Category reviews

reviews

Aug 5 2018

Battleheart 2 Review: Was It Worth the Wait?

battleheart2_1_nokia7plus

Battleheart 2 on my Nokia 7 Plus

It’s hard to believe that the original Battleheart ($2.99) premiered on the App Store in 2011, which feels like a lifetimr sho. The mobile gaming landscape was different then, but then as now, Battleheart (the original) has stood the test of time. I have nieces and nephews who randomly picked up the game on Android and enjoyed it as much as I did then. Over the years, I’d been waiting and hoping for a content update which I would be more than willing to pay for, until Mika announced a sequel a few years after it came out with Battleheart Legacy ($4.99) which I also reviewed when it first came out.

Though my original review of Battleheart is lost, here’s why I considered it one of the best games of 2011.  I still think it’s one of the best mobile games ever, too.

Battleheart 2 ($4.99) now launches in a hugely overcrowded App Store in 2018 and its unique gameplay still stands out because though there have been some attempts to do what Mika Mobile did so well, none have come close.  However, that said, I must admit that some major changes in the game (which I will talk about in detail) leave this diehard Battleheart fan disappointed. Just to be clear though, you don’t need to play the first game to appreciate this one but if you did play the original, some of the changes might make you wish that Mika had just gone and updated the original Battleheart instead.

The Good 

The unique real-time combat system and easy controls are better than ever.

There are lots of playable characters to choose from who may be familiar from the original game plus some new ones, with promises of an expansion underway. (Be prepared to wait awhile though, because updates are few and far between)

Continue reading →

Advertisements
Oct 8 2016

Neko Atsume – Kitty Collector 

What do you do when you have two fluffy cats in real life but can’t handle taking care of more?

one of my cats in real life


 Well, download Neko Atsume, of course!

The game has been around since 2014 (and updated recently in September) but I only discovered it recently while in the car with my husband’s niece. She told me she was busy waiting for Tubbs (the fat white cat on the lower left) to come  when I found myself watching her “yard” with interest.

She identified each cat by name, and showed me how to “attract” feline visitors to the yard.

“You can’t own the cats,” she said, “but you can take a picture of them.” That, ladies and gentlemen, is Neko Atsume Kitty Collector as explained by a very smart 10-year old named Pia.

Cats are odd little independent creatures who prefer a coolly distant relationship with their human friends. They will wander into your yard if you have food and toys. They will stay a while and then leave with parting gifts (cats don’t do that in real life unless if it’s to gift you with a dead mouse).


The gold and silver fish on the lower left represent currency to buy all sorts of food and toys to attract cats to your yard. (Cue that one hit wonder, 2003 Kelis song if you still remember … My cake box brings all the cats to the yard …)  

You can collect money  from gifts from cats or if you buy gold fish (fancier stuff) using real money.

The next challenge (a very mild one) is finding which toys and food will attract rare and not so rare cats to your yard. In real life, though, boxes often do the trick!

These cats come in different colors and patterns as well as a variety of purrsonalities.  Not sure if there’s more to it than that, or if the kitty bio can help us figure out how to attract rare types.  

purrsonality


And the photos:


The great thing about this app is that unlike other free to play games with timers and the like, where you have to constantly monitor the game for freebies, you can enjoy Neko Atsume offline. In fact, the app  recommends that you suspend or reopen it to refresh and check on your yard. In other words, no need to watch it like a hawk. You can have a life outside of your phone.

Some minor inconveniences in the user interface aside, this cute game is for kids and busy people who want a fun, no strings attached kind of gaming relationship with their phone.

Happy collecting!

p.s. If you love cats, check out my cat’s Facebook page – BB the ragdoll cat ?

Rating: 4.5/5

Download: Neko Atsume – Kitty Collector

Price: FREE (with in app purchases) 


Sep 15 2014

Now Playing: Appointment with F.E.A.R. on iPhone and iPad

 

If you are a comic book fan and a gamebook fan, then Appointment With F.E.A.R. is right up your alley. This classic gamebook written by Steve Jackson is Tin Man Games’ latest outing and adapts for the iOS the mechanics of a classic gamebook with an interesting new twist.

Appointment With F.E.A.R. parodies many familiar comic book heroes, villains and locales. As the main hero of Titan City, your job is to keep the city safe from an assorted lot of evildoers and thugs. Mainly, however, your mission is to prevent the meeting of F.E.A.R., a powerful organization of baddies, from taking place. Without much clues and only three days to do it, the challenge is to do the superhero stuff and be a detective at the same time. Oh, and as in typical super hero stories, your superhero identiy is a secret and you are a meek newspaper reporter by day (Clark Kent? Peter Parker?) with a mean boss.

Continue reading →

Sep 8 2014

Now Playing: Valiant Hearts – The Great War for iPhone and iPad

It is 1914 and you are in the middle of World War I. You are an ordinary soldier, thrust into the power struggle between great European countries, to serve as fodder for protracted battles on the ground.

The App Store’s Editor’s Choice of the week Valiant Hearts: The Great War relives the confusion and nightmare of the war, told through the eyes of ordinary folks called upon to serve their country. Just as war, in its broadest sense, is just the game of the generals, it is ironic to see the game make out of a high stakes ‘game’ that cost lives.

Continue reading →

Aug 23 2014

Now Playing: Sentinel 4 – Dark Star for iPhone and iPad

It’s been a while since indie developer Origin8 came out with a sequel to their award-winning tower defense (TD) series, Sentinel. However, Sentinel should be familiar to those who’ve been gaming on the iPhone and during the time when tower defense games were just starting to shine. With a long absence from the TD scene, does Sentinel 4 – Dark World measure up to the TD games that have come out since its hiatus?

Continue reading →

Aug 16 2014

Review: Hanx Writer for iPad

 

 

Hanx Writer for iPad may seem like a quaint idea to most, but for those e who grew up with a manual typewriter long before Microsoft Word became a household name, Hanx Writer brings back memories and then some. The app, incidentally, was commissioned and endorsed by no less than award-winning actor Tom Hanks who is a typewriter fanatic.

 

Back then, typing was a challenging and frustrating experience. You needed to be extra careful when typing things – how soft or how hard you bang the keys means the difference between a smooth looking typewritten page and a page with out of place keys or smudged letters.

I can go on all day about the perils and terrors of typewriter ribbons gone threadbare and paper incorrectly inserted, but I’m not here to wax poetic about a bygone era, I’m here to talk about how Hanx Writer fares as a throwback app and as a notetaking/mini word processor.

The fun part about having a ‘pretend’ typewriter like Hanx Writer is that you get to enjoy the perks of typing manually without the corresponding headaches. The fun part of typing then was hearing the clickety clack of keys and watching words being hammered out on the page with a couple of quick strokes – the less than fun part was dealing with jammed keys, smudged letters and uneven typing. Nowadays, typing with a keyboard is a muted experience while a touchscreen computer is almost silent.

For a free app, you get to enjoy the experience of typing on a ‘pretend’ typewriter, complete with the clicking sound of the individual keys as you type and the ringing sound when you’ve reached the end of the line and have to move to the next. For the full-blown typing experience, you can even turn off the ‘modern’ way of correcting mistakes (read: backspace). However, it would also be nice to see keys a bit out of place just like what I was used to when I typed too hard. For select upgrades, you can try out new typewriter themes or styles or just get the entire pack for $5, which includes more ribbon colors, justify alignment, a title page with the option to put a picture, etc.

Hanx Writer makes typing on the touchscreen keyboard fun, but I’ve tried pairing the app with my trusty bluetooth keyboard and the experience has been seamless.

My only gripe with the app is that sharing options are limited. For now, you can only “share” or export your work in PDF, which you can of course open in other apps such as Goodreader and other PDF readers. It would be nice, however, to have other file saving options such as .txt or .rtf formats.

For a free app that you can straightaway enjoy without shelling out real money for in app purchases (IAP), Hanx Writer is a fun and engaging typing experience that is more than just a trip down memory lane. I can envision it to be my default writing app just to get those creative juices flowing. Check out the report below:

appSIZED rating: 5 out of 5

App: Hanx Writer for iPad

Link: Hanx Writer for iPad

Compatibility: iPad only

Price: FREE

Ver.: 1.0

Developer/Publisher: HitCents, Inc.

 

 

Aug 2 2014

Now Playing: Guardians of the Galaxy – The Universal Weapon

Marvel Studios’ latest flick, the amazingly good Guardians of the Galaxy movie is now out in theaters and enjoying critical and popular acclaim. The iOS game, Guardians of the Galaxy: The Universal Weapon, on the other hand, was released a few weeks prior to the movie’s launch and is currently on sale for a limited time to celebrate the film’s opening weekend. Featuring a funny, ragtag group of space not so do-gooders straight out of a Marvel comic book, the real challenge of GOTG: The Universal Weapon is to be just as good as the movie. Check out the review after the break!
Continue reading →
Jul 4 2014

Now Playing: Royal Envoy – Campaign for the Crown HD for iPad

Ah, politics. Whether in the real world or in Royal Envoy’s fictional kingdom, it’s dirty. Playrix Games’ third and latest installment, Royal Envoy: Campaign for the Crown takes on politics as a mysterious person named Swindler (with a name like that, would you trust him?) seeks to capture the crown through election. Election … in a monarchy? Invoking some ancient law, Swindler has challenged the king to an election and is hell bent on sabotaging the King’s chances of winning.

This is where you step in, as his consultant/adviser/builder. Thanks to a highly effective misinformation campaign, most of the kingdom is in shambles due to charlatans tricking and deceiving people into destroying their home and introducing themselves as envoys of the King. Your mantra is rebuild and damage control in a wide variety of missions.

The Swindler starts out with an approval rating of 100% while you have to start from scratch to save your King.

Continue reading →

Jun 28 2014

Now Playing: Dream Catchers – The Beginning HD for iPad

We have always had a fascination for the secret world of our dreams and how the real and surreal interact in our mind’s landscape while we are sleeping. Dreams sometimes help solve real world problems, others reveal anxieties and fears, while some of us find a fantasy world to escape in.
Dream Catchers: The Beginning HD by G5 Games hints at a new series of hidden object adventure games, with the intriguing storyline of ‘dream catchers’ (although not fully explained) who get caught up in a web of deception and betrayal.
The story, however, begins with the unexplained phenomena of students of a school, including one of its teachers (your sister), falling asleep seemingly without hope of waking up. As you try to piece together what happened, you are also drawn into the dream world with strange scenery, monsters and creatures to defeat in order to wake up.

the zodiac clock

Dream Catchers: The Beginning HD is standard Hidden Object and puzzle solving fare, requiring you to search for objects bit by bit that contribute to activating puzzles in order to obtain objects and tools (inventory items).
Looking for items is a pretty straightforward and simple affair. Some HOGs like to make things more interesting and interactive by requiring you to put together some items in order to find the object on your list, while others encourage you to open a drawer or part a curtain to reveal what’s inside. Disappointingly, Dream Catchers: The Beginning HD doesn’t employ these little gimmicks.
As I have observed with many hidden object games, there isn’t a clear or logical link between objects or tools you need to say, unlock a door or get an object from a tree. In addition, since these are objects scattered across different locations, you really don’t know what you need until you press the hint. Dream Catchers: The Beginning HD is no exception. Thus, in my case, I rely on hints a lot, and more so in this game. Some useful inventory objects show up in sparkly locations, in a seemingly random and arbitrary order.
The game’s art direction evokes some mixed feelings. The earlier parts and cutscenes are a bit hazy and muddled – much like a dream sequence, I know, but some consistency in relation to the regular scenes would be nice. The game would have been more visually appealing if the scenes were less static.
The puzzles are simpler and less varied than most HOGs. Of course, the usual rotate pieces to form a picture and rotate pipes to find your way out can be found in Dream Catchers: The Beginning HD, but I find the execution of some puzzles a bit cumbersome and frustrating.
As what appears to be the first among many in a series, Dream Catchers: The Beginning HD starts off intriguing and promising. However, compared to other HOGs and even G5’s own extensive offerings, this one doesn’t quite measure up. I do hope that future installments of this game will be a lot better in many ways and for its flaws, I will give Dream Catchers: The Beginning HD a pass.
Check out the report card below:

appSIZED rating: 3 out of 5

App: Dream Catchers: The Beginning HD
Download: Dream Catchers: The Beginning HD
Compatibility: iPad only
Price: Free (with In-App Purchase of $6.99)
Deveoper/Publisher: G5

 

 

Jun 5 2014

Now Playing: Battleheart Legacy for iPhone and iPad

Ever played a game where you wanted to be the character who had a little bit of everything? Say, a spellcasting ninja master? Or a knight able to summon the undead? Or perhaps, a humble bard, purveyor of tale and song, yet able to take down long range enemies with a handy bow and arrow? Or do you want to have it all? Hero classes such as barbarian, knight, rogue, ranger, monk, witch, wizard, etc. are farmiliar archetypes in RPGs (role playing games) and are easily defined by the strengths and limitations of their powers and abilities… but in Battleheart Legacy, you can have it all.

battleheart on appSIZED

the original Battleheart

If you played the original Battleheart back in 2011, it was groundbreaking and original. What made it unique was that you could control four (4) of them at once simply by drawing lines from point A to point B, and activating a set of special powers and skills for each one. In Battleheart, you can freely experiment with with the party type system and develop your heroes’ skills, boost their stats with weapons and equipment to get these guys to work seamlessly together. Battleheart, in its own way, changed how we should design and play games on a touchscreen device. While there are many copycats, Battleheart remains unparalleled.

Now, in Battleheart Legacy, you are now a solo player and party-based combat is not used in this game. With Legacy employing a gameplay mechanic different from Battleheart, does it live up to the awesomeness of the original?

Continue reading →