Posted on: May 16, 2010 Posted by: Jesse_Hayges Comments: 1

In the new effort from Fabrication Games comes an App that’s not a game at all, but instead a rather useful tool for gamers to find, discover, and be informed about the games available in the AppStore. The App, ‘The Game Trail’, is a straight forward concept; use any one of the five options to discover new games, or using the search and genre functions – find exactly the game you wish to know more about before blowing your birthday money. Once you have found what you are looking for, or find one that tickles your fancy, you are presented with a description of the game, a trailer or gameplay footage (thanks to use of the built-in youtube App), and a rating of the game. Though I’m not entirely sure how they come up with their ratings. It appears to be X out of Five colored orbs. Some are Gold, while others are Silver, and some are Copper. Though I can’t really seem to find out the reason for this distinction.

Both easy to use, and informative, this App provides another layer to the App shopping experience. It also could help people make an educated decision on what games they might buy. ‘The Game Trail’ is a solid App all around, and this app will definitely be staying on my spring board, as iTunes does not, to my knowledge, allow for people to upload game footage directly into iTunes to help sell their product. In my opinion this is a grave mistake, for even thought it’s true what has been misquoted the world over, “A picture is worth ten-thousand words”, video has the ability to sum up a lot more than ten-thousand words, and might in fact leave you without words to speak. Whether that is due to you feeling as though you’ve lost IQ points after having watched a trailer for a game you nearly blew twenty dollars on, or because you are so amazed, I’ll leave that responsibility to the game makers themselves.

This App is not just a tool for finding out info on just a specific game you are researching, but it also is a helpful tool for discovery of games that you might not be able to unearth from the horrific deluge that is the AppStore these days. This is accomplished by one of two ways. Either through doing a search, whether it be the top 250 feature, the new or upcoming tabs, or via the default featured tab, you will also be treated to a “people also liked this” type of suggestion at the bottom of each games page. Or one can do the Random Trail option found in the ‘More’ tab at the far right. This option will generate a random game trailer attached with some other suggestions of possible games you might like if you like the game they randomly selected for you.

Also included is a feature for users of the App to submit games, and reviews of games, for consideration to be included into the App to help others select Apps with less consumer guilt. Submission of suggestions and reviews seems rather easy, though I myself did not go through the process as I felt that might be something akin to double dipping in this case. All that is required to submit a suggestion or review is a valid email address, the title of the game, (and if you’re uploading video) your youtube ID that they will use to embed your video of the game. Or if you’re not uploading you’re own video, you could always put in the youtube ID of the company making the game.

In the past week of testing, I have made actual use of this App personally in the purchase of a game that I am hoping to make a review of sometime in the week to come. This App is nicely polished for being a free App, and is not (or at least not that I’ve noticed yet) ad-supported. It is also very thoughtful of them to add the ability to jump right to the iTunes App and buy the game right away at the push of a button. Combined with it’s ease of use, and it’s ability to be of ACTUAL use, I would recommend this App for any iPhone game enthusiast. With little else to say, and almost depressingly, nothing to complain about either, I would rate this App a solid 8 of 10, and wish you all good luck on The Game Trail.

App rated on a ten point scale.

1 people reacted on this

  1. Great review! It is always extremely interesting to hear what people think about the app and you describe your experience in detail. We are continuing our work with it adding new features and games on a daily bases. Our ambition is to become a 10 out of ten and the next thing we are aiming for is a “what games does your friends like” support. The orbs is just a way of differentiate from Apples stars, our system is a meta system based on independent reviews.

Leave a Comment