Vroovy has a couple of Bollywood movie tie-in games in their app store. We reviewed their earlier games like Happy New Year and Kochadaiiyaan the Legend. This time we look at their attempt to make a game for the 2015 hit movie Baby.
Google Play Store Link to BABY: The Bollywood Movie Game.
After the pixelated face of Akshay Kumar at the start of the title, Baby The Bollywood game loses all relation to the movie and instead becomes a simple click based shooter. The game makes poor to absolutely no use of the movie’s franchise and instead focuses on progression based on score. Addition levels and equipment are locked until the previous are cleared. The premise has you shoot off against an onslaught of legion of street thugs and terrorists.
The game forgoes any story in lieu of a more direct shoot-em up experience. You will instantly start off in the Katmandu level fighting off enemies using a pistol and a shotgun while civilians occasionally run about as an added obstacle to avoid.
The game also severely lack presentation. There are serious texture issues with even the title screen appearing blur and pixelated. The graphics of the game are just plain bad with a very inconsistent art design. Some textures and enemies with realistic portrayal appear grainy while others have a cartoony touch.
The basic rules of the game are simple, enemies come in from all corners of the map and hide behind obstacles occasionally poking their head through or standing up to shoot at you. You click on them to shoot them, also staggering them so they cannot attack you. Most enemies take a couple of body shots to go down or a well-placed head shot. The only issue is the aiming is not at all accurate, and clicking at the same spot even will send your shots all over the place. Despite all these issues the shooting remains functional, nevertheless. Somewhat due to the challenge of the game which I enjoyed. It has a stick and carrot reward system, where clearing a level unlocks a new one. I could not play the game for extended periods due to each level lasting about 1-2 minutes and failing meant to repeat the same scenario over and over. It is only tolerable in short bursts of 1-2 matches at a time.
There are a few different types of enemies the game throws at you, suicide human bombers, thugs with pistols, terrorists with automatic weapons like the AK-47, and special forces with body armor that take a few hits before they go down. There are power-ups featured in the game but their uses or functionality is not explained in the game. It was only after I lost my life (in the game, lol) that I knew what the first power up does because the game gave me an option to use it for an extra chance and continue the level where I left it off.
While all the design and production shortfalls may be overlooked what is inexcusable is the fact that the difficulty has been lopsided to make use of special powers in order to overcome any level and which generally includes countless retries or stocking up on special powers with real money. There is an option to buy these power-ups in game but the rate of accumulating gold coins to do so is duplicitous slow.
While the game is free to play it does include microtransactions with ads on most of the menu screens and during transitions between gameplay and the menu. Ads are also incorporated in the gameplay, sometimes covering up important parts of the UI and obscuring vision. You have the option to get an extra life by watching a video ad. The system in practicality does not work as well as I watched 2 ads and still it refused to give me the extra life it promised. In the end I had to resort to using up a special power for reviving.
I did enjoy the core gameplay somewhat, but It was a substandard distraction for when you need to get in the action quick and shoot something. It is let down by lack of polish and design with pushy monetization choices.
