Click For Points (Steam) Review

Click for Points is a free 2022 clicker game on Steam by These Are The Good Games where there is a big pixelated red button with a number on it that counts your clicks, that is literally it but I really want to review as many things as I can and I’m good at clicking a lot lol so why not (even though I keep forgetting to complete other reviews). It also has a ‘mode’ where you click as much as you can within 30 seconds and a £2.50 soundtrack.

Unfortunately this is one of those cases where even the little it offers is either badly done or doesn’t work, sounds and background colors changing per click is disabled by default due to the amount of flashing that inevitably occurs if you are any decent at clicking fast and even if the achievements worked (which they do not) the game has been hit with the limit that keeps them out of profile stuff (e.g. showcases).

I noticed that you can get clicks rather quickly by using one hand to hit the space bar which works (whilst over the button) as well as any clicks on the mouse (though I just did left and right) but with how the upgrades work and their costs the requirements balloon into absurdity quite quickly with the final upgrade needing 71.4 million actual clicks to achieve, this is because each upgrade only gives you an extra +2 per click whilst being 10 times as expensive.

Overall its one of those games that can’t really even be played as a joke as what little it offers is still done rather badly, to the point that it bothers me that games like this that are mostly overlooked tend to get high amounts of recommendations from non-serious people (not that I hate jokey reviews just not when there is too many). There is literally no reason to recommend this so I obviously am not.

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Introduction

Shrek 2 is a 2004 3d platformer for PC developed by KnowWonder and published by Activision thats loosely based on the movie of the same name. Like most games that are movie tie ins, especially a lot of earlier ones, it has a lot of problems. Also note there is no screenshot at the time of rewriting (must have accidentally deleted it or something).

The Review

From the very start the game shows signs of being terrible, immediately greeting you with a non rebindable control scheme where left click is attack (normal) and right click is jump (weird). On top of this the camera was notably player controlled with no sort of automation at all (or any toggle). And then double jumping needed you to press twice faster than you’d think because the window to perform one is rather slim unlike most other platformers. However this didn’t matter because for some reason the game seemed to have some sort of auto-jump system where you could just aim at another platform and click jump and the game would just do it for you destroying any difficulty the game had.

This is the same when it comes to other obstacles and enemies, they are so mind blowing easy that most of the time you can just tank them and destroy them with ease, the bosses feel more like a mild annoyance than an actual challenge and it almost feels like the ai is outright broken in later stages. Of course it didn’t stop the devs throwing in a few insta-kill traps now and then for that sweet false difficulty increase. This all in turn made all collectibles pointless; The 4 health powerups in the game, the coins that only bought potions and the posters that would take you to mini bonus stage to get more coins (per 3 posters).

Outside of gameplay the visuals were passable for the time but the sound got annoying with the characters talking too much whilst often repeating (mostly 4th wall breaking) lines til you get sick of them as well as music that seemed to be louder than the sound at times despite the fact it starts at 30% (while sound is 100%).

Overall

Simply put this is an example of a games developer thinking that building a game for young children needs no effort or challenge showing that they have no idea what kids actually want. I would not recommend buying this game for yourselves or a young family member unless you want to see for yourself just how bad it is.

Curl up and Fly (Flash Game) Review

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Curl up and Fly is a free 2014 flash ‘launch’ game by John Cooney (aka jmtb02) on Kartridge (Kongregate’s recently released indie store) where you launch a armadillo via a cannon and try to get as far as possible with the help of useful objects and upgrades. The gimmick being the curling up.

The game seems rather simple though compared to others in the same genre it does have its share of unique gimmicks, the main one being curling up. Whenever you were not using your booster the armadillo would curl up which allowed it to hit objects safely and bounce off the ground, otherwise they’d act as obstacles and actually stop you meaning it was not just a case of being lucky with the random placement but timing and fuel management were also things.

On top of this the upgrades were done by a tree of sorts with some of the endings giving you access to a kongpanion, sadly this is both a good and bad feature. Good in the way that its a nice thing to have but it sadly does remind me of something not directly tied to the game. Essentially you get to choose a Kongpanion out of all the existing ones (which takes forever) with each coming with a boost of their own, however these boosts get multipliers if you actually own them or even better have the shiny version. 

To put it in context, to get a kongpanion means completing the kongregate badge of the day in that specific week and the shiny version means doing it 5 times in a week. If you don’t that kongpanion is lost to you forever. While it is arguably an extra to me its like if Pokemon locked off a portion of the pokedex if you didn’t play it religiously. Though maybe it wouldn’t bother me so much if the game didn’t make you scroll through all of them one at a time to hopefully find the good ones (aka shiny ones with the boost you want).

Other than that its a pretty nice game, you very quickly find yourself able to go pretty far distances without that much effort so its great for those that like casual stuff. The Kartridge app actually has a badge (basically its version of achievements) for hitting 500,000 feet traveled in a single launch if thats your thing.

Overall worth checking it out, as long as you aren’t bothered by how the kongpanions work there’s nothing really wrong with it.

Recycle City (Flash Games) Review

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Recycle City is a US government created site made on behalf of the Enviromental Protection Agency which aims to teach kids about recycling. There is a part with a bunch of info in it disguised as a tour but for this we’re focusing on the 2 flash games.

Recycle City Challenge

The recycle city challenge is basically a quiz where you answer 5 sets of 3 questions with the best answers giving 3 points totalling to a 45 point max. The visuals are boring as you’d expect from a game of this type, the music though is quite nice. Why? Because they literally stole it from Yoshi’s Island DS, got to wonder what idiot calls themselves a developer and doesn’t know what Nintendo is like about people using their ip’s. Even those that didn’t play Yoshi’s Underground can’t deny this as the mp3 is called yoshidsunderground as in Yoshi DS Underground.

I’m not too much storage space on an image from this game.

The quiz was painful to play from the constantly looping tune to the ms paint art but the worst thing was the questions themselves. Sure the ‘game’ was aimed at young people but the idea of a quiz is to at least have some challenge. Firstly the answers seemed obvious, secondly most of the time 2 of the answers gave you the max 3 tokens anyway and thirdly there was a magnifying glass in each question that pretty much gave you the answer.

On top of this it was actually exploitable, as long as you didn’t complete the set of 3 questions you could simply press back click on the level and try again. You didn’t get any extra points from this but not getting 45 was something you’d have to do on purpose. No wonder people got bored and either put amusing things into the leaderboard (I believe one was “Nintendos Top Lawyer)” or in a few cases just straight up hacked their score because with how thrown together the game is it was probably easy to do.

If for some reason you still want to play it though here’s the link.

Dumptown

While its the previous game that’s getting all the attention for its blatant music stealing I was obviously going to review the other one as well. Though then again while the site calls this a game the truth is it isn’t.

This was already terrible quality even before I shrank it for storage space reasons

What do I mean by this? Well you click on the city hall, then you click on each program and then the “try this program checkbox” which makes numbers and the picture change a little with the only twist being the fact Home Recycling Pick Up also has a checkbox in an upgrade tab. There is no fanfare for doing this, what the creators want you to do is read all the writing that is thrown in your face in the program menu’s which is boring enough if not for the fact this time there is no music whatsoever either.

I seriously don’t understand how anyone thinks this sort of thing works, like there’s probably plenty of games out there that do a better job than this that aren’t even focused on recycling at all. But if you want to see this for yourselves once again here’s the link.

Conclusion

At the end of the day I really should not have been surprised at what we ended up with. After all these were edutainment ‘games’ that were created by a dev team hired by a group of idiots that still to this day try to blame actual videogames for violence. At least they both take a short amount of time to ‘complete’. Now the question is how long until Nintendo swings the hammer down on them and how will they react.

Girls’ Frontline (Android) Review

Girls’ Frontline is a strategy game for Android by Sunborn Games where you control ‘Echelons’ of T-Dolls (aka Teams of Female Robots) to “unveil the far-reaching conspiracy that permeates the world. I will admit this is one of the games I steered away from because I assumed its noticeably fanservice friendly premise meant bad gameplay (and/or microtransactions).

First impressions (outside of the usual tutorial and installing) was it seemed like the game would be much more complex than I had first thought. Though since most of its locked til you level up or til you’ve completed certain levels its best to talk about the base gameplay.

The main idea of Girls Frontline was to build teams of 5 (you can have up to 4 teams) with some strategy involved in how you place them in a formation and what types of weapons you use. You then deploy them in maps made up of connected nodes with the goal of capturing said nodes and defeating the opposition eventually capturing the enemy command center. Movement/Deployment used action points while you would use up resources like ammo/rations during each mission (based on how powerful your echelon is). In other words while seeming simple there is indeed quite a bit of strategy in the base gameplay. Also the enemy could pretty much do what the player could do (including deployment) which made me wonder why I never saw any mention of PvP.

The fights are pretty simple, you mostly just watch your echelon fight the enemy automatically though you can choose to activate their special abilities manually if you’d rather not automate that as well. I liked how there was always an indicator on the map for how much strength a team had left (if a t-doll was destroyed or retreated for example) and you can switch the position of 2 teams in adjacent nodes for free increasing the possible strategizing.

The game had 4 kinds of resources: Manpower, Ammo, Rations, Parts. These were used not only during the missions themselves but also to repair any that are damaged (as they don’t heal since they’re robots) and to create. Repairing can get both expensive and timely depending of how damaged a t-doll is while creating a t-doll let you use as much or little resources as you want (using more obviously boosting the chance of rarer t-dolls). Considering over a 3 day serious play period I got 3 5 star t-dolls and a decent amount of 4 star ones the rates seem pretty damn good compared to other free to play games. Its worth noting that damaged t-dolls have different artwork and its where the fanservice part of the game shows itself, though the devs know some people are weird and downloaded the game for that and allow you to see those pics in a character index.

There were also plenty of ways to upgrade each t-doll, calibration was the usual way to use spare t-dolls to boost some stats while Dummy Linking (something you can’t use much) blew my mind. Essentially Dummy Linking takes a t-doll (at a required level) and by using another of the same t-doll at the required level or using cores adds an extra unit to the t-doll with an icon stating how many it has. A lot of cores are needed for high star t-dolls and the second dummy link needs the t-doll to be Lv30 but the potential to effectively have (at least) 15 in a single team is certainly an exciting prospect. Also there was combat simulation and skill training which is even more stuff but its not really worth mentioning since I didn’t use it much.

There were even dorms for the teams, essentially rooms in which your teams would be in which would firstly raise the affection of t-dolls in them (which is something else that can eventually improve them) but also acquire batteries which lets you upgrade things in the other dorm facilities from the rescue center which gives the chance of finding pets for the dorm to the data station which is focused on getting surplus exp and creating combat reports, something giftable that basically gives a t-doll more exp. The only thing a little bothersome about dorms was firstly that you only start with 2 dorms and getting furniture meant using hard to get tokens on a gacha, though since it seemed like an extra compared to everything else I was alright with it. Including the fact a pet cost seemingly a lot to adopt.

Of course the game does have free to play mechanics and a premium currency being gems. As for the mechanics auto-battles, missions, repairs, creation, training etc all take time to complete meaning. Of course this is where having 4 teams is nice (even if you honestly want to use as many per mission while still being quick enough for S rank).

The gems which also weren’t that easy to come by could buy basically anything including the resources though the obvious things that I had been eying was the Echelon Limit +1 which would let you build a 5th team (though most things from creation to repairing also have locked slots). I have yet to be able to afford it but the surprising thing is its incredibly easy to get enough t-dolls to have 5 whole teams within without even needing to use doubles in the 3 days I played it (maybe even 6). I have honestly not yet felt like I need any.

If there was anything I found a little odd before I wrap up the review its that while the friend system seemed really useful (to the point you can only use a friends team in a mission 20 times a day) I have yet to receive a single invite even from newbies. As a paranoid person I tend to not send requests myself but at least the game knows that and offers a friend team that scales with the current missions difficulty.

Overall its a pretty good game, at first I thought it was just something made for fanservice but the gameplay and extras are pretty complex. I didn’t even mention all the seemingly late game things that were currently unreleased.

“Autumn/Christmas Releases” (PS1 Demo Disc) Review

The “Autumn/Christmas Releases” disc is a small compilation disc for PS1 containing a few demos for games scheduled for Autumn/Christmas 1996. Note I didn’t have the original box and the disc itself fails to tell you which ones are rolling demos or playable til you select them.

Something that bothered me was th game would force you into random demo’s if you waited on the select screen too long. Also the visuals weren’t that good either in all honesty.

The Demos/Videos

Destruction Derby 2 ‘Rolling’ Demo

For those that don’t know a rolling demo is one that plays itself. This one in particular, for the driving game by Reflections, had the player watch a race replay following what I assume is an ai racer in a white car (they did kind bad at points) with different camera angles. I admit it does look quite cool but considering how both show the followed plaer doing terribly and neither of them finish the race (first one gets totalled, 2nd one just cuts off suddenly). That really wouldn’t have made me confident in buying it.

Wipeout 2097 Demo Review

The racer thats actually developed (and not just published) by Psygnosis Wipeout 2097 actually had a playable demo. While the type of race couldn’t be changed and options were also unselectable there were 4 possible vehicles (ranging fom beginner to expert in handling difficulty) to race around the track (which itself could be played in novice or expert). Thankfully it also shows the controls before throwing you into the race.

Controls definitely felt responsive but it was obviously not an easy game, one of the gimmicks of the game is similar to stuff like F-Zero you go pretty fast with the top speed getting higher as the difficulty does. I did alright on novice, had a bad habit of crashing in the dark tunnel section every time though. On expert however I did terrible, running out of time just before the finish line of the first lap. I probably would need to learn how the airbrakes worked to get good at it.

If there was one thing that bothered me about the controls was that circle was used to fire weapons and square was used to discard them. Its quite easy to press square while pressing down X but not O. Still a pretty nice demo though, I imagine the full game would have button config. The only reason Iwouldn’t have bought the full game is because of how bad I am at it but I’d still recommend it.

It does have a rolling demo if you leave it alone.

Monster Trucks Rolling Demo Review

This rolling demo was all sorts of awkward, for some reason it thought watching a monster truck drive over and crush a row of cars for a bit was enough to get peoples interest, with some of the voice lines being spoken twice in a row.

The advert after that was even more so especially nowadays, one of the features being 1,000,000 polygons per 6km2 per level. Interestingly its also made by Reflections, the people that made Destruction Derby 2. And people say companies shovel out games these days. This one doesn’t interest me at all, in fact it probably could have been part of another game.

Formula 1 Demo Review

Honestly by this point in reviewing and the 4th car related game published by Psygnosis (developed by Bizarre Creations) this disc was seeming disappointing. However it was a playable demo letting you play through a full track of the game.

Controls were surprisingly easy to guess though it’d have been nice to get shown them. I actually did quite alright though there was one thing that bothered me greatly, at one point it starts telling you that you are low on fuel and since the game doesn’t tell you and I’m not a Formula 1 watcher I had no idea what to do about it. Other than that its a pretty decent demo, I do have to wonder if the full game did well considering its name highly implies its the first F1 based game ever.

If you leave the game alone it’ll show a short rolling demo similar to how Destruction Derby 2’s did but I imagine it’d interest people more being based on something licensed.

Tekken 2 Demo Review

Finally something non car related, the fighting game sequel by Namco. After watching (or skipping) the intro cutscene you are given a choice between Jun or Lei to play a specific fight, Jun fights Jack-2 while Lei fights Heihachi.

Controls were easy to figure out (though once again not show) but something felt really awkward about the gameplay. A lot of attacks not only did huge damage but were usually the more chainable ones. Unlike other fighting games this meant it was possible to practically nuke the opponent or get nuked. On one hand I got a perfect against Heihachi, on the other hand Jack-2 did a throw attack on Jun that did a horrifying amount of damage.

Despite this it still seems like a pretty good demo, I imagine you wouldn’t have needed to play the first game to become interested in the game.

Crash Bandicoot Demo Review

The Crash Bandicoot demo (game by Naughty Dog) was another awkward one that threw you into a level with no instructions at all. In fact trying to pause quits the demo and leaving it too long has an ai play it for you.

The controls were pretty easy to work out though and the game was really generous with lives, to the point that I imagine people new to platformers would be able to work things out. The demo felt kinda tiny though so while I liked it I’m not sure it would’ve been enough to make me interested in buying it.

The Verdict

While the disc did have a few nice demo’s the heavy lean on driving related games all published by the same developer really lowered my overall opinion on it aka it wasn’t that good.

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Merge City: idle building game (Android) Review

Merge City: idle building game is a casual ‘merge’ game for Android by Sphere Game Studios where you build a small city by making and merging buildings to discover new ones. I played v1.13 updated Jan 13th 2019 which was essentially a kindness update with bonus boxes and lucky merges (plus an improved soundtrack apparently).

Gameplay starts almost immediately giving you a 9×9 isometric grid (with 10 unlockable squares) and a box to click. Said box would spawn boxes every 10 seconds but its 1 second faster per tap. Opening boxes and meging building felt notably responsive. Eventually you unlock ingame achievements and the ability to buy buildings with your income. Visuals are alright, mostly simplistic but its got a theme to it. The music is ok too, not something you’d want to listen to for long periods but good for a game like this.

What I found surprising was how generous the game felt compared to others, in most because of the recent update. Now and then when a box is spawned a blue or purple one can appear. The blue one contains a building of a higher level than usual while purple boxes contains money. There is also the chance of a lucky merge which once again gives you something higher thanyou’d usually get. Sounds just like the description right, what I didn’t mention though is that both of them aren’t even that rare and can easily skip more than one level. On top of this when you eventually get a 2nd city while the building visuals are different it shares the same level progression as the first aka if you unlocked the ability to buy level 8 buildings in the first you can i nthe 2nd.

Of course being a free game there would be some monetisation, while the game pleasantly didn’t force you to watch an ad you could choose to in order to get a x2 boost for 5 minutes (which stacks) or double offline income when you load the game back up. However there were some things that bugged me, firstly sometimes when you visited the shop it offered to let you get a building free for an ad which usually was just a waste of time (it replaces the buildings buy button making you have to go back and reenter too) and secondly there is a paper airplane that flies over that offers x5 for 1 min in exchange for watching an ad but I felt it appeared far too often. They also had a option on the left for a 7 day pack of boosts for £2.99 but it was honestly ignorable.

If there was anything else that bothered me was the fact they put in a very simplistic stacking game you could play everytime you level up but usd the google play games icon. Considering the game has ingame achievements and a leaderboard you’d have thought it’d have integration. Although it may be a good thing considering one of the achievements is literally watching a very unrealistic amount of ads.

Overall while it did seem it wouldn’t last as long as some idle games it certainly doesn’t have some of their problems.

Adventure Escape: Carnival (Android) Review

Adventure Escape: Carnival is a hidden item/puzzle adventure for Android by Haiku Games where you follow Maya, a witch with magical powers, as she tries to solve the disapppearance of a girl at a haunted carnival.

Visuals in the levels were pretty decent as you’d expect from this kin of game though the map couldn’t looked a little nicer (even if it weren’t important). Gameplay was also as expected, the first puzzles starting off pretty simple and ramping up at a pretty respectable rate. Some of them would need you to remember clues and put them together to work out codes while there were also some that were basically levels of oldschool games (like sudoku).

The way that the game tried to monetise itself was with the use of stars. Stars would let you gain clues to puzzles (5 per clue) or completely skip it (up to 30 stars I’ve noticed) though there was only 1 time I needed to use them. There was a puzzle involving manequins at one point and while I noticed that you moved the limbs by tapping the joints (shoulder, elbow, knee etc) but despite getting what I was certain was the right positions (also paying attention to color) I couldn’t get the game to register and I kept retrying til I just gave up on it. Amusingly while the game has picture ads between levels (aka ‘chapters’) they are all for other games by the developer. It did also ask for a 5 star review between levels but while that would be annoying google play has broken ratings so I just ignored it.

Story was alright, not something that pulls you in like some and the characters aren’t going to be that memorable. Thats just what happens when its a very small story but you did learn some things about both characters and nothing seemed particularly bad.

Overall it was a pretty decent game, while it may not last very long if you are good at these types of things it barely shows any advertising either. In fact seeing how many other games in the series there was makes me tempted to review them all at some point.

Banana Kong (Android) Review

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Banana Kong is a 2d runner for Android by Gamaga and puvlished by FDG entertaintment where you control an ape called Banana Kong as he tries to outrun an avalanche of banana peels.

Controls were very easy to get used and were quite responsive, visuals were also pretty good and I was pleasantly surprised how switching between areas worked with some feeling more like bonus areas though crashing still made you lose. On top of this variety there were animal buddies you could ride each acting different from each other and only being found in certain areas. Even the audio had a little charm to it with the words Banana Kong actually spoken now and then.

Banana’s were used for powerups and cosmetics and nothing felt grindy at all other than some of the one time use items though you didn’t need to use them so I didn’t really care. There were also missions, oddly enough completing enough of them nets you rewards with one of the possible rewards being a permenant score multiplier. This does make going for high scores a grind and a half but I can appreciate it not just being a microtransaction.

Speaking of microtransactions there was some but honestly since I never really felt like I was being pushed towards any I never looked, only thing of note being the hearts you can use to continue on a run. Interestingly instead of only allowing 1 extra chance per run the cost just doubles each time you lose in that run. In fact while the game did show ads they were usually the real short ones.

Overall I was not only pleasantly surprised at the nicely made gameplay and its not-so-grindy nature but this may be a rare occasion where I will not only recommend the game over some other runners but also mention removing the ads is a pretty respectable £0.89.

The game can be downloaded on Google Play here.

2 Cars (Android) Review

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2 Cars is an arcade style game for Android published by Ketchapp where you control 2 cars collecting circles and dodging squares within 4 lanes, the red car in the left 2 and the blue car in the right 2 switching lane when you tap that side of the screen.

As you’d guess from that description the controls are very easy though the gameplay itself is actually pretty challenging since not only was there the obvious point of dodging with 2 cars at once but you were also not allowed to miss any circles. The visuals weren’t very good though and a game like this could have done a bit better if it had some visual customisation.

It was also one of those games that relied solely on its one mode and peoples habits to go for high scores. Sure its fun but it didn’t justify the frequency of ads I got and i have to wonder if £1.25 is a bit to much to remove them considering the lack of variation.

Overall its alright, not good enough that I’d personally recommend it however I will still link to its storepage on Google Play here.