Currently Playing: February Mobile-5
BEST FIENDS I had to play Best Fiends for a work assignment, and my goodness, it sure does look old and tired now, though the zoomy 1st person camera angle during "combat" is still a cool and classy touch. But ageing though it is, Best Fiends still delivers exactly what a casual gaming audience want: colourful worlds, cutesy characters, and a high rewarding (though not necessarily highly rewarding) touch-based gameplay mechanic. You match colours, you squash slugs, chirpy music plays and all is right with the world.
GERRYMANDER: RIG THE ELECTION
We live in, as Terry Pratchett would say, "interesting times." Though the constant threat of nuclear armageddon can frankly start to get you down, there is at least one upside: new inspiration for media art! Gerrymander RTE is a gamified educational tool/commentary on election rigging. It does an admirable job of my two personal least favourite topics, maths puzzles and politics, into an engaging puzzle game. It's easy to pick up and play, and I found there to be a lot of replayability on offer too. I'd recommend it.
DEUS CULT
I am not loving this. Endlessly, yet efficiently torturing and sacrificing innocent mortals to a Satanic figure is not, it turns out, my thing, and my distaste for the subject matter is making it difficult to play well. I don't like looking at it, so I'm not paying as much attention as I should be to the tutorial prompts, and getting confused as a result. Its weird proof of the fact that not liking the way a game looks can have a big impact on your perception of its quality; whether you want to admit it or not, I think we all have visual bias.
TANK BUDDIES
Tank Buddies is an endless runner from Kiseki Games. Even before researching the creators, my first response was "this is looks/sounds like a Nintendo game." Tank Buddies is bright, colourful and relentlessly cheerful. You'd be forgiven for assuming it would be easy, but you'll need precision to play well, and with just 1 or 2 too many ads, this can try the player's patience (though progression is saved.) However, though challenging, Tank Buddies is fair and fun, and far too cute to be mad at for long.
SIMON'S CAT: CRUNCH TIME
Crunch Time feels like the evolution of Best Fiends. It uses all the same building blocks and achieves a highly similar result, just a little fresher and more up to date. Of the two, I prefer it, probably because I like the Simon's Cat animations and so the characters are recognisable to me. Matching games are a genre I have almost no interest in as a player (I don't hate it, it's just dull to me) but I can still recognise a game well made and a job well done. I'm keeping an eye on it in Apptopia: I reckon this is going to be a hit.
