![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroGuardian Cross - This game will spend an half an hour downloading things before it lets you play, which is a lousy first impression. It also runs slowly with a lot of loading on my Galaxy Tab 4. That aside, it’s a card-based mon-battle game, with a lot of drive to collect cards and complete missions via card duels, but the card game itself is an automatic affair, where the only strategy is which monsters you put in your deck. Battling consists of watching your monsters go head-to-head with the opponents until somebody falls down, then continuing through your deck until somebody runs out of cards. Also, you can only hunt for new monsters once a day (unless you buy tickets), and your ability to fight duels slowly recharges over time (or you can pay to fill it up right away). It has a vague attempt at stock plot (you’re a Guardian Master for the empire and the empress sends you on missions), but besides that and the Final Fantasy references, I don’t see anything that sets this apart from every other collect-em-all mon-battle pay-to-win mobile game.
The Legend of Roland - Touted as an “action rpg”, which is vaguely accurate, though it’s got significant RTS elements. After an intro section controlling a paladin as the Great Sage goes mad, you get control of a young knight named Roland who needs to quest his way through the land, fighting hosts of enemies with his cleric companion Charlotte. Each stage is a series of semi-automatic battles broken up by dialogue, which grow progressive more complex (in terms of moving characters around in real-time and occasionally triggering special attacks) as you get more characters and more enemies spawn. You gradually earn treasure to upgrade your characters and unlock better ones, or of course you can pay real money for gold to buy upgrades up front.
Weapons throwing RPG - Another gimmicky casual game with rpg elements, though this one has addictive potential. You equip your assortment of weapons, then stand on the bow of an airship and throw them at enemies. They throw things back at you. Weapons with the same arc (draggers, swords and axes) will collide, with the stronger one continuing. Weapons have a recharge time before you can throw them again. There’s a fun bit of strategy to when you throw and what you throw to try to knock out enemy weapons before they hit you while still doing damage. This is also done in a retro-pixilated art style which I generally like. Though the text was obviously written by a non-fluent English speaker—I’m pretty sure it’s actually bad, not parody bad—but it isn’t that critical, you can figure everything out. (The biggest irritation is that it’s a “limited stamina recharges over time or by paying money” game, which means the number of stages you can play without waiting an hour drops sharply as the game progresses. Couldn’t you just show me more ads, or put more items in the “buy with real money” store?) Given the re-use of art assets, I’m pretty sure this was made by the same folks as Inflation RPG.
Gold of the empire - So, it’s taglined as “a parody game” and the icons are all in (what I guess is) Russian. I can’t tell if it’s actually Russian or (more likely) it’s somebody’s in-joke, as it seems to be connected to a Youtube group called Konfederation. Not a terrible Match-3 game otherwise, though.
Bejewelled Bricks - I feel like I’ve encountered this style of puzzle game before, though I’m not sure where. It looks like Arkanoid and plays kind of like Wario’s Woods: You need to move blocks from the bottom (the top of the upside-down stack) to match up four-of-a-kind. As the levels go on, they complicate things with limited moves, specific win conditions, “boss battles” where the AI freezes blocks, and the like. Like many stack games, allowing the stack to get larger increases your risk, but also your ability to trigger a big chain and a ton of points. Fun for fans of puzzle games.
The Legend of Roland - Touted as an “action rpg”, which is vaguely accurate, though it’s got significant RTS elements. After an intro section controlling a paladin as the Great Sage goes mad, you get control of a young knight named Roland who needs to quest his way through the land, fighting hosts of enemies with his cleric companion Charlotte. Each stage is a series of semi-automatic battles broken up by dialogue, which grow progressive more complex (in terms of moving characters around in real-time and occasionally triggering special attacks) as you get more characters and more enemies spawn. You gradually earn treasure to upgrade your characters and unlock better ones, or of course you can pay real money for gold to buy upgrades up front.
Weapons throwing RPG - Another gimmicky casual game with rpg elements, though this one has addictive potential. You equip your assortment of weapons, then stand on the bow of an airship and throw them at enemies. They throw things back at you. Weapons with the same arc (draggers, swords and axes) will collide, with the stronger one continuing. Weapons have a recharge time before you can throw them again. There’s a fun bit of strategy to when you throw and what you throw to try to knock out enemy weapons before they hit you while still doing damage. This is also done in a retro-pixilated art style which I generally like. Though the text was obviously written by a non-fluent English speaker—I’m pretty sure it’s actually bad, not parody bad—but it isn’t that critical, you can figure everything out. (The biggest irritation is that it’s a “limited stamina recharges over time or by paying money” game, which means the number of stages you can play without waiting an hour drops sharply as the game progresses. Couldn’t you just show me more ads, or put more items in the “buy with real money” store?) Given the re-use of art assets, I’m pretty sure this was made by the same folks as Inflation RPG.
Gold of the empire - So, it’s taglined as “a parody game” and the icons are all in (what I guess is) Russian. I can’t tell if it’s actually Russian or (more likely) it’s somebody’s in-joke, as it seems to be connected to a Youtube group called Konfederation. Not a terrible Match-3 game otherwise, though.
Bejewelled Bricks - I feel like I’ve encountered this style of puzzle game before, though I’m not sure where. It looks like Arkanoid and plays kind of like Wario’s Woods: You need to move blocks from the bottom (the top of the upside-down stack) to match up four-of-a-kind. As the levels go on, they complicate things with limited moves, specific win conditions, “boss battles” where the AI freezes blocks, and the like. Like many stack games, allowing the stack to get larger increases your risk, but also your ability to trigger a big chain and a ton of points. Fun for fans of puzzle games.
