Evoland 2

One of the best RPGs I’ve ever played. For me, this game is among the greats: Chrono Trigger, Legend of Zelda, etc. The Evoland 2 offers great storytelling and constantly switches up the format so you’re never bored. Beyond your standard RPG platforms (of essentially every variety) Evoland 2 has Final Fight, Street Fighter, Guitar Hero, and Bejeweled-style games, plus the ever present card battle mini-game. I’m the kind of player that usually needs a walkthrough to get through tougher parts of RPGs, but this one is pretty easy in terms of figuring out what the next step in the storyline is and solving puzzles. I was thoroughly entertained and sad when I beat it. The only drawback is the frustrating controls. You can’t turn around suddenly and attack, for example. And unless you hit the screen exactly where the “buttons” are, nothing happens; which really drives you crazy if you have big thumbs like me. If the developers fixed that problem, I don’t see how the game could get any better.

This Zelda/Chrono Trigger-style game is fun and cute until you reach areas that are impassible without going into new style of gameplay. The Alpha Mountain platform-gameplay level is far too long and frustratingly difficult with the iPhone controls. Then, if you beat that and were hoping to get back to the RPG style-game you are out of luck! That is followed up by an unavoidable, jittery, boring bullet-hell style flying game that is also made nearly unplayable by buggy, bad controls. (The flying thing constantly jumps to the top of the screen!) This section goes on about 3 times longer than it needed to. Then you are forced into a bad street fighter clone that’s also twice as long as it should be, shallow, and frustratingly difficult only because of the controls. All this twee, jokey gaming variation feels like conceited arrogance on the part of the developers that they couldn’t let this be all be shorter and more spaced out, or even optional. (“Hey check out my flying game! Now you need to play my fighting game! I can also do platformers! Is there anything we can’t do!?”) Maybe this game is worth the sale price, if you have patience or a separate controller. The RPG side is fun though, with some very clever levels and funny jokes. Overall, be warned. Frustrating game play from half-baked bad design is so much worse than something that is n intentionally well designed challenge.

If i had left this review before the 3D era this would have been a solid 5 stars. But after reaching Alpha mountain, I am so frustrated I am going to put this game aside. This game has you travel through time. Each jump in time changes the graphics style of the game. You play 8-bit graphics, 16-bit and 3D graphics. The game has an interesting storyline and has been enjoyable to play. A lot of similarities to Zelda. The controls have been fine for the tasks that you are required to do. But in Alpha Mountain that all changed. you need to jump from bouncing mushroom to mushroom and if you do not land on the next mushroom you die. A touch screen does not work well for this, I have spent 60 minutes of jump jump jump die, start over again. You need to jump really high and over multiple obstacles. I do not mind tasks like this that take some skill to complete, but when the reason for failure is not skill, but the poor responsiveness of the controls, it turns a fun game into pure frustration. These types of issues completely ruin a game. Yesterday I was looking forward to playing this game and seeing how the story ends. Today I have given up in frustration and am looking for a new game to play.

I like the premise of the game and the different mediums it runs through but have a big issue with the controls. I am at the point where I am in 3D land and need to hop over mushrooms. Sadly the developers didn’t consider why we don’t have instant kill platform levels anymore or at the very least ones without decent controls. If they gave you d pad to control the side scrolling parts like they do in other parts of the game it’d be fine, but the issue is there is run and super run speed with a hair of space in between rendering accurate platforming nes levels of difficult. Also, as well intended as the references are in the game it starts to get a little old when it feels like something you’d see in kingdom hearts. Sadly, a lot of these references won’t hold up with time and it can really kill the atmosphere of the game for pushing the 4th wall a bit too much. It almost comes off as a terrible meme and your second party member acting as the straight man is one of the few redeeming values so far.

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Overall the game is pretty great. Combat is similar to Zelda, characters are funny and quirky, and the music sounds great. However, it all starts to fall apart when the 16 bit era is unlocked. There is an annoying graphical error that occurs when moving up/down that causes black horizontal lines to appear and flash as you are moving. If you are moving left to right then white vertical lines appear, but they did not give me a headache the same way moving up/down the screen did. During this section there were a few annoying missions like moving the mammoths correctly or the sewer mission, but the graphical error does not appear to occur when the game transitions into 3D. I truly hope the Devs see this and fix this issue as it occurs for the first 1-3 hours of the game and it nearly made me uninstall it. The controls aren’t perfect either, but they were not awful to me anyway and certainly not as awful as the black line glitch. Once the issue is fixed I would be more than happy to change my score based on the incredible production value of this game and how it experiments with different genres of games.