Simply Amazing! A Hidden Gem of The App Store – Solomon's Boneyard Review

When it comes to classic twin stick shooters, no other app in the store even comes close to Solomon’s Boneyard. The simple fluidity of the gameplay, randomness of the level up system, and sense of progress of the perks system all combine to create a great unique experience with every run. This, combined with the developer’s relentless drive to make the game better (even pushing updates years after launch to improve the game), reveals a true hidden gem in the App Store. And the reviews don’t lie, people love boneyard for the aforementioned reasons. Despite how great the game is, That isn’t to say that there aren’t any issues with the game. First of all was the loss of data. Due to the nature of such conversions, this loss is understandable. If any of you lost data or gold, feel free to contact Rapisoft support. They were extremely helpful (and nice) to me when I was trying to get my gold back. Similarly if you bought bribe destiny/ other paid perks before, you now can restore for removal of ads which imo is a great compromise considering removal of ads costs $3.99. My issue with data in this game is that it is 100% localized without any cloud save feature whatsoever. Please make a way to upload/link ones data to their FB/Gamecenter. This would make it so that people can’t lose data even when deleting the app and saving your support team a lot of trouble restoring user data when they switch phones etc. Second issue was the introduction of ads. Ads definitely were a turn off to many, due to their intrusiveness. However in this case I would actually have to argue in favor of the developers. It literally only costs $3.99 to remove these ads. In my opinion $3.99 is a solid price for a game like this if it were to be sold. Instead, the creator lets your try the game for free and then let you decide if you want to “purchase” the game. If you don’t want to spend money, worry not as you can play the full game without paying anyways. Similarly, during my time playing with ads, they only appear during level up and therefore do not intrude on gameplay. My only issue with ads that that watching ads for gold gives you WAY too many gold. When I was watching ads for gold, I only got 6 second ads which usually rewarded around 300 gold. However, I got a few jackpots ranging from 2.5k to 10k gold. In around an hour I was able to accrue over 200k gold. This is terrible because you get WAY too much gold from watching ads and it makes it almost pointless to play the game for gold (or pay any money for gold) when you could watch and ad and earn 10-100 times more gold in the same amount of time. This ruined my sense of progress considering that originally you had to play to get perks and progress. Now it’s just watch ads for a couple hours and you’ve got everything. Therefore I think that ads for gold should be removed (or at least reduce the gold you get from them / limit the gold you can get per day like a 5 ads per hour thing). I do think that ads can be used for good purposes. For example, a player could opt to do a one time cheat death by watching an ad after they die. That brings me to my next point, cheat death. If you’re getting mobbed, cheat death won’t save you because recovering health means nothing when you can’t move and you’re surrounded. Cheat death should either cast a teleport or a flame ring to clear the enemies as soon as it happens in order to give you a true second chance. Finally the gold sink. Personally I despise the tonics that let you carry more perks. I believe that once you’ve progressed far enough in the game to earn your gold, it should be spent on things that seem “fun” and enjoyable. Therefore making the tonics cost up to 2000 gold for every run just so you can run a “fun” but not efficient combination of perks is downright distasteful. You can reduce the cost of tonics, but once you get around to 400 gold it becomes more or less pointless to keep improving it as the cost to reduce tonic cost by ~20 is 10000 gold. Therefore I believe that every time you buy cheaper tonics, the tonic price gets reduced by 50 until you hit 0. That gives players a huge upgrade chain with constant benefit (lots of gold needed to max) but also lets players have fun with crazy perks after they max everything out with little to no cost. The scavenger in its current state is also poorly done. You should only have to pay gold to retrieve certain items, not pay amounts of gold to look at all the rings. The price should increase based on the rings rarity. This is because most players only really care about retrieving one or two rings at most but the scavenger charges more to find all, which is unnecessary. I do believe that the bribe destiny is well made. If there should be a gold sink, I believe bribe destiny should be the only one due to it being heavily overpowered if used correctly. However, if maxed players want to troll (going max rush) or have fun, they don’t have to do it at the expense of spending gold on perk tonics and other shenanigans. Multiplayer could be an interesting addition, but multiplayer networking and getting servers to route such data is time consuming and stressful. I doubt any such addition would be made soon and that is totally fine as I’m sure Rapisoft has other projects in mind and not much time to focus on multiplayer. Overall the game is quite an amazing twin stick shooter with a addictive style of gameplay and progression. It’s a solid 4.5/5 due to the gameplay and developer but a few areas can be touched upon which reduces the total score by about 0.5. I will round up in this review, however, because Solomon’s boneyard has always been one of my favorite games since years back. Hopefully the steam release of Solomon’s keep is going well. Looking forward to it! Potor10
Review by Potor10 on Solomon's Boneyard.