Review written by Mike "Sponge" Rubits
Chillingo - The Premier Games Publisher
&b=POCKETGAMER">Buy Realms from Clickgamer
[Editor's note: Two Stunads and Co. is now known as Pomegranate Studios and is still developing games, albiet for the iPhone platform. If you were a fan of the excellent SpaceTime graphing application, it's now available for the iPhone. Even better, Realms is now completely free!]
Realms was never exactly one of the big name games in the PocketPC community. This, frankly, stuns me (how punny!) as Realms is an intensely enjoyable game, although a bit easy, with plenty of replayability. It also marked the introduction of Two Stunads & Co. who went on to make SpaceTime, an impressive calculator for the PocketPC, for all the people who actually do work with their PocketPC.
Graphics
Realms features mostly pre-rendered sprites in a space setting. Despite the space theme, which has been done to death in the past, Realms keeps a unique identity through its colourful backgrounds and it's varied ship design. Upon opening the game, Realms makes an attempt at dragging you into the game with all sorts of connection sequences, and effects you would see on a terminal. While it's far from being original, it still does a nice job of bringing the player into the game. Thankfully, this is easily bypassed, as one of the most annoying things in any game are forced intro sequences, only amplified if the game is a quick pick-up game like this one. The UI is also done well; it looks a bit more complex than the norm, but is actually quite simple to navigate. All of this adds to the game, and gives it a polished, professional look, which doesn't happen enough in PocketPC gaming today.
In the game, there's plenty of eye-candy to be found, with rockets bellowing large flames, and tons of small shiny things to stare and drool at. Backgrounds stray from being just a modified Photoshop noise filter starfield, and add various solar objects that are rather nice to look at. I personally spent a few minutes just moving around and staring at the background on occasion. Getting into the action of the game, everything is just smooth. Despite my best attempts, I haven't been able to get the game to slow down a significant amount, ever. Enemy projectiles stick out enough to be noticeable, and to allow you time to maneuver around them, not just blend into the background and only make their presence known when you take damage. The HUD is basic to prevent it getting in the way, and it does a good job in this. It's barely noticeable unless you're specifically looking for it, a sign of a thought-out design.
While the models in Realms are usually excellent, sometimes the texture work on them is a bit weak in comparison. The human ship is just a chrome texture, no markings, not even a window where one would assume the pilot goes. Considering you're staring at the ship entire game, along with the few close-ups, it's a bit odd. This is probably my only problem with the game's graphics.
Sound
Music in the game is limited to mostly a trance-sounding track, which while it serves it's purpose, left me wanting a lot more. The included track is catchy, however this may lead to it beind turned off even faster, as by the time you've progressed into the further realms, it'll become very agitating. I feel that some more subdued music could go a long away in extending the time until one becomes annoyed with it, but what's there is a better effort than most games.
Personally, I would be impressed with the detail put in the game if there were some ambient sounds, such as some tech-sounding noises in the UIs, or even inside the game. The SFX also aren't nearly powerful enough to convey the same impact the graphics do. Laser shots don't really linger around, there's a small whimper, and then they're gone. I was even unable to determine if there were engine sounds using the built in speakers of my H3955. Sadly, it seems that sounds were more or less an afterthought, however the addition of some ambience and the strengthening of other sounds could make Realms one of the showcases of gaming in the sound area.
Gameplay
Thankfully, Realms offers a lot in this department. To sum up it's gameplay in one phrase would basically be "asteroids on crack." It takes this tried formula, adds challenging enemies that shoot back, objectives, and upgrades in order to differentiate it from the rest of the flock.
Realms is basically split up into 6 different, well, realms, each with a different race of enemies. Inside it are 5 different missions, giving you a total of 30 missions, for the math impaired. For the most part, they're your garden variety destroy something, or protect something else type of missions. In order to try and liven things up, there's the aspect of money, or Tari in the Realms universe. Collecting these allow you to upgrade your ship's stats, which I found happened pretty quickly, to getting new, very expensive, inventory upgrades. By the last realm, your ship will be absolutely destructive, although your opponents will have had the same boost in firepower as you by this time. While Realms also has several items to buy, as mentioned above, I've found that most of them are imbalanced; too weak and too expensive. I progressed through the game for quite a while before even remembering I could be upgrading my weapons. A minor blemish which only may lower the replay value a bit, however.
The skill level is a bit odd. I found the first mission to be pretty tough, however, after that I flew through the rest of the missions, especially if you avoid killing the last objective in order to collect more Tari. (On higher skill levels you have less money, and the enemy are more destructive. This seems to be the only discernable effect of making the game more challenging.)
One definite high point is the physics. In a game like this, they can pretty much make or break a game. Luckily they end up being very good, allowing you to pull off some pretty tricky, and cool looking, maneuvers. Braking is nearly instant though; you can come to a dead stop way too quickly, and somewhat eliminates a bit of strategy from the game. Collisions work as they should, you'll either stick to something, or bounce off of it, although it doesn't do much damage in either case. It features a high level of realism; acceleration, momentum, and damage is modeled accurately. To avoid becoming aggravating, the damage model is much more forgivable than the rest, otherwise Realms would've quickly become friends with the great /dev/null in the sky for me, and among many other people I would imagine.
Once you beat the missions, there's still more gameplay to be had, in the form of the Melee mode, available at any time. This is basically deathmatch. Pick your ships, setting, realm (background) and blast everything in sight. A nice touch for some quick gaming, just too bad there's no multiplayer, as I can imagine this would be a real blast.
Realms recovers very nicely from a shutdown, although I did notice sound to be absent a minority of the occasions, making it a great game for boring classes or meetings.
Pros:
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Pre-rendered graphics are very high quality
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Tons of missions, with melee mode
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Physics add deep gameplay
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Smart AI puts up great fights
Cons:
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Mediocre sound
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Poor difficulty scaling
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Occasionally odd texturing
Conclusion:
Realms is a must-try for any PocketPC gamer. Definitely underrated by far, Realms is probably one of the top space shooters on the market to date, and for the foreseeable future. It blends above-average graphics, with a greatly expanded Asteroids like gameplay formula, with physics that haven't been seen since RocketElite, Realms rises above the rest of the crowd, and delivers a game that rivals some professional efforts.
Score-by-score breakdown
Gameplay: 80%
Graphics: 80%
Sound: 60%
Overall: 80%
Please note that the overall score is more than simply an average of the individual ratings. Many thanks to Pomegranate Studios for providing our review copy.
You may wish to search for more reviews of games from Pomegranate Studios. Alternatively, you can view all the reviews written by Mike "Sponge" Rubits.
