"Endless fallers" isn’t a proper genre name, but if it was, that would be the easiest way to describe Daddy Was A Thief [$1.99] In Rebel Twins' latest, you play as the titular daddy -- imagine a more nefarious Andy Richter -- who finds himself abruptly fired and turns to a life of crime to provide for his family. Instead of cooking meth a la Breaking Bad, he opts for something much more traditional: robbing banks.
Every game starts off with dad escaping the bank’s rooftop and then leaping onto an adjacent building’s roof presumably to make his escape. He automatically runs from left to right, reversing course whenever hitting anything, which frees you up to either jump (swipe up) or smash through the floor below (swipe down). That, pretty much, is the entire game.
Nevertheless, Daddy Was A Thief tries admirably to not feel repetitive. There are obstacles to get in your way, certainly, but part of what keeps things moving are the aesthetics. It’s a subtle move, but each floor is a different, bright, warm color. When you’re crashing through floor after floor, it tricks the eye into feeling like there’s more variety than there really is. Not that Daddy Was A Thief is tricky: It has a few core things going on, and sticks only to them.
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 enjoyedHeroes 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.
If it's one thing Brain Seal Ltd's Dark-Quest [$1.99 / $1.99 (HD)]Â is good at, it's staying close to its roots. In fact, some might argue that this old-school turn-based strategy succeeds in that regard a little too well. Still, as a relatively basic TBS Dark-Quest offers an enjoyable experience with plenty of missions, a party combat system, and a few twists to the standard gameplay that will either intrigue or frustrate you.
If you're familiar with old-school boardgame dungeons such as Milton Bradley's HeroQuest, Dark-Quest will probably seem intimately familiar. Like the classic board game, Dark-Quest's missions are based on pre-generated tilesets full of traps, enemies, and loot. Players have a pre-determined amount of turns to accomplish the board's objectives and escape. Each action, such as attacking, moving, or casting a spell cost a turn. The mission ends when all your characters exit the dungeon (thus signaling completion), die, or run out of turns. Besides its boardgame underpinnings, Dark-Quest plays most closely to a combination of a rogue-like and turn-based dungeon crawler.
The combination of genres makes Dark-Quest a bit deeper than one might initially suspect. While the mission levels aren't randomized, the loot isn't which adds to variation between playthroughs. In addition, the available weapons, spells, and abilities that can be purchased for each hero between missions add to the available tactics and reinforce the roles that each should play. While these are important foundational elements that Dark-Quest gets right in making it a good strategy game, it still felt a little bland overall.
Frustration is also added to the mix with the the skull of fate, where the antagonist wizard will randomly force you to enact a random status effect on you (which is typically negative). The concept is supposed to keep you on your toes as the wizard is constantly watching your party throughout the story, but it seemed unnecessary at best and a cheap way to ruin your mission at its worst.
While Dark-Quest does a good job with the basics of the game, some of its supplemental design decisions are questionable and can be frustrating. For example, each turn defaults to the Barbarian's actions, with the game's limited AI taking over for the other two party members if you don't manually select them before ending the Barbarian's turn. In theory, the AI should go a long way towards speeding up the gameplay and lets you focus on the Barbarian. Unfortunately, the AI is incredibly spotty, with my cohorts either not attacking enemies when they're in range, or doing dumb things like picking up cursed gold that cause health damage. A very recent update thankfully provided the option to turn off auto-follow.
Another questionable decision is the fact that the game does not allow you to save mid-quest. If the game remains in your device's memory you can return to it if you leave the App, but if it gets cleared, you'll have to restart the quest from the beginning. Granted, most of the quests are relatively short, but I still don't understand the lack of some kind of auto-save.
On one hand, there's very little in terms of originality with Dark-Quest, especially in comparison to the board games it gets its 'inspiration' from. On the other hand, it's still an enjoyable strategy game that offers a simplified old-school experience that isn't typically executed well on iOS. Thankfully, as mentioned earlier, the developers are listening to players and updating the game with changes. Assuming you can get by its relatively basic offering (as well as the incredibly simplistic visuals), Dark-Quest is worth checking out for genre fans.
Rockstar Games brought a surprisingly playable touchscreen port of their classic Grand Theft Auto: Vice City [$4.99] to the App Store back in December, and for the first time since release they've dropped the price of the game from $4.99 down to just $1.99.
Vice City is the second iteration of the fully 3D, open-world sandbox GTA games and was released way back in 2002. It goes hard with its 1980s, neon, Scarface-meets-Miami Vice theme and follows your protagonist as he starts out as a low-level thug and works his way into the crime boss of Vice City.
For its 10th anniversary Vice City was released on iOS with some cleaned up visuals and some subtle tweaks to certain missions and difficulty levels. While the original Vice City is designed for the many buttons of modern gaming controllers, the virtual buttons actually work surprisingly well on iOS and we really enjoyed the touchscreen conversion in our review.
If you're a GTA fan that for whatever reason hasn't picked up Vice City for your iOS device yet, then now is your chance to grab it for more than half-off. It's fun for what it is, and it's kind of a miracle a game like Vice City can be carried around in your pocket nowadays. As always, more information and discussion of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City can be found in our forums.
There is something inherently perverse about intentionally creating the thing that will destroy you. I don't mean that in any sort of metaphorical sense; this isn't some sort of child-destroys-the-parent thing. In Bit Ate Bit's They Need To Be Fed 2 [$1.99], you are charged with growing a monster and then crawling into its mouth to die, over and over and over again. You are responsible for pulling yourself through a hellish platform-scape, gathering the magical bean that contains your killer, planting it, and then feeding yourself to the monster that results. The game's developer Jesse Venbrux has some twisted ideas.
He also has a talent for crafting killer platformers, as shown by the original They Need to be Fed [$0.99 / Free] and now its sequel. Both have this 360 degree gravity going for them: as you leap from one platform to the next, you're pulled in by gravity, orbiting, crashing and breaking away all based on the pull of the nearest objects. It's not easier or harder than straight jumping, just different—different enough to feel fresh and to create opportunities for original level design.
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.
The retro game porting experts at DotEmu have brought all sorts of classics to the iOS platform in impressive fashion, and this past December they gave us the landmark scrolling shooter Raiden along with some of its sequels in one tight little package called Raiden Legacy [$4.99]. And for the first time since launch Raiden Legacy is on sale for just a couple of dollars, down from its normal price of $4.99.
Raiden Legacy comes with four titles in total: the original Raiden, Raiden Fighters, Raiden Fighters 2, and Raiden Fighters Jet. The original game is an all-time classic, but the Raiden Fighters series really shows the strides the shoot 'em up genre made during the '90s. I was a huge Raiden fan as a kid but never got around to playing the Fighters series, and was pleasantly surprised with just how excellent they are when I experienced them for the first time on iOS.
Of course since this is the work of DotEmu you can expect all sorts of great features and options in Raiden Legacy. Control-wise you can adjust the speed of your movement, even setting it to the arcade original. By default touchscreen controls make shooters like this easier since the ship moves at the speed of your finger, so the arcade setting is nice for purists. You can also move your bomb and fire buttons around to wherever you like or just toggle auto-fire on or off. There's also video settings including running the game in fullscreen or the original arcade aspect ratio, and a toggle for video filtering if you like your pixels smooth or crisp.
If you were a Raiden fan back in the day, or if you've never experienced the series but love yourself a good shoot 'em up, definitely jump on Raiden Legacy during this sale. Hopefully the folks at DotEmu have another compilation in the works that will include the other two games from the original trilogy, Raiden II and Raiden DX, and then I can finally die a happy man.
It was more than 2 years ago now that the original They Need to be Fed [$0.99 / Free] launched on iOS, and despite its age the solid design and execution of its platforming still stands up today. That makes it all the more exciting that after all this time a proper sequel has finally been released, and it takes the solid core of its predecessor and adds in a whole mess of new levels, some new mechanics, and the same great gameplay that we enjoyed so much in the first game.
They Need to be Fed 2 [$1.99] snuck into the App Store last night ahead of this week's new releases, and it's been gaining a ton of traction in our forums. I've been working my way through the early stages of the game and can say I'm very impressed so far - developer Bit Ate Bit has done well in retaining the great feel of the gravity-based platforming from the first game while still tuning it to perfection and adding in some new elements to mix things up.
One of the biggest new additions is an Epic mode which you'll unlock after collecting all 95 diamonds in the normal, "Classic" mode of the game. Epic mode is like a remixed version of the normal levels - some are upside down, have additional enemies or hazards, and there are new things to collect. Oh, also there's no checkpoints. It sounds like an awesome challenge, and I can't wait to get to that point in the game to give it a try.
Platforming fans should be sure to check out They Need to be Fed 2 as the original was one of the better platformers on the App Store and this new sequel seems to up the ante in just about every way.
NOTE: I forgot to mention that a display bug slipped into this release that makes the controls show up wrong on the latest iPadboth Retina iPads, it seems. A fix is already in the pipeline.
3D Attack Interactive assumes you've met the acquaintance of the Super Mario Bros. Hence the name of their game: The Other Brothers [$1.99], a throwback platformer featuring pleasantly pixelated graphics and music straight out of the MIDI era. Everything that Mario and Luigi do, brothers Joe and Jim can do too. They run, jump, and rescue damsels in distress, but the mechanics of those actions work a little differently. Speaking of, I'd wager you've probably heard more about The Other Brothers' controls than you have the game's lengthy development cycle, so let's take a moment to clear the air.
Prior to the update that 3D Attack pushed through earlier this week, The Other Brothers' controls were awful. Touchscreen controls are, well, touchy to begin with, but The Other Brothers used a floating control pad that moved with your thumb. The pad tended to float around even when you were trying to hold your thumb still to, say, guide your character up a ladder. Other times, the control pad didn't track my thumb, leaving me to plummet down a pit or stand around waiting for a burly thug to clock me in the jaw.
Those of you who weren't born with a smartphone in your hands might recall the simpler days of video games. How simple? I'm talking stick figures, backgrounds painted in one, maybe two shades of color, and jarringly loud bleeps that passed as sound effects. Some of these games were awful. Others stand as classic examples of gameplay over graphics, a no-frills approach often lost in the desperate struggle to produce photorealistic graphics, and realistic physics, and realistic bleeps.
Plasma-Sky [$1.99] isn't quite so stark, but it does hearken back to the simpler days of shmups. There's no IAP, no dizzying array of ships with different stats and weapons, and the screen won't fill up with bullets and background flashes and flickers that send you into seizures. At least not right away. Like Geometry Wars, Plasma-Sky applies a coating of retro paint. You control a shiny ship made up of brightly colored lines and fire away at fleets of equally effervescent enemy ships, collecting bigger and better power-ups that light up the black-as-ink sky like colored pegs battling it out on a Lite-Brite.
Plasma-Sky's utilitarian aesthetic carries over to its control scheme, and in a good way. You can tilt your device to steer your ship, or better yet, slide your thumb around; where your digit goes, your ship will follow. Firing is done for you, giving you the leisure to focus on dodging enemy fire and weaving in and out of their synchronized (space) swimming formations. The tilt controls aren't responsive, and your thumb occasionally impedes your view, which can mean the difference between an enemy tagging or missing your vehicle. Otherwise the touch controls are snappy and will carry their weight on your flight to victory, depending on how you choose to play.
The game offers three modes, each of which should pose a hefty challenge to even the most accomplished shoot 'em up-er. Conquest starts you at level one and challenges you to survive up to 80 waves of ships big and small. Every second you survive increases your score multiplier; die, and those impressive numbers you racked up reset to zero. Hardcore mode strips away your life bar and gives you only a single hit point to go on, and Survival throws massive waves of enemies at you in wild displays that should please fans of tough-as-nails shmups like Dodonpachi Resurrection.
As a shmup fan, I enjoyed Survival and Hardcore modes the most, but Conquest presents a rounded mode suited for players of all skill levels. The mode increases the challenge at a slow burn, giving new players time to find their space legs. At the same time, old hands will appreciate the challenge of keeping scores and multipliers intact during the more grueling stages that come up later on. Giving players unlimited continues might seem a strike against challenge, but it actually adds a layer of difficulty: do you continue, knowing that pressing on means losing your score and power-ups? Or do you go all the way back to level 1 and give 'er another go?
Three modes, touch controls that hop to at the slightest touch, and retro graphics. Doesn't sound like much, does it? Don't be fooled by appearances, Plasma-Sky is a solid addition to the ever-expanding galaxy of shmups available on the App Store.
When The Other Brothers [$1.99] launched at the beginning of this month, it polarized the many gamers who had been anxiously awaiting upwards of a year for the retro-inspired platformer and finally got their hands on the title. Pretty much everyone agreed that The Other Brothers had a great look, great music, and a ton of personality, but there was one aspect that people either loved or hated: the controls.
To explain further, The Other Brothers team tried to do something new in the world of touchscreen virtual controls. They created a virtual d-pad that was designed to be used like an actual d-pad on a controller -- keep your thumb on the screen and subtly rock in the directions you wanted to go. They even went so far as to implement a small amount of AI for the d-pad itself that was intended to help predict your motions and make you forget about the controls altogether.
There's nothing I love more than a well-executed iOS RPG but there always seems to be an issue of balance in regards to presentation. On one hand, an emphasis on exploration and side quests (as well as the grind) act as throwbacks to the roots of the genre. Meanwhile, streamlined gameplay and simplified battle system are seen as an evolution towards the current mobile scene. BoxCat'sNameless: The Hackers [$3.99 / Free] is squarely in the latter camp. Eschewing a lot of the standard tenets for an RPG, Nameless focuses primarily on grinding and cutscenes, leading to a somewhat monotonous overall experience despite its decent battle system.
Nameless follows a group of ragtag hackers as a few innocent jobs turn into the unraveling of an increasingly complex tale of worldwide control by the corporate machine. Unfortunately, the actual weaving of the tale in Nameless isn't as interesting as my synopsis makes it out to be. The story is told through anime-inspired cutscenes with a lot of the actual advancement of narrative taking place between a load of fetch quests. While the story itself should be compelling, I found the actual writing to be a bit bland.
When Hunted Cow Studios originally launched Battle Dungeon this past December, it seemed like a promising tactical turn-based strategy title with a heavy emphasis on online play. In fact, even the single player portion of the game relied on Hunted Cow's online servers, as that's where the computer AI lived too. No matter how you planned on playing it, Battle Dungeon required an online connection.
So when the game began to pick up steam in the pirating community, and those same servers began filling up with players who never actually paid for the game, it became financially unviable for Hunted Cow to continue to keep them running. That means the game was pulled from the App Store and servers were turned off, and thanks to how the AI was hosted it made Battle Dungeon useless even for an offline single player experience.
A sad story for a game that hadn't even been out for a week at the time, but Hunted Cow was very good at facilitating refunds for those who bought the game and they vowed to rework Battle Dungeon and re-release it as an offline, single-player only game. After a few months the team has finally reached that goal with the release of Battle Dungeon: Risen [$2.99].
Battle Dungeon: Risen features the same turn-based gameplay as the original game, but spread across 12 self-contained single-player scenarios. Each scenario has a 3-star grading system, and with the level of customization you're given to create a team and progress each character there is a lot of replay value in finding the best team and set of tactics for beating each one. And, as you can see in the comparison screen below, the graphics and lighting have been noticeably improved over the original Battle Dungeon.
While the absence of competitive online matches is a bummer, Battle Dungeon: Risen proves it wasn't a necessary requirement for having a thoughtful, challenging, and highly tactical turn-based strategy experience on mobile. If you enjoyed the original game or just didn't get a chance to grab it before it was removed, give Battle Dungeon: Risen a shot and check out our forums for even more positive impressions.
Just last week we posted a new trailer for the Phase 3 update for the futuristic racer Repulze [$2.99], and it seems the Apple approval process went rather smoothly as the update popped up in the App Store today.
To quickly summarize, Repulze is a racing game with a focus on speed and a futuristic look, something akin to the Wipeout series. We enjoyed the original game as well as the Phase 2 update earlier in the year, but the action was focused on single car time-trial style racing rather than actually racing against opponents or battling with weaponry like in the Wipeout games.
Not a bad thing by any means, because Repulze did what it intended to do very well, but it wasn't exactly what some fans were looking for from the game. Today's update takes Repulze closer in the direction of what those fans were asking for with the introduction of AI opponents and a new weapon system to use during races.
I've been saying this for a while, but Repulze is one of my favorite racing games to come along in a while. I enjoyed its original iteration, the Phase 2 update, and I'm looking forward to spending some time with the new Phase 3. Check out our forums for some more impressions of the new update and be sure to give Repulze a look if you're looking to quench your need for speed (and vehicular combat).
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?
"Endless fallers" isn’t a proper genre name, but if it was, that would be the easiest way to describe Daddy Was A Thief [$1.99] In Rebel Twins' latest, you play as the titular daddy -- imagine a more nefarious Andy Richter -- who finds himself abruptly fired and turns to a life of crime to provide for his family. Instead of cooking meth a la Breaking Bad, he opts for something much more traditional: robbing banks.
