This Week at 148Apps: September 21-30, 2015
Leap Into Fall With 148Apps
How do you know what apps are worth your time and money? Just look to the review team at 148Apps. We sort through the chaos and find the apps you're looking for. The ones we love become Editor’s Choice, standing out above the many good apps and games with something just a little bit more to offer. Take a look at what we've been up to this week, and find even more in our Reviews Archive.
Kubiko
Kubiko is a fun little game. It’s slightly reminiscent of logic puzzles used to test your intelligence, but that’s not a bad thing at all. Across 40 different puzzles, you’ll find yourself having to piece back together various creatures and objects by rotating groups of pixels to turn the work into a recognizable shape.It’s simply done. While you’re restricted in terms of how many moves you must do this in, there’s no timer or anything particularly stressful going on. Instead, the worst that happens is you run out of moves and the stage immediately restarts. That relaxing nature immediately makes Kubiko more endearing. It’s so easy to just dip in and work towards solving something, any time you have a few minutes spare.--Jennifer Allen
Timecrest
Rob was right when he said we’d see more games like Lifeline. One such game is Timecrest - a tale of time traveling wizards who are trying to save their world. It’s a kind of adventure game book app with you having to make multiple decisions to see how things work out, with different endings encouraging you to try out different paths. There’s an almighty catch though, that soon puts you off.That catch is time. Timecrest is a free game that is utterly littered with timers. As the story unfolds you regularly find yourself having to wait. A few lines, maybe a whole paragraph or two, of story are provided to you, along with a couple of choices as to what to do next. Hit one of those choices and invariably you’re left having to wait to see how things pan out.--Jennifer Allen
Hotel Transylvania 2
If there’s one thing that Hotel Transylvania 2 offers, it’s an abundance of cute but spooky characters - much like the film the game is based around. Unfortunately, while the creatures might seem imaginative the actual game is fairly tired. It’s your usual run-of-the-mill settlement building game, only with a hotel instead. Starting out, you’re gradually introduced to all the elements of Hotel Transylvania 2. That mostly involves placing buildings down exactly where the game wants you to place them. It soon opens up a little though. You then find yourself completing various quests offered by the characters within Hotel Transylvania 2. These sound quite quirky, such as playing a guitar or video game, in order to lure someone in. Unfortunately, all you do to enact this is press the relevant button and leave the character to it. --Jennifer Allen
Lifeline 2
The launch of the first Lifeline… coincided with the release of the Apple Watch. There were a couple of hangups but it was a decent enough take on what I’m starting to refer to as the “timed adventure game genre.” Now we’ve got a sequel with Lifeline 2. It’s ditched the sci-fi in favor of a more modern fantasy setting, and it feels like it might be a bit longer in terms of the amount of story, but some of the hangups are still there.
For the unfamiliar, Lifeline 2 (and games like it) is a sort of choose-your-own adventure with a real time twist where the protagonist will go silent for minutes to hours at a time while they’re performing various tasks. In this instance you share a connection with a woman named Arika (pronounced kind of like “Erica) as she sets out to gather magical items to help her on her quest for revenge against whoever (or whatever) murdered her parents. She’ll fill you in on the details of her current situation, then you get to pick from one of two responses that could lead to a different line of dialog or even change the outcome of the story. --Rob Rich
Call of Champions
Call of Champions, by Spacetime Studios, is a distilled multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) that's reminiscent to Blizzard's Heroes of the Storm in that your team of 3 champions must cross a battlefield to destroy the enemy's base. Each match is timed so you only get 5 minutes to score, and capturing your enemy's base is no easy task. Each team has four towers guarding their base, as well as a wall as their last line of defense. You'll need to guide an orb along a path between the two bases to disable those towers and bring down the wall before you can attack the base proper. All along the way your enemy will be attacking and trying to steal away the orb. If either side fails to destroy the other's base, then the winner will be decided by whomever destroyed the most towers. --Jessica Fisher
Other 148Apps Network Sites
If you are looking for the best reviews of Android apps, just head right over to AndroidRundown. Here are just some of the reviews served up this week:
AndroidRundown
Downton Abbey
Yep, it’s Downton Abbey. Enough said.The game starts in such a way that series fans should find familiar: clan cornerstone Carson eagerly welcomes an agent to the Earl of Grantham’s residence. Early on, the idea is to solve stuff by finding stuff in “plain” site.Completing sessions (by finding items) earns one valuable XP and items. There is also an upgrade/crafting element which comes into play and adds some complexity to an otherwise simple game.When it’s all said and done, it is, at its core, a constructed hidden object game. The core competency sought is the ability to pick out selected items from a series of still images, and to do so as quickly as possible with as few helpers as possible. The artwork utilized reflects the time period adequately — at least, in my mind it did — and the scrolling feature that allows for more hidden objects allows the game to feel a bit more mysterious.--Tre Lawrence
The Lost Treasure
It all starts out with a cryptic letter from Uncle Henry, letting the player know that after studying the map that he (the player) found; Uncle Henry’s recommended course of action is to go on and find the pirates hidden treasure both suspect the map points to.With this modest beginning, our adventure is launched, and one gets to be immersed in the digital caper known as The Lost Treasure.
Right from the onset, the game is fairly easy to navigate. It uses still images to advance the gameplay, and the imagery does reflect the jungle environment one expects from the opening letter. The perspective is first person, and to move around, one simply touches the screen intuitively in the rough direction one wants to go; in this way, one can move from scene to scene, or get a closer look at an area within the scene. Thus, this also how ones investigates objects, which makes up a pretty big part of the game.--Tre Lawrence
Door Kickers
As a child of the 80s, I grew up loving some of the iconic shows of the time. The cop shows were the best; CHiPs was a staple, and for me T.J. Hooker — and not Star Trek — was my first introduction to William Shatner. One show I loved was from the preceding decade, and I got to enjoy it via reruns: S.W.A.T. From the opening score to the credits to the uniforms to, well everything, the show defined cool. Yep, the cops that “regular” cops called when stuff got tough.Boyhood fantasies aside, there’s plenty of room for special tactics sims for mobile devices, and Door Kickers, one of the more notable PC ports, has made its way to Android.The game is a full-fledged planning and action adventures. There isn’t much back story, no; this one gets right down to it.--Tre Lawrence
All this, plus news, game guides, and even more reviews than we can share here.
