Last month Wisp Games released a sprawling galactic role playing game set far in the future, known as Flatspace [App Store] for the iPhone and iPod touch.  An adaptation of the well-reviewed 2003 PC release, Flatspace is a large scale, open space trading game in the spirit of the legendary Elite, Galaxy on Fire [App Store] for the iPhone, and others of the sort.

The distant future. Space has expanded to such an extent that stars and planets can no longer hold form. Humanity still lives and works in space stations and ships, islands of light and technology in an otherwise cold and flat void.

Such is the backstory of the Flatspace game universe.  Upon reading the title of this game along with the backstory, I must confess that I was anticipating an amazingly clever and wholly new type of game experience that might harken back to Abbot's Flatland, or something like the same, but this is not the case.  Not that Flatspace is a let-down, but it seems the "flat" backstory is simply justify a game of galactic proportions being rendered in top-down 2D (well, 2.5D) as opposed to 3D.  I just wanted to clear that up, directly.

At the start of a new game, you create a captain for your ship, choosing from among a variety of professions: Trader, Mercenary, Bounty Hunter, Space Pirate, Police Officer and Scavenger.  You're then equipped with a rather meager spacecraft and dropped into a random spot in the game universe.  From there you're out to amass wealth by way of completing various missions and trading items between space stations — that is, if you're on the straight and narrow.  Another approach is to basically become a space pirate, raiding, stealing, and killing in order to bring in the loot.  Whatever your approach, there are plenty of other space pirates out there to keep you on your toes — watch out for them.

Your ship has the ability to target and scan both space stations and ships.  This reveals important information about the nature of these vessels, so that you can decide whether to interact with them (and in what fashion) or to pass them by.  Your craft is armed with lasers, but available weapons upgrades, which include cannons, missiles and tractor beams, add to your abilities and are necessary to complete certain missions.  Control of your ship is handled via accelerometer for steering, as well as on-screen touch for control of weapons and various other ship features.

Flatspace for the iPhone features three different playmodes.  First off, there's the Standard Game, which lets you create a captain and begin amassing your fortune.  The Custom Game mode gives you control over the types of people in the universe (pirates, no pirates, etc.), the quantity and visibility of space stations, the numbers of asteroids and nebulas, and so forth.  The Arcade Game just throws you straight into the heat of battle, where the emphasis is on action rather than strategy.

Even with my abbreviated time with the game, it's clear that Flatspace offers significant play time to those who fancy a large-scale space RPG.  While more approachable than the seminal classic Elite, Flatspace is one of those games in which you can (and must) invest a lot of time.

The accelerometer-only steering can seem imprecise and the interface, a bit unpolished, perhaps reflective of it being a port of a PC game, but Wisp Games indicates that the first update is almost ready, which will include the option of non-accelerometer steering, video tutorials, and the ability to choose your initial bankroll for Custom Games.  And those who remain undecided can check out the free, demo version of the Windows release to get a feel for the action.

App Store Link: Flatspace, $2.99

The followup title to the extremely popular (and free) Jelly Car game has finally made its way into the App Store. The original Jelly Car was released back in October 2008 and has since developed a pretty massive following. The game is a driving/platforming game in which you drive a squishy car through squishy worlds, trying to reach the exit.

The sequel is being published by Walt Disney and comes with more than 30 new levels, new power-ups, and three new modes. The original free version remains in the App Store if you never tried it.

App Store Link: Jelly Car 2, $0.99, Jelly Car, Free

Gameloft's iPhone adaptation of The Settlers has already appeared in the App Store. The $4.99 real time strategy simulation game started out as an Amiga game back in 1993 and has since evolved through multiple iterations.

You’ve arrived in a wondrous place populated by Romans, Vikings and Mayans competing or cooperating to reach a variety of goals. These goals include occupying land, ensuring the supply of raw materials, or simply trying to create the most beautiful settlement. There is more than one path which leads to success – you can engage in trade, forge alliances, or lead your army into battle.

Gameplay is described by Gameloft:

• Gather resources and build a lively and bustling town in an ancient world. Your decisions and skill in managing and protecting your settlement will determine its fate.
• The strength of your units depends on how effectively you have built up your settlement and paid attention to the economic relationships within it.
• Three nations to govern: Conquer new territories, defeat rival armies, and establish an empire with your warriors that encompasses lands and continents.
• A huge number of parameters to manage: Dozens of building’s types, settlements, soldiers, raw materials, and much more.
• An accessible game for everybody, thanks to extensive tutorial missions and multi-touch gameplay, ideal for strategy games.

Early impressions are starting to trickle into the discussion thread on our forums with some positive first impressions. One forum member mrbass posted an extensive gallery of screenshots of the gameplay and tutorial screens. We'll provide a more in depth look of the game in time.

App Store Link: The Settlers, $4.99

We ran in to Subatomic Studios back at the Penny Arcade Expo in September, and part of my chat with them included the mention of the new levels in the PSP version of Fieldrunners [App Store] eventually making their way to the App Store. These new maps are coming next month when the game is relaunched as the first member of OpenFeint's gold game program. Fieldrunners: Gold Edition will have an in-game store where these new maps will be sold as downloadable content, as well as being the first game to include OpenFeint 2.4 which will boast a number of new features including an in-game instant messaging service. Note, the "Gold Edition" will be a free update to current owners of Fieldrunners.

Similar to our monthly game ratings, the OpenFeint Gold program aims to pick out games which are not only of the highest quality, but also make excellent use of the OpenFeint service. They seem to be setting the bar fairly high in nominating Fieldrunners as the first game to get their gold rating, and it should be interesting to see what games they choose in the future.

Here are two screenshots of the upcoming levels, Frostbite and Skyway:

Each will feature new towers, new enemy units, and will require new strategies.

Fieldrunners was among the first of the highly successful tower defense games for the iPhone, and it's always nice to see original App Store classics like this still getting attention from their developers.

App Store Link: Fieldrunners, $2.99

In Karnival, [App Store] you play as a boy with the arm of a goat who decides to take his talents on the road by starting his own carnival that travels the country offering rides, fortune tellers, snack booths, and 30 different included oddities and attractions that are slowly unlocked as you play the game.

Karnival features gameplay that will be instantly familiar to anyone who has played any of the Tycoon series of games such as RollerCoaster Tycoon, Zoo Tycoon, or many others. In the game you have control over every aspect of your carnival from what rides go where to ticket prices to even keeping your attractions in good repair. You have to intelligently build your carnival to maximize karma, fame, and money earned while (hopefully) keeping your taxes and payroll low enough to turn a profit each day.

Karnival has an intuitive touch based interface to handle all the different carnival management functions, and features a tutorial which does an excellent job at explaining all the ins and outs of running a successful carnival. While the controls and interface do their job well, there were definitely times where I wished I was playing this game with a keyboard and mouse.

If there's any down side to Karnival it's that once you progress in the game a bit, you could drive yourself crazy with the micromanagement of your different attractions. Like other Tycoon-like games, you can mostly let your carnival run itself, or endlessly tweak your business to maximize profits and other stat gains.

Overall Karnival is a game that is a lot of fun wth a surprising amount of depth. The art style and music give the game an atmosphere that's exactly what you would expect of a freaky carnival. With both a story mode that has you traveling across the country as well as a basic sandbox mode, Karnival should keep Tycoon fanatics busy for quite some time.

The game has received strongly positive feedback in our discussion thread, and the developers have chimed in with tips and answers to questions.

App Store Link: Karnival, $5.99

As one of the early tower defense games on the iPhone, Zombie Attack quickly became a cult favorite. The story of one man’s survival against a zombie invasion is something we could all get behind. But despite a fresh approach to the genre and all of that undead-hacking fun, the original game ultimately lacked a lot of variety with one small map and only four turret types. Zombie Attack: The Second Wave takes those concerns to heart and offers a vastly superior offering for those looking to fight off a legion of re-animated corpses.

Like its predecessor, Zombie Attack: The Second Wave will place you in the shoes of a zombie invasion survivor. You’ll be tasked with protecting a building from the undead horde. What sets the Zombie Attack series apart from other iPhone tower defense games is that your survivor will have to manually place and upgrade the turrets. You can’t simply swipe around the screen with a high omnipotent finger placing units willy nilly. You’ll need to safely guide your survivor past the oncoming monsters if you want to place that gun turret just right, or upgrade that cannon to maximum ferocity.

New turrets join old favourites and add a little bit of whimsy to this terror-filled TD. Scarecrows will attract zombies to their location and blow up in their faces. A giant hammer will pound back and forth trying to smash any zombies that get in its way. A ray gun will send out a space age sonic pulse that will slow the shuffling feet of the undead. Mix in Zombie Attack staples like saw blades and flamethrowers and you’ve got a fairly decent assortment of weapons at your disposal, which is good, as you’ll need them to tackle an assortment of new enemies.

The original Zombie Attack offered a fairly generic, repetitive experience in terms of enemy units. While the game boasted two zombie types, it was hard to ever notice a difference. This time around IUGO has introduced a slew of new baddies to tackle. Cheerleaders can use their heads as projectiles. Winged beasts are immune to a variety of turrets. Hounds lock on to the survivor and go for the throat. The Second Wave offers 6 zombie types, which is more than enough to help keep things fresh and a definite change from what’s come before.

Tools of death and types of terror aren’t the only thing to see an increase in Zombie Attack: The Second Wave – the map situation has taken a drastic step forward, going from only one map to four. The maps aren’t just greater in number, they’re also better by design. Larger areas mean you’ll need to scroll around the playfield to see every inch of zombie territory, and different map layouts mean there will be different obstacles that you can try and exploit. Each of these areas showcases a different location like a backyard or a trailer park. It’s a nice touch, but at the end of the day what makes these maps a success isn’t whether or not you’re navigating a spooky graveyard or an abandoned highway, it’s how different each of these levels plays.

This video by AppBank doesn't show much of gameplay strategy but shows moving your character around, though many towers have already been built:

If you grow tired of playing these different maps in the standard Survival Mode, you can check out the surprisingly robust Challenge Mode. You’ll select from 20 different challenges (5 for each map) that offer up some twists on the series tried and true survival gameplay. One challenge may restrict you to using certain turrets. Another may speed up the movement of the zombie horde. With 20 in all, there’s enough here to keep any tower defense fan occupied for days.

Zombie Attack: The Second Wave retains everything that made the original a cult classic while at the same time offering a drastically more robust package than its predecessor. If you were a fan of the original, Zombie Attack: The Second Wave is pretty much a no brainer. As for tower defense fans that found the original a little too shallow, the depth of content offered here definitely makes this franchise worthy of a second look. With all of the new additions and improved gameplay, it’s hard to not fall in love with Zombie Attack: The Second Wave. I can’t remember the last time I had this much fun killing zombies with saw blades.

App Store Link: Zombie Attack! The Second Wave, $3.99

While this week has been filled with news and reviews of fast paced games, I've always had a weakness for word games on the iPhone, even though I'm fairly terrible at them. Here are three recently released or recently updated word games that are all worth checking out–

Guess the News [99¢ / Free] – Surprisingly enough, the news is good for more than material to auto-tune. Guess the News pulls news stories down from various RSS feeds, and turns them in to puzzles to be solved. You're given a brief description of the article, then need to guess the headline from the pile of letter tiles on the game board. Puzzles are broken out in to several categories such as health, sports, and even "odd stories". For instance, I recently played a few games in the technology category that had me guessing the titles of Engadget posts. Guess the News features three difficulty levels which control how much of the headline is already completed at the start of each puzzle, and with the dynamic content fetching provides infinite replay value.

Word Spin [$1.99] – As seen in the above trailer, this game has two parts to it, the first stage amounts to rotating and positioning the various wheels loaded with letters to line up as many words as possible. You then tap the top of the screen to lock the wheels in place, then find every word you possibly can as you rotate the locked set of word wheels searching for valid words. Once you get good enough, you can compete both against friends by sending email challenges where they will play against your exact configuration of the word wheels or by submitting your score to the global online leaderboard. The gameplay mechanic is solid and provides an interesting spin (See what I did there?) on the word hunting game formula.

Words With Friends [$2.99 / Free] – Everyone who owns an iPhone or iPod Touch should have either the free or paid version of this game on their device. Words With Friends takes the game of Literati (a variant of Scrabble) and adds excellent asynchronous online multiplayer with recently added push notifications that alert you when it's your turn in any of your active games. The free version is ad supported, but otherwise fully featured, and according to a recent presentation by the developers at GDC Austin, Words With Friends and Chess With Friends [$2.99 / Free] has 50,000 active users daily.

I've had numerous Words With Friends games going for months now with nearly every friend of mine who owns an iPhone, a clever in-game search function will search the Words With Friends player database for friends of yours you want to start a game with, and if the game can't find them it will offer to send them an email invitation. Everything about the game is implemented so amazingly well that you owe it to yourself to at least try the free version if you're even remotely interested in word games, especially with the recent update adding push notifications. If you need people to play with, stop by the Words With Friends thread on our forums.

So, is it possible to fit another worthy line-drawing game into an already crowded market? Backflip Studios thinks so with their new game Harbor Havoc 3D [$1.99].

Like Flight Control, the objective of the game is to route your ships to their proper docks. Simply draw a line from the ship to the dock and you're on your way. Harbor Havoc 3D's claim to fame, however, is the incorporation of multiple layers of vessels that you must properly navigate. Depending on the map, this can include submarines, boats and helicopters or even submarines and ground rovers in the underwater map. Each type of ship can only collide with like ships, so keeping this in mind is critical for success.

The game comes with 4 maps: Far East, Atlantis, Arctic, and Lighthouse. Each offers a variant in gameplay. Far East is your straightforward Flight Control setup where you are docking different ships to their ports. Ships, however, don't have to be undocked as in Harbor Master. The game also adds an anchoring mechanism by tapping on a ship that will keep them in place. The Far East map is going to feel boring to anyone who has put in much time in any of the existing line-drawing games, but Atlantis and especially Arctic are where things get interesting.

The developer's gameplay video shows how crazy things can get and even shows the locked Lighthouse level which gives you a partially obscured view of the play area.

For advanced players who have gotten bored of Flight Control and are looking for more of a challenge, Harbor Havoc 3D manages to provide added layers of challenge without necessarily being different just for the sake of being different.

App Store Link: Harbor Havoc 3D, $1.99

Riptide Games has released the first game that was the product of the 360 iDev Game Jam. The Game Jam was an all night coding session for developers to try to create a game in 10 hours. This particular game was created in conjunction with Jonathan Hartstein of Pyro Monkey Productions and Eric Lannan of Crucial Games.

Gravity Sling is an inertia based puzzle game, where you must try to get the astronaut back to the space shuttle safely. In order to do this you'll need to take advantage of gravity from the nearby planets as you sling the astronaut through space.

Here's a promotional video showing how the game is played:

Rather than releasing the game at the expected $0.99 price point, Riptide games has taken advantage of Apple's new policy allowing games to be distributed for free with the ability to purchase additional content. 15 levels are included in the free version, with 30 additional levels available in-app for $0.99. This eliminates the need for a Lite version and could be a peek into how things may evolve in the App Store.

App Store Link: Gravity Sling, Free

TipCat Mobile just released a very nice side scrolling shooter called Cell War [App Store].

The $2.99 game offers a beautifully stylized side scroller that places you as the pilot of a nano machine whose mission is fight off viruses and save the humans from disease. Designed for the iPhone, the game has some nice touches with a good variety of level design and power-ups that seem to keep the game interesting. Three levels of difficulty are provided over 9 different stages, and the game also provides online leaderboards.

The game is controlled primarily through the use of the iPhone's accelerometer allowing you to move the ship with tilt controls alone. This can be calibrated in the options so you can choose the neutral position. Your primary weapon is fired automatically and can be upgraded multiple times. Beyond this, the game also offers a nice touch targeting system for missiles akin to Space Deadbeef — simply touching on the enemies will lock on your missiles.

Here's the game in action:

The developers have also released a fully featured Lite version that provides the first two stages of the game, complete with all 3 difficulty levels. There really is a lot to like about this game, and the production values are outstanding. My only real issue with the game may simply be a personal one. I've never been a fan of the use of the accelerometer for ship movement in 2D iPhone shooters, and I much prefer touch (which is not an option). If you have no such hang ups, this game is definitely recommended, but even if you do, the Lite version provides you with a great sampling of the game.

App Store Link: Cell War, $2.99, Cell War Lite, Free