Category: Mobile Game

Pokemon TCG Pocket

In a sense, I am grateful for Pokemon TCG Pocket. It’s given me something to write about this week. I won’t have to endure the depressingly real world of Disco Elysium, or parse out how Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess works. I don’t have to return to UFO 50 and try to figure out how to review 50 games in one writeup.

No, I can just complain about a little app, and call it a day, and ignore some other things stressing me out.

Opening

The starting moments of a game are critical ones. They’re the moment that developer tries to hook you in. It can be a flash-forward, an exciting call to action, character creation, introduction to mechanics, or one of many other different things.

TCG Pocket starts by having the player open booster packs.

This is followed by opening more booster packs.

You can’t actually play a game with the cards until you’ve reached level 3, something you do by opening more and more booster packs, and critically, using the not-quite-premium currency to speed up the pack opening timer. Sure, you could wait the 2 days or so it would take it do it normally, but I would be shocked if more than 5% of the playerbase actually did this.

But after reaching level 3, is that experience worth it?

Not really.

Gameplay

The game generally plays like a simplified version of the physical Pokemon TCG.

Like the physical TCG, there are multiple types of cards, primarily the Pokemon and trainers. Pokemon cards are played out onto a bench, with one Pokemon in the active slot at any point in time. Only the active slot card can actually use attacks. Trainer cards are one-time use effects that can do a variety of things, generally drawing more cards, healing damage off your own Pokemon, or switching which one is in the active slot.

The game has been slimmed down from a standard Pokemon game, however. Players only need 3 points to win, instead of 6. Trainer card effects have been simplified, turning Professor Oak into a Pot of Greed. The bench only has 3 slots.

The biggest change has been made to energy. In the physical game, energy cards are a part of the deck. Only one can be played per turn, and they’re played onto Pokemon. Pokemon can only use attacks that they meet the energy threshold for.

In Pocket, they’re not part of the deck. Instead, you generate a single energy each turn, and can play energy onto a single Pokemon each turn. As a result, it’s no longer possible to get too many or too few energy, even though you can get the wrong type. This is a nice idea that’s currently irrelevant, because the game rewards mono-type quite heavily, with only one incentive for doing otherwise.

The thing is… it doesn’t really feel like it matters. The rewards for winning in PVP are basically nonexistent. None of the daily missions require it, and none of my non-premium missions require it either. PVE is more rewarding, but the events are on a timer you can speed up with money, and many of the rewards are one-time, or locked behind using a specific deck type instead of just winning. The game’s balance is also pretty middling, with just a handful of decks being relevant, and they rely upon 2 copies of one of the rarer cards.

And that kind of makes sense, because it doesn’t really feel like it’s about the battling. It’s about the collecting. Critically, it’s about the booster packs.

Booster Packs

Everything about Pocket is designed to reinforce opening boosters. The home screen is the booster opening page. The link to the in-game shop is more prominently displayed than the link to the battle options.

Booster pack openings are an 8 step process. Select a pack type to open. Select a pack from a revolving carousal. Swipe the top of the pack for a crunchy lovely opening sound. Tap through each card in the booster, with what I can only describe as a glittering chime for each card, and more for rarer ones. View the full results. Watch cards slot into your binder. Swipe up on new cards to register them into your card dex. Watch them slide into place, and your card collection count tick up.

It is then time to open another booster pack.

I’m breaking this down not because it’s overwhelming or slow (though it feels a little drawn out). I’m noting it because it’s indicative of where the game’s priorities are.

Overall

Many people do just collect physical Pokemon cards without playing the trading card game. I certainly did growing up. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with just enjoying the art and collecting them. If Pocket TCG was purely the collection elements, without the aggressive monetization, it wouldn’t be for me, but I wouldn’t have as many problems with it.

But Pocket isn’t just “Not For Me.” It’s an aggressive experience that’s designed to build player engagement habits, and convert those habits into cash. I don’t respect it, and I don’t recommend it.

I’m also not going to pretend that it doesn’t work, that it isn’t at least partly compelling. Bait is designed to be tasty. But I am not a fish. I can spit out the hook.

Squad Busters – A Clown Covered in Leeches

I don’t like exploitive business models much.

I don’t actually play a lot of mobile games any more. There are various reasons for this, but the primary one is that regardless of the mechanics or aesthetics, pretty much 90% of mobile games are covered in metaphorical parasites.

Yes, I am including FGO, Wuthering Waves, and Star Rail in this. Yes, I did add this line just to hurt you.

These are games that might as well be using game design’s dark patterns as a checklist. They are horse armor’s final form. If this was a JRPG, they’d be called something like Greed Beyond Measure, a cosmic incarnation of avarice, entreating the player to just spend that first 99 cents.

Of course, we don’t live in that world. Horse armor never became a villain that we could defeat with the power of friendship, and spamming healing items. It turned into Squad Busters.

Gameplay

Squad Busters is a multiplayer top-down arena sort of thing, in a genre I haven’t actually seen done before outside of some mobile game ads. It’s a fascinating little thing, with crisp, clean rounds, and interesting amount of depth.

Which is why it’s kinda a bummer that it’s also the jaws of Mammon given digital form. Sometimes it’s debatable on whether a F2P game is truly pay to win. Squad Busters, however, has a button where you buy the in-game currency directly next to the button to purchase the one-time use super units.

Thank you, Squad Busters, for alleviating any possible internal doubt I had.

Squad Busters rounds are played over about 5 minutes, and work as follows. You’re given a choice of 1 of 3 units to start with in your squad. You move your squad with pretty standard touch controls, and whenever you’re not moving, your units attack, or cut down trees, or harvest carrots, or whatever else their specialty is. You do these things to get gold and gems.

Gold can be spent on spawning treasure chests to add extra units to your squad. The larger the squad, the more gold chests cost. However, if you collect 3 of a unit, they fuse into a more powerful version, bringing the net size down, and making chests cheaper again.

The end result is a fun bit of tension, scampering around the map, trying to look for areas to farm, and chests to crack for more units, all while building up the best squad you can. The structure of the game is such that over the duration of the game, the edge of the map does the battle royale thing, and closes in slowly, eventually forcing players into confrontation in the more dangerous center. Directly in said center sits the gem mine, a final objective to be pursued.

Outside of this of course, sits the rest of the “game.” I’m not going to dignify it with a description. It doesn’t deserve one. Instead, let’s talk about gambling.

If You Or A Loved One

I have never been to Las Vegas, but there is tiny little casino surprisingly close to where I live. I’ve stopped by a few times to people watch. It is a fascinatingly alien space. Across four rows of slot machines, older men and women sit in mostly stoic silence, save for some small electronic sounds.

From what I understand, each spin costs about half a dollar, and takes about 5-10 seconds to resolve, meaning sitting at this unhallowed ground could run you between $200 – $400 dollars an hour.

Ed Note: I was going to make a point about how it’s statistically less than that, given that RTP (return to player) numbers are generally around 70-80%, but I can’t actually find those numbers for New Hampshire, even after calling up the state gambling commission. Now I’m looking to try to find out if I need to file a Freedom of Information Act request, and to make a long story short, I got real side tracked.

In that sense, then, perhaps Squad Busters is an improvement. It offers no delusions of fortune, or dreams of financial freedom. It’s just as mercenary as the one armed bandit, but it does so with the directness of a pirate rather then a privateer. Still, I cannot imagine the choice of flag would do much for my experience of walking the plank.

I cannot recommend Squad Busters.

Legend of Mushroom

Legend of Mushroom confuses me. It is, technically, a video game. It is technically a video game that I have played a lot of. But in the grand scheme of things, if the average free to play game is a lure on a fishing line, Legend of Mushroom is made entirely out of hooks. It has no real bait aside from pretty graphics, and the most bare bones of dopamine reward loops. I’ve written about idle games before. Legend of Mushroom is different.

It looks like a game. It feels like a game. But much like John Carpenter’s “The Thing,” the second the flesh peels back, it becomes apparent that what you are dealing with is not of this earth, and would terrify even the devil.

Mechanically, Legend of Mushroom is what you get when you set out to make a Skinner box game, and do the Skinner box part, but forget the game. Every mechanic in the game is accompanied by bells, whistles, and a complete absence of player agency.

There’s a battle system, but you can just have all your skills auto-cast. There’s a gear system, but all gear is from a random lootbox, and after 15 days, I’m still not at a point where anything matters for the gear other then bigger numbers. There’s a pet/skill system, but getting pets and skills is, again, a random lootbox. You can’t really make builds, and the better ones are so much better that there’s no reason to not just slot them in.

And yet, technically, I have “played” this game for 15 days. In that time, I don’t think I’ve made any meaningful decisions about gameplay. Instead, I have just clicked on the things to be clicked, and then watched ads. And then I have watched more ads, to get more things.

Why bother writing about it?

Two reasons. One is the fact that after writing about this sort of game, I tend to stop playing. Writing purges any desire I have to continue. The second is that, as always, these sorts of games have some weird shit going on.

The standard weird shit is that one of the events the game is currently running is an event for spending money. Not too uncommon. But the amounts of money are just plain bonkers, especially for a game with no game play.

The game has another weird system though. It’s referred to in-game as the “Employment” system.

Here’s the UI.

You might now understand why I put those quotes up there. It’s also not really thematically about employment, because I’m unaware of a system of employment in which someone just beats you up, chains you in a basement, and extracts wealth from you until you either break free, or someone else sets you free.

That’s just called slavery. I’m not sure why the cute mushroom game has a system for taking other players as slaves, but is does, so that’s neat.

Conclusion

There is no reason to ever play Legend of Mushroom, and with this post, I am free from its grip. If you for any reason, were tempted to play, don’t. If you were tempted to spend money in Legend of Mushroom, do something more productive with it, like buying drugs, or lottery tickets.

Or setting it on fire.

Or “investing” in crypto.

SIGIL

I like bubblegum. I like cereal. I like a hearty stew.

That doesn’t mean I want to mix all of them together and eat the result. I have a similar problem with SIGIL.

Sigil (full name SIGIL – Magical GPS Action RPG), is a single player alternate reality game. Players walk around in the real world to move in-game. Combat is real time, and takes place on a large grid, involving casting spells, and trying to avoid the enemies spells. There’s a tone of whimsy in the design and theming of the enemies, which is a nice change from every mobile game being themed around nude anime girls.

All of which is to say, I’d really like to recommend it. But I’m just not having enough fun with it, and there are some real pain points.

First up, exploration. You can only interact with items in an 150m radius of your player character, and there are a fairly limited amount of things to do. In theory, that’s when you get up and walk around. But unlike Pokemon Go, or Orna, SIGIL doesn’t let you see far away from you, or a map.

This makes it hard to set goals, or to target specific items or enemies to fight. If there’s some sort of system for how enemies and harvestable items are spawned, the game does not explain it, and I have not been able to figure it out just by looking. The game also doesn’t have an in-game map that underlays the interactable objects. This means that the only way to get more stuff is to just go out, and walk around.

This brings us to the second big mechanic: Combat.

Sigil has a grid based real time combat system that feels really interesting. The game starts you out with a single long range attack and block, but there are unlockable spells to summon minions, walls to block to block projectiles, and spells that require you to charge. You do all this while moving around, trying to stand in specific locations on the grid to get buffs, and pick up “Mana” that boosts your resource pool for the fight you’re in.

I have a few problems with the combat, but none of them are directly with the combat mechanics. Instead they’re all parallel problems. First off, you can’t play combat passively at all. You have to be actively engaged, moving around, attacking and blocking at all times.

Which is fine. That’s how video games are supposed to work. The problem is that with most video games, I’m not playing them while also trying to avoid walking directly into the path of an oncoming semi-truck.

The other issue with combat is the performance. I have a relatively new iPhone, and on the lowest settings, the game just sort of chugs along, occasionally lagging, and in one instance straight crashing.

My last painpoint is with the resources themselves. There is no easy way of figuring out how to get most things. One critical resource that’s used in every single hex craft, or hex upgrade, I straight up never found.

Instead, I went and bought it from the game premium currency shop, because of course it has a premium currency shop. It also has ads you can watch after combat to double your rewards bonus. This to me is almost more egregious, because, remember, this is an augmented reality game. You seriously want me to spend data streaming and watching an ad while I’m walking around outside?

You know what screams victory to me? Being told that if I watch an ad of someone screeching at a slot machine, I could get double rewards!

SIGIL is somehow less than the sum of its parts. It has a beautiful weird Tim Burton-esque world I actually would like to know more about, instead of being the typical mobile “Wow, you’re in a world where you need to collect girls who are an anthropomorphic personification of rocks/trains/boats/the subconscious desire to be loved.” It has a strong and unique combat system.

But the combat doesn’t work with the augmented reality, the crafting feels incredibly grindy, and typical mobile garbage rears its ugly head early, and doesn’t put it down.

Limbus Company

Limbus Company is very weird, and just a bit nuts.

Authors Note: I’ve played more Limbus Company since this writeup, and I’ve realized a few things I said were incorrect. You can read those corrections here. I’m leaving this writeup as is though, in order to preserve my initial understanding and perspective.

It would make sense that after 10 hours of Limbus Company, I would have a strong feeling on whether or not to recommend it. Thing is, I really don’t.

Limbus Company is fascinating. It’s unlike any other RPG I’ve played, and it’s tonally different than any other F2P game I’ve played. But its F2P mechanics, poor tutorials, and awful information display make it a very tough sell.

Side Note: I saw someone mention that you need to be a rocket scientist to understand this game. I asked my friend who worked at NASA to try it, and they completely bounced off it.

Limbus Company is a game from Project Moon, a Korean indie game studio. Project Moon’s other games include Lobotomy Corporation and Library of Ruina.

All three games share the same world and story. I mention this because I will be talking about Limbus Company’s story, and that means general spoilers for the other two games. Sort of.

It’s a bit hard to explain. Much like the rest of Limbus Company!

Story and Art

Limbus Company has a strong visual style. I’ve always really liked 2D images in 3D environments as a design choice, and it’s done very well here. The story is unusual, and tonally a bit wonky.

The 13 incredibly poorly adjusted and mildly sympathetic whackjobs the player has to lead.

For reference, the game opens with the player character cutting off their own head and replacing it with a clock. The individual story arcs run the gamut from “Haha, weird,” to “What the ever loving fuck.”

Notable moments in the first category include a casino run by people in Mariachi outfits who fight with maracas.

Notable moments in the second category include a sympathetic NPC being gutted and worn like a flesh-suit. By a giant apple.

Anyway, game mechanics. Let’s talk about game mechanics.

How Limbus Company Works (I Think)

I want to know who plays this shit on a phone.

I’m going to try to explain how Limbus Company works. If you don’t care, you skip this bit. The extra knowledge is useful for deciding if you’d like the game, but not necessary for me to explain my problems with the game, which I’ll get to in a bit.

Limbus Company is a combat game. The player controls a group of characters (sinners) in fights against enemies and abnormalities. On a given turn, the player chooses from two available cards and builds a chain of cards across the characters they control.

Cards have: Power, Coins, Damage, Attacks, Damage Type, Sin Type, and Count. Power determines who wins Clashes, but only after Clashes are resolved by flipping the Coins. There’s a secondary value that determines the increase to power based on the number of coin flips that land heads during a clash or one-sided attack phase.

Damage is the amount of damage inflicted. I think. Honestly not sure. Attacks are the number of attacks to be inflicted on the use of a card, or that will be used for resolution of Clash during a Clash. However, it’s important to note that Sanity has an impact on Coin flip resolution, increasing or decreasing the rate at which you flip heads. This makes the Coin Flip not actually a coin flip.

Damage Type is the type of damage inflicted. There are three types, which are modified by enemy resistance, but also change if the enemy is staggered or panic based on their sanity. Abnormalities though, don’t have sanity, and cannot be panicked.

Sin type determines resonance and absolute resonance. In addition, resolving an attack of a given sin type grants Sin that can be used to activate Ego.

Count determines how many copies of a card are in a sinners deck.

If this doesn’t make sense to you, good. Because I’ve played 10 hours of this game, and I don’t get it.

Anyway, combat! Combat is against either abnormalities or everyone else. In fights against abnormalities, individual abnormalities and body parts of the abnormality can be targeted, but in general fights, characters pick targets on their own.

Game Modes

Limbus Company has multiple game modes. I’ve only unlocked a few of them, but most are just “do combat, get different resources.” However, there is one mode that’s very different, and that’s the game’s mirror dungeons.

Yes, it’s a simulation run. I’m not wasting energy to get a screenshot.

Mirror Dungeons are semi-randomly generated path of various encounters, similar to a “run” in Slay the Spire or Inscryption. The characters are reset to start at level 10, and after winning a fight, there’s a reward of either a random item in the vein of Slay the Spires artifacts, or the ability to level one of the current party members up.

Personally though, I’ve found that Mirror Dungeons got stale fairly quickly. Because there’s no reward for experimenting, and Limbus Company is F2P, I usually just ran more or less the same team, and picked safe options.

Story mode has something similar. While 90% of the story is a set of single linear combat encounters, the mission of each story chapter is a large non-randomized dungeon. These have been some of the more interesting parts of the game for me so far, and feel more like playing an actual video game than a free to play game with a gacha system.

The Collision of Money and Mechanics

There are two large pain points I have with Limbus Company. The first is that the game did not spend enough time and detail explaining the aforementioned combat systems, and doesn’t display in-game information in an easily accessible way. The tutorial is brief, and while not unhelpful, is overwhelming. I had another friend download and try the game to confirm that it wasn’t just me being stupid, and they had a similar level of drowning in information.

While bad onboarding and scaffolding can be a problem with games, it’s not one that necessarily turns me off. As perusing this blog for any length of time will make quite clear, I am willing to play games with janky or unexplained systems. I will play games that are horribly broken. I will play games that are in a language I can’t speak or read.

But learning a game’s systems by experiencing them requires me to actually be able to play the game. Limbus Company is F2P play, which means it has an energy point system. As with every energy point system ever, it boils down to the following core loop:

  1. Spend Energy to enter levels
  2. Get more Energy over time, or by spending real money.
  3. There is no three.

I mentioned in my Arknights writeup a while back how much I liked that the game had a parallel energy system that gave free tries at clearing levels without any rewards.

A system like that is exactly what I want in Limbus Company. Something that lets me play the game, experiment with builds and try to figure out the incredibly obtuse systems that make up combat without “wasting” my energy on fights I can’t clear.

Right now, I felt discouraged from actually experimenting with the game’s mechanics, unless I hit a wall and had no other way forward.

Conclusion

Limbus Company has a compelling, if occasionally frustrating, story and solid art. The mechanics are interesting, and I wish I understood them better, or that they were easier to learn by playing.

If you’re looking for a F2P game, you could certainly do worse then Limbus Company. But enjoying it requires a high level of patience and tolerance for what initially feels like esoteric bullshit.

Limbus Company can be played for free on Steam, and also on phones. I suggest you avoid playing it on your phone unless you have an electron tunneling microscope so that you can actually read the text.