Picnic Wars Review: Why can't food all just get along?

Chillingo, Electronic Arts' indie publishing arm, has produced many fine Windows Phone games in the last twelvemonth: Contre Jour, Piddling Acorns, and Feed Me Oil, to new but a few. Lately though, all of Chillingo's releases have been Nokia Windows Phone exclusives – for ameliorate or worse. Their latest such Xbox release Picnic Wars comes from Crown Adam, a tiny Swiss developer and Philippines-based Anino Games. This interesting accept on food fights starts out quite strong, merely ends on a lemony sour note.

Seeds versus the seedless

Picnic Wars tells of the supposed historic period-old rivalry between fruits and vegetables. I've always thought of the two as cooperating to provide humans a counterbalanced diet, but perchance that'southward but me. The story (such as it is) comes to life via single panoramic pictures that precede sure levels, basically showing one nutrient group being angry at the other. The pictures aren't bad, but really just draw the same affair like eight dissimilar times. How near some word balloons and clever dialog at to the lowest degree? Also, the game stashes a brief animated introduction away like a dingy secret nether the the "i" menu from the title screen.

Structure

The game consists of 2 campaigns: Over Like shooting fish in a barrel Veggies and Cold Hard Fruits. Each one contains 4 sets of eight stages themed later on various historical eras, for a total of 32 stages per campaign. While that technically adds up to 64 stages, the Cold Difficult Fruits campaign is simply a redux of the kickoff ane simply with a few changes: different units available to the thespian, enemies assail more aggressively, and aiming is much more hard due to the removal of the aiming guideline. Cold Hard Fruits doubles the length of the game, but I found Over Easy Veggies far more enjoyable for reasons we'll get to in a fleck.

Angry fruits

Every level takes identify on an isometric playing field. The player controls units located at the lesser of the field, while varying numbers of enemies hole up in a castle at the elevation-correct of the field. But like in Angry Birds-manner games, the objective is to defeat all of the enemies by firing projectiles at them, at which signal the level ends. But the actual gameplay differs so much that I wouldn't telephone call this a physics puzzler.

Instead of a unmarried launcher, players become between i and five units per level. Each one occupies a single lane on the field and can motion upwards and down that lane only. Motion serves two purposes: aiming shots and dodging enemy attacks.

Aim to win

Initially, aiming is as simple as moving the catapults back and along. After positioning the catapult, tap i of your ammo reserves, and then tap and release the catapult again to fire. I enjoy the simplicity of catapult aiming as it goes faster and easier than dragging a line back and forth similar in many a physics puzzler.

If your shot strikes a building, it might damage or even destroy parts of the building, though pregnant harm becomes less likely as the campaign goes on. Hit a TNT butt though and it will definitely destroy much of the surrounding surface area and whatsoever enemies within its radius. Other targets include seed packets (ammo), purple bags used to upgrade launchers, and a Super Growth Formula for rapid ammo growth (which I never used).

Unfortunately, aiming actually becomes more than complicated later in the game when the catapults get replaced with cannons and tanks. Many of these advanced launchers add the unnecessary mechanic of manually aiming the arc of their shots in improver to positioning the launcher on the field. To manually aim on the vertical centrality you'll swipe up and downwardly; swiping left and right-ish aims horizontally. Every bit y'all can imagine, information technology'southward difficult to aim quickly without accidentally moving the launcher. Horizontal aiming is even harder.

Players can downgrade advanced launchers back into catapults past moving them to the dorsum of the field and and then scrolling through the upgrade interface. Just the interface is tiny and extremely fiddley to coil through. Worse, if a catapult gets destroyed, it respawns as a cannon or tank and yous accept to start the downgrade process all over. Why not just let players apply the launcher blazon that they want instead of fighting them?

Harm control

Yep, enemies really shoot at the player, which seemed similar a cool dynamic initially. But the more I played (especially in Cold hard Fruits fashion), the less enamored I became with that dynamic. See, the gamer tin can only actually pay attention to whatsoever launcher he or she is aiming with at any given time, and basically has unlimited launcher respawns.

Enemies plug away at whatever launchers you're not actively using (and probably the ane you lot are using too), destroying them while you aim your shots. That necessitates a manual respawn and just wastes the player'south time, doing nothing to increase the fun. At present I see why the pigs don't shoot back in Angry Birds.

Looks good, sounds bad

Picnic Wars boasts a adequately cute and appealing fine art style. All the fruits and veggies come to life every bit anthropomorphic characters with faces, hands, and feet. Each i gets its ain bio, enabling close-upwardly admiration. Several bios contain grammatical errors that betray the developer's non-English speaking origins though.

I wish I could speak as kindly almost the sound. The music works well enough, but the voices are another matter entirely. At the start of every level, players must endure an obnoxious, high-pitched battle weep, a artless chorus chanting "Charge," and some fool exclaiming "K-g-g-go!" These sound bites got former v minutes earlier the first time I heard them, and they're non getting whatsoever younger.

Inexplicably, the game has no congenital-in volume controls, making information technology impossible to just mute the vocals. Nor does information technology let vibration to be toggled, which could annoy some players. While we're on the bailiwick, the main carte is clumsy anyhow. An icon with a white medical bag leads to a five-screen tutorial section, while the "i" icon holds the aforementioned intro movie, credits, and language selection. Who decided on the icons for these menus?

Achievements

On the plus side, you'll get well-nigh of Picnic Wars' Achievements but by playing through both campaigns. That can exist done in as little equally iv hours. Two Achievements require specific deportment: chirapsia level 1-4 in less than 30 seconds and destroying 6 enemies at one time. The latter necessitates the use of a Pumpkin flop, an item that takes some piece of work to earn.

Now for the down side: the Achievement for unlocking all ammo types is currently broken. It should unlock nearly the terminate of the Hard entrada, simply doesn't. Thankfully the developers take discovered the crusade of the bug, so it volition likely go fixed in a future patch.

Update: The Achievement has been fixed.

Overall Impression

Oft times games beginning out stiff and and then become less enjoyable near the cease due to a rushed development wheel. Picnic Wars probably wasn't rushed like that, but it definitely gets worse as the game goes on. The lack of guidelines in the Cold Difficult Fruit campaign really takes away some of the gameplay's magic. Annoying manual aiming of advanced launchers and rapid destruction of launchers by tougher enemies make Cold Hard Fruit even more than of a chore.

Still, the first one-half of the game works much better. The diversity of food-based ammunition types, interesting castle layouts, and joy of destroying those castles kept me entertained. While I felt similar the second campaign dropped the brawl, gamers who specifically crave a claiming likely won't get so annoyed past the parts that rubbed me the incorrect way. Given the game'southward unusual, lighthearted theme and its relatively short completion time, Achievement hunters will probable want to give it a try.

Picnic Wars costs $ii.99 and runs on both Windows Phone 7 and 8. You can view its Store page here, but it must be purchased from a Lumia Windows Phone.

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Source: https://www.windowscentral.com/picnic-wars-review

Posted by: martinhudinted.blogspot.com

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