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Do you like tacos? How about star fields, spaceships, and throwback games that trade polygons for pixels and full orchestras for beeps and bleeps that hearken back to the glory days of the Atari 2600? Developer Taco Graveyard serves up generous helpings of those elements and more (even the space tacos) in Omegapixel [ Free ], a fast and furious action game that throws in a fair bit of puzzle solving to keep you on your toes.

The first time you load a mission, Omegapixel might remind you a lot of Geometry Wars [ $0.99 ]. Using a virtual stick, you control a small space rig that zips around the cosmos and battles enemy ships. Unlike Geometry Wars, though, you barrel into enemies kamikaze-style instead of blasting them with lasers. While you’re floating like a butterfly and stinging like a battering ram with thrusters, enemies pour onto the screen in greater and greater numbers.

Enemy ships come in several varieties—some that make a beeline for you, others that converge on the pixel. On one stage, I flew around smashing into red ships that targeted the Omegapixel while blue pyramids followed my space vessel in tireless pursuit. Suddenly a vertical yellow line came sliding across the screen like a barcode scanner laser. If the line touched the pixel, I lost a life. Ignoring the red destroyers and blue pyramids for the moment, I flew to the far side of the yellow wall and tapped the lower right corner of the screen, which instantly swaps your location with the Omegapixel’s and vice versa. Teleporting put the pixel safely on the far side of the wall, but right in range of the red ships I’d let live to deal with the wall.

The key to victory lies in shielding the pixel from its enemies, while using it to shield you from yours. To get rid of the blue pyramids that zero in on my ship’s location, I had to lure them into the pixel’s fiery maw by either putting the pixel in between me and them, or waiting for them to draw close enough to touch before teleporting, which dumped the pixel right where I’d been drifting a second before. Easier said than done, especially with bouncers knocking the pixel every which way, red ships spiraling toward it, new purple walls that harmed me instead of the pixel sliding into view, and asteroids that, while harmless, distract you by stealing your attention away from real threats.

It’s stressful, but the kind of stress that leaves your senses crackling from adrenaline. Cobbling together a plan and pulling it off in a matter of moments never failed to invite a thrill of accomplishment. The game almost becomes more of a twitchy puzzler on later levels, forcing you to remain aware of the pixel’s location at all times and pull each enemy type from your memory log the moment it comes into view so you can react to the new threat appropriately.

As you play, you’ll collect credits you can use to deck out your ship: explosive teleports, extra armor plating, defense mechanisms for the Omegapixel, a line of energy that flares between you and the pixel when you teleport, incinerating anything it touches. You can earn credits the old-fashioned way by clearing Story and Arcade missions, picking up credit packs that randomly appear during play, or just drop real money on IAP credit packs and splurge on upgrades.

Like all games that control with virtual sticks, Omegapixel’s controls suffers from minor virtual-stick touchiness, but my fried reflexes cost me more missions than occasionally spot controls. Other than said spottiness and grating music (the sound effects are the right kind of bleepy retro, but the soundtrack, which you can disable, sounds like an 8-bit game that froze right in the middle of a high chord) Omegapixel is a ton of fun, and especially shouldn’t be missed at its current price of free.

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If there’s anything that could completely wreck my plans and productivity, it would be a Super Crate Box [$1.99] RPG. I’d say a quick prayer of thanks to Vlambeer for not going forward with that idea, but it’s too late. FireFruitForge and Everplay Interactive have something against letting me work in peace, I guess, because Spellsword [$0.99] is that perfect storm of quick, one-more-try gameplay and RPG mechanics I can completely lose myself in.

Spellsword isn’t a clone of Super Crate Box (thankfully—Vlambeer really could use a break), but it has a similar starting point. It’s an arena game that’s designed around rapidly collecting weapon spawns to kill baddies. But where Super Crate Box focuses tightly on that mechanic to the exclusion of everything else, Spellsword takes a more expansive road. Along that road you’re going to find levelling, loot, and a lot of new ways to play.

As a result, it’s not quite as clean as Super Crate Box’s more minimalistic approach allows. It has a few problems, and things get sloppy from time to time. I’m not saying you shouldn’t play it, though. It’s crazy-fun, and you really shouldn’t miss out.

You start out as a quippy hero with a spellsword. It’s not worth much on its own, but it can be enhanced with cards that litter the arena. Each one powers up the sword in some way—with fire, ice or poison damage, for starters—and each one also sets off some sort of effect. The ice card sends out wheels of ice, the fire card launches fireballs, and the poison card poisons every enemy on screen. And that’s just the start.

So while you can certainly run around killing things with your sword, it’s dangerous. Better to collect every card you can, and lean on those one-time effects to do the killing for you. This is where the game feels most like Super Crate Box, dodging enemies to get to the next card and never stopping to rest. Still, the differences are pretty huge.

For one thing, enemies drop rupees. In fact, the whole game is pretty much built around the rupee economy. Play well to earn more rupees, which you can use to level up your cards, your sword, and even your rupee drop rate. You can also use them to buy gear that adds to those same skills. And before you ask, no—there isn’t any IAP.

Mission mode is another big difference. Each of the three current arenas come with 20 missions. These ask you to do a bunch of different things. You might need to survive some waves, kill some baddies or collect some cards. In exchange you’re given big payouts of rupees, new cards and the occasional piece of gear.

Endless mode is more familiar, with nonstop waves of baddies until you burn through all your hearts. There are three difficulty tiers of endless mode for each arena. In them you’ll grind rupees, and you’ll also find the leaderboard competition.

When it comes to the little things, Spellsword goes the distance. The look is great, very much like Terra Noctis [$0.99], FireFruitForge’s other big title. The sound is no slouch, but it doesn’t really stand out. Love it or hate it, the real flavor rests in the hero’s quips. There’s one for every mission, and nearly ever single one is a reference to a show, game, or movie. They run the gamut from modern and obvious to old and seriously obscure. Me, I find ‘em charming.

As I mentioned, there are also some problems. The controls aren’t great, and on iPad they’re worse. There’s already a fix incoming for that—along with adding new control types, it will let you reposition the iPad controls. There’s also some clumsiness in the arena design. It’s easy to get caught on edges, or mess up platforms. There are also ways to abuse positioning and let enemies wander off to their own deaths. These things aren’t remotely dealbreakers, but they can be irritating.

Overall, though, the game is outstanding. The RPG mechanics add a whole new layer of compulsion to an already inviting sort of game. It’s not easy to call it quits, especially when there’s one more level to earn, or one more piece of gear you can almost afford. Those things make it less of a pure skill game—you’ll need to put in a bit of a grind to cap out— but they also add a bit of strategy. There is real value in carefully choosing your gear and putting your rupees to good use when leveling.

With some elbow grease and a good once over, Spellsword could easily earn a permanent spot on my iPhone. It’s really that good. And Everplay Interactive seems dedicated to hitting those heights, if the developer’s comments in our discussion thread are anything to go by. I don’t see how you could possibly go wrong here. This a game that’s fun, full-featured and ridiculously cheap, with a developer that’s working hard to keep fixes and content coming. Looks like a winner from here.

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Tentacle Wars HD [ $2.99 (HD)], the new title from FDG Entertainment, is a port of the online Flash game of the same name by Lumarama. It’s a fast-paced iPad strategy game that reminds me a lot of Galcon [$1.99 / Free ], another iOS strategy game from 2008. In fact, I’d go as far as to say it’s “Galcon with tentacles” …along with superior graphics, ambient music and better sound effects.

Playing Tentacle Wars is like being a general overlooking a battlefield. Although in this case the battlefield exists inside the body of an alien life-form. The battles are between antibodies, spores, pulsars and embryos. Each cell can use DNA energy tentacles to attack each other. If your green antibody cells can turn all the other cells green, you’ve cured the zone. Once you clear all the zones, you’ve saved the alien life-form.

To launch an attack, you swipe a line from your green cell to any other cell in range. The more powerful your cell (as indicated by a number inside it), the further it’s tentacles can extend. You can target a red cell (enemy) to engage in battle, target a neutral grey cell to claim it, or target one of your own cells to transfer energy to where it’s needed.

The battles are based on a simple premise: The more powerful cell(s) always win, every time. So if your cell has a weaker strength it will slowly be drained until it’s defeated. But, if you attack the same opponent with tentacles from another cell simultaneously, you can defeat it, because your two cells are collectively more powerful. So, as in real war, choosing your targets carefully (but quickly) is important.

Once your tentacle has latched on to another cell, you can either remain connected to slowly drain it or swipe across your tentacle to cut it. Interestingly, it makes a difference where you sever your tentacle. So, if you slice it right in the middle, half the resources return to the attacking cell and the other half do a rapid attack-burst (ie: a 50-50 split). Whereas, if you cut your tentacle right at one end, all the resources in the tentacle will quickly retreat or attack, depending which end you slice.

To add variation, there’s impenetrable barriers within some levels, purple cells with superior intelligence to overcome, and limits for how powerful a single cell can become within each level. Each cell type also has a limit to the number of tentacles it can extend at one. These factors, plus some interesting level designs, encourage you to modify your strategies to suit each level.

The single player campaign (2 worlds, 40 levels total) is entertaining and satisfying, but far too short. By the time you’re settling in, the single player campaign is over. Additional levels are promised – but randomly-generated levels would be better. Lastly, the campaigns are rather anti-climatic once you complete each world, as nothing really happens, except a small note in the corner of the iPad screen confirming a Game Center achievement.

Multiplayer mode offers two-player online action via a random match-up or by challenging a friend, via Game Center. Choose an arena and color, then engage in a microscopic war ….and in my case, get totally owned by superior players. The online play worked flawlessly once started, but it was often unable or slow to complete a random match-up. That isn’t ideal since the single player mode is completed so quickly, but isn’t a problem if you’re playing friends online.

Tentacle Wars blends strategic gameplay with arcade-style swipes and cuts to create a fast-paced strategy game that’s ideally suited for touch screens. The game is similar to Galcon, but has enough innovation to feel fresh and new. Yet, it needs more levels and online players, otherwise the fun feels as if it’s over too quickly. According to our discussion thread, an iPhone/iPod touch version is expected around May or June.

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Late last year, iOS game developer Two Lives Left released Codea [ $9.99 (HD)]. Originally known as Codify, Codea offered developers everything they needed to rapidly prototype an iPad game… On an actual iPad. Codea has come a long way since then, and today, the first game developed entirely inside of the app has been released.

Cargo-Bot [ Free (HD)] is a puzzle game where players program a robot to move crates around. 36 levels in all are included, there’s a 3 star grading system, and you can even record solutions to upload them to YouTube.

Cargo-Bot is free, and worth a look to see what’s possible inside of Codea. According to the Cargo-Bot site, the Codea Xcode Template used to convert the Codea files into an actual game that can be submitted to Apple will be released soon. Neat!

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Fans of 2D Minecraft-ing on iOS have had it pretty good with the excellent Junk Jack [$2.99/Lite], but the developers at Bytebin Studios want to know what would happen if you take a similar Terraria/Minecraft sandbox idea, placed it in a steampunk setting, and let everyone connect to one giant persistent world together online MMO style. The result is Deepworld, and you can get a pretty good idea of what it’s like in this new gameplay trailer.

Deepworld is in an alpha state but is close to entering beta, and as the game stands right now it contains procedurally generated worlds, a robust crafting system, a day/night cycle and weather effects, and a limited number of enemies. It will also be coming out for Mac, and since the game world is stored in the cloud, there will be cross-platform play between the iOS and Mac versions.

Longer-term goals for Deepworld are a dynamic ecosystem that can be dilapidated and brought back to health, a steam-based power source for creating vehicles and machines, and social game types like Capture the Flag and Freeze Tag. While the idea of something like Deepworld is certainly intriguing, it’s also incredibly ambitious for an iOS title. I’ll feel much better once the initial product gets released and I can actually try it out, and much like Junk Jack or Minecraft itself, Deepworld will likely evolve over time.

It sounds like Deepworld is set to initially launch pretty soon, and we’ll keep an eye out for a specific release date. Until then you can swing by our forums to talk about the game.

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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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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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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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A lot of studios are turning to the casual market to expand their base and diversify portfolios speckled in viscera and splatters of crimson. League of Evil studio Ravenous Games is doing just that with its side-scrolling puzzle game Burger Cat. The result is unique: Ravenous is undoubtedly delivering something that feels like a Ravenous joint, but it’s appropriate for our little ones and game-challenged family members.

It accomplishes this by removing the barrier of entry, while maintaining the vibe and the high-level production we expect from a Ravenous product. In the game, you play as a cat on a quest to find hamburgers. Functionally, this adventures boils down to a bunch of instanced quests where you, as a maestro of landscaping, have to alter the 2D world the cat inhabits in order to get him to a burger. The movement is automatic, but your ability to add and remove blocks of land or introduce an item that changes the way the cat interacts with its world is manual.

For example, in the game’s first level, you’ll need to add a block of land to the corner of a hill so the cat can scramble up the hill as if it were a stairway. In the next, you actually build a similar stairway with three blocks of land, two of which will need to be stacked on top of each other. As the game progresses, you’ll get much more imaginative items: a mouse that re-directs the cat’s attention, a spring that rockets the cat into the air, a pick-axe that removes pieces of the environment, and so on. Actual obstacles that add repercussions, like spinning cogs with blades, are added steadily. The items you’ll receive have a hard cap in each level, and I had the most fun really playing with what I could do with the least amount of stuff, though creating conga lines of items has its simple pleasures, too. In fact, Burger Cat seems to encourage experimentation, as it often gives you way too much.

It’s a different game from the folks who made League of Evil, but it feels similar from a production standpoint. The art is bright and bubbly like the new visuals in League of Evil 2, and the animation work is on par. Music, on the other hand, is exceedingly epic. It almost rewards you before you do anything. Excuse me, but I want my Ode To Joy when I get my hamburger, and not before.

If this looks familiar by the way, it’s because it existed on Flash before. Burger Cat is a new-look port of a WobblyWare title you can play for free right now. In this shot of the original below, take note of how smooth this new iteration looks: no more grids, a less clumsy UI, and less mess in general.

“We updated the graphics to be more cartoony and made some design changes to make another one of our polished iOS releases,” Ravenous told TouchArcade. “The game just felt more suited to touch screen controls and has a lot of potential with the casual market.” And it does play exceedingly better. This game is a breeze to control with your fingers. I’ve zero complaints with what I’ve played so far.

And that’s the thing: we haven’t seen everything Burger Cat has to offer, so stay tuned as we obtain a final build and deliver our final thoughts. My gut says, though, that this is something we’ll be pretty happy with, even though we’re not its market. Look for this to hit April 12 across iPhone and iPad.

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Behold! The kingdom of Kameloot! A great land plagued by literature-loving rats, ruffians, maddened herbivores and stupefyingly high taxes. It is here that Battleloot Adventure [99¢/HD] takes place. In this turn-based strategy/RPG hybrid, you’ll be taking command of a motley crew of mercenaries.

Unlike most titles within the genre, Battleloot Adventure will not have you galloping off to the castle in order to decapitate the state dignitaries. I mean, the local oppression is sort of what keeps you rolling in the dough. While, in theory, your purpose in life is to assist the city you’ve sworn fealty to in its attempt to win the ‘Grand Gossip Notoriety Prize’ , you’re really just in it for the gold.

As you might have guessed already, Battleloot Adventures is not a game that takes itself too seriously. It’s a game plagued with sheep, after all. Black sheep. Red-eyed, rabid-looking sheep. Be-tentacled, flatulent purple sheep. Battleloot Adventure has a sheep for all occasions. Can you honestly imagine something like this being grim and dark?

The bright, cartoony art style certainly enforces the light-hearted atmosphere. Characters are well-drawn and vividly colored albeit often encumbered with slightly overlarge heads, something that may not appeal to those who do not enjoy Japanese anime. In contrast, the watercolor backgrounds look as though they deserve a spot in a children storybook somewhere.

Now, let’s talk about the gameplay. Combat in Battleloot Adventure is wonderfully simple. To attack, you tap on your target. To defend, you tap on yourself. To utilize an item or a skill, you tap on the appropriate icon before tapping on the desired target. Simple, right?

Sort of. Once you dive into it, things start to get complicated. One of the things that you’re going to have to monitor is energy. Almost everything you do (item consumption being the notable exception here) requires expenditure of that precious resource. If you permit a character’s energy to drop below a certain percentage, they’ll be useless up till the point their bar replenishes. And no, you can’t block under these circumstances either, something that will be the cause of despair at least once.

There’s an element of ‘rock, paper, scissors’ to the fights. You see, each entity in the game is associated with one of four classes. Each class, in turn, is represented by a color. Bandits are red, soldiers are blue, healers are green and wizards are flamboyantly purple. As you might have guessed already, certain classes will do well against others. The rogues of the game, for example, do well against soldiers but fare poorly against a wizard’s assault. Needless to say, the ecosystem of colors is something you’ll want to keep in mind if you want to perform effectively in combat.

Skills have been done in a rather interesting fashion here. While most games demand payment in mana or energy, Battleloot Adventure wants payment in stars. Stars are what you acquire when you’ve inflicted sufficient amounts of damage on an enemy. Stars are also essential to some quests and provide bonus gold at the successful completion of a stage. Stars are great. Unfortunately, in order to use a skill, you’re going to have to spend a star. Will it be worth it? That’s entirely up to you.

On top of all that, you’ll also have to take passive abilities, talents, equipment, environmental effects, the fact you can rope your characters together to assist one another in attacks, and quest objectives into consideration. It’s a lot to juggle, but what makes Battleloot Adventure so neat is the fact that it’s not mandatory for you to know exactly what you’re doing. It is exactly as easy or as difficult as you want it to be. You can elect to finish everything in two rounds via a strategic usage of skills and physical prowess or you can work through each enemy slowly. It’s up to you.

One of the things that make me incredibly happy about Battleloot Adventure is the way they’ve handled IAPs in the game. They’ve done an excellent job with it. I think this is the first time I’ve said that about any game’s usage of the freemium model, but it’s true. Instead of ransoming your headgear or demanding money to unlock new quests, Battleloot Adventure will offer you in-game gold for real-life cash, and if you don’t want to, you don’t actually need to buy the gold. Things in Battleloot Adventure do not cost an arm and a leg. At most, they might cost a toe or an unimportant finger. It’s definitely a refreshing change.

That said, with Battleloot Adventure, patience is important. In spite of all the praise I’ve lavished onto it, Battleloot Adventure is one of those games that takes a little warming up. The dialogue isn’t atrocious but it’s certainly not the most impressive in the world. As for the first Act, well, the less said about it the better. I understand wanting to ease the new player into the world but the pacing’s slightly off for Act 1.

Nonetheless, for those willing to persevere, the game opens up when you reach Act II. Suddenly, there are things to do everywhere. There is equipment to unlock. There are feats to complete. With every quest you fulfill, more areas become unlocked. Speaking of equipment, I love the fact that all of the gear that you acquire will be visible on your party members in a wonderful display of attention to detail.

Battleloot Adventure isn’t perfect (I don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth but that Witch is broken, guys. Broken. Also, there’s no Universal version. Why, Digital Tales, why?). Nonetheless, it’s still an impressive addition to the App Store and a game that belongs in your library. It’s immersive, it’s expansive (I’ve been playing it for a week), it’s simple, it’s something you can teach to your grandparents and your three-year old niece. As long as you’re OK with some minor quirks, Battleloot Adventure is one that you don’t want to miss.

TouchArcade Rating:

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