If you're a fan of card games on the App Store, there's a good chance you've heard of Playdek. Creators of the competitive card game Ascension [$0.99], we gave it acceptable marks when it debuted over a year ago. Now, Playdek has partnered with Looney Labs to create an iOS port of Fluxx [$0.99], a more casual-oriented game than its previous offering. Assuming you're in the mood for a game more reminiscent of Uno than Magic, Fluxx may be worth checking out.
For folks unfamiliar with the actual title, Fluxx is a card game for 2-4 players with an emphasis on changing the rules. Cards are divided into four different types: Rule Cards, Keepers, Goals, and Actions. Players initially start out with two cards the baseline rules of having to draw a card from a pile and playing a card from their hand. However, strewn across the virtual deck are rule cards that can change a variety of different parameters. Some examples are cards that change how many cards you can hold in your hand, the amount of cards drawn during each turn, the maximum amount of cards you can hold at any one point, and so on.
About twelve years ago, I went through a phase where I was convinced that blood sport would be the next evolution of American entertainment. This was around the time Survivor hit, and I was watching videos of a lot of very unsettling Japanese game shows. Then reality TV took a sharp left turn into the land of American Idol and The Bachelor, and my fears (hopes?) were allayed.
Man in a Maze [$0.99] is pretty much what I envisioned in those cynical days of my youth: one man, trapped in a maze filled with killer robots, electrified floors and other completely insane things, competing for prizes that wouldn't feel out of place on the The Price is Right. A nice little crystallization of everything that's wrong with mass-media and its obsession with pain and suffering, right here in the middle of a clever game of hide-and-go-seek with death robots.
The contestant of the day is Chuck, an eternally cheerful fellow always ready to throw himself into danger for a nice set of steak knives. The circumstances are almost laughably stacked against him. One man versus the most sadistic set-ups a gameshow host could plan with only a tennis ball to save him.
There are so many things to love about Sega's classic Jet Set Radio. Back when the game debuted on the Dreamcast in 2000, it set the gold standard for visuals, music (courtesy of Hideki Naganuma) and pure style, creating a game that simply hadn't been seen before. The iOS port of Jet Set Radio [$2.99], in some ways, takes that original experience and makes it even better with high-def visuals and a much faster framerate. Unfortunately, like a lot of ports before it, Jet Set Radio's virtual controls leave a lot to be desired, especially when you take into consideration the natural difficulty curve of the game.
If you're one of the few that have never played (or heard) of Jet Set Radio, this is a game about turf wars within the city of Tokyo-to. You take control of a skater gang known as The GGs as they battle rival gangs to take control of the town. Battles take place via missions that span three different parts of the city, with the goal of most missions being to spay the graffiti of your gang over any rival gang marks. While that sounds simple enough, tags can and will be found in areas requiring precise platform skills. In addition, rival gangs, as well as the Tokyo-to police force will always be gunning for you. Finally, a perpetual timer exists in most missions, keeping you on task. Jet Set Radio is a perfect example of a game with a great balance between platforming, action, and exploration.
I envy writers who can always find the word they need, who can tumble through phrase after phrase and arrive at the end in short order. I tend to write ponderously, poking around for the best word for the job and questioning whole paragraphs as I go. That's the kind of thinking that's sure to get you killed in Writer Rumble [$0.99], a word game that isn't for the slower and steadier among us.
No, the preferred strategy in this game seems to be to smash as many three-letter words into your opponent's face as you can in short order, then scramble the board and try again. That's certainly a good rumble, no arguments here. I just can't help but feel I'm letting someone down when I throw down as Homer or Lovecraft with a staggering series of hits like Bat, Bats, Baste, Stab, and my crushing finisher, Stabs. Not a terribly eloquent combo, you know?
Writer Rumble is certain to draw in literary types with its aesthetic experience. You play one of six characters lovingly drawn from the history of the written word. Jane Austen, Edgar Allen Poe, Agatha Christie, the brothers Grimm, Homer and H.P. Lovecraft are all present and ready to rumble. They're cleverly described, humorously animated and I adore each and every one of them. I only wish their unique characteristics came through while playing.
Still, when they battle their way through the single-player survival mode, they travel through great libraries and battle literary demons. They bear special powers that let them manipulate the letters before them. Between rounds, Writer Rumble shares quotes about writing, writers and the power of words. It's such a perfect environment, such great trappings for a word game. If the rest of the game could match up with that experience, no lover of words could resist.
Instead, we have a competitive word game that fails to significantly distinguish itself. It's played on a five by five grid of letters. In multiplayer, both players scramble to find words made up of three or more adjacent letters, launching an attack with each one they select. The board stays static throughout. It's Boggle, but scored as you go.
There's a bit more to it, but not much. Letters have point values, so more complex words have some benefit. Each character has a selection of power-ups that can be used either against the enemy, for a higher score, or more survivability. The only one of these that regularly comes into much use in most matches is scramble, though, as your new best friend for clearing the board when you can't immediately see an unused word.
Feel Every Yummy, the studio behind the game, came close to elevating Writer Rumble beyond being a brief distraction. The power-ups, the survival mode—these things hint at a deeper experience that wasn't quite realized. Instead, you can look forward to frantic and brief matches online, via Bluetooth, or across the screen on iPad. There isn't much else to do. This isn't a terrible thing, but it's also not all that compelling in the long run.
There is one outstanding problem worth mentioning: multiplayer connectivity is a mess right now. Server connections drop regularly, opponents drop out mid-fight (a problem that may have more to do with the win/loss ratio than the servers), and there are far too many long waits for an opponent to notice an invite or successfully connect. Presumably some of this will be fixed up - the developers are already working to improve the servers.
If nothing else, Writer Rumble is a game worth keeping an eye on. There is a near-painful amount of potential here, for what is already a reasonably entertaining multiplayer game. If the kinks are ironed out and a bit more goes into making the game and the characters within it stand out, it could be outstanding. As it is, this is a game that will delight the quick-fingered and quick-witted amongst the more literary minded in our audience. There are far worse things to be.
Right out of the gate, 4NR [$0.99] provokes a couple of big, big eyebrow scrunching obstacles to understanding what exactly it is. It opens with Proverb 15:24 ("The path of life leads upward for the prudent, that he may turn away from Sheol beneath."), has a name that could imply it's a l33t-themed game about a certain British-American hard rock band, and it also looks like it's a Game Boy game prototype. Ignore all of that, tap to start, and 4NR reveals itself to be something much more straightforward, and also much more vexing, than any of that suggests at first glance.
The "Sheol" referred to in the game's intro is from the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible, and it just means "the underworld." Hades. Heck. H-E double hockey sticks as my dad -- and Mitt Romney -- used to say. When the game kicks off you have two paths to take to escape your fate: Either you can ascend to the heavens or you can mine your way down below and try your luck there. Either way, there's gonna be lots and lots of ladders. Think of it as Lode Runner: Spiritual Edition Unplugged With Extra Salvation Sauce Extreme (in two colors).
Motley Blocks [Free / $2.99] takes little voxel statues and blows them into pieces. They probably didn't deserve it. They probably didn't know what hit them. Now they're scattered to bits, and you need to put them back together.
It's a set up for a matching game, but not quite the usual one. Blocks of many colors fly around the screen, doing laps beneath your fingertips. You trace your way through the ones that match, scooping them up so they can be rebuilt. One or two passes are all you have to put what's broken apart back together again.
The fun isn't so much in the matching - it's line drawing with a side of frustration whenever you bump into the wrong color and your combo falls apart. No, the time limit is where the magic happens. After you get beyond the first few, simple levels, there never seems to be quite enough time to clear every single color before that finish line appears on the horizon. It's frantic, but takes extreme control. The distance between those things keeps the game interesting.
When you finish a level, you get to see what you've built. It may be an ice cream sundae or it may be a dragon - it's nice to know which. It's far nicer to know where you rank, because that's when Motley Blocks goes from acceptably fun to dangerously competitive.
There's something about a game featuring rollercoasters that seems to stir up a frenzy in gamers. That's certainly what I felt when I heard about Frontier Development'sCoaster Crazy [Free]. Offering a bit of a fantastical twist to thrill ride creation, there's a lot to enjoy in Coaster Crazy despite some nagging freemium objections.
Before folks get excited with visions of an iOS take on RollerCoaster Tycoon, let's get one thing straight: Coaster Crazy is not a theme park simulation. Rather, Coaster Crazy focuses exclusively on the creation of rollercoasters, with a bit of freemium-based resource management thrown into the mix. The game is broken up into levels, and each level tasks you with building a roller coaster with a variety of objectives. Objectives include the mundane (such as creating a ride that is complete) to interesting (make a rollercoaster with a certain amount of upside-down time) to the complicated (make your ride offer a certain amount of vertical or horizontal g-forces).
Considering how cramped the endless genre feels on iOS, new entries have to try pretty hard to distinguish themselves from the pack. Some titles try to wow with unique art styles, while others focus on improving the actual gameplay experience (while the best games accomplish both). Chillingo'sEndless Road [Free]Â squarely falls in the former, with a great visual presentation that certainly feels unique. However, a relatively basic gameplay experience coupled with a somewhat onerous IAP scheme may leave players wanting more.
As far as endless runners go, Endless Road doesn't deviate much from the norm. Players drive their vehicle across a three-lane highway with the goal of getting as far as possible in a single run. Meanwhile, vehicles and barriers (such as pits, walls and so on) litter the lanes, requiring you to maneuver between the lanes avoiding traffic. Coins can also be collected during a run, allowing players to purchase new vehicles, color schemes, and power-up in an in-game shop. Each run is comprised of 'stages' which give players the opportunity to choose which routes to go to at the end of each, which is a neat way of adding some player choice in an otherwise random setting.
Way back in the spring of 2010, when No Can Win'sCubed Rally Racer [$0.99] hit the scene, the lay of the land was a little different. Retina graphics weren't yet a thing, everyone was using the now-shuttered OpenFeint, and there were all sorts of game genres that didn't begin with "endless."
Cubed Rally Redline [Free] is a game for the modern era, and that's really not a bad thing. It has the same charming retro-blocky look, the same overly aggressive cows and the same boxy little cars, but the rest of the game is a different animal. In Racer, the car was completely in your control. In Redline, it's a bit more of a slot-car situation, stuck in five lanes, hopping between grooves.
As a result, Redline is less of a game of steering skill and more about razor-sharp reflexes. You have three buttons: left, right, and emergency time brake. The first two hop you between lanes, the third slows down time to give you just the slightest chance to maneuver. At any given moment, each lane can be full of obstacles or power-ups. Scattered throughout each run are fuel canisters, coins, and tokens that cause you to drift around curves Tokyo-style. There are also rocks, tunnels, cows and more to contend with.
"In 2012, USA launched a secret proejct. To wake up Japanese people from being too peaceful, their new weapon was sent into Japan. Code name "Battle Cats" Japanese people are too kind and nice to use cruelty weapons to the Battle Cats… By the way, I Saw the developer of the Battle Cats was interviewed on TV… I know, it's insane."  [a thousand times sic.]
That glorious, brain-hurting pile of Engrish is only part of what lurches Battle Cats [Free] into the title screen. There's more to the "story," like how the unknown narrator tried to write a letter to someone and got distracted by their own terrible handwriting and then forgot who the note was meant for so they trashed it. It's all superfluous, crazy, silly, and completely unnecessary because, again, this is all before the game even starts. It's just there to set the scene.
All of this is to say: PONOS' newest game is long on charm and spelling errors, but is still tons of fun. It's a tower defense game but with a couple of key twists: Yes, there are cats, but also you focus more on dispatching units from your single tower instead of upgrading the structure itself. You can improve your tower, but the points you earn are mainly spent to upgrade your troops.
Oh. Yeah. All your troops are cats. Cute, adorable, black-and-white scribbled kitties. Each level starts off with your tower and a slowly increasing wallet. The more you earn, the more cats you can send out. Or you can decide to increase your wallet's capacity, with a button that also speeds up how quickly you accumulate money. The idea is: more, more, more. Earn as quickly as you can. Send cats out as quick as you can. Win as quick as you can.
Each level is set up like a standard showdown: Your enemy's tower is across the way a little bit and they also can send enemies your way. They don't have cats. They have a cat's natural enemies: hippos, stick figures, and dogs. Eventually you'll hit a wall and can't keep up with the enemy onslaught and you can opt to either go back and earn more experience from previous levels or pony up some moolah for in-app purchases to cheat and increase your guys' stats quicker. It's your call, but, you'd have to be the most impatient million-dillionaire to take shortcuts in a game gushing with whimsy about war-driven cats.
There isn't an astonishing amount of depth to the game, which seems more forgivable since it's a free title, but it is a great time-killer. Each level is essentially the same, although the backgrounds change, along with your enemy's towers. (I especially loved the Sapporo beer tower, for example.) So, there's the micro-repetition of each stage and the macro-repetition of leveling stuff up.
There's a lot of different elements to level up (make your tank cat's reach greater, your tower's laser more potent, make your accountant cats able to earn money quicker, etc.), which means Battle Cats (read: not a Thunder Cats knockoff, in case you were wondering) has staying power if you so desire it. Why, you could almost say it has nine lives, but according to Battle Cats, once a cat is killed it dies in a poof of smoke then you have to wait a few seconds to earn $50 to regenerate another one.
If you have daydreams about spending your days at dig sites in distant parts of the world, carefully identifying, cataloging and preserving the history of long-dead civilizations, Choice of Games has your back. Their latest gamebook release, To the City of the Clouds [$1.99] is mostly about the nitty-gritty of archeological field work.
One gets the impression that author Catherine Bailey has personal experience with grant proposal writing, local alcoholic brews, unscrupulous colleagues, regional poverty, and the risks posed by exhaustion, exposure, tropical diseases, and political instability.
A quick word to developers releasing melodramatic arch-fantasy games on iOS: give your Viking brute a name or I will call him Hodor in my internal monologue.
I mean, I'm sure the hero of Alpha Dog Games' Wraithborne [$2.99] has a thoroughly melodramatic backstory -- having been born of a wratih and all -- but the story (and its voice-acted narration) is camp of the highest order. Hodor's warhammer is an appropriate symbol: blunt.
Hodor's hammer is well served by the Unreal Engine, though, which excels at rendering the chunky, heavy violence you'll find in Wraithborne. The enemy and character design isn't much to write home about, but Wraithborne succeeds in making each strike feel physical better than most 3D action games on iOS. Boulders, cystals, and wooden beams shatter nicely, and Hodor's attack animations are just slow and ponderous enough to make combat engaging without making it slow and unresponsive. Clean lines and clear environments roundout Wraithborne's visuals.
The mechanics at play in Wraithborne is standard for action games: light and heavy attacks, a shield, some special spells activated by a rune-tracing mechanic that stopped being interesting halfway through Phantom Hourglass. The controls aren't good per se, but they impart their own weird internal rhythm once you get used to them.
Hodor can equip three spells at a time -- each with their own mana cost and cooldown -- but his mana pool also governs his shield and can be used to power up his basic attacks. At its best, Wraithborne encourages quick decision making: you could cast a healing spell, or just spam your shields to stay alive; you could summon a powerful but inaccurate fireball, or use that mana to power up a dash attack. These trade-offs are the tried and true tropes of action gaming, but they're evergreen because they work.
Furthermore, Wraithborne suggests some amount of depth: Hodor can be seen unleashing projectiles in our TA Plays video, but I could never quite pull those off; there are still a few runes I haven't quite figured out, though perhaps a few upgrades will prove illuminating. The finer points of Wraithborne's mechanics could use more explanation.
The same can be said about Wraithborne's map. The entire game is played in one contiguous, looping area. This is actually pretty neat, as it cuts down on load times, and finding where and how each section dovetails with the others can be its own reward for exploration. More baffling is how Wraithborne handles, say, player death, or the completion of an objective: the game just dumps Hodor in an ostensibly random part of the map.
This isn't really a bad thing -- the world of Wraithborne is pretty small (too small, in fact, for it's over-the-top lore to really take hold), every area is easy to get to, and you can farm goblins and jewels for spell upgrades along the way -- but it is a weird thing.
One explanation might be to pad Wraithborne's length. It's a relatively short game, even by iOS standards -- I completed it in two sittings, deaths and all. Calm your outrage: this injustice is largely mitigated by a robust arena-battle, Horde-like endgame. The game's combat and spell system come to life as you fight wave after wave of goblin, werewolf, and succubus in an attempt to beat your friends' high scores (mine hovers around 34,000). You'll be rewarded with more jewels to upgrade your spells, and optional bosses will also drop the rare spells you didn't find during the campaign. Wraithborne is short, but it also doesn't have the gumption to charge you another $1.99 for new levels: there are no in-app purchases at all.
Wraithborne is Alpha Dogs' freshman effort, and it's not a bad one: it's well-realized within its own confines and makes good use of its visuals and level design. It's probably a bit short and shallow, but touch-controlled action gaming is really difficult, and Wraithborne stakes its claim valiantly.
As you probably know,we'renostrangers to Cobra Mobile'siBomber series. Once a series focused on simple tap-to-destroy bombing runs, the shift to tower defense with iBomber Defense [$2.99]Â and iBomber Defense Pacific [$2.99]Â brought welcomed depth and a larger following to the collection of games. Well, Chillingo and Cobra are mixing it up again with iBomber Attack [Free], a tank-based dual stick shooter. While Attack is a pretty competent tank game on its own, the lack of co-op along with a few other issues keep it from the heights of its tower defense brethren.
Like other iBomber games, Attack doesn't have much of an overarching story. Each mission is self-contained with a few sentences of backstory that set up the primary and bonus objectives. While most missions charge players with blowing up buildings or enemies (sometimes both!) Attack attempts to mix it up a little with time limits and multiple objectives. Still, the story and mission structure is rather basic and doesn't offer much that hasn't already been experienced.
When I first got my iPad, I hadn't been playing physical board games for long. Sure, I played Monopoly and its ilk as a kid, but it wasn't until I got into things like Arkham Asylum and Carcassone as an adult that I really understood the appeal. Before that, they seemed slow, finicky and sort of lame. Afterwards, they seemed slow, finicky and kind of fantastic. The iPad let me dream of board games that kept the quality and ditched all those slow, finicky bits.
For the most part, that's come true. Board game fans are already spoiled for choice on iOS, and a lot of that choice is excellent. Up until now, though, we've been getting a slow trickle of ports of long-standing and popular tabletop titles. Reiner Knizia's Qin [$4.99 (HD)] throws down the gauntlet to game designers by landing simultaneously on the App Store and on retail shelves. The only problem? I can't imagine why I'd possibly want a boxed version when the iPad release is this well-made.
Like so many of the most ingenious gaming concepts, the endless runner is so simple and effective that it’s hard – if not impossible – to bring anything fresh to the concept once it’s been out there in the digital wild for a little while.
Tetris, Bejeweled, Flight Control and so many other genre-founding titles provided such tight and engaging mechanics that they effectively sealed the door behind them, but that doesn’t mean there haven’t been some highly entertaining derivatives that followed. Save Them All [$0.99] is just that kind of respectful homage to the brilliant – if limited – Canabalt. The real question isn’t where it gets its inspiration from, of course. It’s whether you need this game if you already own an endless runner collection.
Save Them All promises you a story mode, which is very rare in this niche genre. But don’t get too excited about that aspect; for the most part the plot boils down to occasional and shabby comic book cut scenes and a trio of objectives for each level before you progress to the next one. The lackluster story mode isn't a deal breaker, as this isn’t a game style that really lends itself to storytelling, but neither is it a particularly strong selling point.
If you're a fan of card games on the App Store, there's a good chance you've heard of Playdek. Creators of the competitive card game Ascension [$0.99], we gave it acceptable marks when it debuted over a year ago. Now, Playdek has partnered with Looney Labs to create an iOS port of Fluxx [$0.99], a more casual-oriented game than its previous offering. Assuming you're in the mood for a game more reminiscent of Uno than Magic, Fluxx may be worth checking out.
