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TUAW review: EpicWin for iPhone
As a gamer and productivity fetishist, I've been anticipating EpicWin for iPhone since we first saw the app's trailer. It aims to enhance the drudgery of a to-do list with elements of a fantasy role-playing game like World of Warcraft, thereby adding a bit of fun to your daily tasks. I've been using it for a couple of weeks now and, while it's fun in a I'm-gaming-while-I-should-be-working way, EpicWin feels unfinished. The developers have promised (and delivered) new features via updates, but EpicWin still feels like an internal beta. Here's what I found. Choose your character Like many fantasy role-playing games, the first thing you've got to do when launching EpicWin is create your character. There are five to choose from, all familiar to the genre: a dwarf, a warrior priestess, an "undead" skeleton warrior, a male warrior and, oddly enough, a living tree. Think of a happy-go-lucky Ent and you'll get the idea. The first three are free; the others can be purchased in-game. %Gallery-101818%
EpicWin aims to turn your real-life tasks into a social game
Given the amount of iPhone and iPad apps coming out these days, I'm not all that interested in getting excited about an app before it comes out. There's already plenty of games and apps available now, so worrying about not-yet-released apps isn't all that important. That said, this app called EpicWin is gaining quite a bit of attention -- it's a very originally designed to-do list masquerading as a game that gives points for accomplishing things in real life. If this idea sounds familiar, it's because we've seen it before -- Booyah Society was supposed to be a game that rewarded you for real-life accomplishments, and there have been a few other apps like it poking around. Most of them haven't worked very well -- the issue has always been that there's no validation, no proof that you've done what you said you did in real-life. But EpicWin has some solid developers behind it (the folks that worked on Little Big Planet for the PS3, and MiniSquadron for the iPhone), and a very intriguing art style and tone, so maybe it'll be more intriguing than what we've seen along these lines in the past. EpicWin is "coming soon" to the App Store -- we'll keep an eye out for it, and let you know when it's out.
