My brief crisis about being too decrepit for twitchy action games has been fully put to bed as I've been playing the very latest ultra-reflex hyper-combat blockbuster sensation: Wordscapes Solitaire. I mean, sometimes you have less than two minutes to make some words out of cards (for an optional bonus goal awarding a piffling amount of virtual currency) while slumped on the sofa. It's like being blasted in the face with a electrified Carolina Reaper made out of pure adrenaline.
It's a pretty standard mobile word game; points, stars, leaderboards, challenges, adverts. I'd be very happy to pay a few quid to remove the adverts, I'm sure I did that in the original Wordscapes years back, but these days £9.99 gets you just 30 days of relief from whatever tat Temu are pushing. That seems frankly mad; £9.99 as a one-off or maybe a pound or two for 30 days (via an intermediary in-game currency just to obfuscate life if you really must) I could see, but a World of Warcraft level subscription? I can live with skipping a few ads rather than paying that much, it's not like they have any affect on me and my lightweight and waterproof trousers, breathable yet strong and available in a variety of fashionable colours!
Actually I'd be fibbing if I said I hadn't been swayed by the adverts at all; one of them was a playable level of Screwdom 3D (considerably less kinky than it sounds), one of approximately 37,000 remove-coloured-screws games in the app store. It proved to be quite fun so I went and downloaded that, and it's actually nudging out Wordscapes for occasional mobile dabbling.
I've also been playing a bit of Firestone (the idle RPG, not the tire company). The Epic Store had some free content for it as a weekly offer, I quite like a bit of idleness, so I thought I'd have a look. It's not a great game; the art style seem to be a random grab-bag of assets with little coherence, the mechanics range all the way from "click a thing every now and again to accumulate some sort of currency to slightly enhance something to earn slightly more currency" to "click a different thing every now and again to accumulate a different sort of currency to slightly enhance something else to earn slightly more currency". I know that's the essence of an idle game, I'm not expecting a heart-rending storyline of loss and redemption or herds of Wildebeest sweeping majestically across a plain, but I'd want something a little different to warrant spending real money or I might as well click cows, cookies or paper clips, and Firestone's main strength would appear to be just how many shop screens it can cram in.
It was an Epic Store giveaway that got me into Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms four years ago and I'm still ticking along in there, but it at least has something of a challenge in formation building and the sounder foundations of D&D for style, I can't see Firestone lasting anything like that. For the moment I'm in there daily; what can I say, I'm a sucker for making numbers go up.
No comments:
Post a Comment