App Army Assemble: Methods: Detective Competition - "Can you become the best sleuth?"

• We handed Methods: Detective Competition to our App Army
• They loved the character designs
• The text is a touch small if you're playing on a phone rather than a tablet

Methods: Detective Competition is the latest release from Erabit Studios. It's a visual novel that sees you putting your detective skills to the test. Our reviewer, Jack Brassell, enjoyed her time with it, but we wanted to see if our App Army community agreed, so we asked them to put their deerstalkers on and get sleuthing.

Here's what they said:

First of all, I would like to thank the developers who are increasingly launching PC/console games for mobile. About my analysis of the game. Methods: Detective Competition is a game of competition between detectives and in it, you have to solve cases, the game is super well done, in the dialogues, graphics and sound, everything works perfectly, but I would like to comment on a specific point that makes it a game where people who do not have a knowledge of the English language cannot play the game.

Unfortunately, the game has no translation into Portuguese, it only has English and Japanese and this will drive away many people because the game requires you to understand all the dialogues to be able to understand the cases and do well in them, otherwise, you will be super lost without knowing what to do. But if you understand English well then you will find a super fun and well-made game to play anywhere. I liked it.

Methods: Detective Competition is described as a visual novel but boils down to tapping through long conversations between characters and examining everything in the competition's murder scenes. Set in a skyscraper, if you don’t solve a ‘murder’ quick enough it either demotion to a lower level or game over and try again.

The game looks nice, with cartoon graphics for the characters with limited animation. The music is rather forgettable. What really lets the game down is the over-long conversations that you must laboriously tap through to get to the ‘murder’ scenes. The attempts at humour are pretty feeble as well. I soon got bored playing this game and won’t be going back to it.

Visual novel? No, it's more like a visual short detective story collection with a LOT of different characters - most being even quirkier than their graphic design. The art is really different (and, to be honest, it really divides opinions - I liked it, but I can see why some people hate it) but the gameplay is rather standard whodunit fare, and if you already played Layton Brothers (or the other Methods games - it's a series) you'll feel right at home.

If you haven't, well, you get a text description of the case, some clues in visual and text form, and lots of character descriptions, and it's up to you to think and decide who the killers are. The cases aren't particularly original nor particularly difficult, the main attraction seems to be the characters themselves. Long story short, if you like reading detective fiction and humour, give this a shot. Although the interface isn't reworked for mobile, which means the font is too tiny IMHO. If that's not a problem, you're looking at a lot of reading for your bucks

This game is especially for graphic novel and visual novel fans. Less action and a lot of dialogue in the game. Murder mystery game where you have to investigate crime. In my view for mobile, they should add more interactive elements. Also, the text is too small for mobile, especially for the iPhone XR. If possible they can add voice dialogues in a few scenes. Still playing the game

Pros

• Character design - 5/5
• Graphics - 5/5
• Story - 5/5
• Gameplay 4/5

Cons

• Very small text
• Interactive elements

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Methods: Detective Competition