TouchArcade.ru

This afternoon, Fabrication Games rolled by TouchArcade HQ in San Francisco to show off its super hip upcoming iPad and iPhone side-scroller, Project Belle. Mechanically, it appears to be a fairly traditional shooter-style take on the genre. Players control a funny bear thing with four arms, each of which is equipped with a gun, and they unload those guns on a variety of cutesy, though dangerous, enemy robots. Interestingly, Belle also incorporates cave flying levels, as well as rail cart excursions.

What caught our all-seeing eye specifically is its moment-to-moment flow. Belle is controlled exclusively via swipe gestures, which keeps the shooting, jumping, and bouncing action rolling at a steady clip. Gorgeous art compliments this, as you’ll see from the screens just below:

Project Belle is expected to launch a little later this month as a $.99 Universal app. It’ll have free-to-play elements, too. In the game, you’ll be able to obtain a variety of different weapons, each of which will require in-game credits to upgrade. At launch, users will be able to buy these credits with actual cash.

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InMotion Software is here at GDC this week, and they stopped by our makeshift TouchArcade headquarters here in the Marriott lobby to show off an upcoming update for the Nickelodeon-published Monkey Quest: Thunderbow [99¢/HD] as well as tease a brand new title.

First off, Monkey Quest received a nice update in early February. We were surprised by how much we enjoyed the game in our review, and the February update added 20 new levels and a boss battle, as well as some new monsters, new weapons, and new control options. The upcoming update is set to add another 30 new levels and should be hitting before the end of March.

In addition to that update, InMotion has also announced a brand new game called Tiny Tails. At first blush, you might write off Tiny Tails as a Farmville clone or something similar. However, the team was vehement that they are not fans of timer-based games like that, but they do want to include a town building-style component for Tiny Tails.

Your main character is a mouse, so everything in the world is comprised of tiny items repurposed as other things. Like buttons attached to a sardine tin to create a wheelbarrow to store food in. While creating a tiny world gives you somewhere to play in, the bigger emphasis will be on actually crafting items, combat, and exploration.

Tiny Tails is still at a pretty early point in development, with nothing beyond some concept art and some early screens. But, the art style is fantastic and I’m curious to see how the crafting and combat pans out in the final game. InMotion is hoping to have the game released in the 3rd quarter of this year, and we’ll definitely be keeping a close eye on it as it gets further along.

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Today at GDC 2012 we sat down with the folks from BulkyPix to have a look at a host of new titles they will soon be releasing, both internally developed and those from outside development groups.

The SandBox

The SandBox, which BukyPix co-produced with Pixowl, is a charming little pixellated 2D world-creation game — and, by world, I mean the space inside of a literal sandbox. The player starts out with the four basic elements and combines them in an on-screen sandbox to create vastly more elements — 40 or so — and, with those, worlds limited by the player’s own imagination (and the bounds of the iPhone or iPad screen).

There is both a story mode with ~30 levels (which serve as a kind of tutorial) as well as a free play mode, which is where the real creation can take place. Once a world has been created, it can be shared with others online, through the game. Players who download others’ levels can then have fun, oh, inserting TNT and other nice little items into them and watching the fireworks unfold. New element packs can be purchased with mana, the game’s virtual currency, which can be accumulated with skilled play or purchased for cash through the app.

The SandBox is being discussed in a lengthy thread in our forums and will be released as a freemium universal app in May.

Lightopus

“When the Gloom came, we were unprepared. They took away everything, including our homes and our young ones, the bulbies. They took away our light. Now the time has come to take back what’s ours. Go, Lightopus. You are the last of our kind. Go into the Abyss, save the bulbies and bring back the Light!”

Thus is the story of Lightopus, a game which challenges the player to steer a strange creature through an aquatic abyss on a mission to save the tiny bulbies in the face of an increasingly menacing enemy horde. The visuals and accompanying ambient audio are similarly eerie and deliver an ambience reminiscent of the PS3 title Flow.

Lightopus is expected to go live on Thursday of this week as a universal game at the price of $2.99.

Kung Fu Rabbit

Internally developed at BulkyPix, Kung Fu Rabbit is a cartoonish platformer that puts you and your on-screen rabbit on a quest for carrots. Carrots are the game’s virtual currency, and the more you grab, the more game perks you have access to, such as the ability to skin out the levels to entirely change their look. While carrots can be accumulated by standard play, they can also be purchased in-app for cash.

Kung Fu Rabbit brings the standard mix of platformer features — the ability to jump off of walls, enemies that can be crush with a jump (Mario style), and substances to avoid (a tarry goo and the like). The game is a universal app that features iCade support and is set to arrive on March 15 for $0.99.

Saving Private Sheep 2

Like its App Store forerunner which we enjoyed, Saving Private Sheep 2 is set to bring a silly / fun play experience to the iOS screen. The game’s challenge is one of trajectory, much like that of Angry Birds.

As it turns out, a wolf has eaten some sheep pals and it’s up to your sheep (and uneaten friends) to aim precisely and toss a (poor, little) hedgehog through various structural arrangements in order to whack the wolf and free the sheep that were recently a meal.

The game features a level creation tool that allows users to create their own set of obstacles to augment the 60 built-in levels and upload them for others to play. The catch, however, is that the player must be able to win their own level before they go online. Levels placed online can be ranked by other users, to create a curated set of challenges.

Aby Escape

In the area of 3D run-and-jumps, BulkyPix demonstrated Aby Escape, a title co-produced with Spanish game studio Pixel Ratio. The game puts you over the shoulder of a purple raccoon that has managed to piss off a bunch of locals who got into hot pursuit of the pesky varmint that is you. In a bid to escape with your hide intact, you must run, jump, duck, dodge, and slide your way to freedom, collecting coins on the way, in a fashion with which Temple Run fans will be quite familiar.

Aby Escape features a story mode with three different settings — a forest park, a city, and Route 66.5 — at 10 levels each, as well as an unlimited running play mode. Little in-game objectives surface during gameplay to mix things up in a manner similar to that of Tiny Wings. The game can be expanded with power-ups and environment enhancements using coins collected or purchased in-app.

Aby Escape will land as a universal freemium title, sometime in May.

Hidden Runaway

Building on the long-running Runaway point-and-click adventure series from Péndulo Studios, Hidden Runaway for iOS, which BulkyPix co-produced with Péndulo, brings a Monkey Island-like mystery to iOS. The game features a hidden object adventure dynamic, wrapped in a thick backstory, peppered with 12 different mini games.

The title will launch for iOS in May and will also be making its way to OS X and Windows PCs.

Yesterday

Another point-and-click adventure from Péndulo, co-produced by BulkyPix is Yesterday. This one is also a Monkey Island sort of game, and places you in the role of a depraved serial killer who must try and piece together just what happened over the last 24 hours. Unsurprisingly, it’s a very dark title, exuding an eerie ambience.

Yesterday, which offers around nine hours of play time, will arrive in the App Store in May and will arrive on the Mac and PC sometime beforehand. Price on this one is undecided as yet.

Gnu Revenge

Developed by Vaze and publishde by BulkyPix, Gnu Revenge is a cartoonish planetary gravity game that drops you into a universe of long-running galactic conflict between the gnus and the crocodiles. You, on the side of the gnus, must fire gnus from orbiting cannons with utmost precision in order to rescue your imprisoned ungulate brethren and knock out your despicable crocodile enemies.

Gnu Revenge is a universal title that will arrive at the end of March at a price of $0.99.

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Mattia Traverso’s soon to be IGF award-winning student project, One and One Story, is set to hit iPad and iPhone within the next four or so weeks. Traverso gave a short demo earlier this morning, and we couldn’t be happier with his progress on the project and the implementation of its touch control scheme.

The elevator pitch would go something like this: One and One Story is an experiential side-scrolling puzzle with a Limbo look and Braid-like brain twisters. It’s minimalist and moody, but also strangely, warming. The premise revolves around the relationship between a shadowy boy and a girl and it explores the themes of this relationship mechanically and structurally. Each chapter riffs on different aspects of this relationship, including periods of loss and love.

For example, in the loss levels, the boy losses his ability to jump. In the love levels, players have to control both characters and have them meet in the middle of a puzzle. Chapters are bookended with tiny bits and pieces of narrative, each vague enough to allow the user to draw his or her own conclusion.

To get a better sense of this mechanically, check out the flash version here. The iPad and iPhone builds will incorporate, possibly, a bonus mode, a refined look, a new song, and levels playable by two people simultaneously. Multiplayer is specifically something that Traverso wants to focus on.

It’s important to note that these screens aren’t final. Traverso is thinking that he might change up the characters’ looks, as well as iterate on the backgrounds. We’ll be keeping in touch moving forward, so expect more soon.

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Games like Hero Academy and the new SSX are seeding the opinion that asynchronous play is THE way to do multiplayer. After catching a glimpse of One Man Left’s upcoming turn-based strategy game Outwitters today, we’re convinced that it is.

As One Man describes it, Outwitters is “a little like chess, but with spawn points and explosions.” Chess’ conceits have influenced quite a bit of the game’s development, as each of three team’s six pieces have wildly different movement and attack patterns. We assume high-level Outwitters users will take a similar thinking man’s approach to its action, which is what makes its asynchronous pop — you want to hang back and think, and you also want to compete. This style of play gives you both of those worlds. Outwitters is also launching with an online league system.

The three teams in order of appearance here: the Adorables, the Scallywags, and the Feedback

To be clear, though, this game couldn’t be any more different from Chess outside of its ideas. Outwitters‘ game board is divided into tons of hexes, the pieces are actually a collection of wildly vibrant characters with wide-ranging moves, such as ranged attacks to slaps to healing, and the objective of each game is to blow up the opposing user’s base. Also, each turn gives a player a certain amount of moves from a pool, and even give them the opportunity to spend those moves on building new troops. The character is amazing to behold: we were super impressed with how alive the game felt in our hands. This thing is oozing with all the right stuff.

Here’s a shot of your typical map, by the way:

You typical game. Check out the board.

We’ll have a lot more on Outwitters in the future. Keep your eyes on One Man’s web site and stayed tuned to us, too, as the game hurdles towards a Universal release in a couple of months. The plan is that it’ll launch free. Maps and additional armies will be provided via IAP.

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I love it when a logo explains it all.

You put on your shoes, and turn on the app. In the background, you hear the throaty hum of an engine and the voice of a pilot speaking into her comm. As you walk out the door, she tells you that you’re on a mission. She doesn’t know what kind, and she doesn’t seem to care, either. Your target is Abel Township, one of the last two remaining strongholds within 100 miles of this area. This is weeks, maybe years after a zombie d-day. Right as you hit outdoors and start an honest jog, the story takes a turn. A missile slams into the helicopter. You hear the crunch of metal, warning beacons, and gears grinding.

You’re three miles out of Abel, and maybe a quarter of a mile out on your run. You’re told to jump, so you do. And then you hear the groans of the undead.

Horror and athletics don’t usually mix, but with a heaping of pure passion, these two things can gel just as well as sweat and iron. Zombies, Run, is an exciting fitness app from London-based studio Six to Start. Its goal is to tell you the story of a fractured world as you jog, and put you firmly in the thick of it. You participate as a silent and athletically gifted protagonist that the survivors of Abel dub “Runner 5.” Runners have a single job: run — run to find new materials, or pick up packages, or trade with others. Each mission in the game presents a new piece of scripted story. Each segment is broken into chunks that are cleverly bookended by your own workout playlists.

The stylish Zombies, Run! poster that was given to its backers on Kickstarter.

The effect is sort of like what would happen if Stephen King’s The Mist 3-D ever melded with Nike Plus. The narrators, who hiss into different sides of your earbuds as you run, provide a rough context as to where you are and what you need to do. They bump out pieces of story intermittently, as you picture wandering through the bowels of a messed up hospital or explore an air drop outside of Abel base. After each mission, the app turns into something similar to Fallout’s radio stations; it plays your music alongside radio-style commentary and news from two Abel survivors.

There’s a much more mechanical game part to Zombies, Run, too. As you run, you’ll pick up items that can be used to boost Abel Township’s hospital, food stores, communication station, armory, residential areas, or recreational facilities. It’s a simple mechanic, but it feels like a treat after an awesome run.

Sometimes, you’ll hear the groans of the undead in your ear and have to run faster in the real world to get away from the game’s zombies. This specific part of the experience is its interval training, which is an important element that sets this apart. Most fitness games are horrible at getting you to new heights. Even the good ones like EA Active are bad at this. Band exercises have limitations, and running in place isn’t going to get your bigger or stronger or faster. Pushing yourself safely with intervals in a real world scenario is an important component to any kind of serious training, and Zombies, Run has that.

That’s a great element, but what I really think makes Zombies, Run work, and work so well, is its soul. The studio has one experienced runner with a history of using fitness apps and a staff filled with people who dig and understand proper storytelling. They want to deliver something special. As an organization, Six to Start seems like the perfect fit for this kind of app.

The Origin

Adrian Hon is one of the brains behind Zombies, Run. He’s the runner of the office. He tells me that he’s wanted a better kind of running game since the iPhone made its debut. He’s used a lot running apps, like Nike Plus and Runkeeper, as well as a couple of more visual-oriented apps. The problem he sees with these apps is legion. Running while looking at a screen is dangerous, stopping to see your progress is counterproductive, GPS can send you to bad places, and there’s not an element of fun.

Hon says he used to hate running when he was younger. He, literally, “Couldn’t think of a worse thing to do.” This all changed when he discovered Garmin GPS, which added an element of fun to the mix. Because of this app, he still runs, although its more of a seasonal thing because no-one likes getting out on ice.

There's a Zombies, Run store that sells these.

“One of the things I really liked about the Garmin was the ‘ghost mode,’ where you could race against yourself.” Hon says. “It made me think there was quite a lot that could be done with fitness games. And I think that physical activity — and of course, sports — is inherently fun and good, so it really shouldn’t be that hard to make a game out of them.” He laments what studios are doing now with their fitness games.

“However, developers have been more focused on the more reliably profitable, yet massively competitive, genres of casual games lately. And more experimental folk find it more difficult to combine tech and physical interaction in a way that doesn’t make you want to shoot yourself when you try to play.”

Zombies, Run was the answer to Hon’s issues with fitness apps and a riff on Ghost mode. It’s a viable one, too, because it treats your phone as if it were an iPod Nano. It only spits out audio when you select a mission, and it never asks you to take a gander at it while you exercise. Aside from random zombie horde events, it also lets you decide when you want to push yourself. A lot of fitness games, if they’re not taxing, they’re just screaming at you. It can be a really counterproductive factor in a workout. It’s easier to get hurt this way. Zombies, Run allows you to take care of your body while also torturing your mind.

Zombies, Run was a project that floated around in Hon’s head since his Garmin days. He and Six To Start had a lot of ideas bouncing around, but they settled on this one, as it artfully combines super simple play alongside an actual story. The narrative is something Hon obviously enjoys, too. “It’s a shame that so few developers have made more than a token effort to put proper stories in their games,” Hon says. “I understand that Triple Town and Bejeweled don’t need stories, but then again, I quite liked Puzzle Quest, so there’s a lot of room in mobile for innovation, but we’re still seeing the same old stuff, even from indie developers.”

This is the first promotional image for the game on the App Store.

Six to Start is all about story. If it isn’t obvious from the fact that it created an audio-based running game about the end of the world, check out its web site.

“We are next-gen storytellers,” the studio proudly states. “Great storytelling and great gameplay is at the heart of what we do. Storytelling is a huge part of the world’s culture, and great stories have always had the ability to move and excite us, whatever the medium. Play means a lot to us, too. We draw inspiration from video games, boardgames, casual games and playful applications and services.”

Six To Start believes that through play, people can learn and discover new experiences. When story and play are combined, it gives Six to Start “the opportunity to deeply engage with our audience get them to do new things — as a large single group or individually.” It’s getting me to run away from zombies, and think about the world they exist in as I kill my body, so this place is obviously doing something right.

Six To Start and Hon’s baby became 3,464 people’s baby, too. Zombies, Run was funded via Kickstarter. The team put up the game’s idea, asked for $12,500 and then received over $70,000 in return. The project was funded in six days alone. Backers received all sorts of neat prizes, including their names in the game’s credits, a poster, or the chance to name something in the game after themselves.

Hon has prior experience with Kickstarter, so it wasn’t a big moment when the idea of putting Zombies, Run on the popular crowd-funding service came to him. However, the decision was also a great way to vet the game’s core idea. “Plus, we thought that the public would be easier to convince Zombies, Run was a good idea than the usual gatekeepers.”

Everyday I Hear Zombies Moan

I usually stick to high-impact weight lifting. I don’t run because I’m afraid that I’ll lose my precious muscle mass. Call it a tic. The truly awesome thing about this app is that it is capable of embracing your routine, no matter how weird it is. I normally use the elliptical for my needs, for example, and I can use Zombies, Run. All I have to do is turn off the GPS features and turn on its experimental accelerometer functionality and I can play just like a runner might. Conversely, I can also just chill with it, and listen to the story, although this method isn’t preferable.

I’m taking Zombies, Run into the gym every day. That’s huge because it’s proving to be a tool. On my calf and thigh days, it’s pushing me, reminding me not to fall into casual or relaxed grooves. I need that because I’m usually only interested in sweating if I’m lifting something spectacularly heavy.

I guess games end up changing a lot when the budget suddenly skyrockets.

Plus, the story is tremendously well told. This isn’t a blown-up, bombastic tale of a few survivors just making do. There’s subtlety to its characters and its world, and just like The Walking Dead, there are moments of intense action, bookended by periods of drama and character building. Zombies, Run wants to actually tell you a story. It isn’t afraid to do so, and that comes across, even if you might be slightly too tired to care in sections. I never feel like an idiot while listening to it, either. It’s told with a straight face and with enough touch to make it feel like an honest story, and not just some weird nerd fantasy running app. There’s interesting stuff tucked into each mission — stuff you want to tune in order to learn more about the world Six to Start is building.

Also, of note, this isn’t a trainer. It doesn’t scream at you. It might nudge you with the zombie horde attacks, but the app doesn’t get in your face. It let’s you do your own thing in your own way. It was designed specifically to do this.

“We want to enhance people’s lives by making their workouts fun, not turn into nagging machines,” says Naomi Alderman, the writer of Zombies, Run. Mission accomplished, I think.

Zombies, Run is available now on the App Store for $7.99. An Android version is coming down the pipes, too. Currently, the game has a total of 20 missions. More missions are slated to come down the line as IAP. Check it out if it even vaguely interests you. I think you’ll be surprised by its purity — and its scares.

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I personally never felt like I was good at shooters. However, being good at them and loving them are two entirely different things. While I marveled at friends that could blast through Ikaruga from start to finish without ever coming face to face with the game over screen, I plugged away at old classics like Konami’s Life Force and Sexy Parodius, hoping each time I’d improve by some miniscule increment. Practice makes perfect, they always say.

Seeing Orange Pixel’s latest title, Neoteria [$1.99], made me realize my days of shmup practice back in the day would be tested once again. A smart-looking little game with retro-inspired graphics, it foregoes deep story in favor of what we’re all here to do when it comes to shooters: blow things up.

You’ll start in easy mode, but don’t be fooled — there’s challenge to be had, even early on. Controls consist of an up and down arrow on your far left (there’s no forward and backward) and a single button for shooting on your right.

One thing I noticed during play is that my finger kept slipping north of the up button and I only realized it when my ship stopped moving (you drag your finger up and down to control these). Once I got a handle on how far up I could slide, though, this stopped being a problem.

It is worth noting about the controls that the arrows and shoot buttons become transparent as you play. Some people in the forums mentioned this and disliked it, others were not bothered by it. It never presented an issue for me, but its worth being aware of.

As you progress through Neoteria’s levels, you’ll see a map that plots out your path. At some point on each level you can choose one part of the route which takes you the high or low road. Regardless of which you take, you’ll be challenged quickly, as there’s lots of dodging and blasting to do. Enemies will leave behind little blue diamonds for you to collect, which will make your weapons more powerful if you pick them up. However, dying can cause weapons to downgrade, so keep it in mind as you go hurtling through space. You have infinite lives here, so that is a great plus.

You’ll have an option to score up to three stars on each level you play, and also get a readout on your accuracy and kills along with a score. You’ll get a single star for beating a level on easy, two for normal and three for hard. If you want to brag on your scores, OpenFeint and Game Center are built right in too, so you can do so with ease.

Fans of classic shooters like Gradius ought to get a lot of fun out of Neoteria. It comes up with plenty of challenge and gives the proper nod to the old games it’s clearly inspired by, but it delivers the action in bite size pieces and is easy to pick up and play at anytime. Even the bosses, wile not as epic of some of the shooters of yore, have a great feel and have you tapping that blast button at high speed just like the good old days.

TouchArcade Rating:

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The first time I booted up ZiGGURAT [$0.99], I was lying in bed, in the dark. I was hoping for something relatively simple  to unwind with, but the pulsing music and unending creep of monoptic aliens made that impossible. Just playing Ziggurat felt clunky the first time I tried it, forcing me to sit upright in bed.

There’s no pause button in Ziggurat, which speaks volumes about its design. Ziggurat demands attention.

Tim Rogers — a game designer under the Action Button Entertainment moniker and professional Kotaku.com word-puker — also demands attention, or at least an attention span. His reputation is for sharp criticism (his own reviews site is particularly brutal) buried under sprawling, maximalist writing, but Ziggurat is beautiful in its simplicity. In its own way, it reinforces all of the fundamental, paradoxical truth of the “endless” genre: infinite potential married to inevitable failure.

The best endless games give players just enough atmospheric window dressing to keep them wondering: where did those giant robots in Canabalt come from? What are they researching in that lab in Jetpack Joyride? Ziggurat’s pitch: You play a woman perched at the very top of the eponymous ziggurat, armed with a laser shotgun and nothing else. High above the swirling clouds, you can see other structures in the background, each one perhaps topped with another human fighter. It’s tempting to hope that, should you actually survive the alien horde, it might be possible to rebuild society in these pyramids, but it’s a false hope.

As the sun set behinds her, our soldier is trapped on a few bricks, with no place to go. The only things that move in Ziggurat are the bullets and the aliens; the soldier is firmly grounded. Even before the aliens start climbing up the pyramid, the soldier’s sprite falls into a little heaving motion, bloodstream pumped full of adrenaline like a cornered opossum or feral dog. The sprite work in Ziggurat is excellent — particularly on the iPad — and it’s packed full of small details that reinforce the design of the game.

The detailed sprites are functional, too. As the aliens climb up the sides of the ziggurat, their cycloptic heads swell and deflate; as the soldier charges her shotgun, the energy ball moves through three different phases. A fully charged bullet against a fully inflated alien face sets off a generously large explosion, which can catch other aliens in its blast. Ziggurat is about efficiency and timing, about shooting the least amount of bullets to set off the largest chain reactions possible, about imposing order on chaos by … unleashing enormous explosions.

The mechanics would be impossible without Rogers’ art direction in place, but they also tend to get buried in the explosions, the chiptunes, and the bullets. There’s no tutorial, but the game is paced so that players can subconsciously learn the design, even while they’re fighting for their lives.

Ziggurat might seem difficult or unwieldy until you realize how the explosions work, until you tap into the game’s internal rhythms. Some aliens jump, others climb, and still others just seem to float, but they all expand and deflate and explode all the same. The joy of Ziggurat, for me, is that cycle of tension and release. When the soldier dies — which happens when one stray bullet or alien claw touches her — the screen flashes red and a discordant guitar riff screeches out. In Gears of War, a guitar riff meant sucess; in Ziggurat, it means failure. In both cases, it means you can start breathing again.

And unlike other “endless” games, Ziggurat is designed tightly enough that I never felt like I was plateauing. I am undoubtedly bad at Ziggurat — my Twitter feed and GameCenter leaderboards make that clear enough — but I’m always getting better. This isn’t a game of masochism, it’s a game of evolutionary improvement, of making the last woman alive stronger and better, one death at a time. There will be good sessions and bad sessions, but my scores are constantly climbing upwards. The title, Ziggurat, doesn’t just describe the setting of the game, but the dominant metaphor: a series of steps, arduously climbed.

Thinking of a structural ziggurat might also the best way to conceptualize the game’s controls. Aiming the soldier’s gun is done by sliding your figure along a horizontal axis at the bottom of the screen, left to right. At the outer edges, the soldier aims her gun down, at an angle. As you slide closer to the middle of the screen, the reticule moves up, until it hits 90 degrees. Everything from the alien freaks to the bullets they shoot to the soldier’s own shotgun coalesces in one spot, at the top of the ziggurat.

(There’s another, Angry Birds-esque control scheme in which your gun acts as a slingshot, but it’s slower and more imprecise than the originals. It also forces players to tap and slide their fingers all over the screen, obscuring the action. And, frankly, it lacks the thematic cohesion afforded by the “precision” controls. Avoid it.)

My favorite thing about Ziggurat is that it dismantles the hardcore-casual myth that has so long plagued videogame culture generally, and iOS gaming specifically. An “endless” shooter with Peggle controls doesn’t make for good advertising, but Ziggurat is a game that forces its players to pay attention, to process and react to constantly shifting situations, to do the (literally) impossible. It’s got GameCenter and Twitter functionality that encourages pro-social competition and discussion without asking players to pony up for more bullets or a different-colored spacesuit. It’s judiciously designed and takes the platform seriously, and Ziggurat speaks for itself.

As I broke the three-digit mark for the first time and saw the sun sink below the clouds, an orange alien behind a force field sneaked behind the soldier and killed her. The screen flashed, a discordant note erupted from my speakers, and I started over.

I’ll see you at the top.

TouchArcade Rating:

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Definitely no stranger to dual-stick shooters, Chillingo is back with their latest one called Mafia Rush [Free], a (duh) gangster-themed addition to the action-oriented genre. While Mafia Rush doesn’t offer much in terms of innovative or unique gameplay, it still gets the job done and is free to check out.

As a dual-stick shooter, Mafia Rush’s gameplay is relatively simplistic. Missions are divided into four different scenarios: Robbery (grab sacks of money and take them to a getaway vehicle), Defend (protect said vehicle full of cash from baddies), Attack (find packs of C4 and bomb an armored cash car) and Survival (survive waves of enemies gunning for you). Missions only last several minutes each, with each completed mission earning you an ‘Ace.’ Collect enough aces and you unlock additional locales.

Players also earn money and experience with each level completion. The money can be used to buy new guns, ammo, and supplemental defenses like automated turrets and grenades. Weapons range from shotguns to flame throwers and actually add a bit of fun to the gameplay. Experience, meanwhile, is accumulated towards a leveling system which lets you increase attributes such as agility (shoot your gun faster) to Speed (move faster). Again, the attribute system is pretty simplistic, but at least offers some depth to the gameplay.

The ’simplistic’ theme continues with the visuals, which are colorful blocky graphics that resemble Minigore [$0.99 / HD] or Cowboy Guns [$0.99 / HD], another more recent Chilingo dual stick shooter. I had no problem with the visuals, and I particularly liked the smooth frame rate. The same goes for the controls, which are standard DSS controls that just work without trying to be too inventive. One complaint I had involved random crashes I experienced while playing the game. It wasn’t prevalent, but crashes are never a good thing to deal with.

I also appreciated the fact that despite its status as a free game, Mafia Rush doesn’t throw IAP in your face. Yes, you can purchase cash as IAP, but it is not necessary in order to succeed. You earn plenty of cash during missions (which you can replay as much as you want), and all levels can be completed with the stock weapons if you have enough skill. It’s a refreshing change of pace to see a free game that isn’t trying to paywall the player in some fashion.

Despite the different missions mentioned above, Mafia Rush just doesn’t have much in terms of gameplay variety. Enemies are all classified into four different archetypes, with palette swaps differentiating between stronger enemies in later levels. There’s also very little in terms of progression: later levels simply throw more enemies and more of the same objectives at the player without anything new added to the mix.

In this sense, I can’t help but think that they missed out on possibly weaving an interesting narrative around the mafia/gangster motif. There’re not a lot of good, original iOS games that delve into such themes, and it would have been interesting to have any kind of story mode. At the very least it would have expanded on the replayability (which is pretty short).

If Mafia Rush sounds a little basic, that’s because it is. However, it’s still a solid dual stick shooter that’s currently being offered for free. At that price, it’s certainly an offer you shouldn’t refuse, at least for fans of dual stick shooters.

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Ever been BASE jumping? Yeah, me neither. The closest I’ve come is with AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! (Force = Mass x Acceleration) [$2.99] by Dejobaan Games and Owlchemy Labs (the folks behind Snuggle Truck [Free]). This is the latest in a series of extreme BASE-jumping titles from Dejobaan, but it’s the first to come to iOS. As we mentioned in our preview, it’s a somewhat shortened port of AaAaAA! for the Awesome, and it’s pretty fantastic.

I’ve messed around with the PC AaAaAA! titles, but they’ve never really clicked for me. Now I know why: I wasn’t playing with tilt controls. There’s a world of difference between controlling a fall with a joystick or mouse and peering down over a massive drop, diving over and holding your fate in your hands. Not quite the difference between playing a game and actually jumping, but it’s still pretty great.

Tilt controls are a turn-off for a lot of people, and I’m no exception. I like the idea of being comfortable playing a game while out in public, and that’s a lot less possible when you’re thrashing around like someone who’s never held a controller before. I set that prejudice aside for AaAaAA!, and I have no regrets. The tilt controls are precise, kinetic, and massively immersive.

AaAaAA! is BASE jumping in a fantasy land. The acronym stands for buildings, antennas, spans and earth, and those are the things you’ll jump from here, but they’re structures designed by a madman in a world without physical constraints. Hundreds of towers floating and merging on top of one another, highways that spiral in and out and around each other in endless stacks, ventilation shafts with dozens of fanblades leading into great tunnels of rings – these are just some of the pathways and obstacles encountered during the game’s many journeys to the ground.

This take on BASE jumping also ratchets up the difficulty from reality. The sport is incredibly dangerous, but much of that sense of danger would be lost in a straight digital translation. Most levels would be a quick fall with a brief landing. Instead of being ranked by distance traveled, here players are ranked by how much risk they can take on without breaking every bone in their virtual bodies. Scores are determined by kisses and hugs: a kiss is a structure near-missed, and hugs are earned by holding close to any single structure. This is, as one might imagine, extremely likely to end in maiming, and should never be tried at home.

The result is a very tense game. I found myself gripping my phone tightly, jerking it out of the way of this oncoming girder or that platform I hadn’t noticed. A prayer under the breath seemed suitable after some tight escapes. It was more than enough to convince me I’m not cut out for BASE jumping, but I sure enjoy the facsimile.

AaAaAA! comes equipped with a few dozen levels, and you can choose how you want to approach them. You begin with a small supply of teeth (and has there ever been a more disturbing currency name?). These aren’t a premium currency, you earn them in-game. You can unlock any level beside, above or below one you can already access, using a thousand teeth or so to open each of the first few. The costs increase from there. So do the rewards: you earn up to 1300 teeth per star, and each level awards up to five stars.

To get top marks, you’ll need to use the unlockable tools you can find scattered in the level map. One gives you the ability to interact with spectators. Fans stand on blue girders in some levels, and protesters stand on red ones. You can give your fans the thumbs-up for extra points, and you can flip off your foes. It’s a particularly satisfying way to earn bonus points. There are also bonuses to be earned for spraying graffiti on government buildings, if you want to be a little extra subversive.

Otherwise earning the big scores just requires good performance and a bit of understanding of the level layout. Each level comes with a training blurb to help you find the best approach. Sometimes that’s whipping around collecting kisses, other time it’s aiming for bonus score plates. Once in a while it’s hitting birds on the way down. The game can be a touch gruesome, but the looks are always sterile and unbloodied.

You don’t need to do extremely well to unlock all the levels—an average of three stars or so should do. It’s just more fun to go for five. Also worth noting is that 21 of the levels are leaderboard levels. Game Center’s restrictions don’t allow for all the levels to come with leaderboards, but there’s a nice representative mix that you can compete on.

There are a few extras to be found in the journey, but I won’t spoil them. Suffice it to say that Dejobaan has a quirky sense of humor, and there are oddities to be found around every corner. Some are obvious, like entertaining splash screens and odd vocal cues. Others can be unlocked, and ought to be experienced at least once.

In fact, I’ll go ahead and say the whole game ought to be experienced at least once. I’ve had a ridiculously good time with it. AaAaAA! is an excellent game, and for me, at least, this is the definitive way to play it. The quirkiness goes overboard from time to time, but it’s easy to skip past to get to the good stuff: the white-knuckled dives straight down to near-certain death. It’s almost enough to make one want to BASE jump. Or maybe skydive—if AaAaAA! taught me anything, it’s that my extreme sport career would be short-lived. If you’re also into armchair sports you should pick this game up, then drop by our forum thread. We’d love to hear about all your close calls.

TouchArcade Rating:

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