Inotia 4 Free In App Purchases

[Akinlolu Bellotti]

Inotia4: Assassin of Berkel neatly encapsulates the worst of the RPG genre together with the worst of mobile gaming. Ropey localisation results in a flat group of characters, while the ever-present spectre of in-app purchases limits your progress.

Mobs will drop mana blobs and loot for the crafting system. However, the fusion machines required for crafting are few and far between, resulting in the components nicely filling your inventory and encouraging you to purchase a bag upgrade.

You can bring up to two mercenaries in your party, and have 16 more on stand-by. These are crucial for boss battles. While they'll happily keep fighting once you hit a target, your mercenaries won't initiate a fight even in self defence, and nor will they take potions automatically.

You have six hotkey slots for skills and equipment, a virtual D-pad on the left, and a 'use' button on the right. Annoyingly for iPad gamers, Com2uS hasn't learned from the previous game in the series, and so this interface is clearly designed for a much smaller screen.

There's no contortion in which you can safely hold your iPad and reach all the buttons you need. It's particularly stressful when you're in a tough boss fight and find yourself walking in squares around the all-important mana pick-ups instead of replenishing your supply.

Every character in the game speaks in a charmingly modern tone. This doesn't make up for the terribly slow expositional exchanges in which Kiyan and Eara (also known as The Channel) will talk about how Kiyan is here to save Eara because she is The Channel and therefore everyone wants her power and she can't go back because she is The Channel and there's going to be a war because she's The Channel and so on ad nauseum.

Role-playing games are a beloved staple of the industry. Ever since they moved from tabletop to desktop, they've captivated the hearts and minds of gamers of all ages. There's something about the RPG genre that provides for a more immersive experience and satisfying narrative.

Of course, there are plenty of bad RPGs that sully the genre's reputation, and it's unfortunate that many of these titles happen to be free. Conversely, the RPGs worth playing often come with a price tag -- one that isn't always cheap.

In terms of production quality, Path of Exile is the absolute king of this list by a long shot. It's an action RPG in line with titles like Diablo III and Torchlight II, but despite the fact that it's free, it still manages to offer stylish aesthetics and deep gameplay that rival the best paid games.

The main draw is its multi-layered and strategic approach to character progression -- "skill tree" would be a huge understatement. Combine that with well-balanced itemization, ability design, and economy, and you've got the recipe for a winner.

While Path of Exile is technically an online RPG, only the central hub is globally multiplayer. The remainder of the world is instanced in such a way that you could play it entirely solo if you want, or you could bring a few friends along if you prefer that instead.

Let's take a moment to explore a subgenre of RPGs called roguelikes. Long story short, these are RPGs that are notable for two reasons: procedurally generated worlds and permanent death. If that sounds undesirable to you, I ask that you give it a chance.

UnReal World will blow you away. The premise is survival in a harsh environment. The world is brand new every time you play, your character is brand new each time, and the goal is to last as long as you can. When you die, you die for good, but that's okay because dying is part of the game.

Quick descriptions for this game will always sound shallow, but the world is incredibly deep and there are so many things to do. You'll never get bored. The challenges are tough but surmountable, and you'll have a blast living in this world (once you get past the primitive graphics). Few AAA games can match its complexity.

What's amazing about UnReal World is that it's been in development since 1992 and still receives regular updates to this day. That's over 23 years of blood, sweat, and tears that have been put into this game -- and it shows in the gameplay.

If you're intrigued by the roguelike concept but are turned off because it sounds too hardcore for you, rest assured that you aren't alone. Pixel Dungeon is a lightweight roguelike for Android that was made for people like you. But don't confuse "lightweight" for "shallow" or "boring", because Pixel Dungeon is great.

It's simple enough. You explore the eponymous Pixel Dungeon floor by floor in search of the Amulet of Yendor. Along the way you kill monsters, collect loot, and advance your character. Each of the four classes presents an opportunity for a different gameplay style.

RPGs on the Play Store tend to fall into one of two categories: paid and interesting, or free and crappy. The occasional paid RPG will be sucky and worthy of refund, but it's almost impossible to find a free RPG that's good enough to sink some time into. There are a few, however, and Inotia 4 is one of them.

It sports a cast of six character classes, a party-based mercenary system, an active combat system, and a fantasy adventure story that feels like a callback to traditional RPGs of the past. In a lot of ways, it reminds me of a Game Boy-era RPG. (Possibly because it's mobile, but still...)

It's free to play, but you can make in-app purchases for extra items. If you like Inotia 4, go ahead and check out the prequel. It's available on the Play Store, fittingly titled Inotia 3. Want even more? Check out these other Android RPGs that rock.

So, you've played Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim, have you? Or even if you haven't, you've surely heard about this ground-breaking open-world RPG series? The franchise has one of the largest fanbases in RPG history, culminating in a massive modding community for Skyrim and a big following for The Elder Scrolls Online.

But most have never gone back to the true root of the series, and that's The Elder Scrolls: Arena. It predates even Daggerfall, the semi-successful game that eventually led to Morrowind. Fortunately, since 2004, Arena has been 100% free to download.

Now, a word of warning: this game debuted in 1994. A lot has changed in the 20+ years since then. Arena has a pseudo-3D perspective that feels a lot like the original Doom. The interface is clunky and the graphics are the exact opposite of high-definition. But give it thirty minutes and none of that will matter.

Arena was revolutionary for its time, raising the bar for RPGs to come. There's very much a "cult success" feel to the game, but it's fun to play and uniquely captivating. Plus, isn't it awesome to see the humble beginnings of what would later evolve into the smash hit Skyrim?

Do note that the RPGs on this list are all single-player, which means that there's still an entire world of free-to-play MMORPGs for you to enjoy. If you have an abundance of time on your hands, these will fit into your schedule nicely.

However I have noticed an alarming rate of failure of this code lately, up to the point that we're having trouble even passing App Store review in our last updates, since the code even fails for them. Basically, it looks like the initial receipts on app install/update are invalid, forcing us to refresh it explicitly (which is a bad user experience, forcing the user to enter their App Store login info). This in turn leads to a bad user experience, looking a lot like a bug to the App Review team, even with our own attempts to mitigate this.

Once the receipt is refreshed, the validation passes just fine, so it is likely not a problem with our validation code, but rather seems to be a problem with the way Apple installs the receipts upon app install or update. Maybe they changed something about the format for initial receipts, but if that is the case there has been no updates to the documentation since last year. Maybe there will be explanations about this at the current WWDC?

Has anybody else experienced something similar? In the past this seemed to be happening intermittently (rarely enough that this wasn't a problem with App Review). Lately this seems to have been failing much more consistently, and even happens on my own devices now. Even worse is that I don't see a way to test this properly as this is expected behavior in the developer sandbox. Validation works fine with a refreshed receipt in both testing and production environmens. It is just not supposed to happen in production, yet it does - and way too much.

We're seriously considering getting rid of receipt validation in our apps if Apple can't make it work properly - which is a shame as besides the piracy protection it really helped keeping track of the user's past purchases simply by inspecting the receipt, and thus avoiding the need to do a "restore purchase". It would be nice to be able to keep doing that, but if this just doesn't work at all out of the gate, then I'm afraid that it's not worth bothering with.

We've had the same problem. Apple's documentation says a receipt is provided on an install (doesn't say anything about an update), but our code tripped up because the receipt wasn't there. It seems like in the last couple of iOS updates that the receipt isn't sent along with the app, and I guess we're supposed to ask for it manually - which isn't the greatest idea, as you mention, since it presents the App Store sign-in dialog. On TestFlight for us this failed with an error code 100 in the delegate method - (void) request:(SKRequest *)request didFailWithError:(NSError *)error. We thought it was because of TestFlight; now I'm not so sure that it isn't something inside Apple.

We changed receipt checking to tell us what was going on, and submitted a new build to see what would happen. That's how we found out that the receipt is missing. Other than asking every user to sign in to the App Store (and making sure that, if an error occurs, we don't ask again and again and again) I'm not sure how we can proceed.

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