We've been keeping an eye on Forest Moon Games ever since it was spun off from Crescent Moon Games with a goal of publishing casual and experimental titles. Hairy Tales [$2.99] is the latest such title to come from Forest Moon Games and certainly fits the bill in both the casual and experimental classifications. In addition to that, Hairy Tales is just a fun and interesting puzzler, particularly with its emphasis on world manipulation and its eccentric style.
Hairy Tales tasks you with guiding a lemming-like character (aptly named a 'Hairy') on a world cleansing mission from its starting location to a portal situated elsewhere in the world. Each world is composed of tiled pieces of land, with most pieces being movable, thus allowing you to move the world around to your liking.
It's not as simple as just guiding your lemming, as the portal requires a crystal to unlock. In addition, picking up the crystal also allows your Hairy to cleanse the surrounding world, which is tracked and necessary in order to fully clear the level. Finally, each level has optional mushrooms littered across the map which should be collected for completion's sake.
Streaming Colour Studio's Finger Tied [$2.99 (HD)] provides some of the finger sliding sensations of Fingle but tests players' speed as well as their dexterity. In over 100 levels, your fingers must make it from point A to point B as quickly as possible, without lifting from the board or moving out of bounds.
Fans may know the LandFormer [Free] and Dapple [$2.99 / Free] developer, but I feel Finger Tied really puts Owen Goss (Streaming Colour's one-man band) on the map.
He makes getting from point A to B on a static screen rather exhilarating. The timer which dictates the medal you receive starts as soon as you place your fingers on all activation points. These points are single-shaped, bright, and pulsing, contrasted from the end points which are double-shaped.
These end points are also optional; without them, your fingers become roadblocks for unnatural finger-Twister. With enough practice, though, you can increase your time to get the gold. I appreciate that I can retry a failed level quickly by touching anywhere on the board, instead of moving my fingers way down south to the "retry" button. Unfortunately, I can't retry a stage for a faster time the same way if I don't fail.
Finger Tied requires at most the tying of four fingers at one time, and it cares not from where or whom those fingers come. It encourages playing with up to three other people, but the developer assures that a player can singularly achieve all the gold medal times with practice. In other words, don't be put off by the heavy multiplayer focus of the game's trailer.
The leaderboards are equally indifferent as to how many players play. At this point, it simply rates the fastest completion time for Finger Tied's four level groupings. Playing multiplayer for the fastest time is a bit of a mixed blessing, anyway, I believe. Having to sync up when to start with another human can cost you time in simpler levels, but that other hand can move freely in more complicated levels.
Finger Tied ends up being tongue-tied in only two respects for me. The upbeat music wears off shortly, with only one track offered. The game also includes a level editor but feels incomplete without a way to share these levels beyond physically passing the iPad.
For now, players have over 100 levels and a way to create an infinite amount more to play locally solo or with friends for $1. If you want a fast-paced game that demands digital dexterity, Finger Tied is an easy recommendation.
Once a stagnant genre at the onset of the App Store, RPG fans have become increasingly fortunate in recent years with a nice selection of titles, both new and old, to enjoy. Spiderweb Software has been doing its part by revamping and porting its large collection of old-school PC RPGs to the iPad. Avernum 6 is the third such title (after Avernum[$9.99 (HD)] and Avadon[$9.99 (HD)]) to be released on iOS and continues the trend of strong, narrative-driven role playing games on the iPad.
If you've never played a Spiderweb Software RPG, I'd invite you to check out our review on Avadon for an in-depth description of the gameplay. For everyone else, Avernum 6 employs the same isometric turn-based combat and movement system along with a deep inventory and magic system. However, fans of the previous iOS games will notice some changes, particularly with the leveling and skill system. The somewhat simplistic skill tree of pervious titles has been replaced with the classic Avernum system of purchasing skills and attributes directly with skill points that are earned with each level.
Mango Down's Catch-22 [$0.99] is a mesmerizing, one-button arcade game that has you constantly facing your toughest opponent: yourself. The goal is to increase your score by gathering the orange orbs and avoiding the oncoming ball. Each round you survive increases the multiplier and the amount of orbs to collect. Once you gather all the visible orbs, you "switch" players, and the jumps you make become the path of your enemy-self. This alternating dance plays out until the two balls crash.
That is, unless you crash when you are crystalized and switching player possession. This special crash makes both balls rightly go in opposite directions, but it more importantly resets the path of the enemy-self. This provides a much needed respite from the last round where you jumped all over the hypnotic, orange playground.
Equally entrancing is the music that loops during the game. The notes pluck subtly, with soft, airy effects for the jumps and slight chimes for gathering the orbs. Thankfully the orange playground itself doesn't move, but the cloudy, dreamy background slowly drifts during gameplay.
Score-oriented 'racers' seem to have a decent following on iOS, with hits such as Mad Skills BMX [$0.99] and MotoHeroz [$0.99 / $0.99 (HD)] garnering fans with their emphasis on speed, precision, and high scores. Stunt Star: The Hollywood Years [$2.99], continues the trend in terms of trial-and-error side scrolling racers. However, while other titles focus entirely on race, Stunt Star does a great job adding personality and presentation with its premise. Sure, Stunt Star's difficulty is exceedingly tough, and its limited-use power-ups don't help the matter, but the game's trick-based gameplay is deep, lengthy and simply fun.
Stunt Star puts you in the role of a prospective stuntman as he gets his start in Hollywood films. Levels are categorized into different films, with each individual mission charging you with performing a specific trick. Players are tasked with getting their vehicle from one point to another in a level, with the goal being to land as close as possible to a checkered flag. Each mission also provides supplemental objectives (typically grabbing a star and using a certain vehicle) which award added points for completion. At the end of each mission players are scored, money is earned, and trophies are awarded based on score.
Look through my game collection and you'll find at least five copies of Mortal Kombat, Doom on assorted media, and more copies of Street Fighter II than Ryu players spam fireballs in a single round. Some games are so nice I've just got to buy them twice. Or more. The iPhone release of Crazy Taxi [$4.99] marks my fourth foray through the boulevards of Sega's imitation San Francisco, and it's still a pretty good game. Granted, the fun is still somewhat hampered by old design decisions, but Crazy Taxi feels good and whole on mobile.
If you somehow missed the arcade original or one of the multitude of ports over the last 13 years, Crazy Taxi puts you in the driver's seat of a yellow cab. Your job is to whisk your customers away to their intended destinations as speedily as possible to collect the highest fare possible, and you do that by cutting through parks, juking between cars, daring to drive left of center, and breaking every conceivable traffic law -- all to the tune of the original head-banging soundtrack.
There are journeys in the real world that we can't make on our own. We can't travel to the center of the Earth. Most of us won't walk on Mars. And we'll never be tiny enough to explore the innermost reaches of the human body. Instead, we visit these places through fiction and film, through games and stories that transport us. Turns out, sometimes we ought to leave well enough alone. If Tentacles: Enter The Dolphin [$0.99] is any indication, the human body is a complete horror show.
That's not to say it isn't fun to explore, mind. The journey is a blast, but the destination is a little nauseous. You'd think the game's star, the betentacled Lemmy, would be the least pleasant part, all eye and mouth and hooked claws ripping his way through the intestines of Dr. Phluff. Not at all. No, when clambering through the chitinous spikes and grasping cilia, or fighting against the malevolent many-eyed bacteria, you might start to feel sorry for poor little horrifying Lemmy. He's only trying to survive the nightmare world Press Play created.
Tobias Neukom's LiquidSketch [$1.99 (HD)] for iPad 2 and 3 is a gorgeous water physics puzzler that does things quite a bit differently, to its favor, thanWhere's My Water? and Sprinkle. Players intimately interact with the liquid in 90 puzzles based on six different stages and four game-changing mechanics.
While the goal is always to fill one or more boxes with (sometimes specifically colored) liquid, the first set of puzzles uses the gyroscope primarily to splash and mix the water. The next set involves using blocks to build bridges, pathways, and even pressure. The pressure will sometimes help the liquids collide fiercely to reach greater heights or spit out further then if it simply poured out.
Players then experiment with touch-enabled puzzles of pressure, mixture, and flow. Fingers can now flick and funnel liquid with ease through mazes to fill each goal.
The iPhone’s accelerometer tends to be one of the most clumsily implemented features in games on Apple’s game machine that occasionally is used to make phone calls. It makes you look stupid in public playing anything with it, and usually the game isn’t responsive enough to reflect your strategic twitches. Cool Pizza [Free] is different. Actually, “different” is putting it rather lightly. Cool Pizza is downright single-malt deranged, has next to no story, and has the ability to turn your next commute into a fit of enjoyable seizures so violent you might look up and find yourself in a stretcher.
So, yeah, in a word, it’s fun. But this is also one of the first tilt-based games in recent memory that’s not just worthwhile, but also enjoyable. That it’s free is just a nice bonus. Then again, it might be free because it’s illegal to buy drugs, and this is about as close to a bad trip you can get without going to the bad side of town and talking to some bad people about snatching up their wares.
Here’s the deal: You play as a skateboarding chick who, if the iTunes description text is to believed, goes to the underworld to fight devils and determine whether pizza can ever be cool.
Good luck finding that out. Cool Pizza is incredibly tough, but also exceptionally easy to pick up and play. Developer Secret Library describes it as “a spastic screen-masher inspired by Space Harrier and After Burner,” which explains the stark color scheme, but to use a more modern vernacular? It’s like an over-the-shoulder Canabalt where you hit ramps to get airborne, smack organ- and bomb-spitting coffins with your skateboard, and avoid nuclear bombs. Also, you'll need to focus extra hard while a glorious, blistering butt-rock guitar soundtrack blazes in the background.
That’s the most concise way of explaining the game. And despite its kooky flashiness, its simplicity helps it shine all the brighter. Because the main mechanic, tilting, and then thwacking your thumb to attack to catch even more wicked air, is all that’s going on here. Really it’s like an old arcade game, where your biggest opponent isn’t any enemy onscreen, it’s your own skill and how quickly you learn the patterns of what’s coming up ahead. I died early and often, and then, eventually, started to die only later and slightly less often. And, believe it or not, that is an accomplishment.
Cool Pizza is a bit sized unique and kookya reminder of where iPhone games could and in my opinion should be going: Not porting yesterday’s console hits or draining your battery to render super-colorful 3D warriors that take up the entire screen trying to emulate a similar "console-like" experience.
Lunar: Silver Star Story Touch [$6.99] is a port of the classic Sega CD/Saturn game, a JRPG with high-quality anime cut scenes, an unusually strong combat engine, and well-developed characters.
If you were into Lunar back in the day, or if you wanted to get Final Fantasy Dimensions [Free] but it was just too rich for your blood, stop reading and go get SoMoGa's iOS port of this JRPG classic right now.
Seriously, go, get on, shoo.... ah, wait a bit. The port isn't flawless.
There are three things that might get in the way of your enjoyment of this classic: the interface takes some getting used to, the anime is dubbed into English, and there seems to be a slow memory leak in the code.
That last one is scary, but it takes a long time to become a problem: about an hour of play on my 4th gen Touch, more like two hours on an iPad 2 (according to the forums). The result is a gradual slowdown/stutter of gameplay that gets progressively worse if you let it go.
The game lets you save anywhere, and any time but in the middle of combat, or this could be a real nightmare. A quick save, force quit and restart of the app took me less than 30 seconds, and doing that once an hour was no real obstacle to my enjoyment of the game.
Still, something that would be a rarely-noticed bug in a more quick-play game is annoying in an epic RPG, and Lunar is epic, the kind of epic that you can and will play for hours straight. Worse, a few players are reporting severe problems, finding the game to be unplayable as a result.
For me personally, the quality of the dubbing was the biggest flaw in the game, but I hate dubbed anime almost as much as I hate white chocolate. I suppose the overdubbed English performances are reasonably competent, but they sounded like so many hammed-up fingernails on chalkboard to me. To be fair, there has never been a port of Lunar with Japanese audio and English subtitles.
If you've played any of the game's previous incarnations, the menu system will be familiar. If not, save yourself a little pain and read the games short and succinct help file. The controls also take a little getting used to: there is a touch-anywhere virtual stick and a tap-to-move feature, as well as the somewhat bizarre option to play in portrait mode with half the screen taken up by a fixed d-pad.
That's a nice range of options, but none of them work perfectly. The tap-to-move feature has terrible pathfinding, pulling off "L" shaped moves most but not all of the time, and almost always failing at "U" turns. The stick is sloppy, feeling a bit like Cthulhu Saves the World's [$1.99] original swipe-to-move scheme. In portrait mode everything is eyestrain-inducingly tiny, but I used it occasionally for precision's sake in battles and in the menu screen.
The thing is, despite these flaws, I am totally in love with this game.
The game's protagonist is the classic boy-with-potential, but he comes off as a lot more real than most such protagonists, partially because of Nall, who might be thought of as Alex's daemon. Luna, his childhood friend, predictable love interest, and party cleric is similarly based on a cliche, but has a surprising amount of nuance to her character. She's tragically insecure, but that insecurity comes across as a character flaw you want to see her overcome, rather than a convenient subordination to the game's protagonist.
A large part of Lunar's appeal hinges on the likability of it's characters. They're all built on cliches, but they tend to outgrow their cliches and become surprisingly "real." A pervasive sense of humor serves to make major and minor personalities more human and rounded. That sense of humor gently introduces diversity and moral ambiguity into the game. A good example of this is the way that ordinary people (minor NPCs) have wildly varied opinions of people and places, and generally with cause.
The game's environments are varied and visually appealing, but after the storytelling, Lunar's big draw is a strong encounter and combat system.
The encounter system strikes a balance between action and turn-based RPG that works well: mobs appear on the map, and you can fight them all try to avoid them in real-time. Battles are turn-based and about as strategic as you can get without a grid or hex map, with movement factored in, and a balanced range of skills and spells to use. There's relatively little grinding and relatively little benefit to grinding, as boss fights scale to your experience level.
SoMoGa's port of Lunar was designed with pick-up play in mind. The ability to save anywhere, an auto-resume feature, and a shake-to-pause feature are all mobile-friendly. The handling of system options could be better, as shaking isn't well documented (I found it by accident) and the only way to get back to the menu is an option in the pause dialogue.
SoMoGa has plans for iCloud multi-device saves, and the devs have dropped hints about adding the Japanese audio (with English subtitles?) and other extras to future versions. One can hope that they'll root out the slowdown bug as well.
Like so many games these days, Lunar: Silver Star Story Touch hit the App Store with some some obvious flaws. The ultimate question isn't what it might become, but whether it can be recommended as-is. The short answer is "yes."
We've had our eyes on Apocalypse Max [$2.99] since it launched on iOS earlier this month (we even took it for a test drive during one of our TA Plays). Now that we've had an opportunity to check it out further, it's obvious that Wandake Games has put a lot of effort into its zombie-killing side-scroller. While Apocalypse Max isn't perfect (particularly in regards to its controls), its impressive visuals, fast-paced gameplay and decent amount of content breathe new life into the somewhat tiring zombie theme.
Apocalypse Max puts you in the role of Max (duh), the only survivor of the zombie infection on Hellthroat Island. Being the sole human on an island of undead, Max does what anyone else would do in the situation: go on a one-man zombie genocide while trying to figure out a way to escape. Max will journey through nine different regions of Hellthroat in a side-scrolling, shoot-em-up platformer taking on a wide variety of zombies. Action is fast, frenetic and challenging as you try to get through each level while holding off the hordes of zombies teleporting onto the field. Thankfully there are also a bevy of different weapons to make the adventure interesting.
One room. Four walls, a ceiling, a floor—a claustrophobic space, if you can't leave. Dark music, heartbeats and whispers. You could imagine the walls closing in while you scrabble for an exit. But The Room [$1.99 (HD)] never lets you worry about any of that. There's a time you stop caring about your surroundings, when you don't care a whit about anything but what's in front of you. It's the moment your work absorbs you completely, or you're on the trail of a mystery.
The mystery, in this case, is a box. A beautiful, ornate box with dozens of secrets and few answers to offer. It has levers and dials, locks and keys, parchment and clockwork. Manipulating them is a joy, the nearest thing to reality you can get on a screen. And all of it leads you deeper and deeper inside, into a nesting doll of mysteries.
In January of last year, Turborilla released their arcade-style two-wheeled racer Mad Skills Motocross [$0.99 / Free], a game we thought was pretty darn fun, and last month they released a pseudo-sequel of sorts called Mad Skills BMX [$0.99]. The new game retains the same basic concept of its forebear: 2D side-scrolling, one-on-one racing with time-trial style tracks and an emphasis on speed running levels.
Where Mad Skills BMX really differentiates itself is in the use of a smart new gesture control system that feels much more native to a touch screen than the previous game’s virtual buttons. They work great and feel intuitive, but they don’t necessarily make for an easy game. In fact, Mad Skills BMX is hard as nails.
The pinpoint timing needed to be successful in the game takes a lot of practice to really get to click, and it can be hard to demand that kind of patience from a mobile gaming audience. Once it does click, however, Mad Skills BMX opens up to become a fantastic speed trials game that should resonate quite well with competitive leaderboard chasers. The problem is, you need to be all plugged into Facebook to get in on that fun.
Far cheaper, less sweaty, and more bizarre than any real-world miniature golf course I've played on, Wonderputt [$0.99 (HD)] is a polymorphic putt-putt painting brought to life by the charming design of Damp Gnat.
Easily observed in the trailer, Wonderputt contains a ridiculous amount of creativity in its 18 holes and the way the course transforms between each hole. Playing on a cubic river optical illusion, a farm mowed by hyperactive cows, lily pads on a lake, or a hill from a fresh avalanche keeps the golf game fresh with unique obstacles.
Wonderputt's biggest flaw is that it penalizes players' scores for the time spent completing the course. How can I not get lost in its visuals?! Maybe by the 5th or 10th playthrough I'll be less distracted.
That said, Wonderputt has only one golf course in the whole game and is the only other let down here. However, in the second playthrough, it becomes much more fun and manageable with the Wonder rainbow collectibles littered across each course. These collectibles seem arranged in a way that the most geometric of players can connect in one shot. It certainly helped me earn two hole-in-ones.
I had actually played Wonderputt online for free last year, but my iPad experience was definitely more memorable. I recall giving up on the pull-back-and-release gameplay with a mouse. Thankfully, the tiny golf ball feels easier to putt with my finger.
Feeling so familiar, I cheated a little and asked developer Reece Millidge what was new to the iPad version. He said it contains a larger canvas than the Flash version, HD graphics for retina display, and a triple-length soundtrack. As for why I played slightly better on the iPad version, he says he made the holes slightly bigger to help with the inaccuracy of fingers compared to the mouse.
Wonderputt has Game Center leaderboard integration, but it offers some homemade achievements that I think add more to the replayability, asking players to eventually hole-in-one everything. Also worth noting, music and sound effects are light but fitting for the game. I'd rather they complement but not overpower the striking visuals.
Wonderputt joins a number of other great mini golf style games on the App Store, and I can see several casual and hardcore players wanting to explore this eccentric golf course from end to end at least a few times. If you're the guy or gal with the fancy iPad 2 or 3, Wonderputt is one of those sharp apps you just have to show everyone and will definitely earn a few cool points in doing so.
Once upon a time, in a land far far away, there was a game called Infinity Blade [$5.99] about slicing people up with a sword, and another game called Temple Run [Free], about looting and running. After a hard day's work hacking and sliding, they went out for drinks together and one thing let to another. Nine months later, a stork dropped dead out of the sky, and there, crushing the stork's carcass beneath a heavy boot, was Infinite Warrior [$3.99].
We really got into stabbing some fools back before the official release of Infinite Warrior, and the release version dishes violent death just as gleefully as expected. Still, the question remains: is there more to Infinite Warrior than step, slash, repeat?
We've been keeping an eye on Forest Moon Games ever since it was spun off from Crescent Moon Games with a goal of publishing casual and experimental titles. Hairy Tales [$2.99] is the latest such title to come from Forest Moon Games and certainly fits the bill in both the casual and experimental classifications. In addition to that, Hairy Tales is just a fun and interesting puzzler, particularly with its emphasis on world manipulation and its eccentric style.
