Review: The Castle
Score:
68%
Version Reviewed: 1.0
Buy Link | Download / Information Link
A-ha! Another Flash game for Symbian. “The Castle,” from BSure Interactive, is certainly a step up from the single screen game and watch style of Office Frenzy that I looked at last week. As with any programming tool, the flexibility is in the programmer – to see Flash used to create a full game is a good thing. And while The Castle isn’t quite up to the expected standards of a C++ game, I’m confident that a few tweaks in the code and it will be there.
Okay, so what’s the game? Well, you have to explore the titular castle, journeying to the very top floor to pick up some armour – which will somehow prove that ghosts don’t exist. Yes, programmers will never win awards for fiction writing, but it’s more than enough plot threads to hang this exploring/collecting maze game on.
It’s a top down maze game, and at any one time you can see a 4x4 grid of squares. During the first few screens you will see the exit, but as you get deeper into the castle, you’ll see that each 4x4 grid is simply a room in the level, and you’ll need to follow the connecting arrows to go to another room. And while some levels will have a simple exit, as you get deeper and deeper into the game, you’ll need to start exploring all the corners of each level to find the required number of moons and stars, all the while avoiding the bombs on the floors, using the secret passages to move around the screen, and avoiding the lethal monsters that will kill with a single touch.
It’s a very simple game concept, and plays smoothly (albeit a touch slow, but I think that’s a limitation of using Flash), and as a demonstration application it showcases the potential. But it is being sold as a leisure title (even though it's trivially cheap at $4, although if you don't have the Flash player bundled with your phone that'll cost another $8), so there are a couple of concerns. The first is that in later levels it is very easy to get lost in the series of 4x4 grids that make up the level. I’d like to see some sort of auto-map to help keep my bearings.
The other missing feature is a way to save my progress. When I’ve travelled through a number of levels and then exited the game (or had it closed for me because the Web browser needed the memory), I was hoping that my progress would be stored so I could return to the right level. Nope, it’s back to the start again – I think you need to use Flash Lite v2.0 to be able to do this, as opposed to the Flash LIte 1.1 that 'The Castle' requires, so if BSure want to make a decent go of application design for Symbian then they should look to 2.0.
There’s also part of me that would like to see some randomisation of the level design to give the game more longevity.
As more and more people turn to Flash development for Symbian, more and more issues are going to come up, and best practises will slowly evolve. The Castle, with crisp graphcs, good presentation and a solid idea, could easily be mistaken for a C++ bespoke app, and that says a lot. As Flash matures, so will the titles. For now though, The Castle is merely a nice diversion, and worth a look.
Reviewed by Ewan Spence at