The auto-running genre is one of the most saturated on the App Store, and although there are many excellent games that use that particular formula, there are far more mediocre or just plain bad games trying to cash in on the genre’s popularity. It’s because of this that it’s hard to get excited when I see new running games released, similar to how I throw up a bit in my mouth every time another match-3 rears its head.

Cynical attitude aside, when a new running game comes out that’s actually good, it deserves to get some attention, even if it’s the billionth one I’ve played. This brings me to Brain in Jar [99¢], the debut title from independent developer Java Soda Games, a new auto-runner that qualifies as one of the good ones. It doesn’t really reinvent the genre in any way, but it has a great visual style and the gameplay mechanics are honed near-perfectly, making it an incredibly fun game to get into. Not to mention, you play as a brain in a jar escaping human capture from a lab, which should be a wild enough notion to pique anybody’s interest.

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The third episode of Agharta Studios’ conceptually brilliant and artistically inspired adventure game series, 1112, has been submitted to Apple and if all goes as planned it should be available on the App Store this coming Tuesday the 23rd. Regardless, it’s out the door and essentially finished after a year or so in development, which is an incredible about of time for a touch game.

Agharta sends word that this episode, naturally, introduces new characters and locations to explore. More importantly, it features several fresh multi-touch “experiences” or puzzles, as well as an intense soundtrack. To get a taste of the latter, just watch this: (more...)

Pocket Warriors [$4.99] is an action hack-and-slash game, with 2d cartoon-style graphics, from WitOne Games.  It's based on killing  monsters and leveling-up your weapons through combat. But you're not alone on this quest, as your party consists of two little warriors - a male and a female, who must work together to protect the village from monsters and dragons. In the thread in our forums, Pocket Warriors is likened to a 2D version of the Monster Hunter series, and it provides many hours of monster combat, with 3 chapters, each containing 12 missions for a total of 36 quests.

Your adventure starts in the village, as you prepare for battle. There's a weapons trader selling both weapons and magic spells,  a blacksmith offering weapon upgrades, the village chief dishing out quests, and your own home for depositing items and storing stuff. After interacting with these four places to prepare, you can walk through the village gates to hunt the next available monster. There's often no minions, just straight to the boss!

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Hey, guys, Phoenix [Free] is reborn! Developer Firi Games’ bullet-hell shooter is now available in HD form on the App Store. It’s also free to download on both the iPhone and iPad, though it’s supported via IAP content. We took a nice, hard, and long look at the original Phoenix back in October 2010 and dug what it had to offer. The integration of HD visuals in this particular version is a welcome and awesome addition to an already visually impressive bullet-hell style shoot-‘em-up.

Where you’ll be limited by the IAP is in ships, and oddly enough, leaderboard support. I guess the latter illustrates that Firi is confident that people who jump in will click with the action, and then get hooked to the scoring mechanics. (more...)

Spellsquares [$1.99 / HD], an atmospheric word puzzle game from Benthic Games, hit the App Store with its iPad version back in June. We missed out on it then, but we picked the game up on its iPhone release this month. It's right at home on the small screen, maintaining an enchanting mix of exploration and challenging puzzles.

In Spellsquares' story mode, you find yourself wandering a castle with a mystery to solve. A mysterious stranger has left notes to guide you on your way (kind of him, since you're out to foil his nefarious plan). Each door, treasure and point of interest is blocked with a word puzzle that you'll need to solve. The puzzles are crafted like Sudoku for words. A square grid is laid out with a few letters already in place. A pool of available letters sits to the side. Your job is to use those letters to make words in every row and column at once -- easy puzzles require three-letter words and the hardest require five. Solving them takes a little bit of logic and a touch of vocabulary. Once you factor in hints, you'll also need a dash of strategy.

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Ever since the moment as a child where I first saw Kyle MacLachlan crush a metal-underpantsed Sting with the force of a single word in Dune, I’ve wanted a game that gave me that same feeling of power. Any time I re-watch an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where the holodeck is featured, I find myself wishing that spoken controls were a bigger part of gaming. I mean, TNG accurately predicted the tablet computer, why can’t we have voice commands that work, too?

Discounting rhythm games like Rock Band where vocal input allows for no deviation, the only contemporary title I can think of that has tackled the problem with any degree of competency is Tom Clancy’s End War. Unfortunately, voice controls in games are essentially like tequila shots. They sound like the best idea in the world at the time, but a few hours later you just end up disoriented, frustrated, and violently nauseous. It was in such a cavalier mood that I chose to pick up Starglow Magic Spells [Free], and I am now paying the price.

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Spacelings [99c] is the new 2d action-puzzler from Hotgen, who previously released To-Fu: The Trials of Chi [99c/HD]. As you might have gathered from the name, their latest game is set in space. The naughty mechanical Roborgs have abducted all the Spacelings and deposited them in over 100 levels around the universe.  Your spaceship, the 'Liberator', has no weapons, so instead of attacking you use your ships tractor-beam to try and recover your fellow Spacelings. This game is a rescue mission.

If the Spacelings stood in a polite orderly queue, directly below your spacecraft, things would be super convenient  - just activate the tractor beam, suck them straight up to your craft and then continue to the next level. However, the Spacelings are actually positioned all over the level, so the tractor beam must be swiped, to turn corners, until it eventually reaches a captured Spaceling to suck back to the Liberator.  Some levels are larger than your screen, so you can drag the background with your finger, to pan around and plan your approach.

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Most music-based games are based on the same premise: interaction with the rhythm or beat of the song in some form or fashion. That’s why Say What?! [Free] seems like such an interesting take on the genre; rather than interacting with the musical composition, the game challenges you to interact with the actual lyrics. While I think that Say What?! is definitely one of the more interesting takes on the genre that I’ve seen, a very limited selection of music coupled with a lack of gameplay diversity leaves it somewhat wanting.

The premise of Say What?! is simple: as lyrics to a song are displayed at the top of the screen various images scroll across the bottom portion from right to left. When portions of the lyrics light up, you must tap on the image that corresponds to the highlighted lyric.

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If you've never heard of Zombie Minesweeper [$0.99], you could be forgiven for thinking the combo sounds a bit dull. Minesweeper has been around the block a few times, and zombies have been overexposed for years. But as those who've played the browser version know, there's something special in the combination of zombies and minefields. This top-down action puzzler puts the two together to explosive effect.

Imagine Minesweeper as applied to an actual minefield. As you direct the game's heroine, Sally, from square to square, numbers pop up on the ground around her. As in Minesweeper, those numbers indicate how many mines are adjacent to a square. To survive the invasion of a variety of zombified animals, you'll need to direct Sally to safe spaces, flagging the spaces you think hold mines as you go, while the undead hordes breathe down her neck.

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Flick Soccer! [99¢] by Full Fat Games is a penalty-shooting soccer game. Games like this feel like mini-games. The type of thing you wouldn't necessarily play for hours, but might jump on for 10 minutes of casual game-play, while waiting for something.  This game has nice graphics of the pitch, goal and stadium, complete with a cheering crowd and a goalie who does warm up exercises. And it opens with a surprisingly  decent rock song complete with vocals.

To shoot at the goal, you simply swipe across the ball in the desired direction, with short swipes to keep the ball low, or longer swipes to aim high.  You can curve the ball with a curved swipe, or do a second swipe while the ball is in-flight to add after-touch. These curved shots are useful for confusing the goal-keeper, swerving around defenders,  trying to correct a bad shot or for targeting with more accuracy. And it definitely feels great to curve your shot perfectly between the goal keeper and defender for a perfect bulls-eye!

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If you've never heard of Ragnarok Online, I'd have to assume that you've been living under a rock since about 2002. The popular Korean MMORPG came to American shores in 2003, but by that time it already had a rabid fanbase among Korean gamers (50 million players worldwide to date). The game originally started as a Pay To Play title, but a Free To Play version came along later down the line, which only amped its popularity. What more could you ask for from a fun little MMO like this? Why, to make it portable, of course ... and with Ragnarok Violet [Free], that's just what you've got.

In Ragnarok Violet, you will play the young hero who hopes to become a knight and eventually gets drafted to stop the Dark Lord from reawakening. Okay, I know that that doesn't sound particularly new or creative, but hey, it's an RPG. Sometimes you just have to breathe your way through the cliches and get on with the gameplay. Speaking of, the game goes with the good old top down format that you'll fondly remember from so many Super Nintendo RPGs of old.

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While some traditional publishers are resisting the trends towards lower-cost software in the handheld gaming space, others are actively working to figure out how to make these sorts of experiences work on their existing platforms. While not a shining beacon of success, the PSP Minis campaign does demonstrate a good faith effort on the part of Sony to cater to the direction that portable gaming seems to be heading. A few growing pains are part and parcel of adapting to a changing market, and there have been a few notable early wins scattered through the program.

One of the largest of these successes has been Frima Games’ A Space Shooter for Two Bucks, which recently reported a healthy figure of 150,000 downloads over PSN. Given the type of game they made, and its popularity on PSP, it’s no surprise that the developers worked to port the title over to the iPhone. Making its debut on iOS as A Space Shooter For Free [Free/HD], this game retains all the good elements from its PSP origin and joins a catalog of solid shmups available on the platform.

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Let's talk about big money (no big prizes) for a second. Financial news site Bloomberg is reporting that Angry Birds creator Rovio Mobile is ‘considering’ taking a strategic investment from an 'entertainment company' to expand their wares to China and fund the upcoming movie. If it goes through, unnamed sources indicate that this investment would give Rovio the value of about 1.2 billion. I love it!

These mysterious sources aren’t indicating what parties are interested in investing. We agree with analyst superstar Michael Pachter when he suggests that EA, Zynga, or even Disney are the likeliest possible investors. All of these companies have a huge stake in the mobile space, and obviously wouldn’t mind getting a piece of the Angry Birds action. Disney definitely needs the most cred out of all of these publishers. (more...)

Since its debut in 1995, the Heroes of Might and Magic (HOMM) game series has been synonymous with deep, turn-based strategy gameplay. While some may argue that the more recent titles have somewhat strayed from their roots, none will argue with the general appeal and sheer depth of the classic titles in the series.

The multi-platform Palm Heroes series looked to capture and recreate the gameplay of older HOMM titles in portable form, and managed to succeed to some degree. Now, with Palm Heroes 2 Deluxe [$4.99/HD/HD Lite], it looks like the definitive version of classic HOMM gameplay has finally arrived on iOS. Featuring a ton of missions, factions, as well as a hot-seat multiplayer mode, Palm Heroes 2 Deluxe will satisfy any strategy gamer’s appetite for quite a while.

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Bean’s Quest [$2.99] was a pretty okay platforming game. The core problem we had was its almost total lack of content -- we could traverse everything it had to offer in about five minutes, which, you know, isn’t quite up there. BUT, as was promised, the game has since been updated with more levels. Specifically, World ‘2’ has been added in a free update, bringing up the meagre level count up by 9 for 16 total.

This update also packs in some hip tweaks. Game Center support has been added, as well as alternate control methods and brand new fancy-pantsy 3D audio. On the bug front, the game has now been optimized for older devices, and several nebulous fixes have been made. (more...)