Journey of Jesus: The Calling

Journey of Jesus: The Calling is a Facebook-based adventure game where you perform missions, clear obstacles and help your friends.

Review:

Great game indeed.

Journey of Jesus: The Calling casts you in the ancient Middle East. Follow the Messiah, clear the obstacles in your way and help almost anyone you come across.

In this story-driven game, players have tons of small maps to meet with different NPCs, talk with them and receive various quests. Anyone feels hungry and you collect fish and vegetables and make a stew or collect pomegranates. If one feels cold, you collect wood by chopping logs and dead trees and start a fire to make him or her warm. Your friend’s son is getting married and you go to lighten the lamps, set the tables and fluff the pillows.

All those quests miraculously work as a whole and you seldom get bored. The quests don’t repeat themselves that much and I am always willing to accept new ones and be surprised at how unique and realistic they are.

Characters are typically “Facebook game figures”, big heads on small bodies, moving around in the bright-colored maps, serving as a lovely feast to your eyes themselves.

The only thing I hate in this game is its energy system. Have a conversation, smack a pest, chop a tree, tend a flower, and all your energy is gone, leaving you in no position to do anything except switching between the hometown and the current quest map to admire the different sceneries.

Comparison with Journey of Moses

This game proves to possess great similarities with Journey of Moses, an earlier product of its developer. With pretty much the same interface, Journey of Jesus quests players with running all the errands in each map, offering no excessive wood, peddles, flowers, or crops. For example, there was this map where I have to collect all the wood, search all the sand piles for items, assemble fishes, harvest vegetables, make a stew, start a fire, smack the pesky pest, and talk to every NPC before I have access to the next map. Yes, both games provide many maps for you to explore one by one, while granting one as the base. In Journey of Jesus, there is the character’s home town where you can go back to collect energy, fish, wood, flowers and some other stuff and also manufacture clays and jars in the kiln. National tension is intense here, too. In Journey of Jesus, there is this Roman soldier who is constantly involved in quarrels with local people.

Journey of Jesus turns out to be much better than its predecessor. You simply collect the usable items, talk to NPCs, and run errands instead of stupidly clicking each part of the floor to discover things as in Journey of Moses. The graphics are much more detailed and beautiful and you can now hover over the rewards to claim rather than click each of them. Also, you don’t have to click the floor on which an NPC is standing to chat with him or her; you can click the figure itself.

The new game, however, isn’t as good as Journey of Moses from one perspective-the energy issue. In Journey of Moses, energy comes in more than 70 and can not only refill over time but also can be replenished to some extent if you use the fruits you have collected; while in Journey of Jesus, you can only pay actual money for more energy or wait for the refill, which gives one energy in over 6 minutes.