More Android games I've enjoyed: Spin Hero 🎰, Prune 🌲, Psychofunk ▶️
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A slot spinning RPG, a tree pruning puzzler, and an autorunning platformer, here’s 3 more Android games I’ve been playing lately!
#1: Spin Hero
Similar in concept to games like Spincraft (reviewed 2 years ago), Spin Hero is all about fighting your way through dungeons using the synergy between items in your slot machine. It’s great!
Screenshots
All screenshots are from version 1.2.1:
| Hero select | Gameplay | Game over | Map |
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Review
As mentioned, Spin Hero is all about combat. After picking from the 4 heroes (essentially Melee, Thief, Lifesteal, Boss Hunter), and choosing your starter item pack (e.g. a more melee focussed one, or a blind one with more coins, etc), you’ll begin your adventure.
Making your way through enemies, elite enemies, bosses, chests, and shops, your goal is to build up a “deck” of items that can deal enough damage whilst still defending yourself from enemy attacks. You’ll be attacking with melee (some weapons degrade), ranged (need a bow and arrows), or magic (need mana), or (ideally!) some combination of all 3.
Each turn you’ll spin, your items will interact with each other and calculate the melee / range / mage attack, your armour, and “apply” it to the enemy. Deal more damage than their armour & health? You win, time for the next round, until you complete the entire stage!
Layered on top of this basic gameplay loop are 12 status effects, from simple things like Poison or Regeneration to interesting modifiers like Shock (randomly increase / decrease all attacks) or Frail (reduces armour gain). These effects operate in “stacks”, so 20 stacked Poison will deal 20x as much damage, making it entirely possible to focus on accumulating these effects during a run.
There are also “Runes”, essential manual attacks with a cooldown. They typically apply a stack of some kind, and can be purchased in the store alongside various items. Oh right, the items…
The main way your runs will vary are the items. Stacking effects, combining the effects of similar items, and eventually getting a crazy overpowered item are what drive your runs. I’ve done a few melee & lifesteal driven runs, where the entire aim is to maximise damage (and therefore healing), using melee weapons that affect each other. For example, axes often amplify the damage of nearby axes, or even permanently increase their damage.
Items are selected after each enemy kill (with stronger enemies rewarding better items) or in the store, with limited rerolls. They have the typical rarity colours, although I’ve only seen 1 Legendary item and 0 Uniques yet.
Range and mage a bit trickier to use than melee, since even the best bow (ignoring infinity bows!) still needs a quiver either near them or on the board and mana for magic is a constantly draining and renewing resource. To balance this they typically deal more damage, so if you get a good collection of items (e.g. items that gain mana more than you use it) the combat styles can be impressively high damage.
These items can get confusing, especially when they have multiple damage multipliers applied, making the ability to tap an item for details being super helpful.
Finally, your characters will also gain XP and unlock new unique abilities as you play. After completing all 5 stages as a character (I managed with Baldwin’s Lifesteal!), you unlock modifiers making the game a bit more difficult (e.g. extra enemy HP), unfortunately after managing to complete the game once, there’s not much extra gameplay to encourage repeated playthroughs.
Monetisation
Spin Hero is a one-off payment of £3.99 (~$5), or is included in Google Play Pass.
Tips
- You can drastically increase the turn speed with the
>>>>in the bottom right, and enable autospin (not recommended). - Read items carefully, and mentally keep track of what resources (e.g. mana) you have a surplus or deficit of.
- Anything that permanently stacks (e.g. max mana, damage per hit) will become essential later on, as enemy health scales up.
- It’s usually worth fighting basic enemies since you should be able to kill them easily, gaining gold and stacking permanent item boosts.
- I love lifesteal in games, and it seems super powerful in Spin Hero too!
- The game is also available on Steam for the same price, where it has received “Mostly Positive” reviews.
- There’s a Discord server for the game, with the developer being fairly active.
#2: Prune
Prune is a relaxing real-time puzzle game all about tactically growing a tree and reaching as much light as possible, or as the developer puts it:
Cultivate what matters. Cut away the rest.
Screenshots
All screenshots are from version 1.1.7:
| Level select | Deadly sun | Blue energy | Multiple obstacles |
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Review
Prune is a good example of how a single core game mechanic can carry a game with minimal additions. In this case, your tree steadily grows and you must guide it towards light sources to help it flower. How? You guessed it, by pruning.
Pruning part of your growing tree lets the growth happen elsewhere, but if you run out of places to grow further you’re stuck. This, plus wind, lets you grow your tree in a curved shape around obstacles or towards energy sources. There are also red suns that kill the tree part that touches them, so need to be given a wide berth.
I’m on Prune’s 24th level, and pretty sure I’ve seen most of the mechanics. Failure is not a big setback, as you can grow a new tree without even restarting the level by just pruning your entire tree away. Each puzzle is well-designed, clearly being solvable even though actually solving it might require a combination of lucky growths and skill.
Unbelievably, Prune is apparently 10 years old (at least the iOS original is)! It looks excellent for its age, and impressively has no text (as far as I can see) besides the credits and language select. This means anyone can pick it up easily without a lengthy tutorial, impressive for a game with a unique core mechanic.
Monetisation
One-time £3.89 (~$5) purchase, included with Play Pass.
Tips
- Cut branches early, so energy isn’t wasted on them.
- When low on energy, branches will slowly grow a tiny bit more, excellent for just squeezing into the light.
- The dots at the top of the screen roughly indicate how many flowers need to grow, but generally you’ll either solve the puzzle or not.
#3: Psychofunk
Psychofunk is an absurdly stylish autowalking platforming puzzler, which does an excellent job at reminding me how poor I am at this kind of game!
Screenshots
All screenshots are from version 2.1.4:
| Main menu | Level select | Level | Boss fight |
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Review
Psychofunk is an unforgiving game, where you must help your relentlessly forward walking character into the exit, ideally collecting any bonus coins. Along the way, you’ll have all kinds of blocks impeding you (ice, spikes, enemies). Dying usually restarts from the level’s start, with some levels featuring a single breakpoint.
The early levels will seem overly simple, but even 20 levels in I’m getting a little baffled figuring out the series of actions needed to reach the exit! For example, you may be on the same level as a block that breaks under impact, so you’ll need to use a “bounce” block to go up a level, then tap the togglable block on that level to land, walk along a bit, and drop down, breaking the block. But oops, you’re facing the wrong way, you should have turned around halfway through this process somehow!
Stylistically, Psychofunk reminds me a bit of Google Jump, with the sketched blocks clearly having fairly generous hitboxes “under the hood”, and every screen being full of little intricately designed details. A great distraction from the repeated deaths.
I’m around 25 levels in, with 1 boss killed, and it’s hard to fault the quick gameplay loops, even if they are somewhat infuriatingly difficult! The challenge is entirely within my own brain, with the responsive and easily understood controls (tap a block to interact, that’s it) not hindering whatsoever.
Monetisation
One-time £2.99 (~$4) purchase, also included in Play Pass.
Tips
- You can land on the head of green block enemies to break them, I took an embarrassingly long time to realise this, making early levels far harder than they needed to be!
- There’s usually 2 paths to proceed forward, so going back and replaying past levels where you missed coins will let you skip levels.