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Our Review by Campbell Bird on November 5th, 2016
Bandai Namco's latest iteration of Galaga a lot of flash with precious little substance.
Developer: BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment Europe Price: Free Version: 2.0.1 App Reviewed on: iPad Air 2 Graphics/Sound Rating: User Interface Rating: Gameplay Rating: Replay Value Rating: Overall Rating:
Galaga Wars is a new take on the Galaga formula that has players touching and dragging their finger around the screen to shoot aliens and avoid being hit. The game looks really great, but beyond that, there's very little to this free-to-play arcade game.
Arcade action
Galaga Wars takes the classic shoot em' up format of the original Galaga games and makes it a bit more mobile ready. Its tap-and-drag control scheme allows you to play the whole game one-handed. Even pausing the game is as simple as letting up your finger from the screen. This, combined with the bright, colorful, and glowing visuals makes the whole package feels really slick on first blush.
To try and keep it feel like Galaga, Galaga Wars features a lot of familiar feeling enemies, sounds, and mechanics from the old games. That said, a lot of these things don't behave in the way you can expect, which could be a problem if you're a Galaga purist.
Galag-almost
In the streamlining of Galaga Wars's gameplay, the experience ends up feeling thin. This isn't necessarily unusual or bad for mobile games, but in this case, it's easy to see parts of Galaga Wars that could be adjusted to make the experience feel deeper.
Unlike previous titles in the series, for example, there is no way to get your ship captured in Galaga Wars. There are still “Boss Galaga” enemies that you can kill to claim a second ship and double your firepower, but this now happens at specific points of levels instead of at a time strategically determined by the player. This is also true of power ups, which are randomized drops that also activate automatically, making them impossible to be used strategically.
Breath of life christian center memphis tn. This would be somewhat excusable if Galaga Wars made more design choices to make it more playable as the light action game it is, but the game's bright background and lack of a relative-touch control scheme make the basic action of dodging enemies and shooting them harder than it should be.
The worst ad-versary
To make matters worse for Galaga Wars, its free-to-play scheme isn't particularly elegant. At almost every turn, Bandai Namco tries to serve ads and gate progress for players.
There are, of course, currencies in the game that you earn slowly over time, but there's also ads served between rounds, an option to watch an ad to continue, an offer to view an ad to double earned rewards, and the ability to warp to new areas by (you guessed it!) watching an ad.
You can opt to make a purchase to get rid of the ads in Galaga Wars, but even then, ship upgrades take time to install and additional ships can only be unlocked by purchase. This makes the whole free-to-play experience of Galaga Wars feel like an ad-riddled demo and the paid experience only slightly less bothersome.
The gameplay of Galaga Wars is just too thin to support the layers of free-to-play systems stacked on top of it. If it was a more meaningful take on Galaga or more elegant in its monetization scheme, Galaga Wars would be a much better game.
iPhone Screenshots
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Spoilers ahead for.If Star Wars: The Force Awakens was incredibly faithful to Star Wars mythology, then Star Wars: The Last Jedi is the shake-up the franchise sorely needed. While it still has plenty of callbacks and references, and tonally is in line with other Star Wars movies, it goes in surprising directions and is unafraid to burn everything down in order to create something new.Nowhere is that clearer in how writer-director Rian Johnson handles the ending of his film. To this point, the main Star Wars movies have essentially been the Skywalker Saga. The prequel trilogy followed the rise and fall of Anakin Skywalker, and the original trilogy was about his children, Luke and Leia. Although The Force Awakens brought in new characters like Rey, Finn, and Poe alongside villains like Kylo Ren, General Hux, and Supreme Leader Snoke, it also kept original trilogy fixtures Luke, Leia, and Han. Additionally, even though he’s largely absent for almost the entire film, the figure of Luke Skywalker looms large over The Force Awakens.
He’s the person everyone wants to find, and his actions led to Ben Solo becoming Kylo Ren and the fracturing of the original trio’s friendship. Image via LucasfilmAnd yet where does The Last Jedi leave us? You can see that in its original intent, it was probably trying to lead up to giving Leia Episode IX after Han’s death in The Force Awakens and Luke’s deth at the end of The Last Jedi (although whether or not he returns as a Force Ghost remains to be seen). However, with the death of Carrie Fisher last year, it looks like Leia will remain off-screen (Lucasfilm has already squashed the idea of doing a digital version like they did with Gran Moff Tarkin in Rogue One), and that really means the end of the Skywalkers for Episode IX.
Technically, Kylo Ren is a Skywalker so it’s not like the story will be Skywalker-free, but they’re no longer driving the action since Rey isn’t a Skywalker.For some, Rey’s lineage will undoubtedly be a controversial point for the next two years: Was Kylo Ren telling the truth when he told Rey that her parents were nobodies, just junkers who sold her for beer money and abandoned her? We spend a large portion of The Last Jedi wondering if Rey and Kylo Ren are connected by more than just than the Force and if they could be siblings.
But if that were the case, that would mean that Han Solo and Leia abandoned their daughter. To rectify that and not make those heroes seem like awful people, you would need an exposition dump of some kind where someone offers a longwinded explanation about why Han Solo and Leia would leave their daughter in the middle of nowhere as well as why they never made any attempt to reunite with her.Where Johnson really puts the nail in the coffin regarding Rey’s parentage is in the final scene. If Rey’s parents are anyone we’ve met before, whether they’re Skywalkers, Solos, or Kenobis, it makes her special due the circumstances of her birth.
She becomes a “Chosen One” figure by virtue of having been born to a recognizable name. But the last scene of The Last Jedi tosses that traditional mythology out the window by showing us an unnamed slave child who uses the Force to casually grab a broom. He then holds the handle like a lightsaber hilt, looks up at the stars, and we can see Rose’s Resistance ring on his finger. What Johnson is telling us in this scene is that the future isn’t going to be some exalted figure or a person of prophecy, but instead it’s going to be “nobodies” like Rey. It’s going to be the downtrodden and the ignored who have always had the power to be more than their circumstances implied.