Tag: first impression »

As part of my job here at 148Apps, I often explore games I have no intention of reviewing or otherwise writing about. Part of being able to offer substantial criticism or perspective on mobile games is to understand a lot of what is out there, even if I don't end up turning those experiences into content or critique.

I went into Chimeraland fully expecting to just dip my toe in to understand what it is before moving on, but it didn't take long to realize this game is... remarkable, to say the least. Although it mostly purports to be an open-world survival rpg (which it mostly is, by the way), it also seem dedicated to being as strange and unwieldy as possible. It's a huge download with an almost minute long initial load (on an iPad Pro, even), and across my first hour with the game I had a hard time making sense of much of what was going on. Check out the video above to see what I'm talking about.

The chill town-building experience Townscaper has finally come to mobile after finding success on PC and console. If you haven't come across gifs or video of it in action, the idea is quite simple. In it, you simply tap around on a body of water to make algorithmically-generated town pieces pop into existence.

Initial taps make a road or walkway pop up, but tapping that roadway makes a house, and then a tower. At any point you can tap elsewhere to begin making new areas to work with, and if they are close enough together they'll pop together and transform into a cohesive whole.