlessly and remove all fun from the game, this is practically the only way to go. You do seem to be cut off after a thousand coins or so, though that hasn’t been consistent. I think the button actually bugs out, because sometimes it comes back ten minutes later and works perfectly.

All of that criticism aside, I want to focus on the potential I see in this game. The gameplay is largely very smooth. The frames do drop when a level starts for a few seconds, or when too many fast fire power-ups are active at once. But that was pretty infrequent. I love the silhouette style of the game, but I just want some variety in the game modes. They all play almost exactly the same. It’s clear this was a budget game from the style and the number of assets. There is only one song in the game, after all. But the gameplay is in dire need of a mix-up. Maybe a racing mode, where you fly through a course of rings, or an item collection race, with or without death and combat enabled. An A to B obstacle course of moving deadly objects. Heck, imagine a boss ship so large, that you have to fly inside of it a’la Return of the Jedi. Even some additional firing modes would be cool, or adding large coin pickups to endless mode.

I like this game, despite its budgeted and money hungry nature. I still feel the soul in it. I hope the developers find some success and can continue, updating the app with more or taking their ideas into a future game. But I’m not going to pretend the flaws don’t exist. In the end, it’s still a very solid game, and it’s totally free. Just know that the real entry fee is several minutes of ad watching if you want to get all the planes and upgrades, and it’s fairly repetitive regardless of that. But hey. That one song in the entire game is a pretty happenin’ tune. So there’s that.

First of all, if you’re here for a fun tale of superhero action, you’ll probably want to pass. Redemption Season is about superheroes, yes, but it’s using the theme as a thin veil for discussing actual modern social issues. That kind of idea is not without precedent in the cape genre, of course. It’s more or less the foundation that X-Men is built on. Redemption Season throws a few superhero skirmishes into the mix, but the majority of your time and choices are focused on your character’s personal motivations and goals. As is often the case in a ChoiceScript game, you can determine your character’s gender, sexual orientation, and other details, but no matter what you choose, you’re always going to be playing a character who has the tough end of the social stick.

In this game’s world, there are lots of people with powers, but some kinds of powers are better than others. Your character is part of three different groups that are treated badly by society at large, all at once. You’re somehow given the chance to take part in the second season of The Hero Project, a reality show where the prize is a spot on one of the premier superhero teams. Your character is there for personal reasons, however. Your sister is unhealthy and the only way she can get treatment is through your success at the contest. In spite of the calamitous outcome of the previous season of the show, it remains extremely popular, so there’s a chance you can become a huge star if you play your cards right. One of the goals the game will try to push you towards is to use your unique status to raise awareness for the minority groups you belong to, but you can take that in a few different directions.

Redemption Season wants to talk about issues like inequality, intersectionality, and the disconnect between mind and body. If you try to make decisions independent of those topics, the game will start to browbeat you about it, either through conversations with other characters or, more awkwardly, by inserting it into your own character’s internal thoughts. Most of the characters come in two flavors. You’ve got characters who will clumsily monologue about their particular issue, and characters who will first pretend to be something else before finally giving a clumsy monologue about their particular issue. There are lots of characters, but you won’t really get to know much about most of them on a single playthrough. Not that there’s much to learn. This is very much a first chapter, so even the characters who get the most time and effort put into them end up a little thin.

The weak characterization does a lot of damage to Redemption Season. While the main plot is fairly interesting and sets up a lot of threads for the planned sequel, it’s nearly choked out by the heavy-handed nature of its message. The main plot itself is wrapped up in themes of racism, so it’s certainly not out of the ordinary for it, and similar social problems, to be a frequent topic of discussion between the cast of characters. The problem is that none of these characters feels like a real person having a discussion about difficult issues. Instead, they feel like they’re preaching to an invisible choir that only they can see. Now, it should be noted that almost the entire story takes place in the reality show, where the characters are constantly being filmed. So it might be deliberate that everyone comes off as shallow, one-note creations spouting sound-bites, but intentional or not, it doesn’t make for very good reading.

That’s too bad, because Zachary Sergi has a good writing style. He’s really improved over the last few gamebooks he’s written, making Redemption Season a pleasant read in spite of its ham-fisted nature. He’s covered similar ground politically in earlier titles in more natural ways, and there are moments where he achieves the same here. The overall plot strikes a nice balance between establishing things for the follow-ups and giving the player a good, satisfying arc within this particular chapter. The high stakes of the life of the main character’s sister being on the line helps to add even more tension to points in the story where failure is a very real option, and I found myself weighing decisions a lot more carefully as a result. It’s not a very difficult game to clear, so long as you remember to be consistent, but it certainly felt like a lot was at risk.

As a superhero game light on superheroics and heavy on cultural discussions, The Hero Project: Redemption Season is already aiming at a particular niche. Unfortunately, the way it addresses the issues it brings up feels less like an exploration and more like a lecture. It’s blunt, awkward, and altogether lacking in immersion every time it tries to untangle these hard topics, and since they’re the focal point of the whole game, it ends up dragging down the whole experience. Perhaps even worse for a gamebook is that you feel railroaded by the kind of story and character the author seems to have intended, so that delicate illusion of choice is shattered. It’s fine that Redemption Season is less a game about superheroes and more a game about contemporary social issues, but it doesn’t handle either of those subjects with the sophistication or care they merit.

Our protagonist this time around is a fabulously-dressed noble named Rain, who is out searching for a special flower when he runs into a magical fairy in need of assistance. Specifically, the fairy wants to see an amazing weapon of some kind so they can return to their realm and bask in the prestige. Rain agrees to show the fairy the legendary Sword Of The Hero, which is kept at the castle where he hails from. Of course, the sword goes missing before the fairy gets a chance to check it out, and the king sends Rain to retrieve it. Along the way, he puts together a party of eligible young ladies who fit the usual types we see in EXE-Create’s games. There’s the “old" 28-year woman who comes on really strong, the somewhat mysterious, emotionally-flat girl, and the innocent maiden. Together, they seek the sword, and end up finding a whole lot more than they bargained for.

This somewhat tired premise is saved, as usual, by EXE-Create’s talent for writing humorous and interesting dialogue. Unfortunately, the good translator must have had the day off this time around, so the writing doesn’t come off as sharp as it could have. There is a lot of awkward phrasing, and if you’re hoping for the usual silly pop culture references the other translator sometimes sneaks in, you’re out of luck. That said, the odd English script occasionally helps certain situations feel funnier than they might have otherwise been. EXE-Create has a penchant for bizarre conversations and mangling the translation often helps them feel even stranger. It doesn’t do many favors for the more serious parts of the game, however. Rain comes off extremely unlikable at times, and everyone speaks a little too casually, even characters like the king. If you give it an hour or so to get going, you’ll probably be engaged enough to want to see it through, but the beginning is certainly rougher than usual.

In all other respects, Glorious Savior is extremely familiar and fine enough. The 3D character models have a black line around them now, giving them a cel-shaded look, but apart from that, the visuals and audio are business as usual, right down to the trademark EXE-Create buttrock guitar licks in the battle music. Skills are connected to whatever weapons you have equipped, with each character able to carry two at a time. Other than choosing your equipment, you have no other input on how each character develops. Instead, EXE-Create takes another crack at a weapon crafting system, similar to what we’ve seen in their other recent releases. You can enhance and deconstruct weapons using special materials, and if you know what you’re doing, you can create some pretty powerful ones.

The UI has been changed a little this time around, allowing you to flick between regular and special attacks by swiping. It’s also quite easy to choose which of your two weapons you want to use to attack with. To tell the truth, I find this new swiping system to be a little more cumbersome than simply navigating through menus, but I appreciate that the developers are trying to make things more intuitive. You’ll be going into and out of menus an awful lot anyway, but such is the RPG life. The main quest is a little shorter than the average game from this developer, but there’s plenty of extra content to dig into if you want to get more out of it. EXE-Create has gotten pretty good at taking care of the post-game in their recent releases, and Glorious Savior reflects that.

Setting aside the general lack of innovation, my other issue with the game is in how limited your options are. There isn’t much satisfaction to be found in the party and character-building, and your characters have fewer choices in combat than usual. Combined with the rougher localization, this aspect makes Glorious Savior one of the weaker EXE-Create releases so far this year. If you’re just looking to scratch a JRPG itch, you could find worse ways to do it. It’s not like there are a plethora of decent single-player JRPGs being released on iOS these days. If you haven’t caught up on other recent releases from this developer, however, you’d be better off playing just about any of those.

Again similar to the last few games, Glorious Savior comes in both free and paid versions. The two versions are identical except that the paid version doesn’t have any ads and gives you a chunk of the game’s premium currency to start off with. You can earn those points in-game by fighting battles, or you can buy them with IAPs. The points can be exchanged for a variety of cheat items like permanent stat increases or experience-point doublers. No story or gameplay content is locked behind those points, however, and the game’s balance is pretty fair even if you don’t touch any of them. As long as you don’t mind ads, the free version is perfectly playable without dropping any money.

If I don’t sound particularly excited by Glorious Savior, well, it’s because I’m not. It’s a serviceable RPG with a good sense of humor, contentedly treading water on the line of mediocrity. It’s probably a better game than more than half of Kemco’s releases, but it’s handily the weakest of EXE-Create’s line-up so far this year. You probably won’t have a bad time with it, as it doesn’t spectacularly drop the ball in any particular way, but it feels like the developer is settling into even more of a groove than usual. There’s only so long you can do that before it all starts to feel a little stale, even if you’re doing everything competently.

While Scarlet Sails (Free) gets a lot right, it drops the ball in at least one big way. The text passages feel incredibly disjointed at times, like you’ve somehow missed things between the pages. It’s particularly bad in the back half of the game, as the story appears to be rushing towards its conclusion after a very enjoyable build-up. You can almost picture somebody skipping pages manically to get to the stabby bits and cannon fights. It’s a serious disruption to what is otherwise an enthusiastically-written tale of fantasy pirates on the open seas. It’s a rollicking adventure story, and a fairly challenging game to boot, where death comes easily to the inexperienced and foolish. It’s a little brief, and you’ll really feel that towards the end, but the story arc is satisfying, at least in the broad sense. It’s just missing a lot of vital connective tissue, frequently taking you out of the story right when you’re getting into it.

You play as a lowly pirate who soon stumbles upon an opportunity to achieve something greater. After a bit of initial set-up, you’ll find yourself as the first mate under the command of a deadly pirate captain on the Scarlet Sails, a ship with, well, red sails. As is typically the case with ChoiceScript games, you get a great deal of input into exactly who your character is, all the way down to their gender and sexual preferences. Right from the start, nearly every choice you make will affect your stats in one way or another. A pirate’s life is dangerous, and you’ll have many opportunities to meet your end along the way. It’s not enough to make the right choices, you also need to have the stats to pull them off. By the time you reach the climax of the story, if you’ve played the game as too much of a dabbler, you’ll find you’re not good enough at anything to survive. I like that it has that bite to it. It feels very honest to the setting.

In a rare case for a ChoiceScript game, you can choose a difficulty setting in Scarlet Sails. This setting determines exactly one thing. If you choose the pirate’s life, the harder setting, you’ll have no clues as to which stats each choice’s chance of success depends on, while if you opt for the easier setting, you’ll get some very specific clues as to what each choice requires. Those who have experience with other ChoiceScript games will likely do just fine with the harder setting, but it’s nice to see a branch extended for players who want a little less guesswork in their games. It only makes the game marginally easier, since you won’t know exactly which stats you’ll need to train up for success down the road. Personally, I enjoyed playing through with the hints on just to see more of the nuts and bolts behind the cover, so to speak. Some of the calculations for success were far more complex than I had guess on my harder playthrough.

Apart from the problem of text passages not smoothly connecting to each other at times, the quality of the writing is quite good. The author, Felicity Banks, expresses a clear affection for pirate stories with her words, and while the story has more than a few cliches, it feels like they’re used knowingly to help some fanciful situations resonate more readily with the reader. I’m impressed with how well the plot manages to dance around the player’s choices, but it also feels like it’s railroading you pretty hard past a certain point. It seems like you have some big choices to make, and you’d think that would result in some wildly different experiences on subsequent playthroughs. The bulk of the text doesn’t reflect that, however, simply gathering up any pieces you may have shattered and hammering them back on as best as it can. The biggest casualties of this approach come in the interpersonal relationships between characters, whose attitudes towards one another sometimes seem to turn on a dime. It’s another example of the game feeling like it has missing pages that should connect individual events more carefully.

As is the case with a lot of the shorter ChoiceScript games, the romantic relationships in Scarlet Sails feel creaky at times, and depending on how you play the story, can feel oddly tacked-on. This is partially a consequence of how much rope the game tries to give you, I suspect. Another big reason is likely the game’s rather brisk pace, which leaves little time to plant the seeds of believable relationships and cultivate them properly. Scarlet Sails does a good job of establishing interesting, memorable characters, at least, even if it doesn’t really seem to know where to go with them. The cast is kept small enough that you won’t find yourself struggling to place names, and the small social circles I’d imagine that pirates travel in is as good an explanation as any for the bigger coincidences in the story.

The first few sections of the game are free to try, with a $2.99 IAP to unlock the rest. It’s nice that you can give it a try, but the story is definitely front-loaded in terms of quality, so if you choose to buy in, do so with that knowledge in hand. Like other ChoiceScript games, Scarlet Sails supports Game Center achievements and VoiceOver accessibility. I also really enjoyed how, after you’ve finished a playthrough, the game compares you to a “real" historical pirate based on your choices. It’s a nice touch. There aren’t any pictures, sound effects, or music to go with the game, so if you’re not the sort that can get by on text alone, this might not be the game for you.

Scarlet Sails is a decent adventure that might appeal to those who love exaggerated tales of swashbuckling pirates, but it feels to me that it could have been a much more satisfying experience if it had a little more narrative padding. As it is, there are too many times in the story where events seem to jump around, making the moment-to-moment action hard to follow. The character interactions could also use a lot more breathing room, and the back half of the story feels absurdly rushed. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the challenge Scarlet Sails had to offer, and it was awfully interesting to get a peek behind the curtain of the mechanics with that other difficulty mode. I just wish the book part of the gamebook had been handled as well as the game part.

The extremely long interval between Kingdom Hearts 2 and Kingdom Hearts 3, eleven years and still counting, has wreaked havoc on the story as prequels and sidequels and even midquels are jammed into an already messy continuity. It’s been good for the games, however, as they’ve been allowed to explore a variety of concepts in an effort to keep things fresh without moving the plot ball forward. That’s where we’re at with Kingdom Hearts: Unchained Chi (Free), a free-to-play social RPG that takes place during the Keyblade War, long before the events of the first game in the series. Don’t worry too much about the story stuff. I mean, that’s good advice for the series in general, but you really don’t have to worry about it here. The premise is just there to give you an excuse to travel from Disney world to Disney world, searching out enemy Heartless monsters and beating them to death with your giant key.

Naturally, you’ll come across various Disney and Square characters in your travels. They’ll ask for your help with a variety of things, but they all amount to wiping out whatever enemies are lurking around. After a set number of these short missions, you’ll fight a larger boss and eventually make your way to the next world. Your player character looks kind of weird, but the familiar Disney and Square characters all look quite good, even if they are rendered in a slightly different style from the other games in the series. Most of the returning characters only make appearances in the game in the form of Medals that you equip to your keyblade, however. These Medals indicate the power and property of your attacks, and also allow you to pull off a special move. Sadly, the characters are limited to static pictures on the Medals, so you won’t get to see The Beast coming in and pummeling monsters for you or anything.

The battle system is very simple. Each turn, you can use your medals to attack the enemy. You can tap on one enemy to do a powerful focused attack, swipe across the group to do a weaker strike that hits everyone, or touch a Medal and swipe to unleash a special move. When you’ve used all of your Medals, the enemy takes their turn. Special moves require you to have your special meter stocked up, so you’ll want to make sure you don’t waste your meter on weaker enemies. The game offers a variety of incentives if you can finish battles in a single round, something that is relatively simple to do if you plan your moves even a little. Enemies, Medals, and keyblades all possess one of a few different elements, forming a rock-paper-scissors triangle of strengths and weaknesses. Pulling off single-round victories in the long run will require you to pay attention to those elements and take advantage accordingly.

Each mission will have you run through four or five of these battles at most. You get a little area to run around in, so if you want to avoid some battles, you can, but there isn’t much point in doing so. Non-boss battles are over in seconds, and many of the level rewards are tied to beating all of the enemies in the stage. Apart from the battles, there isn’t much to do in each stage. There are some items and chests laying around that you can scoop up by running over them, but that’s about it. You’ll want to grab all of that junk because you’re going to need it sooner or later for upgrading or evolving various things.

There are a lot of different upgrade systems in play in Kingdom Hearts: Unchained Chi. Medals work like characters in any social RPG. You can feed other Medals to them to raise their level, and if you have the right materials, you’ll eventually be able to evolve them to a stronger form. You’ll come across some Medals in the missions or as rewards, but most of them are so weak they’re pretty much just there to sell or feed to your good Medals. You can also upgrade your keyblade, increasing its stats and opening up extra Medal slots. Your character has a level of their own which raises based on clearing missions, and even your clothes have things to upgrade. Each set of clothes you come across contains what’s called an Avatar Board. You can spend special Avatar Coins to unlock slots on the board, each one containing a stat increase or an extra customization option. It’s like a simpler version of Final Fantasy 10‘s Sphere Grid.

As with any social RPG, there’s a premium currency greasing many of the wheels of the game. Jewels can be used to pull a random Medal, refill your stamina meter, increase your inventory maximum, and so on. You’ll earn some Jewels for clearing stages, and the game awards them as login bonuses every few days, so if you’re playing without paying you can still get what you need to move forward. If you’re looking for particular characters, though, you’re either going to have to be very lucky or very patient with what the game gives you, or spend some real money for some Jewels. The going rate for them is pretty similar to other social RPGs, so you’re looking at spending at least a few dollars for a random Medal pull. I should stress, though, that you can definitely get by in Kingdom Hearts: Unchained Chi as a free player. It’s a bit tougher, but it’s doable.

The real question is whether you want to do it or not. In terms of gameplay mechanics, Kingdom Hearts has very little going for it. The battle system lacks the depth of many other social RPGs, and with the exception of the Avatar Board, virtually every other mechanic in the game can be found in just about every other RPG. It’s not poorly done by any means, but from a purely mechanical perspective it’s a very bland game. Its appeal, then, falls along the same lines as the original Kingdom Hearts. If you love these characters and are excited by the idea of bouncing around Disney worlds battling Heartless with your favorites by your side, you might enjoy Unchained Chi more than other social RPGs. Although the game uses a different, more economical-looking art style, the visuals are still on point. Better still, the game’s music is all drawn from the original games, which means this game is packed full of wonderful compositions and arrangements from Yoko Shimomura.

At least in my case, that wasn’t enough to hold my attention over the long term. I played this game for a while after it released in Japan, but the mindless nature of the battle system gave me little reason to come back once I got my fill of the aesthetics. It’s a shame, because from a presentation standpoint, Kingdom Hearts: Unchained Chi is really well done. Well, apart from the usual overly-complicated UI, anyway. It’s also reasonably fair relative to many other popular social RPGs, allowing you to make steady progress even if you don’t feel like doing a Monstro impression.  Much like the very first game in the series, however, it’s passing off mediocre, perfunctory gameplay by wrapping it in a nostalgia-laced candy shell that makes it nearly impossible for fans to resist. If you love any of the associated franchises, it’s worth giving the game a go, at least for a little while, but it’s too bad that the lessons learned in the core Kingdom Hearts games seem to have been ignored here.

In Monkey Swingers, you play as a little monkey who apparently wants to climb all the way to heaven. It does this by moving up a vertical shaft, grabbing and swinging off of handholds. Along the way, there are bananas to collect, which work as the game’s currency, and a large assortment of power-ups you can grab. The bottom of the screen moves up behind you, and should you fall off, you lose. It’s a simple game in concept, as all you need to do to play is tap, hold, and release with good timing. Your monkey can grip with either of its hands if you tap and hold when it’s near a handhold. Once it latches on, it’ll spin around the grip point until you release, at which point it’ll go flying off in whatever direction it was pointed in, slowly spinning all the way. The handholds are relatively small and spawn seemingly randomly, so it’s a different challenge every time you play.

When you inevitably miss a jump and go crashing down, you’ll return to the main menu, where you can spend the bananas you’ve earned on a fine selection of upgrades for your power-ups and some funny hats. Things get really costly in a hurry relative to what your banana intake probably looks like, but you can throw $0.99 at the game to get a permanent banana doubler that helps a lot. There’s also a selection of banana packs you can purchase in varying amounts if you’d rather just cut to the chase. The only other monetization in the game is the presence of incentivized ads, which let you earn some extra bananas when you die, with the amount being relative to how many you collected in your current run.

Should your Game Center still be functioning, the game has support for leaderboards, and also allows you to easily share your best height reached on a few different social networks. It also uses nicely integrated in game markers to let you know when you’ve passed your previous run and your best run. Naturally, since you’ll be investing in upgrading those power-ups, your scores should logically trend upwards even if your skill isn’t improving greatly, but that aspect does make it a little hard to make straight comparisons with friends. The starting forms of the power-ups are barely helpful at all, while after they gain a few levels, they’ll make a big difference.

The variety of power-ups is kind of nice because the odds are very high that you won’t run into the same items in any two plays, but there’s a bad side to that. There are a few power-ups which stand out significantly from the rest in terms of how useful they are. With so many less useful power-ups in play, you probably won’t be able to depend on getting any particular item that you specifically want. Random factors are a nice thing in arcade games as they can add some spice and excitement, but in this case, the good power-ups are so good that they tilt the whole game. Picking up a Miracle Bush power-up starts to feel like a miracle, and I started to resent the runs where I would get a bunch of magnets and banana bushes instead.

While Monkey Swingers mostly plays okay, there were a couple of things that felt off for me. You’ve got to be very precise when you try to grip onto a handhold, and you really have to gauge what the result of your grip is going to be. If you missed, you’ll want to tap again quickly, but if you actually caught the handhold and then go to tap again, your monkey will release its hold and drop, often fatally. You really have to watch where your monkey’s hands are as you approach a handhold and hope you’ve supposed correctly.

The game also has a weird pace to it. The handholds are usually far enough apart vertically that you need to swing around your current perch a couple of times to build momentum before leaping. You’re stopping and starting, stopping and starting again nearly the whole way through, when the game is most fun in those rare moments when you can zip from perch to perch. I’m also not a big fan of having to go back to the main menu every time I lose. A quick restart button would be great, since I don’t usually have enough bananas to buy anything anyway after most runs.

At the very least, the game looks really great. The sprite work is excellent, with vivid colors and plenty of detail. There are lots of animations to help make the small world come alive, and the main character is quite cute. There’s a decent assortment of hats you can put on the monkey, and they all look like they belong on its head rather than just floating there like in many other games. The audio end of things is somewhat more subdued, but the music that plays during the game is thematically-appropriate and doesn’t get too repetitive over time.

It feels like Monkey Swingers is only a few little changes away from being an excellent game, but those small issues add up to something that just doesn’t work all that well for me. For a free game, it’s quite player-friendly even if you don’t pay anything, and you’ll likely get a few laughs out of it, but in its current form, it falls into the troublesome category of sessions requiring a bit too much time and concentration to cram into short slices, yet being too repetitive and capricious to satisfy for longer sit-downs.

Rayman Classic is of course a 2D platformer, a port of the original Rayman game from 1994. This appears to be a port of the PC version of the game to iOS. It stars the limbless, eponymous protagonist that has become one of Ubisoft’s most iconic characters. And there is an Assassin Ray, so yes, Rayman has met Assassin’s Creed. Though now I also want an Assassin’s Creed game with Rayman for no particular reason other than “that seems like an idea." This is one of the first games that plunged Ubisoft and Michel Ancel into prominence thanks to its gorgeous visuals and Red Book audio that made it a fit for the CD era of gaming. It also was kind of a brutal challenge, and still is.

Levels have blind leaps of faith, difficult sections with spread-out checkpoints, and difficult boss fights to tackle with limited health, lives, and even continues. Rayman’s fists are a useful weapon, and the limbless nature of the fist makes it act as a boomerang, able to hit enemies on the backswing. Yet, the game often throws small height differences to make it tough to hit certain enemies. The reasons for that amount to “screw you, player." You have health, but sections with enemies that can knock you into instadeath are frequent. And the long distances between checkpoints in levels is a severe annoyance. Plus, the levels are way too long, with many jarring contrasts between the different sections. If these sections were split into individual levels, the game would feel more fair and fun.

This is all brutal if you’re playing on Normal or Hard with limited lives and continues. Easy mode is a welcome respite, offering unlimited lives and 5 health points, but it takes away any of the danger. And just trying to do relentless progress is kind of disinteresting in this game. It’s the context of the game having once been about having a limited number of chances. Take that away, and you just get a frustrating game where the reward is now minimal. But that’s the price you pay in order to play the game in all practicality. Rayman has not aged well with 2016 standards.

Speaking of 2016 standards, Rayman‘s graphics hold up pretty well, though they do look a bit aged. This game suffers from the move to high-resolution and LCD displays from low-resolution and CRT displays. CRT blurriness, tiny screens, and small resolutions gave a nice, smooth look to Rayman back in the day. In 2016, the pixels have a jagged look to them. And because the game has a higher amount of detail than 8-bit and earlier games, it looks flawed on HD LCDs instead of endearingly chunky. Smoothing filter options would have been a welcome addition to help the game look like moving painting it once resembled. So, a fantastic-looking game winds up looking old in modern times. It’s not ugly, just that the wrinkles are visible. One odd thing about the mobile port at launch is that there’s periods where the game will slow down to about half-speed. Sometimes dying fixes this, sometimes you have to quit the level and play it again. This game is difficult enough as it is without worrying about this bug!

One of the refrains I saw as Rayman Classic was being teased for mobile was the question of how the controls would work. Well, the virtual joystick is subobtimal compared to physical controls, but still decent. Quick and precise left/right movements are a bit tricky to pull off. And I’d rather the placement of the buttons be configurable. Having the punch button be above the jump button on the right side of the screen feels weird to me. The virtual buttons are responsive, and the controls are as good as they’re going to get for a touchscreen. Rarely does it feel like it’s the touch controls’ fault for my failures. At least there’s controller support if you want to play that way.

Rayman does show a lot of signs of good design, though. The branching paths offer different options to play through the game. Getting abilities later in the game comes in play when you can go back to earlier levels to find secrets that were once inaccessible. The temporary abilities in some levels are fun to play with. And the later permanent abilities, especially the helicopter hair you unlock, give the game a different feel from other platformers. Part of what makes Rayman so memorable is that it had such a standout set of features for the time. It just didn’t quite stick the landing of being a fun experience, even among difficult 2D platformers.

The one thing that’s frustrating with Rayman is that when it goes right, it feels like a potential all-time platformer. But instead, it skews way too far to the frustrating and unfair side of the scale. And there are design elements that even challenging neo-retro platformers skew away from. I know this is a port of an existing version of the game, but I think this game could use a more comprehensive remake. I know other attempts at 2D Rayman games exist, but the potential of this game in particular would be immense if it got a tune-up for what gamers should expect from platformers in 2016 instead of 1994. Though, what you get here is a history lesson, Rayman represented as it once was.

But that’s the problem with Rayman Classic: there are other, actually good Rayman games now. The auto-runners on mobile like Rayman Fiesta Run ($2.99) are fantastic games. Sadly, Rayman 2 kind of disappeared from the App Store, and I’d love for a new version to pop up, as it’s kind of a bummer that it’s not available any more (though it might be a rights mess as Gameloft published the iOS port), though DRM-free versions are available on PC, so they’re hardly lost. I don’t know why the world needed more Rayman, but we got it, and some fun games came out of it. And maybe it’s tempting to see where this all started. But unless you’re curious to study this relic more than you intend to enjoy it, I’d say to pass. But if you enjoyed Rayman back in the day, this is a solid port of the game that you can take anywhere. And if your reflexes aren’t what they once were 22 years ago, well, you’ll praise the Easy mode as you rediscover just how brutal Rayman was.

MetaHuman Inc. is written by Paul Gresty, who previously created The ORPHEUS Ruse ($4.99). The stories take place in the same world, but apart from a minor link, there’s no direct connections you need to worry about. No, all you need to worry about is surviving your first year on the job, a balancing act that will require you to guide your struggling company back into good health and good graces, solve a few mysteries, and maybe even save the planet. While a lot of that can be handled in the usual gamebook manner, a large part of it comes down to the monthly meetings where you decide how to allocate the company’s resources. You only have so much money to go around, and there are lots of ways to spend it, including investments, product research, PR, and so on. As an added kicker, any products you develop can be used by your character, which might help you out during the regular choice-based events that happen outside the meeting room.

There are a lot of ways you can run the company, but not all of them are successful ways. On top of that, almost everything you do during the events between the monthly meetings will come back to you in some way or another. Whatever route you plan to take, make sure you commit to it fully, because you’ll be eaten alive if you’re too wishy-washy. In any case, everything in MetaHuman Inc. always comes back around to the company. Even the major sub-plot of the game ultimately serves as a reflection of your job performance. With the structure built around the monthly meetings, there’s a measured pace to the game that isn’t found in many gamebooks. It’s a bit odd knowing exactly when the ending is coming soon after you start the story, and the things that happen between meetings tend to feel like episodes of minor importance. Maybe that’s how it really feels to be a CEO. I certainly wouldn’t know.

I do know that at least for me, being chained to the proverbial desk wasn’t a lot of fun. While I appreciate the extra layer of strategy involved in MetaHuman Inc., I also found it to be a stressful experience from start to finish. It’s very difficult to do well, and the people around you aren’t shy about letting you know when you’re messing up. It’s hard to find anyone to trust among the game’s cast of characters, even your romance options, and nobody is particularly likable. After taking so many lickings in the first half of the story, I found myself becoming disinterested in the rest of it because I knew there was little chance of pulling my nose up in time for the end of the year. The writing didn’t manage to compensate well enough for this malaise, so I ended up scanning text instead of truly absorbing it. Once I figured out better strategies, my replay was more enjoyable, but it’s tough to shake the bad feelings from that first playthrough.

As a story, I found MetaHuman Inc. to be interesting but not particularly engaging. There’s a good mystery running through all of the events, but this is one of those gamebooks where the plot seems to be serving the mechanics rather than the opposite. Its mix of science fiction, light horror, and boardroom drama is certainly unique, I’ll give it that. It’s weird that a premise like that comes off as clinical as MetaHuman Inc. does. You don’t get much input on the direction of the overall plot, with your performance determining which of the game’s endings you get, with little variation up to that point.

You do have a fair bit of control over what kind of person your protagonist is, at least, allowing you to be a goodie-two-shoes who probably won’t get along well with the shareholders or a complete jerk who may or may not get along well with the shareholders, with a few extra shades in between. As usual for a Choice Of Games release, you can choose your gender and sexual orientation. The romance elements aren’t very strong in this game, however. You’re married to your job, after all.

The unusual mechanics make MetaHuman Inc. interesting from a gameplay point of view, but overall, I found this to be one of the weaker recent releases from Choice Of Games. There are a few right ways to play it, but it’s hard to find them on an initial playthrough, and the text and plot aren’t strong enough to hold up their side of things while the gameplay elements sort themselves out. If you’re looking to try something a little different and you like the idea of running a company, you might find MetaHuman Inc. to be worth your time, but I can’t say I’m interested in re-upping my contract.

What happened? Your first guess is probably the free-to-play model, right? That’s not it, believe it or not. It’s pretty much the same model as MARVEL Contest of Champions (Free) or any of the other thousand games on the App Store where you collect and combine and upgrade randomly drawn characters. It’s not ideal, of course, but I’m so used to it that I don’t mind it. There are several currencies and timers and all that junk, so if you have an allergic reaction to that stuff than you should probably steer clear anyway.

So it’s not the pay model. Is it the controls? Those can easily make or break a game. But no, as I said earlier, the controls are fine. The game is played in a third-person perspective with typical first/third-person touch controls. There’s a movement stick on the left and you’re free to swipe anywhere on the right to aim. The game auto-fires when an enemy is in the crosshairs, which is something I appreciate on touch screen devices. You can also swipe to perform evasive moves like rolling. Everything works really well, though it was a bit too sensitive for my liking at first. You can change it in the menu, which I did, and it’s great.

What’s wrong, then? Is the game just not fun? No, it’s actually quite fun. As I mentioned in the first paragraph, I love toy-based games like Micro Machines and all that junk. It can feel really satisfying shooting down aliens while leaping from an open drawer to a messy bed, for example. The levels are designed well and the shooting mechanics are solid. Everything feels great.

It must look like garbage, then. Is that it? Nope. It looks amazing, with tons of detailed characters that look and move like toys would and lots of bright, fun colors everywhere. There’s a cool sort of 80’s comic book theme to all the menus and the in-game graphics run really smoothly on my iPad Air. Everything is fluid and sharp.

This whole “asking myself a question and then answering it” thing is starting to feel annoying and gimmicky, so I’m just going come right out with it now: Fantastic Plastic Squad has an auto-play system, and it nearly ruins the game for me. It’s called “commander mode”, and when you trigger it, the game takes control of your character and does all the running and gunning while you can push a couple buttons to reload and roll out of the way, if you want. This might sound perfect for a mobile free-to-play game with lots of grinding, but it really does suck all the fun out.

I know, I know. I can just choose not to use it. And I do. But just the mere fact that it’s there somehow makes everything I’m doing feel pointless. Why control the character myself when the AI aims perfectly and always knows where to go? It’s like you’re in a pie baking competition, and under the counter there’s a bunch of perfect pies already made, and anyone can grab one and get a perfect score. Why do any work, then? Even if the baking is fun, you’re choosing to do it yourself and you know you’ll end up with a worse pie when you’re done.

Other games include auto-play to help ease the repetition of grinding, of course, like Need For Speed: No Limits (Free) and Taichi Panda (Free). The difference is that those games require a human to be behind the wheel initially and only let you put it on autopilot for grinding. It’s a great idea for free-to-play games like this, but it almost breaks the game when they take that requirement away. I keep trying to think of other ways to describe the way it feels to play Fantastic Plastic Squad knowing commander mode is there, but “pointless” pretty much sums it up.

I feel the need now to express that these reviews are essentially just opinions, and your experience with Fantastic Plastic Squad might be totally different than mine. (Indeed, people in our forums seem quite taken with the game.) Maybe you don’t mind using auto-play for the entire game, or maybe you’re able to enjoy playing “manual” even with commander mode there. Personally, I can’t bring myself to do either of those things. If I’m going to let a game play itself I’d rather it be a simple clicker or something, and I just can’t enjoy playing the game myself when I know I can easily hand the controls over to an AI that will do everything better.

All that being said, literally everything else about the game is incredible, and despite being quite hard on it in this review, I think it’s still worth checking out to see if it clicks with you. The production values, the characters, the environments, the controls (if you use them)–it’s all basically perfect. Those first five minutes were really amazing.

As with most of the games from this developer, The Ramen Sensei sees you running a business. This time, it’s a ramen restaurant business. It starts with a single shop, but you can eventually expand into a chain of restaurants. Running the business successfully entails a lot of the usual Kairosoft work, like attracting new customer types, winning competitions, managing your staff, and upgrading your facilities. The most important thing you need to take care of is, appropriately, the soup itself. Real ramen shops pride themselves on their individual recipes, and the proprietors often show a surprising amount of passion for their particular combinations of ingredients. Unfortunately, you can’t afford to be such a believer in your recipes. The name of the game here is getting to know your customers and customizing your offerings to suit their preferences.

Making the soup is this game’s main innovation. You choose the broth and noodles that you want, decide who among your staff puts the final preparations on the recipe, and even select the toppings, arranging them in the bowl to make your ramen look just right. Certain combinations of toppings work better together than others, though you’re limited in how many you can use at once based on your level. Once you’ve put together your ramen recipe, you can add it to the menu and let the customers have at it. The more a customer visits your shop, the more likely they’ll be to reveal exactly what recipes they like best. Serving their needs is not only good for business in general, it also helps you to win competitions and unlock new items and features. They’ll also introduce new customers to you, keeping the cycle moving.

Winning competitions is important because, along with leveling up, the prizes are the grease that keeps the gears turning. You’ll earn new toppings, broths, and noodles, get the right to open shops in other cities, and earn building permits through these contests, and they are one of the best ways to earn experience points. The competitions play out in a dramatic fashion, with you and your competitors having stalls set up to serve whichever ramen you’ve selected to the customers that come along. Whoever scores the most points in a set amount of time wins, and points are earned by pulling in a lot of customers and satisfying them as much as possible. You can see ahead of time which customers you’ll be expecting along with whether or not your soup does it for them, so it’s not hard to plan things out to maximize your advantage.

I feel like the whole subculture around ramen and ramen shops is fairly well-represented here, albeit filtered through the Kairosoft lens. The passion and reverence for the recipes certainly play to a specific niche, but part of what’s fun about Kairosoft games is that they’re not afraid to tackle  narrow categories. Sadly, the old problem rears its head once more here. Beyond the momentary excitement of being able to arrange ingredients visually, there isn’t much here to get the engines running for players who have burnt out on this developer’s particular brand of simulation. The visual design is the same as it’s always been, with the customers being the usual wacky line-up of characters we’ve seen since Kairosoft’s earliest games. The soundtrack has a couple of new tricks, but like the temporary thrill of arranging eggs and chives, it doesn’t take long for you to get over it.

If you love ramen and have been waiting for a sim that captures all of the spills and thrills of running your own chain of shops, well, you might as well bite on The Ramen Sensei because I somehow doubt anyone’s going to be doing it better than this. Similarly, if you devour Kairosoft games like the last few cashews in the bowl of mixed nuts, you’ll enjoy yourself here. It’s all done to their usual standards, after all. On the other hand, if you’ve tasted this soup too often in the past and are wondering if the new toppings mean anything for the flavor, you might want to go somewhere else for lunch. Kairosoft knows just how its customers like their soup, and at this point, expecting them to create something totally different is like hoping for Burger King to retire the Whopper.

Some games are just as swindle-prone as operators who jack up the difficulty on beat ’em up machines so kids will spend more money, and in many ways, Rush N Krush (Free) emulates that experience.

The game starts off innocently enough. Players are thrust into a tutorial section, which showcases the bright art style, reminiscent of classic franchises like Outrun. There’s a ton of variety on display right from the get-go, including Mario Kart style question block power-ups, and tow trucks that can carry you through the stage in an invincible state. These aren’t just throwaway abilities either, as each of them comes with their own set of animations, like the boost that sprouts giant jet turbines on both sides of your vehicle. It commits to the over-the-top cartoon feel, and doesn’t let up.

It gets even more engaging once boss fights come into the picture, allowing your cars to sprout machineguns to blast away the opposition. Getting the hang of the drifting system is also fun, as you can gain a small boost when tailing an NPC car, or a larger one if you swerve out to the side of them at the last possible moment.  A dedicated jump button kind of brings it all together, as it can be used while on flat ground, or strategically pressed right before going off of a ramp to queue up an extra boost.

As a Netmarble game, we’ve basically come to expect a complete overload of UI messages, and that’s exactly what Rush has. From the very moment you boot the game up you’re bombarded with ads, bonus packages for $8.99, seasonal bonuses, and energy notifications. The main menu has no less than 13 options on it, which are part gameplay related, part giant ad machine. While single races are an option, there’s also a story mode with plenty of objectives to sift through, and a decent amount of stages (50 at the time of this writing). But a number of technical problems bring Rush down, unfortunately, despite its fun arcadey nature.

There’s three currencies afoot — trophies (cars),  gold (upgrades and items), and tires (energy). The former funnels into the latter two, which can be purchased in increments of $2.99 up to $99.99. A lot of gameplay is also gated, including multiplayer, which can only be accessed after multiple hours of play on top of navigating the energy mechanic. Netmarble also recommends that you link to Facebook to prevent the loss of any purchases. At what point is enough enough? I submit that the time is now.

If it wasn’t so convoluted and weighed down by the storefront, Rush N Krush would be a must-download for arcade racing fans. Right now though you’ll have to brave the cavalcade of menus and micro-currencies to make sense of anything. I sincerely wish more publishers allowed players a way to  just purchase a game outright as a premium product, but of course, there’s less money to be made that way.

If I may, I need to say how much I enjoy the ridiculous nature of the Warhammer universe. It’s so over-the-top grim and dystopian, with a self-seriousness in its scenario and dialogue that I find just so charming. It’s unironic excessive violence in its world. And the dialogue is written without trying to subvert the ridiculousness of the world. If you want to take it seriously and think it’s awesome, the game doesn’t push back. If you want to enjoy it for the comic nature of just how unceasing it is with its fantasy dystopia, and the dialogue that is perhaps some of the most overwrought in the history of language, well, it provides plenty of material for you to ironically enjoy.

As for me, I named my Freeblade Shinypoines. Seemed only appropriate.

The game uses 3D Touch, and while I don’t have the iPhone 6S necessary to use it, I could see where it would be handy. You have three weapons to use, a rapid-fire weapon you tap and hold to use, a missile-type weapon you use two fingers to fire, and a special weapon that you double-tap to use. With 3D Touch, varying levels of pressure will fire different weapons. The game works well enough as it is with these controls, but it’s not hard to see where having the ability to quickly go from your machine guns to missiles without having to go multitouch would be handy. Double-tapping can be a bit unwieldy in the heat of battle, if you accidentally wind up firing a weapon when you didn’t mean to, and you will. Still, the game does a good job at working well on the touchscreen, which one would hope because it’s an on-rails shooter and all you have to do is aim and fire.

Freeblade excels in the field of visual performance, boasting gorgeous graphics that are incredibly detailed. Your Imperial Knight and their gigantic opponents are detailed and decked out from head to toe. Some of the backgrounds are a bit sparse in some levels, but hey – when you’ve got all this party up front, the business in the back can suffer a bit. Regardless, the game looks absolutely fantastic. And the fact that you can deck out and customize your character as you see fit is a great addition, too.

In terms of structure, you’re going through short, 2-3 minute missions, trying to blast enemies. Success requires having sufficient power to go through missions – much like many free-to-play RPGs, you have an overall power, and the game will notify you if an item is deficient. In fact, the entire metagame is very much like a social RPG, with different item types, crafting, and loot to get. It’s just that the action is all on-rails shooter, where you have to balance out your three weapon types to survive, deploying shields as necessary, and engaging in a simple timing-based hand-to-hand combat mode.

The game’s combat is fun to play around with, because you are a giant walking robot blasting tiny orks and giant creatures, and the game doesn’t mess around with any slow moments. And while the whole weapon-balance aspect to the game is fairly simple, it’s a tried-and-true formula. And it requires you to really be smart and balance out how you’re assaulting the enemy forces. Plus, the missions are short enough that the game is perfect for pick-up-and-play sessions. You can feel like you’re getting something done in a quick moment.

In terms of progression, you have eight worlds to make it through with several levels each. However, these levels need to be replayed again and again to complete their alternate missions and to get 3 stars on each, not just for the ore and loot gains (necessary for crafting better items), but because you’ll hit progress gates where you need a certain number of stars and a certain number of patrol missions completed. Patrol missions are just random levels that give you additional loot for completing them. At least this all means that if you hit a wall in terms of game progression, you’ve got plenty of things to do beyond just trying to valiantly push forward, though you will be doing a lot of grinding, I suppose!

Now, Warhammer 40,000: Freeblade is a free-to-play game, and its monetization strategy seems to be “let’s throw literally every monetization trick in the book at the game." Soft and hard currency are here. There’s different supply drops for getting random items that can be bought with gold, the hard currency. There’s a loyalty bonus, similar to the VIP system in many social RPGs, where spending money on IAP will net you better in-game rewards, such as additional forging slots and XP boosts. You can watch video ads to get more boost items, to get more money, to repair your Freeblade’s energy, and get more Patrol missions. Seriously, pretty much every monetization tactic I’ve seen in free-to-play games is here.

And to be honest, I’m fine with it. This is 2015 – paid games are a risk. And Freeblade ain’t so bad. The frequent video ad opportunities come in handy. A $2.99 gold package purchase will go a long way toward getting you quicker forged items, and energy boosts when necessary. And the game does throw some solid IAP packages your way to give you a discount on normal prices. Freeblade‘s monetization is there and it is persistent, but it’s a game you can enjoy for a while without throwing too much money into the well.

But there’s one thing that really bugs me about the game: for most of the time, the monetization is honest. But it’s the energy system that rankles me. At first, it seems fair, like the game is really only draining your energy really slowly, not really impacting you unless you’re playing for a really long time, and the energy is there to make sure you don’t get bored of the game. But instead, once you hit 60% energy, the game weakens you, forcing you to either watch an ad to get 10% more energy, pay gold to refill, or wait until you’re back at full strength.

It’s disappointing, because it’s so misleading. You think you have a game that’s certainly not lacking monetization tactics, but seems fair enough. And then it makes 60% energy be basically 0% energy, since the game requires you to be at full strength to do well enough to get the medals you require to progress. It stinks and should not be there, or should be more honest to the player. But instead, the game seemingly just uses it as an excuse to stop you in your tracks and make you feel bad about continuing to play. Again, I’m fine with most everything else; I know the realities of the market right now. But this just feels like a jerk move on the game’s behalf, and should be modified or eliminated entirely in a future update, because it sours the entire experience.

After a while, I felt like I had quite caught the gist of Freeblade. Its structure pretty much means that you need to get caught up in enjoying the cycle in its short bursts, and at some point, you may fall out of it. Freeblade isn’t a bad game, but it just kind of becomes something where you’re like “Well, I’ve had enough." And the energy system is annoying, too. You should download this if you have a 3D Touch device, just to see what’s possible in games with that functionality. And if you love the Warhammer universe, giant robots, or just want an action game you can play for quick bursts, you will enjoy some time with this game. But the constant monetization attempts, while fair, do wear down your nerves. And that energy system is a killer that keeps this from being a good game and a solid recommendation.

There are dabs of inspiration from other classic games in here, too, but Legna Tactica is mostly grabbing from the well-worn Tactics model of turn-based strategy on isometric battlefields. You can gain an advantage by attacking from a higher point or hitting the enemy from behind, and certain types of terrain convey bonuses and penalties. You won’t ever need to make extensive use of those features, however. Like stablemate Ixtona, Legna Tactica is a fairly light strategy game. The enemies aren’t very clever and your team is generally quite strong in relation to them, even if you don’t partake of the extra missions you can pick up from the tavern. Gaining levels improves your stats, while extra skills are unlocked by spending points on each character’s unique skill tree. Those points are only earned by progressing the story, which places a hard cap on how much of each character’s tree you can open up in a single playthrough, but the game offers a New Game Plus mode if you truly want to max everything out. You can also respec a character whenever you want with no penalty, so you don’t have to stress terribly about your choices.

The story is a stew made from ingredients like the political intrigue and ideologically-opposed friends of Final Fantasy Tactics ($6.99), the orphans of every mobile Kemco RPG ever, and the mysterious magical girl seen in every third JRPG or so. You’ll specifically be following the character of Leck, an optimistic young soldier trainee who is almost immediately in over his head. He’s initially joined by his childhood friend and fellow trainees Astar and Miana. Astar is soon appointed to a different branch of the military to pursue his goals in his own way, while Miana serves her role as the supportive big sister-type who rounds out the awkward love triangle. There are a number of other characters, though with the playable cast topping out at 14 members, you can probably guess that many of them are little more than cardboard cutouts.

You’ll be prompted to make choices here and there that seem to affect the story, though I can’t speak to the extent of that as I only ran through the game once. That said, even if they don’t make a major difference, it does give you the feeling that you have some input into the narrative, so I’m happy it’s here. Those choices are also good for breaking up the sometimes lengthy and almost always boring dialogue. As usual for a game developed by Hit-Point, the localization is grammatically sound but tedious to read thanks to being overly literal. There’s at least a good attempt at telling an interesting tale here, but it would have needed some top-shelf massaging to bring it out. As is, the broad strokes will keep you going, even if you’ll likely find yourself frequently hammering away at the screen to clear the text.

Hit-Point’s never been all that great at the narrative side of things, though, so I wasn’t all that surprised. The reason why I typically look forward to their work is their seeming desire to experiment with gameplay systems to the extent that their limited resources allow them to. Regrettably, Legna Tactica doesn’t show any of this developer’s usual creativity. As far as its mechanics go, it follows the typical lines of the genre to a tee. If you want to be optimistic about it, the game mechanics are sound in most respects save difficulty. There’s a nice variety of skills and abilities to use, there’s a reasonable variety in the foes you’ll face, and the skill tree system certainly works. This has all been tried and tested many times, after all.

More pessimistically, everything this game does has been done before, done better, and at least a few of the games that have done so are available on iOS. Is having content you haven’t played before worth fiddling around with fussier touch controls and tinier grid squares than other games have? Is a new story worth dealing with the ugly appearance of mismatched elements? Are new maps and characters enough to overcome the game’s toothless difficulty? To tell the truth, I can’t answer any of these questions with much certainty. Legna Tactica is just solid enough that you might enjoy playing through it, but flawed and generic enough that you certainly wouldn’t be missing anything if you skipped it and simply did another run-through of your preferred strategy RPG instead. I like it as a game better than Kemco’s other strategy game, Legend Of Ixtona, but that game at least had a couple of interesting ideas to help it stand out.

If you love Japanese-style strategy RPGs, don’t mind if they’re pretty easy, and have an excess of time, Legna Tactica is a well-constructed enough facsimile to keep you busy for a little while. Like many of the games from this publisher, it’s nothing I’d jump over the turnstiles to get to, but it fills the belly well enough. I’m not sure if that’s enough when the iOS platform is host to some of the better strategy RPGs available today, though.

Candy Curse is a platformer through and through, and doesn’t really seek to be anymore more than that. Using a simple virtual d-pad you’ll be able to move left and right, with two additional buttons — a projectile attack, and the ability to jump. I particularly like how responsive everything is, including the propensity for mashing the attack button. Over the course of the game you’ll become accustomed to other mechanics like diving while airborne,  and double-jumping. You can acquire more power by way of collecting candy, which functions as an experience system of sorts. All said it’s very sound, mechanically.

Where Curse falters though is its level design — it simply isn’t compelling enough on a consistent basis. You’ll traverse over typical tropes like falling platforms and fight enemies that are very samey and rote. The conceit that the main character has released the evil Count Crunch from an innocent bowl of cereal is charming, but it never really goes anywhere from there, instead plopping players into uninspired playgrounds.

There’s 10 levels in all, and you can only face the “Castle of Doom" at the end if you’ve completed every quest in the game. While this is a pretty common tactic that far precedes Candy Curse (see the original Rayman), it ultimately hurts its case as said side quests are not very fun. Most of them consist of simple fetch quests, and nothing is obvious as to what the actual objective entails. The “sticker book," which grants you a piece of candy after completing each subquest, grants you nothing — instead, the developers ask you to tweet out your full collection.

It’s admirable that Candy Curse doesn’t contain any IAP, but at the same time, I’m not sure everyone is going to be engaged enough to actually complete the entire affair. With some more diverse level layouts and quests it would be an easier pill to swallow.

First off, I really dig the 2.5D perspective that ghost of Memories provides. Again, it’s nothing new, but it’s presented with a ton of vivid colors, unique designs, and clear grid-like floors to really set it apart from the rest. The entire narrative is artsy in nature, with a minimalist story that never really goes anywhere, and basically serves as an excuse to solve a bunch of puzzles. The atmospheric feel in general is great though, and the soundtrack alone serves players well when it comes to nudging them along.

Movement is as simple as it gets, as a quick tap will bring you to your desired location, and icons above your avatar’s head will initiate actions like teleporting or the use of objects. There’s a bit of finickiness when it comes to manipulating objects in the world, but since the game isn’t time sensitive or action-oriented in any way, these minor hiccups are more forgivable.

Where Memories falters is in its clarity. For some missions, there’s not even a hint as to what the objective is, which can become problematic for larger maps. Now, I’m not suggesting that the game should be easier, as there’s nothing wrong with a proper challenge, but when you’re wandering around an area aimlessly trying out solutions in a trial and error fashion, it’s not ideal. There needs to be some form of signposting to at least direct players into the general concept of a solution, then let them figure it out from there. It’s not a good feeling to hit a random object and suddenly solve an entire puzzle.

This is especially frustrating for levels that feature floating blocks, where players have to individually swipe them in a specific direction. Here, you’ll need to painstakingly head to certain areas that may take a minute or two to reach, before you quickly realize that you actually need to backtrack and grab another required item. The developers had the right idea, but it’s not designed particularly well. This goes double for some of the latter levels, which are so sprawling that you’ll need to scroll around and plan out your every move.

All said and done Memories should take you roughly three hours to complete, which isn’t terrible given the pricepoint, and the fact that there’s no microtransactions present. For those of you who really dig the art style and like getting lost in puzzling worlds, Ghost of Memories is probably worth checking out at some point. For the rest of you, waiting for a potential sequel to iron out the aforementioned issues is probably for the best.

The Doom Beneath is developer Robot Monster’s second effort. Like the developer’s first release, This Is Not A Test ($1.99), The Doom Beneath is a gamebook made in the style of a graphic novel as opposed to the heavy text-based approach most others in the genre use. It’s extremely eye-catching, though it does mean there’s a lot less text to convey the story with. The theme of the last book centered around surviving a nuclear apocalypse. This time around, you’re dealing with a considerably less modern threat: cultists, demons, and elder gods. Armed with whatever few skills you pick at the beginning and any objects you can grab along the way, you have to try to survive your accidental encounter with these horrific creatures.

The gameplay primarily consists of reading and making fairly frequent choices. The choices you have open to you will depend on the skills you selected, the items you’ve picked up, and the characters you’ve met. While there’s a little wiggle room in the form of multiple solutions to some of the dangers you’ll find yourself in, you’ll still find yourself dying a lot until you can find one of the correct sequences to win. The game also features turn-based battles from time to time, though it’s very opaque about how they’re resolved. Presumably there is some dice-rolling happening behind the scenes, but since you can’t see any of it, making selections in these battles feels more like a matter of luck than anything else. You have the option to just skip to the results, and I found myself doing that quite often after the first few fights.

Apart from those unlucky bounces, the game isn’t too hard to figure out once you’ve made a few attempts. At least in my opinion, it’s a lot more forgiving than This Is Not A Test, though there are certainly plenty of interesting ways to die. Unfortunately, it also feels more confined than the previous game. Robot Monster did a great job infusing their first game with a sort of false freedom that made it feel like you had lots of possibilities. The Doom Beneath is limited to the underground areas, and it feels a lot smaller as a result. It also lacks the unusual flavor of the previous title. There are plenty of horror-house/dungeon gamebooks out there, and apart from its fantastic presentation, The Doom Beneath doesn’t do much with its narrative to separate itself from the pack.

As long as you keep that in mind before going in, you’ll probably enjoy The Doom Beneath. Having well-drawn illustrations of every scene assists greatly in establishing the creepy mood, and I once again really enjoyed the replay value the skill system offers. Even after you’ve figured out how to beat the game, there are achievements and points to hunt down, so you’ll probably get a few more plays out of it if you’re interested in completing everything. I’m happy to see the game support suspend saving right out of the proverbial box this time, too. That’s a vital feature that wasn’t in the initial release of This Is Not A Test, but it’s working fine here. The game also makes good use of audio to support its atmosphere, though I do have to award some naughty points for it not obeying the device mute switch.

The strong presentation ensures that The Doom Beneath has a little something over the average gamebook, but that’s really all it has. It’s a relatively short, straightforward adventure with a very familiar theme. If the concept sounds interesting to you, or you’re a big gamebook fan looking for something with a bit more visual pop than the norm, you’ll probably get a decent value out of The Doom Beneath. It’s nicely polished and competently constructed, even if it ends up feeling a little underwhelming. Just make sure you pay attention to its moral, because little good ever came of a fool running away from a bear.

The set-up here is interesting, with you playing as a Mystic who is forced to go on the run from your people. Your character is the daughter of the Earth Queen, and is able to make use of magical songs that can perform a variety of effects once you’ve learned them. There are a lot of different routes to successfully finishing the game, as well. Even from the very start, you can go in a variety of directions that lead to completely different paths before forking back into the main one. More punishing gamebooks will often present you with choices where you can only succeed by holding one particular item, but Songs Of The Mystics will almost always present two or three different selections, improving your odds of having something to help you get through. It’s a big, complex adventure with a fair bit of replay value, enjoyable prose, and some nice illustrations peppered throughout, all done up in Tin Man’s usual style.

There are a few things about Songs Of The Mystics that drag it all down, however. I think it’s a bit too complex for its own good, for starters. Unless you’re incredibly lucky, you’re probably not going to be able to solve this one on your first run through, no matter how careful you are. Not only are there situations where only knowing the outcome will help you make the right choice, such as the often unpredictable outcomes of using particular songs, there are also points in the game where your next step is chosen by rolling the die, with no hint whatsoever as to what lies behind each possible outcome. Personally, I don’t like it when a game has me feeling like I missed something critical at the mercy of a random number generator, and it gnawed at me enough that I almost wanted to take advantage of the Free Choice option the Casual difficulty setting would have offered me.

I also didn’t enjoy the story as much as I thought I would at the outset. While the quality of the writing is good, bringing the wide variety of scenes and characters to life with vivid detail, the overall plot feels aimless, mostly due to its branching structure. Escape is a good enough incentive at the beginning of the game, but once you’ve accomplished that, it feels like you’re just bouncing around loosely-connected episodes. It’s even stranger when on certain routes you’ve figured out your main goal and your character doesn’t seem particularly focused on achieving it. Depending on the way you travel, there’s a good chance you’ll just stumble on the situation that resolves the impending apocalypse. It’s less like a climax and more like a mailbox you happened across on your way to the store that reminded you of the letter you needed to send. Some branches handle this better than others, but the odds aren’t in your favor.

While the game doesn’t connect its threads as well as I would have liked, and the ending just sort of happens, the mini-scenarios that make up the bulk of the story are fairly engaging. As usual for this series, the character work is very strong. You’ll meet a lot of memorable friends and foes on your travels, and even the ones you encounter briefly on certain threads manage to distinguish themselves in some way or another. No matter which route you take, you’ll eventually run into a particularly enjoyable group of traveling entertainers, and depending on how early in the story you meet them, you might get to know them very well. The story tries to make a connection between your character and one of the troupe members, and how well that works really depends strongly on the circumstances you meet him in.

I suppose that’s the problem, isn’t it? Songs Of The Mystics gives you a lot of potential paths from your forest home to the ultimate conclusion and unless you hit the right sequence, the story falls apart. I’m mixed about this, because it certainly is incentive to replay the game several times to get all of the angles, but if you hit a particularly nonsensical thread on your first run through, as I did, you might come away feeling like you don’t want to play it again. I’m not sure how this issue could have been tackled, given the limitations of the format, but it definitely feels like a design that pushed against the boundaries of its medium and spilled all over the place.

In the end, I’d say Songs Of The Mystics is probably most likely to appeal to gamebook veterans who are willing to put up with its somewhat messy design and appreciate what it’s trying to do, even if it doesn’t quite pull it off. You’ll also have to be willing to deal with a few luck-based branches that you have little control over unless you play on the easiest setting. Fans of the Orlandes setting should also get a kick out this game, as your travels on Isla des Misticos expose you to many interesting bits of lore in a land populated by the unusual style of characters you’ve come to expect from the Gamebook Adventures series. Just be prepared for the possibility that you might have to run through the game a few times before you’ll get a successful run, let alone a coherent, satisfying narrative to go along with it.

Like the last game, Arcane Quest Adventures is a turn-based RPG heavily inspired by the board game HeroQuest. You’ll navigate dungeons, search rooms and objects for treasure, battle monsters using special dice, and so on. The first big difference in this game is that instead of controlling a party, you’re only using one hero. You can hire a mercenary to follow along if you like, but you’re on your own for the most part. The next thing you’ll notice is that rather than restricting itself to various arrangements on the same board, Arcane Quest Adventures spans multiple boards of varying shapes and appearances.

The flow of the game is a bit different, too. You’ll start from a hub area that contains a number of portals. You’ll only have one open to you at first, and you’ll have to beat it to open up the next one. Jumping into a portal brings you to an outdoor zone which contains shops, some treasure, a handful of enemies, and most importantly, entrances to dungeons. The boss of the area will be found in one of those dungeons, so you’ll have to explore them until you find the deadly monster. Kill it, and you can go back to the hub and head through the next portal. Even if you don’t find a boss in a dungeon, clearing it can earn you valuable experience points, treasure, and a gold bonus, so you never feel like you’ve wasted time.

I enjoy the way the game balances its rewards. You’ll never really have enough gold to buy all the equipment you’ll want, unless you choose to buy it through IAPs or grind it out. Thus, gold and equipment are scarce commodities, which means it always feels good when you find some. On the other hand, consumable items are very common, but your hard inventory limit on such tools means you can’t stockpile them. The game encourages you to make regular use of them rather than saving them for a rainy day that will never come. There’s a nice balance between these two types of treasure, with common stuff typically welcome because you know you’re going to use it soon, and rarer stuff feeling valuable because you’ll always need it. You’re going to want to search every possible location, basically.

The game’s turn-based nature sometimes gets in the way of that work, though. Just as in the last game, you can move a set number of squares and take one action on each turn. So once you’ve attacked, for example, you’ll have to wait until your next turn to search, even if you have the movement points to sidle up next to a box or what-have-you. However, in the previous game, you had four characters at your disposal, so it was pretty easy to do what you needed to do and still have actions left for searching. Here, your character is on his or her own, so clearing out a room can sometimes feel tiresome. Given the value of the potential spoils, however, you really feel obligated to be thorough.

That feeling occasionally extends to the combat, particularly when several enemies gang up on you. Early on, taking down enemies is a pretty quick process, but as you get further in, you’ll find yourself missing or whittling off smaller chunks with each hit thanks to the appearance of monsters with higher defense ratings. Battles drag on as you take your turn, do no damage, watch three enemies take each of their own turns doing no damage, then throwing it back to you, where you hit one of them for a single point of damage, and so on. It gets better as you unlock new abilities, but for a good portion of the game, there isn’t a great deal of strategy to consider while you’re fighting. The game offers an option to skip dice rolls and have characters take fast turns, and I strongly recommend you turn it on as soon as you’ve satisfied your curiosity about how the mechanics play out.

The way battles work is that each participant has two sets of dice. One set is for attacks, the other for defense. When you attack, you’ll roll those dice, and the number of swords that come up determines how many hits you inflict. The defender then rolls their dice, and the number of shields that come up is subtracted from the hits to determine total damage dealt. If there are equal or more shields when compared to swords, no damage is done. In the Arcane Quest games, dice come in different colors indicating how powerful they are. Equipment upgrades will either grant you more dice, or more powerful ones. Depending on the piece of gear, there might also be other effects that come into play, such as healing your character or inflicting stun on the enemy. You can also use special abilities or magic, depending on your character and their level.

It’s a decent enough system, but when reduced to a single-character party, it doesn’t leave a lot of room for interesting tactics. Even if you bring along a hired mercenary, you still can’t engage in the level of strategy the previous game allowed. Combat rarely elevates beyond standing next to the enemy and swinging (or spell-slinging) at each other until someone is dead, with the occasional turn spent to quaff a potion or two. I hate to say it, but it’s kind of dull. Which isn’t a deal-breaker, mind you. Lots of excellent games have terrible combat, even some of the best-selling ones. But if it’s not combat that it hangs its hat on, then it needs to be something else. That’s where Arcane Quest Adventures runs into some trouble. The story is nearly non-existent, and there aren’t any role-playing choices to be made. Character customization is non-existent, with level-ups granting you pre-determined bonuses. The equipment selection is largely of the sort where you need to reach a particular level to wear the next statistically-improved set of gear, so there aren’t any interesting decisions to make there, either.

Finding treasure is fun and rewards you for exploring the map completely, and that sense of exploration and discovery is probably the best thing the game has to offer. But even with a sort of perma-death in effect, there’s little risk in those explorations. As the game progresses, battles don’t so much become harder as they do longer. If you die, you’re kicked back to the hub with your progress in that particular portal lost, but whatever progress you’ve made in unlocking portals is saved. It’s a fairly light rap on the knuckles, and not much more than that. Arcane Quest Adventures does eventually get more difficult, especially if you fall behind on upgrading your equipment, but I’m not sure how many are going to be willing to stick with the game through its numb majority just to get to a little slice of something more exciting.

The last trick up its sleeve is the large number of playable characters. The free version restricts you to a small portion of the roster and serves up ads to monetize. If you paid to unlock heroes in the previous game, you can get a code from that game to unlock one of the two character packs for free here. Otherwise, it’s a meager $2.99 purchase to get both at once, giving you a total of 11 heroes to play as. Making a purchase removes the ads, and although you can always buy gold, you don’t need to. There’s a decent variety in characters here, with some a lot more fun to play as than others. Given what I’ve said about combat, you can probably guess that I would suggest the non-meatshield characters if you’re looking for more of a thrill. There’s just one problem with this set-up: you’re locked in to your character choice. The game only has one save file, so once you’ve selected your hero, you’re going to be using them for the whole game. Part of the fun of having a big roster of characters is in letting the player experiment. At least when you’re putting together a party, you have a chance to try four different characters at a time. Here, you’d have to play through 11 times to get a chance to use everyone.

Although it uses the same board game motif as Arcane Quest 2, it’s a little easier on the eyes thanks to its use of a variety of backgrounds. It’s still a bit hard to tell some enemies apart at a glance, and the whole thing is more functional than beautiful, but I can appreciate the improvements made here. Another improvement is in the game’s documentation. One of my criticisms of the last game is that it could be a bit bewildering for people who aren’t familiar with HeroQuest‘s mechanics already. Arcane Quest Adventures does a good job of explaining itself, with helpful tip screens that pop up when a player first encounters new mechanics. You can always go back and view them at your leisure, too. I also appreciate the “action mode", where the game skips the dice-rolling animations and speeds things up in general.

Arcane Quest Adventures is an alright game, and I certainly appreciate the advances it makes to the core gameplay of its predecessor. That said, it strips away a bit too much complexity in its goal of being easier to pick up and play. I think this concept could work, but if you’re going to have players use one character alone, each character needs to offer some interesting choices, whether it be through a healthy stock of special abilities, customization options, or something. Looking at it from another end, it’s still a little too involved to work as a pick-up-and-play game. Players are going to want to stick around to at least complete a full dungeon, so you’re already well out of the waters of being a brief bit of fun for people to fit into their day. Stuck somewhere in the middle, it feels more like a filler step on the way to its best features landing in Arcane Quest 3.

The problem is that Oraia Rift is longer than a few hours, by a good measure. Guiding your chosen character through their quest to stave off the invasion of the Rift Dwellers takes around 10 hours, give or take, and a whole lot of that time is spent backtracking through empty areas and fighting banal battles against largely non-threatening yet maddeningly durable enemies. The developer, COMPASSGAMES, cites early PlayStation 1 games as a source of inspiration for the visuals, but I can feel a lot of that era in the game’s design as well, for better or worse. There’s a real feeling of a developer trying to learn how to create a game in a 3D space, making many of the same mistakes everyone else did back in the day.

Each of the game’s areas consists of a bunch of platforms connected together by bridges and such. Occasionally, you’ll be jumped by enemies as you step onto one of these platforms, and you’ll have to deal with them before you can do anything else. There’s only ever one way to move forward, but you might have to double back to find it. The game provides a pointer arrow to let you know the direction as the crow flies to your next goal. It’s helpful, but you’ll want to be careful about depending on it too heavily, since it doesn’t take things like locked doors or winding paths into account. Unfortunately, the main path frequently requires you to retrace your steps, and with all the puzzles solved and the enemies killed on your way through the first time, it feels like completely pointless filler. It’s a big world, to be sure, but big worlds are only a good thing if they’re interesting to traverse, and the land of Oraia is for the most part not.

Making things worse, there’s no map available. The developer did a pretty good job on the graphics, and there’s more variety than one would expect in terms of visual themes, but within each theme, the individual platforms start blending in with each other really quickly. With how large some of the areas tend to be, it’s easy to get lost even when doing something as simple as trying to make your way back to a town. Provided you’ve been thorough, and indeed you must be, there won’t even be enemies or items to mark your path. I’m not going to lie, there were times during the game when I completely lost where I was going and just about ran out of patience trying to find my way out. Yes, even with the pointer.

The other big issue in Oraia Rift is the combat. With a huge selection of abilities at your disposal, you would think battles would be varied and fun. You’ll encounter a reasonable mix of foes, some of which with the ability to use magic themselves. Sadly, all the battles tend to come down to swinging your weapon as quickly as you can, while your opponents do the same. The enemies are stupid enough that you can easily lead them around the environment until they get stuck somewhere, which is a good strategy against groups. If you have magic power left, you might want to burn it on spells, but otherwise it’s just button-mashing. A lot of button mashing, too, since even weak enemies can absorb a lot of damage before going down. While your character has a roll move that you can activate by pressing the button while moving, it doesn’t function well for anything other than moving distances quickly. During battle, it’ll move you out of a pack, but you’ll end up too far away to counter-attack, even if you could get the attack going promptly. That’s tricky in and of itself. Since the same button does everything, with context determining the outcome, you have to make sure you are completely stationary before you try to attack, lest you simply roll around like a fool.

This is all probably sounding very negative, but I want to be very clear about Oraia Rift‘s faults. Ultimately, I think I like the game more than I don’t, and it’s possible you will, too. You’ll have to deal with all the things I’ve mentioned, along with stiff animations, odd clipping, a sometimes uncooperative camera, and all sorts of other obvious signs of a game’s reach more than exceeding its grasp. If that’s something you can handle, you’ll find a lot of fun moments in Oraia Rift, too. The puzzles are spread out enough that they’re always a welcome sight, even if few of them offer any real challenge. That little thrill you get in a Metroid or Zelda game where you get a new item and instantly think back to some places where you can use it is present in this game as well, albeit to a lesser extent. The occasional graphical oddity aside, the game is quite pretty, and I can even kind of appreciate its level designs. When it sends you to a ship area, it doesn’t even try to make a coherent ship. Instead, it just ship-flavors a twisty labyrinth. It doesn’t hide it in the least, either, since you can see much of the layout from certain points. There’s something kind of nostalgic about that.

Controlling your character is simple, perhaps to a fault. One stick moves your character around, while a button acts as a sort of catch-all for performing actions like talking, fighting, and unlocking doors. You can have up to four different abilities readied on a tray at the bottom of the screen, where you can use them with the tap of a button. When moving around, you’ll frequently get snagged on bits of the environment, so you’ll have to be patient. In battles, the roll move comes out a little too easily. You really have to stand perfectly still when swinging your weapon. You can switch the roll off either just in combat or completely in the options menu, but since it has its uses even in battles sometimes, it doesn’t feel like an ideal solution. A separate button would have been nice. Those with MFi controllers can at least take advantage of the game’s support, but you’ll still have the rolling problem.

Oraia Rift is an ambitious game that suffers from a handful of technical flaws and a fair few questionable design choices. It’s one of those games that is probably too big for its own good, making for a terribly uneven experience over the course of the game. The parts of it that work are a lot of fun, enough that they slightly edge out the parts that don’t, but never mind having a huge sack filled with magic: it’s a bag full of patience that you’ll truly need if you mean to enjoy this game.

The premise is clever. A deer hunter is killed by wolves during a storm, and the Deer God decides to give him a chance to make up for his crimes in life by reincarnating him as a deer. Making up for his crimes seems to entail collecting a bunch of relics and killing animals the Deer God has arbitrarily decided are bad guys. The game itself is a side-scrolling platformer, albeit one with a few twists. Most obviously, the world is procedurally-generated when you start playing it, and though it won’t change from life-to-life, enemy placement will. There aren’t any discrete levels in the traditional sense, but you’ll loop around the same sections until you find and complete the mission in that area. The missions vary, but most of them involve finding an item somewhere in that section and bringing it back. That item’s placement is also procedurally-generated, so it could be ten seconds away from the quest-giver, or it might be really far. In addition to quest items, you can also find helpful items that you can use whenever you like. They run the gamut from healing, to invincibility, to giving you a temporary super jump ability. Your deer will earn new abilities as you go, some as part of the story, others connected to your karma meter. You’ll also run into bosses now and then, and they can be quite the challenge.

There are two difficulty settings. In hardcore mode, you have a set number of lives. You can earn more through various means, but if you happen to run out, that’s it. Game over. The normal setting effectively gives you unlimited lives, though you’ll respawn as a weak little fawn if you run out of lives. I’d recommend going for the latter, as you will be dying a lot, and only some of those will be your fault. There are a lot of reasons for that, but I’ll go into that shortly. If you manage to stay alive, your deer will grow into adulthood, with each stage granting more strength until you’re strong enough to handle even hunters. If you die with lives in stock, you’ll reappear near where you died. If you fall on your “last" life in normal mode, you’ll start back at your last save point. Sometimes those save points land in irritating places, and there are some bugs in the current version that can put them in showstopping locations, such as in the middle of some of the geometry.

The current version of The Deer God suffers from a lot of bugs. Sometimes you’ll clip into objects and be unable to escape. Sometimes you’ll go sailing off a cliff only to find nothing waiting beyond, and be forced to quit back to the menu. I didn’t run into any out-and-out crashes, but I had to quit back to the title screen an awful lot due to clipping issues. Sometimes events that are supposed to trigger don’t, again forcing you to restart the app and hope for a luckier outcome. The game is already fairly difficult, and losing progress in this way is frankly aggravating. While playing the game for this review, I had to completely restart the game from scratch after nearly finishing it, simply because my save file would only spawn me in a glitchy state that prevented me from moving forward. I know Crescent Moon are hard at work fixing these bugs, so with any luck, this paragraph will be obsolete before too long (Since this was written, an update was submitted that apparently fixes many of these bugs.). It’s still worth keeping in mind if you intend to take a chance on the game in the meantime, though.

Unfortunately, The Deer God‘s problems run deeper than bugs. As good as it feels to run and jump around, just about everything else you’ll do tends to be awkward and unpleasant. Combat is the worst offender. The default control layout has you swiping to attack, a gesture which simply doesn’t work well here. Not only is it hard to pull off, it requires you to block the main play area. Since your deer’s attack is a dash, it’s easy to make fatal mistakes, especially when you can’t see exactly what you’re doing. That’s made worse by the beautiful color palette. It looks great, but in terms of functionality, it stinks. Your deer will blend into so many of the game’s backgrounds, and the enemies will, too. You probably won’t even notice many of the enemies until they’ve already hit you. The collision detection is just fussy enough that enemies can bounce you for heavy damage if you get caught in the wrong place, and it’s a rare attack that doesn’t result in your deer also taking damage. You can switch off swiping to attack, which will give you a button to use instead. That works better, but you’ll still run into many of the same issues.

So, combat isn’t very good, but apart from bosses, you can probably just ignore it, right? After all, you’re a deer. Plus, the whole karma thing probably dictates that you shouldn’t be killing every bit of wildlife you come across. You would think that, anyway, but the karma system ends up forcing you to fight. Killing aggressive animals, including snakes, boars, skunks, and others, will get you some positive karma, while hurting or killing friendly animals will earn you negative karma. You’ll earn new special powers as you load up on karma, and since positive and negative operate on separate continuums, you don’t have to worry about the occasional bit of evil-doing. What you do want to make sure you do is to keep the good karma higher than the bad karma. If you don’t, you’ll resurrect as another animal instead of a deer on every other life. That animal will sometimes be unable to progress, forcing you to starve to death to come back as a deer and move on. In other cases, they will be able to navigate just fine, but even the best of them lack the necessary qualities to continue. This is pretty neat the first couple of times it happens, but it gets old really fast.

You can try to avoid building bad karma, but you’ll get “credit" for a good animal’s death even if you don’t have a hand in it. If they careen off a ledge and die, congratulations, you just earned some bad karma. If you accidentally butt into them because they walked in the way of your attack, you’re getting some bad karma. So you pretty much have to kill the bad animals to make sure you’re outpacing your bad karma growth, so that you don’t have to waste away every other life on a weird reincarnation. No, there’s no two ways about it, you’ll have to deal with the combat unless you want a greater annoyance to deal with. The boss fights are unique challenges, rarely making use of straight-forward attacks. Instead, you’ll have to find the special way to defeat them, usually involving some aspect of the environment. You’ll still have to deal with clunky collision and the occasional awkward attack sequence, but the boss challenges feel more like you’re fighting an intended challenge rather than one that springs out of technical issues.

Slightly less irritating, but still worth mentioning, is the platforming. There are lots of places where you need to jump between small platforms, and missing your mark will generally mean death from spikes or whatever other soup-du-jour waits below. This can be a headache for two reasons. First, your deer being a deer, when he starts to move, he really moves. It’s a problem when you’ve only got a small foothold, and if you’re still using swipe to attack, it’s possible to misfire in these situations and fall to your death. The other issue is the camera. It’s very cinematic, but it doesn’t always do a good job of keeping up with your deer or showing the information about your surroundings that you need to survive. It’s so much fun to gallop ahead, jumping in a sweet rhythm, but in practice, you’ll die quickly if you don’t take it slowly around the platforming areas. You have to edge your way down carefully until you see an actual landing spot, because the camera will not give you time to react if you just jump for it. I think the camera needs to be pulled back a bit, but doing so might make details hard to make out due to the subdued palette.

Then there are elements that feel vestigial, like nobody could quite figure out how to integrate them properly but left them in anyway. For example, you have a hunger gauge, which is likely a nod to the roguelike genre. You’ll need to make sure you find and eat enough food to keep your meter up, or else your health will slowly start to drain. The idea here is probably to keep the player moving, because food isn’t hard to come by provided you keep going forward. My question is why we feel the need to rush the player? I guess it’s so that you don’t just sit in one place waiting for time to level your deer up to its adult state, but given the amount of real time that would take, I doubt it would really break the game. Most of the time, there’s so much food around you won’t even need to consider it. The gauge would add tension to boss fights, but there’s usually an auto-replenishing source of chow in the boss’s lair. Starvation proves to be a useful self-destruct mechanism if you get stuck somewhere you can’t escape from, I suppose. Past that, the main effect this mechanic has on the gameplay is when your deer slows down to eat food sources while you’re trying to run away from something dangerous, or munches on some flowers at the edge of a cliff just when you were about to jump.

Given its place in the narrative, the karma system feels poorly-handled, as well. The points you earn feel arbitrary, and indeed, so long as you keep your positive karma higher, doing the things the game deems bad seems to have no effect. Has my hunter really learned something about respect for nature by killing more ugly animals than cute ones? And while I loved the idea of reincarnating me as another animal the first time the game did it, the fact that it happens so frequently, until you kill enough snakes or what-have-you to get your positive karma back up, takes the punch out of it. Plus, some of the animal I reincarnated as were actually better than the deer. Worst of all, it doesn’t seem like karma actually matters in the end. There’s more than one ending, but instead of relying on your karma total, it’s simply down to a choice. In the end, it feels like the karma system is only there to keep you fighting enemies instead of running from them. Given the themes the game is reaching for, that’s a disappointing outcome.

There are plenty of moments in the game that are so dazzling, it’s easy to forget the problems. This is an incredibly gorgeous game, combining pixel art with a strong sense of 3D space that lends it a look like no other. Days roll into nights, the sun gives way to the moon, seasons change, and new areas sprawl out before you. It’s almost worth the constant irritations and meaningless mechanics just for those rare moments when the game takes your breath away. The wasted karma system aside, the game does a nice job of telling a simple yet moving story. I’m not entirely convinced our hunter deserved the wringing the Deer God put him through, but it’s still a powerful journey. Make sure you look around and find all of the secret places tucked around the world. There are little scraps of story that you can miss that contribute greatly to the weight of the conclusion. If you fall into The Deer God‘s enchanting atmosphere and get entranced by its understated narrative, there’s a good chance you’ll love this game enough to forgive its weaker points, significant though they may be.

I wish I could say that applied to me, though. I can appreciate the things The Deer God does well, and I don’t regret playing it, because those moments were stunning. But it wasn’t quite enough to balance out the clunky action, the inadequate camera, and the numerous bugs. There’s something truly special at the core of The Deer God, but it’s doled out in moments of sublime pleasure surrounded by long stretches of frustration and disappointment.

The hypnotic swaying and dodging is a pleasurable mechanic, although the fast-paced and challenging level design means that there isn’t much time to enjoy the scenery. This atmospheric platformer will challenge even those intimately familiar with the genre. Like many platformers, MoBu requires a tricky balance between speed and precision (even more so than most). The swinging mechanic, controlled by swiping forward on the screen, will propel MoBu into cliff-faces, outcrops of stone, bushels of thorns, and other barriers, if you aren’t careful.

I find that the pattern of how and when the obstacles KO MoBu is frustratingly erratic. Sometimes he could safely land on a stone platform, sometimes even nicking them would kill me. Sometimes I could brush up against a cliff’s edge, sometimes the lightest touch ended my run. This makes coming up with level strategies challenging, and not in the fun, puzzle-solving way.

The levels require a lot of trial and error (what platformer doesn’t?) and the controls can be a bit tricky to get a handle on at first. “Lives" (aka number of bananas collected) diminish quickly and once you reach zero you must purchase more from the shop or watch an in-game ad to earn 20 for “free." It is disappointing that these are the only way to keep playing when lives run out (quite frequently, I’ll admit). This became a problem when my lives hit zero and the ads suddenly got stuck buffering about halfway through; when they don’t finish, your lives won’t replenish. So whether this was a bug with the game or a problem with my home wifi, the game became unplayable for me. I would have liked to see a real-time replenishment system as an alternative.

Coupled with the ad interruptions, the “story" didn’t compel me to keep playing. MoBu wanted bananas, so was given stretchy arms to reach them, and now has to collect bananas because his “power" seems to make him hungry faster. Maybe it is meant to be a “monkey’s paw" type wish, pointing to the irony as some sort of cautionary tale regarding instant gratification. However, it wasn’t wasn’t enough to motivate me to keep coming back to tricky levels and constant ad-watching.

Despite this, the game has a really great look and feel. The art direction is unique, fun, and quirky; the jungle atmosphere is eerie and beautiful; the “stretchy arm" mechanic is challenging and interesting. The dark backdrop, glowing with a sense of whimsy, is wonderfully contrasted with MoBu’s cartoony, bright design. It’s the kind of game that will appear like phantasms behind your eyes as you try to sleep. 

I love platformers; they are what originally introduced me to gaming as a kid. There is some genuine fun to be had with MoBu. It’s a free game and so is definitely worth the download. I’m glad I got to spend time with MoBu but once my ads stopped buffering I wasn’t inclined to swing on back to it. 

You play as an aspiring young mage who is just about to become an apprentice of the local sorcerer. After passing his tests, he tasks you with delivering an item to a white mage friend of his in the next town. When you walk in the door of the temple, a mysterious armored warrior beats you and absconds with the item, forcing all of the guilds to come together to try and figure out exactly what the warrior’s true motives and ambitions are. In principle, this means running back and forth between a few different locations, delivering items and fighting pre-set battles against a variety of enemies. Generally speaking, you’ll need to be of an appropriate level to have a chance of winning each fight, and since there are no random battles, the only way you’ll be at the right level for each combat is to follow the exact line the game lays out.

There are several schools of magic, and you’ll join almost all of them very quickly. Although their basic attacks are essentially the same, each school has a set of unique advanced spells that you’ll learn as you climb through the ranks. You’ll also get some new duds that you’ll need to equip to make use of those spells. There are a few other equipment pieces you’ll come across that modify your stats or move the plot forward. Some of them are bought, but most are found or given as a reward for finishing a quest. After a while, you’ll even get some familiars that will stand beside you in battle, supporting you in various ways. New stuff comes at a nearly breakneck pace, and I get a very strong impression that the existing game was cut down from something that was far more ambitious at one point. You’ll only get one or two fights with your latest rewards before the game makes you switch over to something else. The game is nearly finished by the time you finally do have the freedom to use whatever you want.

It’s not a very long game at all, running only a few hours at most, and it’s very linear due to the scarcity of battles and the relative importance of your experience level. What’s here is fairly impressive, however. The game is rendered fully in polygons, and the details of houses, caves, and other structures are pretty good. I appreciate the variety among the locations featured in the game, as well. The seams between squares on the ground are generally visible and I’m not sure they’re meant to be, but otherwise, it’s a nice-looking game. Characters all look like Square Enix’s Black Mage (aka He-Man‘s Orko?) wearing various costumes, and they’re all limbless like Rayman. They animate reasonably well, at least, and they certainly have personality. There isn’t a lot of music, but what’s here is well done. The UI could use some work, as NPC text is positively tiny, making it uncomfortable to read. Hotspots also require you to tap a pretty small circle to interact with them.

In battles, you and your enemy face off, with the fastest character taking their turn sooner and more often. When your turn comes up, you can swipe left, right, or forward to fire a regular attack in that direction, or you can perform one of a few other gestures to use an advanced spell. Regular attacks require just a single crystal of mana, while other spells can use up to five. At the start of your turn, a single crystal is restored, but you can also restore crystals by blocking the enemy’s attacks. When they fire out regular attacks, simply swipe in the same direction to block them. If they don’t use a regular attack, well, enjoy the smack to the face and hope you’re strong enough to survive. Whoever’s HP is reduced to zero first, loses.

It keeps your fingers busy and forces you to pay attention to the battles. Mercifully, most fights wrap up quickly, which is a good thing because the pressure to not make a mistake can be very big as you work through the ranks. The thing that bothers me about the battles is that you can only defend against regular attacks. The enemies can use most of the same attacks you can, and many of those attacks can essentially end the battle in one fell swoop. If you’re up against a speedy foe who will get the first turn every time, you have to hope that it won’t stun or blind you before you can get a move in yourself. It’s pretty frustrating when this happens, but the RNG will eventually relent and give you the opening you need.

A bigger problem is that this is really all the game has to offer. Enemies get a bit faster as you go on, making their attacks harder to block, and those nasty status effects get more common, but there’s no viable strategy to counteract either, so you end up just doing the same old thing for most of the game. Outside of the battles, you’re not doing much more than running back and forth through small areas, talking to people in order to get to the next fight. Mobius Of Magic makes a great first impression with its attractive visuals and exciting combat, but beyond that charming introduction, there isn’t much else to chew on.

You take the role of the Trademaster, whose job is to restore the once-prosperous Paradise Bay to its former glory. At the start of the game, you’ve got very little in the way of resources to work with. Some cotton seeds, a turtle that will go fishing if you provide it with a net, and a workshop that will refine cotton into fishing nets, but as you play, you’ll unlock more buildings, resources, and characters to trade with. It’s a pretty standard formula by this point. In the beginning, things move quickly. Timers are short, and significant progress is possible in a single play session. After the first hour or so, things start to take a bit longer to build or grow, and resources begin to get thinner than your needs. As with most games of this type, you’re meant to just check in for a few minutes at a time during your day to collect things and get the wheels (and timers) turning again.

The island is inhabited by a few characters who will make requests at the trading post for particular items. By fulfilling them, you’ll get money, experience, and maybe even a little snippet of character information. Money is used to build new structures and clear major areas of land for building, while experience obviously goes towards your main level. Your level determines which options are open to you in terms of places and structures to build. If you fulfill enough requests with a character, they’ll give you a chest that contains a good chunk of both money and experience, along with a useful and somewhat rare item for upgrading your storage or removing obstacles from the land. Any excess goods can be sold off to other players after you’ve built a port, and you will eventually be able to seek out and purchase other players’ goods yourself.

The interface is easy to use and makes sense. You can see if you’re able to fulfill any trades at a glance without even clicking on the trading post, and it’s always very obvious when a particular object is available to use or not. I like how colorful and lush the scenery in the game is, although the characters are certainly cut from the King mold, giving them a sort of unintentionally creepy vibe when you just know they were going for cute. Tapping on objects around the world produces little animations and sound effects which help add some life to the whole affair. It probably goes without saying, but there’s a premium currency here in the form of gems that you can use to speed up timers, buy in-game money, expand your construction slots, or open up areas ahead of time. The game gives it out fairly generously, but it costs quite a bit of it to do even the most meager of tasks, so anyone wanting to buy their way through the game should be prepared to shell out a pretty penny.

Optimally, Paradise Bay is something to fill in time where little else might fit. It’s not particularly engaging, but there’s a certain amount of enjoyment to be derived from watching your little settlement slowly grow. Very slowly. The problem is that there are plenty of other games that scratch this itch in a near-identical fashion, many of which are years-old and quite well-established by now. Paradise Bay doesn’t offer any compelling reasons to eject one of those games in favor of stopping by its sandy shores instead. It’s not even using a particularly interesting theme. If you’re looking for a low-effort jawbreaker to help you pass your coffee breaks, this will serve you well enough, but chances are if that kind of game is your thing, you’ve probably already got something just as good as Paradise Bay on your device, if not better.

I will immediately mention that this game is considered to be in Early Access by its developer. It doesn’t say that in the App Store, but the game released as an Early Access title a few months ago on Steam, and it’s still classified as such. There are apparently two more phases to go before the game is considered a proper release on Steam, and I’m pretty sure mobile players need to use similar considerations, because man alive, this game is buggy. Crashes, long freezes, corrupted save files, glitchy gameplay systems, you name it. It basically functions, I’ll give it that much. Even if you run into few problems, you’ll likely need to restart the game now and then due to a memory leak that seems to be connected to the background music. Well, that’s how it goes sometimes.

The good news is, provided you don’t run into any serious problems, the underlying game is once again pretty good. You’ll have the same four characters at your disposal, but this time you can unlock new jobs as you go. You can switch jobs at large crystals you’ll find around the world, which also double as checkpoints in case you lose in a fight. The job system is pretty typical of JRPG-like games, which each class having access to particular combat skills. New skills are learned by leveling the job up, which is not a matter of fighting battles but rather spending rare materials you’ll find around the world. In addition to combat skills, each job has at least one map action. For example, the knight can push heavy boulders, the cook can prepare a tasty lunch at a crock pot, and the barbarian can belch, which will offend any upper-class gentlemen who might be blocking your route. There are 15 jobs in total in the current version of the game, and the notes promise more on the way.

As in the original game, there are tons of secrets to find, many of which contain special moves that can be assigned to any character. You’ll also sometimes find rare materials for leveling up jobs in these rooms, so you’ll really want to keep your eyes peeled. You’ll find the odd chest here and there even if you don’t find any secrets. These will often contain new equipment which is automatically attached to the appropriate character, or at least, should be automatically attached. The game sometimes forgets to do it, and since there’s no way to manually change your gear, there’s nothing you can do about that when it happens. You also can’t sell your old gear, but money is fairly plentiful for the most part, so it’s not a huge issue. Cash is just laying around everywhere, along with food, alchemy ingredients, and machinery parts that can be consumed to fire off certain special moves.

Apart from those changes, the game will be pretty familiar for those who played the original. It’s a riff on classic JRPGs, with random turn-based encounters, dungeons to explore, towns to rest and gear up in, and so on. The story premise once again has four pen and paper role-playing fans heading to their buddy’s house for a night of gaming only to get pulled into a wild fantasy adventure. Kind of. It’s all very complicated this time around, thanks to dimension-hopping antagonist Steel. The opening of the game is a bit too confusing for its own good, and it takes a while before any questions are answered properly, but once the story gets going, it’s actually a reasonably original plot. It’s less of a straight send-up of JRPG tropes this time around and more of a self-parody.

The translation is somehow even worse than the original game. I’m not sure if there’s a single text box that doesn’t have one mistake or another in it. The jokes oscillate between pop culture references and junior high school humor, and they’re virtually non-stop. Doom & Destiny Advanced goes even more over-the-top than its already-silly predecessor, with the script in a seemingly perpetual state of TMI. When you take all of that together, you’ve got quite the recipe for stupidity, and this game’s script is indeed pretty stupid. It’s so stupid, in fact, that it’s almost endearing at times. Other times, well, not so much. For whatever it’s worth, the dialogue of the main characters does ring true apart from the choppy grammar. They sound like four close friends who spend a lot of time playing games together, and each of them has their own role in that sort of mini-clique. But for the serious-minded players out there, consider yourself warned: I didn’t throw that Pauly Shore reference into the review lightly.

The biggest problems I have with Doom & Destiny Advanced at the moment are its rough state of completion and just how goofy it can get at times. The game is obviously not finished, by the developers’ own admission, but there’s no sign of that on the App Store page. Instead, the bugs and glitches wait as an unpleasant surprise for the buyer. Even your save files aren’t safe, and in an RPG with a single auto-save slot, that’s just about a deal-breaker. As for the humor, there’s a certain nostalgic charm to its juvenile nature, but more sensitive players will probably want to steer well clear, because it’s not afraid to step into language many might find uncomfortable or even downright offensive.

In spite of all that, there’s a really good game at the core of Doom & Destiny Advanced. The encounters are challenging and offer a surprising variety, the dungeons are satisfying to explore with lots of secrets, and the new job system is pretty fun to play around with. I really enjoy the chaotic story, and when the jokes land just right, there are plenty of laughs to be had. The script doesn’t take itself all that seriously, but the gameplay does. That’s my kind of mix, even if I have some quibbles with the specific quantities here.

The developers apparently plan to take a similar strategy to games like Wayward Souls here. Updates will be free, but as content is added, the price of the game will go up. As such, if you enjoyed the first game, I’d strongly recommend getting in on Doom & Destiny Advanced even in the rough state that it’s in. It still has a long ways to go, but I’m feeling confident about its chances of being better than the original in the long run. That’s no small achievement, as the original game was a very good RPG behind its goofy mask. It’s hard to say how long it will take to get there, however, which means you’ll need a great deal of patience both to deal with its current issues and to wait for it to get the polish it sorely needs.

The concept of Battle Golf lies in its simplistic conceit — you are literally battling another player on each side of the screen, trying to sink your ball first in a series of holes. The theme is pumped up on the App Store with references to Fight Club, but it’s as vanilla as it gets, with a pixelated art style that works, but doesn’t really say anything from a visual standpoint. Every so often something cool will happen like a whale rising from the water, but for the most part, the phase shifts of the arena at hand are literally par for the course.

You’ll be able to play against someone head-to-head on the same screen, or by yourself by way of a score attack mode. Sadly, there’s no compromise here, as there’s no option to play against an AI opponent solo. Instead, you’ll just hit balls until time runs out, attempting to best your own high score. It gets old after about 30 minutes. 

Having said that, multiplayer is rather fun if you can muster up another teammate. Things get pretty hectic, and since there’s only one button, which controls your angle and power with two respective taps, it’s not difficult to get into the swing of things, even when you’re hunched over one device.

With no online capabilities or AI play however, you might get bored quickly. Since Battle Golf is a one-trick pony, there’s no real IAP outside of the ability to pay $1.99 to remove advertisements. It’s fair, especially when you consider the fact that the ads aren’t all that annoying in the first place. Where the developer really failed is to offer any sort of carrot program.

If you were constantly unlocking new content, levels, or gametypes, I would have been inspired to play over and over. Instead, topping your own high score can only go so far. The repetition is only exacerbated by the fact that there are only two characters that are randomly generated, both of which have the exact same physics system and skillset.

When you get Battle Golf going with a friend, it’s fun to play. But those moments are often fleeting, and that enjoyment will likely plummet once you’re alone with it. Maybe it’ll get some much-needed content by way of future updates. Until then, stay off the grass unless you have someone to play with.

Five Nights At Freddy’s 4 ($2.99) is an interesting mix of tossing aside series conventions and calling back to the first game. You would think it would be hard to milk nostalgia for a game that’s barely over a year old, but it’s surprisingly effective. The big change this time around is that you are not a night security guard, but rather a small child. The space the game takes place in isn’t a closed pizzeria or a kooky attraction, but instead what is by all appearances an ordinary kid’s bedroom. The original group of animatronic horrors are all back, including Freddy, Chica, Bonnie, and Foxy, but they’re pretty different from how you might remember them. The biggest change in terms of gameplay is in how there aren’t any cameras you can check. As usual, your goal is to survive each night without being killed by any of the roaming mascots. Doing so is harder than it’s ever been.

Deprived of your cameras, the only way you can check the exit points of the room is to shuffle on over and shine your light down the hallway or into the closet. You can hold a door closed to send any nearby monsters away temporarily, but you can obviously only keep one door shut at a time. Should you happen to shine your light outside a door while one of the mascots is there, you’ll get a nice jump scare and a game over for your troubles. Your flashlight has unlimited battery power, at least. Since you can’t just flip through the cameras to see where everyone is at, and shining your light is risky if they’re close, you have to rely on sound more than ever. In particular, when you go to check at any of the doors, you’ll want to listen carefully for breathing. If you hear it, hold the door shut and hope they go away. If you don’t, feel free to check at your own risk.

So yes, basically Five Nights At Freddy’s 4 wants you to pay careful attention, focusing intently on sounds, and if you slip up in the slightest, you’ll have a loud jumpscare to deal with. Will you react? I can’t see how you wouldn’t. Is that scary? Not really, but it is frightening, if that makes sense. I suppose ‘nerve-wracking’ is the best way to describe it. So in that regard, this latest game is a big success. With that said, the game design feels like it has regressed from other installments. There are no resources to manage other than your time, and really nothing to do except listen carefully and wander from door to door, slamming them in Freddy and Friends’ faces, hoping desperately that nothing sneaks into the room. The original four aren’t nearly as clever as Springtrap was in the third game, but they’re certainly not shy about using their numbers to overwhelm you, especially later on in the week.

If you’ve enjoyed the frantic plate-spinning of the previous games, you’ll probably be happy enough with the gameplay here, however. It may be stripped down a bit, but it’s still tense and exciting in the same ways as the other games, and the use of sound to play on your paranoia works very well here. The shocking gameplay, though, has always just been one part of Five Nights At Freddy’s success. The bigger part, as near as I can tell from the fandom, is the story. Typically sitting in the background, sometimes literally, there are scraps and fragments that you can put together to try to figure out what happened with these restaurants to make their animatronics go murderous. Five Nights 4 has those, too, and paying careful attention will help you figure out the true nature of your situation.

Since the second game, though, the narrative has been more deliberately told via sets of faux-retro mini-games. As promised, developer Scott Cawthorn has tipped a lot of his hand in this supposed story wrap-up, though a quick look at any gathering of fans on the Internet will tell you he still left plenty up in the air. The problem is, he did most of that in the faux-retro mini-games, and due to memory limitations, they’ve been completely cut from the mobile versions of the game. I suppose it’s not surprising, as the developer has had to simplify some mini-games in previous installments, but in fully cutting them out, those who are playing only on mobile are not going to get the story revelations they might have been hoping for.  The PlushTrap mini-game, which has you playing Red Light/Green Light with a little maniac in a chair for a chance to shave two hours off of the following night, has at least been retained, but I’d honestly have preferred to have the story-relevant bits.

How happy you are with Five Nights At Freddy’s 4 is going to depend on why you like the games to date. If you’re here for the cheap thrills and jumpscares, it might be the best one yet. You also won’t be disappointed if you just really enjoy the essential challenge of FNAF‘s frenetic gameplay, because this might be the toughest one yet. If, on the other hand, you were hoping for some major gameplay revelations, you probably won’t like this installment at all, and if it’s the story and vague lore you’re chasing, you’ll be far better served going with one of the computer versions. I personally found it more satisfying tangling with Springtrap in the third game from a gameplay point of view, and I was really disappointed about the lack of mini-games, especially for a game that has been hyped as a final chapter of sorts.

Agent Awesome is a strategy game at heart, with a wacky story to boot. It’s kind of like a parody of the Hitman games, but it doesn’t really follow through and a lot of the jokes fall flat. Your job, if you choose to accept [and pay for] it, is to infiltrate E.V.I.L. As you can probably tell the setup is pretty hammy, and the dialog is awkwardly attempting to lampoon spy lampoon films. For instance, when approaching an enemy, your handler might say something like “wait, they have a family!" or something stereotypical like that. Think Archer but more straight-forward and without likable characters.

That type of dialog persists throughout the experience — all jokes you’ve heard before hundreds of times, but with very flat writing and no real dramatic flair. It even gets a bit dark at times and I’m not even sure where they were going with that general theme. It doesn’t help that they constantly try to inject memes and existing characters in seemingly at random. I enjoy crude humor, but only if it’s funny. Visually, things are fairly rough, and the character models are garish and uninspired. It’s like they were going for a Pixar-film feel, but only spent half of the time required modeling it.

Gameplay-wise the strategy mechanics do translate well to a touch screen, as Agent Awesome is played in a grid-like fashion. You’ll move your agent to different nodes on a road of sorts, carefully timing your taps to ensure that you avoid guards, much like your standard stealth game. Combat is limited, in that you’ll only have a few bullets or gadget uses at a time, so you really have to plan our your moves carefully.

It’s actually a nice little strategy romp in that you can’t go in guns blazing all the time, and although the levels tend to blend together, all of them offer up a challenge. The controls are fairly responsive, and it’s a joy to be able to slowly plan out your attacks, with split-second decisions being a commonplace occurrence. It opens up once the maps start to get bigger, and the maze-like setup sprawls to multiple screens.

On the IAP front Agent Awesome is fair, but the fact that there’s a $9.99 option for extra currency (rather than deliver it to the player at a faster rate) is a bummer, especially when you consider the premium pricepoint, and that the game will likely only last you five hours or less. Still, the game is currently sitting on $9.99 on PC, so mobile users are getting a discounted version all the same.

If you’re in the mood for an unpolished stealth game with a weird sense of humor that’s hit or miss, Agent Awesome is a decent flawed experience that’s good for a rainy day. Just don’t expect a whole lot from it and you’ll be fine.

My hope was that Earth Vs. Balloons would prove equally deceptive after playing it for a while. True to Mangobile form, it’s a better game than it appears to be, mostly on the strength of clever level designs. That said, although it’s better than it looks, this is a genre where this developer’s particular skills don’t stand out as well as they do in the strategy RPG field. In a vacuum, it’s an enjoyable game that you could enjoy messing around with for a couple of hours. In the greater context of the overall App Store, it’s just another decent single-screen physics puzzler, and it’s hard to say who exactly is hungry for that.

Your goal in each of the more than 90 levels in the game is to pop all of the alien balloons. They’re not much of a threat, being balloons and all, but they look quite mean and will mock you if you fail, so I guess that’s pretty unpleasant. Luckily for Earth, these aliens are susceptible to all of the usual weaknesses of balloons. In this game, you’ll be clearing the bulk of the threat out by pushing them against nails sticking out of boards. Ah, the trusty board with a nail in it. The secret nemesis of all alien invasions. These evil balloons behave like most normal balloons do, so you have to use the tools at your disposal to float them or nudge them towards the nearest nail and/or gun. In most levels, your main tool is an adorable Earth creature. They truly are tools, as their survival is of little importance so long as they perform their job in pushing the balloon where you want it to go.

You get to use penguin by default, but you can unlock a pig and a rabbit either by purchasing an IAP or earning enough stars in-game. The other two animals have different properties from the penguin, making them helpful (or very, very unhelpful) for certain stages. Along with your animal buddies, you’ll be able to make use of props such as fans, magnets, moving platforms, and guns. There are actually quite a lot of things to play with, though most of them have seen heavy use in other games, such as the predictable appearance of portals. It’s not always clear what you can or can’t interact with, which I’m guessing is a result of Mangobile working outside of its usual element. The first few seconds of many stages involve tapping around to see what is or isn’t interactive. Some of the stages require you to get moving right away, which can be a little frustrating when you’re still not sure which pieces you can move.

All of these toys ensure that just about every stage presents a fairly different test of skills from the last. It also makes the difficult slope look a bit like a range of craggy peaks, depending on which parts of the game you’re good at and which you have issues with. The game starts off very soft in terms of difficulty, with most early stages being a piece of cake to clear and get the special star on. It gradually picks up until the halfway point, where things start getting downright tricky. As with most physics games, there are usually several ways to clear any given stage, but the position of the star usually gives you a hint towards the developer’s intention. If you get stuck, you can buy an IAP for a master key that lets you unlock every stage.

Some of the stages require you to not only figure out the puzzle behind them, but also perform some tasks that require tricky timing and only give you one shot at getting it right per attempt. With most stages being pretty short and the restart button being quick and convenient, failing these tasks isn’t the end of the world, but the slightly fussy controls can make things frustrating when trying to manipulate a small object messes up your split-second chance at success. I tended to prefer the stages with a more relaxed puzzle feel as a result, though I have to admit, it was incredibly satisfying when the more complicated quick-reflex stages worked as they were meant to.

While the game keeps track of scores on each stage, there doesn’t seem to be any sort of global leaderboard to compare with other players on. It’s a curious omission for a game that includes a less-common feature like iCloud support, and it hurts the game’s long-term replay value. With all the weird ways you can finish each level, it feels like a scoring system that took that sort of thing into account, with leaderboards to back it, could add a lot to the game. Otherwise, the options and user interface are basically par for the course. I think it needs a few clear signs here and there to tell you which things are interactive and how they work, but it’s easy enough to figure out on your own with an attempt or two.

The game is free to play in its entirety with ad support, which is certainly more than fair. In addition to the two IAPs I’ve already referenced to instantly unlock your animal buddies and get a master key to skip stages, you can also buy a $0.99 IAP to remove the ads forever. As long as you can tolerate the occasional advertisement, none of these IAPs are even remotely necessary, so if you’re curious, it won’t hurt you to take a look at the game for yourself.

I can certainly appreciate Mangobile wanting to try something different before diving into making another hardcore SRPG, and for a first attempt outside that milieu, Earth Vs. Balloons is surprisingly well-rounded. It’s nice to see the developer leverage their level design strengths in a different genre, as well. Unfortunately, it’s hard to recommend Earth Vs. Balloons with any real fervor. It’s not so much that the game does a lot of things wrong or fails to entertain, but it’s merely a decent entry into one of the App Store’s most crowded genres, and I’m not sure if that’s enough to catch the eye of anyone who isn’t already a fan of this developer.

The battle style is a combination of a board game and a slight variation on color-matching games. Randomized rolls will propel the player’s team, assembled by “unlocking" fighter with in-game items or in-app purchases, across the board. This is where the player will encounter other fighters, collectable items, traps, and boss battles.

There isn’t much substance to the board game, to be honest, but the levels are relatively short and don’t take much time to cross. At the end of each board is a final boss battle featuring one of many favorite characters of the Dragon Ball Z universe. Once you’ve completed a stage you have the choice of redoing it on Hard mode and then Z-Hard, which opens some alternate paths but is mainly just more of the same.

The battle sequences involve randomized alignments of multicolored “Ki" balls that can be matched to do damage to your opponent. A lot of it is chance but some strategy can be used by paying attention to “types" and their strengths and weaknesses. For example, red/STR is strong against yellow/PHY but is weak to blue/AGL. Changing the order of your fighters, dealt with three at a time at the bottom of the screen, can also help to guard against attacks and/or instigate special combo moves. You can also (try to) match the type of the character with there associated type of Ki for minor healing and special abilities. Mainly, though, you are at the whim of what colors of Ki the game gives you and how they are aligned on-screen.

Like its namesake, the game’s action sequences are fast-paced and exciting. Also like its namesake, there are lots of slow parts that upset the pacing of the story. For example, every time you summon a new character you will have to watch an often-slow-loading animation at Goku firing a Kamehameha at a planet for some reason. It’s small things like this that really slow the pace of the game down. Also, I wish there was a little bit more control involved with a) crossing the board (remember that “dice" rolls are randomized) and b) setting up your colored Ki matches. As it stands, sometimes all you can do is equip a few healing items and hope for the best.

The game will provide long-time DBZ fans with tepid amusement and loads of fun nostalgic moments. It’s a very average game that hides it’s lack of innovative content behind colorful characters from a much-beloved manga and TV series. Dragon Ball Z: Dokkan Battle is worth a try for fans of the franchise but is powered by fond childhood memories more so than solid content.

That being said, we can only put off the things we don’t want to do for so long, so here we are. Always Sometimes Monsters has a story to tell, and its vehicle for doing so is apparently RPG Maker. It’s been interesting to see that engine take off as a tool for storytelling, because it nicely demonstrates that sometimes the imagination is the best director of them all. Anyway, you play as a writer who in the prologue seems to be rising to the top of the world. We then jump forward a bit in time to find them a month behind on their rent, dumped by their significant other, and extremely late on living up to their end of the book deal they signed. You’re at rock-bottom, in other words, and it only gets worse when your ex invites you to their wedding at the end of the month. You head out into the world to try to make some money to survive, travel to the wedding, and maybe even not look like a total failure to your ex. It’s a world full of choices, and the gods of this world favor irony and coincidence, to be sure.

In total, the game is about eight or nine hours long, and there are lots of different ways it can end, some happier than others. The influence of your choices are immediately apparent in some ways, such as the gender, race, and sexual orientation you choose for your main character, while others take a bit longer to manifest, but they’re all important in some way. It’s interesting to see where everything goes, and for once, if the ending is predictable, you have only yourself to blame. The game also features a number of mini-games, many of which are intentionally repetitive and mind-numbing. Some of the ones that are supposed to be more fun are spoiled by the bad transition to touch controls. The mini-games were a good way of breaking up the monotony of what is otherwise a story-heavy game of walking and talking, so it’s unfortunate that they don’t come off as well here as they did in the PC version.

I found the game’s overall plot to be interesting and engaging, and the choice system works well. You have to make some heart-wrenching decisions at times, and the outcomes are often awful. It’s a shame that the actual writing isn’t where it needs to be to make the proper impact. Although the flaws and foibles of the people you meet in Always Sometimes Monsters are deeply human, nobody really talks like one. The prose is overly flowery when it’s trying to be serious, and leans too hard on in-jokes when it’s not. While the game does a good job of avoiding overt preaching, it feels like everyone in the game wakes up each day ready to read a passage from the big book of philosophy cliches. Few characters if any manage to develop a unique voice, so it ends up sounding like you’re being talked at by one person wearing dozens of faces. There’s perhaps an easy narrative justification for that, but I don’t imagine it’s meant to be like that. Even with the odd writing, though, it’s certainly worth sticking things out for the story experience. There’s some real heart in it, even if generally sounds like pages from a self-help book.

It’s easier to state my feelings on the quality of the port to iOS. Simply put, it’s not very good. Everything works, I’ll give it that. That’s about the nicest thing I can say for it. The UI opts for virtual buttons, which isn’t that surprising or disappointing, but there’s a big difference between good virtual buttons and bad ones. The biggest issue here is that the buttons are always in a movable state. Not being able to move UI elements around is the pits, but having them move around while you’re trying to use them isn’t a whole lot better. The virtual buttons also happen to be your only means of interacting with the game, so you can’t simply touch menu options, for example. The game also suffers from performance problems on both my iPhone 5S and iPad 4, with frequent stuttering whenever the music loops back to the start. I’ve heard RPG Maker doesn’t port well, so that’s probably the reason here, but reasons don’t do much to fix problems.

Think of Always Sometimes Monsters as a visual novel with justifiably tedious gameplay sequences binding everything together, and you’ll be in the right frame of mind to accept its strengths. While I found myself invested in the story, just about every other aspect of the game made it very easy to put down and hard to come back to. I don’t like moving boxes from one side of a room to another using badly-implemented virtual controls, and while I understand that’s the point, it doesn’t make it any more easier to swallow. If you’re looking for a good story, are willing to put up with some technical issues, and most importantly are okay with the idea of a game deliberately not being fun, then you might find Always Sometimes Monsters to be up your alley. I suppose I’m glad I experienced it, but I’m not sure how much I’d recommend the game, particularly this clunky version.

Barcode Knight is a hero building monster fighting gacha machine that pits your hero against typical fantasy trope enemies. Orcs, trolls, ogres, dark elves, and slimes of every shape and type imaginable are all anxiously awaiting a chance to take you down. You spend your time in game fighting, eqiupping gear, upgrading gear, gathering gear and managing an inventory. This sounds like pretty typical RPG fare, except for a few things. First off, you don’t do any of the fighting which sounds weird, but I will get back to that. Second, the game has a very interesting mechanic in that you can scan real life barcodes to spawn monsters.

Lets start with the barcode scan thing, because this is probably the most stand out part of this game. You have an energy bar that depletes as you challenge normal monster groups, but for those of you who are deathly allergic to energy bars there is good news. Scanning a barcode lets you start a fight without consuming any energy. You might be thinking “well gee wiz Mr. Fretz, the game isn’t free, why is there an energy bar?" To that question I would say that its actually a nice way to gently suggest people actually use the bar code scan mechanic if they run out of energy. There is a more challenging monster spawn that costs quite a good sized chunk of energy to use and if you are planning on playing for 20+ minutes at a time, the scanner will let you use the expensive spawner without running out of things to do. It’s not a bad balance in my opinion.

With that bit of positivity out of the way, it’s time to talk about the gameplay of Barcode Knight. What makes me sad about this game is I have literally a single button that I can use during a combat. Now you think it might be an attack button, or maybe a dodge button, but it is not. The only button that you can use during combat is a heal that takes a hefty chunk of energy out of your pool, and you can only use it once per fight.

Let me explain a little more. Combat in the game starts off with your hero and any ally at the left side of the screen and your enemies on the right side. They start to walk towards each other, ranged attacks trigger once in range, melee attacks trigger once in range and any characters hit will get bounced backwards. Sometimes critical attack effects like stuns or extra damage will trigger and eventually one side will lose all their hit points. At level 10 and level 30 you get fast forward options to make combat go faster, but will not directly impact the actual result. If you noticed, at no time did I say anything about controlling any of the action and that’s probably my least favorite part of this game. You set up your character with weapons, armor and a cool hairdo, and then you sit back and watch the game play itself. Sure you have a heal button that is almost 100% of the time not worth pressing, but other than that, this is basically a paper doll simulator.

I don’t necessarily hate paper doll simulators, but I feel like there was a missed opportunity for deeper gameplay with Barcode Knight. I really enjoyed walking around my office looking for stuff to scan, and the graphics and music are both going to trigger a little pixellated nostalgia for those mid-90’s Super Nintendo era aesthetics. There is just no meat under the hood of the game that will keep you drawn in. It is sort of telling that really the only thing you can do to the combat of the game is to get it done with faster.

Ultimately you are going to buy the game for the barcode gimmick. It’s fun and how much fun you derive from it will almost directly translate into how fun you will have with the game on the whole. For me it was worth an hour or two of entertainment and the game got tired pretty quickly after that. If you love pixel graphics and you love scanning bar codes, please add a star to my score. I got my money’s worth but not much more than that.

The level design is simplistic, focusing on a series of slippery steps and ledges rather than puzzle-solving in order to advance. At first I was underwhelmed; timed trials and slippery/icy level designs are some of my least favourite aspects of platformer games. It was all too easy to glide right off the edge of a cliff and into a canyon full of deadly icicles. And my health meter depleted so quickly I barely made it 1/4 of the way up the mountain (you see your climbing height at the end of each level).

However, after the first (of many) deaths, I was taken to a screen where I could spend my collected yellow gems on speed, jumping height, stability, and health. Next time I climbed, I was able to get much higher by decreasing the amount of uncontrolled sliding by upgrading my stability. This made the game much easier and more enjoyable, although I still hadn’t made it to the mountain peak yet.

Each new game cycles through different, randomized mountainscapes, so you aren’t climbing the same slope every time. By upgrading one of the four options listed above, the player can tailor their climb to their own play style. There are also “Safe Houses" along the way that provide items for a temporary boost in speed, etc. I left speed alone for the most part and focused on stability and health.

There is a certain satisfaction to improving your character and watching the progress increase. I would still prefer the typical “solve the puzzle and move on” platformer game, but it was still interesting to see UpUp subvert those expectations. Having just come off of playing Dinofour, it was a welcomed change.

Once you have character stats that satisfy you, however, there’s not much else to do. It reminded me of the Jumping Finn Turbo Adventure Time game ($0.99), where once you upgraded all your items and made it to the finish line, that was it. This is the unfortunate drawback of stepping away from the puzzle-a-level style of platformer. Upon beating UpUp, you will unlock a “Run Timer,” so you can try to outdo your personal best and make it onto the game high score chart.

It started to feel more like an endless runner by the end. New obstacles were introduced infrequently, which is a shame. There are a series of unlockable achievement, but I’m not particularly compelled to collect them all. There were also some graphical issues where the dark hills in the background would flicker as you ran; which isn’t a huge problem in itself, but when you combine that with the constant flow of snowflakes on the screen it can be quite dizzying. I think with a little bit more to do, this game could have been great; but for a free game, it was still quite good. I think I’ll stick with my solve-a-puzzle platformers for now.

So, yes. KKRacing is very, very free-to-play. It’s got timers, upgrades to buy, daily events to complete, multiple currencies, etc. It’s a very specific brand of “freemium”, like Taichi Panda (Free) or Dungeon Link (Free), so if you’ve played those you know exactly what you’re getting into. Personally, I played both of those games for at least a month without needing to spend anything so this particular pay model doesn’t bother me that much. In fact, you could argue it’s part of the fun. (There’s a reason these sorts of games are so insanely popular in Asian countries.)

If that last paragraph made you want to vomit, I can just about guarantee nothing further down is going to convince you, so you can probably stop reading. For everyone else, I hope you also happen to like cheap Mario Kart knock-offs. That may sound a bit harsh, because let’s face it: no similar game on iOS has ever come anywhere close to being as fun and well-made as a Mario Kart game. As far as iOS kart racers go, though, this one isn’t too shabby at all.

It’s actually quite a bit like Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed (Free), in terms of visuals and general feel. It’s very cartoony and goofy, with all the vehicles being sort of rounded and boxy. However, it does take a few things directly from Mario Kart itself, like the two-boost-drift system, several of the sound effects, and even the shape of the spinning power-up cubes. Basically what I’m saying is, the kart racing does absolutely nothing to stand out or be original in any way. That said, it works. It works really damn well, and it’s fun.

The thing that makes the game stand out, then, is the P&D-style RPG junk thrown on top. (Or you could view it the other way around: the only way the game stands out from other social RPG’s is the fact that it has kart racing.) The basic gameplay loop consists of choosing a career race, winning or losing, and then using what you’ve earned to swap out your vehicle parts for better ones. (Of course, more often than that you’ll be enhancing or combining different parts, as is the norm for this style of free RPG.) Each career race has three different objectives to complete: one main goal (get x amount of kills, place in the top 3, defeat the boss, etc.) and two secondary goals.

Rounding things out are several other non-career modes and daily quests to earn more currency and parts. There’s even online multiplayer, and it works pretty well. In fact, one of the main issues I have with other kart racers on iOS (like Sonic) is the lack of players online, and it’s a little sad that this rather generic free-to-play racer has no trouble at all finding opponents. Basically, you’ll never run out of different things to do in the game–at least until you run out of fuel and are forced to wait, of course.

Beyond the fact that the game seems completely allergic to new ideas (other than the basic mash-up at its core), there are a few other small problems I ran into. On more than one occasion I had new parts disappear on me when I tried to enhance them (“Other Reason: 5212" the dialogue box explains helpfully). It might be a problem with syncing back to the server, but whatever the reason, it sucks. The other minor issue is that sometimes the graphics can be kinda wonky. For example, I was about to race one of the bosses when I noticed he was floating about a foot above his seat. Odd.

I’m just about ready to wrap this review up, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least give a passing mention to the English translations in this game. It’s some of the worst I’ve ever seen, and it makes for some hilariously absurd dialogue. I feel like it should be a huge negative (especially since it’s almost impossible to figure out what they were trying to say at some points) but it often comes out so ridiculous that I actually began to look forward to the story sections. No joke, I have like 20 screenshots on my iPad right now of some of my favorite lines. Here’s a good one: “Hey? Do not go ah? The horse is God. Smart Wings????"

I’m gonna be honest: I don’t know how many people in our readership are going to go for a free-to-play kart racing RPG. Especially one that’s pretty generic in it’s racing and RPG-ing. Here’s the thing, though. KKRacing’s actually really fun. The racing is a blast and the free-to-play stuff didn’t bother me too much. I love checking in throughout the day and completing quests, upgrading everything, and getting slightly further in the career mode. Just like my time with Taichi Panda and Dungeon Link (and Terra Battle (Free), Dragon Coins (Free), and Fable Age (Free) before them), I’ll probably start losing interest after a month or so. Until then, though, I’m really digging this. If you’ve made it this far in the review, maybe you’ll dig it, too.

As near as I can tell, Sword Of Asumi is the first visual novel game from developer AJTilley.com. The game was first released on home computers early this year, where it appears to have not made much of a splash. Like most visual novels, it makes the transition to iOS quite well since the game more or less consists of tapping to advance text and making the occasional choice. There are several endings to the game, and which one you see depends on the choices you make along the way. By following certain paths, you’ll see special artwork that will be added to a gallery in the game’s extras menu for viewing at your leisure. Yes, this is a visual novel, alright.

Sword Of Asumi mostly colors within the lines for the genre, really only standing out in a couple of ways. First of all, there are an incredible number of choices compared to the norm in this genre. I’m not sure how many of them are of any real consequence, but the game does ask your input frequently, and I like that. Secondly, it’s really short. I started it at breakfast and had most of the gallery filled out by lunch. Whether that’s a good thing or not will vary from person to person, but I can at least appreciate the brisk pace it moved at as a result. On top of the promising set-up, I also really like the setting. It supposes a Japan where the Emperor was unable to topple the Shogun, leaving the country in an isolated, yet modern state where the samurai still rule the roost. Alternate presents are a good way to catch my attention.

Unfortunately, perhaps as a result of its status as a rookie effort, Sword squanders its premise big-time. It seems like it’s never clear on whether it wants to be a dating sim with mystery elements or a mystery story with light romance. In their struggle for the reins of the story, these two sides of the game end up clashing terribly. The ultimate point of the game is to discover the identity of the mysterious terrorist Raven, but the game frequently slaps you on the wrist if you actually try to go about that in a sane way. It wants you to mingle and participate in goofy events that serve more as an excuse to put the nubile heroine in skimpy outfits than anything else. Yet, in the climax of the plot, the mystery story part essentially overrides almost everything you’ve done socially. There’s very little payoff for the relationships, especially if you happen to have built towards someone involved with the terrorists. That should be prime drama fuel, but it just kind of abruptly ends.

While we’re on the topic of the ending, I want to bring up one of my biggest gripes with the game. If you’re telling a whodunit story, you shouldn’t cheat the reader. That goes the same for a whodunit game. Sword Of Asumi drops an obvious red herring, but I would imagine most people will see through that person to the real mastermind. In the end, you have to choose the person you’re going to go accuse. If you pursue the real suspect, you’ll get a bad ending. Instead, you have to go after the red herring, which somehow leads to you going after the real culprit. It kind of makes sense after the fact, but only after the fact. I had saved the game before making my choice, so I didn’t lose much in terms of time, but it left me with a raw feeling as the credits rolled.

I also found the cheesecake to be a bit too much at times. Now, I know, this is a visual novel, so cheese and/or beefcake comes with the territory. I don’t mind that. But Sword Of Asumi is distractingly focused on getting the main character into sexy outfits at every turn, often at the expense of telling its story coherently. Asumi puts on a different set of sexy lingerie every night, and almost every in-game day has her changing her outfit at least a couple of times, often using the same artwork of her standing in front of her mirror with some new clothes glued on. I think I’d actually enjoy it more if the game fully owned it the way it does in the scene where two of the characters are dressed up like catgirl servants, but that ends up being the sole goofy acknowledgement of Asumi’s penchant for playing dress-up. Have more fun with it, you know? If you’re going to have the shy teenage assassin wear a lacy garter belt to bed, at least wink at the camera or something.

It feels like there are so many ways Sword Of Asumi could have done better with its ideas. The story could use trimming in some places and expanding in others to help it reach its full potential. The actual in-game text desperately needs editing, as it’s currently absolutely littered with spelling and grammar mistakes. The dialogue could do with some punching up to make things sound less banal or awkward. As mentioned above, that whole ending sequence is really poorly-conceived, too. Also, while I understand why the art was done in this way, it’s a bit too obvious that the game is using what amount to paper dolls with clothes, features, and chest sizes swapped around. Even the unlockable special pieces of art are recycled a bit too often given how few of them there are. In visual novels, the galleries are vital for promoting replays, but if my reward is just going to be the same piece of art with one new detail cut and pasted in, it’s difficult to get excited.

If it seems like I’m being hard on Sword Of Asumi, it’s only because I was really in love with its clever premise and enjoyable opening sections. I enjoy the brisk pace of its story and the number of choices I get to make. I’m not so big on how scatter-brained the storytelling is, the generally sloppy writing, and the irritating resolution to the story. It’s a mixed bag, the best parts are front-loaded, and it’s relatively light on content, so I can really only recommend this one to particularly hungry fans of the genre. Still, as a first effort, it’s not that bad, and I’ll be interested to see how this developer’s future efforts turn out.

The developer this time around is WorldWideSoftware, who have been with Kemco from the very start of their smartphone venture. Their best game is usually agreed to be Symphony Of The Origin ($7.99), and although they have their fans, I can’t count myself among them. There’s a certain pervasive blandness to their efforts, and their seeming aversion to shaking up the formula even a little makes their games feel disposable. Their games also tend to fall on the shorter side of things, often ending rather abruptly before the gameplay systems have a chance to really spread their wings. Legend Of Ixtona shares some of its problems with the developer’s previous efforts, especially with regards to the length of the game, but the genre-shift has certainly done some good. There’s a really strong framework in place here that later efforts could capitalize on.

Even with the change to a turn-based strategy RPG though, Ixtona keeps things pretty familiar. You’ll start by generating your own character, who is introduced to the story a short ways in. He or she will be joined by a number of named characters, and you can fill out your roster with any number of hirelings you need. Each character has a different job class, and as they gain levels in that job, they’ll earn abilities you can equip, along with new, advanced job classes. The game itself is more or less a series of battles with story bits and the odd town in between. In towns, you can buy new gear, develop more powerful items, do research, or hire more mercenaries. You’ll want to keep a few more mercenaries around than you actually need, since you can send them out on gathering missions to collect useful ingredients for crafting.

The story follows a young prince whose older brother stages a coup and seizes the throne. What starts off as a fairly interesting but very conventional story of succession quickly takes the next train to wackytown, and wouldn’t you know it? The very fate of the world is soon at stake. The pace of the story moves a bit too quickly, and the end comes sooner than it should. What I thought was simply the map of the first area turned out to be the map the entire game takes place on, with a fairly small number of potential battlefields. There are only a few towns, and most of the game’s more interesting systems never have a chance to really get cooking. You might need to hire on a mage or two to keep characters healed, but you can pretty much power your way through the game using the cast the game assigns to you. You don’t even really need to upgrade anyone’s equipment, rendering the whole crafting system somewhat useless.

I think the fundamental problem is that the battles don’t require much in the way of strategy. Regardless of the difficulty level you choose at the start, your characters will almost always be strong enough to just form a ring of death and take out anything that comes within range. Certain boss-level characters can hit several members of your team at once, which might outpace your healing capabilities if not for a couple of things. Once the enemy mooks are mopped up, you might outnumber the boss by more than ten characters, making it easy to both gang up on it and replace anyone who falls. Even the more powerful bosses rarely have enough HP to outlast you in those circumstances. The few times the game hobbles you by limiting your numbers, you’ll still easily push your way through with basic tactics. It’s rote at best, and boring at worst.

That makes the brevity of the game something of a double-edged sword. The sub-systems could help make the game more fun to play with, but the game’s length and relative ease make that unnecessary. But if the game were any longer, the rudimentary battle tactics would probably sink the whole thing. As it stands now, the game is decent precisely because it’s over somewhat quickly. You meet some kooky characters, follow a twisty plot, smash your way through a bunch of battles, and get your ending. Ideally, I’d like a longer game with more meaningful choices in battle, but this isn’t the worst possible outcome.

Its generally inoffensive nature aside, the most interesting thing Ixtona has going for it is in the sheer size of its battles. Most games like this limit your active team to a small handful of characters, with the opponents facing similar restrictions. Ixtona goes a little wild, allowing you to field more than a dozen characters at once. The enemies can and usually do take advantage of this as well, leading to some very crowded battles. It’s pretty exciting, to be honest, but I’d imagine it would wreak havoc on the game’s balance if it actually had any to begin with. It also results in the funny image I mentioned earlier, where you have 12 or more people surrounding a boss. It looks like a mob of fans trying to get the boss’s autograph or something.

As this is a different sub-genre from what this developer usually works in, the presentation isn’t the same old stuff we tend to see from them. I think the game looks pretty good, and the engine is obviously capable of handling some pretty large numbers, which is a big positive. On the other side, the animations are pretty meager and the locked isometric perspective can make things tricky when you’re trying to get a character to the exact spot you want. The music is as usual fairly forgettable but decent enough, and the game features a reasonable amount of Japanese voice-acting for battle cries and such. The usual Kemco IAP system is in place, with special points distributed after each victory or readily available for purchase with real money. You can exchange these points for a variety of cheat items and extra combat maps you can grind on. No story content is locked away in this shop, so it’s fairly harmless.

Legend Of Ixtona isn’t a particularly great strategy RPG, but it establishes some foundations that could lead to one in the future. It’s short enough to plow through in a weekend, and enjoyable enough to be worth doing just that. The weak AI makes it essentially a strategy RPG equivalent to a mindless button-masher. Those looking for any actual tactical challenge will probably want to keep on walking, but I think there’s a certain appeal to it if you get into the game’s story and quirky characters. All in all, it’s not bad for a first attempt, but with this sub-genre so much more competitive on iOS than the standard JRPG one, WorldWideSoftware is going to need to work harder on the battle mechanics if they mean to revisit it in the future.

In case you can’t piece it together from one or two screenshots, AlphaBetty Saga is basically Bookworm/Boggle dressed up in Candy Crush‘s trappings. That means you’ll go stage by stage, trying to clear varying goals in a limited number of moves. Some of these are very familiar to King’s usual style, such as stages where you need to drop pieces of cheese from the top of the screen to the bottom, or ones that have you popping bubbles that cover the squares of the board. The difference here is that instead of switching pieces to make a match, you’re creating words out of the letters on the board. The words have to be at least three letters long, and every letter more than that you can muster will produce a different special piece. It doesn’t take long at all for stages to essentially require a steady flow of special pieces to finish, so you should get used to it quickly.

Around twenty or so levels in, the usual King obstacles start to appear. Tangled vines will obstruct blocks, requiring you to make a word on them to free them. Stone blocks need to be removed by making words using the letters adjacent to them. There are a couple of new blockers, but the feeling is very close to playing Candy Crush or Farm Heroes. In theory, the puzzle mechanic used this time around should give players a wider margin to show their skills instead of falling to luck of the draw with pieces. And it does, but the bad side effect of this mechanic is that it’s extremely clear when the game is setting you up to lose. There’s a discernible pattern to the letters that fall into the field in some rounds, and it can be very aggravating once you notice it.

The usual rules apply here, as well. You get a stock of lives that slowly replenishes over time. You can refill them instantly by using the game’s premium currency, gold, or you can wait a half-hour per life. That premium currency can also be used to buy special power-ups, some of which can occasionally make the difference between success and failure. It’s just as easy to waste them, unfortunately, and although the game gives you a small stock of each to try them out, the only one you can actually earn regularly in-game is one that allows you to shuffle the tiles around. Otherwise, you’re left to the mercy of your vocabulary skills and your luck when it comes to the letters the game throws at you.

AlphaBetty Saga has the usual King polish to it, of course. The art is professional-looking, the music sounds quite nice, and the game plays with sound effects and musical cues to get you into the game. I found the controls a little fussy when I had to link up tiles diagonally, but I was playing on an iPhone and I suffer from sausage fingers, so your mileage may vary there. I’m not even going to get into the game’s loosey-goosey dictionary, which seems to allow all sorts of non-English words and odd scraps of letters. That aside, there’s clearly been a lot of effort put into the game, as I would expect from this publisher’s previous works. At the same time, I can’t help but feel kind of bored with the game, and when I think enough about it, it’s likely the same thing that led me to ditch Papa Pear Saga pretty quickly.

I think that Candy Crush Saga succeeded because it presented a familiar gameplay mechanic in a fresh way. Instead of basing the game around an open-ended unlimited mode, it went for a stage-based approach, and it wasn’t afraid to bat you around. That particular kind of challenge was at the very least unusual at the time, and it gave the game a hook that made you not want to give up on it. In the case of AlphaBetty Saga, there are already plenty of word games on iOS that take a stage-based approach, and many of them are quite challenging. I feel like the only new thing this game is bringing to the word-game table is the limited life system. It will likely end up with considerably more levels than most other word games, but that doesn’t feel like enough to recommend the game over its many peers in this somewhat-crowded genre.

There’s no part of AlphaBetty Saga we haven’t seen done to death already. The King features are all well-worn by this point, the mouse theme certainly won’t win any awards for originality, and word games are a dime a dozen on the App Store. It’s not a terrible game on its own merits, and it’s certainly well-crafted in that particular King way, but I just can’t see myself sticking with this as long as I have with some of their other games. It’s so by-the-book that it ends up lacking any sort of excitement to call its own, and with heavy competition, that’s more than enough to sink a game.

Challenges center around the timed tapping of various on-screen buttons that change depending on the task at hand in each of the 24 main levels. The player might drum two fingers on the screen to control an animated character running up the stairs or to balance the tipping head of a drowsy child, solve quick observational games by tapping the right answer to a relatively easy question (determining which hand wins a rock-paper-scissors match, for example), or must keep track of the number of finger-taps necessary to complete a task without going over and therefore losing the round. These games are based around everything from tickling a foot with a feather, stacking colorful ice cream cone scoops, solving basic math equations, stopping a bomb countdown, squashing cockroaches, and catching falling eggs.

If a challenge proves to be too difficult the game allows you to buy “Cheats,” which will let you advance automatically. The game also allows a finite number of “Instant Retries,” which allows the player to replay any level with a quick tap of a button rather than going back through the menu. Instant retries, of course, can also be purchased or the player can opt to purchase “Arcade Mode,” which offers unlimited retries and an ad-free game. Failing a challenge and having to navigate the main menu shouldn’t have been too-punishing of a task; however, the game will sometimes glitch and shutdown after the “Failure" screen, which is annoying and will hopefully be fixed in a later update. The menu screen is, for the most part, easy to get through but for some reason once you select a game and are brought to an explanation of the gameplay mechanics, you can’t get back to the main menu without allowing the game to start and then pausing and exiting. This seems like a strange oversight.

The range of available games means that it is hard to find a blanket statement with which to rate the gameplay. The visual-queue and timing-based games were more enjoyable to me than the math-related games, but this is subjective and will depend on the player’s preferences. Overall, the games have a tendency to be mindlessly entertaining but quickly become repetitive. There is no incentive to pay for any in-game content or to keep playing if you get stuck because there are only 24 stages to acquire in total and nothing to do but replay them all when they are all unlocked. Due to the simplicity of each game, the replay value is minimal. The player doesn’t earn any sort of achievements or content outside of new stages. I’m thinking of similar games like Dumb Ways to Die, where victories unlocked more of the characters on the opening screen. There is no actual value to this but it is satisfying to reach a certain number of points and have it commemorated in some small way.

Personally, I found that once I had tried a handful of the games in HGE2, I could put it aside and not be bothered to pick it back up again. I enjoyed the time that I had with the game and the first 12 stages were easily unlocked so the initial play-through was encouraged by constant forward momentum. The games are simple yet satisfying, the music and animation is quirky and fast-paced. The different visuals and concepts for each mini game are playful and often humorous. However, once I reached a point where I would have to replay previously passed levels to earn a certain number of “Stars," I lost interest. If you like brain teasers, you will probably enjoy what this game has to offer. The repetitiveness and lack of content is a downfall that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t give the game a try, only that you shouldn’t expect for it to extend beyond one bored train ride to work or a single rainy afternoon indoors.

So yes, this game is utterly strange. Thankfully, it doesn’t only exist to haunt my dreams–it’s also, as I mentioned, a pinball game. A pretty decent one, too. Each level is laid out like a simple table, with a few flippers, a goal, and not much else. No pinbots, no earthquakes, no party monsters. The ball lazily rolls in from one side or the other and your job is to smack it around with your flippers (by tapping either side of the screen) until it finds its way into a swirling blue portal, at which point the level is complete and you move on to the next one.

Aside from the aforementioned sad dancing cat, the style of the game seems to be influenced a bit by Little Big Planet. The platforms, floaty physics, prize bubble-esque level select screen, and 2.5D layout all make it seem like each level could have easily been crafted in LBP. That might sound pretty neat, but it also means some of the level designs are a bit simple and uninspired. There are some stages that play with gravity and three-dimensional space in interesting ways, but they are unfortunately few and far between.

In fairness, the simplicity of the levels is probably a necessary evil due to the difficulty of controlling where the ball goes. It might be the floaty physics or the barely-perceptible-but-still-there delay in the flippers, but passing a level can feel entirely random at times. Sometimes one would take me three or four minutes to pass, and then the next would take all of six seconds. If there were any more bumpers, spinners, and traps cluttering up the table it would probably be a total crapshoot.

Interestingly, there’s no real way to lose. If a ball falls into a drain, it just reappears with no real consequences. You don’t lose a “life” or anything–you just keep playing until you pass. The only way you are judged is by the amount of time it takes you to complete a level, and even that seems kind of meaningless without leaderboards or anything. The only motivation to keep going, I guess, is to see what the next stage will be like (and what new dance moves that giant earless cat in the background has learned). I suppose there’s a sort of minimalist purity to that, but it’d be nice if there was a tiny bit more of an incentive to keep playing and improving.

Shobon Flip is a hard game to pin down (pun not intended, but I’ll allow it). On the one hand, it’s a competent enough pinball platformer that has a few neat ideas here and there. On the other hand, there’s that Magic Mike cat in the background. The game’s not quite as clever or original as something like Momonga Pinball Adventures ($1.99), but I still had fun bouncing my way through its 30 levels. And while I’m still pretty fuzzy on the lore behind the weird man-cat, I hope he finally finds happiness knowing that he inspired a rather nice little pinball game.

To its credit, Tofu Hunter starts off with a bang. You’ll be aiming down a reticle in seconds, looking down your sights at limping pieces of tofu, who are bloodied when shot. To aim you’ll simply slide across the screen, and shooting is done by way of tapping a dedicated virtual button on the lower right-hand side. Some guns can zoom if you double-tap outside of the shot space. Easy enough.

That’s pretty much the gist of it. You’ll follow specific objectives, killing (subduing?) certain enemies, ignoring others lest you trigger a “failure," and completing parameters like timed runs or score goals. The shooting mechanics are fun, and the objectives themselves range from inoffensive to relatively enjoyable. My favorite gametype is one of the target practice missions, which forces you to seek and find targets across multiple screens — it really tests your reflexes.

If there were more environments and maybe even a funny little story it would be worth returning to time and time again, but the sheer lack of variety hurts Tofu Hunter quite a bit. Often times missions would blur together, like I was playing the same string of levels over and over. If only there were more modes to choose from to spice things up a bit. The humor is rather dry, often relying on the same set of morbid jokes. It’s not even offensive — it’s just not very memorable.

Sadly, while you attempt to weed your way through the mixed mission sets, you’ll be greeted by an energy system that isn’t lenient in the slightest. In-game gold can be purchased for real cash, which can refill your energy or buy items. It’s all a waste of money because of how simple the entire affair is, and unfortunately, the ad-watching scheme is just as aggressive.

To earn the equivalent of $0.10 worth of gold, you’ll have to watch a 15-30 second video The same thing goes for one unit of energy, which takes roughly 30 seconds per round to blow through. You’ll end up watching more ads than actually playing the game. It would be great if there was a “buyout" option.

There are plenty of shooters to spend your time on, and although Tofu Hunter is a welcome free distraction for an afternoon, I wouldn’t recommend giving it more time than that.

Destiny Emerald comes from Watermark RPG, the developer behind the Sorceria games. That’s Sorceria (Free), not Sorcerian ($24.99), though with this game’s Darkslay family sending up Falcom’s Drasle Family, it’s clear they’re fans of the revered Japanese RPG developer. That said, Destiny Emerald is far closer in its gameplay to The Legend Of Zelda. It resembles the first one more than the others, but there’s a bit of Link To The Past in here as well. Your goal is to find the five shards of the Destiny Emerald to defeat an awakened evil. They’re hidden in a fairly large dungeon divided into themed sections. Each of the four members of the Darkslay family has their own skills and parameters, but more importantly, certain tools you’ll find in the dungeon can only be equipped by one particular character. You’ll have to use all of them if you want to recover all of those shards.

Basically, you’ll take one character into the dungeon as far as he or she can go, solving puzzles, collecting keys, and opening doors. Ideally, you’ll recover a tool on the way that allows you to go back to previous areas to find new routes. Depending on the tool, you may have to head back home to switch characters. Some of these new routes will reward you with treasure, but at least one of them will lead you to the next area. Provided you’re using the right character, you’ll soon find your way to a boss, who will cough up an emerald shard if you can kill them. Then it’s on to the next section of the dungeon and likely another character’s turn to shine. There’s a good rhythm to it all, even if a lot of the game is suspiciously familiar. It’s possible I’m mistaken, but I think this is the first iOS game aspiring to Zelda‘s design that includes almost everything. You’ll fight big bosses, bomb walls, burn bushes, push lots of blocks, collect tools, and pick up heart containers.

In terms of size, you can expect an adventure about on par with the first Legend Of Zelda, which is about five or so hours if you don’t die too frequently. It’s lengthy enough to satisfy and certainly doesn’t overstay its welcome. The map design is pretty good on the whole. There are lots of fun secrets to find and although the puzzles aren’t terribly taxing, they’re engaging enough. Unless you want to hunt down every last gem, backtracking is kept to a minimum partly due to a sensible warp system. When you progress far enough in one area, you’ll usually open up a warp back to a special room in the home base. You can use this room to quickly travel around the places you’ve been. There’s also a pretty cheap consumable item in the shop that lets you jump back home instantly if you use it. They’re easy to stock up on, along with the health potions sold there. You’ll want to buy as many of both as you can whenever you’re back at home base.

Most of the enemies you beat will drop gems. Since enemies respawn every time you leave a room and come back, you’ll end up with quite the little collection when things are going smoothly. The shop has a small selection of items, and while you’ll want to invest in the permanent upgrade that is the shield as soon as possible, buying keys only serves to break the game. That leaves health potions and warp items, both inexpensive and stackable. Even with the limited ways you can use your cash, you’ll probably find yourself broke a lot of the time. Whenever your character runs out of health in Destiny Emerald, you’re booted back to your last checkpoint with half of your money taken away. Run into a particularly tricky stretch and you’ll likely be down to nothing in no time at all. As such, it’s not really worth seeking out the hidden treasures until you’ve got a dungeon section mostly cleared, lest you lose it all before you even get back home to spend it. Like I said, buy up consumables at every chance. The 30 gems you’ll blow on a health potion will almost certainly save you at least that much, along with mitigating some of the frustration of the game’s more difficult stretches.

A lot of that frustration is by design. Destiny Emerald is obviously intended to be a tough game, just as the original Legend Of Zelda could be at times. Unfortunately, there’s one way this game doesn’t follow the script, and it’s to its detriment. If you ask me what the difference is between good so-called “NES-hard" games and exasperating ones, it generally comes down to collision detection and the presence of a good invincibility window after taking a hit. Destiny Emerald doesn’t have awful collision detection, but it’s off enough to cause some weird hits at times. Worse, there’s almost no escaping a second, third, or fourth hit if the enemy keeps moving in your direction. Your character’s invincibility window is too short to get away most of the time, making it easy for a single mistake to result in massive damage. It can happen so quickly you might not even have a chance to reach for a health potion. I hope you weren’t hoarding any cash.

Adding to this problem, enemies that take multiple hits seem to have an odd bug associated with them. At least on my iPad 4, sticking my weapon into them causes the game to temporarily freeze up, giving the enemy a chance to hit me while the display catches up. You know who can take multiple hits? Every last one of the bosses. And if you lose to a boss, it’s all the way back to the start of that dungeon section. From the looks of things, the developer is aware of this bug, so it will hopefully be fixed soon. At the moment though, it’s something of a problem from the beginning of the game and only gets worse the farther in you go. The enemies in this game can be pretty tough, with unpredictable patterns and mixed groups that conspire to box you in. They only get stronger and faster as you play, and the last thing you need is for technical problems to make things tougher on you.

If you’re a fan of games like the original Zelda, these issues probably aren’t going to be enough to ruin Destiny Emerald for you. They will, however, make certain parts of the game incredibly unpleasant, and it’s too bad because when things are going as they should, the game is quite fun. There’s a good balance between combat and puzzles, the boss battles are tense and exciting, and the multiple playable characters helps to keep things fresh. When you’re using a character with a ranged weapon and therefore don’t have to deal quite so frequently with the collision issues, the controls work satisfactorily. You’ll occasionally get a stuck input that will send your character running in one direction or temporarily short out your attack button, but I assume that’s connected with the lag problems I detailed in the previous paragraph.

The presentation has its ups and downs. I think the visual design in general is quite nice, with a fairly authentic 16-bit feeling to the proceedings. There’s a surprising amount of variety to the various locations you’ll run through, and although the game is obviously relying on tiles to get most of the work done, there are certain rooms that get more specific detail. The audio doesn’t step up to that level, unfortunately. The sound effects are a bit too subdued, and the music is just okay. Certainly nothing here that will get stuck in your head, but it’s appropriate to the theme and doesn’t get on the nerves, so I suppose that’s something. There aren’t any options to speak of, but the user interface works pretty well as it is. There’s a mini-map visible on-screen at all times, and the inventory menu is easy both to understand and use. In case it’s important to you, I should also mention that there isn’t any IAP in the game.

If the developer can fix the technical problems Destiny Emerald suffers from, I think this game could do a great job of scratching the mobile Zelda itch. In its current state, however, it’s a much harder recommendation. There’s quality in here, but you’ll have to suffer some heavy irritations to enjoy it. If nothing else, I appreciate how far it goes towards realizing its lofty ambitions, I just wish the whole thing didn’t feel like it was going to come apart at the seams at any moment.

Exciting as all of that is, it’s easy to forget that the foundation of the genre is in the writing. It’s neither as sweet and eye-catching as the frosting nor as thrilling as the sprinkles, but the cake itself has to pass the taste test. You can hide bad cake with a ton of sweet toppings, but in the end, only kids will be able to digest it without getting sick. Choice Of Games, one of the more prolific gamebook publishers around, are not big on toppings. They make a fine castella and they appear to be okay with that. You won’t get any fancy animations, music, or text effects in their games. You generally won’t even get another picture after you’ve passed the title screen. No, it’s just words on a page, the writer’s imagination and yours working together to create just about everything. Well, words on a page and some Game Center achievements. They’re not animals.

While it may seem a bit plain at first glance, there are certainly advantages to this approach. It obviously keeps costs down and probably helps the developer keep up the release pace, but it also allows them a lot of freedom that gamebooks with higher production values might not offer. They can take chances with their story ideas more easily, for example, because they don’t actually have to visualize everything. And indeed, Choice Of Games takes quite a few chances. Their line-up has offerings in the usual horror, fantasy, and sci-fi settings, of course. Their library also includes martial arts, mechas, romances, superheroes, intriguing works of philosophy, and even a cheeky comedy or two. Their latest release, Choice Of The Petal Throne ($4.99), is set in the world of Tekumel, a setting that might be familiar to anyone who was heavily into pen and paper RPGs back in TSR’s glory days. It’s an interesting fusion of South American, Middle Eastern, and Indian culture, with a dash of sci-fi thrown in for good measure.

Tekumel’s roots go all the way back to the 1940s, and its creator M. A. R. Barker was almost as meticulous in his process as J. R. R. Tolkein. Simply put, there’s a lot to digest in this world, and its rich detail and unusual atmosphere make a great backdrop for adventure. In spite of its age and the clear dedication of its fans, however, Tekumel is not exactly a household name. The challenge for Choice Of The Petal Throne, then, is to introduce the player to this world without overwhelming them. In that task, it succeeds in some ways and fails in others. The early part of the game, focused on your character’s past and how they came to be where they are, works very well. It’s dealing with themes that are fairly universal, so all of the extra jargon and cultural differences are pretty easy to parse. Towards the end of this bit the game starts to lay out its overarching plot, and that’s where things get sticky.

There’s a whole political mess going on in the background, and your character is unfortunately privy to too little of it to really care about its outcome. That’s bad because the last two thirds of the story swing around that plot, and the lack of investment I felt by the end made the big choices feel less weighty than they should have. The story also has a penchant for skipping past big chunks of time, which is a good approach for your character’s younger years, but less welcome after that. It’s hard enough to follow what’s going on without having to fill in gaps. You jump from a huge battle to a weird dungeon-crawling segment for the finale, and depending on how you got there that’s either going to be an anti-climax or a bizarre turn. It’s not surprising the narrative feels incomplete, given that Petal Throne isn’t quite as big as many of the other games from Choice Of Games. Many aspects of the story feel like they need more meat, something that might have helped the overall plot from feeling as disjointed as it does.

That said, when it comes to gamebooks, faults in the story can often be covered for by giving the player interesting choices along the way. In that respect, Choice Of The Petal Throne works a lot better. Your first decision is to choose which of the several gods you want to worship. That will determine the clan you belong to, along with the kind of character you should be role-playing. Some gods favor frivolity, while others give you points for being a contrarian jerk. You can always check your current status with your god of choice, though I’m not sure if it has any bearing on the actual game aside from whether you go to heaven or hell if you die along the way. As usual for this developer, there are quite a few romance options, each with the potential to have a meaningful effect on the outcome of the story. There are also points where major happenings can actually go completely differently based on your choices. If you make different choices and play to different types on additional playthroughs, you’ll find a lot of situations and choices that you didn’t even get a hint of the first time around. The achievement system provides decent incentive beyond the text itself for investigating all of these branches.

I think there’s high potential for gamebooks in the Tekumel universe, but Choice Of The Petal Throne doesn’t make the case for it as well as it needs to. I love the opening third of the game and the overall introduction to this strange fantasy world, but I didn’t enjoy the rushed feeling of the middle section and the frankly bizarre endgame. While the choices are fun to explore, with the various gods almost daring you to play outside of your comfort zone, the spotty narrative ended up undermining my care for the overall outcome. That final choice should have been a lot harder than it was, but by the end I was completely disinterested. Fans of the world of Tekumel might enjoy this one, but this isn’t one of the better gamebooks from this developer.

A simple tap anywhere at the screen controls your slide, which is ideally enacted right before you hit a corner — there’s even a flame animation to cue you in on it. Releasing it just after hitting the straightaway will net you a boost, which you’ll need to get through all those pesky timed checkpoints.

Beyond the ability to tilt to shift left or right and collect coins along the way, drifting truly is your primary job, and you’ll turn into a regular Han Seoul-Oh in no time. It’s such a simple conceit that it works far better than you’d expect it to, and outside of the occasional crash the animations are extremely smooth. On top of the vibrant color scheme, it’s very easy on the eyes.

The way the game is inherently designed is incremental progression. You’ve seen it before, a scheme that gives you just enough of a fix to keep you going, even if said fix is relatively low in its dosage. You’ll start off with a bad car, reach a checkpoint, fail, get an upgrade, reach the next checkpoint, upgrade, get a new car, and then reach a new level. Perfect runs can net you more coins for quicker unlocks, but for the most part the pacing is sluggish. It’s not inherently gated with hard checks that force you to shell out cash, it’s just slow.

It’s a sticky wicket, because it will probably drive you towards the IAP currency or out of the game entirely. I kind of fell in the middle myself, partially completing the game out of obligation with the frequent spurt of excitement. The developer could stand to be a little less stingy with its currency, but ultimately the levels and mechanics are fun enough. Thank goodness there’s no energy mechanic so you can play as often as you want — that’s the saving grace that helps alleviate some of the pacing pratfalls. It’s funny though, as Mega Drift includes the option to gain a few more seconds after a failed run if you watch an ad. Even if you pay to remove said ads this “feature" still appears, curiously enough.

Mega Drift falls into a lot of the same trappings as other free-to-play arcade games, but it’s worth a shot if you’re into smoothly animated racers. It’s not going to blow you away with the ability to drift like a madman, though it’s a nice reminder of a neon-filled subgenre of the past, and ’90s kids will get a kick out of it.

Naught Reawakening ($3.99) is an iOS re-release of Naught 2. You guide the cat-like Naught through a mysterious underground world, viewed in silhouette, avoiding deadly plants, picking up diamonds to unlock secret zones and collecting seeds to enable checkpoints. Rather than controlling Naught directly, you turn the entire world and use gravity to move the bipedal feline around. In the original game you could spin the world using gestures, virtual buttons, or by physically turning your device, but here you only have the virtual buttons. Naught has also gained the ability to jump.

The use of silhouette graphics initially sets Naught Reawakening apart from the crowd, and invites comparisons to Limbo ($3.99), although there is little substance to the art style here. In Limbo, the dark and menacing nature of the graphics actually informed the gameplay, and vice versa, but one gets the sense that Naught is exploring a silhouette world simply because that’s the visual style of game that the developers chose to make. Unlike Limbo, Naught Reawakening could have been full-colour without impacting on the gameplay. There is no denying that the game does look good though, especially with the occasional splashes of colour to highlight collectables, checkpoints and dangers.

You’re joined on your adventure by the Spirit of the Tree, a small orb which floats around above you and points you in the right direction, as well as serving as the pause button. The first time I got lost, on the fifth level I think it was, I started following the Spirit’s directions, only to find myself in a dead end with the Spirit gleefully pointing out that the exit was on the other side of a wall. This felt like a cheap trick, and when I eventually tumbled my way back around the level and reached the exit, it was just trial and error with no sense of achievement. It didn’t feel like success, just an end to the frustration of being lost.

And there we have the biggest problem with Naught Awakening: It is a maze game. Yes there is a degree of skill required in using gravity to pull you around the level, and there are certainly challenges in getting past the deadly plants and traps, but ultimately you are lost in a maze and you have to find your way out, with just a rough direction to guide you. Mazes lose their appeal really quickly.

Naught Reawakening also suffers from the fault that can blight any game built around a specific feature: This game is all about gravity, and after just a few levels you’ll find that every challenge is the same: You have to turn the world to make Naught fall, and then quickly turn it back to stop him from falling on to something that will kill him. Unless you get some perverse pleasure from repeated deaths, you end up having to nudge him along pixel by pixel, trying to get a peek of what’s beyond the screen boundary. Any joy of exploration or adventure is sapped out.

The game’s frustrating difficulty is exacerbated by a very odd design decision: You collect seeds to enable checkpoints, but each time you die, you lose a seed. In other words, if a level is too difficult and you keep dying, the game punishes you by sending you back to the start. Wouldn’t it have made more sense to help the player in some way?

The real stand-out quality of Naught Reawakening is its soundtrack, which reminded me of the pacing, barely-rhythmic remix of Nine Inch Nails’ Closer used for the haunting opening credits to the movie Se7en. The game’s industrial sound effects are a perfect match, not so much complementing the soundtrack as becoming part of it. Top marks on the sound front.

There are no social features or Game Center integration, so if high score bragging and achievements are your thing then you’ll need to settle for merely competing against yourself in finishing levels quickly. I can’t imagine many people wanting to play these levels over and over again though. Getting through them once is relief enough.

Naught Reawakening is far from a bad game. It has got nice graphics, an engrossing atmosphere, and a brilliant soundtrack. I went in to it without any particular expectations, and found it a bit boring at first. Then I started to like it, and it really grew on me. But the gameplay got very repetitive, very quickly.

Perhaps that’s part of why gamebooks have made such a strong resurgence on mobile devices. For older books, new difficulty settings and a few built-in cheats make it a lot easier to make your way through the story. Newer books can take advantage of more flexible limitations in the media to find different ways to present a challenge. Still, it feels exceptionally satisfying to actually finish a traditional-style gamebook without any assistance. For those who are new to the genre or just plain unlucky, there aren’t actually that many good options when picking from the ones that follow the orthodox style of flipping pages in a virtual book. That’s where the Spellcaster series of gamebooks from writer Louisa Dent Pierce and prolific gamebook publisher Tin Man Games comes in.

Spellcaster: The Gatekeeper’s Oath ($1.99) is the second of a planned trilogy, following up on 2013’s Spellcaster: The Forgotten Spell ($3.99). Interestingly, the first game is an adaptation of an existing physical gamebook that was published in 2006, while the remaining two books have yet to be set to paper. That makes this digital version the first chance for readers of the nearly decade-old Forgotten Spell to continue their adventure. Thematically, this series appears to be aimed at the Harry Potter crowd, with its heavy emphasis on spell-casting, the hero being a young boy wizard, and the text’s relatively restrained approach to violence and gore. The length and difficulty bear that out. Like the first in the series, this is a shorter and easier gamebook than most of the titles in Tin Man’s catalog. I actually managed to fumble my way through it on my very first try, which I assure you is a pretty rare case for me when it comes to gamebooks. In total, it took about an hour to make my way through the first time, but unlocking all of the achievements and art gave me a reason to go back a couple more times.

The basic outline of the game and its story has you going around to the various gates of the city to try to get the password you need to move on. There’s just one catch, however. The gatekeepers have sworn an oath that while the others live, none may tell their secret. Well, you can probably guess what needs to happen, but the order things happen in can actually change depending on what you choose to do and when. Not that it matters all that much, as the gatekeepers don’t have a whole ton of personality outside of the nasty piece of work at the east gate. During your travels, you’ll come afoul of some powerful elementals, and defeating them not only requires using the right spell but also having the correct item to cast that spell. Basically, you need to find a few items, find the gatekeepers, battle the elementals, and hope that everything turns out in the end. Not that we get much of an ending here, since there is a third book planned that we hopefully won’t have to wait another two years to play.

Rather than roll dice to fight enemies and pass tests, here it’s all about casting magic. You have a few spells you’ll be prompted to use when enemies come knocking, and a reasonable selection of other context-specific spells. Casting magic is elementary. No, I really mean that. Each spell has a number associated with it, and casting it involves adding or subtracting the number from the page number up in the corner. Apart from that, there are some puzzles where you have to input a certain word, name, or phrase, and others that require you to carefully examine an image for clues. All of this works just like it did in the last installment, of course, but for those who are yet to try out this series, you’ll likely find its puzzle focus to be quite refreshing, if not all that challenging.

The writing has a nice stylistic tone to it, using a few bits of jargon to help establish that this is, in fact, a fantasy world, but otherwise sticking to detailed, evocative descriptions of the sights and sounds of the city and its residents. The overall plot feels a bit like filler, but it’s hard to judge a middle chapter without the conclusion in place, so I won’t hold it against the game too much at this point. Accompanying the flavorful text is an assortment of illustrations that appear at key points in the adventure. They match the tone of the writing quite well, with a somewhat dingy but never grotesque quality and plenty of fun details to pick up on.

For their part, Tin Man Games have done an excellent job adapting the book using their trusty gamebook engine. That said, it’s a bit cumbersome at times when you need to open up the spell book for reference. I actually had to jot some numbers down for the final puzzle because I couldn’t keep everything in my head for the length of time it took to close the book and get back to the prompt, but it’s nothing too bad. I did have an odd bug during one playthrough that threw me from one part of the story to another for no apparent reason, but it only happened once.

If you’re looking for lighter fare than the usual gamebook release, the Spellcaster series might be just the thing. I wouldn’t advise jumping in with this installment, since it very directly follows up on The Forgotten Spell, but if you enjoy that title, you’ll find this one to be just as satisfying. Gamebook veterans will probably find The Gatekeeper’s Oath to be a little too insubstantial and simple to really get into, however. It’s a pleasant enough read and the unusual puzzles are a nice change of pace, but it doesn’t quite offer the bang for the buck that you would get with many of Tin Man’s other efforts.

Games where you derive most of your enjoyment from unlocking things are not terribly different. Admittedly, in the modern age the developer can always add on to these games, but that’s not always feasible. In many cases, all you can do is have a great time sucking them dry, then toss them away like a forgotten bundle of chemical-drenched paper in a gas station garbage can somewhere near Sudbury. Dungeon Hero RPG (Free) is one such gameDungeon Hero RPG, and while that may not sound like the most flattering of comparisons, things could be a lot worse. After all, like those activity books from my childhood, it’s very hard to put down until you’ve completed everything. The gameplay is perfectly competent in most respects, but a severe shortage of content means the game has to lean on its unlockable goodies to keep you coming back. That well runs dry sooner or later, and that’s when you’ll likely have had your fill of Dungeon Hero RPG.

Given that most people will derive those hours of fun from the game without paying a cent, it’s hard to complain too much, though. Gems are the currency here, the beginning and ending all in one handy value. The game will give you some to start with, enough to unlock the first of many different heroes. You get your choice of three, initially. There’s a wizard who can use powerful offensive magic, a druid who specializes in defensive magic, and a fighter who is really good at knitting sweaters. The dungeons are all randomly generated, but you can choose how big you’d like them to be. At first, only the smallest size is available, but a relatively small number of gems will fully open your options. There is also a selection of pets that you can take along with you, though you won’t have enough gems for any on your first go. Eventually, you’ll be able to take one into the dungeon with you, acting as a valuable companion that you can develop and level up in the same fashion as the main heroes.

That gets us to the main gameplay, which is a real-time dungeon crawl played from a first-person perspective. It’s actually reasonably impressive, allowing you to look around in full 3D. There’s not exactly a ton of interesting sights to see, but the engine is undoubtedly solid. Although it plays in real-time, you move along a grid using a small assortment of arrow keys, just as in turn-based dungeon crawlers. When you encounter an enemy, you simply wail away at both sides of the screen to swing your equipped weapons. If you have any magic, that can be used by tapping a button at the side, and certain items can be thrown at the enemies in much the same fashion. The enemies get more powerful as your hero levels up. They start off relatively harmless, but they soon become quite fearsome. Your character carries over from game to game, whether they finish by finding the exit or simply die, so the early monsters will soon become a rare sight unless you field a different character.

It should be noted that although there’s a surprising variety of monsters, there’s very little variance in their behaviors. Some can attack from a distance, while others can only use melee attacks. The only other differences are cosmetic and statistical. Avoid being surrounded, try to lure them into narrow passageways, and smash away until they’re dead. Hopefully you’ll have enough HP to survive, but if you don’t, you can always just park somewhere safe and wait a really long time for them to restore. Apart from the monsters, there’s not much to see in these dungeons. There’s a ton of loot laying around everywhere, though like the enemies, a large variety in visuals belies the fairly meager differences between each piece. Pick it up, check if it does more damage than what you’re carrying. If it does, replace one of the weapons in your hand, if it doesn’t, put it in your bottomless inventory bag to sell later. You’ll want to keep your eyes open for keys in particular, since locked doors are the only environmental obstacle you’ll come across. There are also locked chests around that carry random loot, enemies, or sometimes nothing at all.

Your goal on each floor is to find the stairs down. Once you’ve found the third set of stairs, you can exit the dungeon and claim your gem prize. The number of gems you receive is based on the size of the dungeon you cleared, and since they’re randomly generated, you might as well go for the largest size every time. The stairs are just as likely to spawn near to you as they will far, so in practice it doesn’t take that much longer to finish the biggest dungeon compared to the smallest. If you’re looking to completely mop up every nook and cranny of each floor, the bigger sizes can take a lot longer, but there’s no real incentive to do that. There’s so much loot to be had, even just following the shortest path to the goal, that you’ll never want for good gear. This is where one of the cracks in Dungeon Hero RPG starts to show.

Ideally, a dungeon crawl should have the player constantly having to make a choice between risking exploration or making a direct, safe run for the goal as soon as it’s uncovered. There are lots of ways to build this into the design. Many games use special loot as the pull, a very effective option if your loot system is strong. You can also use the chance to build up the player character’s power as a useful means of tempting the player to hang around. You’d better level up as much as you can on this floor, because the next one will be even more dangerous and you’re not equipped to handle it. You can also use special encounters, secrets, specific keys, and so on. Dungeon Hero RPG doesn’t provide any good incentive to explore. Whether you level up or not is seemingly pointless, since the enemies will more or less scale with you. The loot is plentiful and nearly inconsequential, so that doesn’t do the job either. There are only two types of keys that will unlock either doors or chests, so you usually don’t have to go searching around for the right one to progress, either. You get the same number of gems no matter how you get to the exit, and if you die, you get no gems. I suppose you could hang around if you’re having fun beating on the enemies, but as hooks go, that’s a pretty weak one.

The most powerful hook in Dungeon Hero RPG is the unlocking of new characters and pets. It’s a very good one, too. There are thirteen heroes and six pets in all, and each of them has their own persistent levels and skills that you can build up over repeated plays. Of course, they all have capped stats that will essentially halt their progress after several level-ups, but that’s nothing a few gems can’t take care of. To keep moving forward in any meaningful way in Dungeon Hero RPG, you need those gems. There are only two ways to come by them: finishing a dungeon, or making use of the game’s IAPs to get a bunch at once. So you want a new character, a new pet, or just want to keep advancing the characters you already have, you need gems. If you want gems, you need to clear dungeons. If you want to clear dungeons reliably and quickly, you should take the stairs as soon as you find them without exception. It’s a good little circle until you run out of things to open up. At that point, the gameplay needs to carry the game, and it gets a lot less pretty.

It’s a shame there isn’t more actual substance here, because the game has its foundations built well. The battles are fun if a bit monotonous due to the poor variety in enemy behavior. The presentation is excellent, with solid tech backed by some lovely licensed art, all set to the tunes of a fairly diverse soundtrack. The movement controls are a little fussy, leading to the occasional misfire, but overall it’s very easy to pick up and learn. All the pieces are in place for something great to be built here, but instead we’ve just got something that feels highly-polished and undercooked all at once. I’ll tip my hat to the generous economy the game has set up, at least. The premium currency flows freely during regular play, so you never feel like you need to buy anything except perhaps as a tip if you’re enjoying the game. Getting more gems quickly just means the joy of unlocking things is over that much sooner.

If you like dungeon crawling, I think you should give Dungeon Hero RPG a try. It’s free, after all, and you are very likely to get at least a short period of great fun out of it. The game doesn’t hold up well over the long term, though, and oddly not because you hit a paywall or anything like that. Rather, you’ll have seen almost everything worth seeing after a few passes through its humble dungeons, leaving only mopping up the remaining unlockables as a reason to keep playing. Unusually for a free game, Dungeon Hero RPG is more than willing to freely give you everything it has to offer. It’s just a shame that everything it’s got ends up being fairly meager in total.

So, the game isn’t that easy to understand without playing it, and this is where I recommend playing it. This isn’t just to get a feel for the game, but also because I think it’s a fascinating concept. You have a team of 12 knights going up against a team of 12 other knights, each with a set of stats and buffs. The player with imitative chooses a knight and the opponent chooses a knight in that same row, then they joust at each other, with the higher power level winning. A minigame where you have to match an arrow in a timing bar as close to the thin green line as possible to do more damage will affect those power levels. Do more damage, and you get points, which is variable based on the rules of the match. Have more points at the end of the match, and you win. Those are the basics, but there are all sorts of crazy points variations that make some rounds more valuable, and the knights all have different sorts of stat variations. There are plenty of aspects that can make even a low-ranked knight dangerous in the right circumstances. It’s a deep game, despite its colorful exterior.

There’s a lot of things in Knights and Snails that can sneak up on you if you’re not paying attention. The numbers that define each of the units don’t tell the whole story, as a unit might have high defense or a higher attack score than their low number would indicates. So, you’re best off checking just what exactly the opposing unit’s stats are before each round. You will often wander into a rougher situation than you think with a matchup against a 2 or 3 score unit. Just be smart and don’t try to play at a too-fast pace. But it does speak to just how esoteric things can be – it’s not necessarily the easiest game to just jump into and play, because there’s a lot going on that you might not even be aware of. Some of it is just randomness, some of it is having things like the powerups on the left side of the screen that you need to be aware of.

Chaos is everywhere in Knights and Snails. Sometimes strategy gets thrown out the window when you’re just dealing with things like this. I think that if you’re a perfectionist, Knights and Snails is not the game for you. There are some battles that you just can’t win. There is still some fun strategy to play with, though. Going after attacks on empty rows can be valuable, as they weaken enemy units, is a powerful strategy. But it’s also risky as you give up some form of control over who you attack. Plus, any sort of imbalance means that there’s just more risk and reward to contend with.

I do find myself concerned with the use of gems in Knights and Snails. It’s the one currency, but it’s pretty much a hard currency. You can buy a knight of various qualities through a card-pack-like system. The main way of spending gems is through plentiful amounts of little boosts you can buy for an advantage here and there. You can buy a starter pack for $3.99 which allows you to get a bunch more of the hard currency and two extra moves of the knights between rows. It’s kind of rough to offer a major strategic advantage as a pay-to-unlock feature, but it’s not the worst thing in the world. You do get your money’s worth out of that purchase, but you’ll find your gems slowly draining over time, rather than emptying them in big batches.

It’s definitely an unorthodox way to approach free-to-play monetization. You can pay a little to get a lot. At least the energy system is set up in such a way that you only lose a life when you lose a match, rather than spending one for each play. This is a system I much prefer to straight-up energy system per match played. There is an energy system for the special knights, where they use more hearts after you play them in a match. This winds up being as much a strategic decision as a way to make money through spending currency for the developers. The ability to buy boosts in matches and also better knights means that matches aren’t entirely strategic.

I wonder if there was a better game to make here. A game more akin to a deck-building CCG, perhaps with certain tiers of cards that you can use as your knights, could be a better game. Knights and Snails goes too much for Candy Crush Saga and not enough for Hearthstone (Free). There’s no reason why this couldn’t be multiplayer-focused, as it’d be fun to take on other people, instead of having to battle against escalating CPUs. It’d be great to plan with a deck of my own choosing without worrying about hearts, or whatever other systems are in play. And the tension of matches would be so much greater with games against opponents on the line.

So, I think Knights and Snails is an interesting game, but one that perhaps should have taken a different approach. This could be a unique collecting-and-battling game, and instead it exists a singleplayer-focused experience, trying to monetize through little advantages here and there. It’s the wrong strategy for this game, and while the core game isn’t bad, I’d love to see the developers regroup and try this one again. They have interesting gameplay, but they haven’t found what makes the game as a whole interesting yet.

That sounds like a really promising game, right? It’s got a dark and gritty theme, while still in a unique period of time. It’s not about chasing down and killing criminals, it’s about analyzing crime scenes using turn-of-the-century techniques, like early photography, in order to solve crimes. No DNA analysis here! Analyzing photos for their contents? Sure, that seems promising! Getting to analyze witness testimony for the important clues? That’s pretty cool! Then, having to make the heart-wrenching decision of who to accuse of the crime! That should be great!

It all should be. But it’s not, because the game goes for the simplest path for all those elements, and makes it practically impossible to fail. All the evidence that you need to photograph is pretty much in plain view, there’s nothing too difficult to hunt down, and you can’t progress unless you take a photo of everything. Even then, Max will give you hints if you need them. There’s fewer per level as time goes on, but considering that there’s not any way to take bad photos or run out of time, it’s not really possible at all to get stuck.

When scanning the photos for evidence, there’s no way to miss anything or fail – or to be missing photos that will help make the case easier. When examining witness’ statements, you can’t, say, ask questions where asking the wrong ones might make it more difficult to choose the correct suspect. And you can’t advance unless you point out everything necessary. At the time to accuse suspects, if you accuse the wrong person, you just go back and try again, but with even a minor bit of deduction based on the info, it’s hard to get any wrong.

Essentially, Criminel is a game that puts a teasing premise in your face, and then leaves you with the premise without the promise that you are actually doing anything, or can be rewarded for solving these crimes. It feels rote and unsatisfying because the training wheels never come off. Criminel disappointingly under-delivers on its premise. If you’re someone who just wants a study in dark atmosphere, then you might enjoy this. But I like a bit of resistance from the games I play. Criminel offers practically no resistance whatsoever, and no fail state at all.

So, if Criminel is a straightforward romp, why play it? Because it’s a wonderful display of atmosphere in a game. It’s got this dark and unnerving vibe that promises a dark finale, and it’s that fear of the unknown that left me hooked to see what was coming next. The grainy look to the game works to make it feel kind of like these are cloudy memories to experience. And the concept of traveling through crimson-lit rooms to head from scene to scene, with some of the deaths rendered in just enough shadow to be creepy, is effective. And the last chapter, where things are really in the unknown, you never really know what’s coming up next, and the game starts to deconstruct the things it has set up, justifies the entire Criminel experience. It’s genuinely eerie and left me unnerved while I played it.

But for people who want a little bit of a game-like resistance, who don’t just want a glorified interactive fiction experience? You probably want to avoid Criminel. It’s not beyond redemption – but it’s just kind of disappointing as you start to realize “Wait, this isn’t actually that difficult." It’s got such a cool premise, the look works for the game, but it decides to not really advance past the tutorial phase of the game.

I don’t know why Criminel is an iPad-only game, because I think that it could work on the iPhone without much hassle. Pretty much everything that you need to see is large enough that it would show up on a phone screen, there’s nothing as far as the interface goes that demands iPad play, and it feels like anything that would be too small, like text, perhaps, could be reformatted in some way for the iPhone. I generally have skepticism when any game is meant for the iPad only, I understand that some games are better on the larger screens, but sometimes they’re just matters of adaptation work that could help bring the games to larger audiences. Criminel being iPad-only would be like if Infinity Blade ($5.99) was an iPad-only game.

Criminel is disappointing, but to reiterate, the ending really redeems the whole experience. It’s a painful reminder that this game could have reached five-star peaks, but never tries to reach for them. Even something narrative-driven like Device.6 ($3.99) threw some puzzles in the way of the player that made exploring the game worth it. But then I wasn’t as much a fan of The Sailor’s Dream ($3.99) so you have to know where my tastes lie here. If my tastes resonate with you, then pass on Criminel. Otherwise, if a good experience, story, and atmosphere are more important to you than being tested, you might want to give this a spin.

Stickman Rush is a collaboration between Dubai-based developers EyeBox and French illustrator Guillaume Kurkdjian. The project came about when EyeBox producer Marc Lejeune saw Guillaume’s web site and approached him about producing a game together, an opportunity that the artist jumped at.

You start out controlling your stickman character in a small rocketship, clearly violating all reasonable traffic laws by speeding along a busy three-lane highway, swapping lanes to dodge traffic and collect coins. You swap lanes by swiping up or down, and swipe right to jump over obstacles.

The swipe controls feel so bad at first that you can’t help but think they’re bugged. But it’s actually a strange conflict between how your brain feels you should be able to control the game, and how the developers have decided that it must be done. Because the game world is displayed, isometrically, at an angle, you want to swipe at an angle to swap lanes. But the game wants you to swipe precisely up or down, and if you’re slightly off then it interprets that as a jump. This issue is already irking people on our forums, but once you condition your brain to behave and do what it’s meant to, you’ll find the controls become much more tolerable.

Even with the control problem sort-of resolved, there’s no getting away from the fact that Stickman Rush is little more than a pretty façade with not much going on behind it. Sure you can switch lanes. Sure you can jump over things. But after doing it a few times I don’t feel inclined to do it again. There are lots of extra vehicles to unlock with the coins you pick up, and EyeBox have apparently taken their lead from Crossy Road by giving you daily free gifts, but you’ll just be doing the same thing in a different vehicle and it’s simply not that fun.

The game is free to download and play, with in-app purchases to turn off the adverts and buy extra coins. When you crash you have the option to watch a video advert and continue your game, but this seems to be a one-time deal, you can’t keep watching videos and continuing forever.

Talking of adverts, on more than one occasion I’ve died because the game froze briefly as it loaded a new advert. That’s a straight-up showstopper that needs to be addressed.

Stickman Rush is a bit of a one-trick pony: It looks wonderful, and little else. Guillaume Kurkdjian has already achieved some notoriety for his minimalist pastel designs, but this game will likely bring his work to the attention of a wider audience. For bringing him to my attention, I am grateful to the game. But there isn’t enough fun here to keep me interested, so there’s a lot of beauty locked within that I’ll never see.

EyeBox and Guillaume are already in talks to produce an update, and are looking in to working on a brand new project together.

Grace Of Letoile ($3.99), as static shocks go, is not a very strong one. It’s a little zap, nothing worse. It carries most of the problems that any Magitec game does, of course. I don’t expect this particular tiger to change its stripes anytime soon. But those dissonant honks aren’t quite as bad this time around, and the good points are a little better than usual. I wouldn’t call this Magitec’s best work, but it’s probably not far from it. The bad things you should expect include that awful old engine doing its best to make you nauseous when it scrolls in any direction, an awkward localization that reads far too literally, and fairly weak dungeons. As usual for this developer, there is also important story content locked in a special in-game shop that you’ll likely need to spend real money to get at.

If you can grit your teeth through that, you’ll find a surprisingly good plot with lots of interesting twists and turns, a thoughtful and unusual battle system, and a satisfying method of customizing your characters. The main hook is the story, which sees heroic orphan Vedley and his sister Moniya chasing down legendary artifacts to try to change the past. The story goes for a bit of a Highlander vibe. Magical dolls called Letoiles are scattered around the world, and if all of their cores are collected by any one of them, it will gain the power to grant any wish. The dolls cannot move on their own, and need to be bound and powered by the soul of a human. Vedley binds himself to a particularly prickly one named Ajin, and sets off to find and destroy the remaining Letoiles, because there can be only one.

Grace of Letoile benefits from a somewhat larger cast than the usual Magitec affair. While the developer seems to enjoy setting their heroes against the entire world with only a sassy sidekick to bounce off of, this game has several characters Vedley can bounce off of. Most of his interactions are still with his sassy sidekick, but it’s a considerably less dour game than we usually see from this developer. It’s still pretty dark in its own ways, however, so if you’ve enjoyed the somewhat brutal tales seen in Magitec’s other games, you’ll get your fill here. The Highlander plot is a good one, enough to power several seasons of Canadian-made TV, allowing rivals to be decent people with goals just as worthy as yours, rather than mustache-twirling villains. There are a couple of those, mind you. It’s also a great concept to milk for some cheap melodrama, and if nothing else, Magitec is pretty good at wringing out every last drop. The translation lets it down a bit, as usual, coming off like it was handled by someone who absolutely couldn’t care less about what they were doing, but it’s more dull than unintelligible, so I guess we should be happy for small favors.

The battle system is a little hard to explain, but let me give it a swing. First of all, it’s turn-based, and unlike their last RPG, Dead Dragons ($3.99), it’s essentially in the traditional style, with one side lining up on the right and the other on the left. Turn order is displayed in a bar at the side of the screen, and various spots on the meter will activate a reward or penalty for whichever participant occupies it, be they friend or foe. You can usually only influence who falls where by removing someone from the equation, hopefully an enemy. You can, however, make limited use of something called the Chronos Gauge, which allows you to interrupt an action or use a special move, both of which can disrupt the order of turns. The gauge itself resembles a clock, with numbers from one to twelve on its face. Each turn taken advances the clock by one hour, and performing special moves that synchronize with the current hour contribute greatly to refilling the gauge. You can also add to the gauge with regular attacks, but they only fill a little bit. You’ll have to plan out your special attacks well if you want to make use of the Chronos Gauge often.

That naturally leads us into the character customization aspects. Special moves are contained in gems that you have to equip to characters in order to use. Each character has a plate that these special gems can be fit into, which like the Chronos Gauge also resemble clocks. Wherever you assign a gem to becomes that skill’s number for the purposes of refilling the Chronos Gauge in battle. Initially, you’re limited in the number of slots you can access, but leveling up allows you to open and make use of new locations on the clock in whatever order you’d like. Leveling itself is also a bit weird in this game. Individual characters don’t level up. Instead, the party itself has a level. It’s pretty weird, but it does avoid the trap of having new characters joining the group and being completely out of synch with your existing members. Not that new members joining your group is a very common occurrence in Kemco games, but I appreciate the sentiment, anyway.

I kind of like how both the combat gimmicks and the character customization actually tie together in a meaningful way. Since the Chronos Gauge moves forward in a dependable way, you can plan for when you want to use certain special moves by how likely they’ll coincidence with the hour the clock is currently showing. So, for example, you probably don’t want to equip healing magic on the first few spots of the clock, since you’re very unlikely to need early on in a battle. It comes unglued a little in longer fights, but for the majority of battles, the choices you make have a genuine effect on how quickly they wrap up. Sadly, boss fights tend to come down to the usual business of pouring out special moves as quickly as possible and healing whenever needed. The boss battles are too long to try to synchronize with the Chronos Gauge, and it empties pretty quickly without you doing that.

I just wish the other aspects of the game worked as well as all of that. The dungeons are still terrible. They’re long, unpleasant, and full of too many winding roads that lead to useless treasure. Magitec really needs to learn to more frequently place treasure that makes it feel like it was worth the trip to get to it. The overall structure of the game is quite repetitive, too. Even if it doesn’t make sense sometimes from a narrative point of view, the game rigidly follows a town to dungeon to town set-up, only occasionally feeling natural in the way it leads the characters around. While I enjoy the plot, the dialogue itself is pretty rough thanks to the dry work done on the English script. Characters have a tendency to drone on well past the point that anyone wants them to, and with the clumsy way everything is phrased, you’ll probably find yourself hammering on the screen to skip its seventh reiteration of whatever point it was trying to make. I also don’t care for this developer’s practice of putting story behind a paywall. You can grind out the points to earn those dungeons on your own without paying, but a single playthrough will leave you with nowhere near enough to do so.

Also, this game engine needs to be ditched, in no uncertain terms. Everyone else under Kemco’s umbrella has moved on except Magitec. This frankly terrible performance was annoying enough three years ago, but there’s no excuse for such modest games to run so badly on today’s hardware. I understand that part of the reason these RPGs are tenable in today’s App Store market is that they heavily reuse assets and crank the games out quickly, and making a new engine is pretty much the opposite of both of those things, but it really needs to be done sooner or later. Until then, we’re going to have to deal with the fidgety navigation controls, a clunky UI designed more for a numeric keypad than touch, and the blurry lurching of the screen every time you move your character. Well, at least there are Game Center achievements, a rarity in Kemco games. Don’t read the list unless you want some light spoilers, though.

If you’re looking for your monthly JRPG fix, Grace Of Letoile will hold you over, and it won’t even be unpleasant about it most of the time. It has a lot of interesting ideas that fans of the genre might find interesting to play around with, and the story is pretty decent, even if the dialogue belongs in la toilette. If you’re even slightly weary with the whole JRPG idea, I’d steer clear of Grace Of Letoile, though. While its plot is unusual and its specific mechanics are unique, the overall trappings are about what you would expect at this point from the Kemco assembly line. As is typical for this developer in particular, it’s a frustrating mix of clever ideas and sloppy execution.

Our story follows an obnoxious idiot named Mattie who is obsessed with money to the point that he’ll do just about anything to get it. While he’s out on a job to recover an item from a cave one day, he meets a woman named Kaldia who makes him the offer of a lifetime. If he can win the Summoners Rex tournament being held by the wise Count Frung, she’ll pay him 100 million gold. Mattie jumps at the opportunity even though he and Kaldia almost instantly dislike each other, and the two set off for the group of islands where the contest is being staged. There’s obviously more going on than meets the eye, but it’s all straight from the JRPG textbook, as is generally the case with this developer. Suffice it to say, you will be finding out why Mattie is such a jerk and while I don’t want to spoil the ending, the world may be at stake here.

The islands in question serve as the setting for the game, but you can’t freely explore them. Instead, points will open up on the map as you progress the story. You simply choose the location you want to go to and confirm to travel there instantly. After you finish out the first few locations, you can choose the order you want to tackle the islands. It’s a bit like Mega Man in that they’re all themed, and while you can choose any order you like, there’s definitely a preferred way to go around in terms of strengths and weaknesses. You probably won’t want to visit the fire-themed island without some ice monsters in your group, for example. It’s certainly a novel approach, though trying to go against the intended path is nearly impossible, so it’s functionally pretty linear. You can’t open the area to catch monsters until you beat the tournament in that location, and beating the tournament without monsters of the right attributes is extremely hard. If you like your RPGs to have a lot of open-ended exploration, you probably won’t be happy, but I personally felt the streamlined approach worked well enough here. An overworld map is only good if the developer’s willing to use it in interesting ways, and Hit-Point has never shown much strength in that regard.

There is a bit of exploration to be had in the various dungeons you’ll be visiting, but nothing too difficult. The main challenge in the dungeons comes from the monsters that are scattered throughout. Mattie can’t directly fight on his own, but he can summon monsters who will battle on his behalf. This isn’t the first time Hit-Point has done a take on Pokemon, but this one turns out to be rather different from Band Of Monsters (Free). There aren’t any invisible random encounters or even discrete battle screens in Seven Sacred Beasts. You can see the monsters wandering around on the map. If you get near them, they’ll start attacking you in real-time, forcing you to summon some of your own monsters to defend yourself. At the start of the game, you can only equip a single monster at a time, but you can actually call out multiples of that monster if your MP holds out. As you progress in the game, you’ll eventually be able to bring along up to three different monsters at once, allowing for a little more strategy than the early game’s simple stick and move techniques.

Your monsters will generally act on their own, but you can assume direct control of one of them if you’d like. Be careful, though, because it leaves your main character vulnerable, and if he runs out of HP, you get kicked back to the inn. It’s usually a better idea to maintain control over Mattie so that you can use his special moves and capture monsters. Capturing monsters follows the Pokemon rule. The lower the monster’s health is, the better chance your capture attempt will succeed. You can make multiple attempts, however, so feel free to sidle up next to a fight and keep jamming the capture button. The only downside is that standing near the battle puts you at high risk of taking damage. The collision system isn’t the greatest here, as you might expect from action-RPG combat being shoehorned into an engine designed for turn-based games. Battles tend to come down to you summoning out your maximum load of monsters, keeping away from the fight until the very end, and then swooping in to make the catch. Against bosses, you basically have to run around throwing out monsters and trying not to get tagged yourself while you wait for your MP to refill. Things tend to run on a little long in general, making most tough battles more tedious than they should be.

Like the overworld map, towns are just a map with a few points on them. You can pick up quests from people for extra cash, do some shopping, or head to the inn to change your monster party. There’s also usually a training center where you can evolve your monsters or teach them new skills if you have the right items. Evolving a monster requires gems that enemies drop, but the drop rate is kind of low. If you want to sequence break, you’ll need to evolve your monsters to get attribute advantages early on, but you’re going to have to grind for that. Actually, chances are good that you’ll have to grind anyway. Seven Sacred Beasts is lighter on content than even the usual Kemco release, so the developer appears to have padded it out by skewing the difficulty and having you return to locations repeatedly. Even with those unpleasant tricks, the game is still quite a bit shorter than the norm, hewing closer to the 10-hour mark than the usual 20 hours from this developer.

The poor balancing, extensive reuse of locations, and poor collision detection in battle all contribute to an overall feeling that this game was too rushed. Kemco releases games at a pretty fast pace, and Hit-Point is perhaps one of their busiest developers, so their games never feel like they’ve been properly fleshed out. It’s a bigger problem here simply because of how different they tried to make this game. It’s like the developer was working so hard to get one new plate spinning that the rest of them went crashing to floor, with the new plate wobbling precariously itself. I absolutely love that they’re trying new things, because they frankly need to, and there’s certainly some merit in the ideas that Seven Sacred Beasts brings to the table, but it just doesn’t work well. I suspect most people will have a similar experience to mine when they play the game. There’s that initial period where you’re just trying to get through the story exposition to reach the game, followed by excitement from the new and novel elements, only to have the game’s serious problems start to seep through and ruin the whole thing. Then, several hours later and with you completely none the wiser, it ends.

If you can get into the extensive grinding that the game requires to fully enjoy it, you might enjoy this odd lump of a game. It’s definitely enjoyable in its early stages, and if you can stick it out to the point that you have a nice array of monsters of different attributes, it does eventually become a little fun again. The localization is a little better than we usually see in Hit-Point’s games, so the story is interesting enough to read, if not particularly unusual in its progression. This developer has a habit of coming up with interesting ideas only to ditch them for the next game, but I really hope they don’t do that with Seven Sacred Beasts. The basic gameplay is fast, enjoyable, and nicely side-steps some of the problems with trying to do an action-RPG on touch devices. It’s just in need of some balancing and a bit more care given to the other elements built around it. That said, while I appreciate the ideas Seven Sacred Beasts brings, I’m pretty indifferent to the game built around them.

The levels are about getting from point A to point B in one piece, but the mission structure does a good job at encouraging players to go out and complete optional objectives, though mostly they consist of “collect items" or “kill all of a certain type of enemy." You get cash for completing objectives, with said cash being used at vending machines to buy more health, ammo (which is limited, technically, but available commonly as item pickups), and rockets, which are naturally more powerful. The game doesn’t really do anything unexpected with its structure, it just throws a dozen levels of enemy-shooting, wall-jumping, and spike-dodging at you.

The game uses virtual arrows and buttons to control the game, with the buttons being smartly laid out. Jumping is in the lower-right corner, firing horizontally and vertically on the left side, with the use button popping up at times. They’re sensibly laid out, and while double-jumping happens accidentally on a periodic basis, I never felt like I fired accidentally in the wrong direction. The movement arrows feel way too small on the iPhone 6 Plus, though. MFi gamepad support is here and works great.

My issue with the movement is that if you double jump, you can only fire downward. I think that I’d rather have the ability to just fire straight and upward as I can while on the ground, or after a single jump, though being able to fire downward is kind of helpful at times. It’s a mixed bag, but a bit annoying when it doesn’t work quite the way you want it to. I suppose not having up/down arrows for movement requires that some sort of system like this to be in place. It’s an odd rule.

The big, honking problem with Ammo Pigs is that what it establishes in the very first level isn’t really expanded on in any significant way. Many of the same enemies appear, the game’s still about hitting those blue switches, and even the music track is the same from level to level. Some new hazards pop up from time to time, and the game does get more challenging as it goes on, but the game really kind of lacks anything resembling variety. It’s quite repetitive after only a few levels. The formula isn’t terrible, I suppose, but a little goes a long way here.

I also have to complain about the checkpointing or lack thereof in this game. I know that it is trying to be very old-school, but I think it goes to a ridiculous degree when there’s obvious checkpointing situations with the blue gates you disable. But when there’s enemies and lasers that can kill you in one hit, and the occasional exploding barrel that can kill you randomly. I’ve heard this concept of retro-style design being something where designers should try to make games feel like how they remember them, rather than how they actually were. Standards have changed, and we have checkpoints because we know that games don’t have to be impossible any more. They can be accessible because we can buy them for two dollars now! As such, I don’t think checkpoints would hurt. Also, I know that “ammo" is part of the name of the game, but the limited ammo system feels like it’s only there to prevent haphazard firing, rather than being anything resembling something you have to seriously worry about.

I think that Ammo Pigs is ultimately formulaic, for better or worse. You know what you’re getting right away, and it may be best consumed over a long amount of time, as the game gets stale after completing 2 or 3 levels in a row. Come in, play a level, and come back a while later when the game feels fresh again. It’s a game that’s limited in scope, but it’s far from evil or terrible for doing so, honestly. It’s really quite the honest game: it tells you what it is from the very get-go and doesn’t change much. I can appreciate that.

Essentially, the game is about making it to the goal in each level, as you control a thief who can only really run forward. Said thief will stop at walls and jump up them, with the ability to slide down and jump off, which is their way of turning around. Each level takes place on one screen, so you always know where the enemies and traps are, and can always keep an eye on them as you make it to the end of each level. On its own, while the levels are small and relatively simple, it’s a game that’s very touch-friendly with consistent physics. As well, it’s made by ZeptoLab, and they know production values. For people who tire of free-to-play games that feel like they aren’t based on skill, King of Thieves will impress.

King of Thieves has a lot going for it. But problem number one with the game is its lockpicks mechanic. Serving as the primary energy system for the game, it winds up being rather ridiculous Essentially, to play a level in either multiplayer or in the singleplayer campaign that unlocks better dungeons down the road, you have to use a lockpick in order to break the correct lock from among a series of lock in order to play a level. The problem is that the lock which unlocks the level is entirely random with no hints as to which lock is the one that you break into. And the locks quickly become ridiculous: you may have a total of 13 picks to unlock a 9-lock level before you get to level 30 in the singleplayer. It’s a system that swiftly descends into self-parody. The multiplayer is a bit more subjective as to how the player has chosen to upgrade their defenses, but it still feels silly.

While the copious consumption of said picks is bad enough, it wouldn’t be so bad if the lockpick system didn’t feel so untrustworthy. It felt too often like it would take all of my lockpicks to open up a level, and sometimes one would open up on the first try if I was running low, to coax me to play more. It’s a random system that never feels like it’s actually random, like too often the game would make me open every single lock before I could play. The game lets you refill your lockpicks for a small amount of premium currency, or watch a video to get 2 more, and it’s easy to imagine the system being weighted in such a way that it gets you to watch more ads. I don’t mind, and in fact appreciate the the videos are there, and any picked locks will remain picked if you run out of picks. Plus, the picks regenerate at about 15 per hour by default, which isn’t awful. But it’s not great, because it’s a system that actively stands against the player and infuriates them with regularity.

It’s a very poor implementation of an energy system, too. I would rather get more opportunities to play in one burst with longer waits. But this is a challenging trial platformer! This is the kind of game built to be played again and again, making me stop playing is kind of against the point! While I understand free-to-play monetization has to run its course, this feels like a bad example of free-to-play, where the gameplay is something that could appeal to even the haters. They just run into an obtrusive system where they can maybe play one level per hour. It is possible to increase both the lockpick production and amount you have with just soft currency, however.

It’s a shame, because this game does a satisfactory job at balancing monetization and pay-to-win fears. You can buy better hazards for your dungeon, but unless you yourself can beat the layout that you yourself made, you’re not going to be able to use it. It also ensures that you can’t quite make an impossible dungeon. But still, you can buy a better set of traps with hard currency or with a greater amount of soft currency than the default traps. So, it’s a balance between the evils of monetization and the joys of player-created content. Granted, the game is somewhat limited because there’s only the limited number of traps available per level, so you will learn how the different hazards work – but there’s still room for cleverness in the design. Everyone is working from the same blueprints, though.

The raiding system is a really cool idea because of the customization that each player has, and the idea that you can genuinely steal things from other players by playing well. However, the lottery system to decide if you get their gem is kind of shady because, again, I don’t trust the lockpicks to be all that fair, and I don’t trust a random spinner where I get more attempts for more hard currency, at an ever-increasing amount. But it’s kind of cool and genuine to not have to play with some sort of AI version of an opponent: you’re taking on an actual opponent. Of course, it’s also very annoying to try and get revenge on an opponent and find that they’re currently online when you try to raid them, or find out that someone else is raiding them, which is silly when I should have priority because they literally just attacked me. Joe Schmo can wait. Or finding out someone has a shield when I try to avenge myself. Some warning would be nice. Also, giving up a shield in order to attack someone who can’t be attacked is infuriating.

If I seem conflicted about King of Thieves, it’s because I really am. We have a game that emphasizes the best and worst of free-to-play. The game has a lot of cool aspects to it, but so much of it also emphasizes the worst things that monetization can bring to the table. If you have a strong distaste for free-to-play, stay far away from King of Thieves. If not, then I really like the concept enough to check it out, even if it’s nowhere near perfect yet.