Well, two more Apple Arcade games dropped so I might as well check them out. This is going to be a lot shorter than the Tamagotchi and Super Kiwi 64 reviews since I don't have nearly as much to say about these, but long story short, they're both kinda mediocre.
Words In Progress: Words In Progress is a simple puzzle game about grouping together letters to form words, and trying to form the largest words you can for the most amount of points. It's basically Scrabble but in singleplayer and it's... fine. It's technically polished and can be decently engaging if you're into word puzzles, but it's nothing I haven't already seen a ton on the app store. The area where Words In Progress lacks the most is in its content and replay value. There's a main online mode, a daily challenge mode, and an endless mode for offline play, but that's pretty much it. Compared to Spell Tower's laundry list of game modes or Wurdweb's never-ending array of challenges and unlockables, Words In Progress feels incredibly thin, and that's not even considering the fact that both games are far more mechanically interesting as well. If you own Apple Arcade and just love word puzzlers, Words In Progress is totally fine and effortless to download, but otherwise, it's really nothing special.
2/5 Stars
BEAST: Bio Exo Arena Suit Team: BEAST, on the other hand, is a far more interesting... umm... beast. This is an online team-based arena third-person shooter, where you play as one of ten anthropomorphic heroes who can hop into a mech once they build up a meter. There's a few modes on offer, but the main gameplay loop pretty much just remains: Shoot enemies, build up the meter, hop into the mech, shoot more enemies until your health goes down, and repeat. I can't really gleam much mechanical depth from BEAST's mechanics, and what doesn't help matter is how streamlined the controls are. BEAST is actually a really polished-feeling game, moving and shooting feels tight and responsive, but you shoot automatically just by pointing you cursor at an opponent so there's really no skill needed at all here. I get that this is a mobile game so the developers probably wanted to keep things simple and straight-forward, but in the case of BEAST, it almost feels like the game's playing itself at this point. I may not be a huge fan of Fortnite, but one area in which I can praise it is that its mobile port doesn't automate everything like BEAST does, it gives the player control for the majority of the time.
And BEAST's obsession with streamlining and automation seeps into a lot more than just the core gameplay, and taps into an issue I've been having with mobile games for a long time. When you start playing BEAST, you are immediately thrust into a lengthy tutorial that forces you to play three battles without being able to fully explore the menus. This is a common trend in mobile games where they forcedly guide the player through the menus to make sure they know where everything is... and I despise this trend. I find it so annoying. I'm someone who likes to take the time to explore the menus whenever I start a game, just so I know where everything is and what the game offers in terms of content, so being restricted from pressing any button aside from what the game wants me to is frustrating and patronizing. And while I never ran into this issue with BEAST, this kind of design can prove to be very harmful if the player needs to change something in the options since the game usually won't even let you access the options menu! I did some research into the trend and found out that mobile games started doing this because not forcing the tutorial onto the player will risk a game getting a lot of 1-star ratings from little kids or very casual players, and I do understand the dilemma, but this isn't the way to go because it just ends up alienating more experienced players instead. At the very least, being able to skip the tutorial would go a long way.
Beyond that, BEAST also just has really annoying voice acting. Your character spouts quips every once in a while in battle and they're always super grating and unfunny. And in terms of content, just like with Words In Progress, BEAST doesn't have much beyond playing the same few modes over and over again to unlock all the characters and skins. BEAST is very much a live service game, which is a format I've also always hated because of how artificial its progression feels. Live service games live and die on you going back to them daily to do the same exact thing for a never-ending stream of useless rewards. You'll never get the satisfaction of completion or progression, they feel frustratingly static. As a whole, despite how polished it is, BEAST feels like it keeps falling into all the pitfalls of its genres. It feels frustratingly automated and hand-holdy like the worst mobile games, and it feels thin and repetitive like the worst live service games. It's not a bad game, but it's a very boring one.
2/5 Stars
I'm not going to turn this into some soapbox of how Apple needs better standards or how two mediocre games on Apple Arcade is gonna ruin the service, because that's obviously not the case. Not every game on a service needs to be a massive gem and if the dev teams behind BEAST and Words In Progress do genuinely feel passionate about the games they made, then that's great, they put something out into the world and they should feel proud. However, I will say that with the release of genuinely impressive originals like Sonic Dream Team, Hello Kitty Island Adventure, and Tamagotchi Adventure Kingdom, I have higher expectations from Apple Arcade games now. I really hope that Apple will be able to keep up this momentum in the coming months, both so that I can get more fun games to play and so that Apple Arcade will continue to be successful, but we're going to need a bit more than this for that to happen.
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