Posts by tag: review
Quick Review: Emilly in Darkness – Dive into an Eerie Adventure
I’m not scared of the dark. I mostly sleep with the lights turned off. Horror stories, on the other hand, give me creeps. Good thing, Emilly in Darkness is not a horror story. This Android game is an old-school, top-down action-adventure title in which you control a female character named Emilly. The story starts when she wakes up in a shady forest and was mysteriously shot by an unknown killer. Luckily, she’s still alive. She finds herself in a purgatory-type of environment where she faces demons, ghosts, skeletons, etc. Your goal is to help Emilly find the answer by navigating her dark world – literally – as you only have a cone of light as your guide. Find keys and get out of the labyrinth!
Drop 7 – Worth Dropping A Few Bucks On
At first glance, Drop 7 would appear to be just another tile-matching game. While this puzzler does involve placing tiles in such a way that it and others might disappear, it is completely set apart from the large crowd of lookalikes. Whether you like the somewhat mindless fun matching 3 or not, the things that make this game so unique might just win you over.
Originally developed by Area/Code Entertainment, the Drop 7 now carries the Zynga brand name along with the team that created it. Unlike other titles stamped with that little red dog, this one isn’t hampered by microtransactions or unnecessary social hooks. It’s three bucks, which seems steep for such a straight-forward puzzle game with so little flair, but the price of admission is worth it, if you like a good challenge
Demanding much more of your brain than most of it’s kin, the game asks players to drop number numbered circles onto a grid, one at a time, attempting to place the tile in a spot where either the row or the column it lands in will then have the number of tiles in it that matches the one in the bubble. For instance, if you’re given a four, you’ll want to try and drop it in a place where it can land fourth from the bottom of the screen or touch a group of only three sequential tiles of any sort in the same horizontal line. As difficult as Drop 7 is to explain, it’s far more difficult to master.
Quick Review: Active Soccer – Kick, Pray in this Scrappy Football Game
I’m not a fan of soccer even though the Philippine Azkals are pretty popular around here. That’s why I had second thoughts when I saw Active Soccer in the Top 25 New Paid section of the Play Store. This Android game from The Fox Software boasts the first online cross platform football game and could be likened to Sensible Soccer.
Blitz Brigade – Locked and Loaded Multiplayer FPS Action
Gameloft is no stranger to First-Person Shooter (FPS) games. I’m sure you are familiar with Near Orbit Vanguard Alliance (N.O.V.A.) 3 and Modern Combat series. This time, you have to choose sides, either Axis or Allied forces, in their new Android game, Blitz Brigade, an ultimate multiplayer FPS face-off that seems to pay homage to Team Fortress.
Before diving in the action immediately, it is best advised to work on your skills in Training Missions. It has 120 action-packed missions which allow you to master different skills. You could also navigate a helicopter and fire off enemies on the ground. Further, you could even control a tank and flatten your opponents.
Quick Review: Flick Golf Free – Drives Short, Misses the Pin
Full Fat released the new and improved free to play version of their smashing hit, Flick Golf. This Android game has the same tagline of “Golf. Reinvented.” Unfortunately, I believe it’s a little half-baked. The proclamation of having reinvented golf when you just have to drive the ball close to the hole is not reinvention, IMHO.
Anyway, Flick Golf Free is an under par golf game that features incredibly responsive controls. Aside from not having to select clubs or worry which type of shot you should play, there is no more typical swing meter or power bar as you just have to swipe to drive the ball. You also have the ability to add spin on the ball up to its third bounce just by simply swiping to your preferred direction. It is undeniably creative and adds a nice touch. Though this Android game includes pins, greens, flags, bunkers, water, sands, clubs and balls, it does not present a total golf experience. Each hole has a par of one and you score points when you hit the ball inside a radius within the pin. Sink a hole-in-one and you get bonus points and additional time.
Baseball Hero – Strikes Out on Three Pitches
I have been a fan of baseball ever since I was a kid. Fell head over heels with St. Louis Cardinals’ brand of baseball. Followed the game through the internet and I have been fond of the players from Mark McGwire and Darryl Kile to Albert Pujols and Chris Carpenter. I once wore number 57 in one of the basketball summer leagues here in our village as a tribute to Kile who died that year. I also played various baseball video games from text-based simulation on the desktop (Out of the Park Baseball) or via console (MLB: The Show). That’s why I was happy to see a baseball game – Baseball Hero – on the Top New Free section on Google’s Play Store. That cloud nine feeling easily faded as soon as I play the Android game.
Baseball Hero features 3 distinct game modes; quick play, career and practice. The quick play mode lives up to its name as it allows you to play a quick three innings without having to worry about your roster. This could also serve as your guide on how to use the controls. During career mode, you’ll also play the same number of innings. After each game, you’ll get coins depending on the result on the field. Get the W and you’ll collect more in-game currencies. You can use the coins to increase your team’s abilities like power, contact and speed. It can also be used to avail of various boosts in your next game like upgrade the contact, speed or power, increase the likelihood of Quick Time Events (QTE), add more chance of hitting in the game, score one more point for hitting a homerun and a coin doubler. Finally, in practice mode you could run-through hitting drills to improve your timing.
Leviathan Warships: Take A Good Hard Look at this MotherF@!*ing Boat!
War drives innovation. For all the hardship, blood, and horrors of war, the silver lining for humanity has been the innovation and the progress it has, for better or worse, provided technologically. So what happens when you take thousands of gamers across four platforms, give them tools to innovate and then set them loose on each other in turn based naval warfare? Leviathan: Warships is what happens.
Strategy games are a dime a dozen on the Android platform. Everything from real time strategy games to reverse tower defense games to RPGs have been done seemingly hundreds of times on the mobile platform. That is why it is a pleasure to find a strategy game on Android that is as refreshingly unique, deep and balanced as Leviathan: Warships is.
It has been a while since I have been as obsessed with a game as I became with Leviathan: Warships over the past few weeks. While it does include a short single player campaign, the real fun in Leviathan comes from jumping online and battling friends or strangers. The amount of shit talking that has been going on between me and my friends these past few days has hit a level I haven’t seen since the long nights of Starcraft and Battle.net.
Creating a completely Interactive and then jumping online with it and either winning or losing would cause me either great shame or pride that few games can match. Its not just that I won or lost, its my creation, the thing I spent hours perfecting, beating or getting beat by something someone else spent hours perfecting themselves. When someone out flanked me and destroyed my flagship before I even got a chance to implement my strategy, I felt as dumb as Alonso Perez Guzman in 1588 (look it up kids!). When things went according to plan, on the other hand, I felt like Chester Nimitz after the battle of Midway. custom fleet using the very robust tools provided by developer Paradox
Plague Inc. – Symptoms Include Fixation, Frustration, and a Whole Lot of Fun
For a while there, I couldn’t put Plague Inc. down. I was having absolutely too much fun watching the world burn. It sounds heartless, maybe even evil, but that’s what this game is. You start with just the seed of a sickness, which slowly spreads on its own, and mutate that germ until those it affects aren’t just coughing, but coughing up blood. The only way to win is to completely wipe out the world, leaving the virus the victor. If anyone lives at all, even a pair of people to repopulate the earth, you, the plague, are defeated. This difficult win state both makes and breaks the game.
Tap these little, blue pop-ups to keep those meddling humans from making a cure.
Quick Review: Daddy Was a Thief – Big Daddy Robs Banks Then Your Time
After being fired from work, Daddy planned to rob a bank to provide for his family. Help him navigate down the building to escape by smashing various obstacles like floors, walls, TVs, refrigerators, washing machine and other furniture. This Android game is an arcade, high-score chaser that you could just pick-up-and-play with tons of achievements to earn. Your goal is to gain as much coins as you can without getting caught as the police are just waiting below. Some has baton while certain forces have guns. Look out for the old lady, bullet-firing turret which turns you to the size of your baby and the missiles darting from either side. If the missile hit you, the game is over as well.
Riptide GP: Ripping and Roaring Through the Seas is Not as Fun Alone.
Racing games need multiplayer. Ever since the original Mario Kart on the SNES, multiplayer has been an absolute requirement for any game that includes a start line, finish line and some sort of motorized vehicle. That is why it is such a shame to see a game that has so much going for it, like Riptide GP, throw it all away by completely ignoring the most crucial game mode for its genre.
First, what Riptide GP does have going for it, which is a lot. It is the best 3D jet ski game currently available on the Google Play Marketplace. Partially because it is the only 3D jet ski game on Google Play, but also because everything about the game, from the graphics to the water effects to the level design to the sense of speed is extremely solid. All of the elements needed for a great racing game are here.
Furthermore, by the nature of racing on water, this is the first racing game I have played where I found the tilt controls to be tolerable, and the game was still a lot of fun without physical controls. Less precision is needed when controlling a jet ski going over wakes than a car drifting through streets and it felt a lot more natural making a character lean on a jet ski by tilting the device than it does trying to simulate driving a car.
