Android Games Reviews: Doom & Destiny
Sep. 29th, 2016 05:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroFour friends thought they were going to their GM’s house for a tabletop game of Doom & Destiny. Instead, they discover that their GM has vanished and they’ve been pulled into a fantasy pastiche world where they might be heroes (but probably aren’t) chosen by Destiny.
While I occasionally mock some KEMCO games as “being made in RPG Maker”, this clearly really was. As in, I recognize a number of the object sprites. The battle system is decent and playing “Chillax” mode keeps the grinding under control; the virtual buttons were fine once I noticed you can change them from being the damn “mobile buttons” to static one-spot virtual buttons that only occasionally blocked my view of something useful.
The skill system is creative, but not well-balanced: They spam you with new skills to buy and nowhere near enough money to buy them or enough points to equip most of them. Clearly you’re supposed to plan your character builds and only buy what you need, but the game doesn’t really telegraph what you might need and what works on what kinds of monsters (except in the Arena, where NPCs are kind enough to give you hints). I ended up with a ton of skills I never really used, and only occasionally wished I’d bothered to equip them. (Nigel’s elemental magic was the worst of this.)
The dungeon design is pretty good, with some open, interconnected areas and a lot of random treasure to find. You rarely feel like you’re following a straight-line path or that you’re walking back and forth just to waste time.
The in-jokes abound, though they focus less on tabletop rpgs (which you’d be expecting) and more on common geeky media: There’s a Zelda-themed area and a Mario-themed area. There’s a Lord of the Rings pastiche (complete with “Judas” who looks like Gollum). Then you go into anime-land, which just randomly references anime that’s popular in the US without really trying to string it together. And you eventually need to retrieve a Flux Capacitor.
Overall the humor is overwrought and sophomoric; it’s “this is targeted at 13-year-old boys” humor. Which is not to say there aren’t funny moments: There are a few clever bits, especially when they remember that this is a video game and play with your expectations of that. There’s a rather clever sequence when you’re given 15 minutes to escape a crashing airship. The place is loaded with treasure, but there doesn’t actually seem to be a way out…but getting caught in the crash advances the plot anyway.
The ads pop up every once and a while when you transition screens; I didn’t find them terribly invasive when I was connected to the internet, though they seemed to be more frequent when I wasn’t (that is, the single ad to buy the game for $3 and remove ads seemed to show up a lot).
Overall: It’s middling. There’s potential here, as it’s a jrpg experience on par with most KEMCO games; but the dialogue could have used a better editor to make more of the jokes really work, and the skill system needed more honing.
While I occasionally mock some KEMCO games as “being made in RPG Maker”, this clearly really was. As in, I recognize a number of the object sprites. The battle system is decent and playing “Chillax” mode keeps the grinding under control; the virtual buttons were fine once I noticed you can change them from being the damn “mobile buttons” to static one-spot virtual buttons that only occasionally blocked my view of something useful.
The skill system is creative, but not well-balanced: They spam you with new skills to buy and nowhere near enough money to buy them or enough points to equip most of them. Clearly you’re supposed to plan your character builds and only buy what you need, but the game doesn’t really telegraph what you might need and what works on what kinds of monsters (except in the Arena, where NPCs are kind enough to give you hints). I ended up with a ton of skills I never really used, and only occasionally wished I’d bothered to equip them. (Nigel’s elemental magic was the worst of this.)
The dungeon design is pretty good, with some open, interconnected areas and a lot of random treasure to find. You rarely feel like you’re following a straight-line path or that you’re walking back and forth just to waste time.
The in-jokes abound, though they focus less on tabletop rpgs (which you’d be expecting) and more on common geeky media: There’s a Zelda-themed area and a Mario-themed area. There’s a Lord of the Rings pastiche (complete with “Judas” who looks like Gollum). Then you go into anime-land, which just randomly references anime that’s popular in the US without really trying to string it together. And you eventually need to retrieve a Flux Capacitor.
Overall the humor is overwrought and sophomoric; it’s “this is targeted at 13-year-old boys” humor. Which is not to say there aren’t funny moments: There are a few clever bits, especially when they remember that this is a video game and play with your expectations of that. There’s a rather clever sequence when you’re given 15 minutes to escape a crashing airship. The place is loaded with treasure, but there doesn’t actually seem to be a way out…but getting caught in the crash advances the plot anyway.
The ads pop up every once and a while when you transition screens; I didn’t find them terribly invasive when I was connected to the internet, though they seemed to be more frequent when I wasn’t (that is, the single ad to buy the game for $3 and remove ads seemed to show up a lot).
Overall: It’s middling. There’s potential here, as it’s a jrpg experience on par with most KEMCO games; but the dialogue could have used a better editor to make more of the jokes really work, and the skill system needed more honing.
