TouchArcade.ru

“Promoting synergy” is a pretty common mantra in today's corporate culture. It encourages all employees to work together in harmony to be stronger and more productive as a unit than they each would have been by working individually. The new game Corporate Fury [$1.99] from developer Swinecrafters is the exact opposite of this type of thinking. Instead, you are encouraged to battle coworkers in violent 3D arena brawls in an attempt to take their jobs away from them. There are a ton of wacky characters, plenty of crude humor, and enough fighting to satisfy any gamers needs in Corporate Fury, and it stands out as one of the more unique offerings for the iPhone.

The game takes place in a semi-open world that acts a large hub connecting the fighting arenas and story-related locations together. You start off as a lowly production worker who awakens after taking a brutal beating from your boss. Your buddy Mike, who also acts as the point man for setting up fights, is there to help you on your feet and explain what is going on since you can't quite remember after being beaten senseless. The first order of business is to visit the in-game shop called Frank's Goods, then head back to Mike to fight in some low-level matches until you are strong enough to defeat your boss and take his job from him. You will continue this process as the storyline unfolds and as you defeat the team of increasingly higher ranked corporate executives, culminating with defeating the top CEO and taking over control of the company.

The overworld in Corporate Fury is fairly large, although not exactly as big as something you would find in a Grand Theft Auto or similar game. In this world the atmosphere has been rendered uninhabitable, so you are left with a large indoor city filled with plenty of areas to explore and crazy characters to talk to. An automap in the pause screen lets you pick from the key areas and set a handy waypoint that guides your character to them so you don't get lost. Graphically the game looks pretty decent, and runs fairly smoothly even on older devices. There are some jagged edges and characters aren't exactly rife with detail, but the overall style of the game works really well and looks good. Most impressive is that the entire game loads quickly upon booting up, and there is no loading at all while playing the game itself.

Fighting in Corporate Fury is fun and totally over the top. An analog stick controls your movement with a button each for jump, punch, kick, and using a weapon. Early in the game it's pretty basic, but as you defeat opponents you earn credits to use at Frank's Goods. Here you can purchase an assortment of weapons, armors, special moves, and increased attributes. Once you've beefed up your fighter a bit, fighting gets more complex and satisfying. It's reminiscent of fighting enemies in the newer Ninja Gaiden or Devil May Cry games, as you can pull off crazy multi-hit combos on the ground and in the air. The weapons you can use are truly awesome, from hammers and knives to explosives and plasma cannons. The armor and accessories are equally interesting, and change the look of your character when equipped.

While Corporate Fury is a ton of fun to play, there are some issues in the game that really bothered me. Some of the opponents you must face to advance the story can be incredibly powerful, and you're stuck grinding away fighting random opponents until you can level up high enough to compete with them. Luckily the fighting is enjoyable and the assortment of random enemies is varied, so it's not too much of an issue, but it can feel repetitive at times. Also, traveling around the city by foot can feel a bit arduous, and a quick teleport to the main locations in the game would be a welcome addition. Finally, while you can save manually at your apartment and the game saves automatically when exiting with the home button, in my experience this hasn't always been reliable and I've lost progress because of it. It doesn't seem to be a widespread problem, and the developer is already working towards fixing these issues, but it's worth mentioning.

Corporate Fury is an incredibly ambitious title for a mobile platform, and while there are some technical and game design related issues due to this fact, the good far outweighs the bad. With a competent fighting system, dozens of crazy characters, and an interesting world to explore, there is plenty here to keep you busy for quite a while. Just be prepared for the crude humor in the game that is full of sexual tones, foul language, and midget references aplenty. The trailer above will give you a great idea of what you're in store for, and could easily sell the game on its own. Players in our forums are loving the game, and Corporate Fury is one of those titles you just have to see to believe.

[source]

With the recent release of Dodonpachi Resurrection [$8.99/Lite], developer Cave has set the gold standard for bullet hell shooters on iOS devices. One problem with that game, however, is that it just pushes too many pixels to be able to run well on older devices, leaving gamers with anything below a 3^rd generation device out of the loop. For those people, developer Firi Games, who previously brought Flare Elite [99¢] to the App Store, have something in store for you. Their upcoming top-down shooter Phoenix features quite a bit of onscreen action of its own, and runs smoothly even on the original iPhone.

Phoenix looks to do a couple thinks differently than your typical shmup as well. Instead of progressing through a series of predesigned levels, the entire game is one randomly generated level that scales the difficulty based on how well you are doing in the game. Tijmen Roberti of Firi explains how the gameplay will work:

The game centers around a single, procedurally generated infinite challenge. The goal is to destroy as many enemies as possible, going as far as possible, in an attempt to achieve the highest score. There is no set difficulty, instead Phoenix uses an AI director that adapts the difficulty on demand, depending on the player performance. In this way, Phoenix generates an exciting challenge for players of all skills. The procedural content generator can create millions of enemy variations, and combined with the adaptive AI director, no single play through will be the same.

Firi has developed their own game engine called the Flare engine which allows Phoenix to run well on all devices despite the intense action onscreen. To prove this, they created a video of the game running on an original iPhone exclusively to show readers in the upcoming game thread in our forums:

Phoenix will feature regional and worldwide online leaderboards to compete for high scores. One point brought up in our forums is that the ship you use seems unusually large for a top-down shooter. Firi explains that while the ship model itself is big, the actual hitbox is just the blue circle of the cockpit, and that will be the only part of the ship where you will have to avoid getting hit. True that Firi doesn't quite have the pedigree of Cave when it comes to developing shooters, but Phoenix is looking pretty good based on the video and should offer another alternative for bullet hell gameplay. If you've been feeling left out of the bullet hell fun due to having an older device, you can look forward to blasting and dodging bullets when Phoenix hits the App Store sometime this month.

[source]

A couple of weeks ago, we had a chance to get some hands-on time with the iPhone and iPad version of Puzzle Agent from Telltale Games. The story of FBI puzzle detective Nelson Tethers was coming together nicely for the iOS devices, and now the game is finally available. Puzzle Agent succeeds beautifully in the art style and story departments, but falls a little flat with the actual gameplay offered. If you go into Puzzle Agent expecting a robust puzzle game with a lot of content and replayability, you'll likely be disappointed. However, if you're looking for an excellent mystery to solve with humorous characters and an interesting plot, you'll find a lot to enjoy about the overall experience of Puzzle Agent.

The game starts with Nelson sitting at his desk in the FBI headquarters. You can tell he doesn't see a whole lot of action, as he is surprised to receive a phone call asking him to go on an assignment in the field. The eraser factory in Scoggins, Minnesota has ceased production, and thus been unable to supply the White House with their required allotment of erasers. All inquiries as to what the problem is at the eraser factory have resulted in odd puzzle-related responses from the townsfolk in Scoggins, making Nelson the perfect candidate to have investigate the situation. You'll travel to Scoggins to question people, solve puzzles, and uncover a twisted tale of what has gone awry at the eraser factory.

Puzzle Agent functions similar to other point-and-click adventure games, giving you a scene with various interactive elements to investigate. A circle will emanate from wherever you touch on the screen, and an icon will show up within that circle if something can be interacted with. I love this mechanic as it allows me to easily check an entire area for clues without tapping on every square inch of the screen. Talking with characters in the game is definitely the high point of Puzzle Agent. Each character is fully voiced and has multiple points of conversation to engage in. The amount of personality and humor that the characters exude through the dialogue is phenomenal, and playing through Puzzle Agent is analogous to watching a well crafted animated film. The art style is also very pleasing, featuring the minimalist hand drawn style of Graham Annable who created the Grickle comics and animated shorts.

iPad screenshots (click to enlarge):

The actual puzzles you'll be solving in Puzzle Agent are a mixed bag. Some are interesting, intuitive, and fun while others are just plain awkward and frustrating. Many times it's just not clear what you are supposed to be doing in a given puzzle. A hint system is in place in case you get stuck, so it never really prevents you from progressing, but it can be annoying to spend time trying to solve a difficult puzzle with trial and error when you are immersed in the story. Another frustration with Puzzle Agent is the controls. The game is designed very well for touch screen, but the actual responsiveness when touching or dragging items is not so great. It feels like the game is optimized for the mouse and cursor of the Mac/PC version, and using the larger surface of a fingertip doesn't afford the precision needed to perform some of the basic actions in the game.

There also isn't much reason to go back and play the game once you've beaten it, as the puzzles and story don't change. One important point to bring up is that Puzzle Agent looks far better on the iPad than it does on the iPhone. Many of the textures are blurry and show signs of artifacting, and are a far cry from the App Store screen shots that look like they are optimized for Retina Display.  This leads me to believe that it's just a bug with the release version that doesn't allow it to display the game in the proper resolution, although I have yet to confirm this. It doesn't completely ruin the game, but it is a significant distraction. The iPad version doesn't seem to exhibit this problem, and hopefully the issue gets rectified with the iPhone version soon.

Even with these issues, Puzzle Agent is still a really enjoyable experience. And that's what it really boils down to – it's better served as an exceptional entertainment experience rather than an exceptional game. The art style, music, voice acting, and story are incredibly well done, but the controls and puzzles are pretty hit and miss. If you're looking for something akin to an enjoyable interactive movie, Puzzle Agent serves this purpose really well.

[source]

We are mere hours away from Apple's latest media event held at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, CA. Few people know for certain what will be discussed today, but the rumor mill is on fire with what could be a potentially redesigned iPod Nano or iPod Shuffle as well as the somewhat inevitable iPod touch refresh. Photos of leaked front panels of what could be the new iPod touch have been floating around the Internet for quite some time now, and it appears that this year could potentially be the year that the iPod touch finally gets a camera– Maybe even a front facing camera to place FaceTime calls. Other rumors have been circulating including potential enhancements to the Apple TV and even revamping the pricing structure for some content on iTunes such as 99¢ rentals for episodes of TV shows.

Yesterday they announced that they will be streaming this event live:

Apple will broadcast its September 1 event online using Apple's industry-leading HTTP Live Streaming, which is based on open standards. Viewing requires either a Mac running Safari on Mac OS X version 10.6 Snow Leopard, an iPhone or iPod touch running iOS 3.0 or higher, or an iPad. The live broadcast will begin at 10:00 a.m. PDT on September 1, 2010 at www.apple.com.

If you don't have a Mac, iPhone, or iPod touch to watch the event on, there is a guide on MacRumors to watch the stream using VLC on a PC. Of course like all Apple keynotes we will be providing live coverage of things from the keynote that pertain to gaming, and we will be on site after the event to hopefully get some hands-on time with whatever new products are available.

[source]

Back in June at Apple's WWDC 2010 in San Francisco, we had a chance to sit down with Natalia Luckyanova of Imangi Studios, the folks who most recently brought us Harbor Master HD [free], to take a look at their upcoming dual-stick shooter Max Adventure, which we first previewed earlier in the year.

Max Adventure paints a friendly end-of-the-world scenario where all the adults have been abducted by aliens. That leaves you, young Max, as the only one who can save the other children and the world, in general.

We recently checked in with developer Keith Shepherd to find out how the game is coming along. As it turns out, a lot of progress has been made on the title since we saw it back in June. The game engine is now basically complete and the focus is currently on levels and content. Imangi is shooting for around 20 levels in Story Mode, with a handful of Survival maps available at launch. According to Keith, they're halfway there, with a mix of mission types currently in place:

• Rescue missions, where you go around saving kids trapped in the neighborhoods
• Escort missions, where you have a lead a particularly scared friend to safety while battling off enemies
• Area clearing missions, where you have to get rid of all the enemies in the area
• Bonus levels, where you get to run around and collect as much treasure as you can in a limited time
• Survival missions, where you have to fend off waves of enemies
• Boss battles

To give gamers an idea of what goes into putting a Max Adventure level together, Imangi recently released a time-lapse video that condenses four hours of level building footage into just three minutes. The video shows progress from a blank slate to a rough, playable draft, all within their own, custom-built, Mac OS X-based level editor. The accompanying score is taken from original, in-game music that Natalia is presently working on.

[ See our WWDC Max Adventure interview / hands-on footage. ]

Keith stresses that four hours to build a level may seem short, but it doesn't factor in the work put into the art assets by designer Kiril Tchangov, programming time, and play testing and tweaking time, which can take up to days for a single level.

And the latest addition to the game? Keith tells us that, recently added, is Max's ability to take over the flying pods of groups of aliens that attack on the wing, giving him the ability to take advantage of a pod's powerful weapons and to fly over low obstacles.

We'll post a close look at Max Adventure when it goes live in the App Store. Stay tuned.

[source]

We've been following Dodonpachi Resurrection [$4.99] for a while now, from its first announcement, to the first gameplay trailer, and even the pricing and release date.  And after all this anticipation, developer Cave's follow up release to the excellent Espgaluda II [$8.99/Lite] actually lives up to the hype. In fact, I like it even more than Espgaluda II, though I'm not necessarily saying one is better than the other. They're very different beasts, and really it's worth owning both if you like top-down shooters. But Dodonpachi Resurrection feels like a more well rounded experience, and caters really well to both casual shooter fans and the most hardcore of them all. There's near endless replayability due to an ingenious scoring system, and Dodonpachi Resurrection deserves a spot on every shmup fan's home screen.

Visually, Dodonpachi is a very striking game. There is no fancy Retina Display support, as this is originally an arcade game running at an entirely different resolution, and it would be unrealistic for Cave to redraw all of the artwork to suit the iPhone 4. That said, the game still looks damn good. There are three different screen sizes to choose in the options. Small has a huge border area but makes the graphics look the sharpest. Large fills the iPhone screen with the game and a small border on the bottom, but the sprites and text look slightly blurry. Medium is the default and it's in-between the other two settings. I fancy the large setting, as I don't really like borders in my games and the blurriness honestly isn't that bad. The game is filled with tons of huge explosions, humongous transforming bosses, and dozens of enemies and bullets onscreen at any given time. No matter what screen size you play with, it all ends up looking really impressive.

There are two game modes in Dodonpachi, the original arcade mode and a new iPhone mode. Arcade has you choose from three different ships and three offensive styles. These styles can give you unlimited bomb use, a more powerful alternate cannon to switch to, or a combination of the two. They all can help you in different ways, and as such each ship and style combination has its own leaderboard in OpenFeint. The arcade mode is a lot of fun to be sure, but the iPhone mode with its unique scoring system and brand new Hyper Cannon weapon are what really stand out in the game.

In iPhone mode, there is no need to pick styles, just which ship type you want to use. A divided gauge in the upper right of the screen is used for the SM scoring system. A circular area surrounds your ship, and narrowly avoiding these bullets but letting them pass through this area (known as “scraping”) fills the gauge towards the M side while also building up a multiplier in the upper left of the screen. You can continue to do this all the way until your multiplier hits x1000, if you wish. When the M side of the gauge is full, you can hit the Hyper button to start your ship firing wildly, and control the direction of fire by touching the ship and turning it. If you touch the ship and spin it in circles during this time, you build up your Hyper Cannon which unleashes an enormous beam of destruction that obliterates everything on the screen.

Killing enemies in rapid succession is what fills up the S side of the gauge, and once it's completely full you will gain whatever your multiplier is at for every enemy you destroy. Essentially, you use this SM gauge in a yin-yang like harmony of avoidance and utter destruction in order to achieve incredibly high scores. It's really brilliantly designed, and it may sound complicated on paper but it's pretty easy to grasp onto after playing for a bit. Admittedly, I'm not a hardcore bullet hell shooter guy. I love me some shmup action, but more the typical brand of them, and I've always been apprehensive of the bullet hell type because they just seemed so difficult. Not so with Dodonpachi, and I really understand now how different a bullet hell shooter is and the different type of gameplay it brings to shmups.

And this brings me to what I really appreciate about Dodonpachi Resurrection, you don't have to play it any particular way. Yes, you can endlessly scrape bullets and build huge multipliers, then strategically destroy many enemies in search of massive scores and coveted leaderboard spots. Or you can play it much like a normal shooter, using the bombs and special weapons to destroy the many enemies and bosses in spectacular fashion as you progress through the levels to the end. Heck, I beat the game twice before I even fully understood the scoring system, and had a total blast doing it. This is one of the first games of this kind where I've felt like any type of gamer can get a lot out of the experience.

There's a lot more to Dodonpachi too, like the absolute spot-on relative control system, the excellent brand new music for the iPhone mode, many OpenFeint achievements to unlock, multiple options and difficulty levels, hidden modes, and more. But the bottom line is that if you're a fan of shooters in any way, you'll want to pick up Dodonpachi Resurrection. There's not currently a lite of the game (there's one on the way), but the introductory price of $4.99 will be going for the next few days before jumping to the regular price of $8.99. Also worth noting is that you'll need a 3^rd generation device or higher, or an iPad, to run the game due to the insane amount of sprites it pushes at any given time. A veritable love-fest is going on with players in our forums who are enjoying the game as much as I am, and as far as shooters go on the iPhone it doesn't get much better than Dodonpachi Resurrection.

[source]

Quest of Knights Onrush [Free] was originally thrown together by developer MoreGames and Chillingo to spearhead a marketing campaign for their then primary focus, Knights Onrush [$0.99], a castle defense game. It turns out that their promotional app, a side-scrolling arcade beat 'em-up, was even better received than the game it was promoting, and in April we revealed that it was being made into a full fledged game. That game, Knights Rush [App Store] is finally here.

Knights Rush takes the formula of the original game– what was essentially a limited, endless mode-only beat 'em up– and breathes the life of an entire campaign into it. Not shying away from that very definition, developer MoreGames envisioned an 'entire campaign' to mean 40 sizeable campaign levels over 8 unique worlds, and a battallion of 50 different enemy types and 8 giant bosses to clog the daylights out of. Not to mention two very different endless modes that improve greatly on its origins thanks to the huge library of art assets now available.

The campaign begins with a short in-game cinematic where your knight, after a little soul-searching, gets pulled into an alternate dimension. It's a no-fuss opener designed to get you into the action as soon as possible, as it's clear this is where the developer has spent most of their time. You start with a tutorial level, where you are soon introduced to two other knights to battle with. Before beginning each mission, you spawn in a portal room, where you can select from one of the three characters: a human Roman-esque knight, an other-world looking, dual scythe wielding knight, and a dwarven, hammer wielding knight. They each play very differently and have their own set of skills and perks to unlock.

The skill system itself needs some explanation, as it may not be apparent how it functions when first picking up the game. Each level, you begin by choosing a character, which is then spawned at level 1. Even if you come out of the first world at level 14, you'll still spawn in world 2 with your character reset. At first, this put me off, as I was having lots of fun with the progressive empowerement of my knight. In retrospect however, this seems to be a very clever implementation. Firstly, it allowed me to explore the breadth of each characters abilities over the campaign, mixing them in ways that I was not able to do in my first attempt. And secondly, it gave a nice sense of character scaling as I sliced through the 5 levels that make up each game world, leveling periodically without maxing out each and every skill.

Ultimately, each character has only 2 active spells that can be unlocked. Abilities are sorted into 'skills' and 'perks', and each level up you have access to 1 skill and a couple of perks. Perks supplement skills and your standard attacks, by adding benefits such as fire or ice to your attacks, or by increasing the rate at which you level or critical strike, or how much health is restored when you pick up health potions (or even how many additional skills or perks you earn each level). Skills on the other hand, include your two active abilities and several other passive abilities, such as attack strength or health bonuses. Each ability has 5 levels, and over the course of a world you'll generally be able to max out 3 or 4 of the reasonably lengthy list before having to reset.

As well as your active skills, the game includes a variety of consumable spells, from a crazy fox strapped with dynamite to your standard room-clearing freezes, proximity mines, or giant balls of energy. Though combat suffers a little from a tendency towards a truckload of frantic attack button mashing, the 3 skills nearly always at your disposal are crucial to surviving anything after about world 3. At this stage, the odds you face will progressively become more and more overwhelming and any previous thoughts of encroaching monotony are quickly swept away in the chaos. Unfortunately this doesn't extend to the huge, great looking boss enemies, who after the horde of enemies you have to wade through to get to, largely seem like pushovers. I would have liked to see a little more strategic varience to these encounters.

In any case it is clear that alot of time has been spent on the enemies in Knights Rush. Having 50 different enemy types is no small feat– but having them all looking unique and with their own individual abilities and attacks is simply astounding. You'll encounter a host of different enemy knights, swamp monsters, giant crabs, giant spiders, the undead, wizards, vikings, golden scorpions, jumping iron-maidens…and more. These are then backed up by the legion of mechanical devices that are littered across each of the worlds. Worlds are replete with spiked traps, falling blades, rotating saws, raining arrows, giant boulders that fall from the sky, cannons, ballistae– you name it, it's there. And in an interesting twist, these enemies can only be defeated by standard attacks (if at all).

Knights Rush has to be one of the most gorgeously detailed and painstakingly created game worlds we have seen on the iOS device. Each character and enemy is inked in a stylized fashion closely resembling that of Castle Crashers on XBL. The backdrops are equally lovingly rendered, richly detailed and set-off in layers to give a pseudo-3D effect that I absolutely love. Playing through the Super Endless Mode– where worlds and enemies are randomly generated as you progress– is a visual treat.

Finally, the standard Endless Mode rounds out the Knights Rush content, where levels you unlock in the campaign can be played endlessly. High scores for both endless modes are recorded in Chillingo's Crystal social platform, which offers additional replay value above and beyond the Campaign's 3 or so hours of game time (which can effectively be doubled or tripled if you decide to attempt Hard or Insane difficulties).

While some may initially be deterred by the few active skills available or the kitten-soft boss fights; you can't dispute that the sheer weight of content here resembles something more like what we'd expect from an expensive console downloadable title. That there are three very different knights to fight with further compounds the game's fun factor as you delve into their individual skill sets. All up, Knights Rush is a highly recommended addition to any action fan's game library, and should be a no-brainer pickup for beat 'em up fans. (Note, we did encounter a small bug where reloading the campaign following an endless mode sessions resulted in the wrong skill tree for our chosen knight, something we expect the developers will address soon but certainly not game breaking.)

If you're still on the fence, head over to our forums to read other readers' opinions and be sure to check out the (slightly outdated) gameplay trailer above as the game looks infinitely better in action.

[source]