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It's always been easy to be cynical about mobile games generally, and it's only gotten easier as time goes on. Fewer premium releases seem to come out each year, and those select few often tend to be ports, sequels to known quantities, or titles locked behind subscription services. Bossgame: The Boss Is My Heart is (refreshingly) none of these things, and is also a unique and special blend of genres that makes it one of the most compelling mobile experiences I've come across in a long time.

Boss-killing gig

Bossgame: The Boss Is My Heart is a game about a couple who work together as devil hunters. This profession is cheekily presented as a kind of gig work for a fantasy city that has other similarities to our modern society. When these two aren't actively in combat they like to hang out at the local “chill and grill” restaurant, flirt, and try to find their way through life.

This results in a game that has a lot of quirky text-based dialogue vignettes that punctuate boss fights where you control both characters through a few simple tap controls that let you cast spells, swing swords, and block attacks as you work your way through fights with robots, devil knights, local politicians, and more.

Combo combat

Action gameplay on mobile devices can be tough to make feel good, but Bossgame: The Boss Is My Heart makes it look easy. Your own controls are pretty simple, but every boss has unique and creative attack patterns that make every fight a fresh and novel combat puzzle.

Your characters have light and heavy attacks, but also a stamina meter that allows them to block. If one character gets knocked out, you can use your other character to revive them. Chaining together enough hits can also let you use a special move that stuns bosses for a few seconds so you can wail away on them. There aren't any rpg or progression mechanics in Bossgame: The Boss Is My Heart, but since every fight is several minutes of bespoke combat design, it stays satisfying and compelling throughout.

Head and heart

In addition to Bossgame: The Boss Is My Heart's smart combat design, the game is also quite endearing. The story is a relatable tale told with characters that like to quip at each other, but also feel like real people with real feelings.

I could see some players getting invested in this game purely for the story, and if that's the case, Bossgame smartly includes a ton of options to customize the game's combat difficulty so you can tune it to your liking. Things like auto-blocking, battle speed, and even invincibility are all at your fingertips to ensure you can see then adventure through to its end without frustrations.

The bottom line

Bossgame: The Boss Is My Heart is one of those games you can tell is made with a lot of love. You can feel it in how the characters talk to each other, how each boss fight is designed, and the smart customization controls. I am not sure I'd change anything about it, and I hope to see more smart and original releases like this on the App Store.

Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/bossgame-the-boss-is-my-heart-review/

Lots of mobile games focus themselves on being as legible and accessible as possible to encourage play on-the-go. I won't say N-GON can't be played while out and about, but I will say it has such an extreme visual style paired with some simple mechanics that can be hard to deploy just right unless you are giving the game your full attention. It makes for a satisfying, hardcore-feeling experience, but one that you might not always feel drawn to play as a result.

Smeared shooter

N-GON is an arcade-style shooter where you control a ship as it flies through the void of space, shooting at all kinds of enemies. Your ship and enemies are all represented as simple geometric shapes that reminds me of early arcade vector graphics like Asteroids or Tempest.

This sounds like a very straightforward and simple concept, but it's complicated by two important factors. The first is that you can double-tap on the screen to fire out a magnet that attracts your own bullets so you can arc shots. The second is that there's a ridiculous amount of glitched-out effects and screenshake that gives N-GON a tremendous sense of speed and the feeling like the game itself is bursting at the seams to even function.

Gate hopping

Progress through N-GON is fairly linear. Each level or “gate” consists of several waves of enemies that enter the screen from all sides and killing them all or simply surviving through their attacks gives a brief moment of respite before encountering another wave. Your ship can take two hits, and you can regain a hit between gates. If you die, you can choose to restart from the gate were on or the entire game from the beginning.

The beginning stages of N-GON play out like a very simple shooter, requiring very little of the player beyond some basic maneuvering while your ship fires away. After clearing the first few gates, though, enemies start showing up with shields and special attacks that will test your skills at angling your shots via your deployable magnet while also dodging through a chaotic mess of special projectiles.

Tricky triangulation

It's when the difficulty ramps up that N-GON suddenly becomes a game where you think “oh, maybe I should sit down and use two hands to play this.” Between the visuals vibrating half-way off the screen and the quick reflexes needed, there is very little that feels casual about the experience.

For anyone who may be overwhelmed with the visual chaos, there's probably not a whole lot here for you. There are no options to scale back any of the game's stylization, so if you have photosensitivity or just want a more visually clean experience you are out of luck. At the same time, though, I'm not sure N-GON would feel like it would have nearly the same sense of thrill without its extreme aesthetics. The “bullet magnet” mechanic by itself doesn't feel substantive without feeling like you're also on careening out of control at all times.

The bottom line

It's probably fair to say that I enjoy the sensory experience of playing N-GON more than whatever I'm actually being asked to do. It's a totally serviceable vertical shooter, but the special sauce that gives it its identity is the way it looks and feels.

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