TouchArcade.ru

I’ve played a lot of iOS games in my time, and have gone through varying levels of addiction with certain titles. Even so, that usually doesn’t last for too long. I’ve never found my own personal Angry Birds or Tiny Tower. That is, until I picked up Hero Academy [Free] for the first time. Shortly after, I noticed that I was playing a match while cooking, waiting for people to come over, or pretty much any other time I had three free minutes or more at a time. At that point, I identified that I might have found that game that I feel the need to play endlessly. Good news is, all my other friends seem to have the same problem, so that works out for me.

Hero Academy is Robot Entertainment’s first iOS offering, and I think it’s the sign of good things to come. The premise is very basic: You are playing a tactical battle against another team, and the goal is to destroy their crystals before they destroy yours. Each round allows you five moves (”action points”), which you can use to either place team members and items on the board, or move and attack with your preexisting team members.

If you play the free version of the game, the only team available to you is the Council, which is made up of humans and is a well-balanced option. Should you wish, you can unlock the Dark Elves for $0.99, which can summon the spirits of their fallen enemies to aid them in battle.

At the bottom of your screen, you’ll see a selection of five items and characters, which the game randomly deals you each turn. If you don’t like what you got, you can use your finger to drag anything you don’t want over to the tiny door in the bottom left corner. Once your turn is finished, you’ll get new stuff and hopefully get dealt exactly what you were looking for. This selection of items includes spells and weapons to strengthen your characters’ attack and defense abilities so you can survive in the field for longer.

The board itself also includes some options to give you the advantage. In the middle of each board is a tile with a crystal on it, and reaching it will weaken the enemy’s crystal a bit. There are also tiles that have a sword or a shield on them, which will give you a buff to attack or defense. At the end of a turn, you can also choose to submit your turn normally or submit it with a taunt, which is pretty much just to piss your opponent off.

Getting to know your characters and how their skills can be used is vital. For example, the magician can cast a spell that can hit a row of opponents and only spend a single action point on it. Using these types of skills to your advantage will give you the edge needed to keep those fools off your crystals.

Frankly, I’m no fan of waiting around for someone to take a turn. When I first saw that Hero Academy had no single player mode where you could at least play against the computer, I was a bit let down. At first, I only had a few games going with other friends. The key to the fun of Hero Academy really came clear when I got a lot of games going, and that was when I started to feel my skills were improving and I was getting better at it. Considering my moves more carefully and how I could best defend against the way my opponent played was rewarding, and I started to win more matches.

There is one downfall to the game, and that is that the free version is relentless when it comes to in-game ads. Between each match, you’ll see an ad that you have to stare at for five seconds before it disappears and you can play again. If you’re good at ignoring things, you may not mind one bit, but if you’re like me and it bugs the hell out of you, you can buy any heroic team to get rid of the ads, which costs a buck. Only the Dark Elves are available for now, but Robot promises new teams are coming in the near future. You can also spend a bit more to get new avatars if you so desire.

Hero Academy is a simple game, and it does what it’s built to do very, very well. If the content continues to expand and offer more for the fanbase, I could see it being something I would want to come back to over and over again in the future. It also offers access to invite Facebook and Twitter friends to join you right in the menu, so never fear if you don’t have enough games going at a time. Invite everyone you know, and soon enough your phone will be jingling with the notification sound you’ve learned that you’re unable to resist.

TouchArcade Rating:

[source]

Woody Woodpecker has his own star on the Hollywood walk of fame, his own famous theme song and a distinctive laugh (ha-ha-HA-ha!   Ha-ha-HA-ha!), but old Woody hasn’t had much press coverage in recent years. So he’s trying to make a comeback, with his new iOS game published by Chillingo.

Woody Woodpecker [99¢] is basically Tiny Wings [99¢] turned into a side-scrolling race between five cartoon characters across a curvaceous landscape. And like most Chillingo releases, it’s nicely presented. You choose which of the five characters to race as, with each having their own “vehicle” and special weapon.

You might choose Woody on a skate board launching missiles, Winnie Woodpecker on skis spraying perfume or perhaps Buzz Buzzard on his motorcycle splashing around black oil to slow down the opposition. Each character has slightly different attributes for speed, acceleration and handling, but this doesn’t make much difference, as it’s pretty easy to win races. This game would definitely benefit from more challenging difficulty levels.

The main controls are based on one finger, much like Tiny Wings. You hold your finger down to accelerate while descending and lift your finger when moving up-hill. Buttons are available to activate your character’s special weapon or for speed-boosts, both of which re-charge before re-use.  There are options for left/right hand controls, although strangely, you must display “left hand” for right handed taps.

Two game modes are provided: Single-player race, or online multiplayer via Game Center. The multiplayer mode randomly matches you with one opponent. My first race was Woody versus someone else playing as Woody. Since then it’s been difficult to find a random online opponent (there’s no option to play a specific friend).

The thirty single-player levels are spread across three locations. You start on the golf course, but can unlock the snow-covered slopes of the Arctic and Circus levels by winning races and earning “thumbs-up” awards, which is essentially the 3-star achievement system used in many games. On the golf course, there are sand-traps to slow you down and lightning clouds to shock you. While in the Arctic levels, the characters are given skis. You can switch characters between races as it doesn’t matter which character you use to beat each level.

Scores are based on the number of slides, tricks, mayhem (swooping on non-race characters), time and points gained during the race, all of which contribute to your “thumbs-up” rating. But if you don’t place in the top three, you don’t receive a score. High score leaderboards are provided in both Game Center and Crystal, with a separate leaderboard listed for each of the three race locations. But don’t rely on the on-screen progress indicators to see how you’re doing, as they frequently misreport your position.

Woody Woodpecker is an easy game to enjoy (like Tiny Wings) and has a special nostalgic appeal. However, whereas Tiny Wings had islands to reach and evolving objectives to satisfy, this game has neither. Sure, there’s levels and worlds to unlock and a few Game Center objectives, but the character attributes aren’t upgradable and the wins come too easily. It would be more satisfying if the various characters, means of transport, and weapons were unlocked along the way, rather than all provided from the start. Overall, a good game, but just for a couple of days or for the kids.

TouchArcade Rating:

[source]

It’s not that Snoticles [$0.99] is a bad game. Not at all – it’s a competent puzzler across the board. It’s just that I’ve grown to expect a lot from games published by Adult Swim. Right or wrong, they blew us all out of the water with Monsters Ate My Condo [$0.99] and Bring Me Sandwiches!! [$0.99] Both have a frenetic sort of madness underlying them, one that seemed like it might just be a trend. The come down since then has been harsh.

Taken on its own merits Snoticles is certainly a solid title, minus a few recent weeks of crash-happy downtime between updates. There are five worlds of physics puzzles to be solved with the excretions of Zit, Dread, Spark and Snot, the titular snoticles. Each has its own abilities that are put to the test in solving puzzles defined by (generally) static blobs that must be destroyed.

Each snoticle has a set number of shots to destroy the on-screen blots. You must carefully aim and fire, sometimes destroying obstacles before you destroy the blots themselves. It’s not completely unfamiliar. But there are no carefully constructed towers to topple, no slingshot to pull. Just the usual things – shooting, a selection of special abilities, a three-star rating system and the goal of complete destruction.

Zit’s shots are the default from which every other shot is drawn. His follow an arc afflicted by gravity and bounce off surfaces. If they hit an Alpha Blot, all other blots around it die. Spark launches fireballs that are unaffected by gravity and fly straight through almost anything in their path. Dread’s shots blow up everything around the first surface they hit. Snot’s particularly grotesque shots cling and can be dropped with an extra tap.

The formula works, but it never gets all that interesting. Every level has more or less a single solution, and most of them are obvious. The only trick is to pull them off with the fewest shots possible. In practice this mostly winds up meaning you’ll retake the same shots in the same order and try not to miss. As the game progresses, more and more blots are shielded and can only be destroyed by one particular snoticle, which only serves to make the correct solution even more obvious.

There are elements that complicate matters – breakable surfaces, moving parts, tunnels and gravity wells and such. Only the last of those adds significant complexity, and that’s only really by making shots much harder to predict. It’s more frustrating than challenging.

There is satisfaction to be found stalking through the levels to hunt down every last blot, don’t get me wrong. It just doesn’t rise above a fairly straightforward premise. There’s an even-keeled wackiness there, but it just doesn’t have much on the outright insanity of some of Adult Swim’s other recent releases.

Here’s what it comes down to: Snoticles is a good game. It’s a fun physics puzzler that provides a mid-tier challenge. But there are so many similar games out there, and this one doesn’t do much at all to set itself apart. If the App Store hasn’t slaked your thirst for aimey-shooty physics games yet, you absolutely won’t go wrong with Snoticles. I just have to wonder if there’s anyone out there that still meets that description.

TouchArcade Rating:

[source]

Back in October we told you that Namco’s classic 3D arcade fighter SoulCalibur was coming to iOS, and now it looks like we have a release date for the game. According to Andriasang (and noted by Joystiq), Namco Bandai will be releasing the iOS SoulCalibur as a Universal app this coming week on the 19th.

SoulCalibur on iOS will feature 19 different fighters and lots of game modes, including arcade, time attack, survival, extra survival, practice and museum modes. Sadly, there is no sign of team battle mode or any kind of multiplayer mode, which is pretty odd for a fighting game. The lack of online multiplayer isn’t really surprising, but I sure hope we see some sort of local multiplayer option in an update in the future.

But even with the lack of multiplayer, SoulCalibur is an absolute classic that I spent countless hours with on my Dreamcast and I’m really looking forward to playing again on my iPhone and iPad. There will be Game Center support for 3 of the above modes, so there will be somewhat of a competitive aspect. Unfortunately, it looks like at release only owners of 4th generation devices or either version of the iPad will be able to run the game. Hopefully the hardware requirements will be able to be lowered down the line at some point.

We’ll be sure to give SoulCalibur a spin and see how it’s stood the test of time when it hits the App Store this week, and you can check out our forums for further discussion of the game.

[Via Andriasang and Joystiq]

[source]