[Note: Godfinger is only available in the Canadian App Store for now. It should be available in other countries soon.]
Godfinger seems like it took a “fun” concept, stretched it into a “fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuun” concept, and marketed the vowels as extra content. It’s a good game that has been artificially lengthened to make sure that you always have something to do and something to wait for — all the while showing you that if you pay, you can cut that waiting time significantly.
The idea behind freemium content is to create a basic service or product that people can access and enjoy for free (e.g. Eliminate Pro for games, Evernote for productivity apps), but which will also provide extra services to users who are willing to pay for them.
Trust is important to the freemium model, since a bad implementation can seem much more like veiled shareware, or an irritating, limited demo that is merely being passed off as a free title. It’s not that ngmoco:) doesn’t understand how to make a good freemium game (Eliminate Pro is evidence of this) — it’s just that they got it wrong with Godfinger.
[mouse over a pic to see read its title, click to see the gallery]
Connected experience
The game requires a Plus+ network login before you can play, and although you won’t be interacting with other players in Godfinger, you will benefit from having a few people on your list in the form of occasional gift exchanges and access to special followers. You’ll also be able to spread the word of your various level-ups and accomplishments on Twitter and Facebook, although I turned this off almost immediately because I didn’t want to spam my account.
I also turned the Push Notifications off because they would even wake me in the middle of the night, despite my implicit instructions to only alert me if one of my in-game followers had died. I’m sure this is just a bug with the push system, but given the number of events that can set the notifications off, I’ve been a lot happier being blissfully unaware of what is happening while I’m outside the game.
He’s got the whole wide world in his hands
Godfinger has you playing the titular God role: doling out goodness and lifting villagers with miraculous swipes and taps of your finger. The game starts out pretty quickly, but demands more and more of your time as you progress (much like an MMORPG). Much of the game revolves around your followers, who work in buildings to generate gold, chant to generate mana, or construct new buildings to beautify and improve your world. Taking care of two followers and a couple of buildings is easy peezy lemon squeezy, but things get much harder to manage as you level up.
Everything in Godfinger — from buildings, to lightning bolts, to followers — is managed by touch, and it can get a little difficult to tap on all sorts of small, moving objects despite the availability of pinch-to-zoom . The world in Godfinger is a 2D planet that you can pan around by simply dragging an object to the edge of the screen, or by swiping along the screen when you have nothing in hand. You pick up objects by tapping on them, and you can pick up multiple followers by simply dragging them over one another in a cute Monkeys-in-a-Barrel fashion. The controls are workable, but not great. The ability to pick a particular unit out of a crowd is especially lacking.
As your followers perform tasks, they’ll run out of energy and need to rest (provided by fountains or tents that you build), and if they stay exhausted for too long they’ll eventually die. The buildings that you create often function in a similar manner as followers: they’ll need rain or sunshine to continue working, and so Godfinger is a constant round of “fill ‘er up” — but topping things off isn’t much fun because of the difficult control system.
Spotting exhausted followers is easy enough, but tapping on them when they’re standing right beside (or sometimes INSIDE) other followers is way too tricky. You have to zoom all the way in and prod carefully, and the pop-up information box that tells you follower names and energy levels often gets in your way. Now I might be a little pessimistic when I say this, but I have a sneaking suspicion that these controls are sloppy for a reason.
Not Awesome
This is because, as in Eliminate Pro, Godfinger operates on the freemium model. Generating mana for miracles, constructing buildings, and the farming gold takes time — often hours upon hours of it. You can speed a lot of things up, however, with the use of Awe Points — and the only way to collect more of these points is to buy them in the Awe Store. The cheapest bundle starts of at $3 for 35 points (you start the game off with 10) — and although this may last you a few days, the way the game is structured means those 35 points will mean less and less as time goes on. This isn’t like a flat $15 WoW subscription where your money always buys you the same amount of time, despite the fact that the game sessions get longer as you play.
Some Awe purchases are merely upgrades, but many of them are really turbo charges for things like regenerating the energy of all of your followers. So for those players who are willing to pay in cash, the hassle of zooming in and selecting one exhausted farmer out of the three standing on a field can become a thing of the past.
Just One More
There’s always something more to do in Godfinger, but having looked at a list of all the possible buildings, miracles, and upgrades in the game — I’m not totally convinced that the game gets much better as you go on. It’s extremely fascinating at first thanks to the way that you can literally shape the terrain, grow flowers, turn areas into forests or deserts — but aside from throwing a few lightning bolts at your people in Pocket God fashion, I do wonder what else there is to do in Godfinger. I’m only level nine at the moment, but I’m not sure that the game will become anything except more time intensive as I gain more followers, manage a larger space, and develop things for no other reason than to satiate the feeling that I haven’t done everything yet.
Conclusion
I’m sure that the thousands of players that have boosted Godfinger to #31 on the Top Grossing list (as of this article) won’t agree with me, but I don’t think that this is a game worth paying for or even playing for more than a day. It’s definitely impressive that Wonderland Software (who worked on Black & White on the PC) and ngmoco:) have been able to jam such an expansive experience onto the iPhone with only touch-based controls, but Godfinger feels like one of the more sinister uses of the freemium model: gameplay eventually just takes too long, and the only way to keep up an enjoyable, fruitful pace is to pay to play. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with paying for a game — but I think this is a real stretch of the idea behind freemium titles, and the Awe Points still seem far too expensive.
I’ve been a gamer all my life and have been horribly addicted to paid titles (even WoW) on all sorts of platforms, but there’s something about feeling like I’m being led on a string that irks me. Godfinger isn’t like the wave of episodic DLC we’re seeing on console platforms and on the PC, nor does it feel like the subscription model of many MMORPGs. It just doesn’t feel right.
When I initially shared the news of this title with my sister, she couldn’t find it on the App Store because she had typed “Goldfinger” instead of “Godfinger”. We laughed about the typo at first, but now that I’ve played a few hours of the game, I’m not so sure she was wrong.
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Godfinger is currently available for free on the Canadian App Store, but it should hit other countries very soon.
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TAGS: ngmoco
