MLP mobile game - Review

So I downloaded yet another mobile game XD I was watching MLP season 4 episodes when I had the urge to see if there were any nice MLP apps around. Well, found this official one. It has the original voice cast, a storyline from the MLP seasons (a bit mashed together, but I can live with that) and very true-to-original animation. Besides the Mane 6, there are mostly everypony else from the series, from the Cake family to Lyra Heartstrings and Trixie. Also some ponies I've never heard of before, but they all have nice designs and all.

The game takes time, and battery power. It is basically a building game, where you build houses for the ponies or shops where they work, to produce goods, to make money, to buy more houses/shops/things-in-general. It is scattered with minigames, however. Each pony can earn stars (levels) by performing in minigames that appear in their houses. These minigames load up after a certain wait-time, but even with only four ponies or so, it'll take you quite a while to empty the field as the minigames load up so quickly. The levels are required for certain jobs at the shops, but you shouldn't worry too much about the requirements of your new shops, as the levels build up very quickly.

There's also a To-Do list, which in theory gives you guideline in which order to build something and also serves as a reminder of the story evolving in the background. You start up with Twilight Sparkle and go on to construct enough things to have Pinkie Pie move in and so forth. But it also clutters up with other menial tasks the games gives you. Gathering this and that, building this and that... The problem is, I hadn't played the game more than a few hours when the game gave me tasks which I can clearly see will take me days to complete. I cannot cumulate enough coins to clear the land, build the houses and buy ponies for these tasks yet. And to make more coin-accumulation, I first need to clear less land, build cheaper shops and buy aquirable ponies, and a lot of them.

This is of course because I want to save my gems (the harder currency in the game), which could speed up anything in this game. In all minigames, the game actually gives you first a choice of playing with the highest points, which of course costs gems, and you have to manually switch it over to the cheaper option. I have lost a few gems by not paying attention to this... It is especially alarming, since this is clearly a kid's game, and kids might not pay attention to any of this, as a cheap-ass adult-me :D

So if you want your small children to play this game, turn off the in-game-buying immediately! I can so see a kid raking up a huge credit card bill with this game. They'll use up the game-alloted gems quickly, and then learn the hard way that you might have wanted to save those to buy some of the nicer ponies (of course only purchaseable by gems...), but at least irl money will be safe.

Now, onto the minigames. The ones you'll mostly be playing are the ball throwing (basic swipe game, doesn't take too much time), stargazing (it is bloody hard to connect those dots in my small screen!) and apple catching (a bit more tedious, but also short). These level up your ponies. Once a level up has been reached, you'll do a short flying minigame, which is sorta-platforming-type of sequence.

There's also a mine cart mini game, that you can play about hourly, or more if you happen to find wheels in game. It is actually quite fun, and hard! I have mostly died around 600 points or so, only rarely gotten over 900. If I had gems to spare, this is where I'd use them :D

And lastly, there is an Equestria Girls dancing/rythm game. I suck at them. You only need to tap the screen in rythm, but I fail so much XD Luckily (for me) these minigames open up more rarely than the others.

EG game especially tries to lure you into connecting the game with FB. If you get friends to play the game, you can get them as background dancers for your routine, which gets you more points. I also have a few To-Do tasks that asks me to 'send treasures' to other towns, which would be Ponyville's of my friends. There appears to be a Princess Celestia town as well, which I can use for this purpose without having any actual friends, but I can only gift that place one per day.

The purpose of connecting is mainly to get easier points all around and compete in leaderboards. I don't know if the treasure chests might contain something useful in game, like a new pony unlocking or something.

I also checked out the 'trophy list' for this game. But it's mostly social stuff, posting about your success on scores way more times than I'm confortable spamming my irl friend's feeds for. So I'll pass on those.

All in all, a cute game, simple game play but too slow progress for free gamers. I think I'll grow tired of this in a week or so...

On other mobile game news: I have also gotten bored on Little Death star (everything takes too long to build and there's a bit too many of everything to maintain anymore), but I've really fallen for SWAT, which I now want to complete for all gold medals, get all characters and overall triumph :D