The Nardio Review
Is Devil’s Attorney Worth Your Time?
Yes. Devil’s Attorney is a lot of fun.
What Should I Play it On?
Devil’s Attorney is available for Android OS and iOS. I played this game on my Google Nexus 7 and was pleased with its performance.
What Did You Think Without Spoiling It?
Devil’s Attorney is a fun, albeit short turn-based strategy game. You play as Max McMann, a slick attorney who knows his way around the court room. It’s a fun and funny game. At the beginning of each trial you get to listen to some witty banter between Max and the defense lawyer. There’s even a bit of a romance that plays out between Max and a female lawyer. If you’re looking for a different spin on a turn-based strategy game, you will enjoy Devil’s Attorney.
How Does it Play?
Devil’s Attorney plays perfectly with no lag whatsoever. Don’t want to read all the dialogue at the beginning of the trial? You can just skip through it. The game is very easy to pick up and there’s barely a learning curve. As you progress through each case and earn more money, you can level up certain stats to improve your courtroom performance and learn new skills. The skills that you perform in court allow you to weaken your opponents testimony by lowering the ‘HP’ of witnesses, evidence, experts and other characters. As you progress through the games, each trial gets a little harder. At first you just need to deal with witnesses and evidence that have relatively low HP. Pretty soon, you’ll need to come up with a strategy on what to get rid of first so that your HP does not reach zero. Of course, you also have limited moves that you can make shown by your action points. You start off with 9, which might seem like a lot, however there are very few skills that cost 1 action point. Most of the more useful skills cost around 3 with some as high as 8. With such limited move, you really need to take your time and decide your moves carefully. Luckily, even if you lose the trial, you can keep replaying the level until you beat it.
Once you do complete a level, you reach money to spend on your apartment. Every item that add/upgrade in your apartment will boost an attribute (Materialism, Decadence, and Vanity) that will help you in the courtroom. Sadly, there’s no way that you can max out all of the the stats, so you’ll have to look at the skills that are eventually offered after reaching a certain level and decide which ones you find most useful. After you’ve completed all of the trials in your court case, you eventually move on to a larger apartment where, yes, you need to start all over again.
Why it Works?
Honestly, Devil’s Attorney is just plain fun. The gameplay is flawless, albeit a little frustrating at times. The dialogue in the beginning of the court cases are pretty funny. Plus, there’s a plot…kind of. There’s also a little bit of replay value here. You can play the game on regular mode or hard mode and there are three different endings that you can choose. If you want to see all three, you’ll need to play through three times. Sure, the trials themselves don’t play out any differently nor does the story actually change, but hey, it’s a fun enough game. Can I also say how much I LOVE the fact that the clothes you choose to wear show up in the little profile image during the court scene dialogue. Yes, you can dress Max up as a pimp. I really appreciate the amount of detail the developers put into this game and it really makes you feel as if you are watching some bizarro 80s courtroom sitcom. The voice-acting during the actual courtroom scene really help round out the experience.
Perhaps one of my favorite part of this game is just how unscrupulous Max is. His “skills” in the courtroom range from tampering with evidence to making Epic Speeches to destroy the evidence and witnesses. Yes, the game really embraces how morally objectionable Max’s actions are, and it does so with gusto. But just because Max has questionable morals doesn’t mean the developers do. You would normally think that with so many different upgrades and skills that the game would be riddled with in-app purchases, but it isn’t. There’s no cheating your way into better stats, the money needs to be earned the gold ol’ fashioned way – by winning the cases.
No Like?
Honestly, not much. The fact that the cases themselves have little effect on the gameplay might be a turn off to some people, but I enjoyed Devil’s Attorney tremendously. I might only ask for a sequel.
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Basic Info
- 1 Player game
- $2.99 on the app store
- NO in-app purchases
- 431 MB
Weblinks
Devil’s Attorney on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/devils-attorney/id562772514?mt=8
Devil’s Attorney on Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.senri.da&hl=en
Developer: l33t Game design