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Late last week Capcom surprised everybody by announcing an iOS port of their classic arcade fighter Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 [ $2.99 ]. In all honesty, I suspect this was a cleverly timed release to casually tie in with ‘The Avengers’ movie coming out next week, but whatever the motivation I’m not complaining. Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 is one of the most beloved fighting games in history, and prior to the downloadable rerelease on XBL and PSN in 2009 it could be kind of a difficult game to play unless you owned the Dreamcast or the somewhat rare PS2 or Xbox versions.

With that said it’s fairly mind blowing then that today you can download the entire original game onto a device that fits snugly in your pocket (or to your iPad if you’d rather, since the game is Universal, though it’s extra snug trying to jam that in your pocket). The iOS version of Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 is really cool for what it is, basically a cheap nostalgic trip, but it’s plagued with several major problems that drag the experience down, making it feel more like a novelty rather than another solid iOS fighter.

The major sticking points in Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 are that it’s difficult to control compared to the other top iOS fighters, the 12 year old visuals have not aged gracefully, and the overall performance leaves a lot to be desired. However, the virtual control setup that Capcom has come up with for the game is pretty clever, and just having a classic like Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 in my pocket is worth putting up with its shortcomings. It’s just a shame because with a little more care I think this port could have been a whole lot better.

Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 features a whopping 56 playable characters, 28 from the Marvel camp and 28 from Capcom. Only 24 are available from the start, with the rest being unlocked from an in-game store using coins earned through play, or for performing certain tasks like completing the arcade mode with different characters.

In the XBL and PSN versions of the game, all characters are unlocked from the start, but I far prefer having to unlock them on my own as it gives you a sense of progress and some goals to shoot for while playing. However, if you’re dying to download the iOS version and bust out some local Bluetooth multiplayer with a buddy (sadly there is no online) right out of the gate, then you might find it annoying to have to spend significant time earning enough coins to unlock your favorite characters. Surprisingly, there is no sort of in-app purchase option to unlock everything.

Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 is all about 3-on-3 tag team matches where characters can be swapped in and out at will, there’s a crazy emphasis on battles in the air, and the combos and special moves are all outrageous and over the top. Unfortunately, the iOS version runs so sluggishly that much of those fun moments are turned to frustration. The framerate can be a bit choppy and the virtual controls don’t seem to respond as well as even other Capcom fighters available on the App Store. This makes pulling off elaborate combos and air battling nearly impossible.

Despite the controls being sometimes unreliable, the default controls that Capcom implemented to simplify the experience are pretty nifty. There’s just a single button each for punch and kick, then there is a special button for controlling teammates and another for special moves. Besides just tapping these special buttons, each one can also be flicked in 4 different directions in order to perform additional moves. For example you can simply tap the special move button to shoot out a hadoken (fireball), but if you flick it to the side instead you can instantly launch into a shoryuken (dragon punch).

It’s a really cool idea and when it works well it’s brilliant, but for some reason much of the time it feels like the special buttons don’t respond to many of your flicks. There is the option to go with the original arcade game controls, which means no flicking for special moves, and I found that this option is much more reliable but does require more work on your part.

The visuals in Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 are also a pretty big letdown. I expect a 12 year old game to look dated, but for some reason the iOS version looks worse than any previous version. Sprites are noticeably jagged and pixelated, something that is accentuated on the iPad’s bigger screen. On the bright side, the fully 3D animated backgrounds are intact here and actually look quite good, especially when you consider the boring static backgrounds used in Street Fighter IV Volt on iOS.

So, Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 has a lot of issues, but nothing that renders the game completely unplayable. The controls work well enough but are far from as good as other iOS fighters, and definitely not good enough to fully pull off some of the game’s more complicated techniques. If you’re a fan of the game on other platforms and can accept the problems it has on iOS for the sake of having it in your pocket, then I think it’s definitely worth the $3 price of admission (or $5 when the intro sale ends). Personally, I’m having a ton of fun playing through the game again, even with the inherent frustrations.

If you don’t have any particular affinity for the original game but are just looking for a new iOS fighter, then Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 is a tougher sell. The controls are passable, but nowhere near the likes of Street Fighter IV Volt [ $6.99 ], King of Fighters-i [ $6.99 ], or SoulCalibur [ $11.99 ] on iOS. It’s frustrating because those examples prove that Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 could have been such a better port, and it may be in the future after some updating, but if nostalgia isn’t playing a big role in your desire for having this game on iPhone then I’d suggest waiting to see how things shake out down the line.

TouchArcade Rating:

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Just last week we were teased by a trailer for My Little Hero, an upcoming game from Acne Play, the developers of the awesome platformer Pizza Boy [ $1.99 ], and being published by NCSoft. As we lamented at the time, the trailer was indeed quite teasery, and all we really knew about My Little Hero was that it was an action adventure game featuring a young boy, a dream world (or perhaps nightmare is more accurate), and a scary stuffed animal stealing boogie man.

Today we finally get the first gameplay video for My Little Hero and as promised it most certainly looks like an action adventure game. And, in a big departure from Pizza Boy, the gameplay and visuals are entirely in 3D.

I’m actually really digging the kid-centric them going on in My Little Hero with the slingshot as a weapon, cardboard sword and armor, and that inflatable donut thingy with a duck on it that you wear around your waist when swimming. What is that thing called again? Anyway, it looks cute is what I’m getting at. I’m pretty interested to check out My Little Hero when it hits, which according to the trailer should be sometime next month.

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“I’ve kind of been the driving force behind this.” Chris Ewington describes what board games mean to him in passionate bursts. “It’s who I am. It’s what I do. It’s what I was meant to do.” Chris is the head honcho at Codito Development, an outfit that specializes in securing licensing and then reproducing tabletop games on iPad under the banner of Sage Games. Chris’ experience with porting the tabletop experience stretches long before iPad came into our lives. He used to make “homegrown” computer versions of his favorites to share with friends and family.

In a lot of ways, he’s the perfect guy to be doing this. His studio has the talent, and he has an astounding amount of reverence for the art form and what it does differently in today’s modern gaming landscape, which is dominated by stupid games like Angry Birds.

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“There’s a lot to be said I think in terms of entertainment value for things like Angry Birds and those huge hits out there where you can go play for 10 seconds and get some fun out of that, but with board games there’s a little more thought involved,” he tells us on this week’s bonus episode of the TouchArcade Show.

“They offer a lot of the other great things that some of those hit titles have, and particularly these euro board games have really great theming. You can kind of get into the world of the game if you will. They also have the replayability and fun factor — there isn’t just one way to win this game,” he says, picturing a title. “If I play it again, even with the same people, it’s going to be a completely different experience.”

Before iPad was even announced, Chris was thinking about iPad. He and his pals had been talking about playing board games on something just a little bit bigger than an iPhone or iPod Touch. He describes the announcement of iPad as an “Apple Saves The Day” kind of moment, as it gave him a legitimate outlet to take his passion and put it into a series of digital products. The list of official ports since is long: Chris has had a hand in Puerto Rico, Ra, Medici, and most recently, Tigris & Euphrates.

In a weird twist, the growth of the App Store has given Chris a calling. The majority of App Store consumers are casual-leaning, so they aren’t familiar with titles like Puerto Rico [$7.99] or Tigris & Euphrates [$4.99]. Chris says its his studio’s mission to get people to play these kinds of games, to show them that games can offer so much more than cheap thrills.

“…it’s part of our mission to open some eyes and introduce people to the joys of it. You can sit down and play a game like Puerto Rico or Tigris and you don’t know what’s going to happen. You have a rough idea how to play the game, but you don’t know what the interactions are going to be.” Chris says that the fact that most board games don’t have a single win condition is one of the most interesting things about them. The high-level strategy, complex theming, and even proximity are several of his other favorite aspects on his personal list.

His goal is lofty, but Chris is still grounded. He realizes that the world of gaming has moved on from tabletop. Much more visceral games like Pong, Mario, and Call of Duty have been re-defining what games are. It’s a new landscape, new audience, new world. But the things he most celebrates about board games are what he thinks will keep people around.

It’s also why he’ll continue doing what he’s doing.

“Board games are a natural fit for my interests and personality. I think more in 2D than 3D. And so, it’s not just … experiencing this big 3D world and trying to blast people. It’s more cerebral than that. It lets you focus more on the interactions between the players and the strategies of the game,” he tells us.

Le Havre

Chris is putting his 2D brain to good use with the studio’s next project, Le Havre. This title will mark the first time Codito Development will ever use a board game’s original art in a port. Chris believes this will add to its appeal for older fans, as it’ll be a much more authentic-looking experience than normal. That said, Codito will do the same thing it always does with its borderline masterful board game ports: honor the design and only streamline the mechanical parts of the experience.

Chris explains what Le Havre is all about. ”It’s largely a card-based game where, rather than having little squares or pieces, it’s based on cards you collect. Those cards represent different buildings you can use in the game. Again, the theming, is really what makes these games stand out above other board games and other games in some cases,” he tells us.

“It’s got this really cool feel of being in the harbor and you’re trying to develop your interests and amass the most amount of wealth at the end of the game. And to crush all of your opponents.”

Le Havre is a fairly recent creation. Publisher Lookout Games released the title in German and Australian English in October 2008. Board Game Geek has a scary breakdown of how it works, but we advise that you not look. The upcoming iPad version, as with all of Codito’s awesome ports, will focus on cleaning up the experience and putting the rules in the background.

“Our challenge is to take care of as much of the mechanics as we can and support the game experience without taking away from it. Let’s get all the other crap out of the way so you guys can just have fun playing the game and have fun with the theme and figuring out how to kick your friends ass without having to remember all the rules and picking up all the pieces and sort them out,” Chris says.

Chris has a lot more to say on this week’s show, so give it a listen. We do podcasts with interesting folks in the iOS space at least twice a month. We’ll be back later this week with another regular episode of the TouchArcade Show.

Oh, and as a special-special bonus to our podcast listeners, Codito is offering up three of its games for $1.99. Here’s some links:

• Reiner Knizia’s Ra [$1.99]
• Tikal [$1.99]
• Reiner Knizia’s Tigris & Euphrates [$1.99]

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An iPad and iPhone game has jumped to PC, while a PC game is still set for a release on iPad. Earlier this week, Capybara’s experiential adventure game, Sword & Sworcery landed on Steam, while the dudes behind Legend of Grimrock [$14.99, Steam] continued to pound away at the long-awaited iPad version of the dark, atmospheric, and classic-style RPG.

Sword & Sworcery is currently $5.99 as part of a launch promotion that ends April 23. It’s a straight-up port so it doesn’t rock any new content, but it certainly looks prettier on our monitors than on our iPads.

The last time we covered Legend of Grimrock, developer Almost Human was thinking it had a chance of putting the game out to iPad by the end of 2011. Obviously, that didn’t pan out, but an iPad version is still very much in the works. An “iOS version is in the plans,” the developer wrote via its Twitter account the other afternoon. We’ve contacted Almost Human for a, uh, more specific answer.

Years ago, we wouldn’t have even thought this kind of movement was possible. Phone games were just… phone games. It’s incredible that these mobile experiences are becoming so much more than just time-wasters in such a short period of time. Wonder what kind of movement we’ll see within the next three-to-four years?

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In January Namco Bandai released an excellent iOS version of their classic 3D fighter SoulCalibur [ $11.99 ]. A a fan of SoulCalibur on Dreamcast more than a decade ago, the faithful iOS port was a great way to re-experience the game. The virtual controls worked well, the graphics were crisp and high-res, and the finely-tuned mechanics withstood the test of time.

However, as good as iOS SoulCalibur was, it was strangely devoid of any kind of multiplayer, a key component for a fighting game. Over the weekend, Namco Bandai looked to rectify that omission by releasing a new update that adds Bluetooth multiplayer to SoulCalibur. The new versus mode works just as well as you’d expect it to, and squaring off against an opponent face-to-face is just as fun as it was back in the day. It really is crazy just how well SoulCalibur has aged after all these years, especially as a competitive game.

One important thing to note though is that multiplayer isn’t compatible with the iPod touch. SoulCalibur is a pretty technically demanding game anyway, and even upon release required at least an iPhone 4, iPad 2 or 4th generation iPod touch to run. It is likely the lower amount of RAM in that iPod touch device that is the reason multiplayer is a no-go.

If you’re a SoulCalibur fan in the iPhone or iPad camp then get to updating your game and go search out a worthy opponent. Believe it or not, SoulCalibur is actually on sale right now to celebrate the update, down from its normal price of $14.99, so if a lack of multiplayer caused you to pass on the game before now is not a bad time to finally pick it up.

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Let’s face it, kids: If you are going to become a giant, fire-breathing monster and take over a city by way of stomping on it, you want to do it right. In style. So if I play a videogame that puts me in the role of said monster, I have one rule — I want to have fun. Glorious, building stomping, people eating fun.

That’s why the original Rampage was such a bounding success. When I saw screens of Monster Takedown [$0.99], I thought I was looking at the same kind of thing. You get to be a big octopus or monster with too many eyeballs or whatever and fend off flying helicopters and incoming bombs. The art looked crisp and cute, and I thought if the gameplay hit the mark, we could have a winner on our hands here. Could. Maybe.

Unfortunately, I can’t report that, because Monster Takedown is pretty boring despite its good looks (and oh, haven’t we all fallen for that formula a few times).  It goes with a very pared down approach, which goes something like this: pick a monster out of five, find yourself splayed over a city doing basically nothing, and wait with a glazed look while helicopters and bombs fly in to attack you. You can’t even move, which really takes the fun out of being eighty feet tall with giant eyeballs stalks.

Seriously though, the lack of movement wouldn’t have bugged me that much had there been something more exciting going on. The helicopters and other flying stuff can be taken out with the touch of a finger, and that can get more complex as you go, although it’s nothing to complain to your friends about.

But the killer is when a nuke flies in from above, which you are supposed to be able to swipe away. I say supposed because no matter how much I swiped or in how many directions, I had trouble getting the game to be responsive when it came to this. It did happen a few times (try a quick left to right swipe), but considering that if that bomb touches your monster, you instantly die — well, let’s just say this little snag took quite a bit of the fun out of things.

You do start each level with one Slow power and one Bomb power, and you can guess what they do by their names. And that’s about all I have to tell you. Oh, except you can post your scores to Facebook and Twitter as well as the Game Center leaderboards, but I’m guessing you already figured that out.

Monster Takedown is completely mediocre, but I think what hurts here is that the look is so cute and you can really see they could have done a lot more with just a little bit of effort. Ah well, there’s always next time. For now, save your dollar, or put it towards a better game.

TouchArcade Rating:

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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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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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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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Back in 2009, Com2uS released Homerun Battle [Free / Free ], which was known as “Baseball Slugger” at the time. We loved it in our review, as it was among the very first iPhone games that featured really slick and seamless realtime multiplayer. Gameplay in a nutshell amounted to getting thrown into a random match with another real person to compete in a home run derby. It was really hard to put down because you could see what your opponent doing in a little picture-in-picture window in the corner of your screen, which only encouraged you to try harder when you see them blast a ball out of the park.

Com2uS followed up Homerun Battle with the sequel Homerun Battle 2 [$0.99 / Free ]. We had a love/hate relationship with the game in our review. We loved the improvements over the original, but hated the insane IAP implementation which was one of the more blatant pay-to-win schemes we’ve seen on the App Store.

Thankfully, Com2uS has listened to player feedback and went back to the drawing board with the balancing of the game. As an established player, it’s a little hard for me to get a feel for how equipment scales as I’ve already got some pretty great gear on my dude. But, if the IAP model Com2uS used previously scared you off, give the game a try again. I’d be very interested in hearing how people feel the power and unlock curve is now. Also, for a limited time the price of the premium version has been lowered to 99¢.

Aside from balance tweaks, the latest update also adds a bunch of new equipment to work towards and a Hell-themed stadium.

In other Com2uS news, they’ve also just released a new free to play game, Magic Tree [ Free ]. When I tried the game it gave me a Frontierville-like vibe, but it comes packed with 3D almost Animal Crossing-ish visuals. Check out the trailer:

So, consider downloading that if it seems interesting. More importantly though, give Homerun Battle 2 another shot. Game balance and IAP was a major point of contention on our forums. If you were one of those people miffed by this game originally, it’s worth a second look now.

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