Here I am, sitting in my dark corner that I share with other fans, where we all cry in silence waiting for one day the bosses of Fox decide to resurrect one of my favorite series of all time, Futurama. Apparently this day will never come, but every time the brand returns to my hands, even through other media, I can assure you that our corner is a little less dark. It already happened with A Game of Drones, and this time it's the turn of Futurama Worlds of Tomorrow, developed by the same TinyCo responsible for Family Guy: The Quest for Stuff and MARVEL Avengers Academy - questionable pay-to-win games disguised as free to play.
Our adventure begins when Bender and his companions, arrived on Amphibios 9, meet Hypnotoad. The toad manages to create a fault in the space-time fabric to meet his beloved, and the intersection of their hypnotic gazes extends the fault on Earth, sucking up a large part of New York and our beloved crew. Fry, the only survivor of the disaster, will once again be the planet's last hope to put things right, with the help of Nibbler.
Being a licensed game, we find in the game everything that is beautiful in the original series: characters, settings, objects and even the actions of the characters will all be taken from the one hundred and forty episodes broadcast on TV. In fact, we will find, in addition to the complete crew and the Hypnorospus, also Lrrr, the Suicide Booth, the Smell-O-Scope and the Poppler, better known in Italy as Scrocchiazeppi. It will not be difficult to see Prof. Farnsworth shake the Lungoarnese, and among the various missions available we will be able to send Fry to sleep in the closet of Bender's house. The game offers a disproportionate amount of quotes, which cannot fail to make die-hard fans happy.
Along the lines of the aforementioned titles by the US developer, the main game mechanics allow us to position the game in the management genre. In an attempt to restore order within the metropolis and save our Planet Express colleagues, we should invest time, Nixon-dollars and Pizza to unlock the areas of the city darkened by space cracks. Each task assigned to the characters, which can last from a minimum of a minute up to tens of hours, will reward us with a variable amount of materials that will come in handy throughout the adventure. Some of the districts of the city, and related blocked characters, will be obtainable only if we are in possession of certain artifacts scattered around the galaxy.
And this is where the game gets interesting: going on a mission to the various planets we will meet their enemies, also taken from the series, which we will have to fight in a kind of RPG-style minigame: we will find ourselves fighting against Omicroniani and Scaramucche in turn-based battles in which, however, our only interaction will be to plug the screen in time: on our character in order to increase his defense, or on an opponent to enhance the damage inflicted by our attack . Also in this case, at the end of the meeting we will receive a reward, and we will have the possibility, but not the absolute certainty, to drop rare materials or the artifacts we were talking about before. This, coupled with the fact that characters engaged in some action on Earth cannot be sent on a mission to space, makes the adventure painfully slow and frustrating. We will be able to speed things up by buying slices of Pizza with real currency, and investing them to end actions instantly, freeing the characters for space missions. We neglect the possibility of being able to get a slice of Pizza for free every time you agree to watch a sponsored video, considering that unlocking certain characters or artifacts can require hundreds of them.
The offered interface it is rather distracting and uncomfortable on smartphones, with buttons that are sometimes too small. Even the icons to click on the game world, rather small, can be difficult to plug, especially if they overlap each other. The music is obviously licensed by Fox, and the characters are voiced by the original voices of the cartoon, which however only give voice to the films and environmental phrases, while the dialogues are completely textual.
Promising mechanics such as space travel and RPG combat are not enough to mask yet another freemium title with a facade clearly devoted to fanservice, but with a soul corrupted by the Robot Devil. Futurama Worlds of Tomorrow goes to great lengths to take root in the fanbase with licensed content and the distinctive Groening and Cohen humor, but it requires very long waiting periods, which are not very enjoyable for veterans of freemium titles and unnerving for anyone else.
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