Today I’ve downloaded a cute little game called AR Shield. It’s a survival game where you control a shield character and needs to prevent a rolling ball from intersecting with the black bricks. The bricks split over time and become more dangerous with a higher probability of hitting your ball.
Players have the option to direct the character to either hit the golden ball or the bricks. Intersecting with the brick or the ball will change their direction based on where you hit them. The controls are quite clunky, but this is probably done deliberately to give you less precise control and make the game more challenging. I actually didn’t have any problem with that, and it felt quite nice.
The game comes with an AR mode, which is a more visually simplified version of the standard game mode.
I personally like casual arcade games, especially when they have interesting gameplay mechanics. AR Shield game mechanics actually felt quite good and refreshing.
I found the level design in AR to be boring and uninspiring. I think the game could have felt way better that instead of a ball you have a sheep and the dark cube is a wolf that split into tiny wolves over time. Adding some nice sound effects and more interesting animations this game would look and feel more entertaining in my opinion.
The game does have a UI bug where the UI is positioned behind the other 3D objects. You can even see this in the gameplay video on the game’s official page in the app store. Furthermore, the game placement visual aid isn’t accurate and it places the game more forward on the Z-axis relative to where I put it.
At the end of each round, you get coins, which you can later use to unlock different characters like a tiger, dog, cat, tortoise, panda, horse and many others.
I have a suggestion how to improve the game. think with a bit more love to visuals, animation, and a touch of humor, the game could have been more interesting to play. The concept is good and it’s a fun game to play, but as I said, it could have been way better with better attention to character look and animations.
If you have some free time and feel just playing a nice casual arcade game to pass time, you can download this and have some fun with it, but you won’t miss a lot if you skip it.
Download the game for iPhone and iPad here.