I have to admit my eyes glazed over a bit when I took my first look at Tomb Breaker [Free] It could probably look more like Bejewled with a little effort, but I've had my fill of straight Match-3s and then some. I probably wouldn't have given it a second look if I hadn't noticed it was from Kurt Bieg, creator of the delightfully frustrating Circadia [$0.99]. That bit of trivia caught my attention, and I'm glad it did.
Tomb Breaker has promise. It's clear Bieg's Simple Machine is catering to a more casual crowd, but it boosts the business of matching gems into something a bit more cerebral than we've come to expect.
If you've played Bejeweled Blitz, you've got the basics of the setup. Tomb Breaker gives you sixty seconds on the clock to pull in the highest score you can, and the option of competing with friends on Game Center. You can use up to three boosts per attempt, paying out of a pool of gems that you can earn or (more likely) buy. It lacks some of Blitz's more aggressive psychological tricks, but the bones are there.
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.
I need Road Not Taken in my life, like, right now. It's the next game from Spry Fox, the studio behind Triple Town [Free]. Inspired in part by Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken," it's being described as an "evergreen rogue-like" that explores life in loss -- you know, heavy stuff, like what happens when you stray from your path and all that.
Spry is being pretty vague with details (and probably for a good reason), but it is sharing some concept art and a teaser trailer, the latter of which we've embedded in this post. Take a look around; this thing looks like a winner.
Road Not Taken is due out for PC in 2013 and "eventually" mobile and tablet down the line. There's no doubt we'll be keeping our all-seeing eye on this thing, so add this one to your Watch List in our app [Free] if you want to be alerted whenever we post an update on the project.
The setting and characters in Murder Files (formerly Blue Toad Murder Files) [$2.99] are bursting at the seams with English flavour, so when I first heard about the game, I wondered if it would have a similar feel to the Sherlock Holmes stories I've loved since I was a kid. Nope; not at all. Once I started playing, however, I found it to be very reminiscent of another, completely different style of detective story I also enjoyed in my earlier years. I remember devouring the type of books where a couple neighborhood whiz-kids on summer vacation would decide to start an amateur detective agency. During their search for, say, old Mrs. Johnson's missing cat, they'd uncover million dollar jewel heist or some such, foil the culprit, and maybe even make the front page of the school newspaper.
The recent iOS port of Murder Files--originally released for the Playstation 3 in 2009--features that same sort of fanciful storytelling and over-the-top mysteries. Despite the alarming body count that accumulates as the story progresses, the game maintains a lighthearted and cartoonish feel. You play as one of four detectives (including, appropriately, two whiz-kids on summer vacation) from the Blue Toad Detective Agency, sent to the small town of Little Riddle for some R&R between cases. But before you can even unpack your bags, you witness the cold blooded murder of one of the town's prominent citizens. A conspiracy unfolds, and you must put your sleuthing skills to work to unravel the mystery.
Heard about Tetris Blitz yet? In a nutshell, it's an arcade take on the title that has you dropping blocks and creating lines in a two-minute rush to get the sickest of sick scores. As you can imagine, it's flashier than regular Tetris. Provided you've got the coin to buy them, you can deploy power-ups that jumble, explode, or even remove blocks. And if you're making lines fast enough, you can activate a frenzy mode that, basically, turns most of the board into TNT. It's sorta like Bejeweled Blitz, except with Tetris. Simple enough.
Tetris Blitz hit the Canadian App Store today as part of seems to be a soft launch for the game. Eli and I took a look at it, mainly because we've been hearing a lot of junk about its free-to-play-ness.
As you'll see, it's loaded with ads, as well as those weird "take a survey" or "sign up for such and such" opportunities. You can also buy the game's currency for real money, and if you're feeling froggy, buy a couple of spins on the game's slot machine mechanic, which hands out random power-ups and coin allotments.
Surprisingly, Blitz isn't as aggressive as we though it would be. The game doesn't beat you over the head about what you can buy, at least. But, some of the power-ups do give players better pieces, which could certainly up their score pretty artificially.
One thing for sure, though: this game actually plays pretty good as far as Tetris games on iPhone and iPads, go. A neat prediction mechanic outlines where you can drop a piece, so all you have to do is tap instead of endlessly rotate your piece and follow it down. It's a neat touch. Also, there's the whole Tetris thing: this game, despite how old it is, continues to hold up as a great puzzle game.
Blitz should be out in the coming weeks. We'll keep our eyes on changes, as there will presumably be a few during this launch phase. Check out our video if you want to see it in action, by the way.
With the new release of Angry Birds Friends [Free] yesterday, Rovio hasn't forgotten about their flock of other Angry Birds games as they've been teasing a new update for Angry Birds Seasons on their Twitter.
Last week, they tweeted out a teaser image featuring the iconic birds and pigs decked out in magician and clown costumes, promising that the next update will feature "magic."
Today, they've gone a step further and have actually created a live-action teaser and posted it to Vine [Free]. The video shows some of their planned magic in the form of portals that will transport your birds. Check it out.
I really liked that little video, it was really well done. And, much in the same way that adding gravity into Angry Birds Space and Angry Birds Star Wars, adding in a portal mechanic is a small but fundamental change that can really affect the way we normally play Angry Birds levels. I'm definitely interested to see how it turns out, so stay tuned and we'll let you know when the latest Angry Birds Seasons update hits.
Hey, do you like Angry Birds? And do you have friends? Well you can finally combine these two major aspects of your life in one handy iOS game. Yes, as we've talked about previously, Rovio has just taken their ultra-popular Facebook social game and brought it to the App Store as Angry Birds Friends [Free].
Here's the thing, though: as snarky as I might try to be about yet anotherAngry Birds game, Angry Birds Friends is pretty darn fun so far. First and foremost, it uses Facebook to do pretty much anything meaningful, so if you're not down with that then you should probably just move on now.
If you are down to plug your Facebook into the game, Angry Birds Friends will pit you against your buddies in weekly high-score tournaments. A different set of 6 levels will appear with each weekly tournament, and you can play and replay each one trying to get the absolute best score you possibly can. Your total score for all levels is the bar used to measure who wins at the end of the week, and then the whole thing starts over again.
While there's nothing mind-blowingly different going on in Angry Birds Friends, it's still fun to have a smaller subset of players to compete against rather than the billion or so people who are playing the other Angry Birds games, and with a rotating set of new levels each and every week it should provide some variety if you've played the other games to death already.
I'm not crazy about having to use Facebook, and the connection to the social network seems kind of slow at times, but for a free download you don't have anything to lose by checking out Angry Birds Friends if you're looking to add a more competitive aspect to your bird-flinging.
We're being trolled, right? Maybe? I honestly can't tell if the titling for this is an attempt to draw interest by capitalizing on a popular brand or just misguided confidence in a product. Either way, Better Than Portal [$0.99] invites a comparison that it can't live up to in any way, shape, or form. In fact, I'm not going to waste anymore of my time comparing the two because POPS Worldwide didn't bother to try to do anything remarkable with this game. It is just another run-of-the-mill 2D puzzle game with flat writing, uninspired art, oodles of fail states, and a portal gun.
In Better Than Portal, you control a kid with whacky hair and a portal gun across a host of chapter-based levels that range from a reactor to an underground lab to a forest. In each level, the goal is to reach a purplish orb thing, usually tucked well and away from the kid. Getting to the orb requires use of the portal gun, which when used, can create tears in the universe allowing for easy teleportation of the kid and other objects such as, say, boxes. As the game ramps up, it introduces obstacles like laser grids, which you'll need to turn off by, generally, finding a box to drop onto a switch.
Where the game starts running into problems is in the controls. Simple taps in the world make portals, but there's just one type of portal, meaning every time you mess up you'll need to make two brand new portals instead of just one. This is wicked frustrating in a lot of the later levels, as you'll have to repeat entire sections of a puzzle (or even have to restart) if you accidentally touch the screen while moving your character.
There's also the issue of just being plain unambitious. The puzzles I've seen so far are Standard Video Game type of stuff. Now, the game might take it to the next level in the last two areas, but nothing I've seen in the mechanical build-up so far indicates that it will. Regardless, the first hour I've spent with Better Than Portal has been lackluster at best.
Anyway, you can see it for yourself today if you'd like. It's available worldwide right now for iPhone and iPod touch. We'll continue plugging away, just like the folks in the game's thread.
Paper Titans just doesn't have enough to it. It's too small in scope and scale, for one, but it's also utterly unremarkable. The mechanics are stale, the amount of repetition it has you do is absolutely numbing, and the 3D puzzles are dull at best. You might want to look over this one tonight as you pick and choose releases. There's just no oomph here outside of the visuals.
To rewind, Paper Titans is a 3D puzzle platform game. In it, you "make" a bunch of odd-looking paper creatures and then search for stars and postcards across a host of same-y, or even recycled, levels. Each one has three stars that you can collect, but the card is the end goal for whatever reason. Monster movement is handled by a line-drawing mechanic similar to the one in, say, Spy Mouse. Just tap the monster and drag a line to where you want him.
Each monster has a special ability. The first one you build is a Collector. He collects things. The next one is a Thrower. He can throw Collectors to raised platforms. There's also a guy that uses a rocket pack, as well as a shaman that can raise platforms.
Once you start diving deeper into the game, you unlock the ability to spawn more and more of these dudes into a level at the same time, which allows you to move around a handful of paper dudes at once. Slow movement mechanics and too simple tasks keep this from being interesting, though. From the minute you load into a level you know exactly what you need to do, so it's just a matter of waiting for your monsters to waddle their way over to the obvious.
I wish I liked this one more. The art style is OK and the sound design is stellar, but the game part is ultimately just ... competent, if not straight-up flat at times. Some folks are probably disagreeing with me, though, so give the game's thread a look as you ponder a purchasing decision as the game hits tonight alongside the rest of the world's new releases.
In January of 2012, developer Spry Fox released their novel approach to the match-3 genre called Triple Town [Free]. It used the basic rules of match-3 but the twist was that you could match certain items and upgrade them into new and better items, thus expanding the entire strategy of matching and where to place your blocks within the games gridded boards. Check out our review for more details, but the bottom line is that we found Triple Town to be pretty fantastic.
Since that time, Triple Town has been updated several times with new features and modes. Today the latest update for the game was released, and it adds yet another new game mode for players who have purchased the unlimited turns unlock from within the game.
The new mode is called Lakes (Classic) and should be familiar to those of you who played Triple Town on the Kindle. It's pretty similar to a standard game, but you'll get special lake blocks which you can place on your board to create spaces made out of water.
These water spaces are kind of like placeholders, as you can build on top of them, but you can't place bears on top of them. However, it adds a new layer of strategy to the game as you can block off portions of the board without dedicating a permanent piece that would otherwise need to be matched to be moved.
In addition to the new mode, there is now a Spring decorative theme you can unlock to give your game a fresh look. Similar to the Winter theme introduced in an update this past January, you can buy the new theme using either in-game coins or as a 99¢ IAP. It's not going to change how you play the game or anything, but it's real pretty and stuff.
If you have yet to dive into the world of Triple Town, definitely give it a download. It's free to try and it uses a pretty cool limited-turn system to allow you to really check out the game at your own pace, or if you like what you see you can plunk down $3.99 to unlock unlimited turns as well as all the bonus modes including the one in this latest update.
It's the simplest games, the ones any player of any age can pick up and play, that become App Store sensations. Temple Run, for example. You tap and swipe the screen to keep your dude from falling down pits and running into walls as he runs forward. And Angry Birds? Even adventurers in galaxies far, far away know about Angry Birds.
Cut the Rope is another one of those "so easy your mom can play it" games that wrapped charming graphics, easy-to-grasp controls, and physics-based puzzles challenging enough to make you wrack your brain yet quick enough that you can solve one or two in a single setting in a 99-cent package. It also spawned a couple of sequels, the newest of which is Cut the Rope: Time Travel [$0.99 / $2.99 (HD)].
Like the previous rope-cutting extravaganzas, Time Travel is all about feeding candies to the Om-Nom, an adorable alien critter with an insatiable appetite for sweets. Said candies dangle from the ends of ropes, and you swipe your finger over those ropes to cut them and send the candies swinging into the mouth of the Om-Nom waiting patiently nearby.
Blendoku [Free] is a game you might not immediately recognize as such. I didn't. Where, I wondered, is the challenge in lining up five colours according to hue? You put the darkest blue on the right side, the lightest blue on the left, and fill the rest with shades in between. A color theory exercise, perhaps, but a game?
That rather exclusionary point of view stuck with me until I took myself out of the lowest difficulty tier and into the next one up. Now I had to do the same thing - arrange the hues between dark and light blue, but in between there were a few shades of brown, a yellow, and a couple colors that looked distinctly purple. In the middle of all that was a small vertical section, and the hues needed to work in that direction too. Now it took thought and experimentation. Now I could see the game of it all.
Many of Blendoku's levels can be handled intuitively if you have half a grasp on how color works. You'll get through them in the few seconds it takes to drag the square color samples from the palette above to the play field below. It's okay that they're quick, though. There are 475 of them, all for free. 75 are complex enough that they're only really playable on a tablet, but even so: 400 levels ranging from dead simple to mind-breaking. Pretty good, no?
ZeptoLabs's Cut The Rope: Time Travel is one of tonight's more notable releases, and it is what you think it is: a solid follow-up to the original Cut the Rope [Free / $0.99 / Free (HD) / $3.99 (HD)] and Cut the Rope Experiments [Free / $0.99 / $1.99 (HD) / Free (HD)] that offers more of the same rope-cutting, monster-feeding shenanigans that managed to strike a chord with folks. It does iterate in some smart places, namely with the introduction of new gadgets that can do things like, say, freeze time and with environmental obstacles like spinning blades. Also, for the first couple of boxes, you'll be feeding two Om Noms, one of which will be wearing period-appropriate gear as you blast through the ages in search of candy.
Another note as we play through this: Time Travel seems to have a lot of heavily timing-based puzzles. We didn't really expect the amount of focus on finger agility and synchronization since this series has been so casual-leaning in the past. It'll be neat to see how people react as the game steadily demands more of their fingers than their brains.
Cut the Rope: Time Travel 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.
Multiplayer videogames tend to bring out the worst in me. I have a temper. I have cursed at and been cursed at, and I've flown into Achillean rage during Mario Kart 64: "Sing, O Goddess, the rage of Yoshi / after he was blasted by a Blue Shell." During one particularly heated game of NBA Jam, I pushed my competitor off the couch we were sharing and said some quite rude things about former Chicago Bulls small forward Toni Kukoc.
But I've never punched anyone over a game, nor has anyone ever punched me -- until I downloaded Frogmind's Badland [$3.99].
Badland is the debut effort from Frogmind, a Finnish duo who cut their teeth on RedLynx Trials series. It is, like so many App Store games, a one-button physics game: touching the screen causes a troupe of silhouetted gremlins (I always called them "little fatties" in my head) to fly forward and upward; releasing your finger allows them to float to the ground. It's our job to guide the afro-sporting fatties through a perilous swamp rigged with booby traps, buzz saws, pneumatic pistons, and spinning fan blades designed to slice, dice, explode, impale, smush, and otherwise destroy them.
ZeptoLab's Cut the Rope [$0.99 / $3.99 (HD)] was fantastic, as was its followup title Cut the Rope: Experiments [$0.99 / $1.99 (HD)] so, I'm going to go out on a limb here and take a guess that the just-announced Cut the Rope: Time Travel is going to be pretty great too. We're really lacking any kind of details on the game aside from the name and this (ridiculously cute) teaser trailer, but I'd say it's a safe guess that there will be some kind of time shifting mechanic.
Take a look:
If you're not familiar, the gameplay mechanic of Cut the Rope hinges around solving physics puzzles to feed the above adorable monster candy. Both Cut the Rope proper as well as Experiments should be on your phone (or iPad), if they aren't already. As soon as we have more information, we'll let you know, but in the meantime don't forget to add this game to your TouchArcade app [Free] watch list.
I have to admit my eyes glazed over a bit when I took my first look at Tomb Breaker [Free] It could probably look more like Bejewled with a little effort, but I've had my fill of straight Match-3s and then some. I probably wouldn't have given it a second look if I hadn't noticed it was from Kurt Bieg, creator of the delightfully frustrating Circadia [$0.99]. That bit of trivia caught my attention, and I'm glad it did.
