You know that feeling you get when you play an RPG and you manage to work your way down every trail and fill out every inch of the map? Apply that to word games and you have Chris Garrett's QatQi [Free], a game that's as much about exploring as it is about spelling.
That's not to say it isn't about spelling at all, though. Those of us with minds for 8-letter words and endless combos of prefixes and suffixes will dominate. It's just that exploration and tactics play a huge role in the breakdown of every final score, and they can't be ignored. The wide maps of QatQi free us from the yoke of the typical word game grid. It's a rejuvenation the genre badly needs.
How to explain Arranger [$0.99]? It doesn't quite fit into any bucket I'm familiar with. It's a mini-game collection, a classic adventure and a music game all rolled into one strange-looking package, each part coming together into a surprisingly cohesive whole. It's about using the power of music to help people, but also about solving the strangest of problems. It features boss battles that involve shooting brains with musical instruments while emotional defenses try to stop you. It's quirky, yes, but also immensely loveable.
You might think from its screenshots that Arranger is a chaotic mess. In practice, that chaos seems much cleaner. The game has its own logic, visually and experientially, and it hews to it consistently. Still, its look may take some getting used to. Don't let that stop you; composer Arman Bohn has crafted a weird, wonderful experience that's only occasionally brought down by reality, and it shouldn't be missed.
Micro Miners [$1.99] feels a bit crude and dirty in more ways than one, and it's such a better game for it. It's not just because the game has a "swearing" option for these hard-working miners to vent their frustration, isolation, and violation. I found myself waist-deep in lo-fi, pixelated dirt and several hours of my life gone in a flash. With over 40 lengthy levels, I easily became hooked on the intense, arcade-style digging, with almost every stage introducing some new and exciting twist.
Before I explore Micro Miners further, it deserves a quick history lesson. Markus “Notch” Persson, who created the digging and crafting phenomenon known as Minecraft [$6.99] made a little digging game in 2006 called Miners4k. Instead of exploiting these mechanics, Minecraft went the way of Infiniminer's 3D building. This left a fortunate gap for Micro Miners to fill, one that Notch publicly endorsed.
Not to crap on Notch (I certainly appreciate his blessings of smaller indies), but Micro Miners is the laser-focused, arcade-style digging game I wish he made instead.
Boxing is all about endurance. A truly great fight is a demonstration of that endurance; the fighters’ stamina, the punches they take, getting up from the mat, and their ability to still deliver a hit when they’re so exhausted that even their earlobes ache.
But endurance isn’t an easy quality to replicate digitally. That’s why most fighting games rely on quantifying your dexterous skill, rather than your stamina. If it takes a lot of stamina to play a game, it’s generally conceived as being a laborious task that doesn’t easily translate into entertainment.
Real Boxing [$0.99], therefore, is quite unique amongst other games in its genre as that’s precisely what it’s all about; endurance. It captures that quintessential essence that turns a brawl into a sport. It tests every fiber of your endurance while remaining solid entertainment, leaving you quite breathless after a fight; fatigued by defeat or euphoric from triumph.
Monkey Labour [$1.99] developer Dawn of Play delivers again with a touch-based Tetris-inspired game that finally nails its controls, even if it's all purposely done backwards.
The goal in Dream of Pixels [$0.99] is to unpack the cascading clouds, piece by piece, as long as the shape you remove doesn't collide with any others on the way down. The classic mode asks players to survive as long as possible, clearing all the clouds before any touch the bottom of the screen and end the dream. For every ten lines cleared, the points system and the speed at which the clouds move increase.
As a precocious teenager, I had an irrational fear of the police. Every time I saw them, my hands started sweating as a fetid pit of anxiety grew in my stomach. As a functional member of society today, this fear has largely dissipated -- a speeding ticket is no longer the end of the world as I know it, and I don't tend to keep company with recreational drug users (much).
Still, Adult Swim's Heads Up! Hot Dogs [$0.99] gets to the heart of some people's mistrust and resentment of the police: they're all pig-eyed, hot dog-shooting sociopaths.
In fact, Heads Up!'s seven levels are surprisingly hostile to the urban sausage: they can be dropped, eaten by dogs, blown away by air vents, and even shot by aforementioned crazed police officers.
To reinforce the point: the police officers will shoot at your hot dogs, even if they're already sitting on top of a bystanders' head. It's all very irresponsible, especially since players only get to lose five hot dogs per level.
At the ripe old age of 30, the boy that was Prince Adam is now a man. A He-Man, and the Masters of the Universe franchise is back with us in the all-new He-Man: The Most Powerful Game in the Universe [$0.99] from Chillingo. And this isn’t just a dusting off of the 80s cartoon toy advert you and I grew up with. It’s a reimagining of the cheeseball franchise that clearly understands its audience isn’t 10-year-old boys any more; it’s the immature men (He-Men?) they’ve grown into.
Everything about He-Man: The Most Powerful Game in the Universe draws heavily upon a delicious retro-ironic conceit, and that was a very wise design decision. So wise, in fact, that I suspect it was actually the saucy Sorceress who came up with it.
Anyway, He-Man and his buddies have undergone a slight change of appearance, hinting at the popular 'super-deformed' art style prominent during the hallowed days of 16-bit gaming. And that’s not all the game borrows from those wonderful times, back when the pixel was king.
When I first heard that Loren Brichter of Atebits – creator of the groundbreaking Twitter client Tweetie (RIP) – was making an iOS game, I was extremely interested. After all, Tweetie demonstrated exceptional UI design and intuitiveness, as well as a clean aesthetic. Put all of those types of qualities towards an iOS game and, yeah, I'm totally on board.
Now the first iOS game from Atebits is finally here, called Letterpress - Word Game [Free], and it does indeed display a remarkable level of design finesse, clean aesthetics, and simple to-the-point gameplay. It's not going to blow you away in the features department, rather it picks one thing to do and it does it extremely well.
In Letterpress's case that one thing is an asynchronous multiplayer word game. Now, I love word games, and I love asynchronous games, and I love the idea of asynchronous word games. But somehow I've never found one that I liked. I've tried to get into Word With Friends [Free / Free], the de facto asynchronous word game, at least ten times by now, and I always end up deleting it pretty quickly.
I think it might be the core design of Words With Friends that rubs me the wrong way. I don't like having point values assigned to each letter. Rather than finding the most interesting word out of your allotment of letters, you're stuck playing a trial-and-error game of what word will land you the most points while trying to take advantage of the bonuses on the board. Somebody described their experience with Words With Friends to me as "tedious", and that totally nails it for me as well.
This is where Letterpress differentiates itself. It gives you a 5x5 grid of letters to choose from. Each letter used is worth just one point, which obviously makes bigger words worth a bigger score. But Letterpress isn't just about who can rack up the highest total score, it's much more about trying to outmaneuver your opponent and playing the board itself so that you wind up having the most points by the game's end.
Each letter you use in a successfully played word gets branded your color on the board. When it's your opponent's turn, they can try and use your colored letters and "steal" them back in their own word, changing them to their own color while also taking away the points you previously earned for using them. This will go back and forth until every letter on the board has been switched to a color, and the player with the most colored tiles (and thus the highest score) is the winner.
Here's where things get tricky. You can also "lock up" a letter tile by changing all tiles surrounding it to your color. So, if one of your colored letters is surrounded on all four sides by more letters of your color (or three sides if it's a tile in the corner of the board) then the surrounded tile becomes a darker version of your color and is "locked." A locked letter can still be used by either yourself or your opponent in subsequent turns, it just won't be worth any points if you do use it.
It's a small aspect, but it toally changes what would normally be a pretty simple back-and-forth word game into something much more strategic. In addition, if you use and reclaim the letters that are surrounding an opponent's locked letter, you'll then "unlock" it and it goes back to merely being a normal tile of your opponent's color, which can then be used to earn a point and reclaim as your own color like normal.
It feels complicated to explain, but trust me when I say after just a few rounds of Letterpress the mechanics become clear. Mastering them, however, is what will keep people coming back over and over again.
Being adept at making fancy words doesn't hurt, but it's also not the most important aspect of Letterpress. Bigger isn't always better, as a shorter word might be able to steal more points from your opponent, or unlock a surrounded tile for use in another turn. It's just as much about planning ahead and looking at the current situation of the board as it is thinking of the biggest, most impressive word, and this is what I love most about the game.
As I mentioned before, Letterpress is an aesthetically pleasing title as well. It uses clean lines and simple colors, with lots of theme choices so you can mix things up a bit if you feel like. The UI is also impressively intuitive, as just about everything you can do in the game is performed just how you think it might be.
For example, if you want to recall a letter from a word you're making, simply tap it to bring it back onto the board. Or if you want to reorder the tiles simply hold down on the one you want to move and drag it to where you want it to be. If it's been a while since you've taken your turn and you want to see what your opponent's last played word is, just tap on their avatar. Practically everything in Letterpress works just how you would expect, and its minimalist style and smooth animation make it feel like a high-end experience, similar to Clear for note-taking.
That's about all there is to Letterpress. It will connect you with random opponents or friends over Game Center for multiplayer, but there is no single-player option or an AI opponent to face if you happen to be offline. Also, Game Center has its own share of quirks with matchmaking, and Atebits has told me he's investigating using his own server infrastructure just to have a bit more control over the experience.
When I said that Letterpress did one thing and did it extremely well, I meant it. It's a fantastic asynchronous online word game and nothing more. It's also a fantastic example of how design can enhance the experience of playing a game, as Letterpress is a joy to look at and to use.
There's nothing quite like speed-based reactionary games on iOS. Smooth framerates combined with fast-reflexes and responsive controls usually make for a title well-suited for the touchscreen. Skyriders [$0.99], with its futuristic feel hits on all these points and then some. Add in great level design and some subtle RPG mechanics, and Skyriders rises above the rest as a great example of challenging and fast arcade fun.
From a basic gameplay perspective, Skyriders is relatively simple. Each level has the player racing from start to finish on a track filled with boosts, stars, barriers and chasms. Besides simply making it to the finish line (which isn't as easy as it may sound), players are also tasked with trying to get as high a score as possible, which is centered around earning and maintaining a high multiplier. Multipliers are gained by collecting stars and hitting boosts consistently (a meter at the top of the screen acts as a timer for how long you have to boost or collect a star before the multiplier dies). Meanwhile, hitting barriers (you can jump or dodge them) instantly kills your multiplier, while falling off the racetrack ends the run.
When a developer like True Axis, creators of the iOS classic Jet Car Stunts [$1.99 / Free], announces a new project, you take note. That's why when the studio announced back in February that they were working on a skateboarding simulation called True Skate, it shot right up into our most-anticipated games list. Well, it did in mine, anyway. I've been skateboarding for the majority of my life, and have really been waiting for a killer skating app to come to iOS.
Well, it's finally come, as True Skate [$1.99] is exactly the kind of skateboarding game that I've always wanted. Rather than being heavily mission- or story-based like the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater series or EA's Skate series, True Skate is more of a sandbox toy that lets you shred around a well-designed skatepark doing whatever you feel like. There's a short list of missions to complete, and there's plenty of potential to flesh out the entire experience further, but on release True Skate is simply an excellent physics-based skateboarding simulator that's only real limit is your imagination.
Half of every one of Polara's [$0.99] levels is out to kill you, but which half is up to you. This auto-running platformer is made up of two colors, and you can swap which one you interact with with the tap of a finger. It's not just a matter of red versus blue, though. Sometimes you'll be blue and red shots will kill you. Other times you'll find yourself face-first in a blue wall that's just knocked you to your death. Reacting isn't a matter of simple color recognition. It's that, understanding, and reflexes all rolled up in every jump and swap.
There are three responses to each obstacle: switch colors, remain the same, or avoid it all together. You'll have to weigh each option dozens of times in every level, and that constant calculus is taxing. You'll fall into patterns, and that's when the game crushes you.
Polara is at its best in those moments when it plays against your expectations. It's fine when it's hard and quick, but it's better when you're running merrily along switching back and forth and it smacks you in the face. Maybe it's a small but sudden change to a pattern, or maybe you suddenly need to switch away from a color. Regardless of the details, it's the surprises that shine far more than the moments that have you tapping and tapping and tapping every half-second.
It's hard to get frustrated either way, because the game is incredibly forgiving. Not easy; forgiving. Checkpoints are never more than a few moments apart, and you'll quickly find a spot that makes you very happy that's the case. For me, it was one segment with a quick red-blue-red-blue-blue-red, with two changes in each jump. It wasn't a hard maneuver, but I slipped into the obvious pattern over and over, unable to make that last second switch. For an auto-runner, Polara rarely lets you play on auto-pilot.
If constant checkpoints sound like nothing worth testing your skills against, don't fret: the game also makes an excellent and vicious endless runner. In the "Other Modes" menu, you'll find an endless mode that does away with checkpoints and randomizes the obstacles. If you're willing to put in a little time and effort, there are five more to unlock.
Each time you finish a story level, the game tells you that it's been unlocked. If you revisit it, there are two new objectives: collecting letters spelling POLARA, and finding a special item hidden somewhere unpredictable. As you complete enough of these challenges, more secret modes open up. You can also play for flawless, zero-death runs if you're into that much punishment.
At first glance, it makes sense to describe Polara as the bastard of Ikaruga and Canabalt. It isn't quite a fair comparison to make. Color switching was only half the challenge in Ikaruga—maximizing your score was the other half. It's the part that seems to be missing at points in this game, as you find yourself collecting colored orbs and soaking up beams to no effect. It isn't until you play for the secondary objectives that Polara feels complete. Those orbs make good obstacles when they sit right in front of the letter you need, and the beams hang out below to make you switch to collect and switch again in midair.
This does leave much of the game's 50 level campaign feeling a bit like Intro To Color-Switching, but to its credit that primer is badly needed. Despite a simple base mechanic and a small collection of obstacles to work with, Hope This Works Games has done a fantastic job of introducing new challenges at a steady pace. The studio combines and recombines each element to create situations that go from being puzzling to simply difficult as you work your way through them.
The story isn't quite as vital, but it's not half bad. Polara suffers from the same sense of dissonance that plagues most games that rely on comic-style cutscenes—it's often hard to relate the story to the action as it plays out—but the story it tells is compelling enough. Short and fairly uncomplicated, but hey, it's a coherent story in a mobile game. That's nothing to scoff at. It serves as part of a strong package, along with striking scenery flying by behind the neon foreground, and a good beat accompanying the whole experience. None of these things stand out particularly, but neither do they detract.
There are plenty of reasons to recommend Polara, but the one that takes it past the tipping point is the sheer volume of quality content. One trip through its levels takes a few hours. The second trip through is even more satisfying. And on top of all that, there are six endless modes to play with to your heart's content. It's almost unreasonable that a game should offer this much for this little. In a time when consumable IAP is king, Polara stands out for its stand-alone offering. If you find yourself asking for more games that are sold complete, then this is most definitely one that deserves—or requires—your love.
At first glance, Devil's Attorney [$2.99] might seem like a shameless Phoenix Wright clone. You do play a defense attorney embroiled in courtroom drama, but unlike the naïve and justice-driven Phoenix, Max McMann is the eponymous devil's attorney. His clients did the crime, and they pay him the big bucks to avoid doing the time. Also unlike Phoenix Wright, Devil's Attorney doesn't take you through adventure-game-style investigations and conversations, but breaks down cases into series of turn-based battles.
In each case, you take on a team of units consisting of witnesses, evidence, and prosecutors in turn-based battles. You fight back against the prosecution's team using an array of courtroom skills. Some skills deal damage, others mitigate the prosecution's defense by lessening their damage, causing witnesses to attack themselves, or neutralizing a specific unit for one turn, and still others increase your case defense. All skills cost varying amounts of action points, and you receive only a teensy amount of AP per turn. Your goal is to determine how to spread your AP across skills in order to knock out the opposing units as efficiently -- and, if you want to collect case bonuses, as quickly -- as possible.
Launcher games are always hit or miss. You either love them or you don't. Mechanically they're about as simple as they come - your job is, generally speaking, to ensure the character that is being launched is capable of achieving maximum height and velocity for the longest sustained flight possible. If you're lucky, you might even get to steer the living projectile a bit. After that, you get to go back to the start, possibly with new upgrades, and begin the whole process anew.
Should the previous description make you crinkle your face in disapproval, you might want to skip reading the rest of this review. Juicy Beast's Burrito Bison [$0.99], recently brought to iOS by Ravenous Games, is a launcher game that doesn't try to be anything more than it is. That said, it's also a high quality example of the genre and one that is liable to make you smirk a lot as you play it. After all, how many games will let you play as a bison-headed wrestler with a vendetta against animate confectionery?
I'm not usually a fan of toilet humor, and Wimp: Who Stole My Pants [$0.99 / Free / $2.99 / Free] takes place in a land reached by toilet, more or less. You hunt down stolen underpants, platform through toxic sewage and solve puzzles to claim toilet paper rolls. This hasn't triggered a moment of squeamishness, though. I've been far too busy touring the sights and sounds of the world of Wimp, trying to get every single one of those rolls into my collection and taking in some fantastic puzzle-platforming.
Wimp is one of the better platformers on iOS, but you wouldn't know it from its structure: 60 levels laid out in a menu, a three toilet-roll ranking system, and a handful of thematic worlds to flip between. It's dull, but it works, and lets us focus on the meat of the thing -- the many clever challenges Flexile Studio has prepared. Most of them surround box pushing or button pressing, but that doesn't mean they're boring.
Games age so quickly. Jordan Mechner's The Last Express [$4.99] was first released in 1997. That's 15 years ago: time enough for pop to become "classic rock", and more than long enough for a television show to have developed an eternally loyal fanbase (Babylon Five ran 1994-8) or have been forgotten utterly (Lost ran 2004-2010). In the worlds of art and literature, 15 years is the blink of an eye.
But videogames age faster than dogs. I think only the fashion industry devours itself on a more regular basis. Here, 15 years is a bloody eternity.
So it was a relief to see just how gracefully The Last Express has aged, just how natural it feels on mobile, and that Dot Emu delivered such a masterful port (on a level with their port of Another World [$3.99]. The Last Express plays like it was designed for mobile, albeit in a "headphones strongly recommended" way.
That's one of the game's weaknesses: it is driven by it's audio and categorically inaccessible to the deaf. There isn't even an option to subtitle every conversation (dialogue in languages other than English are subtitled, just as in the original US release).
You know that feeling you get when you play an RPG and you manage to work your way down every trail and fill out every inch of the map? Apply that to word games and you have Chris Garrett's QatQi [Free], a game that's as much about exploring as it is about spelling.
