Building off of Monday's article, I wanted to briefly run down a handful of mobile games that I have tried over the last four or five months that I just bounced off of. This is not so much a critique of the games themselves, just a list of a handful of games that I attempted on my Pixel 7a that I have played without yucking anyone else's yum.
I first heard about Genshin Impact a few years after Breath of the Wild had been released as a game that looked like its visuals and some mechanics borrowed heavily from BotW. I had tried to download it once on my previous laptop, but the 64.5 GB secondary download size was a bit of a turnoff since it wouldn't install on my external hard drive. Jump ahead six years and I installed the whole thing on my phone, albeit I was only able to run it on low settings across the board; so was I really playing it at all?
After playing for a few minutes in the starting area on my way to the castle, I totally understand the comparisons to
Breath of the Wild, but that seemed about it. Moving the character was fairly intuitive on the touch screen and I could invert the vertical camera so I wasn't running around looking at the sky or the ground the whole time. I did some swimming, I did some climbing, I did some collecting of flora, fauna, and fungi. I climbed a little embankment. I listened to this game's take on
Navi with a significantly larger vocabulary. I fought a couple of goblinoid-type enemies. Then I stopped and uninstalled the game. The controls and combat were fine as were the overall visuals, but it just didn't click with me because it felt like I was playing a much bigger game than what I was expecting from a mobile game, which I guess is a good thing. But, with a game this large, thinking about either
Breath of the Wild or
Tears of the Kingdom, I know that I would not enjoy either of those games nearly as much if I were playing on a phone with touchscreen controls.
I think that's what it boils down to, touchscreen controls with a game of this apparent scale and scope.
The new game from the Hoyoverse, aka the same company as Genshin Impact, which I actually started before downloading/playing Genshin Impact. This game was more of a 3rd person turn-based JRPG with, what felt like, a heavy emphasis on strategic combat rather than button-mashing JRPGs of the SNES era. There was one early battle in which I died because I missed something in one of the tutorials and was not using the correct type of attack against the correct enemy. Instead, I thought I could power my way through the fight since you gain all your HP back after each battle regardless of how poorly you performed in the battle.
My hangups with Honkai: Star Rail was two-fold. First, I felt like the game was doing a lot of handholding and front-loading of mechanics, information, and general world-building exposition. I never felt that I was able to get a good foothold on the game and how to play it before the game threw a new mechanic at me, and at the rate I was playing, maybe 15 minutes or so a day, I was going to miss and/or forget something key to understanding the battle system and then progress would grind to a halt, or at the very least, a very unpleasant trudge. And second, like Genshin Impact, I felt that I was not going to enjoy this type of game on a mobile touchscreen device. Were this a game on the Switch, I think I could probably like it more.
I know people are likely to say that I didn't give this game a chance, but I just felt that this was not the platform that I was going to enjoy this game.
You would think that an idle game would be perfect for what I was looking for. Something I could log in, hit a "collect rewards" button to gather resources and experience points and close a couple of pop-up windows asking me if I want to pay real-world money for additional and premium resources. Go through fighters from the Street Fighter universe whom I've been tangentially familiar with for the past 30 years. I know there was something about training a character and having them fight against random people on the street, bad guys presumably, but I couldn't tell you more than that about any intricacies with the story. But I don't know, this just didn't click with me.
I played the game a bit after I first installed it, and opened it up a couple of times that same week, but then nothing. Although "playing" might be a bit of a stretch as it felt like a lot of what I was doing was following forced in-game prompts to press this button and then use this resource to speed up time, and I get that it's a tutorial, but these kinds that are so front loading heavy I feel like I might never learn because I'm just pressing the highlighted button. So I never came back. I saw it sitting there in my "Games" folder on my phone, Ken (I think) angrily staring back at me wondering why I hadn't logged back in in over a month. Eventually, I just uninstalled the game when I realized I had no intention of playing it again.
Similar to Street Fighter Duel - Idle RPG, Lord of the Rings: Heroes of Middle Earth did a fair amount of hand-holding and info-dumping rules and mechanics early on, although I was able to start doing actions on my own without the literal finger prompts. The game jumps the story from The Fellowship of the Ring ahead to the encounter at Weathertop, more akin to the events in the movie than what happened in the book (which wasn't that), but that's not going to be a make or break moment for me. I'm not playing a Lord of the Rings game for its accuracy to the source material, especially a mobile game, and while I wouldn't want to play a first-person shooter as Hobbits during the Scouring of the Shire, I can understand how different narratives work in different media.
Oddly enough, what was the biggest turn-off was how easy the game felt in each of the turn-based combat encounters. There were some context-specific enemies that the game prompted you to attack either with specific characters or actions, but the damage done by each of the different types of enemies never felt that it was significant enough to actually present a danger to the characters even if you were to attack randomly. I understand wanting the player to feel stronger than the enemies, but this felt completely different in that there was no real challenge. It just kind of made me feel like, "Why am I even here?"
I first heard about
Retro Bowl during an
episode of "The Besites" back in September and while Chris Plante did describe the game perfectly as a 2D visually inspired
Tecmo Bowl with a management sim aspect to it, I just didn't click in the way I was hoping it was going to. The game starts off by telling you that you should be the manager of not your favorite team to give you something to work towards rather than starting off with your dream job. That sentiment from the game, I feel is a good way to describe the overall take on the game. This isn't so much a game about playing football, although you do do that, but its primary focus seems to be that of a team management sim.
I played through a couple of games, to at least get a feel of the mechanics while actually playing football, as well as the in-between of how the game expects and or wants you to manage your digital football team. This was the part of the game that interested me the least. Keeping track of your salary amounts compared to what your team's salary cap is, quality of training and rehab facilities, hiring and firing of stadium staff, free agents, it's all a lot to keep track of even if it is simplified that, presumably, the
Football Manager series. What's that. . Sorry, wrong football, but you get my gist. I even had a team ask for a higher pick in the following year's draft pick when I was trying to trade for one of their players. It's not what I wanted out of a mobile football game, which probably means I should just play
Tecmo Bowl: Kickoff instead, which apparently is the time of year to jump back in.
Now, before you accuse me of being an out-of-touch curmudgeon who is incapable of enjoying games on my phone, I'll have you know that I actually removed one game from this list while going through the writing process. GUBBINS is a daily Scrabble-like word game from Studio Folly where you select letter tiles from a stack and then swipe across your letters-turned-words to score points. There are frequently modifiers that can add additional letters, take letters away, or further modify those letters depending on the specific tile (or Gubbin) being played. I had originally written the game off after playing it twice, but then, after going back and accepting it as a once-a-day puzzle, I had a lot more fun. You can play more frequently if you opt to pay a one-time payment of $5.49, which also unlocks additional modes of play, but as it stands, if I think of it like WORDLE as a once-a-day play, then I tend to have a lot more fun with it.
So that's our take on several mobile games (specifically Android, although they all appear to be available on the Apple Store as well) that I briefly played to some extent. We may or may not have an article up for Monday (December 25th), we'll just have to wait and see how the weekend shapes up.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Step Out From Your Mould
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