If you've been getting stomped in Star Command [$2.99] and stopped playing as a result, consider giving it another shot. Creator War Balloon just pushed out an update that added a bunch of rookie-friendly features, including tutorials, a beginner difficulty level, and tips for the weapon-firing mini-games. Also, three additional tokens are now being dished out at the start of every new game, bringing the total to a hefty 15. Show the space zombies who's boss! Or not!

This update also sees a bunch of other tweaks and improvements. The list is sorta crazy huge, actually. Here are some notable additions: room ammo and assign buttons have been disabled if a room can't hold anymore, max crew has been increased, and you can unlock "larger ships and heavy difficulty," provided you're a Bad Enough Space Dude to handle them.

You can check out the patch notes for yourself over at our sister site AppShopper. Also, if you're still having troubles after updating, consider swinging by our guide for Star Command, which is full of hot tips from us and our community.

We've been incessantly tweeting about it, but I figured it was worth a quick PSA post to get the word out to folks who don't do the whole social media thing. In a nutshell, we're always on the hunt for new writers. As the App Store gets more and more popular, there's an ever-increasing need for more people to handle the exponentially increasing onslaught of weekly iOS game releases.

Whether you're just getting your start in the games journalism world, or you're an experienced freelance writer that's seeking another notch in their belt, we're anxious to hear from you. For more information about what we're specifically looking for and how to submit your details from us, follow this link.

Indie developer Grapefrukt released their minimalist strategy title Rymdkapsel on PlayStation Network just last week, and today they've revealed on Twitter that their game will also be hitting iOS and Android devices in July. IndieGames has a nice write-up of Rymdkapsel, and in a subsequent Twitter conversation an editor inquired about a possible iOS or PC port to which Grapefrukt replied "iOS and Android in July! No promises for PC." If you follow Grapefrukt's blog Prototyprally then you are probably already aware of the impending iOS version. Check out the trailer for Rymdkapsel to see what it's all about.

Back at GDC in March, Rymdkapsel was nominated for an IGF award in Excellence in Design, and while it didn't win it did receive an honorable mention. Grapefrukt has been making many interesting Flash games for a while now, and Rymdkapsel is their first title to be sold and available on a platform like PSN. A week after release and people really seem to be digging it, so if you're liking the look of things then throw Rymdkapsel on your TouchArcade [Free] app Watch List and get ready for the iOS version this summer.

[Twitter, IndieGames]

Foursaken Media's castle defense third-person hack 'n slash mashup Heroes and Castles [$1.99 / Free] has just received another massive update adding all sorts of new goodies to the game. You might remember that we thoroughly enjoyed Heroes and Castles when it came out in January, and the very next month a huge version 2.0 update hit which sweetened the deal even further by adding a competitive multiplayer mode, a single-player Siege mode, and a trio of brand new character classes to play as.

Today's update, which is significant enough to be called version 3.0, again adds a trio of new characters. First off is a female Assassin which gives you a sneakier way to dispatch your enemies. Next up is a Barbarian who has a unique "risk vs reward" attribute that seems him getting stronger as his health gets lower, which should make for some interesting tactics. Finally there is a Druid who uses nature and various kinds of spells to augment the units under his control. The Assassin comes free for everybody, while the Barbarian and Druid are unlocked using gems like the rest of the characters in the game.

In addition to the new characters, a new 20 mission campaign has been added which continues on from the end of the first campaign, and is balanced for players who have beaten the first. It features a new beach environment and new enemy types. There are also several new ally units that you can utilize, like a long-ranged Hunter, heavily armored Dwarves called the Iron Helms to beef up your front lines, two new types of Wizards, and a very powerful (but very expensive) Dwarven Tank which sounds pretty bad ass. Speaking of ally units, you'll be able to level up your buildings and units by 3 additional levels thanks to the new update.

All of this new Heroes and Castles version 3.0 content will be available in versus and co-op, and there's a new multiplayer map to battle it out on as well. If you have a higher-end iOS device you'll also be treated to real-time shadows, and Foursaken has lowered the RAM usage on lower-end devices which should help with of the crashing issues some people had been experiencing. Of course, there's many other tweaks and fixes under the hood in this update too.

Heroes and Castles just keeps getting better as time goes by. There is a full-featured free version which will let you give it a spin risk-free, though the version 3.0 content in that version had a slight hitch and is still waiting for approval from Apple. Seriously, Heroes and Castles is truly awesome and players in our forums have been loving it since day one, check it out if you haven't done so already.

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.

Cavern [$2.99] is a pretty traditional, top-down rogue-like. You might recall the name. It made an impression on folks back when it was released in 2011. Frustrating, game-ending bugs ultimately held it back, though, despite its neat ideas, great touch interface, and hip combat. Most of those issues have now been fixed. A flurry of recent updates, including a big 2.0 update, have made it pretty playable. We've been enjoying it so much, in fact, that we thought we'd share a run in the game with you.

Earlier this afternoon, I decided to school Jared in the art of perma-death in Cavern, which, in hindsight, was a pretty easy thing to do because all I had to do was die. But it sure was nice to walk around in the randomized dungeons of this game again and grab all sorts of loot. Poison, on the other hand, not so much fun.

If you're in the market for an iOS rogue-like game, you need to grab this. Just check out that video and see if it clicks with you.

After a soft launch period that began in February, Gameloft's free-to-play class-based shooter Blitz Brigade [Free] has now been officially launched in the App Store. Originally announced in January, Blitz Brigade feels like the lovechild of Team Fortress 2 and Battlefield Heroes. It's a lighthearted kind of game, as opposed to the gritty, realistic nature of most shooters nowadays. Despite not being an entirely original concept, I'm actually surprised with how much fun Blitz Brigade has been so far.

As you'd expect, it's pretty freemium'd out, but not really in a gross or unfair way. It looks like you'll be able to earn everything the game has to offer just by playing, or if you're impatient or otherwise just don't mind dropping a few dollars on in-game currency you can purchase packs of gems to spend on basically anything in the game. The part that's annoying is that Gameloft takes every chance possible to let you know you could be spending that gem currency, so it's pretty in your face, but at least it doesn't appear to gate any of the content from you outright.

It's sad that so much time need to be dedicated to explaining how a game's pay model works, but that stuff aside Blitz Brigade is pretty darn cool. It looks nice, it plays well, and it's fun. The main dish is of course its online multiplayer, but there's also a good deal of single player missions to work your way through that'll pretty much walk you through all the different aspects of the game and its characters. The online connection has been a bit iffy but seems solid for the most part. If you've played any other Gameloft shooter you pretty much know what to expect.

I'll be spending the weekend playing some more of Blitz Brigade to dig in further, but I have to admit I'm pleasantly surprised with it so far, and our forum goers seem to be digging it as well. It's free so give it a look if you've been waiting for this type of shooter to hit your iOS device.

As we learned back in August of last year, Rodeo Games, who brought the excellent Hunters [$0.99 / $0.99 (HD)] and Hunters 2 [$4.99] top-down strategy games to the iOS platform, are hard at work on an official Warhammer Quest game for our little touchscreen Apple devices. Today they've finally released a look at the game in action, and the developers are even on hand with commentary to explain things and answer some questions they've gotten from the fans. Check it out.

As someone who isn't familiar with anything to do with Warhammer and who didn't play the original board game, I have to say I'm pretty psyched for Warhammer Quest. It looks phenomenal. For even more, take a look at our hands-on preview from earlier this week. And if you haven't already, add this to your TouchArcade [Free] app Watch List to be notified when more news stories hit, and of course head into our forums for some community discussion. Warhammer Quest should be hitting the App Store sometime in the next month or two, and we're pretty darn excited for it.

Back in October of last year we learned that Pixbits, makers of the awesome side-scrolling Minecraft-alike Junk Jack [$2.99], were considering making a new 2.0 version of the game. As the story goes, they had many ideas for Junk Jack that they originally wanted to include but ended up cutting in an effort to support as many generations of iOS device hardware as possible.

With Apple implementing new rules mandating Retina Display and widescreen support for all apps on the App Store, and a new software development kit that cuts support for the oldest devices, it pretty much forced Pixbits hand into creating a new version of Junk Jack that would comply, or risk being removed.

I think, though, that once Pixbits started cranking away on Junk Jack 2.0 things just spiraled out of control in a fantastic way, as yesterday on their blog they announced that version 2.0 is actually a completely new game they're calling Junk Jack X and it looks like they're throwing everything they ever wanted including the kitchen sink into this new project.

I'd highly suggest checking out their blog post for yourself, as there is just so much new information about Junk Jack X, but let me try to summarize the highlights. It will have online multiplayer through Game Center for two people and local multiplayer for up to four. They'd like to increase the number of players who can play together in the future, and for now all multiplayer is cooperative so you can build and explore with your buddy (but not kill them, not yet anyway).

You'll be able to fully customize the look of your character with basic stuff like gender and hair styles, but even more exciting is you can further customize him (or her!) using the new functionality of equipping stuff. Similar to an RPG, you'll have four slots on your character to equip stuff in: head, chest, legs and feet. You can craft items to equip and those will further change your characters look as well as performance, and there's even a special fifth slot which will be used for bonus items or augmentations.

Probably the biggest new aspect in Junk Jack X will be the ability to visit and build on different planets. In addition to creating and saving one-off worlds like in the first game, there will be an Adventure mode which starts you out in the original world but you can find and assemble a portal which lets you travel to different ones. These new worlds will have different themes, different block types, and different mobs. Once you discover a new world in Adventure mode, you'll be able to generate the one-off worlds using that theme, and this time around there's no limit on how many worlds you can create and save.

As I said, there's tons more too, like the addition of liquids, a vastly improved crafting system and craft book, more types of weapons, and a huge upgrade to the visuals. No price has been decided just yet, but one thing that Pixbits says is for sure is that Junk Jack X will not be freemium. Be sure to check out their blog for more, our forums for discussion, and add Junk Jack X to your TouchArcade [Free] app Watch List to get notifications when new stories hit. Junk Jack X is planned for release sometime in the second half of this year.

[Pixbits Blog]

While the folks over at Big Bucket Software are busy cranking away at their next project, they've decided to show a little love to their previous iOS release The Incident [$0.99] and drop its price down to 99¢. What is The Incident? Well, imagine on any random day you're outside standing on the sidewalk. All of a sudden, stuff just starts falling from the sky. And by stuff, I mean just a bunch of weird stuff. Like refridgerators, cars, foam fingers from sporting events, garden gnomes… if you can think of it, it's probably falling from the sky in The Incident.

Your job is to avoid getting smashed by this stuff, but also continually stay on top of what eventually becomes a rapidly rising junk pile. What results is a fun and challenging arcade game that has stayed on my device since its original release nearly 3 years ago.

Check out our original review for more, but keep in mind that over the years The Incident has been updated pretty frequently to keep with the times. First it received an endless survival mode, iCloud progress syncing, iPad Retina Display support, and most recently iPhone 5 widescreen support. It really is one of those cool little games that's always fun to fire up and play, so if you don't own it yet then definitely consider grabbing it during this 99¢ sale.

We've had a couple of discussions about PikPok's insane creative successes in the recent past. This is a studio that pumps out a ton of games for iOS, and it manages to consistently deliver quality despite its workload. So, in a way, news that its first-person zombie shooting game, Into the Dead [Free], has hit 10 million downloads isn't all that surprising. Still, it's a cool point of validation for our cheerleading. Obviously, it's doing something right.

To dive into more detail about this news, by the way: Specifically, Into the Dead has hit 10 million downloads across iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and Android in less than five months after its initial release. Obviously, PikPok is stoked with this news. In the PR we've received about this, managing direction Mario Wynands said:

"I'm very proud of the team and process we have built that has been able to have repeat success, and look forward to seeing how our upcoming releases will be received."

Into the Dead is pretty hot, by the way. And so is Robot Unicorn Attack 2 [Free], Super Monsters Ate My Condo [Free], Extinction Squad [$0.99], Flick Kick Field Goal [$0.99] ... and so on and so on. Makes you wonder if there's something in the water over there.

Heads up: SEGA is doing a sale on three of its more notable recent releases on the App Store. From now until later this weekend, you can grab After Burner Climax [$2.99], Crazy Taxi [$4.99], and House of the Dead: Overkill [$4.99] for a couple bucks off their usual listing price. So, if you want to do something with either zombies, taxis, or jets feel free to go nuts.

Here's one of those handy before and now lists:

• After Burner Climax - $2.99 -> $.99
• Crazy Taxi -$4.99 -> $.99
• House of the Dead: Overkill - The Lost Reels - $4.99 -> $2.99

Each of these games suffer from some of the usual issues that come from ports of games that were originally on machines with buttons (or steering wheels ... or joysticks), but generally speaking, they've been received well by folks.

Surprise! Sid Meier's Ace Patrol [Free], that turn-based WWI aerial combat game we talked about not too long ago, is now available on the US App Store for the low price of $0. What you get with that initial download is the first handful of missions in the British campaign, one of the four campaigns in the game. For a price, you can grab the rest of that one as well as the other campaigns.

There's some other IAP goodies being offered, too, including new skins and fighters, as well as a get-out-of-jail card, in case your fighter gets captured. I'm beyond tired of describing free-to-play systems, so check out our video to see them in action. Speaking of that, here it is:

Like most of Sid Meier's stuff, Ace Patrol is pretty rad. We've been digging it so far, free-to-play and all. Give it a look.

Ravenous Games put themselves on the iOS map with their twitchy, speed-run style platformer League of Evil [$1.99 / Free] way back in March of 2011. About a year later, they released League of Evil 2 [$1.99 / Free], a sequel that went with a more Retina Display friendly art style over the original's pixely graphics. How you felt about the art style change pretty much came down to personal preference, but it was hard to argue that League of Evil 2 didn't up the ante in every other area over the original.

Ravenous has released quite a few games outside of the League of Evil games, but it seems like fans are always bugging them about when we might see a third entry in the series. (They have in fact told me that people incessantly bug them about this.) Well, today is your lucky day League of Evil fans, as League of Evil 3 is a real thing in the works and Ravenous has unveiled the very first screenshot from the game.

As you can see, this third game uses the same high resolution art style as League of Evil 2. I love pixel art just as much as the next guy, but I really love the sharp look of LoE 2 and I'm psyched to see it return in number 3. Probably the best news of all is that League of Evil 3 isn't that far off, and is planned for release in June. More details will be released leading up to that point, so get into our forums and add this to your TouchArcade [Free] app Watch List as we'll no doubt have more on League of Evil 3 in the near future.

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.