Back in early March we told you about Zynga's upcoming Temple Run-style game called Running With Friends, which was just entering a beta period in the Canadian App Store. Early today, Running With Friends [Free / Free (HD)] bid adieu to its limited beta launch and is now available in the US App Store and internationally. VentureBeat has uploaded an official trailer, check it out.
So, endless runners, ya'll. By now you know what they are, you've likely played many different kinds, and here's a new one from Zynga. I'm not really sure what else there is to say on the matter. Running With Friends is free for iPhone or iPad, so you can just download it and try it yourself if you're dying for a new endless runner, or check out the forums for discussion.
Straight-up: Robot Unicorn Attack 2 [Free] is a next-level upgrade over its predecessor. It has a ton of new features that really set it apart, including an item and upgrade store that lets you customize your unicorn and no-mess, no-fuss online functionality that gives you daily goals to complete. Of course, it also looks and plays a lot better, thanks to some first-class art direction and a blazing frame rate.
If you haven't seen it yet, go ahead and give this video a look. In it, Eli and I bumble around in the game, exploring its various options. We also die a lot in search for a hot score, which is probably funny and sad to watch at the same time. After you've seen this just give the game a download. It's free, it's awesome, and you probably won't regret it.
The opening to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Rooftop Run [$1.99], an endless runner based on Nickelodeon's reboot of the popular '90s cartoon, is almost as awesome as the game itself. We open on a shot of our four heroes in a half-shell lounging around the sewer den playing video games. A very young and spunky April O'Neil comes bursting into the room, shouting at the love-struck mutant teenagers to turn on the news, which shows alien invaders descending on New York City.
Boggled at the nerve of the alien riffraff, the heroes rush up to the surface, spout a lot of talk about kicking some alien butt--and immediately set off running when the alien ship swoops in from above and gives chase. My heroes.
Humorous as it may be to see those turtle tough guys turn tail, I'm glad they did, because the resulting adventure makes for one of the more creative runners on the App Store. After choosing a turtle, your hero sets off at a dash, leaving you to tap the screen to leap gaps between buildings and ninja-kick Foot soldiers and aliens in your path. As you run, you'll need to collect green orbs to keep the glowing meter at the top of the screen from draining. Should it deplete, the ship beams you up and, one presumes, the crew dines on turtle soup.
GameVision's Mr. Runner [Free] series has proven popular on the App Store, garnering more than 5 million downloads across its normal and Plus [Free] versions. Yesterday a proper sequel to the original games appeared in the App Store, titled Mr. Runner 2: The Masks [$0.99].
Mr. Runner 2 is an auto-running game. Big surprise, right? However, unlike most typical runners that have you jumping over enemies and gaps in the terrain, you're actually tasked with controlling your character's speed in order to safely get through the very dangerously designed levels.
You see, as you run along, the ceiling will occasionally lower down to meet the floor. There are plenty of very fortunately-placed gaps in the ceiling though, so you'll need to slow down or speed up your character so that you're situated in one of these gaps at the time the ceiling decides to drop down, thus saving you from getting crushed.
Robot Unicorn Attack 2, the sequel to the only endless runner worth caring about on the App Store, is releasing tonight across iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. Chew on that for a second. A follow-up to Adult Swim's bizarre, colorful, and electric Robot Unicorn Attack [$0.99] is barreling down the pipes, coming to your FingerPad device of choice in just a handful of hours. Take a whiff. Can you smell that? It's the sweet, sweet stench of anticipation. And rainbows. And tears.
The star-ploughing fundamentals remain the same. You, as a fearless guider of rainbow-tailed destruction, are tasked with double-jumping and double-dashing as far as you can over the course of three separate "wishes" or runs. At the end, your overall score is tallied. It's a simple formula, but it works well. In fact, I'd argue the beauty of the first game was in its simplicity and ridiculousness, both of which see a return in Robot Unicorn Attack 2.
Disney's Temple Run Oz [$0.99], a movie tie-in mashup between Imangi's mega-hit endless runner and the movie Oz the Great and Powerful, has just been updated with a brand new environment and some new features. The new environment is Winkie Country, and like the rest of the game it's quite a visual treat. It also sports a new hazard in the form of Winkie Guards who will block your path either high or low, but you won't know which until you're right up on them, forcing you to keep on your toes.
You can get to Winkie Country using normal means by following the signs in-game, or you can warp directly to it or any other environment in the game right from the start by using a selection of new utilities that are sold in the in-game store. Also new in this update is your friends' high scores displaying while you run past them, just like in the original Temple Run [Free]. There's also new weekly challenges and more in-game objectives to achieve rounding out this update.
I was blown away when I downloaded Temple Run Ozupon release and expected a semi-boring movie tie-in but ended up with my favorite Temple Run game to date. I'll be spending a good chunk of my day running through Winkie Country, and if you're also a fan then you should check out the new update and get running yourself.
You want a new endless runner that changes up the formula. I think I found one. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Rooftop Run is one of tonight's bigger ticket releases because of the branding, but it's also one heck of a runner that nimbly mixes combat with scaling and jumping, as well impressive QTEs.
At the top-level, this is just like any other runner. You pick your favorite turtle at the beginning and just jump across roof to roof, all turtle-like. Soon, though, you'll be acquainted to the combat system, which has you tapping on foot soldiers and various other TMNT villains and taking them out. Play a little longer and you'll see some more of the game's base mechanics, including wall-running and double-jumps. When you finally get to put all this together, you'll kinda discover that this is a game about juggling your turtle, chaining him into enemies and double-jumping into the next or maybe wall-running into another combat instance before springing up higher into the rooftops. At the end of the day, what you get is a runner with a heck of a sense of locomotion and verticality, which is definitely rare in this fairly stale genre.
There's a couple of other mechanics outside of this. Most notably, you'll need to pick up lots of green orbs. These are used as basically energy, which allow you to keep runs going. If your energy bar gets into the red, the run ends. Another notable: at certain points in a run, you'll have to fight in a QTE against several members of the Foot. The one we've seen so far, just required specific taps on points on the screen to progress.
As you kill bad guys (or knock out or break or whatever happens in the TMNT universe to the dudes the turtles hit with their fairly dangerous weapons) you'll earn coins. With these, you can buy upgrades that modify damage or jumping and stuff like that. Also, you can buy these through IAP, if you're feeling up to it.
But even without breaking the bank, this is a pretty rad game -- and surprising for it, no less. The last thing I expected to do today was dig a modern TMNT game. If you're up for another runner, give this a shot when it hits later tonight.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Rooftop Run 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.
To coin a phrase from a popular comedian, what is the deal with the characters in these running games? Why are they running? What's the rush? You know, you could've snagged that coin tucked away behind that pillar back there if you would've just eased on up to it. The terrified spaceman you play in Worm Run [$0.99] has a valid excuse. He's on the move, and needs to stay that way, because a giant worm is plunging after him, devouring everything in its path. Glance back and you'll see him, eating his way through stone and dirt and steel.
Worm Run throws a few wrenches into the endless runner formula. It's endless, but doesn't pump your legs for you. You do that by swiping. Swipe left and right to run, swipe up and to either direction to jump, and so on. The control scheme sounds simple enough, but it didn't gel with me at first. Holding my phone in my right hand, I used my left pointer finger to swipe. The tutorial didn't nudge me toward or away from any particular pose, so I went with that. It wasn't comfortable. My wrist cramped from holding the phone, and swiping with one finger didn't give me the precision I needed to hop up into narrow shafts.
In this day and age, it takes more than a fresh coat of paint to differentiate oneself in the endless runner genre. While Chillingo'sDream Chaser [$0.99]Â certainly succeeds in bringing its own visual flair, its the game's story mode (in addition to the secondary endless mode) that gives it a leg-up on a lot of the competition. However, a few annoying issues with the story mode and graphics keep Dream Chaser from loftier heights.
The first thing you'll probably notice about Dream Chaser is its nicely done presentation. For example, I enjoyed the game's celestial tunes, which were very befitting of the theme. In addition, Dream Chaser looks great and ran with a fast and stable FPS rate. Despite this, I noticed a good deal of graphical pop-up which ranged from being an annoyance to actually impacting the gameplay at faster speeds and later difficulties.
Gameplay-wise Dream Chaser plays like most other endless runners with a tilt-based control scheme, loads of currency (called orbs) to collect and a distance/multiplier secondary score mechanic. One feature that's somewhat unique is the game's 'Boost' mechanism, which speeds up your character and increases the currency collection multiplier at the cost of faster speed. It's a nice risk/reward feature that works well for an endless runner that relies on fast reflexes.
Unlike the majority of endless runners out on the field, Dream Chaser includes both the standard endless mode as well as a mission-based story mode. Endless mode is what you'd expect, with players racing against a perpetual clock avoiding obstacles, collecting orbs and trying to get to the next checkpoint which resets the timer. Story mode, meanwhile, is a mission-based mode centered around completing a variety of objectives that all center around running a gauntlet before a timer runs out.The story itself, which follows a night spirit named Nito has he works to repair the realm of the gods, is light-hearted but mostly standard.
While Dream Chaser does a decent job differentiating itself simply by including a story mode, I wasn't a big fan of how it was implemented. Unlike the game's endless mode, Chaser's story mode features a set life bar that depletes when players run into obstacles. If you run out of life, fall into a chasm or fail to complete the mission within the time limit, you lose a 'heart' and are given the opportunity to retry the level. Unfortunately, you can only store a certain amount of hearts, and if you run out you either have to wait an obnoxiously long period of time or spend your hard-earned orbs on hearts to instantly continue playing the story mode.
Considering that later levels ramp up the difficulty, making it entirely possible to go through many (even all) of your stored hearts in a single run Dream Chaser's story mode ends up being needlessly frustrating. True, endless mode is always available and its not too hard to earn enough orbs to buy hearts and continue, but those orbs could be better spent on the variety of power-up upgrades and optional items available in the endless mode itself vice the silly heart mechanic. In the end, it all feels like an artificial method of encouraging IAP.
It's really a shame because outside of this frustrating facet of the game's story mode (as well as the pop-up) Dream Chaser isn't that bad of an endless runner. As it stands, genre fans will probably still find it worth checking out, if anything for its style and story mode. For everyone else, it's probably worth a pass.
Arguably the best part of the Sonic the Hedgehog 2 of yesteryear was the Chaos Emerald bonus stages. You remember those, don't you? The camera jumped behind Sonic's shoulder and he hustled forward all on his own while you wove him from side to side to collect rings and dodge obstacles.
Those stages unwittingly created the template for the droves of endless runners available on the App Store today, so the logical next step for the spiky blue hedgehog was an endless runner built around ye olde bonus stages, don't you think? Enter Sonic Dash [Free], a fun runner plagued by the same problems that plague most endless runners.
Sonic Dash is all about swerving around enemies, rocks, pits, and other hazards to collect rings. Swipe the screen left and right to switch lanes, swipe up to jump, and swipe down to perform Sonic's trademark roll, which you can use to clobber the enemies puttering around the environments. You can change direction in midair, drop straight down into a roll to treat enemies in your path like bowling pins, and weave around pillars and rocks on a dime.
Does anyone remember The Conduit? That ambitious Wii shooter that combined mystery and lore with with action fundamentals, and made a run at carving out a core niche on the system? Its developer High Voltage Software seemed primed to make a name for themselves on the back of that game and its sequel. After the tepid reception of Conduit 2 a couple of years ago, however, the talented studio all but disappeared into the contract work they were doing, with big name brands like Toy Story and Star Wars burying their recognition. Now, of all platforms, it seems like it's iOS that has given them a new lease on life.
From first-person shooter to endless runner, High Voltage's Le Vamp [$0.99] puts you in charge of the safety of what may be the world's cutest prince of the undead. Having just escaped from his crypt, the titular character charges headstrong out into the big wide world, obliviously looking for someone to play with amidst the dangers of sunlight, other monsters, and enraged townsfolk. Naturally, it falls to you to keep him out of harm's way...unless you're the real monster, because seriously: who wants to see this adorable baby vamp bite the dust?
Demiuge Studios's side-scrolling endless shooter, Shoot Many Robots, is now available on Android -- and an iPhone and iPad version is in the works, too, the studio said today in a press release. Interestingly, this version of the game was built in collaboration with the folks at Owlchemy Labs, the studio behind Jack Lumber and Snuggle Truck. We've got a few screens of the (free) Android version below:
Shoot Many Robots first appeared on consoles and PC in March 2012 and was met with a mixed reception, thanks to some overall difficulty, control, and scenario design issues. But forget about all that: this mobile take is an endless runner.
I told myself I'd go get lunch after getting through one more of Bobbing's [Free / $1.99] 86 levels. They're short and sweet, once you know what you're doing. It shouldn't have been a problem. Twenty minutes later, I was finally done. Famished, but finished. I probably should have taken the break I promised myself—Bobbing is not a game to be played on an empty stomach.
It's cute, colorful and quick, but it isn't kind. Most precision platformers eventually let you get by on muscle memory. Repeat a level enough times and you'll know it in your fingertips. Bobbing starts out that way, but it isn't long before it becomes clear that Little Bobby Games has created something more ambitious. Each level becomes a maze, a puzzle that needs to be worked out as you go.
You wouldn't think it would be all that complex. Each level is only half a screen high, and there are only two inputs to work with. Tap the left side of the screen to reverse gravity and the right to swap colors. It's loosely familiar if you've played Polara [$0.99], at least up to that point.
Don’t cringe next time you’re gifted a bad sweater for Christmas – those adorable knitted trees and animals have feelings, you know. That’s if Forest Moon’s iPhone-only Knitted Deer [$0.99] is anything to go by, anyway. This runner brings a, well, knitted deer to life, prancing whimsically through purl-stitched meadows of floating skulls and circular saws. It’s deliciously delightful, in the same way as an awkward holiday dinner with extended family can be.
As far as controls go, you know the drill. Tap the left side of the screen to make our bipedal, antlered hero jump (or double-jump); spam-tap the right side to shoot-shoot-shoot. Various obstacles will keep coming at you, and your only goal is to either clear them or kill them. It takes awhile to get used to this deer’s super-high leaps and bounds, but once you’re familiar with it, Knitted Deer is rather engaging. You’ll pick up coins from fallen monsters, and these can be used in an upgrade system that feels admittedly under-implemented.
There’s no health bar, and you’ve got just two lives to spare – well, one life and one death, to be precise. When your happy reindeer slams headfirst into a barrier, he’s doomed to sweater hell with limbs flailing pitifully, the pleasant navy-and-cream color scheme giving way to a world of blood-red. Like Dante’s Inferno predicts, it’s a little more difficult down here than it is on mortal ground; hurled spears join the list of things trying to kill you, and the placement of barriers grows only more haphazard.
You’re not likely to last long. Most games will clock in at under a minute, which makes this the perfect timewaster for whiling away dragging moments at the bus stop.
The visuals and blippy music make for a beautiful aesthetic. While the chunky knit-stitch occasionally makes menu titles difficult to read, it’s been employed wonderfully in representing the deer and his danger-filled world – I never thought that watching a deer get his head ripped off by a bat might actually look rather charming.
The whole knit thing is the reason you’re most likely to pick up Knitted Deer, and it’s also the thing that’ll most likely keep you playing. If we’re being honest here, Knitted Deer doesn’t do anything new in the runner genre, besides veneering everything in yarn and adding a dark twist to our yuletide fashions. It does do an amazing job of exploiting its aesthetic, and it’s worth picking up purely because of that. Plus, just imagine the merchandising opportunities – I’m envisioning hell-sweaters, woollen deer plushies, everything.
I always find that the arrival of a traditionally non-mobile developer on the iOS platform fills me with equal parts excitement and skepticism for their prospects; wondering if we're headed for the next Rayman Jungle Run [$2.99] ...or the next Final Fantasy: All the Bravest [$3.99]. Case in point? Our announcement last week about Uber Entertainment's foray into iOS. The developer of Monday Night Combat is bringing a game to phones and tablets!? And it's based off of that awesome series? Excitement...Oh. It's an endless runner. Skepticism. After diving in and playing the title, I find myself surprisingly caught in the middle.
Set in the same dystopian future as Monday Night Combat, Outland Games similarly lampoons reality TV by introducing players to the latest and greatest bloodsport: combat running. For the amusement of onlooking millions, you're forced to dash through fiery  caverns and hazardous deserts, and battle your way through small armies of deadly robots for good measure. In your arsenal for survival is a mean pair of jumping legs and a handy assassin's blade, controlled with taps on the left and right side of the screen respectively.
Straight-up: Robot Unicorn Attack 2 [
