So a while back (in Canada, actually) I won a Samsung Galaxy Tablet of some description.
I don’t really have much use for it, so what I rarely use it. What I have done lately, though, is put mobile games on it (since I use a Windows Phone and a lot of games don’t get ported that way) to see what they’re like.
So far, I’ve played a lot of the Marvel games (Future Fight, Contest of Champions, and Avengers Alliance), some of the Star Wars games (Commander, Uprising), the Jurassic Park games (Jurassic Park Builder, Jurassic World), Predators and AVP Evolution, and Mortal Kombat X (the mobile version).
I don’t really want to give each game an in-depth review, largely because there are so many, but also because so many of them are more or less the same game. All of them do have one thing in common, though: they’re not good.
For the first day or so, they’re pretty fun. Easy to get into, fast action, all that. Once you get past that, you realize that most of these games have absolutely no substance. Three of the above-mentioned games (Marvel Contest of Champions, Jurassic World, and Mortal Kombat X) are all fighting games, but they’re so painfully simplistic. You tap to attack, tap in a different way to block (which is never responsive enough to be used to stop an attack in progress). They’re more fast-paced strategy games than actual fighting games, which is okay for the first “tower” or “campaign” or whatever, but there’s no differentiation between characters outside of their looks and their special attacks (which do basically the same thing, just look different).
There’s an idea of progression, but it’s done in a stupid way throughout these games: you use certain consumables to level up your characters a certain amount of levels, then you use another more rare/expensive consumable to raise their “rank”, after which you can use the first consumable to level again before you can rank up again. It takes ages to do (unless you pay of course!) and feels stupid and unnatural. The only thing that ranks up as you play the game is your “player rank” which generally raises your total amount of “energy” (a resource that you use up when you play a level. No more energy, no more playing unless you wait or buy more).
Then there’s the grind. I really do not like grinding. It’s boring, and I never feel like I’m accomplishing anything. I don’t enjoy repeating the same small piece of content over and over again for a .01 increase in whatever stat. And that’s in fully-fledged games with complex mechanics; with these mobile games, there is no difference between one piece of content or the other aside from how it looks on the surface: all the enemies are the same, all the levels are the same, all the mechanics are the same. It’s an incredibly futile exercise. And if you don’t want to be nickel and dimed to death throughout the game, the grind is worse, because all the above-mentioned consumables can only be gotten in limited quantities through RNG as rewards or heavy grinding of repetitive content.
Finally, there’s the paywall. As alluded to above, every one of these has one at some point where the game becomes prohibitive to play without paying. If not that, it makes it extremely annoying; and if not that, it puts the best equipment behind a cash vendor.
I’ve been playing them here and there in my spare time, and I picked up the games today maybe a week or two after first installing them and found I just have no will to play any of them. These things have a long way to go before they’re worthwhile.
