Mobile Game Review: Lost Echo [iPhone/iPad]

I discovered this game from the promotional category “15 Greatest Storylines” in the iTunes store for iPad/iPhone. Most of the mobile games I download are free, but an impressive trailer plus the fact that the game was on sale ($0.99 from a usual price of $2.99) was enough to make me buy this game. Lost Echo has been out for some time, released on Sep 2013 for the first version.

This game is an authentic adventure game where you control the main character, following a storyline that gets pretty mysterious after the first few minutes of play. The game’s graphics are all 3D rendered in real time, and depending on where you move the camera angle changes, sometimes gradually and sometimes suddenly.

When I first saw this game’s trailer on my iPhone, I was blown away by the graphics, but after playing it for about an hour or so on my iPad my impression dropped a notch. This is not only because the larger screen size shows off the flaws more easily, but because the design quality of the environments varies significantly, with some contain areas of very simple geometry that stand out. Also, the app preview shows some of the more interesting and better-designed areas, which is only natural from a marketing point of view. Overall they have done a great job with texturing the environment to create realism without using too many complex models.

I’ve been playing for around 90 minutes total time, and the story and dialogue is pretty well-written so far. I am not sure if they are purposeful, but I feel there are similarities to some of the Final Fantasy Games (story and dialoge-wise), plus Half Life series (mostly visual). I haven’t played many true adventure games on iPhone/iPad, but it’s great to know there are some serious adventure games like this on mobile devices. The only drawback story-wise is that sometimes I feel this game devolves to a click fest where I have to just click on everything in sight until I hit upon the right object.

The controls on the game take some getting used to be able to efficiently navigate the world, but even given this learning curve I think there are some things that could be improved. For example, clicking on a location to move there does not normally show any UI confirmation, unless you have happened to click on a hotspot representing a object or other important place. This makes for a frustrating experience, especially because sometimes it isn’t clear whether the place you clicked on is a legal location to walk to. Usually I end up clicking many times quickly to make sure the character starts moving.

There was one scene I just played involving a card game where clicking on a button on an overlaid menu to look at my hand of cards didn’t work properly – instead it acted as if I was trying to touch something on the backdrop, giving me the message “This is a wine crate”. Eventually I figured out I had to click my cards on the table first but I was almost ready to give up. There is one more short scene involving fixing a rattle that was surprisingly hard to control, and I feel that part should be cut completely from the game since it didn’t add anything tangible to the experience.

I also had to struggle with the camera angle, since it would change unpredictably and sometimes I didn’t know where I had to send my character to force the necessary angle change. I think some of this is unavoidable in adventure games with dynamic camera angles, but I think they could refine things a bit. Once you get to the camera setup on each area it’s not that bad though.

For some reason, part of the time when I was playing this game there was no music, even though I had my volume turned up all the way. When I went back and played the next day music was suddenly working, and from what I’ve heard it’s pretty good. This issue might be related to my device, however. Another thing that I experienced once is my iPad getting extremely hot after playing for a few minutes, though this too could be a device-specific problem (it’s an older model).

Almost immediately after starting this game I could tell it was a low-budget effort – not in a negative sense but rather that the team tried to do the best with limited resources. For example, the fact that areas are reused several times in the story, and also the fact there is a lot of dialogue. Both of these things could be attributed to their storytelling style, but with a big budget I’m pretty sure would exposed more areas to be explored.

Looking at the developer’s site (KickBack studios), the team is in fact very small with only two people, who must have worked very hard on this game (their first) in the last two years or so. I’d be very happy if I could ever make a game this cool that could get such visibility from Apple, and I’m looking forward to this studio’s future releases.

Despite the few flaws and annoyances, for $0.99 this game is totally worth it, so I recommend you check it out on iPad or iPhone.

Fallout Shelter – What’s so great about it?

Fallout Shelter was released a little over a week ago on iOS, supporting iPhone and iPad devices. This game developer, Bethesda Softworks, owns the rights for all the previous games, the first of which goes all the way back to 1997. I am a big fan of Fallout 1 and 2, and after catching sight of a few reviews that said Shelter was great I decided to try it out.

Fallout Shelter, like the rest of the games in the series, is set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, where the remaining humans have to do their best to survive in harsh conditions. You play as an overseer of a shelter in the wasteland, and must manage it’s various buildings and inhabitants.

You start by bringing people found outside into your shelter, and assign them to various rooms and roles, for example a diner or power plant. Each of them has their own set of unique stats which influences their performance in their assigned role. As you gather more resources you can eventually build more rooms, unlock new types of rooms, and expand your shelter both horizontally and vertically. You can also assign characters to explore the surrounding wasteland.

The game’s main screen consists of a cross-sectional side view of the habitat with it’s various rooms. The visuals are quite beautiful with a combination of striking 3D and cartoon-shaded characters, though the base view in XCom: Enemy Unknown on PC is quite similar in terms of overall appearance. You can freely zoom out to the point you can see several rooms at once, or make an entire room fit the screen (I played on an iPhone 6).

So far, so good – up to this point the game probably sounds to you like it has great promise. Unfortunately, I saved the worst for last.

After playing this game for around two hours off and on, I got rather tired of it and wasn’t very motivated to keep playing. I tried again a day later, but after 5 or 10 minutes quickly got bored again.

Although I am a big fan of detailed simulation games like SimCity, this game’s scope is just too limited for me to get into the game world. For example, when you explore the wilderness, your are only shown the results of your character’s actions via a textual log. The rest of the time you are sitting staring at your base, which while pretty, gets old quick. I can see how the resource gathering can be addictive for some, but ultimately this game falls in the bucket of “games you play when you aren’t playing”, which means that to gather resources you have to wait minutes, though there is a “rush” option which can speed up production if it succeeds. I can see how someone could turn on notifications and just play this game in spare moments here or there, but I’m just not into those types of games. Of course there are ways to speed up the process by using actual cash via in-game purchases, but this game pushes these a bit less aggressively than other mobile games I’ve played in this genre.

I think Bethesda has done a good job of making a casual time-wasting mobile game in the Fallout universe, and from the looks of it they have addicted a great crowd of people. In all fairness, I think they built the exact type of game they intended to, and the usability is overall pretty good (except for a few times when I had trouble selecting a character when I was zoomed out).

But for me, the real allure of the Fallout universe was the element of exploration and adventure, which is mostly missing from this game. Having characters upset due to lack of food or electricity is much less exciting and engaging than being chased by a giant scorpion, and reading about that in text form doesn’t count.

For the younger generation who is already into these types of games, I can see how it became popular. But for those who are old enough to have played and appreciated the first two Fallout games, I have a hard time believing much satisfaction could come from playing Fallout Shelter. Though I’m sure Bethesda spend a good amount of time developing this game and will make some profit from the in-app purchases, ultimately I think it’s primary purpose is to act as a marketing tool for Fallout 4, which should be released near the end of this year.

[If you enjoyed this article, please consider checking out my latest mobile game, a unique puzzle game for iPhone]

References

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallout_Shelter

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a1/XCOM_Enemy_Unknown,_illustration_of_the_strategy_UI.jpeg