Of the couple hundred apps to cycle through my iPhone's home screen over the last few years, it's the "visual showpiece" titles that I've had the most trouble deleting. And that's not because I'm a bona fide Infinity Blade fanatic, nor am I a Rage HD die-hard. The truth of the matter is much simpler, and much… well, shallower: I treat many of those games like the app equivalents of fancy, hardcover coffee table books. They're incredibly attractive talking points, but I too rarely revisit them on my own time.
After clearing Sunside Games' Crow in a little over an hour, I felt like I'd just skimmed through a slick (if not particularly thick) coffee table book. An admittedly gorgeous game, Crow's lavishly detailed environments and haunting audio design earn it plenty of points in the presentation department, but it suffers from stale gameplay that never really gets off the ground.
Propelled by a muddled "there are Ancients among us" plot, the titular Crow is urged across barren, breathtaking environments by a malevolent voice. The actual gameplay is split into two too-similar segments—exploration and combat—that both see your crow flying across restrictive playing fields. The exploration overworlds have you soaring and surveying until you come across your next objective, where the combat portions are "on-rails tapping" missions, meaning you steer your feathered hero into collectibles and occasionally attack baddies with gesture-based Crow Magicks.
But the exploration is too limited to feel compelling, and the combat too repetitive to be fun. There are under-explained "moral choices" after each of the game's four boss battles, but their impacts are largely insignificant. Now, if you're looking for a showpiece app to impress friends and family with the visual power packed into your smartphone, Crow could very well be the "coffee table app" that you've been looking for. However, for everyone else, there are plenty of other bird-based iOS games that are worth your time.
The bottom line. It's gorgeous and haunting, but Crow is too rarely fun to recommend.
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Of the couple hundred apps to cycle through my iPhone's home screen over the last few years, it's the "visual showpiece" titles that I've had the most trouble deleting. And that's not because I'm a bona fide Infinity Blade fanatic, nor am I a Rage HD die-hard. The truth of the matter is much simpler, and much… well, shallower: I treat many of those games like the app equivalents of fancy, hardcover coffee table books. They're incredibly attractive talking points, but I too rarely revisit them on my own time.
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