***
5. Beats
The design concept of music and rhythm games is perfectly attuned to gaming on the move. You can jump in, play one song, then get back to whatever it is you weren't doing in the first place. Beats doesn't do anything ambitious with the tried and tested formula of hitting on-screen promts with the right timing, but then again, why would it? It comes with a selection of thumping, unlicensed techno but you can download and use songs of your choice, and a greater degree of customisation allows you to set your ideal difficulty - lessening the risk of vulgar outbursts of failure on the bus. Slightly.
Surivial platformers like Copter, Fruit Roll & Zombie Dash hit on a great idea, forcing players to navigate obstacles without control of the pace their avatar is moving at, through a single level that throws new challenges up at every turn, until their concentration runs dry. No checkpoints, no continues, your only goal is getting as far as possible before inevitable failure.
NinJump is a gaming press mainstay along the same (although vertical) lines. You'll scale a never-ending building side by leaping between two walls, avoiding or taking out obstacles for brief bursts of invulnerability and an intuitive leader board makes getting slightly further next time an attractive prospect for weeks.
Slice It! approaches puzzle gameplay in a traditional manner for handheld or indie projects, by taking a simple concept and stretching it to brain-warping extremes. You'll be tasked with dividing a vast stockpile of shapes into a designated number of equally-sized portions, within a designated number of moves.
No amount of remedial geometry will prepare you for the mystifying visual trickery you'll be contending with, but there are hints available for the more defeatist players, strategically offered to reward perfectionists going for flawless stages. Not that those two personality traits often coincide. A pleasing maths-textbook art style really completes the classroom feel.
If there's one game design paradigm that's seemingly least suited to playing on a mobile, it's got to be the RPG. The best role-playing-games demand forethought, persistence and personal involvement, and that's not something developers are lining up to provide to people who'd probably only be playing on public transport, or in lectures or lunch breaks. It's surprising then, that Com2Us made three.
Inotia III fits most of the archetypal tenets of RPG-dom: Players are offered a generous six choices for the protagonist's class, including the typical Warrior, Mage and Rogue models. Play is driven by plot, which follows said protagonist, Lucio, on a quest that will see him tangle with political eruption and a shadowy organisation. It's a banal concept and a colorful cast of characters that drop in and out of your party as well as the story might have kept things interesting until the end, but its undermined by cheap attempts to spin the yarn out longer. Still, even the most vaguely coherent story is a rare occurrence on this platform.
There's a lot of depth in the gameplay too, which is fast-paced and chaotic, and if you're happy to jab wildly at the attack button on your touch-screen to bring down a boss, this could be the most fun you've had on your phone since sexting.
A perfectly designed mobile game aims to do just one thing - addict you. Coming back to one repeatedly for brief bursts of play requires adaptive gameplay and a solid central concept that isn't going to get stale over time. You could say the same for gaming on any platform, but when there is so much on offer out there for zero investment or commitment, a truly great mobile game has to truly amaze despite immense competition and the limitations of the hardware its running on.
But that's exactly what Robotek does. By combining head-scratching turn-based strategy with the thrill of slot-machine gambling, developers Hexage created a blissful distraction from real life. Robotek's beauty lies in its simplicity, (although it certainly helps that it visually pops at every stroke with bright luminescent colours and appropriately binary team designs, which are as disparate as Wall-E and Eve). You're given just one directive - conquer the world, one vibrant, laser-filled battle at a time. And you'll do so by directing a gigantic commanding android, selecting one of three methods of attack each round: a single, directly damaging assault; constructing smaller machines to defend yourself; or information warfare - hacking your enemy's robots to fight for you, or generating shields or energy drains.
The gambling element comes in the form of a slot machine, which will generate three randomised methods of attack from your desired paradigm and then execute them all at once. Getting three of the same moves in one roll will maximise its effect, and the whole system produces genuine strategic conundrums; and the A.I. controlled opponent makes great use of the exact same roster of moves in a way that lets you learn from your inevitable defeats.
Its simplicity could still have been its downfall, as you progress you unlock four special moves that you can then use in battle after a certain number of rounds, as well as perks that increase the odds of temporary stat and effect boosts, but that's it. Otherwise, over the game's hundred plus stages, you'll be fighting the same battle dozens of times. In the end, Robotek hinges on its gambling element, which is pervasive enough that a lucky roll can save or doom you, but subtle enough that you'll rarely be completely reliant on it. And that is Robotek's greatest victory - after dozens of near-identical battles over a course of weeks, every victory is still your own.
No comments:
Post a Comment