GOF2 Guide HD review (iPad)

10 word description: Official Pocket Gamer Guide for Galaxy on Fire 2. (iPad only).

10 word review: A little bit less useful and user friendly than expected.

You will like this if you enjoy: Looking at GoF2 information on the same device that you play the game.

Something useful! Each blueprint description includes the location where it can be found. No associated space map, though, so that’s another missed opportunity

The good news: The title screen is very pretty. Interviews are quite interesting, although a bit short. Image quality (once they decompress) is generally pretty good. You can add individual pages to a favourites list.

Nice, but there’s no information here that isn’t in the game and you can’t sort the list as it’s just an image, not an actual data table

The bad news: Most of the guide’s pages/screens appear to be single compressed images rather than what I would have expected – separate images and text with embedded links, etc. The image decompression is very slow, leaving you with a blurred screen for up to five seconds each time you navigate to a new page and have to wait for it to do its thing. Navigation is a decent attempt at being intuitive, with vertical swiping within a topic and horizontal swiping to swap topics, but this is rendered frustrating and clumsy by the erratic responsiveness and generally jerky nature of the scrolling, combined with the constant decompression and occasional adverts. There’s no search facility. The majority of information in the guide is the fictional, albeit well written, descriptive text copied from the game. The areas of the guide that cover game strategies and tactics are very simplified, with little depth or statistical data; the trade routes might be useful for new players but the guide crashes every time I select that section so I am unable to comment on it. There are some tabs and buttons that can be tapped, but there’s always a tedious delay whenever you do it.

The ultimate attack strategy, devised by gaming professionals:”Buy the best weapons you can afford”. [Insert further sarcastic comments here]

Arcadelife verdict: I was looking forward to comparing my own vast and encyclopaedic knowledge of GoF2 (I’m a geek, ok) with this guide but I found the lack of depth, painfully slow image decompression, erratic navigation and frequent crashes to be a frustrating and disheartening combination. The information on offer definitely lacks the depth that I would expect to find in a game guide, particularly when there have been plenty of independent guides and detailed trading information for GoF2 available online almost since the day the game was initially released. Overall the guide feels as though it was hastily put together as an advert for the Supernova add-on pack, rather than as a genuine guide for the game. As an advert, it works – just about – but anyone wanting a detailed guide that will help them beat the game, gain every achievement and ultimately spoil their fun – as only a truly great guide can – won’t find that here.

I think the pilot must be compensating for something…

Arcadelife rating

Final rating – 30/100

Rating categories explained here.

Version reviewed by Arcadelife is 1.0

Pocket Gamer Guides website link

Arcadelife reviewed this app on:
iPad (iOS 5.1.1)