Last month we posted a brief preview of Chillingo's upcoming hack and slash RPG, The Relic. Originally described as "Gauntlet on steroids", this latest gameplay video does a great job showing exactly what they mean by this. Here is Chillingo's latest description of the game:
Long ago, craftsmen of legendary art conceived an artifact of immortality; an engine of life to overthrow death and usher in the rule of peace. Yet one thousand years the Quinotaur reigns and fills the holes of the earth with horrors. Ascend from the deep where he has buried you, end the tyrant and destroy the source of his power – The Relic.
Play alone or with friends the intense hack and slash game that pits you against hordes of skeletons, spiders and evil wizards. Live the story, consume potions, collect spells and complete quests through a number of levels to uncover the secret of The Relic and finally restore peace to the world. Enjoy stunning graphics, animation and music that make the world of The Relic come alive.
The Relic will be playable with up to two players via bluetooth, and if you're on WiFi up to four players will be able to slash their way to victory.
While still under development, The Relic is looking very interesting.
Gamevil's latest epic RPG got its own lite version today, Hybrid: Eternal Whisper Free [App Store] offers a brief look at the world of Hybrid through three included battle stages where you will be able to master nine different fighting skills.
Hybrid is an adventure roleplaying game with an extensive skill system all wrapped around a brawler-style fighting game. You play as Grey, a kid with a mysterious past protected by an equally mysterious guardian named Fairy through a quest that will take you numerous hours to complete that touches on a number of RPG cliches along the way.
With every enemy you kill, you gain experience points and in-game currency which can be spent on an impressively deep character customization and upgrade system. The combat is the star of the show in Hybrid, and as you fight through each level you eventually gain more moves, techniques, and magical attacks to dispatch your enemies. These attacks can be chained together to form massive combos, and fighting entire gangs of baddies at once can be fairly satisfying.
Like Zenonia, there are a lot of people who love Hybrid, there's a thread on our forums filled with fans of the game. I do appreciate all the work Gamevil has put in to the game, and as you level up and gain more abilities, watching Grey fly around the screen killing enemies is fairly spectacular.
Where the game fell short for me, however, was in the seemingly endless amount of button mashing and thumb swiping required to kill all the enemies on a level only to watch a cut scene with tons of dialog, then get back to mashing the attack button. Regardless, I still recommend trying the free version, because opinions on this game seem divided, and you could find yourself amongst those who can't get enough of Hybrid.
I first got a look at Five Minutes to Kill Yourself [App Store] as part of an oddly secretive preview from the folks at Adult Swim. With the game's impending release in the near future, now is finally the time to pull the cover off Adult Swim's latest iPhone adaptation of yet another one of their flash games.
As the title may imply, in Five Minutes to Kill Yourself, you've found yourself fed up with working in your monotonous office environment and have decided to off yourself. Utilizing various objects found around your office, you only have five minutes to do enough damage to put yourself out of your misery.
It isn't that simple though, as your bothersome coworkers often initiate unskippable conversations with you. Much like working in a real office, these conversations accomplish nothing other than wasting your time. In some instances, through dialog choices you might get a coworker to attack you, but most of the time they just pester you about lunch.
You can staple your forehead, drink toilet water, pee on computers, and countless other things. The amount of objects that you can interact with and the objects that can be combined with others for even more lethal damage is pretty amazing. The following video shows the game's tutorial, selecting clothing, and finally, killing yourself:
Five Minutes to Kill Yourself is also available as a free flash game on the Adult Swim website. It plays exactly the same as the iPhone version, the only difference is instead of using your mouse you use your finger.
Five Minutes to Kill Yourself should be available on the App Store very soon.
Update: Wow, we weren't kidding about it being available soon. It was just released moments ago.
Rake in Grass recently released their latest iPhone game Undercroft, an old-school styled turn based RPG. The game has been receiving only positive comments in the release thread.
The developer describes the game:
Undercroft is a dazzling, epic adventure set in a fantasy world full of magic and monsters. It combines the atmosphere of classic role playing games with plenty of new features, and brings it all together with cool graphics and sophisticated level design.
The game features multiple environments, hundreds of items, and over 20 hours of gameplay. The developers have provided a lite version to try which will give you a feel for the game before committing to the full version.
A couple weeks back we posted a sneak peek of the v1.1 update to Meridian's zombie shooter with RPG elements Alive 4 Ever [App Store]. Late last night the update went live, brining a new level of carnage to iPhone gamers looking for action and gore.
The developer lists the following features in this update:
Survival Battle (Single and Multiplayer) — Try to stay alive for as long as you can. You will be rewared a new weapon – Golden Desert Eagle – if you can stay alive for 10 minutes or more.
Horde Battle (Single and Multiplayer) — Slaughter wave after wave of zombies. You will be rewared a P90, M4 Super 90 and Golden AK-47 if you can clear wave 8, 16 and 24 respectively.
Powerful New Weapons — Altogether 5 new weapons, 4 can be unlocked in the Survival and Horde Battle; 1 can be bought in weapon shop.
Bonus Indicator — Bonus indicator has been added for scenes with challenge completed.
Dual-Stick Transparency Setting — Player can choose from 3 levels of transparency – None, Half and Full.
New ranking for Survival and Horde Battle
Profile name length increased to 8 characters
Reduced the detection area of Briefing Button
Bug fixes
Meridian provided us with the following trailer showing gameplay in the v1.1 release.
Gameloft's Dungeon Hunter [App Store] is a hack and slash RPG easily comparable to either the Diablo or Dungeon Siege series. In the game you play as a prince who was recently resurrected to vanquish evil from your once glorious kingdom. The story doesn't come off as particularly deep or original, but it more than gets the job done.
Your quest (and associated subquests) will have you venturing across the land and killing (almost) everything that moves in a variety of different environments. The dungeons and villages you come across are beautifully rendered, greatly adding to the fantasy atmosphere and dark mood of the game. Just like the rest of the games that Gameloft has been releasing lately, there were several moments where I experienced a "Wow, I can't believe this is running on my phone" feeling as dimly lit corridors lead into giant expanses lit by candle with legions of skeletons to be slain.
Your character movement can either be handled using an on-screen virtual joystick or touch controls. The joystick is self explanatory, but with the touch controls enabled a small red cross will appear anywhere you touch in the game world and your character will run there. I've found myself preferring the virtual joystick, although touch controls work just as well once you get over the learning curve of figuring out the nuances of the pathing your character chooses to take to reach the point that you touched.
Gameloft's Diablo-like action RPG Dungeon Hunter [$6.99] has returned to the App Store with a new version update.
The game originally appeared a couple of weeks ago but was pulled due to a major bug preventing game progress past the Forge level. This update offers a fix for this issue and brings the game back to the App Store.
Mobile developer Big Blue Bubble has released an iPhone version of its popular mobile turn-based role playing game Elven Chronicles [link], winner of the Pop Vox awards, through the App Store.
Turn-based RPGs, such as SoMoGa's popular Vay, are few and far between in the App Store. And so, if our forum readers' reactions are any indication, iPhone RPG fans may find fondness with this release, reworked from its mobile original for the more capable iPhone platform.
Features as listed by the developer:
Classic Console RPG design
Massive World Maps
Captivating Story
Countless Spells, Weapons, Armour and Accessories
Random Dungeon Maps
Stunning Characters and Scenery
Over 20 hours of Gameplay
Pocket Gamer spoke with Big Blue Bubble regarding the challenges faced in porting the game to the iPhone platform.
…We ported the game from BREW using our own code converter tools and the iTorque engine. This port went very smooth and we had a playable game in a matter of days.
Re-doing all the art took much longer than anticipated and we had to put several artists on the project. Also, as we didn't have the same memory limitations as on the cell phones, it was hard to resist adding more art content so this took some time as well.
Finally, we had to re-do all the controls and menu system. Even though fully functional, it just didn't feel right. This is last thing we need to complete before sending the game to Apple.
The studio indicates that they have their ear to the ground and updates, including expansion packs, will be forthcoming, including features added via microtransactions.
Elven Chronicles is currently being offered at a limited time, introductory price of $3.99.
See the developer's game trailer for a closer look.
Korean game developer Gamevil released their latest entry in the Baseball Superstars series last night with Baseball Superstars 2010 [App Store]. According to Gamevil, the original Baseball Superstars is the best selling baseball game on the App Store, and given my experience with Baseball Superstars 2010 so far, it's safe to say they've got another hit on their hands.
Baseball Superstars 2010 is a full featured baseball game with multiple game modes ranging from simple exhibition games to full seasons or homerun derbies. What sets the game apart from the pack are the RPG elements that allow you to create your own pitcher or batter and build their statistics in "My League" mode.
Various exercises and social events are available to train your players along with items to purchase such as bats and shoes with your annual salary. Once you have built up your players (up to 4 batters and 2 pitchers), you can use those players in the full season mode where you will need to manage your team's ability to work together as well as their morale.
If this sounds crazy, that's because it is. Both Baseball Superstars games have this odd mixture of really solid Baseball gameplay and these strange RPG elements that seem silly at first but start to have the same allure as leveling up any character in an RPG. I've never really been a sports gamer, but the RPG elements in the original Baseball Superstars really sucked me in, and the sequel is doing the same.
There's an additional level to the lovable absurdity in Baseball Superstars 2010 with the included "super" players. There is a pitcher that's a robot, a batter who is some kind of nurse, and in a game I just played the opposing team's pitcher performed a super move turning all the baseballs they pitched into bombs. These crazy components to the game with the RPG elements mentioned earlier somehow really make this game appeal to me, and I'm not even a baseball fan.
Baseball Superstars 2010 also offers an interesting solution to online multiplayer. Everything is done via a asynchronous match mode where you can go online to search for teams to play. In this mode, you're essentially downloading the player statistics of the team you select and playing against them locally on your device.
Sure, it's not real-time multiplayer, but the ability to download your friend's team and play against them when you have time should fit in well with the portable gaming habits of a lot of iPhone gamers where you're only playing in small increments while you're on the go.
If you don't want to get involved in a full baseball game, the homerun derbies and missions are great for playing for a few minutes at a time. Competing in both of these game modes will earn points that you can then spend to unlock additional characters and buy items.
Similar to how the Madden games work, Baseball Superstars 2010 is the annual evolution of Baseball Superstars. There are many small tweaks and refinements that make the 2010 edition worth owning if you enjoyed the original. If you haven't played a Baseball Superstars game, there is no lite version for 2010, but there is a Lite for the original Baseball Superstars [Free] that can give you an idea of what to expect out of the sequel.
Pixel Mine Games has released the Chapter 2 update for their action RPG Underworlds [$2.99]. Chapter 2 adds more than 2.5x the content that was in the launch version of Underworlds. Features include:
Visit a new city
Level cap raised to 50
Repeatable dungeons
Thousands of new items
New quests and creatures
Revamped Interface
Quest Log
Mini-Map
World Wide Agon Rankings with Facebook and Twitter support.
One area of major improvement in the game is an interface overhaul which improves the screen layout and character controls. While we very much enjoyed the first version of Underworlds, the new features seem to address any complaints we had.
This video walks through the many interface changes in Underworlds:
The Chapter 2 is a free update to existing Underworlds customers, and the full game is available for $2.99.
Last month we posted a brief preview of Chillingo's upcoming hack and slash RPG, The Relic. Originally described as "Gauntlet on steroids", this latest gameplay video does a great job showing exactly what they mean by this. Here is Chillingo's latest description of the game:
Gameloft's Dungeon Hunter [
Mobile developer 
