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While iOS has become a haven for a large variety of strategy games, good RTS titles seem to come few and far between. Enter Amoebattle [$4.99], the latest title from Intrinsic Games and Grab. Hitting all the cues, Amoebattle does a good job providing a full RTS experience while making its own mark on the genre.

Amoebattle’s tale centers on your role as a new microbiologist exploring the microscopic world with the Amoeba Control System along with your AI assistant AMI. After some introductory research, you encounter rogue amoebas disturbing the ecosystem, which leads to a quest to discover the origin of these hostile beings. The overall narrative does an adequate job moving the story forward while not detracting from the overall experience. For most RTS titles, that’s all you can really ask for.

When it comes to gameplay, Amoebattle implements the standard RTS mechanics while infusing it with some novel elements. Missions are primarily linear advancement, with some stealth, defense and open-ended objectives thrown in for good measure. Amoebattle is also very unit-centric – there aren’t any buildings to produce units or gather resources.

Instead, your amoeba can simply replicate if they have a full ‘Food Point’ (FP) meter and sufficient power. FP can be acquired in a variety of ways depending on if your amoeba is an omnivore, carnivore, or herbivore (each classification also affects other attributes). For example, carnivores gain FP exclusively through attacking other units while herbivores can eat various plants to build FP. While you can use a full FP meter to reproduce, it also bestows increased stats, adding to the strategy.

Power, meanwhile, is a secondary resource that is slowly produced in the background (but can be sped up by capturing fossil artifacts). Players can utilize power to replicate or to launch a variety of probes onto the battlefield. Probes range from slowing down opponents to infecting them with a long-term poison and work well in providing additional battle options.

In addition to replication, your amoebas can also mutate into a variety of different units. Initially the unit pool is small, but as you journey through the campaign you unlock stronger and more varied units, each with their own stats and appropriate strategies. Mutation also requires power, meaning you can’t just wield it arbitrarily.

The above elements lead to a surprisingly deep gameplay experience. Each mission provides suggestions for completion, but as you unlock more options players can begin to experiment with different play styles. Whether you choose to bum-rush with close-range carnivores or utilize a balanced approach with ranged and support units, Amoebattle certainly keeps your options open.

Props also go to the control scheme, which offers an intuitive approach that works well on both iPad and iPhone. Amoebattle uses a combination of taps, drags, and scrolls (single and two-fingered) to control all aspects of the game. Admittedly, it’s a bit tougher to control on the smaller iPhone screen, but it still works surprisingly well. As expected, the game works best on the larger iPad screen.

There’s something to be said about Amoebattle’s difficulty. In short, this is one challenging game. The tutorial and introductory levels do an excellent job introducing core concepts, but once you reach the middle tier of missions, the game quickly stops holding your hand and leaves you to figure out the increasingly tough objectives. It’s important to note that despite the challenge, Amoebattle’s levels are fair. Just don’t expect to steamroll through all the levels with relative ease (especially if you’re new to RTS games).

Amoebattle’s other weaknesses are few, but do hold the game back from RTS perfection. The lack of a skirmish mode hurts replayability, as the game certainly has a deep enough system to make it enjoyable. The same goes for multiplayer, which would be perfect for this style of RTS. As it stands, Amoebattle has a decent amount of content with its campaign, but it would have been nice to have more to do outside campaign completion (besides achievement hunting).

Regardless, Amoebattle succeeds wonderfully at creating a touch-based RTS for iOS. When you take into account the deep gameplay, beautiful visuals (iPad-retina compatible, no less) and approachable control scheme, Amoebattle is a title well worth checking out and joins the short list of great iOS RTS titles.

TouchArcade Rating:

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On this week’s episode of the TouchArcade Show we power… actually, we stay pretty much on topic. At the top, we address a pressing bit of user feedback before jumping into the latest, hottest, and best in iOS. Fibble and On the Wind lead off our games segment, and then we gleefully dive into a bunch of news-y subjects after the break. Topics include the latest rash of 3rd party peripherals and EA being voted the worst company in that one Internet poll.

Feel free to join us. You can listen via one of the links below, or hey, subscribe to us on either iTunes or Zune. If you like us, subscribing is the easiest way to get our new podcasts the second they hit the web.

Also, don’t forget to rate us and be sure to denote your team affiliation.

iTunes Link: The TouchArcade Show
Zune Marketplace: TouchArcade.com Podcasts
RSS Feed: The TouchArcade Show
Direct Link: TouchArcadeShow-046.mp3, 36.8MB

And now, the show notes:

GAMES

• On The Wind [$1.99]
• Towers N Trolls [$.99 / UHD]
• Fibble [$1.99 / HD]
• Sky Gnomes [$.99]

JARED’S KITTY KORNER

• Super Catrio I [$.99 / Lite]

FRONT PAGE

• Controller Round-up: Apple’s rumored device, the BladePad, and An Interesting Camera-Enabled peripheral
• EA Voted Worst Company In America
• Square Releases Puzzling New Game

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The little things matter in flight games. When you crank up an engine, you want the jet exhaust to grease up the screen. You want to hear the thick, thunderous crack of a sound barrier break. And you want to feel like the world is insignificant as you slice through the air at 1500 MPH while a song that vaguely sounds like the one from that weird Cruise flick pounds in the background. Namco Bandai’s Sky Gamblers: Air Supremacy [$4.99] nails a lot of these little things, and while the premise sucks and it occasionally doesn’t look so great, few iOS games deliver as consistently as this one.

Backing up, Sky Gamblers is an arcade flight game that feels pretty similar to the Ace Combat series. It plays it loose with things like, say, physics and reality, but doesn’t try to pretend to be anything else other than an insanely fast-paced, action shooter in the air. It’s really good at leveraging these aspects, too: the sense of speed is fantastic and the maneuvering and shooting components feel blessedly fluid. These things define the experience.

A good chunk of Apple’s faithful should know this game already. It was one of the two titles given a substantial demo at the new iPad press event. As expected, it delivers on a visual level. The assets, and particularly the planes, are rendered with a healthy respect for the new iPad’s higher resolution screen, and most of the environments look alright, too. It also boasts a ton of atmospheric and effects touches that bolster the pace-pumping, action scenarios that dot its content landscape.

But while it nails a lot of the little things, it flubs a few, too. In particular, some of the texture work on ground details and buildings and infantry are straight up ugly, and don’t reflect the work put into the rest of the title. The tutorial in particular is a mess, and the voice acting isn’t so good, either.

The thing that it gets the most wrong is its own story. Told through a jumble of comic book-style entries as if it were a Max Payne, the premise is a mess of poorly constructed context and devices. From what I can gather, you play as a hotshot pilot who, suddenly, finds himself without an army to call home. After a canyon run, you meet up with a group of lovable mercenaries and then join up.

There’s just enough reason in its madness to justify the fact that you’re in a plane and charged with killing people — a lot of people, in fact, across a campaign that tries to feature every environment, objective, enemy type, and color in the Game Design Handbook.

In the first mission, for example, you’ll fly alongside a squad on a quest to kill enemy fighters across a field and over the top of a city. Later, in a dessert level, you’ll be asked to rip through enemy fighters while bombing ground infantry shortly before moving to a Bomb the Base objective. These layers and the sheer scale of each level hammer home the sheer speed your craft can go, and that adds a palpable thrill to each confrontation or traveling section. Dogfights on the other hand reinforce the gracefulness of flight, as you’ll need to spiral or otherwise dance away from lock-ons, circle for position, and hunt your prey airplane-style.

The latter is an important point: since Sky Gamblers doesn’t care about natural laws, there’s a distinct, teeth-rattling speed inherent in the combat design. Fights are all about how many bullets you can let loose while doing crazy stuff, like, say, flying upside down with the throttle all the way up. The same old flight game strategies still apply: you do want to get behind the enemy and execute successive passes, but the way you go about it in Sky Gamblers gives it an awesome edge. Everything just feels so fast; it’s bliss.

Flight games, strangely, have found a home on iOS. The controls seem to work, and this is no exception. The casual pro scheme in particular is great; the d-pad that controls the movement is robust and floats, and the pitch doesn’t get in the way. You can also use accelerometer controls, but those never clicked with me.

If the campaign doesn’t do it for you, then there’s a bounty of bonus modes and missions to check out. Team Deathmatch, Bomb the Base, and several survival modes are all ready to be played from the get-go. You can take these online, too, and the component seems, surprisingly, solid. I’ve yet to experience lag and the matchmaking is sharp.

If you have a new iPad, this is clearly one of THE games to get, as its boasting some of the best 3D, high resolution visuals at the moment. If you dig explode-y things and moving really fast, you’ll probably want to give this a look, too. Smart design bolsters both of these aspects. Check it out.

TouchArcade Rating:

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The description for Ziggurat [$.99] calls it “the end of a much longer story — a story which ends with The Last Human On Earth standing atop a stratosphere-high stone pyramid.” Incoboto [$3.99] could have been described similarly: “Incoboto is the end of a much longer story — a story which ends with The Last Human in the Galaxy trying to survive the heat death of the universe.”

It’s a uniquely lonely and melancholy game, and almost every visual and design tweak reinforces that. Inco, the protagonist and player-character, is tiny and feels insignificant next to the immense contraptions he has to manipulate to find new energy sources for his dying solar system; if you zoom the map out far enough, he disappears from sight completely.

Incoboto’s elegant one-finger touch controls keep developer Fluttermind from having to implement a cluttered user interface, keeping players’ focus on only a few things at a time. The relative abundance of inky black sky only reinforces the idea that Inco is thoroughly alone. In fact, the only communication he receives are from outdated corporate memos and the fragmented death rattles of the dead and dying inhabitants of the Milky Way.

Well … that’s not entirely true.

There’s a sentient star named Helios who chirps and bubbles his way through the galaxy  at Inco’s side, helping him solve puzzles and cannibalizing enough “starpieces” to reinvigorate the cosmos. Helios is consummately chipper, and puts Inco’s dire situation in sharp relief. The best science fiction makes the audience forget that the world is ending in favor of highlighting interpersonal relationships. It only takes a few minutes for Helios to become a charming and precious  sidekick, and Fluttermind achieve it with a few words of broken dialogue and a handful of facial animations. It also doesn’t hurt that cooperation with Helios is crucial to solving most of Incoboto’s puzzles. Utility breeds empathy.

Nevertheless, Fluttermind bring a sort of streamlined efficiency to the rest of their game as well. There’s not a stray piece of dialogue to be found, or a single puzzle or mechanic that doesn’t build upon, integrate, or recontextualize something that came before it.

Incoboto’s galaxy is comprised of a number of small clusters loaded up with machinery, contraptions, portals, force fields, and various other doo-dads designed to encumber Inco on his quest for starpieces. Each world or cluster introduces a new puzzle concept or piece of gear, usually accompanied by Tweet-able slogans or warnings from the cartoonishly evil, Cave-Johnson-era-Aperture-Science-esque Corporation. The worlds feel full and realized: as the Corporation spread, it makes sense that they’d leave defunct machinery in their wake, abandoned on planets slowly rotating about their axes.

The comparison to Portal doesn’t come lightly. A large portion of the puzzles Inco must solve are portal based, and the basics of momentum will be crucial to understanding the toughest ones. More generally, Incoboto falls well within the broad spectrum of physics puzzle games.

Each gameplay chunk is relatively short and discrete — gates to new worlds are unlocked as Helios eats more starpieces — and each new section introduces a new mechanic, giving Incoboto a feeling of constant forward progress. The real trick is how seamlessly each of Incoboto’s new lessons makes its way into the next series of puzzles, getting absorbed into an ever-expanding framework of mechanics and concepts. There are clear laws in Incoboto, but Fluttermind is at liberty to interpret them differently from world to world.

Each gameplay element — the puzzles, the bombs, the gravity beams — are relatively simple, but Fluttermind integrate them in such a way that the game never feels straightforward or boring. Incoboto’s complexity is matched by smart, efficient pacing. I often felt like I was mastering a complex system in a short amount of time. It also makes each section feel meaningful and genuine, giving Incoboto the feel of a much larger and fully-featured game.

In other words, when Incoboto is firing on all cylinders, it’s an empowering puzzle game that makes its players feel smart and successful, like the last gear in a Swiss watch.

When Incoboto stretches too far — when the puzzles seem impossible or, more often, when the touch controls don’t live up to the platforming required of them — it comes crashing to a halt. I spent three days firmly, mind-numbingly stuck in the KindWord system last week.

Finally figuring KindWord out was its own reward, but a single huge breakthrough isn’t quite the same feeling as the joy of sustained momentum, of watching Incoboto’s system gyrate in perfect harmony.  Incoboto is elegant and subdued, unafraid to juxtapose the vastness of the cosmos and the terror of inevitable burning out with the intimacy and charm of a small boy befriending a star. It’s tightly and efficiently designed and as much an experience as it is a game, one that I do hope you check out.

TouchArcade Rating:

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It’s hard to appreciate a novel game when clunky stuff enters the picture. Sminis [$.99] is one of the few Unreal Engine 3 games on the App Store that doesn’t look like an Unreal Engine 3 game, and it’s one of the few puzzlers out there that tries to be something different. I also have a man-crush on its attempt to feel at home on touch devices, as it doesn’t try to do too much despite being rendered in 3D. On the other hand, it suffers from a hairy problem: its core design flashes ruthlessness too often, leaving you squirming helplessly in the hands of overindulgent design decisions.

Sminis are tiny, and supposedly sentient, robot beings crafted by an evil scientist in order to help him do, uh, evil stuff. After a “freak accident,” the Sminis are free to bust out from the scientist’s contraption-filled lair. You play as a maestro-god tasked with guiding entire groups of Sminis simultaneously through the scientist’s Frankenstein machines. Lose too many Sminis to a saw, hydraulic press, or a moving platform, and it’s game over.

Think of Sminis like a new-age Lemmings. Sminis act on their own accord unless you tell them to start or stop with a simple tap on the screen. Presented in a couple of different perspectives, each level has you actively guiding these little guys through various timing-based traps. Sminis are a manufactured good, however, so they’ll keep spilling out of spawns as you guide one or two along a level’s rote path. The catch is that Sminis also possess timers. Stopping one may start others, and so on. If two Sminis touch, you lose both. Each level has a cap of Sminis you can lose. Greater difficulties stress increasingly clean runs.

In the smaller and more focused levels, the individual Sminis timer is an enjoyable, if not wholly pleasant, aspect. It’s a second layer of complexity that compliments the other perfectly. But later, the individuality of the game’s parts can feel overwhelming. Quickly enough, gone is the air of coherent, puzzle-driven play, as the entire experience devolves into a mess of sloppy reactions and stupidity thanks to the sheer amount of moving stuff on-screen. In these moments, it’s like Sminis is afraid to let you breathe.

In one level, for example, you’ll be forced to navigate Sminis moving from three spawns onto three moving platforms set at a very, very specific pace. The timing here seems to revolve more around luck. Take a second to think, and you’ll lose a Smini. Watch the platforms, and you’ll lose a Smini. I should note that, all too often, it’s possible to glean an absolute solution by peering into the level designer’s mind and synching each Smini at specific, undrawn checkpoints. Levels all have a specific rhythm, and you’ll squirm while trying to figure them out.

There’s some solace to take in the schizophrenic pacing; some levels indisputable walks in the park compared to their predecessors. Another helpful thing when you come down with the Sminis blues? The fact that it’s clearly different. It isn’t a match-three. It isn’t a block rotating game. And it isn’t a word game. It’s a novel experience, so that keeps you moving.

It’s disturbing that the consistently awesome look of Sminis hasn’t influenced what goes on in the game. It looks good, if not unique. Only a handful of UE3 titles on the App Store attempt to be something more than “Shiny Dude Kills Everything Part 3.” This has some touch and character, as well as a fun, cutesy vibe.

But while Sminis always looks good, it tends to take big, scary dives in puzzle quality. At the same time, it’s hard not to recommend it alongside a few caveats. Sure, it can be a tad ruthless, and yeah, the mechanics can feel clumsy, but in bursts, Sminis feels good.

TouchArcade Rating:

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Out at GDC 2012 I sat down with publisher Ayopa Games and, in the time of an hour, ran through seven different titles in a sort of marathon session. It was a lot to take in, but there are some real stand-outs here.

Some are new, some are updates. Let’s have a look.

MacGuffin’s Curse

Created by Brawsome and Green Stripe Snake, MacGuffin’s Curse is a game that falls under the category of Werewolf Comedy Puzzle Adventures. It is the tale of out-of-work magician and (hence) not-so-cunning thief Lucas MacGuffin who attempts to rob a museum to pay the rent, and finds himself bound to a magical amulet with the power to turn him into a werewolf (and back again).

The game consists of 150 different rooms across 11 different environments, such as junkyards, parks, mansions, museums, etc. Each room is its own grid-based puzzle that must be solved using Lucas in either human or werewolf form — or both (walking into a beam of moonlight triggers the transformation). In addition to the 150 core puzzles are around 100 secondary features / quests that serve to add variety and keep Lucas especially busy at all times. In the end, the ultimate goal is just to get the cursed amulet off of poor Lucas.

In a nice touch that retro gamers will enjoy, the soundtrack is available in chiptune format, sampled from a real SID-based C64, and can be accessed via an in-game home computer setup.

MacGuffin’s Curse won the Best Writing award at the 2012 Freeplay Independent Games Festival and will be available on April 19th as a universal iOS app as well as on Mac and PC.

Escape from Age of Monsters

In the fall of last year, Massive Joe released Age of Monsters, as sort of ultimate rock-paper-scissors game, to high praise. The studio’s upcoming Escape from Age of Monsters is a follow-up title in the form of a side-scrolling, endless run-and-jumper. The game sets you, poor Gizzard, and a group of orphans on the run from a horde of hideous creatures from all corners of the multiverse. You must tun through crumbling buildings, punch through walls with your magic gloves (and perfect timing, if you have it), jump from building to building, collect bonuses and power-ups, and battle bosses. With any misstep, the monster get closer and snatch up an orphan. Once all the orphans are gone, the next mistake is your neck.

As mentioned, there are walls to smash. There are also fireballs to whack, and both of these actions are color-specific; one glove is red, one glove is blue, and the right glove must be used at the right moment. The whole thing has something of a rhythm component to it, and in some sense Guitar Hero is brought to mind. The music in the game is provided by the Okai Sisters (nee The Binges).

Escape from Age of Monsters will be released as a universal app towards the end of April, with price as yet undetermined.

Pocket Heroes

At last year’s E3, our own Eli took a look at F5 Games’ Pocket Heroes and said “whoa, now that’s really cool.” And he was a hardcore D&D player. After checking out the title, here eight months later, I can tell you things have only gotten better.

Pocket Heroes is basically “Quest With Friends,” a Words With Friends-style RPG. It’s multiplayer-only and allows up to four players to share an asynchronous adventure within a push-powered fantasy world laden with steampunk detailing. There are 20 different types of enemies (spiders, skeletons, ogres, etc.), six character classes (human paladin, dwarven mechie, elf rogue, and the like) with more to come in the future, and 10 different character levels. The whole thing has a pixellated, retro look to it (it takes place in the world of Altair, after all…) and is arranged something like the early Zelda titles.

Pocket Heroes is set to arrive at the end of April and is being discussed in our forums.

Patchwork Battles

Coming this summer from Patchwork Games is a rather unique RPG strategy title known as Patchwork Battles. The game puts you in control of “mimics,” which are on-screen characters made of a patchwork of various materials — cloth, tinfoil, and leather. You, the player, take the role of a young man that is part of a family of Animators, magicians able to breathe life into the inanimate mimics. After finding an ancient tome in his attic, he reads through the story of his forefathers and begins reenacting the battles of past ages with his mimics.

Within the game, there are eight classes of four characters, in all, rendered of different physical material. Each mimic consists of a heart or core, along with five surrounding body parts. Parts can be exchanged between characters to push their abilities in a certain direction. Each part can also be imbued with spells to enhance capabilities.

The version I saw demonstrated was obviously in the early stages of development, but what’s there so far is intriguing. Patchwork Battles will release as a universal iOS app, and eventually make its way to Android, Mac, and PC.

Mailmen

From Sandstorm Interactive comes the iPad-only stealth puzzle game Mailman [App Store], which challenges you to get the mail delivered on time in the face of adversity. And, in Mailmen, adversity comes in the form of neighborhoods full of vicious, roving dogs — the mailman’s bane.

The game sets three mailmen, Johnny, Charlie, and Dave — each with their own special abilities — to pick up mail, deliver it to various marked destinations, and get back to the base without being torn to shreds by the aforementioned dogs. Why are the dogs in this town so vicious? It’s to do with the enraged, psychotic ex-mailman Newman (get it?), who controls the dogs in a bid to make life near impossible for the poor letter carriers.

In order to succeed, teamwork must be used to combine the various abilities of the three mailmen in question, in order to overcome the carnivorous canines. Dogs can be tied up, deceived with fire-hydrant costumes, and left puzzled by a quick up-the-tree getaway. A sort of achievement system that’s really more of a “collectibles” arrangement rewards skillful play and a benevolent hint pigeon can be called upon to aid when things seems hopeless.

Mailmen launched a few days back as a universal app and is available at an introductory price of $0.99.

W.E.L.D.E.R.

Back in November, we reviewed word-creation puzzler W.E.L.D.E.R. [App Store] from Highline Games and were impressed. W.E.L.D.E.R. (Word Examination Laboratory for Dynamic Extraction and Reassessment) is a game that can perhaps most easily be described as Scrabble meets Tetris. The game features an 8×8 grid which is full of letter tiles. The idea is to form words with four or more letters, by moving letter tiles around in various ways. The “Basic Swap” involves tapping any two neighboring letters (horizontally, vertically or diagonally adjoining) so they swap positions. The words must be written from left-to-right or top-to-bottom, much like a crossword puzzle. There’s no time limits, although a certain number of words must be formed to complete each level. When you form a word, the involved letter tiles disappear and any letters above cascade down to fill the gap, including new, off-screen letters.

Britt Meyers of Highline demonstrated an update to the game that recently landed, adding Gigawatt tiles for super scoring, new optional in-app purchasable items, overall balancing tweaks, an Undo button (iPad only), and various other improvements.

W.E.L.D.E.R. has known the distinction of iPhone Game of the Week and was the top selling iPad paid game, near its release.

Dungeon Crawlers

Early this year, Drowning Monkey released their aptly titled dungeon crawler Dungeon Crawlers [App Store]. The game is a visually well-done strategy role playing game that’s filled with witty humor, such as numerous Ghostbusters references (the main characters are Roy, Aegon, and Payter…) and the like.

Your band roams through the game’s various chapters and levels, encountering characters of all sorts, doing turn-based combat, amassing fortune, and leveling up. We reviewed Dungeon Crawlers shortly after its release, and really liked it, but felt that things moved along a bit too slowly for many players. The turn-based battle sequences tend to drag on in a fashion that may lead to frustration.

Drowning Monkey has recently released a v1.1 update to the game that brings a new chapter with three new levels, making for 5 chapters and 15 levels in all. A major addition is an in-game store where gold found in the dungeons, gained in battle, or purchased through IAP can be used to buy weapons, armor, and power-ups. The store offers over 250 items, in all. Additionally, a new “Select Level” option has been added so that players can easily go back and re-play a level with ease.

A v1.2 update that will bring online leader boards and an Arena Mode is already in development.

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We’ve seen a lot of endless runners at this year’s GDC, but none so far have iterated on the Jetpack Joyride model as well as Super Squawk’s Crash Cam. In the title, you control an overeager director as he hurdles through several Hollywood-themed levels, including a backlot. A power meter on his camera stand functions as a time mechanic. As you play, it steadily drains. To refill it, you’ll need to collect orbs scattered about.

The thing that caught our eye is the game’s reverse power-up. Grabbing one switches the director’s direction from the traditional left-to-right setup to right-to-left. It’s a small tweak, but it really gives the game a new-look kind of pacing. Crash Cam will also feature a full compliment of goals and perks, as well as accessories.

The build you’re seeing above in the screens is a work in progress. Crash Cam isn’t expected to launch on iPhone and iPad for another two-to-three months.

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This week’s episode of the TouchArcade Show is way more … irreverent than usual. It was a “slow” week overall, as studios are zipping their lips, so they can blow off our socks at Game Developers Conference 2012. The top of the podcast is a mash of talk that covers an insane range of stuff — from Android to muscles, it’s there. Towards the middle segment we do dip into games, and at the end we talk a little bit about iPad 3.

If this is your first show, wow, you picked an awesome week! To give us a listen, just hit one of these convenient links. If you like what you hear, consider subscribing to us on iTunes or Zune. It’s free, it’s awesome, and we love our regular listeners.

iTunes Link: The TouchArcade Show
Zune Marketplace: TouchArcade.com Podcasts
RSS Feed: The TouchArcade Show
Direct Link: TouchArcadeShow-041.mp3, 43.1MB

Here are your show notes:

GAMES

• Zombies, Run! [$7.99]
• NBA King of the Court [Free]
• Ziggurat [$.99]

JARED’S KITTY KORNER

• Cat-a-gory [$.99]

FRONT PAGE

• Apple’s iPad 3 Event Happening March 7

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On Valentine’s Day last month, League of Evil 2 [$2.99/Lite] launched in the App Store and into our hearts. The sequel to one of the best iOS platformers around didn’t mess too much with what was a winning formula, and instead offered up over 100 new levels of similar bite-sized hardcore platforming wrapped up in shiny new HD visuals. Whether you liked the new graphics or preferred the original’s pixel art, one thing that was certain was that League of Evil 2 offered up a ton more great platforming gameplay, something we appreciated in our review.

The one caveat to this was a curious omission of a feature from the first game. In the original League of Evil, you could run off of a platform and then double jump right out of the air, something that was essential in beating some of the extreme level times in the game. In League of Evil 2, you could still do a mid-air jump, but just one of them. Needless to say, this change caused a pretty big headache for people who were used to that feature, and since the League of Evil games are based around twitch gameplay, it was difficult to not instinctively try double jumping in the air over, and over, and over again.

Ravenous Games has heard this feedback and as of today’s update the original mid-air double jump is back in business in League of Evil 2. Another big change is a reworking of the 3-star completion times for many of the levels. The first League of Evil could be face-meltingly difficult, but this sequel was even harder, and in some cases impossible. Ravenous has gone back and ensured that the 3-star times in all levels are attainable now. Hopefully nobody out there banged their head into the wall too hard while trying to obtain 3-star times prior to this update.

There is the usual plethora of random tweaks and fixes in this update as well, but the big ticket items are the double jump fix and reworked level times. If you’ve been holding off on really diving into League of Evil 2 until things felt back to normal, you should be good to go after grabbing the new update.

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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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