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Robbery Bob [ $0.99 ] has moments where you can tell it was designed by someone who cares. I’m not implying that that is a rarity, but you do rarely see the level of care that portions of Robbery Bob exhibits. Unfortunately though, those portions are few and far between, and what is in between is, well… Uninteresting.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Robbery Bob’s premise is simple: sneak into houses, steal items of value, leave without getting caught. There is a thin narrative wrapped around these acts, but this isn’t a game about story, it’s a game about the sneaking mechanic. And it is that mechanic that the game lives or, more often, dies on. Things start off real strong. Sneaking around the first few houses shows off a lot of the potential for the mechanic, but the game soon devolves into a repetitive room-by-room hunt with obstacles sprinkled haphazardly around. But, again, I’m getting ahead of myself.

Sneaking into a house is easy, the front door almost certainly is unlocked, and once inside Bob has to assess any potential threats to his mission (taking care to avoid them.). “Threats” can include dogs, cameras, old ladies, other humans, and, most importantly, the police. Luckily for Bob, there are ways to avoid these threats. Unluckily, for you they are almost all a pain to use. The methods for avoiding detection range from mundane (hiding in a planter) to the interesting (leaving doors open to pull patrolling inhabitants off their path). Each one of these methods of avoidance are fun, if not a little frustrating the first couple times, but they show their one dimension-ness and tedium by the eighth or ninth time you employ them.

While playing Robbery Bob, I couldn’t help but think about Shaun Inman’s brilliant The Last Rocket [ $2.99 ]. Inman, like the team at Level Eight, had to stretch a simple mechanic over 60+ levels, while keeping it interesting the whole time. He succeeded by not only developing interesting level mechanics, but also by weaving those mechanics together. If you’ll forgive those cliche, by the end of The Last Rocket, you had a veritable symphony of mechanics woven together beautifully. Robbery Rob goes half way in that endeavor. The mechanics themselves are interesting (seeing, for the first time, the way a camera interacts with open doorways was what inspired the review’s opening sentence), but when those mechanics are just dropped into the level without context, they lose almost everything they have going for them. They don’t work together, they don’t play off each other, they exist only as a standalone obstacle, forgotten as soon as you pass them and move into the next room.

Again thinking of The Last Rocket, another thing it did so well was instilling the notion that once you figure out the puzzle, you could move through it with nothing but grace and ease. Unfortunately, Robbery Bob never seems to get to that point, and therefore you never feel like you could replicate a victory. The last levels of any particular area (of which there are 3) feel like a crap shoot with your victory being tied more to chance than to skill. I, just now in fact, went back to try and finish the last level of the first area again and failed 3 times before I was able to do it.

While the game offers plenty of gameplay for the price, including encouraging you to go back and perfect all the levels (ala Angry Birds), it never hooks you like a game of that ilk should. It is a game where the potential is sky high, but you feel like the game itself stayed on the ground, only looking up every now and again. It fails to make a promising mechanic interesting.

Robbery Bob isn’t bad by any stretch of the imagination, it just isn’t good.

TouchArcade Rating:

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It’s been over a year and a half since we last covered the boy wizard and his Lego debut on iOS. Now, after much waiting the adventure is finally ready to be concluded with Lego Harry Potter Years 5-7 [ $4.99 ]. While most Potter diehards will likely flock to this version and have a decent time, a few annoying missteps keep the title from having a wider appeal.

As was the case for the previous Lego Potter game, Years 5-7 is a port of an already existing portable game for the 3DS and more recently, PlayStation Vita. This means that you’re going to have (for the most part) a fully-featured game with a wealth of content. You’ll play through the final four movies of the series reimagined in the now-typical Lego way, each with its own chapters and sub-chapters. In addition, there are tons of unlockable characters as well as collectables. Suffice to say, there shouldn’t be any worries about getting your money’s worth with this title.

Gameplay is standard for what you’d expect from a Lego game at this point. You’ll spend the majority of the game engaged in simple exploration and puzzle solving, with some occasional combat thrown in for good measure. And, of course, you’ll spend a lot of time collecting studs which can be used to unlock new characters who have abilities that can open up previously locked areas. One new element added to the mix is the inclusion of Wizard Duels, which pits your character against another wizard in what is essentially a rock-paper-scissors battle for wand supremacy. While I didn’t think it added much to the overall gameplay, it was still a welcome sight for variety’s sake.

It feels strange saying this, but I was impressed with the visuals in Years 5-7. There was a certain clarity and visual sheen surrounding the in-game environments and character models on the iPhone 4S which put the game on par (or even better than) its portable console brethren. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for the movie cutscenes, which were incredibly compressed. The audio suffers from a similar fate with annoying artifacts which simply feel out of place.

An interesting side effect is the fact that Years 5-7 will drain your iPhone’s battery very quickly. It seems like an obvious statement to make when you’re dealing with graphically-rich games, but I was still surprised at the how fast it drained (60-70% in about two hours of play). Just keep this in mind if you plan on a heavy gaming session away from a power source.

One of the areas we enjoyed in the previous Lego Harry Potter game was its intuitive control scheme, which used a more touch-centric (tap to move, swipes, etc.) method for controlling your character vice a virtual control pad. Unfortunately, Years 5-7 moves away from that style and settles firmly on a virtual joypad complete with various action buttons. While a virtual gamepad scheme is nothing new, the implementation feels off with small buttons that aren’t clearly labeled and the occasional non-register of a tap. Other actions, like specifically selecting a spell, become exercises in redundancy with the current control setup.

There are also a few nagging issues on top of the controls that just bring the experience down. The camera angle occasionally put you in a position where it’s hard to see pitfalls and other insta-death elements, causing sudden death if you’re not careful. I also encountered several situations where it was possible for your character to just get trapped on objects and just hang. Thankfully, the game will mercifully kill you after being this way for a while, but these sorts of bugs just shouldn’t be happening.

I’m happy to see that the Lego Harry Potter series finally completed on iOS. However, I’m not sure why it took so long for this port to land on the platform. Sure, Years 5-7 looks good visually, but the switch to a virtual gamepad along with the issues mentioned above deter the game from being better. As it is, the Lego gameplay is intact, meaning that fans of the series should continue to enjoy it. However, you can do better if you’re simply looking for the next great action/platform game.

TouchArcade Rating:

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Aby Escape [ Free ] is the newest freemium title from BulkyPix and Pixel Ratio, and a 3D spin on the iphone’s popular runner genre. Instead of dashing full speed to the left or right sidescroller style, the game plants the camera just behind Aby’s back and leaves it to you to guide the terrified raccoon down paths cluttered with rocks, cars, animal herds, beer-bellied hicks who lie in wait until you approach, and other obstacles.

To keep your unstoppable force from running smack-dab into immovable objects, you tilt your phone to weave side to side, swipe your thumb up the screen to jump, and swipe downwards to drop to your knees and pull off a Catwoman-in-Arkham-City slide, minus revealing cleavage. (Yeah, I know. Can’t have it all, though.) The core gameplay idea is reminiscent of Temple Run [ Free ], but Aby Escape does a nice job at iterating on the formula with some new ideas and some variety.

The game features two game modes: Story, and Unlimited. In Unlimited, your goal is to stay alive for as long as possible. You accomplish that feat by weaving in and out of danger to pick up shoes that keep your perpetually draining energy meter topped off. Aby gradually picks up speed the longer you survive, making extended play an exercise requiring absolute focus and twitch reflexes. Besides shoes, you can grab coins with which to purchase power-ups, characters, new Unlimited levels, and other unlockables.

And that’s where the trouble begins. The first time you load up Aby Escape, only one Unlimited level, Greystone Park, is available. Two other Unlimited stages are available from the in-game store, but at a cost of more than 3000 coins each. Want to try Story mode? That’ll run you 7500. You can unlock these modes in one of two ways: grind Greystone Park and pinch your pennies for hours on end, or shell out real money for IAP coin bundles.

The unbalanced economy pervades in other ways. Besides new stages, the shop also sells items like speed boosts that blast you forward and render you impervious to harm. The problem is, every item carries an exorbitant price tag. Each item can be upgraded up to five times. The first upgrade for each item costs 400, the next 1200, then 3000, and so on. Handy, but a major cut into your savings when you’re stuck with only one level to play. Playable characters and different types of feet like hairy Hobbit toes go for between 2000 to more than 4000, but don’t alter the game in any way; they’re purely for aesthetics. I hate to harp on this point, but with only one level to play, I simply considered all other purchases a waste until I’d invested in at least one change of scenery to spice up my time with the game.

Unlimited levels feature challenges that reward you with coins, but some of them just don’t make “cents.” Buy two upgrades at 400 coins apiece, get 50 coins back for completing the challenge. Uh, no thanks. I bought an IAP item that gives me two coins for every one I picked up, but that only increased my income from a drip-drop to a steady trickle. Eventually I shelled out five bucks for 20,000 coins—not because I wanted to, but because I felt like I had to. It was either that or more grinding. I unlocked the last two Unlimited levels before diving into Story, a sprawl of levels spread across Greystone Park and two new areas, the same ones you’ll play in Unlimited if/when you fork over the coins.

Story tasks you with racking up a high score by staying alive as long as possible and collecting every pair of shoes on each stage. Running into obstacles knocks points off your score and sets you back at a checkpoint. Most checkpoints set you so far back that you’ll have forgotten earlier terrain in your effort to remember what to do in the area that tripped you up, which amounts to a lot of frustrating memorization and trial and error.

Technical issues also abound. The frame rate chugs sporadically, spelling certain death in trap-heavy regions. Also, since you spend the game running forward into the distance, terrain you pass slides backwards as you run along but some of it slides too slowly, clogging the screen and blocking your view of the next hurdles. More seriously, though, was a store calculation error—I had more than the 400 coins I needed for an upgrade, but the transaction somehow took my wallet down to -97, which shouldn’t even be allowed to happen—and a crash bug that dumped me back to the home screen every time I tried to load an Unlimited level.

With so many strikes against it, what could possibly convince you to help Aby Escape? Because I’ll be darned if it isn’t fun. Grinding grew monotonous only because, really, who wants to look at the same environment over and over in any game? Actually <em>playing</em> the game is quite enjoyable. There’s a feeling of satisfaction and skill in any runner game that comes from guiding your scurrying lemming over, under, and around obstacles, marveling at your response time, dexterity, and lasting for as long as possible before inevitably slamming into something that reduces your bones to a fine powder.

Collecting coins, shoes, and power-ups requires near dead-on collision to register, but aside from the somewhat sluggish tilt-controlled weaving that doesn’t always keep up with the game’s gradually accelerating pace, the controls usually responded sharply enough that I felt encouraged to veer into danger and risk another visit to the Retry screen if it meant snatching an out-of-the-way coin placed in front of a trap. The game also plays fair by giving you a chance to shoulder past obstacles like cars and rocks unless you strike them dead on, which made me even more willing to dash in front of dangerous objects and grab goodies.

Three strong redeeming qualities ultimately saved Aby Escape from outright deletion. It’s fun, it’s deep (you’ve still got all the challenges and your personal records to break even after you’ve opened everything up), and it’s free. If this were a paid game, I’d knock a star off the grade, and fairly. The game really should offer activities from the get go or at least mark down the fee for additional content, but what is there provides loads of entertainment.

TouchArcade Rating:

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From the very first time I launched Pandemic 2.5 [ $0.99 ], I was out to obliterate humanity. My implement of destruction was a virus I called “Iloveyou”—named for a classic. Iloveyou started its life in South Africa, a humble disease with a single carrier. He probably didn’t even know he was sick. At first, we were asymptomatic.

Iloveyou had room to evolve, with 8 EvoPoints to grow into. I spent them carefully. I enhanced our heat capacity, so we wouldn’t die out in the desert. I developed our first symptom: rhinorrhea, the runny nose. A little mucus can go a long way toward spreading a cold, I reckoned. I hoped to spread out to insects, but we weren’t yet advanced enough. I threw in dysuria and photophobia for good measure—not enough to kill our hosts by far, but enough to cause a little discomfort and hopefully improve our spread.

Then we began. The number of infected grew quickly, then stalled out. I had a few more EvoPoints to work with at this point, so we brought in our insect friends. Even with a few more symptoms, Iloveyou didn’t make it much further than that; we were too slow and our infection vectors just sort of got better. But I learned from that first experience. On our next outing we made it to the next tier of symptoms, picking up a cough. Then our victims began to suffer fevers. We lost a few of the infected early on, but we were finally on our way.

And so it went. At first we refrained from killing our victims. Hosts are more important than corpses. We spread across borders before anyone knew to shut them, took out hospitals before anyone knew what was going on. Once most of the world was within our grasp we took the next step and became fatal.

When people started dying, they knew they had a problem on their hands. They mobilized quickly, developed a vaccine almost before we could react. It was too late for most of them, but it was also too late for us: the people that were left were cured, and we would never see our dream of total global destruction come true. Granted, it was quite the morbid dream. It made me a bit queasy to see the number of living humans dwindle, sure. But it’s never nice to lose.

If all this sounds familiar, it might be because you’ve played Pandemic 2. The Flash game has been around for years—it even has its own popular meme. Pandemic 2.5 is a complete overhaul for the mobile crowd. With a new interface and a few improvements, it’s decent port of the desktop classic.

Decent, mind you, but certainly not great. There are little problems, like awkward text fields and introductory text that flows right off the screen. Bigger issues include things like a complete lack of tutorial, and a news ticker that flies by too quickly to read if the game is in anything but full-on sloth mode.

The biggest issue of all is that the game can be agonizingly slow. It’s simply not ideal for a mobile platform in its current state. Playing Pandemic involves a lot of waiting, especially if you’ve already lost the ability to win and just want to get your final score. Normally I’d pull out my phone while the slow parts passed, but, well, you can see the problem with that.

Here’s the thing, though: Pandemic in this form is just as compelling as it’s ever been. Some of the bigger problems with the Flash game have even been worked out. The meme is outdated, as Madagascar is no longer ludicrously paranoid unless you’re playing at the top tier of difficulty. There are also traits (and associated achievements) you can unlock by completing hidden requirements, something that builds a sense of overall progression. If you can ignore the interface problems, this is the best take on the subject matter yet.

So consider this a cautious recommendation. If you can stomach the mild horror of obliterating humanity, if you can handle a somewhat clunky port, it’s pretty great to have Pandemic on the go. It sounds as though Dark Realm Studios is already working on fixing some of the game’s problems, too. Me, I’m working on a new strategy. With luck, we’ll take the island nations, wipe ‘em all out before they know what hit them. Awful to contemplate? Sure. But Pandemic makes a convincing argument: isn’t it time we gave the bugs their turn?

TouchArcade Rating:

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Any gamer who has been at it for as many years as myself certainly has a shortlist of particular standout favorites that set themselves apart for one reason or another, having indelibly left their mark upon his or her twitchy gamer brain. One such game that can be found on my list / burned into my brain is the Apple II title Wings of Fury, written by Steve Waldo and published by Broderbund in 1987. It’s a side-scrolling, carrier based aerial shooter set in the Pacific during World War II. The mission of the game is to use your Hellcat’s canons, bombs, rockets, and torpedoes to wipe out island installations, enemy ships, and defend your carrier against aerial attacks. It’s a lot of fun and is particularly challenging due to the somewhat realistic flight mechanics and the need to delicately land on the carrier to refuel / rearm.

Others out there who, reading this, fondly recall Wings of Fury (it also made it to the Amiga [video], C64, DOS, etc.) will be pleased to know that a rather well-done iOS remake has been put together by Korean studio Idea Spoon Games and released into the App Store.

Wings of Valor [App Store] is an iPhone title that pretty much captures the experience of the original — it looks like it’s all there, with simple, clean graphics. Of course, for a game like this, the onscreen analog stick is no match for the real-world, analog Apple II joystick with which I piloted my Hellcat in decades past, but the Wings of Valor controls work well enough.

In a chat this afternoon, author JY Kim of Idea Spoon explained that he is a huge fan of the original game and, lamenting the lack of App Store titles of the particular sort, decided seven months ago to bring the game, himself. Kim is a one-man operation and, as such, has rolled everything on his own, including the 2000 images that were drawn to bring the game together, the physics and particle system, and the camera / zoom system. He takes particular pride in the last, which he felt needed to be close to perfect in order to make the game work. He plans to soon bring improved visuals, better dogfight AI, and iPad support to the title.

Folks in our forums are having a pretty good time with Wings of Valor, so far.

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TouchArcade has gone a round with Bar Oasis before, back in 2010 when the first installment came out. However, I was completely unfamiliar with the game when I got word of Bar Oasis 1.5 [Free], which promises to bridge the gap between the first game and the sequel. I wasn’t sure what the difference was exactly until I read the fine print: the second game will give you access to tons of extra content, so we’re just getting a taste here. But the taste I got left me ready for much, more more.

For those of you who never played the first game in the series, Bar Oasis 1.5 offers an experience much like that of the Phoenix Wright series and other text-heavy games. In reality, it resembles a visual novel more than the Phoenix Wright series does, so if you don’t like lots of dialogue, don’t download this one. However, if witty banter and great mini-games appeal to you, you’re going to adore this. It also feels a bit like playing a really good anime, which is the ticket straight to my heart with no stops inbetween.

In Bar Oasis 1.5, you play the role of an attractive girl named Carla who loses her job and finds herself at Bar Oasis much by accident. Despite your relative lack of experience, you quickly find out from the head bartender that the guy they usually count on (Vincent, from the first game) has gone running off to China after some elusive woman. And so, they’re desperate for help. You get drafted into his old spot, with lots of characters waiting to get to know you as you learn how to be a great bartender.

Bar Oasis 1.5 has two main modes: story and making drinks. The game utilizes motion, so you will actually tilt the phone to pour and shake it when you use the mixer. One of my only complaints about the game was trying to master the timing (but I think that’s part of the point). Sometimes it seems like timing is the key, as there is a timer in the top right corner that tells you how well you are doing.

It says “Pro” if you’re fast enough, and will eventually tick down to “Amateur” if you take way too long. Making the mix drinks also means memorizing the backbar and where things are, which will come naturally after you’ve made enough preliminary drinks. The game is very smart about this as you serve a whole lot of bottled beer and whisky shots before you get down to more varied orders.

One really cool thing about the game is that all the drink recipes are accurate, so as you unlock them all, you’re also getting a handy recipe app to make cocktails with in the process. It’s when you notice little details like that that you start to realize how clever this game’s entire concept really is. You also have a drink making mode available right from the menu, so you can access the recipes easily and also practice making the drinks. This comes in really handy if you are struggling with getting the drinks right in story mode.

Bar Oasis 1.5 is easily the best title I’ve played on my phone in ages, but that’s also a matter of personal taste. I’m a huge fan of innovative concepts, and in a sea of physics puzzlers, you really notice when something swims to the forefront. The character development is clearly the focus of this game, and it’s nicely balanced with the drink making mechanic.

There are only 20 drinks available in this limited free teaser version, but the developers promise 100 in the upcoming Bar Oasis 2. Frankly, I would have come back just to spend more time with the characters, but I’ll take more drinks to learn as a backup excuse. Don’t miss this one. It might be free, but I’d have easily paid for a title as interesting as this and am eagerly looking forward to Bar Oasis 2.

TouchArcade Rating:

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While dwindling on consoles, RPGs of all shapes and sizes are flourishing on mobile devices. There have been some truly creative and unique RPGs released in the past few years, and perhaps none is capable of tugging at your heartstrings and pushing you to fight just one more battle than Game Stew Studio’s new iOS game, Tower of Fortune (ToF) [ $0.99 ].

Like Puzzle Quest and Sword & Poker before it, ToF infuses a basic role-playing game with mechanics drawn from a completely different genre entirely—in this case, slot machines.

The premise of ToF is pretty simple. You’re a hero. You’ve a lady to rescue. You need to gather coin, get loot, and defeat evil incarnate. A “game of the year”-winning story, this is not, but the simple framework provides enough context to the game to make it work.

Before you even get to the gameplay, though, you’ll be hard-pressed to ignore ToF’s eye-catching retro art style and ear-pleasing chip tunes. Both the game’s quirky, NES-era visuals and strong selection of catchy music make the game visually and aurally simplistic and yet undeniably charming, like the greatest Gameboy games of yore.

Presentation is all well and good, of course, but how does the game actually play? Surprisingly well. ToF succeeds in blending the requisite RPG features with the mechanics of a slot machine, albeit with only one truly noteworthy quirk.

Currency is central to ToF, and it’s what powers all of the game’s subsequent systems. To progress through the game’s world, you’ll need coin. To battle, you’ll need to spend (and potentially lose) coin. To upgrade your hero, you’ll need coin. To heal after battle, you’ll need coin. To buy items… you get the point.

There are two ways to earn coin in the game: through fairly nonintrusive microtransactions or by fighting monsters. Given that the combat is the star of the show, most will be content to get their hands dirty and earn money the hard way, and it’s not hard to do so willingly as prices aren’t as exorbitant as they are in similar games.

This is where the game’s slot system comes into play. When you enter combat, you’ll be greeted with a simple one-line, three-reel slot machine. The reels are filled with icons that represent doing damage, taking damage, gaining XP, and gaining coin. Whatever icon appears on the left-most reel determines what happens during the turn, and the more like icons matched, the more significant the effect. In addition, the effect is multiplied by repeat matches, so if you get XP one spin and XP again the next, you’ll get an XP bonus.

One more level of both gambling and depth is added to the battle system by way of a simple “Bet” button. Prior to a spin, you can bet your coin to enhance the effects of the spin. Every effect is doubled after a bet, so you’ll be crossing your fingers in hopes of avoiding taking damage icons and screaming in joy when you hit a full three-match of XP or coin. This becomes critical as bad guys get harder and have more health.

I’m not much of a gambler, and random elements in games tend to annoy me to no end—here’s looking at you, Crisis Core. But after hours of playing, I’ve found that ToF manages a fine balance between feeling cheated and feeling lucky, and hard battles are nail-biters as a result. As you begin to fight more difficult monsters, the high wrought by a good string of luck and the stomach-sinking disappointment wrought by a bad one make the game quite compelling.

In practice, the system works surprisingly well. This is largely thanks to the game’s simple loot and upgrade systems, which allow you to upgrade your character periodically with simple items and stat boosts, you can do a decent amount to prepare for battle and tip the tide in your favor.

If there are any complaints to be had, they would revolve around the game’s sense of progression. Progression is a critical component of any RPG: it’s what keeps the genre’s fans playing, even when everything else—from storyline to graphics and beyond—may falter. ToF struggles a little bit in this regard, as progression is too random and too fleeting to feel rewarding in the long run.

Moving through the game from area to area requires paying escalating “unlock” fees. This means that you’ll need to amass a substantial purse. This in-and-of-itself wouldn’t be that bad, but when combined with the game’s rougelike treatment of death, you can find yourself frustrated.

Should you die, you’ll lose all the equipment, levels, and upgrades you earned as you play—you keep only your unspent coin. As a result, some may beat the game in a day while others could theoretically play it indefinitely and never see the end.  This near-complete randomness makes it hard to feel any sustained, substantial, and satisfying feelings of progression.

In spite of this issue, though, the game never stops being fun to play. The game’s ability to produce such a wide spectrum of emotional highs and lows is no small feat for a game, and additional elements, like the game’s fun mini-quest system that introduces small objectives that reward XP when completed, do wonders at keeping things fresh.

Ultimately, Tower Of Fortune may not have the progression elements, compelling story, or depth of its meatier RPG brethren, but it has all the stats, levels, loot, triumph, and tragedy a RPG fan needs for on-the-go gaming.

TouchArcade Rating:

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One of the great indie success stories on the App Store was last year’s mega hit Tiny Wings [ $0.99 ] from lone developer Andreas Illiger. While the core gameplay hook wasn’t entirely unique, it was executed to perfection, and literally anybody who was capable of tapping a touch screen could pick up Tiny Wings and get hooked. Beyond just the gameplay though, Tiny Wings had that special, indescribable “something” that allowed players to connect with it on an emotional level, something we noted in our review of the game.

The kind of overnight success that Tiny Wings saw must have come as a pretty big surprise to Andreas Illiger, who seemed to shy away from all the newfound attention. He released several updates for Tiny Wings during the course of the year, but remained mostly silent about any future development plans.

Recently during the A Maze Festival in Berlin last month, Andreas chatted candidly with fellow developer Flow Studio in an interview the company has posted on their blog. In it, Andreas talks about some of the inspiration behind the creation of Tiny Wings, how its sudden rise to the top was actually very scary, and how becoming an overnight sensation hasn’t really changed him. Andreas sounds like a very humble, artistic individual.

Also mentioned in this interview is that Andreas has been hard at work for the last 10 months on his Tiny Wings follow-up, and that it is just a few weeks from being finished. It will again be an iOS title and again he’s developing the game all on his own, but beyond that he isn’t divulging any details about what the game is.

We’ll be waiting anxiously for any more news regarding Andreas Illiger’s latest release, which sounds like it will hopefully be soon, but in the meantime check out the short interview for some insight into one of iOS’s most beloved titles Tiny Wings.

[Via Flow Studio Blog]

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How many games does it take before you can call a developer a sure bet? Radiangames has been bringing its games to iOS like clockwork lately, and we’ve been impressed. Super Crossfire HD [ $2.99 ] and Fireball SE [ $1.99 ] are both excellent games that iterate on arcade classics, and the newest entry, Ballistic SE [ $1.99 ], also returns to a popular well: the twin-stick shooter. Like its predecessors, though, it’s a thoughtful take on the semi-stale genre. It makes up for familiarity with a heck of a lot of fun.

Ballistic SE has two big things going for it. It has a system of enhancements that let you customize your game every time you play (not unlike the Jetpack Joyride update that just landed), and it has ballistic mode, which is pretty much bullet time. Every time you fill up your ballistic meter, a button is primed. Everything slows down when you hit it: your ship, enemy orbs, even the music. As panic buttons go, it’s impressive and stylish.

The game also has a lot of amber. The color is everywhere: menus, interface elements, your ship, explosions, you name it. At the risk of dating myself, I used to play games on a monitor that looked like that; I don’t miss it. But there’s a method to this monochromatic madness. The amber is safe, your eyes drift over it. Every other color stands out, and those colors universally identify your enemies.

The enemy color coding is important enough that colorblind players might be at a disadvantage. The enemies are just orbs—some come in different sizes, but they all have the same general shape. But if you know what a given color does, you know whether an enemy is flying toward you or moving at random, whether it will dissolve before your guns or stand up to all fire. A firm grasp of the enemy colors is a good shortcut to survival.

Whether you’re playing Waves or Challenges, you’ve gotta survive. Waves pits you against ever-increasing waves of enemies, grinding you down over time. Challenges are a more vicious sort of play, with your choice of five pre-set combos of enemy types designed to take you out in short order. The one thing that can help stave off the inevitable? Your selection of enhancements.

Enhancements pretty much make the game. That’s not to say it isn’t good otherwise, but throw in enhancements and you essentially have a leveling mechanic that opens up a huge variety of play styles. You can speed up your ship, drop bombs in your wake, alter your shots, or speed up your ballistic meter. You can even pump points into your score multiplier if your confident that you don’t need any other boost more. It’s a fantastic little system.

Both modes give you access to enhancements, but they differ in how they present them. When playing a challenge you can pick ten enhancements right off the bat, and you’ll live or die by your choices from then on. In Waves mode you’re given a single enhancement point each time you hit a new level milestone. You power up over time based on your picks.

In practice, Ballistic SE plays out pretty simply. You have two sticks (with customizable positioning). One aims your guns, the other aims your ship. Standard twin-stick stuff. Aside from your ship there are three things on the field: enemies, of course, that come at you in waves, immovable bombs that destroy enemies when you hit them, and starbursts that increase your score multiplier. Deciding when it’s best to fly through the bombs is almost as important as learning to avoid and shoot down the enemy orbs. Knowing when to trigger your ballistic meter is another vital skill for long-term survival.

Long-term survival is, in fact, the name of the game. You get extra lives for hitting score milestones, so playing better means living longer and longer. The waves get ridiculous pretty quickly, but there’s salvation to be had with checkpoints that unlock after ever-increasing numbers of waves. You can restart from these checkpoints, but there’s a catch: the further in you start, the more your score will suffer. If you want to remain competitive on the Game Center leaderboards, you’ve gotta start from scratch.

None of these things are revolutionary; Ballistic SE doesn’t rewrite the twin stick shooter or bring us a brand new perspective on the genre. Instead, it’s an incredibly solid, well-balanced game that makes up in entertainment for what it skips in flash. Radiangames is carving out quite the niche on the App Store, and Ballistic SE does it proud.

TouchArcade Rating:

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The Binary Mill’s Mini Motor Racing [$1.99 / Free / $3.99 (HD) / Free (HD)] was initially released late last year, and we liked it quite a bit in our review. It’s a slick little top-down arcade racer with some great visuals, an excellent soundtrack, and tons of content to play through.

In our review, we mentioned how much we hoped that the multiplayer mode, which initially was local only, eventually went online. Well, this recent update adds not only complete online multiplayer via Game Center, but also an entire new championship to race in. New cars have been added, a few tracks have been “remastered,” and there’s a number of other tweaks they threw in as well.

If you already own Mini Motor Racing, make sure you snag this update. If you were waiting on online multiplayer, well, it’s here, so get on it.

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