Another week of awesome games, including one kinda-sorta weird review where we focus on a specific IAP item inside of a game. But, to be fair, figuring out what to do with content-centric IAP is still a little weird for us… Bur, whatever, you need Pinball Arcade any way you slice it. Again, these are the highest scored reviews we published this week:
Pinball Arcade Plus, $0.99 [Review] – The developers behind The Pinball Arcade (Free), FarSight Studios, are nothing if not extremely passionate about pinball. They’ve been in the games industry a pretty long time, over 20 years now, but they didn’t truly find their niche until the 2004 release of Pinball Hall Of Fame: The Gottlieb Collection on the PlayStation 2. Its initial release was perhaps a little too early to catch the renaissance of video pinball, but it at least did well enough that they followed that up a few years later with The Williams Collection. With Williams tables being a lot more well-known among Americans, that release ended up doing pretty well, earning high praise for its faithfulness to the real machines. While this was all happening, digital storefronts started to become more popular. Soon, retail retro collections were becoming retro themselves, with a la carte offerings proving more popular with fans. It was a natural fit for the type of work FarSight was doing, and so The Pinball Arcade was born.
AG Drive, $2.99 [Review] – You just don’t see a whole lot of ugly futuristic racers. Even if a game has ugly visuals, it can be excused away as a lo-fi stylistic choice to represent the vagueness of the future, or some artsy gobbledygook like that. But often, because the games can be big, bold, and colorful because they’re playing with exaggerated fantasy, futuristic racing games can be gorgeous. Wipeout has always been a great-looking franchise. AG Drive ($2.99) follows that Wipeout formula – deliver fast-paced futuristic racing that’s absolutely stunning to look at. This is a solid futuristic racing game that’s quite easy on the eyes.
Planet Quest, Free [Review] – Like Parappa The Rapper, Planet Quest (Free) has a pretty odd theme to its visuals. Also like that game, it only offers up a handful of songs, but with a great deal of variety between them in terms of speed and complexity. Its closest cousin is probably Nintendo’s fantastic Rhythm Heaven series. You don’t have to worry about following complex chains of different buttons. As long as you can tap to the beat, you’re nine-tenths of the way there.
Additionally, we reviewed a few other games this week. As always, you can dig into all of our reviews by clicking here. Alternatively, you can hit up specific scores by using these links:
