Artificial Life App Reviews

Its a great implementation, but really frustrating to lose your creations to "outer darkness" as I like to call it. I want to make a super predator, but it goes byebye... Please fix and it will get 5 stars as it will deserve!

Needs more trade-offs. Reproduction is free, and eating (or attacking the weak) leads to immortality. This causes degenerate strategies. Also, there is no way to gain energy from the sun, so populations quikly leave it. Overall, this is a good start, but it needs more balance to stay interesting. ------------------- Update: survival mode adds a lot of fun. The fact that youre playing just one critter and scored only on lifetime makes reproduction a waste of time. Id love to see a mode where youre scored on how many descendants you have when you die.

I love this game sooooo much I once had a huge tail one but everybody teamed up on him and killed him 

I love this game for its cleverness, originality, and complexity. Theres just one feature I think its missing. I love creating my own Protozoa in survival but im more interested in the survival of my traits rather than my individual. Since we can save the traits, can we use that set in the sandbox to modify specific Protozoa? Right now if I want to inject my personalized guy I have to change all the traits of some protozoa individually and when he dies, I have to do it again with another. Instead Id like to just load my saved settings in a guy or create a new one spontaneously. Or maybe do what someone else said and as long as a descendant in survival mode survives, the game continues. Thats more what life is about, right?

I got Artificial Life a LOOOOOOOONG time ago now (LOL) and I. LOVE. IT!!! It rocks so much that I cant think of much else to say. And I also reccommend this especially to any Spore (the whole game, the one for the computer) fan (like me ) and also to most other people. It is SO worth 99 cents! And Survival Mode is AWESOMEFUL. I LOVE THIS APP! Update: OHMYGOSH MY OLDEST "Oldest" PROTOZOA WAS OVER 7,000!!! But then his "Avoid the Sun" chromosome failed to kick in (he mustve been asleep) and he was burned to death... XP Argh! The most recent update said it fixed the incorrect score glitch in Survival mode, but its still there! I just had a game where my Protozoa was over 1,000 years old when it was killed, but it said my score was 860.... :( Update: O.O LOL! I saw two red, tailless Protozoa circling a tailless yellow one in Survival Mode! It looked like the Sun when youre zoomed way out with 2 equally sized hiding spots!  Forget what I said about the camera thing.  The only problem is that it gets in the way when Im moving the camera. HOWEVER, the update fixed the glitch that sometimes scrambled the chromosomes! THANK YOU!!! Now my Protozoa wont keep sleeping so long that they starve themselves to death!!! Once again, thanks! A third update: Thank you! The new updates fixed the glitch where it was saying that the population was at the max, but everyone was dead except the oldest Protozoa and occasionally 1 other Protozoa!  Now Im just gonna say a few random things about cool things Ive noticed while using this app. Unfortunately, they dont exist any more because I had to restore my iPhone to factory state due to some glitch that kept crashing it. (It was a glitch in the iPhone software, not an app. ) There is a certain color of Protozoa in my world that steals babies from their parents. This is odd behavior, but makes a bit of sense to me because the baby then follows the one who stole it, thinking it is its parent. It also is usually a baby of a similar purplish-magenta-ish color but not the same. There is one color of Protozoa that travels in packs. Usually, probably about half the pack is its on kind, and the rest is other colors. After traveling a while, some of the others will start trust the ones that are the same color and not ever leave the pack like some of the others. Then suddenly, without warning, the cyan ones (the ones that are all the sane color) will kill and eat the trusting ones. This behavior is very interesting as I have only seen it in the cyan Protozoa, all of them do it, and never do it to one another (well, almost never). Its also interesting because that is a very smart way to get food! The foolish ones stick to you, then you kill them when you want to eat. It is traitorous and has nearly killed the Protozoa Im following (I try to protect the ones Im following, and I also usually follow the oldest ones when that glitch isnt there), but I killed them or changed their chromosomes first. Another of the smart/interesting things about this is that they almost always eat the ones they kill instead of just leaving it there, and they seem to have a taste for scavengers. The last thing I wanna say for now is about the Protozoa I mentioned earlier that lived to be over 4,000. He/she/it kept on mating with his/her/its children, until some of them probably had the exact same chromosomes as him/her/it! But he/she/it only mated with the ones that were the same color as him/her/it. Strange, huh? I also think thats how he/she/it survived so long—he/she/it was always sticking around with its relatives! The Protozoa he/she/it mated with the second-most often were the baby-theives I mentioned.

The new Petrie dish option is very good addition, but now the Protozoa lost the ability to hide in the spots-they jump in and out of the spots constantly instead of actually being "hidden asleep"

The survival mode is pretty good Good overall

I absolutely enjoy running simulations with this whilst I do things like homework. Setting rules that determine the social habitat based on countless options and the order in which your instructions are put to play, tweak so many outcomes of behavior that is amusing to watch. I would like a little more interaction with the world though and I have some good ideas that I will edit into this post later.

Fun to watch your protazoa evolve, should make more stages of evolution

I think that most of these reviews have good ideas, so instead of restating Ill say look below. Also my suggestion is that there should be 2 or 3 levels of complexity, mostly for sandbox mode (I dont know how to work it into survival). That way you can do level 1 to get the feel for it, 2 to get going, and 3 to really challenge you.

Great app! Like others, however, I would suggest some way to keep track of lineages, also maybe manipulate what determines what traits protozoa look for in a mate (other than being the closest one)? Perhaps a way to "tag" and then follow a specific protozoa and its progeny. Whatever you can add will be happily accepted - designers clearly did a brilliant job and will surely be thinking of things I cant on the spur of the moment! If you are in doubt, buy this app. Really.

What are the ultimate chromosomes? I never last more than 5 minutes in survival mode.

Very good app. But I have noticed something very interesting, the creatures I edit never survive as long as the creatures Ive left alone, even if the instructions I give them seem fullproof. Just goes to show the power of evolution I guess. And I have a suggestion, I think it would be cool if another source of nutrition could be found like water ( you could have little lakes that look like the hiding spots, but blue) or maybe trees that would orbit the sun and drop food at changeable intervals. Anything to add more variables and variance in the behavior that could arise. But either way this is a great app, very good job.

This is amazing but could go with some improvements. I suggest adding some if and/or statements. EX. If predator less than 180 units away and food less than 80 units away then eat. My second suggestion would be to have more behaviors to add more customization. Finally I suggest adding a game mode that is like survival but your overall goal is to become the dominant protazoa. Keep up the good work and try to make many updates to make this the most amazing simulator on the market. It definetly has the potential to become the best. I had an idea for a new gametype. You pick 2 previously created protazoa or 1 previously created protazoa and 1 randomly generated one. The game then makes 100 of each, no breeding allowed, and the one thats wiped out first loses. Also if you could add some way to save a succesfull Protozoa directly from sandbox mode to your list of custom Protozoa that would be great. Keep the updates coming.

This is quite a good app. However, I would like it if there was some kind of "Species Survival" mode. What I mean by this is that you try to make a species dominant instead of just one Protozoa. This way herding would actually become useful, since currently everyone youre herding with usually gets the food first. I do love the simplicity though, and the fact that it is biologically correct alone is enough to get it five stars. Keep up the good work, Life team!

This is an excellent app but unfortunately the sandbox function doesnt work on mine. I would really appreciate if this were fixed.

I was searching for a game like this since I switched to iPhone...previously I was playing a more primitive version on WinCE called LoCE. Minutes after purchasing the game I was actually regretting I got the game - having difficulty to know where to start, and the starting zoom level of the graphics didnt exactly look enticing. Just before I deleted the game, I stumbled on the instructions under help, and it got better since. In fact - Im using it like a fish tank now... destressing by checking out on how my protozoa was doing. I think a tutorial would have helped for beginners, and yes - some of the suggestions given here in ther reviews are great, like other stimuli and food sources. I would also like to suggest that we could choose the color of our protozoa? And the looks... is there a significance in the length of the tail? Does it make the protozoa swim faster? Anyway - great job guys - keep up the good work... have another update, and I will not hesitate to recommend this game to more people! Oh - a free version too might help in the marketing. ;)

This is a great start but take all of these reviews seriously. I love trying to play this simulation app but my fun is almost always stifled buy a glitch for instance, all the Protozoa in sandbox mode stop moving suddenly and the whole Petrie dish dies. These issues tempt me to ask for a refund. 1. Fix glitches 2. Make it possible to import Protozoa into sandbox mode from your library and spawn them with a tap. 3. Make the programming more clear. For instance: my condition #1 is true so why isnt my Protozoa doing that instead of rule #9 which may also be true but is less important

Pretty awesome. Those less patient of you may find it boring, but I love it. To the designers - more variables would be nice. Good app. Buy it.

well its confusing