App Profile: Age of Solitaire : Build City

Whitanay

Rating: 4/5

I read the description in the App Store and mingled over the idea of getting swept away in a new game. This sounded new, exciting, intriguing. Build a city within a game of solitaire? It’s loneliness and abundance all in one; I had to know more. I downloaded. Five scrutinizing minutes of waiting but alas... “Open” appeared. I pressed on. I waited until I would reluctantly see the word “Play” pinned to the middle of my gleaming screen. I pressed on only to be halted in my journey of escaping the realities of this modern world. I never made it past “Play”, the word that will haunt me; the word that will symbolize my stunted life in never knowing the true age of solitaire. :-( Update: Finally works. Cute game, interesting take on Solitaire. Increased rating.

oceanroyale

Rating: 2/5

I’ve played a ton of this game. It’s a nice way to zone out. But there are a few bugs with ads that make it really frustrating. Ads sometimes pause other audio (like podcasts or music) and then the podcast fails to restart after the ad is done. When you restart the podcast yourself, when you come back to the game you are immediately bombarded with another ad which pauses the background podcast again. They game can get stuck in this cycle. It seems dependent on what ad service is being called. Some ads are ok. Some ads have no sound enabled (the best). This happens with the phone set to silent and the in-game audio set to silent. I have very much enjoyed this game and would pay a small amount of money to take ads away forever. Another bug with ads is sometimes you can accidentally suspend the app on iPhone X depending on where you rest your hand while playing. This causes ads to spam as the game thinks you have re-opened the app after suspending it. An example is accidentally swiping any native apple menu from the top or bottom of the screen. I would change my review to 5 stars if the app consistently played nicely with background audio and didn’t get stuck in ad loops after suspending the app.

Stubear

Rating: 3/5

...for a couple things. First, I don’t mind paying for an ad free experience but $4.99 for a solitaire game (with one variation only at that) is a tad steep. Throw in a few different variations. Make the difficulty match the number of points you get to upgrade the village (e.g. Klondike only nets you a hundred or so points while Spider nets you double that) Still, the ad free version is far more enjoyable to play and I’m old school and love Klondike. Second, why is it so difficult for companies to implement syncing of game data through Game Center? Yes, you technically can sync your game through Game Center...manually...every time you switch devices (e.g. iPhone to iPad and back again). Why not sync data up after each game and down in first load? Make this a pro feature—no ads AND automatic sync—if you must but please make this a feature. Third, iPads still exist and I’m assuming many people, like myself, use them in landscape more, especially when charging. A lot of apps seem to forget this and this one is no exception. Please provide a landscape mode for this game.