OK, it's official. The S60 (2nd and 3rd Edition) game Invasion looks a million dollars - but it's only half finished and lacks almost everything needed to make it into an immersive (not to mention fun) experience. Here's krisse's detailed review.
Read on in the full article.
Once again, Krisse, thanks for an excellent review of a game that seems to be the epitome of the common negative side of mobile gaming production and distribution at the moment. While there is some good stuff out there (surprisingly often free stuff), Invasion is frightenly typical. Just like you write, so much talent is wasted in the process of making these games! Also, not to mention the loss of good will and trust of a mobile games consumer who buys such a waste of bytes...
My hope is that we'll eventually speak of "pre" and "post" Nokia Next Gen platform, and that the whole industry will finaly raise the bar and pull itself up by its boot straps.
But what are the real issues behind today's immature mobile gaming production and distribution? Bad budget? Lack of talent? Failing market? Lack of quality assurance? The promise of money for nothing?
I'm currently doing the review for a new S60 3rd Ed game which has brilliant graphics, brilliant instructions/tutorials, AND brilliant gameplay, so it's not all bad. 😊
N-Gage games were mostly very good, despite the really terrible launch titles. Most N-Gage games from 2004/2005 got good reviews, and were easily the best games ever released on smartphones/PDAs, but the problem was that by then most shops and magazines had abandoned the N-Gage so very few people ever got to know how good a system it was.
Hopefully the Next Gen platform will take its time getting the launch games right so that people who use it at the beginning stay with it. Because it's across Nokia's range of S60s rather than one or two models, the size of the userbase shouldn't be the problem that it was on the N-Gage and QD, so there's a huge potential games market here as long as they release some good games right from the beginning that show off what can be done.
"But what are the real issues behind today's immature mobile gaming production and distribution? Bad budget? Lack of talent? Failing market? Lack of quality assurance? The promise of money for nothing?"
I think it's the quality assurance, both at the publishers and the distributors, and also the difficulty of buying a game. At the moment it's easier to get a pirated game onto your smartphone than a legal one, that has to change if the market is to become viable (and hopefully the download distribution on the Next Gen platform will do that).
The talent and money is clearly there, otherwise the graphics and sound on Invasion and 4Elements wouldn't have been so good. They had everything right except the actual game, it ought to have been properly playtested.
Publishers should refuse to fund rubbish, and distributors should refuse to sell rubbish, because as you say it destroys confidence in phone games as a whole. There's an AAS's feature on this very topic:
Hi Krisse,
Thanks for this review.
Our company is on self-maintenance. All money we have is from AquaCalendar mostly.
Our first attepts to create games, seems to be not sucessful. This review will show truth for some "stubborn" peoples. And starting from New Year, game design and final game quality will be under my own control.
I was able to deliver quite sucessfull AquaCalendar for all smartphone users, and I love and play games 😊.
So in 3-4 month all users will get complete new game on Invasin graphic engine.
Thanks for understanding,
Valentin Kalinin
Author of AquaCalendar and PocketTorch CEO.
Thank you for the very polite reply Valentin. 😊
Both the 4Elements and Invasion reviews said that the games had a lot of potential: they're both good ideas, and they both have an excellent graphic engine which is very successful. They're not bad games at heart, they just need more development time and playtesting so that they're easier to play, especially for people who don't know how they work.
I hope you don't give up on making games, because you've done a lot of things right in your games so far.
I wish you the best of luck with the next game, your company has done brilliant things on S60.
Hi Guys!
I tested the UIQ 3 version, and also was very sad with the result!!! I love strategy games, and find them very suitable to mobile phones, specialy the ones that have touch sreen support
I don�t understand why people make such errors with gameplay...there is a game(s) that marked what a mobile strategy game should be like, and it was writen in java - Ancient Empires, from Macrospace, now Glu(1 e 2) - those were absolutely briliant, almost to the level of games they were inspired in, mainly the Advance Wars series on GBA. I don�t understand why other publishers don�t folow that example and make more games like that, those were almost the only mobile games that made me actualy loose some sleep