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Ladies and Gentlemen, start your engines. As Nimblebit’s Pocket Planes continues to barrel through its beta period, we’ve had a chance to try out one of its new features. It’s been added since our GDC preview and we’re pretty sure you’re going to like it.

You know how Tiny Tower [Free] and Pocket Frogs [Free] have missions you can complete—stock this much of certain items, or breed certain colors and patterns of frogs? Pocket Planes is going to have missions, too, but they’re competitive. For these ones, you’re going to need a little help from your friends. Or rather, your flight crew.

A new Flight Crew challenge will be posted every so often—maybe twice a week. The challenges look to be pretty simple: deliver as many jobs (pieces of cargo and passengers) to a certain city somewhere in the world. You can’t just take any old thing, though. Everything in the game has a destination, and the destination needs to match the city for this to work.

Your Flight Crew can have as many or as few people as you can muster, but the more the better: the crews who manage to bring in the most jobs will win some very cool in-game prizes. Like, say, the bad boy below. Look familiar? Nimblebit is hard at work making up some very cool secret planes as we speak—here’s hoping for a good ol’ fashioned airship. And on top of the cosmetics, it sounds like there will be a Bux reward to boot.

Now Pocket Planes is still a work in progress, so none of this is set in stone. But currently, the only thing you need to join a Flight Crew is a Game Center account (which you don’t need to share with your crewmates) and a common Flight Crew name. If I were the sort of person who wanted to get a leg up on the competition, I might use that information to hit the forums and start drumming up a good team of people. While I was at it, I might try to recruit a few of the folks who have put 2323 pages of forum posts into trading frogs in Pocket Frogs. Those dudes seem like they might have the dedication for the job.

The rest of the game is coming along nicely, from what we’ve seen, and it looks like Zynga hasn’t caught on to it so far (fingers crossed!). Nimblebit isn’t ready to commit to a release window yet, but it can’t be too far over the horizon at this point. So stick around—we’ll have much more to show you as Pocket Planes gets ready to touch down.

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It’s been sort of a slow news day, so while we’re busy plugging away at busting out reviews from yesterday’s release onslaught, here’s two great deals you should be aware of. Actually, before you get either of these you should take a good long look at Ballistic SE [ $1.99 ] as I’ve been having a blast with it since it came out last night. But, anyway, on with the show.

Smash Cops, Free – [Review] – [Forum Thread] – Normally $2.99 and free for a limited time, Smash Cops is a really cool driving game where you (get this) play a cop, and smash into other cars. It’s worth checking out for the controls alone, because the way you drive the car is by “pushing” it with your finger. It’s hard to explain, and feels a little weird as first, but once you get into it you’ll wonder why more top-down games don’t employ similar controls.

Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer, $0.99 – [Review] – [Forum Thread] – Normally $4.99 and recently slashed to 99¢, Ascension is a deck building fantasy-based card game. I had some small gripes with the mechanics of the actual game itself in my review, but as far as a paper card game to iOS port, Ascension is flawless and worth checking out just to see how well it translates. 99¢ is also a stupidly good deal considering the physical version retails for $39.99. An expansion with new cards is available in game for $2.99, which sells for $29.99 in the real-world paper version.

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Keep crossing your fingers: an iPad or a handset version of Botanicula is still in the cards, Czech developer Amanita Design has told TouchArcade. But before it can go forward with this version, it needs to go back. “We are still fully focused on the PC and Mac version of Botanicula,” representative said. “First, we need to fix all of the bugs and update the game on all channels, and then we’ll start to port the game on tablets.” The updates are basically ready, we’re told, so work should begin soon.

We last heard about a possible port of the gorgeous new adventure game in October 2011, well before its release on other platforms. At the time, Amanita said it needed to be able to experiment before it could take an iPad or iPhone port seriously. That phase of the development appears to be just beginning.

“I’m sure there will be many technological challenges and we’ll have to adjust also the design at some places so the experience on the tablets is perfect, but we are definitely excited about this version because I believe tablets are ideal devices for this kind of game,” we’re told.

If you have a Mac or PC, definitely give Botanicula a spin. It’s a beautiful game with a well-realized world and a delicious premise. We’re thinking it has the potential to be the Next Big Thing on iOS, so here’s to some relatively smooth sailing as Amanita begins work on this version.

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Most puzzle games would have you believe that fun only lies under a pile of rigid rules. That doesn’t seem quite right, when kids have the most fun playing without any rules at all. Whitaker Trebella’s Polymer [ ] isn’t child’s play, but it only demands one thing: a shape can’t have unfinished edges, or it’s not a shape. Everything else is fair game, and that sure feels freeing.

To create shapes in Polymer, you slide rows of pieces back and forth, columns up and down. When you’ve found a stopping point and slid your last piece into place, tapping the shape destroys it. With that, poof, your hard work is gone. In its place you’ll find a fresh canvas and a big pile of points to soothe you.

Polymer’s first mode serves as a good introduction. Called “Two Minutes,” it gives you that much time to create anything you like. A hundred tiny shapes in a row, cascading into ever multiplying combos? Sure. A few carefully crafted behemoths? Go ahead. Quality generally scores over quantity, but your masterpiece won’t be worth much if you can’t finish it in time.

“One Polymer” mode does what you might expect: it gives you as long as you need to create the ultimate shape. Each piece that you manage to add to it rockets your final score to new heights, but there comes a moment when your shape is so large and complex that every move you make will damage the surrounding structure. The most important skill you can learn here is how best to delay that moment.

“Bombs,” the third and final mode, adds, well, bombs to the mix. These are pieces with timers and four unfinished edges. Working them into a shape doubles its score, but the game ends if a single timer runs down to zero. More and more bombs are introduced as the game progresses. Here you need to know your limitations—how complex of a shape can you make within each time limit?

You’ll begin playing Polymer with only the first mode and two kinds of pieces, a rounded corner piece with two free edges and another that caps ends. Reaching a certain accumulated score unlocks the next piece, and then the next mode. It’s a good system, ensuring that you fully understand how to play with what you have before things get more complicated.

Unfortunately, this same system might prove frustrating for some players. Since the scoring scales on a steep curve, players who can’t pull off large shapes will find themselves pecking away at unlocks for much longer than necessary. There are two ways out of that hole: improve, or pay your way out. Each unlockable can be bought if you don’t have the patience to earn it. It’s a little too easy to see this as a push to make extra purchases.

Better to put your wallet away, though. The game is more fun when you have something to work toward aside from achievements and leaderboards, and playing without pushing yourself won’t get you far. Not only that: it’s entirely possible to get ridiculously high scores without the unlockable pieces. At the highest tier of play, you’re probably going to need them. Before then, though, they can actually get in the way, making the board too complicated for beginners. If you find yourself in over your head, you can toggle the more complex pieces off for as long as you need.

As mentioned in our preview, music plays a big part in the Polymer experience. The mood of each mode is enhanced by its soundtrack, cheery, studious and tense in turn. The tones created when you destroy a shape are equally fitting. This is one of those games you’ll want to play with the sound on.

The visuals are somewhat less appealing, at least at first. The look is clean and minimalistic, but when the pieces are all strung together they start to look a little sausage-like. It’s not the most pleasant association. I forgot all about that slight distaste after making a few complex shapes. I’ve saved pictures of a few of my successes for later, and been tempted to tweet more than one. If waiting to acclimate to the look doesn’t work for you, try one of the unlockable color schemes. Some are quite striking.

The thing that keeps me coming back isn’t color or music, though. It’s not even the selection of game modes. The game draws me in because it lets me be creative. It’s freeing to play a puzzle game that lets the player decide when a piece is finished. It’s great to have the choice to create something pretty, or huge, or sophisticated. Polymer cuts away all but the most necessary of rules, and the game is all the better for that. Take a look, and share your best creations in our forum thread.

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On paper, Radiant Defense [Free] doesn’t stack up when compared to other tower defense titles. It shouldn’t be as good as it is. I mean, it only has ten levels, and its free-to-play model gives you just a handful of towers to work with unless you want to pay more. But Hexage is full of surprises, and this free tower defense game is certainly one of them. It might not work on paper, but it sure works in practice.

All too often, freemium titles either lock all the fun behind a paywall or let you skip right over the gameplay if you put down your money. Radiant Defense does neither. I can’t say for sure that you can get through all ten levels without making a purchase. I couldn’t, because Radiant Defense is crazy hard. Buying any (or all) of the four optional tower packs gives you more room to strategize, but it just barely makes the game easier. Paid or free, you’re going to have to get your hands dirty.

Radiant Defense offers a mix between static path defense and the ability to create complex mazes. Players are often handed a few loose modules between waves. These can be used to build walls. Sometimes this is advantageous—drawing enemies out along long, winding paths is a good way to make sure they die well before reaching their goal. Other times it’s suicidal. Some enemies regenerate, so luring them away from your carefully crafted kill zone just means they’ll continue on, fresh and ready for more.

The tower selection adapts to any situation the game throws at you. You start out with the ability to build or research ballistic weapons for pure damage, energy weapons to take out shields, and the other usual suspects—towers that slow or weaken the enemies, and powerful area-of-effect towers. The purchasable packs add variety, with mines and blades to bar passage, weapons of mass destruction, and a few things that are just plain odd. Each has its own cost and drawbacks, though, making for a decently balanced experience no matter how many (or few) packs you own.

That balance falls on the side of intensely challenging throughout. Radiant Defense is unforgiving, with brutally long levels (making up for their limited selection) and increasingly aggressive waves. The game never lets up—every time you think you might have a handle on all the tricks you’ll need, it throws even more enemies at you in even more aggressive combinations. It can be aggravating, but it makes winning all the sweeter.

Not every part of the challenge is as sweet, unfortunately. The worst bit is dealing with frustrating tower AI. Towers will happily shoot the first thing that crosses their paths, blithely ignoring targets that are about to hit the goal. This behavior is consistent, so you can plan for it. It might even be intentional—it certainly gives players a reason not to use tight corridors to their advantage each and every time. But as difficulty goes, this isn’t the fun sort. It can leave you floundering moments after you’re sure you have everything under control.

There are concessions to this frustration, though. Each wave can be restarted as many times as you need without penalty, so you’re free to experiment with the best possible moves you can make with the resources you have. Anything you do before beginning the wave will stick, though, and while you can sell back unused towers at cost, upgrades can’t really be reversed. Your strategy may hinge on what seems like a simple decision: whether to spend your cash in the lull between waves or save it for the madness in the midst of combat. The latter is easier to revert but much harder to pull off.

That sort of decision-making drives the strategy of Radiant Defense. It’s rarely just a matter of this tower or that tower. Instead you’re balancing upgrades, positioning, and pathing, all while you decide if you should meet the current threat with force or save up for an unknown future.

If you’re comfortable with difficult games, Radiant Defense is easily worth the download. It’s a nice little package—decent art and music wrapped around generally excellent gameplay—and the price is more than right. It’s refreshing to find a game that respects your intelligence, money, and time. All the better that it’s good fun, too. Take a look, and stop by our discussion thread to share your thoughts.

TouchArcade Rating:

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Three upcoming games recently popped up on our radar, and while we don’t really have enough details on any of them yet, smashing all three games together sort of makes a story, so strap in for this.

Inotia 4: Assassin of Berkel – When it comes to Korean action RPGs, the App Store seems to have two main staples, Gamevil’s Zenonia, and Com2uS’s Inotia. Zenonia is up to four different games on the App Store, and this upcoming title will be the fourth installment in the Inotia family. The “party battle system” in Inotia 4 sounds pretty cool, and like previous entries in the series I’m sure we’ll see all sorts of incremental improvements that these yearly sequels always seem to have.

Alexandria Bloodshow – A strategic card-centric battle game from Sega. Gamezebo got a preview of it, and used games like Plants vs Zombies to describe how gameplay works. I’m not too familiar with the original Samurai Bloodshow, but I’m all about any strategic game with online multiplayer.

N.O.V.A. 3 – Gameloft is teasing quite a bit of their upcoming Halo-like first person shooter these days. We expect it to be pretty similar to the previous two installments in that it’ll likely come packed with an awesome online multiplayer component to compliment the single player campaign. If that is actual in-game footage we’re looking at in the above video, it should be pretty rad.

We’ll have more details on these games as soon as we get them. Unfortunately, the best we’ve got right now is they’re all coming to iOS devices, and they’re all coming “soon.”

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Chillingo’s penchant for publishing dual-stick shooters returns with the release of Lock ‘n’ Load [ $0.99 ], a content-rich title developed by GameLab that hits all the right notes for the genre. While a lot of that content is initially locked away a bit tighter than I’d like, the gameplay, visual-style and presentation make up for that setback, leading to a game well worth checking out for the dual-stick shooter crowd.

Lock ‘n’ Load puts you in the role of a hockey-mask wearing protagonist taking on an evil magic-wielding girl whose minions trampled his garden bed. As you can imagine, the tone of the game is very tongue-in-cheek and does a great job making fun of itself. While the story obviously takes a backseat to the gameplay, I still enjoyed it more than most other dual-stick shooters, including the twist at the completion of the main campaign. Still, what’s more important is content, and Lock ‘n’ Load certainly has a lot of enemies to throw at you.

You’ll be taking on those hordes of minions with your choice of three weapons (you’ll have to unlock two of them) through mostly standard DSS gameplay. I say mostly because Lock ‘n’ Load does a great job spicing up the gameplay with good plot pacing and a variety of mini games. You’ll do collection quests, first-person carnival shooting – even a Space Invaders-inspired stint. Of course, there’s also a ton of opportunities to simply mow down the mobs. A second, harder difficulty is also available, along with a second unlockable campaign (and challenge missions) that focuses more on gameplay than story.

Visually, Lock ‘n’ Load looks impressive with a wide variety of backdrops and character models. I was particularly impressed with the assortment of environments used across the campaign, each with their own graphical effects. In addition, the game runs at a good frame rate and looked exceptionally nice on my iPhone 4S. Relatedly, I thought Lock ‘n’ Load did a great job with its auditory aspects, with the music setting the mood appropriately and decent voiceovers accompanying the story cutscenes and combat. It did get a little annoying hearing your character repeat the same catchphrases over and over but in general I thought the voiceovers did much more good than harm.

One of my few complaints about Lock ‘n’ Load is the way it handles unlocks with its in-game currency. Every upgrade and unlockable requires cash, which can be randomly dropped by enemies while playing the campaign or purchased en masse via IAP. As is becoming custom, while you can earn a decent amount of cash through a campaign run it won’t be nearly enough to unlock all the content.

Unfortunately, I think the amount of cash dropped in-game should definitely be adjusted. I ran through the entire campaign (with several restarts on some missions) and didn’t even earn nearly enough cash to unlock the first tier of upgrades. When you include all the challenge levels, skins, and second story mode, players will end up having to rerun through completed levels many times before they can earn enough cash to unlock everything.

On top of all that, unlocks don’t appear to transfer between iOS devices (unless you have the all-encompassing ‘premium pass’) meaning that simply spending a few bucks on cash to unlock extras isn’t going to cut it if you want to play on multiple devices. Also worth mentioning is a crash bug that’s affected some users. An update with a fix is already submitted, and in the meantime if this is affecting you turning on Airplane mode should work as a temporary fix.

Even if you have an adverse reaction to IAP, Lock ‘n’ Load still offers a decent amount of content with more that can be eventually unlocked (even if it takes a long time). When you combine that with the excellent visual style and content diversity, Lock ‘n’ Load becomes a highly recommended game. While we’ve had our share of good dual stick shooters, it’s rare to find one as well-rounded and content-rich (even if you have to unlock a lot of it). Gamers remotely interested in dual stick shooters owe it to themselves to check out this title.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Need more CCG action in your life? Great! You and Ubisoft are on level. Earlier this morning, the publisher finally popped the lid off of Might & Magic Duel of Champions, a free-to-play card game set in the Might & Magic universe.

Ubisoft didn’t divulge hard mechanical details in today’s announcement materials for whatever reason, but it has confirmed the following about the game: (a) Duel of Champions will have collectible cards, (b) players will fight each other with these cards, and (c) users will also be able to buy these cards. So, yeah… this sure is card game.

More information will be coming to the game’s official web site, and apparently a beta is open right now in France. We’re doing our best to dig up some more substantial details so stick with us. If the Assassin’s Creed card game proved anything, it’s that Ubisoft knows how to fund decent tabletop experiences.

[images via PocketGamer]

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