Ship management and pseudo line-drawing make an appearance in Kavcom Limited’s The Lighthouse HD [$4.99]. Offering a different take on the classic genre, The Lighthouse HD’s great visuals and variety offset some choice design decisions holding the game back from loftier heights.
In The Lighthouse HD, you take the role of an all-seeing lighthouse operator helping ships get across hazardous waters. Tap anywhere on the screen to shine a light on that area. If you shine the light near a ship, it’ll alter direction towards the direction of the light (and will then continue straight on its new path). The game plays somewhat similarly to line drawing games like Harbor Master [$1.99 / HD / Free], with the difference being that you can’t directly alter the course of your ships and instead must use the light to indirectly manage your shipping lanes (rather than drawing routes).
Are your time-management titles missing the hands-on charm of cooking sims, and your cooking sims missing too much restaurant management? If so, you'll want to take a look at Order Up!! To Go [Free]. A combination between a time-management restaurant game and a touch-screen heavy cooking sim, Order Up is filled with great stuff: charming characters, varied locations, fun recipes and surprisingly decent voice acting, for starters.
Order Up!! was first released for Wii in 2008, and is due to come out soon for PS3 and 3DS at full retail price. I haven't played the console version of the game, but it sounds as though To Go is essentially the same game. For the mobile outing, Supervillian Studios has added advertisements, removable with IAP, and taken away certain goals to encourage players to purchase currency. Aside from that, it looks like everything else is intact. Intact, and downright entertaining.
Did you ever wonder about what happened to your settlers after you finished a classic game of Oregon Trail (or the newer iOS remake)? Yeah, me neither. However, the folks over at Gameloft have taken that premise and used it to build a free-to-play town builder game. Set in the frontier wilds, The Oregon Trail: American Settler [Free] tasks you with building a new town from scratch. While many folks will no doubt be somewhat perturbed by this classic series going freemium, those that are willing to check it out will find a potentially decent game with more gameplay and content than similar titles (along with more annoyances).
Gameplay-wise American Settler generally plays like most other freemium town builders. Players chop trees for wood and grow crops for food with the intent of building houses and businesses to make cash. You then use that cash to build bigger and better businesses to make more coin, and so on. Each action rewards you with experience for leveling up, which subsequently unlock better things to build. Folks familiar with freemium building games should feel right at home. In addition, the visuals in American Settler are quite colorful and look very similar to those found in the recent iOS remake of the original Oregon Trail. In other words, if you were able to accept the cartoony graphics of the remake, you’ll be fine with American Settler.
On your first look at Snoopy's Street Fair [Free], you'll probably feel a warm glow of nostalgia. It might be for Charles Schulz' classic Peanuts comic strip or television specials like A Charlie Brown Christmas. But you also might be thinking of something a little more recent. Like, say Beeline Interactive's big hit, Smurfs' Village [Free].
The apps have a lot in common, you see. Both of them are fantastic at bringing back the properties we know and love. Both flawlessly emulate the look of the classics. Both are missing a few key features. And both are cripplingly tied into IAP and grinding mechanics.
Yesterday, TouchArcade attended EA's Naughty or Nice game event in New York and spent time with a number of just-announced titles on the way from Chillingo. Perhaps the most stand-0ut game of the lot is Zombie Wonderland 2, sequel to the June 2010 release Zombie Wonderland [App Store]. As in the original, the upcoming sequel puts you in the shoes of Chuck, the renowned Zombie Cleaner of the pleasant little '50s Americana town, Niceville. While, before, your task was to keep the homes of your clients as clean and as zombie-free as possible, your new order of business is a bit more complex a proposition.
Now, while we aren't allowed to get into to many details as far as the storyline goes, just yet, I can tell you that the rooms you will be defending (and cleaning) are, this time around, spread throughout time. From the local museum, which serves as a kind of time-hub, you will be traveling to medieval castles, ancient Egyptian crypts, Viking halls, and ancient Japanese dwellings -- all riddled with zombies that make terrible stains when dispatched.
Some of the tasks that must be completed involve several stages set in different locations and / or times. For instance, one of your clients, Vlad the vampire, has given up drinking blood and moved over to milk. So you must travel through time to get him a glass of milk by milking a cow in a zombie-swarmed barn. Each of the temporally far-flung locales features its own mini-boss that appears and drives the zombies into attack frenzies that make the task of keeping the rooms clean and zombie-free quite a challenge.
While the original release featured four locations, four weapons, and five types of zombies, Zombie Wonderland 2 delivers 25 locations, 25 weapons, and 22 types of zombies, as well as a mega-boss zombie. Some of the weapons available are special bullets, medusa bullets, gnawers, turrets, lightning bottles, killer grass, the brain toy -- even a Roomba(-like robotic vacuum). Weapons can be damaged by zombies, but can also be repaired. New weapons can be quickly bought via in-app purchases or unlocked through dedicated gameplay.
Some areas of the town's museum are visibly under construction, and serve as placeholders for additional areas that will arrive in updates, down the road.
We'll take a closer look at Zombie Wonderland 2 when it arrives sometime before Christmas, but, however we rate it, it's sure to is sure to take the crown as far as number of genres represented. This survival cleaning, time management, tower defense zombie shooter will be priced at $0.99.
I've been chastised in the past for using phrases like "Unless you grew up under a rock, you've probably heard of...", but in this case, if you haven't heard of FarmVille, you've probably never used the internet. Or you're Amish. Possibly both. At any rate, while there's nothing new about the whole land management genre, we can definitely give FarmVille a nod for making it popular on a massive scale -- and not with just gamers, either. Facepalm all you want, but when your mom tells you that she totally built out her English Countyside, you have to admit that games like this have changed the gaming landscape in a major way (although good or bad, we can't quite agree on.)
Tiny Farm [Free] is the latest offering in this popular genre, and I'm just gonna say it right off the bat so I don't feel like I'm holding back: It looks a billion times better than FarmVille. It trades in the deformed character style that makes you feel like you've stumbled into an avatar generator for a clean cartoon look, and I admit it made me like the game ten times more right off the bat. The cute little sounds the animals make when they get all swoony over you for feeding them in pretty great, too.
Back in the Summer of 2009, Flight Control [99¢/Lite/HD] had just sparked off the line drawing craze in the App Store. But before the market was completely flooded with “me too” clones that brought nothing new to the formula, Imangi Studios had released Harbor Master [Free/HD], a line drawing game very similar to Flight Control but with its own unique twists.
Obviously, the premise in Harbor Master differed by having the player direct boats into docks rather than planes onto landing strips, but it went a bit deeper than that. Boats that were destined for particular docks came in various sizes and speeds, and you’d need to wait for the ship to unload its cargo before directing it out of the dock to make room for a new ship. This small change added a whole new level of strategy and frantic gameplay, and Harbor Master has remained a favorite in the line drawing genre around the TouchArcade headquarters since its release.
Most of us here have been anticipating NimbleBit'sTiny Tower [Free] since the developers first announced it. Their last take on the freemium model was the extremely successful Pocket Frogs [Free], a game that I still pull out a few times a week.
So the big day has come - does Tiny Tower live up to the hype? Yes, with one suitably tiny caveat: this isn't the second coming of Sim Tower. Let's just get that out of the way up front, because the early screenshots gave some people that impression. That aside, yes, Tiny Tower is a fantastic, adorable successor to the Pocket Frog empire and it's just as hard to put down.
Here's how it works. Upon starting the game, you're greeted by a fresh new tower and a simple lobby. Working through the tutorial, you build your first residential floor and your first production floor, move in your first Bitizen and give them a job. The Bitizen gets to work creating items to sell, bringing in coins. Spend those coins on building more floors and eventually your tower will reach up into the sky.
Each floor has three items to stock, and each one is on a different timer. When an item's stock sells out, its your job to tell your Bitizens to order more, a task that takes anywhere from a minute to a few hours depending on the item. When that timer fills up, you also need to order them to put the item up for sale again. When you're overseeing a few production floors, this means checking in occasionally. When you've got a 40 story tower, on the other hand, this production cycle will quickly take over your life—if you let it.
The game uses local notifications to let you know when the first item is available to restock after closing the app. This is a great way to stay on top of your towers' needs early on, but with enough production floors it might just make you crazy. I turned notifications off pretty quickly, and discovered something cool—unlike most of these "appointment gaming" types, I can peek into my tower at any time and find something to do. There's always something ready to stock, or someone waiting to ride the elevator. So Tiny Tower fits perfectly into any little gaps of time you have for it. And with no spoilage mechanic, the only thing to lose by ignoring it is the coins you could have been earning in the meantime.
If this all sounds like a lot of managing timers and pushing buttons, you'll be happy to know there's a bit more to it. The Bitizens are really the heart and soul of Tiny Tower. Their comings and goings will occupy a lot of your attention. For starters, they each have their own set of talents. There are five categories of production floor, and individual Bitizens are stronger working at some and weaker at others. They also have their own little dreams. Bitizens working in their dream jobs are better than their counterparts, and you get a tidy bonus for putting them there. Want to see what they're thinking? Hit up Bitbook, a virtual social network for your virtual workers that's filled with quips and little hints.
You're also in control of their literal comings and goings, because you control your tower's elevator. Ferrying Bitizens to their destination nets you tips, both in coins and Bux, the game's premium currency. Occasionally, VIPs show up to add a bit of strategy to the game. They have special abilities, and where you drop them off can make a big difference to your production.
For the creative types, you can customize your tower to the nines. You can't pick which floors are built, just which categories you're creating, but you can move your floors around and paint them to match any color scheme you can imagine. You can also dress up your Bitizens with a palette and outfit randomizer. It took a bit of persistence, but I've got all my employees dressed smartly in per-floor uniforms. The adorable pixel art makes this extra satisfying.
The premium aspects of the game are more than fair. You can buy Tower Bux with real money, but you can also earn them as tips or as bonuses for fully stocking a production floor. A Where's Waldo-style mini-game also awards them. You can exchange them for coins or as timesavers to build a floor faster, finish stocking it, upgrade your elevator or move in a Bitizen. If you're really keen to get ahead, purchasing Bux will help. But if you just play regularly you'll always have lots to do and plenty of chances to expand. Nothing is locked out for players who don't want to pay.
Other than a nitpick or two (it would be nice to toggle the elevator-style music off and keep the sound on, for instance), my only real concern is the lack of social integration. These games are always better with friends (many of whom you can find in our forums), but the only thing you can really do with your buddies in Tiny Tower is compete with them on the Game Center leaderboard and for achievements, and look at their towers. Maybe we'll see more social options in the future, like something to exchange with friends or something to do in their towers.
But enough talk. Tiny Tower is another great, free game from the guys at NimbleBit, and you should definitely check it out. Just try not to get too caught up in the lives of your little Bitizens - it's important to put the game down once in a while.
Firemint has just temporarily dropped the price on the iPad version of their highly popular, feature-filled chaos management title Flight Control. For just 24 hours, Flight Control HD [App Store] will be available at an 80% discount for $0.99, down from its regular price of $4.99.
For those somehow unfamiliar, Flight Control turns you into an air traffic controller, routing helicopters and airplanes of various sizes and speeds into the proper (color coded) airports -- hopefully without incident. It's game that should handily dispel any aspirations you have to become a real-life air traffic controller.
Flight Control has been extremely well maintained since its release and now features leaderboards, achievements and online multiplayer via Game Center, local WiFi / Bluetooth multiplayer and, specific to the iPad version, shared (same device) multiplayer, both cooperative and competitive.
Flight Control brings a great balance of easy pick-up gameplay, ramping difficulty and that "just one more time" draw. If your iPad lacks Flight Control HD, now's the time to take care of that.
Better known for their gory zombie shooter, Alive-4-Ever [$2.99 and its sequel, Meridian takes on an entirely different genre in Airport Terminal, pitting you in the shoes of an entrepreneurial airport mogul. In doing so, they show off the spectrum of their creative output by not only being capable of gory zombie shooters, but also charming time management games.
In each of the whopping 70 levels in Airport Terminal you are faced with a variety of different customers from all walks of life. Basketball players, movie stars, snotty kids; each have distinct needs that must be catered for. Firstly, this involves delivering them to their respective First, Business or Coach class check-in, before sending them off to a number of different amenities and services invariably found in an airport terminal.
What separates Airport Terminal from other time management games on initial observation, is the dual-screen challenge presented by the check-in and boarding process. If you manage to incur the wrath of a patron or incur delays at check-in, expect these patrons to be equally sour and tardy come boarding time. This is especially so when faced with the endless customs queues that we're all so fond of.
Activities are different between the two screens (though some actions are shared, such as hitting each customer up twice at duty-free) and comprise events such as passport stamping, customs scanning, restroom stops and even a chow-down while waiting for your plane. As seems to be the trend with the better time management games, sending a customer to a facility triggers one of 8 mini-games that require your immediate attention. These range from fun to effortless (read: mindless) but all importantly add up to further time sinks and distractions that compound the frantic pace of the game.
Besides its huge number of levels, spanning 7 different airports, each with individual setups, customers, assortment of minigames and strategies; Airport Terminal also features 70 individual upgrades to customize and improve your terminal. These include upgrading the light rail between areas, increasing the staff at various service points, and increasing staff competency levels (to name but a few). Though these upgrades promote bettering your score (and thus earning more money to spend) even the most expensive items never seem too far out of reach.
Airport Terminal is an endearing time management game that will hold your focus for hours as you coordinate the activities and improvements of each world famous airport. Though not as complex as titles such as Mystic Emporium [$2.99], Airport Terminal still offers enough frantic timely tapping to satiate any fan of the genre.
City simulation games on iOS devices generally haven't been that amazing, with very few developers creating a small handful of worthwhile games in the genre. Virtual City [$2.99] by G5 Entertainment is an attempt by one developer to buck that trend, strongly drawing from the earlier SimCity games by Maxis.
Each level in Virtual City sets you up with an impending crisis, supply-line hiccup or urban restoration to resolve (to name but a few scenarios), giving you the tools as chief transport contractor (and budding city planner) to address them directly. The central hub for each of your cities is therefore your garage, from where you can deploy a range of vehicles to transport goods, transport civilians or collect garbage-- all vital instruments to achieving a happy, productive city.
Initially, Virtual City starts you off slow, holding your hand through some of the basic functions, such as earning income by shuttling civilians to malls, or creating a simple clothing supply line. Supply lines are comprised of different production centers which require a number of inputs to function. Transport therefore plays a pivitol role in fuelling your economy. Eventually you'll be introduced to how environmental concerns have an impact on happiness (and thus population) and how a healthy city is a clean city. Yes, you'll be taught to take out the garbage.
Moving on, subsequent levels will open up trade with neighboring towns and more difficult, interconnected supply lines. Eventually factors like sickness, fires, disrepair and income concerns will emerge to boost the difficulty of levels encountered. If there's one thing that Virtual City gets right, it's that it has an excellent sense of progression and learning curve; only dropping you in the deep end when it has provided you with the tools to stay afloat.
The following levels, of which there are a total of 50 spread across 5 different states, are given an interesting context selected from a possible 18 scenarios. With only the help of a hint or two, you are sent on your merry way to make things right. These scenarios can get quite complex, so it is fortunate that Virtual City features an easy to understand interface that clearly delineates end goals and interim goals to work towards to complete each level. Menus are easily navigated, and holding down on each item will reveal a tooltip detailing its cost and other information (something that may not be apparent while playing).
Virtual City's difficulty is further compounded when demands on supply ramp up; forcing you to upgrade your production structures and vehicles to boost their output and carrying capacity. This places an enormous toll on your finances, and often you'll spend much of your time devising ways to first fill your coffers. If your scenario dictates the construction of a complex landmark such as a Space Shuttle launch pad, then the entire process needs to operate as a well-oiled machine. Virtual City is no walk in the park, demanding considerable efforts in both attention and organisation of your city and structures.
For this reason alone, Virtual City takes a hefty swing at the best city simulators currently out there on the App Store. But G5 Entertainment have not rested on their laurels in creating Virtual City-- from the ground-up it is a fantastic looking, smartly designed simulator host to an enormous amount of content. From research and development upgrades, public events, the construction of transit systems and even urban landscaping, the many gameplay nuances of Virtual City keep it constantly engaging, often surprising but relentlessly demanding of your attention.
Virtual City currently has a blanked out Sandbox mode on the main menu, a feature meant to be arriving in the next update. We'll let you know when this goes live. In the meantime if you're looking for help or reader reviews, check out the thread in our forums.
Imangi Studios'Harbor Master HD has seen a number of additions since its original iPad launch in April. The base game includes a single map and can be downloaded for free, but they've since added four new maps for $0.99 each as in-app purchases. The map above is called the Bermuda Triangle and includes pirates, monsters and cyclones to make your line-drawing life a bit more difficult.
But with the latest updates, they've also added a clever rewind feature that lets you restart the game right before that last fatal mistake:
We've also added a really cool feature - rewinds. With rewinds, after you crash, you can choose to rewind (or undo) the crash, and continue playing where you left off. You can only use ONE rewind in a game, and you get a limited number of rewinds total. When we launched the update, we gave people 5 rewinds, and then they could earn 1 rewind for each 1000 pieces of cargo they ship. So they more you play, the more rewinds you earn, and therefore you can use a rewind more often.
You start off with 5 rewinds and can use one in any particular game. Rewinds are then earned for longer play time or can be purchased via in-app purchase ($0.99 for $2.99 for 20, $4.99 for 40).
Balancing in-app purchases is always a challenging problem for a developer. On the one hand, in app purchases need to offer a legitimate value in a consumable product. But that product can't be one that gamers feel is a necessary component of the game. I feel like the rewinds fill this sort of niche well, and I'd expect we'll see it more often in the future. As an added bonus, I've always thought the compelling feature of these chaos management games is the "oh no!" last second regret when death comes suddenly. Now you get a second chance.
The use of a movie license, particularly one as huge as Star Wars, usually brings with it the gloom and doom of expectation-- and more often than not-- subsequent frustration too. It is fortunate then that no one expected THQ Wireless' latest release, Star Wars: Cantina [App Store], a surprisingly well rounded, if light-hearted time management game.
Time management games invariably adopt a similar formula-- impatient, fussy patrons, frantic table-to-table action and an upgrade system that assists you in serving even more impatient and fussy patrons. Though Star Wars: Cantina doesn't deviate far from this mould, when the subject matter concerns a spark from Lucas' brain matter, you just know you're in for something special. In this case a humorous back-story of an indebted bartender ties the gameplay together with an intermittent comic strip filling in the details.
The stars of this Star Wars saga are undoubtedly the customers though, who start off as mere moisture farmers, but progress over the 16 levels of the Campaign to introduce Jawas, Bounty Hunters, Gamorreans, Twi'lek Smugglers, Stormtroopers and even Hutts! Each of these archetypes have different personalities, framed in terms of levels of patience and their generosity. It wouldn't be a Star Wars Cantina without a bar brawl either, an event that easily results if you leave some of the more volatile patrons waiting-- much to the chagrin of your property.
As each level is completed you are able to retrofit your bar with equipment that helps soothe your clientele, and assist you in preparing drinks all the more promptly. Controlling Nia (our hero) is effortless, and despite the the initial tutorial being somewhat confusing, you will quickly be zipping around the bar sending patrons to their tables, taking their orders, and cleaning up after them too. The challenge comes in taking the right drinks to the right patrons and ensuring you manage their moods-- for example, moisture farmers can wait all day but Stormtroopers had better be served pronto. The gameplay isn't all that complex-- you don't have to manage prices or supplies of drinks -- but we think Star Wars: Cantina actually benefits from adopting a more light-hearted approach; placing the difficulty on the customer types and numbers instead.
Star Wars: Cantina has an enormous amount of personality instilled in it by its excellent artwork and the hallmark (and very familiar) Star Wars tunes pumping through the bar. A particularly nice touch was how all our favorite Star Wars tracks have been jazzed up to suite the bar environment. With a Career mode and an Endless Shift mode, where your current upgrades can be put to use to see how long you last before any patrons up and leave, there's also quite a bit to do in Star Wars: Cantina too. For high score seekers, both modes have leaderboards that can potentially add even more replayability to what is already a game of reasonable length.
Without a doubt, the biggest thing that Star Wars: Cantina has going for it is how successfully it captures that Star Wars charm-- from the music to the background art and the notorious characters you encounter-- you almost expect Luke and Han to walk through the door next. So if you're a Star Wars fan and have even a remote interest in time management games then Star Wars: Cantina is very easily recommended. Hardcore fans of the genre though may feel it skimps on the traditional micro-management of products due to its simplistic formula. We understand too that this is a niche genre and not even the Star Wars licence will change people's opinions of a play style that has remained largely unchanged since Lemonade Tycoon.
Megan Fox, if you are reading this, you should give this one a try. And it's not because I think Megan Fox is a hottie (perse), it's just that she was a huge fan of the previous iPhone game that came from this designer -- Sally's Spa. Dan Kratt and Craig Rushforth previously worked at GamesCafe where they designed and produced Sally's Salon and Sally's Spa before breaking out on their own with BlueUnit Studios.
Hottie Hookups is the first product from that studio and is worth a look if you like time management or chaos management games. While the game is very well executed and delivers a lot of character, I was never sure I was personally sold on the gameplay. However, a free version was recently released so you can give it a spin.
Meridian has released a new game in the App Store which is a departure from their recent games such as Alive 4-Ever and Against the Fire. This time they've returned to the time management genre with a nice doctor-themed game called Are You Alright?.
Chloe is a brilliant doctor that strongly believes the medical machines invented by her dad will bring great benefits to a lot of patients around the world. She continues to work at hospitals in different countries to demonstrate the machines so that they can be widely used and recognized.
Like most time management games, you are tasked with keeping your customers (well, patients in this case) happy as you direct them from station to station. The story mode for Are You Alright takes you across 70 levels with 50 additional Time Attack levels.
Are You Alright? keeps things interesting by adding station-specific mini games such as X-Rays, Bacteria Testing, Plaster Casting and more. You need to take the time to properly complete each task before moving on.
As you earn money during levels, you can upgrade your equipment and hire additional help that will help keep the flow of patients moving. But, take too long with one, and they might not make it out alive.
This gameplay video shows an early level:
We've only spent a short amount of time with the game so far, but we've found it to be a fun and well executed time management game.
Ship management and pseudo line-drawing make an appearance in Kavcom Limited’s The Lighthouse HD [$4.99]. Offering a different take on the classic genre, The Lighthouse HD’s great visuals and variety offset some choice design decisions holding the game back from loftier heights.
