ugvm

the site of uk.games.video.misc

Doctor Who: An Unlikely Heist (iPad): COMPLETED!

Posted on Written by

This is a bad game. Do not play.

You want more? Sigh. Fine. Doctor Who: An Unlikely Heist, which was renamed in an update to “Doctor Who: Hidden Mysteries” presumably because there was no unlikely heist in the game, is a hidden object game. I’ve no beef with hidden object games. They can be fun but they are very shallow, and usually, that’s fine. However, it’s not just a hidden object game because there’s a tenuous Doctor Who story here too, about some magical cloud which is turning things into the wrong things from another time period and The Doctor (the 13th one) and Yaz have to sort it out. How? By you finding a list of objects in various scenes to earn canisters of magic dust that you can then use to unlock the next bit of story.

See the map on the right? The big thing with the plans on it? That’s not the map.

Which, limited in scope as it sounds, in itself is OK, right? Nothing fancy, a bit of Who fan service (with trips to locations from the TV show, appearances from various aliens and even – for no discernible reason – the 10th Doctor), and finding stuff. The problem is, it goes on. And on. And on and on and on and on. Each tiny bit of story progression requires you to complete several levels to get the required number of canisters, with that number generally increasing as the game goes on. After 30 hours, probably more, I reached level 1023, only to discover that beyond that point the levels went into “endless” mode and no longer gave you magic dust, and there was still story to unlock. The game was broken.

Apparently he was in the show. I don’t remember him.

Thankfully, they updated it (and that’s when they changed the name), so I could finish it off, but it was so, so tedious getting there and certainly not worth it for the plot. Over 1000 levels to slog through, when they’re mostly the same thing. Sure, they mix in a few rule variations – they flip the scene horizontally, or have it so you have to find two of the same item at once, but it’s not hard (you have powerups to help you find objects – I never used them, never failed a level, never got close to running out of time) and it’s certainly not fun. It also doesn’t help that there’s no naming consistency (a bin is sometimes a trash can, or a rubbish bin, or in one case, a battery) and there’s US naming some of the time and others there isn’t. And this, this one really got me annoyed: A chess set is an “outlet”?!

So yes, bad game, do not play. I did so you don’t have to.

Garden Tails (iPad): COMPLETED!

Posted on Written by

Yes, it’s the same damn game as Zoo Keeper World and Simon’s Cat and Puppy Blast and 50% of the games on the App Store, but it’s polished and cute and as it’s on Apple Arcade has no IAPs or wait times or other nonsense that gets in the way of, you know, just matching three things and clearing the board of whatever it is that needs clearing.

And sometimes, that’s all you want. Simple, pretty, puzzle fun.

80 Days: 89 days

Posted on Written by

It's been a while.  I've been playing a fair bit - progressing in 200cc grands prix in Mario Kart 8, getting the gold wristband in Forza Horizon, pootling around the world in Majora's Mask.  I've completed Peggle Blast and found that I am hopeless at Worms Reloaded.  Maybe at some point I'll write more, particularly since I have a draft post on the last of those half done.

But what I wish to talk about today is 80 Days.  It's an iPad game, although it can be played on a phone if you really must.  It's a text adventure with trading and route planning, based loosely around the Jules Verne novel but with a great deal of artistic licence thrown in.  Your primary objective is to get around the world in 80 days, but if you fail (as I have done) you simply restart but with knowledge over what may happen.  There are hundreds of routes to choose from and the world seems to be based on a random seed meaning that no two games will be the same.

I started well, travelling through France and Germany, then up to Scandinavia.  Unfortunately routes to Russia were limited and I ended up having to travel back down through Turkey and the Middle East to India, arriving in Japan at around day 45.  Not too bad, but my journey across the Pacific (a direct boat to San Francisco) was interrupted by a storm, and we lost a number of days heading down to Hawaii instead.  I led a mutiny to get the boat to depart for the US West coast immediately, but travelling across America took a long time and on day 80 I was aboard a paddle steamer, just after it had exploded.  No oceanic transportation from New Orleans meant a slow trek up the coast to New York.


It felt a huge anticlimax, and this made me realise just how exciting the game had become.  Every time plans went wrong, or I arrived at a city with no clear path forwards, I was feeling genuinely anxious.  I remember watching Michael Palin's second travelling series Pole to Pole, and feeling that without the time constraints of Around the World in Eighty Days it felt a little pedestrian.  Here again I could see the deadline creating the tension.




A game like this needs to have good writing and a clear visual style, and 80 Days has both.  It's a testament to its quality that as soon as I'd arrived in London I was ready to set sail again.  On my second journey I managed to make good time across Europe and Russia, until on day 23 I was thrown into a Russian military jail.


Let's hope I can continue at this pace.

Sonic Dash: offputting microtransactions

Posted on Written by

Sonic Dash may be the best Sonic game for years - in that it's not trying to be anything other than a fast run through scenery.  It's an endless runner, with controls which match Sonic's standard abilities - jumping in a ball, rolling in a ball, and running fast.  You have to jump over, roll under or dodge obstacles, and roll into enemies to kill them.  From time to time there's an easy boss battle.


There's a bit of added complexity which sits behind the main game.  By completing missions, which vary from simple things like "collect 200 rings in a game" to difficult things like "avoid rings for 1000m", you can build up the multiplier applied to your score.  You can also double the multiplier by filling up the dash meter (the bar in the bottom-right, filled by collecting rings) and not activating it.  By doing this I now have an X38 multiplier, and my high score is 997,000 (compared to the next highest on my friends list of 67,000).

One thing to note that I couldn't find elsewhere on the Internet - one of the missions is to "use 5 revives in one run" which I assumed meant that you had to revive Sonic five times; since the number of tokens required doubles each time I assumed this meant I'd need 31 tokens.  Instead, the mission completed when I revived for the third time, which was annoying after I'd been saving up revive tokens for two weeks.

There are other bits to the game as well.  Over Easter there was a special event whereby collecting eggs randomly placed throughout the levels let you earn additional unlockables.  I managed to collect about 220 eggs over the period, which meant that I unlocked Cream the Rabbit.  Yes, real name.


So, all rosy.  The downside to the game is that it's full of microtransaction rubbish, where you spend rings to get new characters or upgrades, and collecting the rings in-game takes ages so you feel like spending real money to get more rings.  And it's not as if it's really hidden.


It's odd, I would happily have paid a few pounds for this game given how well it works and its production values, but I won't spend 69p on virtual currency in the game even though I got the whole game for free.  They're making significantly less money from me.