The Dark Passenger is definitely not to everyone’s taste. The celebration of murder and violence that permeates the Dexter TV show and books can turn both the stomach and head of those who don’t share a guilty desire to see brutal justice administered with the edge of a razor blade, so Dexter the Game 2 [$2.99] was always going to have a limited audience.
But that small audience is a passionate one, and revels in the demonic righteousness of the conscientious serial killer. The first game was quite the technical breakthrough on iOS, and despite its many flaws, Dexter the Game whetted our appetites for the possibility of a broader, grander journey with the Dark Passenger.
In this sequel, the developer made the exciting decision to open up the world of murder capital Miami, with the promise of giving you free reign to pursue your deadly justice by night, and develop your suburban camouflage by day. It’s a rock-solid concept that sounds like the perfect Dexter game.
Rovio has been teasing us for the past month, but the wait is finally over for Angry Birds Star Wars [$0.99 / $2.99 (HD)], which is now available worldwide, a wee bit earlier than expected. In this crossover title, one of the most iconic movie franchises of all time, Star Wars, mashes together with the poster child of mobile gaming, Angry Birds. The result is a game that plays very much like the Angry Birds games of the past but with all the sights and sounds of the Star Wars universe.
Not just that, though. The protagonist cast of birds and the antagonist fleet of bad piggies have special new abilities based on the Star Wars universe, like Force Pushing, Lightsabering, and firing off lasers with the iconic "pew pew" that's a hallmark of the franchise.
One thing that you can count on is that we'll be playing the heck out of Angry Birds Star Wars over the next few days to see how it holds up against the rest of the entries in the series. If you've played an Angry Birds game before then chances are you know what you're getting into here, but if you're a Star Wars fan too then it looks like there's all sorts of neat fan service and cool ideas that make great use of the IP.
As is typical of Rovio, there are separate versions of Angry Birds Star Wars for the iPhone and iPad and you can grab either or both from the links below. Also don't forget to check out the iPhone version forum or the iPad version forum for even more impressions from early buyers.
This afternoon, Eli and I spent some time with tonight's other game Wraithborne [$2.99]. It's an isometric brawler that shares a lot of features and mechanics with dungeon crawlers. In the game, you play as big dude tasked with hacking and slashing goblins, werewolves, and other fantasy oddities on a magical quest. With either touch or virtual controls, you'll string together devastating combos and activate special magic powers by tracing runes.
Split across easily digestible chunks, this is a breezy game built for mobile through and through with its accessible controls and goals. It's also a looker, as you'll see.
We haven't seen enough of Wraithborne to offer a firm recommendation, but there might be enough in this video for action game fans. Check it, see if it clicks, and if you're feeling it grab the game from the link below.
When we first heard that Zeboyd Games would be bringing the long-awaited third title in Penny Arcade's RPG series to iOS, suffice to say we were pretty stoked that we'd finally be able to play an episode of On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness on Apple's touch screen devices. Now that we've had a chance to check out Episode 3 [$2.99], it's obvious that Zeboyd has a winner both in the RPG fundamentals as well as the outrageous tale weaved throughout the game. While Episode 3 does have a few annoyances, the majority stemming from the move from controller to touch-based inputs, there's a lot to love and enjoy in this outing.
If you've never played a Penny Arcade RPG (and if iOS is your primary platform, you probably haven't), On The Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness follows the adventures of ethereal detectives Tycho Brahe and Jonathan Gabriel as they investigate the supernatural happenings of New Arcadia. While Episode 3 continues the story of the previous games, familiarity with the rest of the series is thankfully not required in order to enjoy the narrative of this sequel.
It's not as though I need another word game. I mean, just look at the embarrassment of riches we've had in that genre over the past year or so. But Kieffer Bros. keeps making these little games that don't seem like much on first look and then sink in their hooks and never let go, so it was a pleasant surprise when Spell Rift [$5.99 (HD)] landed on my desk.
When the game wrapped up 21 levels later, I was still thoroughly pleased. Spell Rift might not look like much—a small grid, a bunch of letter tiles, and a thoroughly standard scoring mechanic—but it's what it's missing that casts the hook. There's no space to move in Spell Rift's grid. It lacks the relief of wide open spaces. There are just 35 tiles, and every one that's wasted is one less opportunity to spell something worthwhile.
Claustrophobia might be the name of the game, but it doesn't count for much until the stakes are raised. Spell Rift's first few levels are as typical as it gets, and that's just not much fun when you have so little to work with. The game pushes you to do your best, but it still starts out too slowly.
Hey have you heard of this game called Bad Piggies? It's sort of popular or something. I think it was done by the same people who made Angered Burt, but I'm not sure.
Anyway, if you happened to have heard of Bad Piggies [$0.99 / $0.99 (HD)] then you may be interested to know that a new update was just released for the game, and adds 15 brand new levels for you to play through. The new level pack is called Flight in the Night, and has a slick new moonlit theme. Of course, there's also teasers for two more 15 level sets coming to Flight in the Night, so expect that at some point as well.
In addition to the new levels, there's a new Sandbox level available for purchase called the Field of Dreams. Basically, it's the biggest Sandbox level yet and it lets you go nuts creating whatever kind of contraption you want with over 300 different parts. It'll set you back $2.99 if you want to get in on the Field of Dreams Sandbox, but it sounds like it has endless possibilities.
Also, as you've probably noticed by the screenshot above, Bad Piggies now supports the widescreen on the iPhone 5 and new iPod touch, which is always a welcome improvement in my book. Expect Rovio to keep on churning out the updates for Bad Piggies as long as it continues to ride the top of the charts, just as they've done with that certain bird game. We won't complain, as we simply loved Bad Piggiesin our review and look forward to even more expansions like today's in the future.
Let's pretend, just for a moment, that you had just woken in a dilapidated-looking hospital room. You have no memory as to how you got there, no clue as to where you are and no idea as to who the inhabitants in your quarters are. How would you respond? If you're the protagonist in 3F Interativo's point & click adventure Reversion: The Escape [$1.99], you would ask questions in a relatively calm and controlled manner. Er. Right.
Unlike many point & click adventures these days, Reversion: The Escape isn't big on the slap-stick humor. Set within a dystopian future, Reversion takes place in a ruined Buenos Aires. According to the somewhat shady-looking medical personnel you encounter upon consciousness, twenty years has passed and the government is in shambles. Your only clue as to what happened? A torn fragment of a photograph.
Naturally, given the nature of such things, you also find yourself imprisoned within the room under the surveillance of an even more suspicious-looking guard. With the prospect of interrogation by a mysterious Colonel looming over your head (and the very name of the game giving it away), you eventually find yourself endeavoring to seek escape.
I sometimes wonder if we play Monopoly more out of habit, or some sense of nostalgic obligation, rather than because we actually want to. There’s barely a half-functioning family in the world that doesn’t have some kind of annual board game tradition, and at some point during the year we all give Monopoly a dusting off and joke, between yawns, about how great it’d be if this were real money.
Patience for long, semi-serious games like this is much thinner these days, though. Yes, we dredge it up once or twice a year, but how many of us actually finish a game? More often than not fun fatigue sets in and everyone agrees that whoever’s got the biggest wad right now is the winner, and then there’s a mad rush to pack it all back in its dog-eared box as you attempt to salvage what’s left of the evening. And now we have Monopoly Millionaire [$2.99 / $4.99 (HD)] finding its way to iOS, with a promise of a “fresh take on classic Monopoly.”
It’s a new take, to be fair, but “fresh” is not a word that I’d rush to associate with Monopoly Millionaire. What this really is – and indeed it’s probably a wise move, even if it doesn’t quite pay off in this situation – is an effort to speed up an ordinary game of Monopoly. Not reboot it, or refresh it, or rebrand it, or revolve it, or reload it, or reinvigorate it. Just get it finished before everyone realizes they’re not having fun.
At first glance, Devil's Attorney [$2.99] might seem like a shameless Phoenix Wright clone. You do play a defense attorney embroiled in courtroom drama, but unlike the naïve and justice-driven Phoenix, Max McMann is the eponymous devil's attorney. His clients did the crime, and they pay him the big bucks to avoid doing the time. Also unlike Phoenix Wright, Devil's Attorney doesn't take you through adventure-game-style investigations and conversations, but breaks down cases into series of turn-based battles.
In each case, you take on a team of units consisting of witnesses, evidence, and prosecutors in turn-based battles. You fight back against the prosecution's team using an array of courtroom skills. Some skills deal damage, others mitigate the prosecution's defense by lessening their damage, causing witnesses to attack themselves, or neutralizing a specific unit for one turn, and still others increase your case defense. All skills cost varying amounts of action points, and you receive only a teensy amount of AP per turn. Your goal is to determine how to spread your AP across skills in order to knock out the opposing units as efficiently -- and, if you want to collect case bonuses, as quickly -- as possible.
Oh, what a strange an twisting trail an iOS game can blaze. Auto-runner platformer Ivy The Kiwi? [$2.99] is finally available as a mobile gaming experience after it started out as a Japan-only mobile game back in 2010. Between now and then, it’s been on the Wii, the Nintendo DS, and the DSiWare store. And this history lesson is a way of saying that the old girl has still got it, but it’s starting to show some signs of age.
For instance, at first blush, the controls feel completely unnatural. Ivy is a bird-brained bird who, Lemmings-style, will trot to the right until she runs into something, and then pace back to the left. Your only means of manipulating her path for a course correction are three vines. You draw them by touching and dragging a spot on the screen, and timing is essential because if she hits any spikes, it’s game over. It’s made somewhat more frustrating because there isn’t a tutorial. So, if this is your first time with Ivy, you’re in for a bit of a rough ride from the outset.
What the iPhone version has that the iPad version doesn’t is perhaps the smallest possible view of the action that the game has had thus far. What that means is that sometimes playing Ivy is a bit like driving in a heavy fog: Oftentimes, you won’t be able to see a hazard until it’s too late to swerve out of the way. I found myself having to start over and over again a few times in a couple of different levels for this exact reason.
Some of this also has to do with Ivy’s learning curve, which isn’t particularly steep, but is on a noticeable incline. Unlike the DS version, here you have to slightly obscure your own view by smearing your digit across the screen. That coupled with Ivy’s brisk pace means you’re giving yourself a couple milliseconds to react to that’s coming. But as I got a little deeper into the game and conquered more levels, I realized the game could be played two ways: offensively and defensively.
Defensively is how I started off. Offensively is where I wound up. It’s the difference between carefully creating a ramp for Ivy to navigate a few road bumps to flat-out slingshotting her around the stage and hoping you’ll be able to create a landing vine in time before she hits a game-ending obstacle. Eventually it begins to feel as natural as swinging around town in any of the more recent Spider-Man console games.
By the time I mastered this technique, the game was half over and its repetitiveness started to sink in. There are 50 levels (half of the retail version’s), and because the backgrounds don’t change very much, they all start to blur together eventually. And, well, because you are careening around the levels anyway, a pervading sense of same-ness started to wallop me.
To combat that, there is a Mario-like item-collecting element here, with each stage having gold feathers strewn about for you to scoop up. It’s possible to go through some levels without seeing a single one. Sometimes, they seem to exist only to artificially pad the game’s length. In some levels, where the goal is a straight shot from where you start, there’s a “detour” you can take between oodles of spikes just to get them.
Another way to extend Ivy’s shelf life comes with its iOS 6.0 “challenge” capabilities, which allows both free and paid users to compete with one another’s scores. But points and feathers are arbitrary currencies there for replay value only. Honestly, the most fun Ivy offers is in trying to shave off a couple seconds from your own score. Because many of the levels are basic, it turns the game overall into an abstracted version of Olympic ice skating. You could take the most boring route and skate in a complete circle. Or you can opt for something stylish, showcase your moves and fling Ivy about to take home the gold. The decision is yours.
Just over a month ago, Avengers Initiative [$6.99] from Marvel and Wideload Games made a surprise debut on the App Store. We were initially quite intrigued by the shiny comic book characters, but after taking the game for a test drive in a TA Plays video, we came to find out that Avengers Initiative was essentially Infinity Blade with a Marvel Universe re-skin and The Hulk as the main playable character. Not necessarily a bad idea on paper, actually, but the extent of the similarities to Infinity Blade made Avengers Initiative feel extremely hollow and uninspired, and kind of boring as evidenced in our review.
Anyway, I don't want to totally be a Negative Nelly about the situation. Since its source material was already a great game, that means that Avengers Initiative wasn't that bad for what it was: an uninspired Infinity Blade clone where you play as The Hulk. I mean, there's got to be some value in smashing on bad dudes as the big green fella, right? Well for the original price of $5.99 that might have been a harder pill to swallow in the iOS game world, but right now you can nab Avengers Initiative for half price, making it a much more attractive prospect if you're a Marvel fan looking for something shiny to play on your device.
Score-oriented 'racers' seem to have a decent following on iOS, with hits such as Mad Skills BMX [$0.99] and MotoHeroz [$0.99 / $0.99 (HD)] garnering fans with their emphasis on speed, precision, and high scores. Stunt Star: The Hollywood Years [$2.99], continues the trend in terms of trial-and-error side scrolling racers. However, while other titles focus entirely on race, Stunt Star does a great job adding personality and presentation with its premise. Sure, Stunt Star's difficulty is exceedingly tough, and its limited-use power-ups don't help the matter, but the game's trick-based gameplay is deep, lengthy and simply fun.
Stunt Star puts you in the role of a prospective stuntman as he gets his start in Hollywood films. Levels are categorized into different films, with each individual mission charging you with performing a specific trick. Players are tasked with getting their vehicle from one point to another in a level, with the goal being to land as close as possible to a checkered flag. Each mission also provides supplemental objectives (typically grabbing a star and using a certain vehicle) which award added points for completion. At the end of each mission players are scored, money is earned, and trophies are awarded based on score.
Back in August, developer The Men Who Wear Many Hats released a strikingly authentic riff on the classic edu-tainment title Oregon Trail with their zombie-infested iOS game Organ Trail [$2.99]. We thought it was pretty darn fantastic in our review, but there were definitely a lot of minor bugs and issues that can be typical of an initial release. Despite the simplistic visuals, there were a lot of complex systems under the hood of Organ Trail, and bugs can easily slip by unnoticed until a game hits a wider audience.
Just a couple of weeks after release, a substantial maintenance update was issued which addressed a ton of those types of problems. It was a great step forward, but some issues still were cropping up as more people continued to pour their time into the game.
Today, The Hats have released a second Organ Trail update, and again it focuses on tons of little tweaks, bug fixes, and optimizations. If you check out the full update notes in the App Store description, you can see all the little nips and tucks the team has given the game. Nothing has ever been completely broken, and we've been enjoying the heck out of Organ Trail even with its minor issues, but it's nice all the same to see them continue to be addressed.
If you're waiting on an actual content update for Organ Trail, that's something that's in the cards as well, but as we've talked about before it somewhat hinges on how their PC version of the game does in the Steam Greenlight program. My gut tells me we'll be seeing new content for the iOS version either way, but we have yet to hear anything definitive.
Anyway, Organ Trail was great when it came out and is an even better, more solid experience thanks to these updates. Next on my wishlist: iPhone 5 and 5th gen iPod touch widescreen support. You hear me, you hat-wearing men? Make it so.
Last November FDG Entertainment released a really interesting and unique puzzle game titled Blueprint 3D [$0.99 / $2.99 (HD)]. It tasked you with aligning pictures, which had been "exploded" out into a 3D cloud of chaos, and getting things lined up properly to put the picture back together again into something recognizable.
It wasn't a hard game, or an especially long one, but we thought Blueprint 3D was satisfying nonetheless in our review, and it's been updated several times since then with new level packs that have fleshed out the whole experience.
Well get ready for the fleshing out to hit an infinite level as with an upcoming 2.0 update to Blueprint 3D you'll actually be able to explode any picture you wish, creating an unlimited amount of puzzles to play through. Check out how it works in the following video:
Capcom delights in updating each Street Fighter at least three times before hunkering down to create a new version. Diehard fans rationalize the updates, touting new special moves and under-the-hood improvements. The rest of us shake our heads and hold out for the inevitable next version, or open our wallets and migrate with the rest of the herd. Street Fighter X Tekken [$2.99] marks the third Street Fighter to land on mobile devices, but unlike the previous and most excellent second release, Street Fighter IV Volt [$4.99], this one's not so easy to recommend.
Like the flagship console version, SFxT for iphone is a two-on-two fighter. Each player chooses two warriors and lays waste to other tag teams using a flurry of combos, special moves, and tag-team attacks. The roster is one of SFxT's weak spots. Volt currently offers a staggering 22 fighters from which to choose. SFxT includes 10, leaving fans of either series with a mere five familiar faces and an anorexic roster. To be fair, Capcom added to Volt's roster over time and they'll likely do the same thing for this game. Or, more likely, you'll have yet another release to add to the army of Street Fighter icons littering your Home screen.
As in previous mobile iterations, SFxT players duke it out using a simplified interface: One punch, one kick, an X button to swap fighters, and a Special button for special moves like fireballs. The streamlined interface benefits both the novice and the pro player looking for on-the-go action away from his fight stick. Novices can tap buttons arbitrarily to string together moves, while veterans can still outperform button mashers by relying on precise execution to pull out longer, flashier combos, or disable simple moves and input specials using the tried-and-true mix of joystick movements and button presses.
Besides tag-team play, SFxT throws a few more elements into the mix. After choosing their team, players choose a Pandora's Box, a powerful but temporary upgrade that sacrifices their partner and a compelling risk-reward mechanic for desperate situations. Gems, another new addition, are awarded in a random roulette-style game triggered when players perform a tag move. Depending on where the wheel stops, you might receive a boost to an in-game stat such as attack, or nothing at all. You're not punished for missing out on a power-up, so the off-chance of netting one is a good way to reinforce using tag attacks, maneuvers that experienced players will want to weave into their strategies.
Technically, the game makes a few minor improvements. Animations are as fluid as ever, characters boast significant detail and crispness. Unlike Street Fighter IV Volt's frozen-in-time environments, all SFxT backgrounds are animated, injecting some liveliness into fights and taking mobile games one step closer to providing a full-on console experience.
SFxT deviates from Volt in other, less fortunate ways. In Volt, players can enter ranked or unranked Wi-Fi matches. SFxT features only ranked and Bluetooth battles, forcing players to put their win-loss record on the line if they want to challenge opponents outside their living rooms. Crippling lag lowers ranked mode's stock even further, as matches outside your home country are often unplayable. More significantly, partaking in ranked battles requires credits. If you want to throw down online, you must either wait for the timer in the upper corner of your screen to expire and grant you a single credit, or buy gold as an in-app purchase and put it toward more credits.
SFxT's most egregious in-app purchase might be a deal breaker for hardcore fighting fans: At any time, players can buy gold and use it to upgrade their Pandora's Box. Honest players can swear off the store and earn points toward upgrades by playing the game, but inevitably they'll run up against players who dropped a Ben Franklin on upgrades. Pay-to-win upgrades don't break the game; skilled players can and usually will come out on top. But their mere existence does tip the balance away from Street Fighter's traditional reliance on skill (and spamming fireballs).
There's no denying that SFxT is a fun game. Like its predecessors, it runs smooth as butter, features a fighting system responsive and robust enough to nearly emulate playing on a stick, and it's a helluva lotta fun to look at. But Capcom's nickel-and-dime multiplayer decisions and the paper-thin roster make it an appetizer to Street Fighter IV Volt's seven-course feast.
The Dark Passenger is definitely not to everyone’s taste. The celebration of murder and violence that permeates the Dexter TV show and books can turn both the stomach and head of those who don’t share a guilty desire to see brutal justice administered with the edge of a razor blade, so Dexter the Game 2 [$2.99] was always going to have a limited audience.
