Assassin's Creed Identity reviews

Some of reviews about the mobile game

PROS

Smart enough graphics

Visually captures the spirit of Assassin's Creed

CONS

Terrible controls

Broken missions that hamper progress

RPG elements something of a smokescreen

Then about game review

When Ubisoft first dangled Assassin's Creed in front of us almost a decade ago, the French publisher billed it as a slice 'em and dice 'em stealth game. The world Assassin's Creed Identity enters in 2016, however, is one where the IP has shifted into an all action, sandbox-style adventure. From the way Identity presents itself – the cities to explore, the haystacks to hide in, the walls to climb and the people to take out – you'd imagine it stands as a rather good fit.

In practice, however, Identity plays like every Assassin's Creed fan's nightmare; almost all of the aforementioned features are botched, painful, and implemented in an entirely half hearted measure. In short, if you ever needed evidence that Assassin's Creed just isn't a game for mobile, this is it.

Things start in a promising fashion. Traversing the game's array of Italian cities has been simplified compared to the console releases, with climbing walls just a case of running up to them, hopping over barriers pulled off in a similar manner and combat locked off to specific battles rather than part of a free-flowing populous. It's an approach that gives the feel of Assassin's Creed without getting bogged down in the intricacies of the console counterparts. Even the missions are broken down into short and sharp memories with set missions to accomplish – there's little room given to check out the game's sights and sounds along the way.

The upgrade system has been similarly altered for mobile. Rather than spending money in the shops on the city's streets, upgrades are made in a (needlessly complex and often headache-inducing) menu system, when credit accumulated from successful missions can be used to bulk up everything from abilities to weaponry. It's a process that borrows heavily from mobile's free-to-play elite (despite this being a paid release), though in truth it isn't all too demanding of your time if all you want to do is get to the action.

It's the action itself, however, where things start to go wrong. Mission's tend to revolve around taking out targets or saving an ally from attack, though Assassin's Creed Identity dictates how you do it. An early level tasks you with taking out a thief. Problem is, the game is particularly picky about just when you can kill him; even if you manage to catch up with him fairly early on as he attempts to slip from your presence, Identity won't actually let you take the crook down. Rather, you have to track him to the other side of the city in order to slice complete the kill in a set location, for absolutely no reason whatsoever.

At the same time, should you encounter any guards along your travels, you'll be forced into combat with them – often a particularly taxing exercise, given that a side goal to some of the missions is to avoid taking any other lives. Attempting to skip these encounters is tricky; guards simply lock onto you and the game prevents you from moving on until a gauge enabling you to dash has filled up.

The controls don't help, either. A virtual thumbstick on the left side of the screen handles movement, with swiping your finger on the right turning the view. Controlling both is an especially fiddly encounter, especially when attempting to do so whilst chasing a target streaking away from you. At points, it's impossible to keep your view in check, meaning running into walls or down dead ends is as common as your progress is inelegant. For a game where tracking assailants at pace is a fairly common exercise, to have the controls and the game itself (which jerks even on an iPhone 6S or iPad Air, as tested) combine to undermine the experience is unacceptable.

The end result is, while Ubisoft has seemingly realised that Assassin's Creed needs a break on console to retool, Identity is evidence a similar rest is needed on mobile. Ironically, this is one franchise that could do with hiding away in the shadows for a bit.
More new free games

Top Eleven 2016 review

Top Eleven 2016 reviews

1. PROS

Easy to pick up

Doesn't require masses of football knowledge

Slots into a nice routine

2. CONS

Mourinho's appearance only token

Match simulation non-existent

Then we have a post of game review

Available in iOS and Android

You have to wonder whether, during the depths of Chelsea's catastrophic season this year, Jose Mourinho worried around his Top Eleven contract with Nordeus. Top Eleven 2016, like all recent versions of the game, comes emblazoned with Jose's face and is littered with pictures of the 'Special One' throughout, but all at a time when the man himself is out of a job. Suffice to say, Mourinho's lack of employment serves as more of an embarrassment for Top Eleven than the great man himself.

Luckily, Top Eleven has always had very little to do with Mourinho beyond the superficial, meaning that its approach to football management – which intentionally strays from the 'traditional' Championship Manager model – remains entirely intact. In fact, as fans of the franchise are well aware, developer Nordeus simply updates the existing Top Eleven app on iOS and Android each year rather than pushing out a new version.

It's an admirable decision which means that, from the world go, the Top Eleven universe is populated with millions of players to take on, and chances are a fair few of your Facebook contacts will already be on its books.

That's important because Top Eleven, both now and before, is built around multiplayer. Setting up a fictitious club based in the country and city of your choosing, career matches are scheduled in for set times of the day, taking place with or without your involvement.

Indeed, your main job in Top Eleven – aside from choosing a formation and just which players will take to the field – is training your squad and making sure they're in the best shape possible for the match ahead.

Training is crucial in Top Eleven, with each run adding ability both to your players and helping you level up as a coach, the latter unlocking new abilities you can then put into force with your players. There's no real limit to just how much you train your players (and, indeed, if you want to be fully prepared for your next match, you'll need to squeeze in a good few), but overdoing it will tire them out – a gauge you'll need to use in-game credit to fill back up.

This is the heartbeat of Top Eleven; the entire game is governed by a collection of different in-game currencies that need to be topped up, either by paying, waiting for time to tick over, or watching adverts, in order to be successful.

Let your players take on a match untrained, for instance, or on the flip side so knackered from your last set of training sessions that they haven't had a chance to recover, then the likelihood is they'll lose.

There is a certain simplicity to this approach that appeals to casual football fans, however. Though it's important you set up your team with a formation and an approach to the game when in and out of possession, Nordeus' continued decision to set this in a fictitious football world means Top Eleven isn't about signing real up-and-coming players you've seen in some obscure Korean league no one but the most dedicated football aficionado has heard of, but keeping to a daily routine of training your players and then fully resting them before each scheduled match.

The longer you play and the more you engage, the better your team will get and the more matches you'll end up winning. Like all the best free-to-play games, Top Eleven asks that you play little and often, keeping your team ticking over in between the matches, but never requiring you to devote any more than a few minutes to the cause. It's this contemporary approach that means that, for hardcore football fans, Top Eleven will remain as unappealing a prospect as it ever was.

For anyone who wants to dip their toe into the world of football management without getting all too wrapped up in the statistics, Nordeus continues to offer them their best port of call, delivering a take on the beautiful game that manages to be welcoming to the more casual fans amongst us without being a complete pushover. Ironically for Mr. Mourinho, chances are you'll be taking it on for considerably longer than he stays in his next job.

VERDICT

As casual as ever, Nordeus continues to stand Top Eleven apart from the competition by fully embracing the free-to-play world and delivering a game you can take on in small nuggets. Not one for dedicated football aficionados, then, but a route in for anyone else who wants a hand in the beautiful game.
Top Eleven 2016 is a free game and you can get new free games in this.

Hay Day: Farming game

In one way, it's sort of strange that farming - a menial, repetitive task that involves long hours and lots of hard work - has formed the basis for the latest craze in casual simulators.

But in another way it makes perfect sense. Games likeFarmVille are all about managing time and resources in order to create a particular outcome, and farming may be the most clear and direct form of resource-management in the world. Seeds go in, plants come out. Done.

Hay Day is the latest freemium title to try and cash in on the farm craze, and while it isn't particularly original it still manages to get all of the basic elements right.

Green fingers

You start out with little more than a grubby patch of land and and a talkative scarecrow for a helper. After being walked through the basics you're largely left to your own devices as you attempt to build up your business.

With only a couple of crops to choose from, and not very many places to grow them, things begin sedately, but as your farming career blossoms you'll be dealing with animals, tending multiple feeds, and trying to sell your stock to as many people as possible.

Everything grows in its own time, from eggs to carrots, although you can speed things up with the liberal application of diamonds, which you can buy with real-life money from the game's shop.

Factory farming

Every action you perform - whether cutting down trees to make space for your expansion, baking bread in the on site oven, or selling items to the customers who wander in - gives you stars. These are basically XP, and each time you level-up you get new crops, buildings, and products to play with.

There's a social aspect to the game, too, in that you can add Facebook friends in order to trade with them, and visit their farms to see how your competition is doing.

The real draw of gardening is the satisfaction of a job well done, and that's something that Hay Day just about manages to capture. Watching your crops grow and your twee factories spew out products is a quietly pleasing experience.

If you're vehemently opposed to freemium farming sims then this one won't change your mind. But if you fancy spending a relaxing few minutes a day tending the farm then you could do a lot worse than tend this one.

Calsh of clans: Game for everyone

This is a freemium game review, in which we usually give our impressions immediately after booting a game up, again after three days, and finally after seven days. However, Clash of Clans has been out for months, and I've been playing for a good long while, so I'm going to be doing things a bit different this time round...

I was introduced to the game by my main man Jon Jordan through the Pocket Gamer Podcast a few months later, after hearing about his love of the game, and the staggering amount of money he'd ploughed into the freemium title.

I've always been interested in freemium games, and I've sunk more than my fair share of time in them. But by the time I played Clash of Clans I'd become frustrated with the failing common to many freemium world-building titles: there's very little skill or strategy involved in success.

One small step for barbarian man

To me, Clash of Clans represents a tentative but significant step towards changing this, though it's a step that few take the time to recognise. See,Clash of Clans asks you to be good at the game as well as patient, and for that it deserves recognition.

Clans asks you to build a village and populate it with everything the warring tribe you're leading might need. A town hall for leadership, a gold mine for money, an army camp to hold your warriors, an Elixir collector to gather up this additional resource from the ether - pretty soon you've got plenty of architectural work to be getting on with.

As you build and expand your small camp into a burgeoning fortress you unlock more building types, but never enough to weigh you down with choices. Hit a high enough level and you can take over the Clan Castle, allowing you to forge allegiances with other players, upgrade your barracks, and create different types of unit.

There are more than enough types of unit to unlock, but not enough for any of them to seem perfunctory on the battlefield.

It's in the battles that you first appreciate the necessity for skill. The first few battles with the AI are easy-peasy. Simply build enough Barbarians to overrun the Goblin hideout, and watch them take it apart.

Then you're given access to archer units, and you're thinking, "well, this is easy, I'm storming through these."

Brick by brick

Then you run up against an enemy barricade with a few cannons and a big chunky wall, and you're done for. Your hand-to-hand units can't tear the wall down fast enough, and your archers are too busy plundering resources to notice that they're being fired on by cannons.

So you upgrade your Barracks and after a while you have Giants and Wall Breakers. Now you can smash through those same walls with a well-placed bomb, and your Giants are dismantling cannons with ease.

The game builds like this, requiring more and more sophisticated units, asking you to strategise and really think about which elements you should focus on building within your camp.

Next you'll find that having overwhelming numbers just isn't going to cut it - you'll need to specifically think where and when you'll deploy troops, and how they're going to interact with the enemy camps.

Lots of cannons guarding an entrance? You'll want an aerial unit to rain fire from above. Bomb traps lying in wait around the back? Go through the walls at the side.

There's even narrative justification for these systems of play, should you need it. You're wrangling a riotous clan, of course you don't have complete control over all your troops, but you can give general orders as their chief.

This, of course, is all training for when you first get raided by another real-life player. The first time you see your base wiped out, you'll watch the replay to see how it happened, rebuild, and perhaps shore up certain areas of your base. Then it's time to train troops and go show them who's boss.

Coming home

The pressure to continue formulating better defences or more deadly forms of attack keeps you coming back, and the well-calibrated match-making system ensure you'll never grow too frustrated or bored.

It's not a perfect game, of course - hence the Gold Award and not the Platinum. But the issues are few and far between.

Occasionally, the game will mistake you scrolling across your camp as you wanting to move a building, which can be a pain. And it's quick to boot, but seems to reset the loading process whenever you return to the iPhone's home screen and then jump back in.

It was never the best-looking game. It's not ugly by any means, but the presentation is all isometric 2D and the number of frames of animation could have been a little higher.

And perhaps it takes slightly longer than desirable to buildings to go up. It's not excessive, and it gives you time to walk away and think about how you want to move forward, but when you just want to get on and execute on your strategies it can be a pain.

But these are minor gripes. Clash of Clans is a superb game, freemium or otherwise, with more nuance than most give it credit for. That's why it's passed the test of time since its launch and still has an active community devotedly constructing elaborate fortresses in the hope of becoming invincible.

So go and grab it. It's free, it's easy to get into, and it's a superb example of how freemium should work.

That's our experience of the game, what's yours been? Let us and the rest of the Pocket Gamer Community know by leaving us a comment in the box below.

Boom Beach review: Brother of Clash of Clans

Take a gander at the top grossing games on iOS and one game that’s been there for an incredibly long time is Supercell’sClash of Clans [Free]. Combining freemium elements with base building and combat, Supercell managed to create a compelling system to encourage players to come back (and spend some money). Now, the freemium powerhouse has returned with the worldwide launch of Boom Beach [Free], the spiritual successor to Clash. Offering a similar experience in a different setting with just enough tweaks to make it unique, Boom Beach isn’t going to offer a radically different experience, but that might not be a bad thing in terms of approachability.

If you’ve played Clash of Clans, then Boom Beach is going to look pretty familiar to you. Players start out with a simple island base with the goal being to explore the surrounding areas and free the surrounding island natives from villainous servitude. You’ll free them by building and upgrading ships, namely a gunship and landing boats, that you’ll use to deploy landing parties and take out opposing headquarters. Freeing islands rewards both immediate and long term resources. In addition, islands are constantly being taken back, affording players an opportunity to retake and earn additional supplies. Eventually, the retaken islands become player islands which, provide even more resources along with medals, which are the primary measure of success.

Sounds simple, but you’d expect from Supercell there’s a bit of strategy involved. Landing boats can be outfitted with a wide variety of different units, each having pros and cons in terms of health, strength and weapons. Gunship weapons, as well as each of the landing units, can be upgraded as well as the ships themselves. Meanwhile, base buildings include the standard defensive mechanisms, as well as resource gatherers, structures that allow the aforementioned upgrades, and so on. Of course, all the building and upgrading is buttressed by a freemium timer system that applies to all facets of the game.

As someone that was a bit intimidated by Clash of Clans, I was surprised by how inviting the introductory phases of Boom Beach were. Currency is simplified at the onset with secondary currencies slowly introduced as you upgrade your headquarters. Premium currency, which plays the standard role of speeding up timers, doled out on a regular basis (although still a bit slow for my tastes). Even the game’s combat system is paced really well with a player’s zone of influence (and potential opponents) being small at the onset but gradually expands at whatever pace the player desires.

Of course, as friendly and interesting Boom Beach is, it’s important to note that it’s still a freemium game at its heart. The building, recruiting, upgrading and resource systems are all premised on timers, with the only alternative to patience being to use premium currency to speed up the timers. Also, once you get into mid-game and additional currencies start appearing, Beach has a nasty habit of pushing you to instantly upgrade fundamental buildings for said new currency. Considering the fact that combat only occurs when you explore new regions (which take coins and radar upgrades) or when conquered islands are retaken (which take time), long session players will quickly find that Boom Beach plays best in smaller, more frequent sessions. I won’t get into a theoretically debate about freemium, but all I’ll say is this style of play fits perfectly for my lifestyle, which is why it doesn’t bother me in the slightest.

Now, I’m a fan of the streamlined gameplay but it does come with some costs. As far as building bases is concerned, there’s some loss in customization. In fact, taking a glance at the top players it also seems like there’s some loss in terms of viable endgame strategies as everyone seems to have the same exact base layout. There’s also very little in social integration currently available, which I thought was a pretty big part of Clash. I’m sure such additions will get updated into Boom Beach eventually, but right now it’s a bit bare.

Regardless, pacing, balance and approachability are important facets to a successful freemium game, and I think Boom Beach succeeds well in both in its other non-base defense aspects. Assuming you aren’t too obsessed with the end-game or social aspects (and you don’t have an irrational hatred for freemium games) Boom Beachcontinues the showing seen in Clash of Clans. Whether it has enough staying power as its spiritual predecessor will depend greatly on the inevitable tweaks to the core gameplay. Meanwhile, it’s worth a shot.