2019-04-26

Being the masochist that I am, I'm trying out even more freemium mobile games. I am a sucker for these things because, well, I can't afford normal games that often and these give me that sense of 'new' and like a Skinner box, they make me happy with numbers that go up and up.

A big shift from Blades, this time we're playing Rival Stars Horse Racing. I love animal husbandry and breeding games, so when I saw this with its nice-looking graphics in the pre-register section of the Play Store, I clicked it.

The game is a mobile version of a PS4 game called Phar Lap, or from what it seems, Phar Lap is a console version of this game.

Anyway, let's just get into the game.

The first thing I want to point out is that the graphics are really nice for a mobile game. Everything is really pretty, and even on my old Galaxy S7, it runs great with the highest graphical settings turned on.

This game focuses largely on the racing -- everything else is just timers and RNG -- which is pretty simplistic. Your horse will have a preferred place in the pack, and if you stay in that place, you'll charge up your sprint meter, which you'll need for the final stretch. At any time, you can swipe left or right to move your horse that way on the track, slow down a bit, or sprint to speed up. In longer races, you'll have to manage slowing and speeding up to get your horse's sprint meter full without falling too far behind.

It's simple but it's pretty fun, especially for a casual mobile experience.

Outside of racing, you'll be tapping on little icons to train and breed your horses and upgrade stuff. Breeding is probably the next most interesting aspect of the game, though it's more frustrating than fun. Basically you tap on the two horses you want to breed (if you don't have a suitable stud, you can choose from some outside stallions but it will cost you in-game currency) and then a baby appears and you have to wait for a timer for the baby to be born.

Even though the parents have preferences on distance and track surface and position, the resulting baby horse seems to just have completely random preferences, as far as I can tell. But that's not that bad since you start with just one horse so you'll want different stats than just those same ones over and over.

The frustrating part is in how random your offspring will be. I'm sure later when you're wanting a very specific set of preferences, you'll be crying as you spend weeks or months waiting for the right baby to pop out. Early on, though, this frustration manifests in getting horses of higher star ratings.

For example, when breeding two 2-star horses, I had a 45% chance of getting a 3-star horse, or a 55% chance to get another 2-star horse. It took me four tries to get a 3-star horse. Because higher star ranking horses can be trained to higher levels, this is the only way to progress in the game. And then once you start reaching higher star ratings, each breeding session will make you wait like 7 hours and stuff like that, so you'll be sitting around forever just to learn you failed and have to wait all over again.

Your horses will gain experience points as they race, which allows them to level up. The higher their level, the more they can be trained. Training is simply pushing a button and waiting for a timer, which results in the horse's actual stats raising. You'll be going back and forth between racing to level up and training to get higher stats.

You'll also be managing resources as training costs money and items, and racing costs stamina and money.

It's pretty much what you would expect from this kind of game.

One thing I really appreciate about the game is the amount of flavor text and stuff that has been added. When you finish a race, you can watch a video to earn more money. Most games would just say "Watch an ad to get more money!" but this game says that you're appealing to a sponsor who saw you in your last race. And by watching that sponsor's ad, you get some bonus cash. It's still the same old watch-ads-to-do-stuff or pay-money-to-do-stuff, but it's given little explanations that make it just a tad more interesting, which is a breath of fresh air in this game's market.

Another great thing about the game is the horse naming system, and the announcer voices. There's a huge list of words that the announcer can pronounce, and as long as you name your horse with two of those words, your horse's name will actually be said aloud during the races. The announcer voice actor even recorded multiple ways of saying each word so that it sounds proper at the beginning or end of a name, and even saying them that way in a more excited way for the end of the race. It's super cool and one of my favorite parts of the game.

Horses' names are generated randomly by choosing a first word and second word from the big list (you can keep re-rolling or type in your own name if you want for your own horses) so you get some really weird names like "Dead Donut" and "Ridiculous Spaghetti." My only "gripe" about this system is that we can't just choose from the list; if you want to name your horse a specific thing, you have to type it in and see if it's compliant, without knowing what all is actually acceptable or not. You can go by other names you've seen -- like if you see "Calico Caffeine" and "Wednesday Push" you know you can name your horse "Wednesday Caffeine" or "Calico Push." But I want to know all my options, and that's probably the saddest missing feature of the game so far.

There's also a bit of "story" to the game, with most of it being in the introduction to explain why you started your horse career in the first place. The character portraits are again really nice looking, like everything in this game. There's even a cute old guy who helps you out throughout the game.

Outside of what I mentioned, there's also time trial leaderboards that award you with roses which you can use to buy special horses and stuff, as well as see how your horse ranks alongside other players. You can customize your jockey by choosing one of four different skin tones and a gender, as well as choosing the color and design of their silks.

The worst part of the game is the freemium part. I mean, that's the worst part of any freemium game, but it's pretty bad in this one. Wait timers are long. For example, it takes 20 minutes to regain one stamina, and it can cost multiple stamina just to race one time. Breeding will take several hours, and probably days once you get to higher levels. Upgrading your facilities takes hours, too, and you get limited ads per day to lower the timers by a few minutes.

The cost of premium items and subscriptions are ridiculously high. You can pay like $20 to get enough gold to buy a horse that you'll be able to get through breeding in a day or two. You can also subscribe with a recurring membership that gives you basically nothing. You'd have to be stupid rich (and by that I mean 'very rich' and 'rich and stupid' at the same time) to actually spend money ont his game.

But then if you're not spending money, you're going to sitting around and waiting on long timers and RNG to progress in the game, which gets boring and frustrating fast. So you'll either have to be very patient or willing to drop hundreds of dollars to see a different colored horsey appear on a screen now and then.

I like supporting good freemium games by buying some kind of cheap $1-$5 pack (or, uh, like $200 worth of bs *cough*Star Trek: Timelines*cough*) to support the devs and support decent, well-designed freemium practices. But this game I actively discourage anyone from spending money on.

GOOD THINGS

• Stellar graphics for a mobile game
• Flavor text is nice and actually adds to the game
• Racing is fun enough
• Pretty horsies
• Cute characters

BAD THINGS

• Ridiculous wait times
• Freemium cost is stupid high
• No mustaches

The 'bad things' are pretty bad (especially no mustaches), so unless you're just wanting to pull up the game now and then casually to get in a few races and start a few timers just to come back much later, you'll probably want to stay away. But if you're just looking to play now and then like that, it's a pretty good experience for a freemium mobile game.

I'm hoping in the future we'll get a "team" (guild) system where we can link up with friends to do like team time trials and more for roses or other rewards. Plus in this kind of game, everyone wants to share their horsies with each other, so even just a friend system would be nice. But you know I love the guild junk.

I dropped Blades pretty much immediately after writing the review for it, though I do go back to it like once a week. Rival Stars has me checking in multiple times a day, and I even put off writing this review because I was playing more of it. Now that the timers are getting really bad, I don't know how long I'll last, but for now, I intend to keep playing the game in hopes of seeing new features added.

#rival stars horse racing #reviews

2019-04-12

The Elder Scrolls: Blades popped up on my phone today as available to download (still in Early Access). I don't know how long it's been available, but at least now that I got the notification, I decided to try playing it. I knew almost nothing of it going in, other than the graphics looked Skyrim-ish. The preview images in the Play Store were just a few scenery shots and that was it.

So, I'm going to write a little summary of the game for people curious about trying it out (or wanting to know why they should stay away).

The story of the game seems to be that while you were out adventuring for some reason or another, your town got burned down perhaps by some crazy queen because your village didn't pay its taxes. You return to town to find it almost completely abandoned, and somehow it's now your duty to repopulate and rebuild the town.

The game jumps back and forth between the town, which serves as a central hub where you can do things like crafting and talking to unlock quests, and the quest areas where you fight monsters and bandits and stuff while gathering loot.

And gathering loot is pretty much the meat of the game.

The controls are pretty simple and actually pretty intuitive. You can slide your finger around to look around, and then tap anywhere on the ground to walk to that location. You can also use a more dual-stick-like approach by using one thumb to move and the other to turn.

Combat is pretty lackluster, as you'd expect from a mobile game. Basically, you just hold on the screen and a circle will grow. When it reaches its maximum size, your attack is prepared, so you can let go, and you will attack. As you level up, you'll gain skills and magic that you can access by tapping their icons on the screen.

There's quite a bit of customization in the game (though some of it is more just "feels customy" and not really that much of customization). As you gather materials and bring in lost townsfolk, you can build buildings in the town, as well as decorate it. Basically there's a bunch of empty lots and you choose which building goes where. Your character weilds whatever armor you equip, which is always fun. You also get to create your character at the beginning of the game. I can't remember what all races were available, but I think it's the same lot you could choose in Skyrim, maybe minus one or two. There's a variety of pre-made head shapes, nose shapes, etc. and you can change the style and color of your eyes and hair and stuff. The mustache selection is very light, so if you're a mustache fetishist like me, you will be a little disappointed. But like all of the NPCs seem to sport the mustache so that's good.

And then there's the... actual game. As you know, these freemium games always revolve around some kind of catch (or often, multiple catches) where the game will suddenly become unbearable or frustrating if you don't pay money.

Blades's catch is in its loot box system. As you go through quests, you find and earn Chests, which contain valuable crafting materials, consumable items, and even sometimes weapons and armor.

The problem with the chests is that they take real-life time to open, and you can only hold so many. So you'll either have to go questing and forfeit all of your new chests you may get, stop playing and wait a while for your chests to open to get space for new chests, or spend the premium currency to open the chests immediately and continue playing unhindered.

At least in the beginning of the game, you seem to get a lot of wooden chests which open in 5 minutes. But you'll also somewhat easily grab other chests that take an hour or more to open. After my first little bout with the game, I was filled up with three hour-long chests and six of the five-minute ones. I had already started opening one of the hour-long ones, so I got "stuck" and couldn't continue playing unless I wanted to forfeit all my upcoming chests.

I'm assuming if I were to play long enough, I'd just end up with like 8 of the hour-long chests and have to come back every hour opening them for a while until finally I could play the game again.

Like all of these kinds of games, you have daily missions and stuff that you can do, as well as a main campaign mode. I'm not sure how easily it will be to complete all of the daily objectives and quests without paying to open your chests. It doesn't seem like it should be too bad, but again, I've only played for maybe an hour and a half.

Surprisingly, for a Besthesda game in Early Access, I've come across a total of 0 bugs so far. I'm a bit bewildered!

Anyway, the dungeon exploring feels nice, even though the dungeons are largely linear (maybe they will be less so later?) and it's always exciting to find chests and other loot laying around. The combat already feels stale and doesn't feel like it will get any better by leveling up and getting new abilities; it basically will boil down to your character being strong enough to win or having to level up and get new equips to win. There's not really much in the way of strategy. But I mean Skyrim was like that, too, heh.

If you want to crawl around dungeons and pick up loot casually, it would be a pretty fun game. If you're wanting to get intense into upgrading your character and stuff, you're going to be really restricted unless you dish out tons of cash, obviously. If you don't mind lootboxes and you like TES, totally go for downloading it.

So far I'm enjoying just trodding around and nabbing items, though, but I like that kind of thing. I'll keep playing it for now. Hopefully the game evolves so that we can visit each others' towns, create guilds and add friends, etc. Of course, we're still in Early Access so the game will have to manage to keep my attention until they add stuff like that. When even the high-quality Dragalia Lost didn't manage to win me over for more than like a month, things aren't going to look so great for tap-and-hold-to-win Blades right now. But I do like the aesthetic and as long as the dungeon-crawling feels relaxing, I might keep going for a while.

Good Stuff

• You can play in portrait or landscape mode!
• Intuitive and easy controls.
• Graphics and sound are pretty nice; runs fine on my old Galaxy S7.
• Looting dungeons is soothing if you like dungeon-crawling.
• Decent amount of customization.
• Mustaches, albeit few.

Bad Stuff

• Combat gets stale after about 2 battles.
• Loot and mats will probably get stupid rare really fast, unless you buy more lootboxes.
• Lootboxes with random contents.
• Lootboxes with pay-to-finish timers.
• Lootboxes with carry limits.
• Lootboxes.

#the elder scrolls: blades #reviews

2018-09-09

So, for Rayark's 7th anniversary, some of the additional stories to Cytus II were on sale, so I had to nab them. ConneR was a part of them. I had to.

Anyway, I hadn't played Cytus II in quite a while. And I have no idea why!! The game is so phenomenal. I played the hell out of the first Cytus and then when Cytus II came out, I played it for like... a couple days non-stop and then kinda moved on to other stuff and never came back. And now coming back, I wish I hadn't stopped hahaha.

So let's talk about the awesomeness that is Cytus II and the DLC I just got. Actually, I don't know too much about the DLC yet because after leveling up ConneR a few times, I realized I wanted to go back and finish the base story before playing the DLC stories, because I don't want to learn something about A.R.C. or cyTus or something that would be more fun to learn through the main story.

So, Cytus is a rhythm game series (I guess you can call it that, since there's two now XD) with a sci-fi/cyberpunk story. The first game basically just had chapters and you could play through in any order, and each chapter had a "story" stage where the stuff that happened in the background told a story while you played the music stage. Becuse you were concentrating on the music stage, it was hard to really watch the story, and there was very little text so you were basically trying to figure out the story by watching a slideshow of (really awesome) artwork, and to be honest, even after clearing all the chapters many times and trying hard to understand the stories, I still don't really understand the story of Cytus.

Cytus II, however, is a lot easier to understand. Kind of. The games are originally in Chinese and the translation is not amazing, as Rayark is a pretty small company still. But there's a lot more narrative, so even though I still don't understand everything, there's a lot that I'm following. Some of it is not meant to be understood, as part of the story is learning about the world in which the story takes place, so you'll hear about concepts that you're not supposed to fully understand at first. So I don't know how much of it is me not getting it and how much of it is me just not being far enough into the story yet.

BUT let's talk about how cool the story and atmosphere is, along with how the story unfolds. The game takes place in a future where people... live inside the internet or something? It's kind of hard to explain, because everyone seems to have a corporeal life and connect to the internet separately to do things like talk on BBS and stuff, but at the same time, they seem to live inside some kind of computer world called cyTus where things are divided into "Nodes" and real life has simulated elements...? Definitely there's more to this that we're supposed to understand as the story goes, so that's part of why it's so hard to explain, but I think the best analogy would be that it seems to be something like the Digital World from the Digimon series, but with a darker setting. And not a bunch of cute creatures that evolve into furry sex fantasies running around.

At first it just seems like a cool virtual world that would be any tech nerd's paradise. But as you go on, you start to learn about the inner workings of the world and its government, which seems to have recently had a major shift in power, and it seems to be very questionable. I don't want to give too much away, but you'll easily get captivated by the world and find yourself eager to find out more. Even though it's a rhythm game at its core and you can even completely ignore the story if you want, you'll find yourself dire to get as much EXP as possible to move the story along instead of just playing music stages for the music aspect.

The main story unfolds through reading various message board posts. There are three main characters' stories you can play, and each one functions like a 'song pack,' with their own set of music to play. You choose a character and play music stages in their pack, and based on your score and whether or not you've cleared that song before, you'll get some experience points for that character at the end of the stage toward leveling up that character. While it's called "leveling up," it's more just a story progression bar.

When you get a level up, you'll see some new messages appear on the BBS, when you can read to figure out how the story is going. Not only do you see messages from the characters you're leveling up, but you'll see other characters' messages, and even just randos' topics and stuff, too. Each topic has a bunch of comments on it (there's even like spam comments and stuff haha) and through these posts, you learn about the events happening in the world of the game. You'll see the events unfold more through the perspective of each character and their fans and friends (the main characters are all musicians/performers) as you level up each character.

Eventually you hit a "level lock" where you have to have the other two characters leveled up to a similar level before you that character will start gaining EXP again. The main point of this is just so the story will make sense, so you won't start seeing BBS threads vaguely referencing stuff that you don't even know happened yet, or get other characters' major events spoiled early, stuff like that.

The characters themselves have so much unique personality, and you even learn about their fanbase, which has their own cultures, too.

First, we have PAFF, who seems at first to be your standard "pop princess" type, but as you go on, you find that maybe that image was created for her and she's not really that type of person. She's my favorite character, and probably the real "main" character of the overall narrative. Her songs are mostly vocal songs with powerful, emotional vocals.

It's hard to comment on PAFF's personality because she's very reserved, and her staff seems to post on her behalf online more than she herself. She has a loyal following of fans who call themselves "Puffs," and she seems to be one of the most popular music performers in cyTus. Threads related to her story tend to be pretty calm and similar to something you'd see on a friendly Facebook forum.

Then we have NEKO#ΦωΦ (I hope that displays properly; it's not displaying properly in vim for me but the encoding should stay in-tact I hope XD) who is like... an obnoxious gamer? I don't know XD Even though she's a public figure, she openly bashes PAFF and others and loves to stir up drama. She has a lot of easily-excitable and crude fans, as well as a lot of normal fans, too. Her threads tend to be full of much more heated comments; think something like the 'bad' parts of YouTube.

For our other main character, we have ROBO_Head, an online administrator who talks like a computer. I'm still not really sure if he is a person or a legit robot. I think he's a person who pretends to be a computer? Of course, his fans are the geekier type as well as some fans who just think he's a cool robot like Daft Punk or whatever hahaha. The threads tend to be a lot more mature with a few casual comments thrown in.

We also have other characters (who have their own stories you can buy as DLC; the core game is only $2 for a TON of content, and then additional stories are $10 each (or $5 when there's a sale), a pricing system I really like; you can pay a small amount to get a full game, and then if you like it enough to want to see a lot more, then you can pay the big $s) who interact along with all of this too: Xenon, a more adult-acting character who doesn't like to get into all the drama and posts short and truthful comments; ConneR, a historian with a fascination for 'classical' instruments like guitars; and Cherry and Joe, who I don't really know anything about. Xenon and NEKO seem to be friends, though Xenon likes to keep NEKO and her fans in check. ConneR doesn't interact with the others, but is sometimes referenced by them. He seems to be more connected to the overall world/setting than the other characters, seeming to know more about everything going on than anyone else. He also seems to have more insight into what life was like before all the major changes that seemed to have happened before the story starts, as he's a bit older than the other characters.

So in all, you can pay $2 to get the full main story and a complete game, and if you like it enough to want twice that with additional stories, you can pay $20-40 for the full HUGE experience. I like that a lot better than paying $40 for a game only to find out you don't like it and don't want to spend $2 on the DLC. There's also song packs you can buy for $5 each so if you're wanting to keep throwing money at the game, you can, and that's probably where they make a lot of the money. It's easy to get hooked into the game and want more, and with such a low entry price, it's not intimidating to drop a few bucks to try it. The original Cytus used a similar system, but the original game was completely free with a $2 fee to remove advertisements from the full game, and then there was a bunch of additional paid DLC for a lot more.

SO, that's how the story works. So what about these additional characters? Xenon and ConneR were on sale for the Rayark 7th anniversary and I had to pick them up. Xenon is a very fascinating character from his interactions with the other characters, and ConneR is a disgruntled old man who seems to know a lot of secrets. And he has a bit of a mustache.

I only played a little bit of ConneR's story, but instead of BBS (since he's not much into that), we get insight into some government files about him as we level him up! After reading a couple, I knew we'd probably find out WAY more about the world than I wanted to know before completing the other stories, so I went back and started working on those again. It seems really exciting, though, and I can't wait to get back to working on his story.

So what about the actual gameplay? I mean, I have talked this whole time about the story, and this is a rhythm game. The gameplay should be the core, right? Not story?

Well, don't worry. Rayark is a company passionate about rhythm games. The staff are not only musicians but rhythm game fans themselves. You get a variety of awesome music and the tap charts are phenomenal. Aside from another Rayark game I love called VOEZ, the Cytus games are the most musically-satisfying rhythm games I've ever played. (VOEZ is so amazing though I can't even begin to tell you how fantastic those charts are!) The timing is spot-on, the scoring system encourages you to keep trying harder and harder, the challenge ranges from beginner-friendly to fucking insanity, and there are tons and tons of songs each with three difficulty levels to play.

It's basically just a "tap on the buttons in time" type of game, with taps appearing all over the screen similar to something like Ouendan, but the placement on the screen determines their timing, with a timing bar bouncing back and forth. There are regular taps, held notes, notes you follow with swiping, and little flick notes. The tap chart designers really know what they are doing, and write charts that fit with the music perfectly, and they don't just follow the melody (like you'll find, sadly, in way too many rhythm games). You'll play along with the percussion, the counter-melodies, the wub wubs, unique taps that create their own percussive rhythms... if you like the composition of music and the variety that goes into the different voices that make up a music track, you will be very delighted by the attention to detail to all of these things.

I can't recommend Cytus enough. If you just want to try one of the two games, go with Cytus II if you're willing to shell the $2 solely for the awesome story and atmosphere, but if you're just wanting to see what the rhythm gameplay is like, go ahead and try the free version of Cytus. Another game I must recommend is VOEZ, which is completely free with some IAPs available. You can unlock stuff by playing through the story (which is super challenging) or pay little bits of money here and there to unlock stuff without having to complete the story. The game cycles a lot of paid content into the 'free for now' sections so each week you have access to new paid content without having to pay anyway.

But yeah, playing Cytus II again now with ConneR and Xenon unlocked got me super hyped about this game again, and I had to write this entry. It's especially nice because I've been dying for a game I can play without having to sit at a desk for when I can't or don't want to sit up in my computer chair lol. But yeah, if you're a fan of rhythm games at all, go check out Cytus and VOEZ. There's also Deemo, which is a bit older and not as solid as the newer games, and based solely around piano tracks. It's amazing, too, but I'm spoiled by the newer games.

#cytus 2 #cytus #voez #deemo #rayark #reviews