Turn-based strategy games are a natural fit on iOS, as evidenced by the decent selection of offerings on the App Store. However, it’s rare to find a title that takes the effort to implement every facet of its offering with care and attention to detail. Rubicon’s Great Little War Game [$1.99 / Free] was one such title, offering iOS gamers an excellent strategy experience. Its newly released sequel, Great Big War Game [$2.99], continues the tradition with the inclusion of asynchronous multiplayer that truly changes the game.
Great Big War Game continues where its prequel left off with the same great turn-based tactical action that we’ve grown to love. If you haven’t played Great Little War Game, imagine a strategy title similar to Advance Wars and other turn-based games that have you commanding an army of various units against the opposition. Battles play out in a rock-paper-scissors sort of way, with units being strong or weak against others, and so on. There’s serious depth to GBWG with a wide range of units and strategies to employ against the enemy.
I've been on the same map in Fieldrunners 2 [$2.99] for half the day and it's driving me up the wall. Like a textual Yoda, the in-game help keeps telling me the same thing, “Use the choke points.” I do but keep failing. When I attempt to save up for lasers, I find myself getting overrun. When I trust in bargain-bin Gatling guns, I find myself getting exactly what I paid for. The happy medium exists somewhere. I know it. I just need to figure out how to get it.
There is no delicate way to put it. Subatomic Studios' Fieldrunners 2, the sequel to their hit tower defense game, will eat your soul and have you thanking it for the privilege. Filled with all the things that made its predecessor such a hit with its fans, Fieldrunners 2 is the embodiment of the phrase 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it'. You won't find unnecessary innovation here, no awkward attempt to blend genres – Fieldrunners 2 knows what it is. It's a tower defense game and a bloody good one at that.
When Andreas Illiger released Tiny Wings [$0.99] in February of last year, nobody had any idea the kind of success it would become. Sure, it’s easy to look back and see just how well he struck a balance between whimsical art design which hooked you on a deep level and brilliantly simple game design which was perfectly suited to mobile.
While hindsight is 20/20, a much harder problem (and one we’ve explored in the past) is just how do you follow up such an unexpected hit? The answer in the case of Tiny Wings is don’t fix what isn’t broken, and instead expand upon the mechanics of the first game in a way that’s unobtrusive to what made it a hit in the first place while simultaneously changing enough to make the whole experience feel fresh.
I think Andreas has achieved that beautifully with Tiny Wings 2.0, a free update for the original game, as well as with Tiny Wings HD [$2.99 (HD)], a brand new iPad-only version that contains all of the same features as version 2.0 plus has a sweet same-device multiplayer mode.
One of the first games I ever bought on the App Store was Solitaire City [$2.99], and I remember thinking all the way back in mid-2008 that card games work amazing on touch screens and how unfortunate it was that (at the time) the most complicated offering available was the same game of Solitaire I'd spent most of my educational career playing on Windows computers. Since then, there have been a number of collectable card games available on the App Store, but they all pale in comparison to the nearly 20 years of refinement and evolution that Magic the Gathering has experienced since the physical game was originally release in 1993. Of course, two decades of complexity, rulings, and card releases can be a double edged sword in that getting involved as a new player is potentially very intimidating.
This is exactly where Magic the Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers 2013 [Free (HD)] comes in. I've often described the previous installments (only available on PC and consoles) as a "gateway drug" to the Magic universe, and really, I still can't come up with a better way to put it. Previously, getting into M:TG required buying (potentially lots) of physical cards, and either finding someone to play with or attending an actual event like Friday Night Magic. Even then, you'd still deal with the fact that it's a complicated game that (despite Wizards of the Coast's best efforts) is fairly difficult to learn without someone teaching you all the little nuances.
Pocket Planes [Free] is a tremendous, cohesive game that can appeal to your lizard brain as well as its strategy can stroke the intellectual part. It offers a character-rich and fluid world to explore and become a part of, and its mechanics have a soul. This is a game that does almost everything right; plus, it's free, so just ... try it.
But for me, Pocket Planes says something. It avoids all of the common pitfalls of free-to-play design by executing on the simplest of concepts: providing fun without a fee. It isn't a pushy game, and its systems are balanced to benefit the user. In this age of F2P, games are starting to feel more like business models with graphics. Pocket Planes doesn't. There's a life to everything in it. It's systems and mechanics have meaning.
It was in July of last year that SNK Playmore brought their classic fighting game franchise to iOS with The King of Fighters-i [$2.99], and it was the only game that could really stand up to the then current standard for touch screen fighters Street Fighter IV [$0.99], and in many ways it even exceeded it. Which series you prefer is largely a personal preference thing, but I always felt that The King of Fighters-i edged out Street Fighter IV in overall quality and playability.
The problem was that by the time The King of Fighters-i hit the App Store, the superior sequel to Street Fighter IV had already been out for a month. It was called Street Fighter IV Volt [$4.99] and it came packing everything that made the original game so great plus additional characters, new features, and most importantly online multiplayer. The online matchmaking worked surprisingly well in Volt, and despite The King of Fighters-i being absolutely fantastic it was still just a single player- or Bluetooth multiplayer-only game, and online battling was the new hotness.
Do you remember the Bullet Time Wars of the early '00s? Every game had to have it, and not one of them got it right. We lost a lot of good games during that time; lost to the unnecessary addition of a dumb movie gimmick.
But then Max Payne [$2.99] was released, and overnight the war ended. There was no disputing that, finally, a game had gotten bullet time right. That day was almost 11 years ago, and since then the world has changed. Games still implement bullet time, most of them successfully, but they all owe it to Max Payne.
For those of you who somehow missed out on it the first go around, Max Payne is revenge story wrapped in a noir coat that is so thick that the game occasionally comments on how warm it is. It serves as almost a noir for dummies book. Can’t sit through Chinatown? Max Payne will teach you all there is to know about noir.
But, for as silly as the writing occasionally is, it is still a good story. You will run into some truly gut-wrenching moments before you hit the 5 minute mark. But I wouldn’t dare spoil an 11 year old game, so I’ll stop right there. If you want to know more… Well, I assume you know what to do.
There is little sense in reviewing an 11 year old game that won nearly every award it could when it was first released. It's well established that Max Payne is a fantastic game, but it is also ELEVEN years old. That means it comes with all the baggage that an 11 year old game has earned. So, rather than focusing on Max Payne the game, lets talk about Max Payne the iOS port instead.
This is the absolute best this game has ever looked. On the new iPad, the game sees resolutions and clarity that were pipe dreams when it first came out. Granted, the textures are low resolution, but they still look pretty good rendered on the iPad’s Retina Display. The between level “comic book” sequences are not Retina resolution, but it’s not a great mystery as to why.
I doubt anyone at Remedy envisioned people wanting to play the game at ridiculous resolutions, so it’s likely that they never created super high-resolution assets for anything. But, thanks to how well everything upscales, they still look pretty good. While it didn’t age as well as Grand Theft Auto 3 [$4.99] did visually, it is still a great looking game. Bonus points if you can make it through the whole game without giggling at Max’s facial texture.
Controls are about what you would expect from virtual joysticks. Max feels a bit floaty when he moves, and looking around can be a pain, but the game is still very playable, thanks in part to a pretty competent auto aiming system. I know a lot of folks scoff at the idea of auto-aim, but it really does make the experience more cinematic and fun. When I turned off auto-aim, the results were decidedly less than fun (and often borderline frustrating), but your mileage may vary.
The real problem with the default virtual control layout is that the hit zones for buttons are too close to each other. Because you are aiming at a nondescript part of the screen, rather than a button, you will often find yourself jumping when you want to enter bullet time. A minor problem once or twice, but growing in annoyance significantly over the course of an 8 hour game. Like GTA3, you can move the buttons around on screen in the options, but you never really shake the feeling that this is a game made for a controller (or keyboard and mouse).
(Original E3 2011 trailer for PC version.)
Playing Max Payne to completion takes anywhere from 7 to 10 hours. If you intend to make that journey, please be sure to manage your own save files. Yes, Max Payne offers an auto-save, but I found it to be unreliable at best, and downright abusive at it’s worst. Unfortunately, games ported from PCs seem to bring more quirks than if they were ported from a console. Max Payne is from a time where we didn’t trust the game to save for us, so we took that responsibility upon ourselves. Max Payne for iOS has ported that feature spectacularly, so make sure you adjust your habits accordingly.
I’ll be the first to admit that I was super stoked about Max Payne coming to iOS. It was a game I loved on the PC 11 years ago, and I wanted to see how rose the colored glasses were. The answer is, surprisingly, not that rose. While it looks old, and has virtual joysticks, Max Payne is every bit the great game it was 11 years ago. I wish Rockstar had put more love into the port, but for costing me 1/25th of the original game, I’ll cut them some budgetary slack.
Now if I could just get rid of these war flashbacks, I’d be in business.
Let's wind the clocks back to 2009, as really, to appreciate what Angry Birds has become, I think we need to go back and appreciate what Angry Birds was. The App Store was a crazy place. The "gold rush" was still in full effect. Publishers like Chillingo were trying to stake as large of a claim as possible in this brave new world brought about by the impulse-powered instant gratification of downloading a 99¢ game and the exploding popularity of the iPhone.
Chillingo was incredibly successful in pooling together a library of games we called "AAA titles" at the time. iDracula [$2.99] may look incredibly archaic by today's standards, but back then, it was among the cream of the crop. In late May, Chillingo spun off a new brand called Clickgamer.com, which per the original press release was intended to "carry casual games and software applications in the Apple App Store. This new brand will fully complement Chillingo’s existing catalogue of AAA innovative titles."
Alright, I'll come clean. When I saw OMGPOP's Draw Something [99¢ / Free] glued to the #1 positions on both the free and paid charts I assumed it was yet another flavor of the week flash in the pan freemium game. Then I tried it, and wow is this game good. I'm not quite sure how they did it, but Draw Something is a perfect witch's brew of Facebook integration, word scrambling, and asynchronous two-player Pictionary.
It works a little something like this- You start a game with someone (I've found games with people you actually know via Facebook seem to be the most fun.) and are given the choice of three words of varying difficulty. You choose one, do your best to draw it, and hit submit. Your friend gets a push alert, sees your drawing, and is given a array of scrambled letters to spell the word with. If they guess correctly you're awarded between one and three coins, they take their turn, and the process repeats.
The free to play mechanic is actually sort of neat, as you can play the free version for eternity with ads and a limited set of colors to draw with. Alternatively, you can spring for the 99¢ ad-free version. The coins you earn are used to either buy bombs which nuke some of the letter tiles which don't go to the word you're supposed to guess or buy more colors to paint with. Sure, you can just do your drawings in the few colors that everyone gets, but to really tweak out your illustrations you need at least a few more paint sets.
The rub of the coin system is that actually earning enough coins by playing to buy bombs and unlock paint sets takes forever, which means you basically have to buy them unless you're way more patient than I am. But, at the end of the day, I'm having a really hard time getting that worked up over the IAP as the game is worth every penny worth of the $4.99 bucket of coins I bought to unlock a bunch of paint (and the 99¢ I dropped to get the ad-free version).
Recently, the game was updated with additional words, and complete support for the Retina Display of the new iPad. In fact, my original intention of this post was just a quick news article on that fact, but I just can't help but gush all over this game. Everyone I know is playing it, and recently taking my turns in Draw Something is both among the last things I do before I go to bed and the first things I do when I wake up every day.
So, I'm tagging this as a review, giving Draw Something five stars, and telling you again: Download this game.
There are many ways to envision Mars. It could be a barren world, perhaps host to life once but certainly no longer. It could be a thing out of science fiction, teeming with hostile life we haven't yet met. Or it could be the future of our species, our best hope to leave a planet growing ever-smaller.
Tiger Style imagines a future that brings us to Mars to discover the truth. As the developers of Spider, The Secret of Bryce Manor [$2.99], the company has a lot to live up to, but they don't falter. In creating Waking Mars [$4.99], they have crafted another game built around storytelling. It is a brave game, one that is willing to think the best of us: that we could discover new life and seek to learn from it, not exploit it.
Liang, the star of the piece, is a Chinese astrobiologist who is part of a tiny team responsible for researching the red planet. This is done from a safe distance, with the help of rovers and computers. When the rover goes missing, it's up to Liang to recover it.
This means descending into Lethe Cavern, a Martian cave system that has only barely been explored. What should be a brief jetpack jaunt becomes an incredible journey. Liang encounters the Zoa, and begins to bring Mars to life.
The Zoa are Martian lifeforms, essentially plants. Tiger Style has researched and weighed every aspect of the Zoa ecosystem: each plant has its own dietary needs, soil pH requirements, vulnerabilities and biomass. Each contributes to the system in some way: one's seeds feed another, one releases spores that prepare the soil of others, one predatorily dines on lesser types. A careful balance is required at all times.
The caverns are protected by cerebranes, Zoa that react to nearby biomass. Just as many plants need to be pollinated or processed by other species to reproduce, the Zoa need Liang's help, and the cerebranes ensure he must give it. By raising the biomass in each cave, he can keep progressing deeper.
In practice, this means collecting seeds and planting them appropriately. ART, Liang's A.I. companion, keeps track of biomass, tracking it with a five star system. Three is often enough to pass through a cavern, but five is better for reasons that will become clear as you play.
As Liang travels deeper into the caves, a larger story unfolds. It's the story of the Zoa, and of Mars. It is not the story of Liang. He is stoic, quiet. He rarely discusses his own experiences. He is here to learn, to explore, and to complete his mission.
Aside from ART's occasional interjections, Liang has one more companion: Amani. She stays back at Base Camp, reaching out to Liang with encouragement and information.
If I have one complaint about Waking Mars, it is this: Amani's portraits don't feel appropriate. Where the art is otherwise excellent, Amani's is bold and out of place. Her portraits look a little too much like a series of stock photos. This is a small problem, but a jarring one.
But Amani herself is a welcome distraction. Early in the game, ART and Amani interrupt Liang's journey near-constantly, walking him through all the basics. As time passes, they pop in less and less. The solitude of the caverns is a wonderful thing, enhanced by the game's gorgeous soundtrack, but it's also lonely in there, deep below the surface of Mars. On those occasions when Amani's signals break through, it usually begins a much-needed moment of human connection.
Otherwise, Liang is alone with the Zoa, working to build enough biomass to continue his journey. Each discovery he makes is noted in a research journal, each cave he visits is marked on a map. The only thing left to remember is the composition of each cave. At first, resources are plentiful. Later, you'll need to revisit caves to find the seeds you need.
Waking Mars is never truly difficult. Some of the Zoa are carnivorous and must be avoided, but there's no real penalty to letting Liang's health drop. Similarly, some of the Zoa are very vulnerable, and can be killed. Keeping them alive is rarely completely necessary, however, as most caverns can eventually be brute-forced into growing sufficiently with enough persistence.
In place of difficulty, Waking Mars has intelligence. A clever game, it pushes players to contemplate its mysteries while they solve its smaller puzzles of ecosystem and biomass. Most of your questions will be answered by the time the curtain falls; in fact, I'd consider this one of the most satisfying gaming experiences I've had on this platform. Most of that satisfaction is down to the story and its presentation.
In the end, you'll be left to decide the fate of the Zoa. Though the story can play out in multiple ways, there isn't a wrong answer among them. You can always reload your final save to try things out differently. This is a blessing, one that lets you find every answer before putting the game down for the last time. This isn't a game that will stand up to being replayed for most people, but at 6 to 10 hours it should provide entertainment enough.
Waking Mars has everything: a compelling story, beautiful environments, a gorgeous soundtrack and gameplay worth playing. Though it is, in some ways, less risky than Tiger Style's last game (though I'd argue a game about a Chinese astrobiologist studying Martian botany is not completely risk free), it's a worthy successor. Spider was an amazing experiment in storytelling; Waking Mars raises the bar on quality in long-form iOS games. Neither should be missed under any circumstances. Get this game. Whether you adore it as I do or not, it's worth experiencing.
You could say we've been looking forward to Simogo'sBeat Sneak Bandit [$2.99] The developer announced it just a few months back in November, but it feels like we've been waiting forever. After all, these are the folks that made Kosmo Spin [$0.99] and Bumpy Road [$2.99] two fantastic (if divisive) games, so who could blame us for a little eagerness? Now that the wait is over, you've gotta ask: does it live up to the hype?
And I have to tell you that yes, it totally does. I don't know of any other stealth rhythm puzzle games, but I'm pretty sure Beat Sneak Bandit could take on all comers. Every aspect has been expertly crafted, from the high level game design down to the details of the menus. Oh, and you guys? It's so very, very fun.
You should check out the trailer if you're mystified about the idea of a stealth rhythm puzzler, but here's the scoop in broad terms. You play the Beat Sneak Bandit, breaking into the mansion of Duke Clockface. He has, for undoubtedly nefarious reasons, stolen all the clocks from Pulsebury. He's kind of a jerk like that, I guess. Your job is to take back all the clocks without being caught.
When Reckless Racing [$0.99 / HD] hit the scene back in October 2010, we praised it for the incredible top-down racing experience it offered. Now, the folks at Pixelbite Games are back again with Reckless Racing 2 [$4.99], the long awaited sequel to this arcade racer. Improving on nearly every facet of its predecessor, Reckless Racing 2 is hands-down one of the top arcade racers I’ve ever played and is well worth the price of admission.
From a presentation standpoint, Reckless Racing 2 makes some significant changes in comparison to its predecessor. Gone are the country themes present in the music and characters (although the latter still remains somewhat in the avatars and names of your AI opponents). In its place is a stylized, clean motif complete with fast-paced music reminiscent of 80s action movies (think Top Gun). Some folks may argue Reckless Racing 2 loses some of the ‘charm’ found in the original, but I think this is a great move that moves towards a more universal appeal.
A shoulder surfer would describe Super Crate Box [$.99] as a mess, a pixelated mash of vivid colors and explosions wrapped in a whirlwind of erratic movement, 8-bit sound, and some decidedly bizarre character design. They'd be right. Super Crate Box is a mess, but it owns its fast-moving arcade chaos, and deftly brings you along for the ride.
You don't even realize that you embraced it until it's an hour later and you hate that godforsaken disc launcher with the passion of many angry men. What renders you helpless has a lot to do with its infinite, looping structure and purity of play. This is a minimalist, throwback-style game that wants you to do one thing: capture crates for a high score. The hooks are in its constituent parts, which seamlessly blend into a cacophony of arcade action surrounding this pure purpose of play. It becomes hypnotizing, fast.
Picture Super Mario Bros. Got a nice image in your head? Good. Now imagine Mario could never stop moving and would only change direction if he hit a wall. A little tougher. And what if absolutely everything could kill him in one hit, and there was no such thing as a checkpoint? That sounds like the sort of game that would have you cursing, spitting, and contemplating throwing your controller, and it also sounds a lot like Wind-up Knight [$0.99]
Occasionally a game will come out on Android that looks so good I slaver for a port. Wind-up Knight is one of those games. Released on the Android Market a couple months back, the side-scrolling adventure looked slick, adorable, and hard -- all the things I look for in a platformer. Now that it's arrived on iOS, I can finally confirm: this game is outstanding.
The only way I can start this review is with a little history lesson, both for people who aren't familiar with Sonic CD, as well as those of you who might not have been reading TouchArcade since the summer of 2009. Let's start at the beginning, so everyone can truly appreciate just how wonderful the very existence of this game is.
Sonic CD, or Sonic the Hedgehog CD was originally released in late 1993 for the Sega CD, Sega's CD-ROM accessory for the Genesis console. Sega CD had actually come out earlier that year, and many gamers (myself included) couldn't wait to get their hands on one as the promise of full motion video powered gaming seemed incredible. Unfortunately, both due to the many technical limitations of the system, as well as the games themselves just not being very good, the Sega CD never really took off quite how I imagined Sega wanted it to. (There's actually a bunch of reasons I could also get into, but I digress.)
Turn-based strategy games are a natural fit on iOS, as evidenced by the decent selection of offerings on the App Store. However, it’s rare to find a title that takes the effort to implement every facet of its offering with care and attention to detail. Rubicon’s Great Little War Game [$1.99 / Free] was one such title, offering iOS gamers an excellent strategy experience. Its newly released sequel, Great Big War Game [$2.99], continues the tradition with the inclusion of asynchronous multiplayer that truly changes the game.
