With the recent announcement that Diablo would be making its way to consoles, gamers have been looking for something to satisfy their hack-and-slash needs on their iOS device. Gameloft recently released the fourth installment of their dungeon crawler, Dungeon Hunter 4, and less than two weeks after, Gamevil has come out with their first foray into dungeon crawlers with Dark Avenger [Free]
Dark Avenger is all action with little in the way of overall substance. As of this review, there is only one playable class, the Templar, with a second class “coming soon”, the Ranger. Despite having only one type of character at the moment, the game gives you three save game slots. You're tasked with killing bad things from bad places because... well, it's a game without a story. Perhaps because some evil convenience store clerk looked at your grandma the wrong way and now you're exacting sweet revenge.
Delving into the game proper is as easy as choosing your character and selecting your mode. Single player consists of progressing through multiple levels, all within the same basic environment. The virtual joystick is dead simple to use; one joystick on your left controls movement and direction, while the icon on your right controls attacks. Tap it once for a basic attack, tap it up to three times for a combo attack.
For some reason there isn't an iOS adaptation of HeroQuest, the adventure board game that informed the childhoods of many folks my age. There are a few that tread similar territory, though, and one of them is Mighty Dungeons, [$1.99] published by Forest Moon Games.
It's a fairly literal take on board-based dungeon crawling, with tokens for heroes and enemies and tiles to reveal as you explore. You choose a hero from one of a few classic classes—warrior, ranger, mage and the like—then take him out on your choice of a ton of missions. Each one takes you down into a dungeon to smite orcs or skeletons and claim their belongings for your own.
Practically speaking, that means tapping. Lots and lots of tapping. Tap on a tile to move to it, then tap the Attack button to attack over and over on the combat screen. Tap doors to open them, traps to disarm them, and objects to investigate them. Every so often you might want to tap a potion or spell, too.
This might sound a little mindless—and frankly, it is. There are few meaningful decisions to be made in Mighty Dungeons. Do you attack, or do you chug one of your plentiful potions first? Do you explore this room first, or that one? It makes no difference, as you'll probably clear the map each and every time you take on a quest.
For simplicity's sake, call me a Bronie: the only part of the label I won't own is the defensive masculinity implicit in the "bro." I'm also a gender-neutral parent, which just means trucks and dolls, pink and blue, workbenches and kitchen playsets for everyone.
Speaking as both a Bronie and a parent, I have to say that My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic [Free] has its charm, but is likely to frustrate and disappoint young fans and Bronies alike.
The game doesn't do anything terribly excessive or unusual for a timer-driven three-currency (regular, control, and social) freemium sim. It has levels, quests, achievements, a random-draw game, and terrible writing.
It's the last one that really got to me. 'Friendship is Magic' (the TV show) has built its audience primarily on the quality of its writing. It would be understandable and probably forgivable if the game had little writing in it, especially as it is a city-building sim, but instead there's a lot of text, and none of it is even remotely clever.
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.
I distinctly remember playing Zaxxon in the arcades, although I’m now a bit shocked to discover it was 1982. What I remember most about Zaxxon isn't so much its amazing graphics, but rather a vague sense of bewilderment as I tried to wrap my head around its pseudo 3D controls.
This was the first game to introduce isometric graphics, which is how we used to have 3D games before the third dimension was discovered. Zaxxon’s visuals perhaps weren’t so much amazing, actually, as they were clever. Impressively clever, mind you. Whoever figured out a method of fooling our senses so simply was definitely underpaid, no matter what sort of wage they were on.
Now we don’t need anything too clever to give us a 3D-looking game; just a bucket full of polygons, an iPhone and thirty years of game development to deliver Zaxxon Escape [$0.99].
The isometric flight through an outer space obstacle courses is now a fully-3D run through endless tubes, which raises the first and most prominent question about Zaxxon Escape, and I expect it’s one that the developer Free Range Games knew the iPhone world would be asking: how exactly is this Zaxxon?
Despite one's personal feelings on the Marvel universe (or comic books in general) you cannot deny the sheer rejuvenation in popularity for the series, culminating in the recently released Avengers film. Marvel (via Wideload Games) has decided to take advantage of this popularity with its release of Avengers Initiative [$6.99], a new title for iOS. While Initiative looks stunning and models its gameplay after the incredibly successful Infinity Blade series, a distinct lack of innovation coupled with a weary reliance on IAP make it fall disappointingly short.
Avengers Initiative puts you in the role of Bruce Banner's green alter-ego as he's sent on a mission by Nick Fury to bag and tag a variety of super-villains that have escaped from S.H.I.E.L.D.'s high-tech prison. Initiative's story has some interesting facets due mostly to its Marvel underpinnings but for the most part the tale is fairly mundane with Hulk moving from location to location battling generic minions while looking for the next villain, with the occasional cutscene thrown in. Supplementals like dossiers that include additional info on the main players is a nice touch, but fan service only goes so far.
As much as I love tower defense games, I have to admit that there's currently an issue of over-saturation within the genre. As such, I'm always looking for games that differentiate themselves from the pack. Bulkypix's Bug Invasion [$1.99] attempts to do so with its emphasis on nature's smaller denizens. Unfortunately, while battling for food supremacy offers a different take on tower defense, Bug Invasion falters in basic genre staples, leading to an overall generic experience.
As its name implies, Bug Invasion puts you in the role of a young protagonist as he wages war against an army of creepy crawlies that have come for the sugar. You'll help defend the sugar utilizing standard tower defense mechanics. Bugs come down pre-determined lanes in specific waves while you defend against them with a variety of strange towers. While placing a Soda Tower or Blender seems neat, you'll quickly realize that most towers are easily classified in the usual TD nomenclature (i.e. Siege, Anti-air, e.t.c.).
We’ve had our share of flying-based 3D platformers and ANIMA Entertainment’s Crash Birds Islands [$0.99] looks to build on the genre with its own take on the experience. Unfortunately, a decidedly average gameplay experience combined with spotty controls and a harsh difficulty keep the ride from being anything but smooth.
Crash Birds Islands uses a tilt-based control scheme for steering your bird, with altitude and direction controlled via tilting your iOS device forward or on its side, respectively. Level s are separated by worlds, with each world offering several predetermined objectives that range from collecting all the coins in a level to reaching the end in a specified amount of time to destroying walls made of boxes and so on.
Accomplish the objective and you’re awarded a star that allows you to move on to the next mission (assuming you make it to the end alive). Each mission is also judged on a secondary timer with additional stars awarded for completing a level quickly. While the worlds are somewhat varied and certainly offered difference experiences, the objectives never changed which lead to a tedious experience. The fact that the objectives themselves weren’t particularly engrossing and represented the simplest of goals found in platformers.
Being a 3D flying platformer, one of the most important aspects for Crash Birds Islands are its controls. Unfortunately, I found the tilt controls a bit too sensitive, especially in later levels where the difficulty ramps up. Even worse, there isn’t an option to even modify or fine-tune the tilt controls (although you can invert the axis, if you wish), which feels like an important omission. Also, gamers that aren’t fans of tilt-based games are not going to find a reprieve – Crash Birds Islands is tilt-only.
My biggest issue with Crash Birds Islands is its reliance on purchasing supplemental items and characters using its in-game currency in order to succeed. At the beginning of each level, you’re given the option to purchase either a helmet or a jet pack (which is actually required for some of the missions). You’ll quickly see from the first level on you will never earn three stars unless you purchase the jetpack and the faster characters. Of course, said purchases require coins, which can be obtained through normal playthrough. There’s also the convenient option to buy all the coins you need via IAP to instantly give you a leg-up on progress. While it isn’t hard to earn coins for these power-ups, the fact that they are one-use only and must be purchased per level feels like an easy ploy to encourage the IAP of coins.
One bright spot in Crash Birds is its visual system, which is colorful, cheery and decently implemented. The game’s country-themed music also does a good job reflecting the lighthearted aesthetic and the birds are also cute and feel like they have personality. Crash Birds Islands also runs at a decent framerate, with little slow-down experienced during the actual gameplay on current iOS devices. While the framerate works well, the game does suffers from long load-times even on an iPhone 4S.
Unfortunately, nice looking visuals aren’t enough to propel Crash Birds Islands above the rest of the 3D platformers on iOS. For fans of platformers, Crash Birds certainly has enough to satisfy any itches for a new game. However, the iffy tilt-controls, suspect upgrade system and lackluster objectives do little to appeal to anyone else.
Deep in the bowels of my local Wal-Mart, past frozen foods and sporting goods and electronics, a heated Bop It! tournament takes place. The competitors: me, and the last sticky-fingered kid who pulled one of the boxed electronic toys off the shelf and pulled, twisted, and bopped his way to a high score.
We don't play for credit, these anonymous athletes and I. We play because we revel in the quick thinking and quicker response time needed to keep up with commands as the game fires them off, and because we rise to the challenge wrapped in the insults the game hurls our way when we inevitably react a moment too late, rather than wilt and blubber and sulk.
Luckily, times have changed. Now these toy store athletes and I can trade bulky toys and unsung glory for iPhones, Game Center leader boards, and a new game--Bop It! Smash [Free], a virtual rendition of Hasbro's newest Bop It! contraption.
Fernando Sanchez is Virtua Tennis Challenge’s [$4.99] Rafael Nadal doppelgänger. So whimsically named after barely winning out against Brafael Nadalf in an interoffice poll, Bizarro Nadal quickly became my player of choice in the iOS version of Sega’s classic tennis series. Sanchez, like Virtua Tennis Challenge, is a pretty good facsimile of the real thing. He’s fast and has an incredible two-handed backhand, but he’s a facsimile all the same. A half-hearted attempt at greatness, poor Fernando’s Plasticine mullet and vacant zombie eyes are analogous to the lack of care Sega has given this, the newest entry in one of its most revered franchises.
Jarringly, disappointment and confusion set in from the get-go. Tennis games thrive on the simplicity of input, the best examples (Top Spin, Mario Tennis, some game called Pong) being the classics that make the simple act of swatting a ball back and forth enjoyable. What better platform then, than one that lets you accurately swipe your finger through the ball, right?
Punch Hero's [Free] moment of brilliance occurs when it has you against the ropes. You’ll come to a point during the game’s eighteen-bout arcade mode where progression seems well-nigh impossible. Down to a trickle of health, you will think about throwing the towel in, taking an uppercut to the chin so you can earn some gold and turn the thing off.
But you won’t. Instead, you weave under a vicious right hook and in cinematic slow motion land your own devastating punch. Your opponent is dazed. Jab, jab, jab. Right in his big, stupid face. He comes to, and, mad as hell, throws an uppercut. You weave under it and this time, in similarly cinematic slow motion you throw a left hook. The knockout punch. “Oh my God,” you’ll probably say while your cats look on in shame.
Let's face it, kids: If you are going to become a giant, fire-breathing monster and take over a city by way of stomping on it, you want to do it right. In style. So if I play a videogame that puts me in the role of said monster, I have one rule -- I want to have fun. Glorious, building stomping, people eating fun.
That's why the original Rampage was such a bounding success. When I saw screens of Monster Takedown [$0.99], I thought I was looking at the same kind of thing. You get to be a big octopus or monster with too many eyeballs or whatever and fend off flying helicopters and incoming bombs. The art looked crisp and cute, and I thought if the gameplay hit the mark, we could have a winner on our hands here. Could. Maybe.
We've had our eye on Tweet Land [$1.99] from Why Ideas ever since we spotted it as a curious Kickstarter project back in April of last year. The project was more than sufficiently funded, and last month we were treated to a new trailer and news that Tweet Land would be hitting at the end of January. As expected, earlier this week the game finally went live in the App Store.
Tweet Land was intriguing due to its unique real-time usage of tweets drawn from Twitter that would trigger elements into the game. It reaches out into the vast ocean of Twitter and utilizes special keywords from real tweets to create things in the game. It's a fantastic idea in theory, and Why Ideas did pull it off on a functional level just as they had promised. However, despite being really innovative, Tweet Land doesn't hold up as well in the gameplay department, and there were a couple of unintended side effects of using live tweets that left a sour taste in my mouth.
Way back in 2010 when Monster Dash [$0.99] was released it felt a tiny bit lacking. Not that it wasn't a fantastic game, but it could have used a little more depth. You know, upgrades to earn, a complex mission system, maybe eventual retina support?
Now there's no need to worry about any of that. Not because One Epic Game [$0.99] brings any of that to the table, mind, but because Jetpack Joyride [Free] came out a year later and blew its predecessor out of the water. So why is it we're still seeing retreads of an older, lesser product? Could it be, she wonders, because Grip Gamesforgot their own game's roots when bringing it back from PlayStation Minis?
My feelings on Kairosoft's new simulation, Venture Towns [$3.99 / Lite], are mixed, leaning on negative. My recommendation is rather weak: I'd say buy it... but only if you dug Oh! Edo Towns [$3.99 / Lite] a lot.
Venture Towns, for the most part, is a carbon copy of Oh! Edo Towns set in the modern day. You'll build houses and then people will buy them; you'll build buildings and then people will work in them; you'll buy cafes, and arcades, and pastures, and parks, and then people will spend money in them. A grid-based placing system keeps everything as neat and tidy as can be, and a UI choked with options and graphs and additional mechanics will be where you spend the most of your time.
Buildings, in order to be efficient enough to profit, need to be paired with other very specific buildings. People, in order to fair well in the workplace, need to earn bonus statistics given nebulously from these buildings. Special items, on the other hand, can increase the parameters of buildings, shops, and commerce.
All these systems feed into the overall research and build structure; buildings dish out research points at unpredictable intervals, and this gives you the power to research new buildings. Money gathered then goes into building the stuff you just researched.
This is all pretty simple in theory, but there's a huge, catastrophic catch: the only way to execute well and learn what works is to continually fail, and to fail so badly that you need to start new games over and over again. This is a code-red, oh-my-god-I-hate-this-game kind of stuff -- and nothing really saves it.
I've had to dump around five hours into deficit drowning towns in order to even figure out how to position houses and stores together efficiently. Worse, it has taken over four restarts to get a handle on the combination system -- what buildings go together to create the most profit -- and how to acceptably micro-manage my citizens and buildings with boosts. Venture Towns never gives you the tools to be successful. It fails to give you any kind of blueprint for success, and there's obviously one it wants you to use, or else it wouldn't punish you so much.
This is a problem that feeds into everything else just about as well as its structure feeds into the research and build model. Kairosoft's typically sluggish pacing feels even slower as you flounder, the hot-and-cold translation effort gets even more grating as you're forced to read bad tutorial bubbles, and the dumbphone-geared interface gets even more in the way as you knowingly suck at the game for hours on end.
Venture Towns uncharacteristic ruthlessness makes what's usually forgivable with Kairosoft's formula unforgivable. It makes me feel like the whole thing has been played out; that sly hesitancy to give me all the important information up-front comes off as underhanded, the cutesy visuals feels like a mask, the resemblance to other Kairosoft games conceptually and mechanically is grosser, and the mechanics are bulky and the systems brutal. Its just all so muddled. Confidence and fun come at a costly premium of tons of your time and patience.
For what it's worth, there is a decent-enough game buried in this mess. After wrapping my head around all of the unmentioned mechanics and systems and uncovering most of the title's great mysteries -- such as how to advance as beyond as a town, how to unlock cars as vehicles, and how to grid buildings -- the actual game part, the weighing and measuring of what to build and when, became magically entertaining.
It just sucks that Venture Towns sucks until you invest massive, massive amounts of time into failing and discovering what the game is actually offering. As a whole, it doesn't feel like a fully fleshed out title -- there's too much hanging in the breeze.
Oh! Edo Towns has a similar kind of approach, so I think that game's fanatics might find something they might like in Venture Towns. I gotta say though, the modern backdrop doesn't do this game any favors; it's bland, SimCity type of stuff with Kairosoft's characteristic wrapper.
With the recent announcement that Diablo would be making its way to consoles, gamers have been looking for something to satisfy their hack-and-slash needs on their iOS device. Gameloft recently released the fourth installment of their dungeon crawler, Dungeon Hunter 4, and less than two weeks after, Gamevil has come out with their first foray into dungeon crawlers with Dark Avenger [Free]
