When we checked outTiny Troopers [Free]Â last year, there really wasn't much to critique with the simplified real-time strategy title. With streamlined controls, plenty of action, and a robust weapon and upgrade system, there was in fact a lot to love.
Fortunately, developer Kukouri has elected to not mess with a good thing when it comes to their follow-up release Tiny Troopers 2: Special Ops [Free]. Focusing more on refinements of the already established gameplay system, Tiny Troopers 2 offers more of everything we loved about the original and is an excellent sequel.
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.
To coin a phrase from a popular comedian, what is the deal with the characters in these running games? Why are they running? What's the rush? You know, you could've snagged that coin tucked away behind that pillar back there if you would've just eased on up to it. The terrified spaceman you play in Worm Run [$0.99] has a valid excuse. He's on the move, and needs to stay that way, because a giant worm is plunging after him, devouring everything in its path. Glance back and you'll see him, eating his way through stone and dirt and steel.
Worm Run throws a few wrenches into the endless runner formula. It's endless, but doesn't pump your legs for you. You do that by swiping. Swipe left and right to run, swipe up and to either direction to jump, and so on. The control scheme sounds simple enough, but it didn't gel with me at first. Holding my phone in my right hand, I used my left pointer finger to swipe. The tutorial didn't nudge me toward or away from any particular pose, so I went with that. It wasn't comfortable. My wrist cramped from holding the phone, and swiping with one finger didn't give me the precision I needed to hop up into narrow shafts.
Multiplayer videogames tend to bring out the worst in me. I have a temper. I have cursed at and been cursed at, and I've flown into Achillean rage during Mario Kart 64: "Sing, O Goddess, the rage of Yoshi / after he was blasted by a Blue Shell." During one particularly heated game of NBA Jam, I pushed my competitor off the couch we were sharing and said some quite rude things about former Chicago Bulls small forward Toni Kukoc.
But I've never punched anyone over a game, nor has anyone ever punched me -- until I downloaded Frogmind's Badland [$3.99].
Badland is the debut effort from Frogmind, a Finnish duo who cut their teeth on RedLynx Trials series. It is, like so many App Store games, a one-button physics game: touching the screen causes a troupe of silhouetted gremlins (I always called them "little fatties" in my head) to fly forward and upward; releasing your finger allows them to float to the ground. It's our job to guide the afro-sporting fatties through a perilous swamp rigged with booby traps, buzz saws, pneumatic pistons, and spinning fan blades designed to slice, dice, explode, impale, smush, and otherwise destroy them.
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.
RPGs and matching games are a proven combination, one that's been explored thoroughly since the good old days of Puzzle Quest. There may be variations yet to be discovered, though. Take Dungeon Hearts [$2.99 (HD)], the boss rush of Puzzle/RPG hybrids. It's a frantic matching experience that lets up only when you win or die.
Your party, a fighter, mage, healer and archer, line the left of the screen while a parade of enemies take their places on the right. One after another you knock them down, desperately grab your reward and start in on the next. Your health is whittled down all the while, and you'll have to be both skilled and lucky to reach the end. There's nothing to give you an advantage - no gear, no skills retained between attempts. All you have is your own talent for gem matching to get you through fight after fight.
In this day and age, it takes more than a fresh coat of paint to differentiate oneself in the endless runner genre. While Chillingo'sDream Chaser [$0.99]Â certainly succeeds in bringing its own visual flair, its the game's story mode (in addition to the secondary endless mode) that gives it a leg-up on a lot of the competition. However, a few annoying issues with the story mode and graphics keep Dream Chaser from loftier heights.
The first thing you'll probably notice about Dream Chaser is its nicely done presentation. For example, I enjoyed the game's celestial tunes, which were very befitting of the theme. In addition, Dream Chaser looks great and ran with a fast and stable FPS rate. Despite this, I noticed a good deal of graphical pop-up which ranged from being an annoyance to actually impacting the gameplay at faster speeds and later difficulties.
Gameplay-wise Dream Chaser plays like most other endless runners with a tilt-based control scheme, loads of currency (called orbs) to collect and a distance/multiplier secondary score mechanic. One feature that's somewhat unique is the game's 'Boost' mechanism, which speeds up your character and increases the currency collection multiplier at the cost of faster speed. It's a nice risk/reward feature that works well for an endless runner that relies on fast reflexes.
Unlike the majority of endless runners out on the field, Dream Chaser includes both the standard endless mode as well as a mission-based story mode. Endless mode is what you'd expect, with players racing against a perpetual clock avoiding obstacles, collecting orbs and trying to get to the next checkpoint which resets the timer. Story mode, meanwhile, is a mission-based mode centered around completing a variety of objectives that all center around running a gauntlet before a timer runs out.The story itself, which follows a night spirit named Nito has he works to repair the realm of the gods, is light-hearted but mostly standard.
While Dream Chaser does a decent job differentiating itself simply by including a story mode, I wasn't a big fan of how it was implemented. Unlike the game's endless mode, Chaser's story mode features a set life bar that depletes when players run into obstacles. If you run out of life, fall into a chasm or fail to complete the mission within the time limit, you lose a 'heart' and are given the opportunity to retry the level. Unfortunately, you can only store a certain amount of hearts, and if you run out you either have to wait an obnoxiously long period of time or spend your hard-earned orbs on hearts to instantly continue playing the story mode.
Considering that later levels ramp up the difficulty, making it entirely possible to go through many (even all) of your stored hearts in a single run Dream Chaser's story mode ends up being needlessly frustrating. True, endless mode is always available and its not too hard to earn enough orbs to buy hearts and continue, but those orbs could be better spent on the variety of power-up upgrades and optional items available in the endless mode itself vice the silly heart mechanic. In the end, it all feels like an artificial method of encouraging IAP.
It's really a shame because outside of this frustrating facet of the game's story mode (as well as the pop-up) Dream Chaser isn't that bad of an endless runner. As it stands, genre fans will probably still find it worth checking out, if anything for its style and story mode. For everyone else, it's probably worth a pass.
I don't know about you, but I think Disney's foray into mobile games might have yielded some of the most creative work of its recent years. Ignoring of course the companies they own, the Mouse House has been seen as lagging in both the movie and videogame departments for quite some time. As anyone not living in a sewer themselves knows, that all changed with the release of Where's My Water? [$0.99] For the first time in...well...ever, a new Disney icon had been created at the videogame level first, and the company seemed to be using mobile to kick off an upswing in the quality department. So naturally, with an alligator as their new face of gaming, they'd follow things up with...a fluffy kitten. Wait, what?
If Mittens [$0.99]Â - from its seemingly detached concept to its unexpected existence - has you skeptical, you're not alone. Heck, in our TA Plays for the game, Brad drew some early conclusions about the way that the experience seemed like it was playing things disappointingly safe both from a mechanical and creative standpoint. Having now cleared through all of the game's levels and its available bonus pack, it seems that like its in-game collectibles, this one might just be a gem after all. As with the title's titular feline, though, players may go through ups and downs along the way.
The thing is, where Swampy brought with him not only a novel concept but a slew of memorable levels - each of which felt like it had a distinct theme and purpose - Mittens meanders much more on its way to eventual greatness. As with any physics puzzler, the basics are covered in the first few levels of each zone, with the core concept revolving around the need to swipe and tap our brave kitty to safety on a quest to impress his true love. Unfortunately, this introductory mindset seems to bleed into a large portion of the game's first fifty levels, with many of them feeling like indistinct, unmemorable versions of one another.
You know that sense you get when a new level in a three-star puzzler feels vaguely like a rearranged version of the one you played just far enough back that the game thinks you forgot it? Yeah, it's that.  All the trademark elements are in place, including sliced ropes, last minute drops onto bouncy objects, and risky collectible snagging - painted with a Disney polish that ensures everything feels smooth and precise. Yet for all its emphatic not-badness, there's a lingering feeling of ho-hum in the first two zones that's hard to shake. A sense that Disney might be trading in slightly on its newly minted supremacy in the genre, doing far less than they could to justify a purchase.
The yin to this more reserved yang, however, comes in the form of the levels that appear towards the end of each zone, as well as almost the entirety of the game's third area. Reassuringly, Mittens does eventually step out of the genre's comfort zone to deliver a much fresher take on a well-trod play style. First appearing as five bonus levels that are unlocked as you collect gems, these more complicated stages feel like a wonderful mix between Amazing Alex [$0.99] and Cut the Rope [$0.99]. Each one  departs from the "tap here, swipe this" feeling, instead forcing you to navigate landscapes already full of motion, and piece together the perfect timing needed to play your role as the little furry cog in a miniature machine. Better still? They tie together wonderfully and make up for the feeling of detachment prevalent throughout earlier levels. My particular favorites are the five final circus big-tops of the second zone, that culminate in a brilliant level full of tightropes, cannons, and miniature cars.
And while the last zone and the game's much tougher (and more imaginative) harbor zone continue this trend, I can't help but wonder why it feels like it takes almost half the game to get there. Drawing further attention to the game's design foibles is a seeming lack of effort in  - of all areas - production values. Mittens' is completely without stage music save for a repetitive chime at the end of a level, and the cut scenes that exist to punctuate play pale in comparison to the subtle, endearing storytelling achieved in Where's My Water? Except for grating meows when you fall into blackness or foul up, the titular kitty lacks all semblance of a personality, and it proves nigh-impossible to invest in the game beyond the compulsive desire to beat its levels.
This, perhaps, is the predicament I'm having with Mittens. You'd be hard pressed to call it bad by any stretch, and about half way through, it manages to take off in ways not hinted at in our TA Plays video to become a pretty wonderful take on the physics puzzler. At a dollar, and with a future that will doubtless be filled with more content, fans of the genre would be hard pressed not to pick this one up. At the same time, however, it's more than a little disheartening that Disney seems to have followed up their return to form with a return to safety, and I don't think it's unreasonable to expect more than a competent time-killer from a studio of their pedigree.
Like a top notch student handing in a rush job, Mittens sags not under the weight of what it does wrong, but all that it could have done much better.
I'm a big fan of survival horror games, especially ones like Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Slender, which provide no means of defending yourself from their boogeymen. You run and hide, or you die. While scoping out upcoming App Store releases late Wednesday evening, I learned about Eyes - The Horror Game [$0.99], a port of the indie PC title of the same name that promised a similar flight-no-fight experience. On an iPhone.
It was to laugh--to guffaw, I tell you!--at the idea that any game on a five-inch screen could make me shriek like Jamie Lee Curtis in a Halloween flick. But I am comfortable enough in my rugged masculinity (I haven't shaved in six weeks) to admit that's exactly what happened. I downloaded the game, plugged in my ear buds, turned off the lights, and turned up the volume. And within two minutes--give or take 60 seconds--I bounded out of bed mumbling "Nope nope nope nope" and switched the bedroom lights back on and started in on the much more cheerful Sonic Dash.
The goal of Eyes, like the controls you'll use to accomplish that goal, is deceptively simple. Ransack an old house to retrieve bags of money. A virtual stick moves you forward and back, sliding your thumb over the right half of the screen rotates your view, and you pick up objects by tapping them. Drawers also open with a quick tap. Simple, just like I said.
The hard part is mustering the courage to pillage and plunder. Eyes immerses you in incredible atmosphere, and as any survival horror savant will tell you, the right atmosphere makes or breaks the experience. Every chamber is dark and dusty. Wind howls and batters against the walls, your footsteps thump along, clocks tick and tock, and doors creak when you open them.
Those ambient noises set the mood, but they also serve as an early warning system. When your teeth begin to chatter and the furniture begins to rattle, make for the nearest room and cower in the corner. A ghost roams the manse, and she's not keen on the idea of letting you abscond with her earthly possessions. Catch more than a glimpse of the lady of the house and it's game over, much like bumping into the Slender Man in his backwoods domain.
The inherent sloppiness of the virtual stick inadvertently added to my experience. Doors are supposed to open when you push against them, but unless you hit them dead on, you'll just slide back and forth against them like a drunkard who's forgotten how knobs works. Every time the ghost got the jump on me, I ended up turning heel and throwing myself at the nearest door and fumbling against it due to the virtual stick's slipperiness. That heightened my sense of panic; I felt like I was a character in a horror movie who was too overcome with fear to properly grasp and turn a knob.
To finish Eyes, you need only collect a specified number of bags determined by your difficulty level and escape through the front door before the ghost nabs you. The house both helps and hinders your quest. Bags and other items such as keys are randomly strewn about each time you play. Your map fills in as you explore, but does not show your position, so you'll need to keep track of every twist and turn you take, especially in the basement. Eye symbols, also randomly placed, let you look through the ghost's eyes for a few moments--a handy if disorienting tool that can help you plan routes.
My only complaints are the ease of finding money bags and the short length of the game. The bags sparkle, standing out even in pitch blackness. Some are stashed away, but you can spot most by standing in one spot and turning around. Once you collect your bags and hit the front door, that's it. You're done. Once you learn your way around the house, completing the adventure won't take long even considering the random placement of items. I understand why randomizing the architecture isn't possible, but I'd love a longer experience--maybe an extra stage or two as IAP, or perhaps a sequel or remake along the lines of Slender: Arrival.
Those are minor gripes, though. Take my advice: don't be like me. Wait until after dark, shut (lock) yourself in a quiet room, and pop in your ear buds. Eyes is as immersive, as unsettling, and as chilling a horror experience as you'll find on any platform, if not as lengthy as horror fans would like.
Hello everyone. My name is Eli, and...I can't say no to the retro aesthetic. Wow! It feels good to get that one off my chest. In all seriousness, though, the resurgence of 8 and 16-bit era visuals on iOS has done a number on my wallet over the past few years, and that's been somewhat of a double-edged sword.
On one hand, I've discovered some fantastic experiences steeped in nostalgia: everything from Velocispider [$1.99 / Free] to Mikey Shorts [$0.99 / Free]. Yet for every gem that's still on my device, there's at least three lame ducks that have suckered me in with the power of childhood fan service.
So when I discovered Pixel Licker Games' Slayin [$0.99]Â as the result of a friend's tweet - complete with an icon that looked like a cartridge and an in-game controller skin - I knew I was powerless. The only question that remained was: would it be a wonderful walk down memory lane, or end up collecting virtual dust with all the other deleted duds?
Remember when the word "port" conjured up terrifying visions of developers taking your favorite arcade game and cramming them into cartridges that spat out blurry graphics and fuzzy sound? Twisted Pixel does, and they know it wouldn't be proper to make gamers revisit those dark days, so they put forth a solid effort teaching their Xbox Live platformer, Ms. Splosion Man [$2.99], how to speak mobile. Solid, indeed, except for a bothersome implementation of an IAP pay wall.
(Unfortunately the 'sploding star also speaks teenager, and that just won't do. Immediately open the options menu and disable VOX, her constant "Oh mah GAWD!" jibber-jabber. Done that? You're welcome. Okay, then. Let's continue. )
Unlike ports of 3D games that require more virtual buttons than you have fingers, Ms. Splosion Man keeps things nice and simple. You've got a slider to move around and an invisible "splode" button anywhere your right thumb pleases. You can enable a virtual stick, but as you only need to prance left and right, the slider feels better and more responsive. Exploding pops you into the air. Press it twice and you'll do the Ms. Splosion Man equivalent of a double jump.
Arguably the best part of the Sonic the Hedgehog 2 of yesteryear was the Chaos Emerald bonus stages. You remember those, don't you? The camera jumped behind Sonic's shoulder and he hustled forward all on his own while you wove him from side to side to collect rings and dodge obstacles.
Those stages unwittingly created the template for the droves of endless runners available on the App Store today, so the logical next step for the spiky blue hedgehog was an endless runner built around ye olde bonus stages, don't you think? Enter Sonic Dash [Free], a fun runner plagued by the same problems that plague most endless runners.
Sonic Dash is all about swerving around enemies, rocks, pits, and other hazards to collect rings. Swipe the screen left and right to switch lanes, swipe up to jump, and swipe down to perform Sonic's trademark roll, which you can use to clobber the enemies puttering around the environments. You can change direction in midair, drop straight down into a roll to treat enemies in your path like bowling pins, and weave around pillars and rocks on a dime.
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.
Trauma [$2.99] gives us few concrete facts. There is a hospital, a woman in a bed, a doctor offering an uncertain prognosis. Beyond that, a series of dreams pieced together from photographs and memories, narrated by the woman, a victim of a traumatizing accident.
Taken on its surface merits, there isn't much to it. As with its original desktop release, Trauma is a tiny game, an experience of no more than an hour or so at most. There are a few ways to explore its virtues, but only so much to discover. What's there is, however, interesting to examine in a way that few mobile games manage.
The goal is to work through four dreams, each with a specific challenge: a teddy bear crushed under a large weight, a ghost that cannot be caught, a road that must be followed, and path that must be found.
When we checked out Tiny Troopers [Free]Â last year, there really wasn't much to critique with the simplified real-time strategy title. With streamlined controls, plenty of action, and a robust weapon and upgrade system, there was in fact a lot to love.
