Mobile game reviews

TECHLIFE’S TEAM REVIEWS THE LATEST GAMES FOR ANDROID & iOS SMARTPHONES & TABLETS.

Rise of Kingdoms POCKET CONQUEST. Free with IAP

ONE OF THE most crowded game genres on the App stores involves city building and conquest – put a farm here, a quarry there, wait an hour and then come back to collect your spoils. In many cases, most of these games are themed but generally stick to the same sort of style – a restricted map, limited team dynamics, and not a lot of actual strategy. In many cases, Rise of Kingdoms follows much of this playbook, but takes a much different tack in how it manages the strategy element and conquest.

So, while you are still building your city, developing units, farming resources and levelling up your power numbers, there is an endgame that relies heavily on the alliance you join and the strategies your team makes to win. There are milestones that appear as the Kingdom, (the world map) gradually populates with players and develops; these milestones are based on both your alliance’s ability to complete certain tasks and expand territory using flags and buildings built by individual players as a group. There’s also a fun historical element based around real world leaders and military commanders that provide individual benefits based on their context.

As your alliance gets larger and stronger and space becomes limited, the strategies change and require careful diplomatic discussions between other alliances. Inevitably wars will break out and managing both your units’ positions and those of your alliance will determine how successful you will be in the end. Thankfully, the game is fair when it comes to monetisation, and while it does ask, there isn’t a need to spend any money. The game is reasonably generous and prioritises participation over simply logging in, tying much of the rewards to meeting both individual and alliance tasks as well as fighting larger bosses.

That said, for those looking for a light experience, Rise of Kingdoms does expect a higher than usual time commitment for most games. While most buildings can take hours to complete, much of the team and strategy components demand quite a lot from you, leading to almost constant notifications (that you can customise quite granularly based on how much you want to participate).

Rival Stars: Horse Racing RAISE AND RACE A HORSE EMPIRE. Free with IAP

IF YOU’VE EVER fancied yourself a jockey or feel like you’d be great at fielding and training horses for the racing circuit, Rival Stars: Horse Racing may be the thing that keeps you coming back to your phone. The game covers everything – from the breeding and raising of animals to training and competition in a wide range of races on different surfaces, weather and difficulty. Each horse is bred with different skills, based around speed, stamina, surface preference and more.

Much of the active component of the game is the racing, which is genuinely quite fun and requires careful management of stamina, placement and pacing. The animations are fantastic and even better is the live commentary that runs through every race, keeping track of the placement of all horses and using the correct names and trajectory of how they are moving through the pack. While races are based on “ghosts” (the game stores times of other races and you compete against those times) it doesn’t affect the competitive elements of the game, but it would be a good improvement to add live racing at a later stage.

Breeding horses keeps those histories in mind and thus you can breed your own line of champions. You can also customise the jockey with uniforms, silks and helmets, as well as other custom benefits for in-game money.

Godzilla: Defence Force IDLE BATTLES WITH A DIFFERENCE. Free with IAP

THERE’S SOMETHING ALMOST ironic about the “Idle” style of game, where players setup systems for generating revenue or fighting battles, and the game continues to run on these metrics even after the app has been closed. It’s ironic because when you do eventually open the game, you still must tap like a maniac to proceed as the increasing difficulty requires engagement to in order to level up. Godzilla: Defence Force takes this model and tweaks it a little, putting more emphasis on active play (insane tapping) and less on the idle component.

The idea is that your city is under attack, and you must build new units (by tapping) and building more revenue gained by defeating monsters, ranging from the small to the Godzilla-sized (including the big man himself). This money allows upgrades such as new buildings that spawn bigger and more powerful units, as well as the ability to upgrade those buildings.

Godzilla: DF restricts the amount of Idle time to 8 hours, and makes the difficult curve very high, very fast. It then blankets you with a lot of advertising in order to get around this curve, promising double cash and what not if you watch an ad after almost every fight.

Durango: Wild Lands SURVIVE A DINOSAUR DYSTOPIA. Free with IAP

DURANGO IS PROBABLY one of the most unique and creative games to launch on the mobile scene for some time. After you are transported from modern day life through a portal that opens up on an everyday train ride, you find yourself dumped and stranded on a deserted island. After some wandering someone finds you and explains that you are in Durango, a dinosaur infested series of islands that are full of other people, who like you, had been transported against their will and need to survive.

From the beginning, Durango has a strong difficulty curve with a tutorial system that only really scrapes the surface of the extraordinarily deep crafting and customisation system.

On top of this is a clan system that allows you to coordinate across a wide array of quests and battles, build entire villages with shared resources and stockpiles.

Durango is an extraordinarily well-designed game for mobile – it has fantastic graphics and animations, works well on both phones and tablets with controls that suit touch well, and like Rise of Kingdoms, heavily rewards participation.

It’s hard not to recommend this game to anyone who likes crafting and survival titles.

Operate Now: Hospital PLAY DOCTOR AND ADMINISTRATOR. Free with IAP

IF YOU ARE one of the millions of people who have installed Fallout Shelter – a quirky little simulation where you manage a bunker full of survivors hiding from a violent and irradiated world – then you’d be familiar with the basic structure behind Operate Now: Hospital, where you run a hospital from the ground up, hiring nurses, doctors and surgeons, opening new departments and wards, and ensuring staff don’t become overworked and patients are attended to.

This is done via a series of boxes that represent different rooms and areas of your hospital, you can move employees between areas, ensure they are taking breaks and putting the most qualified staff in the areas they are needed. The other portion of the game is much more interesting however – every surgical manoeuvre in the hospital needs to be completed by you.

It’s engaging and clever how the game increases the intensity and difficulty of the surgeries over time, as well as structures them into a cheesy if not entertaining story that would suit a mid-90s medical drama. If you enjoy Operation or managing the day to day needs of a hospital, you could do worse than tapping install on Operate Now: Hospital.