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Game Reviews, Games

Pocket Planes (iOS) Review

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Developer/Publisher: NimbleBit LLC || Overall: 5.0/10

Hardware Used: iPhone 5 with iOS 6

Pocket Planes is a somewhat-sequel to another NimbleBit game, Tiny Tower. Instead of managing an endless tower of floors, you are in control of your own endlessly expanding airline full of planes and airports across the Earth. Eventually you’ll be able to grow your airline from using planes that can only carry one person or one piece of cargo to planes that can carry up to 17.

The goal in Pocket Planes is to deliver stuff to different cities in the most efficient way possible. You take people and cargo in varying combinations from different airports and try to end up at your destination in the quickest/cheapest way possible so that you can have more capital to expand your reach. The idea is pretty interesting to me, personally, because I like Tycoon games, and at the end of the day it is one.

From a game design standpoint, Pocket Planes is a nice evolution from Tiny Tower. In Tiny Tower you basically had to micromanage your endlessly expanding tower. While there is still micromanaging in Pocket Planes, it isn’t nearly as stressful to keep up with since there is some actual strategy involved instead of just mindlessly spam-tapping you finger against a screen endlessly. When you want to deliver a person/cargo to a city, you have to figure out the best way to get there and the best way to make profit from the venture.

As opposed to Tiny Tower, you don’t necessarily feel like “time” is a resource. All of the planes in your fleet operate independently of each other, and you don’t feel like you’re “losing money” by having your planes sit at an airport waiting for instructions. Technically you could always be sending your plane on a job to make money, so there is that element of wanting to keep your planes busy, but the inclination is much less urgent. You can also dump a person/cargo at another airport without any penalties (other than fiscal) so that another one of your planes can take them wherever they need to go.

However, there are still some inherent flaws that the developers at Nimblebit just don’t seem to grasp that are present in both Tiny Tower and Pocket Planes — being able to FIND what you’re looking for EASILY. You’re going to have to memorize and hunt-and-peck for the airports you’re trying to get to. An arrow indicator or at least some sort of noticeable color that grabs your attention instead of slowly pulsing white text would be a real help here. Why are they trying to make me memorize where all of the airports in the game are? It looks like there are a hundred airports, at least.

User interface can also be a little wonky at times. It can lack intuitiveness, and the biggest issue is trying to figure out what is the most profitable flight path for a particular plane. You can’t easily switch out cargo to another piece to figure out if you’re going to make more money from shipping one piece versus another if you’re at the airport screen – you have to go back to the airport, go back to the load out screen for your plane, and THEN back to the map screen. You can’t just go back to the load out screen and back to the map screen back and forth. I feel like there are a lot of unnecessary taps involved in trying to send a plane on a new order. It should be more refined in this aspect and instantly bring up certain screens once you tap certain items instead of having to tap the button that explicitly has them occur. Or allow you to go back to the immediately previous screen.

Stability of the app is a huge issue. The game freezes, lags, and even crashes. Tiny Tower had some lag issues when you had a lot of floors, understandably, since it was trying to display all of the info at the same time. In Pocket Planes, there is much less going on, so it makes no sense whey I have to wait a minute or force quit the game to get anything going when it decides to go haywire.

The currency system in this game might actually be more ridiculous than Tiny Tower’s. Tiny Tower pretty much only had one place to sink your Coins into – more floors. In Pocket Planes, there are at least ten things you can spend Coins on, and more things to sink your Bux into. Coins are used to buy new airports (which come with a bonus plane part) and upgrade airports/airplanes. You can also advertise airports to get more traffic in and out of it. Bux are used to make planes instantly arrive at their destination, buy more Coins, and buy more planes or parts. Once you have enough parts for a particular plane, you can spend more Bux to build that plane and put it into service. If you don’t have enough available airplane slots, you have to buy another with more Coins. Airplanes have three stats that you can upgrade with Bux: speed, range, and weight. Speed and range seem self-explanatory. Weight, however, can be a little bit ambiguous. Weight will improve the efficiency of the plane and make them cheaper to fly, which means more profit in the long run. All three stats can be upgraded three times.

Of course, Bux are the all-important currency in this “free-to-play” game. Bux allow you to pretty much excel in the game, and if you have too many you can exchange them into Coins. While Bux are the more valuable currency and you are “allowed” to buy them with real money, Coins are the most needed and you need gobs of them to do anything profound (we’re talking tens of thousands). There is also the cost of actually having to spend Coins to have your planes fly anywhere, so if you don’t have any Coins, your planes aren’t going anywhere. When a piece of cargo or a passenger is paying Bux to get to their destination, you are essentially paying Coins to get those Bux. Spending Coins in this game to make Coins doesn’t have the same problem Tiny Tower does – in this game you can actually influence how much profit you can make by your flight plan for each individual plane. In Tiny Tower, all Coin costs were essentially fixed and could have easily been taken into account so that you wouldn’t have to “spend Coins” to make Coins.

The prices of airports range from 1000 Coins to 75,000 Coins, or maybe less/more. I’m not really inclined to tap a ton of airports to figure out how much they cost. Airplane slot costs slowly increase from about 2000 Coins to infinity. There is a leveling system in place that restricts your maximum amount of airplane slots you can buy (as if you would be able to buy them all) and the amount of airports you can own. Gaining levels gives you extra Bux to use as you please. Once you get to the point where you don’t want to use your one or two passanger planes anymore, you can remove them from service, which go into a repository named the “Hangar.” If you want to put those planes back into service, it costs Bux to do so.

One of the redeeming factors of the game is that it allows you to “collect” all of the planes in the game in your Hangar. It is also pretty cool because they have fun planes like a Starship or Hot Air Balloon. Another cool aspect is that practically every screen allows you to instantly look up Help information in-game if you are sketchy on the details of a particular option. The Help icon in the top right is pretty helpful at times, and is nice to have.

Notifications are also a problem that carries over from Tiny Tower. This game constantly notifies you if you are going in and out of the game. Every time one of your planes land it buzzes to let you know. You can temper the notifications – there are two options: “First & Last Landing” and “All Landings.” You can only disable the notifications if you go into your iPhone’s settings — not something you can do in-game. If you are constantly playing the game you are going to get buzzed quite a bit, and it can become tiresome during those points. There needs to be some sort of way to group up notifications – such as every 30 minutes (or something you can customize) the game should at that point tell you there are “8 planes ready for directions” instead of resetting the “First & Last Landing” counter every time you go into it.

A lot of the art in the game is re-used from Tiny Tower. The art style is basically the same as its predecessor, on account of the recycling, so it meshes well with it. It is nice to look at, but not as upfront humorous as Tiny Tower, since most of the time you’re spending it on menu screens. The sound is also sort of annoying since it is ambient airplane burrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. And you can’t make it go away unless you go to an unoccupied airport. Recommend to turn it off, sirs and madams.

Pocket Planes may become as cumbersome as Tiny Tower does later in the game. As you expand airports, you might have a tough time remembering where anything is, and since there isn’t an easy way to figure out how much profit you can get from alternate choices, it may compound even further. You also shouldn’t get smart and try to start having airports randomly across the world – you will start getting requests to go to those airports you can’t reach with your main fleet, so it’s better to expand from your first airport out.

Playing the game for a longer period of time, you tend to hit a “wall” where you can’t buy any more airports or add any more planes to your roster. Gaining Coins is such a cumbersome task that it is hard to gain because your smaller planes only make so much in one delivery run. Expanding to the larger planes is also a difficult prospect, because the “class” of the plane allows it to only land at “bigger” airports. A Class 2 plane can only land in Class 2 or higher Airports, and so on. That means your larger planes won’t visit any Class 1 airport you bought and as a result, you won’t really be making money from a Class 2 plane until you have a lot of Coins. But you can’t make a lot of Coins with smaller planes… unless you grind forever. It is a vicious cycle, and sort of impedes any natural “progression” that you may have. The level restrictions are just an additional unneeded barrier since the thing that is really holding you back is the amount of Coins you earn.

I suppose recommending this game would be something I would do, but it’s not really all that fun, just more attention-inducing than anything else. You kind of wait around a lot and get tons of notifications. There’s a few “meta objectives” that consist of you delivering thousands of jobs and competing in some sort of social competition thing called Flight Crew where you can qualify for bonuses if you achieve a certain mark during an event, but they don’t really change the game that much – it just “inspires” you to play more.

Games like this tend to not be anything more than a time waster. There isn’t any skill involved with playing, and there isn’t any “fun” progression. The natural progression of the game is lassoed by the intent to make you buy Bux, and that is pretty sad. If it weren’t for the endless grind, stability of the app, and the recycled art, Pocket Planes might actually be fun.

Games, Game Reviews

Infinity Blade (iOS) Review

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Developer: Chair Entertainment Group | Publisher: Epic Games || Overall: 5.0/10

Hardware Used: iPhone 5 with iOS 6

Infinity Blade is a game in which you must vanquish a bum in his castle.

How does a bum get a castle? Hell if I know. But this guy who owns his five-room castle full of his sex-slave gimp-dressed “Champions” stand around and jerk it all day waiting for the next adventurous idiot (20 years apart from each) to go through the castle and kill them.

Infinity Blade is everything that is wrong with traditional gaming trying to make its way on mobile platforms. It’s an on-rails dungeon crawler with some point-and-click (or is it point-and-touch, now?) elements to it. It takes the feeling of freedom away from the player since you aren’t necessarily able to explore wherever you like and can only progress in a few paths that all ultimately end up in the same place. As opposed to a traditional console game where you’re able to move by yourself with ease, the designers decided it was best to not allow you to have the frustration of moving in 3D with only a touch screen and completely removed the ability to freely control your character. During battles, all you do is swipe your finger to hit the enemy with a sword, block, dodge, or use your overpowered specials (a stun and various magic spells) that can help you win a battle. Battles break up your combos whether you like it or not by inserting a five second cutscene at every third of the enemy’s health. The camera angle is also changed so that you become disoriented to limit your ability in fucking up the enemy again right off the bat.

The touch screen is no replacement for buttons, and this game makes it all too apparent that buttons are an evolution of necessity – it is easy to know when you push something it will react. However, when you swipe your hand across the screen or push a touch-screen-button the reliability of the action that you actually want to happen is around 85% rather than 99%. My biggest problem with the game is that the touch screen “buttons” in the game are not reactive to my lifeless hands. For some reason I always have trouble conducting enough electricity or heat or jazz in my hands to make something work on my touch screen. Don’t ask me why, it just happens. No matter how many times I smack my finger down on the touch screen to dodge, if it isn’t going to work, it isn’t going to work. The other annoying thing about Infinity Blade is instead of pushing a button and an analog stick to swipe; you have to move your whole hand, wrist, and arm to do one swipe. Essentially, you are playing Fruit Ninja on steroids, and I really wish there were buttons for this game because I’m going to get tendonitis in my shoulder if all games end up being like this.

But I suppose that buttons would make this game too easy as is. You can tell that the difficulty is adjusted to allow for reaction times in swiping. However, once you memorize the animations of each of your enemies (there are probably about 5 unique models in total, with different skins), you will breeze through most of the encounters. You can also use a healing spell, depending on which item you have equipped, which will basically help you cheat. Items are also an important part of the game, as when you master one of the hundreds of weapons and armor in the game, you gain a stat point to allocate. This aspect forces you to progress and not use the same items forever so that you can master more items and gain more stats, in addition to the stats you gain each level.

On the other side of Infinity Blade, you have a game that aspires to be something greater than it is. “Amazing” graphics, notwithstanding, you’ve got a unique experience with Infinity Blade that isn’t replicated very often in mobile gaming right now. I would align the graphics in the game to early-PlayStation 3 quality, but since the image is shrunk down to a 5 inch screen, that would be a bit too much credit. It’s probably more like late-PlayStation 2 graphics shrunk down with cooler lighting. However, the game will make you say “hey this looks pretty cool” …and then you get used to the graphics and it kind of doesn’t matter anymore. Except when you notice that the battery on your phone drains faster while playing than your phone can charge if you have the foresight to have it plugged in while playing.

So, now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about what makes the game even worse. Once I figured out the point of the game, I actually got sad. The overall, repeating, arc of the game is that you go in as this nameless adventurer guy, fight through battles until you get to the bum who is ridiculously powerful and kills you almost assuredly on your first encounter. Once you die, you see your adventurer’s son appear on the same ledge overlooking the castle that his father did 20 to 23 years earlier. Each tour through the castle and meeting your fateful demise is considered a “Bloodline.”

What this game tells you about the story is basically nothing. What it implies, though, is that there is society outside of the reach of the bum who owns a shitty castle. This society breeds new adventurers so that one day, a hundred or so years in the future, the bum will be killed. So, since these adventurers are somehow forced to father a son before leaving on their journey, he must be banging all of the women in the society to make sure that there is one son before he leaves, so that in twenty or so years, that fatherless child can go and die the same death his father did.

Thinking further about this “society,” you have to wonder about its structure. Is it matriarchal or patriarchal? My personal thought is that the women in this society are propagating this attitude of sending the son of this same Bloodline over and over to their death because they’re mad the bum bought up all the tampons at the general store for his Champions.

These women have deemed this particular Bloodline the only one that can go and fight the bum known as a “Deathless.” The Deathless guy sits on his chair eating chips and his Champions stand in the middle of rooms for twenty years at a time. He only ever gets out of his comfy throne to fight an adventurer who is idiotic enough to go and die by his blade. Pretty weird, if you ask me. Nothing is demonstrated as to the terrorizing the Deathless dude actually does to anyone else in the world, so I have to fill in the blanks. He just sits on his throne and watches Law & Order all the time. Leave the guy alone!

If this society’s only purpose is to destroy this Deathless guy, why hasn’t the Deathless guy got off his ass in the hundreds of years before and after you start playing the game and just fucking kill them? Who the fuck knows. He’s probably a lazy bum, that’s why I keep calling him that. I mean, he doesn’t even improve his living situation. There are literally no cool features of his castle — he doesn’t have a bowling alley, or a game room, or even a bathroom. What the hell are you paying your Champions for? Train them to be plumbers and masons instead of just how to use weapons only once every twenty years. They’ve got to be depressed being sanctioned to only a certain part of the castle and never being able to do anything fulfilling. Can’t he find a better castle? One where these stupid adventurer guys won’t bug him?

Once you are able to fight the Deathless guy and beat him to about a third of his health, he will proposition you to either join him or you can pick up your sword again and fight him to the death. If you join him, you just fight him again, so the game doesn’t really “let you” join him. If you end up actually killing the guy, the Deathless dude will say something inane about “other dangers” in the world being even worse than him. And as if that wasn’t a cop out enough, the adventurer dude is now alone in this stupid castle and has nothing better to do than snoop around. So he presses some weird console on his throne and all of a sudden a 3D Holographic map appears and some weird sci-fi music and other random weird shit happens. I have no idea what the fuck is going on in this game. What the fuck is the point of all of this? All you do is grind XP, master your weapons, gain stats, and swipe your sword over and over at the same five enemies, and then they throw in this mind-fuck for no good reason.

If ChAIR even bothered to put some sort of inkling of a story in this travesty of a game I wouldn’t feel like I was put out to pasture. What the hell is the point of half-assing this story and throwing in some random sci-fi shit that doesn’t belong just to give us a mind-blowing moment or whatever? Just so that they can get us pissing our pants in excitement for the next Infinity Blade game? Get out of here with that shit. The only reason I even downloaded this game to begin with was because it was free. If I paid 9 dollars or whatever it is for this game I would be fucking pissed off right now.

As if endlessly grinding XP and Gold wasn’t enough, they make the prices of this shit so astronomical they “allow” you to buy Gold in the game. 2.5 million Gold-things for 50 bucks or whatever? Doing more research about what you do in the game after you kill the level 50 God King Deathless bum, you are able to purchase the Infinity Blade for 500,000 gold. Using this blade, you can open three or four extra bosses who have levels in the hundreds. So, that’s one reason to keep grinding the game after you’ve “beaten” it.

Yeah, that sounds great. What a load of bullshit. This game sucks. I’m uninstalling it. Eventually.

Game Reviews, Games

Crazy Rings (iOS) Review

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Developer/Publisher: Cervo Media GmbH || Overall: 8.0/10

Hardware Used: iPhone 5 with iOS 6

Want to go on a Match-Three Safari full of deformed animals that are caged in some weird contraption called a “crazy ring?” Well, if that specific craving has arisen, Crazy Rings is for you. 101 stages full of fun and oddly not-very-funny humor. For some reason the game is listed in the store as “the funniest game ever” or something, but I have yet to even see a real joke or something funny. Maybe that’s the joke.

I guess it doesn’t matter. What there IS to like is probably what should be paid attention to, anyway. Through the “Campaign” mode, in which you presumably play through all 101 of the stages, you are trying to get as many points as possible and clear the Crazy Rings with as much efficiency and/or combo-making as possible. Once you complete a level, you gain up to three stars (you can earn zero, too) depending on how well you do in the level and progress to the next one.

The concept is not hard to grasp, nor is it really that difficult, at least until the point I’m at, which is Stage 25. The game can get a bit hectic, depending on the little things they throw in to make it harder/easier to play. There isn’t a whole lot of variety up until this point, but I’m not complaining since the art is nice to look at, and the game isn’t really that frustrating to play – it is also a stable application that doesn’t crash or have frequent bugs that I have encountered.

The essential control mechanic is to tap where you want to send one of your spherical animals, and in doing so, try to match them up with the others and try to make combos, like many other Match-Three games. What makes this game a little bit unique is that the crazy rings will rotate, expand, or travel around in a circle, so you will have to pay attention to those elements in order to not misplace any of your spherical lions, frogs, snakes, pigs, or other animals. You can also have multiple crazy rings which will also rely on the speed of each ring’s rotation if you want to match any animals with the outer rings, as they can all be rotating and expanding at the same time.

At a certain point, the game will begin to give you helpful one-time-use power-ups. One of them is a pork-chop-shaped meat thing that you can launch at the ring of animals, and they will all go chasing after it off-screen. This can be useful if you have two rings at the same time or if you just have a lot of random animals. Another power-up is a tranquilizer needle, which can slow down the ring that you shoot at, limiting its rotational speed or elastic rate. Later on, there is a Rhino that you can use to break through any obstacles, including rocks. I’m sure that they throw in different power-ups and obstacles every now-and-then to break up the monotony.  Obstacles, like the rocks, which act as a wall within a crazy ring can change your strategy in completing a level.

You aren’t able to save these particular power-ups, and you have to use them within about 10 seconds of their appearance, or lose the opportunity to use them. The only power-ups that you actually keep are Rocket Rings. Rocket Rings are basically things you can use to “cheat” and clear a level if you somehow get frustrated enough to use it. I am not entirely sure if Rocket Rings are acquirable in-game, but you are able to buy them. Doing so will also unlock all of the levels in the game without having to progress one-by-one — it is a package deal and I’m not sure if you are able to just keep buying Rocket Rings after your first purchase.

Considering the Rocket Rings aren’t very enticing to use, and you can unlock all of the levels by yourself anyway, I don’t know why you would WANT to buy this “package,” even if it is a very low price to do so (at the moment, $0.99). The game isn’t particularly annoying in trying to get you to buy anything or share anything with your friends, so that is a welcomed aspect. There are also no naggy notifications or stupid social/faux-multiplayer bloat features. What I enjoy about the game is that you are actually playing a game and not trying to show your friends how cool it is to not play a game.

The game itself is quite meaty, considering there are 101 levels, and once you get through all of those, you can re-play them and try to get three-stars or play what seems like an endless-play mode called “Zen Mode.” The rings probably get crazier and crazier (and difficult) as it goes along. The sound effects/ambient noises aren’t annoying, so they’re nice to play with if you require something to listen to, but you’re not missing much if your phone is on silent.

The game is not a bad bargain for “free.” If you like puzzle games, you will enjoy Crazy Rings, and while it may not be the most unique concept you’ve ever seen, it is still worth playing. It can get pretty hectic at times, but I have yet to encounter a level that I couldn’t pass on the first go. I’m sure that in the later levels it may become difficult enough where it may require a couple of tries, but in general, there isn’t much retrying.

Games, Game Reviews

Jetpack Joyride (iOS) Review

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Developer/Publisher: Halfbrick Studios || Overall: 7.0/10

Hardware Used: iPhone 5 with iOS 6

Jetpack Joyride feels like one of those games that are intentionally supposed to make you nostalgic for side-scrollers. In a sense, the way the game is actually played is almost like an old arcade game, pitting you against ridiculous challenges and timing that almost guarantees you will die – the question is when. And literally, that is the metric by which you “win” in Jetpack Joyride. You are trying to get as far as you can, running from left to right, to the farthest point possible before you are fried, blown up, or electrocuted to death. Avoid as many obstacles as possible, get a couple of power-ups, and collect coins. That’s pretty much it.

When you begin the game, you probably won’t get further than 200 meters or so. Then you’ll slowly progress to 400, 500, and then maybe 2000 meters. Eventually you might even get further, depending on how lucky you are. The only thing that is guaranteed, though, is that you will be attempting it over and over again. The distance you might end up is pushed just a bit further each time when buying enhancements or one-time boosts with Coins that you find during your repeated runs through the evil (or at least, nefarious) science lab you have decided to run endlessly through with your character.

Ah, yes, Coins. Considering you need thousands of coins to even get the smallest of upgrades, you will be playing a lot of runs just to be able to use them in any meaningful manner. BUT YOU CAN BUY THEM WITH REAL MONEY!!!! As if you didn’t see that coming, right? I don’t have much incentive to purchase anything in free to play games, but when something is as grindy as earning the coins in this game, it is definitely one of the biggest motivators to pulling out the credit card. You’re probably going to be spending a good too many hours just trying to collect enough coins to buy the next jetpack or whatever random gadget they included in the game for you to use to your benefit. I suppose it is nice that they at least have Coins in the game for you to collect, but the grind is practically endless. They appear in somewhat plentiful manner, yet they almost always require you to skillfully fly your jetpack in a formation to maximize your collection of the coins. The collision with the coins is fairly unforgiving, so you will have to really be accurate if you’re running through coins to get as many as you can, since you will be leaving a few behind. Sometimes you may even have to sacrifice yourself when your reaction time isn’t fast enough to avoid the next obstacle.

As you run further through the endless, randomized, corridors of this very large science lab thing, your character will begin to speed up. This increases the difficulty considerably, since you aren’t able to see what is coming up more than half a second before you almost hit it. When you come across a power-up, such as the Lil’ Stomper, Crazy Freakin Teleporter, or Gravity Suit, among others, you essentially gain a life before dying – if you are unable to avoid one of the coming obstacles, you forfeit your power-up and revert back to normal Barry Fries the Rocket Guy. The acquiring and destruction of your power up will also clear out any of the obstacles on the screen, so it gives you a fair chance to reset your bearings and be ready for the next obstacles ahead.

The humor of the game is probably what is most enjoyable. I like the terminology they use, like calling the Teleporter power up the “CRAZY FREAKIN TELEPORTER” or the huge mech robot with rocket boosters the “Lil’ Stomper.” The names of gadgets and types of rocket packs are also fun names. The Machine Gun jetpack, the first jetpack you get, shoots bullets underneath you and kills the scientist guys below you. The “DIY Jetpack” is a balloon, which I assume let’s you control just a little bit better than the Machine Gun Jetpack, but I’m not sure if these different jetpacks are more than just cosmetic upgrades. Other jetpacks do other funny things, like shoot bubbles or 1920’s 1000 dollar bills.

I suppose it would be beneficial to buy the in-game upgrades offered. There are quite a few gadgets to purchase, and you can’t get the next tier of gadgets without buying a certain amount of stuff from the lower tier. Of course, the grind becomes longer and longer each time. I am unsure what kind of variety this game can really offer since all that really seems to happen are randomized obstacles, randomized backgrounds, and not much traditional progression. You aren’t excelling to another level. You aren’t starting from a point further than the beginning unless you spend Coins on head starts. I’d even go so far as to say the game is engineered to make you fail a lot and make you feel you AREN’T progressing so that you are more inclined to spend money to get ahead.

Once you die, you are given a chance at bonuses based on how many Spin Tokens you gather during your run. The bonuses will give you another chance, more coins, bonus distance, or a free head start on your next run. The bonuses are random, since it is a slot machine, but since the Spin Tokens are plentiful enough, you’ll at least have one after each run. You can also cash-in your tokens for 50 coins each, which may be a particularly attractive offer if you don’t win a lot on the spins.

To break up the seeming monotony of the game, there are Missions to complete. They are “interesting” challenges such as finishing the game between the 500m and 600m mark (aka intentionally dying at that point), or going a certain distance in a vehicle, or collecting spin tokens in varying amounts, among other things. Completing missions awards you from one to three stars to gain levels, which require progressively more stars. I’m not entirely sure what the point of gaining levels is, except to gain the coin bonuses awarded for achieving the next level. However, you are allowed to spend coins to complete a mission so that you can get the next mission, so there is some weird disconnect here. You don’t really gain any benefits from gaining levels, so why are you trying to do it, and why would you ever spend coins to get fewer coins? It is fairly confusing. But then, I remember that they want you to spend money on coins, not give it to you in copious amounts, so I guess that’s why they let you spend coins to make fewer coins. It’s almost ingenious, really.

The experience as a whole is relatively stress-free. You can play a couple of runs and be done with it for the day. It doesn’t notify you to go back into the game to collect bonus coins or to do something inane for upkeep. In a sense, the game is almost more traditional in this way in that it doesn’t constantly nag you and beg for attention. It also relies on skillful controls, which is rare to see in a touch-based game, especially considering touch-based controls are anything but accurate most of the time. Relying on the skill of the player is also a boon to this game since the controls do not inhibit being able to control the character as they are binary and very responsive. It doesn’t rely on any touch-screen directional pad – you either propel yourself up or let yourself fall down.

However, I wouldn’t say that the game is original or even very exciting. It doesn’t really seem like it’s trying to do anything other than provide a single, difficult challenge, and force you to grind coins for years. If there were actual levels or some other kind of quantifiable progression that allowed you to feel like you were accomplishing something overall, the game would be something great. It definitely has a foundation for good gameplay, good art, doesn’t have any noticeable bugs, and the sound design is pretty much ridiculous in and of itself. I feel a game like this isn’t being simple for simplicity’s sake; it’s being simple because it is lazy, and the intentions of the game design are not toward the experience of the user, but towards people spending money so they can bypass the monotony of dying over and over.

There are a couple of those stupid social features, like leaderboards, and “tweeting your progress.” I can’t believe people would ever want to tweet that they went 1,979 meters. I can’t believe anyone even has another friend that plays this game that they added as a friend in the iOS Game Center thing. Why these developers waste their time with these absolutely terrible features is beyond me.

Games, Game Reviews

Words with Friends (iOS) Review

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Developer: Zynga With Friends Studio | Publisher: Zynga Games || Overall: 7.0/10

Hardware Used: iPhone 5 with iOS 6 / LG Ally with Android 2.1 (past experience, not used in basis for review)

Reviewing a game like Words With Friends is basically just reviewing a game like Scrabble. It’s sort of pointless as long as the rules are adhered to and aren’t taken in some extreme manner. The point of reviewing Words With Friends comes with taking a look at the feature set, its ease of use, and user experience, and little to nothing with the gameplay itself.

The actual meat of the game almost has nothing to do with the actual purpose of playing the game, oddly enough. The point of Words With Friends seemingly is to play Scrabble with your friends on a pace that may take days or weeks, instead of straight through. Given the gift of technology, there is now a higher probability you will actually get to finish a full game of Scrabble. It’s a lot easier to convince your friends to play a couple minutes a day than it is to invite them over to your house to play an hour-long (or more?) board game. So, if you actually enjoy playing Scrabble, this game is right up your alley.

It would literally be impossible to talk about this game without talking about Scrabble. I’ve already mentioned it 5 times, and that’s basically what the main problem with this game is. It’s not very original, but at the same time it doesn’t really have to be. When it comes to Words With Friends, the game pretty much mirrors all of the rules – but there are no errors, since it calculates all of the points for you, easily, and tallies them up. It also makes sure that all of the words you are using are actually words you can use. Inviting random friends on your Facebook is pretty easy, and it shows you who plays and when they last played – so you can play with last week’s hookup or even your mom, and use as many provocative (yet, legal) words as you can in games with them. There is also an option to play a randomly matched player — so it’s not all that hard to find someone to play with, although random matches won’t seem to be as motivated to play with you… at least in my experience. And in the rare instance you are physically with someone who you want to play Words With Friends with, there is a local multiplayer mode where you can play and pass your phone after each turn, which is a nice, if seemingly antiquated in today’s environment, option to have.

Most of the game is rooted in convenience, when it comes down to it. You’re not getting any particular feature that is exciting or cool or helps provide some sort of meta-game experience. I honestly think some sort of score-counter between two players for games won would do a great amount of good for the game – if you play hundreds of games with one person, at least you’re going to see something from all of those matches and know who is usually winning, etc. I’m not asking for a page of statistics, but it shouldn’t be that hard to implement a counter.

The game is free, and with being free comes lots of advertisements. They’re not particularly intrusive, since they will appear typically after one to two plays. You can also upgrade to an ad-free version for 3 or 4 bucks, which might be worth it if you play a lot. Obviously, this is Zynga’s end game when it comes to Words With Friends: Making money off of ad impressions and clicks. They are pretty much painless, though you do have to actively move past them when they appear, sans any bugs that might force you to quit and restart the app (which may happen quite often).

What really inhibits this game are the random bugs you will get. I’m currently playing this on iOS, but started with the Android version. For two years, it was absolutely the most terrible piece of shit I have ever seen. It would crash over and over and when my Android finally ran out of space to keep any apps on it, out went Words With Friends until a year later when I finally got an iPhone (that had more than 512 mb to store stuff). So, why do I bring up the Android version in a review for the iOS version? Because the iOS version is not without its own bugs, either, and shows a pattern of carelessness. While the game is demonstrably more enjoyable to play when it’s stable, there are occasional random crashes, and advertisements that fail to load which produce nothing but a white screen which make you force quit the program to remedy. I have also had problems with letters being frozen and not moving onto the board. Network connectivity issues can also cripple the game temporarily – whether it is a problem with your phone’s connection or not. A company like Zynga, which relies on nothing but its games, should be squashing these bugs within weeks, not months or years. I can’t imagine they aren’t losing some sort of revenue from these bugs.

The occasional interaction with people you may or may not talk to a whole lot is probably the biggest benefit of the game. I personally enjoy playing with people I actually call my friends, because there’s some sort of interaction going on, whether or not it’s real life or meaningful. I suppose that is the main appeal of the game itself, and seeing how well you can play against them. It’s also great when there’s some random word that they make that might have some sort of inside meaning or something that is completely off-base that catches you off-guard. My most recent gaffe was playing a game in which “Krauts” was an accepted word. In another game, I played “Shit” and got a few points, as well. The rules say they don’t allow derogative words or racial slurs, so I’m not sure how they went through, but it’s still fun, nonetheless. It should also be noted that this game’s social features are actually useful and there aren’t really any stupid features like “post your word on Facebook” or some other dumb shit you might see in some other game as a cheap way to get you to advertise for them.

Words With Friends is your barebones convenience package for Scrabble. It’s an enjoyable game that you can play with your friends, but little more than that is what is going to be going on. There are no interesting game modes and no features that string together your multiple games into some sort of a career or competition with particular friends. Some might appreciate the simplicity of “just Scrabble” but there is just a little that could have gone into it that could have kept that simplicity while adding something interesting to the mix. I wouldn’t mind seeing some sort of 3-or-4 player modes implemented or inviting people to tournaments. But since this game doesn’t make a habit of adding features, that is about impossible to ever see from Zynga, who typically like to ride coattails.

Game Reviews, Games

Tiny Tower (iOS) Review

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Developer/Publisher: NimbleBit LLC || Overall: 6.0/10

Hardware Used: iPhone 5 with iOS 6

Tiny Tower is one of those games that takes a relatively simple concept and artificially inflates the time it takes to do anything to make you feel like spending money to get ahead.  But that’s every game nowadays on an iOS or Android platform, and its easy to get riled up about business aspects of any of these “free to play, pay to win” games.  So, what does Tiny Tower offer that you might not occasionally see in other games?  Well, I can’t say that there’s much that I really “enjoy” about the game except for maybe two things: the art style and the humor.  It’s nice to say that in this case, Tiny Tower actually tries to go “against” the curb, looking cartoony or “old” (read: 8-bit) and get away with it.  Truth be told, the art style mixed with the humor therein is more what makes this game enjoyable than anything else.

In Tiny Tower, the basic goal of the game is to add more floors to your tower.  Your tower floors can be residential or a random store within six individual categories.  The people who live in your tower work in your tower.  These little slave people bend to your will and will work and live wherever you tell them to.  And if you don’t like their face or their skills, you can evict them.  Ah, yes, Tiny Tower is also probably making a social commentary on the downturn of the economy with people having “dream jobs” of working in a donut shop or a coffee house, but I digress — that is probably part of the humor of the game and also adds an element of difficulty in trying to match your “Bitizens” (whom live in your tower) to work and be happy.  Oh, and they also pay you rent.  It’s indentured servitude at its finest, and they can wear a sheet to look like a ghost while doing it all.

Tiny Tower is an okay game.  It isn’t exactly the most fun that I’ve ever had with my spangly-dangly iPhone, and I can’t imagine I’d be playing this game for very long because of it.  I think what actually ticks me off about the game more than anything is that there is a lot of micromanaging involved.  Each business on your floor has 3 items it can sell, and each take a certain amount of time to “re-stock.”  Once re-stocked, the game notifies you the item is ready to be stocked, and doesn’t start selling until you go back into the game to click it and then get back out.  I thought I was paying my little slaves to do that for me, why do I have to get notifications every 3 seconds to do something new?  I thought this game was supposed to be leisurely fun, not harassing me to pay attention to it like a GigaPet or Tomagatchi!  Not only do I have to do that, but I have to monitor all of the floors individually by clicking on them and figuring out which items will become out of stock soon.  There isn’t an easy way to just view all of the possible re-stocking actions I can do and decide from there — I have to individually click 6 different floors to see what’s up and if I don’t, I run the risk of losing potential money.  What happens when I get to 30 or 40 floors?  Who do they think they’re kidding with this?

Reeling it back a little bit, there is basically one goal to the game, and that is to add more floors for you to manage.  To accomplish this, the game gives you two currencies.  You know that when there are “two currencies” in a game, one is the one you actually want (Coins), and the other is the one that they want you to buy with real money (Towerbux) so that you can save “time” and actually progress in the game to the point of madness before you have your third coronary.  Towerbux can be used to buy more coins, or pay off some of your Bitizens to do stuff faster.  Great, so why couldn’t I do that with coins?  OH, that’s because Towerbux cost like 3 to 9 cents each (depending on the bulk size) and THEN you can convert them into coins, but you can’t seem to do it the other way around.   Tiny Tower allows for a little leniency in this regard, however, since there are actually ways to earn Towerbux INSIDE the game and as a result the game is balanced around using Towerbux to at least a certain extent.  It makes Towerbux not seem as useless as its cousins in other games, like BlowJobBux, or whatever they’re called in other games, since you actually get to use them.  If a game were giving out free Blow Jobs, would you not partake?

Coins are the real end-game, however, and the more coins you get the more floors you can add to get more coins for the whole process.  Towerbux essentially help you earn more coins at a faster rate, and depending on if your math skills are any good, you have to figure out what the best way to use your Towerbux actually will be.  My general tactic seems to be using it for the “3rd tier” items for whatever has the most stock that can sell (since they sell for 3 coins each, as opposed to the lower tiers which are 1 and 2 respectively).  The amount of stock that an item can maintain depends on who works there, which also relies on your ability to count from 0 to 9 and being able to assign people to the right color based on those numbers.  Sometimes Bitizens will be useless in your situation, so you can evict them and hope for a better idiot to replace the guy who is wearing last year’s purple hat.  Or hope that you’ll get an Asian-looking lady for your Day Spa so that you can start selling Happy Endings.

There isn’t ALWAYS something to do in the game, though.  So, during those times where you’re just trying to wait for more measly minutes of your life to pass you by while you wait for another event to happen in Tiny Tower, you can act like an elevator attendant and work for tips.  Depending on what floor they ask you to take them to, you’ll get twice the amount of coins there.  However, you will occasionally get one Towerbux instead and boy howdy, it’s time to go to the strip bar!  If you know what I mean… it’s on the 69th floor and the 3rd tier of stock to sell is Backroom Dances, so you can tell them to “Hurry!” and get some more Backroom Dances in stock so that people can start buying them at 3 coins each so you can repeat the whole process again and be depressed that there is absolutely nothing better to do with your time than be a slave to this game.

Not only do you have to wait anywhere from 10 minutes to 3 (or more?) hours for things to restock, but you have to use coins to pay for the restocking so that you can earn more coins.  It sort of doesn’t make sense to me when you look at it from a gameplay standpoint, even if it makes sense in a real life standpoint.  But this game is not real life, it is a game.  They should just make us earn less coins per stock or reduce the amount of stock you gain per restock.  It is sort of a weird, needless, cyclical thing going on and perhaps it is some sort of fail safe on their end so that if you end up spending all your coins and somehow can’t afford to restock anything you have to sit there and waste an hour elevating people to parts of the tower that are closed because they can’t sell them anything — or buy Towerbux so that you can exchange them for Coins!!  AHA!  I found out their little scheme.  But, for now, I’m just going to chalk that up to another one of those “meaningless” micromanaging things they thought was necessary to include in this game, since there’s a lot of those already.  Once you further progress in the game, you are also able to fulfill missions and get Towerbux for them.  There are about 50 of them, and it probably isn’t even worth doing for the return you get.

So, what makes me come back to this game?  Honestly, not much.  The only idle interest I have in pursuing the game any further is to see how ridiculous the micromanagement of all of your stores can get once you add a lot of floors to your tower.  I’ve played the game for approximately two days and I already find it taxing on my sanity.  Every three minutes I feel like I have to go back to the game and do “something” before I put it down and wait another three minutes to do “something” again.  The game is stable and has some seemingly useless social aspects in which you can see what towers your friends have or whatever, but that interests me not in the slightest.  How about spending more time on a single-player experience and less with these meaningless faux-multiplayer features?

This game certainly didn’t help my terrible cough, that’s for sure.

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Post-mortem:

Since I wrote the review, I ended up getting to the point at which I had 40 floors in my Tower.  The more floors you added, it seemed like the game began to become less stable and you would get random crashes now and then.  They also updated the game for “Valentine’s Day” a week before February even rolled around, and made everything an obnoxious pink.

I finally decided enough was enough and I uninstalled the game on February 3rd.  I feel like a weight was lifted off my shoulders, and I probably should have done it much earlier.  This is an absolutely terrible game, and I would probably re-rate it at about 3.0/10 based on playing it for a long time (3 weeks straight?).  I can only imagine what floor that poor schmucks out there who actually enjoy this game are at, and how much time per day they spend restocking and shuffling Bitizens.

Game Reviews, Games

Slots – Pharaoh’s Way (iOS) Review

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Developer/Publisher: Cervo Media GmbH || Overall: 9.0/10

Hardware Used: iPhone 5 with iOS 6

Slots are one of your basic casino stereotypes.  Old ladies clutching their purses, chasing the 20 dollars they get from their nickel bet…  It’s not that exciting to think about.  In fact, it’s probably a bit comical.

Video slots are much different, though, and appeal to a new generation that is very technologically and entertainment-focused.  Video slots open up a whole new realm of possibilities such as bonus games, screwing the gambler through incorrect math programming, and enchanting the player with even more lights and sounds than mechanical slots typically offered.  Themes also work a lot better with video slots.  Star Trek slots, anyone?  Who wouldn’t want Shatner’s soothing frequencies spurted every time you lost a spin?

Slots – Pharaoh’s Way is basically going to be the best video slots fix you’re going to get for free or otherwise.  I personally downloaded this on iOS 6 with an iPhone 5 and have become enamored with the fake gambling experience it provides.  If the title of the game wasn’t obvious enough, it is an Ancient Egypt-themed slots game.

The game contains all of the things that make actual video slots fun and exciting to play.  Fast plays, smooth animation, high quality art that fits in with the theme, and lots of annoying noises.  The first thing I did was turn off the audio, of course.

It should be obvious that if you don’t like the concept of video slots, this game is probably not for you.  I would say that slots in general do not appeal to me, at least until I played video slots a couple of years ago.  Video slots, to me, provide more “gameplay” opportunities when it comes to bonus games – and boy are they (usually) exciting.  Slots – Pharaoh’s Way replicates the exciting feeling of normal video slots by providing unique bonus games (depending on the slot game you are playing) and free spins.

If you break down the goal of the game to its very basic element, you are doing one thing: Earning Diamonds.  These Diamonds are used in grinding levels to unlock more slots to play.  Diamonds are earned through normal slot play and each progressive level has a substantial percentage more to get to the next level, which promotes playing more/upping your bet to get further along.  Playing straight through, the feeling you are grinding out levels doesn’t settle in until about level 13 or so, and depending on how many Credits (the game’s currency) you have, it is fairly influencing to up your bet and earn Diamonds at a faster, even reckless, pace.

Your most reliable source of Diamonds comes from your initial bet at a rate of x2 what your bet is.  If you’re betting 10 Credits per slot play, you gain 20 Diamonds, if you bet 100, you get 200, etc.  More often than not, at least one of the spaces on your slot board will be bonus Diamonds which also increase at a rate of x20 what you are betting.  In this case, you gain 1000 bonus Diamonds for a 50 Credit bet, and so on.  That’s only if you hit bonus Diamonds in a space, and that can sometimes prevent you from winning more Credits depending on its placement.

When your next level is about 150,000 diamonds away (at level 21) you’re almost going to be hoping for the bonus Diamonds more than anything else you could get.  Essentially, when you are using Credits to win more Credits, what you are actually doing is using Credits to get more Diamonds, and being as efficient as possible in earning Diamonds becomes the real intent.  Earning Credits only allows you to have a chance of earning more Diamonds.  There are also various rewards and bet amounts unlocked for each progressive level, which can supplement your Credit gain/usage.

What I began to realize is that earning Credits is paltry compared to getting Diamonds, and in the end Credits almost mean nothing as the game forces you to keep parity with your growing Credit pool and level by upping your bet to earn more Diamonds at a higher rate.  No matter how many Credits you have, you will practically always have the “same” amount of spins you started out with as the winnings all scale linearly.  The only thing that increases exponentially is the barrier to level up.

Sure, you could play for 1 credit each bet while you have 3,000 sitting in your pool, but what the hell is the point when there’s absolutely NOTHING else to do with said Credits other than to earn Diamonds with them?  In a sense, it combats the inflation that the developers no doubt predicted would happen with Credits, and unless you want to be stuck at the level 20 range for the rest of your life and never unlock another slot, you’re going to be upping your bet.

My personal strategy for betting with Credits has been to always have “100” spins available to me before I go bankrupt.  If I fall below the 1,000 Credit mark, I would lower my bet to 10 Credits so that I could work my way back up to a comfortable level for my currently-comfortable bet of 50 Credits.  However, when I get up to 5,000 Credits I’m sure I’ll at least up it to 100 or 250 Credits.

Design-wise, all of this makes sense.  When you actually play it, however, you begin to beg for variety.  Playing the slots game proper is good enough, and every time you win a bet, you get the option to play a simple card game where you can guess the color or suit of the card and gain twice or four times what you won in the slot game.  This bonus game is fun for a while, but ends up being less enticing as the stakes get higher, since it really is not in your favor, and doesn’t even net you any Diamonds directly.  You’ll probably not want to waste time playing it at all after a while, regardless of the fact that the card game has better odds than the actual slots game at the end of the day.

New slots open every 10 levels with new artwork, a different bonus game, different payouts, and slightly different rules/spaces.  For example, the second slot is only 3 reels, but every consecutive 3-way match is counted.  On the 5 reel slots, which are the first and third slots, you have 25 to 50 lines in many different random combinations that are harder to predict when you win.  The idea is that the more progressed slot has the best payouts, but you might visit the previous ones to get a change of scenery every now and then.

Each slot has its own bonus game which throws in a little variety every now and then, but they are barely rewarding.  One of the bonus games named River of Luck relies on your… “luck” to guess whether or not the next number in a sequence of numbers will be higher or lower.  If you know anything about statistics, it might be an easy decision process, but it certainly does take a long time to get through the game, not to mention the payouts are almost laughable for the amount of time you spend on it until you guess about 8 times in a row correctly (which almost never happens).  The bonus games don’t typically hit often either, which adds to the disappointment.  The monotony of constantly pressing the “spin” button can be subsided with the AutoPlay option, but then it REALLY feels like you’re doing nothing, so I use it sparingly — only when I’m jerking it.  Other bonus games are pretty simple, like “finding a match” and clicking cat idols until you click two of the wrong ones.  Meh.

I think there is a missed opportunity here with the way the game is made as far as bonuses go.  If they made some mechanic for spending a certain amount of Credits and being able to play a bonus game that awarded Credits, Diamonds, or even both outside of the random chance of the Slot games, it would be a lot more fun to play for long sessions.  Even if they were rehashed bonus games that you already unlocked for the slots you are playing, it would be a step in the right direction.  As it is, you simply plug away and hope that you get to the next level range before the turn (pun!) of the century.  But I suppose that’s where buying Credits might alleviate this frustrating aspect of the grind.

Every 4 hours you are able to collect free bonus Credits.  When the four hours are up your phone will light up and notify you that you are able to collect bonus Credits, thus allowing for the timer to restart.  Your bonus will increase the more levels you gain, but in the end you’ll probably burn through it all in about a couple of spins regardless of how much you actually get, since your normal bet will keep increasing along with the bonus.  If you are really enthralled with the experience, you can always buy more Credits.  The option to buy Credits isn’t terrible, but you come to think about the philosophy behind a game like this.  By no means is Slots – Pharaoh’s Way a major offender of the “Free2Play” format as you can get by just fine without ever paying one red cent to get ahead.  At some point, though, you’ll need to up your bets considerably to match the teetering-on-the-insane Diamond grind.

Taking a long, hard look at business practices for one throwaway game might be a waste of energy, but this isn’t the only game with this model.  “Free2Play” games create unique products that may not have otherwise been available, and I know that I wouldn’t be playing this game at all if I had to pay anything to play it.  With so many options for games nowadays, getting someone to even spend time with your game is particularly valuable when you can make more money than you ever could per player by creating the capability to spend absurd amounts on it on the back end.

At the end of the day, Slots – Pharaoh’s Way is what it is, regardless of the philosophy involved.  Having a four page review on what is “simply” a slots game is probably overdoing it but as soon as I started playing I knew I had a lot to say about it.  The game sets out to do what it does with almost perfect execution, and the only glaring flaw is that the game lacks variety and more of a meta-game.  I don’t only want to progress, but I want to be able to play a random cool game every hundred spins so I can be excited to do another hundred spins to play that quick, fun mini-game without taking too much focus off the slots game itself.  It would be a detriment to the point of the game to have a whole suite of mini-games that are always accessible – but there is a happy medium that should be attained.  Otherwise, all you’re “doing” is grinding the Diamond counter, and not playing a game.  It is “drop-in-a-bucket” gameplay at an extreme.

From what I gather, this game is actually updated every couple of weeks to add more slots and adjust payout balance or math errors.  I’m not sure how engaging this is for people who just start out the game, since it appears you have to grind at least 50 levels before you even get to a “new world” which may or may not be available at this point.  To know the game is supported is nice, however.  But it would do wonders for the game if it had some sort of “news” in the game to keep people up to date with what’s going on.

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