Another day, another number-based sphere-takeover game. Can this one set itself apart from the rest? There are plenty of these types of games available, most of which aren’t the greatest in the world or original in content by any means, except for a few exceptions. Is this one of those exceptions?
Title: Phage | Developer: Noalm | Genre: Strategy / Action | Players: 1 Player | Version: 1.0.8 | Size: 670K | Price: Free / £1.25 / $0.99
There’s a few genres which dominate Android Market to the point that they drown out the visibility of other games. You can barely move for all of the tower defense games, element-combination games and copyright-infringing puzzle-games that clog up the market.
Anyway, on to the awkwardly-titled genre of number-based sphere-takeover games, in which you play as one colour of self-replicating stuff. Your task is to move some of your coloured “stuff” to the blank or enemy spheres and take them over by force of numbers, eventually consuming the whole board. Simple.
Phage plays a lot like GalaxIR and its brethren, but there are some presentational differences. The spheres in the case of Phage represent bacteria which you and your competitors are trying to infect with phages, but they might just as well be planets, or even beehives, as per developer Noalm’s remarkably similar game, Beez Buzz.
Gameplay: Taking all of this into account, I was all set to give this game a serious savaging, especially as the first few levels revealed nothing new to me.
Then I started to notice a few small differences. The difficulty curve, for one, kept the game challenging for longer than I’d expected, with new strategies being required as the game progressed. There’s also added replay value, as you can play as five different species of cell, each with different levels of virus replication and virus speed. Although there isn’t a whole lot of gameplay innovation in Phage, it is nonetheless very well-executed.
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Sound & Graphics: Phage is ugly to look at and disgusting to listen to. I guess that grimy graphics and squelchy sounds could be said to be appropriate for a game about bacteria infecting each other with phages, but that doesn’t make it any nicer an experience.
Controls & Presentation: The in-game controls are spot-on, but there are frustrations in the menu system, especially the use of the back button to exit the game entirely, rather than go back to the menu. Plus it’s unacceptable to be asked to rate the game before we can even begin.
Overall: Against all of my better judgement I did enjoy Phage. Despite the substantial presentational flaws, it plays well and held my attention for hours. The free version is fine, adverts aside, and Phage is a perfectly decent example of its genre.
But we really do need to see a little more imagination and originality out there, so I can’t possibly recommend buying the paid, ad-free version in fear that it would just encourage yet more clones to enter the already overcrowded number-based sphere takeover genre. And I never want to have to write the phrase “number-based sphere takeover” ever again.
Rating: 3/5
