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The Voice of Cards series is kind of odd in that it is based around a dedication to gimmicks that don't meaningfully change the core of the games all that much. These titles all want to emulate a grand fantasy adventure using nothing but tabletop game pieces, like cards, counters, and even a game master to narrate the whole tale to you. Outside of these things, the games are essentially a small scale role playing game, which is mostly a good fit for their arrival on iOS, though at least The Forsaken Maiden has a few issues that makes it less than ideal for mobile play.

A fetching quest

Voice of Cards: The Forsaken Maiden takes place in a fantasy world comprised of island villages that are each home to a maiden who is responsible for keeping these communities safe. There is some not-entirely-clear threat that the world is constantly defending itself against and the arcane rituals and ceremonial magic of these maidens keeps that threat at bay.

The Forsaken Maiden follows the journey of a silent maiden named Laty who finds herself having to journey with her attendant to the other islands to help other maidens perform their rituals. In meeting these characters, you build up a party of adventurers who fight in random battles, level up, and customize their ability sets as they uncover more about the evil forces perpetuating the need for maidens and their magic.

Card-based but conventional

The entire story of The Forsaken Maiden plays out through the use of cards and narration by a fully voiced storyteller. This doesn't mean that this game (or the other Voice of Cards titles, for that matter) are deck-builders or have any other card game mechanics or conventions. There's no card drawing or collection to speak of at all. The closest The Forsaken Maiden gets to being like a card game is how its ability cards cost a certain amount of tokens that you accumulate over the course of a fight (as opposed to having mana pools or anything).

Otherwise, The Forsaken Maiden plays almost exactly like a very conventional role-playing game. You explore an overworld to wander between locations, interact with key characters, and fight in random battles and boss fights. As a sort of smaller scale game, I will say I appreciate this game's sense of pace. Getting through The Forsaken Maiden should take less than 20 hours, and throughout there is no real need to grind out experience or money at all.

Onerous on-the-go

On paper, it makes total sense to bring a game like The Forsaken Maiden to mobile. With the streamlined storytelling and straightforward card combat, it feels like it should be exactly the thing you might want to bust out at a moment's notice while out to take a few steps toward the ending credits. Unfortunately, though, this isn't quite the case, and The Forsaken Maiden's relatively unwieldy mobile design only gets worse the longer you play it.

The first roadblock to making this game easy to whip out is a long inital load. You can bypass this if you can manage to keep the game suspended, but it still means every time you start it anew you've got to wait almost a minute to actually play it. As you play, there are also times where the game either hasn't optimized the touch areas of menus or certain buttons just don't work, to the point that late-stage abilities aren't even selectable. These things didn't put a huge damper on making me want to see the game to the end, but the long drawn-out sequences of fights with uneven difficulty and no ability to save between really did. I got through to the end and was satisfied by the conclusion, fortunately, but I can't see myself wanting to revisit the game for any of the side quests or other unlocks I received upon beating the game the first time.

The bottom line

If I had to sum it up, I'd say The Forsaken Maiden is a solid rpg up until around the last act of the game, where it simultaneously makes some design missteps and loses all sense of mobile friendliess. Before you reach that point, the problems with the game's mobile port are apparent but it's much easier to look past them and just enjoy the swift-moving rpg playing out via cards and narration.

Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/voice-of-cards-the-forsaken-maiden-review/

I like a good management game to dink around on, particularly on iOS. Water 2050 is extra appealing to me because it also has a noble cause. As a game developed in partnership with the Water Environment Federation to alert players to issues surrounding water pollution, it highlights a challenge that we face in the real world and frames it as a tough but surmountable challenge. While I do like the game's messaging and most of its core concepts, Water 2050 is unfortunately pretty rough around the edges and therefore isn't easy to recommend.

Purify the pollution

As its name suggests, Water 2050 takes place in the not-so-distant future, where you are in charge of running a city which–among other things–has a very polluted water system. There's a helpful little engineer named Martin who helps guide you through the ins and outs of running the city, including assigning objectives to help you try and reverse the tide of pollution that threatens the existence of your populace.

You have to balance your pursuit of cleaning up water with a lot of other city management requirements, though, like producing enough food for people to eat, maintaining city happiness, and deciding how to handle emergencies, be they natural disasters, organized protests, or something else entirely. Luckily, you don't just have to manage things how they are. Due to some special research, you also have the power to temporarily travel through time to 2023 to help you take preventative measures that affect conditions in 2050, though you also have to manage the past version of this city and balance your ability to jump between time periods with everything else needed to keep everyone alive and healthy.

Simple solutions

Given the focus of Water 2050, your goal is very clear, and–although there are things in the game that distract from water purification that you have to deal with–getting to the win state of the game is very simple. By reducing pollution, balancing your resource intake, and prioritizing water collection and cleaning you'll eventually have the looming threat of polluted water under control.

The more I think about this, though, the same is true for the real world about addressing any kind of existential threat. If people collectively could just look a little further beyond their own personal or otherwise short-term desires to recognize and respond to a problem we all need to fix, it could get done. Unfortunately, it's not so easy to just ignore corporate influence or otherwise manage a whole city like it's a game about water purification. But still, Water 2050 gets its point across and has some neat information about modern water conservation technologies baked right into the game's tech tree.

Rough waters

Water 2050 isn't a game that goes on endlessly. Provided you are able to manage successfully for long enough, you'll eventually research enough tech to filter and/or gather an amount of clean water that outpaces the rate at which it gets polluted. From there, you can then venture forth to another city to save.

Unfortunately though, I don't actually know what happens at this point, as just before I reached the threshold to do this, the game bugged out and gave me an ending saying I ran out of clean water when I had nearly 100% clean water reserves. This would've been a surprising end to my playthrough, but it was almost expected given some of the things I encountered while playing. Time warps bugged out to give me extra turns, I tapped into random events populated with place-holder graphics and text, and sometimes my resources would rise and fall at random between turns. All of this was annoying but manageable up until this end point, but the game-ending bug was particularly frustrating, especially since I had no way of resuming my game from an earlier state at that point.

The bottom line

I wish a game like this with a pretty basic but effective message was built a little bit better. It's hard enough to sell people on a game that might be seen as preachy from the outside, but it's even more difficult when the game doesn't work properly. When it is flowing along without issue, though, Water 2050 is an enjoyable little management game. It's just too bad the game is littered with bugs big and small basically all throughout the experience.

Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/water-2050-review/