I'm sort of "cleaning up" my GameLogs as I write this - getting back to writing about games that I haven't played in a while but otherwise seem "active" on my list.
The truth is that I played a fair bit more of this, but not so much. I ended up stopping playing when I realized that the game felt more grindy that I enjoyed - it seemed like the campaign system where you have to, in a way that's fair and realistic, account for your losses/destruction from your last mission, was really too much of a "brake" on my play - and that I'd have to spend too much time doing too many missions simply to stay afloat. This isn't a knock on the game or it's experience - it's just that at the time, I was enjoying the mech combat more than the economics of running a scrappy mercenary outfit that is barely hanging on because there's never enough cash to improve...( sort of like Cowboy Bebop now that I think about it). Ha!
My last successful run (I think it might have been a daily?) ended with some weird cutscene where the character I was controlling's eyes lit up (in the creepy way) and some other creepy stuff happened, and I'm like WHAT?
I think that, having beat the game (was this my first win? It can't be...or perhaps they rolled in a new feature in an update and I only now saw it because you have to win in a run to see it?)...my next run will be against the deck from my last (winning) run?
I guess I should be more careful when tempering my expectations based on the game's publisher.
This game was published by Zoo, and they're mostly familiar to me from their casual match-3 and hidden object games. I think. If I go and check I'll probably learn they don't do hidden object games. Ha! Well, pretty sure it was just in casual games...and this game is, sort of casual, but is a fun and interesting economic business simulator game - you have to manufacture chocolate, travel the world to buy ingredients and sell your wares, find recipes, buy more factories (to make your treats), and more. It's more engaging than I expected, really is global in scale (I only just "opened" up traveling to European and African locations) and is...fun.
Weirdly, the least satisfying part of the game is the "action" mini-game where, in each factory, when you want to start making a new kind of treat, you have to play an action-based minigame where you must assemble the right proportion of ingredients for each treat (at first it's only chocolate bars) as these empty "trays" spin around. It gets harder the longer you go and, depending on how well you do, you set the production capacity of the factory (e.g. 17 cases of milk chocolate bars a week). Oh, the game is set in the 1800s, so things are a bit slower - and you travel by sea, train, etc. Going from Brazil to San Francisco means taking a ship around South America through Cape Horn!
The simulation is pretty neat, accounting for things that make sense without getting all tied up in numbers and graphs (for the player). For example, I bought some cashews and didn't used them - the eventually went bad! (I wasn't paying attention to know how long it took for them to go bad).
Contrary to other sim games I've played - and here I'm playing the story/campaign, I'm guessing this is different in the free-play mode - it's not too hard, I felt like I was making progress, and the one time I thought I'd painted myself into a corned turned out to be just a mistake on my end (I didn't know how to sell my chocolate, and I'd spent all the money on ingredients, and then could leave the city I was in, because it costs money to travel, all solved when I realized I could sell my bars). I guess I wonder if the game breaks if you get yourself stranded in a place with no chocolate to sell and only ingredients? Can you sell your ingredients? I'm not sure if the campaign has a lose condition...
Anyways, I'm not looking to experiment THAT much with it, just to say that it has been a refreshing amount of fun I was not expecting and was surprised by.
It's impressive how the games are all essentially the same - there's a list of abilities that each result in a special interaction you can do in some part of a level, each character has (at best) one of these abilities. And the rest is basic/simple combat, exploration, building things, and breaking stuff for studs. The exploration is mostly interesting when you're on free-play, because each game's level is stuffed with collectibles.
I must have played 2-3 hours, finished 10% of the game (according to the in-game tracker), which was basically four levels that equated with the first movie. This was a surprise! The game has all four movies! Which is...a lot. Also, each level has a bunch of animated cut-scenes (Lego humorous recreations of parts of the movie). I'd assume that the animated scenes were all made for the higher-end versions of the game (PS3?) and then downscaled for the DS. And, this is still super impressive! I was only annoyed I couldn't skip them.
As for "unique"(?) to this game - the only gameplay I think is unique is that there are "duels" against certain characters (these are all pre-determined at set times in the game) - each duel has two steps. First is a button mashing to build up a meter and then 3 quick time button presses. Do this twice (or, from what I played, at most three times), and the duel is won. Nothing terribly special, but...it's a little something in a series of games that are almost their own genre at this point (because of how many games they made).
And yes, here I am playing one again (I won't continue after this) and, I continue to be amazed/surprised by how compelling it STILL is to break something in the game, have it explode into studs, and then proceed to hoover them up. I can't even blame "I wanted the trophy" here - because there's no such thing on the DS.
I did go back and play the first level on free play, found almost everything (there was one "ship in bottle" I couldn't get because I wasn't able to figure out which character could use their ability to let me reach where I needed to go, I thought it might have been a bug?). And wow, the free play version is a lot more expansive than I imagined. Significantly!
I wonder if the DS levels are smaller/truncated versions of the other console versions?
