For better and worse, A Memoir Blue feels like a creator’s first short film — it’s got some interesting ideas and artistic flourishes, but it’s also a little rough around the edges.
First released on consoles and PC in March, the Cloisters Interactive-developed game has just made its way to mobile. To say this is a “game,” though, is a bit misleading, and I don’t even mean that in a pejorative sense. Instead, A Memoir Blue is considered more an “interactive poem,” a sort of adventure game that’s extremely light on actual gameplay.
In A Memoir Blue, you follow Olympic swimmer Miriam who, despite her successes, finds herself solemnly reflecting on her late mother. These are conveyed through colourful, aquatic dreamlike sequences in which you use a pointer to interact with objects. In this way, there are “puzzles” — though I use that in the loosest sense of the term — to clear, but they’re not intended to present actual challenges.
Instead, the idea is for you to gently guide Miriam through her fantastical memories and learn a bit more about her upbringing. Admittedly, though, this sort of “childhood reflection” experience is something we’ve seen a lot in recent games, especially in other titles from publisher Annapurna Interactive, like What Remains of Edith Finchand this year’s Hindsight. As a result, A Memoir Blue‘s one-hour experience is arguably too short and understated to make much of a lasting impression.
But for what it is — a clearly personal tale for the developers — A Memoir Blue is fine. Its greatest strength is its minimalist presentation. Telling the story completely dialogue-free is refreshingly different for a game, relying instead on the lovely visuals for storytelling. Cloisters Interactive also does a neat thing of using cute doodle-esque character models for scenes with Miriam and her mother to neatly contrast the gloomier present-day.
The biggest frustration, though, came in the gameplay itself. I’m fine with mechanically-lite games, especially in service of more atmospheric narrative experiences such as this, but it doesn’t translate that well to mobile. Maybe it was my fat thumbs, but I found myself struggling at times to interact with the correct objects on my iPhone 13 Pro because they were just too tiny. At times, the game requires a more precise touch, like swiping to unlock Miriam’s phone in a purse, but I had difficulty actually doing that. This likely wouldn’t be an issue on iPad, but it proved frustrating on iPhone.
In the end, A Memoir Blue is a decidedly niche game. A lot of people will be put off by its teensy bits of gameplay, while others may not find the story much more than serviceable yet familiar. I don’t mind either of that, but some clunky touch mechanics were certainly troublesome. With all of that said, an engaging aesthetic and a sincere story make it worth checking out if sweet little experiences like this are your cup of tea.
It’s 2am, I’ve just finished God of War Ragnarök and can’t get to sleep. (My full review on that game is coming November 3rd.)
Lying in bed, I figure “why not go play a bit more of Marvel Snap?” I had played a bit of the recently released free-to-play card game but got sidetracked by FallReviewSeason™. Well, fast forward an hour-and-a-half and I find myself still playing Marvel Snap.
I was shocked. While I’m a diehard Marvel fan, I don’t generally enjoy playing games on a phone, especially since, more often than not, they’re littered with unsavoury microtransactions. But for many reasons, Marvel Snap has gotten its hooks into me, and I’m eager to keep playing.
Central to the game’s success is its approachable nature. Developer Second Dinner (a team consisting of several Hearthstone veterans) has designed matches to be around three-to-four minutes long with a clean, mobile-optimized interface and small, 12-card decks. This is particularly welcome as many AAA games nowadays are bloated and extremely long.
Marvel Snap‘s rules are also quite simple. The playing field has three locations containing spots for four cards each on either player’s side. Each card has a Power level that adds to that specific location, and the player who has the highest Power in two of the three locations will win. (Ties are broken by who has the most Power overall.) In this way, Marvel Snap is, like the best of card games, really easy to pick up and play, but also hiding a lot of depth.
That’s because cards all have their own unique effects which shake up the flow of a match. This is important to consider for many reasons, but chief among them is the fact that cards have different Energy levels. Cards with higher Power levels will cost more Energy, and you only get a set amount (which increases each turn). Therefore, it becomes a tricky balancing act about which cards to put in your deck and, while in a match, whether to play low- or high-level ones and where they should even go. For example, opening a match by playing a Hawkeye (who costs only one Energy) sets you up nicely for a follow-up move, as he gains 2 Power the following turn if you place a card in the same location. Meanwhile, Iron Man costs 5 Energy with 0 Power but makes up for it with the ability to double your total Power in a given location.
Locations themselves can also greatly affect the outcome of a match. Based on iconic Marvel locations like Stark Tower, the Triskelion and Wakanda, these randomized areas each have a unique benefits — or even hindrances — on players. Take Xandar, which adds 1 Power to each card placed there. That’s certainly handy, but you might also get Subterranea, which shuffles five ‘Rocks’ into each player’s deck. Rocks have 1 Energy/0 Power, so they’re effectively duds. I say “effectively,” though, because some cards can actually leverage them, like Carnage (2 Energy/2 Power), who can destroy your other cards to gain 2 Power for each. You may even get Ego the Living Planet, who with seize control of player’s turns himself. The ebb and flow of the ways in which Marvel Snap‘s cards and locations intersect and affect one another never cease to amaze me, and it creates a deeply compelling gameplay loop.
Before too long, you’ll also unlock the titular ‘Snap’ mechanic, which adds a layer of tension to the proceedings. At any point during the match, you or your opponent can double down (‘Snap’) to win more Cosmic Cubes, the currency used to increase your competitive rank. Naturally, losing will decrease your rank, so the decision to Snap is centred around a smart risk/reward system. You might even opt to Snap as a bluff to throw off the other player. At the same time, you can retreat from a match to minimize your Cube loss if things are looking rough.
Best of all, the monetization is… actually decent? New cards are unlocked entirely through gameplay, and in-app purchases are only spent on buying currency to upgrade a card’s rarity. Doing this will give it a fancy variant artwork (like pixellated or 3D) that also raises your ‘Collection Level,’ which opens up other rewards. While this helps speed along your progression, you can’t actually buy or craft specific cards outright, making the game refreshingly not pay-to-win. There’s also a $10 premium season pass to get resources more quickly, but you get these at such a steady pace from matches and the associated daily missions, anyway, so it thankfully feels optional.
Everything about Marvel Snap would work well regardless of the licence attached, but the Marvel premise just adds that much more personality. On a base level, there’s just an undeniable appeal to collecting cards based on Marvel characters. And to Second Dinner’s credit, Marvel Snap isn’t just focused on big names like Spider-Man, Iron Man, Captain America, Wolverine, The Hulk or The Punisher. There are some appreciably deep cuts here, too, like Squirrel Girl, Blue Marvel, Kazar, Wolfsbane and White Tiger. Characters also have little voiceovers and animations to elevate the presentation, like Hawkeye’s card shooting arrows when played or Star-Lord calling out to Groot when both are on the field. Second Dinner clearly had a lot of fun coming up with the card abilities themselves. In an absolutely brilliant bit of dark comedy, there’s a card for Uncle Ben whose only use is to be destroyed so you can draw Spider-Man.
If I had any gripe with Marvel Snap, it’s that there isn’t any sort of campaign at all. I wasn’t expecting some sort of Marvel’s Spider-Man-level narrative, but some sort of single-player mode with even a loose story could have been cool. But really, that’s not needed when the core card game mechanics are so sound. Inviting design choices, a robust and varied lineup of cards, constantly rewarding gameplay loop and fun Marvel theme make Marvel Snap a joy to play. Against all odds, it’s one of my favourite games of 2022, and I absolutely intend to stick with it.
You can download Marvel Snap on iOS, Android and Steam (early access).
Prominent app analytics firm Data.ai (formerly App Annie) has published a new Q3 2022 report on the mobile gaming industry, and there are quite a few interesting findings.
To start, it found that each week, consumers are spending $1.54 billion USD (about $2.2 billion CAD) in mobile games as well as downloading more than 1.1 billion new titles. Data.ai notes that even though this is a slight drop from last year, it’s still 25 percent higher than Q3 2019, showing how gaming has only continued to grow amid the pandemic.
To that point, Data.ai reiterated that of the project $222 billion USD (about $305 billion CAD) that it expects the gaming industry to generate overall this year, mobile gaming will account for about 60 percent.
Speaking of percentages, the firm also acknowledged that gaming is more impactful on Google Play than iOS. To be sure, the App Store generated $21 billion USD (about $28.9 billion CAD) in mobile gaming revenue in Q3, which was well above the $11.4 billion USD (about $15.7 billion CAD).
But on the App Store, only about half of revenue comes from game, versus roughly two-thirds of revenue on the Play Store. Put another way, nearly half of the 30 billion apps downloaded on Google Play in Q3 were games, versus only a quarter on iOS. Therefore, mobile gaming plays a comparatively bigger role for Android than its does for iOS.
In terms of specific games, Data.ai says Subway Surfers was the most downloaded game across both platforms in Q3, while Honor of Kings saw the largest consumer spend. Data.ai also singled out Blizzard’sDiablo Immortal, which launched in June to much criticism over its monetization. Despite that controversy, the game still placed seventh in total consumer spend, edging out Pokémon Go and coming in a few spots behind Roblox and Genshin Impact.
Marvel Snap, a new collectible card game based on the mega popular Marvel Universe, is now officially available on mobile and in early access on PC.
Notably, Marvel Snap was developed by Second Dinner, a new studio made up of many ex-Blizzard developers, including former Hearthstone director Ben Brode.
In Marvel Snap, you’ll assemble a deck of cards featuring hundreds of Marvel heroes and villains, including big names like Spider-Man, Wolverine, Iron Man, Doctor Doom, Star-Lord, Daredevil and Deadpool, to lesser-known characters like Squirrel Girl, The Hood, Medusa and Sunspot.
Matches, meanwhile, have been designed to be mobile-friendly and bite-sized at about three minutes each. They play out in a grid containing 50-plus Marvel locations, including Wakanda, Asgard, the Baxter Building, Stark Tower and the Triskelion.
In the grid, you’ll place your character cards, each of which has an associated ‘Power,’ and the player with the highest Power level wins. Most cards and locations also have special effects that either give you a boost or set your opponent back. You can play against the computer or other players online.
As with any free-to-play game, there are microtransactions in Marvel Snap, although they work a little differently than you’d expect. Thankfully, you can’t actually buy cards to pay-to-win, which levels the playing field a bit. Instead, you can spend real money on variants of cards you already own that feature different artwork but are functionally the same.
That said, you can also fork over cash on credits to upgrade the rarity of cards, which increases your collection level and, in turn, lets you unlock more cards. Therefore, there is certainly a gameplay advantage from using real money, although it’s not as direct as buying cards outright.
Otherwise, the response to Marvel Snap has been quite positive during the early access period. You can download the game for yourself on iOS, Android and Steam.
It’s also worth noting that a fun ad for the launch was also released, featuring none other than Samuel L. Jackson reprising his long-running Marvel role of Nick Fury:
Want to replace Nick Fury? The Marvel Universe is in your hands when you play MARVEL SNAP. Congratulations!
Second Dinner also has released a content update roadmap, promising regular new cards, locations, cosmetics, challenges and more. You can read more on that here.
Warner Bros. has revealed Mortal Kombat: Onslaught, a “collection RPG” that it’s calling the first “mobile-exclusive cinematic story experience” in the series.
Developed and co-published by Mortal Kombat studio NetherRealm, Onslaught tasks players with building a team of fighters from a “vast” roster of Mortal Kombat characters and face off in real-time group battles to stop a deadly threat.
Specific characters weren’t mentioned, but the official poster for the game does show a handful, including mainstays Sub-Zero, Scorpion and Raiden. However, no screenshots or footage from the game was shown, so it’s unclear exactly how you’ll “collect” fighters or how battles will actually play out.
Notably, this is the first mobile game in the long-running fighting game series since 2015’s Mortal Kombat Mobile. The latest entry, meanwhile, is 2019’s Mortal Kombat 11, which most recently got an enhanced port on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S in 2020.
It’s unclear what NetherRealm’s next console/PC game will be. Earlier this month, Mortal Kombat creator Ed Boon said the studio is currently focusing on celebrating the series’ 30th anniversary, and a separate announcement regarding its next game will come after that.
For now, though, those interested in Onslaught can register for updates here.
Final Fantasy VII: The First Soldier will shut down on January 11th, 2023, Square Enix has confirmed.
This will be just over one year after the free-to-play battle royale game launched on Android and iOS in November 2021.
“Despite all our efforts to bring you regular updates with fresh and exciting content, we haven’t been able to deliver the experience that we were hoping to, and that you all deserve, so we have made the extremely tough decision to end service for Final Fantasy VII: The First Soldier,” Square Enix wrote in a statement via the game’s official Twitter account.
The company adds that it will continue to provide updates for the game leading up to its closure. However, Shinra Credits, the game’s in-app currency that can be purchased with real money, have been removed from the in-game shop. Therefore, only previously purchased Shinra Credits can be used until service ends.
Square Enix attempted to make The First Soldier stand out through multiplayer combat that mixed traditional guns with character classes, spells, monsters and locations from Final Fantasy VII. That said, the battle royale market is incredibly saturated, even on mobile, due to juggernauts like Fortnite, PUBG, Apex Legends and Call of Duty.
While The First Soldier is coming to an end, the Final Fantasy VII series is pushing along at full speed. Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII Reunion, a remaster of the PSP prequel to the original FFVII, will launch on consoles and PC on December 13th. Additionally, Ever Crisis, a mobile retelling of the entire Final Fantasy VII series, is set to hit mobile sometime later this year. And, of course, there’s the highly anticipated sequel to Final Fantasy VII Remake, titled Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, which will release on PS5 sometime “next winter.”
Tom Hanks is launching his first-ever video game exclusively on Apple Arcade.
Developed by the U.K.’s Blueline Studios, Hanx101 is a trivia game in which the Oscar-winning actor serves as narrator. Altogether, Hanx101 features some 58,000 questions covering a variety of topics, including science, technology, history, geography, art and food.
Hanx101 will launch on Apple Arcade on September 2nd. An Apple Arcade subscription costs $5.99 CAD/month.
While it might seem odd for Hanks to partner with Apple on his first game, Hanx101 marks the third collaboration between the actor and the tech giant. 2020’s Greyhound, a war film written by and starring Hanks, was released directly on Apple TV+ amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The following year, Hanks starred in the post-apocalyptic survival film Finch, which also premiered exclusively on Apple TV+.
Square Enix has confirmed that Avatar: Generations, a new Android and iOS game based on Nickelodeon’s beloved Avatar: The Last Airbender series, will soft launch in Canada, Denmark, South Africa and Sweden sometime later this month.
Access will expand to additional countries and territories “in the months following,” according to Square Enix.
Developed by Square Enix London Mobile in partnership with Vancouver’s Navigator Games (Iron Maiden: Legacy of the Beast), Avatar: Generations is a free-to-play turn-based RPG in which players control fan-favourite characters like Aang, Katara, Sokka, Zuko and Iroh. At launch, the game’s first chapter will retell the events of The Last Airbender, with future expansions adding new stories and characters, including Avatar Kyoshi, Korra and Roku.
Players will be able to upgrade and customize characters while experiencing “fan-favorite locations, stories, and events in an open world, as well as brand new stories that expand the universe.”
Activision Blizzard has released its financial report for Q2 2022. In it, the publisher states that throughout the three-month window ending on June 30th, more than half of its revenue came from mobile games.
During Q2 2022, Activision Blizzard reports earning a total of $831 million USD (roughly $1.06 billion CAD) from its “mobile and ancillary” side of the business. In comparison, PC sales totalled $332 million USD (approximately $426 million CAD). Console sales, on the other hand, totalled $376 million USD (around $483 million CAD). Activision Blizzard says its mobile and ancillary business “primarily include[s] revenues from mobile devices.”
It’s no coincidence that Activision Blizzard’s mobile sector is seeing a boom given that Blizzard Entertainment’s Diablo Immortal launched during the quarter. While available on PC, the Diablo spinoff has found a successful home on mobile devices. During its first two weeks of release, it reached over eight million downloads. The free-to-play game also drew in about $24 million USD (around $31.22 million CAD) via in-app purchases across iOS and Android.
It’s worth noting that Activision Blizzard also owns the development studio King. This behemoth in the mobile game space generates a fair amount of revenue for Activision Blizzard. King’s most popular title is Candy Crush, though the studio recently launched auto-runner Crash Bandicoot: On the Run for mobile. Blizzard’s Hearthstone also undoubtedly attributed as well.
Activision Blizzard reports that PC and console sales see a decline in year-over-year revenue growth. However, mobile actually saw a five percent increase. The publisher attributes the waning PC and console sales to “lower engagement for the Call of Duty franchise.” Additionally, World of Warcraft has seen a small decline when compared to 2021 when its Burning Crusade Classic expansion launched.
Speaking of World of Warcraft, it was recently reported that Blizzard and NetEase have cancelled the planned World of Warcraft mobile title. No official word has come from the studio as of yet.
Backbone has teamed up with PlayStation to create its latest mobile gaming accessory, the Backbone One — PlayStation Edition.
Launching today, July 28th, the peripheral builds on the Xbox-inspired Backbone One model for iPhone that was released last year by adding PlayStation-specific accoutrements. The new device is also compatible with iPhone and has been built specifically for PlayStation’s Remote Play feature, which lets you stream and play PS4 and PS5 games on your smartphone or tablet.
To start, the Backbone One — PlayStation Edition sports a white finish that’s inspired by the standard PS5 DualSense controller, with signature PlayStation buttons like Triangle, Circle, Square and Cross.
The Backbone app has also been reimagined to allow users to navigate without the device connected via touch screen in what it’s calling ‘Standalone Mode.’ To switch back to ‘Controller Mode,’ simply re-connect the Backbone device and the app will automatically transition.
Further, the Backbone app now features “special integrations” with the PlayStation and PS Remote Play app, including a dedicated row with new releases and updates from PlayStation and the ability to install content onto your console remotely.
Finally, the Backbone One — PlayStation Edition can connect directly to other PS5 accessories, including the Pulse 3D Headset.
You can order the Backbone One — PlayStation Edition from Backbone’s website. We’ve reached out for specific Canadian pricing and will update this story once a response has been received.
