GAMING REVIEW

Kochadaiiyaan games review

Movie-videogame tie-ins used to synonymous with low quality, and the shift to mobile for tie-in games has largely been a good thing, since the shorter time and budget available for developing these kinds of games is a good fit for the mobile space. As tablets and phones get more powerful, that's going to change, but for now, mobile games based around movies have been seen as a reasonably good fit.
In India however, mobile games based around movies have been about as bad as the console games based around movies. When you look at movie games over the years, you can see slow improvement from the days of something like Ghajini to the new Dhoom 3 game. The latest two such games are based around the Rajinikanth starrer Kochadaiiyaan; both have been made in collaboration by Gameshastra and Hungama, and continue to show how Indian games are slowly improving. Both games are free, but ad-supported, and also include in-app purchases. Currently available only on Android, versions for iOS, Windows Phone and also Facebook are being developed.

Kochadaiiyaan: Reign of Arrows
Given what we've come to expect from Indian developers, the game is surprisingly high quality. The idea itself isn't very new, but the execution is pretty good. It looks a little chunky, and when you compare it with a game like Frontline Commando or The Collectables, then it looks terrible, but compared to the average game, Reign of Arrows is a pretty good fit.

Kochadaiiyaan: Kingdom Run

This side scrolling auto-runner is a little bit more of a problem than Reign of Arrows. The fact is that the genre has been very thoroughly exhausted by now - many of the best early games on mobiles were sidescrollers, before the slew of Temple Run clones took over. It's still worth checking out though, and it's available for free on the Android Play store.

As a result, there's nothing Kingdom Run can do to feel fresh. Add to that the fact that the animations don't feel fluid or natural, and the game starts to feel dissatisfying. With Reign of Arrows, the focus is usually on the faraway enemy, and people move a little, then get into cover, and so the flaws in animations get concealed.

Overall, this is true for both games, but platformers are a more thoroughly exploited genre and that is why the problems feel more pronounced here. The game has the same kind of monetisation as Reign of Arrows, which can be a little tedious, but again, the game is free, and is certainly a step in the right direction.