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Today, at The Gadget Show Live in Birmingham, four teams of student developers will bring Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone’s Fighting Fantasy series to the iOS audience in a brand new way. We’ve had the chance to look at the games in development, and they’re looking pretty hot.

The Make Something Unreal Live competition is the sort of opportunity most folks who’ve dabbled in game development would kill for. It’s organized by Epic Games and Train2Game. Student teams were given access to the Fighting Fantasy IP and, basically, told to go nuts with it. They’ve spent the last few months building games based off that IP using the Unreal Development Kit. Working with industry mentors, they’ve created new interpretations of the beloved books. Now they’ll go on stage and put the finishing touches on their titles with help from some of the industry’s biggest names.

If you don’t know the Fighting Fantasy IP, it’s a series of roleplaying gamebooks that were super popular in the 80s and 90s. A number of them have been brought to iOS in classic interactive fiction form by Big Blue Bubble, but this is the first time they’ve been reimagined for the platform as full 3D games.

There are four teams of students competing in Make Something Unreal Live, each with members with expertise in art, design, programming and QA. Each team set out with a different title: The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, Armies of Death, The Citadel of Chaos and Deathtrap Dungeon. We’ve had some time with each of the titles, and they’re shaping up nicely.

Digital Mage is the team responsible for Armies of Death: Rise of Agglax. It turns the tale of Armies of Death on its head. Players will command the undead forces of Agglax as they travel down lanes destroying the heroes and defenses of the kingdom of Allansia. Defeating enemies releases their souls, which provide the power needed to raise the undead.

The levels of the game are inspired by events from the original book. Though we were only able to try out the early stages of the game, Digital Mage says that the final product will boast a lovingly crafted story that expands of the tale of Armies of Death.

Indigo Jam showed us its take on Deathtrap Dungeon. Like the book, the game pits players against rooms of devious traps and vicious enemies. It’s a first-person action adventure with areas and traps designed on a grand scale. From what we’ve seen so far, stealth will play a large role in the game, and sneaking around unseen is the surest way to survive while you try to solve the deadly puzzles of the dungeon.

The Citadel of Chaos: Dire Consequences is a wave-based first person action game built by Derp Studios. Players are tasked with protecting Dree Village against waves of monsters. You begin with a sword and shield, but with each wave you survive you’ll have the opportunity to purchase and upgrade spells with the souls you earn in combat. Players who survive 10 waves unlock new levels, and ultimately win after 20 waves.

Derp Studios plans to bring in a story mode as well. This will take place after the final moments of The Citadel of Chaos.

Finally, we took a look at The Warlock of Firetop Mountain: Lost Chapters, by Commando Kiwi. Though we won’t know which game takes the grand prize at Make Something Unreal Live until next week, this one really caught our attention. Built as a third-person RPG, it already has a progression system in place and some promising looking item collection. But the combat system is where it stands out.

Lost Chapters uses an active-time style combat system, with a selection of abilities that operate on individual timers. To capture the element of luck that the Fighting Fantasy titles so relied on, blocking is left to good fortune. Each time an enemy attacks the player is presented with three cards. Each has a shield on the other side, one red, one yellow and one green. If the green card is drawn, damage is escaped. The red card hits twice as hard.

The four teams will show their games off today at The Gadget Show Live, and they’ll receive feedback from the advisory board. The judges include Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone themselves, as well as industry leaders that include, no joke, Peter Molyneux and Cliff Bleszinski. Teams will work to bring the games to their full potential over the course of the show, providing regular updates and showing their work off to an audience of over 100,000 attendees on the show floor. The winning team will be announced on Sunday, and it will get to take home a commercial Unreal Engine 3 license.

The games should all be heading to the App Store soon, though it sounds like the winning team might have a leg up on the others. The builds we played were still far from being ready for release, but they had real potential. Here’s hoping the final releases follow through, because we’re pretty jazzed about seeing more original RPGs and action-adventure titles on the App Store. So good luck to all the teams—we’ll be keeping an eye on what comes next.

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PlayGround States logo, as it appears on Facebook.

“It’s been an amazing experience,” Double Fine founder Tim Schafer told fans via a live stream that celebrated the closing moments of Double Fine Adventure’s success on Kickstarter. The project generated over three million dollars worth of donations in a month. Double Fine had asked for $400,000. It wasn’t just amazing. It was magical.

Not every studio sees this kind of outcome. Lead artist and the brains behind Playground State, Barry Collins, is walking us through what his studio looks like, and what has happened to his game, after his project failed to receive funding.

Playground State was founded two years ago by Barry and his brother Brad to explore and express the ideas that Barry has had floating around in his head since childhood. If you look closely at its web site, you’ll notice that there’s no physical address. It’s just a collective “willing people” across the globe coming together to build a series of sci-fi titles called Knights. A PC title called Knights: Spiral Islands was to be the first.

Spiral Island became a known project thanks to Kickstarter and a warm reception by PC enthusiast web site Rock, Paper, Shotgun, which featured it in an editorial in February 2011. Spiral Island is described as an episodic online action-adventure game in which you, as a knight in the game’s sci-fi universe, battle evil across the cosmos. Its hook, outside of its UDK visuals, is its lack of boundaries: in one mission, you’ll be hacking and shooting Vikings, in others space bees, mushroom zombies, robots, and large crabs.

Concept art of a playable Knight. You'll see other Knights in the upcoming preview game.

It has the look and feel of something incredible, especially if it were to be expanded as planned. Spiral Island was pitched to potential donors as game design in motion, as it would have seamlessly integrated new scenarios and enemies in a constant steam.

For whatever reason, it didn’t receive sufficient support. The Kickstarter effort ended with a thud later that April. Playground was looking for $10,000. A hair over $1,500 was pledged across 36 serial donators. One pledger, for example, has backed 48 other projects.

It’s easy to see this as a knockout shot, but to Barry, it’s just a glancing blow, and now the team is looking to iOS and its vast audience to continue.

“The lack of funds was frustrating, but it didn’t really kill our ambitions or desire to make this work,” Barry tells TouchArcade. In the ultimate show of confidence, the studio grew. It picked up an artist, a musician, a sound designer, and a couple of programmers following the failed attempt at funding.

That Playground is reacting in the exact opposite way you’d expect isn’t lost on Barry, and he explains that the reason is tied into how deeply his core team believes in what the studio is trying to accomplish.

“It’s our baby,” Barry tell us. “Amazingly, after maybe an hour or two of rambling with the various team members, they all irrevocably become hooked on the concept and what it has to offer, and slowly but surely begin to own it. Right now we have a team of guys all on the same page and all excited about the small steps as much as the bigger one that will come later — Knights as a whole.”

The crab monster we originally fell in love with, but now fewer polygons for mobile.

While the team grew, so did Knights. It’s now more than a game: it’s a series of mobile titles based in the same universe that spans multiple platforms and genres. Barry has an idea for several projects, some of which are in early stages of development. The most important is an Epic Citadel-like preview title, built specifically for iOS to show off what his team can do.

But even though the team is growing and excited about the games Barry wants to make, it has a horrible issue: it’s hemorrhaging programmers. It can’t keep one on staff, and this is putting a kink in the size and scope of the Knights games Barry wants to make. Barry says they’re in a spiral of simplification, as no one has the expertise to implement complex content into builds. The lack of a revenue stream is undoubtedly one of the culprits here. It’s also the reason why it’s bothering with a showcase project in the first place, and opening its doors for outsourcing work.

“This constant tug of war is what pushed us to our current goals of producing a very basic, free to download visual demo — a means of walking around a crazy environment full of eye candy and talking to basic scripted actors within the world. This will lay the ground work for follow-up episodes to come afterwords,” Barry tells us.

That Knights is blowing up, too, isn’t lost on Barry. He says this game has two goals: to nab exposure and be a launching board. Barry believes it’ll generate new ideas for future Knights games, and argues that the scope in this game is much more manageable than the one he put out there with Spiral Island.

This is how Playground wants to tackle on-screen FPS controls.

Another game is another iPhone and iPad-specific title called Knights: Arena. This is also a victim of the rotunda of programmers cycling through the studio. It’s an FPS that revolves solely around online play: team deathmatch, capture the flag, and so on. Barry, with a lengthy Internet sigh capping off what he tells us about Arena, says the studio’s goal is to establish a revenue stream as quickly as possible. It needs to hire at least one, dedicated programmer. “But that in itself is a Catch 22,” he says. “Need a programmer to make revenue, need revenue to get a programmer.”

Playground State’s ability to keep its legs churning in the mud seems unreal, but it’s a human reaction. With a teeth-gnashing kind of pride, Barry plans to continue marching on beyond his studio’s funding failure. He doesn’t just want to make games — he wants to see his dreams realized.

“I don’t quite know how we managed to grow in quality, strength, and numbers. Faith in Knights among the team is stronger than ever today, despite everything,” he tells us.

“Knights is one of many projects I dream of making. So this is the blood, sweat, tears part of paving the way to eventually being able to produce these with a real budget and fully paid team. This is it. This is what I love. It’s what I want to do for the rest of my life.”

That’s why Barry is up for using Kickstarter again. He has at least two in the works right now. One is for an extensive indie bundle that features developers in the Vancouver area. The other is for Knights: Arena or a single-player variant of that idea, which he wants to launch “at the same time that we launch the free demo, so people can see or play it and discover it that way.”

Barry talks about Knights: Spiral Island in his Kickstarter promo.

Spiral Island’s crowd-funding failure didn’t come without costs in terms of people and revenue. There were lessons learned, though. The first was scalability. “No need to come out of the gate with a massive universe to embark on hundreds of small stories in other universes. A single story is good enough, or if finances and or programming get in the way, as we are discovering, there are still options,” he tells us.

“We did not go into this expecting it to be quick and easy, and it has not been quick or easy either,” he says.

And let’s say these Kickstarters don’t pan out? Barry isn’t worried. “We will keep pushing along until we are earning revenue on our own, find the right investment deal or get the attention of a publisher that wants to work with us.”

“But no matter what, this project will see the light of day, and as a series of mobile games to start.”

Towards the end of our Barry conversation, we pressed “pause” so we could ask what makes him so idealistic. His vision for these Knights games still seems almost too ambitious considering the lack of funding. The risk of what will happen if these ideas die could be monumental to the studio’s future and Barry. These games are the realization of his dreams, after all.

Honu are a species you'll be able to talk to in a preview. Here's one in a warrior outfit.

“Knights in general is an extremely ambitious concept,” he says. “It started big and the scope of the games we want to tell based in this setting have been cut back for the sake of getting something to market sooner. “

“The concept of Knights being so grand just means we always have room to grow. We realize that we may only ever produce the Knights preview or only ever get as far as Knights: Arena because there’s a real possibility that Knights is lame and we are all crazy people working away on an idea nobody else likes. “

“For me this would just be a continuation of exactly what I have done for 11 years, which is to just hire myself out to whatever studio wants to pay me, and doing so in mass with others is old hat. The grind of tracking down clients and deadlines, milestones, massive delays in payment and so on… it’s all a part of the job. But, Knights, to me, is a way out of this, to finally get all the ideas my brother and I have been brewing up for decades. It’s time we produce things we want rather than the things that pay the bills.”

Barry says that he likes to focus on what could happen with some success. He could hire programmers, no more lost time on contract projects, and the people he’s surrounded by could be supported.

“I just really hope people want to play a game about the Knights — the ultimate saviors of all things, the definition of heroic. Not a bad bone in their bodies, watching them take on any bad guy we can dream up and throw at them, across all history in any universe and time. I really want to play that game.”

When a Kickstarter fails, it’s not necessarily a catalyst for disaster. Barry is idealistic, and maybe too ambitious, but he’s not a quitter. He’ll keep creating. The success of Double Fine was magical, but the intensity of at least one man who didn’t win big is special, too.

While Barry’s story stands on its own, we are covering something larger here. This is part one of a two-part series of articles. In the next, we’ll introduce you to three more studios who haven’t had the greatest experience on Kickstarter. We’ll also discuss why we don’t normally cover games on the service and why we’re not certain of the long-term viability of crowd-funding sources like Kickstarter.

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So, what’s Chair Entertainment been up to, you wonder? Well, at least part of the studio has been busy designing and implementing Infinity Blade 2’s [$6.99] long-awaited, and awesome-sounding, ClashMobs feature. IGN Wireless just posted a short hands-on piece that details its functionality and otherwise shows off the new-look element.

From what we’re gathering, the early promise of ClashMob has been realized: in it, you and thousands of others take turns beating the crap out of one really big monster in an epic attempt to gather exclusive loot. The challenges come in the form of skirmishes, and seem like they’ll have a mini-game sort of feel to them. One type skirmish has you doing the most damage to a monster that you possibly can within 30 seconds, for example.

IGN details some of its social hooks:

The more connected friends you have participating in ClashMobs, the better benefits you’ll be eligible for. Bonuses like additional combat time, bonus victory cash and extra ClashMob attempts will be awarded to players with more MyMob members.

ClashMobs are due out as part of a larger update next week. Expect new equipment, new monsters, a new gem interface, and “a gem forge” feature. Check out IGN for more info because, man, this sounds like the greatest thing ever.

[via IGN]

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How refreshing it is to play a game with a down-to-earth plot? Even the most grounded of games usually bear their fair share of swords and sorcery or bombastic battles. Super Lemonade Factory [$1.99] goes a different route, telling a simple story from one particular moment in time. Lisolet and Andre are newly married in the days after World War II. Andre is set to take up his father’s lemonade factory, but first he and Lisolet must tour the premises, meeting the workers and learning about the challenges they face.

It might sound a little dry, but the tale accompanies a clever platformer designed to play on the strengths and weaknesses of its stars. Andre is blessed with physical strength and can break through boxes that bar the couple’s path. Lisolet is agile; she can double jump and reach places Andre can’t, often giving him a foot up with a crate from a higher perch. Isn’t it lovely to see a marriage with partners that complement each other so well?

The journey through the factory is surprisingly perilous—you’d think it had been designed as a deathtrap. Often, either Andre or Lisolet will need rescuing right from the start. You’ll have to direct the other across a pit of spikes, perhaps, over floating platforms and around the surprisingly deadly people of the factory. Once one has saved the other, they can travel together—Andre is happy to give Lisolet a piggyback so you needn’t cover the same ground twice. From there it’s usually a hop, skip and a jump to the level’s exit.

A detour may be necessary on the way. Though it seems like the sort of thing aimed at completionists, you’ll want to collect each level’s bottle cap. These are occasionally well hidden and usually hard to reach, but behind them sits half the game’s content. Collect all the caps in a given area and you’ll unlock the hardcore version of that area, where platforms are smaller and faster and spikes are everywhere. Brushing against a spike is deadly, and Andre and Lisolet only have two lives to work with if you can’t find any bags of sugar to replenish them.

Controlling the couple is simple, with on-screen controls for walking, jumping and dashing. These are responsive and rarely get in the way, but they suffer the usual flaw of being a little too easily mis-tapped. You can swap between Andre and Lisolet with a horizontal swipe; a vertical swipe puts Lisolet on Andre’s back.

Lisolet is blessed with one more ability: a way with words. She can speak with any of the factory’s denizens. The foreman, the chef – these workers open up about their hopes and dreams, both for the company and for themselves. A food inspector waxes poetic on the need for cleanliness, and a General blusters about the misfortune that could befall a company that chose not to meet military requests for supplies.

These bits of flavor are woven into the metagame: Game Center achievements are awarded for speaking with all employees, and your progress is marked on the level select screen. But more than that, the dialogue is rather charming. The foreman is a burgeoning Bolshevik who loves to muse on the meaning of labor; Andre will share stories from his past. Much of it hits a bit heavy-handed, but it’s always a pleasant diversion—you’ll also find the occasional pop-culture reference if you’re paying attention.

In the end, the gameplay suffers for its simplicity. The most puzzling levels aren’t more complicated than pushing a couple boxes in the right order before jumping, and there are only so many spikes one can add to a level before it gets silly. If there’s more to be done with the formula, though, we may yet see it done. The developers offer a system for level creation and plan to add the best of the user-created content to the game. On top of 72 already entertaining levels, that sounds pretty good.

And hey, if you haven’t noticed, Super Lemonade Factory is a looker. If you’re into pixel art, you won’t be disappointed—both the style and the animation are fantastic. On top of that the chiptune soundtrack is pretty great, if a tad overly-aggressive for the content.

So while the game isn’t flawless, it’s still an easy recommendation. There are kinks to be worked out, but they don’t detract much from the good stuff: a solid, fun puzzle platformer with great ideas and outstanding presentation. And, frankly, how often do we get to play a game with such a delightfully low-key premise? For that, Super Lemonade Factory most certainly deserves a look. Still, it’s unlikely to push platformer fans, so know that going in. You might not find a challenge, but you’ll find a lot of charm.

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In tomorrow’s update for SpellTower [$1.99], creator Zach Gage is giving fans a lot of reasons to stick with his beautiful word game. On top of adding new iPad support, night colors, tweaks, and various fixes, Gage is finally implementing a bluetooth battle mode, which looks as great as it sounds. We’ve got video of it just below, in fact.

If you’ve somehow missed out on SpellTower, now’s a good of time as ever to take the plunge. It’s a remarkable word game with a ton of clever puzzle games and its designed with elegance in mind. It ended up being one of our Game of the Year contenders, as it was easily the standout word game of 2011. Give it a look.

UPDATE: Sometimes things don’t go as planned, unfortunately. Some approval process stuff is holding back the update. The new release date is April 12th.

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In tomorrow’s update for SpellTower [$1.99], creator Zach Gage is giving fans a lot of reasons to stick with his beautiful word game. On top of adding new iPad support, night colors, tweaks, and various fixes, Gage is finally implementing a bluetooth battle mode, which looks as great as it sounds. We’ve got video of it just below, in fact.

If you’ve somehow missed out on SpellTower, now’s a good of time as ever to take the plunge. It’s a remarkable word game with a ton of clever puzzle games and its designed with elegance in mind. It ended up being one of our Game of the Year contenders, as it was easily the standout word game of 2011. Give it a look.

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In a world where trees can murder grandmothers, a lumberjack who can distort time and space takes his revenge. Welcome to the premise of Owlchemy Labs’ next absurd iPad and iPhone game, Jack Lumber. Set to hit later this summer, it’s a log slicing game with a delicious looking bullet-time mechanic. But don’t call it a Fruit Ninja-alike.

“Our goals with Jack Lumber were to create the best damn lumberjacking game this side of the Redwoods,” Owlchemy’s Alex Schwartz told us. “The scientists here at Owlchemy Labs love the Halfbrick guys with all our heart, but comparing Jack Lumber to Fruit Ninja is like comparing apples to logs. After six iterations of crazy log-cutting gameplay, we hit on something magical.”

Alex shared an… interesting play-by-play:

Logs are flying by at breakneck speed. You’re watching intently to find that exact moment where the logs have coalesced on-screen to form a perfect arrangement. You can feel that it’s the right time, so you touch your finger down. Time slows to a halt. You’re in “Lumber Time”. Thankfully, you have supernatural powers, otherwise this would be quite difficult. You draw a smooth and calculated path with your finger, swooping through logs from end-to-end along the grain, weaving, dodging, and turning with the finesse of a brutish and hairy figure skater.

You see you have less than a second of draw time left on the clock and you catch the ‘Time Extended’ bonus log and sigh a breath of relief for a brief moment, drawing onward to grab the last four logs remaining on screen. But wait! A skunk is in your way and you barely pivot around him before he releases his raunchy green ‘defensive maneuver’ on you. You successfully clip the last log and triumphantly lift your finger as your axe replays your epic path of destruction, decimating every log with the fury you reserve only for the trees that killed your grandma. Combo points explode from the madness and ‘Straight Shot’ bonuses fill the screen as your eyes tear up from sheer joy and excitement.

Also, there are flying moose.

We’ve got the first footage of the titular hero’s title just below, but you’ll also get to see it in action during PAX East at the Indie MEGABOOTH, which will feature many other games to play.

We saw a generous Jack Lumber sneak peek this year at GDC 2012, and were impressed with the iterative design on display. Most slicing games don’t bother to mix up the formula, but this does by introducing choice into the mix. You won’t just be slicing wood, you’ll be making an informed tactical decision with each cut. The game will also feature a full campaign mode with dialogue, and a progression mechanic for your axe. “You can upgrade your axes to absurd lengths,” we’re told, “to the point where you get the Canadian maple leaf axe among others.”

“Absurd” is the right word for this. We’re hopelessly stoked to see this in motion, so stay tuned. We’ll be bring you a lot more before its release.

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Hero Academy [Free] is now a Universal app. Last week, Robot Entertainment spilled the beans on the update, confirming its existence and detailing one of the more exciting additions: a new team called “the Tribe.” It also announced the inclusion of a new game board and two new mechanics that accompany its arrival: barbed crystals and Resist boost squares. Lead designer Marcin Szymanski breaks down why these are important to the game on its blog:

Barbed Crystals are quite a departure from our board designs, giving the units responsible for our victory condition a way to fire at the enemy! We actually started off with some passive boosts for crystals on this board, such as innate damage reflection, but the active ability easily won out in playtesting. And, the new Resist boost premium square complements the Defense boosts that is already in place on other boards. On paper, it is a small change, but it actually changes various match-ups quite significantly.

This update isn’t without the usual glut of fixes and balancing tweaks. Robot has laid out everything on its blog, so if you’re into the nitty-gritty, go check it out. Also, take note that this version of the game now has an “undo” mechanic. Starting now, you can undo a single action with a tap of the AP wheel. Neat!

Hero Academy, by the way, is a fantastic turn-based strategy game. If you haven’t picked it up alongside most of the known world, you should. Our review is available for your reading pleasure here.

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When you’re playing Coco Loco, [$0.99] it’s important to remember that you’re rescuing your marshmallow brethren from chocolate guardians. You’re absolutely not rescuing your eggs from pigs. Sure, if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably Angry Birds, but Twiitch deserves credit: this particular physics puzzler with slingshot mechanics is actually pretty great.

Some of Coco Loco’s levels could be pulled straight out of similar games—let’s just say there isn’t much difference between an egg-shaped mallow and an egg-shaped bird. But those structural similarities surround cunning levels designed for more than brute-force thinking. The formula takes another sharp turn with terribly entertaining liquid dynamics. It plays like a brand new game, even if it doesn’t look much like one.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: the Marshies were enjoying a simple dip in the hot chocolate springs when the cocoa guardians took them prisoner. Now it’s up to you to get revenge, rescue your pals, and free them from their, err, celebrity-costumed captivity. That sort of quirkiness gives Coco Loco a fresh angle to build on, and it extends through every bit of the game’s visual design.

From there it’s a matter of differentiating itself through gameplay. The liquids make up a big part of that: the Marshies can be freed by being swept up in cocoa, and the chocolate guardians can be melted away similarly. Many levels will see you redirecting cocoa, breaking through dams and barriers and generally splashing around.

Lest I give the impression this is just a damp Angry Birds (probably an obvious mashup in this post-Where’s My Water world), I should emphasize that the level design in Coco Loco is very, very good. Rarely are you left to smash down a structure with however many projectiles you feel like using. Instead, you’re often given exactly what you’ll need to solve a puzzle, one with moving parts, flowing liquid and tight corridors to aim your way through.

The tools you’re given are a good mix of familiar and new. You’ve got your standard Marshie, the one that knocks over the things it hits. Another one explodes on your command. But there’s also one that expands into a gelatinous wall on demand, and another that shoots cocoa out of a cannon, amongst others. Combined, they can pull of some excellent tricks.

You have to be creative when using them, as much as you need to be precise. Most of Coco Loco’s 75 levels are set up for specific solutions: toss this dude at that spot to clear the way for the next guy to knock over the cocoa just so, and the whole thing comes together. Or take each of your Marshies and land them in just the right places all over the screen. You’ll need to use your brain more often than you will your pixel-hunting skills.

I just wish the same creativity that’s been brought to bear on the level design had bumped into the rest of the game at some point. We have the three star rating system, “Fluffy,” the IAP that finishes any level for you, extra points for having Marshies left over, and that’s just scratching the surface. Coco Loco is strong enough to stand on its own, and hanging a lantern on its similarities to Angry Birds does it no favors.

Just don’t let that stop you from checking it out. Coco Loco isn’t a strikingly original game, even without the checklist of familiar interface elements, but it is one of the most thoroughly solid and entertaining physics puzzle games I’ve played in some time. Taken in a vacuum, it could have blown me away. In the context of the rest of the App Store, it’s still a heck of a lot of fun. Don’t just give it a look, give it a play and you might be impressed.

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There are some games that try to impress by offering a well-rounded gameplay experience. Others meanwhile try to latch onto one or two key elements and hope that it’s enough to make up for other potential shortfalls. Violet Storm [$0.99 / HD] squarely falls into the second camp. While the dual-stick shooter impresses somewhat with its take on weapons and visual overstimulation, it may not be enough to overcome the otherwise generic gameplay and presentation.

As a dual-stick shooter, Violet Storm plays it safe with its gameplay offerings. Players have a choice of three different single-player modes: Sniper Mode, which is a timed run scored by accuracy, Speed Havoc, which challenges gamers to destroy a set amount of enemies as fast as possible, and Campaign.

Campaign is the most complete mode and pits you against a never-ending onslaught of enemies separated by timed waves. Survive a wave and you’re given a break (as well as a score bonus) before bigger and more difficult enemies come at you. There isn’t an artificial barrier around the playing field (like Geometry Wars, for example) so players are free to move in any direction for as long as possible. However, enemies will continually spawn near you and blindly running in one direction is a sure-fire way to get cornered and lose health.

As you battle enemy ships, you are rewarded with an occasional power-up (invincibility, damage boost, bombs) as well as weapon upgrades. The weapon upgrades are one area Violet Storm attempts to differentiate itself from other shooters. Weapons are relatively simple at the onset, but quickly build up to ridiculous multi-tracking lasers of various spreads and homing missiles (all being shot simultaneously no less). Last longer, and you even get to play with lighting. While Violet Storm obviously isn’t the first game to pioneer ridiculous weapons, I was impressed with the showcase nonetheless.

Keep in mind all these weapons lead to a dazzling display of visual elements and intensity, which is another area Violet Storm looks to improve upon. It really is a sight to behold when you combine lasers and missiles, along with the large influx of simultaneous weapons and their projectiles on the screen at the same time. In fact, the visuals may be a little too intense, as later levels definitely border on ‘bullet-hell’ extremes (without the precision, unfortunately). Disappointingly, Violet Storm occasionally doesn’t handle all the graphics well, as I encountered some slow-down across all current generation devices during the more hectic scenes.

Notice I didn’t say the game differentiates itself via graphical style; Violet Storm looks very much like a Geometry Wars clone in most ways besides the sheer amount of graphical elements and the weapons. Granted, the game still looks great on most iOS devices, including the new iPad. Oddly enough, while Violet Storm is a universal app, gamers looking for iPad retina assets will need to pick up Violet Storms HD, which is an iPad only app.

Once you get past the weapons and visuals, Violet Storm falters somewhat. The music becomes repetitive rather quickly and ends up detracting. Also, while Sniper Mode and Speed Havoc are nice twists on the standard gameplay, there’s little in terms of actual variety, (save for three difficulty levels) to keep you coming back. The game experience just feels as if it was designed simply to showcase the crazy visuals.

I wouldn’t go so far as to call Violet Storm a one-trick pony, but in terms of bringing things to the genre it’s pretty close. The over-the-top weapons and graphical effects look great, but even those aren’t implemented perfectly. Regardless, outside of those features you’re still left with a competent arcade dual-stick shooter. However, considering the wealth of choices already on the app store, anyone other than fans of the genre may end up deciding to pass on this one.

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