A Fish
OK, like Talesof Under, this will be my first SBIH entry. Be aware if I make mistakes.
- The first thing about Magic Tiles 3: Piano Game is that it’s a very obvious rip-off of the popular music game Piano Tiles 2, but that definitely isn’t the worst aspect of it. For one, most of the songs are bad covers of what is popular at the time, which are mediocre at best & horrible by themselves at worst. There’s also false advertising behind it, as the devs use the original songs. Said ads are also EVERYWHERE in other games. The tiles themselves don’t make sounds most of the time. There are also backgrounds... which you have to pay for to unlock. Finally, there’s the VIP subscription, which can’t be deactivated until your sub’s up! And yet it’s number 1 on the App Store.
If a game reaches #1 on the app store, it has to have done something right. No, it doesn't qualify.
SP00PY month!
OR maybe it used bots to get to #1 & prevail over the actually good games?
Not Sherlock Holmes
Okay, I’m thinking about adding a new example. Please criticize me all you want, as this is my first time writing a SBIH entry.
- On the Google Play store and App Store, there are many games involving combining two elements together to get something new. Most of these games range from “average” to “good”, but one stands out in particular as the absolute one: Crafting Story, by Sergey Manucharyan. It actually starts off with a promising idea: a boy finds a magical globe that allows him to manipulate the world, but it quickly degenerates into a mess. For one thing, most of the element pictures are blatantly plagiarized from Doodle God, another alchemy game. Even if you can get past that, the game shovels an advertisement in your face every two combinations, which causes it to quickly turn into an ad farm with only a few seconds of gameplay in between. Most of the combinations are absolutely nonsensical: in one stage, you have to combine a kiwi with a pineapple to get a coconut. To top it all off, in a recent update, the game is Unwinnable by Mistake due to a glitch that makes it so you can’t get past the city stage. Overall, you’re better off just sticking with other alchemy games: at least those have a shred of logic to them.
You should mention reviews so we can be sure everyone hates the game and not just you.
Would a 3 star rating on Google Play count?
“Now! Let us engage in the art of deduction!”
3 stars is So Okay, It's Average. Too many ads isn't a SBIH-worthy flaw unless it's really severe (such as an ad popping up during a tricky action sequence, which doesn't seem to apply to this game). And according to one of the reviews, you can avoid the ads by turning off your phone's internet connection.
Not Sherlock Holmes
I don’t know if Cup Hand Adventures qualifies, as it’s just one of many, many terrible bootlegs, which means it’s not unique enough to qualify here. And the example says that it qualifies “because of the airplane powerup”.
“Now! Let us engage in the art of deduction!” Hide / Show Replies
To be fair, that airplane powerup looks like it really messes the game up.
But you have a point that there are so many bad mobile phone games that are just clones of each other with a different character slapped on, so it's not really worth covering all of them unless there's something that makes the game particularly bad (such as excessive microtransactions or severe glitches).
Declined the cut due to inbounds and redirected the page instead.
Edited by GastonRabbit Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.