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Fireball Wizard is about as straightforward in concept as it is in its title. It's a game where you play as a wizard, and (surprise!) they can shoot fireballs. With this basic, primary tool, you weave your way through brief platforming levels that don't feel too unlike mini Mega Man stages. It's a fine game for anyone looking for some new platforming challenge, but is far from feeling particularly special.

Jump, shoot, cast

Armed with your wand, a spellbook, and double-jumping abilities, Fireball Wizard has you pilot a little pixelated wizard through stages that can typically be completed in a few minutes. In these levels are typical fantasy enemies like skeletons, blobs of goo, bats, etc. as well as environmental hazards like fire pits and spikes.

The goal of these levels is simply to reach the exit, though killing enemies rewards coins that can be used on upgrades and there is a secret area in each level that can grant more rewards. At the end of each level, there is a bonus mini-game that can give you even more coins before placing you back in an overworld where you can revisit old levels, go upgrade your wand, play some mini-games, or move on to the next challenge.

Tricky spells

As you move through Fireball Wizard, you also gain access to non-fireball spells to add to your spellbook. You can activate your spellbook at any time in-game, and doing so pauses the game while you choose what to cast. These spells almost all have a corollary to platforming powers you've seen in previous games. For example, there's a freeze spell that can destroy walls that you were previously not able to move past and a spell you can cast mid-air to do a “stomp” move through breakable blocks below you.

There is some novelty to this spell book mechanic, especially since some spells can be useful outside of their initial context. The aforementioned freeze spell, for instance, can also freeze enemies, which can be useful for plucking pesky bats out of the air or avoiding fast attacking enemies. I sort of wish these spells had more consistent or wider use cases than they do, but the extent that they have multiple uses is also kind of neat.

Bosses and bugs

Every tenth level in Fireball Wizard is a boss stage that puts your abilities to the test before unlocking a new area. These fights are the most challenging combat encounters in the game, but they definitely feel familiar to anyone who has played a game in the vein of Mega Man before. Otherwise, Fireball Wizard levels are full of the same level design gimmicks that you've also very likely seen.

Despite these levels only taking a short time to complete, I found Fireball Wizard to test my patience. Dying in a level forces you to restart it from the beginning. Deaths come mostly from very fair attack patterns or hazards you can read and react to, but since all of the game feels like something I've played before, it was nonetheless frustrating. I also encountered a bug with opening the spellbook at the same time as finding a secret area, which renders the entire game unresponsive, thus adding occasional other reasons to have to restart levels.

The bottom line

There isn't anything fundamentally wrong with Fireball Wizard. It rearranges common tropes of platformers into one that works in its fantasy setting and on smaller screens. It isn't perfect, but it works well enough, It just also doesn't really take many risks or add anything else to its formula to make it stand out.

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

Over the years, the App Store has seen some ingenious design go into the humble one-touch platformer. I'd even go as far to say that some of these past titles are some of the best platforming you can find just about anywhere. Due to this stiff competition, games like Bumballon have a hard time standing out. Despite a decently charming aesthetic and intriguing concept, this game has just enough working against it to make it hard to recommend over alternatives.

Balloon bouncer

In Bumballon, you play as a duck-like creature who launches out of cannons to blast through environments has super speeds. Your only way to control this creature is by tapping to make it inflate and float slowly along like a balloon. You only have a limited time to be inflated, though, with the idea being that most of the time you'll be shooting through levels in mere seconds.

As you fly through the air, any number of things might come in to view to knock you out of the sky. Deadly creatures, walls, and other hazards you have to play around and try to time your flying just right so that you don't careen into them and die, which would force you to start the level over from the beginning.

Duck death

It doesn't take long for Bumballon to become a pretty serious test of your reflexes. Once you get to the end of the first world (of seven total), you'd have to be pretty lucky to make it through a level without dying at least once. The speed at which the game moves and the way you only have such limited control of your character means you can expect to die quite a bit before clearing levels moving forward.

I don't usually have an issue with platformers that are punishing like this, but Bumballon's flavor of it has a couple sour notes. The first is that there are many times where you can identify your doom well before you even reach it, as sometimes a mistimed launch can't even be saved by the one control option you have. The second–and perhaps most important–reason I don't have much patience for dying and retrying in Bumballon is that restarting levels takes a bit too long. By my estimate, viewing the death screen (which also keeps a tally of your increasingly embarrassing death count and tapping to try again takes a few seconds, when it should really be an instant restart.

Quacky quirks

Outside of the core design decisions of Bumballon's gameplay, there are a couple of other things that rub me the wrong way. The first is that the game is a little buggy, particularly when it comes to its sound. During almost every play session, the game sound completely stops, which can be quite distracting, especially if in the midst of a challenging sequence.

Also, the game's free-to-play model–while generally pretty standard in most circumstances–makes the punsihment of death even more excrutiating. Having an advertisement add further delay to the retrying process ruins what is already a pretty sluggish sense of momentum, which is key to making a challenging one-touch platformer feel replayable and less frutstrating than it would otherwise be.

The bottom line

There are just a few too many things that make Bumballon bothersome to play. In light of no quality alternatives, that may well make it worth picking up, but that is definitely not the case. There are myriad other high-quality platformers you could be playing that deliver what Bumballon in a slicker and better designed package.

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