I was a bit leery of this game but once I saw the makers of one of my favorite iOS titles made this, instabuy.
I've watched the trailers and stuff, but I still just don't get this game. Is it just an endless platforming/growing experience? Or is there some overall goal or storyline? And what do you do, just fly around planting seeds?
When you play, you explore an open-ended world, discover new environments and lifeforms, and learn their behaviors -- how they reproduce, what they eat, are they dangerous -- and use those behaviors to your advantage in bringing the ecosystem back to life. Your core mechanics are jetpack flight and throwing inventory items (usually seeds, but there are a few variants with different behaviors later in the game). Sometimes, passage will be blocked due to the presence of an alien lifeform called the Cerebrane, which is retracted once the biomass in a chamber reaches a certain level. In order to level up the biomass, you must come to an understanding of the Martian ecology. This doesn't always involve planting. There are lifeforms that reproduce only when fed, and you have to feed them other types of lifeforms. There are ways to acquire compost to create enriched terrain to boost the value and behavioral activity of certain lifeforms. So... on the mid-level, you are strategizing or puzzling your way through obstacles based on the environmental conditions. There is also a survival aspect, as there are acid drips and creatures that will bite at you and pools of magma that you need to be wary of. We have 3 difficulty modes in case you find the survival parameters too taxing or too easy for your tastes. As for story, we have a cast of 4 characters -- you play as Dr. Liang Qi, your handler at Base Camp is Dr. Amani Ronga, and your suit computer ART is along for the ride. Meanwhile, one of your multiple mission objectives is to find the lost robot 0CT0, who was trapped in these same caves on an earlier mission. A lot of the fiction is delivered through conversations, but there is also a lot of background storytelling, as there was in Spider. As you get really deep into the Martian caves, you find hints of a lost civilization, strange alien signals, structures that could not have been naturally occuring. And a lot of the story unfolds out of these discoveries. Also, there are 2 (and a half) endings. Total game time is at least 6 hours for a minimum playthrough, and new playtesters who have gone all the way through to the special ending have sometimes logged 10-12 hours. Hope you'll buy it and check it out
Its still very early doors I know, but after about half an hour of playtime so far, I've gotta say that I'm loving every minute of it! It's kinda hard to put my finger on it, but Waking Mars just feels special. It's utterly fabulous. At $4.99/£2.99 it feels like pretty good value too. My advise is don't hesitate, just jump in!
Sorry, but we don't have explicit iCloud support. We save the entire world state -- every level you visit and touch saves all of the changes you make -- and there was no clean way for us to adapt our persistent open-world save scheme (which predates iCloud by about a year) to easily work with iCloud. It's more important for the world to be consistent, so when you populate an area with life, and return to it later, everything is in exactly the same place and state. We'll definitely look to support it in future titles.
(Quote slightly corrected.) The game looks and sounds really good. Being cheapo as I am (well I spent far more than 1,000 Euros for iOS apps since my iPhone 3G) I watched the price activity of the dev's other game @ the beloved & much used & unofficial & very reliable iOS App Store data base AppShopper.com: Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor (iPhone/iPod touch version) http://appshopper.com/games/spider-the-secret-of-bryce-manor Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor HD (iPad version) http://appshopper.com/games/spider-bryce-manor-hd …and will decide now if I can hold on between eight months (HD) and thirteen months (iPhone) for the first sale. BTW: There is a free lite version of TSoBM (which I own and enjoyed for some time) called Spider: Hornet Smash (iPhone only): http://itunes.apple.com/app/spider-hornet-smash/id346102709?mt=8 BTW #2: The games are really hard to find in iTunes. In German language App Stores the name of the iPhone version is Spider: Das Geheimnis von Bryce Manor and the HD version is Spider: Bryce Manor HD (in English)—don't ask me why… Back to topic. Screenshot Austrian iTunes App Store:
I absolutely love the game so far. The premise and presentation are very interesting and I even like the control scheme so far
Regarding saving: yes, it's basically save anywhere. Whenever you hit the home button, the game state is saved. We support fast app resumption so assuming you don't kill the process, you'll be right back where you started. If the process dies (because you reboot the device, for example), we load full state of the world. You may be back at the beginning of the level but everything that has changed in the world when you last saved -- every plant planted, every creature spawned, every fertile terrain changed, every breakable broken -- will be back where you left it. We also save for you whenever you transition between physical levels or whenever the biomass goes up.
I am reserving judgement on the game at the moment since I have no idea yet as to its real depth, (played for a half hour or so) but who on earth thought those "character" photos were a good idea? Talk about breaking immersion. Some character art to suit the theme and style of the game would have been infinitely preferable. (All that those photos suit is the stiff, wooden main character animation. Again: inappropriatsville on top of the much better created backgrounds.)
I think I'm going to skip on the game for now until I see some reviews. I saw those character portraits a week ago, and they really turned me off. Not sure what's up with them.