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Today, at The Gadget Show Live in Birmingham, four teams of student developers will bring Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone’s Fighting Fantasy series to the iOS audience in a brand new way. We’ve had the chance to look at the games in development, and they’re looking pretty hot.

The Make Something Unreal Live competition is the sort of opportunity most folks who’ve dabbled in game development would kill for. It’s organized by Epic Games and Train2Game. Student teams were given access to the Fighting Fantasy IP and, basically, told to go nuts with it. They’ve spent the last few months building games based off that IP using the Unreal Development Kit. Working with industry mentors, they’ve created new interpretations of the beloved books. Now they’ll go on stage and put the finishing touches on their titles with help from some of the industry’s biggest names.

If you don’t know the Fighting Fantasy IP, it’s a series of roleplaying gamebooks that were super popular in the 80s and 90s. A number of them have been brought to iOS in classic interactive fiction form by Big Blue Bubble, but this is the first time they’ve been reimagined for the platform as full 3D games.

There are four teams of students competing in Make Something Unreal Live, each with members with expertise in art, design, programming and QA. Each team set out with a different title: The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, Armies of Death, The Citadel of Chaos and Deathtrap Dungeon. We’ve had some time with each of the titles, and they’re shaping up nicely.

Digital Mage is the team responsible for Armies of Death: Rise of Agglax. It turns the tale of Armies of Death on its head. Players will command the undead forces of Agglax as they travel down lanes destroying the heroes and defenses of the kingdom of Allansia. Defeating enemies releases their souls, which provide the power needed to raise the undead.

The levels of the game are inspired by events from the original book. Though we were only able to try out the early stages of the game, Digital Mage says that the final product will boast a lovingly crafted story that expands of the tale of Armies of Death.

Indigo Jam showed us its take on Deathtrap Dungeon. Like the book, the game pits players against rooms of devious traps and vicious enemies. It’s a first-person action adventure with areas and traps designed on a grand scale. From what we’ve seen so far, stealth will play a large role in the game, and sneaking around unseen is the surest way to survive while you try to solve the deadly puzzles of the dungeon.

The Citadel of Chaos: Dire Consequences is a wave-based first person action game built by Derp Studios. Players are tasked with protecting Dree Village against waves of monsters. You begin with a sword and shield, but with each wave you survive you’ll have the opportunity to purchase and upgrade spells with the souls you earn in combat. Players who survive 10 waves unlock new levels, and ultimately win after 20 waves.

Derp Studios plans to bring in a story mode as well. This will take place after the final moments of The Citadel of Chaos.

Finally, we took a look at The Warlock of Firetop Mountain: Lost Chapters, by Commando Kiwi. Though we won’t know which game takes the grand prize at Make Something Unreal Live until next week, this one really caught our attention. Built as a third-person RPG, it already has a progression system in place and some promising looking item collection. But the combat system is where it stands out.

Lost Chapters uses an active-time style combat system, with a selection of abilities that operate on individual timers. To capture the element of luck that the Fighting Fantasy titles so relied on, blocking is left to good fortune. Each time an enemy attacks the player is presented with three cards. Each has a shield on the other side, one red, one yellow and one green. If the green card is drawn, damage is escaped. The red card hits twice as hard.

The four teams will show their games off today at The Gadget Show Live, and they’ll receive feedback from the advisory board. The judges include Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone themselves, as well as industry leaders that include, no joke, Peter Molyneux and Cliff Bleszinski. Teams will work to bring the games to their full potential over the course of the show, providing regular updates and showing their work off to an audience of over 100,000 attendees on the show floor. The winning team will be announced on Sunday, and it will get to take home a commercial Unreal Engine 3 license.

The games should all be heading to the App Store soon, though it sounds like the winning team might have a leg up on the others. The builds we played were still far from being ready for release, but they had real potential. Here’s hoping the final releases follow through, because we’re pretty jazzed about seeing more original RPGs and action-adventure titles on the App Store. So good luck to all the teams—we’ll be keeping an eye on what comes next.

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Being called a “Child of the 80s” has made me more aware of my mortality recently, than it has conjured memories of the actual time period.

The USSR? Gone.
Hair Metal? Mostly gone. (Thanks for this.)
Reaganomics? Relegated to post-punk indie hardcore band names.

These days you will be lucky to find any kind of media that doesn’t have 1 or 2 glassy-eyed teenagers waiting anxiously for “The Drop.”

Thankfully, the Wonder-Twin powers of Mighty Rabbit and Joystick Labs has manifested a game that absolutely drips 80s nostalgia and helps me forget that the twilight years are quickly approaching. Saturday Morning RPG [ Free ] is as close to a physical manifestation of my childhood as I am going to find, without a truckload of Pixiesticks.

Inspired by the JRPGS of the 80s and 90s, Saturday Morning RPG is nothing special on the surface. Its battle system, littered with quicktime events that modify damage done and taken, is straight forward and pedestrian. In fact, the game’s story (the supposed hallmark of the RPG genre) has the literary alacrity of an R.L. Stine novel. Luckily, none of this matters. One would argue that that is exactly the point.

Episode 1 of Saturday Morning RPG (which comes free of charge) has the game’s hero, Marty, fast asleep on his bed. In his dream, he is spending the day with his sweetheart Samantha, when she is kidnapped by Cobra Commander Hood. Hood intends to wed Samantha, whether she wants it or not. After being beaten down by Hood and his minions, The Wizard (and his powerful glove – which is (so) bad) appears before Marty to offer help. He gives Marty his Trapper Keeper, the spell book Marty can use to defeat Hood’s Army and rescue Samantha. And that is what Marty (and you) set off to do.

The Trapper Keeper enhances the vanilla battle system by throwing in spells and other wild cards. It’s first feature is customizable scratch and sniff stickers. Using up to five, the stickers provide benefits like +15 health or -2 Enemy strength for the length of the battle. The trick is that you have to scratch them to release their bonus, and you are only given a small amount of time at the start of the battle to do so.

Once the battle begins, your Trapper Keeper functions as your spell book. Spells vary from the mundane (a flaming basketball) to the awesome (a glittery-glove-clothed punch, delivered via Moonwalk). There are some balance issues that become apparent, such as getting more bang for your buck via spells and, therefore, not focusing on leveling up melee attacks, but I’m not sure the developers care. The actual gameplay is the plain cracker on which the aged nostalgia cheese is served. No one should complain about the cracker.

When you aren’t battling Lizards or Hood Soldiers, you walk 8-bit Marty around the episode’s environment (they are different in each episode) talking to people and, occasionally, collecting a quest or two. The quests don’t do much to flesh out the universe, instead trading lore for laughs. They vary from the eye-rolling “stop all the downloadin”, to the morbid task of setting animals free by flushing them down the toilet. Completed quests offer you either XP, Spells, or stickers, so they are worth doing when you find them.

If there were any complaints to be leveled against Saturday Morning RPG, they would be the ones I’ve already mentioned. The game is a very basic RPG. Encounters are not random (your character and my character are probably going to be pretty similar by game’s end), quests and quest completions are very linear, and the story lines are pretty dumb. There just isn’t much substance here…much like a Saturday Morning Cartoon.

In that respect, one could argue that this game captures the spirit of the Saturday Morning Cartoon perfectly. And, in the process, litters the game with wonderful nuggets of 80s nostalgia. To play Devil’s Advocate a bit, if the game is called Saturday Morning RPG, and playing it perfectly recreates the spirit and feeling of an 80s Saturday Morning cartoon, doesn’t that make it the perfect game?

You and I could argue about this all day, but I don’t think we could argue as to whether or not you should give this game a shot. The first Episode, which took me 2 hours to complete (I try to be thorough), is completely free. If you like it, you can unlock Episode 2 for a measly 2 bucks. That, to me, seems like an awesome way to sell your game. More Episodes are in the pipeline of course, with Mighty Rabbit shooting for a May/June release for Episode 3.

All in all, Saturday Morning RPG is exactly what it promised. A fun, easy going, RPG with a heavy coating of 80s nostalgia. With an upfront cost of “free”, it’s hard not to recommend it.

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Today’s Dark Meadow [$5.99] update smells like damage control, but that’s not a bad thing for the folks expecting the premium title to stay premium. With the latest update, all the costs of weapons and amulets have been converted back into gold from Sun Coins, robbing the incentive to buy the weapons with real-world currency. Also, creator Phosphor Games has tweaked loot drops to “be more generous” and has tooled around with health drops. As explained on our message board, this is a permanent shift for the app.

Back in March, Phosphor caught wind that free-to-play was The New Thing and planned to update its offering with F2P mechanics. Fans weren’t pleased, and so Phosphor decided to release a free version of the game instead. Oddly, it then decided to stick all of those elements into the paid one anyway, which didn’t make people happy, either. But, hey, now the app is basically back to normal. Neat!

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While iOS has become a haven for a large variety of strategy games, good RTS titles seem to come few and far between. Enter Amoebattle [$4.99], the latest title from Intrinsic Games and Grab. Hitting all the cues, Amoebattle does a good job providing a full RTS experience while making its own mark on the genre.

Amoebattle’s tale centers on your role as a new microbiologist exploring the microscopic world with the Amoeba Control System along with your AI assistant AMI. After some introductory research, you encounter rogue amoebas disturbing the ecosystem, which leads to a quest to discover the origin of these hostile beings. The overall narrative does an adequate job moving the story forward while not detracting from the overall experience. For most RTS titles, that’s all you can really ask for.

When it comes to gameplay, Amoebattle implements the standard RTS mechanics while infusing it with some novel elements. Missions are primarily linear advancement, with some stealth, defense and open-ended objectives thrown in for good measure. Amoebattle is also very unit-centric – there aren’t any buildings to produce units or gather resources.

Instead, your amoeba can simply replicate if they have a full ‘Food Point’ (FP) meter and sufficient power. FP can be acquired in a variety of ways depending on if your amoeba is an omnivore, carnivore, or herbivore (each classification also affects other attributes). For example, carnivores gain FP exclusively through attacking other units while herbivores can eat various plants to build FP. While you can use a full FP meter to reproduce, it also bestows increased stats, adding to the strategy.

Power, meanwhile, is a secondary resource that is slowly produced in the background (but can be sped up by capturing fossil artifacts). Players can utilize power to replicate or to launch a variety of probes onto the battlefield. Probes range from slowing down opponents to infecting them with a long-term poison and work well in providing additional battle options.

In addition to replication, your amoebas can also mutate into a variety of different units. Initially the unit pool is small, but as you journey through the campaign you unlock stronger and more varied units, each with their own stats and appropriate strategies. Mutation also requires power, meaning you can’t just wield it arbitrarily.

The above elements lead to a surprisingly deep gameplay experience. Each mission provides suggestions for completion, but as you unlock more options players can begin to experiment with different play styles. Whether you choose to bum-rush with close-range carnivores or utilize a balanced approach with ranged and support units, Amoebattle certainly keeps your options open.

Props also go to the control scheme, which offers an intuitive approach that works well on both iPad and iPhone. Amoebattle uses a combination of taps, drags, and scrolls (single and two-fingered) to control all aspects of the game. Admittedly, it’s a bit tougher to control on the smaller iPhone screen, but it still works surprisingly well. As expected, the game works best on the larger iPad screen.

There’s something to be said about Amoebattle’s difficulty. In short, this is one challenging game. The tutorial and introductory levels do an excellent job introducing core concepts, but once you reach the middle tier of missions, the game quickly stops holding your hand and leaves you to figure out the increasingly tough objectives. It’s important to note that despite the challenge, Amoebattle’s levels are fair. Just don’t expect to steamroll through all the levels with relative ease (especially if you’re new to RTS games).

Amoebattle’s other weaknesses are few, but do hold the game back from RTS perfection. The lack of a skirmish mode hurts replayability, as the game certainly has a deep enough system to make it enjoyable. The same goes for multiplayer, which would be perfect for this style of RTS. As it stands, Amoebattle has a decent amount of content with its campaign, but it would have been nice to have more to do outside campaign completion (besides achievement hunting).

Regardless, Amoebattle succeeds wonderfully at creating a touch-based RTS for iOS. When you take into account the deep gameplay, beautiful visuals (iPad-retina compatible, no less) and approachable control scheme, Amoebattle is a title well worth checking out and joins the short list of great iOS RTS titles.

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Late last month we caught the first video for Everplay’s upcoming hack ‘n slash platformer Spellsword, and thought it looked pretty darn cool. It’s an arena-style game similar to Super Crate Box but with larger environments, more enemy types, and many upgradeable items. It also features a more structured campaign with 90 levels in addition to unlockable endless arenas. In case you missed it before, you can check out Spellsword in action in the following trailer.

Yesterday in our forums, Everplay announced that Spellsword has an official release date, which will be two weeks from this Thursday on April 26th. We’ve been anxious to get our hands on Spellsword since it was announced, especially since it’s from the same team that did Terra Noctis so we know they can do platforming right. It all sounds good so far on paper, but the real test will be when we can get our hands on the final version of Spellsword when it hits later this month.

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I love word games, but they have a bit of a PR problem: the vast, vast majority are glorified takes on the word search with a new hook here and a novel mechanic there. And y’know, I don’t really mind—give me a reason to frantically form words and I’m usually happy. Letterbox [$1.99] is a pretty good reason. It’s a game in the word-search mold, bringing in 3D block stacking for its special touch.

Word hunting in 3D is entertaining on its own, but Letterbox goes a step further. Finding words is a means to an end—the real goal is to use those words with a variety of special blocks to tear your tower down. It becomes a game as much about destruction as it is about creating words.

Though ShockPanda is keen to call the game “Jenga meets Boggle” in its marketing material, the Jenga comparison is a bit loose. There is no fear of collapse, here, no tottering physics. Instead, you carve away at your cube with each word you make, letters disappearing and leaving gaps behind.

It’s easy to create precarious outcroppings of letters that become utterly useless. But with a little careful planning, you can carve away their supports and let them tumble down. In Jenga this would be a failure—here it’s a necessity. Once reunited with the bulk of your letters, those left over Ws and Ks that were so useless on their own become powerful tools.

The more awkward letters of the alphabet are marked as orange blocks rather than white, and each one is destructive in its own way. Sometimes they’ll clear a tunnel straight through your tower, other times they’ll clear all the blocks that surround them. That’s great, because your ultimate goal is to clear away 100 percent of the blocks on screen. It’s a high bar to reach, but it’s a lot of fun to try.

There are other special blocks to help you strategize. Some rotate whole rows or columns. Another merges nearby blocks into a single mega-block. I have a love/hate relationship with the one that drops down a new layer of letters. It slows down your climb toward 100 percent, but it may be the only thing to do if you can’t find a word in what you have. And, of course, wild card blocks are always a treat.

Letterbox comes complete with three game modes. In Clear Mode, every word you play drops more letters on the pile. In Panic Mode, they’re added every few seconds. Chill Mode gives you only the letters you start with. They’re minor iterations on the original concept, but they switch the game up just enough to keep it from getting stale too quickly.

Though the fundamentals are solid, Letterbox flubs some of the details. The camera is reined in too tightly, so you can’t always see the letters on top of the tower or deeper inside it well enough to tap them. The interface is uncomfortably reminiscent of SpellTower [$1.99] at times. The soundtrack borders on grating—it’s full of well-executed electropop by Yung Sir, but vocal tracks don’t mesh well with extended play sessions.

It’s fun to destroy your way though each tower of letters, compelling enough to keep an eye on Game Center to see if you can come up with the best word or the highest clear percentage. But ultimately Letterbox is one more play on traditional word game mechanics, and it isn’t quite cool enough to overcome the creeping sense of familiarity. If you’ve been looking for a new word game to pass the time, check it out and let us know what you think. If it would take something really special to convince you to drop one more word game onto the pile, this isn’t the game to get you there.

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Since he started making games for iOS, indie developer Jeff Minter of Llamasoft has really been cranking them out. The guy has been making games — and, rather unique games, I might add — for over 30 years, but I don’t believe he’s ever dished out one after another faster than he’s doing for Apple’s platform. And that’s really good news for iOS gamers because all of his iOS titles are rather well done and worth playing. His latest title, Five A Day [link], which just landed in the App Store, comes close on the heels of Gridrunner for iOS, his excellent remake of his original 1982 VIC-20 game and one of the best shooters on the platform.

When we first reported that Minter was developing for iOS, about two and a half years ago, we mentioned a Time Pilot-style game that he was working on, set to be his first iOS release. Well, time passed, Minotaur Rescue arrived, and we never saw anything else about that supposed first iOS release. That is to say, not until now.

Five A Day is a shooter (with bananas), but it’s equally an ethereal experience of sorts. It’s a kind of spacey, zen sort of thing. It’s a little hard to describe, so I’ll let the author.

…it should’ve just progressed into a good old banana-oriented shooter as originally intended but by accident it sort of went all New Age and ambient. While still actually retaining the characteristic of actually being any good, of course. It didn’t just turn into a useless ageing hippy of a game that lies around smoking weed and listening to Steve Hillage and burbling on about auras and crystals without ever doing anything useful. Redolent it may be of joss sticks and wind chimes but it’s still jolly good fun and will kick your arse quite handily on the higher levels, just you wait and see.

But what turned the game all auras and wind chimes? Apparently, it’s largely due to the in-game audio which, Minter indicates, lead the way in shaping the game during its development.

It started relatively slowly at first, with just fluffy clouds and the addition of a rainbow trail behind the spaceship. Then I needed some audio and headed out to a site called Freesound, where you can download snippets of stuff and use them in your projects. You can search by keyword so I put in “Space”, and that was it, game was doomed from that point on. All manner of floaty synth sustains, whale noises, chimes and gongs, page after page of them. Once I started putting one or two of them into the game, the game more or less began to shape itself. By the time I got to the first shower of bananas and enumeration of the first end of level bonus the audio was already heading firmly in the direction of “epic New Age”, and that’s how it ended up.

So, there it is. Every Minter game I can think of is rather “out there,” but this one is just a little moreso, perhaps (if you can imagine it).

We’ve got the vibe covered, now for the gameplay. Five A Day puts you in control of a craft soaring through the clouds, forever shooting. The sky is full of baddies that resemble familiar, pixellated villains of video games’ past. Some of these baddies are in possession of fruit. You want the fruit, and you need to destroy said baddies to collect it. There are also rainbow-bejumpered minotaurs floating about. Collecting either of these places them in tow and increases your shield power (which enemy fire drains) and, in the case of the latter, results in a Death Blossom-style weapons discharge that is bad for those around you.

As you progress, other elements come into play as well, such as bosses, sky-mines, homing missiles, and the like. A goal of the game is to finish each round with at least one piece of fruit in tow, as five such completions in a row result in a bonus life for your having been the healthy lad and getting your five-a-day (of fruits and veggies). And the whole thing is set not to a frantic, pumping audio beat-track, but to the whispers and tinkles of a holistic astral massage parlor. It’s an interesting — and fairly odd — scenario.

Your ship can be controlled via touch, by drawing circles anywhere on the screen in indication of how you want to maneuver, as well as via tilt-control. As with most iOS Llamasoft titles, the iCade control unit is also supported. Our gameplay video demonstrates iCade and touch controls. Being a universal app, Five A Day plays nice with both iPhone and iPad.

I’ve been having a lot of fun over the past few days with Five A Day, as I have with every one of Minter’s iOS releases. (The guy’s catalog is outstanding and should be investigated by everyone reading this.) That said, the overall feel and pacing of the game — a bit more relaxed than the typical shooter out there — combined with the ethereal audio stylings deliver an experience that might come across as a bit of an oddity to the typical gamer as compared to most of his other iOS releases, or certainly most other shooters out there. I would recommend Five A Day to any like-minded gamer, but it’s definitely a different sort of shooter experience.

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If there’s one thing that can be said about Square Enix, it’s that they’re excellent at the whole production values thing. Chaos Rings II [$17.99/HD] is absolutely stunning. From the gorgeous musical score to the voice acting to the vibrant landscapes, there is a lot to savor in Square Enix’s latest turn-based RPG. However, that’s not really surprising. We are talking about Square Enix, after all. How often have they published a new game that does not make you whistle gently under your breath? The real question is, ‘Is Chaos Rings II more than a pretty face?’

The plot here works something like this: an apocalyptic force is threatening Earth with impending doom and there is only one person in the universe capable of stopping it. Can you guess who that is? Yup, that’s you. Sort of. In Chaos Rings II, you’ll play as Darwin, a rather effeminate-looking chap that had been unwittingly pushed into the role of the Nominator. As the Nominator, his job is to sacrifice the Pillars (a bunch of people that were forcibly drafted for the dubious honor), harvest their spiritual energies, complete something called the Rite of Resealing and seal away the Destroyer in order to save the world.

Here’s where it gets problematic for poor Darwin. To begin with, he wasn’t supposed to be the Nominator. Due to a freak turn of circumstances, he acquired the position after he unwittingly killed the original candidate. To make matters worst, he sort of murdered the poor bastard in front of the Pillars. Under normal circumstances, this probably wouldn’t have gone over so badly. After all, one predestined murderer is the same as the other, right? Obviously, that wasn’t the case here. You see, the Pillars in the Rite of Resealing are always composed of those who have some form of attachment to the Nominator. As you can imagine, this makes things a little bit awkward. Not only do you have to murder innocent people, you’ll have to murder some innocent folk that had ties to the dude you unintentionally axed.

(In spite of the religious undertones to the game, the eventual evolution of the plot will probably grab a smirk from any atheists in the audience.)

Intriguing as this all sounds, however, there’s a slight problem. While the Japanese voice acting is rather superb (my best friend, who is Japanese, assured me that the voice acting is also supported by decent lines), the localization is not. Technically speaking, there’s nothing wrong with it. There’s no rampant Engrish, no glaring grammatical errors, no spelling mistakes that may evoke a heartfelt palm to the face. Nonetheless, that doesn’t change the fact the English text feels … lackluster. The dialogue’s also anachronistic in places. Words like “gotta” and “c’mon” pop up from time to time to rattle your sense of immersion. As such, I can’t help but feel as though the full potential of the plot was never realized. Something had to have been lost in the translation. Still, it could have been much, much worse.

Gameplay-wise, those who have any experience with the original game or, JRPGs in general, will probably find themselves in familiar waters. For the most part, the game operates in a fairly linear fashion. You’ll be given a task and told to advance to a certain location. You must then make your way through an assortment of random encounters before achieving your goal. From there, you’ll have to go back to the central hub and begin the process anew. There isn’t much else to do. You get a certain amount of freedom in determining the sequencing of events but that’s pretty much it. There is no open world exploration. There are no mini games to engage in. What saves Chaos Rings II from being completely linear are the side quests that you eventually acquire from the corpulent, cat-like Piu Piu (he’s the only merchant available to you and your party) and and his scantily-clad cutouts.

A lot of your time will be spent moving through the exquisitely presented remnants of your world. Along the way, you’ll stumble across equipment, items and, of course, random encounters. You’ll also get to move through ’shortcuts’ in the world. Once you dive through a portal, you’ll find yourself in this odd little realm that would probably not look amiss in a cyberpunk setting somewhere. Here, you’ll also be called upon to partake in some incredibly light puzzle-solving. Each of the accompanying characters have a special ability that will allow the party to access a part of the world that cannot otherwise be reached. For example, Li Hua is capable of punching through barriers while Connor can shoot at distant targets. Needless to say, once you’ve sacrificed somebody (yup, you’re going to have to kill those people), you’ll lose permanent access to those unique skills.

While it doesn’t deviate too far from the standard formula (you’ll be able to attack, cast magic, defend yourself, occasionally escape from combat and utilize items amongst other things), combat in Chaos Rings II is actually rather entertaining. There are plenty of variables to juggle and even more to worry about. To begin with, you’re going to spend a lot of time deciding if you would rather have your characters acting separately or together. If you choose the ‘Pair’ option, you’ll have access to stronger attacks but will also open your party members up to damage that they would have not taken otherwise. Acting ’solo’, on the other hand, will provide you with more control but less of a punch.

It gets even more complex than that, of course. Technically speaking, combat in Chaos Rings II is turn-based but the reality is that things are also highly dependent on speed. This can be a serious problem if your opponent is armed with some truly devastating moves. If they have the opportunity to assault you before you can defend yourself, you can expect to see the ‘Game Over’ screen faster than you can enunciate your favorite obscenity. Additionally, there’s also a layer of ‘rock, paper, scissors’ that you will have to factor in. Depending on what forces are currently in play on the battle field, attacks and defenses may increase or decrease accordingly.

On top of that, there is also the Break Gauge and the Charge Gauge. The former was inherited from the original game. It’s a pretty nifty mechanic that monitors the flow of the battle. When it is marked even, neither parties will receive bonuses. However, when it sways in favor of you or your opponent, the Break Gauge will cause the beneficiaries to increase in potency. As for the Charge Gauge, it functions something like the Limit Break mechanic in the Final Fantasy games. Once it has filled up to a certain extent, you’ll gain access to your ‘Awake’ and ‘Advent’ powers. The latter will allow you to summon a massive being known as, well, an Advent that is associated with the Human Sophia (that thing you get after you’ve defeated the creature born from a dead Pillar) you currently have equipped.

Speaking of Sophias, those form another interesting component in the game. While Pillars are the only ones capable of bestowing the command of a monstrous critter upon you, you can also acquire Sophias from the game’s menagerie of enemies. Each ‘Monster’ Sophia will grant your characters certain atributes and skills. Once you’ve unlocked the right recipes, you’ll be able to acquire even more abilities by combining Sophias in a certain way, something that adds considerable depth to your character customization.

On a more shallow note, I’m going to take a moment to once again remark on the fact that Chaos Rings II looks pretty darn sweet. It is, by far, the prettiest game in the franchise yet. Compared to its predecessors, the resolution in Chaos Rings II is so much higher, the backgrounds more lavishly detailed. Even the characters themselves look more refined. That said, I’m really mostly in love with the little things in the game, things like cherry blossom petals suspended in the air and waterfalls trapped mid-motion.

As for the music, I’ve nothing but good things to say about it. I would buy the soundtrack if the Malaysian App Store would let me do so but I can’t so I’ll settle for assuring you that it’s something that would deserve a spot on most playlists unless, of course, you have an aversion towards soaring vocals and epic-sounding melodies.

In many ways, Chaos Rings II is the quintessential JRPG. You will spend a lot of time grinding. You will be gently but firmly led along the story’s path to its inevitable end. You will see all of the familiar JRPG tropes. However, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but your decision in regards to whether or not you actually want to purchase the game is going to be dependent on this. For all of its flaws, Chaos Rings II has done more than ample justice to the formula. It’s refined, it’s meaty, and it’s definitely worth the high price of entry.

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Kairosoft really got gamers fired up when they released Game Dev Story in Fall of 2010, a sim where you took the reins over building your own game company from the ground up. Then, they realized we liked the formula, and a flurry of other “stories” followed. Pocket League Story. Venture Towns. Grand Prix Story. Mega Mall Story. It was fair to say that most of these games had a lot in common: build a business or town from the ground up. And while I admit I was a major fan, I don’t know that I would have sprung for another title in this series if there wasn’t a little spice thrown in to change things up a bit.

Luckily, Kairosoft also realized we felt that way, and Epic Astro Story [$3.99] is the result. If you take the building sim thing and mix it with some Star Trek and a dash of Phantasy Star for good measure, you’ve got a pretty good idea of what to expect here. Just in case you’ve never played a Kairosoft title before, they give you the reins on building something and managing its growth, much like SimCity.

In Epic Astro Story, you attempt to colonize a planet. The new stuff comes in the form of away missions, which are totally hilarious and buff up the gameplay in a way I really enjoyed. As a solid Trek nerd, I was extremely amused to discover my first residents were “James Turk” and “Jean Vicard.” Later you’ll be joined by Wes Smasher (which cracks me up every single time he says something), Bones Mc Gee, and many more great riffs on the classic Star Trek universe.

The away missions are handled very smartly by a little bar across the bottom of the screen, which takes up very little real estate but makes you feel involved with what is going on. As the team encounters question marks, they will experience events, which can be good (finding money) or bad (finding monsters). If you do find monsters, you’ll go into a battle mode. You can actually get a peek at your enemies and their hot points before you start a battle, and it allows you to equip your team accordingly and choose their placement on the field before a battle. Once it starts, it’s all automatic, but the battles are quick and a great way to earn both money and research points.

If you thought you had a lot to manage in previous Kairosoft games, you have even more now. In addition to building on your land, positioning landscaping for maximum benefit, and keeping an eye on your residents, you’ll also choose when the away team explores new territory and invite people from other planets to come live on yours. Tourists will fly in and out of your Space Port and attempt to make peace with your people. You’ll meet aliens in ships. It’s a lot to manage, but it doesn’t feel over the top or stressful.

On the whole, I think Kairosoft has done a good job dressing up the basic formula. It’s still fun, and the fighting is a welcome addition. I admit I would like to see the company do something completely different in the future, but as far as this goes, it’s my favorite title of theirs yet. Mixing elements of the core simulation gameplay from previous Kairosoft games has worked out extremely well for Epic Astro Story, and if you’ve found yourself enjoying their other titles then this one should be no exception.

However, I’m still waiting for Spock to show up. I pray they changed his name to Glock.

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What happens when you take all the block-sliding, switch-flipping, obstacle surmounting goodness of a competent 2D puzzle game and wrap it around a three dimensional, cylindrical frame? As it turns out, you get something like Rinth Island [99¢], of course. A tropical-looking puzzle/adventure with personality to spare, Rinth Island is about as much bang as you can demand from a solitary buck.

Set within the titular landmass, Rinth Island follows the tale of the island’s inhabitants after a moderately cataclysmic storm laid waste to their idyllic lifestyles. Okay, to be fair, things aren’t really as dire as it sounds. Here in Rinth Island, you won’t have to fight against the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse or sacrifice your bobble-headed self to save your neighborhood. Instead, you’ll spend most of your time running about fetching things like lamps or strange runic blocks. As you might have guessed, the story is merely serviceable but that’s perfectly all right because the puzzles will keep you amply occupied.

I really, really like what developer Buzz Monkey did with the puzzles. While Rinth Island still would have been a perfectly decent way of spending a dollar, the creative usage of 2D and 3D space is what makes the game so special. To give you an idea as to how it works, try picturing your average 2D level, complete with a panoply of blocks and ladders to navigate, wrapped around an invisible tube.

It’s not an extravagant twist but it’s something that can give rise to some unique situation. Because of how things are structured, not everything will be visible at the same time. Additionally, you’re also going to have to interact with things that exist on the other side of your current platform. Failure to do so can result in you having to reset the level. Before you ask, the answer is no. There is no way you can salvage a mistake. One false step is all it takes unless, of course, you’re willing to invest in the on-off purchase of the ability to undo an error.

Compared to the grandiose amount of stages offered by other games within the genre, the 60 stages currently available in the title can feel slightly lacking. Fortunately, however, a decent amount of replayability can be found in the form of Rinth Island’s three additional game modes and the slick built-in level editor. Festooned with almost every one of the game’s assets and user-friendly enough to teach to a hamster, the game’s level editor is probably one of the best I’ve seen. As an added bonus, you’ll be privy to information like the number of people who successfully met your challenge and so on.

The controls aren’t quite as slick as the level editor. While you’ll be able to select between a virtual d-pad and a more ‘hands-on’ approach, I personally found myself going for the former. Both felt a tad bit klunkier than I would have liked but the d-pad felt slightly more responsive compared to its counterpart.

And that’s my only real complaint about Rinth Island. Everything else is pretty spot-on. The art style is bright and happy, the music suitably atmospheric. Characters are cute and reasonably well-rendered. For those willing to spend a little extra, there’s a variety of outfits and pets that you can acquire for your chirpy looking avatar. But even without frivolous add-ons, Rinth Island is a solid and satisfying puzzle game with a big unique twist, and is worth having a look at.

TouchArcade Rating:

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