Setup: iPad Pro
Developer: BattleBrew
Version: 1.4.3
Released: 9/19/2019
Since I started No Escape I have tried hard to provide coverage of interesting mobile games. I believe that mobile gaming is often maligned unfairly, where some of its brightest lights are ignored entirely to shame its weakest links. If every PS4 game was judged using Life of Black Tiger as a primary calibrator, you might assume that the console produced nothing but shovelware with “a few gems” like Bloodborne mixed in. However, despite my love for the category, not even I can deny that there are absolutely problems with it that conventional video games by and large don’t have.
Microtransactions, premium currencies, artificial progress gates, pay-to-win packages – all legitimate issues that plague far too many games in the mobile space. And these things are issues for many people: kids who don’t understand how money works and their parents faced with footing a $500 App Store bill; players with gambling addictions; the so-called “whale economy” that preys on people who can and do regularly spend thousands of dollars on gacha pulls and gem packages. And while you can find these things in conventional games too – hello, EA and Star Wars: Battlefront II – their concentration within mobile gaming is unreal. It’s almost expected for a new game to have some kind of microtransaction scheme. And by and large? It will.
Apple Arcade launched last year, and part of its hype train was focused on the fact that games coming to the service would not have any such in-app purchases. You pay $5 for the service and nothing for the games, ever. Apple made deals with a wide array of developers – some conventional, many mobile-only – and brought a wide variety of games to the platform. Some of those games are closer to conventional video game-ass-video games than to a game like Candy Crush or GardenScapes, but many are dyed-in-the-wool mobile game-ass-mobile games.
The interesting bit is seeing what happens when these games lose the things that make mobile gaming so unbearable in many folks’ eyes.
This is Down at the Arcade, a series where I quixotically attempt to cover every single Apple Arcade game in the order it was published in. Today’s game: BattleSky Brigade: Harpooner.
The truth nobody wants you to know about mobile games is that they’re actually pretty fucking fun. Like, on average, the main draw many mobile games have is that they look marginally interesting and suck you into the gameplay loop. This is how they get you paying for gems and buying extensions to how long you can keep playing without stopping and pulling like five hundred characters in your favorite gacha game. If there was any kind of “objective” “gamefeel” “measurement chart” it would be very difficult to rate a competent mobile game below a 7 or 8 out of 10, uh, gamefeels.
BattleSky Brigade: Harpooner (which I’m just going to refer to as Harpooner from now on because… come on man) is absolutely a mobile game-ass-mobile game. It is aggressively meant to be played on your phone. The gameplay loop, which I can only describe as “Vlambeer’s Ridiculous Fishing but inverted?” takes place over a matter of seconds rather than minutes, so grinding becomes much less of a chore and more something you can do while waiting for a file to download or waiting in line at McDonalds or something.
The main thing I dealt with through my playthrough is that the game is intensely geared toward a preteen-young teen demographic, with juvenile-yet-not-inappropriate jokes, cutesy characters that aren’t cloying, and a progression system that isn’t overly complicated. I felt myself wanting to bounce off Harpooner pretty regularly, but at no point could I say I was having a terrible go of it. It’s just very much not for me.
So why am I fascinated by Harpooner? Because in the course of playing the game I thought I could spot the places where a microtransaction scheme or an artificial progress gate was supposed to go. The most obvious spot was in the airship upgrade systems. The whole thing felt like I should be spending $2.99 to instantly unlock a particular weapon or engine upgrade, but of course – none of that to be found here. Other examples include areas that weren’t locked down but probably should have been, the absence of a life counter which would prevent you from playing for a certain amount of time after a certain number of game-overs, and the existence of a world where you could basically come untethered from the airship and collect everything you got at the end of a run – not locked behind any paid DLC at all.
You’d have a hard time convincing me that if you put this on your nephew Brian’s iPod touch, he wouldn’t just play the shit out of it. And considering the alternatives? That’s alright.
While it’s not my cup of tea, Harpooner represents a positive force within the broader project of Apple Arcade. It makes sense for a game like Shinsekai Into the Depths looks and feels like a typical higher-budget indie game; it lends the service conventional legitimacy. Likewise, Harpooner legitimizes the service not just as another subscription games service, but specifically as a mobile games service. And it provides a blueprint for how mobile games can keep their addictive gameplay without keeping the addictive purchases.
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