Another title in the onslaught of tonight's releases is Ark of Sinners Advance by Bulkypix. Set in the Anima: Beyond Fantasy universe, Ark of Sinners seems to draw considerably from the existing pool of lore that an already established universe provides. You play as Celia, who according to the previously linked Wikipedia page is a member of a faction who is "implanted with technology infused with magic."

The game opens with a brief tutorial that gets you familiar with is 2.5D action-oriented gameplay that leans heavily on virtual controls all over your screen that handle jumping, attacking, movement, and evasion. Jumping feels a little weird since how high you jump is directly linked to how long you hold the button down which always translates to being a little weird to me. After the tutorial, you're greeted with a brief cutscene that covers the protagonist being inflicted with some mild amnesia with an off-putting amount of side-boob.

The meat of the game seems to be action-oriented platforming, rampaging from area to area brawling with gated fights where you cannot progress past a certain area until you've killed all the dudes on screen. Eventually you'll come across some blue glowing orbs which serve as "Lost Time Memories Points." These are used to fill out an impressively vast screen of character upgrades ranging from increasing your hit points to adding new moves and combos to your combat arsenal.

First impressions of the game are giving me almost Bayonetta-like vibes, especially when you combine the gated combat with the huge combat capability upgrade system. Of course, like most of these virtual control-laden platformers, I'm guessing how much you enjoy the game will be closely linked with how you are with virtual controls. Even in the early portions of the game I've found myself slightly frustrated with falling and dying unintentionally, although I'm anxious to see if this gets better or worse as I get deeper into the game. The original WiiWare title was basically ravaged on Metacritic, so I'm not sure how hopeful I should be on that.

Forum Thread: [NZ] Ark of Sinners Advance - (by Bulkypix) [Universal]
International App Store Link: Ark of Sinners Advance, $2.99

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Ark of Sinners Advance should be available on the US App Store at 11:00 PM Eastern, or potentially much earlier if you're in a region east of the USA. To be alerted when the game is available, open this story in the TouchArcade App [Free] and add it to your watch list. A little after 11:00 PM tonight you'll get a push alert with the download link.

Halfbrick's Fish Out Of Water is among the many other games that are launching tonight, and I'm not sure I could be more stoked about it. We've extensively covered the game in the past, but here's the gist (again)- Imagine skipping stones in a constantly changing ocean that's directly linked to the weather in game, only instead of stones you've got a variety of fish that each have slightly different abilities such as being able to fly extra far or being able to skip across the surface like mad. Each attempt is graded by a set of judges who each look for specific things in your tosses, and doing well involves not only choosing the right fish for the weather but also throwing them appropriately to best handle the current state of your waves.

Of course there's a Jetpack Joyride-style objective system, so even if you're totally failing at impressing the judges you can at least complete different mini-goals, such as tossing all of your fish to stay under a low vertical line across the screen and much more. Will it be the next Fruit NinjaFish Out Of Water.

Forum Thread: [NZ] Fish Out Of Water! - (by Halfbrick Studios) [Universal]
International App Store Link: Fish Out Of Water, 99¢

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Fish Out Of Water should be available on the US App Store at 11:00 PM Eastern, or potentially much earlier if you're in a region east of the USA. To be alerted when the game is available, open this story in the TouchArcade App [Free] and add it to your watch list. A little after 11:00 PM tonight you'll get a push alert with the download link.

In the world of iOS games, we're often impressed with what our mobile hardware is capable of, and crave those big gaming experiences that are comparable to those found on consoles and desktops but with the ability to be played on the go. It's a neat world we live in where stuff like that is possible.

The flip side of that coin is that mobile devices are also a perfect place for the not-so-robust title; something quick and accessible that we can distract ourselves with for those few moments throughout the day when we'd otherwise just be killing time.

With that, sometimes a game does basically just one thing that's clever or unique, but won't necessarily be a game you spend months or years with. But for their intended purpose – a quick distraction – these games do what they set out to do really well, and while an in-depth review typically isn't warranted for such a game it's worth quickly highlighting their unique aspects for those people who are constantly looking for new and interesting gaming fixes while on the go.

Over the weekend a game caught my eye that fits this bill perfectly. It's called 1800 [Free], and the idea is simple enough that literally anybody can give it a shot. Picture those meters used in golf games over the years, you know the ones I'm talking about – a cursor travels back and forth and you're tasked with stopping it at just the right spot on the meter which correlates to the power and accuracy of your shot. It's a classic game mechanic used in lots of instances, and the basic idea is what drives 1800.

A cursor travels back and forth, and stopping it in the dead center awards a perfect score of 1800. You're graded on a 3-star level based on how accurately you can stop the cursor in the center and get 1800. That's the game at its core, at least, but as you progress through the 20+ levels more complicated and challenging variations of the idea come into play.

For example, a line will run across the meter along with your cursor, both traveling in different lengths at different speeds. You'll need to time it just right to stop the cursor and the line right in the middle of the meter at the same time. Levels increase in difficulty by adding more line variations and even an additional cursor to keep track of.

1800 is an incredibly difficult game. Just getting the 2-stars in a level that are needed to progress to the next is really hard, but if you're going for 3-stars on every level then it's downright brutal. It's extremely quick and easy to retry levels though, so it's actually a pretty welcome challenge. There's an additional Timed mode to unlock too, which gives you 60 seconds to land as many direct hits as possible. Game Center leaderboards are included for both the regular and Timed mode, along with just a handful of achievements.

It might not be the most robust title out there, but 1800 is a quick bit of fun when you feel like challenging your motor skills, and if you really click with it then chasing the elusive 3-stars for every level will keep you busy for a good long time.

When we checked out Tiny Troopers [Free] last year, there really wasn't much to critique with the simplified real-time strategy title. With streamlined controls, plenty of action, and a robust weapon and upgrade system, there was in fact a lot to love.

Fortunately, developer Kukouri has elected to not mess with a good thing when it comes to their follow-up release Tiny Troopers 2: Special Ops [Free]. Focusing more on refinements of the already established gameplay system, Tiny Troopers 2 offers more of everything we loved about the original and is an excellent sequel.

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TouchArcade Rating:

Foursaken Media's Block Fortress [$0.99] is one of those games that could last you forever. It plops you into a Minecraft-like block-based sandbox, tasks you with creating the most impenetrable fortress possible out of those blocks, and then sends wave after wave of enemies in to see if your creation will indeed stand up to the test. Oh, and while these enemies are attacking you're thrust face-first into the action by dropping into your created map in first-person mode, allowing you to help blast away at the baddies yourself. It's pretty great stuff.

The ability to create your own levels means that Block Fortress is really only limited by your imagination (and a device's technical limits), and today Foursaken extends the game's legs even further by updating it with the ability to upload and download user-created maps right into the game.

In Block Fortress's sandbox mode, you're given basically endless resources to create the craziest fortress possible. With today's update you can now upload your creations for the world to see, as well as download the maps that other people have made to test them out yourself. A simple "thumbs up/thumbs down" rating system helps ensure that the best maps are readily visible, and already there are tons of maps available to download.

Block Fortress is awesome, but it's also a pretty complicated and challenging game. Once you get warmed up to it, though, it's an amazing experience. To help you out, we commissioned some tips from the developers, and an avid player of the game submitted his own set of tips as well. Check those out for a closer look at the strategies behind Block Fortress.

Besides the level-sharing functionality in this new update, there's also a boatload of tweaks, fixes, new block types, and more that you can read about in full in the App Store's update description. To top it all off, Block Fortress is currently on sale for just a buck, so now is definitely a good time to give it a look if you have not done so yet.

In a vaguely RAGE-like post-apocalyptic future where some sort of weird manmade oil has the power to turn dudes into zombies, a gigantic uh-oh sort of oil spill ends up turning a lot of dudes into zombies. So much for warning labels, right? These zombies ain't your usual type of brain-diggers, either; their desire seems to revolve around beating folks up and then dragging them into the magical sludge, which now covers a tiny island chain you'll be exploring in DeNA's upcoming free-to-play first-person shooter The Drowning.

Not that there was much to it, but The Drowning doesn't use its premise for much more than just an excuse to put you in the shoes of a scavenger who roams this little island in search of parts to various vehicles and guns in an effort to survive, keep moving, and maybe escape. For the most part, this is a hollow game; you're tasked with little more than just moving from arena to arena, killing dudes and collecting random parts after the battle. The story is too lean to be a driver and the arenas too scripted and bland. You play an area enough, for instance, and you'll learn exactly when and where dudes spawn.

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Good things (or is it bad things?) come in threes, so first we had Real Racing 3 repair timers getting nerfed, then today GolfStar heart regeneration got buffed, and now Gameloft is joining the party by reducing the cooldown for potion regeneration in Dungeon Hunter 4 [Free] to four hours down from eight. To back things up a bit, Dungeon Hunter 4 is the last of a long line of Gameloft dungeon crawlers. Over the years, they've gotten more and more free-to-play-y, climaxing on the release of the fourth iteration which among other free to play elements made players wait eight hours between getting additional potions.

We thought this felt particularly gross in our recent TA Plays video of the game. Eight hours seemed like a long time to us, and the general vibe on our forums was in near-complete agreement. This time around, Gameloft has been uncharacteristically active in our community, gathering feedback and actively responding to it. They even mentioned the possibility of the timers going down to two hours.

It's a really promising sign that all of these different companies are listening and responding to player feedback when it comes to balancing the timers in their free to play games, but I'm starting to feel like a broken record here in that much like with GolfStar, I wish we just had the option to buy DH4 and play it like a normal game. Either way, it's nice to see some leeway from developers when it comes to tweaking their free to play elements to be a bit more player friendly.

I just got the call from fellow carb-free buddy, all around nice guy, and honorary King of Australia: Halfbrick's own Phil Larsen (who was also actually on a recent podcast) to tell us that Fruit Ninja [$0.99] as well as the iPad counterpart Fruit Ninja HD [$2.99 (HD)] are both free. Originally released in 2010, Fruit Ninja quickly ascended to "classic" status along side App Store staples like Doodle Jump [$0.99] or Pocket God [$0.99] with an incredibly simple premise and controls that even your grandma can get a hang of.

It seems silly to explain the premise of Fruit Ninja, as I'd hope anyone who reads TouchArcade would already know about it, but the basic idea is fruit gets tossed up on the screen of your iOS device of choice, and you swipe it to slice it while avoiding slicing bombs. Through a variety of updates they've added new game types, fruit to slice, and have even released the movie-themed spinoff Fruit Ninja: Puss in Boots [$0.99].

I figure there's a good chance most people around here already have Fruit Ninja, but still, if you don't now is a great time to snag it. Similarly, if you're a TouchArcade regular chances are you're also "that guy" who all your iPhone-owning friends ask for game recommendations, and, well, Fruit Ninja for free is a pretty solid one.

Dungeon Hunter 4 is a return to Dungeon Hunter form, but it's also a free-to-play title with one of the most bananas schemes we've ever seen. Need a new sword or helmet? Don't wait for them to drop, just simply buy one of the several pieces of gear offered on your own inventory screen. Want to use two healing potions in rapid succession? Either wait eight hours or pay twenty diamonds for the pleasure. Need some new skills and don't want to level up for them? You can pay for them instead, which we're fairly sure throws the game's balancing all sorts of off. When we looked at the game this morning, we came away pretty impressed with the lengths this game goes to in order to compensate for being free. It's not so much gross as it is hilarious.

This is kind of a shame since there's some good stuff in this. The visuals are solid and the art has a really cool oil-y and colorful look. The action feels pretty good, too, as far as virtual d-pads and buttons go. The skill and crafting systems feel like they're going to be great, as well.

Dungeon Hunter 4 hits tonight at 11PM EST for the price of zero dollars.

Foursaken Media's Heroes and Castles [$1.99] is a castle defense style game that also lets you jump right into the action yourself and beat the snot out of some bad guys from a third-person perspective. It's a more hands-on approach than your typical defense title, but still takes all the strategy and planning that's a hallmark of the genre. Basically, Heroes and Castles is awesome.

If you have yet to experience the game yourself yet, Foursaken has released a new free version called Heroes and Castles Free [Free] which essentially gives you the entire game, including all online multiplayer functionality, without dropping a single dime.

Here's how it works. The regular paid version of Heroes and Castles comes with three playable hero types unlocked from the start, with three additional heroes available to unlock using the premium in-game currency, which is earned through play or bought as IAP. This version also costs two bucks right out of the gate.

Heroes and Castles Free is the same as the paid game in every way but one: rather than having all three starter characters unlocked from the start, you'll choose just one of those three to unlock as your starter character, and the remaining 5 characters are all unlocked using the same premium currency setup as the paid game.

So if you're alright with only unlocking a single character at a time, you can get in on the fun of Heroes and Castles totally for free. In my own experience, I've been plenty busy working my way through the campaign with just a single character type anyway. Each character is incredibly different from one another and requires learning their different strategies and nuances. For the time being I'm content sticking with my Knight, and by the time I get around to wanting to explore another character I should have stockpiled a good amount of currency anyway.

If you were on the fence about Heroes and Castles then you should jump all over this free version. I wasn't sure about it at first myself, as I'm not usually big on castle defense games, but about ten minutes in and I was hooked. It really is a game that needs to be experienced to be appreciated, and now it won't cost you anything to check it out firsthand.

Alright, so posting about iPhone 5 updates might be a little old hat these days, considering the iPhone 5 came out in, um, September of last year... But, you can't miss out on a game this good when it's free. The Blocks Cometh [$1.99] is a great game with a simple premise: Survive as long as you can by avoiding and climbing on top of the endless supply of boxes falling from the sky.

This simple gameplay mechanic is greatly enhanced by a silly amount of playable characters that you can unlock. Each have a slightly different play style, and can make the way you approach the game change substantially. For instance, dudes with a more powerful attack can get away with destroying more blocks, while guys who can jump well are often better off relying on acrobatics to survive.

Oh, and to make things even better, you can play as me, Brad, and Jared in the game if you're a bad enough dude to unlock us. If you missed it the last time the game went free, now's your opportunity to snag it. If you've already got the game on your phone, and you're rocking an iPhone 5, be sure to grab the new widescreen update.

If you've found yourself wondering what in the world Bolt Creative has been up to lately, I've finally got an answer. Aside from updating Pocket God [$0.99] for quite literally years now, releasing Pocket God: Journey to Uranus [$1.99], getting cool toys made and exploring the background of the pygmies in a comic series (which is also available digitally) they've been hard at work on a new game.

It's called Ooga Jump, and it takes the existing mini game found inside of Pocket God and turns it up to 11. We got a very quick look at GDC, and it's definitely as advertised. Imagine a jumping game, but just dripping with everything that makes Pocket God, well, Pocket God. We'll have more details soon, so make sure to add Ooga Jump to your watch list in the TouchArcade App [Free].

We already knew that Iron Man 3 is on the horizon later this month, but there's some additional Gameloft news that'll likely get fans of the Dungeon Hunter series super stoked: Dungeon Hunter 4 is due out this month.

What we've heard so far is that the series is taking a significant departure from Dungeon Hunter 3 [Free] with a focus far more on the single player aspect of the game. The game, however, remains a freemium title. TUAW describes that aspect of the game:

Unfortunately, despite abandoning the "arena" ideas that caused so many problems with the third game in the series, the freemium elements are still there in force. You will probably enjoy this one -- if you can avoid and ignore the bright in-app purchase buttons and currency markers that seem to litter the screen.

iMore has hands on video:

There's some action brewing in our forums over the game, but if you want to be alerted when Dungeon Hunter 4 is released or when we get more details on it, be sure to add it to your watch list in the TouchArcade App [Free].

It's time to take a bite of the reality sandwich. At the end of the day, office worker bees can only put out so many fires and circle back to so many tasks before they need to table their workload and develop a more synergistic flow. What I mean to say, I think, is that you need to loosen your white collar, grab a foreign object, and smash your office to smithereens or risk becoming a lifer who goes postal or, worse, stares mindlessly while muttering about a stapler.

The prototypical office drone you play in Smash the Office [$0.99] has done just that. Reduced to a gibbering mess by unrealistic time tables, micromanagement, office jargon, and conversations that no doubt began with "Workin' hard or hardly workin'?", your character takes up the nearest blunt instrument and sets out to raze his workplace to the ground.

Each level drops you in a standard nine-to-five office setting replete with cube farms, servers, computer, and other office gear. With a club in hand, you have exactly one minute to earn a high score by smashing and bashing everything in sight. Once you've, uh, taken the meeting offline in one room, break down the door to move on to the next room of breakables.

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TouchArcade Rating:

This afternoon at GDC in San Francisco, Gamevil swung by and showed us a couple of its upcoming titles. The first was a Diablo 3-ish kinda game called Dark Avenger. It's got a neat art style and an especially smooth control interface. The other game was a weird match-3 that combines traditional matching play with a PVZ Zen Garden-ish persistent plant growing system. It's called Smile Plants.

We've got video of both, if you'd like to see. Our favorite was Dark Avenger, FYI.