Detective Stories: Finding Fun rather quickly.
In Detective Stories you do hidden object scenes and mini games to find clues, collect stars, and solve mysteries. The mysteries vary; I won't spoil much, but the first case is a murder, the second a kidnapping, the third a romantic affair, and the fourth is even a bank robbery case. With the clues you collect you find out more about the criminal and at the end of the case you arrest one of the suspects.
Every crime scene hidden object game takes ten energy points and you can hold about fifty-five. They slowly return over time; usually a point every few minutes or so. Whenever you raise a level your energy is refreshed and you can also earn coffees and such to refresh your energy. Some mini-games also reward you with energy depending on how long it takes you to finish them.
Analyzing clues can sometimes take some time. Sometimes fifteen minutes, sometimes a couple of hours, but usually you have other things you can do while it runs its coarse. In the meantime, you can collect stars by completing the scenes. Not only does this make the scenes more challenging, but after five stars the scenes only cost three points. The stars are used to analyse, examine clues, and question suspects.
You can also customize your male or female detective. You unlock extra features and buy them with money that you get in game for completing the hidden object scenes. After finishing a case it takes a few days for the next to unlock, unless you have friends. In this time you can collect stars on old cases and exchange them for coffee and other energy refueling objects.
I did find one, strange glitch. In the bonus scenes where you have to find the listed items in a limited amount of time, all of the items in the scene, sometimes the list won't show any new items. This actually breaks the scene as even if you use a hint you can't click on whatever it directs you to. I've only seen this happen a few times on that specific challenge.
All in all, I enjoy this game very much and when case five opens I'll be back for more!
Update: Reached case five and am enjoying it a bit more than case four. The game's still going strong!
City Girl Life: Gold digger
For everything City Girl Life does right it takes a massive step in the wrong direction by doing something incredibly awful. It almost seems like a normal Sim game, but it's main two problems is its need to leech on friends and it's addiction to consuming gold. This game wants nothing more than for you to feed it a steady stream of both and if you don't then you'll be punished by not being able to finish really any quests. Well, any quests that actually reward you.
You go to a city and sit in your little apartment filling needs constantly. I thought Sims had needs that dropped rapidly, but this is insane. It is almost impossible to stay dazzling, all needs filled fully, and sometimes you have to be dazzling to choose certain actions. All of the clothing, which sometimes must be acquired to continue on, is incredibly expensive except for the cheapest stuff... And frankly, none of it looks 'good'.
Again, quests are incredibly frustrating. You'll work halfway through one and then get stuck with an item that needs to be requested by a friend. If you don't have a friend who can send you the designated item then you'll have to pay for it with gold. It doesn't help that later in the missions you'll need more items that, of course, both need gold and then take twelve or more hours to complete. Did I mention that a good deal of these missions expire? What's even the point?
Then you might say, "If you don't like the missions then just play the game." Unfortunately I can't... Because there isn't a game outside of the missions. Building a career? Blocked by a friend request wall. Changing apartments? Blocked. New furniture and clothes? Too expensive. This is literally the only thing I can do in this game and it's trying its damnedest to milk me for 'gold'. I had to get gold through looping surveys and playing other awful games to get gold in return, so that I didn't actually have to pay. Not fun.
Basically City Girl Life is a gold digger whose looking for you to shower her in gifts and pay her way through the city, one that rewards you occasionally for all of your effort, but not enough to keep you entertained.
Island Experiment: Slows to a halt.
Starts out as a fun management game, gets to the point where you literally can't do anything. Seriously, it becomes a tug of war between making money and making food, both of which need the other to get in proper amounts. Doing anything involves both of these and getting them together is almost impossible. Even the gems you get, the paid currency, don't actually do much except speed time. Your only chance to get anything done is juggle food and money, get a few lucky breaks, and then waste it all buying or upgrading a building, then starting over once again.
The storyline, or lack thereof, is supposed to be about exploring the island. Most of the time you will instead be stuck at the same camp watching the same characters grow crops and clicking houses for gold. Missions don't lead much of anywhere and the rewards for missions are too minor to help you get into the next one, so you basically have a lot of time to kill along the way.
There's really not much to say about this. Expect to be stuck in an endless loop of looking for gold and food unless you're willing to fork out money or get extremely lucky.
The Heavens: Bribery will get you nowhere.
I've never seen a game so broken. So completely pointless and awful. The Heavens is complete hell. Firstly, you make a bland character of a cult out of a choice of six, then you battle... And battle... And battle... And everything you can do is blocked by a higher level limit, usually, save battling equal level members and the occasional weak ghoul.
And 'equal level' is garbage too. I went from equal battles in level two to level three, where every opponent has two thousand more health, more spells, tends to attack multiple times in a row, and is practically invincible. In one battle I got in a hit, then the opponent cast a heal spell, a power increase spell, knocked me down 800 health, and then chained eleven 'moves' in a row. It's a partial match three game too, it matched eleven in one shot. I was dead before I could attack a second time. Even training and upgrading you character doesn't seem to do much.
Why is this? Well, simple really. You can get a ton of diamonds, the game's special currency, if you go on its link and give it five stars. Five minutes into playing the game and it offered this; at that point it still was decent, but definitely not fun enough to warrant five stars. Sudden change in difficulty aside, the game is incredibly boring. Just battle after battle after battle. I guess that's why they need to bribe me to give them a five star rating.
You can't choose what level you want to fight either. I am stuck in stupidity; it will take me days to reach the fourth level which promised me free gold f I did so, but only a fool would keep playing. This game is a disaster in every way, wanting only a five star rating that it can't fairly achieve.
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