As reviewers it is our job to report on things as they are, not as we predict they might one day come to be. This presents a problem in game journalism since the process of patches means a product that is an ugly duckling today might become a beautiful swan tomorrow, or — occasionally — do the exact opposite by giving in to the dark side of IAP greed. What follows are some recently released games that had issues at launch, but have since taken the time to more properly spread out their wings.
Nuclien: To be fair, we never actually said that Nuclien was bad when we reviewed the fast paced number tapping game. What we had said at the time was that no one short of a God could possibly keep up with the game’s brutal difficulty curve. Thankfully — for all of us non-deities out there — James Barnard agreed with our assessment, choosing to release a version for all of us mortals out here in iOS-Land.
While I wouldn’t say the game has become easy — per se — I will say that Nuclien is definitely now balanced such that you no longer need precognition in order to play, and the results are amazing. I will be honest, I had quite a bit of difficulty pulling myself away from the recent update long enough to write this follow up. Instead of again screaming to myself that only a God could play Nuclien, I now found myself frantically declaring, “No… No… No… I can do this… I got this… I just have to try it one more time…”
However, if any deities out there decided to purchase the game based on my earlier review… well, I fear they’re going to be throwing bolts of lightning in rage while they scream “NERF!” in response to this update.
LAD: I will give Black Chair Games this, they have overhauled the controls in LAD (our review) so much that I can safely say its like I’m playing a completely different game now. The controls still have some floaty issues that can be annoying at times, but I finally feel like I actually have a real degree of control over the actions of silhouette boy (to the point I was actually able to finish the game this time around). While the end result is still not the mind blowing equal to Limbo, the game does get more interesting once you get past the initial simplistic tutorial segments.
Not only have they updated the controls, but they also updated the scenery to have more animated elements — such as birds that fly off as you get near — so that everything doesn’t feel quite as stale as it previously did. They’ve also made the instant death spikes more prominent so that you can actually tell which patches of ground will kill you immediately, versus just wondering why you are dying at random. That said, it would be nice if the switches you need to touch — in order to open locked gates — didn’t blend in with the background scenery quite as well as they currently do.