Christmas slowdown

Whinges are on the way, just… slower than usual. I may be whingeing a tad less over the Christmas period but whingeing will return to standard frequency in January. I tried to write one for today but I’m too knackered and contemptuous to squeeze out a whole one so here’s a brief summary of the games I reluctantly had a go at:

• Crazy Zombies: Boring zombie premised strategy game. Well, calling it a strategy game is a stretch, it’s hardly Napoleonic warfare. You have to choose which idiots go where tap on a special ability button every few seconds. It’s World of Warcraft where the characters don’t move and you get 2 abilities. Oh and it’s interspersed with dialogue that so bad it makes me want to superglue my eyelids closed.

The only thing that lets this game down is every aspect of it,

 

• Godus: Gag-inducing slime from the perpetually flapping gums of Saint Peter Molyneux. An irritating “god” game where your godly powers are laregly limited to stretching and shrinking platforms to please or frustrate a noisy crowd of hateful minions. Shit on a stick with no ice.

If only real deities were forced to deal with this level of annoying mico-management and… existed I guess.

 

• Five Nights at Freddy’s 2: A nauseating series of jpegs. A slideshow where sometimes when you flick back and forth between the slides and a creepy anthropomorphic animal with dead eyes stares back at you. Genuinely creepy at times, executed with the grace of a donkey.

This game is probably actually terrifying but I played it on the bus at rush hour and the smell induced more fear than this game ever could.

 

• Stick Hero: A non-game created by graphic designers. Very simple, tap and hold to create a bridge, if the bridge is too long, the hero walks to his death and you have to start again. About as deep and engaging as guessing the outcome of a coin toss. I play a lot of these types of the games on the store actually. Games with one concept and then an arcade style game over when you mess up. It’s not good design, it’s lazy and it’s wank.

A simple idea using simple graphics and a simple control scheme for simpletons.

 

• Turbo Dismount: This is like one of those golf games where you tap and hold to control the shot’s power, only instead of hitting a ball, you control a milk van’s speed and it crashes into stuff, tamely, causing a little ragdoll man to get a bit squashed. It reminded me of the crash test dummies and how an actual real game was made based around them instead of a poxy little, minimally interactive half-game.

Pictured: A game with simpler controls and less entertainment value than a plug socket.

 

Both Godus and Crazy Zombies required an internet connection to play too so they both get double shittiness points.

Modern phone games are about as much fun as inhaling glitter and coughing upwards into your own eyes. Merry Whingemas.

Transformers: Age of extinction

Transformers! Robots in disguise! Run forwards! Shoot your guns at guys! Transformers: Age of Extinction is an irritating movie game tie-in so I shouldn’t have had high expectations but it managed to disappoint me in basically every way imaginable. The core mechanic involves traveling along a straight road while several grey robots stand in your path. The way to deal with this threat is to either dodge them or shoot them. Oh and you can jump over barriers, like in the movies yeah? Remember those two-hundred roadblocks Optimus Prime has to jump over to save the earth?

It feels a lot like a tarted up version of game-and-watch and that’s not a compliment. It’s just so dull. I’ve played transformer games and mech games aplenty but usually there’s something worthwhile to prevent instantaneous loathing. I thought nostalgia might make me secretly enjoy it while I mocked it but nostalgia wasn’t enough to cover up the downright sloppiness of the game’s design. It’s a bore and it has all of the nuisances of games that typically squat at the top of the list: push notifications nag me to play it and you’re encouraged to spend money on worthless shit to boost your powers.

Pictured: A game better than Transforms: Age of Extinction

After about two minutes of churning through waves of generic enemies, you start to question if life is worth living. I wish I could transform. Maybe I could transform into a blender or an iron and get left alone in a cupboard somewhere. I could spend my time in blissful solitude, preparing food once a year like a sentient robotic Santa. I’d enjoy it even more if I could have the ability to turn other people into awful devices. If an old lady cut in front my at Lidl, I could transform her into a Samsung Galaxy Fame and cackle at her obsolescence.

One thing that also bewildered me was that I didn’t see any robotic dinosaurs in this game and I was hoping to see grimlock or at least something lizard-like. Why is it even called Age of Extinction? I imagine there are actually dinos if you stick with it but frankly I’d rather watch Jurassic Park and Short Circuit back to back. At least that way I wouldn’t wish I was a blender.

Actually, the single most disappointing part of this game is the transforming. You have the ability to turn into a car and they could have done loads with that mechanic. What they chose to do was make you go a bit faster. Oh, and if you have the cheek to get slapped by an enemy then you transform right back. It doesn’t feel even remotely worthwhile or fun to transform. It’s like the ability to do so was an embarassing afterthought. There’s no reason why this couldn’t be the coolest part of the whole game.

For an example of a game that does transforming well and is incredibly fun, pick up Future Cop: LAPD on the PSN or buy a PS1 and buy the disc off your gran. If the singleplayer campaign starts to feel a bit rough, try out a multiplayer game but on yer own, Sky Captain awaits.

 Don’t install Transformers:Age of Extinction, it’s rubs.

Angry birds: Epic

I was expecting Angry Birds Epic to be the same “Angry birds” I played and have avoided since 2011 but surprisingly it turned out to be an RPG in the style of  Battleheart. This is great! Sort of. I kind of wanted it to be a mildly altered Angry Birds. Part of the catapult-em-up allure is the lovely physics and that’s gone out the window in favour of turn-based RPG drudgery.

It’s got polish but there’s nothing thrilling about the new direction. It’s a numbingly tame RPG and it’s decidedly non-epic. This is presumably to avoid scarring children for life with excitement or to avoid scarring advertising partners for life by introducing some kind of challenge.

Innovative RPG gameplay! well… the same gameplay as every RPG 

The inclusion of “rage chilis” is another thing which irritated me. Me, cheery, non-complacent, happy-go-lucky old me. Eating the chilis is supposed to boost the power of the birds because… spicy foods = power I suppose. However, the reason chilli peppers are spicy to our mammalian palates is to discourage us from eating them. Chili plants actually want birds to eat them because birds can’t taste the spice and then the birds will carpet-bomb-shit out those seeds over a wide area. What I’m saying is, birds couldn’t taste the damn peppers. I’m sure Rovio will realise this and patch it soon though. They wouldn’t want to look like idiots would they?

There’s certainly lots of the usual boring RPG faff in this game. There’s collectible tat, critical hits, mages but who has the patience for the repetition huh? You? Your mates? Noel Edmonds? Personally, after battle 3, I’ve had enough. I don’t want to see the enemies. I don’t want to waste my time organising the minutia of a battle. I want to be the emporer penguin commanding platoons of… birds over a minefield assaulting an enemy nest castle. That would be epic.

I want too much I think, clearly the game is aimed at the millions of drooling infants who are already besotted with the franchise. You can get angry birds soap, angry birds toothpaste. I’d be surprised if you couldn’t find angry birds vegetable oil at this point.

I don’t know if I hate this game enough to truly slate it and it wouldn’t make bugger all difference to anybody if I did so… good work Rovio, you untouchable goliaths. Consider yourselves told. By me. One man. With my blog and smattering of subscribers. Yeah, just you try and win me back (I will accept cash bribes of any amount).

Angry Birds Epic is the gazpacho soup of games. It’s wholesome, probably good for you but it’s actually fairly unpleasant and in dire need of a kick.

This bird’s face sums up how I feel about this game.

Hay day

I know that town building games are popular right now but I before I started this process, I didn’t expect for so many of the top games to be so bloody similar. Hay day is another naff isometric building game where you stupidly try to build up a farm from nothing, as tediously as possible.

There are good reasons to avoid building your farm in the middle of nowhere on a field full of rocks. Agricultural reasons, financial reasons, logical reasons. The goal of this game though, is to defy all these reasons and build a farming empire from shit and boulders.

I got as far as raising 3 chickens. I’d be a terrible farmer. All the competition and manual labour. Also, I really hate scarecrows telling me what to do.

Or else it gets the hose again

After realising that this was another one of these types of boring bait-and-switch games and then trying to bite my hands off in despair,  I played the game for a few minutes to find specific things to poke holes in and my first task involved swiping to harvest some crops – I said to myself  “Oh, they’re going to involve some unique mechanics for each task … maybe this game will be different and instead of spending purchasable coins, I’ll be able to complete tasks with a sort of miniature version of manual labour.”

That button should say “uninstall immediately”.

Since this was the first screen displayed to me, I didn’t really think that pay-to-play was off the table but I did genuinely think that maybe I’d be able to perform tasks with a variety of gestures. What an optimistic buffoon I was!

Yes, I am a dreamer. The “swipe to do stuff” action is the same action for everything. Swipe to feed the chickens. Swipe to paint the barn. Swipe cover up an industrial accident. Swipe to assassinate the belgian health inspector. Swipe to join the choir invisible. Wait, where’s swipe to uninstall?

I didn’t actually give the game the usual 5 minute minimum playing time. I kept hitting connection errors and getting booted out of the game, what a bastard I am! Trying to play the game offline! Do I want the developers to starve just because I am not within range of a wifi hotspot? Yes. That’s exactly what I want. Developers of these games are human leeches… for money, or… a better analogy.

I did try to reconnect a few times, but it didn’t checkpoint frequently and I had to repeat a bunch of monotonous chores and barely avoided headbutting my phone into a thousand shattered fragments in frustration. It wasn’t worth the effort, much like real farm work.

Don’t play Hay day if you like enjoying yourself.

Hay day is a pineapple. It is bloody difficult to consume without a bit of background help, it’s a big nuisance and even if it seems kind of sweet, it’s eating you inside.

Rise of Berk

What a name! Rise of pillock is a tedious clash of clans sort of game where you have to build up the island of git by enslaving dragons from nearby islands which you find with your own pet dragon which is sent out on errands.

In defiance of this forced labour, I decided to release the first few dragons.

Can you blame me?

I’m pretty sure that they were the last 3 dragon eggs in existence though because my dragon started to bring back nothing but fish and logs. The game does specify that my people are “Vikings” and that does specifically mean we are a race of pirates and raiders. It’s fine that we’re stealing resources but it’s clear to see that plonker island is covered in trees so let’s steal something we don’t have in total abundance yeah? Don’t want to get ransacked when the saxons come to town.

I decided to have a look around my hamlet and it seems like the goal is to make houses for the teenage twats of wazzock island. Can’t they do it themselves? What else do they have going on? Some kind of bizarre Viking disco? While I, as the town architect do all the work? Sod that, let me into that Viking disco! That sounds like a much better game. There are enough games about construction and manual bloody labour already.

“Rise of Berk” is definitely a side order of cheap takeaway chips. Nasty potato slivers deep fried in lizard fat.