Remember that tech-demo-y not-quite-a-game game Aves (Which has since been removed from the App Store) released in late 2009? It was a game with (then) great graphics, a really cool physics model, and a ultra-basic gameplay mechanic that just centralized around shooting a bow and arrow. Well, The Legend of Holy Archer [Free] takes that similar vibe and just runs with it, and keeps running, all the way to super-epic archery land where you're put to the task of firing arrows at huge monsters in several fantasy environments.
Despite definitely being an archery game, The Legend of Holy Archer almost feels more like a flying game. See, when you fire off your arrow, you can actually swipe around on screen to control its flight path. Monsters rarely (if ever) are a simple straight shot from where you're standing, so you'll usually need to bank around columns, avoid hills, and other terrain to hit your mark.
Being a stealth assassin sounds like the coolest job ever. Hunkering down in the shadows, sneaking up on your target, and quietly handling your business – all without making a peep or being noticed by anyone. While it sounds cool on paper, I could never actually handle being an assassin in real life. I feel bad even swatting a fly, and I'm clumsy as all get-out. I wouldn't last a second.
Recreating the feeling of being a bad ass assassin through video games is something I'm capable of, though, and series like Metal Gear and Splinter Cell have done a good job over the years at putting players in those shoes. So when I saw an iOS game simply titled Stealth Assassin [$0.99 / Free], where all you do is sneak around and take out marks, I got excited.
And it delivers everything it promises in its name: level after level of assassination jobs, but an inaccurate control scheme has had me pulling my hair out in frustration, not to mention getting myself constantly killed, in what is an otherwise fun game about covert killing.
You might remember an interesting little title that released late last year called Arranger [$0.99], developed by composer Arman Bohn and published by Ayopa Games. It was a retro-inspired RPG/adventure/mini-game concoction that saw your little yellow square of a hero traveling fantastic lands and completing quest in an effort to complete a collection of instruments. The whole game is very music-centric, being created by a composer and all, but it really gelled together well, as we noted in our review. Arranger was a really cool game.
As we've seen happen in the App Store world before, the publishing deal with Ayopa expired or otherwise went south for some reason, and the original release of Arranger is no longer available. Arman has just re-released Arranger under his own name in the App Store, and in an effort to do right by previous purchasers, he's making it available for free for a limited time.
The Ayopa-published version should still continue to work for the forseeable future, so you can continue playing that version if you wish. But it won't be seeing any future updates. My advice if you enjoy Arranger is to grab this new version while it's free.
And if you hadn't picked up Arranger previously but had your eye on it, well, you can basically score it for free right now too. It's a really unique game, and although it doesn't take too long to complete, it's a fun journey while it lasts.
If there ever was a series that could pose as a case study in the general shift to freemium in iOS gaming, Gameloft's Dungeon Hunter would be at the top of the list. The first two games operated as full-featured Diablo style clones with everything you'd want in a dungeon crawler. The third made a dramatic leap into the freemium sphere by going away from its dungeon crawling roots with arena-style gameplay, very little narrative, and plenty of IAP.
Dungeon Hunter 4 [Free] looks to bring some balance back to the series with the return of an actual story and a greater emphasis on traditional dungeon crawling. For the most part, the game actually succeeds in this regard, with a legitimate story, plenty of gameplay and options and beautiful visuals to boot. While the game certainly brings back some of what we loved in the first two titles, the 'in-your-face' IAP and other freemium elements leave a wistful feeling in your mouth.
After mysteriously waking up in the middle of a demonic invasion of your kingdom. Dungeon Hunter 4 puts you in the role of one of four heroes mysteriously imbued with power and charged as last hope of the kingdom of Valenthia. As the kingdom's savior you'll journey from region to region taking on standard story-based dungeon crawling quests coupled with a decent amount of side quests that provide supplemental awards. I didn't find the story to be particularly enthralling but it is a full-featured narrative and provides a far better experience than the previous Dungeon Hunter.
Mangomobile's free to play Kingturn RPG [Free] has been absolutely ripping up our forums since it was released last week, and per a quick note from the developers, while they're focusing on "smoothing out" Kingturn proper first, they have plans to bring both sequels, Kingturn RPG Plus and Kingturn Underworld to the App Store. Kingturn would be an easy game to skip looking at screenshots, as admittedly, the graphics do look a little basic- But in doing that you'd be missing out on some ridiculously deep strategy RPG action. How deep? Well, there's over 40 hours of gameplay spread across 67 battle scenarios, 700 items to loot, and 60 different skills distributed over 30 unique character classes. It even has that payment model that people are always asking for, in that you can snag the game for free, make sure you like it, then buy the rest via a single $4.99 unlock.
The two additional games in the series basically sound like Kingturn RPG but more. So, if you've somehow managed to burn through all the content already available, there's more coming soon. In the meantime, you can hang out in the upcoming thread, or add these two pseudo-sequels to your TouchArcade app [Free] watch list and we'll give you a heads up when they're available.
It seems like as poker surges in popularity games that utilize familiar poker mechanics to do non-poker-y things have been popping up all over the place. My personal favorite(s) still are Sword & Poker [$2.99] (and its sequel/expansion Sword & Poker 2 [$3.99]) but the recently-released Alice of Hearts [Free] sure is a worthy contender in this weird genre, especially at the current asking price of free. Like other poker battlers (That's a genre, right?) gameplay revolves around using cards from your Scrabble-like rack of cards and placing them on a grid to form the best hands you can. It sounds simple, and to some extent it is, but there's a surprising amount of strategy that goes in to these games as your opponent can also use these cards after you place them. So, while you might think you're super clever playing a three of a kind, you need to consider that you could potentially be giving your opponent the opportunity to counter with a full house.
So, Alice of Hearts is a totally competent poker battle game, but it actually kicks things up a notch further via the "Ego" system which essentially gives you multiple characters with different bonuses to play as. Additionally, if you've found yourself annoyed by the AI of other similar games, Alice of Hearts also has online multiplayer. At first look, the IAP systems powering the game seem fairly optional, allowing you to buy coins and various "premium" upgrades such as allowing you to have a wider stable of "Egos" to choose from with additional slots to store them in.
If you haven't yet tried a game with this sort of card battle mechanic yet, give this one a shot. These always seem to work really well on iOS devices.
Landlubbers take notice: Johnny Two Shoe's awesome swashbuckling adventure Plunderland [$0.99] is currently free for a limited time. It's a side-scrolling affair that sees you controlling a group of pirates in a God-like manner as you travel the seas going port to port and pillaging everything you encounter along the way. There are tons of neat interactive elements in Plunderland, like being able to pick up people in the game and fling them about or set them on fire, swipe enemy cannonballs out of the sky, and discover treasures by tap-digging on islands.
Plunderland is unlike practically anything else on the iOS platform, and although it launched nearly three years ago it still holds up incredibly well to this day. It was even updated last fall to include some modern features like iPhone 5 widescreen support and Retina Display graphics for the iPad, in addition to some tidying up of menus and other optimizations.
You can check our original review of Plunderland as well as the details of a huge update which added a new campaign, or check out the lengthy thread in our forums for player impressions. Plunderland has only been free once before, and while we're still waiting extremely patiently for Johnny Two Shoe's upcoming epic Prevail, there's no reason you shouldn't jump all over it right now for some free plundering in the meantime.
Straight from tonight's "So, this exists" department is Gutpela's SideWalker - Late to Work [Free] a game that cleverly combines two things that are very hot right now on the App Store: Any behind the back Temple Run style game, and anything that has even vaguely Minecraft-y graphics. SideWalker combines these two fads into one incredibly absurd concept of a game where all you're doing is walking to work. Of course you need to avoid other pedestrians on the sidewalk and other obstacles, but you can basically take your time controlling your speed by swiping up or down on the screen between a slow saunter and a power-walk. But, yeah, the goal is to just get to work.
I'm not entirely sure if it's possible to get to work, as the game is over when you (somewhat inevitably) collide into obstacles three times. Oh, better yet, your health isn't represented in any kind of traditional measure. Instead, you just lose your clothes. The first time you hit something you quite literally lose your pants, and things escalate from there.
Of course, like any good Temple Run-like there's a bunch of power-ups you can dump the plentiful amounts of in-game currency you'll be picking up while walking to work. You can also buy SideWalker money in different denominations, but much like most of these free to play behind the back games, there's not much reason to.
If you like the silly side of the App Store, give SideWalker a try. There's something incredibly endearing about it, especially as most of these games have such grand premises like escaping evil monkeys in Temple Run [Free], surviving some weird nuclear apocalypse in TheEndApp [Free], and others. In this, all you're trying to do is walk to work. Hell, you could get super meta and play SideWalker while you are walking to work. That might be life changing.
I am the developer of Sidewalker. This game was accidentally release today by the app store, however the official release date is not till May 2. It is being removed from the store right now. If you did manage to download it please enjoy the pre-release demo. Sorry for the mix up.
PopCap's Bookworm Heroes [Free] finally saw its international launch tonight after what's seriously been months of the game being soft launched in Canada. No joke, the thread for its Canadian release on our forums was actually originally posted on December 4th, 2012. I spent some time with last year's release of the game, and it really doesn't seem like there's a whole lot different from the actual proper international version aside from potentially minor balance changes or other things that are hard to notice.
The basic gist of the game is you either challenge your Facebook friends or random opponents to turn-based word battles. It's a lot like Writer Rumble in that your Scrabble-like individual word score gets converted into attack damage and the game is over once someone has reduced their opponents hit points to zero. You take turns until this happens, with various power-up style letter blocks potentially appearing that allow you to do way more damage.
As mentioned, my initial impressions of this version of the game mirror those of a few months ago in that I really don't like it when games lock me in to using Facebook for matchmaking. Personally, my Facebook is a safe place with only friends and family, not random weirdos I play video games with. Sure, I could have a second account, but that really seems less than ideal when services like Game Center exist. Additionally, the turn-based "combat" just feels really slow when you're used to the pace of what you'd typically think a Bookworm game to feel like- Particularly as you're left with nothing to do while you wait for all your opponents to make their move(s).
On top of that, it's also really free to play, with way too many UI elements dedicated to largely displaying just how many bonus coins (the in-game currency) you can get by connecting your Facebook and doing other social-spammy things. I suppose it's worth checking out just to see the dark path the creators of Bookworm [$1.99], Peggle [$0.99] and Plants vs. Zombies [$0.99] seem to be on with all this free to play junk, but I can't imagine Bookworm Heroes living a very long life on my device.
My vote for weirdest game that's coming tonight goes to Jared Bailey and his newest release Fist Face Fight. I mean, to my knowledge there aren't any other games that let you play as a giant ninja fist with legs who must use their fist-shaped body to fight off various brightly colored enemy ninjas who are all hellbent on breaking your heart. Yeah, it's strange alright, and it's also deceptively fun.
Like his previous games Cubed Rally Racer [$0.99 / $1.99 (HD)] and Cubed Rally Redline [Free], Fist Face Fight is a throwback to the old-school of gaming and keeps the mechanics and visuals fairly simple, but has that certain something that drives you to keep coming back and giving it just one more go.
While guarding your heart in the lower center of the screen, you simply need to tap in front of where the enemy ninjas are approaching from to position your fist-y self and fight them off, sort of like stopping missiles in Missile Command.
It's stupidly simple to play, but as you progress in levels things get hectic and much more challenging, also due to the increasing difficult of new enemy ninja types. The difficulty levels are cleverly split into the different kinds of belts you probably earned in karate class as a kid, so starting off with white, then on to yellow, orange and so on.
Fist Face Fight might not be the most robust title ever made, but it's a cool little arcade game that is surprisingly engaging despite its simplicity. Oh, and the chiptune-y music kicks ass too. It's free, so don't be afraid to give it a look when it drops later tonight.
Fist Face Fight should be available on the US App Store at 11:00 PM Eastern, or potentially much earlier if you're in a region east of the USA. To be alerted when the game is available, open this story in the TouchArcade App [Free] and add it to your watch list. A little after 11:00 PM tonight you'll get a push alert with the download link.
Of course it wouldn't be a Wednesday without a Chillingo game, and tonight's title seems to be R.I.P. Rally, a rare free to play game in Chillingo's typically fairly "premium" lineup. I dig the premise of the game, which is laid out in an entirely text-less comic book page showing your car (with a giant gun mounted on top) being heli-dropped into a massive arena of zombies. I think the easiest way to describe R.I.P. Ralley is to take the vibe of those arena levels in Twisted Metal, throw in a dash of Smash TV, replace all enemies with zombies, then apply a heavy glaze of free to play on top.
The gameplay loop seems to revolve around fighting wave after wave of zombies, earning coins, upgrading your car, getting slightly stronger, fighting slightly stronger enemies, and repeating this process. The vehicular-based combat is actually quite a bit of fun, as just being able to run over massive groups of zombies always feels satisfying. One thing that immediately jumps out at you is how (comparatively) poorly the zombies themselves are animated, and I'm wondering whether or not that was a conscious decision to simplify the zombies to allow way more of them to be on screen without any kind of performance drop or not- As even on my iPad mini, the game runs great with loads of undead lumbering around.
I liked the game a lot until I started delving in to the upgrade system, at which point the freemium elements begin to rear their ugly heads in a big way. R.I.P. Rally features the whole kit and kaboodle of free to play trimmings between ads (which you can disable for 99¢) and two different currencies (one you can buy). There's even super-gross Burstly referral deals where you can do things like sign up for a Discover card or complete a survey to qualify for a free glucose meter from Alliance Healthcare Services for a small stipend of in-game coins. Being pushed into trading a Blockbuster membership for a bumper upgrade really makes me sigh and say, "I wish I could've just paid $2.99 for this game."
R.I.P. Rally should be available on the US App Store at 11:00 PM Eastern, or potentially much earlier if you're in a region east of the USA. To be alerted when the game is available, open this story in the TouchArcade App [Free] and add it to your watch list. A little after 11:00 PM tonight you'll get a push alert with the download link.
In the world of iOS games, we're often impressed with what our mobile hardware is capable of, and crave those big gaming experiences that are comparable to those found on consoles and desktops but with the ability to be played on the go. It's a neat world we live in where stuff like that is possible.
The flip side of that coin is that mobile devices are also a perfect place for the not-so-robust title; something quick and accessible that we can distract ourselves with for those few moments throughout the day when we'd otherwise just be killing time.
With that, sometimes a game does basically just one thing that's clever or unique, but won't necessarily be a game you spend months or years with. But for their intended purpose – a quick distraction – these games do what they set out to do really well, and while an in-depth review typically isn't warranted for such a game it's worth quickly highlighting their unique aspects for those people who are constantly looking for new and interesting gaming fixes while on the go.
Over the weekend a game caught my eye that fits this bill perfectly. It's called 1800 [Free], and the idea is simple enough that literally anybody can give it a shot. Picture those meters used in golf games over the years, you know the ones I'm talking about – a cursor travels back and forth and you're tasked with stopping it at just the right spot on the meter which correlates to the power and accuracy of your shot. It's a classic game mechanic used in lots of instances, and the basic idea is what drives 1800.
A cursor travels back and forth, and stopping it in the dead center awards a perfect score of 1800. You're graded on a 3-star level based on how accurately you can stop the cursor in the center and get 1800. That's the game at its core, at least, but as you progress through the 20+ levels more complicated and challenging variations of the idea come into play.
For example, a line will run across the meter along with your cursor, both traveling in different lengths at different speeds. You'll need to time it just right to stop the cursor and the line right in the middle of the meter at the same time. Levels increase in difficulty by adding more line variations and even an additional cursor to keep track of.
1800 is an incredibly difficult game. Just getting the 2-stars in a level that are needed to progress to the next is really hard, but if you're going for 3-stars on every level then it's downright brutal. It's extremely quick and easy to retry levels though, so it's actually a pretty welcome challenge. There's an additional Timed mode to unlock too, which gives you 60 seconds to land as many direct hits as possible. Game Center leaderboards are included for both the regular and Timed mode, along with just a handful of achievements.
It might not be the most robust title out there, but 1800 is a quick bit of fun when you feel like challenging your motor skills, and if you really click with it then chasing the elusive 3-stars for every level will keep you busy for a good long time.
The digital money printing machine known as The Simpsons: Tapped Out [Free] has received a new update themed after the most important fake holiday known to man: Whacking Day. Ok, maybe it's the second most important right behind Festivus, and let's not forget about Love Day, but Whacking Day is definitely up there.
Despite being your typical freemium Farmville-ish city building game, The Simpsons: Tapped Out does incorporate a ton of excellent fan service. Basing an update on the iconic show's fictional snake-clubbing holiday is further proof of that.
Whacking Day is officially on May 10th and in this new update there are all sorts of new ways to celebrate this special day. Take place in a time-limited event to whack snakes and earn special rewards, expand your city with new buildings and decorations, and complete new quests. You can also play with a handful of new characters including "washboard abs" Willie. Just don't be playin' with him between 4 and 5. That's Willie's time!
If you've been dutifully building up your own virtual Springfield in The Simpsons: Tapped Out then you should be pretty stoked to check out the new Whacking Day update content. If you're a Simpsons fan but haven't dabbled in this city-building adventure then it's a free download if you want to give it a look firsthand.
Good things (or is it bad things?) come in threes, so first we had Real Racing 3 repair timers getting nerfed, then today GolfStar heart regeneration got buffed, and now Gameloft is joining the party by reducing the cooldown for potion regeneration in Dungeon Hunter 4 [Free] to four hours down from eight. To back things up a bit, Dungeon Hunter 4 is the last of a long line of Gameloft dungeon crawlers. Over the years, they've gotten more and more free-to-play-y, climaxing on the release of the fourth iteration which among other free to play elements made players wait eight hours between getting additional potions.
We thought this felt particularly gross in our recent TA Plays video of the game. Eight hours seemed like a long time to us, and the general vibe on our forums was in near-complete agreement. This time around, Gameloft has been uncharacteristically active in our community, gathering feedback and actively responding to it. They even mentioned the possibility of the timers going down to two hours.
It's a really promising sign that all of these different companies are listening and responding to player feedback when it comes to balancing the timers in their free to play games, but I'm starting to feel like a broken record here in that much like with GolfStar, I wish we just had the option to buy DH4 and play it like a normal game. Either way, it's nice to see some leeway from developers when it comes to tweaking their free to play elements to be a bit more player friendly.
One of the reasons that previewing free to play games is hard is because you never really get an idea of what the out of the box experience is going to be like until you actually download the game yourself. Back at GDC we got a great demo of Com2uS's GolfStar [Free] but like most of these demos we see, it was a development account with loads of IAP which essentially allowed them to play the game, well, like you'd think a golf game should be played. In actuality, when GolfStarlaunched yesterday, it was packed with some shockingly gross freemium elements which our forum members were (understandably) having no part of- Which really is too bad, because I was really excited for the game as it was demonstrated at GDC, without all that junk.
The good news, if there is some to be had here, is that Com2uS is listening to the player base. Similar to how Real Racing 3 [Free] saw some timer tweaks, Com2uS is changing up how quickly "hearts" regenerate. See, your hearts are used as that all-too-familiar energy mechanic to rope you into either paying or waiting to play in GolfStar. When the game launched, you'd regenerate one heart every half hour, which is just crazy considering playing a nine hole course burns up five of your hearts.
This regeneration rate is being doubled, so it'll only take fifteen minutes to regenerate a heart. That still doesn't feel great, but it's way better than two and a half hours to play another round of golf. So, if you grabbed GolfStar and deleted it because of the timers, or you just skipped the game because of the overwhelming negativity in the forum thread, it might be worth a second look.
Personally, I wish I could just pay $9.99 or whatever reasonable price Com2uS sets for this game and just play it like you'd normally play a golf game. It's too bad too, as if you stripped away all the freemium offers, ad pop-ups, timers, and other nasty stuff you'd be left with a really radical game with great multiplayer, a cool almost RPG-like feeling of progression between gear and ability unlocks, and a bunch of other neat features.
Fingers crossed for that, I suppose.
UPDATE: Oh, and if you do give the game another shot, Com2uS is doing a free item promotion where if you enter this code on the events screen in game you'll get some free stat-boosting gear:
Remember that tech-demo-y not-quite-a-game game Aves (Which has since been removed from the App Store) released in late 2009? It was a game with (then) great graphics, a really cool physics model, and a ultra-basic gameplay mechanic that just centralized around shooting a bow and arrow. Well, The Legend of Holy Archer [Free] takes that similar vibe and just runs with it, and keeps running, all the way to super-epic archery land where you're put to the task of firing arrows at huge monsters in several fantasy environments.
