Following on the heels of West Coast Hustle, Miami Vindication and Rio, Gameloft’s latest Gangstar entry, Gangstar Vegas [$6.99] brings the largest environment in the series by virtually recreating everybody’s favorite city of sin, Las Vegas.
I’ll get this out of the way quick so I don’t need to waste your time later – Gangstar Vegas is, in most ways, identical to Grand Theft Auto, from the way the missions are given to the dialog while driving to the types of missions available. The game also doesn't drastically change the way the other three Gangstar games played, but it does refine some mechanics from the previous ones.
As Jason Malone, a boxer who gets paid to take a dive by mobster Frank Valieno, you agree to throw the match, but during one round, you manage to get a hit in and you knock the other guy out cold. You win the fight, and while you didn't mean to, you’re now on Frank’s hit list. During this interactive prologue, you’re introduced to the hand-to-hand fighting controls.
Vegas’ tutorial introduces you to the main aspects of the game while documenting your escape from Frank. Everything is pretty straightforward. You’re able to steer your vehicle by tilting, but I found I was tilting my iPad like a wild man and still couldn't get around corners that easily. I fiddled with the sensitivity, but eventually just swapped to the virtual button steering option. You're able to change the control type for each different vehicle, should you be so inclined.
Stickets [$2.99] is a piece of art, and wouldn't look out of place hanging in a modern art museum, right between a Piet Mondrian and "Bored Kid Playing Tetris, Oil on Canvas." Developer Wanderlands has created a striking, spare work, a mix of intellect and aesthetics. And, like, it's really, really fun.
It's a single-player puzzle game with a look and layout reminiscent of Letterpress. Simply put: place L-shaped pieces, each with three different colors, onto the board. When three or more colors are connected, tap to clear them from the board. Keep going until you run out of room. There's no opponent, no AI. There's just you and an increasingly unwieldy board.
"Space" mode requires thoughtful consideration of every move. I'd sit and play out different scenarios in my head, only to make a move and suddenly realize the thousands of ways I'm an idiot. In "Time" mode, it's the opposite, as every piece turns into a ticking time bomb. After 10 go off, the game is over, but the process can be reversed by matching four or more colors.
Gather around ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, and allow me to present to you the papercraft circus. Let Paper Titans [$0.99] baffle and amaze or, alternatively, frustrate and fatigue as they traverse their wood fiber world. Blitz's parchment constructed 3D puzzler is a visual and aural marvel whose beauty, to an extent, assuages the relative drudgery of its gameplay.
Your goal in each stage is to reach a lipstick-sealed envelope dangling from the grasp of paper birds. It's stowed within easy reach somewhere about a folded amusement park stage, accompanied by a trio of optional hollow stars scattered afield, waiting to be collected. Such involves navigating your little green paper robots to each item, issuing orders by drawing lines and bypassing obstacles with the help of fellows as he goes.
You may skip straight to your goal, but it'd be painfully easy: what challenge there is comes correctly organizing your actors, each uniquely capable of dealing with a certain type of hurdle, to grab each star in turn before ending the level. Have a ruffley-collared accordion guy launch your collector up to a ledge he can't return from too early and you'll need to restart.
Upon starting Downhill Supreme [$0.99], you are greeted with a song. It’s strange as it doesn’t really fit any particular vibe or scene you would otherwise associate with a sport like mountain biking and is more akin to a royalty-free track fit for "MTV Cribs". Your eyes fare no better as you are also visually distracted. There are a lot of bright, vivid colors and there seems to be three NASCAR racers’ worth of logos strewn about. Superficially, it is a very busy game.
At its core, though, Downhill Supreme by ArtRB is only about one thing, and that is riding down mountains and cliffs at high speeds on nothing more than 30 pounds of metal and a prayer. You choose among 48 different side-scrolling tracks set across either canyons, mountains, or generally rocky terrain and divided across either the Rookie, Pro, or Elite categories. Based solely on your time, you will earn a rating of one to three stars as you descend varying tracks towards a goal and unlock additional bike parts.
None of those rewards matter, though, as they have zero impact on the gameplay (at least from what I could tell, though the feature list describes a “Suspension Sim”). Even the subdued yet manic melody at the beginning is taken out and replaced by the sounds of bike chains and intermittent rider grunting and crowd groaning. And all those bright, elementary school colors kind of fade out as your focus hones in on nothing but your racer.
I'm not sure if I should be indignant. Cats have been used to paw at my interest, and successfully. Granted, Jindrich Stefan's Cats, Flowers & Labyrinth [$0.99] doesn't reek of the sorts of cloying appeals to internet obsessions often found elsewhere. Rather, this story of Marvin's love for his kitty, Kitty, proffers an arts and crafts aesthetic that's genuinely, quietly adorable.
Our hero, formed from construction paper circles and triangles, navigates his way over a pond of callow brushstroke waves and chalk fishies. I'm reminded of Leo Lionni's Frederick set to gentle Italian cafe music. I don't think I should be indignant.
Cats, Flowers & Labyrinth is an unassuming collage of familiar puzzle types. A dash of Pac-Man, a large helping of 15-puzzle tile sliding and Pipe Dream, and a bit of single-pass route planning. Like the schoolhouse mediums forming its art style, they work together without stepping on each other's toes, nor do they synergize to create anything truly special.
Evil's brewing, and it's up to the holy crusader and his pals to end it. Deep Dungeons of Doom [Free] celebrates a frequently trodden yet continuously enjoyable path with a suitably generic story and enough dry humor to keep it relevant. Wrapped in some gorgeous pixel art and animations, Bossa Studios has one satisfyingly bountiful iOS game on their hands.
Attacks, which are triggered with a tap on the right side of the screen, have a refractory period - you won't be able to mash your way to success. Attempt an attack while the ability is cooling and you'll prolong the cooldown. A tap on the left readies your guard, eliminating any damage the enemy might toss your way. Victory in each duel spurs the chest on the far side of the room to burst, spewing its contents of gold and, potentially, loot. A bottom up swipe of your finger will drag the screen up, sending your character deeper underground (and on to your next fight). Dungeon crawling without the crawling.
Super School Day [$0.99] plays like any other of the mini-game collections on the App Store, yet it manages to not bore by being (so damn) charming. From the second the game launches it’s crackin’ jokes, successfully entertaining with style and personality. Don’t be fooled, Super School Day is actually a not-so-casual, challenging, laugh-in-the-face of mini-game collections - and succeeded at becoming a by-the-hour affair with me and my iOS devices. These days games like *that* are a rare breed.
The premise is simple; you pick a student avatar and go through a day of school. Only, if this wasn’t a Second Impact game that might be ok. These avatars come with RPG-style personality and intelligence attributes that play a role in how difficult each class of the day is. Mini-games get played, then… you get to try and save the world; Dragonball-style punches vs. a meteorite. I emphasized the try, there, because that meteorite is one hell of a challenge.
Due to its inherent suitability to touch-based controls, line-drawing games are a genre that exploded in popularity long ago (in gaming time). Nowadays, it feels like there isn't much in the genre that hasn't been covered in some form or fashion.
Enter Ripstone'sMen's Room Mayhem [$0.99], one of the more thematically interested line-drawing games to come out recently. While the gameplay is pretty generic, Mayhem does earn some points with its original premise and well-done presentation.
In case you didn't check out our first impressions awhile back, Mayhem tasks players with playing traffic control in a men's restroom. Each restroom has the requisite urinals, stalls, and sinks, as well as an entrance and exit. Users come in indicating their preference to use a urinal or stall and you guide them to their respective location via line-drawing. After they finish their business you opt to guide them to a sink to wash their hands and earn extra points, or you can send them straight to the exit (ew).
Hyper Breaker Turbo [$1.99] drums up warm, fuzzy feelings of Breakout and Arkanoid. But the game is so much more – and not just because I’m no longer playing on a TI-82 calculator or Windows 95 machine. This is an indie upgrade from beJoy developer, Barry Kostjens, who also developed another blocky iOS game called Push Panic! [$2.99]. Multi-tiered levels, three delightfully distinct worlds, inebriated power-ups and 75 stages had me breaking bricks, circular doodles and neon triangles in Hyper Breaker Turbo for a good many hours.
In a typical brick-breaking game, you’re landlocked, moving your paddle from left to right. You always feel like you’re not able to react fast enough, especially when a power-up speeds up the ball’s acceleration. Hyper Breaker Turbo gives you a free-floating paddle. You are able to slide left, right, diagonally and every other which way within the paddle’s movement space, which is about three-quarters of an inch high. So when you get a Speedball or Bouncy paddle boost, you will have no one to blame but yourself when the ball starts to bounce wildly out of control.
I have to admit, I'm a sucker for graphics. Sure, gameplay may be the most important aspect of any videogame, but you simply don't want to play with it if it looks like the back end of a dump truck.
So there I was, looking around on the internet for games to review, and out jumped Shiny the Firefly [$0.99] from Spanish outfit Stage Clear Studios, and whacked me properly in the teeth with its pixelized perfection. This game is pretty. Seriously, it's like playing a Pixar movie.
The animation of the hero himself is just gorgeous. Shiny has a multitude of facial expressions, which are beautifully realized… you'll always know exactly how Shiny is feeling. I can honestly say this is the most emotionally linked I have been to a character in a videogame in a very long time, and he's an insect for crying out loud. Every visual aspect of this game has been buffed to a level of shininess usually reserved for the rich and famous.
Now I'm not usually one to pick up a puzzle game, partly because there are so many of them crowding the App Store that are simply below average, but mostly because my brain is as good at solving problems as a goat is at knitting a car. But when I saw the pixel art screen shots, I had to download Little Luca [$0.99], as being a '70s baby I am a sucker for anything 8-bit. Luckily, the cutesy low-fi images aren't the only good thing about this game... far from it.
I'll get straight to the point, Little Luca is a stunner. The world that Swedish brothers Björn and Rikard Wissing of Glowingpine Studios have created is so beautifully crafted, you can literally taste the love seeping out of the screen. Okay, that came out kind of wrong and is totally disgusting, but this game is anything but. From the choice of the color scheme to the soundtrack that is as atmospheric as, well... the atmosphere, every aspect of Little Luca has been done just right.
Inspired by a small Flash game by the name of Flabby Physics, Little Luca is a ninety-level-environmental-manipulation-physics-based-puzzle-game, for lack of a better term. You start out faced with relatively simple geometric shapes, such as deflated balls that resemble chunky bananas, and at the touch of the screen, said shapes inflate.
Let’s be honest: if you’re a fan of Ron Gilbert’s work you’re already playing Scurvy Scallywags [$1.99], only reading to make sure I give the game a score you can agree with. Scroll to the bottom, and thank me later. For everyone else: I hope you’re looking for a match-3 that’s more than what the App Store has accustomed you to; because Beep Games’ latest pirate-themed matcher is exactly that.
Scurvy Scallywags takes a customizable pirate avatar island-hopping across the seas, plundering familiar match-3 gameplay, for loot, while defending from the likes of undead swashbucklers. 16 verses of The Ultimate Sea Shanty – a charming pirate-jingle you have set sail to collect – are sprawled across a dozen hours of gameplay, wrapped in an art-direction that often feels inspired by Spumco cartoons.
Scurvy Scallywags uses an unorthodox method of shifting around the match-loot, making it feel new while allowing more strategic control over the playing-field. Items, enemies, and swords enter from all four edges of the board, instead of dropping from the top like most other match-3 games. Whichever direction you choose to shift-items, while making an item-chain, determines from which direction new objects fill the playing-field.
It's standard tower defense every sense, from Com2uS, the guys behind the game actually titled Tower Defense [$0.99 / Free]. Defense Technica [$2.99 / Free] gives you a power core whose innards are particularly delicious looking to the alien hordes. They trample blindly toward it, ignoring your defenses until they find themselves without a route to their objective. You cobble together said defenses with the guts and gore, or a nameless resource, left by their corpses.
Variety exists on both sides. Enemies assume different shapes, sizes, and armor types, and towers gain different strengths against each. Flames incinerate tight groups of small biological units quite well, bladed stabber towers nicely puncture mechanical foes, et cetera. With a tap and selection from a radial menu, upgradeable towers plop down on preset squares, sometimes allowing you to redirect the mindless flow of targets to your advantage.
In the event you can build yourself a maze, you've got the option of spending crystals to reveal the most effectively squiggely path. This persistent resource is slowly accumulated by completing stages, the sum awarded dependent upon your performance. Even if you score aces each time you play, however, you won't have enough crystals to fund best path revelation each mission. Should you decide to save up, there's a luck-based card system to drop your excess on.
These offer enduring bonuses such as reduced build costs, potentially having dramatic a dramatic effect on gameplay. Unfortunately, the odds are stacked against you and it'll take an age to earn enough crystals to get anywhere by normal means. Luckily, you can spend real cash to buy crystals! Hooray. It's possible to progress without dipping into the wallet, but I get the sensation the difficulty is tuned to make you want to. The urge to pay up lingers.
IAP woes aside, however, Defense Technica is still a well put together game in the respects that matter most. Turrets hit a nice chunky mechanical feel, machine guns sound rusty and rattly, and some of the enemy models look rather neat. It's a bit of a looker, albeit a generic one. Grinding enemies is satisfying, levels vary in construction, and strategy is malleable.
On the other hand, the story is utterly forgettable and could have been completely excised without much impact. Some subtle grammar and spelling issues rear their heads as well, but they kind of add to the Korean import charm.
You'll scratch your tower defense itch with this one, but likely won't remember it for long. It competently hits the right notes while never presenting anything new or interesting. There's little creativity, but there's effective design. In a genre so saturated as TD, however, it takes both to stand out.
Based on the new movie Turbo from DreamWorks Animation, Turbo Racing League [Free] is, as it says on the label, a racing game, developed by the good folks at PikPok, who are known for developing very fun pick up and play games like Into the Dead and Super Monsters Ate My Condo. While Turbo Racing League isn't quite at the same level as those two, it's nevertheless a very fun, competent racer.
For those not familiar with the film, Turbo follows the story of a snail who dreams of becoming the fastest racer in the world. In the game, you control a snail racer, working your way up the ladder to reach the highest racing class. Suffice it to say, this is not a simulation racer. Instead, it takes a page from drift-heavy racers like the classic Outrun, along with track design littered with boost pads in the vein of F-Zero and other futuristic racers. There are one or two shortcuts set on each track that you'll want to hit as often as you can, but the meat of the game is drifting skillfully around the tracks, going from boost pad to boost pad.
The tracks all reflect the small size of your would-be speedster, built on tabletops with everyday objects like books and playing cards creating tunnels and ramps. The selection of tracks, nine in total at the moment, offers up a nice variety of hairpin turns, hills, loop-de-loops, and jumps. They're very fun, both to look at and play. You'll be completing a few different types of challenges on these tracks, including one-on-one races, time trials, slaloms, and fuel challenges. Fuel challenges are interesting because you need to pick up fuel around the track in order to keep going, but a taken can of fuel will not reappear on your next lap, so you need to plan carefully.
Progression in Turbo Racing League is a hybrid of typical racing games and three-star challenges. To move up to the next racing class, you need to earn a set amount of stars. Each challenge offers up to three stars, and you can have three of these challenges open at any given time. Once you three-star it, the challenge clears and another one appears. This gives you some options, in case a particular challenge is giving you grief, but only to certain point. You'll never make it to the next racing class if you can't three-star at least one of the challenges in front of you. You also have the option to run a time trial on any of that class's tracks, to practice, or to earn some tomatoes to upgrade your racer.
Initially, your snail is very plain, better suited to a dinner plate in an upscale restaurant than the Indy 500. As you complete races and challenges, you'll pick up tomatoes, some on the track, but most as prizes for performing well. You can use these tomatoes to trick out your snail in a huge variety of ways, from boosting your base stats to purchasing new shells and shell accessories. You can even purchase new snails, though that requires quite a few tomatoes. Unfortunately, as you move up to each new racing class, you'll need to buy your upgrades all over again, which is a bit disappointing.
The game is very free with the tomatoes in the early going, but from Class 2 on, things start to get a bit more expensive, so you might have to grind a bit if you want to really improve your stats. Naturally, if you don't feel like grinding, a bevy of tomatoes are just an IAP away, including the ever-useful doubler. Additionally, you can complete daily challenges to earn a few more tomatoes, though not terribly many. The game ups its challenge at a pretty fair rate, so even if you don't want to spend money on IAPs, you should be able to move forward without getting stalled for too long at any given point, given enough practice and skill.
You can choose from four different control layouts. The game defaults to tilt controls but will immediately give you the choice to change them to one of the other three layouts. If you like virtual controls, you have two flavors to choose from, or if you don't, you can pick a control option that relies on simple left-side/right-side touches. I found the tilt controls to be more than capable in most cases, but the slalom races were a little tricky initially. The options are certainly quite welcome, so good on PikPok for including them.
Overall, Turbo Racing League is a very fun game. Although it's probably not the kind of game you'll sit down with for hours at a time, there's a surprising amount of depth to the racing itself, as people on our forums have discovered. If you're looking for a quick bit of arcade racing fun with a nice dollop of visual charm on top, you should check this one out.
Here's a question: How in the world does a puzzle game generate buzz in a world dominated by 'match 3' games? Well, you can either stand out via presentation, or stand out via quality gameplay. Quell Memento [$2.99], a new Sokoban-style puzzler available on the App Store, tries to do both.
On the gameplay side of things, Quell Momento makes a...lacking first impression. There are a lot of nuances to Quell Memento's seemingly simple gameplay, including portals, color-changing orbs, one-way passage ways, light-refraction mechanics, power-switches, and about a half-dozen other modifiers that Quell is more than happy to teach you about.
On one hand, I appreciate that. Puzzle Quest had a pretty decent tutorial, but once you got invested in the dungeon building mechanics, things got pretty confusing, pretty fast. On the other hand, after putting five hours into Quell Memento I still feel like I'm in the tutorial. Typically the game introduces a mechanic, teaches it to you, then gives you four or five puzzles to use it before introducing a new one. Eventually the mechanics combine and the puzzles become increasingly complex, but I've yet to have my mind totally bent around backwards, which is something I was looking forward to after seeing all the different mechanics I'd be dealing with - though to be fair I have quite a ways to go.
Following on the heels of West Coast Hustle, Miami Vindication and Rio, Gameloft’s latest Gangstar entry, Gangstar Vegas [$6.99] brings the largest environment in the series by virtually recreating everybody’s favorite city of sin, Las Vegas.
