RoosterJuice

This is an extremely elegant, tightly designed strategy game with innovative dynamics. Attacking in this game is about utilizing your extremely limited actions to gain maximum benefits. You are also often unable to avoid negative outcomes, even when you are playing perfectly. The genius of the system is the way the enemies don't simply attack, they instead propose threats to various items on the map where they will attack NEXT TURN. The objective is to negate the enemy's attack, or use their own attacks against them. Because the enemy has more resources than you do, you are challenged with a new puzzle every turn that isn't completely solvable to your advantage. So the game is also about choosing the least horrifying outcome. All of the upgrades feel powerful and interesting. The game is amazing, yet not for those who don't believe in themselves.

Microtransactions in an $60 single player game is like buying a nice car and then after driving it for 1 year, a message pops up on the dashboard saying you can only drive a maximum of 40 mph unless you purchase more "credits". Unacceptable filthy greed.

Microtransactions in an $60 single player game is like buying a nice car and then after driving it for 1 year, a message pops up on the dashboard saying you can only drive a maximum of 40 mph unless you purchase more "credits". Unacceptable filthy greed.

This game gives does some neat things, particularly when it shifts the boss battle gameplay into a melee "scene". Reasonably well designed controls, and there seems to be amount of control during a battle. Gaining a life for passing a boss's "sub-stage" is also very interesting. These mechanisms are solid. However, the developers need to realise there is a difference between difficult and annoying. It took me 50-100 tries to beat Ornstein and Smough with a Great Ax in my first playthrough of Dark Souls. I am unafraid of a challenge. However, a great challenge should come with a great feeling of reward, as well as a period of lesser difficulty, to allow you to bask for a period in your awesome accomplishments. In Furi, you receive neither. Your character never improves. Your reward is to fight another boss, and it just becomes harder. The fights also become extremely boring, even during the fight as they are simply too long, and there is not enough change in the scenery or the boss's behaviour to remotely justify the length. The visual style of the game looks cool occasionally, while other times it just looks ghetto. The cut scenes are also so boring (and also unstoppable), that I nearly wanted to kill myself. Until I realised I can just turn off the game instead. Some neat ideas in a game that is fundamentally flawed.

I gave this game a fair shot... and have come to the conclusion that it's an overrated festering pile of feces. Like many puzzle games recently, it rips off the Dungeon Raid mechanic. This time, the mechanic is used on top of a resource gathering system. The resources are then used to collect other resources, which are then converted into upgrades to allow you to collect resources slightly faster, and so the loop goes. The problem is that all intensity experienced in Dungeon Raid (or any other puzzle game) does not exist in this game because you don't really fail. Playing well simply allows you to gather resources slightly faster, which really just makes the game less tedious. If you want to experience this game in a system that feels intense and interesting, play Dungeon Raid instead.

While I can appreciate this game for it's artistic style, polish and demeanor, I simply don't enjoy it that much. It's definitely a game that I wish I liked more than I do. There's simply no hook for me in terms of gameplay. You just tap to the beat trying to synchronize your path with the rhythm, the only payoff is finishing the level perfectly, which simply doesn't feel all that great.

A perfect game for families. I purchased this game at Christmas for my boys, who are 3 and 4 years old. They have been playing it for 4 months now with no sign of getting bored of it. Because the game is cooperative, both of them are always playing together which means no waiting around. Throughout January I was getting past most of the hard stuff for them, but now my 3 year old has exceeded my skill level at the game... and I'm a gamer. At first I thought he was some kind of videogame savant, but I now realize that it's just an amazing game that keeps kids and adults completely engaged having fun together. The game also allows you to beat each other up along the way making for some hilarious mishaps. The game is the most polished platformer I've played since Donkey Kong Country and Super Mario World. However, I would dare to say that Rayman Origins takes the title as the greatest platformer ever created. The designers have included the kitchen sink, but it all melds together perfectly. It's difficulty ramp is perfect, the animations are mind blowing & blend together absolutely seemlessly, it's funny, the music is amazing, it's innovative, it's polished, the graphics are total eye candy, the painted backgrounds are beautiful, and best of all: it's somehow just as fun for adults as it is for children. In a world where video games have turned into a cult of the new, with sequel after uninspiring sequel, this game stands alone as something that game development houses used to stand for. Though the game has only sold a few hundred thousand copies, I strongly believe that it will still be selling 50 years from now, as it is honestly EVERYTHING that anyone could ever ask from a platformer and more.

I got this game because I saw that the rating was quite astronomical on Metacritic. I also got it because I liked fruit ninja. In Jetpack Joyride you are basically going as far as you can through one extremely long level (ala Tiny Wings). Like Tiny Wings, there is not really a goal to the game beyond going as far as you can. This concept works extremely well in Tiny Wings, because Tiny Wings central mechanism is a developable skill. You can feel yourself improve over time, and therefore a "goal-less" system still feels rewarding. In JJ however, this is not the case. After many many plays you don't feel as though you've really gotten any better at the game. This is because your deaths are basically random, and not a true measure of your skill at the game. You will be flying along when randomly an "electro-wirery-killing-thing" (the main obstacle in the game), will appear on the side of the screen you are on. A lot of the time you are in a position where there it is not even actually POSSIBLE to get out of the way, regardless of your response time / skill level. This makes your death feel inevitable, and random. When you are done a level, you get to play a slot machine for various bonuses using tokens that appear randomly during the level. I find this rather ironic, as it is quite metaphorical of the actual game play itself. This whole app is just a big slot machine. What's worse, is that the upgrades are mostly completely USELESS, literally. Only about 5 of them actually do anything (the vehicle magnets), and they only improve your ability to score coins, and do not effect your ability to perform in any way. This is actually reminiscent of Tiny Wings' system, as TW just upgrades your points multipliers instead of upgrades. This upgrading philosophy keeps the game a "pure skill" game, meaning that the high scores are in no way effected by upgrades. The fundamental difference is that TW's skill ceiling is much much much higher than JJ's . Since the game is NOT a pure skill game, the developers should have included **** of awesome upgrades that allow you to get better and better and go farther and farther. What a wasted opportunity. To be clear, I have nothing against random games Peggle is one of my favorite casual games of all time. But Peggle doesn't pretend to be a skill based game. JJ does. There are also consumables, that are astronomically expensive... one of which could be initially conceived as useful, which is the "second chance" consumable which allows you to . However going as far as you can in the game doesn't actually feel like the goal of the game. The goal of the game feels like scoring as many coins as possible. So, if the goal is scoring as many coins as possible, why would I spend 5000 coins on something that will allow me to continue through one of my random deaths? It's completely, and utterly stupid. One of the other upgrades is a "750m head start", but again this goes under the assumption that I feel like the goal of the game is to go as far as I can, which isn't the case. The only place this game hits, and hits hard, is the aesthetics. It's Metal Slug-esc veneer is gorgeous, the coins and sounds are so cute you just wanna eat them. The skin of this game masks an other wise completely pointless, goalless, random, skill-less system, pretending to be the opposite. I'm actually dumbfounded by the positive reviews this game has received. It's clear that the critics of the game app market don't have much gaming experience. For a skill based "go as far as you can" game, play Tiny Wings. For a random "go as far as you can" game, play Flight by Armor games. This game fails on all fronts, but sure does look pretty.