As someone who can get pretty obsessive about both reading and video games, I keep expecting gamebooks to grab me by the throat. It seems as though they should be perfect for that: part game, part book, all gripping entertainment.
Most of the time, however, I find them a bit thin. Not enough game to really sink into mechanically, not enough book to really reel me in. Sorcery! [$4.99] managed to keep me up well past my bedtime, though. Inkle offers the same expertise they displayed in bringing Frankenstein [$4.99] to life to the task of drawing the magic of Steve Jackson's Sorcery! out onto the screen. At least in part: thus far, only the first of the four books of Sorcery!, The Shamutanti Hills, is available.
The journey through those hills is still a gamebook trip, no doubt about it. There are stats, interactive combat scenes and plenty of big decisions to be made. It's just that nothing feels restrained; nothing feels all that formulaic. Sorcery! goes big where needed, and the app shines for it.
Two years, two Kickstarter campaigns, and lots of hookers and blow later, developer Warballoon has finally beamed up Star Command to the App Store. Do some screws still need tightening? Affirmative. Should you dive in immediately? Absolutely.
After designing and naming your avatar and ship, you learn the ins and outs of running your rig. Your spacecraft is made up of three types of rooms: weaponry, science, and engineering. You decide which types of rooms you want to build, then hire crew and assign them to rooms. Without crew to operate equipment, rooms cannot function. Rooms cost tokens to build, and some rooms, such as the plasma torpedo, require special ammo tokens to operate.
With the basics under your belt, you set sail for faraway planets and mix it up with your first band of hostiles. The goal of ship battles is to knock out the opposing craft's shields and sap their hull down to zero before they do the same to you. You wait for your weapons and defensive tech to charge up, then let fly with your chosen offense by playing quick time-like minigames such as stopping three spinning balls inside tiny circles and lining up vertical and horizontal sliders. Survive, and you earn tokens you can allocate toward more rooms and upgrades for your crew and equipment.
It's the simplest games, the ones any player of any age can pick up and play, that become App Store sensations. Temple Run, for example. You tap and swipe the screen to keep your dude from falling down pits and running into walls as he runs forward. And Angry Birds? Even adventurers in galaxies far, far away know about Angry Birds.
Cut the Rope is another one of those "so easy your mom can play it" games that wrapped charming graphics, easy-to-grasp controls, and physics-based puzzles challenging enough to make you wrack your brain yet quick enough that you can solve one or two in a single setting in a 99-cent package. It also spawned a couple of sequels, the newest of which is Cut the Rope: Time Travel [$0.99 / $2.99 (HD)].
Like the previous rope-cutting extravaganzas, Time Travel is all about feeding candies to the Om-Nom, an adorable alien critter with an insatiable appetite for sweets. Said candies dangle from the ends of ropes, and you swipe your finger over those ropes to cut them and send the candies swinging into the mouth of the Om-Nom waiting patiently nearby.
The opening to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Rooftop Run [$1.99], an endless runner based on Nickelodeon's reboot of the popular '90s cartoon, is almost as awesome as the game itself. We open on a shot of our four heroes in a half-shell lounging around the sewer den playing video games. A very young and spunky April O'Neil comes bursting into the room, shouting at the love-struck mutant teenagers to turn on the news, which shows alien invaders descending on New York City.
Boggled at the nerve of the alien riffraff, the heroes rush up to the surface, spout a lot of talk about kicking some alien butt--and immediately set off running when the alien ship swoops in from above and gives chase. My heroes.
Humorous as it may be to see those turtle tough guys turn tail, I'm glad they did, because the resulting adventure makes for one of the more creative runners on the App Store. After choosing a turtle, your hero sets off at a dash, leaving you to tap the screen to leap gaps between buildings and ninja-kick Foot soldiers and aliens in your path. As you run, you'll need to collect green orbs to keep the glowing meter at the top of the screen from draining. Should it deplete, the ship beams you up and, one presumes, the crew dines on turtle soup.
If your haven't seen Crabitron [$2.99 (HD)] in action, you owe it to yourself to check out this TA Plays. Two Lives Left's Crabitron is fast, funny, endless but kept remarkably fresh with boss fights and classic game parodies, and has spot-on controls that make it one of the most iPad-native games I've played.
In hindsight, a game that takes advantage of the multi-touch screen by asking you to use your fingertips like chopsticks makes perfect sense, and the kaiju (giant monster) theme really suits that mechanic. If the original Rampage captured something about the potential (and limitations) of the arcade technology of it's day, Crabitron does the same thing for the iPad, very much including the Mini.
It also, and seemingly unintentionally, sports really good single-device cooperative play.
Most of the games that offer single-device multiplayer on the iPad are turn based. There are a few with simultaneous competitive play, like Shufflepuck Cantina [Free / $2.99] and the HD version of Fruit Ninja [$2.99 (HD)], but only where the controls can be kept to separate parts of the screen, to avoid input confusion.
By default, one of the challenges of playing Crabitron is trying to use both claws effectively at the same time. It's hard to do anything fancier than having one claw mirror the other. But share your tablet with a friend, and the challenges change. Now you can each focus on your own claw, but you have to worry about what that other claw is doing. This can lead to almost Spaceteam [Free] levels of confused shouting. Even the fact that the claws can get tangled due to input confusion if they're pressed together feels more like a feature than a flaw.
Perhaps best of all, players of widely varying skill can play together. This is the only videogame I've found that I can play with my toddler without one of us quickly getting frustrated or bored. It's amazing, really. So far, my high score for the game is from a run I started with him, played a little by myself, continued with my spouse, and then finished alone.
The biggest problem with Crabitron's co-op potential is that it doesn't mesh well with the game's coin-based upgrade system. You can upgrade each arm separately, but upgrades are costly, permanent, and irreversible. Thankfully, there's no IAP grubbing: you can buy a coin doubler or a tripler, that's it.
It feels like he devs were preparing for the possibility of needing to release Crabitron as a freemium game, but took the risk of charging Happy Meal prices instead, something they deserve credit for.
Regardless, it would be a lot more fun (especially in co-op mode) if you could choose different claws or abilities for each game. Fixed-upgrade systems, with their roots in RPG character customization, tend to feel really player-specific.
To be fair, I don't think I'm playing Crabitron "as intended," it just happens to be a heck of a lot of fun this way, a bit like the tricycle that became cooler when you figured out you could ride it backwards downhill. Just don't hold Two Lives Left responsible if you injure yourself. Whether or not you've got a friend (or toddler) to play Crabitron with in this unintentional co-op mode, you really need to check the game out as Crabitron is a perfect example of how to intelligently craft a game for the iPad that really could only exist on the iPad.
I used to play outside. Then I turned seven and discovered computers and video games. (Nope, no arrow to the knee.) But I can't give the siren's song of electronics all the credit for luring me to the air-conditioned indoors. Like karma, Mother Nature's a... Well, she's a nasty one. There are all sorts of creepy-crawlies lurking in her leaves, her trees, her grass. Better slouched in front of the computer than out under the sun, that's what I say, and nobody knows that better than Little Chomp of Little Chomp [$0.99] fame.
Half climber, half puzzle game, Little Chomp asks you kindly to guide a caterpillar from the bottom to the top of trees infested with vengeful critters. Moving Chomp is simple. Just pull back on him, line him up where you want to go, and release to catapult him from leaf to leaf. It's much like aiming birds in Angry Birds, except physics aren't as important here. No matter how far back you stretch lil' Chomp, he'll slingshot off exactly where you pointed him.
When we checked outTiny Troopers [Free]Â last year, there really wasn't much to critique with the simplified real-time strategy title. With streamlined controls, plenty of action, and a robust weapon and upgrade system, there was in fact a lot to love.
Fortunately, developer Kukouri has elected to not mess with a good thing when it comes to their follow-up release Tiny Troopers 2: Special Ops [Free]. Focusing more on refinements of the already established gameplay system, Tiny Troopers 2 offers more of everything we loved about the original and is an excellent sequel.
To coin a phrase from a popular comedian, what is the deal with the characters in these running games? Why are they running? What's the rush? You know, you could've snagged that coin tucked away behind that pillar back there if you would've just eased on up to it. The terrified spaceman you play in Worm Run [$0.99] has a valid excuse. He's on the move, and needs to stay that way, because a giant worm is plunging after him, devouring everything in its path. Glance back and you'll see him, eating his way through stone and dirt and steel.
Worm Run throws a few wrenches into the endless runner formula. It's endless, but doesn't pump your legs for you. You do that by swiping. Swipe left and right to run, swipe up and to either direction to jump, and so on. The control scheme sounds simple enough, but it didn't gel with me at first. Holding my phone in my right hand, I used my left pointer finger to swipe. The tutorial didn't nudge me toward or away from any particular pose, so I went with that. It wasn't comfortable. My wrist cramped from holding the phone, and swiping with one finger didn't give me the precision I needed to hop up into narrow shafts.
Multiplayer videogames tend to bring out the worst in me. I have a temper. I have cursed at and been cursed at, and I've flown into Achillean rage during Mario Kart 64: "Sing, O Goddess, the rage of Yoshi / after he was blasted by a Blue Shell." During one particularly heated game of NBA Jam, I pushed my competitor off the couch we were sharing and said some quite rude things about former Chicago Bulls small forward Toni Kukoc.
But I've never punched anyone over a game, nor has anyone ever punched me -- until I downloaded Frogmind's Badland [$3.99].
Badland is the debut effort from Frogmind, a Finnish duo who cut their teeth on RedLynx Trials series. It is, like so many App Store games, a one-button physics game: touching the screen causes a troupe of silhouetted gremlins (I always called them "little fatties" in my head) to fly forward and upward; releasing your finger allows them to float to the ground. It's our job to guide the afro-sporting fatties through a perilous swamp rigged with booby traps, buzz saws, pneumatic pistons, and spinning fan blades designed to slice, dice, explode, impale, smush, and otherwise destroy them.
I'm a big fan of survival horror games, especially ones like Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Slender, which provide no means of defending yourself from their boogeymen. You run and hide, or you die. While scoping out upcoming App Store releases late Wednesday evening, I learned about Eyes - The Horror Game [$0.99], a port of the indie PC title of the same name that promised a similar flight-no-fight experience. On an iPhone.
It was to laugh--to guffaw, I tell you!--at the idea that any game on a five-inch screen could make me shriek like Jamie Lee Curtis in a Halloween flick. But I am comfortable enough in my rugged masculinity (I haven't shaved in six weeks) to admit that's exactly what happened. I downloaded the game, plugged in my ear buds, turned off the lights, and turned up the volume. And within two minutes--give or take 60 seconds--I bounded out of bed mumbling "Nope nope nope nope" and switched the bedroom lights back on and started in on the much more cheerful Sonic Dash.
The goal of Eyes, like the controls you'll use to accomplish that goal, is deceptively simple. Ransack an old house to retrieve bags of money. A virtual stick moves you forward and back, sliding your thumb over the right half of the screen rotates your view, and you pick up objects by tapping them. Drawers also open with a quick tap. Simple, just like I said.
The hard part is mustering the courage to pillage and plunder. Eyes immerses you in incredible atmosphere, and as any survival horror savant will tell you, the right atmosphere makes or breaks the experience. Every chamber is dark and dusty. Wind howls and batters against the walls, your footsteps thump along, clocks tick and tock, and doors creak when you open them.
Those ambient noises set the mood, but they also serve as an early warning system. When your teeth begin to chatter and the furniture begins to rattle, make for the nearest room and cower in the corner. A ghost roams the manse, and she's not keen on the idea of letting you abscond with her earthly possessions. Catch more than a glimpse of the lady of the house and it's game over, much like bumping into the Slender Man in his backwoods domain.
The inherent sloppiness of the virtual stick inadvertently added to my experience. Doors are supposed to open when you push against them, but unless you hit them dead on, you'll just slide back and forth against them like a drunkard who's forgotten how knobs works. Every time the ghost got the jump on me, I ended up turning heel and throwing myself at the nearest door and fumbling against it due to the virtual stick's slipperiness. That heightened my sense of panic; I felt like I was a character in a horror movie who was too overcome with fear to properly grasp and turn a knob.
To finish Eyes, you need only collect a specified number of bags determined by your difficulty level and escape through the front door before the ghost nabs you. The house both helps and hinders your quest. Bags and other items such as keys are randomly strewn about each time you play. Your map fills in as you explore, but does not show your position, so you'll need to keep track of every twist and turn you take, especially in the basement. Eye symbols, also randomly placed, let you look through the ghost's eyes for a few moments--a handy if disorienting tool that can help you plan routes.
My only complaints are the ease of finding money bags and the short length of the game. The bags sparkle, standing out even in pitch blackness. Some are stashed away, but you can spot most by standing in one spot and turning around. Once you collect your bags and hit the front door, that's it. You're done. Once you learn your way around the house, completing the adventure won't take long even considering the random placement of items. I understand why randomizing the architecture isn't possible, but I'd love a longer experience--maybe an extra stage or two as IAP, or perhaps a sequel or remake along the lines of Slender: Arrival.
Those are minor gripes, though. Take my advice: don't be like me. Wait until after dark, shut (lock) yourself in a quiet room, and pop in your ear buds. Eyes is as immersive, as unsettling, and as chilling a horror experience as you'll find on any platform, if not as lengthy as horror fans would like.
I've been golfing before. The first time I tagged along with my dad. He hit a ball just off a slope. We hopped in the buggy to retrieve it, he told me to lean out and grab it as we rumbled by, I fell out and tumbled down the slope. The second time, I actually played! Just one hole, though. Why? Because golf is boring when you have to, you know, fish your ball out of sand traps and actually walk around. Yep, that's golf: boring at best, painful at worst. Thanks, Dad.
Super Stickman Golf, however, is neither boring nor painful. It is awesome. If you enjoyed developer Noodlecake's golf-slash-physics-puzzler, you'll be happy to hear that Super Stickman Golf 2 [$0.99] is loads better, and available at the same impulse-buy price point.
Super Stickman Golf 2 challenges you to complete courses at or under par. Sounds a lot like golf, right? Well, instead of straight shots from tee-off to the green, each hole in Super Stickman Golf 2 plays out like an obstacle course. There are pits, sand traps, water traps, moving platforms, lasers that vaporize your perfectly-aimed shots, and portals inspired by Valve's popular spatial puzzler: smack a ball through one portal and it pops out the other.
There's been a lot of talk lately about Block Fortress [$0.99] and for good reason. Rare have we ever witnessed a game that manages to combine tower-defense, first-person shooters and creative sandboxing genres all in one game. Foursaken Media's Block Fortress not only successfully accomplishes such a feat, but manages to do it in such a way that truly makes its sum greater than its (individual genre) parts. There's a lot of love about Block Fortress, making it a game that really needs to be checked out.
Simply put, Block Fortress is a game about survival and defense. Players place a barracks on one of several pre-set maps, and are charged with defending it from hordes of enemies. Generally, gameplay is divided into two phases. The build phase tasks you to fortify your barracks with walls, turrets, and a variety of other attachments. This is also the time to purchase and equip weapons and items for your character. This lends way to the attack phase, which starts the enemy waves and puts you into FPS mode, letting you get into the action and supplement the defense of your barracks.
Meanwhile, while Block Fortress features three game modes, I found the most appealing to be Survival, which starts you off with limited resources and challenges players to build up resources while defending against waves of enemies. The other two modes, Quickstart (which starts you off with a ton of resources to instantly build the fortress of your dreams) and Sandbox (which gives you total control of building and enemies) are also great additions and provide entertaining alternatives with emphasis on creativity.
We've seen tower defense games incorporating FPS elements, but nothing to the degree of Block Fortress. The first-person shooter element is fully featured, with a variety of weapons to purchase during the course of gameplay. Meanwhile, the building element is also full featured, with a wide dearth of customizability in both structural choices and defense options coupled with secondary essentials such as power blocks (necessary for anything requiring power), lights (essential at night) and farms (allow you to replenish health). Sure, the FPS controls still suffer from the perpetual issues that seem to occur on touchscreens and the construction menus can be a little obtuse, but the sheer amount of potential and the fact that the game as a whole actually works far outweighs these minor nuisances.
As if the near limitless possibilities for construction weren't enough, Block Fortress's long-term upgrade scheme showcases just how much depth the game can offer to dedicated players. Each weapon and turret (along with certain building blocks) has the potential to be infused with modifications, which can be built with rare minerals that are mined and gathered during normal gameplay. Modifications have the potential to dramatical change the way you play the game, and are an essential component to pay attention to for players looking to truly succeed. One complaint lies in the relatively slow rate of accumulation for rare minerals (particularly at the beginning of the game) but an IAP shop, coupled with the optional nature of mods makes it less of a showstopper.
I'm a huge fan of what Block Fortress has to offer, especially when it comes to the sheer amount of potential strategies that can be employed. While there's obviously some tactics that'll succeed better than others (and with that said, I highly suggest checking out our previoustips postings), a lot of the appeal lies in being able to try whatever you wish. In this regard, Block Fortress has everything needed to offer plenty of replayability. In fact, the only thing truly missing is some sort of co-op multiplayer mode, and it's something that I hope that can conceivably be added at some point in the future.
Of course, if the appeal of Minecraft-like construction (or the controls of iOS FPS titles) doesn't suit your fancy, it's hard to imagine that you'll particularly enjoy Block Fortress. However, for those that are intrigued, Foursaken's latest is a game that simply has to be experienced. With plenty of depth, replayability and a great melding of genres, there's plenty to check out and enjoy.
In my fourth year of university, I took a class called Canadian Experimental Shorts. I wasn't optimistic going in (I mean, that title alone puts you to sleep, right?). On my first day, however, instead of handing out notes or instructions, the professor dimmed the lights and showed us something I had never seen before: a film without cameras. Barely longer than two minutes, it was animated entirely onto physical film strip, and packed with color that danced, twinkled, and exploded to the sound of classic jazz. Its name was Cameras Take Five, and it sold me on Canadian Experimental Shorts. Good news if you're looking for something completely original: Melodive [$2.99] is basically Cameras Take Five: The Game.
Fair warning: like experimental film, this one isn't the most approachable at first blush. Before embracing the game's persistent feeling of being lost, I felt...well...completely lost. Unable to understand the controls, not quite sure what shapes I was looking at, and disturbingly confused as to which way was up. Fascinated by the ambient noises and sea of floating jewels, I decided to re-read the instructions section and give it another go. And another. And then another. And while I can't say I ever fully came to terms with which way was up, it ultimately didn't matter soon enough.
I told myself I'd go get lunch after getting through one more of Bobbing's [Free / $1.99] 86 levels. They're short and sweet, once you know what you're doing. It shouldn't have been a problem. Twenty minutes later, I was finally done. Famished, but finished. I probably should have taken the break I promised myself—Bobbing is not a game to be played on an empty stomach.
It's cute, colorful and quick, but it isn't kind. Most precision platformers eventually let you get by on muscle memory. Repeat a level enough times and you'll know it in your fingertips. Bobbing starts out that way, but it isn't long before it becomes clear that Little Bobby Games has created something more ambitious. Each level becomes a maze, a puzzle that needs to be worked out as you go.
You wouldn't think it would be all that complex. Each level is only half a screen high, and there are only two inputs to work with. Tap the left side of the screen to reverse gravity and the right to swap colors. It's loosely familiar if you've played Polara [$0.99], at least up to that point.
Slot machines and RPGs make good bedfellows, as the King Cashing series has taught us. Dungeon Plunder [$1.99] takes that combination and applies it to the roguelike, creating an interesting pairing. On one hand, the semi-random nature of slots works nicely in the otherwise randomized world. On the other hand, I like my combat to be quick, you know?
If you can get around the speed issue, Dungeon Plunder's slot-based combat is clever, just one of several smart features that make it one of the better roguelike experiences on iOS. It's even welcoming to the less hardcore among us, with a legacy system that means you make progress even when you draw the short end of the permadeath stick. It's lacking in the looks department, but that's just how roguelikes tell you they want to be taken seriously.
Not that Dungeon Plunder is particularly serious. The premise of an evil wizard hell-bent on sending the world into a new ice age is just a good excuse to send your sprite off to fight. That sprite might be a mage, a warrior or a rogue, each one as generic as the last. Frustratingly, you have to buy cosmetic IAP to unlock female sprites, but the lack of consumable purchases more than makes up for that disappointment.
One way or another, after you pick a class and sprite, a name, and a starting rune (a kind of permanent stat boost), you're off to do battle on a randomized map with all sorts of big bads and creepy crawlies. There is nothing turn-based about Dungeon Plunder. Enemies are static on the map until you bump into them, and combat is simultaneous. You spin the reels of the slot machine, then you and your enemy both take whatever damage you need to take. The one with hit points left at the end of the process wins, and the other one retires for good.
The slot-machine combat needs a bit of explanation. There are five reels, and a number of symbols that represent things like damage, healing, money and defense. You spin the reels, select as many as you'd like to hold on to, and re-spin the rest. Two or more of any symbol is a win, with more of whatever it is you matched being granted for each extra symbol.
This might sound like the results of combat are extremely random, but there's strategy at work. You need to pay attention, to focus on damage when your health is high, to keep your shields up, to manage your class's special abilities and so on. You can only control as much as the reels allow, but re-spins make the system surprisingly flexible.
So you toodle around killing orcs and brigands, wandering through random dungeons and collecting treasure. Then, nearly inevitably, you die. You get a final score and that's the end of that character. It isn't the end of the road, however. You can begin your next character with some of the last one's gold and maybe an artifact or life scrolls to heal you in a pinch. If you make it far enough you can unlock a new rune to add to all your future characters' stats. You also begin at level based on the highest one you've reached with that class so far.
Death isn't a total write-off, it's a step in Dungeon Plunder's journey. Eventually you'll make it so far that success will be a foregone conclusion—if not on this attempt, then on the next. It can get old, settling in for game after game of lengthy slot-machine combat, but there's always the thought that you might get a little further to keep you going.
Dungeon Plunder is a bit rough around the edges. Death could be telegraphed more obviously, the interface could be better laid out, and so on. All surface stuff in a pretty deep game. The most important thing is this: if you play, you will die, but you will want to pick yourself up and start all over again when you do. That's the mark of a good roguelike, that incentive to never give up, no matter how stacked the odds.
As someone who can get pretty obsessive about both reading and video games, I keep expecting gamebooks to grab me by the throat. It seems as though they should be perfect for that: part game, part book, all gripping entertainment.
