SEED 1 – Rise of Darkness, a new fantasy-RPG developed by CH GAMES and published by Chillingo, has been released in the app store. Feeling like a budget version of other recently released RPGs, SEED falls significantly short of our expectations.
SEED brings very little new to the table with this effort, catering to the typical RPG clichés in an effort to fit in rather than break out. You control the character of Litta, a young boy with big dreams. These dreams will take him on the adventure of a lifetime, which evidently involves fighting monsters, dressing up, and performing mundane tasks like collecting mushrooms and walking around. His journey will lead him through more than 20 different villages, rife with danger and more mundane tasks, er, quests. These quests will allow you to gain experience, learn valuable skills, earn powerful weapons, and the like. Many of these items actually alter Litta’s appearance, as you equip him with new armor and weapons. Objects that you pick up along the way can be combined and compounded to make newer, more powerful objects to assist you in defeating the forces of evil bent on enslaving the land and its people. Use magic and potions to defeat your enemies and prevent the end of civilization. And so on and so forth. Now, we’re not knocking SEED per se, but just pointing out that these games have become fairly interchangeable, save for the graphics, music, and controls. It gets to the point where it’s hardly worth mentioning the backstory and plot of the game, as it could easily describe most of the games in the field.
To set itself apart, SEED needs to bring it with some awe-inspiring game elements. Sadly, it does not do so. The graphics feel a bit chunky and cartoonish, not polished and stunning like the images we saw in the promotional preview items. Granted, the character’s appearance changes are a nice touch, as are the day/night changes based on the real world day/night cycle, but this is neither groundbreaking nor overly impressive, especially given that some quests can only be carried out at night. This would appear to be more of a hindrance to gameplay than an enhancement, especially if a player is unable to play at certain times of the day. The music is some cheesy looping track that doesn’t even loop smoothly, stuttering often enough to make immersing yourself in the gameplay a near-impossible task. Shutting it off eliminates all sound effects, so that’s not even a great option.
The controls are a bit of a mixed bag, too. We loved the save button in the upper-left corner. Short of autosaving, this is the most unobtrusive way to handle that feature. The virtual pad forces you into choppy up/down/left/right movements, where right angles rule and smooth strides have been banished from the land. It felt a bit oversensitive to us, and we found ourselves repeating movements back and forth until we settled in the spot we wanted to be in originally. We also experiences significant issues with the up button not working properly. Pressing it more often than not would make Leeta slide to the left or right, or not move at all. We had to hit it just right to properly activate the up direction. This is a problem we’ve noticed in a couple of other games, too. It should be a relatively easy fix, but it was extremely frustrating trying to negotiate the game with this issue. There is a myriad of tiny circle buttons for quick access to user-chosen items on the right side of the screen that seem made for a stylus and little else. It’s all a bit cluttered for our taste. A large action button is in the bottom right corner, handling the fighting, talking, etc. Next to that is a button that launches a decent menu system that allows you to see your equipment, inventory, stats, quests, potions and more, albeit in very, very tiny form. We were impressed by how much they crammed in there; not so with how difficult it was to figure out what things were and actually hit the right buttons. Your health bar is along the screen bottom, in an awkward place that is often covered by our fingers, so it is actually surprising when Leeta dies because we rarely saw it coming. A tiny health bar over his head during fights might offer more useful feedback regarding his current health.
SEED includes a shop where DLC can be purchased, though it is unnecessary to enjoy the full experience. Replay value is what you make of it. There is not a class system like in other RPGs, so replaying as a different character is not an option. It feels like you will have witnessed all that the game has to offer on the first playthrough. While adequate as a standalone (with a few future tweaks), SEED is overshadowed by the competition in just about every way. Currently available for free, its price tag will attract the budget-conscious gamer who’s willing to settle for SEED’s quirks. We’re willing to give SEED the benefit of the doubt and a cautious 4-Dimple score with the expectations that updates must be forthcoming quickly or SEED will fail to germinate.
SEED 1 – Rise of Darkness gets our AppSmile 4-Dimple rating:
