Archive for the ‘ECID’ tag
‘Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective’ First Impressions
Sissel has a lot of problems, but the least of them is that he’s dead. Well, not dead-dead, but dead. I’ll explain: Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective [Free] is all about what Sissel has gained in the afterlife. Like a common ghoul, this guy can rattle mundane objects, activate levers and buttons, and possess stuff. He can also decidedly un-ghoulishly rewind time, which is a trick that comes in pretty handy; a lot of the people he knows tend to die, and he needs these people to help him with his biggest problem: memory loss.
Ghost Trick first saw a release on Nintendo DS around a year ago. This isn’t its debut on iOS, though. A couple of months after the DS release, Capcom dropped a Universal version of the game on the Japanese App Store. Now, the rest of the world is finally getting to see a version of this port tonight.

And it seems like it’s OK from a technical standpoint. In my modest amount of time with it, I haven’t seen any port-specific issues like stuttering or flickering. It controls pretty well, too, and caters to your finger just about as well as it did to the stylus.
There’s some stuff still bothering me. The assets aren’t as high of a resolution as I would like. Also, a good sixth of the screen is covered by a thick layer of UI that, it seems, is simply there to keep the pixel density high. It’s weird.
In case you missed out on Ghost Trick, it breaks down like this: Sissel is often charged with reversing people’s deaths and he has to use his powers to do so. Each death is like a puzzle, basically, that has you opening doors, spiritually oozing to adjacent objects, and otherwise setting up Rube Goldberg-ian scenarios that’ll change that person’s fate.
In most cases, you’re watching a death, infesting that person’s body in order to rewind time, and then actively trying to disrupt that sequence. The solutions to puzzles seem to be mired in weird video game logic, but the saving grace here is that there is a single and true solution to every puzzle. You just gotta find it, you know?
I’ve been having a blast so far, by the way. This is a pretty thoughtful, if not challenging game with some insane, but fun-to-discover solutions. And while the minutes of overly long exposition is starting to wear me out, I’m digging the characters and the humor. Just wait until you meet dog, man. Wait for it.
We’ll definitely continue on with Ghost Trick, and try to give you something much more definitive than this in the near future. This is a free release, though — the first two chapters, which take about 60 or 70 minutes to complete, are what you’ll get with a $0 download, so that should give you a good indication of what you’re getting into. Our gut says grab it. Here’s some more screens:


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‘My Little Monster’ Review – Let’s Roar Down Memory Lane Together
Games like My Little Monster [99¢] are nefarious. In spite of being a largely thankless collection of repetitive chores, they have this way of making you fuss over them constantly. They’re like kids except without all the collateral benefits. Just ask anyone who has ever owned a Tamagotchi or any other of those ‘virtual pet simulator’ things.
I use the term loosely, by the way. My Little Monster isn’t exactly what you would call a Tamagotchi, though the simplicity of the gameplay here is definitely on the same level. At the beginning of every in-game day, you’ll be given the opportunity to decide whether you want to purchase new hats, upgrade one of your three skills or improve various statistics. This, in turn, is accomplished by spending the currency you earn from your daily fights.
Now, before you get excited about the idea of rumbling with other leviathans, combat here isn’t all too fancy either. You have no direct control over the fights themselves. For the most part, your time will be spent tapping on various words on the screen, tapping on the ability you want to use, and a fair bit of waiting. Assuming you survive, you’ll then have your score tallied and the whole cycle will begin anew.
Yes, I know. It’s kind of underwhelming but that doesn’t make it a bad game. In an odd way, it’s actually one of the reasons that My Little Monster works so well. You can play it anywhere, any time. Because so little brainpower is needed to propel the game forward, it’s ideal for meetings and long, uncomfortable road trips. Of course, things would be different were the presentation any less stellar.
really did a brilliant job (granted, they could have gone with a better choice of fonts but that’s me being nit-picky) with the delivery in My Little Monster. The nostalgia-inducing visuals, the silly cut-scenes, the menagerie of eccentric enemies, the offbeat dialogue, the ludicrous plot – they all go along together like Japanese curry on rice. I mean, really? Is it even possible to dislike that little green guy and his earnest quest to grow up and destroy the world? I thought so.
Though considerably shorter than I would have liked it to be, My Little Monster is a reasonable amount of bang for your buck. If ‘virtual pet simulators’ weren’t a thing back when you were growing up, you might not quite enjoy it as much as some. But for the rest of you, this may be a pleasant trip down memory lane.
TouchArcade Rating: 
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Macworld | iWorld 2012 – Catching Up with Gameloft
I was able to stop by Gameloft’s San Francisco offices while at the conference, and chatted with them about some of their recent releases as well as some of the backlash they’ve received over them. First was the issue of how they put advertisements into Hero of Sparta II [$4.99], and after an overwhelming amount of negative feedback they decided to take them out. I think it’s good when a company goes out on a limb to try something, and then can admit they were wrong about it and make things right in the end.
Next we discussed the reception to Dungeon Hunter 3 [Free], which was pretty mixed. The game itself was actually pretty good, but so drastically different from the previous two entries that I think it alienated the established fan base of the series. Had they positioned it as a spinoff rather than a direct sequel, I think the outcome would have been a lot more favorable. Plus, it’s a freemium title, which is the type of thing that will always draw criticism from some folks.
Finally, we talked about their recent release Urban Crime [Free], which was essentially a repackaging of an older Gangstar title into a freemium model. The game has not gone over well with either critics or players, and we didn’t have too many good things to say about it in our review either. The combination of outdated visuals, a rehashed game world that many people had already played to death, and tough freemium restrictions was just a recipe for disaster with Urban Crime.

(Left to right: Hero of Sparta II, Dungeon Hunter 3, and Urban Crime)
So what do these three games all have in common? Well, they’re all examples of Gameloft trying to find out the best way to sell their brands in a turbulent market like the App Store. Honestly, I think putting ads in Hero of Sparta II and making an old game into a freemium game with Urban Crime were just their way of experimenting to see what works, and although neither of those really went over so well with gamers the negative feedback was actually invaluable to Gameloft moving forward. And as for Dungeon Hunter 3, I think they made a good game but just didn’t position it right, which is another lesson learned the hard way.
What I did take away from our meeting is that Gameloft is not going completely freemium with their games from here on out, as some people have been quick to conclude. Part of these experiments is finding the best way to go about selling their future titles, and with nearly all of their development cycles lasting from 10-14 months, it can be hard to keep up with a market that moves as quickly as the App Store. But they assured me that they do have a mixture of the types of premium games that they’ve built their iOS reputation on still coming down the line, as well as titles that take advantage of the freemium model, which seems to be the prevalent model in the App Store as of late.
To wrap up our meeting, they let me get some hands-on time with their upcoming Unreal Engine title, which is still extremely early in development and doesn’t even have a title just yet. I’m sworn to secrecy on most of the nitty gritty details for now, but let me say that I was really impressed with how good the game is shaping up to be, and of course it looks absolutely gorgeous with the Unreal tech under the hood. About all I can say is that it’s a fully 3D real-time action game that will have a full storyline to play through. It will be a paid game, but will have some in-app purchase items. Finally, we should be seeing the game in the second quarter of this year, which should be by this summer.
I’m really hoping to be able to share more on the upcoming Unreal game as it gets closer to release, and after meeting with the representatives of Gameloft in person, it’s easy to see that they’re a passionate bunch who care a lot about putting out products that their customers will enjoy. Their recent missteps really seem like a part of a larger learning experience in a marketplace where traditional rules are pretty much thrown out the window. I’ll look forward to seeing how Gameloft adapts and grows on the App Store this year, and if they’re able to unlock the key to a happy medium between being profitable and keeping their huge stable of fans happy.
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‘Star Command’ Ship Combat Might Be Turn-Based… Or Not
Star Command looks like a real winner, so we’ve been following it like the hawks that we are since its initial unveil. The especially cool part about this approach is that we’re watching it grow month-by-month, and our users, who are understandably excited, are a something of a cog in its development now. Case in point: the Star Command dudes are asking for feedback on the ship-versus-ship battle system to decide if it should be real time like the rest of the game’s action or turn based as initially planned. Talk about big decisions, eh?
Here’s the scenario being laid out:
You receive a transmission from the Evil Cortexians. You start a fight with them; your weapons begin to charge and you fire using a brief 10 second mini-game to target them. You then take a few critical hits and your shields drop; now, you have a fire from the last shot occurring on you’re bridge so you move some guys from engineering to go fight the fire. Meanwhile, engineering gets hit by an even bigger blast and you have to split this repair crew… and …
… then two different follow-up scenarios are introduced, both of which are fairly wide-reaching and strategically harrowing. The problem that the developers are running into is that they’re afraid to ditch the methodical X-Com-ish strategy in favor of a more seamless, action-focused kind of approach. Your thoughts matter here, however it does seem like turn-based is currently out of favor.
Check to dive in, see everyone’s thoughts, and add your own to the delicious pile. And speaking of thoughts, it looks like free-to-play might be thing in Star Command. Check out this :
…the game will be fully playable, beatable and fun but with the monetization along the lines of unique characters, or something along those lines.
This way the game isn’t forced to go slow or be painful just to entice to raise revenue. Instead, we will have random drops of non-important game items — and if you want that specific one — you will have to pay for it or just keep trying to grab it.
At SOME point we need revenue, and freemium might perhaps be the least painful way of doing it. Perhaps not, but it is also (as we are all mature) a good way of raising more revenue which leads to more Star Command.
If that seems up in the air, it’s probably because it still is. The larger takeaway from these kinds of community outreach pitches is this: Star Command probably isn’t anywhere near finished. You don’t ask about stuff like “Hey, how should we do our combat” unless a product is still a ways off. Kind of a bummer, actually, now that we think about it… but, hey, at least you can have a voice in this stuff.
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Creator of ‘Triple Town’ Focuses Legal Lasers on ‘Yeti Town’
They say that bad luck comes in threes, and that definitely seems to be the trend in last week’s news cycle. First Zynga ripped off Tiny Tower [Free], then Glu fired up their copy machines, and then some similar although unrelated drama hit the land of Triple Town [Free]. is all over this recent story, but I’ll provide a quick rundown-
Spry Fox’s Triple Town hit the App Store a couple weeks ago and it was clear that we loved it in our review. It’s even sort of an interesting take on the free to play model, as you can download and play the game for free and play for a limited number of turns. You can buy more turns with in-game coins which you can earn (and buy with real money) or just download the unlimited turns unlock for (currently) $3.99. If you don’t play much, or get bored easily, you might not ever need to buy anything… But once you get to the point where you need unlimited turns, chances are you’ve gotten way more than four bucks of entertainment out of the game anyway. I like that.

Anyway, , they’ve filed a copyright infringement suit in federal court against 6Waves LOLAPPS due to Yeti Town [Free] which actually beat Triple Town to release by nearly a month. It’s the same sad story we hear way too often on the App Store in that Yeti Town relentlessly copies absolutely every aspect of Triple Town.
Per Spry Fox:
Yeti Town, as launched by 6waves, was a nearly perfect copy of Triple Town. We’re not just talking about the game’s basic mechanics here. We’re talking about tons of little details, from the language in the tutorial, to many of our UI elements, to the quantities and prices of every single item in the store (how exactly did 6waves “independently” decide to price 200 turns for 950 coins, or 4 wildcards for 1500 coins each? That’s quite a coincidence!)
This exact copying is also one of the things that really amused me about all of these Tiny Tower clones which all featured 5 categories of skills, 5 people per apartment, 3 people to a floor, 3 products per floor, 5 elevator upgrades, and other exact copies of core game mechanics. Unfortunately, you can’t copyright a game idea, which is why companies like Gameloft are able to do what they do. Yeti Town is different through, as allegedly Spry Fox was in intense negotiations with 6Waves to publish Triple Town on the App Store which abruptly ended when Yeti Town was released.

As part of this, 6Waves had closed beta access months before Triple Town went public and had been “pumping [Spry Fox] for private information” which included design ideas, Facebook launches, as well as revenue and retention figures. This sort of elevates the Yeti Town clone to an entirely different level of shadiness, at least in my eyes.
If you want to read the full text of the lawsuit, you can . Now, let’s all go back to making our own original games, eh?
[via ]
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‘One Epic Game’ Review – Stick a fork in "Epic," folks. It’s done.
Way back in 2010 when Monster Dash [$0.99] was released it felt a tiny bit lacking. Not that it wasn’t a fantastic game, but it could have used a little more depth. You know, upgrades to earn, a complex mission system, maybe eventual retina support?
Now there’s no need to worry about any of that. Not because One Epic Game [$0.99] brings any of that to the table, mind, but because Jetpack Joyride [Free] came out a year later and blew its predecessor out of the water. So why is it we’re still seeing retreads of an older, lesser product? Could it be, she wonders, because forgot their own game’s roots when bringing it back from PlayStation Minis?

Say it ain’t so, but I can’t see many other explanations for what’s happened here. One Epic Game isn’t a Monster Dash clone, but there are some obvious similarities. To name a few, both have a humorously hardcore hero, randomized levels and weapon drops, the same flavor of non-stop platforming, the same methods of murdering slow-moving enemies, and three-life heart system. Maybe one wasn’t inspired by the other, but that reads like a bit of a stretch. Now, all’s fair in love, war and game development, especially when it comes to making games on different platforms. But if you’re going to bring your game back to compete against its grandaddy, you at least ought to be sure you’ve made a few improvements in the meantime.
Here’s the thing: One Epic Game has more content than Monster Dash. The latter is an endless runner, period. The former has a handful of levels in a story mode and seven challenge modes on top of that. But more isn’t the same as better, and that’s doubly true here.
The game is presented as a parody, hanging a lantern on all those silly things we’ve seen in games. It’s the broadest sort of parody, satirizing concepts that are virtually universal. Ha ha, tutorials are a pain, aren’t they? And so many games have zombies, am I right? Look at this obnoxiously jingoistic story, and mock these bland heroes and villains.
But here’s the rub – the story, heroes and villains are extremely bland. The tutorial is horrid. It’s not a great joke when you actually respect your audience so little you feel you have to teach them the ins and outs of the jump and shoot buttons. One makes you jump. The other makes you shoot. Got it? And yes, there are zombies. And aliens. And World War II settings. Hah, I bet you haven’t seen so much of any of those things before that you might actually be profoundly tired of playing games that fail to use them in any sort of interesting way.
Maybe I’m just not getting the joke, but does it extend to clarifying why the rest of the game is so sloppy? The lack of Game Center and Retina support are the biggies, but if you look any deeper it’s just issues all the way down. The game makes due with the bare minimum of animation, for example. Alpha Dog, your musclebound space marine stereotype, has just one: running. Jumping is just the running animation slowed down. The enemies only get to walk (or fly) in a straight line until they fall off something, still walking. Only the weapons and jetpack do anything of note with the visuals.
So it goes with the platforming. The game just loves to screw with you, sticking the best power-up in a place you can’t survive or hiding the fact that a platform is too small to hit until you’re already mid-jump. That’s the joy of intentionally frustrating design, but then occasionally a platform crumbles away before you can reach the end or an obstacle you jump over stretches a little too far to be survivable. It’s sloppy, pure and simple.
One Epic Game has two things over Monster Dash: you can chain kill enemies to build up a score multiplier, and you actually have a score, making killing monsters distinctly more valuable than avoiding them. All other things being equal, maybe that would be enough to set it apart. But all other things aren’t equal, and we’ve had nearly two years to find better endless runners in the interim. There’s just no reason to go back to something that might have been an okay (if slightly familiar) title two years ago when there are so many fantastic games coming out right now. If you decide to take the plunge anyways, share your thoughts in the. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.
TouchArcade Rating: 
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Clever Interactive Comic ‘Meanwhile for iOS’ Drops to 99¢ as High-Res Update Hits
Alright, so even though Meanwhile for iOS [99¢] isn’t normally what would come to mind when you think of iOS games, it’s something that I bet most people out there aren’t aware of. Also, if you’re the kind of person who likes Choose Your Own Adventure style books like the variety of gamebooks we’ve posted about in the past, this will be right up your alley. Maybe you’ve got kids that like comic books, Meanwhile would be equally perfect in that situation.
I first heard about its , which is worth checking out just so you can see the clever way its all laid out. You make decisions in the comic book, then follow colored lines to the next panel you should be reading. The amount of decisions included is just silly, as the book boasts 3,856 different possibilities. The plot follows a kid named Jimmy who goes from deciding if he (or, you, as the reader) wants vanilla or chocolate ice cream to deciding the fate of the world after encountering mad scientists, time machines, robots, and tons more.

The comic is targeted at kids in grades 4-6, so if you’re an adult looking for some hard-hitting plot points, you’ll likely be disappointed. If, however, you’re just into comic books and want to check out a really clever implementation of a Choose Your Own Adventure style comic, this is 99¢ you have to spend. The way they adapted the actual book to iOS devices is fantastic. I particularly enjoy how you still see irrelevant (to your particular story path) panels as you read through the comic, which really just makes you want to replay it over and over again to figure out how to get to something you saw that was particularly crazy.
It’s on sale today only, due to an update landing which adds completely re-mastered high resolution art. So, don’t wait too long or it’ll be back up to $4.99.
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‘Jazz: Trump’s Journey’ Review – Perdido Street Platformer Blues
The world of Jazz: Trump’s Journey [$2.99] is a lush throwback to 1920’s New Orleans, brought to life with watercolor backdrops and great tunes. You take the stage in parades and theaters, prisons and sewers, all the way to the French Quarter as you run through the history of Trump’s success. You rise from a boy with dreams of making beautiful music to a man at the top of his game.
The game you play over the course of that journey is a platformer, with all your standard platforming elements: running, jumping, collecting widgets, and so on. Trump’s music has the power to stop people in their tracks – literally freeze time – which opens the way for a few clever puzzles and challenges. But imprecise controls and terrible translation keep Jazz from reaching the heights it deserves.

The translation is the worst offense, completely mangling what may be a touching story or may be a heavy-handed lesson on racism. It’s hard to tell when it’s presented with phrases like this:
“To be honest. I got prepared to that, but even tough I didn’t lost my hope because I knew my music affected her.”
We can overlook a few misspellings or grammatical errors, but this translation is inexcusably bad. Oh, and the “daring parallel with the real story of Louis Armstrong,” as mentioned in the app description? Ignore that. It’s a cute story, but pretty banal, and beyond the setting, the jazz and the color of their skin, Trump and Satchmo don’t have much in common at all.
The controls aren’t nearly as bad as the grammar, but they need to be fine-tuned. They’re laid out with movement on the left side, action on the right, but movement is split up into two sections (back and forth, up and down) and action is laid out so you can’t really do more than one thing at a time. If you need to, say, climb a ladder and jump or push a box and freeze time, it’s a finger-twister. The game seems to delight in making you do those sorts of things from time to time. Throw in occasionally sketchy physics and strange inconsistencies in the properties of objects and you have yourself a recipe for serious frustration.
If those problems get fixed up, Jazz will be an absolute gem. Every bit of it is gorgeous. You can clamber over the menu and credits, laid out in an elegant theater. The levels, silent movie cut scenes, and animations look fantastic from start to finish. The game is accompanied by a lovely jazz soundtrack that gets better and better as you put your band together and move toward the climax. It’s all downright beautiful.
Aside from the frustratingly floaty controls (and the lack of consideration the level design gives them), the platforming is quite cool. The ability to freeze time opens up interesting possibilities for puzzles, allowing you to manipulation sections of your environment and the people around you. Objects that can be frozen are visually distinct from those that can’t, but that doesn’t make solutions immediately obvious.
For difficulty, I’d stick Jazz at a comfortable middle of the road. It stays too easy for just long enough to get worrisome, but things ramp up apace once they start moving. There are eleven long levels, broken up into several sections that are filled to checkpoints, so you’ll never have to replay much unless you want to go back for collectables. Within those tiny bits between checkpoints, however, there are occasionally big-time challenges. Usually these difficulty spikes come at a welcome moment, but every once in a while they’re phone-throwingly frustrating.
I can’t recommend Jazz: Trump’s Journey wholeheartedly. It sells itself as a game with a unique and engaging story, and that’s something it simply doesn’t have. Setting aside the translation, the message of the game is still iffy at best and you’ll only find parallels to Louis Armstrong if you squint really hard. But it is, for the most part, a solid, fun platformer. And can you argue with the looks, or the sound? Let’s settle on a cautious recommendation, with a side of hoping for a significant patch-up sooner than later. If you decide to take a look, swing by our and let us know what you think.
TouchArcade Rating: 
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‘Super Crate Box’ Review – Please, Not the Disc Gun Again
A shoulder surfer would describe Super Crate Box [$.99] as a mess, a pixelated mash of vivid colors and explosions wrapped in a whirlwind of erratic movement, 8-bit sound, and some decidedly bizarre character design. They’d be right. Super Crate Box is a mess, but it owns its fast-moving arcade chaos, and deftly brings you along for the ride.
You don’t even realize that you embraced it until it’s an hour later and you hate that godforsaken disc launcher with the passion of many angry men. What renders you helpless has a lot to do with its infinite, looping structure and purity of play. This is a minimalist, throwback-style game that wants you to do one thing: capture crates for a high score. The hooks are in its constituent parts, which seamlessly blend into a cacophony of arcade action surrounding this pure purpose of play. It becomes hypnotizing, fast.
Your typical game goes a little something like this: on a flat plane, enemies tumble out of an invisible pipe in the opening of a level, and you, while they fall, capture crates and defeat those enemies with the weapons you pick up from said crates. If an enemy hits the lava pit because you didn’t kill it, it pops back out of the top at double speed and joins the ever-growing conga line of even more brainless enemies.
Avoidance is key, but so is aggression. Each crate contains a new weapon that forces you to strategize distance versus time at the drop of a hat. As you play, you’ll unlock even more weapons, all of which do something completely different and are often devastating. Laser guns, mines, rocket launchers, grenade launchers, the shotgun are just a taste of what’s on the roster. Each has its own special kind of spread and weaknesses. Some even have big negatives, like the disc launcher, which is a single fire gun that has bullets that bounce back at you.
Whatever pacing you’re imagining, multiply that by 11 and you’ll get a sense of the raw madness that is Super Crate Box. One second you’re charging up a laser gun to rid a platform of its occupants, the next you’re dropping down to another level and using a mine in order to put a stop-gap on that side so you have enough free-time to grab a crate on another platform. The frenzy absorbs you, and the raw precision becomes a second nature thing. People say it’s a mess, and it is, but I’m OK with it. I welcome all of it.
As you play, you’ll steadily unlock more guns and more characters to use in the game. It’s your usual incentive program, but where it departs is in the fact that it also rewards failure. If you die 500 times, for example, you’ll unlock Super Meat Boy as a character. Simply gathering crates, no matter how many times you die along the way, is also a valid way to unlock stuff.
I’m surprised by how much I dig the virtual controls; Halfbot and Vlambeer did a heck of a job translating the action to the touchscreen and then making it feel as natural, and as split-second responsive as the game’s PC and Mac counterparts. On iPhone, the two-button UI is a tad too bulky. On iPad, the game feels at home. Regardless, these guys nailed it. This game feels good.
Another place you can play is on the iCade. Currently, the controls have been flip-flopped inadvertently in an update, but when they’re working ideally, they feel great. I think this is the way to play since you get that tactile feedback.
People in general are really responding to Super Crate Box, and our community digs it. I love it. Its high-octane play married with its no-frills, arcade game design that keeps me collecting crates and blasting enemies into delightful little pieces of monster. I’m thinking it’ll grab you, too.
TouchArcade Rating: 
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‘ZDay Survival Simulator’ Review – Just Like You Imagined
You might not have downloaded it yet, but you’ve played Z-Day [$1.99] before. It’s the game you play in your head while reading The Walking Dead; you know, that game where you plot out where you would go and how you would operate during the zombie apocalypse? That one.
Would you take in that stranger you found on the road? Would you mug him instead? Would you break into a police station surrounded by zombies? With moans at your back, three kills to your name and a sledgehammer at your side, would you stop to take a bag of tools from a broken-down car in the middle of the road?
These are the questions Z-Day asks, and presumably, ones you’ve considered before if a z-day daydream ever popped into your mind. Z-Day is a graphic novel spin on the Choose Your Own Adventure, text-based game, except its presented on iPhone and iPad in all of its gory, high-resolution art glory.
Playing is simple, and the moment-to-moment content is strangely intense. You start in your house. A zombie apocalypse has begun. You decide if you want to run or grab a new weapon. Then, you decide, while zombies are coming to the door, if you want to dig for supplies like duct tape, fight the zombies, or get to higher ground.
All along the way, Z-Day gives you plenty of entertaining situational content. At one point, you’ll be asked if saving your best friend is worth a zombie attack. Later, you might bump into a roving band of gun-toting jerks robbing a pawn shop. Before that, you might meet your unfortunate end in the bowels of a police station, as a horde steadily infests it as you search for fat loot.
The most interesting thing about Z-Day is that it doesn’t pull punches; if you make a bad decision, you’ll probably die. Also, it puts you in horrible situations and then has you make uncomfortable decisions. As you play, you might notice things like empathy have vacated your brain in the face of so many horrifying scenarios.
Breaking this down mechanically feels like a disservice to the experience. In Z-Day, you’ll be presented with a variety of Choose Your Action text boxes, hand-drawn graphic novel scenes, and a description of situations. Pick an action, and then move on to the next moment. The goal is survival, but even if you die, you’ll be scored on a variety of elements, including your decision-making or the quality of your weaponry and items and the amount of survivors you brought along the way.
Z-Day doesn’t have unique content, so you’ll see the same situations over and over again as you restart. It’s really up to you to role-play it and see different outcomes. There are quite a few, too, in each given situation.
I’ve been having a blast with this since it’s essentially gameifies what runs through my head whenever I read or watch a piece of zombie content, but it’s also solid production-wise. I heartily recommend this to anyone that still has an itch for zombies, or even an appreciation of primarily text-based titles.
TouchArcade Rating: 
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