I’m not a real mobile gamer, not really a console gamer anymore but after seeing the trailers for Horn I was immediately transported back to playing the Legend of Zelda on my Nintendo Wii and was quite keen to give this game a go.
However after buying Horn for ~£5 [ouch] then having to wait for the ~2GB data file to download [groans] then having the game constantly crash out due to memory limitations the sheen had kind of worn off, especially after discovering that the game has in app purchases!!
Don’t get me wrong here Horm is a visually stunning game with lens flare effects and beautifully put together landscapes a great narrative.
If you are not familiar with the story basically Horn is the name of the apprentice blacksmith of village of Cuthbert he wakes with no recollection of what had happened but soon discovers that all living things had been turned into stone monsters which are susceptible to Pygite which he then crafts into a sword that he uses on the monsters to free them from their Pygon curse
You walk through the forgotten land where you encounter stone monsters that you battle with, to move around the world you basically point to the location you want to move, thats pretty much the control system for the game. When you come face to face with a monster the battle system is quite intuitive, basically swipe around the screen like mad to slash it with your sword
As you progress through the game you have cartoon/storyboard cut away sections which I really like and the voice acting in these sections is superb
The thing is with Horn once you complete one of the levels thats it, repeated again and again through the game the puzzles difficulty doesn’t really increase and the format is exactly the same and I found I was left with a game where I was just ‘going through the motions’ to get to the end of the level
I recall discussing this with one of my Google+ friends Bas Grolleman and he put it very eloquently by saying “A good game is 30 seconds of fun repeated forever”, Horn for me is failing that. Looks good, story is nice, but can’t find the “fun” button.