Game Reviews

Sand Flame

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iOS
| Sand Flame
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Sand Flame
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iOS
| Sand Flame

Incredibly stupid games aren't necessarily bad. I mean, you can't throw a hat in the App Store without hitting a brainless and thoroughly enjoyable action game.

But when a game is both incredibly stupid AND bad... well, it doesn't make for a particularly attractive mixture.

Meet Sand Flame. It's incredibly stupid. And bad.

Bullet hell

We're in the mood for getting straight to the point here. This is partly because it's in keeping with Sand Flame's no-nonsense gunplay, but mostly because we want to hurry along and play something else.

This is a third-person shooter with an exaggerated but charmless Lego-meets-comic book art style.

You nudge your chunky soldier along a tightly restricted path with a virtual analogue stick. You aim your weapon by dragging on the screen with your right thumb, and you shoot by hitting the 'shoot' button.

The gunplay itself feels wooden and unsatisfying, with bullet-sponge enemies giving scant indication that they're being shot (despite leaking gallons of cartoonclaret) until they keel over. There's little possibility of avoiding shots yourself without hanging back and nipping in and out of cover.

Melee combat is bewilderingly prosaic, too, to the point where you'll question whether your knife of choice is really being swung.

Political land mine

If that ineffectual combat wasn't bad enough, let me tell you all about the game's tiresome ecosystem. Put simply, you are furnished with marginally less rubbish weapons for increasingly exorbitant sums.

You could grind through the game's war of attrition levels to earn enough for a minor pistol upgrade through the game's confusing menus, but why do that when you can spend $5 on a machine gun instead? Why, indeed.

Meanwhile, we'll give the developer the benefit of the doubt and simply call its portrayal of terrorists and the freakily busty female character 'crude'. Yes.

We should also mention that the game didn't run properly on our iPhone 5S.

Sand Flame is big, dumb, and not much fun. That's a truly deadly combination. And not in the way that the developer might have hoped for.

Sand Flame

Sand Flame is a sluggish, unattractive, and just plain bland third-person shooter with grind-heavy combat and a wearisome IAP model
Score
Jon Mundy
Jon Mundy
Jon is a consummate expert in adventure, action, and sports games. Which is just as well, as in real life he's timid, lazy, and unfit. It's amazing how these things even themselves out.