This is also a good time to mention people have been reporting since the release of the iPhone X 2 years ago the game does not properly interact with gestures at the top and bottom of the screen due to Notification Center. I imagine it’s similar to this issue and there’s probably a similar fix on Android as there is on iOS. (On iOS, the system gives precedence to the OS when you make edge gestures, but if you set a single property it gives precedence to your game and a player has to make the gesture twice quickly if they want the system gesture.)
It’d be nice if the mobile versions behaved like mobile games
Actually the problem is it’s too easy to pull that menu up because it overlaps with the game field. Same with pulling down from the top. The bottom gesture is also true on any iPhone.
The reproduction works sort of like this:
Get in a state where you want to move a gem down from the top row or up from the bottom row.
Try to move the gem.
The phone’s menu swipes down/up.
When you return to GoW, the move happens.
It’s even more frustrating on an iPhone X because now that gesture is “switch apps” instead of “display Control Center”.
In other games I play that need a bottom/top gesture, they’ve set the OS flag. It takes multiple quick swipes to summon the system menu in those, so when I want to switch apps I can pause the game then do a couple of swipes.
While we’re at it, a couple of suggestions too, these aren’t bugs but could be nice QoL fixes:
Stuff in the extreme top-left and top-right corners is cut off a tiny bit depending on your orientation. Newer iPhones have rounded corners instead of squared corners, and the placement of these elements assumes a square. (Someone long ago mentioned using “safe insets” that were introduced in iOS… 11 I think? They tend to guide you to put elements within the safe boundaries but really we’re talking most of these buttons could scoot over 10-15 pixels and be fine.)
The way GoW handles the notch leaves it uncentered and that bugs me. GoW just shifts the UI over a notch amount of pixels, but that leaves things that should be centered not centered. Other games I play handle it by “letterboxing”, they put a strip of UI down both sides of the screen to maintain the centered appearance and support having the notch on either end. It costs a tiny number of horizontal pixels but the phones with notches are so dang big it doesn’t matter.
I’m not disagreeing with you at all, but I’m going to move this to the feedback section so it stays on the radar and doesn’t get lost in the bug reports as these are all Quality of Life suggestions
Fair! I have a little bit of additional feedback, I paid more attention to what other games are doing over the past few days.
Not every game has the “it takes several taps” behavior. A big example is Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp. However, in that game you really don’t do much at the lower or top portions of the screen, so it’s possible it doesn’t inconvenience anyone.
Azur Lane does, but it has many screens with lots of UI on the extreme bottom.
I feel like GoW falls in the “should” camp, since making gem matches can happen at the top or bottom. A bad solution would be to letterbox those regions; my understanding is on iOS one can set UIViewController preferredScreenEdgesDeferringSystemGestures to tell iOS to make it a little harder to do the system gestures on those edges.