For today’s mobile game review, I went to the Google Play Store’s holiday sale. There I found a plethora of games and at that point the hard part was choosing just one. I found a holiday game called Nun Attack: Run & Gun which looked interesting and had a controversial name—double win, in my opinion. This is just running game with the gun element added for some fun.
It’s funny because nuns are usually pacifist
First off, this game is cute and fun. The graphics are a little edgy, but it works in the setting. Players get to choose a nun, which is Rosy, a tall, leggy young lady with an eye patch and a semiautomatic rifle, by default at first. Other nuns can be unlocked later in the game.
The object of the game is to run and gather coins (much like the oh-so-boring Temple Run), but is made more interesting by the addition of skeletons, werewolves, and zombies, which all want a piece of nun.
I wonder how Rosy lost her eye.
The controls are fairly easy, considering the lack of physical buttons to work with. Up and down buttons on the left allow Rosy to jump or slide to gather coins and avoid spinning skill saw blades and other deadly objects. The button on the right allows Rosy to fire her rifle at the evil creatures who wish to prevent her holy work.
As with most mobile games, this game relies on in-game purchases for revenue. Fortunately, it appears that jewels/diamonds are only used for free revivals (pun intended) for the nuns. Unlike many games where jewels are required for leveling up, it would appear that it is unnecessary to spend money in this game to fully enjoy it. Most upgrades to weaponry, etc, are purchased with coins, which are earned in gameplay. That’s a huge plus for someone like me. It’s also nice that these coins are generously distributed. From time to time, the nun will run into a portal, which will take her through a strange rip in the space-time continuum which for whatever reason has been filled with coins.
There are a few things that do get in the way of a perfectly smooth playing experience. The nuns do not seem to have a very long life span. I would have preferred that my character could survive a few attacks before she fell on her face and literally bit the dust.
Another big problem for me is that just as the nun starts her run, a popup screen listing the available power-ups appears and stays there until it is manually closed. This requires me to move my hands away from the important buttons at the bottom of the screen, which is very scary.
Go away! I’m trying to run.
Lastly, it is both distracting and difficult to find out what the objectives are for each level. They appear in small black bars at the bottom of the screen during actual gameplay and are not listed anywhere else in the game. I can either ignore them completely and hope to accidentally achieve them; or I can stare at the bottom of the screen and wait for them to appear, and potentially allow my nun to run into something deadly.
This is really just a run and shoot game—not that the astute player would gather anything different from its name. I enjoyed playing it, and it gave me a nice chance to take out my anger from my seasonal retail job (Yell at me because you don’t have a coupon for your purchase, will you? Take that, skeletons!!!!). The game is available in the Google Play Store and in the iTunes App Store. All things considered, I give it four out of five death stars.
The “League of Heroes” is a simple RPG available both in the Android Play store and Apple App Store. I really enjoyed the bright, playful graphics and the smooth game play, but there were some drawbacks to this game.
Welcome to the village of Froggnest
The hero of the game is asked to undertake a quest to rid the small village of Froggnest of the scourge of evil creatures that presumably want to destroy the inhabitants. These inhabitants seem to consist of a Captain, an armorer, potion mistress, town troll, a trainer, and an elderly grandmother. Most of these have obvious functions, such as the armorer and potion mistress, who both sell valuable items that are useful for completing quests. The Captain gives the player missions and individual quests, and the trainer provides certain capabilities for a price—such as increased hardiness or stamina. The town troll is the social feature of the village, and the grandmother provides small side quests for a reward, such as gathering sticks for her while the hero is on other larger quests.
The Grandmother’s Quest
Each time the hero leaves the village, he is given a choice for his quest. There is exploration, which allows him to continue to defeat ordinary monsters, the daily quest, which is pretty self explanatory, and the boss level. I like this layout because the player can choose when to face the boss level. If the hero has gone too long without facing a boss, the game will alert him that he can continue to accumulate coins and jewels, but that his XP will not increase until he has finished the boss level.
Choose your own adventure…
I like the smoothness of this little game and the ease with which the player can become immersed in the world. The graphics are bright and pretty. Quests are simple enough to be played in roughly three or four minutes—which is perfect for the adult player who just wants to take a brief break from work or homework.
There is a nice variety of monsters, and while most of the terrain looks similar, it is not exactly the same. This helps keep it from being boring. Also there are lots of little barrels and jugs scattered throughout each level that can be smashed to reveal the contents—coins, usually, but occasionally nothing. Once a level has been cleared of monsters, the hero is given the option to go straight home to the village, or stick around and search for more treasure.
Where the game falls short is the controls. The main character is controlled with a touch compass in the bottom left corner of the screen. Moving the compass determines which way he goes. The bottom right corner is the action button. While the player is exploring, this is a sword. At other times it can be used to interact (or “talk”) with other characters, or perform other actions.
I realize that the game has to work with the soft, onscreen buttons on most tablets and smart phones, but it makes the player work very hard to keep his character headed in the right direction. I’ve been defeated during several levels because I was swinging my sword away from the monsters that were attacking me, and couldn’t get turned back around in time.
Here there be monsters
Overall, this is a bright, cute, fun game to idle away some hours, but it is easy to get frustrated over the difficulty of control due to a lack of physical buttons. I give the game three out of four Death Stars.
March 11th (14th for Europe and Australasia), the release date for Dark Souls 2, is going to be a magical day for the Dark Souls Community. All the information we’ve seen from the network test/beta points to one great experience! The fans exhibited much wailing and gnashing of teeth when Miyazaki was removed and Yutanimura was assigned as Director of the project. However, it seems that all of this has been met with aplomb.
So far it would appear that the things the fans were worried about, such as difficulty and sparse storytelling of the previous games, have been honored. It looks like From Software will be offering us some great improvements to basic mechanics. Most of the rumors have been gleaned from some of the still-strong contributors to all things Souls related. (Many thanks to Epic Name, Bro!, VaatiVidya, Rurikahn, and many others for digging up info as it has been released and staring at videos trying to find the details that give clues as to what’s in store; and to NamcoBandai for reaching out proactively to the DS Community.) Here is a recap of all the goodies we’ve heard so far—from some old ones from E3 back in the summer to some more recent videos. There are so many excellent tweaks and cool changes to mention!
In both the original game and DS2 when a character dies as a human, he goes hollow. In the new game, Humanity has been removed and replaced with Human Effigies to restore a hollow back to human. The players are encouraged to do this because if they die as a hollow, the character permanently loses a percentage of his hit points. Also, in a brilliant move to fix what could be considered a broken mechanic, staying in hollow form no longer prevents invasions! As long as the game is connected to the network, any game can be invaded at any time. In the original Dark Souls, as long as a player stayed hollow, he or she could essentially play the game unmolested by anything but the environment, which really killed what I consider the defining feature of the Souls games: the passive multiplayer aspect.
In Dark Souls, white soapstone “summoning signs” allow other players to alert other players that they are available to come help defeat particularly difficult levels. In an interesting fix to heavy multiplayer styles of play, there will now be two sizes of soapstone summoning signs. White phantoms will only last a set amount of time and that time will be shortened with each kill the white phantom makes. Large soapstone signs will last longer than small ones. I hope this limitation of friendly help will put a bit more pressure on those who want to be carried through levels by more powerful friends. On some recent gameplay videos I’ve watched, the white soapstones were each infinite, but I presume when the game releases, the small white soapstones will be found more often than the large white soapstones and the infinite feature will ultimately be removed. Additionally, summoned phantoms have a health bar displayed on the screen for easy reference. No longer will the player have to turn the camera to see how close to death his buddies are.
Hopefully, this fix will also alleviate ganking. Too many times have I run through the Forest in Dark Souls only to be jumped by a trio of over-powered players who get off on unfair fights.
One of the big changes from Demon’s Souls to Dark Souls was the Covenants. These gave players an option to join a club of sorts to gain certain advantages or abilities. I am personally really excited about the way Covenants are being addressed in this second installment. When I first started playing Dark Souls, I was really interested in the covenants and how they might affect the style of game play a person uses. I especially liked the idea of the Gravelord Covenant in Dark Souls, but early play really wasn’t affected. It wasn’t until after a couple patches and some testing by players did we finally learn how to use it. By then, though, the charm of most covenants had passed and what really could have been a major twelfth man on anyone’s team just ended up being a means to get exclusive miracles, armor, or other things that really didn’t affect game play in a major way.
Dark Souls 2 seems be handling this flaw in a promising move. The big leaked covenant is the Way of Blue—possibly a working name—which, when joined, causes a blue phantom to automatically be summoned when the game is invaded. This could mean one of two things: either entering this covenant allows the advantage of summoning another player as a guardian and, in turn, are volunteering your assistance to other players, or that there is a sister covenant which will allow for this mechanic to be separated. In other words, one covenant will always get help and the other will always be the one helping. As for other covenants, no other rumors have surfaced; however, the equivalent to the Darkwraiths, from Dark Souls, has been confirmed. That’s a no-brainer, though, no Souls game will be complete without a way to actively invade other players so this is not news to anyone who plays Dark Souls and loves to invade others. Invaders will also be able to heal mid-invasion by using the Estus Flask while trying to kill. This is an interesting detail added to the game. I see a lot of really cool possibilities for the Covenants and cannot wait to see what From Software has cooked up.
Epic Name Bro has found some other changes while looking through the menus, including a bunch of different stat associations:
Casting speed is now increased by Attunement instead of Dexterity—a much more logical change separating Dex builds from Int builds.
Magic and Fire are made more potent by Intelligence. Along these lines, it is interesting to note that fire spells aren’t called “pyromancies”. This has interesting implications to back story and lore, so it will be fun to see how that plays out.
Lighting and Dark are strengthened by Faith, which also plays very well into the lore of Dark Souls as each is tied to gods or their followers.
Dexterity enhances poison and bleed effects
Lastly, an Agility stat has been added that affects the general speed of a character’s actions, such as rolling, raising a shield, or disabling traps. This is an interesting spoiler to people with specialist builds.
I like the idea of spreading out the enhanced effects over so many stats as this will make specialization in more than a couple stats much more difficult, thus curb over-powered character builds. I also like the idea of tying elemental damage to certain stats to further the idea that power is derived from it. From a story perspective, this makes role playing much more exciting.
I have watched some random network test release videos and, from what I’ve seen, there are six classes to choose from when picking a character. This seems a bit limited, but for a beta it gets the job done. These are: Soldier, Warrior, Sorcerer, Temple Knight, Dual Swordsman and Hunter. This seems quite melee heavy, but I assume—in usual Souls fashion—that the starting class won’t matter for very long. Soldier and Warrior are two very similar classes, but one starts with a spear. Sorcerer and Temple Knight are also related. The implication that I get is that the Temple Knight is the equivalent to the Cleric from Dark Souls, which means he starts as a miracle caster to counter the Sorcerer’s spells. The two remaining classes are the off brands. The Dual Swordsman is something a lot of players have wanted for a long time. Now the option exists and it should lead to a lot of very interesting situations with main-hand and off-hand attacks or parries. The Hunter starts with a bow and seems to be a pretty straight forward range character.
Here are a few remaining details about DS2. Spells now have standard and strong attacks, just like weapons. That should make the casting classes a bit more dynamic and fun to play. I have heard that some shields can be used as catalysts/talismans. Yes, please! Backstabs are handled differently now, as each type of weapon seems to vary in difficulty of execution. Daggers and smaller weapons can more easily perform backstabs than larger ones. They also seem to have their own animations as well. Some of these are really neat. In one video I saw a guy with a spear plunge it into an enemy’s body, lift him up on the end of it and then slam him to the ground. I found it quite satisfying. Swords tend to do a series of slashes while knocking enemies down to the ground. Also, backstabs no longer offer invincibility with the animations so backstabs aren’t the all-powerful fortresses of solitude they used to be. Parries have also changed up a little. Players have to work at them even more now and getting in the riposte takes timing. Practice with both of these will be necessary because enemies now attack in groups and are much more aggressive than in Dark Souls. Getting jumped by a bandit while being shot at by an archer seems to be pretty common.
The bonfires make a return with the usual uses, but now invaders can use them to light torches and such. Overall, it looks like the bleak, uninviting world of Dark Souls 2 is turning out to be more unforgiving and more interactive than ever before. Of course, any and all of these changes could show up or be canned at any time until release, so take it all with a Coke and a smile. However it works out in the end, I may come out of next March pasty-skinned, thin, and with a long beard.
Here is the most recent video from VaatiVidya. Quality is low, since it was shot on a smartphone… apparently no one was supposed to record their gameplay, but he managed to get permission straight from Namco.
This past week I have discovered the new Angry Birds Star Wars II game, which is based on the prequel Star Wars movies. There are a lot of cool, new features on this game that I have not seen on previous Angry Birds games. Here is a quick review to get you started.
Mapping sequences are prettier AND collecting a map in certain levels gives the player bonus levels.
First of all, this game is visually far more appealing than any previous Angry Birds game (and I have played them all—I’m mildly obsessed). This is saying quite a bit, because I found the Angry Birds Rio game to be bright and fun. The mapping sequences in between levels are now actually shown through animation each time the player completes a level, which makes it easier to feel a sense of accomplishment. In previous versions of the game, a player could work through an entire map of fifteen levels without realizing how far they had gotten.
The individual levels also feature stunning graphics. The original Star Wars Angry Birds game took place primarily in space and was dark, and sometimes boring. The levels released so far in this edition all take place on planets, and the scenery really is beautiful.
Angry Birds kept one of the innovations from the first Star Wars game, which I feel had been a big improvement: visible paths for birds before they are actually fired. Since firing birds from a slingshot in space can be tricky business—especially considering magnetic and gravitational fields—this is very helpful.
As the player earns points, they can purchase “replacement” birds to help with difficult levels.
The talents of some of the various birds available have been reinvented, which is a lot of fun. For instance, at a quick tap of the screen, the Jar-Jar Binks character shoots out a long sticky tongue to grab hold of either a fixed object in order to swing out and hit something, or a moveable object to drag it with the force of the bird’s inertia through the air. I have to admit that it has taken me several tries to perfect using this character.
Also, the Yoda character now spins like a… well, like a tiny green Jedi. At a tap, he will spin violently, and bounce off objects to quickly take out whole sections of evil, Sith-pigs.
Care to join the Pork Side, young Jedi?
Perhaps my favorite innovation, however, is the fact that a player can now choose whether to play as a Jedi bird, or as a Pork Side pig. After playing through two or three levels as a Jedi, the game will prompt the player to decide if they would like to continue using the Force for good, or whether they would like to go to the Dark Side. Fortunately, unlike Anakin’s choice, the player’s decision need not be permanent, as the player can choose either side of the Force at any time from the main menu.
Alternate levels to play, once the maps have been exhausted.
Once the two maps that are currently available have been completed from both the Jedi and Pork Side perspectives, players can also go to another screen and choose individual levels with only one type of bird. This is a really nice way for the Angry Birds team to ensure that players have plenty to work on while they wait for the next few maps to be released.
The game has me completely addicted at this point. I definitely recommend it to any fan of Angry Birds OR Star Wars. It’s a great time filler for just about anywhere—just avoid being obvious about playing it in Economics class… not that I know from personal experience!
There are a few things that do get in the way of a perfectly smooth playing experience. The nuns do not seem to have a very long life span. I would have preferred that my character could survive a few attacks before she fell on her face and literally bit the dust.
So far it would appear that the things the fans were worried about, such as difficulty and sparse storytelling of the previous games, have been honored. It looks like From Software will be offering us some great improvements to basic mechanics. Most of the rumors have been gleaned from some of the still-strong contributors to all things Souls related. (Many thanks to Epic Name, Bro!, VaatiVidya, Rurikahn, and many others for digging up info as it has been released and staring at videos trying to find the details that give clues as to what’s in store; and to NamcoBandai for reaching out proactively to the DS Community.) Here is a recap of all the goodies we’ve heard so far—from some old ones from E3 back in the summer to some more recent videos. There are so many excellent tweaks and cool changes to mention!
Therefore I Geek 