This app is worth the money, but mostly because Le Havre is such an amazing game, not because it is an excellent implementation. Mind you, this is a good implementation, just not a superb one a la the original agricola app. It’s also a bit disappointing that despite this app having been on the market for such a long time, the following bugs persist. Thus, I’ve finally decided to write a review in the hopes that the developer will take note.
In dozens of offline and online games, I’ve noticed the following bugs occur repeatedly:
1-Game center games FREQUENTLY fail to start. I generally need to send at least three game invitations before all players in multiplayer game are able to join. Most players, after joining, just see a “Waiting for game start” message on the game screen, even after all players have supposedly joined and the first player has taken his turn. This could very well be Game Center’s fault, and not this app’s, however. Game Center is, in general, a mockery of online gaming, and so it wouldn’t surprise me if this issue is on their end.
2-in online games, the player who created the game always goes first. Not necessarily a big problem, but it’s annoying, bc player order has a major impact on strategy in Le Havre, and it would be nice to have a truly random player order
3-the chat function is completely useless. Most of the time the chat button is unresponsive, but every blue moon or two the chat screen will appear and you can send a message. Of course, the other person will have to wait til the next blue moon to see it.
4-the sound effects setting is broken. despite having set the music and game effects volume to zero, every time I open the app and take my turn, the sound effects still play, which is extremely disruptive, and makes it impossible to enjoy this app in a place where you can’t have LOUD noises playing, e.g. a library, uppity Internet cafe, etc.
5-occasionally when you set up a multiplayer full game, it will instead launch the basic game. (This hasn’t happened as frequently as the other issues, only once so far) So, you need to start a whole new game, send new invitations, etc. frustrating.
6-occasionally, when returning to the app after leaving it open in the background, I am unable to close out of the “Last Moves” screen, which automatically displays when you enter a game. This is a minor annoyance, as you then need to close the app completely and relaunch.
7-If you lose your internet connection in an online game, it will still let you take your turn and confirm. The game screen will update. However, if you leave and return to the game screen, you’ll find that nothing it has returned to the state it was before you took your turn, and there is no notification to tell you that you’ve lost your internet connection or anything. This has caused me to occasionally wait days for the other player to take his turn, when in fact my turn was never actually sent, despite having displayed on my device. To work around this, I often need to check my online games list after taking my turn just to be sure my turn actually went through.
To give this review some balance, here are the things I love about this app:
1-The Le Grand Hameau is implemented beautifully as an IAP.
2-You can choose which special buildings will appear in the game. Awesome for trying out those buildings that you haven’t gotten to play with yet, or for drafting special buildings before play.
3-You can adjust the animation speed to make the game go extremely quickly. So much better than the crawling Brass app. I can play a full 3p game against AI in about 20 minutes, 30 tops if I don’t get all AP.
4-The AI difficulty is challenging enough to be interesting, however, perhaps not challenging enough for experienced players (50+ games or so). But it’s good enough to make the app worth buying, even without the online play feature.
5-it has an excellent rules and building reference, and the tutorial is sufficient to learn the game (and conveniently not broken... Are you taking notes, “Steam” app?).
6-you can have multiple online and local games going on at once. This is something that Sage games does very well (e.g. in Tigris and Euphrates and their other apps) and more board game app developers should make this feature a priority.
7-for a game with this much information to parse, the UI is surprisingly clean and easy to read. No wasted space on game screen, you can tap on buildings and ships for more info. All in all, well done.
All in all, Sage has done a good job making a clean implementation of Le Havre, albeit with some unfortunate, persistent bugs. I thank Sage games for their hard work on this app, and on the others like it, for bringing some of these oldies-but-goodies designs to the modern board game market. Please consider fixing the issues above so I can up the rating!
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