Fury of the Gods
Developer: Spectral Games
Publisher: Chillingo
Platform: iPad (Reviewed), iPhone, iPod Touch
Release Date: March 7th, 2013
Price: $0.99 Buy it Here
Overview
Fury of the Gods is a tower defense game that pits angry mortals against the three brother gods Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades who respectively rule over the sky, water, and the dead. Players will unleash a variety of spells, use famous Greek mythological creatures, or simple beat down the trespassers with a vengeful finger from above to stop the intruders.
Story
After the Gods fail to deliver salvation to the mortals after a series of natural disasters, droughts, and pestilence, the mortals decide to rebel and tear down the temples dedicated to Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades. Besides a short cutscene while the game loads, there is no real progression to the story. The game does not really guilt you for slaying the mortals with reckless abandon, but it does not make you feel great about it either.
Gameplay
Your temple in the middle of a circular arena. Enemies will charge from all sides, climbing several possible routes to attack the temple. The temple has a limited amount of health and can deal a little bit of damage to attackers, recover a little bit of health, and start the game off with extra silver with some upgrades. Enemies are killed in three ways. Tapping on the enemies will do a small amount of damage, defensive units can be purchased to pummel nearby enemies with silver earned from killing enemies, and spells can be dragged from the skill bar on the left hand corner onto enemies. All these abilities are unlocked and upgraded with gold earned from attacks. A small amount of gold is given for an unsuccessful level and more gold is given for completion based on performance. Unfortunately, players will only get an extremely small amount of gold for replaying levels. It seems like you earn more gold by failing a challenging level versus going back to improve your old score. This really puts a huge damper onto the replayability of the game. Unless you feel like playing unlimited waves mode, there is almost zero motivation to improve your scores.
Be prepared to tap your screen more than Tap Tap Revenge. Seriously. Although there are a variety of skills and creatures to assist in the defense of your temples, the main ability is the crushing finger from gods. Unfortunately, this creates my biggest problem with Fury of the Gods. It is literally painfully repetitive. A good 75% of the game is spent tapping attackers at high speeds over and over again, ad nauseum. Although there are five spells to use, the amount of mana available to cast the spells simply cannot keep up with the amount of enemies to kill.
The controls are a mixed bag. You need to tap units directly to register the hit as if you were crushing them like the little ants they are. However, even on the iPad, the finger covers up the health bar which results in over kill or worse, not even realizing the fact you have failed to hit the enemy. On the other hand, the spells and placing movements work perfectly. The UI works well, staying out of the way.
The tutorial did an ok job. It explained the gameplay perfectly, but failed to properly explain the power ups. It resulted in me needlessly expending a few of them to figure out their effects, including the one power up that can only be purchased through an in app purchase. Ouch. I only learned the exact description of the ability when I dug around the skill purchasing menu later.
Visuals
The legendary Unreal Engine powers Fury of the Gods. The game looks fantastic on the iPad’s Retina display. It will crush your battery life and make your devices run hot. The environment is beautiful and from a distance, the units look great. The frame rate runs smoothly with no frame drops or slowdowns.
Audio
The game has four music tracks, one for each god and one for the menu. The songs tend to be hit or miss. They are a bit short and loop rather often. They are all pleasant to listen to, but I found Zeus’ music to be too intense to listen to for long lengths. The sound effects are good, sounding realistic and not too repetitive considering the nature of the game.
Overall
Fury of the Gods could have been a good game. However, repetitive gameplay, little incentives to beat old scores, and problems with the controls hamper the game. Considering the level of in app purchases already included, the game probably would have fared better as a free game versus a $0.99 purchase.
Capsule Computers review guidelines can be found here.
