Title: Squids
Developer/Publisher: The Game Bakers
Price: 69p
The phrase ‘Turn based RPG’ can send a shiver down the spines of many gamers. Some hate them for the predominant use of clunky menu systems, a relic from a bygone age that has somehow survived into the modern era of gaming, some dread how compelling they can be and have fevered nightmares of the amount of time they have sunk into them, and some love them so much that they have become frustrated that it’s a relatively under-served genre.
Whatever you think of them, the turn based RPGs of this world can display an awful lot of depth and complexity and the right one can compel even those not traditionally fans of the genre to sink many hours in to them.
Enter Squids.
Squids, from the Game Bakers, is an attempt to deliver a deeper iOS game beyond the short skill based challenges that tend to make up the majority of the games found on the App store. Squids focuses instead on progression through a story and allows you to build your team up, increasing their prowess as you go through the game.
Squids puts you in charge of a team of four cephalopods out on a mission to save their world from a malicious toxic ooze that is corrupting the wildlife around them, pitting you against a legion of vicious crabs.
You can quickly find yourself outnumbered if you don’t keep your team together.
Taking the form of a turn based RPG, Squids immediately wins out by playing to the strengths of touch screen devices and instead of relying on a menu based system for planning your moves, it has you flinging the titular squids around the screen by grabbing hold of them, drawing them back and pinging them off in different directions, much like the drawing and firing mechanic of the highly successful Angry Birds. The way in which this is handled is highly satisfying, with squids rebounding off walls and into your enemies in a well designed manner. The levels of polish are also clear from the start, with incidental animations and sound effects triggering perfectly whenever you grab one of the squids.
Each squid also has a different class and you are given a scout, which can move very fast, a trooper, which can take a lot of damage and performs a large stomp to hit enemies near it, a shooter, which can shoot a pearl at a nearby enemy, and a healer, who can heal your squids by bouncing in to them. These tick off all the classic archetypes for a well balanced RPG with the tank, healer and DPS roles fulfilled, and the scout is a natural addition that gives a little more versatility in all of the stages.
One of the most beautiful loading screens I’ve seen in ages. Little comments pop up at the bottom suggesting that your squids are holding things up by checking their emails and facebook. Perhaps I’m just simple, but it always makes me laugh.
The overall design of Squids is beautifully polished, and it is clear that the developers have sunk a lot of hard work and love into this project. The style of the backgrounds sit somewhere between painterly water colours and children’s cartoon, never diving too far either way and giving the feel of a beautiful and vibrant underwater reef. The character design is also flawless. It’s easy to see which squid does what and their design is even in keeping with the level of character each team member has.
Squids is regrettably fairly short and you’ll find yourself at the end quite quickly. I was left with the impression that I had played a decent episode of a larger game and I believe that the intention is for more episodes to be released over time, which would be most welcome. This said, the game will still take you a good few sittings and there is scope to go back and replay levels that you didn’t perform well at.
As for the goal of Squids, to produce an iOS game with more depth, it succeeds for the most part, although I feel it could have been taken further. There isn’t much scope for really customising your squids in the distribution of points on stats and any hopes for being able to build interesting teams are dashed by the fact there are only four types of squids, and although you unlock two extra team members, they are just duplicates of existing types, albeit with slightly different strengths. It is difficult to balance a levelling system with a player skill-based system and it by no means ever feels unsatisfying, but at the same time I wasn’t ever really aware of any major differences before and after levelling up my team.
Cartoony but crisp character design. You can probably tell their general disposition from their design…except for possibly the healer, whose character trait appears to be ‘girl’.
There are also still things here that seem to be staples of iOS games that I fear holds the platform back, such as the option to pay money for extra pearls, a currency that you can use to level up your squids and buy extra items. Although paying a little money to remove the need to grind levels is fair enough, I still can’t get past the point that you’re paying money so that you don’t have to play the game, which seems to defeat the point of playing the game in the first place, but I’m aware this might just be me. In this case as well, the pearls feel almost redundant. I was never too short of them to buy extra unlocked items, and I very rarely ended up using or needing any of the special items you can spend pearls on to help you out in the middle of a battle.
Also, the way most iOS (or handheld games in general) are broken down into short levels that can be easily managed in short bouts of play time is evident here, with options to go back and play levels again to get all three stars, gained for exploring, speed and not getting any squids knocked out. I would love for a few more iOS games to take a risk with longer levels, or open worlds and not be afraid to lose the increasingly common three star system to encourage replayability. I know we play these things on the train, but players aren’t going to be upset at having to replay half a stage if they had to unexpectedly close the app down in a hurry, so the game doesn’t have to be broken down into such small chunks.
Some of the stages actually get quite big and feel much more satisfying to beat.
I am already looking forward to further episodes of Squids. The story was simple and cheerful and finished on enough of a resolution to satisfy but enough of a cliff hanger to open it out more, the environments were rich and varied and most importantly, the gameplay was satisfying and fun enough to make me want to keep playing.
This is definitely a title that I recommend you having a look at and it is a direction that I sincerely hope more iOS games will take.
Additional Notes
I would like to point out the price. I’ve said this before, but I find it incredibly difficult to say anything too bad or critical about something that is A) really quite good and B) 69p.
There is a tendency when playing games on iOS devices to excuse them as some sort of demo and a lot of poorly designed titles get a free ride because of an attitude that because it’s on an iPhone, it’s not a real game. This is a ridiculous attitude to take, but one that is sometimes difficult to avoid. With Squids I never once found myself internally making this excuse and it is one of only a few titles that has made me forget that I’m playing an iOS game and just let me enjoy it. When playing this, I was judging it as, for want of a better way of saying it, a real game, and not a cheap disposable iOS title.