When I heard there was a multiplayer sequel to last year's Puzzle Family [$2.99/Free], I was pretty psyched. Though the game was stuffed to the gills with in-app purchases, at its core it contained a pretty excellent collection of mini-games. I was looking forward to trying them out against a friend or two. That was not to be. As it turns out, the defining features of Puzzle Family must have been the wacky stylings and in-app purchases, because those are what have been brought to Puzzle Family VS [Free]. I guess the mini-games didn't make the cut.
Instead, we're looking at a single Tetris Attack-style game that pits players in a frantic block-matching competition with opponents from around the world. It features much of the lunacy of the original, but little of its variety. The letdown could easily have been enough to turn me off of Puzzle Family VS, but here's the thing: I really dig it.
Most of us have played the game "Snake" which came pre-loaded on Nokia phones back in the day. You know the one: Eat pellets to make your snake longer, but avoid your own growing tail. There's various snake incarnations on the App-Store, such as Hard Lines [99¢] which we reviewed favorably back in June. But right now, I'm really enjoying Hyper Snake [99¢] by ClawHammer-Games.
Hyper Snake uses accelerometer tilt controls to steer the snake and there's no other control options. This will put some people off, but the tilt controls are really superb, with three different tilt configurations available depending on how you hold your device. I used the slightly-inclined setting and the tilts were totally responsive. It's easy to move slow and precisely, or to accelerate the snake rapidly.
One of the strongest genres on the App Store is the arcade shoot ‘em up, as it’s well suited to the portrait orientation of iOS devices and – as long as they’re done right – the touch screen controls can offer more precision and finesse than even traditional physical controls. It’s no surprise there are a ton of shooters on iOS, and more than a fair share of excellent ones. This week saw a few tidbits of news for several shooters, nicely collected here by yours truly.
Shogun, Free - A couple of weeks back, we reviewed Shogun from developer Int13 and found it to be an excellent modern bullet hell shooter with insanely good graphics and challenging gameplay. Shogun received an update this week adding some minor but welcome changes. You can now adjust the control deadzone to your liking, and there’s an option for showing the exact hitbox on your ship so you know just where not to take fire.
One of the coolest features in Shogun was how it slowed down bullet-time style when you lifted your finger off the screen so that you could change weapons or activate powerups. If you weren’t feeling this, though, you can now choose to display those options as static buttons on the edge of either side of the screen. Finally, there are additional audio settings and several bug fixes. Be on the lookout for the next update too, as Int13 hints that it will contain new modes and goodies.
Phoenix HD, Free - Phoenix is another indie bullet hell shooter that came out in late 2010. We liked this one a lot too due to its randomly generated endless design and a dynamic difficulty that adjusted to how well you played the game. An update last August gave Phoenix HD visuals, improving the already great experience.
This week Phoenix received its latest update, and gained a new enemy ship called the Brute, which is large but agile and packs a split-shot weapon, and a new lightning Alpha Strike. The less exciting bits in this update include improved menu interfaces, separate toggles for music and sound effects, Chinese translation, and various other tweaks and fixes.
Wonton 51, Free - Wonton 51 came out last October, and as much as I wanted to love it due to its completely crazy and humorous style, the controls were just too awkward to be enjoyable. It required moving with one hand and firing by touching enemies using your other. It made for some pretty distracting screen blockage, which isn’t good in a game based around not crashing your giant mech into oncoming buildings.
Later on, an autofire option was included making the game much more approachable. This week another update has hit which adds a boss rush mode and a shooting-only mode where you don’t need to worry about dodging buildings. Each mode is available as a 99¢ IAP, but right now the initial download of Wonton 51 is completely free. The original mode is more than enough fun on its own, and at the very least you should download it just to experience its offbeat humor.
If you generally like Cave's brand of bullet hell shooter, then you should have no problem liking Dodonpachi Blissful Death. It's one of the more simple Cave shooters out there, but does not lack in action or entertainment. As long as Cave keeps pumping out their excellent library of shooters to iOS, I will gladly keep buying and enjoying them.
It was one year ago today that Halfbot released The Blocks Cometh [Free] into the App Store, a game we enjoyed immensely in our review. Several months after its release, a pretty beefy update added landscape support, new characters, two new difficulty modes, and an awesome GameBot mode available as a 99¢ IAP.
Since that update last July, though, things have been relatively quite on the Blocks Cometh front as Halfbot has had their hands full working with fellow indie developer Vlambeer in bringing Super Crate Box [$1.99] to iOS (a hugely successful endeavor, I might add). With that out of the way, Halfbot is again back to giving some love to The Blocks Cometh.
One of the most charming and whimsical games on iOS, Whale Trail [99¢], has just received a nice new content update. We really liked Whale Trailin our review when the game first released in October, and a December update added a whole new dimension to the game by offering 32 scoring-based challenge levels to the mix. Each level had 3 stars to earn, and there was a new Hyper Boost power-up that could launch you way up high in the sky.
Today's update is along the lines of the first, offering 32 new challenge levels and 2 new power-ups. The premise in the previous update was that the game's villain Baron Von Barry fell asleep on the job, allowing Willow the Whale to explore the colorful challenge levels in Rainbow Playground without pursuit. In the new set of 32 levels, the Baron turns the tables on Willow and puts him through these extremely difficult challenges in the Thunder Bros' kingdom where it's dark and stormy all the time.
Dodonpachi Blissful Death [$4.99] is a port of Cave’s 2002 arcade title Dodonpachi Dai Ou Jou, and is a direct prequel to their previous iOS effort Dodonpachi Resurrection [$7.99/Lite] (which also happens to be my favorite of the Cave iOS shooters, FYI).
Blissful Death is similar to its sequel at a basic level, but it lacks some of the complexity and strategy found in Resurrection. But, like Cave’s last release Bug Princess [$4.99/Lite], its simplicity is also its strong point for those who maybe aren’t hardcore bullet hell people or those who just like to blast the crap out of everything without much fuss.
Diggin' Dogs [99¢] from Soap Creative and Chillingo is already being compared to Disney's popular release Where's My Water? [99¢], since both games use the same "swipe-to-dig" mechanism. But the inspiration for Diggin' Dogs actually came from Soap Creative's online Flash game Truffle Hunter, which you can try on your computer. Personally, I didn't think much of that Flash game, but I'm diggin' Diggin Dogs with its noisy little puppies.
The easy-to-use controls involve a mix of swiping, tapping and tilting. You drag to dig burrows for the dogs to clamber down and swipe to make the dogs jump. Tap to activate and deactivate objects (such as changing gravity orientation), and tilt to make the dogs, coins and various in-game items slide left or right. If you're not a huge fan of tilt controls (like me), don't worry your fingers do most of the work.
Last month Namco Bandai treated us to an excellent iOS port of the original SoulCalibur [$14.99]. It was based off of the superior Dreamcast version (or more accurately, the high resolution XBLA remake) rather than the arcade version, and came equipped with just about everything that made it a classic back then, barring a couple of significant things.
First was the baffling lack of any sort of multiplayer, as well as a few missing modes that had been in previous versions. The second big thing was the frame rate. See, one of the things that was so memorable about SoulCalibur on the Dreamcast was just how crazy smooth everything moved. The frame rate rocked a solid 60fps, and it elevated the visuals way beyond anything that was on current consoles, and rivaled much of what was popular in arcades at the time.
Last month Taito announced that they were bringing a port of Dariusburst – a recent entry in the classic Darius series of shooters that was released in arcades and on PSP in Japan – to iOS. While it's a bit of a straggler behind the normal round of new weekly releases, Dariusburst SP [$10.99] is now available on the App Store.
Originally Dariusburst was a PSP game, and featured the familiar horizontal shooting and brutal difficulty that the Darius series was famous for, but with beautiful 3D visuals. It was then released in arcades about a year later as Dariusburst Another Chronicle, and came with additional features not found in the PSP game as well as a crazy double wide screen.
When Reckless Racing [$0.99 / HD] hit the scene back in October 2010, we praised it for the incredible top-down racing experience it offered. Now, the folks at Pixelbite Games are back again with Reckless Racing 2 [$4.99], the long awaited sequel to this arcade racer. Improving on nearly every facet of its predecessor, Reckless Racing 2 is hands-down one of the top arcade racers I’ve ever played and is well worth the price of admission.
From a presentation standpoint, Reckless Racing 2 makes some significant changes in comparison to its predecessor. Gone are the country themes present in the music and characters (although the latter still remains somewhat in the avatars and names of your AI opponents). In its place is a stylized, clean motif complete with fast-paced music reminiscent of 80s action movies (think Top Gun). Some folks may argue Reckless Racing 2 loses some of the ‘charm’ found in the original, but I think this is a great move that moves towards a more universal appeal.
Fly With Me [99¢] from Electronic Arts may resemble a cute kids game about a flying bird, but it's not actually as simplistic as it seems. You tap the screen to make the little bird fly and try to collect three stars and reach the birdhouse at the end of the level. This may sound easy, but the catch is you have a limited number of wing-flaps available.
Each time you tap the screen to flap your wings, your flap-meter decreases slightly. Once that meter is depleted, you'll literally fall out of the sky with an amusing animation as you splat into the ground. So, you quickly learn to be more conservative with your flaps, and glide whenever possible. NOT flapping is a key part of this game. Your flap-meter must also be replenished by eating bees, otherwise you won't have enough flaps to reach the end.
I avoided the movie Snakes on a Plane because the premise of reptiles causing an aerial ruckus seemed a little lame. So my expectations were equally low for Gorilla Gondola [$1.99], a game about a silverback gorilla who's riding on the roof of a moving gondola. But fortunately it turns out this debut iOS release from UK developers Electric Pixel Factory is pretty entertaining.
The word "Gondola" has a few different meanings. To clarify, this gorilla is not riding on a flat-bottomed boat in Italy or an open railway freight wagon (that would be ridiculous). It's actually standing on top of a ski-gondola on a cable, which moves along automatically. By swiping up or down with your finger, the Gorilla jumps or stomps. The further and faster you swipe, the stronger it's movements, causing the ski-lift to rise and fall.
Heads up: Limbic Software is continuing to build on Zombie Gunship [$.99] with the release of a third residential expansion this afternoon. The expectation is that it'll expand on the fiction like the others, and hey, presumably give us another bodacious zombie-popping romp in the process, too. You can grab it now for the delicious price of $0.
Zombie Gunship is a little old by App Store standards, so here's a little refresher for your mushy stuff. From our review:
If you've played Call of Duty, you may remember the levels where you fly in an AC-130 and target the enemies below in a fantastic display of aerial firepower. Well, Zombie Gunship is based on that idea.
In the game, you look down over an apocalyptic landscape and wait for enemies to appear on your radar. Suddenly, a solitary human figure rushes from the shadows, trying to escape from hoards of brain-loving zombies. This is where you step in to save the day. You must shoot the zombies below, before they eat the few remaining humans or reach the bunker. If one lifeless zombie reaches the bunker, it seals itself to avoid being breached and your mission is over.
We're still loving this game, and judging from the response on the game's Facebook page, it looks like its followers aren't anywhere close to being done with it, either. That's good. If the title continues to thrive, we'll probably keep getting new content, too. Screens of the latest just below, by the way:
We've had our eye on Tweet Land [$1.99] from Why Ideas ever since we spotted it as a curious Kickstarter project back in April of last year. The project was more than sufficiently funded, and last month we were treated to a new trailer and news that Tweet Land would be hitting at the end of January. As expected, earlier this week the game finally went live in the App Store.
Tweet Land was intriguing due to its unique real-time usage of tweets drawn from Twitter that would trigger elements into the game. It reaches out into the vast ocean of Twitter and utilizes special keywords from real tweets to create things in the game. It's a fantastic idea in theory, and Why Ideas did pull it off on a functional level just as they had promised. However, despite being really innovative, Tweet Land doesn't hold up as well in the gameplay department, and there were a couple of unintended side effects of using live tweets that left a sour taste in my mouth.
After spending some quality time with a preview version of Int13’s new bullet hell shooter Shogun: Rise of the Renegade [Free] last week, we were eager to get our hands on the final version to see how it all came together. And sure enough, earlier this week Shogun quietly snuck into the App Store.
It was interesting that Int13 was departing from their typical augmented reality based games, like ARDefender [Free], and trying their hand at an established and nuanced genre like arcade-style manic shoot ‘em ups, especially with veteran shmup developer Cave basically cornering the market with their stable of high-quality ports. However, Int13 has surprised me with just how right they got Shogun, and while it might fail to totally impress the more discerning bullet hell enthusiast, fans of shmups in general will find a lot of action and fun brimming from the game.
When I heard there was a multiplayer sequel to last year's Puzzle Family [$2.99/Free], I was pretty psyched. Though the game was stuffed to the gills with in-app purchases, at its core it contained a pretty excellent collection of mini-games. I was looking forward to trying them out against a friend or two. That was not to be. As it turns out, the defining features of Puzzle Family must have been the wacky stylings and in-app purchases, because those are what have been brought to Puzzle Family VS [Free]. I guess the mini-games didn't make the cut.
Last month Namco Bandai treated us to 
When 
Heads up: 
We've had our eye on Tweet Land [
