Who doesn’t like planting crops and a little cross-pollination? It’s the kind of relaxing fun that got thousands hooked on Farmville, until those Facebook alerts got unbearable. Bloom Box [$1.99 / Free] is the new plant-based puzzle game from Nexxstudio. If you plant your seeds in the right sequence, you can set off a chain reaction that brings your tiny garden to life. It’s an intricate setup for a game that isn’t as complex as it wants to be.
Each level in Bloom Box starts off with a small flower-less garden and handful of boxes. The flower button at the bottom of the screen is connected to the first “bloom box” in the chain. The bloom boxes have dots on the top, like a tabletop-game die. If you tap one of the boxes, you can see where the box will spread its seeds. There are five different types of boxes, each of which shoots out between four to eight seeds at varying distances.
Here's something I've been waiting anxiously for – the stellar iOS port of Sonic CD [$0.99] has finally received proper widescreen support for the iPhone 5 and newest iPod touch. I've been having a love affair with the original Sonic The Hedgehog [$0.99] on iOS ever since it was remade (and stuffed with cool secrets) back in mid-May, courtesy of Christian Whitehead and co.
However, Christian's original work of Sonic remake magic, Sonic CD, had remained stagnant in the App Store since its initial release in December of 2011. With the first Sonic remade in such elegant fashion and a similar treatment coming to Sonic 2 (and, fingers crossed, Sonic 3 & Knuckles too), poor old Sonic CD needed to be brought up to snuff, and that's just what has happened today.
Now, in addition to widescreen support there is also the nebulous mention of "bug fixes" without any further details. I have played through Sonic CD numerous times on iOS since it launched and never encountered any problems, though I'd imagine the more discerning Sonic fan community has collected a list of nits to pick in the title.
Anyway, rest assured that this updated release is even more solid now, and even the first Sonic The Hedgehog received an update today promising increased performance and a fix for a game completion bug. Sonic updates in tandem is never a bad thing, so be sure to grab both these latest updates and excuse me while I spend the rest of my day playing through Sonic CDyet again.
To the drone of determined electric rock, 3 Sprocket's latest pits geometrical combatants against each other. Cubemen2 [$1.99] is a 3D soldier-marshaling strategy game of varying description. Many will start with the tour of defense levels that gradually metes out new content. More a sandbox for play than a defined, guided experience, however, it options configurable modes of tower defense, skirmishes, territory takeover, and more.
A majority of these are cross-platform multiplayer types that'll substitute somewhat exploitable bots for other humans if you'd prefer. Usually it revolves around a TD-like stream of AI-driven units marching toward a static destination with intent to destroy someone's home structure.
You're presented with a gridded landscape of blocky tiered heights, by default a stark textureless monochrome that looks like rudimentary VR. Swipes and gestures of the fingers fling and zoom the camera around it with enjoyable ease and precision. Cuboids form the canyons, trenches, and castles that your selection of unit types parade about, following orders issued by tapping to select and tapping once more to direct.
You’d think that a game involving stickmen wouldn't be that in-depth. Or warrant anything other than a free download.
Stickman Tennis [$0.99] falls into the middle. On the surface, it’s a very simple game involving two stickmen playing each other in a game of tennis. But underneath this simplistic style is a decent representation of the sport.
Upon launching it for the first time, the game sets the control scheme so that your stickman moves automatically, and leaves just the shot controls available to you. You can easily change this in the options so that you control movement as well, and I recommend you do so. Not only does it make the game more fun, but it adds a bit more challenge. With the auto-movement enabled, I found myself staring at the screen and hitting as the balls came to me, which wasn't fun and quickly got boring.
If you've heard of ustwo as a gamer it's probably thanks to Whale Trail [Free], a psychedelic flier starring the darling Willow the whale. Since that hit in 2011 the studio's been fairly quiet on the game front, focusing its attentions on apps that showcase interaction and user interface design. Now ustwo has returned to the gaming world with Blip Blup [$1.99 / Free], a game that might be even better suited to its specialities.
If you're looking to show off your interface design skills, after all, puzzle games are probably the way to go. A solid set of rules and a sensible interface can win the day. Blip Blup has a pretty simple ruleset: when you touch a tile (an act called a "blip"), a pulse of color spreads out from it. It passes like light from its source, travelling through connected corners and stopping against walls. Change the color of every tile before you run out of blips to win.
Simple, and spelled out clearly through the game's interface. The first couple level packs are kind, showing you where your blips will take you. Later, you'll simply need to know. Everything makes perfect visual sense, though. At a glance you can see which tiles you can tap, which ones will get in your way, which ones are special and what they do.
The special tiles are introduced as you work your way through Blip Blup's ten level packs. Each one adds one new rule to the game. An arrow sends your blip along a new path. A series of dots means you need to hit the tile enough times to fill each dot. You can probably imagine what a skull means, and whether or not it's a good idea to blip death tiles.
They all follow that simple, clear iconography, so you could easily put Blip Blup down for a few weeks and come back to it without missing a beat. You might find you need to: there's no way to skip levels, so if you can't complete something in the requisite number of blips, you just need to do better. By the same token, there's no IAP or funny business—aside from an absolute glut of ads in the free version, at least.
The first eighteen levels or so are a cakewalk. It's not easy to fail to get three stars. After that, the game stops holding your hand. Passing levels is still a breeze for quite some time, but earning three stars by using fewer than the maximum blips gets dicey. Once you start juggling a few different types of special tiles, you may find that just passing each level is enough of a challenge—never mind perfecting it. The ramp up isn't quick, but it's there.
If you've ever played (the delightful) Helsing's Fire [$0.99] you'll probably find the experience familiar. Blip Blup is a simpler game, both mechanically and visually, but hunting around for the perfect position to light up the map still works brilliantly.
And while it's simpler, Blip Blup manages to be just as complex as it needs to be. A handful of tiles that mark special rules may not seem like much, but when put together just right they create some very interesting puzzles. Blip Blup may make for an excellent exercise in interface design, but it's also quite a fun little puzzle game from the folks at ustwo.
Living for glory kinda went out with dying by the sword: there just isn't much of it in the daily struggle to work a desk job, handle your homework or get your kids in bed on time. Sword & Glory [Free] is an outstanding game that imagines a time when life was all about the struggle to raise yourself and your family for nothing, earn a reputation for great deeds and pass that down through generations.
The life you live may always start the same—the same small homestead, the same brotherly advice— but you have a few key decisions to make before you begin. You can pick a clan, align yourself with the hardy Elk Clan, the noble Eagle Clan or the traditional Bear Clan. Or you can shove the whole clan system and go it alone. Similarly, you can dedicate yourself to a faith or go for a more worldly approach. Finally you define a personality trait for yourself. Those choices directly impact the life you'll lead—the kinds of quests you'll encounter, the opportunities that will arise and the ways you'll excel in combat.
From those humble beginnings you head off to build a life. At first you'll probably focus on helping your family and clan, driving off competition for resources, hunting down petty thieves, and otherwise protecting your homestead. Maybe you'll get married. Maybe you'll range far from home.
Many decisions come down to a binary choice: do violence, or don't. Violence isn't always the best option, but it is usually the fastest route to glory (score, more or less), Epic points and silver. With those things you can improve your lot in life, so while you may want to pick your battles, you'll have to do some fighting.
Fighting comes down to a fairly simple duel system. You face off against a foe with a sword and shield. You have buttons for the same. Combinations of tapping and holding give you shield bashes, blocks, and careful, fast or power attacks. There's a rock-paper-scissors calculation going on in the background, and with that and careful timing you can destroy your foes.
With a few successful bouts under your belt, life opens up. You can expand your home, improving your stats in the process. You can buy new gear that gets passed down to your future characters. You can use your Epic points to unlock truly impressive items. And you can range farther afield, encountering new adventures and new challenges.
Wounds are easily dealt with at the cost of some of your hard earned Epic points, but eventually you'll take too many hits in a single fight and die. Even if you're a flawless warrior, death gets us all in the end. When that happens, your character is given a title for his sacrifice and a place in the graveyard. Your glory is marked on the leaderboard, your silver is lost, your points and gear go onto the next generation, and you start again anew.
It's a fantastic arrangement, well thought out from almost every angle. The most confusing part is that Sword & Glory is currently completely free. It seems as though room was left in its design for in-app purchases of Epic points, but those haven't materialized. You have to earn every bit of future success for yourself, and there is no cost but the effort you're willing to put in.
Sure, the art style might be a touch divisive (stark whites as far as the eye can see) and the game sometimes suffers from clumsy writing, but there's really no reason not to try it out. Sword & Glory delivers what it promises: glory to be had, and life and death by the sword.
Following on the heels of West Coast Hustle, Miami Vindication and Rio, Gameloft’s latest Gangstar entry, Gangstar Vegas [$6.99] brings the largest environment in the series by virtually recreating everybody’s favorite city of sin, Las Vegas.
I’ll get this out of the way quick so I don’t need to waste your time later – Gangstar Vegas is, in most ways, identical to Grand Theft Auto, from the way the missions are given to the dialog while driving to the types of missions available. The game also doesn't drastically change the way the other three Gangstar games played, but it does refine some mechanics from the previous ones.
As Jason Malone, a boxer who gets paid to take a dive by mobster Frank Valieno, you agree to throw the match, but during one round, you manage to get a hit in and you knock the other guy out cold. You win the fight, and while you didn't mean to, you’re now on Frank’s hit list. During this interactive prologue, you’re introduced to the hand-to-hand fighting controls.
Vegas’ tutorial introduces you to the main aspects of the game while documenting your escape from Frank. Everything is pretty straightforward. You’re able to steer your vehicle by tilting, but I found I was tilting my iPad like a wild man and still couldn't get around corners that easily. I fiddled with the sensitivity, but eventually just swapped to the virtual button steering option. You're able to change the control type for each different vehicle, should you be so inclined.
Stickets [$2.99] is a piece of art, and wouldn't look out of place hanging in a modern art museum, right between a Piet Mondrian and "Bored Kid Playing Tetris, Oil on Canvas." Developer Wanderlands has created a striking, spare work, a mix of intellect and aesthetics. And, like, it's really, really fun.
It's a single-player puzzle game with a look and layout reminiscent of Letterpress. Simply put: place L-shaped pieces, each with three different colors, onto the board. When three or more colors are connected, tap to clear them from the board. Keep going until you run out of room. There's no opponent, no AI. There's just you and an increasingly unwieldy board.
"Space" mode requires thoughtful consideration of every move. I'd sit and play out different scenarios in my head, only to make a move and suddenly realize the thousands of ways I'm an idiot. In "Time" mode, it's the opposite, as every piece turns into a ticking time bomb. After 10 go off, the game is over, but the process can be reversed by matching four or more colors.
Gather around ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, and allow me to present to you the papercraft circus. Let Paper Titans [$0.99] baffle and amaze or, alternatively, frustrate and fatigue as they traverse their wood fiber world. Blitz's parchment constructed 3D puzzler is a visual and aural marvel whose beauty, to an extent, assuages the relative drudgery of its gameplay.
Your goal in each stage is to reach a lipstick-sealed envelope dangling from the grasp of paper birds. It's stowed within easy reach somewhere about a folded amusement park stage, accompanied by a trio of optional hollow stars scattered afield, waiting to be collected. Such involves navigating your little green paper robots to each item, issuing orders by drawing lines and bypassing obstacles with the help of fellows as he goes.
You may skip straight to your goal, but it'd be painfully easy: what challenge there is comes correctly organizing your actors, each uniquely capable of dealing with a certain type of hurdle, to grab each star in turn before ending the level. Have a ruffley-collared accordion guy launch your collector up to a ledge he can't return from too early and you'll need to restart.
As expected, the upcoming version of iOS, iOS 7, will bring in a ton of changes to the core design of the OS. It's an end-to-end overhaul that sees the addition of new icons and new animations and new multi-tasking functionality to iPhone and iPad. The release date is this fall. A beta build for devs releases today.
More relevant to our interests is the UI overhaul of Game Center, which will kill the goofy green felt look and replace it with a practical, white, and minimal UI. It's up in the air if this overhaul extends beyond new window dressing, but even if it doesn't, Game Center will magically become infinitely more useable on iOS 7 because man that thing looks bad on the current (and previous) iterations of iOS.
Evil's brewing, and it's up to the holy crusader and his pals to end it. Deep Dungeons of Doom [Free] celebrates a frequently trodden yet continuously enjoyable path with a suitably generic story and enough dry humor to keep it relevant. Wrapped in some gorgeous pixel art and animations, Bossa Studios has one satisfyingly bountiful iOS game on their hands.
Attacks, which are triggered with a tap on the right side of the screen, have a refractory period - you won't be able to mash your way to success. Attempt an attack while the ability is cooling and you'll prolong the cooldown. A tap on the left readies your guard, eliminating any damage the enemy might toss your way. Victory in each duel spurs the chest on the far side of the room to burst, spewing its contents of gold and, potentially, loot. A bottom up swipe of your finger will drag the screen up, sending your character deeper underground (and on to your next fight). Dungeon crawling without the crawling.
Super School Day [$0.99] plays like any other of the mini-game collections on the App Store, yet it manages to not bore by being (so damn) charming. From the second the game launches it’s crackin’ jokes, successfully entertaining with style and personality. Don’t be fooled, Super School Day is actually a not-so-casual, challenging, laugh-in-the-face of mini-game collections - and succeeded at becoming a by-the-hour affair with me and my iOS devices. These days games like *that* are a rare breed.
The premise is simple; you pick a student avatar and go through a day of school. Only, if this wasn’t a Second Impact game that might be ok. These avatars come with RPG-style personality and intelligence attributes that play a role in how difficult each class of the day is. Mini-games get played, then… you get to try and save the world; Dragonball-style punches vs. a meteorite. I emphasized the try, there, because that meteorite is one hell of a challenge.
Due to its inherent suitability to touch-based controls, line-drawing games are a genre that exploded in popularity long ago (in gaming time). Nowadays, it feels like there isn't much in the genre that hasn't been covered in some form or fashion.
Enter Ripstone'sMen's Room Mayhem [$0.99], one of the more thematically interested line-drawing games to come out recently. While the gameplay is pretty generic, Mayhem does earn some points with its original premise and well-done presentation.
In case you didn't check out our first impressions awhile back, Mayhem tasks players with playing traffic control in a men's restroom. Each restroom has the requisite urinals, stalls, and sinks, as well as an entrance and exit. Users come in indicating their preference to use a urinal or stall and you guide them to their respective location via line-drawing. After they finish their business you opt to guide them to a sink to wash their hands and earn extra points, or you can send them straight to the exit (ew).
Hyper Breaker Turbo [$1.99] drums up warm, fuzzy feelings of Breakout and Arkanoid. But the game is so much more – and not just because I’m no longer playing on a TI-82 calculator or Windows 95 machine. This is an indie upgrade from beJoy developer, Barry Kostjens, who also developed another blocky iOS game called Push Panic! [$2.99]. Multi-tiered levels, three delightfully distinct worlds, inebriated power-ups and 75 stages had me breaking bricks, circular doodles and neon triangles in Hyper Breaker Turbo for a good many hours.
In a typical brick-breaking game, you’re landlocked, moving your paddle from left to right. You always feel like you’re not able to react fast enough, especially when a power-up speeds up the ball’s acceleration. Hyper Breaker Turbo gives you a free-floating paddle. You are able to slide left, right, diagonally and every other which way within the paddle’s movement space, which is about three-quarters of an inch high. So when you get a Speedball or Bouncy paddle boost, you will have no one to blame but yourself when the ball starts to bounce wildly out of control.
I have to admit, I'm a sucker for graphics. Sure, gameplay may be the most important aspect of any videogame, but you simply don't want to play with it if it looks like the back end of a dump truck.
So there I was, looking around on the internet for games to review, and out jumped Shiny the Firefly [$0.99] from Spanish outfit Stage Clear Studios, and whacked me properly in the teeth with its pixelized perfection. This game is pretty. Seriously, it's like playing a Pixar movie.
The animation of the hero himself is just gorgeous. Shiny has a multitude of facial expressions, which are beautifully realized… you'll always know exactly how Shiny is feeling. I can honestly say this is the most emotionally linked I have been to a character in a videogame in a very long time, and he's an insect for crying out loud. Every visual aspect of this game has been buffed to a level of shininess usually reserved for the rich and famous.
Who doesn’t like planting crops and a little cross-pollination? It’s the kind of relaxing fun that got thousands hooked on Farmville, until those Facebook alerts got unbearable. Bloom Box [$1.99 / Free] is the new plant-based puzzle game from Nexxstudio. If you plant your seeds in the right sequence, you can set off a chain reaction that brings your tiny garden to life. It’s an intricate setup for a game that isn’t as complex as it wants to be. 
