Apple Arcade: Grindstone, Bleak Sword, and Overland Review

Apple Arcade is Apple’s mobile game subscription service. The service gives subscribers access to hundreds of games without intrusive ads or microtransactions. The subscription fee is 200 rubles per month. Many of the games available through Apple Arcade support the use of controllers, which significantly improves the comfort of playing on iOS devices. It’s important to note that not all of the games presented meet high quality standards, and some of them may not be of interest to users.

Today, let’s take a look at three more games from Apple Arcade and assess whether they’re worth paying attention to. In this fifth installment, we’ve taken on Grindstone, Bleak Sword, and Overland.

We’ll take a look at three more games from Apple Arcade and evaluate whether they’re worth checking out.

Apple Arcade: Grindstone

Let’s start with Arcade’s variant of the Bejeweled/Candy Crush game. As you’d expect, it’s cooler and far more interesting than most clones in this genre of mobile games.

Track your way through matching creatures – subject to certain challenges like treasure chests, boss monsters, and magic stones that let you switch colors – and then hit “Go.” Instead of the gentle clinking of jewels (which has been repeated from game to game for decades now…) you’ll be rewarded with ridiculously gory (albeit cartoonish) animation.

The Grindstone game, which is much easier to pick up and spend time in it in small intervals than it is to put away, also takes the prize as the most addictive arcade game I’ve ever tried… this week (:

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Apple Arcade: Bleak Sword

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Devolver RPG takes the style and atmosphere of Dark Souls and puts it through a pretty 8-bit filter. Here’s the most accurate and succinct description of the game.

So here’s the most accurate and succinct description of the game.

The difficulty increases madly as you dodge, parry, and cut through increasingly dangerous mobs of monsters and bad hamsters: some levels are so demanding that you have to plan them out like Hotline Miami. You get as many attempts as you want – the game is pretty forgiving – but one death results in the loss of all your gear… unless you can complete the level on the next attempt, which makes for tense gameplay.

The game’s gameplay is a lot of fun.

Bleak Sword is fast, addictive, and a lot of fun. It’s also occasionally infuriating, as only good games can be. I may not be a particular fan of the Dark Souls series, but I think this «simplified» mobile version should appeal to a lot of people, since I had fun passing the time with it as well.

Apple Arcade: Overland

FTL, reimagined as a road trip; The Walking Dead, based on a Cormac McCarthy script; a turn-based version of Resident Evil… all of these descriptions characterize the next mobile title in one way or another. This survival game draws inspiration from the best, and the result is atmospheric melancholy and desperate complexity.

Survival Game.

Each level is both a puzzle and a fragment of isometric Americana: a few squares of asphalt, grass, picnic tables, abandoned cars, and hazards. As the monsters get closer, you have to make decisions about which resources are needed and which (and who) will have to be left behind. It’s an exciting and addictive game among the mobile segment.

An exciting and addictive game among the mobile segment.