Rail shooters are one of my guilty pleasures as a gamer. They're mindless fun, like climbing into a rollercoaster car that happens to rumble and weave through a shooting gallery. I'm especially fond of The House of the Dead, the first on-rails shooter I had the pleasure of touring from inside the cool darkness of a video arcade. The House of the Dead: Overkill - The Lost Reels [$4.99] is arguably the best entry yet, but an aggravating pay model and IAP leaves some divots in an otherwise smooth and flowing track.
Lost Reels consists of three episodes broken up into five stages each. You choose a character, lock and load two guns, and unlock levels as you clear haunted houses and zombie-infested hospitals. By default, you aim your crosshair using a virtual d-pad. After the first few levels, zombies come rushing in from all directions, and the d-pad just doesn't respond fast enough. Aiming using the accelerometer works much better, but did leave me massaging my wrists as I stepped over dozens of corpses toward boss battles and victory screens.
"Endless fallers" isn’t a proper genre name, but if it was, that would be the easiest way to describe Daddy Was A Thief [$1.99] In Rebel Twins' latest, you play as the titular daddy -- imagine a more nefarious Andy Richter -- who finds himself abruptly fired and turns to a life of crime to provide for his family. Instead of cooking meth a la Breaking Bad, he opts for something much more traditional: robbing banks.
Every game starts off with dad escaping the bank’s rooftop and then leaping onto an adjacent building’s roof presumably to make his escape. He automatically runs from left to right, reversing course whenever hitting anything, which frees you up to either jump (swipe up) or smash through the floor below (swipe down). That, pretty much, is the entire game.
Nevertheless, Daddy Was A Thief tries admirably to not feel repetitive. There are obstacles to get in your way, certainly, but part of what keeps things moving are the aesthetics. It’s a subtle move, but each floor is a different, bright, warm color. When you’re crashing through floor after floor, it tricks the eye into feeling like there’s more variety than there really is. Not that Daddy Was A Thief is tricky: It has a few core things going on, and sticks only to them.
Talisman is a geeky boardgaming legend. Created in 1983 by Games Workshop, it features a broad range of fantasy archetypes (Elves, Wizards, Monks, etc.) competing to be the first to reach the Crown of Command.
Each of the heroes available has a simple set of RPG stats, including Strength and Craft (magical power); plus one or two special abilities, such as the Druid's ability to change his alignment at will. Some also have drawbacks: the Monk can add his starting Craft to his Strength when fighting, but can never equip weapons.
The goal is to reach the center of the board, but movement is intentionally imprecise. Each turn you roll a die and move that many spaces in either direction then follow the instructions for the space you landed on: usually drawing one or more Adventure cards, which can represent monsters, loot, followers and other kinds of enconters.
The Nightjar [$4.99] is a fantastic fabrication of horror, creating a vision of terror from the wonderful and disturbed recesses of the subconscious. Your eyes are rendered useless and your ears become sight. Focusing on finite and nearly faint ‘beeps’ of access panels to exit doors, the paces of creatures, and the echoes of a dead and void space station made my body have claustrophobic reactions and my thoughts feel with the dread of a disgustingly loud and crunchy demise. As Somethin' Else's spiritual successor to Papa Sangre [$4.99], The Nightjar is impressive in design and even more in the execution of an auditory warp into darkness.
Left behind to survive on the derelict spacecraft, your goal is to escape its metallic remains. Nightjar has a unique pacing that immediately builds tension as you internally battle the ship’s on-board computer (an eerie homage to ‘Mother’ from Alien) and your guide (voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch). Each contradicts the other, making trust rest with the voice that saves you from the most recent dire circumstance. Sound becomes equal parts enemy and ally.
The controls are minimal using two light bridges expressing your steps and a rotating dial as your compass. As my brain rewired and adjusted to not using the sense of sight, I failed a small number of early acts before I confidently connected to the UI. Nightjar's refinement is displayed when the controls are synchronized with 3D audio from the Papa Engine. As direction is navigated by sounds, going towards something perceived as awful is often done. However, the closer to danger one may come, also yields the true path to your exit as a new sound may be introduced, better defining the correct direction. This made me move with purpose, but not too fast, as every step is wonderfully pivotal by syncing ambience to situational awareness. Utilizing the instructions of the ubiquitous guide, I filtered my projected madness from the atmosphere, and eventually, pinpointing the lifesaving “ding”.
If a deadly apparition feels like its nipping at your feet, it is. Crystal-clear is every sound and yet, The Nightjar often placed my bravery into question as I continually second-guessed myself in moments that needed complete poise and some common sense. When watching a horror-flick, common sense can be constantly absent as supporting characters are either too patient or overly edgy at the incorrect moment. The Nightjar gives you a construct but it doesn’t necessarily have to be obeyed. When death is close, there is no shame in running; or if the exit appears to be near a threat, trying another approach may prove better.
Though a short experience, besting 2 hours, there are several challenging stages in Nightjar's second half that can surely extend your length of play. Coupled with a few generic twists, there’s enough variance in the plot to see The Nightjar through to completion. It is a fresh survival horror app that will test your nerve and synesthesia while leaving a strong sense of fulfillment. The Nightjar is a definite bird to catch so check out our forums and see what the community is saying about the experience.
If it's one thing Brain Seal Ltd's Dark-Quest [$1.99 / $1.99 (HD)] is good at, it's staying close to its roots. In fact, some might argue that this old-school turn-based strategy succeeds in that regard a little too well. Still, as a relatively basic TBS Dark-Quest offers an enjoyable experience with plenty of missions, a party combat system, and a few twists to the standard gameplay that will either intrigue or frustrate you.
If you're familiar with old-school boardgame dungeons such as Milton Bradley's HeroQuest, Dark-Quest will probably seem intimately familiar. Like the classic board game, Dark-Quest's missions are based on pre-generated tilesets full of traps, enemies, and loot. Players have a pre-determined amount of turns to accomplish the board's objectives and escape. Each action, such as attacking, moving, or casting a spell cost a turn. The mission ends when all your characters exit the dungeon (thus signaling completion), die, or run out of turns. Besides its boardgame underpinnings, Dark-Quest plays most closely to a combination of a rogue-like and turn-based dungeon crawler.
The combination of genres makes Dark-Quest a bit deeper than one might initially suspect. While the mission levels aren't randomized, the loot isn't which adds to variation between playthroughs. In addition, the available weapons, spells, and abilities that can be purchased for each hero between missions add to the available tactics and reinforce the roles that each should play. While these are important foundational elements that Dark-Quest gets right in making it a good strategy game, it still felt a little bland overall.
Frustration is also added to the mix with the the skull of fate, where the antagonist wizard will randomly force you to enact a random status effect on you (which is typically negative). The concept is supposed to keep you on your toes as the wizard is constantly watching your party throughout the story, but it seemed unnecessary at best and a cheap way to ruin your mission at its worst.
While Dark-Quest does a good job with the basics of the game, some of its supplemental design decisions are questionable and can be frustrating. For example, each turn defaults to the Barbarian's actions, with the game's limited AI taking over for the other two party members if you don't manually select them before ending the Barbarian's turn. In theory, the AI should go a long way towards speeding up the gameplay and lets you focus on the Barbarian. Unfortunately, the AI is incredibly spotty, with my cohorts either not attacking enemies when they're in range, or doing dumb things like picking up cursed gold that cause health damage. A very recent update thankfully provided the option to turn off auto-follow.
Another questionable decision is the fact that the game does not allow you to save mid-quest. If the game remains in your device's memory you can return to it if you leave the App, but if it gets cleared, you'll have to restart the quest from the beginning. Granted, most of the quests are relatively short, but I still don't understand the lack of some kind of auto-save.
On one hand, there's very little in terms of originality with Dark-Quest, especially in comparison to the board games it gets its 'inspiration' from. On the other hand, it's still an enjoyable strategy game that offers a simplified old-school experience that isn't typically executed well on iOS. Thankfully, as mentioned earlier, the developers are listening to players and updating the game with changes. Assuming you can get by its relatively basic offering (as well as the incredibly simplistic visuals), Dark-Quest is worth checking out for genre fans.
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.
RPGs and matching games are a proven combination, one that's been explored thoroughly since the good old days of Puzzle Quest. There may be variations yet to be discovered, though. Take Dungeon Hearts [$2.99 (HD)], the boss rush of Puzzle/RPG hybrids. It's a frantic matching experience that lets up only when you win or die.
Your party, a fighter, mage, healer and archer, line the left of the screen while a parade of enemies take their places on the right. One after another you knock them down, desperately grab your reward and start in on the next. Your health is whittled down all the while, and you'll have to be both skilled and lucky to reach the end. There's nothing to give you an advantage - no gear, no skills retained between attempts. All you have is your own talent for gem matching to get you through fight after fight.
I don't know about you, but I think Disney's foray into mobile games might have yielded some of the most creative work of its recent years. Ignoring of course the companies they own, the Mouse House has been seen as lagging in both the movie and videogame departments for quite some time. As anyone not living in a sewer themselves knows, that all changed with the release of Where's My Water? [$0.99] For the first time in...well...ever, a new Disney icon had been created at the videogame level first, and the company seemed to be using mobile to kick off an upswing in the quality department. So naturally, with an alligator as their new face of gaming, they'd follow things up with...a fluffy kitten. Wait, what?
If Mittens [$0.99] - from its seemingly detached concept to its unexpected existence - has you skeptical, you're not alone. Heck, in our TA Plays for the game, Brad drew some early conclusions about the way that the experience seemed like it was playing things disappointingly safe both from a mechanical and creative standpoint. Having now cleared through all of the game's levels and its available bonus pack, it seems that like its in-game collectibles, this one might just be a gem after all. As with the title's titular feline, though, players may go through ups and downs along the way.
The thing is, where Swampy brought with him not only a novel concept but a slew of memorable levels - each of which felt like it had a distinct theme and purpose - Mittens meanders much more on its way to eventual greatness. As with any physics puzzler, the basics are covered in the first few levels of each zone, with the core concept revolving around the need to swipe and tap our brave kitty to safety on a quest to impress his true love. Unfortunately, this introductory mindset seems to bleed into a large portion of the game's first fifty levels, with many of them feeling like indistinct, unmemorable versions of one another.
You know that sense you get when a new level in a three-star puzzler feels vaguely like a rearranged version of the one you played just far enough back that the game thinks you forgot it? Yeah, it's that. All the trademark elements are in place, including sliced ropes, last minute drops onto bouncy objects, and risky collectible snagging - painted with a Disney polish that ensures everything feels smooth and precise. Yet for all its emphatic not-badness, there's a lingering feeling of ho-hum in the first two zones that's hard to shake. A sense that Disney might be trading in slightly on its newly minted supremacy in the genre, doing far less than they could to justify a purchase.
The yin to this more reserved yang, however, comes in the form of the levels that appear towards the end of each zone, as well as almost the entirety of the game's third area. Reassuringly, Mittens does eventually step out of the genre's comfort zone to deliver a much fresher take on a well-trod play style. First appearing as five bonus levels that are unlocked as you collect gems, these more complicated stages feel like a wonderful mix between Amazing Alex [$0.99] and Cut the Rope [$0.99]. Each one departs from the "tap here, swipe this" feeling, instead forcing you to navigate landscapes already full of motion, and piece together the perfect timing needed to play your role as the little furry cog in a miniature machine. Better still? They tie together wonderfully and make up for the feeling of detachment prevalent throughout earlier levels. My particular favorites are the five final circus big-tops of the second zone, that culminate in a brilliant level full of tightropes, cannons, and miniature cars.
And while the last zone and the game's much tougher (and more imaginative) harbor zone continue this trend, I can't help but wonder why it feels like it takes almost half the game to get there. Drawing further attention to the game's design foibles is a seeming lack of effort in - of all areas - production values. Mittens' is completely without stage music save for a repetitive chime at the end of a level, and the cut scenes that exist to punctuate play pale in comparison to the subtle, endearing storytelling achieved in Where's My Water? Except for grating meows when you fall into blackness or foul up, the titular kitty lacks all semblance of a personality, and it proves nigh-impossible to invest in the game beyond the compulsive desire to beat its levels.
This, perhaps, is the predicament I'm having with Mittens. You'd be hard pressed to call it bad by any stretch, and about half way through, it manages to take off in ways not hinted at in our TA Plays video to become a pretty wonderful take on the physics puzzler. At a dollar, and with a future that will doubtless be filled with more content, fans of the genre would be hard pressed not to pick this one up. At the same time, however, it's more than a little disheartening that Disney seems to have followed up their return to form with a return to safety, and I don't think it's unreasonable to expect more than a competent time-killer from a studio of their pedigree.
Like a top notch student handing in a rush job, Mittens sags not under the weight of what it does wrong, but all that it could have done much better.
Arguably the best part of the Sonic the Hedgehog 2 of yesteryear was the Chaos Emerald bonus stages. You remember those, don't you? The camera jumped behind Sonic's shoulder and he hustled forward all on his own while you wove him from side to side to collect rings and dodge obstacles.
Those stages unwittingly created the template for the droves of endless runners available on the App Store today, so the logical next step for the spiky blue hedgehog was an endless runner built around ye olde bonus stages, don't you think? Enter Sonic Dash [Free], a fun runner plagued by the same problems that plague most endless runners.
Sonic Dash is all about swerving around enemies, rocks, pits, and other hazards to collect rings. Swipe the screen left and right to switch lanes, swipe up to jump, and swipe down to perform Sonic's trademark roll, which you can use to clobber the enemies puttering around the environments. You can change direction in midair, drop straight down into a roll to treat enemies in your path like bowling pins, and weave around pillars and rocks on a dime.
Trauma [$2.99] gives us few concrete facts. There is a hospital, a woman in a bed, a doctor offering an uncertain prognosis. Beyond that, a series of dreams pieced together from photographs and memories, narrated by the woman, a victim of a traumatizing accident.
Taken on its surface merits, there isn't much to it. As with its original desktop release, Trauma is a tiny game, an experience of no more than an hour or so at most. There are a few ways to explore its virtues, but only so much to discover. What's there is, however, interesting to examine in a way that few mobile games manage.
The goal is to work through four dreams, each with a specific challenge: a teddy bear crushed under a large weight, a ghost that cannot be caught, a road that must be followed, and path that must be found.
There's nothing I love more than a well-executed iOS RPG but there always seems to be an issue of balance in regards to presentation. On one hand, an emphasis on exploration and side quests (as well as the grind) act as throwbacks to the roots of the genre. Meanwhile, streamlined gameplay and simplified battle system are seen as an evolution towards the current mobile scene. BoxCat'sNameless: The Hackers [$3.99 / Free] is squarely in the latter camp. Eschewing a lot of the standard tenets for an RPG, Nameless focuses primarily on grinding and cutscenes, leading to a somewhat monotonous overall experience despite its decent battle system.
Nameless follows a group of ragtag hackers as a few innocent jobs turn into the unraveling of an increasingly complex tale of worldwide control by the corporate machine. Unfortunately, the actual weaving of the tale in Nameless isn't as interesting as my synopsis makes it out to be. The story is told through anime-inspired cutscenes with a lot of the actual advancement of narrative taking place between a load of fetch quests. While the story itself should be compelling, I found the actual writing to be a bit bland.
With its large screen and multi-touch controls, real-time strategy titles have had somewhat of a resurgence on iPads (and its smaller iOS brethren, to a lesser extent). Bitmen Studio's Galactic Conflict RTS [$5.99] is the latest such title, with a focus on tons of spaceships on-screen and the requisite massive scale of dogfights. While Galactic Conflict certainly succeeds in that regard, the rest of the game is relatively benign, leading to an otherwise standard real-time strategy game.
Following the last remnants of Earth across space, Galactic Conflict's campaign features a dozen missions that put you in control of the Terran Confederation as they strive to defend themselves from attacks by the Pyros race. Narratively, what little story that exists in the campaign is told through standard in-mission cutscenes. While I found the campaign a good way to get introduced to all the ships and upgrades, from a story standpoint it was relatively bland. Thankfully, a skirmish mode and decent multiplayer offering exist for folks that just want to get into the battle.
Hacking isn't much of a competitive sport. There are certainly competitions out there like Pwn2Own, but they don't look much like Hollywood's idea of hacking—you know, the bright colours, trippy graphical interfaces and sexy music (and people).
But what if they did?
PWN: Competitive Hacking [$1.99] imagines just such a competition, a tournament that pits Hollywood hacker against Hollywood hacker. They style themselves in cyberpunk accoutrement and have names like Axiom and Cipher. The neurally augmented, the leader of an underground army of hackers, the government agent-turned freedom fighter—these are the sorts of characters that enter the tournament, and that's about all you'll ever know of them.
The colorful cast is a campy treat, but it's just window dressing for the main game: a head-to-head battle for digital territory. The game is played on a grid of linked cubes called nodes. Both players have one node to begin with, and the first to leave the opponent with nothing wins. This isn't a game of manual dexterity—you only need to tap a node to capture it. The time it takes to be captured is dependent on a couple things, namely the number of connected nodes you've already captured and which power-ups you and your opponent have in use.
There are a lot of themes that have been overdone in iOS -- zombies and retro-themed visuals, to name a few. However, one area that hasn't been fully explored is Greek mythology. Chillingo'sFury of the Gods [$0.99] looks to address that by combining well-known ancient mythology thematics with interactive tower-defense gameplay. While Fury's difficulty curve seems to lend itself a bit too much towards IAP, the core game is enjoyable and adds some nice touches to the traditional tower defense genre.
Putting you in the role of three ancient gods, Fury tells the tale of the human race rebelling against their former saviors. As mankind rises up and attempts to attack the gods, you'll utilize various powers and mythological creatures to repel the attacks and put humanity back in its place. Narratively, Fury sounds very much like a certain blockbuster movie series. However, originality aside, I still enjoyed the overall theme. The same goes for the visuals, which do a great job utilizing the Unreal engine to create some decent mythological environments. I only wish the game had more than just three locales, as each one looks great.
Don’t cringe next time you’re gifted a bad sweater for Christmas – those adorable knitted trees and animals have feelings, you know. That’s if Forest Moon’s iPhone-only Knitted Deer [$0.99] is anything to go by, anyway. This runner brings a, well, knitted deer to life, prancing whimsically through purl-stitched meadows of floating skulls and circular saws. It’s deliciously delightful, in the same way as an awkward holiday dinner with extended family can be.
As far as controls go, you know the drill. Tap the left side of the screen to make our bipedal, antlered hero jump (or double-jump); spam-tap the right side to shoot-shoot-shoot. Various obstacles will keep coming at you, and your only goal is to either clear them or kill them. It takes awhile to get used to this deer’s super-high leaps and bounds, but once you’re familiar with it, Knitted Deer is rather engaging. You’ll pick up coins from fallen monsters, and these can be used in an upgrade system that feels admittedly under-implemented.
There’s no health bar, and you’ve got just two lives to spare – well, one life and one death, to be precise. When your happy reindeer slams headfirst into a barrier, he’s doomed to sweater hell with limbs flailing pitifully, the pleasant navy-and-cream color scheme giving way to a world of blood-red. Like Dante’s Inferno predicts, it’s a little more difficult down here than it is on mortal ground; hurled spears join the list of things trying to kill you, and the placement of barriers grows only more haphazard.
You’re not likely to last long. Most games will clock in at under a minute, which makes this the perfect timewaster for whiling away dragging moments at the bus stop.
The visuals and blippy music make for a beautiful aesthetic. While the chunky knit-stitch occasionally makes menu titles difficult to read, it’s been employed wonderfully in representing the deer and his danger-filled world – I never thought that watching a deer get his head ripped off by a bat might actually look rather charming.
The whole knit thing is the reason you’re most likely to pick up Knitted Deer, and it’s also the thing that’ll most likely keep you playing. If we’re being honest here, Knitted Deer doesn’t do anything new in the runner genre, besides veneering everything in yarn and adding a dark twist to our yuletide fashions. It does do an amazing job of exploiting its aesthetic, and it’s worth picking up purely because of that. Plus, just imagine the merchandising opportunities – I’m envisioning hell-sweaters, woollen deer plushies, everything.
Rail shooters are one of my guilty pleasures as a gamer. They're mindless fun, like climbing into a rollercoaster car that happens to rumble and weave through a shooting gallery. I'm especially fond of The House of the Dead, the first on-rails shooter I had the pleasure of touring from inside the cool darkness of a video arcade. The House of the Dead: Overkill - The Lost Reels [$4.99] is arguably the best entry yet, but an aggravating pay model and IAP leaves some divots in an otherwise smooth and flowing track.
