Welcome back to the Top 3 in 10 – iOS edition! In this series, I play through the Top 3 free games on the iOS store for the day (currently the 20th of May, 2021) and give you my first impressions.
Like A Giraffe!
Like A Giraffe! might be the best game I’ve played in a very long time. It’s a simple rhythm game, where you need to swipe left and right to ensure your ever-growing animal of choice finds more pieces of its neck to stack (sounds morbid; is cute), and it’s all in time to very catchy music that, once you find your groove, you’re fixated and realize the musician you wanted to be when you were 16 was inside you all along.
The colors are superb and easy enough on the eye that after a long day at work, you can get lost in the sea of yellow and relish in the simple, yet strong-lined and engaging artwork that Like A Giraffe! delivers in spades.
One of the highlights of Like A Giraffe! are the heartfelt encouragements that are showered on you as the game progresses. You never feel like a failure even when you lose your streak, with the character telling you “It’s okay” when you mess up, amongst other kind encouragements.. And honestly, that makes me want to play again and again.
As far as I can see, there’s no forced ads, and it shows that developer Hyun-joong Kim is passionate about being fair to their audience as players can actually choose to watch an ad by selecting the prompt in the top left corner of their screen, which will also grant them 1000 coins to put towards a new character to play. Hyun-joong, if you’re listening, this is the best monetization strategy I’ve ever seen for a hyper casual game. Kudos.
For me so far, this is game of the year.
5 stacked giraffes out of 5!
My Hero Academia: The Strongest Hero
1.5GB is a tall order to download for something that I’m only allowed to play for ten minutes, and to make it worse, the download stalled multiple times when I was trying to get into the game. Turns out the servers have been down all day for the majority of players.
I have to give developer A PLUS JAPAN some slack though, as they landed launched on May 19th and landed on the top of the charts for a game based on popular manga of the same name, meaning the amount of players looking to jump in is significant.
Heading to the subreddit for the game, and it looks like I wasn’t the only one having problems. If there’s any takeaway from this, it’s that I might need to give this game a bit more attention than a simple ten minute playthrough.
My Hero Academia: The Strongest Hero gets a raincheck out of 5! We’ll be back to try it soon. Meanwhile, try defeat the ultimate server boss now on iOS or Android!
Bounce and collect
True to its name, Bounce and collect is a game about… emptying a cup of balls down a chute and then funneling them via a points multiplier to collect them in another cup to then repeat the process, realized you collected 18,000,000 points for doing absolutely nothing, then also realizing that that was the entire game.
I’m generally pretty fair with any game that comes across my desk, and when doing the Top 3 in 10 series, I know what I’m getting in to, as at any given day, the charts might be stacked not in my favor and I get stuck with some lemons; and that’s ok with me. But for some reason Bounce and collect really felt like VOODOO, the developers, had given up for their Friday afternoon and just bounced out whatever they could before clocking off for the weekend (see what I did there?).
I love physics games, and I love watching things fall over, hit other objects, explode, cause general chaos, but this… this is just lazy. Notwithstanding that I am forced to hand over all my data before I can play (I do this for you, dear reader), but at least give me something worth capitulating to the endless spam emails for.
Bounce and collect is quite simply put, not really worthy of your time or the top third position on the charts today. But you know what is? Like A Giraffe! GO PLAY IT NOW.
Bounce and collect gets 1 bouncy ball out of 5 because of the cool sounds the balls make when they bounce around.
Bounce and collect is available on both iOS and Android, but so is Like A Giraffe! 😉
