[Review] But I thought it was a Deemo!
Never left without saying goodbye
Deemo, the rhythm-tapping mobile game, with a unorthodox storyline:
Deemo is a mystic character lives in solitude, a castle, all by itself. A little girl falls from the sky, not knowing who she is, where she comes from. To help the little girl back to her world, Deemo comes to realize a tree keeps growing tall on top of the piano whenever it plays. What would Deemo do when it gets comfortable with the companionship it never had before? What if the little girl couldn't deal with the truth when her seemingly lost memories regained?!
I've never played any rhythm games with such a mysterious and different plot/goal. The free-play version only has limited plot progression, so I got the full version ($2.48). Here are my thoughts on this, after playing through the whole game.
Mechanics
You just tap the note "bars" when they come. There are 2 types of notes - the normal black ones and the yellow ones. This gentle learning curve allows you to start playing songs and pieces without remembering a bunch of different kinds of notes and how to press them. You just tap the black ones and slide your finger across the yellow ones (You'll get it when you get it). It was easier for me to just start playing and quickly move on to the harder ones. All songs come in 3 difficulties: Easy, Normal, and Hard. To make it easier for the user to differentiate, the developers have quantified the difficulties with different levels (1-10). There could be an Easy mode marked with lvl 6 difficulty, or a Normal mode marked with lvl 4 difficulty - a pretty neat feature if I do say so myself.
Hardware Resource Consumption
Not too too bad for a game. Playing one song doesn't even deplete my Samsung Core LTE by 1%. For that specific phone, opening it for the first time may cause lag on the first note, but it's fine after that.
Free-to-play and Full Version
The free-to-play only lets you play till you grow the tree to 3.99m tall (just a little tiny bit from the end of the game at 20m, sarcasm intended). After you get the tree to 3.99m, the game will urge you to get the full version for $2.48. If you ignore it, you can still play (with random 50-60s pauses between loading up a song because you are not using the full version), but you won't progress at all. Did I also mention that there is a store that can be unlocked only in the full version? You start off with only 2 "albums" and you work on unlocking songs in the albums, but there are more albums, more albums that you have to buy with real money to play (you can sample them free if you want to). An album costs more than unlocking the full version itself. A bit outrageous, if you ask me. In my opinion, I think that they should have removed the "paywalls" and just went with it. If they needed to, they could just up the price to buy the full version. I of course didn't buy more albums; I was content with what I had already.
Conclusion
If you come across this and think that this is just another rhythm game, you are right - it is just another rhythm game, just branded with another gimmick. The music is well rounded and (probably) suits everyone, the art style is unique and simple, and the characters are shrouded in a veil of ... mystery. This game is easy to pick up and easy to put down (unless you are/become an addict). If you are not a grammar nazi, or if you don't cringe at the sight of bad translations, then go ahead, try it out, and see what it will turn you into...