Aside from downloadable content that lets you dress a marshmallow in a medieval helmet, Rise of the Blobs [Free] doesn't have much in common with Wind-Up Knight. Both are made by Robot Invader, but Wind-Up Knight [Free] was a viciously funny precision platformer while Rise of the Blobs is a matching game with broader humor. Jiggly blobs, fruit splatters and big bright colors, all these things are hallmarks of a friendlier, simpler game. Here's the thing about Robot Invader's games, though—what you can see on the surface rarely reflects the depth of what's beneath.
Let's not give too much thought to the premise. A friendly marshmallow named Mal stands atop a mighty, rotating tower while cubic blobs rise up below him. He throws down fruit of many colors at an increasingly frantic rate. If you match a piece of fruit with the same colored blob it will be absorbed, and you can pop the whole works. This triggers a chain that pops any adjacent blobs of the same color.
For a few seconds, Rise of the Blobs might fool you. It might make you think it's a walk in the park. Not for long. The difficulty curve is steep. The first few lobs of fruit are slow and steady, and the swipe-to-drop mechanic comes in handy.
In mid-January Imangi Studios surprise released Temple Run 2 [Free], the sequel to the 170 million+ selling behind-the-back runner that started it all: Temple Run. It amassed 6 million downloads in just the first 24 hours of its release, and went on to total 20 million by the end of its first weekend of being available, news that kind of blew us away when we heard it.
Well, this is even more impressive. About a week after the iOS launch of Temple Run 2, the game landed on the Google Play Store for Android and the Amazon Marketplace for the Kindle, where it was also quickly devoured by hungry Temple Run fans. Yesterday, just 13 days after the initial release of Temple Run 2, Imangi announced that they had broken the 50 million download mark across all three platforms collectively, making it the fastest growing mobile title in history.
The previous holder of that honor was Angry Birds Space early last year which hit the 50 million mark after just 35 days of being on sale. While I think it's not entirely the same thing comparing a paid game like Angry Birds Space with a free title like Temple Run, I still can't help but be completely impressed with how popular the new Temple Run has turned out to be.
I mean, not that it shouldn't be or anything. We thought it was fantastic in our review. But 50 million copies downloaded in less than two weeks is just insane. It'll be interesting to watch if it can keep up its momentum and where it will go from here, but needless to say Temple Run 2 is another massive success, and if you haven't yet given it a look then you should definitely get on that.
SlotZ Racer 2, an upcoming follow-up to an old favorite of ours, is hitting this coming Thursday on the App Store as a free download. With that zero dollar purchase, you'll be able to get behind the wheels of several different vehicles, race across 31 tracks, and play with the game's track editor. Via IAP, you'll also be able to grab a few more cars and unlock the game's "Car Editor" and "Pro Tune" features to customize your stuff.
In case you wanted to know, Freeverse, the publisher of the original SlotZ game, does not have a hand in this one. As pointed out in this game's press release, SlotZ Racer 2 is being self-published by Strange Flavour. But there's still a little something extra being packaged in this game for original SlotZ owners.
Players with the original SlotZ Racer on their iOS device get a special bonus! If SlotZ Racer 2 detects the original version of the game, among other things, a unique car is unlocked, just for being brilliant.
That's neat, right? We'll get our hands all over this in the coming days, so stay tuned for some impressions. In the meantime, check out this video of the game:
Yesterday, a game that was developed in 1982 for arcade hardware, but never officially released, quietly landed in the App Store. Gridlee [Free] is a simple game where you maneuver a little green fellow about a grid that stretches off into the distance, blasting upwards at bouncy red figures that try and squash you. That's Gridlee, but that's not the crux of the matter with this app.
As developer David Loureiro explains, Gridlee was developed for the Bally/Sente SAC I cartridge-based arcade machine. It has been brought to iOS devices by way of an emulation wrapper...namely MAME4iOS.
It seems it's a good day for good game design, as not only did the audio visual feast that is Wave Trip [$1.99] launch earlier today but we stumbled across another incredibly stylish little game called Wide Sky [$0.99] from developer and motion design specialist Marcus Eckert. In it you play as an adorable little hedgehog who must swing around each level trying to smash into an orb, breaking it into a bunch of shards, and then go around and collect those shards as quickly as possible. You're given a grappling hook-like rope that can attach to clouds and swing your hedgehog around to build momentum and launch yourself towards your targets. You tap and hold the screen to attach your rope and tilt your device to swing around.
They're really interesting mechanics, but also incredibly tricky. Like, I am terrible at this game so far. Unlike most other hooking games, in Wide Sky your rope will only launch from the top of your hedgehog, so you need to keep an eye on its rotation before launching so you can aim properly. It takes a certain kind of finesse that I just don't seem have yet to attach the rope where you're intending to. I'm just fumbling around at the moment, but I think it's one of those things that will eventually "click" and I'll improve. You can see Wide Sky in action in the trailer below, which I should add is one of the nicest game trailers I've ever seen in my life.
While I'm still figuring out the mechanics in Wide Sky, I can't help but marvel at just how thoughtfully everything else has been designed in the game. It reminds me of the kind of minimalism and ingenuity showcased in an app like Figure [$0.99] mixed with the whimsical audio and visual styles of companies like Simogo and Lucky Frame. It's also a hilarious game, as the description texts and tutorials are all colored with a ton of humorous dialogue.
Wide Sky is just oozing style all over the place, and while I'm still waiting to come around on the gameplay portion I'm enjoying myself a lot nonetheless. If you've got a spare buck lying around and can appreciate tremendous design, then I'd suggest giving Wide Sky a look and checking out our forums for more discussion and impressions while you're at it.
When Imangi Studios originally launched Temple Run [Free] in August of 2011, the small indie developer had no idea the kind of phenomenon it would go on to be. In fact it wasn't even a success right off the bat, and only after a switch to free-to-play about a month after release did it start to build up some momentum before flourishing late in the year and all throughout 2012. The latest tally is that Temple Run has been downloaded and played by more than 170 million people across all platforms. That's just insane.
Now with Temple Run a household name and the kind of bona fide success that can spawn a successful spinoff game with a major Disney movie in Temple Run Brave [$0.99], a proper sequel has stealthily landed in the App Store. Not a lot has changed in Temple Run 2 on a fundamental level, it still plays very much like the original game you know and love, but it has received a massive upgrade in the visual department along with a few new tweaks to the formula that make it a substantial improvement over the first game in just about every way. It feels like a fresh start, a new Temple Run that's geared towards the future.
I'm sure most everyone is familiar with how Temple Run works, but just for kicks let's go over the basics. You follow your perpetually running character from a third-person perspective as they're being chased by a humongous demonic primate. You see, your adventurer swiped the beast's precious idol and that didn't seem to go over too well, so now you've got to run for your life.
Control of your character is handled by swiping up or down to jump over or slide under obstacles, and swiping left or right to turn when necessary. Tilting your device moves the character back and forth inside the lane for collecting coins and avoiding additional hazards. That's about all there is to it, and it works great. Temple Run 2 is one of those perfect games to play with just a single free hand, for just a few minutes at a time or for hours on end as you tirelessly try to top your best run. Nothing has changed with the sequel in that regard.
The biggest improvement in Temple Run 2 is in the graphics department. The game has been built from scratch in Unity and boasts gorgeous lighting and colors as well as extremely fluid animations. My one gripe is that the draw distance isn't the best, which means environmental elements will pop-in right in front of your eyes. It doesn't really bother if you're focusing on not dying like you should be, but it's still kind of disappointing considering what iOS devices are capable of.
The original Temple Run didn't have that great of a draw distance either, but it was masked quite ingeniously using a fog effect that worked well with the dank jungle theme. In Temple Run 2 you're running in a temple in the sky, so everything is right out there in the open. This new sky temple is great though, offering a much more dynamic feel to the level design. The track will curve, dip and elevate in ways that the rigid straightaways of the first game never did. It feels like a more organic environment, and it also keeps you on your toes just a tad bit more since you never really know what's coming around the next bend.
Like I said before Temple Run 2 is a beautiful game, and there's a greater variety to the types of scenery you'll see, like various temple ruins architecture and forests with sunbeams poking through the leaves. There's a couple of new environmental elements too, like a zip line to ride and mine cart sections. These parts aren't drastically different from the rest of the game's normal running, but they do add some additional drama and excitement to your adventure.
Temple Run 2 brings back 4 playable characters from the original, and each one is associated with a specific power-up. As you unlock the additional characters beyond the default Guy Dangerous, their associated power-ups become unlocked too for any character. There's the standard set of upgradeable attributes too, like a Head Start boost and a coin value increaser, which are also shared across all characters.
The power-up you choose for your character can be activated with a double tap once you've collected enough coins to fill up the associated meter on your screen. The power-up itself can be upgraded too, using the game's premium gem currency. Both coins and gems are available as IAP and are also earned through play. The coins come at a relatively fast clip, especially if you splurge on the IAP coin doubler, but the gems are typically few and far between. It still feels balanced though as the number of gems needed for normal upgrading is gradual.
One other use for the premium gems and something that's a huge change in Temple Run 2 from its predecessor (as well as a point of contention with some of its fans) is the ability to continue your run after a death by spending gems. This essentially sullies the scoring as in theory you could drop enough cash on IAP gems that you could just continue on forever.
The cost to continue doubles in gems each time, and it's possible there's a limit to how much you can continue that I just haven't seen yet. Even so I'm not super interested in the leaderboards anyway so it doesn't really bother me, I just have fun playing for the sake of it. Still, adding a special "sudden death" leaderboard where continuing with gems isn't allowed would be a nice compromise. Really what's more annoying to me is the un-skippable continue countdown that plays after a run ends. It would be nice to be able to immediately retry.
If you weren't a huge fan of the first Temple Run then I doubt the sequel will drastically change your mind. Though, it's free, so I'd say just try it anyway just in case it clicks differently for you this time around. You don't have anything to lose. If you loved the original game then I think you'll love Temple Run 2 just as much or more so. Granted the continuing aspect is kind of suspect and there's some minor technical issues, but Temple Run 2's improvements far outweigh its flaws.
There are plenty of more complex runners out there, and the beauty of the App Store is that you're free to play any and all of them to suit your tastes. But Temple Run 2's simplicity and intangible "something" is what made its predecessor a game that I always went back to even in the face of a smorgasbord of alternatives, and it's what will keep this on my device easily within thumb's reach for a long time to come.
We've been waiting for Lucky Frame's follow-up to Bad Hotel [$0.99] since the studio announced its existence back in November, and as of today Wave Trip [$1.99] has finally arrived in the App Store. Like the developer's previous titles, Wave Trip has a clean aesthetic and game mechanics tied closely with music creation.
This is essentially a cave flyer like many you've no doubt played before, but every element in the game has a musical sound attached to it. So as you fly through a level collecting items and avoiding obstacles, a song is slowly and progressively building up until you reach the end of the level. By that time you've got yourself a reasonably complex, funky little tune. It's really beautiful as an audio/visual experience, but it's quite fun and challenging too with its 3-star system for each of the 25 song levels.
What's more is that Wave Trip comes with an extremely easy to use grid-based level creator, so you can make levels and upload them to share with the world or conversely download levels created by others to play yourself. You can even remix any of the included levels using the editor just to put your own spin on the default setups. It's pretty sweet actually.
Right now we are definitely digging Wave Trip in our brief time with it, and we'll continue to dig in to see how well the game parts of it stand up. When it comes to the visuals and sounds though, it's already easy to see Lucky Frame has totally nailed it. You can get more early impressions in our forums and you can snag your own copy of Wave Trip for $1.99 with the link below.
Rocketcat and Madgarden have just pushed out a new update for their excellent endless puncher Punch Quest [Free] adding a few significant new features and tweaks. If you aren't well-versed in the ways of Punch Quest then give our original review a look to get the lowdown. Basically, it's a side-scrolling auto-runner mixed with a brawler that sees you punching anything and everything that comes your way. It's also delightfully over-the-top in terms of visuals and the sheer lunacy of some of the power-ups and abilities in the game.
That lunacy gets ratcheted up a notch with today's update. The biggest new feature is a new egg in addition to the one that lets you ride around on a velociraptor that shoots lasers out of its mouth. This new egg is equally absurd, and hatches to reveal a goat with a unicorn horn that has an attack that is suspiciously similar to the rainbow dash from Robot Unicorn Attack [$0.99]. I would expect nothing less awesome than that. Behold, the Goaticorn:
Aside from the Goaticorn, there's also a new Power I Skill called the Shadow Step which will allow you to briefly teleport past dangers that will cause damage. Some Ultrahats and the sweet Spartan Mode that was added in the last major update have been reduced in price, and you can also now earn coins for sharing your endeavors over Facebook or Twitter. Punch Quest briefly flirted with becoming a paid app back in November, but it's been free again for the last month or so, so if you have yet to give it a look now would be an excellent time to check it out.
This past November, Cubed Rally Racer [$0.99 / $1.99 (HD)] developer Nocanwin released a long-awaited follow-up title called Cubed Rally Redline [Free]. It traded in the traditional driving mechanics of its forebear for a more streamlined auto-runner type of setup, while still keeping the same awesome retro-inspired look and fantastic chiptune soundtrack.
Cubed Rally Redline turned out to be a pretty fun little arcade game, one that we rather enjoyed in our review. Right now, for no real reason other than just for the heck of it, you can pick up Cubed Rally Redline for free.
If you need another look at Cubed Rally Redline then be sure to check out our TA Plays video of the game embedded above. Also, since our original review, a big update hit that added a sweet new Rally Mode as a 99¢ IAP that came with 20 distinctive levels to race through in addition to the main endless mode. It's all a lot of fun, so don't hesitate to download Cubed Rally Redline while it's free until this Sunday.
We'll have our normal weekly "Coming Tonight" post out for you later today, but this news is just too big to wait for. Hitting the New Zealand App Store just mere moments ago and set to filter its way across the world and into the US later tonight is the sequel to one of the App Store's biggest success stories. Yes, Temple Run 2 [Free] has arrived. Not a spinoff, not a movie tie-in, and not yet another clone, this is a true and proper sequel from Imangi Studios developed with the help of Fuzzycube Software. Sweet!
I've been playing Temple Run 2 for the past day, and for the most part what wasn't broke has not been fixed. Right from first boot up you'll get a sense of deja vu as the camera sweeps in on the cursed idol that has been the cause of so much running over the past year and a half. You're still being chased by freaky monkey creatures – well, just one giant creature, actually – and you're still using a combination of swipes and tilts to jump or slide past obstacles and collect coins. This is totally Temple Run.
However, just because the key components remain the same doesn't mean there isn't a ton of new stuff in Temple Run 2. Quite the opposite. The game takes place during the "golden hour" that's just before sunset in a new temple floating high up in the sky. This sequel has received a big upgrade in terms of visuals and animation over its predecessor, and it makes a difference. It's a beautiful game for sure.
The real improvement, though, is just how fluid and natural the environment feels. The original Temple Run was very rigid with mostly straightaways and 90-degree turns. Temple Run 2's environments are curvy and hilly, giving everything a more natural and "real" feel. There are cool new ziplines glide down, and eventually you'll come across sections where you'll be riding the rails in a mine cart. It's pretty sweet. Check out this gallery of screens below (click to enlarge):
There are also four different playable characters, each with their own unique attribute as well as a host of upgradeable abilities. I'm sure there's a bunch of cool stuff I have yet to discover, too. We'll continue digging into Temple Run 2 and will have more on the game soon, but if you were among the millions and millions who enjoyed the original I think it's a pretty safe bet you're going to like the sequel. Look for it in international markets throughout the day and the US at 11pm EST, and check out our forums for more early impressions of the game.
Let's clear the air: clean lines and futuristic stylings aside, Pixelbite Games' Repulze [$2.99] shares little in common with Wipeout. One is an iOS racer that costs less than a dollar, the other is one of Sony's most popular and enduring racing franchises. That's not to discount Repulze, though -- it's from the same team that developed the excellent Reckless Racing 2[$1.99]. Whereas RR2 included drifting mechanics and a dynamic difficulty system, Repulze is comparatively stripped down: it only does one thing, but it does it really well.
The game's most obvious feature is its visual design. The tracks and hovercraft all fit squarely in sci-fi's artistic wheelhouse, but the vibrant colors and sharp lines look nice on a big iPad screen. One of my favorite hovercraft, for example, is the Yugana SB-23, the one that looks most like a podracer from The Phantom Menace. I like the way it handles, of course, but I also like the the way its hydraulics pulse up and down as I bank left and right. Each vehicle is full of small visual touches that set it apart from the rest, and Pixelbite's attention to detail permeates the entire game. Even the menus look nice.
There is no way to sugarcoat this: ShaqDown [Free] is not a great game. It is, at best, a merely serviceable game ideal only for anyone ravenously massaging their hands mad scientist-style with anticipation. This also probably is going to really, really bum out Shaq who is himself a hugely outspoken Apple enthusiast.
Sorry Shaq. But what follows is true.
So what went wrong? There is far too much emphasis and reliance on gimmick. ShaqDown starts off in Yemen, which is seemingly ground zero of the zombie apocalypse. Mankind underestimated the zombies, and wound up being enslaved by them. Among the wreckage, though, “[there] was a man that stood up to mutant zombies all by himself. To some he is known as the ‘Dunkman.’ We know him as ‘The Justice Bringer.’” The opening cinematic laying this all out comic-book style is charming, but by the time you’ve hit “buy” in the Apple store, you know all this. Its element of surprise and kitsch has all but worn off.
Mutant Mudds 2 is a thing that's happening, Renegade Kid co-Founder and director Jools Watsham confirmed the other day on Twitter. And it's probably coming to iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. "We do not have any dates yet on when Mutant Mudds 2 will be released," Watsham told us via e-mail this morning. "But, I think it is safe to assume that it will land on a few platforms, including iOS devices." Neat!
The original Mutant Mudds [$4.99] made its way to iPhone and iPad this December after debuting on the Nintendo 3DS eShop last January. Working off what we've heard, it's probably safe to speculate we'll see a bit of lag time between wherever Mutant Mudds 2 lands first and where it hits second, kinda like with the first game.
Mutant Mudds, by the way? Pretty good. We took a look at it last year, and really dug how it played with depth. Check it out if you haven't yet.
Are you the sort of person who knows all about the majestic alot? Have you considered sending your friends posters to help them with their little their/there/they're problem? Well then, we should probably hang out some time, since insufferability loves company. Also, you might want to take a look at The Grading Game [$0.99 / Free].
There's an argument to be made that this isn't really much of a game, that it's just badly disguised work. You take poorly written 'student papers' plucked straight out of Wikipedia, locate the errors that have been inserted into the text, and see how well you did at tracking them all down within a short timer. For the wrong person, this would be agony. If you're anything like me, though, you'll love it.
It's the timer that does it. I'm not the fastest editor out there, and The Grading Game isn't exactly generous. So many great games are about snap reflexes for skills you'll likely never use in real life, but this one hones skills that are actually pretty useful. Get good enough at it and you'll have no problem spotting a misspelling, a run-on sentence or a poorly-place punctuation mark at a glance.
There are two ways to play The Grading Game. One, Career mode, has you work your way through dozens of levels that focus on individual topics. Each time you complete a level you earn fake cash and unlock the next. The narrative has you grading to pay off a crippling pile of student loan debt, working for the abhorrent Dr. Snerpus. Fail his students and he's ecstatic. Let them through with a decent grade and you're fired.
Career mode's levels are split into three rounds, and your performance on each is paid out into one hefty total—supposing you've managed to get the students down to sufficiently low grades. Each round generally has its own style of play. Sometimes it's a matter of finding a certain number of errors before the timer runs out. Sometimes sections pop up one at a time, each with a single error to find. Occasionally a whole round will hinge on finding one sneaky little error, a nice break for your marking hand.
In Quick Play mode you're still working for Snerpus toward the same goal, but this time the play is more or less endless. Each time you finish a round you're presented with a new one, and you keep going until you fail to, er, fail a student.
The problems with this game are the ones you might expect if you're a seasoned stickler. There are rules that aren't always cut and dry, so the difference between success and failure can sometimes ride on iffy calls. Similarly, there are occasional errors in the text that the developers apparently neither introduced nor noticed. You get hit with a time penalty for incorrectly marking an error, so this can be a hassle.
I'm also going to nitpick briefly, as this is a game for nitpickers. The Grading Game is a nag. It nags me about following the developers on Twitter. It nags me about rating the game. It prompts me with all manner of prompts, and I'm really not interested. Learn to take no for an answer, mode of expression.
Most of the time, though, The Grading Game is pretty cool—assuming your idea of cool is finding other people's mistakes and punishing them. Allow me to propose that it's a better outlet for that sort of thing, than, say, your friends' Facebook conversations, or comments on blogs. Not only will The Grading Game make you a better, faster, more precise editor, it could make you more likeable to boot. How many games can claim that?
Mister Frog! [$0.99] is Coconut Island's follow-up to the impressive One Tap Hero, so it has big shoes to fill. In this case, they're probably clown shoes, as Mister Frog! presents itself as a Vaudeville act, in which the titular frog is performing to entertain an audience: perhaps you and the child you're trading turns with.
At a glance, one might me tempted to draw comparisons to Frog Fractions, what with the stationary frog catching flies with his tongue-thing, but this game is as straight up as that one is twisted.
You swipe to stretch Frog's tongue out to catch bugs, with three or more creating a combo. Combos of all the same color insect worth more, and a progressive combo multiplier that drives you to keep up the combos.
Aside from downloadable content that lets you dress a marshmallow in a medieval helmet, Rise of the Blobs [Free] doesn't have much in common with Wind-Up Knight. Both are made by Robot Invader, but Wind-Up Knight [Free] was a viciously funny precision platformer while Rise of the Blobs is a matching game with broader humor. Jiggly blobs, fruit splatters and big bright colors, all these things are hallmarks of a friendlier, simpler game. Here's the thing about Robot Invader's games, though—what you can see on the surface rarely reflects the depth of what's beneath.
