Tag Archives: mobile

Marvel Puzzle Quest — Issue 41

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A mar­velous puz­zle journey

Ah, qui­et, placid Puz­zle Quest. We’ve seen many ver­sions of the clas­sic match-three game and yet, some­how, some way there’s a unique spin added that catch­es the eye and delights. Mar­vel Puz­zle Quest, the mobile jug­ger­naut from Demi­urge Stu­dios, is a spec­tac­u­lar extra move-laden free-to-play boun­ty for on the go.

I’ve played at least two ver­sions of Puz­zle Quest and they’re decent. Hav­ing that his­to­ry helps with con­cepts and under­stand­ing some of the intri­ca­cies of MPQ, but the base match-three con­cept is not hard, though. Your goal is to match three or more like-col­ored gems (green, black, yel­low, blue, red, pur­ple, and sil­ver) to dam­age your oppo­nent until they are downed. You can have a team of one to three char­ac­ters who will take turns match­ing gems against an AI-con­trolled team. From time to time, match con­di­tions vary — espe­cial­ly depend­ing on the mode or in-game event, but the main goal is gen­er­al­ly to take out your oppo­nent as clean­ly as possible. 

The Mar­vel com­po­nent comes in through char­ac­ters to col­lect from the sto­ried com­ic book com­pa­ny. Your team and the AI’s team will be com­posed of Mar­vel char­ac­ters rang­ing from the obscure to the most recent MCU-themed ver­sions, ranked in a five-star sys­tem. Char­ac­ters have three spe­cial moves — some­times with sub­sets and pas­sives — that must be unlocked. How you obtain them is where the pay aspect comes into play. Pric­ing can be steep when you’re try­ing to build a decent ros­ter, but it’s no worse than some of the oth­er options out in the mar­ket­place right now, and it has a more sat­is­fy­ing feel to com­plet­ing a col­lec­tion here. As a well-known Mar­vel doc­tor­al can­di­date, I have had a lot of fun pulling togeth­er a ros­ter with MPQ. I know most, if not all, of the char­ac­ters and their vari­ants (thanks, Loki!), and it’s decent work to keep track of who I have earned or am still hunt­ing down. In the year that I’ve been play­ing, I’ve cre­at­ed a spread­sheet that’s updat­ed dai­ly to track where my col­lec­tion stands. It’s that deep.

The depth of the puz­zle engine is also sur­pris­ing. It’s not uncom­mon to strate­gize moves, match­es and board set­up to max­i­mize poten­tial dam­age in a fight. The AI is well-bal­anced, enough that I rarely feel as though it’s unfair. I also very sel­dom lose match­es now that my ros­ter is about 80 per­cent com­plete. And in terms of ros­ter-build­ing, I also tend to get my fair share of rare and pow­er­ful five-star char­ac­ters. MPQ could eas­i­ly be a mon­ey sink, but it’s avoid­ed with a lot of devel­op­er bal­anc­ing behind the scenes.

The bal­anc­ing act also extends to the dif­fer­ent modes, and it’s a job well done. There are quite a few events to choose from at any giv­en time, and they’re fun to mill around in to improve your skills and earn rewards. You can join an Alliance, which is high­ly rec­om­mend­ed. The ben­e­fits from join­ing a sol­id squad can mean get­ting a rare char­ac­ter for free, or oth­er perks you might have to pay for nor­mal­ly. The modes are nice and pro­vide a change of pace. There’s a dai­ly mode fea­tur­ing Dead­pool with dif­fer­ent require­ments; Ver­sus mode, where you face off against AI-con­trolled avatars of real teams; Puz­zle Gaunt­let, where there are solu­tion-ori­ent­ed puz­zles against teams; Sto­ry events, where pre-deter­mined sto­ries play out through match­es and cut scenes; and, time-lim­it­ed events, where you and pos­si­bly your alliance join forces to take down a boss.

Demi­urge Stu­dios also does a great job with how the game looks, as well. MPQ has some of the best mobile graph­ics of any­thing on the mar­ket right now, and the use of actu­al run com­ic book cov­ers to rep­re­sent char­ac­ters is fan­tas­tic. The back­ground art also looks amaz­ing and crisp. Demi­urge out­did them­selves and for a sev­en-year-old game, it still looks sol­id and well done. The sound­track is nice, but it’s noth­ing to write home about. I usu­al­ly keep the music turned off, but it’s by no means terrible.

If you’re into Mar­vel, you’re going to love this. You’re going to drop a lot of mon­ey try­ing to build your ros­ter, and you’re going to have fun doing it. Even if you’re not into Mar­vel that much, you’re going to find some val­ue in this. It’s a good time wrapped up in a mobile game that plays well and pro­vides a lot in small pack­age. It’s a mar­velous play no mat­ter how you look at it.

Mario Kart Tour — 4Q2020 issue

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Mobile Mario Kart still stuck at start­ing line

Grow­ing up as a gamer, there was always a series I could count on to pro­vide a lot of enjoy­ment: Mario Kart. High qual­i­ty, fun rac­ing ensued as did a famil­iar­i­ty with the sys­tem that made up rac­ing in the Mush­room King­dom. But as time has marched on, there are dark clouds over the king­dom and it’s not nec­es­sar­i­ly Bowser’s fault for the fool­ish­ness for once; it’s Nintendo’s greed.

Mario Kart in mobile form has always been a safe bet for the Nin­ten­do rac­ing fan. Being able to race with your favorite Mario char­ac­ters and take it on the go? Where do I sign up? But Mario Kart Tour, the lat­est mobile prop­er­ty for the gam­ing giant, is not a fun tour … er, trip. It’s Mario Kart for the SNES dumb­ed and watered down with gatcha ele­ments tacked on for good measure.

Mario Kart Tour takes the usu­al Mario Kart for­mu­la and adds things like gatcha pulls to unlock spe­cial char­ac­ters, karts and glid­ers, usu­al­ly in the high-end cat­e­go­ry, as well as lev­el up your estab­lished ros­ter. The gatcha pulls are obnox­ious because it’s depen­dent on luck of the draw using real mon­ey to fund the pulls. The real mon­ey — that you’re pulling out of your wal­let — is spent in the form of rubies, which allow you to pull from pipes pos­si­bly con­tain­ing the high-end items in batch­es of one pull for five rubies or 10 pulls for 45 rubies. Though the rubies are mod­er­ate­ly priced, it’s the fact that you must buy the rubies or com­plete some­times ridicu­lous chal­lenges to get rubies that makes it beyond the pale.

And, just as infu­ri­at­ing­ly, there’s the character/kart/glider sys­tem that’s tied to the stages cho­sen for each tour. Each lev­el has three or four spe­cif­ic char­ac­ters that are favored on this track. Usu­al­ly, the char­ac­ters that are favored are the fla­vor of the tour; that is, a char­ac­ter or vari­a­tion cre­at­ed espe­cial­ly for the spe­cif­ic tour. As always, they are high-end and exceed­ing­ly hard to acquire. Because this is tied into the pipe pulls, it’s also a cash grab designed to pull in the most ded­i­cat­ed who have the most mon­ey and time to spend fid­dling around with a mobile game. These “whales,” as they are called in online cir­cles, keep this cash grab going and endorse this con­tin­ued behav­ior from Nin­ten­do, which, in all hon­esty, is atrocious.

In addi­tion to the tool-like sin­gle-play­er mode, there is the mul­ti­play­er mode from hell. I wish I could some­how con­vey the trash-like qual­i­ties of mul­ti­play­er in words, but I’m at a loss with­out get­ting an FCC fine for pro­fan­i­ty. The mul­ti­play­er plays like garbage and ignores any sort of mechan­ics that Tour attempts to cre­ate in the sin­gle-play­er cam­paign. It is utter chaos in every match and those lucky enough to do well have to be doing that with sheer luck. It can’t be from actu­al skill and good mechan­ics, because Tour is miss­ing the mark in both areas.

The mechan­ics, lack­ing in skill and refine­ment, are a seri­ous prob­lem. Now, I’m cog­nizant of the fact that this is a mobile game, so we’re not talk­ing pre­ci­sion like a main entry would have. How­ev­er, this is rough even for a mobile game. Often, drift­ing is dif­fi­cult and ultra mini-tur­bos are next to impos­si­ble. Giv­en that I’ve mas­tered the drift­ing fea­ture in Mario Kart with every entry start­ing from the Nin­ten­do 64 days, I shouldn’t have this much trou­ble main­tain­ing a drift. The com­bo sys­tem, while inter­est­ing and a great fea­ture, is not refined as well as it should be. There should be a meter that shows me the length of time between com­bo actions and how much time I have left if you’re going to tell me that I have a time lim­it on those actions. Some­times, com­bos drop inex­plic­a­bly, ruin­ing a run at a chal­lenge that requires a cer­tain number.

Equal­ly prob­lem­at­ic are the weapons sys­tem and the AI lev­el. I tend to race com­fort­ably on 100cc, but I will race on 150cc and 200cc (with a pur­chased Gold Pass) if I’m work­ing on improv­ing scores in the bi-week­ly ranked cups. In the months since I’ve begun play­ing, I’ve noticed the aggres­sion of the com­put­er-con­trolled karts steadi­ly creep­ing up, which is a prob­lem. It’s most­ly notice­able on the week­ly favored track, which quick­ly gets infu­ri­at­ing when you’re try­ing to main­tain a rank­ing and the com­put­er is hell bent on keep­ing you from achiev­ing this goal. The weapons sys­tem plays a large part in this because it’s near­ly impos­si­ble some­times to receive your character’s spe­cif­ic weapon or a fren­zy or even a use­ful fren­zy despite your char­ac­ter more than like­ly being a high level.

Also low­er­ing Tour’s fun fac­tor is the char­ac­ter sys­tem. As in oth­er games in the series, there are a vari­ety of char­ac­ters from the Mush­room King­dom and Nin­ten­do in gen­er­al that can be and have been added to the ros­ter. The sheer vari­ety is great but the need to unlock and pay for these vari­eties is the prob­lem. It’s greedy as hell that you have to buy rubies to pos­si­bly unlock a char­ac­ter to do well in the fea­tured tour track or mag­i­cal­ly come up with the ways to earn them, which are far and few in between. Basi­cal­ly, Nin­ten­do wants you to spend mon­ey and they’re not afraid to pimp out Mario Kart to achieve this goal, so they’ll nick­el and dime you constantly.

And I hope you love a lot of the tracks already pulled into Tour because track vari­ety is lack­ing. There are a lot of not-fun tracks that seem to be repeat­ed quite often. That decreas­es the enjoy­ment of rac­ing because you know you aren’t going to want to mess around with a cup that has an obnox­ious track (I’m glar­ing at you, 3DS Rain­bow Road).

Visu­al­ly, Tour is fine. It looks like Mario Kart and has all the ele­ments of the rac­ing god we’ve come to know and love. As a mat­ter of fact, the game looks like a bet­ter ver­sion of the Wii U’s Mario Kart 8, just below Mario Kart 8 Deluxe for the Switch. Those oft-repeat­ed tracks are gor­geous recre­ations of old faith­ful favorites from the SNES, Nin­ten­do 64 and Game Boy Advance titles with a few new cities of the world tracks thrown in the mix. In the begin­ning there were a lot of dif­fer­ent city tracks, but because of the pan­dem­ic, work on the tour has been kept to already estab­lished tracks from the series that can quick­ly be con­vert­ed for use in Tour.

Musi­cal­ly, Mario Kart is known as hav­ing a banger sound­track for every game. Tour doesn’t slouch in that depart­ment with the new tracks, but it does mess up with some of the old­er tracks. I’m not quite sure how a game can get one part of the sound­track right but mess up the oth­er parts, but Tour some­how man­ages to do it. Any of the new tracks that were cre­at­ed for Tour are excel­lent. The menu themes are excel­lent, as well, with new tunes mixed in with remixed favorites from pre­vi­ous games. But then you get to an old­er track, let’s say Koopa Troopa Beach from the SNES. It does not sound the same as the orig­i­nal ver­sion at all. The pitch sounds off by a few notes, as if some­one recre­at­ed it for Tour and kind of, sort of remem­bered the way the orig­i­nal sound­ed. Rain­bow Road from the SNES has the same prob­lem. It sort of resem­bles the orig­i­nal tunes but also … not real­ly. I’m not quite sure what I’m going to get from tour to tour, so I don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly get my hopes up in terms of music qual­i­ty when I see an old­er track announced.

All my prob­lems with Mario Kart Tour are fix­able, but that’s up to Nin­ten­do to work on and decide if it’s worth it this far in. With increas­ing fre­quen­cy, how­ev­er, I find myself say­ing this might be the part of the Tour that’s my last stop.