Remember Fall Down? It's a super simple arcade game that revolves around dropping a ball down a series of gaps between ledges. Think Doodle Jump, but flip the mechanics on their heads. Recent release FallDown! 2 [Free] takes this formula and spices it up a bit with a bunch of power-ups, a forever-falling laser beam of death, and some insane colors. People seem to really be digging this new treatment, too, as the game has rocketed up the charts and is currently sitting pretty at number one in Top Free.
Eli and I gave it a spin this afternoon and came away pretty impressed with the lack of free-to-play grossness. The actual game part is pretty rad, too. Its breeziness as well as accessibility are great features.
Eli used to play this on his old Calculator For Smart People, so we talked a lot about that in our elongated look at this chart topper. If you ever wanted to see it in action, here's your chance.
You've read the review, now watch a couple of idiots stumble around in the trap-filled crypts and hidden passages of Dark Quest [$1.99 / $2.99 (HD)], a turn-based strategy game with a ton of old-school board game design flavor. Also, skulls. It has tons of skulls, one of which must be rubbed from time to time in order to satisfy a jerky wizard.
I know, I know, hold the phone: you have to rub skulls in this game? The review's going to fill you in the best, but, in brief, every dungeon in Dark Quest is a mission sent to you from an evil overlord-y wizard guy. As you move around these dungeons and accomplish whatever the wizard wants, he'll hit you up at random times and ask you to rub something called the Skull of Fate. When you do this either something good or bad happens. For the most part, it seems like the results are always BAD.
Anyway, we had a blast playing this game earlier today. Who knew wizards could be fun?
Straight-up: Robot Unicorn Attack 2 [Free] is a next-level upgrade over its predecessor. It has a ton of new features that really set it apart, including an item and upgrade store that lets you customize your unicorn and no-mess, no-fuss online functionality that gives you daily goals to complete. Of course, it also looks and plays a lot better, thanks to some first-class art direction and a blazing frame rate.
If you haven't seen it yet, go ahead and give this video a look. In it, Eli and I bumble around in the game, exploring its various options. We also die a lot in search for a hot score, which is probably funny and sad to watch at the same time. After you've seen this just give the game a download. It's free, it's awesome, and you probably won't regret it.
There's a little story behind this one. A disastrous, no-good, very bad technical hiccup kept us from covering Lone Wolf: Blood On The Snow at GDC 2013. For whatever reason, our capture rig pooped out during the live demo Forge Reply gave us. And what a demo it was, man. Dazzling comes to mind as a word to describe it, even though that sounds a wee bit hyperbolic. You gotta understand, Lone Wolf holds a surprise within its pages. It's the kind of surprise that you don't want to just tell people about, you want to show them.
So, here we are, circling back to Lone Wolf with a build in our hands. This is an effort to give you the same shot in the arm that the demo managed to give us.
Anyway, what is Lone Wolf? It's a game-book, but not your everyday game-book with a few interactive elements and nothing more. This is a GAME-book, and you'll see what we mean if you catch the video we've got just above.
We're really impressed with the effort that is going into every part of this. The page-turning effects are rad, the text is great (Forge has brought in the series' original author Joe Dever), and the art direction is superb. Also, dat surprise.
If you'd like to keep tabs on Lone Wolf, just add it on your Watch List via our app [Free]. I think we'll be talking about it a lot more before it hits digital shelves this year.
I was negative years old in 1983, so I couldn't jump on the Talisman train when Fantasy Flight Games and Games Workshop got together, created some terrible box art, and brought it out to the world. The urge to call my parents and ask why they took so long is strong in me as I play through the "Prologue" iPad version of Talisman as a first-timer. It's a superb game that cuts to the core of what makes RPGs great. You take quests, you fight a bunch of bad dudes, you find fat loot, and you create your fairly epic story in about 20 minutes or less.
Rewinding a bit, Talisman Prologue on mobile is a fantasy-ass fantasy RPG. In it, you play as an adventurer tasked with doing hero-y deeds. As a Barbarian, for example, one of the quests charges you with saving a princess from a duo of ogres and taking her back to the castle. The first Monk quest has you looking for a cross and delivering it to the Chapel because looking for artifacts is pretty cool. Other adventurers have more... narratively adventurous quests, but you get the idea. Also, all the production design in the game is traditional; it has that rugged, old-school pulp fantasy book look that extends all the way to creature design and into font.
Two Lives Left's Crabitron [$2.99 (HD)] is one of those games you've just got to see. It's an endless crabber that tasks you with charging through the cosmos, crushing and devouring anything that gets in your way. You do this by mimicking the pincers that you're steering around. Want to crush something? Pinch your fingers together. Want to eat something? Bring your fingers (and thus the pincers) to your crab's mouth and go to town. It's a wild control setup that's, surprisingly, good.
Jared and I gave it a spin this afternoon in an attempt to show you what's up. Our run is pretty good: you'll see a couple of the game's mini-games that break up the pacing, and if you don't blink, you'll even see some teleporting cars and explosive burps. And maybe a puzzle game knockoff. Man, this game is good.
It might just be something in the air, but most of us over here are starting to really get into rogue-likes. Mighty Dungeons [$1.99] is the latest one we've played, and we're digging it for the usual reasons: the thrill of random loot drops, the high stakes of permanent death, and the satisfaction that comes with killing hundreds and hundreds of skeletons lurking about in crypts, secret rooms, and libraries. What more could you want, right?
In the interest of giving you a solid look at the game, Eli and I gave this a go just the other day. We dived into quite a few dungeons in mad searches for forgotten relics and managed to, somehow, live quite a while. As you'll notice, the starting difficulty in Mighty Dungeons is maybe a little too ... easy, so maybe consider ratcheting it up before you go on your own no-heals MLG no-scope perma-death run.
If you haven't yet, you should really check out Illusion Labs's new title, Mr. Crab [$1.99]. As we've noted a couple of times now, it's a whimsical platform game that not only plays to the strengths of touch devices with its one-finger controls, but also rocks some stellar level design that encourages thoughtful jumps without threatening the player with a Game Over screen. It's sort of refreshing if you've been playing as many masocore-style platformers as we have lately.
You'll see what we mean by if you peep what we've got below. Jared and I spent about ten more minutes with the title yesterday in an attempt to give you a quick rundown and tour of Mr. Crab. Here you go:
In a vaguely RAGE-like post-apocalyptic future where some sort of weird manmade oil has the power to turn dudes into zombies, a gigantic uh-oh sort of oil spill ends up turning a lot of dudes into zombies. So much for warning labels, right? These zombies ain't your usual type of brain-diggers, either; their desire seems to revolve around beating folks up and then dragging them into the magical sludge, which now covers a tiny island chain you'll be exploring in DeNA's upcoming free-to-play first-person shooter The Drowning.
Not that there was much to it, but The Drowning doesn't use its premise for much more than just an excuse to put you in the shoes of a scavenger who roams this little island in search of parts to various vehicles and guns in an effort to survive, keep moving, and maybe escape. For the most part, this is a hollow game; you're tasked with little more than just moving from arena to arena, killing dudes and collecting random parts after the battle. The story is too lean to be a driver and the arenas too scripted and bland. You play an area enough, for instance, and you'll learn exactly when and where dudes spawn.
Two TA Plays for a single video game? What's up? Here's the deal: we want to give you a better look at Star Command's combat and what happens when fights start going sideways. In our first look, that was kinda hard to do since we were really early in the game and also had to spend a good chunk of time explaining systems and mechanics. This newer and nastier look shows off two more fights, both of which we limp out of with a shell of a ship. Fire! It's sort of a big deal!
You'll also get to see how the story is threaded, though we've gotta warn you: this has a few plot spoilers. There's nothing in here that we believe is going to hurt your time with the game, but if you're sensitive to this kind of stuff don't watch.
Anyway, have another look at Star Command and our crisis management skills:
Dungeon Hunter 4 is a return to Dungeon Hunter form, but it's also a free-to-play title with one of the most bananas schemes we've ever seen. Need a new sword or helmet? Don't wait for them to drop, just simply buy one of the several pieces of gear offered on your own inventory screen. Want to use two healing potions in rapid succession? Either wait eight hours or pay twenty diamonds for the pleasure. Need some new skills and don't want to level up for them? You can pay for them instead, which we're fairly sure throws the game's balancing all sorts of off. When we looked at the game this morning, we came away pretty impressed with the lengths this game goes to in order to compensate for being free. It's not so much gross as it is hilarious.
This is kind of a shame since there's some good stuff in this. The visuals are solid and the art has a really cool oil-y and colorful look. The action feels pretty good, too, as far as virtual d-pads and buttons go. The skill and crafting systems feel like they're going to be great, as well.
Dungeon Hunter 4 hits tonight at 11PM EST for the price of zero dollars.
At the top level, Star Command is a sci-fi simulation game that focuses on the real guts of an interstellar ship -- you know, the people, the facilities, and the technology that makes travel and battle possible. As far as feel goes, it's something of sci-fi slugfest where you find yourself limping out of every battle in a charred ship that's being staffed by a skeleton crew because everyone either (a) got sucked out of the hull, (b) got incinerated by phasers, or (c) died in a fire. I'm not really sure that this is the feel that creator War Balloon was ultimately looking for, but this is how it came across to us for the first couple of hours. And, spoiler, this is a pretty cool thing.
We didn't know this when we first booted it up, but Star Command is story-driven. You play as a commander of a ship in Star Command, a "Star Trek"-inspired Federation of sorts. In the opening moments, you're tasked with responding to various threats in our system under their watchful eye. After a brief tutorial, things get real when you discover a busted up ship which explodes as soon as you get there. Star Command gets on the honker and blames you for the explosion, saying you fired on the thing. From here, the adventure takes on a different tone entirely. You're now the commander of a rogue ship in a big galaxy with an assortment of alien species and various tricks, traps, rewards, and oddities.
If you dug Cut the Rope, you'll probably dig Mittens [$0.99 / $1.99 (HD)]. It's the latest game from Disney, and it's undeniably inspired by ZeptoLabs fantastic -- and ultra-successful -- physics-based puzzle game. In Mittens, you control a cat across a variety of levels in a quest to reach milk, mice, or, oddly, balloons. You'll swing on ropes, you'll cut ropes, and you'll even fire the little guy from a cannon through fiery hoops.
Simplistic one-touch gestures make this a breeze to play, and while it's totally a good and competent game, it's hard to shake the impression that Disney only wanted to make a "safe" title and not necessarily a brilliant one. It's charting, though, unsurprisingly.
Jared and I gave it a look just a few minutes ago and thought it'd be rad if we shared our initial impressions with you:
Mittens is available now on iPhone. There's an HD version for the iPad, too, if you're into that. Note: we accidentally call it a "universal" game in the video and say it's price is free; whoops!
Of late, we've been thinking a lot about how sickness travels from person-to-person and that kinda got us back into the Plague Inc [$0.99] mood. Released back in May 2012, Plague Inc is a simulation game that puts you in the shoes of a deadly plague's manager. Basically, you make a plague, mutate specific parts of that plague, and then watch it spread across the world. If you're a good enough disease designer, you'll annihilate the entire planet. If you suck, the world will scramble together a cure before the curtains close.
It might be a slow game, but it's an intensely interesting one, as you've got to quickly and constantly make decisions based on where you plague is, where it needs to go, and what kind of folks it needs to infect. People have been loving this game and creator Ndemic Creations has done an awesome job with releasing a ton of post-release support.
Jared and I spent some more time with it the other afternoon. Check it out, if you haven't yet:
Plague Inc is available as a paid app and you can get a bunch of new mutations and two new modes via IAP.
We're guessing you've already heard this, but just in case: Twisted Pixel's mobile port of Ms. Splosion Man [$2.99] is now available on the App Store. "Port" feels like a good word to use here, too, since the game's a pretty faithful reproduction of the XBLA version. It does have IAP for power-ups and level progression, though, which is new to Ms. Splosion Man overall.
If you're hungry to see this in action, give this video a look. Eli and I spent some of our post-GDC time with the game this afternoon, pounding through a level before getting in trouble with the first world's last boss encounter. You'll probably walk away with a good impression of how this game rolls mechanically and tonally. That's cool, right?
If you're into platformers, you should have probably grabbed this yesterday. It's pretty good.