Men In Black 3
You’d be forgiven for thinking that any MIB
tie in would be a run and gun style of game, talking aliens down and generally
rehashing old ideas. But what you get here is actually a resource management,
turn-based game that is surprisingly good. It’s also free but you can bet
there’s a bunch of in app purchases to slightly sour the experience, though
it’s no different from any other freemium game on the market.
As a new agent, it’s up to you to manager
the MIB agency by training agents, developing weapon and gadgets, expanding the
building and fighting aliens both in 2012 and 1969, just like the movie. It all
kick off in rookie/tutorial mode showing you how the game works and as you
become more adept, you’ll stockpile resources and expand the MIB offices to
help Agent D save the world.
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Completing task earns you money, energy and
experience points that allow you to expand the HQ, heal wounded agents, recruit
new agents, buy new weapons and so on. Missions can vary in length but you can
speed them up using the Temporal Pulse Recharge which of course costs real
money. For $1.99 you can get 20 T-Pulses or for $4.99 you get 53. I’m still to
figure out why 53?? Still, for the money you do at least get a decent number of
T-Pulses so it’s not a total rip.
The combat takes place in turns. You fire,
then the alien fires back and so forth. There are multiple agent so it’s not a
one shot for one shot scenario but it’s sort of last man standing gunfight at
the OK Corall. It’s actually kid of fun especially as the weaponry and gadgets
become more advanced, but it involves a lot of tapping, waiting, and more
tapping so it can be repetitive.
This is a great looking game too,
cartoonish but with a great amount of detail, but you won’t hear the real
voices in the game. This is good and bad as it keeps the size of the app low
but it could have been much more engaging hearing Will Smith or Tommy Lee
Jones/Josh Brolin. Instead you get some retro arcade gaming music which is
great for old school gamers and perhaps a little annoying for newer gamers.
Despite those criticisms Men in Black 3 is
a good fun game with a decent amount of replay value and a ton of hours worth
of material.
Jumping Knights
On the surface Jumping Knights might look
like a Doodle Jump clone. While its normal is similar as well as the controls,
Jumping Knights manages to crave its own niche as somewhat of a hybrid in an
artsy cartoon style world where you take control of a gallant knight, sword in
hand and bounce upwards from platform to platform.
As in Doodle Jump, controlling your knight
is performed by tilting the device left and right. As you go determinedly
skyward, the idea is to avoid falling, collect power ups and beat the bosses at
the end of each level in a bid to save the princess. By tapping and dragging
you can also fire your “sword energy” so there is a good amount of action
intertwined with some RPG style elements as your knight levels up and collects
a ton of items that sit in your inventory for later use.
Amazingly, for a game that seems so
one-dimensional, there is a great deal of variety particularly with power-ups
to keep the game feeling fresh and exciting. There are the usual shield powers
and weapon power-ups, but there are a few kooky powers at your disposal that
will have you hurtling onward and upward with more than a little humor.
Along your travels you’ll find a lot of
enemies to avoid but this is fairly easy, sometimes too easy, by just jumping
but the most fun comes when using your sword. Bosses on the other hand can be a
trickier affair though not so much that you won’t find a way past them in due
time.
For a game full of bouncing and jumping it
helps that the music is similarly bouncy and the crisp, colourful graphics make
this a very nice game to see in action. The overall experience isn’t a
relatively deep one but the addictiveness of trying to beat your own score as
well as others in Game Center is more than enough to keep you engaged for hours
on end.
Jumping Knights could have been very
monotonous but thankfully, the boss battles break up the regular gameplay and
there’s enough variety to ensure the game never really gets old.
