Archive for the ‘Apple’ tag
Best iOS Games January 2012
Our ratings for games we reviewed in January are now in place, and we now present to you the ones that are on the top of the heap. Each game reviewed receives a 1-5 star rating relative to the other games from that month. Generally, a three-star or higher is considered a “good” rating.
Our final scores are not the product of any traditionally objective measures such as graphics or sound, but simply reflect the games we would most recommend to others. Keep in mind, this listing is comprised of games we reviewed in January, and not necessarily games that were specifically released in January.
5 Stars
Super Crate Box, $1.99 – [Review] – [] – Vlambeer knocks it out of the park with this ultra-frantic crate collecting game. With great virtual controls, and gameplay that is great for pick up and play mobile gaming sessions, Super Crate Box is a game you shouldn’t miss.
4.5 Stars
Blockwick, Free – [Review] – [] – A really slick puzzle game that you can try for free. After that, level packs of increasing difficulty are sold in bundles of 60 for 99¢ a pop. Don’t let the initial pack it comes with turn you off, think of it more as a really long tutorial.
Hero Academy, Free – [Review] – [] – This multiplayer tactical game by Robot Entertainment has become incredibly popular amongst our community, and even was the topic of a . If you’re looking for people to play with, hit the forum link and you’ll find tons of people looking for a game.
Run Roo Run, $0.99 – [Review] – [] – From the creators of Scribblenauts comes this super-fun mini-level jumping game. Most levels will only take a few moments to complete, but thankfully, there’s a ton of them. Clearing a world unlocks some really difficult levels that’ll really put you to the test.
Smash Cops, $2.99 – [Review] – [] – Not only does Smash Cops have great graphics, but it also has a new control method that we haven’t seen before for controlling your cop car. You use your finger to “push” the car where you want to go. It sounds strange, but it works great.
Triple Town, Free – [Review] – [] – There’s a definite learning curve to Triple Town but once you get over that hump and come to grips with how the mechanics of the game works, you’ll be building amazing towns and cursing at bears in no time. Argh, those bears. They ruin everything.
Windosill, $2.99 – [Review] – [Forum Thread] – This iPad exclusive puzzle game originally started its life as a Flash title. It’s aged incredibly well, and feels like a perfect fit for the iPad. Multitouch adds so much, even if you played the original, it’s worth trying again on the iPad.
The rest of the game ratings can be seen in their respective rating categories (also found in the sidebar navigation): 5 Stars, 4.5 Stars, 4 Stars, 3.5 Stars, 3 Stars, and 2 Stars.
As always, we expect there will be some debate about relative scores, but keep in mind that everyone’s personal ratings may vary based on individual tastes.
For more of our favorite iOS games, check out our “Best iPhone Games” category which includes all of these monthly posts as well as other special compilations of the greatest games the App Store has to offer.
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Upcoming Bullet Hell Shooter ‘Shogun: Rise of the Renegade’ Hitting iOS Soon
Paris based developer are experts in the field of augmented reality on mobile devices. They showcased this on iOS in late 2010 with the release of ARDefender [99¢], an augmented reality tower defense game. In terms of content, ARDefender was a bit one note, though it did receive a nice update this past October that fleshed out some of the features. However, despite being a pretty simplistic game, the actual tech behind ARDefender was really solid and incorporated into the gameplay better than almost any other AR game I’ve played before. Also, it was just plain fun to play.
Now Int13 is taking a break from the augmented reality for their next iOS release in order to pay homage to a genre they enjoy: manic arcade shooters. A project that originally started back in 2010, Shogun: Rise of the Renegade is a bullet hell shooter in the same vein as the classic shmups that were prominent in arcades in the 90s, and like the ones CAVE has been so generous with porting over to the iOS platform. I’ve been playing a preview build of Shogun for the past week or so, and am super impressed with the title so far. You can check it out in motion with the developer’s trailer for Shogun below:
The game is absolutely gorgeous in person, the video doesn’t quite do it justice. The gameplay is also really solid, offering most of the bullet-hell conventions you would expect as well as a few twists on the formula to differentiate itself from the pack. Shogun is already submitted and awaiting approval from Apple, which means we could possibly see it as early as Friday but most likely it will be sometime next week. It will be free to download and contain the entire first level, with the remaining 3 levels unlockable through in-app purchase. Oh, and here’s something awesome: Shogun will have iCade support baked in, something people have been dying for with other shooters on the App Store.
If you’re a fan of shmups, keep your eyes glued to this space as we’ll have a review of Shogun: Rise of the Renegade whenever it ends up hitting the App Store sometime in the next week or so.
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Zynga Shamelessly Rips Off ‘Tiny Tower’ With Canadian Release of ‘Dream Heights’
Per the nearly standard operating procedure of “beta testing” wide-scale free to play titles, Canadians and “Canadians” can now get their hands on Zynga’s latest iOS game, Dream Heights [Free]. It doesn’t take more than a few quick glances at the screenshots and iTunes text to realize that Zynga has firmly focused their copy machines on NimbleBit’s Tiny Tower [Free]. It’s really incredibly just how blatant of a clone this is, as Zynga has gone far beyond just copying the premise of the game- They even directly lifted the restocking mechanics, elevator upgrades, UI elements, and more.
NimbleBit’s Ian Marsh has with an image that perfectly exhibits just how shamelessly Zynga’s “inspiration” is for this new free to play title of theirs with side by side screenshots and a hefty amount of trademarked NimbleBit snark.
Take a look:
(Click for full size, with many more comparisons.)
It’ll be interesting to see how this all shakes out. Historically speaking, Apple has had a very hands-off approach to even the most blatant of clones on the App Store. But, we are talking their very own game of the year last year that’s being mercilessly knocked-off here, by Zynga of all companies. I doubt much if anything will actually happen, but I’m not sure how Zynga couldn’t stir up a hefty helping of bad blood amongst anyone who realizes that such a large company is lifting ideas straight from a three (3) man development studio.
We’ll have to see how Dream Heights does once it eventually sees its worldwide release. The amusing (and sad, to be honest) part of all this is that per , Zynga once attempted to acquire NimbleBit. If you can’t buy ‘em, clone ‘em?
Canadian App Store Link: Dream Heights, Free
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‘Puzzlejuice’ Review – A Mashup of Tetris, Match-3 and Boggle
If you enjoy Tetris, match-3 games and Boggle, then Puzzlejuice [99¢] from might be right up your alley. That’s because this falling-block, color-matching, word-finding mash-up combines these things into a nice-looking bundle of pleasure.
Puzzlejuice starts with falling puzzle-blocks, just like Tetris. You can rotate each falling block by tapping the screen or drag it left or right. A ghost image of the block shows where it will end up at the bottom. When you’re happy with the position of the block, you can swipe it downwards to speed up its descent. And the idea is to form a solid row. That should all sound fairly familiar for anyone who knows Tetris, but that’s just the start of this game.
When you form a solid row of blocks across the playing area, instead of disappearing, the blocks turn into letters. And to make the letters disappear, you must draw a line across adjoining letter-blocks, to spell a word in eight directions, like Boggle. If your word is long enough, the surrounding blocks are also destroyed. So now you’re multitasking between managing falling blocks and finding words.
The falling blocks are comprised of different colors. Whenever you match-up three or more blocks of the same color, those blocks can be tapped so they convert into letters. So now you’re managing falling blocks, matching and tapping colors and also finding words, which is enough to keep your brain challenged and fully entertained (especially if you’re a male, because apparently we’re not great at multitasking).
A series of objectives are provided as well, which can be completed across multiple games. For example, you might need to spell a six letter word, use two power-ups simultaneously or activate 3+ rows at once. By satisfying these objectives, you can unlock power-ups, like “The Kabomb!” (explodes blocks), “Driller” (falling blocks carve through everything they touch) or “Twister” (scrambles the blocks). You can choose up to three power-ups to carry.
There are two game modes, Zen and Core. In Zen Mode the blocks don’t drop, but you only get 90 seconds to play. In Core Mode you play until the blocks reach the top of the screen. Core Mode has two difficulty levels, with the harder levels requiring longer words to explode surrounding blocks, but offering three times the points. Basically, the longer your words, the bigger the width of your explosion, which all helps your Game Center score.
I tried this universal game on the iPad and iPod touch, both of which played well, although the music spluttered at times on my 4th generation iPod. There’s a “picture-in-picture” mode for the smaller screen devices, which shows a zoomed in image of what’s under your finger. On the iPad that mode is unnecessary, but on the smaller screen it’s useful for seeing the words you’re swiping, or un-swiping.
Puzzlejuice may not be totally original, as it combines three common App Store genres, but putting them together into one game was a stroke of genius. It’s a real breath of fresh air with loads of frantic gameplay, style and humor. As an added bonus, Puzzlejuice is currently on sale for 99¢ due to being featured by Apple, and at that bargain price (or its original price of $2.99, for that matter) it’s a strong recommendation for puzzle and word game fans.
TouchArcade Rating: 
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Buckle Up: New ‘Kids vs Goblins’ Trailer Hits
‘ tactical RPG Kids vs Goblins has been getting a lot of traction for good reason: it looks hot. In the game, you’ll control three kids with up to 80 different spells on a quest that’ll see them exploring a total of seven unique environments. As you’ll see in the new trailer below, the spell system takes a cue from ; it encourages users to combine individual spells and then exploit the combined power in order to progress and beat up waves of bad dudes. There seems to be a fair bit of standard action RPG-ery, too.
Kids vs Goblins is being published by , and is expected to hit the iPad first later this February. In the game’s message board thread, the publisher has noted that Apple has it in its hands right now, so it’s just a matter of approval. We’ll continue keeping our eye on this one, for sure.
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‘Caylus’ Review – Play Tom Builder, But Prepare to Play Alone
Caylus [$4.99] is an outstanding game, consistently ranking in top 10. It plays like Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth as you take on the role of a master builder tasked with winning the favor of a ruler and building something great. Your world revolves around struggles for resources, money, favor and opportunity. , the folks behind Neuroshima Hex [$4.99 / Lite], have put together an equally outstanding port – as long as you’re prepared to play locally.
It’s becoming a bit of a running joke that Big Daddy’s Creations puts out great board game ports with shoddy (or no) multiplayer, and Caylus is no exception. You can’t play over Game Center, you can’t invite friends, and trying to play asynchronously will extend the game length to near-infinite. But if you’re down with fighting AI or playing locally against friends, this is a must-buy for any board game fan.
Here’s how a typical game of Caylus goes: there is a castle, there are buildings, there is a road. Each players has six workers, and takes turns each round placing them in the various buildings. The provost and bailiff (essentially progress markers) make their way down the road at the end of each round and each worker gets his due. Some buildings provide resources, others provide gold or change the turn order, and some let you trade your resources around.
The ultimate goal is to build up more favor from France’s King Philip the Fair than any of your competition. The king is generous with favor in a ‘you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’ sort of way. If you use your resources to help build up his castle, he’ll bestow favor upon you – especially if you’re the most productive builder of the round. If you collect resources, you can turn them in at the end of the game for more favor. Building monuments, shops and landmarks like churches will make you very popular, and sometimes you can ship off extra money or resources to earn a little extra mid-game. Though I wouldn’t say Caylus is incredibly strategically deep, these methods of building up points give players a few different tactics to use to defeat their foes.
Going deeper, there are a number of rules and strategies that can affect your success in a big way. For example, each worker you place costs you money. Generally, the further along the road you place a worker, the better the reward. If the provost hasn’t passed the building he’s in, though, it won’t be counted in the round’s final tally. You can pay the provost to move him back toward the castle or further along the road – but so can everyone else. So sending a worker to a far out shop can be a massive risk, especially if you’ve already earmarked unearned resources to help build the castle at the round’s end.
There are five different resources to manage and a huge list of buildings to erect. There are also a slew of conditional rules to keep track of. So here’s where I applaud Big Daddy’s Creations the most: Caylus’s tutorial is outstanding. With the tutorial messages on through my first playthrough, I figured out maybe three quarters of the game. After one more match to polish up on the details I understood nearly everything. I’m still working on strategy, but such a thorough and straightforward introduction is pretty impressive for a game with Caylus’s complexity.
I’ve run into one or two cases that weren’t explained by anything in the rules, and it’s possible they were bugs. A couple crash bugs have been found, as has a miscommunication with Apple about translations (the game is only available in English but lists several other languages in its App Store listing). Big Daddy’s Creations has covered their plans to solve these problems in a already, so I’m confident any other issues that crop up should be handled in a timely fashion.
Otherwise, the big sticking point is multiplayer. Caylus is universal, so you can play with friends on an iPad or pass-and-play on smaller devices. But online play should be a big part of the game, and playing with random unranked strangers that you can’t chat with takes a lot of the fun out of it. Also, you really have to poke around the interface to quit a game once it’s done, or to leave one for another part way. The interface is mostly extremely usable, but that’s an unintuitive task. And there’s a serious lack of stat tracking.
But for pure entertainment dollar by dollar, I’ll take Caylus over most board games in the App Store. It’s an obscenely good game, which makes its flaws all the more frustrating. If you also want to gripe about that, there’s support to be found in our . Me? I’ve said my piece, so now I can go back to playing. It will take more than awkward multiplayer to keep me from having this much fun.
TouchArcade Rating: 
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‘Zombie Wonderland 2: Outta Time!’ Review – Don’t Forget to Clean Up Your Mess
Zombie Wonderland 2: Outta Time! [99¢] has everything a good zombie game needs: guns, girls, guts, green goo and a generous amount of cleaning equipment. Oh, come on. Don’t raise that eyebrow at me. You know it’s true. Every good shoot-out tends to leave an inevitable mess and Zombie Wonderland 2, unlike so many of its peers, is not afraid to acknowledge it.
Here, in this goofy little defense/time-management/real-time strategy title, you’ll have the dubious pleasure of playing as the redneck stereotype Chuck. Being the responsible Zombie Cleaner (and someone totally oblivious to the idea of job security) that he is, Chuck will stop at nothing to rid the world of the cannibalistic undead.
As you might have guessed, this isn’t a particularly easy task. You’re going to have to do everything from bringing a vegetarian vampire his lactose-rich treat to protecting pet goldfish in Medieval Japan.
Silly, eh? If that description hasn’t scared you off just yet, this might spell the beginning of a wonderful friendship. Much like the story itself, Zombie Wonderland 2 is a fair bit of mindless fun, the kind that can easily rob you of a few hours of your time. If what you want is a simple, silly hybrid of the aforementioned genres, stop reading and go download it already.
However, if you’re an Apple App Store connoisseur, this may be where you sit down and ponder the direction of your dollar a bit more. Like a serving of fast food, Zombie Wonderland 2 is both satisfying and unfulfilling all at the same time.
Gameplay here is relatively straightforward. Each stage consists of you being told to defend a certain item from zombies for a number of nights. Of course, as a Zombie Cleaner, you’re also going to have to do your best to ensure that there is no unnecessary gunk on the floors at the end of the night, something easier said than done.
To accomplish this, you’re going to have to make use of your trusty shotgun ‘Betsy’, cleaning implements, turrets, wooden planks, unusual bullets and a peculiar assortment of limited-use weapons. Controls are exceedingly simple. To attack a zombie, you touch it with a finger. To board up a window, you tap it with a finger. To summon your infant Death Worm, you – you get the picture.
Sadly, though, it isn’t quite as exciting as it sounds. Your nightly escapades will mostly consist of you boarding up windows and playing ‘whack-a-mole’ with the festering onslaught. Regardless of how many you purchase, you’ll only get access to one turret at a time. One. Uno. Satu.
To make things even worse, your turrets are about as impervious to zombie attacks as cookies are to the Cookie Monster. More often than not, you’ll find yourself attempting to fix it while corralling flaming cadavers. It’s the same with the limited-use weapons and the various bullet types. Sure, you might have a dozen but you’ll ever get to use one variety at a time.
All said and done, however, Zombie Wonderland 2 is still an enjoyable piece of work. The over-the-top silliness and the bright, colorful graphics feel reminiscent of an old Saturday morning cartoon. The game’s just difficult enough to make it challenging and simple enough to engage in without requiring too much of a forethought.
TouchArcade Rating: 
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‘Monkey Quest: Thunderbow’ Review – Who Knew Nickelodeon Made Good Games?
Games like Monkey Quest: Thunderbow [$0.99/HD] disrupt the feel-good media narrative we like to tell about the App Store. It’s a low-risk way to capitalize on experimental games like Sword & Sworcery [$4.99], a place where Andreas Illiger, [$0.99], can sell thousands of copies. It’s also where a giant corporation like Nickelodeon can sell us an Angry Birds [$0.99] clone to advertise its kid-friendly MMO, .
It would be easier to find Thunderbow distasteful if it weren’t so radical, born out of the same mid-90s fever dream that brought us anthropomorphic turtles who were also ninjas. The hero of the game is a nameless monkey who carries a bow-and-arrow. After you beat the 30 available levels — more are, supposedly, coming soon — you can play a few bonus rounds with a girl-monkey who shoots lightning bolts out of her electric guitar-bow. It’s incredible.
My favorite thing about Thunderbow (that name!) is how self-aware and understated it is (those aren’t adjectives people generally use to describe licensed games). Children’s media tends to be overblown and moralistic, full of uplifting melodramas or cautionary tales, but there’s not a word of dialogue or narrative in Thunderbow, only beautifully illustrated storyboards introducing its next enemies.
That same type of restraint carries over to the game design itself. Even the MMO overlay — after completing certain achievements, Monkey Quest players can collect new gear — is unintrusive, and Thunderbow seems fully-realized despite the ancillary tie-in. There are no frills here, just one monkey on a quest to squish scorpions with his thunderbow and physics-enabled exploding carrot-arrows.
Our primate protagonist accomplishes this by shooting a variety of ammunition — pineapples that explode like cluster bombs, bundle of mosquitoes that splinters into individual kamikaze dive-bombers, etc. — at exploding barrels and supporting structures. It’s all standard stuff for the physics-slingshot genre, but Thunderbow is so refined and enjoyable that it never feels stale.
More specifically, the levels feel smaller and more compact than the ones found in, say, Angry Birds — none of them are larger than one screen. With the smaller scope comes a focus on precision — lining up Monkey’s shots isn’t a matter of swiping as much as it is small, discrete adjustments, complemented by razor-sharp controls.
As a result, player intent is never compromised — you can see exactly what you need to do, and Thunderbow provides the necessary controls to pull it off. The game rewards patience, precision, and attention to detail, and the levels are compact enough that two or three well-placed arrows will bring the whole house of cards down. With top notch visual and aural feedback, the simple act of crushing a screen full of scorpions with boulders can be very satisfying.
The flipside of Thunderbow’s precision is that it skews toward being a little too easy. The tough part is finding the chink in each level’s armor, but the execution of your Rube-Goldbergian air-strike is generally straightforward. The levels were tough enough to give me pause — especially because players must collect bananas (three per level) to unlock content — but I never felt frustrated or stumped. It helps that Thunderbow is relatively short: I plowed through the game in a few hours, before the mechanics and bright colors lost their luster.
During each level, light butt-rock is pumped through your speakers while a monster truck derby announcer growls catchphrases like, “Unstoppable!” and “Mass Destruction!” This isn’t a criticism as much as it is an example of the game’s aesthetic as a whole. It’s the type of game a nine-year-old on a Surge bender would design, but Thunderbow is vivid, imaginative, and well-executed, even if its conceits are well-established by now. It’s simultaneously childish and childlike, but it’s so pure in its vision that I couldn’t help but enjoy it.
TouchArcade Rating: 
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Coming Tonight: ‘Run Roo Run’, ‘Smash Cops’, ‘Star Marine’, ‘Zombie Wonderland 2′ and More
Imagination Spills the Beans on PowerVR Series6 GPU Family; 20x as Powerful and Likely Headed to iOS Devices
Imagination’s PowerVR GPU’s have shipped in every iOS device since the release of the iPhone 3GS and the third-generation iPod touch. Those early devices used the PowerVR SGX, while the iPad and iPhone 4 moved on to the PowerVR SGX 535, and finally the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S came packed with the PowerVR SGX543MP2. At CES today, they got ever-so-slightly more specific regarding the Series6 family of PowerVR GPU’s, and it seems incredibly likely that we’ll see them included in future iOS devices, judging by Apple’s three-generation track record of utilizing Imagination’s GPU technology.
Per the , gamers will be able to expect 20 times the performance of current generation hardware, along with a 5x boost in efficiency. Imagination has announced that 8 different outfits have signed up to utilize these new GPUs, but curiously enough, only list 6 of the companies. If I were a betting man, I’d put Apple as one of the two unlisted chip makers.
Needless to say, the potential these new GPUs have is just crazy to think about. The iPad 2 and iPhone 4S are already graphical powerhouses capable of rendering beautiful games like Infinity Blade 2, and imagining the next generation of devices potentially being 20 times more powerful is incredible.
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