Streamline
  • Home
  • Spotlight
  • Reviews
    • Action
    • Strategy
    • RPGs
  • Most Hardcore
    • Devices
    • Gifts
    • Gadgets
  • About Us
Hardcore Droid
Hardcore Droid
  • Home
  • News
    • News
    • Spotlight
    • Interviews
    • Consoles
  • Reviews
    • Action
    • Adventure
    • Strategy
    • RPG
    • MMOs
    • Racing
    • Indie
    • Hardware
  • Best Of
    • Top 10 Games
    • Best RPGs
    • Best Action
    • Best Puzzlers
    • Best Strategy
    • Best Indie Strat
    • Best Indie RPGs
    • Most Hardcore
  • About Us
    • About Us
    • Game Jobs
    • Archives
    • Attributions
    • Opportunities
  • Action

MacGyver Deadly Descent Review

  • June 16, 2014
  • Travis Fahs
Spread the love

macgyver_deadly_descent_android_thumbEven as far back as the Atari era, licensed games have had a poor reputation. The time constraints of coinciding with a release combine with forced shoehorning of subject matter in a way that seems like a formula for mediocrity. But MacGyver: Deadly Descent is different; it didn’t have to happen. The show hasn’t been on in decades – hell, it’s probably remembered more for its parodies than by people who watched it first hand at this point – so there’s no rush, and no need for this game to exist at all unless someone with real love for the franchise wanted to revive it. Or so one would think.

It’s not hard to envision how the ‘80s action series could translate to a fun and cheesy game – the name MacGyver is practically synonymous with the kinds of inventory combination puzzles that drive the adventure genre. But alas, no one has done that here. Instead, the entire license is used as the thinnest premise around which to string together a series of extremely derivative, wholly unoriginal logic puzzles, served up by the dozen.

macgyver_deadly_descent_android_01

The story is told through brief scenes comprised of panning across comic book pages, as if to forget that this was ever a TV show and not a comic in the first place. Our titular hero must infiltrate the DAWN facility to rescue those trapped inside, and in classic MacGyver fashion, he uses only his wits. In this case, that doesn’t mean crafty ingenuity but rather playing a pile of puzzle games, mostly designed to represent “hacking.”

You’ll have a pile of levels tossed in front of you, with two or three different types in each stage. You don’t have to beat all of them, so if you get stuck on one, you can simply switch over to one of the other puzzles types until you’ve completed your quota and the game decides to march forward with its story.

These puzzles follow just about every trope in genre. There’s  a laser/reflector puzzle (a la Deflektor and countless derivatives since), a pipe/water puzzle (a la Pipe Dream or Pipe Mania), and a wholesale rip off of the mobile hit Flow. There’s even a block-pushing exercise in the vein of Sokobon, perhaps puzzle gaming’s most weathered puzzle style. MacGyver stops just shy of the sliding tile puzzle in its quest to dredge up every cliché in the book.

macgyver_deadly_descent_android_02

The puzzles themselves are not bad, really. They have a nice, gradual difficulty curve (although some types are harder than others), they’re seldom outright frustrating, and some of them may even feature some clever design. They’re realized with 3D graphics that are perhaps a notch above the simplistic 2D you’d find in many of their mobile analogs, although this does come at a price. Puzzles that involve dragging are not very responsive and feel a bit awkward, sometimes leading to frustrating botched moves, especially in the block puzzles where this can render a puzzle unsolvable without starting over.

These are classic, battle-tested puzzle formulae, and for the most part they work as well here as they have before. In this way, perhaps, Deadly Descent is not a terrible game, but bathes itself in mediocrity. It’s utterly unambitious, uninspired, and doesn’t even to manage to leverage the campy charm of its license to inject a personality into the milquetoast puzzle gauntlet. The result feels as flimsy as its hero’s duct-taped improvisations.

 

Is it Hardcore?
2

Nah.

Almost aggressively mediocre, MacGyver manages to be little more than a series of all-too-familiar puzzles strung together with some sparing comic book panels.

Related Topics
  • Android Action Games
Travis Fahs

has been a game journalist since 2006, writing for IGN, Gamasutra, and Cheat Code Central. An avid gaming history buff, he enjoys writing about classic gaming most of all.

Previous Article
  • Racing

Trials Frontier Review

  • June 15, 2014
  • Travis Fahs
View Post
Next Article
  • Strategy

Conquest of Elysium 3 Review

  • June 18, 2014
  • John Markley
View Post
You May Also Like
Road to Valor Empires Official Promo Art
View Post
  • Action
  • News

Road to Valor: Empires Now Available on Google Play and App Store

  • James Bell
  • July 19, 2022
Mia And The Dragon Princess Feature Image
View Post
  • Action
  • News

Mia And The Dragon Princess Coming To Mobile Later This Year

  • Jack Brassell
  • July 15, 2022
Disney Mirrorverse Feature Image
View Post
  • Action
  • RPG

Disney Mirrorverse Review

  • Jack Brassell
  • July 14, 2022
View Post
  • Racing

Race N’ Survive Review

  • Michael Knight
  • June 26, 2022
The Undestroyed title screen
View Post
  • Action

Undestroyed: Shadow ARPG Review

  • Dean Delp
  • June 25, 2022
Fantasy Raid title
View Post
  • Action
  • RPG

Fantasy Raid: Diablo-like RPG Review

  • Daniel DeAngelo
  • June 20, 2022
Diablo Immortal Splash Screen
View Post
  • Action
  • RPG

Diablo Immortal Review

  • Jack Brassell
  • June 11, 2022
Dungeon of Gods title
View Post
  • Action
  • RPG

Dungeon of Gods Review

  • Daniel DeAngelo
  • May 29, 2022
0 comments
  1. Pingback: Deepweb
  2. Pingback: หลังคาชิงเกิ้ลรูฟ
  3. Pingback: What common foods are vegan? - Quora
  4. Pingback: nova9
  5. Pingback: คาสิโนออนไลน์

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

The Latest
  • Ragnar Lothbrok Joins Vikingard in Vikings Crossover
  • RuneScape Gives Its PvP Area a Makeover
  • 2022’s Top Free Game Round-Up
  • Postknight 2 Launches Greater Heights Major Update
  • Alice Fiction Hits Android Devices
  • Bloodline: The Last Royal Vampire Review
  • Charlie in Underworld Launches On Android
  • Forestopia Preregistration Now Open On Google Play
  • Iron Knight: Nonstop Idle RPG Is Now Out On Android
  • How Mobile Phones Have Increased the Popularity of Online Gambling
Meta
  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.org
Hardcore Droid
  • Reviews
  • Spotlight
  • Hardcore
Core Gaming on the Android OS

Input your search keywords and press Enter.