Uptasia

Although back in the day video games were pretty exclusive, nowadays they are much more streamlined and easy to pick up. Not only that, but thanks to the smartphone and tablet market, you can play them for only a few minutes at a time whenever you have some time to waste. Granted, some genres are more suitable for this style of gaming than others, but it depends on how creative the developers are.

Uptasia is a hidden object game with puzzle elements, in which you also get to build structures and use them to gather resources. While it may look fairly complicated at first, the game is actually pretty simple, not to mention repetitive after a while. Hence, things fall into their place after only a few minutes of tinkering, especially since there’s a very pushy tutorial to show you the ropes as well.

You begin with a few simple structures that provide you with basic resources, show as a bakery and a flowery. These can also be used to play various mini-games or hidden object sequences, each one of which rewards you with points and extra goodies. However, you often have to repeat the same missions multiple times, and not much changes between the runs, which can be rather boring.

The way to advance is to acquire enough resources to erect a variety of other buildings, each one of which takes longer and longer to complete. They also provide you with access to a variety of other missions, but don’t expect anything more than your average puzzles. The hidden object mini-games are very simple as well, with the only challenge being the enforced time limits that quickly get out of hand.

Since this is a free-to-play title, there are microtransactions to watch out for as well. In this case, you can run out of resources to complete missions, so you are basically forced to wait until you are able to play. You can solve this much quicker by throwing money at the game, but that’s obviously not a very fun or rewarding experience, especially not when you have such a large variety of alternatives at your disposal on the video game market.

In the end, Uptasia fails to impress in any regard, which is a bit of a bummer if you are looking for something new or exciting. The hidden object missions are very repetitive and simple, while all the other mini-games can be pretty underwhelming as well.