Darwinism (Game Review)

From those great people at TrueToken comes another great game for the Firefox OS Phone. This time it is Darwinism, and is all about evolving creatures into other creatures. True Token is a really cool game company in Kiev (or Kyiv), Ukraine. I really loved one of their games I reviewed earlier, Steel Story. This game reminds me a little of Boom Town, an HTML5 game that AppMobi created to demonstrate that you could make one HTML5 game and port it to every possible form factor. Darwinism is similar to Boom Town, only in that it uses a clever way to adapt a match-three game to something else besides falling jewels.

So here's how Darwinism starts:

Colorful, good art, gets right to the point of things. The splash screen lets you Play the game, get some hints on what evolves to what, gives you Help, and allows you to turn off the music (but the music is really great).

If you press the question mark for Help, here is what you get:

 

You see the game board and learn fire burns and that you need to match three of a kind to create a new species. That is the essence of the game, but there's more.

If you go back to the main menu and choose Evolution, you'll get a little taste of how the game works.

Right here at the start, you can see that the Amoeba is the lowest animal (one-celled) and that they then can turn into a Jellyfish. How? By combining them! Just get three Amoebae and you've got yourself a nice purple Jellyfish. And then ... get three Jellyfish and you can turn them into a Fish.

But before you start, Darwinism gives you something that most games don't, but should. You can choose between Easy, Medium, Hard, Expert, and Ultimate. I really like this kind of thing because I can learn the game on the Easy setting and then work my way up to Ultimate. I also really like the extra touch that True Token takes by making the choices look like carvings. A lot of work went into this game and it adds up to a great experience.

You can only choose Easy at first anyway, but the point is that this game has a lot of replay value. So when you start out Easy, you are given a mission: create a lizard!

By following the pictures, you can see that you need to use Amoebae to make Jellyfish, and then on to Fish, and finally onto ... Lizards. Seems logical to me. Fish can become Lizards. So now you're ready to start evolving.

The game even walks you through the steps the first time. You have a 5 by 5 grid that you play in. The piece you play is above the grid on the left. You simply tap where you want to put the piece. Put the Amoeba next to another Amoeba.

Working up your way on the evolutionary ladder, eventually you'll combine three Fish and make a red Lizard.You've finished the first round! You also have a score of 3000, reflecting how long it took you to get there.

 

When you play, the last of the three creatures that you play determines where the new creature will appear. So if you play Jellyfish - Jellyfish - Jellyfish, the new Fish will appear where the last Jellyfish was placed, and the other two disappear.

But there's three more twists that give this game extra strategy.

1. If you don't want to play the creature that is next up (on the left), you can tap it and the creature will jump over to right and wait. You can then play the next creature up instead. If later you want to use the creature you set aside, just tap the one that's ready to go and it will trade places with the one you saved.
2. When you start out, there are a few ice squares. Every once in a while, an ice square will appear and eventually you need to play it. If the board fills up with ice squares, the round is lost.
3. But every so often you'll get a fire tile. This can be used to melt ice squares (or other creatures) to get them out of the way. Part of the strategy is to place tiles so that you can get three of a kind next to each other, and then they can form a new grouping to evolve again.

So all this fits together neatly to make a game that you can play for a few minutes at a time, and do some thinking while you do it. And the music is fun to listen to, nice percussion music that evokes the primitive world.

I really enjoyed this game and I'm looking forward to more fun from the boys in Kyiv. One of the things that is cool about Firefox OS is that people are contributing to the success of the project from all around the world. I'm going to start a side project to keep track of all the games I review and see what countries they come from. If you know of a game from a country I haven't covered, let me know!

Also, thanks to Christian Heilmann (@codepo8) who mentioned this game earlier today on Twitter. Requests are always welcome!

Cost: Free

Genre: Match Three
Score: 6 (out of 5)
Tested on: ZTE Open (Firefox OS)
Get it at: Firefox Marketplace

Bubble Meadow (Game Review)

Every once in a while, a game comes along that is both familiar and pleasant. It may not break new ground, but it can provide a few minutes of fun when you are distracted or impatient. One such game is Bubble Meadow, created by Logicking, based in Kiev, Ukraine. The art is pleasing and the game play is familar, but well tuned and works well on the Firefox OS ZTE Open.

Bubble Meadow is a simple bubble shooter, but I like it better than other bubble shooters I've played (with maybe the exception of a variant called bubble spinner), and I like bubble shooters very much. In fact, I reviewed one earlier called Planet Defense that I liked because of its space theme. But Bubble Meadow survives and succeeds for a few important reasons. But first a little about the game.

Here is the title screen. Cute, fun, bright on rainy day!

The star of the game is a cat who has a cart full of bubbles. And the meadow he is driving through has bubbles also. There are three buttons on the screen.One is for sound, and the sound doesn't work. This is the only flaw in the game, but I understand that sound is tricky in HTML5 games and I will definitely be writing about it soon.

The other two buttons are Play and ?. If you press ?, you get the credits of the team in Kiev:
 

If you press Play and choose the first level (which is all you can choose the first time through), you get some great help and tips. This is great, even though there a lot of bubble shooters out there. Here is what the first screen tells you:

Shoot at the bubbles and match three. Notice that the art uses a finger so you know you are playing a game on a phone or tablet. You throw the bubble in your hand at the bubbles at the top of the screen. But you need to match the color, and match three to get the bubbles to burst.

Next is a useful tip. You can bounce the bubbles off the side to get the bubbles you want. Nice!

Finally, you are told something that makes this game more fun.

You can swap the ball in your hand for one in your cart. This helps you from getting stuck. Way cool, Logicking! Having some options makes a game cooler, more fun, and telling me about it in this simple way is better still. Firefox OS is clearly aimed at a world market, and so the rules for your game should be told in some kind of pictures. Text should be optional. I was really charmed by the rules and story for Steel Story and I can't recommend enough that it is always great if you can give the rules and tell your story in pictures, making your game easy to play in any country in the world.

So now you know how to play the game. When you press Play on the title screen, you get this:

 

You get a set of meadows to play in, each with a different challenge of bubbles to burst. There are 16 levels here but that is a good start. I'm looking forward to Bubble Meadow II. This screen also gives you a choice to go a main menu, which looks like this:

 

You can use this as a pause, and then you can resume your current level, restart it, or go to the Levels screen, or also turn off the sound if you had any (boo hoo). 

And here is the first of actual play:

The cat is holding a purple ball and he must shoot it at other purple balls. Shoot straight up, cat!

But what makes this game cool is that you can switch the balls by touching the cart:

 

Now he has a green ball, which he could shoot in either directions since there are two green groups.

Here's a later screen, for comparison:

As you can see, the layout of the balls is more complicated. I really like two things about this game:

  1. The balls are larger which makes it actually easier to aim but at the same time make it harder to bounce around balls you don't want.

  2. I like the option to switch balls.

And the art is really bright and colorful. This will have a permanent place on my ZTE Open! 

Even without the sound, this rates a definite 5. I look forward to more games from Logicking.

Cost: Free

Genre: Bubble Shooter (match 3)
Score: 5 (out of 5)
Tested on: ZTE Open (Firefox OS)
Get it at: Firefox Marketplace

PS: I just noticed that Logicking is the creator of Ultimate JS, an HTML5 game engine. I'll have to check it out! There are so many HTML5 game engines out there but right now I'm focusing on making everything from pure HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript (oh, and SVG, which is a good friend of HTML5. I'm also starting to look at CSS3, but I'm not sure how widely adopted it is.

Jewels (Game Review)

This game fooled me a little and then confused me but finally is one I'll keep as a good way to spend a few minutes. That's what phone games are, a happy way to spend a few minutes. Or not. Maybe longer games have a place and if you know of any longer games that work on Firefox OS, let me know. For example, I'm also playing through the Legend of Zelda on a Nintendo 3DS and having a blast doing one or two screens at a time.

But back to Jewels (by Tweensoft). Note that Tweensoft also makes an HTML5 game called Jeweled, which looks more like a bubble shooter games. Interesting marketing!

I like bubble shooters, but this is more of a genuine puzzle. You must rotate groups of balls and if you get four to match color, they vanish. An unusual variation on match three.

So here's the opening screen:

Note that you can see high scores and get more games. Tweensoft has a lot of them!

Here's the instructions. I'm always glad to have those, but (later) I'll add a few tips.

Sort of simple, but this screen will make it more clear:

You have 16 jewels of different colors. At either lower corner you have a circular arrow that determines which way the jewels will rotate. The four that are enclosed (green, green, red, blue) will rotate counter-clockwise if you tap inside the circle.

Select different sets of four and rotate them until you get four jewels in a square -- but the square can be larger than 2x2. When you have four matching at the corners, those corners disappear and new jewels fall down from the top to fill any holes.

I first got confused because I thought this was a simple match three game like Bejeweled, but it wasn't. Maybe a grandchild of Bejeweled. I would have preferred a more descriptive title like Four Corners or, well, that's a great name for this game.

But then when I tried to play it, I couldn't figure out how you select. Sometimes clicking one a jewel would select the connected four so that the jewel was in the lower corner, and other times in the upper corner. Then I finally realized (here's the tip) that you tap in between the four jewels you want to rotate. Perfect! Now you can tap fast and furious!

My only real grip, now that I know how to select and play, is that I would have preferred that the game be in portrait, not landscape. I like to hold my phone in portrait and have a good grip on my ZTE Open while I'm tiptoeing through the tulips. But maybe that's just a preference.

Oops, I forgot one thing that makes this a game of skill. On the right side of the screen is your life meter. Every time you get a 4-way match, your life meter goes up. Every time your rotations don't cause a match, the life meter goes down. When it gets to the bottom, the game is over. You then see the final screen and have the option to enter a high score.

A nice game. Simple, but colorful and fun. I don't like that I had to puzzle over where exactly I had to tap, so the game loses one point. I'd almost deduct only 1/2 a point because the rest was perfect.

Cost: Free

Genre: Puzzle
Score: 4 (out of 5)
Tested on: ZTE Open (Firefox OS)
Get it at: Firefox Marketplace

Candy Crush (Game Review)

Candy Crush is a nice match three game. You match three or more candies and watch them explode. Makes me wonder if someone had an unfortunate incident with some candy at a young age.

Anyway, here's what the game start screen looks like:

There's no instructions, but at least the game lets you choose between playing for the a high score for the number of turns you take, or the highest score for how many candies you explode in a fixed amount of time.

Maybe a match three game doesn't need instructions? So here's what the game looks like when you play:

You have a grid of candy, two boxes to show your score and how many turns you have left, a button to restart the game, and another one to exit. A lot of games don't have exit buttons, but I would like them on every game, even though you can press the home button to end any game.

Wait! What's wrong with the screen? The developer, Richard Armuelles, didn't make the game fit my phone, the ZTE Open. Close, and playable, but you'll notice that the Exit button is cut off at the bottom and the top row of candy is cut off at the top. Lose one point!

There are several books written on Responsive and/or Adaptable Web Design, and they are important for Firefox OS on a phone! One phone may be one size and another different. In this case, it's clear that the overall screen should have been a little smaller and the buttons on the bottom moved closer together.

Oh, and a simple help file would have told me what happens when certain striped candies are part of the exploding candy chain. I know I get extra points, but I don't know why. The striped candies seem to knock out a whole row or column, but I'm not sure exactly what because it all happens (reasonably) fast.

But the game is playable and I find that match three games are a good way to waste a few minutes when I'm waiting for the bus. Often a good game can be made better with a little bit more attention to the details, like help, but fitting to the screen is important. Because I like this game, I'm giving it a 4, because the game is definitely playable and has fun art.

Sometimes my rating is influenced by whether I like a game or not, but I'll try to be somewhat objective.

Anyway, this sounds like a good lead-in to my next post, which will start to look at the programming issues of sizes and boundaries. Stay tuned, but not iTuned.

Cost: Free

Genre: Puzzle
Score: 5 (out of 5) after revisions (see comment below by me)
Tested on: ZTE Open (Firefox OS)
Get it at: Firefox Marketplace

Fruit Quest! (Game Review)

Sometimes you're the bug and sometimes you're the windshield. In this case, the bug hit the windshield, bounced off, flew back again, and got smashed up pretty good.

With a name like Fruit Quest!, I wasn't sure if this was about slicing fruits, a slot machine, or three-in-a-row. I think it is a match-three game, but I don't know.

Strike 1: When the game booted up, it wanted me to log in to Facebook. With no option otherwise, So I thought about it, and said okay, and then went through a series of dialogs. At least they were nice enough to ask if I would let them post to my Facebook and I said no!

Strike 2: But then, when I was finished doing all that, this is what came up on the screen.

And that's all I got, no matter what. So my guess is that this game wasn't targeted at Firefox OS Phones and isn't responsive to the ZTE Open phone screen size. I haven't had this problem before with a game, so I don't know the story. 

All I know is it didn't work. This game looks like it is also available on iOS and Android, but it isn't quite ready for prime time here, even if it is in the Firefox OS store. 

Strike 3: It looks like it is free but on the other platforms, it looks like it is free but they'll offer you the choice of paying more if you want to continue playing. I know that's a big trend, but I don't like it. I'd much rather have a trial and then pay if I want the full version!

So three strikes, and I think this means I have to rate it as a 0 (zero) because it didn't work, it forced me to add them to my Facebook, and I don't like the idea of having to pay while I'm playing (although I don't think you can pay for anything in the Firefox OS Marketplace anyway).

Cost: Free

Genre: Match Three
Score: 0 (out of 5)
Tested on: ZTE Open (Firefox OS)
Get it at: Firefox Marketplace