Zombie games and the App Store seem to go together like peas and carrots. I'm not sure what the allure of zombies is, but I'm not one to argue about slaying legions of undead. Developers Super Awesome Hyper Dimensional Mega Team (Yes, that's their real name) have been working on a sports zombie apocalypse hybrid for quite some time now, and finally seeing it in motion with this gameplay video is truly something to behold.

Details are vague right now, but the developers have provided us this list of things to expect in Pro Zombie Soccer:

• One of the most surreal and funny stories to ever grace a videogame.
• Lots of different zombies for your zombie killing pleasure, all of them with different hit points.
• A powerful blockbuster-type soundtrack and sound design.
• And of course: a nice combo system; different levels; Zombie Odyssey Mode for the hardcore gamers; character skill upgrading system.

If you've watched the video and think there are some strong similarities to the art and animations in Plants Vs. Zombies, it's because Super Awesome Hyper Dimensional Mega Team is comprised of an international team of seasoned game industry veterans with titles under their belt such as Worms, Vin Diesel's Wheelman, the EyeToy Play series, and Plants Vs. Zombies itself.

Pro Zombie Soccer is still in development, for the most up to date news on the game's progress, check out the official thread on our forums.

Along with tower defense and line drawing games, it seems like the twin stick shooter genre has an amazing representation on the App Store. We just got exclusive word from Angry Mob Game that they're ready to show the world what they've been working on for the last six months: Guerrilla Bob.

The game takes the standard survival shooter format we're all familiar with by now and structures the gameplay through various levels that take place in canyons, deserts, and urban environments. There also is an exploring element to the game, with new weapons and secret items to be found. While on your quest of mowing down everything that moves with your arsenal of weaponry, you will encounter bosses described as "epic" as well as "elements of depth and complexity never before met with any iPhone games of its genre" according to CEO Bogdan Iliesiu.

The recently released trailer and screenshots are required viewing for anyone interested in dual stick shooters:

Guerrilla Bob is still in development, but Angry Mob Games is hopeful to have the it submitted and ready for release in early December. In the meantime, feel free to stop by the Official Guerrilla Bob Thread in our upcoming games forum.

What do you get when you combine a creative lead from Spore and an artist that just finished working on Brütal Legend with the indie spirit of the App Store? Apparently, a dragon with an insatiable desire to stomp on castles while raining fire down upon unsuspecting victims and doing other things dragons do. Or at least, that's the premise of their game Earth Dragon [App Store].

The game features a mixture of tilt and touch controls to maneuver your dragon and spew fire across 15 different levels of increasing difficulty. The recently released trailer shows a bit of the gameplay as well as expanding on your duties as a dragon-

Developer Chaim Gingold has an impressive resume revolving around his involvement in Spore (along with his own Wikipedia page) and artist Jane Ng has spent time as a Senior Artist at both Double Fine Productions and Electronic Arts. It's interesting to see what the two have come up with on the iPhone, and while Earth Dragon doesn't really provide anything revolutionary to the platform, it's still a fun game to play.

App Store Link: Earth Dragon, $2.99

TouchArcade Rating:

This weekend is "crazy Donut Games weekend," folks.  Why the craziness?  Donut Games is giving away three of their popular iPhone titles for free.  Have a look.

Spikey's Bounce Around (normally $2.99)

Bounce with SPIKEY through the magic gardens on a quest to free all his friends.

The sacred butterflies have all been trapped inside glass jars, and it's up to Spikey to smash them open using his wild bouncing skills!

Rat on the Run (normally $0.99)

Help Ratty get FATTENED UP for the winter in this hilarious platform game!

Ratty has just found the house of his dreams – a house full of cheese blocks and doodles.
There's just one big problem. All floors are full of slimey blobs, mean spiders and other baddies who try to stop Ratty from getting the goodies.

Includes the bonus game: RAT ON A SCOOTER

Lucky Coins (normaly $1.99)

LUCKY COINS is a bumping fun mix of the best elements of Pinball, Pachinko and casino style games!

Feelin' lucky? Drop the golden coin and watch it bounce off bumpers, pins and moving gizmos. Magnets will trap the coin and allow you to aim and blast the coin in new directions to grab more bonus items than you can think of.

Combine your skill and luck to rack up loads of points in this updated version of LUCKY COINS.

Based on the crazy Donut Games weekend forum post, readers are having a great time with these limited-time freebies.  Grab 'em for free while you've got the chance.

Gamevil's latest epic RPG got its own lite version today, Hybrid: Eternal Whisper Free [App Store] offers a brief look at the world of Hybrid through three included battle stages where you will be able to master nine different fighting skills.

Hybrid is an adventure roleplaying game with an extensive skill system all wrapped around a brawler-style fighting game. You play as Grey, a kid with a mysterious past protected by an equally mysterious guardian named Fairy through a quest that will take you numerous hours to complete that touches on a number of RPG cliches along the way.

With every enemy you kill, you gain experience points and in-game currency which can be spent on an impressively deep character customization and upgrade system. The combat is the star of the show in Hybrid, and as you fight through each level you eventually gain more moves, techniques, and magical attacks to dispatch your enemies. These attacks can be chained together to form massive combos, and fighting entire gangs of baddies at once can be fairly satisfying.

Like Zenonia, there are a lot of people who love Hybrid, there's a thread on our forums filled with fans of the game. I do appreciate all the work Gamevil has put in to the game, and as you level up and gain more abilities, watching Grey fly around the screen killing enemies is fairly spectacular.

Video by AppBank

Where the game fell short for me, however, was in the seemingly endless amount of button mashing and thumb swiping required to kill all the enemies on a level only to watch a cut scene with tons of dialog, then get back to mashing the attack button. Regardless, I still recommend trying the free version, because opinions on this game seem divided, and you could find yourself amongst those who can't get enough of Hybrid.

App Store Links:

• Hybrid: Eternal Whisper Free, Free
• Hybrid: Eternal Whisper, $5.99

Two new lite versions of games we can't say enough good things about appeared on the App Store recently. If you haven't already bought either of these games, I really recommend giving the free versions a spin

Baseball Superstars 2010 Free – Baseball Superstars 2010, $5.99

With a nearly flawless 4.5 star rating here on Touch Arcade, Baseball Superstars 2010 took everything that was good about Baseball Superstars 2009 and made it better. If you like baseball games or roleplaying games, Baseball Superstars 2010 can potentially consume your gaming life as you find yourself batting through just one more season before going to bed to make your super batter even more powerful.

And of course, like most Gamevil games, there's even a completely off the wall commercial for the game that is totally worth a watch just to see an angel and some type of demon having some kind of epic baseball battle.

---

Hook Champ Lite – Hook Champ, $2.99

Hook Champ may very well be my favorite game that has been released lately. Fantastic pixel art graphics combined with physics-based gameplay that somehow always keeps me coming back for more (even after falling in to lava for the 100th time) would be enough to interest me in this game, but there's also a whole in-game store with all kinds of both useful and useless character upgrades.

You swing through caves, evade an oddly hungry ghost, and plunder relics along the way. As if Hook Champ wasn't awesome enough, your performance in every level is seamlessly tracked online, and after you beat the game you can go back and try to make it to the top of the score boards in your favorite levels.

Last weekend we took a look at a preview release of React Games' Archon Conquest and, as fans of the 25 year old EA original, we liked what we saw.  The game has since gone live in the App Store [link] and we've spent a bit more time with this variation on the studio's remake of the chess-like action strategy game.

Back in June, React brought a revamped take on EA's 1983 classic Archon [App Store] to the iPhone. Archon is an action / strategy game set on a 9×9 chess-like board arrayed with a variety of Light and Dark game pieces, each with its own set of battle attributes.  When two pieces come face-to-face on the same board square, action turns to the battle arena where the enemies do battle, arcade style.  The winner takes the square.

Archon Conquest stays close to the original formula, but in place of the chess board setting is a variety of different environments in which to play — four maps or campaigns with 60 different quests or puzzles to complete in all.  As mentioned in our preview, Archon Conquest looks visually closer to EA's 1984 sequel, Archon II: Adpet, but the similarity ends there.  It's still a matter of controlling power squares or wiping out the enemy wholesale, but in new, obstacle-laden environments.

Archon Conquest allows the player to earn medals on each quest, depending on overall success and tracks skill through (Plus+) online leaderboards.  Power characters can cast spells, including new spells as compared to the original, and characters can level up and collect various power-ups in the combat arena.

The differing available characters through the game's various quests, along with the need to negotiate the new board environments, mixes the game up tangibly from the more ordered gameplay of the original.  It feels very much like the new take on Archon that it is, and as a big fan of the original, I find it pleasantly refreshing.  There's definitely more long-term playability here than in the classic title. In fact, the full play time is estimated at 16 hours to complete all four maps.

[ Full HD version | Low Bandwidth version ]

Those familiar and fond of the original should find the variety that Archon Conquest brings a welcome twist on a solid formula.  And, thanks to the variation that the game brings (not to mention a lower cost of entry), those who've never commanded the Light or the Dark before might just find React's latest to be more appealing than classic Archon. 

Wherever you fall, if a well-balanced fusion of action and strategy sounds appealing, you'd do well to give Archon Conquest a try.

App Store Link: Archon Conquest, $0.99

TouchArcade Rating:

Rockcat Games' second title, Hook Champ [App Store] was approved and appeared for download last night. Since then, I've spent a good amount of time with the game and have really enjoyed everything about it.

In Hook Champ, you play as an Indiana Jones-like character equipped with a grappling hook trying to escape from various haunted ruins before you're eaten by a ghost. The core gameplay mechanic revolves around using your grappling hook and rope to swing through these ruins as quickly as possible.

The controls are simple and work well, touching the bottom right and left corners makes you run that direction, and tapping the top of the screen throws your rope in that direction. Releasing your finger recalls your rope, and you can immediately tap again to send your grappling hook flying back to the top of the screen to swing again.

Your time in every level is tracked and uploaded to an online leaderboard, and as you progress through the game you earn coins to buy various upgrades for your character. These upgrades tweak every aspect of the game from making your rope longer to making you run faster and everything in between. There are even superfluous upgrades like football helmets and headbands for your guy to wear.

The whole game is wrapped in wonderfully nostalgic pixelated graphics with chiptune music, and load times on my iPhone 3GS are nonexistent. It's very difficult to find anything about Hook Champ to complain about, although I do suppose the lack of mid-level checkpoints can be irritating on the more difficult levels. Still, all the levels are short enough that you never feel like you've lost that much progress when you die.

Hook Champ is an absolutely fantastic game that all fans of retro styled sidescrollers should own. It's currently on sale for 99¢ this weekend, which only serves to sweeten the deal. The thread on our forums are filled with enthusiastic and overwhelmingly positive impressions of the game, and Lasharor has some excellent tips for newcomers.

App Store Link: Hook Champ, 99¢

TouchArcade Rating:

Yesterday I made it out to the Freeverse offices and sat down with their development teams to look at their lineup of upcoming games. The title closest to completion was Warpgate, which we have previewed in the past. I played through the first few tutorial missions, and the game has grown substantially from the initial screenshots we saw so long ago.

The concept of the game has stayed essentially the same since our preview, but since then Freeverse has added a tremendous amount of content and graphical effects. Each system that you can land on has their own economy which is in constant flux, along with a series of procedurally generated random missions that will allow you to play the game forever without running out of things to do.

In the graphical department, normal mapping has been added to every object in game. Normal mapping is a rendering technique used to fake shadows and lighting on objects to create much more detailed graphics while still maintaining a low enough polygon count to be rendered at a high framerate. (Wikipedia has an excellent article on the specifics of normal mapping, including an image that does a great job of illustrating what it can do.)

There have been other games for the iPhone that have used normal mapping, but all of these games have been sold as "3GS-Only" games. Warpgate is anticipated to be the first game for the platform that scales these graphical effects based on the device you're playing it on.

If you're playing on an iPhone 3GS, normal mapping will be enabled and you'll be able to see canyons and crags in planets along with the different details of the ships and warpgates. But, if you're playing on a previous-generation device, the game will gracefully degrade back to standard textured 3D models. If in the future you upgrade to a newer device, all of the graphical features you didn't have access to are instantly enabled without needing to buy a "enhanced" version of the game.

Here is a video provided by Freeverse illustrating the difference in graphical quality between devices:

[ Full HD version | Low Bandwidth version | Quicktime Movie]

Warpgate is still in development and Freeverse is hopeful to have it on the App Store in time for the holiday season. We've been playing different builds of the game over Warpgate's development, and the game seems to be rapidly progressing. Look forward to a more detailed preview and review of the game here as its release approaches.

Dark Nebula is described as a "skill-based action game" which we previewed back in August. The game is brought to us in part by Anders Hejdenberg, the lead designer of Battlefield 2: Modern Combat.

Dark Nebula is a tilt-controlled ball roller, but one that adopts an action/arcade vibe rather than the more tedious precision work found in many others. In fact, it feels so different, I'd hesitate to put it in the same genre. The game proceeds across 10 levels of action-packed gaming. Each level is very well designed with a variety of obstacles introduced along the way. Your tasks include the avoiding of spikes, triggering switches, avoiding laser fire, and more. And despite no calibration options, the game's controls seemed perfect.

Each of the 10 levels are primarily vertical scrolling scenes with distinct start and end points. Your ball has a single shield that can be replenished along the way. Get hit with your shield down or fall off the level and you have to restart at the beginning of the level poriton you are died on. If you lose all your lives, you can restart at the beginning of any level you've unlocked. There are 10 levels in all.

In fact, it seems the developers have gone to special trouble to avoid user frustration in the game. For example, if you get killed by a laser shot or spinning spikes, these elements actually slow down so it's easier to get through on your next life. The result is a game that you will enjoy immensely to the end, though one that will end relatively quickly.

Dark Nebula is billed at offering an hour's play time to make it through the entire game. If you are particularly coordinated, you will be able to make it through in a significantly shorter amount of time, though going back to get gold stars on each level do offer a legitimate amount of replay value.

Overall, Dark Nebula offers a very fun, action-arcade experience that we loved every second of. The game's rather short length, however, is a legitimate point of concern, but at only $0.99 and high quality of the overall experience, we still recommend it.

App Store Link: Dark Nebula, $0.99

TouchArcade Rating: