3D Attack Interactive assumes you've met the acquaintance of the Super Mario Bros. Hence the name of their game: The Other Brothers [$1.99], a throwback platformer featuring pleasantly pixelated graphics and music straight out of the MIDI era. Everything that Mario and Luigi do, brothers Joe and Jim can do too. They run, jump, and rescue damsels in distress, but the mechanics of those actions work a little differently. Speaking of, I'd wager you've probably heard more about The Other Brothers' controls than you have the game's lengthy development cycle, so let's take a moment to clear the air.
Prior to the update that 3D Attack pushed through earlier this week, The Other Brothers' controls were awful. Touchscreen controls are, well, touchy to begin with, but The Other Brothers used a floating control pad that moved with your thumb. The pad tended to float around even when you were trying to hold your thumb still to, say, guide your character up a ladder. Other times, the control pad didn't track my thumb, leaving me to plummet down a pit or stand around waiting for a burly thug to clock me in the jaw.
Those of you who weren't born with a smartphone in your hands might recall the simpler days of video games. How simple? I'm talking stick figures, backgrounds painted in one, maybe two shades of color, and jarringly loud bleeps that passed as sound effects. Some of these games were awful. Others stand as classic examples of gameplay over graphics, a no-frills approach often lost in the desperate struggle to produce photorealistic graphics, and realistic physics, and realistic bleeps.
Plasma-Sky [$1.99] isn't quite so stark, but it does hearken back to the simpler days of shmups. There's no IAP, no dizzying array of ships with different stats and weapons, and the screen won't fill up with bullets and background flashes and flickers that send you into seizures. At least not right away. Like Geometry Wars, Plasma-Sky applies a coating of retro paint. You control a shiny ship made up of brightly colored lines and fire away at fleets of equally effervescent enemy ships, collecting bigger and better power-ups that light up the black-as-ink sky like colored pegs battling it out on a Lite-Brite.
Plasma-Sky's utilitarian aesthetic carries over to its control scheme, and in a good way. You can tilt your device to steer your ship, or better yet, slide your thumb around; where your digit goes, your ship will follow. Firing is done for you, giving you the leisure to focus on dodging enemy fire and weaving in and out of their synchronized (space) swimming formations. The tilt controls aren't responsive, and your thumb occasionally impedes your view, which can mean the difference between an enemy tagging or missing your vehicle. Otherwise the touch controls are snappy and will carry their weight on your flight to victory, depending on how you choose to play.
The game offers three modes, each of which should pose a hefty challenge to even the most accomplished shoot 'em up-er. Conquest starts you at level one and challenges you to survive up to 80 waves of ships big and small. Every second you survive increases your score multiplier; die, and those impressive numbers you racked up reset to zero. Hardcore mode strips away your life bar and gives you only a single hit point to go on, and Survival throws massive waves of enemies at you in wild displays that should please fans of tough-as-nails shmups like Dodonpachi Resurrection.
As a shmup fan, I enjoyed Survival and Hardcore modes the most, but Conquest presents a rounded mode suited for players of all skill levels. The mode increases the challenge at a slow burn, giving new players time to find their space legs. At the same time, old hands will appreciate the challenge of keeping scores and multipliers intact during the more grueling stages that come up later on. Giving players unlimited continues might seem a strike against challenge, but it actually adds a layer of difficulty: do you continue, knowing that pressing on means losing your score and power-ups? Or do you go all the way back to level 1 and give 'er another go?
Three modes, touch controls that hop to at the slightest touch, and retro graphics. Doesn't sound like much, does it? Don't be fooled by appearances, Plasma-Sky is a solid addition to the ever-expanding galaxy of shmups available on the App Store.
Illusion Labs has a reputation for quality iOS games, with Blast-A-Way [$4.99], Touchgrind [$4.99] and a few other classics under its proverbial belt. Let that be enough to convince you to try out the studio's newest, Mr. Crab [$1.99]. At a glance it looks visually busy and overly simple, a vertical platformer of no great account. A few moments in action, however, show that it's more appealing - and more interesting - than it first looks.
Since my taste in platformers tends toward the sadistic, I was skeptical of Mr. Crab's one-touch platforming. It isn't a cruel game, for the most part, but it's also far from mindless. Each trip around its pillars manages to bring out new challenges, ones that range from amateur to agonizing. It also has the whole cute thing going for it—I dearly wanted to save all of Mr. Crab's little baby crabs, and that's where things got interesting.
Slitherine Software has built a name for itself on well-researched historical strategy and tactical wargames, and Legion is where it all started, back in 2002. Slitherine's Legion [$9.99 (HD)] is a well-executed port of that game, deep and complex, but not taking full advantage of the iOS platform.
The look and feel of Legion will be familiar to fans of the Civilization games, including Civilization Revolution [$2.99 / Free / $6.99 (HD)], though it is much more deeply rooted in its setting, with nearly all of the maps based on historic Roman campaigns, and balance more finely honed in the absence of a research system.
Legion handles resource management, city development and logistics in a manner common to 4x games. There are a few wrinkles that enhance the sense of being a Roman Legate, rather than, say, the ruler of an intergalactic empire. Building construction and unit recruitment are only completed in the spring, for example, and the same "units" of population that work to provide resources are expended to create new military units.
The battles are perhaps the game's most interesting element, as you select initial placement, formation, and orders, but can only watch the engagement as it plays out. RTS fans will be appalled, but I found this appropriate to the era (formations are important, but mid-battle changes of orders nearly impossible), and makes you think about orders and formations, rather than counting on reflex and fast-scrolling to win the day.
The game's flaws result from it being a port: the controls are responsive and become comfortable quickly, but still fall into the category of adapting the player to use a finger like a mouse. The main problem is that there are parts of the interface that are easy to miss or misunderstand if you just jump into the game. The tutorial, however, is both brief and sufficient, and a very lightly edited version of the game's original manual is included.
At first, tooltips were poorly placed, and I found I often had to switch hands to see them, but a new update fixes that. That just leaves my biggest gripe: saves. Slitherine's Legion only saves via the original save-game and autosave (at the beginning of a new turn). That means that if you have to leave a turn in progress to do something else (such as chasing after your hyperactive toddler) you could lose everything you've done in the current season.
One of the advantages of this being a port of a classic game is that there is far more content – more scenarios and ways to play them – than would be invested in an original iOS game. You can play historical campaigns as any of the tribes and nations involved, or swap out for fantasy scenarios in which the Romans invade England starting in Scotland, or Gallic tribes conquer the Italian peninsula (Asterix's revenge!).
If you're wondering what Slitherine's Warhammer 40k game might be like, Battle Academy [$19.99 (HD) / Free (HD)], with its tactical play and 3D graphics, or Slitherine's own Field of Glory rules for historical tabletop play [$14.99 (HD)] are probably going to be better reference points. Legion, however, demonstrates that these people can handle strategy on every scale. There has never been a Warhammer videogame that preserved Games Workshop's tabletop rules: maybe Slitherine will be the one to do it.
Considering the large amount of physics-based puzzlers that get continually released on the App Store, it takes a special kind of title to differentiate itself from the pack. Little Bit Games' The Seed [$0.99]Â does so in a variety of ways. Its emphasis on minimalist (but beautiful) presentation combined with approachable gameplay is a great mix and is executed well. In addition, its subtle narrative and reflective visuals lead to a game that's only sullied by its shortness.
As you might imagine, The Seed tasks players with guiding a magical seed through a variety of barren locales on a quest to regrow the land. This is accomplished by guiding the seed through a variety of stages with the goal of each to land the seed on a flat of fertile ground which allows it to grow a plant and move on. Sounds relatively simple, but the simple act of guiding and moving the seed (which is done via water droplets) is an adventure in itself.
It's time to take a bite of the reality sandwich. At the end of the day, office worker bees can only put out so many fires and circle back to so many tasks before they need to table their workload and develop a more synergistic flow. What I mean to say, I think, is that you need to loosen your white collar, grab a foreign object, and smash your office to smithereens or risk becoming a lifer who goes postal or, worse, stares mindlessly while muttering about a stapler.
The prototypical office drone you play in Smash the Office [$0.99] has done just that. Reduced to a gibbering mess by unrealistic time tables, micromanagement, office jargon, and conversations that no doubt began with "Workin' hard or hardly workin'?", your character takes up the nearest blunt instrument and sets out to raze his workplace to the ground.
Each level drops you in a standard nine-to-five office setting replete with cube farms, servers, computer, and other office gear. With a club in hand, you have exactly one minute to earn a high score by smashing and bashing everything in sight. Once you've, uh, taken the meeting offline in one room, break down the door to move on to the next room of breakables.
There are very few motifs out there that haven't been beaten nearly to death by a deluge of games crafting variations of the same story. Zombies. Pirates. Ninjas. And yet, I've somehow maintained a soft spot for the story of the well-meaning robot caught up in something bigger than itself. Whether it's a brilliant point-and-click adventure like Machinarium [$4.99 (HD)] or the frantic puzzling of Robot Wants Kitty [Free], I can't say no to the task of taking care of something cute and artificially intelligent. So it's no great surprise that when I heard Teotl Studios was bringing their well-received head-scratcher Unmechanical [$2.99] from PC to iOS, I had my download finger at the ready.
Set in a mysterious, subterranean expanse, Unmechanical follows a plucky propellor-equipped robot on a mission to bring life back to a place long-forgotten. Armed with only one ability - the power to emit magnetic rays that allow you to carry objects, lift latches, and power switches - you zip through a series of interconnected rooms and pathways, slowly coming to understand what you're doing, and where you are. What stood out immediately for me was the way the game's vague narrative leant itself to a mobile port.
Scenes are shot in a purposefully limited field of view, forcing you to fly slowly outward to the walls of a cavernous room too understand its scope, take in its many machinations, and gain a sense of your surroundings. Looking down on the scene as it rests between your hands within the confines of a phone or tablet screen helps immerse you in the unknown, giving off the sense that you - like your spinning protagonist - are under the microscope.
This oscillation between a sense of both discovery and ambiguity is maintained in the puzzle structure, where Unmechanical truly shines. What seem at first like tenuous, disconnected elements of a sprawling space soon give way to a clear goal, albeit one that seems massively difficult. Yet by testing, investigating, and probing the scene, you see see a small, simple first step. When you take that first step, suddenly the path forward seems a little clearer, a little less uncertain, and a bigger picture takes shape: one that you couldn’t see before. Clever, tangible puzzles based around levers and switches soon take their place in larger, multi-part mind-benders that reveal their scope as you progress. Watch out for a particularly satisfying sequence that seems like it begins with a one-off test of refracting lazers, which comes full circle to deliver a hugely satisfying challenge many screens later.
The whole experience is tied together with controls whose simplicity have me torn. On one hand, the boiling down of the Windows version of the game - complete with its controller control option - to two key gestures, is hugely admirable. Resting your finger on the screen and dragging it where you'd like to go handles movement, while tapping the character turns its magnetic function on and off. The massive diversity that Teotl Studios eeks out of that combination serves as a compliment to the game's overall elegance, and very rarely feels forced. Things do, however, feel occasionally spotty in ways that can frustrate. A demand for precision when it comes to the magnetic field, and some imprecise hit boxing for turning it on and off all result in actions being repeated, or solutions being botched needlessly.
To that end, not all of the game's smaller challenges fall down on the right side of that divide between logic and experimentation. A handful of sequences feel altogether too rote, and the ensuing "puzzling" amounts to a lengthy sequence of carrying and dropping. Meanwhile, a couple roadblocks seem to lack any rhyme or reason, and fall down on the side of tiresome trial and error. Make no mistake: Myst [$6.99 (HD)] junkies will enjoy whipping out a notepad to do some detailed cataloguing, but the sparing nature of these types of puzzles makes them feel out of place and at odds with the game's otherwise consistent tone.
That, ultimately, is what helps Unmechanical rise above the kinks in its own machinery to stand out as a deep, satisfying experience: a tone and game world worth exploring. On a platform focused so misguidedly on "replayability," the game's gorgeous setting, subtle story, and (mostly) wonderful puzzles make it something better - deeply playable. Huge kudos to Teotl for flexing their acrobatic skills with Epic's Unreal Engine here on mobile as well, where even an iPad 1 is able to clunk its way through the entire game without crashes (though it's not advisable given the graphical dip!). Fellow robot sympathizers, players looking for a mental workout, or anyone bitter their iPad still can't play Machinarium: don't let this one pass you by.
Does anyone remember The Conduit? That ambitious Wii shooter that combined mystery and lore with with action fundamentals, and made a run at carving out a core niche on the system? Its developer High Voltage Software seemed primed to make a name for themselves on the back of that game and its sequel. After the tepid reception of Conduit 2 a couple of years ago, however, the talented studio all but disappeared into the contract work they were doing, with big name brands like Toy Story and Star Wars burying their recognition. Now, of all platforms, it seems like it's iOS that has given them a new lease on life.
From first-person shooter to endless runner, High Voltage's Le Vamp [$0.99] puts you in charge of the safety of what may be the world's cutest prince of the undead. Having just escaped from his crypt, the titular character charges headstrong out into the big wide world, obliviously looking for someone to play with amidst the dangers of sunlight, other monsters, and enraged townsfolk. Naturally, it falls to you to keep him out of harm's way...unless you're the real monster, because seriously: who wants to see this adorable baby vamp bite the dust?
Liberation Maiden [$4.99] began as part of Level-5's Guild01 compilation, a collection of four downloadable Nintendo 3DS games made by some of Japan's quirkiest and most innovative designers, including an RPG from Yasumi Matsuno (Final Fantasy series, Vagrant Story) and an airport-management game from Yoot Saito (SimTower, Seaman). Goichi Suda's contribution is Liberation Maiden, a free-roaming, 3D shooter about a young woman who becomes president of New Japan, jumps in a mech named "Kamui," and throws off the yoke of some faceless oppressor called "the Dominion."
Better known by his nom de guerre, Suda51 is distinguished by his surreal, tongue-in-cheek, ultra-violent third-person action games, but Liberation Maiden isn't his first shoot-'em-up: that honor belongs to Sine Mora, a 2D horizontal shooter in which all the pilots are anthropomorphic bears. Liberation Maiden is more subdued fare than what we usually expect out of Suda, but the relatively standard anime-girl-in-a-mecha-suit motif is handled deftly in cutscenes by Bones, the animation studio most famous for Fullmetal Alchemist.
Kitties are cute and should be saved: this is the premise of Jones On Fire [$0.99], and it's a good one. These kitties are indeed cute, and you, as the intrepid firefighter Jones, really ought to save them. I can say with some certainty that they'd do the same for you.
The woods are on fire, and they're utterly stuffed with kitties. It's a bad combination. So Jones leaves the safety of her fire hall, dives out into the flaming woods, and runs and slides her way through each hazard level collecting every kitty she can. Then, after a brief breather in the hall, it's back out into the hellish flames, this time coming on even faster.
Hazard levels are an effective way to break up the monotony of an endless runner. Each one is tougher than the last, but the rewards are also greater. When you get through one, you pause to tally your kitties, multiplied by the difficulty you face, and then you hop back to it. When you burn through all your lives, the kitties drag you back to Hazard Level 1 to start all over again.
Games like this are always somewhat sparse on narrative, but let's just say our beleaguered pink protagonist must have done something terrible, because we find him in the room from hell. An inescapable rectangle filled with spikes, missiles, buzz-saws, lasers, and fiery flying heads, this chiptune thunderdome offers only one choice: survival. Luckily, some idiot left an anti-gravity device lying around, allowing you to zip to the top and bottom of the screen collecting gems on the way to safety. Why gems? Because…because high scores. Somewhere along the way, this "make up a story" thing really fell apart.
I've got to hand it to Butterscotch Shenanigans, there aren't that many iOS games that can pique my interest on premise alone. However, TowelFight 2: The Monocle of Destiny [$0.99] certainly does, and is a pretty crazy title in most regards. More importantly, TowelFight is an enjoyable game, with only some control issues keeping back an otherwise unique take on the old-school action-adventure genre.
TowelFight follows the story of Hardik, an ordinary monocle-wearing guy that gets sucked into an alternate dimension where infighting amongst gods is causing chaos. Armed with his newly enchanted monocle, Hardik gains the ability to shoot animals from his eye and is charged with a quest to take down opposing gods and save the world. While the story sounds entirely absurd, I thought TowelFight did a great job not only with its overall narrative but also with its dialogue, which is often tongue-in-cheek and filled with a lot of amusing colloquialisms.
From a broad standpoint, TowelFight plays similarly to the original Legend of Zelda. Combat and exploration take place in single-screen environments connected by doors and tracked with a grid-like overworld map. Enemies also drop coins, which can be used to purchase a variety of weapons and items. Health is also measured in hearts, with Hardik losing a percentage of coins and returning to home base if he dies.
Sir Pussington is my favorite cat—hackycat? He's just so dapper with his little top hat and monocle, and his mustache gives fellow hackycat Mustachio a run for his kitty treats. Both of them bounce nicely when I kick them, and their little feet paddle the air as they fly.
Hackycat [$0.99] isn't kind to these animal denizens. The little kitties just fall to pieces if they touch the ground. It's up to you to save them, to keep them up and away from that tragic fate as long as you can. Like Hacky Sack, this means a lot of bouncing things off your feet, your knees, or your head. Unlike those more humane games, these things meow piteously when you bounce them. It's a tough gig, but what are you going to do? Let the little guys explode?
It works because Hackycat takes itself ever so seriously. This is a right proper game of kick-ups, one with a steep climb to insane heights on its leaderboards. You'll learn to manage three, four, five balls at a time, never blinking, never letting one drop—only the balls are cats and you adopt new ones with cheeseburgers (or tofuburgers) and it's all completely and utterly silly.
You start with a single cat. It can be bounced up, then bounced over and over without a miss for a combo. A ribbon of cheeseburgers appears, and you bounce your kitty over to collect them. When you collect enough, a target appears. Anything tapped inside that target can be launched right out of the game, never to be seen again.
After a bit you find yourself with two cats, and you juggle both the same way. If you can hit both in one tap you'll get a bonus. Then a third parachutes into the mix. This might be when you start to hope for that superkick target to show up. If not then, your moment of need will come. There are always more cats to kick.
Doesn't that sound just horrid? But Hackycat makes it work. Perhaps you have a fundamental moral objection to depictions of violence against animals. Otherwise, the game does a fantastic job of alleviating any guilt there is to be had. The cats look disgruntled when you kick them, and positively high when they get cheeseburgers. Each power-up you unlock gets them even higher, until you can be fairly sure they'll just float away. Even failing, their limbs scatter bloodlessly in little piles of ex-hackycat. It's all adorable, except the meowing.
Along with high scores, your kitty kick-up adventures are rewarded with cheeseburgers. You can spend them on a whole list of adoptable kittens, each one cuter than the last. Those get cycled in randomly as you play. There's also a bonus character to unlock, and bonus stages to play in. None of these things makes a significant difference to your high score but they're all exceptionally desirable. It's a good carrot, and there's no stick to be seen.
All that crazy stuff sits on top of a strong foundation, so it's not like Hackycat is only for fans of the absurd. It's legitimately challenging to keep the cats all up for any length of time, and it takes skill to corral hits into major combos. Risky moves earn the big points, after all. You also have to be cautious and aware, or you'll tap the occasional bird that shows up to mess up your groove.
Hackycat is a solid game of kick-ups wrapped in a pretty delightful package—and hey, if you're going to kick cats, make it these ones. They need the help, and you need the cheeseburgers if you're going to kick 'em all.
In the life of the App Store, the original 2009 release of Real Racing [$0.99 / $0.99 (HD)] was a massive turning point. As mentioned in our review, both the graphical quality and the "feel" of the game were unlike anything else available at the time. Almost a year and a half later when Real Racing 2 [$0.99 / $0.99 (HD)] hit, we questioned whether or not it was "the perfect iPhone game" in our review. Fast forward two more years and tonight Real Racing has officially turned into a trilogy with the release of Real Racing 3 [Free]. Everything in the game is better than its predecessors, except how much you'll need to fork out if you want to play it like you may have played previous installments in the series- Or essentially any racing game you've ever played before.
Real Racing 3 by far has the best "out of the box" experience of any iOS game I've played. After a totally free download which is going to suck up close to 2GB of free space on your device once it's installed you're thrown into what initially seems to be a typical pre-rendered intro cut scene of a Porsche zooming around a track- But then you quickly realize this isn't pre-rendered at all, this is running in real-time, on your phone. This first race serves as a brief tutorial of sorts on how the game works, and if you're online, you'll come to the second amazing realization that these other cars in the tutorial were actually driven by real people via Firemonkeys' new "Time Shifted Multiplayer" system. The whole thing is ridiculously impressive, particularly if you're used to the typical free to play offerings on the App Store which normally consist of basic arcade style games or endlessly reskinned cow clickers.
From there, you buy your first car (Per our tips post we recommend the Silvia!) and you're off to the races. I cannot stress enough just how great the graphics are in Real Racing 3. "Console quality" seems to be a buzzword often thrown around, but if there's any game that deserves that distinction it's this one. The game screams on the iPhone 5, with high resolution textures, amazing looking models, incredibly detailed car interiors, and mirrors that actually work. The sound design is great too, and with a good pair of headphones it's crazy just how immersive the game can feel- Even on the 4" screen of your phone.
Like previous Real Racing games, RR3 sports enough control configurations to satiate everyone regardless of how crazy you want the setup to be. There's options for tilt controls, on-screen controls, and every mixture of the two you can think of. There's also assistive systems for practically everything. If you're a super casual player that isn't very good at racing games, leave steering assist, brake assist, and traction control on and all you'll need to worry about is tilting your phone to drive around the track. If you're a experienced racer, you can take full control of everything (except shifting gears, oddly enough) and likely see way better results as you're not subjected to the overly-cautious automatic systems.
I've really been enjoying how the new Time Shifted Multiplayer works in Real Racing 3. Racing against ghosts has been around for what feels like forever, where you're playing against a car that you cannot interact with, recorded from a previous racing attempt. In this game, Firemonkeys have taken similar data and melded it with an AI racer. If you play into the social features and have friends who are also playing the game, you'll be actively racing against them, potentially hours after they completed the same race. The experience is particularly cool once you link up your Facebook account and randomly see friends on the track that you didn't even know had the game. What's even better is catching up to one of these friends, and actively being able to ram them out of the way to take first and beat their time.
After playing a few races, you'll quickly come to the harsh realization of just how much of a timer-based free to play game Real Racing is. You'll start the game out with a small initial load of premium currency, and periodically unlock smaller amounts in game, but Real Racing 3 is as much a waiting game as it is a racing game. You'll eventually find yourself waiting for the weirdest things stopping you from racing again, covering everything from installing performance upgrades to repairing your suspension. Of course you can skip all these time sinks by making it rain real-world dollars, making the actual price of Real Racing 3 anywhere between free to infinitely expensive depending on how often you open your proverbial wallet.
The up side, if there is one, is that these timers can be somewhat mitigated by playing intelligently and may not be an issue for you at all depending on how you play iOS games. Racing conservatively and actively trying to avoid wear and tear on your car can allow you to squeeze out a few more races before you need to repair, but you could also make the argument that what's fun about these sorts of games is aggressively taking corners, slamming into cars, and barely squeezing out a first place finish. You can't do that in Real Racing 3 unless you want to wait, potentially a very long time.
Personally, I'm so inundated by other things to play that the way I've been enjoying Real Racing 3 is by playing as much as I can, eventually hitting the wall with timers, and then just waiting for the game to send me a push alert telling me my car is repaired and ready to go. Then, when I have time I'll do a few more races before repeating the cycle again. I'm totally OK with this because these short bursts are typically how I play games on my phone. However, if you're the kind of person who wants to download a game like this and blow through it in one massive marathon play session, Real Racing 3 is very much not the game for you.
On the subject of push alerts, in its current iteration having them enabled has some serious drawbacks if you're annoyed by alerts. I'm of the camp of people who like their phone to buzz and beep as little as possible. I'll almost always say no to the popup asking if an app can send you push alerts, and will instantly delete anything that sends me alerts without asking, but I like Real Racing 3 enough that I want to be notified when I can play it again. Unfortunately, by allowing alerts, you're also inviting an endless stream of beeps and vibrates, particularly if you've got lots of friends playing the game. Real Racing 3 will send you an alert whenever someone beats your time in a race.
If you're an active player with friends who are also fairly active, you're in for alert spam like you've never experienced before. This wouldn't be so bad if these alerts actually did something. As it is, when you get an alert that a friend beat your time, you slide it, and the game just loads. It's not like you can swipe the alert to get thrown directly back into that same race to compete against them. The implementation seems really sloppy, and I wish there was a way I could turn this alert spam off while keeping the whole "Hey your car is ready to race again!" alert on.
Firemonkeys have shown that they can tweak these sorts of things on the fly. Since its release in New Zealand two weeks ago, the amount of time players have needed to wait for various things in game have varied wildly, and the solution to my push alert problem is just a checkbox away. It will be interesting to see how these aspects of the game evolve over time, especially considering in its current iteration the way timers work don't make a whole lot of sense. For instance, you can almost mitigate them entirely (or at least get to a point where you can play the game for way longer before stopping) by purchasing multiple cars. Real Racing 3 is actually at its worst for gameplay-stopping timers for new users, as once you hit the point where your car has to be repaired there is absolutely nothing for you to do other than wait or pay. Making new players hit this wall seems very counter-productive when it comes to user retention.
Real Racing 3 is a weird game to review. On one hand, it's free, and is the absolute best looking game available on the App Store right now. You need to experience the sights and sounds of the game as it is downright jaw-dropping to see what Firemonkeys has accomplished on a technical level. On the other, it feels incredibly strange to take a genre that's typically very hardcore and wrapping it in free to play trimmings with hard timer-based stopping points. The juxtaposition between awesome adrenalin-fueled racing and the "Sorry bro, insert coin or come back later" is very, very odd.
If you're a free to play gamer used to the often basic games that litter the Top Free chart on the App Store, Real Racing 3 is going to knock your socks off. Our verdict is to definitely give the game a try, and if you feel the timers are too oppressive, the alerts are too annoying, or it just doesn't otherwise jive with your play style, either download one of the other Real Racing games or check out other great racers on the App Store like Gameloft's Asphalt 7: Heat [$0.99] or EA's Need For Speed: Most Wanted [$0.99] and race the night away.
NOTE: We're not sure what (if any) difference there is between the two Real Racing 3 entries on the App Store. If one link doesn't work in your region, try the other one.
This week's haul of new games had a lot of weird stuff in it, like Backflip Madness [$0.99]. I included it because there's a huge contingent of people who can't seem to get enough of these various physics games, and honestly, I didn't expect a whole lot from the game. When 11:00 Eastern rolled around, I downloaded it with everything else, and haven't been able to put it down since.
Here's the premise: Do a backflip, then another backflip, and another. That's it.
I'm big into getting the bad news first, so let's dive into why this game is terrible. First off, the physics are beyond janky. You'll mess up endlessly, yet somehow miraculously stick really weird landings that you have no business doing unless your shoes were coated with a liberal layer of super glue. The graphics aren't that great, background textures clearly repeat and your little backflipping dude has the animations of a simple paper doll. The music is repetitive, the UI is weirdly basic, and most of the in-game systems such as choosing different styles of backflips are remarkably unintuitive. Oh, and if you've got friends playing it, you'll get an endless stream of Game Center push alerts with their scores.
...Yet, I can't stop playing it. It's one of those games that are so bad, and so simple, that there's this endless feedback loop of "I should be able to do this, why am I failing, I KNOW I can do this," which leads to never giving up- Particularly as you start to see the proverbial Matrix, have a string of five perfect backflips in a row, then fall flat on your face.
Here's how it works: A single button in the bottom right corner handles all the action. The first time you hit it, your dude starts to kneel down. The second time you hit it he jumps up. The third time you hit it he crunches into a backflip position. The fourth time you hit it he extends his legs to land. That's it. The first jump in the first level has you just performing a backflip in place, and things quickly escalate to much larger jumps, including arching over obstacles and jumping off basketball hoops to land inside of the designated area marked with orange cones.
The brutal difficulty of this game feels more like a roguelike than a physics backflip game. You have three lives, fall on your face three times and you start the whole level over. Initially this seems annoying, but it's just stupid how intense this makes things. iOS games don't often make me yell in real life, yet, I've lost count at the number of audible "OH COME ON!" that have been invoked as I make it farther than I ever had in a level then just completely bungle my backflip. Game over, start over.
The "just one more try" factor is through the roof, especially as you fully realize just how simple the task at hand is. Do a backflip. Press a button four times. That's it! It's infuriating, but impossible to put down. People in the forum thread also seem to be having similar experiences.
This is such a weird game to even review, as I can fully admit its flaws are numerous, and it's definitely not for everyone... But, any game that has us yelling at our phones definitely deserves some attention.
We also posted a TA Plays video of Backflip Madness:
3D Attack Interactive assumes you've met the acquaintance of the Super Mario Bros. Hence the name of their game: The Other Brothers [$1.99], a throwback platformer featuring pleasantly pixelated graphics and music straight out of the MIDI era. Everything that Mario and Luigi do, brothers Joe and Jim can do too. They run, jump, and rescue damsels in distress, but the mechanics of those actions work a little differently. Speaking of, I'd wager you've probably heard more about The Other Brothers' controls than you have the game's lengthy development cycle, so let's take a moment to clear the air.
