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The first game from Kyle Barrett I played took some time to warm up to. Immortal Rogue was one of those games that you just had to keep banging away at before its initial walls broke down to turn it into something more compelling. Given this design philosophy, I wanted to make sure I sunk a good amount of time into Ultra Blade, which at first blush feels like Barrett shoehorning Vampire Survivors into Immortal Rogue, but for as much time as I dumped into Ultra Bladeit never really felt like these concepts meshed together all that well.

Kill to survive

Ultra Blade is a wave-based survival game where you can choose from a variety of characters before being dumped into an arena where endless monsters spawn and your goal becomes surviving as long as possible. As you kill monsters, items may drop that can help you level up your character and grant new abilities for them. The only catch is that you only ever get the chance to pick from a semi-random selection of possible powerups.

These powerups can do things as simple and straightforward as increase your damage or give you a shield and as complicated as giving you a throwable glaive or gear that transforms the way your heavy attacks work. In order to keep up with the ever-increasing power of the monsters spawning into the arena, you need to try and piece together the best combination of powerups and stay leveling up as quickly as possible while avoiding damage.

I'd rather play separate games

As you die and retry in attempts to survive more waves, you'll earn currencies, unlock new characters and gear, and gain access to other arenas to take on. Between that and the honing of your own abilities to recognize enemy attack patterns, learn powerup synergies, and master the basic controls, you'll almost inevitably extend your run lengths and get further in Ultra Blade the more you play it.

I like this kind of game design, but here in Ultra Blade it feels too much like it is splitting how its structure works across two different games that it is borrowing ideas from. Every play session feels like the permanent unlocks and in-arena unlocks are not substantial or frequent enough that you have a whole lot of room to experiment without harming your chances of success. As a result, the game feels like it nudges you to grind out ways to make the grind faster.

Tough luck

I don't want to sound too down on Ultra Blade, because it can be quite fun. When things are really clicking together in a run or you unlock a new character to try and learn the ins and outs of, it can be quite engrossing. It's just that this situation doesn't arise as often as it does in other games. This is usually fine because different games should be different from one another, but when Ultra Blade is so clearly spinning out its own flavor of Vampire Survivors mechanics it's hard not to.

Looking at Vampire Survivors, a big part of how it rewards you is through how it makes you feel like you are lucky all the time. Things that appear random aren't, actually, and–even if they were–most of its progressive unlocks upgrade into abilities that are so powerful that you don't have to worry a whole lot about playing optimally. Ultra Blade, on the other hand, makes luck feel hard to come by and the ways that you can overcome that through player skill alone feel pretty limited unless you have already invested the massive amount of time necessary to unlock and level all of the game's characters, relics, etc.

The bottom line

Ultra Blade is a fine game, but it falls into the trap of reminding you of other, better games you could be playing. The mashup of progression mechanics here is interesting, but they don't feel as rewarding together as they do separately in other games you can already get on the App Store, one of which is free.

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

I don't know anything about the Gomorrah tv show that this mobile game is based on. If the game is any indication, though, Gomorrah is stylish crime family drama that has some quality writing. There are some text formatting issues that can make it hard at times to fully parse what is happening in this game, but otherwise Gomorrah is an enjoyable text adventure with some nice art and light management mechanics.

Fated family

In Gomorrah, you play as Nina, the 18 year old daughter of the top organized crime lord in Naples. Without giving anything away, some things happen that put you in a position where you need to lead your own crew of mobsters as you set about trying to solve a mystery of sorts.

Given your age and relative inexperience with mob life, a lot of your moves get questioned and folks doubt your abilities while the game puts you to the test of deciding how Nina rises to the challenge. Some of this is done through dialog choices that make up the bulk of the game's seven chapters. There are also some interludes where you are placed in a light management sim and given choices on what kinds of jobs to give to certain crew members to make sure you maintain funding, respect, and power over your crew.

Graphic and novel

The moment-to-moment action of Gomorrah is basically everything you'd expect from a good crime family drama. There's a lot of subterfuge, backstabbing, and–of course–death. Similarly, the management portions of the game are pretty standard meter balancing exercises that mostly feel tedious and only slightly meaningful to how the overall story plays out.

That said I am quite impressed with the game's writing and art. There are clever turns of phrase and artistic flourishes that breathe life into the characters and reveal a lot about Nina and her relationships with her parents and others. It made entering every vignette something to look forward to, which is not something I can say about just any mobile text-based game.

A mob of text

Something else I appreciate about Gomorrah is how it divides its story into chapters that then get subdivided into individual stories of roughly the same length (a few minutes). It sounds like a really small touch, but knowing and having consistent and intentional breakpoints in a story is very helpful for a game that is so easy to break out and start playing just about anywhere.

I just wish that this kind of thoughtful structuring also went into the text formatting of Gomorrah. Every story is divided essentially into comic book-like panels with text and drawings that fill your screen without having to scroll that you tap a button to proceed through or make a choice about. While it is nice to not have to worry about a need to scroll, Gomorrah often formats dialog between different characters with no line breaks, which can make it difficult to figure out who is saying what without reading carefully or re-reading a block of text a couple of times to figure it out. This isn't a huge deal, but it can break any kind of natural reading flow and it's very easy to accidentally thumb past something which could pose a problem since there is no way to go back to read anything you may have missed.

The bottom line

I was not expecting to enjoy the story of a mobile game that ties into a universe I have no frame of reference this much. Gomorrah is a well told crime drama that is reasonably paced and enjoyable to make your way through, provided you can take your time to read through it carefully.

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