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We’ve had our eye on Tweet Land [$1.99] from Why Ideas ever since we spotted it as a curious Kickstarter project back in April of last year. The project was more than sufficiently funded, and last month we were treated to a new trailer and news that Tweet Land would be hitting at the end of January. As expected, earlier this week the game finally went live in the App Store.

Tweet Land was intriguing due to its unique real-time usage of tweets drawn from Twitter that would trigger elements into the game. It reaches out into the vast ocean of Twitter and utilizes special keywords from real tweets to create things in the game. It’s a fantastic idea in theory, and Why Ideas did pull it off on a functional level just as they had promised. However, despite being really innovative, Tweet Land doesn’t hold up as well in the gameplay department, and there were a couple of unintended side effects of using live tweets that left a sour taste in my mouth.

First, let’s talk about the kind of gameplay that’s in Tweet Land. You control a car heading down the highway (Route 140 no less) and you must make it to the finish line while dodging tweet-driven hazards and other traffic on the road. You can veer into the other cars from the side to knock them off the road and score some points, and ramming multiple cars off the road at once will multiply the points you earn. If you hit cars from behind or run into road hazards, you lose a bit of life, which is represented by the visual damage on your car.

I really like Tweet Land’s retro style, and there is a lot of humor and personality in its pixel art visuals (though it’s kind of blurry on my iPhone 4S). But things start to fall apart when you actually start playing. The controls are very slippery, and it’s hard to be precise when trying to properly ram other cars or avoid hitting hazards. With practice you can get used to it, but it’s still really annoying when you’re trying to quickly react to something and the controls don’t afford you the kind of finesse that you need to get it done.

I think when you have games that are built on top of a very simple core gameplay concept, you have to get all the little details right. That’s why games like Jetpack Joyride or Angry Birds are often imitated but rarely duplicated. as they get the feel of the controls and the movement in the game so right. If you’re going to be doing the same action over and over again, you want that action to be fun. While Tweet Land has its share of fun moments, something about it just feels off, like it’s missing something but I can’t pinpoint what.

The game is broken into two environments with 12 levels each, with a spot for a third environment that’s said to be coming soon. With each new level, new tweet-driven elements are introduced and added to the current ones, so as you keep going the variety of things that can happen increases quite a bit. An example of a hazard would be if someone tweets the word “meteor” then a meteor will fly in from off screen and you’ll have to use the position of its shadow in order to avoid being crushed. There are helpful things that can be triggered in the game too, like health packs or a temporary spread shot for your vehicle.

One problem with the progression in Tweet Land is that it gets rather hard rather quickly, and if you get stuck on a level there’s no moving forward until you beat it. This got pretty frustrating since many of the times that I died it felt like it wasn’t actually my fault. When elements are brought in from Twitter, they are accompanied by a label with the Twitter handle of whoever tweeted that keyword. This is neat, but leads to an incredibly cluttered and distracting screen, especially when there are multiple things happening at once. Coupled with the floaty controls and the speed at which things are zooming by, and the odds are stacked against you.

Arrows indicate where things will be coming in from off screen, but they’re hard to notice amongst the busyness on the screen and often aren’t very helpful. Add in the fact that there’s usually a ton of traffic on the road with you, and making it to the finish line intact can require a healthy dose of luck just as much as skill. The levels tend to be a bit longish, and nothing is worse than seeing your cheap demise when you’re within a stone’s throw of the finish. The more I failed a level over and over, the less I felt compelled to go back and conquer it.

However, my biggest issue with Tweet Land is something that I didn’t really expect: the tweets that the game draws from can be much too somber for what is supposed to be a fun and lighthearted game. For example, if someone tweets about a “car crash” then cars will zoom in from offscreen and wreck into some of the other traffic on the road. When your run ends, you have the option of looking at a list of all the tweets that were used to bring things into the game.

To my horror, I found that in this particular instance “car crash” was pulled from a huge retweet campaign trying to raise money for a girl who had lost her parents in a car crash in Florida. I know Tweet Land has no way of telling the difference, but I couldn’t help but feel crass for playing a game that was fueled by somebody else’s tragedy. With some of the other keywords used in the game – like tsunami, terrorist, and death – I have no doubt that encountering a downer situation like that will occur often.

While I do still think the idea behind Tweet Land is incredibly clever, I just find the game too fundamentally flawed to be enjoyable. Don’t get me wrong, I want to like it and I did find myself having fun with the game at times, but those fun times are quickly diminished when you realize your game is possibly being powered by the tragic tweets of strangers. Beyond that, the gameplay is too average to warrant dealing with cheap deaths and an unpredictable difficulty.

With some tweaks to the controls and interface, and perhaps some sort of filter for what kind of keywords are utilized, then Tweet Land could end up being something pretty special. It feels like it’s just a couple notches off of being something great, and I hope it gets there someday. As it is now, though, it’s hard to recommend the game except to those who might be curious to check out its novel use of Twitter or are prepared to deal with its shortcomings.

TouchArcade Rating:

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Did you know that penguins spend up to 75% of their time underwater, looking for food in the ocean? Or, if Chillingo’s recent Greedy Penguins [99¢/Lite] is to be believed, they spend 85% of their time on ice floes, waiting for you to feed them, 10% of their time playing guitar and burping, and 5% of their time getting eaten by ravenous Orcas.

Greedy Penguins is a bird-centric physics puzzler (what a concept!) that revolves around you finding ways to get incredibly stressed-out fish in the mouths of the correspondingly-colored penguins. You tap the fish to drop it from its hook and get it rolling, then through a combination of timing and obstacle-clearing, get it to the right-colored penguin. Once your penguin is successfully fed, he coughs up ice cream, which you tap to feed each level’s companion and get bonus points when completing the level, garnering a one, two, or three-fish rating.

The concept isn’t new, but the execution feels good. I found myself really enjoying this game, as much for the cute graphics and theme as for the well-designed puzzles. While the earlier puzzles seem easy (don’t they always?), once I really got going it became quite challenging to make sure I got the fish moving in order to clear obstacles. I found myself failing some levels multiple times. Since each level is short, I didn’t mind too much, but it did remind me of how bad my timing is (I still get night terrors regarding the Cave of Wonders level from Aladdin for the Sega Genesis).

Another challenge, though one not personally experienced, is that the colors chosen for each penguin and their food make the game exceptionally trying for color blind people. As mentioned in the forum thread, those who can’t see colors will have a heck of a time getting through this game. If you’re persistent and don’t mind some trial-and-error, you might still enjoy it, but as a person who had enough trouble being able to clearly see everything, I would probably recommend skipping it until a color blind option is added.

The other thing that I personally didn’t like was the in-app purchase option. I’m generally of the conservative “in-app purchase?! Not in my paid app!” mindset (I am a bit of an old person, after all), and my thoughts on Greedy Penguins are no different. Simply beating every level in a world isn’t enough to unlock the next set of levels. In order to unlock the second and third igloos (worlds of 12 puzzles each), you need to have either collected thirty fish (out of only thirty-six) or pay 99¢.

The game also encourages you to waste time in levels by tapping the penguins and their companions to make them do “funny animations,” making it unlikely that you’ll get a perfect score of three fish on your first try. Crafty, no? I don’t know about you, but I don’t really like replaying levels of games just to gain points (or fish) in order to unlock content that I feel entitled to, having already purchased the app.

All things considered, Greedy Penguins is a well-crafted – though hardly groundbreaking – puzzle game. It’s fun and extremely well-executed, with enough challenging puzzles to keep you occupied. If you’ve got a dollar or two burning a hole in your pocket, I’d definitely recommend giving it a spin, especially since it’s Universal. If not, well, you can always get your penguin fix from this video!

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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 discussion thread and let us know what you think.

TouchArcade Rating:

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When I play a music game, the most important things I’m looking for are good music and approachable gameplay. Cytus [$0.99] by Rayark manages to nail both of those and even adds a little bit of visual flair on top of it. While Cytus does have a few small issues and miscues in regards to a few elements, it’s still great to play and is a worthy addition to the iOS rhythm genre.

Cytus plays similarly to Elite Beat Agents – note bubbles appear on your screen and must be tapped to the rhythm of the song. An ‘Active Scan Line’ moves up and down the screen to the beat of the song and helps you time the hits on each note. In addition to normal notes, the game also features holds and slides which add some variety to the gameplay. Hits are scored on a system ranging from ‘Perfect’ to ‘Bad’ with a final ranking at song completion dependent on the length of your hit chain and the amount perfect hits.

As you can imagine, the gameplay is pretty simple, but well executed. While the note positioning is mostly done well, there were a few songs where the notes seemed slightly off or not in tune with either the beat or off-beat. There weren’t too many instances of this, but it was still annoying nonetheless.

Where Cytus really shines is in its music selection and presentation. Song-wise, players can choose from 15 songs ranging from J-Pop to Techno with a little bit of Synthpop thrown into the mix. The song selection is very much Bemani-inspired and should sound familiar to anyone that has played those types of games before.

While I imagine some gamers may immediately scoff at the music genres I just listed, I’d plead with you to give it a chance. One of the things I loved about each song in Cytus is the approachability regardless of whether you’re a fan of that sort of music. It’s not very often that I play through a music game and I pretty much like every single song that’s thrown at me, which should speak volumes of the care put into the selection in this game. Just make sure you play with some headphones in order to do the music justice.

The overall presentation, meanwhile, is one of the more striking aspects of Cytus. Everything has a very clean, minimalistic feel accompanied with some beautiful artwork. It’s hard to explain what in particular is so appealing – maybe it’s because the whole game looks like a modern Final Fantasy-menu. Also included is Game Center support as well as social network integration. There were a few instances where the interface was a little too bare (for example, the tutorial fails to explain the various pop-up mode options), but otherwise I came away impressed.

While Cytus gets a lot of things right, there are a few elements missing that are typically standard in most music games. For example, there’s no ‘life meter’ in Cytus, meaning that you could just simply launch a song, not do anything and still see the level through (technically, you ‘Fail’ the level, but you don’t know until after the song ends). Granted, you actually have to get a ranking higher than the minimum in order to unlock the ‘Hard’ difficulty and new songs, but some of the fun with music games is working under the pressure of an all-powerful meter judging your performance (or maybe I’m just a masochist).

Another weakness in Cytus is in regards to the hit detection. Basically, the hit window is relatively loose, meaning that you have a wide margin of error between what is considered a ‘Perfect’ tap and what is considered merely a ‘Good’ hit (or between ‘Good’ and ‘Bad’ for that matter). While some folks wouldn’t necessarily consider this a bad thing it does decrease the overall challenge, particularly for those of us that are veterans of music games that were rather unforgiving.

Despite these omissions, Cytus still does a great job executing the features it does have. Considering its relative minimalism, I think Cytus is a good title for gamers looking to get into the music genre on iOS devices. I would have liked to have seen more songs, but I’m hoping the developers will add more in the future. Regardless, with a great selection of music, simple but well-executed gameplay, and a good, clean overall presentation, Cytus is well worth a recommendation for anyone interested in rhythm games.

TouchArcade Rating:

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Last week when we learned the classic laser disc arcade game Mad Dog McCree [$4.99] was coming to the App Store, I was stoked. I had fond memories of gunslinging at that giant arcade cabinet as a kid, and figured reliving the experience on my small touch screen device would give me that great shot of nostalgia that I’ve been fortunate enough to encounter often on the App Store. Then I actually fired up the iOS version, and learned once again that nostalgia is a fickle beast.

Mad Dog McCree has not aged well, and I’m not so sure it was ever a very good game to begin with. With a certain part of the video game spectrum always striving for the most realistic visuals possible, and the introduction of disc-based storage in gaming which started becoming prevalent in the late 80s and early 90s, mankind embarked on one of its most hideous inventions of all time – full-motion video games. What could be more real than actual real-life video footage?! It was THE FUTURE.

Unfortunately, the biggest drawback to full-motion video is that it’s extremely linear. Rather than an artificial world which you built from the ground up and could manipulate in an infinite amount of ways, you had to plan ahead for what could happen and then produce those results on film, limiting the level of variety in the game. As such, games like Mad Dog McCree allowed very little player interaction or variation.

My 9 year old me didn’t care about these things, though. All I knew is that I could point a big plastic revolver at cowboy outlaws on a massive screen and they would react to me shooting them. Crazy stuff. That also brings up one major point of contention with the iOS version of Mad Dog McCree – there’s no light gun. This sort of takes away a huge part of the appeal of a game like this, however, I actually found the tap-to-shoot mechanic on the touch screen to work just fine and I didn’t end up feeling like I was missing out by not having a gun peripheral.

As for how well the rest of the game translates, the port itself is very good. The video sequences look good enough, though obviously lightyears away from the high definition visuals we’re all accustomed to nowadays. Aside from the natural old-school look of a 20+ year old title, the menus and interface in the iOS version are really quite ugly. They look especially jagged and blurry on Retina Display devices, and could use a high resolution upgrade. It’s a pretty minor thing, but it sticks out.

Gameplay comes in an original Arcade mode and a new, easier Casual mode. Truthfully, both of them are stupid hard. Mad Dog McCree requires lightning quick reaction times and good memorization of how the levels play out in order to be successful. Enemies can be hard to see in the environment, so tremendous amounts of trial-and-error are necessary to learn the ins and outs of each level. In the iOS version, it’s easy to skip cutscenes and retry sections quickly, and the ability to quit and continue where you left off makes actually completing the game a more realistic endeavor (not to mention, at $1 a pop in the arcades if memory serves me correctly, a whole lot cheaper).

Mad Dog McCree is the product of a FMV era that was light on gameplay and heavy on the “omg look the graphics are actual people!”, but it’s definitely earned its spot in gaming history. The iOS port is really pretty good, and whether or not you should pick it up will ultimately come down to if you actually enjoyed the original game or if you just remember it through the rose-colored glasses of a 9 year old, like me. Strangely, as shallow and frustrating as the game is, I find myself going back to it over and over again. For some reason I really want to see it through, most likely because I never would have been able to as a kid in the arcade.

I don’t think it’s as fun as other iOS laserdisc ports like Road Blaster [$4.99/HD] and Cobra Command [$6.99], but Mad Dog McCree does a solid job at translating the gunslinging action of the arcade original to the touchscreen of iOS. If you’re a fan of the source material, then you should be pretty satisfied with this port.

TouchArcade Rating:

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Controversial is probably the best word for War on Terror [$1.99]. Originally a board game conceived by Terror Bull Games in 2003, War on Terror has precipitated everything from bans to death threats – true story, I swear. As you can imagine, when the iOS version was released, there was significant concern about it being forcibly annulled from the App Store. It wasn’t, and I’m damn well glad for that because War on Terror is the sort of game you should at least play once.

Fans of the title should be forewarned, however. The iOS version is significantly watered down compared to the original. There is no Axis of Evil. There are no off-board negotiations or dealings. Defeated players do not become terrorist nations. You don’t even get situational cards. Nonetheless, that doesn’t change the fact that War on Terror is surprisingly fun and, once you’ve realized the genius behind it, devilishly clever.

But we’re moving a little too fast. Let’s take a few steps back and take a look at how the game actually plays. When you first start the game, you’ll be asked to select your avatar (this is purely cosmetic, by the way) and the number of players you wish to play against. After that, you’ll be dropped into a world map with a few nations under your control. To win, you must accumulate a certain amount of liberty points. How do you do that? By taking over continents (each continent rewards you with a certain amount of points). I’m totally serious about this.

If you cringed at that, you should probably stop reading now because it gets a lot worse. Did you know that the total annihilation of a player in War on Terror is usually accompanied with fanfare and a declaration that the aforementioned individual has been liberated. Ahem. Moving on.

The actual gameplay itself is relatively straightforward. During each turn, a set of dice is rolled and countries with the corresponding number will reward its owner with a certain amount of money. You’ll also be able to do things like establish alliances (these seldom seem to help), declare war on others, develop the countries under your ownership (the better developed the country, the greater the revenue you receive from them), indulge in a spot of terrorism (they’re surprisingly effective), build defenses (protect a country against radioactive assaults or common-place rabble; it’s your choice) and even initiate nuclear attacks (exactly what you think it is).

Complex as all that might sound, it’s not. War happens when you click on an adjacent nation and select the appropriate option. Victory is even less hands-on; a win is determined by whether or not your dice rolls are above a five.

Such is the case for everything else as well; it’s all a matter of pointing and clicking. However, what makes War on Terror shine is the way the game enforces the need for proper accountancy. For example, you can wage war as much as you like – just make sure you have a minimum of forty million in your bank. Want to call a nuclear strike? Sure. Have five hundred million in reserve. No one ever said it was easy to be a world leader. If anything, it’s bloody expensive. Guerrilla warfare, on the other hand, is not.

In fact, compared to everything else, terrorism is almost mind-bogglingly cheap. You’ll only need to spend ten million in order to send your incendiaries anywhere in the world. As an added bonus, you won’t have to worry about weathering retaliation either – radicals in this game are rather close-mouthed about their affiliations.

For the sake of decorum, I’m going to forgo discussing the political aspects of the game. You can come to your own conclusions yourself. However, I will have to say that War on Terror is rather compelling. Once you’ve gotten into the swing of things, it’s easy to get caught up in the act of expansion, in worrying about the next oil turn and whether you will be a prince or a pauper. Do you play nice with your neighbors or do you move for the kill? Do you spread like a venereal disease or do you focus on building up the nations under your control?

Like any good iOS game, it’s simple but prone towards provoking ‘one more turn’ instincts. Graphics-wise, War on Terror will likely be a hit or a miss. If you enjoy the political cartoons in the newspaper, you’ll probably like it. If not, well, it’s not intolerable. It’s just not something to shout about.

As I’ve mentioned before, War on Terror is a game that you need to experience at least once. But only once. Re playability is a big issue here for me. After beating it once, I feel little imperative to do so again, an odd turn of circumstances given that War on Terror was derived from a board game. I imagine that this opinion might change once online multiplayer (hot seating could have worked brilliant too, guys) is introduced but for now, it is a problem. Still, if you’re willing to overlook that, War on Terror remains a rather brilliant if possibly misguided piece of political satire and a rather entertaining game to boot.

TouchArcade Rating:

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We’ve been keeping tabs on Paradox Interactive’s Defenders of Ardania [$4.99 / Free] since its initial unveiling way back in February. While Defenders boasts beautiful artwork and a decent amount of content (including multiplayer), the majority of attention is centered on its gameplay, which attempts to move beyond the typical tower defense experience with some new and interesting ideas. Overall, despite some minor concerns with the UI and other areas, Defenders of Ardania is an excellent addition to the tower defense genre and is a must-try for any fan.

One of the first things you’ll notice when playing are the gorgeous visuals. The artwork showcases a variety of fantastical locales and certainly looks as if the developers paid extra attention to setting the scene for the entirety of the campaign. The actual units and towers look a little out of place, but I think that’s mostly a credit to the attention paid to the backdrops. Of course, heightened visuals aren’t going to necessarily make or break a tower defense game, but well done efforts deserve credit nonetheless.

Gameplay-wise, take a glance at some of its screenshots and Defenders of Ardania may look like just another tower defense game. However, actually fire up the game and you’ll discover that it offers quite a bit more depth than most TD games. For starters, Defenders combines the gameplay elements of both the tower defense and real-time strategy genres.

Like tower defense, players must strategically place towers of various strengths and abilities onto the battlefield in order to take out the oncoming hordes of enemies looking to attack your base. There’s tower upgrades, resource management and a wide variety of enemies, including baddies that can fire at your towers and destroy them if you don’t repair in time. Taken simply with these gameplay elements, Defenders of Ardania would have been a standard, decent TD game.

Add in what we’re calling ‘Tower Offense’ elements, and Defenders quickly turns into a game about extensive resource management and striking the all-important balance between multitasking both offense and defense. In addition to guarding your own keep from the enemy throngs, you must also send out your own units against the enemy’s towers in order to take down the opposing strongholds.

Furthermore, the more units you send out, the more ‘experience’ that unit earns until it upgrades, giving it a nice stat boost. Later campaign missions up the ante with having multiple enemy keeps, forcing you to defend and attack on multiple fronts. Finally, Defenders also has a magic system allowing players to expend resources on spells ranging from defensive and offensive buffs to enemy unit slowdown.

All these gameplay elements lead to a lot of different strategies that can be employed while playing Defenders of Ardania. The goal of each mission is to destroy all the enemy forts, so obviously you’ll need to pay attention to your offensive forces and decide whether to attempt to brute force the enemy with tons of units or launch a varied team of units to try and stymie the opposing towers. However, the game ends if the enemy takes your own keep, so you’ll have to make sure your defensive towers are well placed and upgraded.

In addition, towers, units, and magic all use the same resource, so your biggest task will be balancing your allocation of currency. This all sounds like a lot of information to work with but Defenders does an excellent job managing all the pieces and tying it all together in a way that just works. In fact, the only complaint I could really foresee with this sort of gameplay is the length of time entrenched battles might take, but I think that’s just part of the strategy.

While the game does a lot of things right, Defenders of Ardania does have a few small issues, particularly with its UI and introductory segments. For example, I would have really liked an actual tutorial level, rather than the static help screens currently serving as the ‘tutorial.’ It certainly would have helped newcomers looking to jump in the game fast and having no idea what to do. In addition, the lack of difficulty options may stonewall some players as they get further into the campaign.

Also, while Defenders does feature a tower defense only gameplay mode, it lacks a lot of the niceties of most tower defense games, such as a fast forward button and difficulty levels, making the mode too easy and very slow. One last complaint is with Defenders’ Game Center oriented multiplayer mode which is pretty fun, assuming you can actually get a game started (I had quite a few errors trying to set up matches). Granted, most of these issues are relatively minor and don’t detract from the overall single player experience, and will more than likely get sorted out in future updates.

If you’re a fan of tower defense games (and have an iPad), you need to stop reading this review and just check out Defenders of Ardania. It’s simply a well done game that merges established gameplay elements with good new strategic twists all wrapped up in a visually appealing title. Even if you’re on the fence, you should at least check out the lite version and see if the tower offense pieces suit your fancy. Either way, it’s nice to see advancements made in the area of TD games, and I hope this is a sign of more innovation to come.

TouchArcade Rating:

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I think one of the reasons people are drawn to certain formulas in gaming is because they flick some silent switch within them, and from then on, it’s forever in the on position. Clearly birds and physics are one of those irresistible combos, and for me, there’s something about zombies and anything that should not be a zombie that is like a drug I must get my hands on. In this case, it’s zombies and the elderly, apparently. Which is why I had to find out what was going on behind the clever and attractive look of a game with a name like Corpse Granny [$.99/HD].

I mentioned earlier that Corpse Granny was a nice looking title, and I feel like I have to repeat myself on that because this is an unusually good looking game. Like, if it was a girl and it walked past you at a party, you’d turn around to look again. But could you catch up with said girl and have a worthwhile conversation? Well, yes, you could, but how long the conversation would remain interesting for, I can’t say. Or let’s throw that metaphor out the window and say that we’ve seen some of this ground before.

Corpse Granny offers three worlds to explore and a total of 45 levels to make your way through. Each level is very simple: You’re presented with a puzzle which you’ll need to solve, and you’ll need to use the world’s items to do so. This mostly means cutting fireballs free and aiming them at unsuspecting zombies, but as the levels grow more complex, you’ll also use other obstacles such as boards, bombs and boulders to make sure you take out everything in your path to clear it.

As you progress, three different types of fireballs will be at your service: orange ones which are … well, basic fireballs, blue ones which you can tilt the phone to move, and green ones which you will inevitably hate because they will vanish after touching anything near it three times. As annoying as they are though, the green fireballs do add a level of complexity to solving these puzzles that I enjoyed, as I had to work harder to think through how I would complete each of these levels once they came into play.

The game dices up the formula a bit by tossing in some boss levels that allow you to actually go up against the decaying grandmother of the title, who moves around as you try to use your environment’s advantages to take her out. For an old lady, she’s pretty spry. Must do yoga or something.

A cool extra is that you can unlock levels players have created, and there’s also a little sign that gives it away that more content is coming later down the line, so if you’re a fan, you can look forward to more zombie bowling in the future.

The heart of Corpse Granny is trial and error, and it works as long as you like to play in bite -sized bits and puzzle your way through how to solve each level. This game is chock-full of personality, and it also uses OpenFeint to track scores and such so you can compete with your friends. The art style is really cute and reminds me a bit of the The Behemoth’s humorous take on character design, but it still has its own unique bend. I think personally I’m a bit burnt out on trial and error titles, but that doesn’t mean I can’t call something quality when I see it — and Corpse Granny certainly has it in spades.

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Fantasy Flight Games is a company that’s known for creating very complicated tabletop games from geek-friendly properties, like A Song of Ice and Fire, Battlestar Galactica, The Lord of the Rings, and the works of H.P. Lovecraft. One of their most popular offerings is Arkham Horror, a game with approximately 700 cards, tokens and markers to keep track of and a play time of up to four hours. Earlier this year, the company released Elder Sign, a game that takes the Lovecraftian horror of Arkham Horror and distills it down to about half the time and only 200 pieces or so.

I love these games, but there’s really no such thing as a quick game of, well, any of them. Between set up, tear down and the inevitable time taken to teach new players and reference forgotten rules, you’re looking at a full evening’s entertainment. So imagine my delight playing Elder Sign: Omens [$3.99 / HD], the first of Fantasy Flight’s more mature games to arrive on the App Store. It’s quick to play, can be learned (mostly) as you go, and can be played solo or hotseat with friends. What’s not to like?

Elder Sign: Omens is harder to explain than it is to learn, but let’s give it a shot. Azathoth, one of Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones, is showing signs of awakening. This would basically be the end of the world, filled with eldritch abominations and mindless gibbering, so you must assemble a team to stop this from occurring.

You can choose from a list of 16 investigators to create a team of 1 to 4 members. The investigators all have their own strengths and weaknesses. Some have more sanity, others more stamina, some get more items than others and all have unique abilities to help you on your mission.

Once you enter the museum in which Elder Sign takes place, you’re faced with a selection of missions. Each one is horrifying in its own way, and your investigators risk losing their lives or their sanity by facing them down. In each mission, you roll the dice (proverbially in this game, and literally in the tabletop version) to see if you can match the symbols that come up, things like Terror, Peril and Lore, to the symbols needed to defeat the nameless horror you face.

If you do, you’re well rewarded, earning items for your investigators that help you improve your odds and occasionally Elder Signs. If you don’t, you fail the mission and suffer, losing sanity, stamina and sometimes gaining Doom. If the Doom Track moves up by twelve spaces before you collect the fourteen Elder Signs needed to seal away the Great Old One, Azathoth awakens and all is lost.

There are a few other details that can effect the outcome of your game. As you succeed at missions you earn trophies that can be exchanged for healing, items or expensive Elder Signs. Time passes on as you take your turns, and at midnight terrible things happen depending on how many monsters or Midnight signs you’ve left on the board. And occasionally portals open to Other Worlds, where the stakes are higher but so are the rewards.

As a result, success in Elder Sign is part luck, part strategy, but it’s certainly weighted toward luck. If you fail at rolling the signs you need, there’s little you can do. But making sure you pick the right investigator for the job, keep them alive and choose the missions you can defeat — therein lies strategy.

For the most part, the transition to digital has been very kind to Elder Sign. Azathoth is the only Ancient One that features — the others and their varied win conditions aren’t present in Omens. But otherwise the game is intact and elegantly presented. The interface is superb, aside from a few small oversights. I would prefer to be able to see what items can do at a glance even when they’re not usable, and I didn’t discover that tapping the title of a mission would bring up more information about it even while you were in the midst of it until I was quite deep in the game. But on the whole, Fantasy Flight has done a fantastic job of making a complicated game simple and easy to play.

They’ve done such a good job, in fact, that you don’t need to worry about learning much at all before you play. I’d recommend watching the tutorials so you don’t get lost, but this is a game you can muddle through and understand within a single playthrough. That’s outstandingly intuitive for this sort of thing. Playthroughs are much quicker than in the tabletop game, too, though not as speedy as they could be — a bit too much focus is placed on fancy but slow scene transitions.

You can play Elder Sign: Omens alone, using up to four investigators to explore the museum. You’re given a local high score when you finish the game, win or lose, and it’s endlessly satisfying to try to defeat that score with different teams and strategies. Alternately, you can play hotseat with friends — assign each person to a single investigator and pass your device around. The game doesn’t change, but it works brilliantly both ways.

Best of all? Win or lose, no one has to clean up the table when you’re done. There’s no overstating how much I’d like to see more of Fantasy Flight’s catalog brought to iOS. If you agree, voice your support in our discussion thread. And do try to keep your sanity intact while you wait.

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We’ve nailed our collective pants to our chairs, but they keep flying off when we look at the first image from Oceanhorn: Monster of Uncharted Seas. Finnish developer Cornfox & Bros describes it as a Zelda-’inspired’ action adventure game that seeks to put the focus on puzzles and exploration instead of RPG sub-systems and menus. It’s also gorgeous — like, your-pants-will-pop-off kind of gorgeous.

The name of the game is derived from the fiction’s ancient sea monster who “terrorizes” the World of Uncharted Seas. You’ll play as a “nameless hero” tasked with killing this monster and saving his sister. In order to accomplish these things, you’ll need to explore the world in boat and on foot, and undoubtedly plunge into some puzzle-y areas filled with treasure.

We don’t know about you, but we can’t help thinking about Wind Waker whenever we look at the art and consider Cornfox & Bros’s pitch for Oceanhorn. Bring it on, we say, because the world needs more of these games.

UI and effects not final or missing, FYI.

Cornfox & Bros, one of the gaggle of developers responsible for Death Rally if you didn’t know, is expecting Oceanhorn to hit at some point in 2012. This reveal first appeared to our forums and the studio says it’ll continue updating its thread as it reveals new information. There’s also a blog, too, which is revealing some other cool mechanics. For example, apparently Oceanhorn can attack “at any time” while you’re sailing the high seas in your upgradeable boat. So excited!

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