Back in August of 2014 Sunnyside Games launched The Firm (Free), a twitch arcade game that had you frantically buying and selling stocks before they stacked up too far on your desk and your company fires you. You’d buy a stock by swiping it right and sell it by swiping left, and The Firm felt like the lovechild of Timberman and Tinder. The setup was simple: There are red and green stocks, and you want to buy the green ones when they’re on the rise and the red ones when they’re on the decline. The opposite was true for stocks you want to sell. As you progress in the game the speed that the stocks are sent to your desk increases, and although it’s a simple task of recognizing what to do with each type of stock, once things start to speed up The Firm turns into a truly manic high-scoring game. Check out the trailer.
In February of 2015 a significant update was released for The Firm which added some new features and a new gameplay mechanic in the form of Urgent Reports which would occasionally pop up in your stack of stocks and require you to tap the report a certain amount of times and then either swipe it up or down depending on what the report called for. Basically, it was a monkey wrench thrown into your careful stock-trading concentration, and it added a lot to the game. Aside from a 64-bit compatibility update this past July, we haven’t seen anything new for The Firm since that big update in early 2015. That changed this week with a new version 1.2 update. The biggest new addition is changeable themes, which include Morning, Day, Night, and First Snow. Here’s Morning and First Snow below.
By default the different themes in the game will reflect the actual time of day, or given that we’re in winter and right on the doorstep of Christmas, the First Snow theme. But you can go into the options and choose any theme you want at any time. There’s also some new music tunes to choose from and a revamped interface for the in-game shop. The only IAP in The Firm is a “buy us a cup of coffee" 99¢ tip jar-style IAP, but you do earn money just from playing and can then use that in the shop to buy special bonus items. There’s also multiple language support with full translations for French, Russian, Spanish, Italian, German, and Portuguese in addition to English. Finally, The Firm now fully supports the whole screen of the iPhone X and they’ve rejiggered how the game plays on the iPad so it fits the screen properly now. All great things for one of my favorite arcade games, so if you haven’t checked out The Firm previously and you love twitchy games be sure to give this newly updated version a shot.
