The ramblings and rants of a strange girl: The best of iOS Apps: Beyond the Dead

Today I spent my day ransacking the Apple Store in search of a few decent treasures hidden within the iOS App Store. I discovered 11 free Apps and 1 cheaply priced, that from first glance looked entertaining.

The first App I looked at was, Beyond the Dead, a free App that can be found on the editors picks selection on the App store. I have always struggled with finding exceptionally entertaining apps for my iOS platforms.

'Nothing in life is free'; if a product is free, there is usually a good reason behind it and that usually involves ulterior motives to get customers to cough up the cash or a huge sacrifice in game quality. I don't find any of these attractive in gameplay, and sadly it seems prevalent within iOS free gaming. This has encouraged me to hunt for a gaming App that defies human nature and ignores all of the above.

I thought I would attempt to differ you from dropping the Apple Store like a hot potato and help narrow down your search for the best gaming Apps out there.

Beyond the Dead

(Released October 30th 2013, by GREE INC.)

First impressions are always key!

I thought I had found a winner before I even begun; nothing is better than an action/zombie killing game. As soon as I opened up the App, I felt completely let down, but what should I expect from a free app?

Lets start with the negative!

1) For me, one of the worst characteristics of a game is the typical freemium feature found all too commonly in Apps.

2)There is no hands-on zombie killing sprees, they pose no real threat to your avatar.

If I ignore these unattractive components and focus on the stronger attributes of the game it seems more bearable. The main objective of the game is to build up a team of 5 survivors, which you can train and level up through forfeiting other survivors and bonus goodies found across the game. You also have a responsibility to build up your camp with buildings which you can also upgrade, allowing you to gain more coins to aid the levelling up process of your team.

Unfortunately this game is a fremium, town builder so everything is free to some extent, with the persuasion of cheap add-ons to improve your gameplay, but this can quickly become pricey!

On top of levelling up your survivors to compete with others and building your camp, there are also missions set across destinations within the game. The missions usually involve the killings of the different types of zombies (doctors, civilians, clowns, mascots etc.) Consequentially, as I mentioned above none of the deaths are hands-on, all you do is tap once or twice to kill a zombie for the completion of missions to gain coins and goodies, which hastily became a bit dull.

One of the attractive and addictive qualities of this game is the building of your team, there is a never-ending selection of survivors you can use to frame a solid party. Specific goodies (mystery boxes) rewarded through the completion of missions offer a random selection of common, uncommon, rare and epic collectable personas. This allows every customer to have his or her own experience dissimilar to everyone else's, which is something alien and unique in the AppWorld.

Unfortunately its major pitfall is its only strength; as the characters level up, it becomes more difficult to progress further into the game with the limited energy offered within the game, (which I guess is probably the whole point) the game producers need to find money somewhere. As I am not a fan of the money-grabbing morals of fremium games, this was majorly off-putting and unfortunately this lead to a very repetitive and lifeless game (for me anyway).

So, what's the result?

Freakishly similar to the Village People!

Beyond the Dead was a great time killer, I spent hours creating an interesting and comedic team, scarily with a similar look to the Y.M.C.A, which amused me to no end, it was a welcoming feature and I got a good giggle out of it too. Unfortunately similar to all freemium games, the fun was short lived and it became tedious surprisingly fast.

Still, it offered a lot more gameplay than other free games; so for that I would score it an easy 8/10, within the free game scale.

As a game in general it was doomed from the beginning, unless you are willing to pay the cash. It was a bit of a disappointment, which is the reasoning behind why I score it a mere 4/10 within the overall scale of games.