Reviews

  • Recent Articles

    • Shadow’s Call review

    Written By: Torbjorn Kamblad
    January 10, 2011

    Arielle sees ghosts, and she is trying to make a living as a medium. But if you dabble into the unknown spirit world you become a target yourself. A bound spirit enters Arielle’s life, and something more sinister is at play. I am just about to become intrigued by the story despite the poor writing, and somewhat weird heroine. Then it ends abruptly without any real resolution to anything, and it hasn’t managed to build up enough steam for a proper cliff-hanger. I feel like the game just left a void, and I feel no interest whatsoever to wait for the sequel. The fact that the entire game took me less than 30 minutes to complete, and more than half of that was un-skippable voiceovers leaves me even more dissatisfied.

    img_3018As a reviewer I got this game for free as a promo code, and it feels that I still paid for it. First the 30 minutes that it took me to play it, and then the hour it takes to write these ranting sentences feel like time lost from my life. This is like going to see a movie, and just having the trailer for it. Complete waste of time.

    Shadow’s Call is a point and click adventure that takes everything that is good about the genre, and soils it. There are almost no items to interact with. The inventory is poorly executed. The interaction menu is innovative with a cool voodoo doll to click on. Legs to walk, arms to use, eyes to look and mouth to talk. Sadly it is hard to precisely press the action you want, and if you by mistake press look instead of talk you have to sit through un-skippable dialogue. There is almost no story development since the game only gives you three scenes. Finally the voice acting is pretentious, and sounds just off. It could have been funny, or it could have been natural/realistic. Now it sounds like someone like me trying to sound like someone cool in a realistic way, and it doesn’t really work.

    img_3023I really hope that the developer drops the idea of a sequel to Shadow’s Call. Sure the cartoon imagery is quite good, and somehow even manages to look slightly scary. There isn’t enough content to warrant a purchase at all. Even at a dollar the game is a waste of bandwidth clocking in at 200 MB. Prior to playing the full version I tried the lite version that isn’t available anymore. The lite version gave about 20 minutes of content, and that content was exactly the same as the first two thirds of the full version. The two puzzles within the game pose no challenge, and if the game had skippable voiceovers it could be completed within minutes. There are many interesting games in the genre for the iOS, and I see no reason at all to get this game.

    Final Rating

    1pt5-stars

    Shadow’s Call $0.99
    Version: 1.2
    Seller: Imba Entertainment

    TwitterFacebookGoogle BookmarksDiggStumbleUponShare
    • John

      Hello,

      i think what i just read is not exactly a review. It sounds to me more like an non expert or bad-ass opinion. Have you even considered that this game is made by an indie developer?? How you can even say to drop the idea of a sequel. Seriously have you ever considered how much time and effort takes to make something like this?
      Do you really want games only from BIG company ?
      And after all it’s only 1.99 dollar. cheapeee. And you took it for free.

      or you seek money from the developers to say a few nice words?

      Try to be more open-mind next time and not so bad ass!

    • Torbjorn Kamblad, Sweden

      @John

      I am not alone in my rating of this game. Slide To Play gave it a 1/4 for example. I don’t give out better or worse ratings depending on indie or big developer. Heck I have been giving low ratings to a lot of stuff from big names such as EA, Gameloft and Taito. On the other hand I gave Space Miner a 5/5 last year, and that is a indie developed game. What matters is the quality of the game, and Shadow´s Call isn’t worth either the time or the money. With two easy puzzles, and dialogue you can’t skip being both slightly off and constituting more than 75% of the play time this is a fair score. If you are the developer, or friends of the dev. I urge you to consider spending your energy on some other game instead. A sequel to a game scoring 1/4 and 1,5/5 on major sites will not sell. The character, and story from Shadow’s Call can probably be salvaged, and turned into some other type of game instead if you feel you have invested too much time in them to release them.

      And no I never seek money to say anything. Writing is my hobby, and it is completely free getting reviews from us at TouchGen.

    • http://www.ontheedgeapps.com Austin Morrow

      @John

      You need to learn what a review is and if you haven’t been here awhile you will soon learn that Torbjorn is one of the best reviewers around and he knows exactly what he is talking about. Please stop bickering and face the fact that not all indie developers make great games. I vaguely remember Torbjorn giving many, many EA games fairly low ratings and many other writers at TouchGen give big game developers lower ratings. In case you didn’t know, the developer should be happy for whatever score he receives, because then he or she will know what to improve in the next update or in the next game.

      That is all.
      Love and hugs, Austin.

    Podcasts

    Comments

    Tweets