Monetizer: Lawless

hello and welcome to pocket gamer.bizizz monetizer feature this is where we play the first 10 minutes or so of free to play games and just have a look at the um kind of initial user experience have a look at the in-store monetization um in addition the general flow of what's going on in the game so again we're going to look at um today is uh Lawless which is the new game from uh DNA so it's a Shooters but actually been developed by a menu studio in the UK um okay so this will send me push notifications I think this is something um normally I think it's quite you know it's kind of almost quite rude I've not even played the game and it wants to say push notifications I think this kind of interaction with the user is much better um after you've played some of the game you can always pop it up you know in five minutes into the game in this case I will allow it because I want to see kind of what the game is going to communicate with me but I think this is not a very sensible use of push notifications or at this stage of the

proceedings anyhow so so go back to um yeah so there's a game from DNA Let's Straighten that up um it's actually 8 pixel square or a new studio um that came out of a uh one on UK Studio that kind of uh were bust um so they've had lots of console experience this is their first mobile game so it'd be interesting to see it so in this case um mobile gay is um is DNA's kind of social network um so it's quite unusual um in that actually no so it does have a play now option previously mubarger games have forced you to either sign up with their own network or sign in with Facebook in this case um I don't have a problem signing up but let's just sign let's just play as a guest to begin with just to see what the experience is like see we'll get them yeah okay 14 years old sadly yes okay

so I hope we get some audio at some point s on isn't it yeah okay is going wrong I imagine this is going to be a bit like heat go go go I'm gonna be shooting so obviously put the light gun game going on here go where am I going go away okay there we go

it's very straightforward defeat the required number of opponents to complete the stage that's gonna be I'm gonna be too confusing is it come on okay Larry needs us to build a new crew with some serious Firepower okay so now we can kind of uh yes this is very based on heat that character um so this is my if I sign in to have my Proper mobile code here my ranks obviously pretty low at the moment um so it's going to see two currencies here there's a there's a golden cache so I can change character Bond 10 boost when he has a submachine gun

Miller template boost with a shotgun and the girl the attempts and boost with a assault rifle and then okay so she's presumably about a bio because she costs money let's see what he says purchase Lee I'm gonna I haven't got any crime coins okay so this is quite a good way of I'm just checking out the um have the in-game currency Works let's go and see what crime crime coins are like so um babage being a being a platform tends to have um kind of very similar uh kind of in-game stores for for all the games that you use mobile game so this is kind of typical what we'd see so it's 99 Cents for uh I don't know what it's doubling I'm up here but 100 crime coins and then we'll probably go down yeah so 99.99 for 10

524 crime coins which is if my memory serves me my burger games tend to have the exactly the same currency um ratios for each so you don't have these slightly weird numbers um so it's 5210 crime coins for 49.99 so it has it was kind of quite typical now if you have six transaction bands I sometimes have five now um excuse me mobile guys a bit quite interesting it still has the cheapest one is 99 cents a lot of games now particularly more I was kind of Hardcore strategy RPG games they're starting in-app purchases um is this one so three pound in UK or 4.99 um but this gives us a slight kind of smaller option uh but you can see obviously the ratio of these for this one you're spending 99 Cents and you're getting 100 Chrome coins oh there's about the greatest about the same actually yeah so

so I'm not gonna buy any of these I don't really care at this stage who my character is yes oh that's confusing we'd like to cancel this purchase dismiss will cancel that's weird technology okay so they won't go for Lee we'll go for the let's go for the man with the bad haircut another level so achieve a one star rating here we go so these other guys are in my team but I'm not controlling them oh girl

you can't shoot the cars actually no run it well that's fast it's got some gold I got some cash no civilians down so I'm not that bad at Criminal foreign weapon type I'm not even equipped weapon here I don't think okay so have a quick see if we can level up some things I suppose um this is going to give me some stuff not really

hmm okay let's do another one Okay so we've got a Time basis I guess that's kind of with the thing that with light gun games assassinate the boss before he escapes please don't please put another question come on hmm

I guess the interesting interesting thing with this game is because the gameplay is so simple just tapping on stuff how they can build complex sentence so presumably time is going to be one of them you have full set of lives okay all right so that's gonna be another um mechanic is going to be like this is going to be going to be an energy when I run out of lives and then what's this here so this is my weapons only at one for one percent assuming I can level this up but quite how I do that I don't know maybe it's still um that wasn't even a proper level I was like oh there we go okay so it's very much like a CSR Racing type thing so the gunsmith has he's gonna

kind of take me through the process um he's got give me a discount budget okay so there's a m16k it was a cut down M16 damages but I've got this one I've got the Scorpion well I don't want that one so I can rank it up I can test for it it's gonna cost me ten thousand I've got ten thousand I don't really want to buy it so it's going to force me to do it oh this looks very much like the animation that was in um the drowning which is another shooter game from um DNA okay so now I'm gonna oh can I not level it up so I could I know it's not let me do it especially opponents have a white outline hit them quicker to increase

your multiplier okay all right failed I've got gum bones XP

my point to multiply over velocity Miss and the special opponent or here it's a villain that's my gun bonus that's gonna upgrade my upgrading this mechanism okay so crew members as well to unlock okay so now we can see a bit more of the proper UI uh so he's my crew leader I can rank up with that I've got a free gifts holiday if I can invite friends so I can use Twitter Facebook mail or SMS and my reward is a there's some sort of shotgun and that's on a it's a timed gift I mean Box hours I'm going some Dubliners because I guessed so this is showing why are getting it

okay so that's all right so I've collected a weapon this is that a gun that is a gun okay so it looks like there's gonna be lots of weapons to collect and that's going to be the um the main kind of gameplay mechanic so it's kind of interesting with the drowning again we looked at quite a lot that was um we actually had proper controls it wasn't like a like a light gun shoe like this or on this on rail shooter effectively this is when we had good good control which I actually really like the drowning um and basically the leveling up was um you played again it's very short missions kind of two minute missions either a tackle Defender against these zombie um kind of characters so there was a kind of a light story mode of post-apocalated type thing but a lot of people didn't like didn't like the controls so I mean obviously doing um first person shooter controls on a on a touchscreen is pretty difficult to do this gets around the problem well um although it's obviously being a light gun game takes a lot of the kind of uh

skill out of this game makes it much more kind of a resource-based game because probably you'll have enemies with certain amount of hit points unless you level up your weapons you're going to kind of destroy it you won't better kill them so um I guess and kind of see what they're doing with the game um with adrenaline it was kind of a bit of a debate about whether it was it was a success or not I guess it depends on what you kind of your view on what they um what uh DNA Hope just um to get out of the game I think they got about kind of one to two million downloads didn't seem to monetize it kind of monetize okay but it didn't seem to um be I don't think it was the success they kind of really thought they were going to get um but we'll see with this one um yeah so that's Lawless we'll look at it in our um probably one of our Charter School features just to see kind of if it if it does find a audience I guess the other thing for these kind of games is they this is a bit more casual because it's on Rails

but it tends tend to be it's going to skew to a kind of a young young male audience um and this kind of game is potentially not like a strategy game where people are going to be playing for for months on end this is probably a bit more of a play for a couple of weeks on end okay cool