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Freebie Alert: ‘Rolando: Royal Edition’ is Free this Week to Help Ease the Pain of Being Stuck at Home

TouchArcade Rating:

It’s been a weird couple of weeks, to say the least, with the COVID-19 pandemic making a huge impact all over the world with many people being forced to stay at home to try and curb the spread of the virus. In an effort to contribute some good to such a dire situation, many game developers have been throwing big sales or freebie promotions on their games, because if you’re going to be stuck at home then there’s nothing quite like being able to curl up with a new video game and forget about the real world for a while. The problem, if you could call it that, is that there are SO MANY sales happening it’s pretty overwhelming to try and cover, and lots of the sales have only been for an extremely limited time. We just don’t have the means to stay on top if it all, but I will point you towards AppUnwrapper’s website where they’ve been doing a tremendous job keeping on top of daily sales related to the quarantine. There is however one game that will be free all of this week, and it’s so near and dear to TouchArcade’s heart that I just had to post about it. I’m talking about Rolando: Royal Edition ($4.99) from developer Hand Circus.

Rolando was one of the first bonafide big-time original iPhone games when it launched WAY back in December of 2008. It had colorful graphics, cute characters, fantastic music, and personality for days, but more importantly it was the type of game that felt like it could only be possible on a device like the iPhone, with its touchscreen and gyroscope functionality. Last year Hand Circus released Rolando: Royal Edition, which was a complete top to bottom remaster of the 2008 original. We loved Royal Edition in our review and chose it as our Game of the Week when it released just about a year ago, and it’s hard to describe what a joy it was to revisit such an old mobile gaming friend more than a decade later. Plus Royal Edition was a great way to introduce brand new fans into the world of Rolando.

I’m still holding out hope that Hand Circus will be releasing the additional “hidden" levels from Rolando as well as giving the remastering treatment to Rolando 2, but even if not I’m so thankful to have a modernized version of such a defining title from mobile gaming’s history, and one that still holds up incredibly well today. If you have not experienced Rolando before or never got around to picking up Royal Edition, jump straight over to the App Store right now and grab it while it’s free for the week.

  • Rolando: Royal Edition

    9.5/10 – “Simply the best game you can get for the iPhone” – IGN Original Review 10/10 – “Unquestionably the…
    TA Rating:
    $4.99
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