Broken Game with Ads – All My Gods HD Review

All My Gods is a brief resource management game from Realore, the guys who brought us the Roads of Rome series which is the best resource management games I have found for the iPad. Realore is also the company behind Northern Tale, Pioneer Lands, and the Island Tribe series. In fact, All My Gods contains gameplay that references Roads of Rome and Island Tribes. The company is no stranger to the genre and is capable of high quality games. Unfortunately, they miss the mark here. All My Gods can be finished in just a few hours, even taking into account the time needed for new players to figure out how things work. The game's price seems to reflect the typical length of gameplay, but don't expect to be occupied for long. The game also has some flaws that can be hard to overlook, partly because of cumulative irritation and partly because the flaws should be so easy to fix. Selecting objects is touchy. You have to hit just the right spot or you select something else, which means you spend the entire game struggling to select the proper item. You have limited space in which to build and you need multiples of most buildings which is a legitimate in-game challenge, but the limited room exacerbates the selection difficulties, which were already a serious hassle. Most of the explanations of game mechanics are provided through popup windows amidst story dialogue, making explanations easy to miss and impossible to call back for later review. Some information is covered in the Help available from the menu, but certain things were left out. Buildings that increase storage capacity for a resource will provide that information in their descriptions, but if the game ever says anywhere what the starting values are, I never saw it. So you find out the maximum you can store of a resource only when you reach that number. And the specs for different building levels can only be seen by keeping different levels of buildings on hand for reference. In addition to piles of rocks and trees that must be cleared to make room for buildings, there are a number of pointless rock formations that clutter up the area and cannot be cleared. This not only reduces the area in which you can build, it also makes it impossible to arrange your buildings in neat lines, which probably only matters to the OCD, but there it is. Draining swamp or lava areas to convert them to possible building locations leaves graphic patches that are eyesores and that clutter the visual landscape, and the visual landscape is going to get pretty cluttered anyway. Far worse is how the game bombards you with in-game popup advertisements which seem to be designed to make you select them accidentally while you're playing. I got the game as a free download, but ordinarily it requires payment, and I would be quite unhappy if I had paid for the game only to be spammed with ads. And if you finish all the storyline scenarios, the game may crash at the end, and then even closing the game and rebooting the device won't get it running again. All you can do is delete and reinstall, which means losing all your game saves. What's worse: this game-breaking bug has been present and complained about in more than one update of the game. And except for these very fixable flaws, it's actually a fun little game. It has nice graphics. The storyline is unusual and full of humor. At least to some extent, you can customize the layout of your settlement which is a nice feature, and because most of your tasks have no timer, it has the potential to be a relaxing, enjoyable experience. If Realore fixes the crash at the end of All My Gods and removes the in-game ads, I will be happy to adjust this review and my rating. If Realore fixes the end of game crash, removes the in-game popup ads, and corrects the selection of the green confirmation checkmarks, the game will be worthy of good marks. But months have passed already with no fix in sight, and I do not recommend purchasing this game until these issues are fixed.
Review by player58z on All My Gods HD.