Good Afternoon Sithizens,
We were asked to do a review of an iPhone app by the moderators of swtorstrategies.com, and not being ones to disapoint our masters, we did so eagerly. The app is called Galaxy Link, and although it doesn’t have any links to the game itself due to the fact that Bioware has yet to put out their API for The Old Republic, the app does try to push what usefulness it can with timers, a small social networking tool, and a small encyclopedia of basic information on datacrons.
The social networking tools are relatively bare bones, especially because it has no ability to tie into the game itself. It works by you entering the server and character you play, as well as answering some basic questions about them. After completing the short registration, you see a list of everyone else linked into the network, organized in multiple ways. As useful as it can be, I didn’t like the fact that you could see everyone as soon as you finished registration, but the mechanics themselves are pretty solid. You’ll like this if you love every form of social networking, but otherwise you’ll most likely ignore this part. One other thing should be mentioned however, that it operates over data and not text from what I can tell, which can be useful if you’re out of texts for the month.
With three, four, or five companions constantly working on different professions, traversing the galaxy to get you materials just for you to have to babysit timers, being able to set up those timers within the app itself could be pretty useful. Once again, however, the problem of no API and not being able to hook it up into the game itself to use the app to command your minions comes up. This hinderance makes the timers near worthless to me, especially in the mid range of companion jobs and the very short timers they’ve got, as it sometimes takes a third of the time a companion is out for a job just to set the timer up in the first place.
The final part of the app is the one I feel is actually pretty useful even without being linked into The Old Republic, and that’s the datacron hub. It has decent catagorical information on where to find most of the datacrons, although some data is still missing, but that can easily be remedied in later versions. If you only have one screen then this will greatly reduce the time you spend just sitting around trying to alt tab back and forth from a browser trying to find that darned last cube you just can’t find on Tatooine, only to find the balloon you need to ride to get to it just flew over your head.
Overall, the problem of not being able to tie it into the game itself comes up over and over again, and really holds this app back. It’s well compiled and works smoothly, but without The Old Republic allowing apps to use the game itself there’s not a lot to scream about here. The encyclopedia for datacrons is worth your time and money for this, but beyond that I wasn’t a huge fan.
As soon as the app is released to the public, we’ll post more on this topic. The Sith Inquisition appreciates being able to take the time to review this product, and we look forward to seeing more work from the community in the future.
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