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AppReviewToday- All
Hi, my name is Kristina and I work as the office manager of Mid Atlantic Consulting. We are a Macintosh Support, Service, and Consulting Company. I will review one iPhone app every day coming from a non-tech like me. Add your comments and I will try to reply.
Athenion might not have the pedigree of some other deck-building card games available for mobile, but that shouldn't put you off. This is a game that's packed full of bright ideas, fresh new gameplay modes and enough content that you can lose hours of your life to.
Battles take place on a 4×4 grid, and see you taking it in turns with your opponent to lay down cards. You draw up to five cards from your deck of forty at the start of every turn.
These are the units you're playing in the fight, and they range from hulking monsters to flighty fairies, from magical trees to fearsome undead dragons.
Your cards have arrows on them that you show you which direction they can attack. You'll also notice a bunch of other numbers on the cards. These let you know the hit points a card has, how powerful its attack is and how many soul points it grants you.
Those soul points let you attack your opponent and they're the key to victory. The first player to lose all of their own hit points is the loser.
There's a lot more going on than that though. For one thing you need to pick from one of six different factions before you even get to the fights.
These factions have different strengths and weaknesses and figuring out which of them best suits the way you want to play is the first step of a pretty long journey.
Different factions have different special moves as well. Some let you link together cards to make them more powerful, others are all about sacrificing weaker units to create pockets of dark magical energy. One lets you build giant rock walls that you can use to protect some of your units or power up others.
There are single-player challenges, regular events and much, much more as well. You're never short of something to do in Athenion, and the pace of the matches lets you get a lot of them in in a single setting.
The Good
There's a staggering amount of depth to Athenion. It's going to take you a good while to get to grips with the basics and once you've done that there are layers and layers to peel back. Every time you win you'll figure out a new strategy and every time you lose you'll be trying to find a way to right that wrong.
The game looks amazing too. The cards all sport a brilliant anime art-style and you'll want to collect all of them just so you can check them out. The speed of the fights is a massive plus too – they deliver huge chunks of tactical action in the sort of short-blast sessions that are perfect for mobile play.
On top of that there's a brilliant community to the game, and you never have to wait long to find an online battle. There are a number of different modes that let you practice with different decks, take part in intriguing events and fight it out in ranked and casual multiplayer matches.
The Bad
There's a pretty steep learning curve here, so if you're not in for the long haul then you might be better finding your card-based fun somewhere else. Even when you've got the basics down you've still got a lot to learn and it can be punishing to come up against an opponent who knows more than you do.
There are also a lot of currencies, crafting materials and other rewards to figure out. The game does tell you what they do, but the tutorials are pretty brief and you're left on your own for a lot of the time to try and get to the bottom of things.
Overall
Athenion might not be the easiest game to understand, but once things start clicking it becomes something really rather special. There are some brilliant ideas here and they're woven into a bright tapestry of gorgeous visuals and wonderfully paced mobile play.
It won't be to everyone's taste, and it's fair to say that some players are going to put it down before they've even got to the good bits, but this is one CCG that it's well worth sticking with.
Moleskine Actions (Free) by Moleskine is the complement app to Moleskine Timepage, a pretty decent digital planner app that we're fans of here at AppAdvice. If you're looking for a to-do app that's similar to something like Things 3, but like the aesthetic of Moleskine apps, then Actions could be for you. But it's not without some flaws of its own.
I used to consider myself a productivity nut, always trying out the latest to-do list app on the App Store, or finding other methods to become more productive. But that's kind of stopped, at least in the to-do list department. I've settled with Things 3 since it came out, because I love the simple design and feature set. And while my go-to calendar app is still Fantastical, Timepage was a close second for me since I'm a big Moleskine fan — I used to write in their paper journals. So naturally, when I saw Moleskine Actions on the App Store this week, I was intrigued and had to give it a shot. Sadly, I'm disappointed.
As a fan of Timepage, I like Actions' aesthetic, because it falls under the same design. It's a simple, clean design that focuses on a clutter-free lifestyle. You simply have your Schedule and Logbook of completed actions. Your lists are all organized how you want them, and they can be color-coded for easy reference. The Action Cards are solid colored rectangles with rounded corners that look great, and Actions showcases a basic sans serif typeface that wraps up the modern look. There's the default Light theme, as well as Dark, and you can have it switch automatically depending on time. There are smooth animations as you transition from one view to another, and even creating action cards and moving them around is fluid. Again, Moleskine knows how to make a product look classy and contemporary.
If you use Timepage, then you'll be glad to know that Actions integrates pretty seamlessly with Timepage. You can quickly throw an Action from Actions into Timepage, and vice versa. Both Timepage and Actions also use Moleskine's subscription-based model though, which starts at $1.99 a month or $11.99 yearly ($1 a month). When you sign up for an account, it automatically starts a 7-day trial. If you choose to not continue, both Timepage and Actions will be read-only mode. This is rather unfortunate, but at least the trial gives you a taste of what everything's like so you can make your decision.
When you first launch Actions, there's a brief tutorial that shows you the basics. It's pretty heavily gesture-based, though you get used to things after a few moments because it's fairly intuitive.
After the tutorial, you'll see your Schedule. This pulls data from your iOS calendar to display current and upcoming appointments and events on your timeline in a list style. If you tap on the checkmark at the bottom, or swipe from the screen edge, you'll see the Logbook, which shows completed tasks.
But how do you add tasks? First, you'll want to create some Lists, which you can access by tapping on the card icon in the bottom right corner. Then click the plus button to make a new list, which requires a name and then you get a lively transition to color bubbles, where you pick the list color (can be changed at any time). Once you make your choices, the list is saved and you can start adding actions directly to it.
You can add actions directly in a list or from the Schedule view. If you choose the latter, you'll need to pick the list to add it to when you create it. All Action cards can also have notes added to them, if needed.
Actions understands natural language input, though it's not as advanced as Fantastical's engine. This means you're able to type in something like "Post status report every second Friday" and Actions automatically takes care of the scheduling, reminders, and notifications. Or you can do something simple, like "Deposit paycheck every other week" or "Buy chicken by Friday" and Actions handles it.
However, I'm annoyed at the fact that Actions' natural language input does not understand everything, unlike Fantastical and other apps. It doesn't understand when I put things like "on 2/28" or "at the end of every month," and then just defaults to today for these actions. For something that claims to understand natural language, I'm seeing more fails than successes.
Another thing I've noticed is a weird text glitch. If I type something and make a typo, I want to just tap on the delete key and go back to fix my error. A few times I've done this, the last letter of the word I'm editing remains at the end, even though I'm fairly certain I placed the cursor after it. It's a small glitch, but it's driving me bonkers.
To complete an action, just swipe right-to-left. A swipe in the opposite direction lets you schedule it. If an item is in the logbook, you can swipe right-to-left to mark it as incomplete, or left-to-right to delete it for good.
Action cards can also be moved around the schedule just through drag-and-drop. There's also nice haptic feedback as you shuffle things around, which I like.
For those who like to use Siri for voice activated commands, Actions has support for that. However, I tried it out and it doesn't seem to work too well. One of the things you can say is "Create a list called whatever in Actions." When I tried this, first Siri created it in Reminders because I didn't accentuate the 's' in Actions hard enough. Then it made the list but kept the "in" at the end of the list name. I've never gotten along with Siri for voice commands, as it never seems to understand the words I'm saying, so I don't see the Siri integration in Actions very useful for me anyway.
Moleskine Actions is a new to-do app that complements Timepage.
The Good
Actions has a gorgeous design that is classy and modern. Like Timepage, it looks great, and the selection of colors means you can customize it to your liking and make it pop. The navigation is pretty decent and intuitive enough for most people. You can create as many lists as needed, and the integration with Timepage is nice. And while it's not perfect, the natural language input is useful for certain things.
The Bad
Unfortunately, there's more I dislike about Actions than like. First, I'm not a big fan of the subscription model for both Moleskine apps. Honestly, I'm tired of everything turning into another monthly or annual subscription payment, because there are plenty of other options that are viable without having to pay to use it every month (like Things 3 and Fantastical for me).
I found the navigation system to be a bit clunky at times. I think being able to swipe anywhere, not just from the edges of the screen, to navigate between Logbook and Schedule should be an option. I mean, as long as you're not swiping an Action card, there shouldn't be an issue.
The natural language input needs a lot of work to be up to par with other apps like Fantastical. It should recognize things like "on 3/30" or "at the end of every month," as I feel this is naturally how people speak. It doesn't translate into Actions, and I found it surprising.
Other small things, like the text glitch and Siri commands, also need work. With all of the current problems the app has, I can't justify paying a subscription fee to use it every month. At least I was able to use the trial to discover that it isn't for me.
The verdict
As a fan of Timepage before, I was hoping to like Actions. But a lot has changed since I last used Timepage, apparently, and I can safely say that I'm not a fan. While Actions looks great and has good integration with Timepage, I agree with others in the fact that this should have been added into Timepage itself, and not be a standalone app. After all, Fantastical is able to handle both scheduling and reminders, why not Timepage?
For now, I will stick with my current system. But hey, if you want to give Actions and Timepage a shot, at least the 7-day trial lets you get a taste before committing.
