The wait is almost over: Star Command is coming to iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad on May 2. Yup, you read that right -- War Balloon's sci-fi battle and tragedy simulation game is coming later this week. As planned, it'll debut as a Universal app for $2.99. Also, it apparently won't support in-app purchases, which is neat.
If you haven't been in the loop, this celebratory launch trailer should get you up to speed in no time. Watch as the player's ship turns into a burning, useless husk! Note how hull breaches create vacuums and suck crew members out of their rooms! When things go bad in Star Command, they go real bad, man.
We'll continue covering the game, of course and should have a review and some other nice things ready around launch. But, anyway: hey, guys, Star Command! It's finally coming!
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.
The opening to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Rooftop Run [$1.99], an endless runner based on Nickelodeon's reboot of the popular '90s cartoon, is almost as awesome as the game itself. We open on a shot of our four heroes in a half-shell lounging around the sewer den playing video games. A very young and spunky April O'Neil comes bursting into the room, shouting at the love-struck mutant teenagers to turn on the news, which shows alien invaders descending on New York City.
Boggled at the nerve of the alien riffraff, the heroes rush up to the surface, spout a lot of talk about kicking some alien butt--and immediately set off running when the alien ship swoops in from above and gives chase. My heroes.
Humorous as it may be to see those turtle tough guys turn tail, I'm glad they did, because the resulting adventure makes for one of the more creative runners on the App Store. After choosing a turtle, your hero sets off at a dash, leaving you to tap the screen to leap gaps between buildings and ninja-kick Foot soldiers and aliens in your path. As you run, you'll need to collect green orbs to keep the glowing meter at the top of the screen from draining. Should it deplete, the ship beams you up and, one presumes, the crew dines on turtle soup.
Long, long time Mac developer Pangea Software was amongst the first to really go full-steam into iOS development and the new App Store back in the early iPhone days. Because of that, some of their titles will always stand out to me as absolute classics for the time that they were released. Games like Cro-Mag Rally and Enigmo. Pangea has also always been really good at adopting new technology and features, often being first out of the gate to implement things like Retina Display support and Game Center online multiplayer.
So, Pangea is a solid developer with a great history, but the iOS App Store in particular has been really good to them. In an effort to thank all their fans, they've made their entire much of their iOS game catalog free for the next 24 hours. Here's a list of what's on offer, including their games which are free to begin with.
This isn't the first time Pangea has had a freebie blowout like this, in particular they did this a couple of years back for their third anniversary on the App Store, but there are some quality titles on offer here for zero dollars so if there are some games listed above which you haven't discovered yet now is a great time to check them out. Also, if you like being alerted to freebies like this be sure to have the TouchArcade [Free] app installed to get notifications when time-limited sales like this go into effect.
If you're a longtime iOS gamer then you probably remember Lego Batman: Gotham City Games, the first Lego Batman game to grace the App Store. You also probably remember that it was an uninspired collection of mini-games that was a far cry in terms of enjoyment from its console counterpart. These are painful memories.
Well, it's been more than four years but perhaps there's finally a chance for redemption with Lego Batman: DC Super Heroes, set to hit the App Store in the US in just a few hours. We'll be looking forward to checking it out then, but even already you can tell that this is a far cry from that other Lego Batman game.
First off, this is a full 3D action title, similar to the console Lego games and even Lego Harry Potter [$4.99] on iOS. You'll run around doing 3D platforming and light puzzle solving, all the while beating up on both bad guys and objects and then collecting the sweet, sweet Lego studs that are left behind, which are then used to buy different characters and other goodies. Lego Batman: DC Super Heroes boasts an 80 character roster, and not surprisingly it looks like you can buy studs as IAP if you desire.
Controls are also always a concern with a game like this, and Lego Batman: DC Super Heroes offers two different options. First is your standard "Classic" virtual stick and buttons setup, and second is a streamlined "Touch Screen" option which simply has you touching where you want the character to go and tapping items to interact with them.
If you liked the iOS versions of Lego Harry Potter then chances are you'll dig this latest Lego Batman incarnation, as it seems to be in the same vein. Or, if you just like Batman and other DC heroes, you'll probably get a kick out of it too. Add it to your TouchArcade [Free] app Watch List to be alerted when it hits the US later tonight, and check out our forums for even more impressions and discussion.
Earlier this month we told you that Gun Commando, a retro-styled first-person shooter previously released on PlayStation Mobile devices, was on its way to the App Store, and it's worming its way through international markets as we speak and should land in the US later tonight. I've been toying around with Gun Commando for a bit and so far it's pretty much what I expected: a simple, but fun, frag-a-thon that's a real throwback to the early days of FPS games.
When I talk about throwback, I mean that Gun Commando is like Doom [$4.99] or Wolfenstein 3D [$1.99 / Free] in that you're aiming is fixed to a single plane, so you don't have to worry about aiming up or down. This makes the game less complex, but also much easier to control on a touchscreen. The controls are still as fiddly as most touchscreen FPS games, and I'm sure a far cry from the actual dual-sticks of the Vita, but they get the job done fine.
Graphics in Gun Commando are really simple, with blocky environments and textures, but it has a really cool stylized look that makes it feel like you're playing an '80s cartoon. The levels are simplistic and are all really bite-sized, which is well-suited to mobile. You aren't likely to get lost working your way through them, but there are 3 trophies to search out and collect in each one and plenty of little secret areas to find that give you additional goals to shoot for.
By far the most interesting aspect about Gun Commando is its weapons system. Unlike traditional games where you where you can switch between the various weapons you run across in the game, here you'll always start out with a base pistol and work your way up from there. You do this by landing shots into enemies consecutively, which builds up a meter in your HUD.
Each time you fill the meter your weapon levels up, turning it into a more powerful weapon. With every hit you land the meter notches up a bit, and when you miss it notches down a bit. This system is brilliant as it makes you focus on accuracy rather than just mashing the trigger willy nilly, but on the flip side I do miss the strategies that come with being able to choose your weapons and manage your ammunition.
The lack of strategies or complexity isn't necessarily a negative in Gun Commando's case, especially for a mobile game. Its focus is on running around and blasting bad dudes, and I like it that way. It also has a really cool visual style and lots of tongue-in-cheek personality, and players in the forums seem to be digging it too. Gun Commando should land around 11pm EST, so throw this bad boy on your TouchArcade [Free] app Watch List and we'll alert you when it hits the US App Store.
In late February Angry Mob Games, creators of Muffin Knight [$0.99 / Free] and Guerrilla Bob [$0.99 / $2.99 (HD)] on iOS, released a new 3rd-person action game in the Aliens vs. Predator crossover universe titled AVP: Evolution [$0.99]. In fact, Angry Mob had already proven their merit in working with this kind of IP with their previous dual-stick game Predators [$0.99], which was actually quite good.
Graphically, AVP: Evolution is very impressive, and it lets you battle through its campaign as either an Alien or a Predator. At first blush, though, it felt like nothing more than a mindless, button-mashing brawler. In some ways it actually is, and there's nothing necessarily wrong with that. However, put a little time into learning the mechanics and there's actually a very satisfying game here, and it's one that players in our forums have been enjoying a ton since its release.
Yesterday Angry Mob pushed out the latest update to AVP: Evolution and it's a doozy. Two new playable characters have been added, the Berserker Alien and the Chopper Predator, and each come with their own unique new abilities. There are some new missions to play through and secret areas to discover throughout the game's campaign. Oh, and the Predator has gotten a couple of new weapons to add to his arsenal: a Shuriken and a Plasma Railgun.
Additionally, the combat camera has been improved, following up on some tweaks made to the camera and combat mechanics in the previous update. Difficulty has been adjusted as well, along with performance improvements so the game runs more smoothly on all the various supported iOS devices.
AVP: Evolution opens up as a pretty awesome action game once you've spent some time learning the ropes, and especially if you're already an Alien or Predator fanatic. This new update keeps the good times rolling, so be sure to check it out.
There's not a really tidy way to categorize Chillingo's Madmonster. It's not a runner, even though it does task you with guiding a tiny monster dude around a world from left to right in an endless charge. It's not a platform game, even though its core mechanic revolves around that monster bouncing up and down and smashing various objects. It's a game that sits in the middle between these two genres, satisfying neither's conditions as neatly as I want it to. And while I'm being wishy-washy: it's not a thrilling game, either, though it is a competent arcade-y game.
To rewind: In Madmonster, you control a brown-ish, pink fuzz ball with some nasty looking teeth in an overall quest to destroy everything in its path. By tapping on either the left or the right side of the screen, you plough this furry ball of death into anything that gets in its way. Curiously, whenever you make contact with an object -- be it tank, bomb or even satellite dish -- the monster bounces off of it and then goes airborne. The more junk you run into as you're flying through the air, the higher you go. If you get high enough, you hit outer space, instantly reminding you that, yes, this is a video game.
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.
Back in the late '90s, Sega's House of the Dead was one of the most popular games in arcades. It let you team up with a buddy, each with brightly-colored plastic guns in your hands, and lay waste to hordes of the undead. How could it not be popular?
While having a stand-up cabinet with physical faux guns attached was a big part of the appeal of a game like House of the Dead, the franchise went on to become quite popular on home consoles, utilizing its own set of gun peripherals or more recently being compatible with motion controllers like the PS3 Move and Nintendo Wiimote.
Tonight Sega is getting ready to drop House of the Dead: Overkill - The Lost Reels on the App Store. It's a touchscreen-tuned, remixed version of the title released for the Wii back in 2009, and I've been playing around with it for most of the morning. To be honest I wasn't exactly expecting much out of the iOS House of the Dead, but I have been pleasantly surprised so far, save for a few head-scratching quirks.
The game is broken up into three different "movies" which each contain four levels and a boss fight at the end. The initial download gives you the first movie, Papa's Palace of Pain, as well as a locked second movie Ballistic Trauma. You unlock that second movie merely by playing through the first, but the third movie, Naked Terror, must be purchased for a $1.99 IAP. I don't mind so much having to pay for additional DLC levels in games, but on day one in a paid game that already only comes with two chapters it feels a bit weird.
On the bright side each chapter in the game is quite lengthy. You're guided around "on rails" through each environment, blasting at zombies (oh sorry, I mean the infected) at every turn. There are also a ton of cool little touches to discover, like hidden items or secret doors you can access by shooting them.
A pretty robust shop system allows you to buy and upgrade new weapons. While you can certainly buy the "Koins" currency as IAP, I found I had more than enough to upgrade my starting shotgun and handgun quite well just using what I earned through playing. Good thing too, as the third segment of the first chapter is where things really started to get tough, and the upgrading instantly made the going a lot easier.
The weapon upgrades are permanent, and there are some abilities you can permanently upgrade for your character too like beefing up your life bar or combo multiplier. The shop also contains consumables which will give you a temporary boost in things like damage done or Koins earned.
One of the biggest head-scratchers so far has to do with the controls. There are options for a virtual stick which moves your aiming reticule around the screen, and it works really well, and then there's an option for accelerometer controls which aren't quite as good in my opinion but still seem to get the job done alright. Then there's a Frenzy Tap option, which sounds like a tap-to-shoot scheme, and also seems like the control option that would make the most sense for this game.
I say "sounds" and "seems" because I haven't actually tried Frenzy Tap yet. For some inexplicable reason it's locked, and I haven't quite figured out how to unlock it. It seems very strange to lock away something like a control option, but I'm getting along just fine with the virtual stick so I guess I'll just see what happens I do end up running across Frenzy Tap.
Other than the couple of quirks I mentioned, the actual action in House of the Dead is as solid as ever, and I'm having a blast so far. The production values are quite high, and fans of the series should be pretty happy having a version to carry around in their pocket. House of the Dead: Overkill - The Lost Levels should be hitting the US App Store tonight at 11pm EST, so in the meantime hit up our forums for more impressions and feel free to add the game to your Watch List in the TouchArcade app [Free] to be notified when it does land here in the US later tonight.
Robot Unicorn Attack 2, the sequel to the only endless runner worth caring about on the App Store, is releasing tonight across iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. Chew on that for a second. A follow-up to Adult Swim's bizarre, colorful, and electric Robot Unicorn Attack [$0.99] is barreling down the pipes, coming to your FingerPad device of choice in just a handful of hours. Take a whiff. Can you smell that? It's the sweet, sweet stench of anticipation. And rainbows. And tears.
The star-ploughing fundamentals remain the same. You, as a fearless guider of rainbow-tailed destruction, are tasked with double-jumping and double-dashing as far as you can over the course of three separate "wishes" or runs. At the end, your overall score is tallied. It's a simple formula, but it works well. In fact, I'd argue the beauty of the first game was in its simplicity and ridiculousness, both of which see a return in Robot Unicorn Attack 2.
Pocket Frogs [Free], Tiny Tower [Free], Pocket Planes [Free]… Nimblebit’s gotten pretty good at keeping us enraptured on our devices with cute graphics and pixelated timers. With Nimble Quest [$0.99], the team takes a turn towards improving upon and deepening a classic arcade experience. Less of a time-management title and more of an action-oriented experience Nimble Quest is an excellent title that continues the trend of high quality games coming out of Nimblebit.
The best way to describe Nimble Quest is like a game of Snake, except way better (to paraphrase the title of our TA Plays). Similar to what Call of Snakes [$0.99] did last year, Nimble Quest takes the simplicity of Snake's mechanics and adds layers of variety to turn it into something more. The game centers around guiding a group of heroes around a bordered plane with simple swiping controls turning your heroes left or right. Movement and attacks are both on auto-pilot and the goal is to dispatch enemies that randomly appear in the environment. Take out a certain number of baddies, and you move on to the next level.
Away from the heart. You have to bounce the ninjas—no, punch them—away from the heart, not toward it. Indiscriminate punching isn't good enough. "Defend Heart!" they said. You had one job, and you failed by scoring on your own goal, punching some guy right into your own vulnerable heart. There might be a metaphor there.
In Jared Bailey'sFist Face Fight [Free], you're a disembodied fist. A disembodied fist with feet, that is, fighting face ninjas with feet of their own. They aren't particularly malicious ninjas. They're probably just going about their days. But your heart is right there, exposed, helpless. So you punch, because that's the only way to keep it safe.
You begin as any child starting karate class might, with a white belt. In the distance is your goal, the coveted black belt. Between you and it are quite a few ninjas and no shortage of punches. Each belt is functionally a level. White is easy - the ninjas will hardly have a chance as you tap them in their expressionless faces. Each time you earn enough coins to unlock a new belt the ninjas you have to fight get more dangerous. They'll take two hits, three, nine. They slip in and out of reality. Things start to get chancy.
Back at GDC we took a peek at some of the new stuff heading to Pixowl's The Sandbox [Free], and today the first of those updates has gone live in the App Store. The Sandbox, if it wasn't obvious, is a 2D sandbox game which lets you play as the almighty finger of God and create things by mixing different elements, making machines, using electricity and steam power, and so much more.
It's really incredible some of the things players have created in the game, and in addition to passing the 4 million download mark Pixowl has also announced that more than 200,000 user-created levels have been shared in the online gallery. You should definitely check out what's on there.
Today's update adds to The Sandbox in 6 new elements based around lasers and pipes and all the various items to go with them to make them work. A new 10 level campaign is available for $1.99 that has you putting those new items to work in different ways which will teach you the ins and outs of how to use them.
In addition to the Lasers & Pipes campaign content, there are 5 new levels for the Dinosaurs campaign and 5 new levels for the Pixel Art campaign. And the Contraptions campaign, which was previously a paid DLC item, is now free for all players. Finally, a set of new instruments have been added to the game – guitar, bass, drums and trumpet. Some of the musical levels created by players are just mind-boggling, and I'm sure they're ready to go nuts with these new instruments.
If you haven't checked out The Sandbox previously, give it a shot. It's free to download and comes with enough content to give you an idea if it's the sort of experience you'll dig, and there's tons more content available as IAP if you want to dig in even deeper. The second update we covered at GDC, which will add zombies to the game, should be hitting sometime next month, so keep an eye out for that too.
Dear Gut: you've made a lot of great assumptions and predictions in the past and while I still appreciate your abilities as soothsayer, trash compactor, and bile bag, you led me astray on Haunted Hollow [Free]. It's not a soulless or uninteresting free-to-play game. It's a solid strategy game that takes some actual brains to play.
You should give it a shot today, too, dear reader. It's available now wide as an actual release and the financial barrier to entry is as low as it gets: zero dollars. But what kind of game is it, you ask? In brief, it's a one-versus-one, turn-based strategy game that tasks you with building up a horde of monsters and taking control of a village by scaring the townspeople. The first player to get every building wins.
The wait is almost over: Star Command is coming to iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad on May 2. Yup, you read that right -- War Balloon's sci-fi battle and tragedy simulation game is coming later this week. As planned, it'll debut as a Universal app for $2.99. Also, it apparently won't support in-app purchases, which is neat.
