If you love shelling out cash on useless in-game material, Beards and Beaks will be great for you. Otherwise, this WP7 exclusive is disappointing, and you should stay away.
Overall Score: 2/5
After spending $3 to get the game, your lasting value is incredibly short and you are expected to purchase more content. Also, the controls can be frustrating and the gameplay simply isn’t that interesting.
Gameplay: 2/5
There’s nothing too interesting about this game. It plays out as a real-time strategy game, where you control a fleet of gnomes and try to collect as many jewels as possible while defeating the enemy birds. There’s so much going on in such a small space that the controls can be very frustrating. Sometimes you will accidentally throw your gnome into the water, killing him. Other times, you’ll accidentally move one character instead of another. And while the gameplay does have a lot of variation between levels where you protect a base, destroy a base, collect jewels, kill enemies, or defeat a rare boss, there’s nothing that I find too enjoyable about this. There are power-ups that you can use, but you have to stop playing the game for a few hours to let them recharge, or pay actual money to use them! It appears you will either love or hate this game, but I am on the side of hate.
Presentation: 3/5
The music is fun and jazzy, but the presentation is very average. It also takes a decent amount of time to resume your game, considering that the game isn’t visually demanding. All the levels are played out on a static background, and even the water isn’t animated.
Lasting Value: 2/5
The game will last you between 1 and 2 hours. After that, the developers want you to BUY more levels! When you already paid $3 for a mobile game, you expect to get at least 3 hours of gameplay from it. Oh and even if you buy the levels, there’s more levels that still haven’t been created yet, so you’ll have to wait for those to be made. This is a mobile game; the developers should have the game finished and release all the levels for free like all the other mobile games! You don’t see Angry Birds charging you a dollar more after you’ve played 2 hours worth of their levels! There are leaderboards and achievements, and a star rating system for completing the levels, but being asked to pay for additional content really destroys the experience.
Title: Beards & Beaks
Price: $2.99 + ridiculous in-game content
Publisher: Sadly, it’s Microsoft Game Studios. I figured they could have made a better game for their own phone.