AppReviewToday- AppReviews

Wildfrost is an easy game to fall in love with. What I mean by that every little aspect of the game has its own little charming flourish to it. You might not be able to appreciate all of those nitty gritty details on a phone screen, but on larger displays Wildfrost is one of the most polished deckbuilders you can find on the App Store.

Cold cards

The core concept of Wildfrost is hardly new. In it, you customize a deck full of units, abilities, and more to battle through increasingly difficult stages in an effort to reach and defeat a final boss. As you try and fail a bunch (and occasionally succeed), you'll unlock new cards or factions to add more variety to each playthrough.

There are definitely some significant ways in which Wildfrost reworks this idea into something unique, though. Combat takes place across two lanes and involves unit cards that have their own timers that tick down every turn before attacking and using their abilities, for example.

Friendly frosts

The main thing that jumps out about Wildfrost is just how nice it looks, feels, and sounds. Everything is bright, colorful, and full of expression, and there's a ton of little animation or design touches that bring its flat cards to life. I also want to shoutout the game's superb soundtrack, which is something I don't think I've ever said about a deckbuilding roguelite before.

All of this attention to detail extends to more technical aspects of Wildfrost as well. The game runs at an extremely smooth frame rate all the way up to 120 frames per second and its cloud saving system is among the best I've experienced, with progress syncing between devices nearly instantly.

Icy edges

As charming as I do find the vast majority of playing Wildfrost, there are a few things that I found slightly troubling in my time with it. The first (and most significant) is that it is awfully difficult to see and read cards on certain devices like my iPhone SE. If you have a larger phone, I could see this being a non-issue, but I found myself only really feeling sort of comfortable playing on my phone after simply memorizing what most cards do, and only then only playing the first few opening stages before things get too complicated.

And this brings me to my second point: deep runs in Wildfrost can be very infuriating due to a certain degree of randomness, some ambiguous card text, and the high degree of complexity that doesn't always play well with an occasionally finicky control scheme. There are multiple times during my time with Wildfrost where I lost entire runs because a card didn't operate the way I thought it would, or an attempt to read a card resulted in playing it. If there were some way to confirm card plays or have an undo button, most of this would be a non-issue. It's also something that becomes less of a problem the more you play, though that's mostly because you end up learning how to avoid these things the hard way.

The bottom line

There is an extremely high bar set for roguelites on mobile–particularly deckbuilding ones–and Wildfrost manages to clear it despite some pain points in its design. This is thanks mostly due to the game's impeccable style that makes spending more time with it a complete delight.

Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/wildfrost-review/

Ghost Trick is a cult classic game for a few very good reasons. It's a one-off release by the creator of the Ace Attorney series that only released on Nintendo DS back in 2010, which was pretty late into that device's life cycle. Beloved as it may be, it's not a huge surprise to reveal that it didn't perform well sales-wise back then, but at least Capcom knows that the game captured enough hearts that it was worth remastering. This new release of Ghost Trick looks and plays great, and–although it has some of the same pain points of the original release–is well worth playing for its unique sense of style and charm.

Ghost game

Ghost Trick is a bit of a critical darling, so I won't spend too much time in this review belaboring how it works or what it's about. What's important to know for this remaster is that it takes advantage of being on upgraded hardware by looking extremely sharp and running at a smooth and stable frame rate.

As for the gameplay, using a finger in place of the stylus works exactly like you'd expect, and there's nothing so demanding design-wise that having higher fidelity touch is necessary. The only mild annoyance I came across while playing this version is that taps to advance dialog occasionally would register as a swipe input and pull up the game's dialog history instead.

Sample specter

The iOS version of Ghost Trick is a free-to-start title, which gives you a surprisingly lengthy chunk of game to play to decide if it is for you or not. You play through multiple puzzle sequences in their entirety and get enough story to get a sense of what the overall plot will end up being. Very few things past this paid point end up being all that surprising, but it is nice that Capcom has decided to really let players get a feel for the game before deciding whether to fork over a whopping $29.99 for the full experience.

Aside from the main story, Ghost Trick has a few special features like illustrations, notes, and music from the game you can browse/listen to, as well as a “Ghost Puzzle” minigame that is simply an animated jigsaw puzzle of several scenes from the game. These aren't terribly exciting add-ons in my opinion, but the core game is more than worth the asking price alone.

Old soul

The last thing to talk about now is probably just how Ghost Trick feels to play in 2024. The short version is: pretty good! It's definitely easy to peg it as an older title, but its look and gameplay are still so incredibly distinct and charismatic. In almost 15 years since its release, I don't think anything has measured up or even made the attempt to do things that Ghost Trick does.

My only caveat with the experience is that some of the game's puzzles are not all that fun to figure out. Deep into Ghost Trick as the challenges get more complex, there are times when the way to avert someone's fate with your ghost powers is–let's say–less than clear. This can lead to quite a bit of trial and error, with errors kicking you back to the beginning of a sequence. Luckily, there's a menu option in-game that lets you fast-forward through dialog to make these sections feel less tedious, but it can still grow tiresome to just experiment until you happen upon some obtuse solution to move the story forward.

The bottom line

Ghost Trick is a charming and unique puzzle adventure experience, and I'm not sure there's anything else out there quite like it. It's certainly not the smoothest play (especially these days), but this remaster definitely adds enough shine to make it worth picking up on iOS.

Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/ghost-trick-review/