Maybe it's the '90s era gamer in me, but I always feel right at home playing a sidescroller. Wrrr [Free] is just that, with a touch of hand drawn charm to make the package even more appealing. You play a dinosaur dad who has been separated from his family and has to go on a trip to find them. And so off you go through nine different levels of challenge to rescue them. Yes, I know you've heard it before, but hey, we don't play iOS titles for the deeply compelling stories (although I admit there have been a few exceptions).
On the whole, Wrrr feels very traditional, and reminds me a bit of Earthworm Jim. You have a world map, which is really very handsomely drawn, to show you your progress as you go through each level. Your controls are basic: a forward and backward arrow in the bottom left corner and a d-pad in the right that lets you jump, crouch, swing your tail behind you, and strike forward with your weapon.
iPad users have had the pleasure of checking out Michael Jackson: The Experience [$2.99 / $4.99 (HD)] for a few months, but it wasn’t until last week that iPhone/touch users were finally able to jam with the King of Pop. Now that both versions are available, we thought we’d see how it plays out on iOS. Unfortunately, the excellent presentation and fan service that it offers aren’t enough to overcome a variety of issues concerning controls, song selection and visuals.
If you’ve never played one of the many iterations of Michael Jackson: The Experience, you’re in for a treat from a fan service perspective. Songs take place in environments from their music videos, with backup dancers and scene changes as appropriate. Cutscenes and familiar choreography set the stage and do a great job helping you remember the time of classic (and dare I say, better) music videos. You can also change Michael’s costumes between songs (for a price), adding to the nostalgia. There’s a lot here in terms of presentation and production values. Unfortunately, the game goes downhill from there.
Being based off the Vita version of Experience, you’d expect this iOS port to have decent visuals and to a certain extent you’d be correct. The game looks nice enough, but behind the mask you’ll find stunted (and repetitive) movement. In addition, I encountered slowdown spikes at random intervals during some song runs, which can be really dangerous and mess up timing (particularly in a rhythm game). Still, outside the slowdown the visuals work well enough for a rhythm game, until you get to the controls.
Experience’s gameplay centers on swipes and taps that must be done to the beat of the music. Prompts will appear on the screen indicating the direction and timing of the move, with two indicators slowly coming together until they merge (indicating the right time to swipe/tap). Harder difficulty levels add in curve and circle-swipes, as well as moves requiring both hands.
There are several issues with the rhythm controls in Experience. First, the timing mechanism just feels off. There are not enough visual cues to really differentiate between a ‘Perfect’ and a ‘Great,’ leaving you guessing a lot. In addition, there aren’t any auditory cues if you miss notes. Finally, while I understand hard difficulties are supposed to be, well, difficult, but Experience’s difficulty seems to stem more from a confusing mess of control prompts rather than actual difficulty. Other silly issues, such as the inability to see which difficulties you’ve beaten, and the lack of a song progress meter, keep the game behind the curve.
One area that is really disappointing in Experience is the song selection. For the price of the game you get four full songs to play, with 9 others available as IAP (separate purchases, no packs). Strangely enough, the IAP selection seems to vary between the iPhone version and the iPad version. For example, Thriller is available as IAP for iPad, while it’s not for iPhone (which makes no sense to me). I’m not sure of the reason for this fragmentation (besides monetary reasons), but I don’t like it. Adding insult to injury is the fact that all the IAP is pre-downloaded, with purchases simply “unlocking” the songs vice downloading. Maybe it doesn’t make much of a difference but it just feels wrong.
Unfortunately, offering a recommendation for Experience isn’t as black or white as one would hope. The imprecise controls, and surprisingly small song selection hold the game back. Of course, that’s not to say that the game is necessarily bad – it just isn’t as good as the better iOS rhythm titles. Regardless, if you’re a fan of Jackson songs and you’re willing to put up with the above issues, you can do a lot worse than Michael Jackson: The Experience. Just don’t expect much more than the fan service if you get it.
Sometimes all you need is a gimmick. The difference between a bland game and a winner can come down to a clever idea that turns a genre on its head. Then again, sometimes a gimmick just isn't enough.
Enter Button Brigade [$1.99]. It seems so very clever: virtual buttons are often such a shoddy solution, constantly in the way of the action. In Button Brigade they are the action. They live inside the game world, and inform everything you do. It's a neat idea, one that seems kind of special. In practice, though, that specialness rarely shines through what is an otherwise middling dungeon-crawling puzzle game.
I love the idea of Party Wave [$1.99]. Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi creates his own studio, Mistwalker, and sets out to build a game that captures one of his lifelong loves: surfing. It's the sort of feel-good story that iOS has become known for, the developer who finally has the freedom to make what he really wants to make.
I'm not quite as into the reality of Party Wave, though. It's cool in concept -- a line-drawing game about bringing surfers together through all manner of dangers tied to an arcade game about keeping them all riding the swell or up in the air. But as with so many first attempts in the App Store, it bails on the controls.
Don't know who Judge Dredd is? That'll be 6 months, creep, for lying to an officer.
Dredd is the UK's best-known comic book character, but if you're not into comics then you probably only know him from the utterly regrettable Stallone movie. With another movie in the works and fan hopes high, it's a good time for Tin Man Games' Judge Dredd: Countdown Sector 106 [$5.99].
Judge Dredd had been arresting perps -- and shooting them in cold blood -- since 1977, and reflects the cold war paranoia of the time through the satirical lens of British humor. You see, the comic book is British, but the character is American. Dredd is part of the dictatorial government of post-apocalyptic Mega-City One. He (and the other Judges) are literally judge, jury, and executioner, enforcing the impossibly strict law brutally in a society where possession of coffee or sugar is a crime and unemployment is over 90%.
I've always seen Dredd as a parody of the American obsession with gun-toting "antiheroes" with massive body counts, and while Tin Man Games' gamebook version of Judge Dredd captures the argot and atmosphere of Mega-City One, it wasn't the biting satire I'd hoped for.
When I look at jello, I don't think about anything acrobatic. You know the drill: chill, eat, repeat. Maybe add some fruit for emphasis. The idea of a jello hero doesn't really sound that appealing. He's shaking in the first place, so he'd be easy to destroy right?
Oh wait, I forgot -- logic and iOS games don't mix, especially when it comes to storylines. That being said, Jelly Jumpers [Free] is from Chillingo, who seem to be gifted when it comes to pumping out games at the speed of light. I've reviewed a few in my day, and while I admit some of them are a bit generic around the edges, usually I expect a good product from them. While Jelly Jumpers isn't exactly the kind of game you want to rave to your friends about for its uniqueness, it falls right in line with the usual: fun, easy to play, and probably forgettable after you've spent a few hours with it.
I can't find a way to talk about Fluxe [$0.99] without talking about Tetris, a fact that hopefully won't bring down the wrath of The Tetris Company. Fluxe isn't a clone, it doesn't use the same shapes and it isn't even all that similar, but it stands on the shoulders of the giant and plays with expectations built up over the last three decades.
You may be familiar with that long column that shapes fall into, and those shapes made up of little squares that just keep falling. In Fluxe, you don't control the falling, you control the shapes. Your game is outside the column, in a jumble of pieces that need to be turned into lines on the other side of the screen. Imagine yourself as Tetris's benevolent master, dropping the pieces down only because you really, really want the player to succeed.
Much like the eponymous film currently raking in millions in ticket sales, The Dark Knight Rises[$0.99] aims for great heights and mostly hits its marks. The game follows and expands on the events that unfold in the final entry in The Dark Knight trilogy film saga, but don't worry: we won't divulge any spoilers for the two of you who haven't seen the movie. All you need to know is a masked terrorist named Bane has bad intentions for the people of Gotham City, and you, being Batman, need to strongly discourage him against those plans.
The game's story comes from the movie, but The Dark Knight Rises owes most of its feature set to the popular Batman Arkham console games. Using a virtual stick and a few buttons, you swing, glide, and fight your way through Gotham's darkest alleyways and tallest towers, all gorgeously detailed. Tapping the jump button after leaping into Gotham's embrace spreads Batman's cape, letting you glide around. You can slink, stride, and sprint to nearby locations, fire the grapping gun to pull yourself around, and pilot vehicles like the Bat-Pod and the new Bat flying machine, making travel even quicker and fun.
Coming up with just one word to describe Hasta La Muerte [$1.99] is easy, it's different. Different in that it doesn't play much like any other games on iOS these days, and has a crazy visual style to go along with it.
Hasta La Muerte has you moving around levels collecting souls and finding the exit before being killed by giant mustaches. You're encouraged to do this as quickly as possible, with the incentive being a higher score to impress your friends. Each level has a certain amount of souls to collect, and each level is harder than the last. Fortunately, the controls in the game work great making each level seem possible to master.
Evoking memories of games like Geometry Wars and Tilt To Live, Radia [$0.99 / Free] takes the tilt-based "survive as long as you can" mechanic out for another drive, and the results are comfortably non-threatening.
In Radia, the primary objective is to tilt the device to guide a small circle through a level, collecting the luminescent "radia" that spawn around the playing field. Each level introduces a different layout of walls that offer up a very Pac-Man-esque design aesthetic, while haranguing the player at every turn with ghostly sawblades sent adrift across the landscape. The main catch of the game: the player must navigate through the confines of the maze-like level, while the blades can pass through walls.
Tapulous returns to the iOS music scene once again with Tap Tap Revenge Tour [Free], the latest in a string of TapTap Revenge games that stretch all the way back to before the App Store even existed. While Tour offers the same basic gameplay with new tracks (as well as a decent backlog of free and premium songs in its store), not much else has been improved upon or changed, save for the addition of a new freemium-based mode.
For those unfamiliar with the series, Tap Tap Revenge is a rhythm game that follows in the footsteps of Dance Dance Revolution with players tapping notes along three lanes to the tune of whatever is playing. Tour does do a lot to shake up the basic formula as taps, holds, swipes, and shake moves all return with little in terms of actual changes.
The life of a goldfish is often short. Carried around in plastic bag on a hot summer day, flopped out of its bowl, eaten by another pet—we don't put much value on their little lives. But there may well be no goldfish as tortured as Yello. To recap, Saving Yello [$0.99] saw the little guy yanked out of his bowl, over and over, made to travel through all manner of obstacles to survive. Now, in Chasing Yello [Free], he finds his freedom— briefly and painfully, before coming to a dramatic end.
The only thing you can do for the poor fellow is make sure he survives as long as possible, collects as many stars as possible, and enjoys his freedom for as long as he can. When you think about it, endless runners and their ilk are kind of morbid. Best not to think about it, then. Best just to enjoy the game and put the fate of poor Yello out of your mind.
If there's one thing we can rely on these days in iOS gaming, it’s the never-ending stream of cute puzzle titles from Chillingo. Jar on a Bar [Free] is the latest such game, and like many before it it’s a competent mix of cartoony visuals and physics based touch gameplay. While its overall presentation and implementation make it a game that’ll probably appeal to puzzle fans alike, a reliance on IAP along with dodgy physics are sure to stifle any broader appeal it may have.
Jar on a Bar follows the tale of a goldfish that gets trapped in a jar and is left perilously on top of a wide variety of structures made of wood, ice, and other materials. Your goal is to guide the fishbowl down to the bottom of the screen, where your fish friend happily jumps out of the bowl and back into the adjacent stream. If the bowl tips on the way down, you lose water and points, which determine the rating received at the end of the stage (with a max of 3-stars of course).
If you've seen the trailer, you might think the mulletted hero of Unstoppable Fist [$0.99] is a bit of a brute, all fists and fury. Not so. Yes, he fights, and he does so with all the intensity of an early 90s action hero. But this is no ham-fisted flail—when played correctly, it's more of a dance. Each kick is performed with timing and grace, each punch is delivered in a deadly rhythm. Inevitably, that's when a chicken smacks him in the face.
Or maybe it's a scorpion, or a flying zombie head, or a puffer fish. There are endless forces arrayed against our hero, both natural and otherwise. So you kick, and you punch, and you kick some more, hoping to survive but knowing it's not going to happen. "Unstoppable" is an exaggeration; you'll be stopped again and again and again, and your only hope is to do better next time.
The Act [$0.99] is the sort of experiment I'd love to see more of. It is, at its heart, a short film, one that's sweet and touching and full of emotional resonance. It's also a game. During key moments of the story you're given the ability to interact, swiping left or right depending on how you want to proceed. But it's not a Choose Your Own Adventure sort of thing: in The Act, you're controlling emotions, not (usually) actions. If you can keep up the act, as it were, you'll win the day.
As an interactive film, The Act works well. Scenes that might go by in a blink gain more weight when the results are in your hands. But as a game it's a little less successful. The stakes are low, the experience is quite short, and the interactivity is as often frustrating as it is original. When you have to question whether the experience would have been best with or without any interaction at all, it's hard not to question if The Act is best suited to being a game at all.
Maybe it's the '90s era gamer in me, but I always feel right at home playing a sidescroller. Wrrr [Free] is just that, with a touch of hand drawn charm to make the package even more appealing. You play a dinosaur dad who has been separated from his family and has to go on a trip to find them. And so off you go through nine different levels of challenge to rescue them. Yes, I know you've heard it before, but hey, we don't play iOS titles for the deeply compelling stories (although I admit there have been a few exceptions).
