[EXPRESSO] Mass For The Dead iOS | Bossing Lich Mobile

Anime licensing is often weird as hell when applied to videogames (see the Attack On Titan or My Hero Academia releases for recent examples), but like that Overlord themed Picross game, previously release as “Lords Of Nazarick”… it was kinda necessary, since this popular light novel/anime/manga isekai series has one of the most generic titles ever, and there already was a a videogame series called Overlord (beloved if fairly forgotten nowadays).

Despite this, this new adaptation it’s well presented, with even an original animated opening by MADHOUSE and a track by MYTH & ROID to make it feel like the anime, with redrawn background, some good Live 2D sprites and decent 3D in-game models. The game start off with the general premise of the protagonist, that find itself stuck in the fantasy world of the VRMMORPG he was playing as his lich avatar, but offers an original story with some new characters.

Gameplay wise, it’s a RPG, fittingly so, but more like a proper turn based rpg, with some convenient options (and a mostly useless autobattle function) AND some actual tactical nuance for when enemies become more powerful than a fly…. which will take a while, and even so, you will be a bit too prepared for the boss battles, until they start using way specific “almost instakill” moves. Then you grind or just use premium currency.

To be honest, i arrived at the second part of the story just for the sake of review, it’s kinda boring, and doesn’t have any peculiar “hook” to make you come back to it (outside the usual ones, anyway), the gacha differentiates between paid and free/in-game earned premium currency, there’s VIP/battle pass equivalent, etc.

It’s.. alright, ok, honestly.

It’s something for Overlord fans to do until the 4th season of the anime, at least.

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[EXPRESSO] Bleach: Immortal Soul iOS | Soul Whales

Bleach Immortal Soul iOS

As you may know, Bleach is coming back, with serialized and animated versions of the one-shot Burn The Witch, created by Tite Kubo and taking place in the Bleach universe, and the anime returning with the adaptation of the final arc, The Thousand Year War, expected for early 2021.

So time to milk this renewed interest in the franchise as soon as possible, like with a mobile free-to-play gacha game live service. Another one, Bleach Brave Souls (which is still going) was a hack n slash, this is one of those extremely basic kind of anime rpg for smarthphones, turn based, with most of the challenge and “strategy” being on timing attack to create combos… until the game itself points out the auto-battle function.

Then it becomes just a matter of upgrading stats and letting the way too efficient auto-battle do its thing, since the usual“rock-paper-scissors” system of types weaknesses and strenghts works only on paper, and the repetitive battles lack any depth, so they just become a formality, like how you can technically decide where to proceed in story stages… despite being no reason to do so.

All made worse by overly busy menus bursting full of things to “engage” with, in the hope of making you spend actual money on this cheaply cobbled together cash grab, that on top of recycling frames from the anime series and – somehow – managing to have typos on dialogue cribbed word for word, has laughably cheap and amauterish scene transitions.

At least it serves as a decent cliffnotes refresher for Bleach’s story from the beginning, but even so, a lot of the manga it’s available for free on the Shonen Jump app.
Complete waste of time and data.

I do hope we get a new proper Bleach videogame later, a musou, maybe?

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Azur Lane The Animation 2019-20 [REVIEW] | The Bone Of My Boat

Azur Lane The Animation 2019-20.png

Ah yes, one more for the evergrowing subgenre of “shipgirls military slice of life”, less Arpeggio of Blue Steel, and more Kancolle/Kantai Collection, which is obvious as hell as Azur Lane (by chinese companies Manju and Yongshi) came out to fight Kadokawa’s browser game, but actually bothered to give it more actual gameplay, implement less taxing gacha elements (which is akin to say “less rusty gambling hooks piercing my flesh”), and actually made it easier to access worlwide without any need to know japanese, use google translate constantly or set a VPN, just released an app for smarthphones.

And given it performed quite well (even in Japan), it was just a matter of time to see an anime adaptation of sorts, which came out in late 2019…not fully, as two last episodes were postponed to march 2020 after concerns on animation quality. I thought it was due to fans expressing criticisms on social media, but it seems it was mostly the staff itself’s decision in order to deliver a better and satisfying ending to the series instead of rushing it, which is commendable, and gave me time to catch up. Continua a leggere “Azur Lane The Animation 2019-20 [REVIEW] | The Bone Of My Boat”

[EXPRESSO] World Beast War iOS | Kaiju Klicker

World Beast War iOS

Sometimes i kinda miss the early days of mobile games on smarthphones, when the free-to-play plague hadn’t become the standard, the banal evil, and the market wasn’t infested with endless clones of what’s popular, insanely overpriced ports, a satured mess with extremely rare gems like Onion Hotel.

But still, once i a while i search or stumble upon some title on the App Store, and i give them a whirl. This one is about big ass monsters going on a non-trademarked rampage, all done in the cheap and frankly cliched “faux 8-bit” aesthetic, but whatever, the idea of combining monsters together to make new ones is always nice, and the main attractive.

The problem is even the “monster merging” is too basic to hold any interest even in the “short run”, because you can’t spawn the more advanced ones in the “lab area”, even if unlocked: you must spawn the very basic one and keep merging them manually. There is an auto-merge function, but it’s inefficient, and even seeing what monster you’ll get next gets boring and moot, because you just put them to automatically thrudge through dozens of identical levels.

Because this is actually a clicker game, the store page describes it clearly as an “idle rpg”, so it’s not fraudolent advertising, it’s just that even with more to it than just clicking on stats to upgrade so you can earn more money to upgrade stats some more, it’s boring and lacking any “hook”. Ironically, the fact that there is more to it IS an issue, as there isn’t enough depth added to make you overlook its nature, but enough to inadvertently expose the pointless “gameplay” loop at the core.

Even as a timewaster on the toilet it gets old too quickly, and bootleg Rocket Raccoon just isn’t enough.

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[EXPRESSO] Arknights iOS | Medicated Nation

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So yeah, Yostar’s new gacha game, looks a lot more like Girls Frontline (or an anime take on The Division) than Azur Lane but isn’t any of that, it’s a tower defense thingie with people befitted of the ever popular animal ears, because. The vague plot sees you as the amnesiac leader of pharmaceutical-commando company Rhodes Island, in a world afflicted by Catastrophes, bringing destruction and the precious mineral known as Originium, which infects people with the mysterious disease of “Oripathy” ( awakening powers but also being lethal in the long run), and you fight the other factions at play, the cultish Reunion and the military force of the city of Chernobog.

Plot is decent, character design good for this type of game, and gameplay wise – as i said -, it’s a tower defense affair: you put units on the available grid spaces to stop the enemy units from entering through the gate/s at the end. If anything, the surprisingly long tutorial-prologue will get you up to speed to the basics and Arknight’s minor but nice additions to the formula. The usual free-to-play bullshit isn’t that bad either, as the game gives you useful items to start with (not just crap), but of course wants you to roll the gacha for characters with an alluring design by using real money.

Aside from some inusual design choices, like characters who don’t receive exp directly from fights (instead you gotta use xp item received as rewards to level them up), Studio Montagne’s game is fairly good in itself, with a good introduction of new enemy types and objects to keep things interesting, using actual gameplay to keep you coming back, instead of just using the typical psychological hooks to make you log in something way repetitive that basically plays itself (hi, Azur Lane).

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[EXPRESSO] Biker Mice From Mars iOS | Nostalgia & Rat Milk

Yeah, time to reach for some low hanging fruit. If you were born in the 90s, you probably saw or remember this TMNT rip-off from you childhood.

Not that it’s worth remembering.

Then again, you probably didn’t know (or care to know) about this smartphone game, which i stumbled upon when browsing for other stuff in the bowels of the App Store.

Of course it’s a crappy endless runner. Functional, yes, but so bad it doesn’t feel like you’re moving through space in a bike, more like you’re a toy with magnets moved around a crap plastic city by a bored child. It looks like ass, unfinished, and is so cheap it reuses badly cropped images from the old cartoon, because who cares.

This one is so fuckin pathetic it won’t even try to coerce you into using premium currency to retry a level or continue, it knows it’s dung to the max. The game being so shit it pratically begs you to keep playing would be laughable enough for a cheap ass license videogame that exists to mine some some cash from desperate, naive souls.

But i just lost it when i arrived at the first boss, and got stuck in a loop, able to continue from a checkpoint, but since the ammo isn’t recharged when you continue, i kept inevitably smashing into enemies i couldn’t kill. I was gonna quit and end it there, but i kept trying and somehow the game decided to skip me to the boss, which managed to “kill” me with oil puddles… which just didn’t appear, if not for a fraction of a second when hit.

Then i somehow managed to fail the mission entirely, which required me to replay the stage from scratch.

Disinstalled into the void from which it came.

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