BADLAND (iPhone Game Review)
BADLAND is a side-scrolling puzzle/platformer designed for the iPhone. That means simple controls on top of a powerful engine, beautiful graphics, and gameplay designed to be broken out into two-minute chunks. In a lot of ways, I appreciate that. I mean, I wouldn’t be playing it if I had to sit down for an hour at a time. But on the other hand, this makes me miss the more involved platformers of the past.
In fact, maybe “platformer” isn’t the best term for it, since your avatar floats through the air rather than jumping between surfaces. And it’s easier for me to appreciate when I don’t use the term. There is a lot of great stuff here. Frogmind has taken a very simple concept – tap to fly up and forward, do nothing to fall back down – and built almost every conceivable idea they could on it. There are power-ups that make you smaller, larger, bouncy, sticky and even change the flow of time. Some also give you “clones”, sometimes allowing dozens of your characters on the screen at once. This is necessary for some puzzles, since you may need to pick up items or flip switches in both a high and a low path, or trigger a deathtrap while other clones sneak through. It’s also fundamental to the scoring in the game, since you can keep replaying the level to see if you can save more clones next time. (Each level also has three missions, which include saving clones, but also picking up all the items, exploding all bombs, completing without needing a respawn, etc. Being a smartphone game, most of the gameplay comes from going back to old levels to try to do better.)
The atmosphere is the most distinctive part of the game. Your character is a circular flying blob in an otherwise-unpopulated world. It appears to be an idyllic land that was turned into the dumping ground of a technological society. You have to maneuver around gears, buzzsaws, bombs, loose pipes, and more (though the main threat is often just keeping up with the scrolling screen). These foreground items are so iconic that they’re shown mainly in silhouette, while the background is defined by a beautiful color palette that changes as the levels progress.
Everything about BADLAND seems designed right. The rules are taught in-game. The difficulty curve is good. The puzzles and unique situations keep things varied and leave no idea undeveloped. It’s memorable, instantly recognizable, and easy to keep playing for just one more round. I like it, but feel like I should like it more than I do. It’s not really compelling. I’m not getting anywhere in the end or finding secrets, and when I put it down, it’s pretty easy to ignore for days at a time. But when I pick it back up, I always remember how fun it is.
Grade: B
The app does a great job of updating an old game system that had been heavily dependent on a specific technology. I was a little more frustrated with the plot they chose, though. You play a promising young hero sent off on a mission of great import to your people, but it’s possible to play through the whole thing without getting a clear description of what that mission is or what this world is like. Yes, an opening dream sequence mentions a magical crown, but it wasn’t clear to me until halfway through my first game that that was my real goal. And even then, I had no good understanding of why it was urgent to find this item that was lost to the ages, what kind of culture my people had (aside from a few undeveloped hints), or even why I was chosen to seek the crown alone. I spent the first half of my first game feeling absolutely no connection to the events in front of me, even less than I’d expect from a physical gamebook. Though the whole thing plays through in a matter of hours, it still took me a few weeks to find the motivation to get through it.
Though 
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The first thing you’ll see when starting Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes is a warning that quitting the game at the wrong time will corrupt all saved game data. That’s just not an acceptable flaw for an iPhone game to have, and it’s the first sign that this Nintendo DS port may not have been planned very carefully.
Even with a bigger screen, there would be other problems. The fights don’t become interesting until you gain a few levels and earn enough units to fill the battlefield. You need to wait for frequent load screens. Worst of all, the gameplay is slow, with the “minutes played” counter on the save screen feeling less like an interesting fact and more like a note about how much time you’ve wasted. Once your units are ready to attack, they take a certain number of rounds to charge up. This is important to the strategy, since you may use that time to set up combos, and your opponent may try to prepare with walls or by setting up a faster attack in the same column. However, it means that you may still have a few rounds left to play after the outcome of the battle becomes obvious. And the rounds play slowly. With the animations of each unit charging up or fighting and the slow-paced opponent moves, you’ll often need to tap your screen to keep it from falling asleep between the time you end one round and begin the next! That feels way too passive. By the higher levels (which you get to quickly, since the game is a series of campaigns), the no-risk battles against minions can easily take eight to ten minutes, and a battle featuring defense and healing abilities could feasibly take half an hour! They never feel meaty enough to justify that time.
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The game is at its best when it lets you enter a simple Zen-like state. With no time pressure, you can watch the circles bounce around harmlessly while waiting for the right time to increase one by a point or two. (SemiSecret Software, also the publisher of Canabalt, seems to have a thing for simple games that reward a relaxed mind.) However, most levels don’t let you do that. The game introduces other types of objects, including non-growing ones you can drag around yourself, ones that shrink down towards “0” when left alone, and ones that reset anything they touch back to “0” immediately. Some of those add a time pressure, especially the ones that stay red, forcing you to complete the level before they bump into anything. (New rules about “frozen” pieces add some exceptions, but that isn’t worth going in to here.) Suddenly that meditative gameplay goes out the window, and you need to outrace objects that will undo all your work.
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