Oh dear. We’ve had our share of appalling freemium-by-numbers titles recently – anyone remember the unspectacular Township? Divine Academy takes the same traits and compounds them with a terribly unoptimised port from other platforms – and then adds a plethora of touchscreen bugs on top as the icing on the cake. Avoid like the plague, at least in its current state.

From the Store description:

Divine Academy is a unique mixture of strategy and god-sim genres. Build your ancient city, develop your godly skills and rule your people. Become a part of a fascinating world – a university for ancient Greek deities. Pass exams at the Divine Academy and get a license to cast the most powerful miracles! Build the most amazing metropolis by casting spells, accumulating wealth and empowering those around you. Be it gardening, architecture or math, help your people learn and explore new frontiers. Discover the vast and beautiful game world and learn to rule it!

Yes, it’s a typical town building game but set within an age of ‘gods’, spells and other forms of intervention. The concept is interesting, with a colourful cast of ‘divine’ characters to help out, but the implementation is flawed on Windows Phone:

No, that’s not your eyes, the text really is that miniscule…. This is part of the intro sequence…

Aside from the 150MB or so initial download, there are extra updates and resources grabbed when you first run the game….

Add tiny stats, titchy icons and tortuous gameplay to horrible touchscreen bugs that see you tapping on something ten times in order to make it work, and you have the makings of a gaming disaster…

The core gameplay is familiar – build stuff, collect crystals, coins, and so on, build more stuff, avoid disasters, grow the population, and so on…

But you’ll soon need the freemium in-app purchases – which run to almost £58 in the UK. Yet again, I’m calling developers like this out. There is NO reason for such high purchases other than to catch out the unwary or foolish.

Can you tell that I didn’t enjoy looking at this game?(!) It’s a cheap port, poorly coded and with freemium greed and complexity on top. Just say no.