Little known fact about the Araknasaur: its eggs are delicious. And the evil CEO of the Robot Seafood Corporation wants them for breakfast. He wants them so badly, he's willing to bring the full might of his aquatic robot army to bear against the Araknasaurian hero of Velocispider [$0.99], a Universal retro arcade shooter that's as ridiculous as it sounds. It's created by Retro Dreamer, creators of Linkoids [2.99/Lite] and Sneezies. [$0.99/Lite/HD]

Velocispider is a fixed-view shooter with ultra-simple tilt controls. You fire continuously upwards at the Aquabots as they come to kill you and steal your eggs. They start out in Space Invaders-style formations, but switch up often and come at you from all angles. Some randomly drop power-ups that improve your shots, restore a life or give you extra points.  You can charge up a powerful shot by holding down anywhere on the screen. I killed a lot of Aquabots before I learned about the charge shot, but it makes destroying bosses much easier. The tilt movement can be a little touchy and caused me occasional trouble. I wouldn't say an alternate control method is necessary, but it might be a nice addition for a future update.

The game is broken up into 20 individual waves. They unlock as you complete them so you can start from your highest completed wave, but that's just a convenience to help you progress through the game. The real challenge is playing through without dying by losing all three of your lives or all three of your eggs. At its heart, Velocispider is a high score competition, with Game Center leaderboards that will be topped by those who can get through all twenty waves in a single play-through. It's that challenge that will keep you coming back for another shot long after you've seen all that the game has to offer.

But enough about the technical stuff. Velocispider is a ton of fun, but the mechanics aren't what caught my eye. The game is gorgeous, in a pixel art and chiptune sort of way. The art is full of character, and that character is super ridiculous. I can't decide if I love the drop sharks (manta rays?) or the bomber whales more. The game also has a great soundtrack, though I wouldn't mind if a few more tracks were mixed in.

The story is the exact sort of campy over-the-top tale you'd expect from a game like this. There's not much to it, but I looked forward to the moments between each wave that illustrate the evil CEO's growing desperation and failing grasp on reality. Sadly, you might miss a few of them if you're doing well, since they only show up before boss waves or when you start playing.

If you're anything like me, the thrill of fighting off waves of aquatic-robot monsters with a well armed half-spider, half-velociraptor Araknasaur makes Velocispider an easy buy. Fortunately, it's also a challenging arcade game that will keep you scrabbling for a high score. Players seem to be enjoying the game in our forums too, so give Velocispider a look and let's go shoot some squid.

Nitako's Popstar Physics (Save Toshi 2) [Free] is a puzzle game wrapped in a weird exterior. It's also a sequel to Save Toshi [Free], a game that got a lot of love for how odd it was, how gaudy it was and ultimately, how fun it was. So Popstar Physics has a lot to live up to both from a technical and a critical standpoint.

Save Toshi was all about saving a pop star who had forgotten how to walk and using physics to transport her to the dance floor. Popstar Physics picks up where the story left off with Toshi once again being kidnapped by demons, but this time they've cloned her and turned her into zombies -- and no -- before your eyes drift away, this isn't a zombie game, it's still a 3D physics game -- it just happens to have zombies in it.

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Monster Hunter: Dynamic Hunting is a competent hack-and-slash title from the studio that brought the actual mega franchise to market. That’s a good sign. But, while all the mechanics are serviceable, in the early parts of the game, combat seems to suffer from weird design decisions that slow the frantic pace of battle it tries to conjure.

Over-the-shoulder perspective fighting games are nothing new on the App Store. Chair Entertainment, however, possesses the crown thanks to Infinity Blade [$2.99], a sharp and fast-moving action joint that prioritizes sword control. In that, you can hack wherever you desire and the movements will translate to the screen. Hunting doesn’t do this. You can only swipe your sword in two directions: north and south and east and west.

This is... odd because Hunting wants you to hit specific parts of the humungous monsters that it puts in front of you. In this sense, the game sort of requires accuracy, but the lack of fine sword movement makes this lofty requirement hard to fulfill. Instead of dancing around a monster and hacking at its ankles, I’ve instead been rolling almost aimlessly in circles until I accidentally slash at a behemoth’s legs.

To be fair, the early game, at least, isn’t so concerned with where you hit the monster, so long as you make contact. That makes this concern moot to an extent, but I think you can understand some of the frustration I’ve been experiencing -- I want to drill monster’s in their obvious ‘open’ places, but I can’t because I’m fumbling with a system not really built for you to exploit such fine details.

In addition to slashing, you can also pull off some defensive moves. By placing two tips on the screen, you’ll go into a guard pose. By swiping those two fingers, you’ll roll. If you slash after successfully pulling one of these moves off, you’ll perform a counter-attack, which are some of the most devastating moves in the game.

The study of monster habits is integral to the Monster Hunter experience, so that little fact nugget doesn’t come as much of a surprise. You’re supposed to know your foe and then act on its quirks or hesitations. And when you can conquer the sword and really get into the diving, guarding, and countering the game feels great -- it clicks.

The loot and grind components are fantastic drivers in the early going. You don’t level up in this specific joint, but you do earn loot from monsters each time you defeat them, which can then be used to make even better weapons and armor. Some of the enemies in the game are absolutely vicious, so it relies on this hooking you. As you beat more monsters, you can unlock more weapons to build, so I’m looking at this as the “leveling” component.

I think there is a hearty caveat that I should note about the guard and counter mechanics, though, and it ties into the game’s hearty UI. The entire bottom quarter of the screen is obscured by your health bar and the like, so when you place two fingers, you’re really eating up screen space and obscuring possible counter cues that may arise.

We’ll be doing a full review on Hunting in the near future and I encourage you to give that write-up a look. For this impressions piece, I’ve taken a narrow glance at the battle system in first "chapter," so you're not getting the full story here.

Who knows? Maybe there's a pivot point that can sway my opinion of the battle or maybe there's good justification for the rigidness and design decisions. Definitely check back with us later to get the full run-down of what Hunting as a complete product.

App Store Link: Monster Hunter Dynamic Hunting, $4.99 - Available in the USA at 11:00 PM Eastern, earlier in other regions.

Here's a fact that might not be entirely too surprising: People are hungry for World of Warcraft. Seriously, I still know people who spend hours upon hours a day and have been playing with the same fervor since it was released in 2004. Also, tickets for Blizzcon, Blizzard's yearly almost entirelyWoW-centric convention, sell out within seconds of going up for sale. So, really, Gameloft couldn't have picked a better game to clone with Order & Chaos [$6.99], especially judging by the fact that the company just announced that they've managed to make $1,000,000 in the first 20 days that it was available on the App Store.

In addition, there's also an update on the way which fill add some new quests, the ability to migrate characters between servers, and separate chat channels for each language. After that, future updates are planned which will include things like new dungeons and PvP arenas. Something tells me that with the kind of cash Order & Chaos is making, Gameloft will be supporting it very well.

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Straight up: you’ll have to forgive me if some of the nuance of Shadow Cities [Free] -- one of the newest geo-centric MMO games available on the App Store -- has evaded me. It’s not good at telling you what it is and how you’re supposed to interact with it. Although, a lot of that might have to do with the fact that I don't exactly live in a dense metropolitan area, rendering the location awareness of the game moot since there's no one around me playing.

The PR isn’t much better, though the press releases and the buzz around it are the things that drew our attention in the first place. Shadow Cities is billed as a PVP-centric ARG that uses wherever you are as the game’s map. Like an MMO, it supposedly offers a cool and deep leveling system and a ton of missions and ‘activities.’

That's real high-concept stuff. What I actually see is a weird, blacked-out Google Maps-style world with little purple, blue, red, and green orbs floating around like neon snowflakes. With a couple of flicks of my wrists, my orange orb can decimate these other colored orbs. Then, I get experience points and, I guess, the implied promise of further orb decimation.

It seems like the point of the game revolves around killing these orbs. With each victory, I come closer to dominating my urban center, which happens to be a small city deep in the American south. I don’t see any progress bars or anything of that sort, though, so I’ll just assume that the forthcoming tyranny will take some time to seed.

In Shadow Cities, you play as a mage of one of two sides. I picked the “tech priest”-type of dudes assuming that the meld of man, psychic powers, and machines would fair better against the earthy, organic types of mages. I don’t think there’s a substantial difference in what “team” you pick. At least, I don’t get that impression.

There are two chat rooms available to you once you start the game. It isn’t, at least here, specific to your urban center. The guys talking in the chat are from my state in general and they’re looking for people to battle because app hasn’t reached the kind of critical and consumer response that it needs to flourish and become more than a proof of concept that sounds neat in press releases.

Over on the game’s official blog, proof of stuff that can happen in the game can be found. Earlier in May, users were encouraged to join battle groups, which are, essentially, global communities of 100 mages assigned to a country. There was a campaign in which one team won over another by keeping large cities to themselves, while destroying the other team’s big cities. That sounds pretty cool, actually.

I’d like to get a sense of that scale, but through the app, I can’t. I just see city streets and AI-controlled wisps of color that dance around my orange wisp. I destroy these wisps and then more generate and then I destroy them. If I could see where my battle is going, how my individual fights are factoring into a larger picture, or if I actually felt like I was interacting with a larger world, Shadow Cities would click better with me.

There's a lot of promise here. I mean, think about it. Just by whipping out your phone and spending the 15 seconds it takes to crush an orb, you could be helping to decide the fate of a global battle. That's heavy, man, and fun-sounding idea to boot. Or, additionally, if you live in a dense area, this could be like Yelp!, except with mage battles. You walk into a store some jerk checked-in to and then BOOM -- you take him out.

I should note that the studio behind Shadow Cities, Grey Area, is behind the project and willing to keep iterating on top of the existing software. Gamasutra caught up with its CEO recently and he said as much, adding some specifics on new mechanics being added in the future:

"We want to develop it further and enable people to interact in the way that they want," he said, "we’ve been really conscious and paying attention how people want to create the battles... that’s what people want to do: strategize, plan, raid locations together, and all of that, so it’s definitely in the works, if you will.”

Cool. Come next update, I hope someone, anyone, around here picks up the game so I can put a spell all over his face.

This morning Apple announced plans for the WWDC keynote which will take place this coming Monday June 6th. As usual, details are vague and the inevitable "one more thing" is veiled in secrecy, but here's what they've said so far:

Apple CEO Steve Jobs and a team of Apple executives will kick off the company's annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) with a keynote address on Monday, June 6 at 10:00 a.m. At the keynote, Apple will unveil its next generation software - Lion, the eighth major release of Mac OS X; iOS 5, the next version of Apples advanced mobile operating system which powers the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch; and iCloud, Apple's upcoming cloud services offering.

I'm anxious to see what iOS 5 and iCloud bring to iOS gaming. We likely won't know any details until the keynote itself, but I'm hoping for either an updated (or greatly refined) version of Game Center. Also, it would be super-sweet if iCloud functionality included some kind of cloud-based save game syncing across iOS devices.

Man, that was fast. Just earlier this month, word spread that Monster Hunter was coming to the App Store. Tonight at 11PM EST, said game will hit in the US for the first time. It's available in New Zealand now.

As the proper name implies, Monster Hunter: Dynamic Hunting is a pared down experience, but not one that neglects the series’ roots. In a nutshell, Hunting is all about the sweet science of bringing down monsters -- the bread and butter of the franchise. You’ll also be able to collect elements from these monsters that can be crafted into armor and weapons, which is another super important part of the Monster Hunter formula.

To be more specific on the latter note, Dynamic Hunting will feature three different types of weapons -- ‘Sword and Shield,’ ‘Great Sword,’ and ‘Dual Sword’ -- that can be turned on their heads in about 40 different ways. There are also 13 different types of armor that you can make or, possibly, customize further.

How the battles themselves feel I can’t speak to just yet -- a review is forthcoming, when the game hits the US. But, Capcom has stated the basics. When faced with a foe, you’ll be able to ‘attack,’ flick to do a fast attack, evade, counter attack, and guard. Here's a video of it in action.

If you ask me, it sounds like Capcom took some notes from Chair Entertainment which is a welcome change from previous efforts of theirs.

Looking forward to Dynamic Hunting? We are, too. The cool thing is that the wait isn’t long, nor should the one be for our first impressions. Stay tuned, folks, and keep those claw fingers nimble just in case.

Hudson is doing a fantastic job of keeping a fresh batch of new games pouring into their excellent TurboGrafx-16 emulator app called the TurboGrafx-16 Gamebox [Free]. The app launched last December with a decent selection of titles, all of which could be purchased from within the app for $2.99 apiece with one rotating title per day available for a free timed trial. We really enjoyed the TurboGrafx-16 Gamebox in our original review, and within a couple of months a new selection of titles was added improving the game further.

Earlier this month, yet another update hit adding another 5 brand new games to the package, including the classic pinball game Devil’s Crush and the third entry in the Bonk’s Adventure series. Now, just a few weeks later we already have another new update to the Gamebox adding 5 more new games.

Likely the most recognizable of the titles is the vertically scrolling top-down shooter Raiden. Raiden was an absolute classic in the arcades a couple of decades ago, and remains one of my very favorite shmups of all time. The TurboGrafx-16 version is obviously highly scaled down from the arcade original, but while it lacks the graphical oomph it still contains excellent gameplay. Performance-wise, Raiden can slow down a bit when action gets intense on screen, but overall it’s pretty solid.

A far more exciting addition to the Gamebox, at least for me personally, is Dragon’s Curse. You may know it by its former name, Wonder Boy III: The Dragon’s Trap, as it was called on the Sega Master System back in 1989. This was one of my all-time favorite action/puzzle/platforming games back then, and it still holds up extremely well today.

It has a Metroidvania vibe where you must take on the roles of different animals that each have unique abilities that allow you to access new areas of a huge non-linear world. There's a number of different weapons, armors, and items to buy which adds a nice RPG element to the gameplay. Dragon’s Curse is colorful, clever, and just plain fun, and I’m really excited to have the game in my pocket to play through for the umpteenth time.

The three other titles in this latest update to TurboGrafx-16 Gamebox aren’t as familiar to me, but they may hold a special place in your own heart. These titles are: Shockman, Moto Roader, and Out Live. There’s plenty of other classic TurboGrafx-16 games I’m still waiting on too, like Keith Courage, Super Star Soldier, and Legendary Axe, so hopefully Hudson continues to crank out the updates. Currently, I think they’re doing a pretty darn good job, and the TurboGrafx-16 Gamebox continues to be a shining example of how to do emulators right on iOS.

One man development studio Chaotic Box has released a video for his upcoming iOS release Match Panic, a followup to last year’s excellent Silverfish [$1.99/Lite]. Whereas Silverfish had a hardcore, old-school-arcade style of gameplay and a striking visual style, Match Panic appears to be on the opposite side of the spectrum with an extremely simple gameplay mechanic and an overly cutesy style.

One thing the two games seem to actually have in common though is a frantic pace and a focus on high scoring. As you can see in the video below, gameplay involves sorting an incoming lineup of sprites to their designated side of the screen. The line moves as fast as you’re able to sort, so it’s in your best interest to move quickly if you’re shooting for a high score. Sometimes you'll need to match more than one image per side, and there's special items and a multiplier aspect involved as well.

Match Panic has already been submitted to Apple and is due out in the next few weeks. It will come equipped with Game Center achievements and leaderboards and a dozen unlockable characters. The gameplay may look incredibly simplistic, but sometimes it’s the simple games that have the deepest hooks, and I haven't seen this particular type of gameplay on iOS before. Plus, I’m a total sucker for cute pixel art.

You can drop by the thread in our forums for Match Panic discussion and we’ll be sure to check out this title when it hits the App Store soon.

I'm not the biggest crossword person. I love word games and trivia, but crosswords have just never grabbed me. So I'm a little surprised by how much I've enjoyed playing CRUX Crosswords HD [4.99].

Maybe it's the way it manages to capture the feel of playing on paper without all the messy stuff that goes along with actually playing on paper. You can't beat the aesthetic, with each puzzle laid out on a page of virtual newsprint with a nice clean handwritten font. I can almost smell the ink when playing this game.

Or maybe it's all the helpful little features. You can write in pencil or pen mode, so you know which answers you're certain about and which are still iffy. When you highlight a cell, you can see both the clues that intersect it at a glance. If you're getting close but can't pick an answer, use the rebus option to enter up to twelve options per cell. If you're really hard up, you can set the game to double-check your answers or reveal cells, entries, or the whole shebang. That saved me from a shameful trip to Google on a few occasions.

As a newbie, the source list mystifies me a bit. CRUX has a list of nearly 30 sources, split between U.S. and U.K. style puzzles. A few (those from New York Times and Telegraph) require subscriptions to their respective crossword services, which is to be expected. But I'd love to see a little more information on the sources. Are People Magazine puzzles more or less difficult than Onion A.V. Club puzzles? Or Washington Post puzzles? It's pretty much trial and error for me, but if you know your stuff, the hearty source list should be quite satisfying.

You can download each puzzle as it's published online, and once you've got it its yours to keep. A recent puzzles list lets you hop between in-progress or recently downloaded puzzles at will. You can also create user profiles if more than one member of your household has the crossword bug.

Every time I ran into an irritation, a few moments of investigation solved it for me. I was frustrated that the game would skip over already completed cells when I typed in a full entry. Turns out you can toggle that option off. If the timer makes you feel a little too pressured, turn it off too. There are almost too many ways to navigate each puzzle—you can tap on a cell, tap on a clue, swap between intersecting clues, or use the on screen direction pad to move between cells. You can also set CRUX to show only incomplete clues or only those that intersect your current selection. I have yet to run into a feature or convenience I felt was missing, but if you do, the developers have been taking feedback in the forums.

Like I said, I'm a crossword newbie. But CRUX Crosswords HD is pro. It looks fantastic and comes with everything but the kitchen sink packed in to make your crossword solving more convenient. If you enjoy crosswords, you should definitely give it a shot.

Anyone remember Meteos? If you think back on that DS classic fondly, you might want to check out Mini Meteors [$2.99], a new iPad-only release. I'll just say that you'll find a few similarities between the two.

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, let me elaborate. Mini Meteors is a fast-moving match 3–style puzzle game. Unlike your traditional match-3, you can only move blocks up or down. The lines you create can be vertical or horizontal, but you can't move blocks side to side.

The blocks rain down from the top of the field like falling meteors, and you need to move quickly to clear them before they fill up a column. Matching three or more blocks of the same color launches them upwards, along with every block above that match, and anything that flies off the top of the field is cleared. If you're feeling really good about your skills, you can speed up the falling blocks, but be careful—leave your columns at the top of the field without being launched and you'll lose.

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Remember last week when we posted a set of borderline unbelievable looking screenshots for Madfinger's upcoming Shadowgun? I admit, even I was skeptical about whether or not this game would look anything like this when it's actually running on a device. Two videos recently appeared with the game running on a Tegra 2-based Android device, give 'em a look:

If this is how the game runs on Tegra 2 devices, I can't wait to see it running on the iPad 2 which is a graphical beast in comparison. Madfinger has committed to releasing the game on the iPad, iPad 2, iPhone 4, and of course, whatever the iPhone 5 is called. No word yet on older devices. If this all sounds interesting to you (and I don't know why it wouldn't), stop by the thread on our forums where people from Madfinger are actively posting and answering questions.

It was back in mid-April that we first caught sight of Dream:scape, an upcoming fully 3D adventure game built using the Unreal Engine. Dream:scape has been loosely compared to a free-roaming Myst-style game, and the trailer showcased fairly stunning visuals and intriguing dialog that had me curious to see more. Here’s a quick synopsis as seen on the developer Speedbump Studio’s website:

Take on the role of Wilson, a coma patient relearning his past by exploring the dreamscape of his memories. Only there, in the lucid light of the subconscious, buried secrets are revealed, unraveling a decades-old mystery of tragedy, betrayal, and ultimately, revenge.

Unfortunately, after submitting the game to Apple, the release of Dream:scape hit a snag when it was revealed during the review process that due to a memory bug the game would only be certified for iPhone 4 and iPad 2 devices. It was expected that a robust game like Dream:scape would likely only work on 3rd generation hardware and up, but being limited to only 2 devices would not be acceptable. Speedbump decided to pull the submission and spend time reworking Dream:scape to run on older devices.

Which brings us to today, just over a month later where Speedbump has revealed that Dream:scape is finally ready and will be released next week on June 9th. The official devices supported will be the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, 4th generation iPod touch and both iPads. Curiously, no mention of 3rd generation iPod touch support, though since that hardware is nearly identical to a 3GS I think it will be safe.

To celebrate having an official launch date, Speedbump has prepared a brand new trailer for Dream:scape:

I don’t know about you, but that second trailer has me even more excited for the release of Dream:scape. The first trailer showed some realistic depictions of gorgeous landscapes and interiors, but this one shows some seriously twisted dream world stuff going on that looks great and also kind of creepy. Also, I hate spiders, so the gigantic spider part is sure to freak me out.

We’ll be eager to check out Dream:scape when it launches next week, and until then you can drop by our forums to discuss the game.

Ever felt like stomping your way all over Paris or San Francisco? Zilla has you covered in Demolition Dash [$0.99 / HD]. Smash and run action will take you all around the world, to eight major cities where you'll rip down trees, kick pigeons, blow up billboards and destroy the military forces that try to stop you.

Zilla is our hero, a rather small monster with a great big roar. Following the model of other run 'n guns, Zilla runs full-speed ahead in one direction while you control jumps with one hand and roars with the other. Roaring is Zilla's only attack, but it's super effective, destroying everything in range. Demolition Dash isn't an endless runner, though. Zilla climbs out of the water, runs, jumps and smashes through each of the game's 24 stages, and dives back in at the end—if you survive that long.

Little Zilla is up against an impressive force. Police squads, vans, helicopters and tanks all get in the way, and the only way past is to roar them to pieces. Run into one of them or miss a jump and a chunk of Zilla's tail gets knocked off. Lose all three tail pieces and the next hit is game over.

On top of making it through each stage alive, there are additional challenges to master. Each stage has its own secondary goal, so sometimes you'll need to hunt down 30 helicopters, and other times you'll be gunning for a high score. There are also Game Center leaderboards for each city and 11 achievements to earn. You can improve your score by earning demolition combos and by making smart use of the game's three power-ups: chili peppers that give you mega roar, wings that let Super Zilla fly, and stars that bring out the GodZilla in our little dino friend.

Other than the adorable Zilla, it's the artistry of the game's eight cities that really makes Demolition Dash shine. Each city gets custom buildings and trees, a background featuring a major landmark, and its own arrangement of the game's theme. Clearly a lot of love was put into the music, and it paid off—I just wish as much thought had been put into the rest of the auditory experience.

I turned off the game's sound effects during the second or third city. With Zilla crashing around and roaring every few moments, police squads shouting and sirens blaring, the sound turned into a mess. The audio quality is great, but I was sick of hearing it. Thankfully you can toggle sound effects and music separately.

I also found myself wishing for a quick level reset option. Things get kind of crazy in later levels, and it sucks to lose lives early on. The only way to restart and get back into the action is to quit back to the menu and wait through rather lengthy loading screens. My 3GS struggled a bit with some of the busier levels, making this a bigger problem when I would die early to frame rate drops. A freshly reset phone performed better, though not perfectly, and the newer devices play Demolition Dash smooth as silk. It also looks gorgeous on Retina screens.

Demolition Dash should be getting an update next month to add Endless Run mode, which seems like it will be a perfect fit. Open Feint support and stat tracking are also planned. Weirdly, the game currently gives players a code that can be redeemed on the developer's Facebook page for a discount on t-shirts or web storage, if you're looking for value-added features.

Smashing up cities and making mayhem with Zilla is great fun. Our forum users are enjoying it so far, too. So if you're looking for a little destruction in your life, Demolition Dash is a game you'll want to play.

The Chromanoids are invading the solar system. You, the Captain of the human fleet, must take charge and shoot them out of the sky before they arrive. With such a classic premise for an entertaining arcade game, Chromanoids™ [$0.99] starts out great.

The game is loosely based on Missile Command. You have a central weapon at the bottom of the screen, and alien attackers fly at it from all directions. Tap to fire missiles and interrupt them before they destroy you. The trick is in the timing: your missiles take time to reach their destinations and the alien ships are also moving, so without the right amount of lead time the missiles explode harmlessly behind the attackers. The aliens also get trickier as you progress, shielding, swerving and phasing to slip by your defenses.

There's a score of games on the App Store that follow that formula, but Chromanoids™ goes further to differentiate itself. The Chromanoids are all different colors, and your missiles can only hurt matching colors. Below your weapon are three primary color panels. Before launching a missile, you need to tap the correct color to fire. The attackers are quick to adapt, so you'll soon be mixing colors on the fly. It's a twist that makes the game much more challenging and a bit more fresh.

The game has five modes to hold your interest. Story mode gives you 25 waves punctuated with cute dialog cuts. Armada mode is harder and faster. Depleted mode stacks the odds further against you, so your shots are smaller but your score gets higher. Ultradrive mode rewards accuracy. Red-Shift mode does away with the color matching mechanic so you can blast away freely. Chromanoids™ has enough variety to keep any arcade fan happy. And if only Hothead Games had been equally generous with its payment model, I'd completely recommend it.

As a freemium game, Chromanoids™ would be very reasonable. You get 75 credits to start, and it costs 25 credits to continue playing after you use up your first few lives. You earn credits slowly through daily play, or you can buy them at a generous 1000 for $0.99 or 4000 for $1.99 You can also pay for powerups, but you can earn them in regular play.  So if Chromanoids™ were free, it would be an easy recommendation. But it's not, and it's not an easy game, so you're going to need to hit Continue a few times.

Unfortunately, this also makes the Game Center leaderboards sort of meaningless. Since you can pay to keep going without losing your score, there's no way to know if you're competing against people who are skilled or just have deep pockets. Maybe this is an attempt to be super faithful to classic quarter-pumping arcade games?

At least Chromanoids ™ is a good homage to those games in every other way, with stylish retro art, a campy storyline and good sound. If Hothead Games decides to drop it down to free at any point, I'll have an easier time recommending it. You'll probably only ever need to spend an extra buck or two, so if you're fine with that, it's a good buy. But if you're put off by paying for extras in a paid game, you might want to give this one a pass.