Rule The Sky iPhone Game Review.
While the name itself might be misleading, perhaps making you believe it’s a war game of sorts, Rule The Sky is as peaceful as they come. It’s a social networking game where you build, care and rule your very own floating island in the sky, called Flotia. Me, personally, I’m not too into this type of games that draw you in and suck life out of you. Real life is much more interesting, but that didn’t stop me from going through all of this game’s initial checkpoints, until the waiting really began. Enough said.
How to play
The game itself will remind you of FarmVille, since one of you first tasks in the game is to build a farm on your piece of land. You then need to plant seeds on it, fertilize it and, when the crop is ripe, harvest it to gain money and experience.
First let me say that the graphics and sounds are all astounding. The design is pretty incredible. There’s no lagging in the game, everything is smooth and the animations are eye-catching. Some candy for your eye indeed!
The goal of the game, I presume, is to grow as much as you can. You do this by building new buildings, upgrading your old ones, expanding your land and harvesting crops on farms. The game is based on a three-point system. Number one, building and planting crop will cost you coins. Number two, speeding up production will cost you stars. Number three, harvesting crops will give you money and build up your experience to advance in levels. As you advance through the levels, more buildings and more crops become available to you. Some levels represent milestones which will give you some neat upgrades, like expanding your land or upgrading your castle.
The game doesn’t feature a tutorial, instead you learn how to play Rule The Sky as you go along via quests. Your first quest is to build a farm. Second quest is to plant strawberries on it. Each quest will have an instruction panel that explains how to do what your supposed to do. Everything is really self-explanatory anyway, and anyone who has touched an iPhone before will know how to play this game immediately.
Of course, the game is more fun with friends, but since none of my friends were playing it, I couldn’t get the full experience. Presumably, there’s another level of interaction that I missed. The basics of the game don’t change nevertheless.
The game is free, but there are various things that you can purchase via in-app purchases. The most interesting of those, I believe, is the Chest of stars that gives you 250 stars (if I'm not mistaken). So what can you do with stars, well, you can speed up production and building, but also there's one very important upgrade you can buy: trees. Trees? Yes, trees! They're the one thing in Rule The Sky that will cost you 0 coins but a whole lotta stars - 190 to be exact. But what you get in return is fantastic: gold. A whole lotta of it - 9960 to be exact. And from there...the sky is *really* the limit. Among the dumbest things to do with all that gold is to buy the Deer Topiary. Cost: 13200 coins. Produces: squat!
Tips and tricks
A few tricks to get you started then. When you first see your Flotia, you’ll notice the word “Hello” written on the land in big letters, and a star next to it. Obviously, you don’t need those, so tap on them and you’ll be able to sell them for coins. You can later replace them with a name of your choosing - which will cost you stars.
After unlocking a few crops, you’ll be tempted to plant whatever you just unlocked. But some things just aren’t worth your time. Clover and carrots will give you basically the same rewards, but clover will take 10 times as more to grow before you can harvest it. By planting carrots, you’ll make almost 10 times as much money and experience.
Of course, you need to be *in* the game to actually harvest crops, so when you’re upgrading your Flotia and actually playing, plant carrots. But when you’re ready to leave the game, plant the most rewarding crop (like rice for example). Be sure to also fertilize all your crops before leaving the game. To fertilize, grab a cloud from the sky and hold it on top of the crop until the fertilization process is complete.
Fatal flaw
The game shares one fatal flaw with all other games of this type. You can only play it for a couple of minutes at a time and then you have to put it aside and wait hours for your crops to grow before you can enjoy it again. Even more so with Rule The Sky that seemed to rush me very quickly through the first quests and left me with no coins to spare and waiting for crops to grow before I can get to the next level.
Something that threw me off in the beginning is that the game was dead slow to start on the first run. Once you start it for the first time, you’ll have to spend a couple of minutes looking at the pretty pictures while the game installs. I don’t know what, but this process was lengthy, but only happened the very first time I started Rule The Sky. Once it installed, you had to enter a username and an email. Then and only then can you start playing the game. So my advice is, don’t let yourself be disappointed by the slow start, and be patient until you get to the cool graphics :)
The game is worth it if you’re into this type of social games.
Rule the Sky is also available for the iPad.
Screenshots
Developer: JCEntertainment Corporation
Category: Games
Released: July 5th, 2011
Price: FREE
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Hi! Im in level 11 but a quest popped that i should rain over a npc? What is that?