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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:

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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:

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Absolutely nothing about the first five minutes of Darkness Rush: Saving Princess [$0.99] gave me any reason to think it would be a good game. There’s that mouthful of a title, for one thing. An absolutely incomprehensible story and translation didn’t help, and the Castlevania stylings and scantly clad ladies plastered everywhere just made me nervous. Even the tutorial was off-putting – I mean, seriously, how does it take that long to show us how to use a jump button?

It was a huge surprise when I realized two things: this game is an endless runner, and it’s really, really fun.

There are two caveats to lay out before we go any further. This game is poorly optimized even compared with standard Unreal Engine memory consumption. My freshly restarted 4S experiences unforgivably bad frame rate drops sometimes. Only the newest generations can run the game, and crashes are a big problem if you’re low on memory. Also, the game pushes its in-app purchases pretty hard for a paid title, but there’s only one thing that can’t be earned by playing. Prepare to put down an extra dollar if you want to unlock the under-dressed (but fantastic) Helena as a playable character.

Now to the fun. Darkness Rush follows a pretty typical formula for an endless runner. You run and jump as long as you can while collecting coins. Eventually gravity gets the better of you, and you die. Your score is uploaded to the Game Center leaderboards and then you do it all over again.

Yawn, right? But remember the awesome mission set up from Jetpack Joyride [Free]? You’ve got that to contend with here as well. Each time you play you work toward four different missions that change up whenever you earn one. Completing missions gives you experience, and leveling up earns you a new title to show off in multiplayer.

You can spend the coins you earn on equipment and power ups. Each time you start a new game you’re prompted to buy single-use powerups that give you extra lives or double your income, that sort of thing. They’re totally reasonably priced and can make the game much easier. Equipment is less reasonably priced, and could take hours to grind (or moments to buy with real cash). Here’s the thing, though: equipment isn’t just cosmetic – it can also increase your agility, mana, jump height and speed. Makes it a bit more worth the grind than Barry’s flowery lei, no?

Mana is where the real fun is, taking Darkness Rush from your standard running and jumping affair to something a lot more interesting. As with Stylish Sprint [$0.99], you can attack some of the obstacles in your way, and you can fly. Both those things cost mana, which regenerates very, very slowly. Run dry and you’re pretty much toast. But you also collect gems as you run, and once you have three you can transform into a wolf, bat or angel depending on your character. While you’re transformed you don’t use up mana. You can also take an extra hit, which knocks you back to your human form. Managing transformations adds a whole new level to the game, and it’s the key to getting a good score.

Then there’s multiplayer. It’s not currently a huge selling point, to be frank. Once you make it through the wait for a match (which varies wildly with the game’s relatively small user base) you’re dropped into a foot race against another player. If you die you get set back, so it’s mostly a challenge to see who can die less. Considering the lag and frame rate drops, this gets pretty hilariously bad.

But multiplayer is just icing on an otherwise excellent cake. The terrible translation is due to be fixed, and it sounds like there may be some optimizations coming down the line, too. I sure hope so. As endless runners go, this one is gorgeous, varied and tons of fun, so it deserves to be playable. And if you’re sitting there steaming that all the lovely gothic art has gone to waste as an endless runner, swing by our discussion thread. Rumor has it that LuckySheep will be moving on to something more Castlevania-like next. I can’t wait, but dear lord – let them hire an editor first.

TouchArcade Rating:

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To steal a line from Jon Irwin, “The platforming genre, once dominant, has now been relegated to counterprogramming.” Which is to say that the two-dimensional platformer has overtaken, like kudzu, much of the niche and indie landscape that isn’t dominated by games that involve shooting things in the face. For mobile gaming, that idea is more or less maintained  if you swap face-shooting for physics-puzzling or colored-block-sliding. But that kind of reductive generalization doesn’t leave room for nuance, and nuance is exactly what you need to talk about Terra Noctis.

At first blush, Terra Noctis [$.99] seems pretty derivative: the pits are inexplicably endless, the physics are rudimentary, and the enemies — pumped in straight from the Mushroom Kingdom — die if something lands on their heads. Even the narrative introduction seems particularly on the nose: Allen is a nightmare who isn’t scary enough to pass his monster exams. Desperate, he sneaks out of school to find a way to get scarier. The idea is never revisited.

It’s not long before Fire Fruit Forge starts to introduce new mechanics: shooting, power-ups, puzzles, three different types of currency, and a bat named Columbus who guides Allen to secret areas and sometimes, bafflingly, lets him ride around on his back. Unfortunately, these do little to dispel the first impression: some of the mechanics don’t really affect the core platforming, and the ones that do are one-note concepts that don’t add much.

There are three different collectible items that can be spent: blue fairies buy power-ups, red fairies unlock the next hub-world, and golden coins unlock bonus levels. It’s kind of weird that a game about crushing goomba skulls involves so many ways to buy stuff.

I like the idea in theory — collectibles have long been a staple of the genre, and Fire Fruit Forge are right to give Allen’s monetized pixie dust mechanical value. Because these items are hidden throughout each non-linear level, players are ostensibly motivated to explore. This, in turn, introduces a risk-reward element to Terra Noctis‘ points system and OpenFeint leaderboards: player score is based both on speed and collection, and climbing the leaderboards depends on managing both.

There are problems with the system, though. The power-ups add very little to Terra Noctis, and using them never become a regular part of my strategy. This devalues the importance of the blue fairies, which in turn makes collecting them less gratifying. It disrupts the balance of the entire system. Similarly, the red fairies and coins are too easy to find, and the levels they unlock are too cheap: not once was my progress impeded by a lack of funds. In other words, not once was I motivated to explore Terra Noctis in a meaningful way.

The other supplemental mechanics, like shooting and flying, simply aren’t creative enough to keep Terra Noctis moving forward. The first time I shot a bat to complete a puzzle was neat, but the shooting function hasn’t changed since. These things are largely tangential to the running, jumping, and head-stomping, but adding extra mechanics isn’t the same as using them effectively. It doesn’t help that the environments and level design change very rarely, despite there being four different hub-worlds to explore. Visually and mechanically, Terra Noctis is a static place, and the entire experience can tend to feel same-y.

Despite the lack of variety, Terra Noctis is buoyed up by its visual design. You’ll explore the same vague forest and cave designs over and over, but the backgrounds are a nice example of parallax scrolling, and the foreground has a lush, storybook feel to it. The animations are fluid and expressive — I especially like that Columbus, the helper-bat, manages to seem anxious and excitable, even though he’s basically just a set of eyes with wings. There’s an undeniable charm and innocence that runs through every piece of this game.

You’ll also hear the same four or five synthpop tracks during the course of the game, but the Herbie Hancock-esque score — no, seriously — is used judiciously to set the tone for each level.

It doesn’t hurt that Terra Noctis is so fun to play. Even disengaged from the high-level design choices, jumping up and down and stomping purple goombas is a treat, thanks in no small part to the game’s  controls: they’re simply the most sensitive and responsive virtual buttons I’ve encountered to date. They aren’t perfect, though, since the buttons are placed too closely to one another — I often find myself going left when I mean to go right.

(The other systemic bugbear in Terra Noctis is hit detection: Allen’s hitbox seems too big and he often finds himself stuck in a ledge or block. This might lead to a few unwarranted deaths, but the checkpoints are spaced evenly enough that it never becomes a huge issue.)

Still, the level design is generous enough to accommodate those lapses, and the most significant exploration is vertical, not horizontal.  Players sometimes get cut off from areas they mean to explore, but Terra Noctis is usually pretty good about expanding and bottlenecking appropriately. In all but a few exceptions, you can feel free to wander around, comfortable with the knowledge that you will eventually circle around toward the critical path.

Maybe it’s a good thing that Terra Noctis‘ more ambitious designs fall through — there’s a lot of fluff that distracts from the core. As it stands, the game’s fairy-tale premise evokes something akin to coming home for a long weekend. The game’s strengths are found in the understated joy of jumping through space, of seeing some unreachable ledge or platform and guiding Allen to it. Terra Noctis, through its intuitive controls and design, provides simple pleasure. This is comfort gaming — familiar, identifiable, and care-free. I’m ready to spend Martin Luther King Day in my pajamas, guiding Allen through the rest of his quest.  I’m pretty sure I know where he’s heading.

TouchArcade Rating:

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Breakout-style games can be tough to create. On one hand, their relative simplicity and timelessness offer gameplay that can be considered universally accessible. On the other hand, this simplicity challenges developers to incorporate new gameplay elements to avoid being classified as stale or boring. This is the exact problem with Transformoid [$0.99], the latest in a long line of Breakout clones. While the steampunk-inspired game does offer a different take on some standard elements, in the end there’s simply not enough to overcome what is otherwise a somewhat boring take on the genre.

As far as core gameplay is concerned, Transformoid stays very close to its roots. The game places you and your paddle at the bottom of the screen versus the blocks up top; there are no barriers or enemies looking to destroy your paddle or any other twists in the formula. In this regard, Transformoid doesn’t offer anything unique or innovated, although it does offer plenty of levels to play in, along with elements that seek to separate itself from the competition, particularly when it comes to physics manipulation.

Even though it’s a typical Breakout clone in most respects, Transformoid does incorporate a few interesting ideas in an attempt to differentiate itself. For example, one of the power-ups you can collect transforms your paddle into various shapes, each changing the way your paddle interacts with the ball. Some shapes make it easier to aim where you want the ball to go, while others make it a bit more erratic. Regardless, I thought it was a good idea and actually brought some variety to the game, assuming the physics were working as desired. I also liked the Steampunk motif that Transformoid uses, although I will admit that it’s becoming increasingly prevalent in more games. Still, the visuals are done well, and little touches like the backdrop subtly moving as you tilt your device back and forth add to the experience.

Another differentiator for Transformoid is the concept of wind, which can come in all different directions and can subtly change the direction of the ball. Unfortunately, wind is one of those gameplay elements that sounds good in theory but ends up being mostly annoying in practice. This is especially true when you’re at the end of a level and the wind is making it difficult to get your ball to travel anywhere, much less to that one spot in the corner with the last brick. Even worse, wind contributes to the fact that Transformoid is simply a very slow game – the ball moves slow, the paddles move at a set speed (on the slow side), and even power-ups that speed it up don’t do much. It’s not slow enough to be unplayable, but enough to be annoying.

Transformoid is also filled with lots of strange miscues that give the game a very rough appearance. There are a few typos across the menus that really stand out, for instance. In addition, there’s no scoring system to speak of or even Game Center support, meaning that there’s no external influence or motivation affecting replayability. Even little things like always resetting the map selection to the very beginning every time you play the game and not letting you cycle from the first level to the last quickly give the game an overall amateurish impression. Of course, none of these issues are game breaking, but they are significant detractors to the overall experience and do little to convince casual players to check it out.

You’d have to be a diehard fan of Breakout-styled games in order to check out Transformoid. The lack of any sort of progression system or leaderboard support means that you’re simply playing the game for the love of the genre. If you happen to fit this description, then Transformoid, with its somewhat interesting visuals and power-up ideas may be worth checking out at its current price. However, for anyone else, the inherent slow pace of the gameplay and uneven overall presentation mean that you should probably look elsewhere.

TouchArcade Rating:

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I have a little confession to make: I’m directionally challenged. I know exactly where everything is, but ask me whether you turn right or left to get there and I’ll give you the correct answer about half the time. Not bad for a 50/50 chance, right? Because of this deficiency, Aetherium II [$0.99] has become my new nemesis. I know where I’m going, and I just need to tap one side of the screen or the other to get there, but somehow I still end up smashing into a wall most of the time.

I’ll not hold that against the game. My failings aren’t its failings, though it has several of its own. But man, if you like Snake, there are 100 levels here that will light up all the same bits of your brain, and four modes on top of that to boot.

Although every mode in Aetherium II plays with direction, there are three very different ways to play. You’ve got the main mode (and by far the best), Avoid the Edges, three different Maze modes and First Person, which is quirkier than it is successful.

Avoid the Edges is, um, pretty much what it sounds like. The edges are death – they can’t be touched. So you slip around each level avoiding walls and picking up stars, easy enough. But you can only turn left or right, and those directions are always relative while the controls are not. It gets pretty dicey as the passages get more complicated, the corridors get narrower and doors start closing in your face. And that’s before you start controlling two or three ships at once. It’s not all reflexes – later levels are positively puzzling.

The similarly puzzling Maze modes could be great fun, but instead they miss that target completely. Edges are fine, and you can navigate in any direction. The trick is to reach the end, and reach it quickly. The levels get downright huge, but are always contained to a single screen. It’s good, but could be better – the controls are a bona fide pain in the butt.

Traveling in all four directions using the edges of the screen is fine, but Aetherium II seems to lack any support for multitouch. So if you want to play with two hands, you’ll need to make certain to lift one finger before putting down another or you’ll careen right into a wall. Not cool, and hopefully fixable. It makes earning full marks for time pretty unlikely.

Otherwise the maze modes could be great. There are three varieties. Classic is as standard a maze as you could find. Tunnels mixes it up with passageways and shortcuts. Doors gives you a series of switches to puzzle through. All good fun.

First Person mode will test your memory and direction sense. Enjoy wandering through a maze of twisty little passages, all alike? You’ll love this. You know the exit of the maze is directly across from where you begin, but not how to get there. If you can manage to keep from getting completely lost, this will be fun. It’s not for me – every level feels like getting lost in the same neon closet – but I can see how enjoyable it could be to build up a map in your mind as you wander each level.

So that’s 200 levels that are mostly great fun, but the trappings that surround them are a little clunky. As I said, the controls are dodgy, and aside from that the menus are awkward and the sound design is pretty terrible unless you’re really into beeping. But more importantly, how do you feel about motivational tricks – achievements, locked levels, and the like? Because you won’t find any of that here. There are leaderboards to climb and stars to collect, but it’s a game built for casual poking around and not dedicated play.

I’ve gotta say, there are great ideas here. Aetherium II is just full of them. But they don’t cohere into any kind of immersive experience. If you want to test your sense of direction, it’s a fantastic game to mess around with. But to commit to? It’s not quite there.

TouchArcade Rating:

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We have good news and bad news for you. The good news? Portable Pixel’s Tamagotchi-style game, Hatchi [$.99], is now available on iPhone and iPod Touch for $.99. The bad news? The star of our glowing hands-on preview of the neat title, Big Poppa Pump, is dead. He left this world just 24 hours after the write-up. We can’t quite let him go yet, so he’s currently rotting as we figure out how to keep moving on with our lives.

In case you missed the piece, Hatchi is basically Tamagotchi for mobile. You hatch a little monster, and then feed, bathe, play, and teach it. As the hours tick by, it grows and evolves into something of your creation. Hatchi requires some patience, but it’s a cool experience that our community really seems to dig.

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The easiest way to describe 5th Cell’s upcoming Run Roo Run is to call it Canabalt, but with levels. That works. In the game, you control a kangaroo in search of its joey, and the path to finding it involves plenty auto-running and manually hurdling obstacles. To jump, you tap the screen. To run, you tap the screen. It’s as much of a triumph in that style of minimalist design as Canabalt is, and it has similar elements and mechanics.

The “but with levels part” is a pretty big game-defining departure. Run Roo Run’s world has oodles of color and instance-based content. In all, it rocks over 400 levels, all of which are clumped into individual chapters that introduce new mechanics. You’ll bounce on tires, float on fans, play around with a double jump, and avoid retracting spikes as well as the rest of its outback’s hazards, like cactuses, jagged trees and wood, and so forth. The way the game builds on itself, considering it has just a single, super-easy action, is pretty impressive.

Most levels break down like this: on a horizontal plane, you’ll be presented with two or three jumps, all with repercussions for failure. Jump too soon, and you might hit a wall or a jagged rock. Jump too early, and you’ll collide with the obstacle. As you progress, you’ll be jumping to a tire, bouncing off of it at the perfect moment into a double jump that’ll carry you in-between two rocks and to the level’s end point.

Each level is designed to be super breezy. You’ll finish most 3-5 seconds. You’ll then be graded and awarded a medal based on some sort of behind-the-scenes magic, presumably tied to the amount of jumps and time spent.

There’s a level of thoughtfulness, precision, and attention to specific points of design throughout the game. The jumping mechanic has no give — when you jump, you’ve committed; you can’t make adjustments. Since this is the case, consideration of how you’re going to do something is integral, and so is your observation of level structure and your callbacks on how to do stuff.

Being tuned for scrutiny isn’t a problem, by the way. Even though this is a particularly bloated game on an art production level, 5th Cell holds back on filler. Every piece of a level has a purpose, and it’s that purity that helps you understand the hazards.

If you wanted to be crazy about this, you could probably call Run Roo Run a “masocore” game. Like a Super Meat Boy, or even Run Roo Run’s inspirational material Space is Key, Run Roo Run is all about the thrill of perfectly nailing an increasingly convoluted set of actions in rapid succession. The reward is your accomplishment — the platformer equivalent of a puzzle game’s “a-ha!” moment.

I think the key difference here, though, is that this game doesn’t hate you. Every time you jump, 5th Cell throws an arrow on the floor. This helps you focus on that third jump, as you’ll be able to easily gauge where to jump again on the first two based on the arrow. Additionally, you can buy or earn level-skips and a fancy bullet-time aid that slows the action down. The F2P stuff, by the way, doesn’t interfere with the game.

More importantly, though, it just doesn’t set you up for failure like most of these masocore games do. The action is straightforward; each jump is mightily choreographed, each obstacle plainly displayed. You’ll never be left scratching your head or feverishly thinking about what your iPhone would look like with its gears and guts sprawled gushing from the sides.

Undoubtedly, 5th Cell is going to get some flack because the overall game is tuned to be easier than it could be — the vast majority of its hundreds of levels are these simple, breezy romps. There are “Extreme” offerings, however. After finishing a chapter, you can go back and compete in a series of a dozen or super challenging levels. I don’t mind the casual build to a remarkable level, so the difficulty isn’t a problem for me.

One neat point: 5th Cell is apparently going to get behind Run Roo Run in a big way, as it’ll be uploading 10 new levels a week beyond release. It’s unclear how long it’ll keep this up, or really what base this will serve, but it’s a neat idea.

I think you should check this out. Run Roo Run isn’t the most original game ever, but it takes the best out of a lot of worlds, and then owns that stuff. Its entertaining in big or small chunks, and those challenge levels are a whole new world of hurt. Give it a shot.

TouchArcade Rating:

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A shoulder surfer would describe Super Crate Box [$.99] as a mess, a pixelated mash of vivid colors and explosions wrapped in a whirlwind of erratic movement, 8-bit sound, and some decidedly bizarre character design. They’d be right. Super Crate Box is a mess, but it owns its fast-moving arcade chaos, and deftly brings you along for the ride.

You don’t even realize that you embraced it until it’s an hour later and you hate that godforsaken disc launcher with the passion of many angry men. What renders you helpless has a lot to do with its infinite, looping structure and purity of play. This is a minimalist, throwback-style game that wants you to do one thing: capture crates for a high score. The hooks are in its constituent parts, which seamlessly blend into a cacophony of arcade action surrounding this pure purpose of play. It becomes hypnotizing, fast.

Your typical game goes a little something like this: on a flat plane, enemies tumble out of an invisible pipe in the opening of a level, and you, while they fall, capture crates and defeat those enemies with the weapons you pick up from said crates. If an enemy hits the lava pit because you didn’t kill it, it pops back out of the top at double speed and joins the ever-growing conga line of even more brainless enemies.

Avoidance is key, but so is aggression. Each crate contains a new weapon that forces you to strategize distance versus time at the drop of a hat. As you play, you’ll unlock even more weapons, all of which do something completely different and are often devastating. Laser guns, mines, rocket launchers, grenade launchers, the shotgun are just a taste of what’s on the roster. Each has its own special kind of spread and weaknesses. Some even have big negatives, like the disc launcher, which is a single fire gun that has bullets that bounce back at you.

Whatever pacing you’re imagining, multiply that by 11 and you’ll get a sense of the raw madness that is Super Crate Box. One second you’re charging up a laser gun to rid a platform of its occupants, the next you’re dropping down to another level and using a mine in order to put a stop-gap on that side so you have enough free-time to grab a crate on another platform. The frenzy absorbs you, and the raw precision becomes a second nature thing. People say it’s a mess, and it is, but I’m OK with it. I welcome all of it.

As you play, you’ll steadily unlock more guns and more characters to use in the game. It’s your usual incentive program, but where it departs is in the fact that it also rewards failure. If you die 500 times, for example, you’ll unlock Super Meat Boy as a character. Simply gathering crates, no matter how many times you die along the way, is also a valid way to unlock stuff.

I’m surprised by how much I dig the virtual controls; Halfbot and Vlambeer did a heck of a job translating the action to the touchscreen and then making it feel as natural, and as split-second responsive as the game’s PC and Mac counterparts. On iPhone, the two-button UI is a tad too bulky. On iPad, the game feels at home. Regardless, these guys nailed it. This game feels good.

Another place you can play is on the iCade. Currently, the controls have been flip-flopped inadvertently in an update, but when they’re working ideally, they feel great. I think this is the way to play since you get that tactile feedback.

People in general are really responding to Super Crate Box, and our community digs it. I love it. Its high-octane play married with its no-frills, arcade game design that keeps me collecting crates and blasting enemies into delightful little pieces of monster. I’m thinking it’ll grab you, too.

TouchArcade Rating:

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By the time you read this, my big problem with Letris 2 [Free] might be resolved. That’s the beauty of modern gaming: what is broken can be fixed. But indulge me for a second before I get to the good stuff (and there is quite a bit of good stuff to be found in this freemium title): Letris 2 uses what might be the worst dictionary I’ve had the pleasure of bashing my head against.

Ivanovich Games has already assured us there is an update coming in that adds 25,000 words players have submitted. That leaves a question, though – why were at least 25,000 words left out in the first place? Worse, how is it that the game accepts every common curse and racial slur I tried, a smattering of proper nouns, and at least a few non-English words in their place? The dictionary is the backbone of any word game, and this one is more than a little fractured. Let’s hope the update fixes it, because aside from that one glaring issue there’s a lot to like in Letris 2.

The game is split into two sections, each one unlockable with a separate in-app purchase of $0.99 after you try a few levels. On one side is Letris, a game that doesn’t have as much to do with Tetris as it sounds like it might. On the other side are two puzzle modes, Acronymus and WordMatrix.

In Letris mode, letters continuously fall from the top of the screen into tidy rows at the bottom. You can tap letters to form words with any of them – only in the highest difficulty mode do you need to use letters that connect. Each level of Letris gives you a goal to reach. Collect that many letters in the words you make and you move on to the next. Longer words give better scores, clearing the screen is worth a bonus and you’ll fail if the screen fills up.

Though this mode is time-sensitive, it’s also pretty mellow to start. Once you unlock the paid content for Letris mode, you can keep progressing to higher and higher levels with higher and higher scores to reach, but the levels, as they are loosely defined, are never the same twice.

Acronymus is more of a classic puzzle mode. You’re given a set selection of letters that you need to use up completely. There’s always a solution planned, and you can use hints (that you can also purchase) if you get yourself stuck trying to find it. WordMatrix is an extension of the same idea – a full screen of letters that you need to use more and more of each level, until eventually you’re forced to come up with a collection of words that use up every single letter on screen.

Because these modes aren’t timed, you can play around freely to try to come up with outrageously long or obscure words. It’s fun, and pleasantly relaxed – when the dictionary cooperates, of course.

There are a couple oddities aside from the word selection, though. For one, it doesn’t seem to be possible to unlock the premium content until you work through the free levels of at least one mode per pack. This means that even if you’re sure you want to buy the game, you’ll need to sit through ads for a while before you can disable them with the purchase of either IAP pack. For another, it’s surprisingly easy to abandon a game without your score being saved – the ability to resign is hidden beneath the hint button, and using the obvious home button instead will abandon your game and leave your score off the Game Center leaderboards.

Neither of these things is enough to ruin an experience which is, at the very least, worth trying with a mind to buy. I’d try it out after the update before pulling the trigger, though. Unless you take great delight in playing a few forbidden four-letter words, the updated dictionary should be worth the wait. In the meantime, our discussion thread is a good place to get a bit wordy.

TouchArcade Rating:

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