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CTA RATING: ★★★★★★★☆☆☆

We were one of the lucky 10,000 to get Expando for free but we would definitely say that this game is worth the 2 bucks that the developer has since begun to charge.  Don’t get your panties in a bunch.  They announced that it would be free to the first 10,000 and then charge after that.  They’re not part of the dingy group of developers that put their stuff out for free before charging once it gets popular.  Read about the gameplay and the app in general after the break…

When you open the app you are faced with a couple of choices: play, high scores, instructions, tell a friend or buy more.  High scores takes you to the developer’s website where you can compare your best to others.  Instructions give a very limited idea of how to play, but it’s really not too hard anyways.  Tell a friend tosses you to the built-in email app on the device and allows you to share the news of this company’s product with others.  Buy more again takes you to the developer’s website.  They have a lot of projects underway, but this is the only app that is available now (as of this writing).  The last button, play, obviously allows you to play the game.  Let’s talk about gameplay…

The object of the game is to fill 67% of the screen with smiley faces while avoiding the tiny — annoying — red balls that bounce around the screen.  If you touch the screen, your smiley face will grow.  The longer you hold, the bigger it gets.  At the top of the screen it tells you what level you’re on, your score, how many balls you have left, how many lives remain and the percent of the screen you have filled.  Knowing the percent filled is a strategic part of how you should play the game… but we’re not going to tell you how we got to level 31. We’re sure there are people out there who’ve gotten further than us, but we quit at 31 because we figured out how to play and seemingly could have gone on forever.

What do we wish could be different?  Well, a play/pause button or tap combo would be awesome.  The developer suggests that we can use the sleep/off switch to “pause the game” and that it’ll allow us to resume when we wake up the device.  Cool… nope.  Say I don’t want it to sleep, I just have to reply to comment on CTA and then will come right back to the game: no dice.  What if I need to make a phone call?  You can’t.  If you exit the game for any reason, you lose your progress and you must start over next time you launch the app. BOGUS.  

Most of our complaints are listed in the App’s Notes in the iTunes App Store.  This is just another example of how good developers listen to their customers’ opinions.  They’ll be including an auto-save feature in the next version as well as difficulty levels, more backgrounds, and more music tracks.  We think that they should include a double-tap pause capability as well.  The sleep switch is kind of a ruddy option.  

The developer also explains that you can double tap the home button on the device and it will allow you to play your own music.  So, yeah, we tried… didn’t work.  I started playing a song in my “iPod” app and then opened Expando, started the game and double tapped the home button.  It took me to my contacts by default.  My thought: if you’re gonna advertise functionality, it should be there without me having to change my default settings on my device.  With that said, we’re chalking that up to a non-functional claim made by the developer… bummer.

Those are just a few things that don’t really affect the gameplay, so we didn’t dock the score too much.  The auto-save feature is crucial and should’ve been in the first release, so we’re not comfortable giving this one any more than 7 out of 10.  When version 2.0 comes out, we’d be happy to take another look… right now, it’s a great game without perfect implementation.

Oh, one last thing.  This is a game that literally ANYONE could play and find amusing.  There are some games that could easily be considered violent and that an over a protective parent may not like.  I say, let the kids play this one.  It’s great.

 

***Developer Update***

 

We’re being told that Version 2.0 should be live and soon, like possibly now.  We can also expect to see user definable music in the future.  We were also wrong about them not having other apps out… Word Whirl is another app that they have available in the app store.  Lastly, we got word that Apple is now keeping a big brother watch on all the apps: they actually docked the app from the top seller list because they gave them away free and started charging.  We wish that more developers did it this way, but without the backlash from Apple.  There’s a lot of App Store Politics that have yet to play out, but hopefully they’ll come to a standard at some point in the near future.

Expando Support

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