Apple Arcade review #105: Yaga The Roleplaying Folktale

I’ve been wanting to review Yaga for a while, but for several weeks it consistently crashed when loading. Turns out the game wasn’t compatible with a recent iOS update. It was eventually fixed, but how diligent will Apple be about keeping these games updated and running? How many of the Arcade games will fail to work with future OS updates? And is Apple paying developers to update their games?

I was really looking forward to playing Yaga, because from the promotional art it looked beautiful and seemed to offer an interesting Eastern European twist on the traditional action RPG. It is and it does, but it also has a number of issues that prevents it from being a very good game.

The music is emblematic of my feelings about Yaga. It’s well produced and often quite stirring, but it’s also tonally off. When you’re wandering about the village, for example, the music is intense and action-packed, with a contemporary sound to it. The voice acting is generally of a high quality, but the writing is awkward, and the direction broad, which again affects tone. The art is beautiful, no question about it, but some textures and characters are weirdly blurry when the game zooms in for a conversation or cut-scene. On their own, these elements are solid, but they don’t necessarily fit together.

The virtual joystick and buttons are…virtual. I’ve made it clear how I feel about those in general. In Yaga, they work, but they also make combat unnecessarily difficult. A controller is definitely recommended — as is playing the game on a bigger screen, since the iPhone makes the UI very hard to read and tap targets difficult to hit.

In terms of game mechanics, Yaga is like an old-school Zelda game. You wander around the 2D world solving quests and fighting numerous enemies. Monsters are well-designed and artistically quite beautiful, but combat often ended up being a slog. The hammer mechanic is cool; like Thor, you toss your hammer and it comes back to you, but it’s hard to pull off accurately using touch controls.

I wanted to like Yaga, and I tried my best, but at the end of the day it wasn’t clear what game the developers wanted to make. The world, story and characters didn’t grab me — something that’s critical in a roleplaying folktale. It’s not a bad game, and most of the elements are of a very high standard, but they don’t come together into a coherent whole.

Link: https://apps.apple.com/no/app/yaga-the-roleplaying-folktale/id1455514508