Review of the game Retry
The other day, after several “trial” months, the Retry title from the new Rovio brand, LVL11, was launched worldwide. We have played it and are ready to share our impressions.
The new project from Rovio is stylized as an eight-bit game: a characteristic "wheezing" sound, a pixel picture, a soundtrack reminiscent of all the hits of the eighties at once.
The project has a lot in common with Flappy Bird and Swing Copters, so comparisons cannot be avoided. However, they are all (in our opinion) in favor of Retry. The level of difficulty, as in the mentioned titles, is far from casual, but there is no desire to launch a smartphone into the wall. The clumsiness of the character, which caused so much hatred in Nguyen's projects, is present here, but to a lesser extent. The “Cornhusker“ hardly gains altitude, glides gracefully, entering a peak and becomes completely uncontrollable only in a ”dead loop". A nice detail: in those places where the player lost control and crashed, there are translucent ghosts of the plane. He bumps into an obstacle with such a sound (we associate it with facepalm) that you want to throw your winged car into the wall again and again.
The issue of monetization in the game is solved very ingeniously. In—game currency - coins — are used to pay for checkpoints, that is, points on the route where it is possible to save. Almost all coins are positioned in such a way that attempts to get them cause an accident. If you don't want to collect or buy them, you can just watch a relatively short (27 seconds) video advertisement, the CTR in the game should be high.
In addition, the game has commercial levels. For example, one of them is paid for by YouTube. Your plane will fly past banners with symbols on its way and will collect recognizable Play buttons along the way for a prize — all the same coins. In fact, this is not even a level, but a real game advertisement (which, as we remember, sells better than usual).
To sum up: the Finns managed to create a not particularly original, but charming game — thoughtful, solidly and soundly made, with a non-intrusive but effective monetization scheme.
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LVL11 is a publishing brand of the Finnish company Rovio, created with the aim of launching a project "different from Angry Birds". It was founded in 2014.
