Releases of the day - Wednesday (03/18/2015)

Half of the working week, consider it over. There are a couple of days left until the weekend. And, as always, we have several interesting projects in the selection – Schools of Magic, Heartbeats and Sick Bricks.

Schools of Magic

The game from Codigames managed to accomplish an exceptional thing: to create a magical atmosphere, to give the feeling of a real cartoon fairy tale within a time manager with elements of a role-playing game. It is clear that without such a high-quality production, which the game boasts, this would hardly be possible. And so it turns out that it is he who plays the first violin here.

As for the gameplay itself, it is divided into two components: construction and adventure. There are no questions about the first one – it’s a simple builder. As for the second one, everything is more complicated here. The player raises the hero – magician, performs quests for them – combat battles. They are frankly poorly made. It seems that the developers could not decide which type of gameplay is closer to them. As a result, we got the UI and the manner of moves from step-by-step mechanics, launched in real time.

It feels like, metaphorically speaking, an hourglass was thrown into the trash, and a stopwatch was put in its place.

There are very few ratings in the App Store so far. The game has just appeared in the store. The results on Google Play cannot be called decent.

Heartbeats

A strange game in which the user has to guess what he needs to do on each of the game screens in order to move to the next one. The project reminded me of the Russian quests of the early noughties, in which the solution of the problem, as a rule, was not to build a logical chain, but to tap the screen for the presence of active zones with items from the inventory.

The above may sound like criticism, but I liked Heartbeats more than Year Walk, it is more honest, unambiguous. In addition, being equally challenging in visual terms, the developers from Kong Orange do not position it as something elitist.

Despite the fact that the game was released a relatively long time ago, already in December, the number of reviews for it is quite small. But almost all are exceptionally positive.

Sick Bricks

The game is about how an evil megamind decided to take over a Crazy city and turn all its legoid inhabitants into ghouls. The player’s task is to resist this by collecting the details of the construction and destroying the ghouls.

Sick Bricks in terms of gameplay is another ideological heir of Diablo, in which management is completely carried out within the framework of interaction with game objects (and not with the UI). This is both the advantage and the disadvantage of the project at once.

On the one hand, the absence of sticks and navigation buttons sets a lot of freedom, brings the project to a high level in terms of interactivity. On the other hand, we are talking about an action-rpg game, where it is critically important to see what is happening on the screen. The player’s fingers on the core of the mobile device screen do not contribute to good reviews.

The project, judging by the reviews, has so far been accepted with restraint.