Making the transition from mobile to PC is a tricky one for developers. Do you go for a direct port, or do you add extra bells and whistles? What happens with microtransactions if your game has them on mobile? It almost gets taken for granted that you’d expect a game to be stable in that transition and to run smoothly. With BODYGuard: Cellwars, that wasn’t the case for me.
BODYGuard: Cellwars is a sedentary shooter. Taking place inside the human body, the player controls a mini doctor that shoots medicine at bacteria and viruses trying to infect the human body. It’s like a tower defence game, but you are the only tower aiming and shooting. The unique trick is that your medicine shots work more like arrows. They have an arc to them, a bit like Angry Birds, and so you have to aim and shoot like lobbing bombs. This takes a while to get used to, but players will get into the groove after a few attempts. As you play, you earn points which can be spent on upgrading your shot damage, range, and the rate of energy recharge. Every shot you fire costs energy and that means you can’t spam fire. After three shots without pausing, your energy runs dry. Accuracy is king in BODYGuard: Cellwars.
Energy cost will increase over time, too. Part of the upgrade system includes passive shot changing powers to may make enemies explode on death, or send a ricochet bullet to the nearest enemy. These all add a percentage increase of energy per shot, meaning there’s a tactical trade-off between power and speed. It’s one of the best bits of game design present in what is a thin game experience. There are only five level layouts for either story mode or endless mode. The former works on permanent upgrades, the latter offers an action roguelike choice after a wave of enemies.
Whilst not particularly memorable, the game was an inoffensive time-waster, but very quickly, I ran into technical problems. If you switch between the mouse and controller, the game freezes. That’s a problem as the level select menu isn’t programmed properly, making the start level button unselectable by all peripherals except the mouse. It also seems to freeze at random intervals for no rhyme or reason. In-game, in the upgrade screens, even the character select screen froze at one point. It was happening every 1 to 4 minutes, and it drove me up the wall. BODYGuard: Cellwars is already designed to have a slight grind for upgrades to make levels survivable, but now I was finding that 1 in 3 attempts to play a level would just crash the game. I haven’t played a released, non-early access game this unstable in probably two years. After many reinstalls and turning off as many background system tasks as possible, I couldn’t improve the stability, and I gave up.
Hopefully, this is either a localised experience for me or it can be salvaged in future patches for everyone else. BODYGuard: Cellwars wasn’t on track to be a must-buy, but it was tracking towards a harmless 5.5 or 6 out of 10. It was perfectly serviceable… except for its serviceability. What a shame. Go mobile for now.
Review copy provided by the developer. BODYGuard: Cellwars is out on PC and mobile.
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