=== Mobile Game Review -- Hustle Castle - Management - 7.5/10 ===

I started playing Hustle Castle some time ago and couldn't have been happier at the time when I first started because everything was so similar to Fallout Shelter. Hustle Castle really had a similar vibe right off the bat, but I did enjoy the different style of combat which gave me more of a "tactical" feeling about the game that I didn't get from Fallout Shelter.

At first, I thought Hustle Castle had a better combat system... but as I've played more and more, I've slowly realized that it just doesn't hold up that well. The combat slowly turns into more and more of "who has the better items of the single best strategy" sort of thing. In a perfect world, without a way to outplay an opponent with skill, there needs to be a way to counter each strategy... but that just isn't the case with this game. Quite simply, if you try to do more fun things and change up your build, you'll just lose to whatever the strongest strategy is, which is usually some sort of silly continuously resurrecting some really powerful tanks. The only way I've found to reliably counter strategies is to just be stronger than your opponent and/or have better items.

There is a little bit more which can be done with the combat in Hustle Castle which MAY be able to sway thing in your favour by upgrading spells and bringing them into combat with you. There is a selection of spells including one to damage a random enemy, one to heal your most damaged character, and one to increase the damage of all your troops for a few seconds. These spells can be very powerful when used properly, though I still tend to find that the combat relies much more on how powerful your units are rather than any sort of strategy involved.

Of course any time you leave the game for a while and then come back to it you'll get a lovely update on any attacks which have been done against your castle and the result of them whether it was a win or a loss and you can even watch the combat replay if you want to see exactly how the fight went.

All of these combats are found through the world map which allows the player to continue along the "campaign" trail with each area unlocked having a selection of opponents who can be battled whenever you wish. Once you defeat another player on the map one time, their castle will disappear and be replaced some time later with a new one from another player. After some time, an option will appear which will allow an opponent to be "re-rolled" with another player who may be at a higher/lower/equal level.

Besides the campaign and battling other players there are a couple other options available to keep you busy in the game including a portal which opens up every once in a while which gives increasingly difficult levels of battles that can be done to gain more soul shards which can then be traded in for rewards such as epic items and resources. I have personally found the portal to be quite fun while it's open and then the game slows down a lot with not as much to do while it is closed.

If not busy doing portal fights there is an arena system which lets you put your best combinations of troops up against those of other players in a tournament-style system where you earn more points depending on who you choose to fight and win against. So far I have only managed to be in tournaments where I can perform reasonably average, but I've never been able to win because there's always another few players who have really powerful combinations of units or who are at a much higher level.

Winning one of these tournaments rewards the player with a chest which would have....... I'm not really sure, seeing as I've never won, but I assume there are some pretty good rewards in these things. However, competing in these tournaments does provide another type of resource which can be traded in for more epic and unique items.

Speaking of chests, there are a bunch of different chests which can be earned in Hustle Castle which have varying types of rewards inside of them including resources and items which can them be used to equip your characters whether that is for fighting or for making more resources faster.

Opening chests is also a very simple and kind of fun process of hitting the next open button which continues to open more chests as long as you have another chest to open. I don't know what it is about opening chests of random rewards that's so much fun even when 90% of them don't have anything useful in them.

Moving away from the combat system, there is some castle management which needs to be done while you're not out fighting monsters or other players. In this game, that comes down to building what rooms are available and upgrading them whenever possible. The castle rooms produce resources as time goes on which can be used to construct more rooms or upgrade existing ones depending on what is available at your current player level. One one hand, this is nice because there is a clear build path, but on the other hand I don't like it because there's no customization or learning curve to it besides "I better make this because it's available to me." Definitely ups and down on the castle management depending on how much customization and learning you like in your games.

My personal thoughts on Hustle Castle are quite mixed. I really like how well made the game is and how fluid the combat system is as well as the simplicity of the castle management. As far as a long-term game goes... this one falls flat just like all the other idle-simulation type games out there. Once you get far enough into the game you start having to save up so much resources that the player loses interest in waiting before being able to do things again. There's a great start to this game which really gets you into it, but with the usual idle-roadblocks I found myself losing interest. Granted, usually I lose interest because the wait is too long and there isn't really anything to progress to after a while... only this time my loss of interest wasn't because I didn't have anything to progress to; I lost interest because I hit a wall where the only solution was either to spend real money, or to wait days or weeks before being able to upgrade enough to make any real progress.


Summary

Gameplay: Being the most important part of a GAME, I thought the actual gameplay was quite fun right off the bat up until I wasn't able to progress any further without waiting for really long times due to needing resources and upgrades and training times before being strong enough to get past certain areas and boss fights.

Sound: There's not much of note to the sound design to this game. All the noises fit well without being annoying and the music is nice to listen to, but playing the game without any sound doesn't really make any difference to the enjoyability especially when only logging in momentarity to collect resources and then turn off the game.

Replayability: As the game went on, my interest in continuing to open the game went down and down with the increased upgrade and resource colletion times.

Bonus: If you enjoyed Fallout Shelter, this game has some similar aspects which will feel familiar and fun.

SCORE: I'm giving Hustle Castle 7.5/10. It's better than many other idle-type games out there with having more to do and being more interactive. The biggest downside for me is that it continues to suffer from the same problem as all the others where wait times get way too long without spending real money which I feel with this type of game would just go to waste.

=== Mobile Game Review - Fallout Shelter - City Builder / Base Management - 9/10 =7=

I can't believe I've held off on reviewing this game for so long. I've played Fallout Shelter before, uninstalled it out of frustration, and now here I am playing it once again. It constantly draws me back in no matter how much I try to resist.

Welcome to Fallout Shelter. You are the new overseer of vault *insert number here*. It is now your task to build a shelter and keep an community of people alive and well with everything out there in the wasteland trying to get inside and kill you in some way; or perhaps everything will go down in flames.

Fallout Shelter is a game where you begin with a few dwellers and you are tasked with putting them to work to gain resources and grow your population. To start, you must balance three resources which are power, food, and water. Power is the most important resource because all of your rooms require power to run and they will shut down if you don't have enough. Food is the next resource which is needed to keep your dwellers healthy and to naturally heal their wounds. Then you have water which is needed to keep your people from being irradiated which lowers their maximum health.

Once you have these under control, you can start thinking about expanding your population. For this you need money which is most easily gotten by completing quests and rushing rooms. The downside to rushing rooms is that there is a chance to fail which causes some sort of hazard such as fire or enemies to attack the room. Every time rushing a room succeeds, the chance to fail gets higher... but the rewards increase as well.

Now that you have money and a growing population, you'll need to think about keeping your people healthy and treating the radiation from the enemies that enter the shelter and the wasteland itself. Stim packs are used for healing injured people and are used to fight off radiation poisoning. These are very important as the enemies get stronger and radiation is more common as you explore further into the wasteland.

There's such a balance of resources and actions which must be managed to succeed at this game. And at any point it's so easy to completely forget about that high-level dweller you sent out into the wasteland hours ago and is now dead. You'll lose your most important things by sending out high-value items with a high-level character who'll die because you forgot to bring them back home before you went to sleep for the night. You'll run out of resources and lose your base from expanding too quickly or building your base in such a way that one catastrophe spreads throughout your whole base and kills all your people. This game will frustrate you so much, but for some reason you'll keep coming back to it because you just thought of a different way to do something which might work better than last time.

This game is absolutely addicting. I'm giving it 9/10 for how amazing it is. Sound design is good, art style is fantastic, and gameplay is top-notch. The only thing I'm taking a point away for is the controls. In a crisis situation, it can be VERY difficult to select the correct character and send them to the right spot... so you'll lose characters because you tapped the wrong person or didn't manage to select the right guy in time before he lost his last bit of health. Despite the occasionally frustrating controls, I absolutely recommend this game to everybody. I'm still playing it... again.

~ Kyle Welykholowa 

=== Dark Reign - Game Review, Real Time Strategy - 10/10 ===

     Today I'm here to review Dark Reign: The Future Of War. This game is an oldie made back in the good old days of 1997. This game was one of the first RTS games which came out at around the same time as Command & Conquer and Warcraft II. Considering the age of this game, I'm not reviewing it completely as though it is a new game considering the age of the game; but even considering how the game has held up over the years, I think it's going pretty great.

     Many RTS games these days tend to have at least two types of resources to work with. One basic resource and one advanced resources with which to make stronger things or research new things with. Some have even more types of resources; Dark Reign has one... and a half. The most important resource in this game is water; the story goes that most of the water has been poisoned and now fresh spring water is a valuable resource. So you collect enough water until it gets launched off-world in exchange for credits which you use to spend on things. Easy enough, right?

     Now, why would I say there's a half of another resource? I say that because you also have to power your buildings using a resource known as Taelon. That sounds pretty important.... but if you have enough credits, then you can keep building new power plants to power your things without filling them up with Taelon because every power plant is already half full when it's completed.

     The campaign in this game I think is done wonderfully. There are 12 levels in total and you can play each one in control of either of the two factions in the game. That means there are technically 24 levels in total... but if you only want to play each level from one side, you only have to complete 12 of them to get to the final level in which you  play a "third" faction which has access to all units from both sides in the game.

     The two factions in the game as seen above, are the Freedom Guard, and the Imperium. As this is an early RTS game, the two sides really aren't very different. They have nearly the same tech tree with some differences in units, but for the most part, everything is quite similar even when you get down to the units available to each side. I could take some points off for this, but as it is quite early in the timeline of RTS games, this isn't a huge concern for me. The game seems pretty well balanced and I can see how it could be quite competitive as a result.

     So from me, Dark Reign will get a 10/10. If you haven't played this game but are a huge fan of the Real Time Strategy genre, then you have to pick this up from GOG and give it a try. This was and still is one of my favourite games of all time. Yeah, maybe I'm giving it a higher score than it deserves, but this truly is a wonderful game and you really should give it a try.

~ Kyle Welykholowa

=== Idle Kingdoms - Mobile Game Review, Idle / Active City Builder - 4/10 ===

     I'm always on the lookout for new games to play especially when I'm looking to kill some time on the go. Unfortunately, this one isn't one of the best games I've played. As with all idle-type games, this one has an aspect of it where you still make progress even when you're not actively playing the game.

     Strangely with this game, there's an option whenever you turn the game back on to watch a video to get double rewards. This means you get more out of NOT playing the game for a long period, then turn the game on, upgrade a bunch of things, and do it again. I'm not sure I agree with this approach; while I do think it's good for there to be a level of progress in some way while not having the game turned on... I wouldn't want to encourage people to not play at all.

     Now we must keep in mind that this game is a game in progress. There are no sounds or music to listen to, so at this time this game doesn't get any bonus points on that front. The gameplay also seems to not be set in stone. I started playing Idle Kingdom when everything was immediately gathered by clicking the gather button. Recently there has been an update where you have manually sent out carts from your castle and gather points to bring back resources. A little bit of it is automatically gathered and there is no limit to the stockpile of resources which can sit at each location. This update seems to have made the game slower which does not feel as fun to me.

     As with most other idle games, there is a system of restarting the game to gain prestige which makes you produce and carry more with each point. Unfortunately this doesn't really solve the problem of the game still being quite slow and then rewarding you for forgetting about it for a while.

     Progressing through the game involves saving up enough food to buy the next tile which you can then build on. Every once in a while you come across a shrine which unlocks new structures or bonuses such as more prestige or faster production. There does come a point where things get so expensive that once again the game becomes so slow that it doesn't hold much interest.

     Idle Kingdom at this time gets 4/10 from me. At this time it's unfinished and I'm not a fan of the current gameplay and rewards.

~ Kyle Welykholowa