Sunday, September 14, 2014

Spider-Man Unlimited

-puts thor 2 on the big computer screen, hits the blog on the laptop-

https://itunes.apple.com/app/id674657235
Free, 96mb download, universal, gamecenter enabled.


My Thoughts
A suprisingly good endless runner from gameloft. Controls are standard, swipe left and right to change lanes, swipe up to jump, swipe down to slide, swiping up and down are also combat mechanics when dealing with hostiles in your path. You'll spend your time collecting a yellow jar which is all over the place and used as ingame currency for upgrading hero cards an whatnot. Only two new mechanics to endless running, you can tap hold to web out an fly over large areas and occasionally the track goes up buildings in which you go tilt control.

Graphics are fantastic, cell shaded, very comic book feelingy here. Sounds are par for the course. Controls, occasionally a swipe dosent register, which as we know is insta death in runner type games.

As for things to do.
1. Endless mode, see how far you can make it.
2. Events. These want you to go as far as you can and reward you as you hit certain tiers. Events have two catagories each offering rewards. First is just goals for reaching 5k, 25k, etc distance and 25k on up actually award iap currency. The other is a reward based on where you ranked in a top 100 board against 100 other randomly choosen players for the event.
3. Story mode, these are stages and not endless. Always reward a good mix of currencies and occasional cards. As you finish issues you also unlock other things to do and maps to run on in endless.
4. The cards. Your spiderman is a card that levels up as you play him. Every 10 levels the card hits a ceiling. At an time before the ceiling you can combine cards to speed up the leveling. At the ceiling, you combine certain cads to unlock higher leveling ceilings. Leveling up increases your reward multiplier in all modes of game play. Unlocking higher ceilings also increase the star rating of that card.
5. You spend in game currency on random cards and combining cards.
6. You can send your non main spiderman cards on little missions that take x amount of time to complete, award x amount of random stuff and has a x.x% chance of failure, which can be eliminated by sending higher level cards or more than one car.
7. Collect cards is always fun, your basically pulling from alternate dimension spider men and each card has different 'buffs' to the runing if you use it.
8. Ingame currency also is spent on upgrading the random buffs you encounter mid run, this is a standard of endless runners. Increase magnet duration, etc.
9. There are two iap only permanent buff purchasables, a exp boost and a vial (ingame currency) boost. If you were to buy both from the iap store via purchased iap currency you'd have to spend 50 bucks, or spend 20 and farm the 20 you'd be short. Ouch.
10. The main story is tied in to several comic issues. As you complete issues you unlock additional character slots in all modes of gameplay except story. You put additional characters in these slots and it has two affects. 1, every character equipped gains experience for the run. 2, The score multipliers of the individual characters stack. This is amazingly useful for daily/event leaderboard and progress chasing.

There is a energy system here, 5 stack 10 minutes per charge recharge time. You can go to the leaderboards and invite anyone there to your in game friends list. Every time you run out of energy you can request energy from your friends and you'll see energy requests from them as well. Its a win win and a good way of circumventing the energy system entirely if you have several friends who are as active and you.

My feelings? I'm going to play within the energy timers, will spend farmed iap currency on those permanent boosters, spend in game currency on cards as needed and on improving my power ups elsewise.

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