Ok not a spare thumb like an extra one, but if one of your thumbs is free then I've got a game for you to check out. Bouncy! Trampoline [$0.99] is one of those games that came out a few months ago, I played around with it real quick, and then it's sort of just been hiding on my device ever since. Recently, when going through my many folders of games that time forgot, I came across Bouncy! once again and decided to give it another go. This time Bouncy! really stuck with me.
A deceptively simple game at its core, Bouncy! sees you playing as an adorable rabbit bouncing on a trampoline. Pressing the screen causes you to throw your weight downward into the trampoline, and once the elastic surface hits the lowest point it can from your weight, you let go for maximum propulsion into the sky. If you've played a Mario game or any of the many similar platformers over the years with a springboard in it, then you should be familiar with this mechanic.
Just a quick heads up that a very neat game is currently free, and worth checking out even if you miss out on the freebie. It's called Floris [$1.99] by Ox & Coon, and it takes similar matching inspiration from games like Tetris and Dr. Mario and blends them into an audio/visual treat that feels equal parts art and game.
To be perfectly honest, Floris seems pretty simple on the surface but it actually can get quite complex and strategic as you go. It's also one of those things that's hard to explain, but will eventually "click" after you play for a bit and from that point on Floris really begins to shine.
Floris is based around a center point with 12 extensions branching out from it evenly, like the numbers on a clock. At any given time two of the extensions are pointing towards the top of the screen, and two sets of colored dot-like petals travel down them towards the center. Buttons on either side of the screen allow you to spin then entire shape around, changing which extensions are pointing up and receiving the dropping petals. Another set of buttons allow you to swap the position of the dropping petals, and touching the center of the Floris causes your petals to fast-drop to the center. It's easier to see in motion in the following video.
Matching five of the same color on one extension will eliminate the petals in that extension, but the real fun lies in making entire circles of a matching color around the entire Floris. Again, it's tricky to explain and I'm even still trying to wrap my head around the game, but suffice to say there is a lot of strategy involved in the mechanics of Floris. You'd do well to read the developer's guide which does a great job of explaining things, as there really isn't an in-game tutorial to speak of.
There's so much more to Floris than the basics that I've covered here, and it's worth the effort to read up on and learn its ways as it really is a clever and visually striking little game. Players in our forums seem to be really enjoying it ever since its release a month ago, and you'd do well to snag Floris during its freebie sale.
Rail shooters are one of my guilty pleasures as a gamer. They're mindless fun, like climbing into a rollercoaster car that happens to rumble and weave through a shooting gallery. I'm especially fond of The House of the Dead, the first on-rails shooter I had the pleasure of touring from inside the cool darkness of a video arcade. The House of the Dead: Overkill - The Lost Reels [$4.99] is arguably the best entry yet, but an aggravating pay model and IAP leaves some divots in an otherwise smooth and flowing track.
Lost Reels consists of three episodes broken up into five stages each. You choose a character, lock and load two guns, and unlock levels as you clear haunted houses and zombie-infested hospitals. By default, you aim your crosshair using a virtual d-pad. After the first few levels, zombies come rushing in from all directions, and the d-pad just doesn't respond fast enough. Aiming using the accelerometer works much better, but did leave me massaging my wrists as I stepped over dozens of corpses toward boss battles and victory screens.
A tiny world unfurls across your iPhone screen: the surface of a tranquil pond, where water beetles swim about, tadpoles wriggle to and fro, and turtles laze atop drifting waterlilies. But do not be deceived, beneath this soothing surface lies a cruel, Darwinian realm, where you must guide the tastiest of the Tasty Tadpoles [$0.99] as he attempts to eek out an existence.
As a game, Tasty Tadpoles places itself firmly in the realm of the sort of one-touch controlled mobile experience first imagined in Angry Birds. You've seen this before: the cute cartoony characters, the colorful visuals, and those three stars to collect each level. . . So, after slinging birds for them, cutting ropes for them, filling buckets with water for them–is this latest three star scavenger hunt worth your time? In a word: yes.
In Tasty Tadpoles, you must guide your intrepid little amphibian to the pond's exit, dodging predators and collecting stars along the way. The game is played in portrait mode, with the entirety of the level displayed on your screen (though some later levels will buck this trend). A single screen tap will send your tadpole darting on his way, or by dragging your finger you can create a more complex path. The stars must be collected sequentially, and only after grabbing each one will the next one's location reveal itself.
"Endless fallers" isn’t a proper genre name, but if it was, that would be the easiest way to describe Daddy Was A Thief [$1.99] In Rebel Twins' latest, you play as the titular daddy -- imagine a more nefarious Andy Richter -- who finds himself abruptly fired and turns to a life of crime to provide for his family. Instead of cooking meth a la Breaking Bad, he opts for something much more traditional: robbing banks.
Every game starts off with dad escaping the bank’s rooftop and then leaping onto an adjacent building’s roof presumably to make his escape. He automatically runs from left to right, reversing course whenever hitting anything, which frees you up to either jump (swipe up) or smash through the floor below (swipe down). That, pretty much, is the entire game.
Nevertheless, Daddy Was A Thief tries admirably to not feel repetitive. There are obstacles to get in your way, certainly, but part of what keeps things moving are the aesthetics. It’s a subtle move, but each floor is a different, bright, warm color. When you’re crashing through floor after floor, it tricks the eye into feeling like there’s more variety than there really is. Not that Daddy Was A Thief is tricky: It has a few core things going on, and sticks only to them.
While the folks over at Big Bucket Software are busy cranking away at their next project, they've decided to show a little love to their previous iOS release The Incident [$0.99] and drop its price down to 99¢. What is The Incident? Well, imagine on any random day you're outside standing on the sidewalk. All of a sudden, stuff just starts falling from the sky. And by stuff, I mean just a bunch of weird stuff. Like refridgerators, cars, foam fingers from sporting events, garden gnomes… if you can think of it, it's probably falling from the sky in The Incident.
Your job is to avoid getting smashed by this stuff, but also continually stay on top of what eventually becomes a rapidly rising junk pile. What results is a fun and challenging arcade game that has stayed on my device since its original release nearly 3 years ago.
Check out our original review for more, but keep in mind that over the years The Incident has been updated pretty frequently to keep with the times. First it received an endless survival mode, iCloud progress syncing, iPad Retina Display support, and most recently iPhone 5 widescreen support. It really is one of those cool little games that's always fun to fire up and play, so if you don't own it yet then definitely consider grabbing it during this 99¢ sale.
Kevin Ng's upcoming Impossible Road has the look and feel of an everyday mobile arcade game, but it's definitely not. In it, you guide a ball down an infinitely winding neon stretch of track, collecting points as you rocket through the numbered gates that line it. It's a simple, breezy task where death comes fast because the track twists, turns, and falls into itself. As you play, though, you start noticing gaps in the system. For instance, the ball doesn't need to follow the track linearly. You can let it fall off and land onto a stretch that's deeper down. You can also skip gates, too, and earn the same amount of points that a person that managed to hit them all would. Also, the ball doesn't even need to roll down. If you're a bad enough dude, you can just keep throwing it off the track and controlling its ricochet off of the curves.
I thought I was a crazy person when I started noticing this, but sure enough, Ng notes in the app description that this is a game about exploitation. "And when you learn how to cheat the game and you discover that it is rewarded not punished," the description reads, " the leaderboards will belong to you."
As far as physics and feel go, Impossible Road is hard to measure. I mean, as an arcade line game it feels OK. I mean, you can keep the ball on the track and it has a decent amount of weight and predictability behind it. But, the point seems to reside in breaking the game part, letting the ball tumble and roll and bounce off lower swathes of track -- you know, stuff that you're typically not supposed to be doing. Does it feel a little funky as a result? Sure, a little.
Strangely, Road also has that one-more-time thing going for it. I'd still be playing if I didn't NEED to stop and let you guys know about it. Does this say something about how much fun subversive play can be? I don't know! But since I plan to go back and keep racking up my sick scores that I totally broke the game for, may it does.
Impossible Road will be out tonight at around 11PM EST. You can add the game to your Watch List on our app [Free] and get a notification whenever it makes it over alongside the rest of tonight's releases.
Remember Fall Down? It's a super simple arcade game that revolves around dropping a ball down a series of gaps between ledges. Think Doodle Jump, but flip the mechanics on their heads. Recent release FallDown! 2 [Free] takes this formula and spices it up a bit with a bunch of power-ups, a forever-falling laser beam of death, and some insane colors. People seem to really be digging this new treatment, too, as the game has rocketed up the charts and is currently sitting pretty at number one in Top Free.
Eli and I gave it a spin this afternoon and came away pretty impressed with the lack of free-to-play grossness. The actual game part is pretty rad, too. Its breeziness as well as accessibility are great features.
Eli used to play this on his old Calculator For Smart People, so we talked a lot about that in our elongated look at this chart topper. If you ever wanted to see it in action, here's your chance.
There's no escaping it: multiplayer on a single iPad is pretty much always a full contact sport. It's all hands and fingers everywhere, ducking and dodging to see under and around your opponent and clear to your goal. You can try to fight it, to keep everything very organized so everyone stays in their respective corners. Or you can embrace it, as Alistair Aitcheson has with Slamjet Stadium [$2.99 (HD) / Free (HD)]
Slamjet Stadium is pretty chaotic in its Solo mode, in that crazy future bloodsport sort of way. Playing bumper cars with a soccer ball, more or less. Then you add a second player on the same screen, and things get downright aggressive. This is a game that encourages players to steal their opponents' units if it helps. Anything goes, though you really ought to stop before your opponent gets physical. It's probably not supposed to be that sort of bloodsport.
Each player (or team) controls two units, slingshotting them to try to get a small ball into the other team's goal. The stadiums are claustrophobic. Four bumper car-style units is a crowd, and anything more would be impossible. Half the battle is avoiding your own goal, and the rest is making the best of the arena.
There's not a really tidy way to categorize Chillingo's Madmonster. It's not a runner, even though it does task you with guiding a tiny monster dude around a world from left to right in an endless charge. It's not a platform game, even though its core mechanic revolves around that monster bouncing up and down and smashing various objects. It's a game that sits in the middle between these two genres, satisfying neither's conditions as neatly as I want it to. And while I'm being wishy-washy: it's not a thrilling game, either, though it is a competent arcade-y game.
To rewind: In Madmonster, you control a brown-ish, pink fuzz ball with some nasty looking teeth in an overall quest to destroy everything in its path. By tapping on either the left or the right side of the screen, you plough this furry ball of death into anything that gets in its way. Curiously, whenever you make contact with an object -- be it tank, bomb or even satellite dish -- the monster bounces off of it and then goes airborne. The more junk you run into as you're flying through the air, the higher you go. If you get high enough, you hit outer space, instantly reminding you that, yes, this is a video game.
Back in the late '90s, Sega's House of the Dead was one of the most popular games in arcades. It let you team up with a buddy, each with brightly-colored plastic guns in your hands, and lay waste to hordes of the undead. How could it not be popular?
While having a stand-up cabinet with physical faux guns attached was a big part of the appeal of a game like House of the Dead, the franchise went on to become quite popular on home consoles, utilizing its own set of gun peripherals or more recently being compatible with motion controllers like the PS3 Move and Nintendo Wiimote.
Tonight Sega is getting ready to drop House of the Dead: Overkill - The Lost Reels on the App Store. It's a touchscreen-tuned, remixed version of the title released for the Wii back in 2009, and I've been playing around with it for most of the morning. To be honest I wasn't exactly expecting much out of the iOS House of the Dead, but I have been pleasantly surprised so far, save for a few head-scratching quirks.
The game is broken up into three different "movies" which each contain four levels and a boss fight at the end. The initial download gives you the first movie, Papa's Palace of Pain, as well as a locked second movie Ballistic Trauma. You unlock that second movie merely by playing through the first, but the third movie, Naked Terror, must be purchased for a $1.99 IAP. I don't mind so much having to pay for additional DLC levels in games, but on day one in a paid game that already only comes with two chapters it feels a bit weird.
On the bright side each chapter in the game is quite lengthy. You're guided around "on rails" through each environment, blasting at zombies (oh sorry, I mean the infected) at every turn. There are also a ton of cool little touches to discover, like hidden items or secret doors you can access by shooting them.
A pretty robust shop system allows you to buy and upgrade new weapons. While you can certainly buy the "Koins" currency as IAP, I found I had more than enough to upgrade my starting shotgun and handgun quite well just using what I earned through playing. Good thing too, as the third segment of the first chapter is where things really started to get tough, and the upgrading instantly made the going a lot easier.
The weapon upgrades are permanent, and there are some abilities you can permanently upgrade for your character too like beefing up your life bar or combo multiplier. The shop also contains consumables which will give you a temporary boost in things like damage done or Koins earned.
One of the biggest head-scratchers so far has to do with the controls. There are options for a virtual stick which moves your aiming reticule around the screen, and it works really well, and then there's an option for accelerometer controls which aren't quite as good in my opinion but still seem to get the job done alright. Then there's a Frenzy Tap option, which sounds like a tap-to-shoot scheme, and also seems like the control option that would make the most sense for this game.
I say "sounds" and "seems" because I haven't actually tried Frenzy Tap yet. For some inexplicable reason it's locked, and I haven't quite figured out how to unlock it. It seems very strange to lock away something like a control option, but I'm getting along just fine with the virtual stick so I guess I'll just see what happens I do end up running across Frenzy Tap.
Other than the couple of quirks I mentioned, the actual action in House of the Dead is as solid as ever, and I'm having a blast so far. The production values are quite high, and fans of the series should be pretty happy having a version to carry around in their pocket. House of the Dead: Overkill - The Lost Levels should be hitting the US App Store tonight at 11pm EST, so in the meantime hit up our forums for more impressions and feel free to add the game to your Watch List in the TouchArcade app [Free] to be notified when it does land here in the US later tonight.
Pocket Frogs [Free], Tiny Tower [Free], Pocket Planes [Free]… Nimblebit’s gotten pretty good at keeping us enraptured on our devices with cute graphics and pixelated timers. With Nimble Quest [$0.99], the team takes a turn towards improving upon and deepening a classic arcade experience. Less of a time-management title and more of an action-oriented experience Nimble Quest is an excellent title that continues the trend of high quality games coming out of Nimblebit.
The best way to describe Nimble Quest is like a game of Snake, except way better (to paraphrase the title of our TA Plays). Similar to what Call of Snakes [$0.99] did last year, Nimble Quest takes the simplicity of Snake's mechanics and adds layers of variety to turn it into something more. The game centers around guiding a group of heroes around a bordered plane with simple swiping controls turning your heroes left or right. Movement and attacks are both on auto-pilot and the goal is to dispatch enemies that randomly appear in the environment. Take out a certain number of baddies, and you move on to the next level.
Away from the heart. You have to bounce the ninjas—no, punch them—away from the heart, not toward it. Indiscriminate punching isn't good enough. "Defend Heart!" they said. You had one job, and you failed by scoring on your own goal, punching some guy right into your own vulnerable heart. There might be a metaphor there.
In Jared Bailey'sFist Face Fight [Free], you're a disembodied fist. A disembodied fist with feet, that is, fighting face ninjas with feet of their own. They aren't particularly malicious ninjas. They're probably just going about their days. But your heart is right there, exposed, helpless. So you punch, because that's the only way to keep it safe.
You begin as any child starting karate class might, with a white belt. In the distance is your goal, the coveted black belt. Between you and it are quite a few ninjas and no shortage of punches. Each belt is functionally a level. White is easy - the ninjas will hardly have a chance as you tap them in their expressionless faces. Each time you earn enough coins to unlock a new belt the ninjas you have to fight get more dangerous. They'll take two hits, three, nine. They slip in and out of reality. Things start to get chancy.
At TouchArcade, we pride ourselves on highlighting the best games the App Store has to offer. The Best Worst App Ever - EPIC [Free] is not one of those games. In fact it's terrible, but in all the right ways. Indeed, as its name implies, in the world of bad apps this is definitely among the very best. The very best of the worst. And that's how the developers intended it.
Now, I've played a lot of bad iPhone games in my days, and Best Worst App Ever - EPIC definitely isn't the worst I've played. It's just a little too simple. As a rocker bro cuts licks on his axe in the middle of the screen, a bunch of crazy crap begins zooming by. Tap an item to collect it, and tap three of the same item in a row to create a combo for more points.
That's… pretty much it. You can play through a level-based campaign, which increases in difficulty and throws new silly items into the mix as you go, or play in free mode and just tap items to your heart's content. In both modes you earn coins which go towards buying new items to deck out your rocker dude and his surroundings. The items also add various levels of coin bonuses, so you can earn a bit more based on what decorations you choose.
You can see everything you need to know about Best Worst App Ever - EPIC in its trailer, though if you're prone to epileptic seizures then it might be best to avoid watching.
There are a lot of games in the App Store that are just thrown together and barely functional, but the Best Worst App Ever - EPIC isn't one of those. It's obviously had some love and effort put into it. The main gameplay mechanic is a bit too simple to keep me engaged, but it's a free download and good for a laugh if you're into sheer wackiness. Or you could just watch the trailer and basically get the entire gist of it, the choice is yours.
Halfbrick's games usually grab me immediately. Jetpack Joyride [Free] was the cave flier of my dreams, Fruit Ninja [$0.99] devoured my high-score hunting hours. I didn't immediately latch on to Fish Out of Water [$0.99], though. It doesn't have the same obvious hooks—the shiny coins and the upgrades that keep you hitting that play button over and over. Heck, it doesn't even have a typical high score system.
That initial ambivalence gave way after I spent a bit more time with the game. What seemed painfully simple at first—skipping fish over the water as far as possible—began to show off some of its hidden depth. You can get by without paying any mind to the different qualities of the fish that star in Fish Out of Water, and you can ignore the weather as an oddity. It just wouldn't be very much fun.
Without those things, Fish Out of Water is a quick, simple game. You pick a fish, fling it upwards and outwards, and watch as it skips across the water and eventually plunges beneath the surface. Once you do that three times a panel of crabs pops in, judges you on your performance on a rank out of 10, and takes off to let you start again.
Ok not a spare thumb like an extra one, but if one of your thumbs is free then I've got a game for you to check out. Bouncy! Trampoline [$0.99] is one of those games that came out a few months ago, I played around with it real quick, and then it's sort of just been hiding on my device ever since. Recently, when going through my many folders of games that time forgot, I came across Bouncy! once again and decided to give it another go. This time Bouncy! really stuck with me.
