At first glance “1000: Find ‘Em All” from Glu Mobile reminded me of Zelda – A Link To The Past on the SNES – the art and style of the game world is really cute and slick. The world is a traditional 2D pixel art background, whereas the main character is rendered in 3D, which gives him a nice appearance. It also allows a full 360 degree direction of movement.
The controls are very slick. You can either tap a location and your character automatically walks to this point, or you can drag your finger round and control your character’s movement directly. All in all, the actual game engine and controls are a triumph that Glu Mobile can be very proud of. But how does 1000 fare as an actual game?
The aim of the game – as the title suggests – is to find all 1000 items hidden in the world. In the game world this translates into wandering round looking for various in-game features. such as pink trees, doors and windmills that can sometimes hide items. You tap on these features, and roughly 1 in 5 will reveal an item. Very occasionally you will meet hooded figures called Wanderers. What or who they are is unexplained, at least it hadn’t been explained by the time I collected over 500 items.
A nice touch (which encourages exploration) is that all the world starts off in grey and as you walk around you bring colour to the world. This made me find every nook and cranny in order to colour 100% of the world, but since there is no story to speak of, this colouring the world is completely unexplained other than as a game mechanism.
As well as collecting items in the game world, you can also find them in the real world. There are two ways to do this. The first way involves “Gifters”. You tap a button to look for Gifters, and if you find any they will give you a present once per day. In reality these Gifters are Wifi access points that your phone is detecting. Unfortunately not every access point becomes a Gifter, but only ones registered in some way with Glu Mobile. In my area I have only found 2 Gifters, so in my experience this is a bit of a non-starter as far as features go. But potentially if you’re in an area such as a city where there are a lot of Glu registered access points, this may be of more interest.
The second real world item collecting method actually overlays your character on a Google map of your area and then randomly drops about 20 items onto this maps. As you walk or drive around you will automatically pick up any items that you get within about 100 metres of your location. This method works well, and is the quickest way of amassing items. The only issue is if you’re driving down a road (by this I obviously mean being driven as we all know you should never play around with your phone whilst driving) – as you move off the current map screen you will be moving out of the area where the 20 items are, you must therefore refresh the item drop to get 20 new items. This means when driving about 1 kilometre you have to hit the refresh 3 or 4 times, otherwise you wouldn’t actually accomplish anything. It’s a shame that the game can’t add a new item onto the map, in roughly the vicinity of the direction you moving in, for each item collected.
1000: Find ‘Em All has achievements for various tasks such as certain amounts of presents collected, amounts of map coloured in and in game animals scared etc. But these aren’t tied into any of the social network-style services such as Plus+ or OpenFeint, so whilst they are nice to get, they aren’t really adding to anything greater than an in-game tick sheet.
I really wanted 1000 to be great; it looks good and all the elements of the game work well technically. But there are certain flaws with the real world interaction elements as I’ve mentioned, and there is no story to mention. Also as beautiful as the game world is, there are no inhabitants and no point to the various locales you walk through. In my play through the game I started off playing in game in order to get all the in-game achievements (such as 100% colouring the map and scaring butterflies), but once these were done then the in-game world is actually the slowest way of collecting items. You end up just using the map collecting system when you’re on a journey – keep refreshing the map every few minutes and you can very quickly pick up hundreds of items. So this totally destroys the whole game and it quickly becomes and exercise in grinding.
If I was to recommend any changes for Glu Mobile for an update or new version, my suggestions would be:
- Have some story to explain what is going on and give the game a purpose. It doesn’t have to be Lord of the Rings, it can be something basic like trading the 1000 treasures with some evil tyrant for the life of a princess/girl you love. (Glu – If you’d like to use this imaginative story feel free to contact me and I’ll flesh it out a bit, maybe come up with character names etc)
- Make every access point a gifter, not just specific registered ones
- Get the map collection system to auto-update
- Allow your character to collect multiples of items and then trade these with other players
- Integrate either OpenFeint or Plus+, I guess this would help with the trading suggestion
- Expand the game world element of the game, make it a real Pokemon-style RPG, have characters to chat to, tasks to complete, dungeons and caves to explore and enemies and bosses to fight
All in all, whilst it lasts 1000: Find ‘Em All is fun, but you can finish the game with all the achievements in under 10 hours. Towards the end it does get quite monotonous. But Glu have made a solid game that – with a little work – could be an absolute classic iPhone title. I just hope that someone from Glu reads this and takes my thoughts onboard.
[Since this review was written, Glu have released an update, which includes some social networking hooks, namely Facebook Connect and a global leaderboard – Matt]
1000: Find ‘Em All
Version reviewed: V1.0
Category: Games
Developer: Glu Games, Inc.
Current Price: £1.79
Works on: iPhone & iPod Touch
