Dig down deep enough and you'll notice that most matching games target the parts of us that want things tidy, want to clear a whole color right off the board or line up all the gems into nice little rows. The game messes things up, and we go about tidying after it. Go Round [Free]toys with this instinct, forcing players to clear out only the things that truly matter.
We start with three concentric rings. Each of those rings is scattered with colored balls, and each time you match three of those balls they combine and move inward. Assuming they can, at least. The goal is to get them to the middle, but you can only do that if there's a clear path to travel.
Were we to respond in the obvious manner, we'd clear paths to the center and then go to work methodically cleaning out each ring as we went. That would, however, be a quick way to lose.
Snide headline aside, is it starting to get anyone else's proverbial goat that there's all these seemingly cool puzzle games being released these days that, in practice, are less about solving the actual puzzle and more about gaming how to play it without paying? I suppose with the success of Candy Crush Saga [Free] and similar games, it only makes sense to try to go this route, but holy cow is it refreshing when someone releases a good puzzle game that you just pay a dollar for that isn't incessantly trying to get you to spam everyone from your immediate social circle to your estranged extended family for in-app currency offers.
Chock A Block is a basic puzzle game that uses mechanics that I'm sure any iOS puzzle fanatic has seen before- You slide blocks, and each block you move slides until it collides with something else, whether that's the side of the play field or another block. If the blocks it collides with share similar colors and three (or more) are touching, you've made a match. There's all sorts of mechanics for upgrading to better higher scoring blocks too, depending on how quickly and how many blocks you match which sort of reminds me of converting your condo floors to diamonds in Super Monsters Ate My Condo [Free].
Multiple game modes are included, and all seem to determine just how intense the actual gameplay is. Typical classic mode puts you to the task of clearing game boards, and any unmatched block left behind costs you one life (of the ten you have) and you see how long you can play. Other modes have more or less restrictions to make the game easier or harder, and there's even a challenge mode to challenge your friends to beat your scores.
Chock A Block should be available in the US App Store at 11:00 PM Eastern, so keep your eyes peeled if you're looking for a slick puzzler that you just... *gasp* Buy, download, and play.
Over the weekend, a guy named Bryan Henderson tapped the final cube in Curiosity [Free] and got to see the "life"changing" secret hidden within the game's magic puzzle box. He opted to share the secret with the world, revealing to all with access to YouTube that 22 Cans's secret was more practical than philosophical. In return for tapping that cube, Henderson will be given the opportunity to be a digital god in 22 Cans's next banger, Godus. He'll also be receiving some royalties from the sales of it, too.
The prize was revealed via the video we've embedded below, which features Peter Molyneux in a white room making all sorts of promises:
Godus, by the way, is a god game billed as an "innovative reinvention of Populous, the original god game" that'll deliver "exciting global cooperation, competition, creation and destruction to a whole new generation." Henderson will "accrue riches," establish the morals, and be in charge of this world, helping shape or create its rules. Sounds like a job.
Fact. Everybody loves vikings. Miniature vikings escaping dungeons? Even better. And there’s a lot to like about Utopian Games’ Little Viking Dungeon Of Doom [$0.99], but a bunch of small annoyances hold it back.
In Little Viking Dungeon Of Doom, you control the titular lil’ viking as he moves from room to room (100 total), collecting coins and keys to unlock doors to the next level. At the end of every level, the lil’ viking does a lil’ viking yell that is simply darling. Darling, I tell you!
A virtual controller moves the viking left and right and shifts gravity in four directions. You avoid spikes, monsters, guillotines and pits, and use boulders and pulleys and quick gravity shifts to get to those beloved golden keys. Levels start out incredibly simplistic, but gain in difficulty. Figuring out and finishing the later levels feels tremendously good, as that viking yell feels more and more earned.
The gravity mechanic is cool, and the best stages require thoughtful consideration and nimble movement. It takes a fair amount of futzing with each level, followed by some solid strategy, and finally, solid execution of the strategy. Unfortunately, the virtual buttons are way too small and close together, so after thirty attempts at one stage, losing because that gravity button is way too small and too close to the “move left” button makes the game feel like a dirty cheat.
This is the kind of casual game the iOS was made for. It’s got a nice, colorful art style reminiscent of Dungelot, the levels are quick and low commitment, and the concept is incredibly simple, but will have you constantly coming back as you further refine your technique- A similar impulse that classic puzzlers provide.
And yet there are so many issues that keep Little Viking Dungeon Of Doom from achieving casual bliss. All 10 levels need to be completed before gaining access to the next 10, meaning if there’s just one obnoxious stage that’s impossible to finish, tough luck. Keys don’t reappear after beating a level, meaning going back and replaying a level is useless. And there’s no Game Center support. So many little bummers.
The 100 stages are fun, and the gameplay gets more complicated and interesting as it goes along, but the look and music are stagnant. The visuals may be nice, but after 50 levels of the same color scheme, it’d be nice to see a change.
It was just released (with no IAP or ads), so hopefully Utopian Games could remedy some of this in an update. Bigger buttons alone would improve the experience immensely. As it stands, Little Viking Dungeon Of Doom is an imperfect but charming time-waster with lots of potential. And that viking yell. Seriously, someone needs to add that to a soundboard. So darling!
Appearances can be deceiving. In the App Store, Mosaique [$0.99] looks like it might be a generic block-pusher game, or some sort of warped Tetris clone. The truth is that developer Winning Blimp uses these familiar aesthetics to create something altogether completely different.
In Mosaique, Colored squares assemble onscreen in a seemingly random pattern, and you must navigate the screen’s perimeter to clear them by going to the side you want and then dispatching your colored square out into the field. You can only remove same-colored squares – send it out against something not matching your color, and the new color comes boomeranging back, and what you sent out originally takes its place.
It might sound somewhat complicated, but it really isn’t. It’s your level of mastery with this mechanic that will determine whether you’re a skillful player or merely just okay. It can be a little confusing at first, even with the tutorial, but the best way to understand Mosaique, alas, is to just try it for yourself. After spending a few hours with it, though, I can tell you: This is not a time-suck game in the traditional sense.
With soothing, almost meditative music playing, and a hyper-focus on the game’s sole mechanic, Mosaique can be downright distracting to the extent that the rest of the world can seemingly fall away and disappear. Falling under Mosaique’s spell, my entire world became these giant, differently hued pixels. Even though there's not a ton of depth here, there's something very absorbing about the game that's difficult to articulate.
What prevents Mosaique from being too easy is your shot meter. Every time you spew a square out to try to remove more, it dissipates slightly. If you’re careless, your play sessions will be rather short. The only way to survive is by strategizing, Raiders of the Lost Ark-style, when Indy is trying to grab the idol. If you’re in a rush and just go for the easy shots, you’ll be penalized. But if you’re crafty and realize, “Hey, if I shoot this blue one here for this green one… then I can use it to line up all these purple ones after I move the yellow one,” well, then, you’ll fare much, much better. You’ll also be able to continue on, because obliterating two or more squares in one go is the only way to extend your shot meter.
“Winning” is defined by completing seven different, increasingly more difficult puzzles. The game isn’t timed, so you can take as long as you want to hem and haw, but unless you have a chess-master’s mind, you probably will need to dive in and just start square-swapping to crack how to best survive the world of Mosaique.
Earlier this month, EA soft-launched a new version of the iconic block-clearing game Tetris in the Canadian App Store, called Tetris Blitz [Free], and we took the title for a spin in a TA Plays video to see what it was all about. Basically, it's the Tetris block-dropping-and-clearing that we all know and love, but stuffed into a fast-paced timed mode similar to Bejeweled Blitz [Free]. It's pretty good, despite being littered with all the freemium trappings that we've come to expect on the App Store.
Today, Tetris Blitz graduated from its soft-launch status and has released outside of Canada and into the world at large. Here's an official trailer showing the game in action.
Tetris Blitz is actually a great version of the classic game, and out of all the various Tetris games that have been released on the App Store over the years this one really nails the touchscreen controls the best. The downfall, of course, is the freemium-ness of the game, but at least it's not completely in your face and is pretty easily ignored. Anyway, it's free to check out, so if interested definitely give Tetris Blitz a look.
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.
Dig down deep enough and you'll notice that most matching games target the parts of us that want things tidy, want to clear a whole color right off the board or line up all the gems into nice little rows. The game messes things up, and we go about tidying after it. Go Round [Free]toys with this instinct, forcing players to clear out only the things that truly matter.
