Check Out Our Mobile Games RoundUp For April

With April come and come, it’s time to review the mobile games we played last month. Here’s are roundup.

Bonza Word Puzzle – MiniMega

Word puzzles are definitely a new hype and we played a good one. Bonza is an innovative and unique way to play crosswords. Each puzzle has its own theme and a bunch of scrambled individual or pieces of the crossword and it is your job to put them back together. If you hit a snag, the game lets you collect some in-game currency that can unlock some clues or some other free hints that require watching an ad to reveal. Most free games always take this approach and it works fine. Bonza is a pretty fun experience. The level of difficulty depends on your knowledge of the theme and sometimes you need some creative thinking. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle mixed with a crossword puzzle and for the most part, it works well. And hey, you might end up expanding a little of your vocabulary, which is always a positive educational experience.

Bottomline: Challenging and fun hybrid puzzle word game that educates and strays away from the norm. Great for word puzzle lovers who are looking for something a little different.

Lightslinger Heroes: Puzzle RPG – Skyborne Games

Skyborne Games has created quite the mesh here as it merges a bubble shooter with an RPG. Bubble shooters are pretty much Match-3 puzzles and in this one, the puzzle shifts as it gets shot to re-evaluate how to shoot the next bubble. You can also discard the bubble if you don’t want it for the next move. The next layer here is building the team of players. They are color coded to the different elements and have different abilities. When they are charged up, they can cast their own individual spells to fight the enemy on screen.

A quest mode with a generic storyline moves from one island to the next conquering a handful of battles. The story doesn’t quite define itself too well and the bubble shooter RPG feels like it’s going through very familiar motions, sticking to the genre, however its strength is in its characters and art. The heroes themselves are unique and the names of their powers and moves also rather creative. It cripples itself a bit by forcing in-game purchases though, even if they are infrequent.

Bottomline: Lightslinger Heroes lacks story depth and game design yet its art and character design makes up for most of it.

Joe Jump: Impossible Quest – Blue FX Games

To call Joe Jump innovative would be really hard, mostly because it marries a side scroller Geometry Dash style but uses a little dude to get through the level and restarts at the beginning when you die while throwing in an axe throwing element. However, it’s sometimes easy forget that a simple formula works for mobile side scrollers because of its easy-to-learn-hard-to-master strategy. That said, Joe Jump is hard because of its inaccuracies and inconsistencies along with the addition of throwing axes, which is most of the reason why we fail and restart. Luckily there are some checkpoints in the game or else it would be a completely frustrating experience. There are currently 10 levels available in this free side scroller. For what it is, there are other games with much better quality and concepts. Perhaps it needs a few more patches before it is completely worth the rage.

Bottomline: Joe Jump: Impossible is a rage-inducing experience that lacks the finesse to be a fully satisfying experience.

Duet – Kumobius

Duet is an abstract arcade game that sees you balance two forces symbolized by a red and blue orbs to avoid obstacles. You are a beam and by pressing the right or left side of the screen it rotates it in either direction, helping to avoid both static and dynamic objects floating around throughout the chapter. Each chapter/level has a narrative linked to different themes, though it’s hard to grasp what this game is trying to achieve. The story feels too abstract and forced therefore making it lacking greater meaning. However, the game design while simple gives it a nice progression of difficulty to keep it engaging and challenging. A lot of it is based on reflex and strategizing how to approach the level with precision and with this type of game, there will be many deaths and retries and Kumobius definitely knows it also because your red or blue orb will splatter and leave its own mark with every retry.

Bottomline: A simple and challenging arcade game where the narrative feels forced but game design makes up for it.

Mind Construct – Studio Rouleau

It would seem that the mobile game market loves abstract narrative as Mind Construct uses a memory collecting objective to unlock the story about our character trying to collect their memory fragments to know what happened to the world. This game actually is structured much like the previous game, Duet, which consists of different levels in a bigger stage that culminate to reach a certain amount of minimum memory fragmenta that will unveil another scene in the story. With that said, as the stages get further, the story becomes far and sparse except the constant reminder that we have lost our memory or when we do bad, that our memory is slipping away, making it hard to follow whatever little progress has been unlocked. Mind Construct’s main gameplay is to navigate a small dot through moving dangers to get all the memories within the time limit. It’s not hard to grasp the concept however, maneuvering the dot has its downfalls especially when using a touch screen as your fingers can obstruct the big picture.

Bottomline: Mind Construct is visually a beautiful minimalistic game however, the trip to uncover the story seems a bit too much of a side achievement that only those who enjoy this game for its design and mechanics will be grasped by.