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Brew Town (Free) by AppBox Media and I Fight Bears is, as the developers call it, the world's first Craft Beer Simulator. If you enjoyed games like Project Highrise and Game Dev Story, but appreciate the art of making a fine brew, then Brew Town is the perfect little sim for you.

While I certainly don't drink as much as I used to, I still prefer craft beers over the mass produced stuff that's everywhere. Yeah, I guess I was a bit of a beer snob back then, but that's because the common stuff usually doesn't taste all that great. And please, don't try and say I'm wrong — no one is going to pick a Budweiser over a tasty craft beer from a small indie brewery if given the chance. When I heard of Brew Town a few months ago, I was eager for the game's release. I love simulation games, and throw some beer brewing into that? Heck yeah I'm in. After many months of waiting, Brew Town is finally here, and it's definitely a fun sim, though it has some annoyances.

$3.99

Project Highrise

Kalypso Media Group GmbH

$4.99

Game Dev Story

Kairosoft Co.,Ltd

Visually, Brew Town is rendered in beautiful 3D with a modern retro aesthetic. In some ways, it reminds me of Horizon Chase, probably because of the low-poly design. Despite that, Brew Town is still fairly detailed when it comes to the architecture of each building in your brewery, and the world is bright and vivid. As your brewery comes to life one-by-one, tiny little people will populate the area and drive through, so it's fun to watch it all come together. Animations are smooth and fluid for the most part — I did experience some slow frame rates when I had a lot going on and was furiously tapping away being efficient. There isn't much going on for the soundtrack, but Brew Town has the realistic sounds of sports games, bars, cars passing by, and glass bottles clinking together.

As you design your own brews, you can customize the bottles with a variety of stickers and decals. There's a lot to choose from, and each sticker acts as its own layer. Each one can be colored, resized, or even rotated to create your perfect label. Bottle colors and caps can also be personalized with your choice of color, so every brew is special.

Brew Town has you starting from the ground up, and in the beginning you'll start with Value Hops. As you complete specific goals, you can then upgrade to the next level of hops, but all of your building progress get reset. However, as you increase your choice of hops, they become faster to brew and much more profitable, so it's completely your call. Rebuilding on the next go takes less time, but you do start over with buildings, which I found annoying.

The process for your brewery is simple, and the game does have a tutorial that explains the basics when you start. Essentially, you'll have the hops farm, and when hops are ready to be harvested, just tap on them to collect. You can only hold so many hops at a time before it's full, so keep an eye out on your stock.

The next step is to start brewing. In the beginning of the game, you get a lager, and more brew types are available. However, to get access to other types, you must do research and create or improve a formula to earn a certain amount of profits before they open up. The more you research a formula to improve, the more expensive it becomes to research. With research, you choose a new flavor to add to the formula, then play a little mini-game where you must stop the dial in the designated green areas (or at least close to the marker) to ensure good quality.

The brewing is done with timers. The more profitable a beer is, the more time it takes to brew. You start the game with 50 litre brewhouses, but you can upgrade them to increase their capacity. When it's done brewing, you send it off to the bottling plant to go into your custom designed or default bottles. Just tap to bottle — it starts with one bottle per tap, but you can increase it through upgrades. Eventually, you'll also discover the tap-and-hold bottling method, which is another costly upgrade, but you can just long-press once to bottle.

All bottled brews are stored in the warehouse, which you can also upgrade to hold more. You can stock the bar, also upgradeable, to sell a certain number of bottles per minute for profits. Your HQ gets order requests from other businesses, and serves as a decent enough cash generator once you fulfill them. Once your brewery has delivered a certain number of bottles, you can upgrade your HQ.

As you play, you'll also notice some drones flying around — tap on these for quick cash. There are also pink limos and vans driving around that can get you bottle caps with a tap or some cash if you watch an ad.

Every now and then, you'll get large requests for sporting events. These orders are special and you only have a certain amount of time to fill the order, but the payoff is worth it, especially if you're in the more valuable hops territory. When these events happen, you'll want to make sure all of your brewhouses are brewing the specified brews for the order, and you may want to sell off unwanted brews in warehouse fire sales to make room.

All of the buildings you can build and use in Brew Town can be upgraded. However, they get extremely costly, and that's why it's annoying when you move up to a better hops since it all resets. However, you do at least keep your brew formulas, thankfully.

Your farm generates a few hops at a time, but the best way to get more is to play the mini-game, Hop-or-Not. This is like a Tinder for other brew labels that people have designed, and you can rate them with a "Yes" or "No" by swiping or tapping the buttons. While you can be critical, I find it's better to just give everyone a like so you can quickly accrue more hops, as a few get awarded after every five likes.

A craft beer brewery simulator.

The Good

Brew Town is a cute and addictive little simulation game that shows what it's like to manage your own craft beer brewery. The graphics are nice, and I love the realistic sounds effects. There's humor in the game too, with references to hipster Instagrammers and "sportsbowl" events, so that always brought a smile to my face. I think the coolest part about the game is the fact that you can design your own beer labels, which gives you a chance to get creative and make your dream label.

The Bad

Unfortunately, as I played the game for hours yesterday (it was so hard to put down), I had encountered a number of annoying glitches. First, for some reason, the game decided that it should reset one of my formulas that I had researched several times back to the beginning, and I lost my label design. This happened twice with two different brews, and needless to say it was pretty frustrating.

I also noticed that sometimes I would watch an ad for the promise of more caps or cash, but the game wouldn't do the payout after the ad was done. I tried watching the ad again and still nada.

And while customizing your own label is great, I encountered a glitch that made it impossible for me to truly make what I want. The color picker's bottom row is a no-touch zone on my iPhone 8 Plus, since the text "Label Designer" covers the bottom area of the colors. So I'm unable to access the blacks, grays, and whites for my labels.

Needless to say, I was a bit disappointed with the amount of bugs in the game. Hopefully they all get ironed out soon.

The verdict

Brew Town is an entertaining simulation clicker style game that is keeping me busy whenever I sit down and check in. I found the tutorial to be a bit unclear, but the game is pretty straightforward once you get the hang of things. And it's easy to just lose yourself in for a few hours at a time here, especially when you've become super efficient at brewing and filling orders. The graphics are great, and the sounds are nicely done. I don't really understand why all the building upgrades must be reset when you get a new hops though, and I hope the bugs that I've encountered get fixed. Still, I'll be playing this one for a while, at least until I get bored of running a successful brewery, anyway.

Brew Town is available on the App Store as a universal download for free for your iPhone and iPad. There are in-app purchases.

8.7

OVERALL

Replayability 9

Gameplay 9

Game Controls 8.5

Graphics 8.5

Sound/Music 8.5

FREE

Brew Town

AppBox Media

Source link: http://appadvice.com/reviews

Sdorica -sunset- (Free) by Rayark is a role-playing game with dashes of strategy and matching-puzzles. If you enjoyed other games like Terra Battle 2or Fire Emblem Heroes, then you'll get a kick out of Sdorica.

When I was in high school, I was introduced to JRPGs by my group of friends and I fell in love. Everything from the anime art styles to the dark and intricate, though usually cliché, stories, to the combat system — I loved it all. I'd end up spending hours playing these games because I had all the time in the world back then, and not many worries. But now I'm an adult with responsibilities, so time is short. While I still love JRPGs, I just don't have as much time for them like I used to. So when there are mobile JRPGs that provide a bite-size experience, I'm down.

Rayark is a fairly popular developer, and they've made some other great games like Cytus (I reviewed the sequel), Implosion – Never Lose Hope, and VOEZ. I've played most of their iOS releases so far, and have thoroughly enjoyed them. They pump out quality games, so when I saw that Sdorica was a role-playing game, I knew I had to check it out. Even though it's a free-to-play title, it does things incredibly well, and the usual annoyances with F2P games is not found here, surprisingly.

Free

Terra Battle 2

MISTWALKER CORPORATION

Free

Fire Emblem Heroes

Nintendo Co., Ltd.

$1.99

Cytus II

Rayark International Limited

$1.99

Cytus

Rayark International Limited

$9.99

Implosion – Never Lose Hope

Rayark International Limited

Visually, Sdorica is one of the most beautiful F2P games I've seen, but I'm not surprised since this is Rayark, after all. Sdorica has a heavily anime-inspired art style that JRPG fans will appreciate. The game is packed with anime cutscenes that reveal the story in each chapter, and the character sprites during gameplay are rather cute and "kawaii," as they say. The character renderings for gacha pulls and portraits are incredibly stylized and detailed, and the game world is stunning, no matter what quest you're doing. Animations are smooth and fluid during scenes and gameplay, and I didn't have many issues with choppy frame rates on my iPhone 8 Plus. However, I did notice that there's a bit of a lag when going through the menus, and there's more loading screens than I'd like.

Aside from art and gameplay, one of the other reasons I enjoyed playing JRPGs back in the day was for the soundtracks. Sdorica has a whimsical and atmospheric soundtrack that fits in with the entire fantasy theme, and helps set up the mood and tone of each story chapter. It's a delightful soundtrack to listen to, so I recommend using earbuds to be fully immersed. Sdorica also features Japanese voice acting for the spoken dialogue, which I enjoyed. All of this put together makes Sdorica feel like a triple-A title, which is surprising since it's free and quite frankly, packed with content.

When you start up Sdorica, you may have to download some game data before you're able to dive in. This can take a few minutes depending on your connection speed, but it's well worth it. Sdorica features a tutorial in the beginning that walks you through the ropes of how the game works, and new element menus, but once you get started, it's hard to stop. Plus, that game data download is pretty large because there's a ton of content available from the get-go, and the best part is that there is no energy system. Yes, you can play this game as much as you want during each session without having to worry about running out of energy and timers. For a free-to-play game, that's pretty much unheard of.

Most of your time will probably be spent in Sdorica's story mode, but there are special events, abiiity and training quests, and region exploration missions. However, regardless of which mode you play, the setup is still the same. You pick your team from your available roster (characters can be unlocked through the story or earned from gacha pulls), and then head into battle. Each stage consists of about three waves of enemies that you must defeat before the stage is cleared. While it sounds easy, Sdorica's unique gameplay mechanic breathes some fresh life into the tried-and-true turn-based formula.

Each character in your roster may only be assigned to one of three positions in battle. When you tap on the spot you want to fill, it shows you which characters can go there. Sometimes though, like in certain story and event missions, certain characters must take part, so that slot becomes locked. But if there's no lock, then you're free to choose who you like.

Sdorica's roster is a mix of magic users, damage dealers, and tanks. So ideally, the magic users go in the back, the damage dealers in the middle, and the tanks up in the front lines. You can even have up to two advisors, which are extra slots for a character but they just have unique advisor abilities, rather than take part in the battles themselves.

Battle in Sdorica is an interesting mashup of turn-based RPG combat and match-three puzzle. At the bottom of the screen will be two rows of colored orbs (white, purple, and orange). You can tap on a single orb or gather up two or four (in a square formation) with a swiping gesture to have one of your team members perform an action. The action depends on who you're using, but actions are always a melee or magic attack, support moves, or healing. Before you make a match, the game tells you who will do the action and what they'll be doing.

Enemies have number counters on them — this is the number of moves you can make before they attack. Sometimes they'll also have unique traits or abilities, and you can view this information by long-pressing on them. If an ally falls in battle, don't worry — you can still resurrect them by getting enough resurrection orbs. But you won't lose them permanently, thankfully, and they still get experience if you win.

Once you clear out all of the waves, then that quest is cleared and you'll get your loot. Each completed stage nets experience for your team members, as well as your own Watcher level. There may be other rewards, such as character minerals for evolving them, crystals (premium currency), or soul energy.

The Soul Energy is what you need to "invest" in your roster, raising their level up to become more potent in battle. If you have all of the required materials, you're able to "resonate" them, which means evolving into their next form. The crystals are used for the "infuse" section, where you can take a chance with character pulls or get materials.

Sdorica -sunset- is an insanely good JRPG that's full of quality.

The Good

Sdorica is an excellent mobile JRPG that is rich in story and has unique gameplay. The graphics are also beautiful, insanely detailed, and character designs are amazing to look at. The music is well done, and the voice acting is just icing on the cake. Even though this is a free game, there are no ads, no limitations on how long you can play, and there's ample opportunity to get the premium currency without paying a dime. It's also jam packed with content, so I can safely say that this is one game that I will be playing for some time.

The Bad

There's a lot of good stuff to be found in Sdorica, but I found the slight delay between menu selections and loading times to be a tad annoying. Sometimes I think the game froze, but it's just taking it's time with my selection is all. Hopefully this slight delay is fixed in future updates to be more responsive. Still, it's a small nitpick I have with the game, but it's tolerable considering how good it is.

The verdict

While I'm not usually a fan of free-to-play RPGs, I think Sdorica is one of the exceptions. Rayark did a fantastic job with this one, from the visual art style and sound to the interesting battle mechanic and tons of content for free, no strings attached. They also give you a ton of goals to complete for free premium currency, so the in-app purchases for more are more like a way to say thanks to the developers for making such a good game. It's completely optional and not necessary to play the game, but I can see myself spending a few bucks in the future to just support Sdorica. I highly recommend giving this game a chance if you're a fan of JRPGs.

You can find Sdorica -sunset- on the App Store as a universal download for your iPhone and iPad for free. There are in-app purchases.

9.8

OVERALL

Replayability 10

Graphics 10

Sound/Music 10

Game Controls 9.5

Gameplay 9.5

FREE

Sdorica

Rayark International Limited

Source link: http://appadvice.com/reviews