Mobile game reviews
James Pinnell reviews the latest games for android & iOS smartphones & tablets.
League of Legends: Wild Rift A MOBA SANS-GRIFT.
Free with IAP (iOS Only)
Over the past five years there’ve been plenty of new MOBA games to quench the thirst of those looking for a solid strategy experience on the go. Unfortunately, since the slow death of the original, Vain Glory, the bulk of mobile MOBAs tend to follow the Chinese/Korean model, which is a heavy focus on monetisation, confusing event currencies, and poor performance in Oceania. Outside of a few exceptions, namely Mobile Legends or Arena of Valor, any new contenders struggle to reach a population density to avoid long wait times.
Riot Games has been surprisingly late to enter the mobile arena with their flagship product, League of Legends ( LoL),
arguably the most successful game in its genre. Almost every other game it joins on iOS/Android has shamelessly copied not only its primary map, but most of its heroes, items, and build systems. This recent push is based on a ground-up development of a standalone title primed for not only mobile, but consoles as well.
As expected, Wild Rift is stunning, not only in its art style but in its simple, clean and fluid interface. Gone are the dozens of poorly/quickly drawn popup windows, dozens of currencies, bundles and pointless mode varieties – instead, a pure focus on the core game remains, with only a handful of modes (Normal, Co-op vs AI, Ranked, and so on) and a shop for buying heroes and cosmetics. Helpfully, the game also offers you the chance to pick a few of your own starter heroes for free, outside of the handful it offers to you as you level.
All the “champions” are straight out of the PC version of LoL, along with their standard abilities. You also login with your original League account, which interfaces with your original friends list, and offers rewards based on your existing league play as well as adding some weighting for your current play experience. Without a doubt, even in this “open beta” version there is a new king of MOBA on mobile. Riot’s polish and attention to detail shines through here.
Doors: Origins AR WITH PURPOSE.
Free with IAP
One of the issues of playing detailed puzzle games on your phone is feeling like space is almost certainly a premium. Screens may have gotten higher and higher when it comes to resolution and pixel counts but the size itself still hangs around the 5-6-inch mark. AR, or Alternate Reality, aims to expand the field of view by allowing you to place objects in your real space, which the phone then tracks and remembers, allowing you to move around physically. This means your 5-inch screen can quickly become a window into a 6-foot object – which you don’t have to pinch to zoom.
This may sound confusing in theory but in practise, Doors: Origins is a stunning example of how this technology can work. As you would expect, each stage consists of a door surrounded by several items, switches, cranks, locks and so forth. Your mission is to figure out how to use and manipulate these tools to open each door – which would be fairly interesting on your screen but being able to physically walk around the door, blow it up, focus in on it, kneel down and reach up is really quite a unique and fun experience.
Giblins STILL, ACTUALLY, GOBLINS.
Free with IAP
Giblins, on the surface, seems like an interesting twist on the base builder – mixing the “bunker management” of Fallout Shelter with an idle mining simulator. The problem, however, is that Giblins is nothing but a time locked Farmville-style experience – you build new buildings, whether they are to mine items you can sell in your above ground shop, or an above ground facility like a bar or banquet hall to generate revenue from the townsfolk.
Every building you put down needs to be built – via time lock. Once built, every action must be manually entered – via time lock. This then wraps your currencies in to speed up said time lock and before you know it, you are buying overpriced currency bundles to speed up your buildings. It is especially sad because this idea is quite clever, by hiring ‘Giblins’ underground to farm resources for their human masters.
The focus is purely on sucking down a revenue stream at the expense of fun, but the funny part is that it is bad at hiding this fact. Most titles usually open things up early to get you hooked, but Giblins is so keen on soaking up money it does not even offer an ad-based alternative.
WWE: Undefeated FUN WAS DEFEATED.
Free with IAP
You would think that professional wrestling – a very physical, fightbased pantomime with plenty of focus on wild personalities, crazy costumes, dramatic flair and over the top events would translate almost perfectly into video games. Few other popular entertainment options are almost built for gamification, but developers have struggled, particularly in the past decade or so, to make a half decent wrestling title.
WWE: Undefeated unfortunately continues that trend by offering what I have found is the most bafflingly awful fighting system on any platform. In screenshots for the game, it looks a lot like a Shadow Fighter- style game – side by side fighting with touch/swipe controls – which works relatively well on a phone.
Your fighters will simply stand there, waiting for their energy meter to fill up so they can clumsily throw moves at one another, before waiting again to get more energy back. Eventually you or your opponent will slowly wear down their opponent’s stamina and the match is over.
Ninja Chowdown DO-NUTS.
Free with IAP
I once found a website that had a ‘game generator that randomly spat out names for games, based on popular trends. I am not kidding when I say that one of those was ‘Ninja Donut’, which still makes me laugh now when I realise someone made that game, but called it Ninja Chowdown instead. NC is a runner, where you feature as an overweight, donut-loving Ninja who is chasing after a Mongol-esque villain who has stolen the “Golden” donut and must be brought to justice.
As you’d expect, you run from left to right, collecting donuts to power up your special meter which when activated, balloons you into an enormous ball of Ninja that can bounce across the screen, taking out baddies and collecting even more delicious pink pastries. Unfortunately, the game tends to stick very closely to this formula and after a few levels it felt tiresome.
On a technical level, however, the game looks and sound wonderful. The pixel art is charming and detailed, animations are smooth and fluid, and the design is cheeky and clever.