Easily one of the more stylish games to grace the AppStore, Colorbind brings to the platform the fresh concept of puzzle-oriented ribbon weaving. Your objective each level is to match all the circles on screen with their respective colored ribbons and you do so by simply dragging your finger across the screen.
What makes Colorbind challenging is that each ribbon cannot intersect with another on the same plane– they must be folded either under or over the other by creating a right angle. The concept sounds difficult in text but soon becomes second nature after seeing the ribbons interact first hand, revealing a simple elegance to Colorbind that looks incredible.
That's not to say the game isn't challenging though as Colorbind has some of the more difficult puzzles we've seen yet on the AppStore. Some levels will have you at wits end trying to unravel (pun very much intended) the correct maze of ribbon needed to collect all the various colored circles. Certainly not one for the faint of heart, but all ye puzzle fans and lateral thinkers will definitely get a kick out of Colorbind.
In any case, be sure to check out the free Lite Version for a hands-on with the gameplay.
Disney has pulled a proverbial rabbit out of its hat (or hole?) by surprising us with a timely Alice in Wonderland [App Store] puzzle-platformer to tie-in with the upcoming film release.
Our early impressions from playing through the first few levels are definitely positive, with a range of puzzles providing some fresh if challenging gameplay elements. Alice in Wonderland – An Adventure Beyond The Mirror, the game's full title, pits you in the shoes of Alice who finds herself back in Wonderland on another inane adventure. By tapping on Alice you are able to change between four other characters including the White Rabbit, the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter and the March Hare; each with their own abilities to help Alice navigate through the various puzzles you'll encounter each level. The game's write-up and feature list as provided by Disney is as follows:
Play as Alice and solve a series of puzzles with help from the Mad Hatter, White Rabbit and other memorable characters from the movie. Explore a world filled with whimsical settings, optical illusions, challenging puzzles, and formidable adversaries.
Master unique abilities with the help of Alice's friends:
Freeze time with the White Rabbit
Make objects appear or disappear with the Cheshire Cat
Use the power of Telekinesis with the March Hare
Transform objects from one world to another with the help of the Mad Hatter
Unlock Hidden Objects in Alice's Journal with your GPS, Camera, Photo Library, and by playing the game!
100's of puzzles and challenges to complete
The graphics in Alice in Wonderland are a rich, cell-shaded affair that bring out the child-like madness of Wonderland beautifully. In a way they remind us of the hit multi-platform indie game Braid (most definitely a welcome thing), which is fitting as some of the gameplay elements are very Braid-esque too, with stopping and starting time and objects featuring heavily from the get go.
Our review is still cooking but we'll have it hot out of the oven for you shortly. In the meantime, be sure to check out the Lite version which offers up a brief tutorial level to give you a taste of the gameplay.
Last week we got a sneak peek at Indeeo Games' recently released line drawing game, AirStrike Defense [App Store]. Featuring three modes that the game hops between with each mission, AirStrike Defense asks players to control ships and/or planes in a variety of different combat scenarios.
Regardless of which unit type you're controlling, both naval and air forces are maneuvered by drawing lines originating from the ship or plane. Both are capable of boosting their speed for a brief period of time, and handle much differently depending on the unit. For instance, massive battle ships move and turn extremely slow, while smaller ships move much faster, and your jets move even faster.
Gameplay is structured through a series of mission, each with slightly different objectives. Some naval missions ask you to navigate a fleet of battleships through an ocean full of mines, or avoid bombers trying to sink your ships. Air missions involve bombing enemy ships, and there's a combination mode where you're managing your air offensive while protecting your naval fleet.
The sea missions are fun, but I found the various bombing missions to be the most enjoyable by far. As you progress through the game, you'll need to take out entire fleets of enemy battle ships with your bombers and your performance is graded by your overall bombing accuracy. Achieving a high accuracy score is easier said than done, as it takes quite a bit of skill to precisely drop bombs on enemy fleets filled with a variety of ship types that all behave differently.
Where things went south for me was when AirStrike Defense has you managing both bombers and ships at the same time. Instead of having everything take place on a single screen, you hit a button in the top left corner that switches in between the screen with your air forces bombing the enemy fleet and the screen with your fleet avoiding the enemy bombers. It's confusing and disorienting constantly switching back and forth between both battles to manage all your units at once.
While I wasn't crazy about the combination missions, AirStrike Defense does a great job at mixing up the objectives enough to keep gameplay fresh. The line drawing controls work great, and there is a ton to work towards in the game as you slowly get access to different types of ships and planes. AirStrike Defense is definitely worth a look if you've enjoyed line drawing games in the past, and want something a little more involved than Flight Control and similar spinoffs.
In 1989, influenced by Tetris and tic-tac-toe, Dave Akers and Mark Stephen Pierce created Klax, originally programmed in just a few weeks in Amiga Basic. Nearly 20 years later, Mark Stephen Pierce flying solo with the help of Super Happy Fun Fun released Star*Burst [App Store], a matching game with tons of particle effects and all the gameplay from classic Klax turned upside down as the rights to the original Klax seems to be trapped somewhere in Midway's bankruptcy-powered licensing purgatory.
If Klax was before your time, or you just never got around to pumping quarters in to a Klax machine, here's the basic gist of the Star*Burst– Randomly spawning bricks come down a conveyor belt towards a paddle which can catch and hold up to five bricks at once. Moving your finger around controls the paddle, and swiping down throws a brick back up on to the conveyor belt, while tapping the paddle throws the brick up to the five by five grid at the top of the screen.
Blocks on the top of the screen are cleared by matching them horizontally, vertically, diagonally, and other more complicated layouts such as forming arrows, an X, or stars. The more blocks you clear the more points you earn, and as blocks are removed the existing blocks compress to fill any spaces that may have been created as blocks disappear– Allowing you to chain massive combos (and earn point multipliers) if you can set them up.
When you get farther in to the game, wild blocks that will match any color and bomb blocks appear that can destroy nearby blocks on the grid. Just like Klax, achieving high scores involves thinking ahead and intelligently managing which blocks you keep on your paddle, which blocks you flip back up on to the conveyor belt, and how you arrange the blocks on the grid. The game is over when you either fail to catch five blocks from the conveyor belt, or you run out of spaces on the grid to place new blocks.
If you were a fan of the original Klax, you need to have Star*Burst on your iPhone. The touch controls work well, and really my only gameplay criticism is that the on-screen button to make the conveyor spit out blocks (the small square with two arrows near the top in screenshots) seems to be awkwardly positioned. You really only need to speed up the block conveyor in the earlier levels when blocks come slower, so this is a very minor issue.
Star*Burst has online scoring and tons of achievements, but unfortunately uses Facebook instead of Plus+ or OpenFeint so the online scoring/achievement functionality is fairly primative and seems to be limited to your Facebook friends and spamming your Facebook wall. With a better online scoring system, Star*Burst would be amazing.
It's hard for me to resist a game with a ridiculous premise, and it's difficult to get more silly than this. In Ghosts'n Zombies [App Store] you play as a bushy-eyebrowed, cigar-smoking, shotgun-toting monk who apparently was dispatched from the Vatican to investigate a mysterious haunted chapel. Upon your arrival, you discover the church is absolutely loaded with rats, ghosts, zombies, and other demons. So, as an agent of the Vatican, what do you decide to do? Shoot everything that crosses your path of course.
The movement of your monk is controlled by tilting your iPhone, and shooting is just a matter of tapping the screen. Alternatively, you can drag your finger around to precisely aim your shots, which are then fired upon releasing your finger. Aiming your shots quickly becomes a vital component of the game, as apparently the Vatican sent you out on your mission woefully low on ammo. Killing multiple baddies in one shot causes them to rain loot for you to pick up which restores your ammo and slowly builds a meter in the top left corner of the screen that you can tap to briefly upgrade your weapon to a rifle, mini gun, and even a rocket launcher of sorts among others.
The more enemies you can kill at once, the more loot and points you get, but at the same time there is a delicate balance between holding off to be able to shoot multiple enemies while still allowing yourself a clearing to run to without getting hit. As you progress through the game, different environmental obstacles and enemies are introduced, with spice up gameplay even further. Ghosts'n Zombies includes OpenFeint, providing leaderboards for each level along with a bundle of achievements to earn.
One thing that's strange about Ghosts'n Zombies is that the paid version game comes bundled with Ad Mob ads on the menu screen. According to the developer, these ads are only going to be in place until the introductory sale is over, but they seem like a very odd thing to include regardless– Especially with how much people dislike advertising in anything they're paying for. Never the less, Ghosts'n Zombies is a fun shooter with a silly premise, and worth picking up if you can ignore the ads rotating on the main menu.
The latter half of 2009 saw a barrage of top-down dual-stick shooters emerge on the AppStore, though scarce few proved memorable or substantial. It is fortunate then that Guerilla Bob [AppStore] departs from the trend, providing both finely tuned action gameplay and all the bells and whistles expected of a polished title.
Guerilla Bob's bloody adventure begins with a forgettable story designed only to set the scene for the gun-toting action which follows. Fortunately, that action never lets up, periodically dispersing weapon upgrades and varied enemies in which to unleash them as you progress through the game's 7 missions. All up, these can be breezed through in well under an hour on easy mode, whilst the hard difficult may throw up the occasional challenge to lengthen that time as enemies fire more rapidly and in greater numbers. Though this may seem short, Guerilla Bob does a great job in keeping the linear gameplay fresh, unleashing enemies on you in a myriad of ways; be it from behind fortifications, on the banks of a river as you sail past, or mano a mano on a tight-rope bridge to name just a few.
From the onset Guerilla Bob's action feels graciously familiar, borrowing heavily from tried and true mechanics of past successes such as Minigore whilst wrapping the formula in a gorgeous middle eastern setting. In fact, it appears that sharing the same publisher has allowed a collaboration of sorts with the Minigore developers; a certain well-known protagonist featuring heavily in the loose Guerilla Bob storyline. More importantly however, the developers have ensured that Guerilla Bob handles just right, with the responsive thumb-sticks proving a boon in the enemy-laden Survival mode.
Where Guerilla Bob stands on its own two feet is in its terrific presentation. The middle eastern theme has been beautifully crafted, to the extent that you can make out various garments hanging from clothes lines as you pass underneath. Enemies are treated with the same careful brush and are introduced in a retro freeze frame as they are encountered to show off their detail. There is no problem at all telling the pot-wearing grunt from the explosive barrel-wielding suicide bombers. As each enemy requires a different strategy to counter, being able to tell them apart at a glance is a godsend. The presentation is rounded by Bob's amusing banter, his frequently corny but gruff commentary another throwback to Minigore. The rest of the sound is a mixed bag, with gun fire occasionally sounding more like popcorn. Fortunately the explosion and fire effects are spot on and the persistent jungle beat never overpowers the action.
If one had to nitpick, it's that perhaps the game is a little too short, relying squarely on its Survival Mode which is unlocked upon completion of the game to meter out replayability. And whilst the diversified levels are appreciated (particularly the night mission!); re-use of the same art assets throughout really leaves you pining for a fresh setting by the game's end, as the desert does start to feel monotonous. Fortunately, Survival Mode is challenging and frantic, and can very quickly amount to the bread and butter of the gameplay for those more competitively inclined.
It's worth noting too that Guerilla Bob is another game to feature Chillingo's very own Crystal SDK to provide many of the same features that we are accustomed to from the existing OpenFeint, Plus+ and AGON platforms. It appears to do the job just as competently and is integrated seamlessly with the game which is nice.
Guerilla Bob does a great job raising the bar for how a top-down dual-stick shooter should be packaged. It is both eye-catching and sassy in its presentation whilst still presenting a fun, non-stop desert rampage. Complaints about its length only accentuate how drawn into the gameplay one actually gets, as by the end of it you are already looking forward to a hopeful sequel.
Be sure to check out the launch trailer above and post your own impressions to our Guerilla Bobdiscussion thread, where people have been going crazy over the game since its release.
Nothing says "shear terror" like a good old fashioned brother vs. brother llama farm cannon battle, and Fleeced! – Shear Terror (developed by Bight Interactive Inc.) delivers that action in spades. This is the a revamp of the "castle defense" genre that absolutely works, and it even comes with online multipalyer.
The premise of Fleeced is quite unique, to say the least. You control one of two brothers in the midst of a hardcore sibling rivalry, and they've decided to settle their rivalry by setting up fragile llama pens about 100 feet from one another and firing cannons at each other. In a completely unrelated incident, there is one "llama rustler" prowling around the outskirts of both brothers' pens, and any time a wall is brought down by cannon fire they'll pounce on the unsuspecting llamas and shear some of their valuable fur.
Victory can be achieved in these 1v1 faceoffs by opening up your opponent's wall repeatedly to let in their local llama rustler in enough times to fully shear the llama. I have absolutely no idea why making your brother's llama naked would make you victorious in anything, but that ridiculous plot setup makes for an extremely fun, competitive game.
As an angry llama farmer, you have several options available to you in your battle against your brother. There are four different types of cannons that can be built, but building a cannon will cost you several coins. Luckily for you, coins randomly apparate within your llama pen at a constant rate throughout each match, so all you'll need to do is run over these coins using the on-screen dpad to pick them up. The walls of your pen will require constant maintenance as your brother attacks him with his cannon fire, but repairing them is as easy as walking over to the wall in question and tapping the "repair" button, and repairs don't cost a player any coins.
The actual act of firing a purchased cannon on your brother is an interesting event in which the game camera follows behind the slow-flying cannonball and tilt controls are used to direct the ball's flight path to a desirable impact point (preferably right in the middle of two walls right near the ever-prowling rustler; hitting a wall right in front of the rustler allows him quick access to your opponent's soon-to-be-nude llama). The tilt controls work extremely well, and after only a few games nearly anyone will be able to master them without trouble. Fleeced uses some extremely intelligent auto-calibration so you'll be able to play the game even wile laying in bed without problem. This is a feature that I cannot express enough my appreciation for, and more developers (I'm looking at you, Super Monkey Ball dev team) should take note.
Cannons and walls can be upgraded, but in my experience the game's balancing was a little bit off in both of these areas, as the reward for delving into the upgrade system really wasn't ever worth the cost. Fully upgraded walls are still pretty weak comparitively, and it would cost dozens upon dozens of coins– coins that could be better spent on more cannons– to upgrade all the walls in a pen (especially in the single player game's later levels, where the llama pens become enormous and difficult to manage).
The single player mode is really more of an introduction to Fleeced than anything else, especially given its incredibly short length. The real draw in Fleeced is the arcade mode, where players can face either an A.I. opponent or their friends via wi-fi, bluetooth, or even internet connections. Arcade mode lets players set perimeters like the size/shape of their llama pens and strength of the wind during the game (which will determine how hard it will be to steer your cannon shots into their targets). It's worth mentioning that when selecting to play online, a popup message that says "Internet play is free for a limited time" appears. Assumedly due to the negative feedback that this message generated, Bight Interactive has confirmed in our forums that online play will always be free, and that the scary message will soon be removed.
While I hope that a little bit of balancing to make upgrading walls and cannons more of a worthwhile investment will be done in a future update, it's safe to say that Fleeced! – Shear Terror is already a great multiplayer game. The quirky art style melds extremely well with the high-quality 3D environments, and the game ran consistently smoothly for me. Fleeced is worth every penny of its asking price.
Meridian has released a new game in the App Store which is a departure from their recent games such as Alive 4-Ever and Against the Fire. This time they've returned to the time management genre with a nice doctor-themed game called Are You Alright?.
Chloe is a brilliant doctor that strongly believes the medical machines invented by her dad will bring great benefits to a lot of patients around the world. She continues to work at hospitals in different countries to demonstrate the machines so that they can be widely used and recognized.
Like most time management games, you are tasked with keeping your customers (well, patients in this case) happy as you direct them from station to station. The story mode for Are You Alright takes you across 70 levels with 50 additional Time Attack levels.
Are You Alright? keeps things interesting by adding station-specific mini games such as X-Rays, Bacteria Testing, Plaster Casting and more. You need to take the time to properly complete each task before moving on.
As you earn money during levels, you can upgrade your equipment and hire additional help that will help keep the flow of patients moving. But, take too long with one, and they might not make it out alive.
This gameplay video shows an early level:
We've only spent a short amount of time with the game so far, but we've found it to be a fun and well executed time management game.
Zombie games come a dime a dozen on the App Store, but most take form as some sort of shooter, so it's refreshing to see somebody trying something new in The Raging Dead, developed by GhostBird Software. Using either bombs or a machine gun players of this fresh zombie game are tasked with quickly eliminating a zombie threat in over 22 different areas of a metropolitan city from a bird's eye view. With agressive zombie A.I. that will hunt down civilians and convert them to their undead army in only seconds, The Raging Dead will require a quick eye and an even faster finger to find success.
Each level in The Raging Dead consists of a single screen with hundreds of dots that represent people milling about. Blue dots are humans, and red dots are zombies. At the start of a level there will only be a few red dots (or more, depending on how far into the game you've made it) but that quickly changes as the evil little red dots begin quickly catching the little blue people, pausing only for a second or two to convert the former human into another red zombie dot, which will then join in with its attacker to catch even more humans.
As you might imagine, entire cities can be completely overrun with zombies unless the undead are stopped quickly, and that's where the player comes in. Tapping on the screen will drop a bomb (or fire the machine gun, if that's your preference), killing all zombies in the impact area. That impact area is painfully small at first, and that combined with the extremely zoomed out view in each level makes precision a bit difficult. Luckily, weapons can be upgraded with money earned at the end of each level to allow for a more forgiving blast radius, so players will be able to eliminate the zombie threat quickly and efficiently.
The interesting part of the game becomes apparent when you realize that your weapon has limitations like reload speed time, and you must sacrifice some civilians in order to prevent the infection from hitting everywhere in the city at once. The strategy is to quickly eliminate all the scattered zombies at the start of the level, and by the time you've done that it's likely that the one or two that you missed have created a small army around their locations. That's just the sacrifice that you'll have to make if you want to be successful, because the only way to win is the eventually get all the zombies in a corner where they have no more civilian targets to infect and wipe them out all at once.
Bombs are great for killing many zombies at once, but you'll run the risk of killing humans and damaging the city if you spam them. The machine gun can only kill one zombie at once but its very useful once you decide to start going for "A" rankings by avoiding avoiding city damage and keeping more civilians "unzombified."
There are four different rankings that can be awarded at the end of each completed level, and more money is distributed to the player for higher rankings. Levels can and will likely have to be replayed to farm money (especially towards the beginning of the game, where everything is just a tad too hard), but it's likely that you won't mind, as levels can be completed in only seconds if you're good enough and you'll want to improve your level rankings anyway.
GhostBird Software has stated in our forums that multiple profiles, more levels, more weapons, more behaviors, and different modes like challenge and survival will be added in the future.
The Raging Dead is an interesting game, especially if you remember the Zombie Infection Simulator java applets that made the rounds online quite a few years ago. The strategy the game forces you to use in choosing which humans to sacrifice to save the rest of the population from the zombie infection is a unique gameplay element that we enjoyed.
Bottle Rocket Apps is responsible for quite a few entries on the App Store, most notably, the National Public Radio app which has been well received by iPhone owning fans of NPR. Their most recently release is Doodle Bomb [App Store], a physics-based bomb puzzle game that is a lot of fun.
The goal of each of the 50 levels in Doodle Bomb is to assist your eyepatch-equipped "bomb master" in tossing bombs from what appears to be some kind of strange sewer pipe to flip various switches, resulting in a door being unlocked– Allowing you to progress to the next level. Bombs are thrown by tapping on screen in the direction you want to throw, tapping closer or farther away from the bomb master to control the strength of your throw.
Throughout the game you will come across many different obstacles such as mice to bounce bombs off of, soldier to blow up with bombs, switches of different colors that control different gadgets and gizmos on the game board, pipes to throw bombs down, and many others.
Each level can be completed either by just tossing tons of bombs out and hoping something lands where you want it to, or by precisely throwing bombs and using the least amount possible. Every level also comes with a target number of bombs to use, and if you get under that, you will earn a "bomb badge" which then unlock additional goodies in game.
Doodle Bomb reminds me a lot of Ragdoll Blaster and other similar physics games on the App Store. I think it's safe to say if you're a fan of the physics puzzle genre, Doodle Bomb will be a welcome addition to your game collection. The Doodle Bomb thread on our forums also has quite a few people posting positive responses, along with the developer actively answering questions.
Easily one of the more stylish games to grace the AppStore, Colorbind brings to the platform the fresh concept of puzzle-oriented ribbon weaving. Your objective each level is to match all the circles on screen with their respective colored ribbons and you do so by simply dragging your finger across the screen.
Bottle Rocket Apps is responsible for quite a few entries on the App Store, most notably, the 
