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?
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.