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There are great mysteries buried beneath the surface of the alien world of Gene Effect [ $4.99 ], mysteries your small team has been sent to uncover. As you immerse yourself in the atmosphere of those distant tunnels, you’ll encounter alien life, hostile and beautiful, and the remnants of a civilization both ancient and powerful.

You pilot the exploration ship Triton. It’s almost ludicrously vulnerable, destroyed with equal ease by careless piloting, aggressive plant life and man-made defenses. But that doesn’t change the facts: you’re the only one who can unlock the secrets of this cavern and its alien masters. Unarmed but for your repulsors, you travel ever deeper.

This journey isn’t one of lengthy maze-like exploration. Gene Effect is broken up into levels, and most of those levels are fairly straightforward. There will be a task or for the Triton to complete, maybe collecting a certain amount of koronite resources from the environment, finding DNA samples or powering up ancient reactors. You might need to use your repulsors to clear away loose rocks in your path, or locate and use the occasional drone to clear a path. Once those things are done, it’s just a matter of finding the warp gate and moving on.

There are subtasks that might impede your progress, though. The path is often blocked with gates that need opening in some way—finding the right triggers tucked away in the tunnels, collecting enough of a resource or turning on (or off) the lights. On their own these things are usually fairly simple—or at least they would be if not for the presence of so many walls.

Walls are the Triton’s natural enemy. While you’re still getting comfortable piloting you might find yourself bumping into them. Do so for more than a moment and you’ll blow your ship up. The controls are well-designed, with a responsive joystick that controls movement, so crashing shouldn’t be a big problem for long. It’s when you’re comfortable that the game brings in mines and plant life that will smash you into walls if you’re not ever-so-careful.

Once you have survival sorted out, you can start to enjoy the real meat of Gene Effect. It’s a completionist’s dream, with level trophies for speed, careful navigation, and overall score. And then there are the relicts and artifacts. Nearly every level has a hidden relict or two tucked away somewhere. They’re often hidden in the walls, revealed with a lucky ping of your sonar and a well-placed blast from Triton’s repulsor. Sometimes they’re hidden more deeply, in temples opened with camouflaged triggers or rooms tucked away behind seemingly solid walls. Some, the most hidden of all, aren’t even listed on the level score breakdown, so you won’t know they’re present until you find them. Those are the alien artifacts, and if you find enough pieces you’ll be able to strap them on to Triton to upgrade its capabilities.

While all of this is going on, the game slowly unfolds an intriguing story. It tends toward telling over showing, as it’s revealed far more in static text feeds at the end of each level than within the gameplay itself. There are also a few too many errors in the text for comfort. But the story has some great hooks, and it should string you along quite effectively while you’re out exploring.

Gene Effect is ambitious, and long—accounting for deaths, I’ve put in quite a few hours without finding everything that’s out there to discover. But that length also highlights the game’s flaws. For example, the caves, while gorgeous, all look fairly similar to one another, and while the levels grow more difficult they don’t really get all that complex. On its own this would start to feel a bit repetitious, and pixel-hunting your way to new artifacts doesn’t really help.

The game’s difficulty level varies between hard and stupidly frustrating. Some of the later levels are long, and meander between traveling through long, mostly harmless tunnels and facing down sudden bursts of danger. Long periods of boredom followed by short-lived struggles aren’t really what I look for in entertainment. Take it easy when you choose your difficulty—Gene Effect is harder than it looks, and you can’t really change difficulty modes mid-stream.

All of this leaves Gene Effect something of a tough call. On one hand it’s gorgeous, with a well-crafted story and loads of content. On the other hand, that content ventures into boredom or frustration a little too often. Ultimately, though, it’s a game worth playing, a story worth experiencing. And it will leave you wanting more, so let’s hope there’s more on the way soon.

TouchArcade Rating:

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The iOS platform is hardly lacking for games that allow you to send living things to their inevitable death, and Gratuitous Space Battles [ $9.99 (HD)] satisfies the tactical itch with a capital T, while managing to bring some big eye candy and a light sense of humor to compensate you for all your hours spent constructing.

When you first launch the app, you’re driven towards a fairly anemic tutorial, which hardly deserves the name. A game like GSB has a lot of meat, layered on top of more meat, with a crust of meat at the center – a simple text-driven tutorial cannot even begin to prepare you for how many numbers there are to be crunched, how many configurations possible, and how many men are ready to die in your service. Inexperienced strategy gamers are going to be overwhelmed with the complexity, and while the tutorial does a competent job of getting you into the cockpit of the starter-ships, it does little to prepare you for the amount of ship-building you’ll be doing.

Ultimately, that’s what this game is about – building. Unlike a traditional tower defense game, you don’t fight off waves of enemies while upgrading in-between. Instead, you’re given a “historical” battle to participate in, and are given all of the enemy troops’ positions, ship-types, etc. Once you initiate the battle, your control of the fight is over – the ships will play out the battle based on a configuration of orders and equipment that you assigned beforehand, and your job becomes that of a silent watcher. Your real goal, and where the game completely shines, is to build and outfit your ships, and arrange them tactically to obliterate the alien host.

Most of the time spent with the game is spent customizing out your various ship-types with gear from a pool of upgrades that you’ve unlocked using the “honor” that you’ve won from battles. In a twist on standard tower defense games, you’re not only rewarded for winning, you’re rewarded for winning with honor. What this means is that while anyone can swing in with a massive Cruiser army and obliterate the alien force, the payout will leave much to be desired. More honor is paid out to the cautious commander, and the fewer ships you field and win with, the more honor you’ll earn to spend on unlocking upgrades, new hulls, and alien races to play as.

Visually, the game is beautiful, filled with detailed backdrops rich with stars, nebula, and distant worlds. Ships are highly detailed and beautiful to look at, and the constant hail of missiles, plasma beams, and scrambled clusters of fighters ensure that the game never gets boring to watch. Thundering music and the sounds of combat are decent, if a little drawn out over the length of the fight.

Being a port of a game that was designed for PC, GSB comes with touch controls that are generic but passable with nothing that really stands out. Pinch-to-zoom works on the combat map, but frustratingly caps out at a maximum zoom that feels too small – especially given the enormous size of the maps. Tapping on the various statistics during the building phase yields crucial information about each, but trying to pinpoint the miniature numbers can prove to be frustrating for the more sausage-fingered couch-commander.

Small touches add a sense of extra value to the game, such as the top panel during combat which plays out messages being sent by your crew, ranging from the tragic to the wry. It’s an unnecessary addition but a fun one, and injects a bit of humor to an otherwise dark and brooding atmosphere. Survival mode brings the endless-wave fun of traditional tower defense, but without the ability to upgrade on the fly. The result is a test for how well you’ve outfitted your fleet, and the only reward is bragging rights to your friends. A fairly in-depth (though extremely text-dense) manual is also included, to flesh out any areas of curiosity a new player might have.

Players who crave a little more direct control over their operatic space-genocide may find themselves bored or underwhelmed, but for the true tactician, there’s a lot to love here. While the $9.99 asking price may seem a bit steep, this is the sort of game that could have easily gone the route of IAP currency, and didn’t. Ten bucks is practically a steal for the tactical war game fan, though a lite version for the unsure to try out would be a really good idea. Additionally, the lack of ability to try matching your fleet against a friend’s fleet isn’t game-breaking, but it would be nice to try your hand against Game Center friends.

Overall, Gratuitous Space Battles is worth obsessing over if you love numbers, tactics, collecting and crafting. It is easy to get lost for hours in the menus within menus, outfitting and saving custom ships, and learning what works and what doesn’t work through trial and error battles against the alien horde. It’s a worthy addition to an already-stellar list of deeply tactical games on iOS, and is well worth a look for strategy fans.

TouchArcade Rating:

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In mid-March, Ubisoft and RedLynx released MotoHeroz [Free / Free (HD)] an iOS port of the WiiWare side-scrolling platform racer that felt like a close cousin to the studio’s crazy popular Trials HD series. We enjoyed MotoHeroz in our review despite its somewhat tough progression and overall high level of difficulty. Still, for fans of hardcore trial and error games that tasked you with perfection through repetition, MotoHeroz was money well spent.

Today, however, no money needs to be spent in order to enjoy the punishment that MotoHeroz offers. A brand new update has hit and to celebrate both the iPhone and iPad versions of the game are currently free. The update contains two new level packs each with their own new vehicles, as well as support for having 3 online friend leagues going on simultaneously.

If you haven’t checked out MotoHeroz yet, it’s definitely worth a look while free. The difficult nature might be a turnoff to some, but I personally found the challenge welcome and have enjoyed playing certain levels over and over again until you have that run that’s just right. Now with new content added, it looks like I’ll be getting sucked back into that cycle once again, which I’m definitely not complaining about.

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It seems my favorite board games are about the end of the world. We’ve talked about my love of Elder Sign [$3.99 / $6.99 (HD)], the game about stopping (or failing to stop) the rise of the ancient ones. And now I have a new sweetheart: Yggdrasil [ $5.99 (HD)], a game about stopping the forces of evil from destroying the world tree and changing the fate of Ragnarok. While it has a decidedly more Norse spirit than its eldritch cousin, Yggdrasil is more familiar than it first looks.

That first look might be a killer, though. Like so many board games before it, Yggdrasil makes the mistake of data dumping all over the player on the first glance, which left me completely confused about what lightning strikes had to do with anything, how elves were even involved, and why on earth I’d want to take anything from the World of the Dead. But it’s not nearly as confusing as it seems. One game’s worth of flailing around Yggdrasil was more than enough for me to learn how to play—from there on out, it was all about learning how to win.

Let’s not break this down too far. If the game designers can’t explain it clearly, I don’t expect to have much more luck. But here are the basics: you begin with your choice of up to six Norse gods—you know, Thor, Odin, Freyja and the like. You can play any combination yourself or you can split them up for a cooperative pass-and-play experience; there is no online multiplayer so far. The more gods you add the longer you’ll need to survive. If that’s not enough of a challenge you can also throw yourself a few extra handicaps.

Good and evil take turns. On your god’s turn, you have to complete three actions (though some gods have unique talents that alter that total). Each of those actions must be done while visiting a different world, any of the nine that can be reached from Yggdrasil. In Asgard, for example, you’ll fight your enemies and push them back. In Midgard you recruit more vikings to die for your cause, and so on.

After each god takes his or her turn, one of the evil gods takes one too. One is drawn from the deck, be it Loki, Hel, Fenrir or any of the others, six in total. That one moves forward in Asgard, getting one step closer to Odin’s stronghold and the end of the game. Each enemy also takes a single action as determine by its card—Jormungand, for instance, destroys one of the islands where your Valkyries collect viking souls, and Fenrir requires you spend actions to calm him. Asgard has three lines of defense. If five of your enemies pass the first line, three pass the second, or one passes the third, you’ll only have one final turn to push back back or lose. This is complicated by the substantial strength they gain as they trek across the board.

All this together makes for an intensely strategic experience. Since the enemy is moving inexorably forward, every time you fail to push one back you’re losing ground permanently. So each turn you have to plan your three actions carefully. Elves and vikings can help guarantee your success in combat by lowering the number you need to hit on your dice rolls, but they’re a semi-limited resource and recruiting them costs actions. Weapons are similarly necessary and similarly costly. Early on you might be able to get away with a few full turns spent building up your strength, but if you don’t dig in and hold back the advance you’ll lose before you know it.

There’s quite a bit more to it. You have to manage the flow of viking souls, and move your valkyries across islands to recruit them. You have to defeat Loki’s ice giants as he summons them or they’ll cut you off from whole worlds. And at every step, you’re at the mercy of the cards and dice. Will Fenrir get drawn multiple turns in a row, eating away your actions? Will the dice give you the numbers you need to defeat your enemies? And do you have a backup plan? You’re definitely going to need one.

For all its tension, Yggdrasil isn’t actually extremely difficult to win. Putting together a good team and using their godly powers to their limits isn’t a guarantee, but it improves your odds substantially. And ultimately all you really need to do is survive long enough to wear down the enemy and empty its deck. Once you do succeed, there’s a single Game Center leaderboard to compete on, but no achievements. You’ll be well-rewarded for good performance nonetheless—as you win more games by wider margins you unlock new gods and new Ragnarok scenarios. These can increase the game’s difficulty substantially, so you can customize the game to your skill level.

For the most part, I’m impressed. The Norse theme comes through with surprising depth as each element of the game takes its place in the overall story of Ragnarok. And despite a slightly slow start, the game gets immensely tense. If you’re passing the iPad around to play, expect long discussions about strategy. The evil gods come on like a tide, impossible to hold back forever. Carelessness can mean a loss before you have any idea that you’re failing.

There are a few small quirks of the iPad adaptation, which has some errors in the text and instructions that seem to be written for the physical board game. On the technical side, it’s a bummer that the game isn’t Retina-ready. It multitasks, thankfully, but it doesn’t have any longer-term saving. Longevity might be a problem, too; it seems that once you get a good strategy down it will be up to you to push for harder scenarios.

Those things aside, Yggdrasil is giving Elder Sign a serious run for its money in the field of board games I most like to play solo. It plays beautifully on iPad, and looks nearly as good as it plays. Most of all, I enjoy Ygdrassil because it’s a game that gives me a good measure of control over my fate, and the fate of the world by extension. You’ve gotta be lucky, but the game rides on much more than luck. Board game fans would do well to pick this one up, and maybe pop in to our discussion thread for some tips when you do.

TouchArcade Rating:

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If there’s anything I’ve learned after pouring several days of my life into the latest installment of Com2uS’s action-rpg Inotia franchise, it’s that no amount of Engrish exposure can truly prepare you for that strange moment when a gorgeous brunette clad in diaphanous silks informs a ‘pretty boy’ of an anti-hero that he is squirting blood.

This awkwardness informs a lot of the dialogue in Inotia 4: Assassin of Berkel [$2.99 / Free ]. While relatively free of the grammatical errors that usually plague such games, Inotia 4 has a rather, uh, unique way with words. Here, you’ll find imposing-looking orcs declaring that things are “kinda awkward” and villains that order their lackeys to “allure” helpless souls to a nefarious end. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, mind you. Unless you’re totally adverse to the idea of peculiar phrasing, the accidental humor actually offers a light-hearted touch to what otherwise feels like a stereotypical jaunt.

The story in Inotia 4: Assassin of Berkel is one built out of familiar tropes. For example, the protagonist’s an effeminate-looking but curmudgeonly chap who also happens to be young, gifted at the art of assassination and a member of the Shadow Tribe. His star-crossed love interest? A young woman who bears more than a passing resemblance to Final Fantasy heroines like Rinoa, Garnet and Yuna. Needless to say, this sort of sets the pattern for the rest of the game. Inotia 4 is a little bit of everything you’ve ever encountered in an RPG from the Orient. There are warring factions, magic, subterfuge, hidden pasts, and even an arrogant stranger with an overpowered weapon. If you were looking for something new, this isn’t the KRPG you’re looking for.

While I’m not particularly fond of the virtual d-pad utilized here or its periodic lack of responsiveness, the controls are pretty standard fare. It’s the interface that bugs me to no end. On top of many smaller issues, the deluge of buttons, character portraits, health bars and mana bars can make it literally impossible to see where you’re going. To be fair, it doesn’t happen all that often but when it does happen, you’ll take painful notice.

From an audiovisual perspective, Inotia 4 is neither particularly impressive nor completely humdrum. An odd mixture of Retina quality elements and retro-looking graphics, the game feels a little older than its actual release date. As for the audio, I’m somewhat on the fence. On one hand, the music isn’t too shabby; it’s the kind of stuff you would expect from an RPG. On the other hand, the sound effects left something to be desired for.

So, why play Inotia 4? Why go through strange localization and flighty controls? Why endure the storyline you’ve probably heard a thousand times before? Why did this get a four star as opposed to a plea for you to run away?

Simple. Because it’s actually pretty good.

Like a blind date between mostly compatible people, things can begin on a slightly shaky note. However, once momentum has been built, beautiful things can happen. If you have nothing against grindfests (it IS a Korean RPG, after all) and an obsessive-compulsive need to build the perfect party, Inotia 4 will eventually suck you in and keep you there.

The party system, though far from ground-breaking, is rather commendable. One of the things I liked best about it was the fact that while you can only have two party members (in addition to the protagonist) active at any given time, the game not only allows you to keep a stable of six but also ensures that all of them level up in an appropriate manner as you progress through the game. It’s a small feature but a clever one. Unlike many other RPGs, you can actually elect to mix and match your selection of humanoid minions without having to first devote extensive amounts of time to their personal developments.

Speaking of party members, they will consist of mercenaries summoned from item drops and, from time to time, the odd plot-generated NPC. Most of your time, however, will be spent with the former. Your mercenaries may belong to any of the six different classes available in the game. They also come with as many item slots as the protagonist, their own set of skills and statistics appropriate to the quality of the item that conjured them. While you’re in command of their equipment, you will need to cough up a few crystals if you want to change the rest.

As you can imagine, some of the appeal in the game lies in how you can tailor the composition of your party. Curious as to how pet-wielding classes will do against a stubborn boss? Bring them out and prepare for a crowded rumble. Fancy seeing how well three tanky priests can hold up against the game’s dungeons? Go ahead and test out that theory. Nothing will stop you. The level of micromanagement required is also entirely dependent on you. While you can choose to rely on your A.I settings, you can opt to take control of any of your characters at any given time.

Inotia 4 is also a dream come true for those who just HAVE to have the best gear. By and large, there’s no shortage of equipment to collect. Random beasts will sporadically drop legendary headgear. Fusion machines will occasionally offer the chance to engage in repeatable quests, quests that will grant you access to recipes for absurdly powerful items. You will also find goodies from boss battles, treasure chests and their spoils, side quests and shady merchants marketing what may or may not be the next best thing. Inotia 4 makes it easy to be covetous and is shameless about rewarding those willing to grind their way towards glory.

You know what the best part of all this is? Your party’s appearance will change with every high-priced trinket you acquire.

By the way, I’m impressed with how Com2uS handled one aspect of their IAP system. In Inotia 4, crystals are used for, well, pretty much everything. Have a weapon you really want to make but lack the ingredients for? Pay for its creation with a handful of crystals. Want to resurrect your party instead of restarting from the last saved point? Cough up the crystals. We know you have them in there. While hardly the most unusual approach, Com2uS has made usage of those crystals as enticing as ever. In the grand scheme of things, five crystals is nothing compared to an hour spent scouring the maps for material. You almost find yourself compelled to conform.

In between all of this, crammed between the good and the bad, nestled between the occasional guilty crystal expenditure, that’s where the magic happens. Inotia 4 will have you mashing buttons, switching hot keys, pondering talent points and beating on artillery turtles without so much as a second thought. It will have you gathering ingredients for a powerful new weapon even as you effortlessly transform your glass cannon of a priest into a shield-wielding bastion of power. It will keep you trucking towards the next level, determined to see how your new weapon will do against the latest dungeon or how well your latest collection of party members will hold up. Inotia 4 isn’t the most original title out there but it certainly knows which buttons to press.

TouchArcade Rating:

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Does the idea of yet another farming game sound exciting to you whatsoever? Your answer would likely be a resounding no, unless you’ve seen that there are still plenty of seeds to plant with Tractor Trails [ $0.99 ], the farming game that is not only fun and exciting but plays more like a puzzle game rather than the next FarmVille [ Free ] clone.

You see, Red is a tractor that needs to plant seeds on his maze-like farm so he can grow fruit trees. Your (and Red’s) goal is to earn a three star rating at the end of the level by planting as many trees as possible (filling the entire board if you can), collecting the groundhog, and doing it all in the fastest amount of time you can. Earning stars allows you to unlock more level sets, with five in all. Controlling Red is incredibly easy, only requiring that you swipe where he needs to go on the farm so he can plant trees and collect the groundhog along the way.

While controlling Red may be easy, the challenge does ramp up quickly meaning you’ll need to learn fast to stay ahead. The initial levels are pretty much on auto-pilot with little or no chance for error, while more advanced levels will all but require plenty of plotting ahead to make sure you’re going to be able to plant as many trees as possible. In fact, a stage not too far into the game left me puzzled for more than fifteen minutes before coming up with a working solution.

The real challenge in each stage is trying to determine where exactly to send Red without screwing up. Sending him down the wrong path means you have to start over, so planning ahead is best when coming up with solutions. Combine that with the time bonus that’s riding on each stage, and you’re in for a brain buster if you’re not in the correct mindset. The more you play though, the more the mechanics begin to click, and you’ll find yourself having fun without too much trouble. On top of that, the payoff of finishing each stage is satisfying, rewarding you with much-needed stars and achievements for completing stages as efficiently as possible.

Spicing up the gameplay in Tractor Trails are the power-ups you can purchase with the corn you collect (or purchase through IAP). You can buy upgrades such as a queuing system, which is a bit of a saving grace to the gameplay (which can be a bit slow once you get the hang of it). Other power-ups include undo and speed upgrades. These don’t do as much to change the gameplay but can help out if you’re finding some stages a bit too challenging. The problem (albeit minor) with these upgrades lies in the pricing system, as you will have to continually purchase most of these items over and over again with increasing prices after each purchase.

Each set of levels does appear to have its own distinct theme, with its own color scheme to go with it. For instance, the first set of levels has a distinct shade of green, meant to represent a sunny, summer style. In the second set, you’ll be seeing a lot of brown as the theme is meant to represent autumn. After spending a good amount of time in each level set, your eyes will welcome the change of scenery each time it happens. The graphical tone seems to borrow a bit from Triple Town [ Free ] but there was never a vibe of ripping off, although the similarities are clear.

Where Tractor Trails really nails the fun factor is in its simplistic, yet rewarding gameplay. A game that you can pick-up and play for a few minutes or up to a few hours is still rare, so it’s nice to see that Tractor Trails stays as fun as it should long after you’ve started.

TouchArcade Rating:

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Aby Escape [ Free ] is the newest freemium title from BulkyPix and Pixel Ratio, and a 3D spin on the iphone’s popular runner genre. Instead of dashing full speed to the left or right sidescroller style, the game plants the camera just behind Aby’s back and leaves it to you to guide the terrified raccoon down paths cluttered with rocks, cars, animal herds, beer-bellied hicks who lie in wait until you approach, and other obstacles.

To keep your unstoppable force from running smack-dab into immovable objects, you tilt your phone to weave side to side, swipe your thumb up the screen to jump, and swipe downwards to drop to your knees and pull off a Catwoman-in-Arkham-City slide, minus revealing cleavage. (Yeah, I know. Can’t have it all, though.) The core gameplay idea is reminiscent of Temple Run [ Free ], but Aby Escape does a nice job at iterating on the formula with some new ideas and some variety.

The game features two game modes: Story, and Unlimited. In Unlimited, your goal is to stay alive for as long as possible. You accomplish that feat by weaving in and out of danger to pick up shoes that keep your perpetually draining energy meter topped off. Aby gradually picks up speed the longer you survive, making extended play an exercise requiring absolute focus and twitch reflexes. Besides shoes, you can grab coins with which to purchase power-ups, characters, new Unlimited levels, and other unlockables.

And that’s where the trouble begins. The first time you load up Aby Escape, only one Unlimited level, Greystone Park, is available. Two other Unlimited stages are available from the in-game store, but at a cost of more than 3000 coins each. Want to try Story mode? That’ll run you 7500. You can unlock these modes in one of two ways: grind Greystone Park and pinch your pennies for hours on end, or shell out real money for IAP coin bundles.

The unbalanced economy pervades in other ways. Besides new stages, the shop also sells items like speed boosts that blast you forward and render you impervious to harm. The problem is, every item carries an exorbitant price tag. Each item can be upgraded up to five times. The first upgrade for each item costs 400, the next 1200, then 3000, and so on. Handy, but a major cut into your savings when you’re stuck with only one level to play. Playable characters and different types of feet like hairy Hobbit toes go for between 2000 to more than 4000, but don’t alter the game in any way; they’re purely for aesthetics. I hate to harp on this point, but with only one level to play, I simply considered all other purchases a waste until I’d invested in at least one change of scenery to spice up my time with the game.

Unlimited levels feature challenges that reward you with coins, but some of them just don’t make “cents.” Buy two upgrades at 400 coins apiece, get 50 coins back for completing the challenge. Uh, no thanks. I bought an IAP item that gives me two coins for every one I picked up, but that only increased my income from a drip-drop to a steady trickle. Eventually I shelled out five bucks for 20,000 coins—not because I wanted to, but because I felt like I had to. It was either that or more grinding. I unlocked the last two Unlimited levels before diving into Story, a sprawl of levels spread across Greystone Park and two new areas, the same ones you’ll play in Unlimited if/when you fork over the coins.

Story tasks you with racking up a high score by staying alive as long as possible and collecting every pair of shoes on each stage. Running into obstacles knocks points off your score and sets you back at a checkpoint. Most checkpoints set you so far back that you’ll have forgotten earlier terrain in your effort to remember what to do in the area that tripped you up, which amounts to a lot of frustrating memorization and trial and error.

Technical issues also abound. The frame rate chugs sporadically, spelling certain death in trap-heavy regions. Also, since you spend the game running forward into the distance, terrain you pass slides backwards as you run along but some of it slides too slowly, clogging the screen and blocking your view of the next hurdles. More seriously, though, was a store calculation error—I had more than the 400 coins I needed for an upgrade, but the transaction somehow took my wallet down to -97, which shouldn’t even be allowed to happen—and a crash bug that dumped me back to the home screen every time I tried to load an Unlimited level.

With so many strikes against it, what could possibly convince you to help Aby Escape? Because I’ll be darned if it isn’t fun. Grinding grew monotonous only because, really, who wants to look at the same environment over and over in any game? Actually <em>playing</em> the game is quite enjoyable. There’s a feeling of satisfaction and skill in any runner game that comes from guiding your scurrying lemming over, under, and around obstacles, marveling at your response time, dexterity, and lasting for as long as possible before inevitably slamming into something that reduces your bones to a fine powder.

Collecting coins, shoes, and power-ups requires near dead-on collision to register, but aside from the somewhat sluggish tilt-controlled weaving that doesn’t always keep up with the game’s gradually accelerating pace, the controls usually responded sharply enough that I felt encouraged to veer into danger and risk another visit to the Retry screen if it meant snatching an out-of-the-way coin placed in front of a trap. The game also plays fair by giving you a chance to shoulder past obstacles like cars and rocks unless you strike them dead on, which made me even more willing to dash in front of dangerous objects and grab goodies.

Three strong redeeming qualities ultimately saved Aby Escape from outright deletion. It’s fun, it’s deep (you’ve still got all the challenges and your personal records to break even after you’ve opened everything up), and it’s free. If this were a paid game, I’d knock a star off the grade, and fairly. The game really should offer activities from the get go or at least mark down the fee for additional content, but what is there provides loads of entertainment.

TouchArcade Rating:

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Hey, did you know that two Final Fantasy veterans, including the scenario writer of Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VIII, and several other JRPG vets have teamed up to form a new studio called Crunge Products? Did you know it just released its first RPG on the Japanese App Store? Yeah, we didn’t either. But, ”Border Walker” sounds cool. Its name draws from its time cycle hook: the game’s world is split into two distinct night and day worlds, and your character can cross freely between them. Siliconera breaks down the battle system:

Border Walker has a unique battle system that splits the touch screen into a 3×3 grid. Players can use different skills by touching the grid in different spots. You can learn secret techniques by playing through the game’s sub scenarios. Crunge Productions also created dungeons to explore and a colosseum with powerful monsters to fight.

It’s unknown at the moment if Border Walker will ever come to the US, but we’ll keep our eyes out. Check out the trailer below:

[via Siliconera]

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So, this morning we learned that EA Mobile had sent out a popup notification to users of the original Rock Band [ $4.99 ] for iOS effectively stating the game was shutting down at the end of the month. This naturally drew universal criticism from gamers and left me wondering one thing: why?

If EA wanted to stop the online support for the game and instead focus on the newer and better Rock Band Reloaded [$4.99 / $9.99 (HD)], well I can understand that. But the message clearly said the game would “no longer be playable on your device” after May 31st. It seemed pretty lame to not just leave the game playable in an offline way for those who had bought it and/or spent money on the IAP songs.

Well as Polygon reports EA has responded to the situation, issuing the following statement:

“Rock Band for iOS will remain live – the in-app message users received yesterday was sent in error.”
“We apologize for the confusion this caused. We’re working to clarify the issue that caused the error and will share additional information as soon as possible.”

It seems highly dubious that this whole thing could have been one big accident, especially since the iOS Rock Band is listed on an EA support page as having its connected features discontinued after May 28th, and a comment on our previous post points to an EA representative confirming in a help topic on EA’s website that the game would no longer work after May 31st, but that topic has since been deleted. Perhaps their intention all along was to drop support for the online features, and the strongly worded “no longer playable on your device” message was the mistake. Either way, this reeks of damage control rather than an actual mistake.

Either way, Polygon notes that EA is looking into what caused the error in the first place, and we’ll let you know if there’s any more news on the matter. For the time being it looks like iOS Rock Band-ers will still be able to rock out on the go.

[Via Polygon]

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In a “good news/bad news” sort of situation, I always like starting with the good news first. Maybe it’s just me, but it makes the bad news easier to stomach. So, try this on for size: The Fighting Fantasy game books were originally first published in 1982, starting with The Warlock of Firetop Mountain and blossoming into a full-blown series of gamebooks. What’s a gamebook? Well, imagine one of those choose your own adventure novels from when you were a kid (You do remember those, right?) except with more interactivity. Instead of simply turning to page 92 to to jump across a pit or turning to page 59 to go down the tunnel to the right, you need to roll actual dice to do a skill check to see if you can make it across the pit.

This adds a great element of randomness to things, and it feels more like you’re playing the book instead of just making arbitrary decision along various branching paths. I like ‘em a lot, and if you’re a fan of fantasy novels I’d go as far as saying this whole series is a “must-have,” especially considering at the current sale price of 99¢ you can buy the whole set for less than one dead tree version will run you.

Fighting Fantasy: The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, $0.99 – Deep in the caverns beneath Firetop Mountain lies an untold wealth of treasure, guarded by a powerful Warlock – or so the rumor goes. Several adventurers like yourself have set off for Firetop Mountain in search of the Warlocks hoard. None has ever returned. Do you dare follow them?

Fighting Fantasy: Deathtrap Dungeon, $0.99 – Deep in the caverns beneath Firetop Mountain lies an untold wealth of treasure, guarded by a powerful Warlock – or so the rumor goes. Several adventurers like yourself have set off for Firetop Mountain in search of the Warlocks hoard. None has ever returned. Do you dare follow them?

Fighting Fantasy: Citadel of Chaos, $0.99 – The Citadel holds a dark and dangerous peril for anyone foolhardy enough to venture through its gruesome gates. And yet venture you must for your mission lies at the heart of the Citadel, with the dread sorcerer, Balthus Dire!

City of Thieves, $0.99 – Terror stalks the night as Zanbar Bone and his bloodthirsty Moon Dogs hold the prosperous town of Silverton to ransom. YOU are an adventurer and the merchants of Silverton turn to you in their hour of need.

Fighting Fantasy: Creature of Havoc, $0.99 – You begin this adventure not knowing where you are or who you are. All you know is that you are some kind of creature of instinct, understanding little. During the course of the adventure, it may be possible for you to begin to control your bestial nature, to find out more about yourself, and even to learn your destiny. But even if you know all this, success is by no means certain, for the traps and terrors of Trolltooth Pass are many … Are you ready — to become the Creature of Havoc?

It doesn’t matter what order you play them in, so just download and start with whatever sounds the most interesting.

Now, the bad news. Big Blue Bubble, the developers responsible for bringing these gamebooks to the App Store, are on the verge of having their licensing agreements expire. It doesn’t sound like they’re being renewed either, so once these are gone, they’re gone. This also means there won’t be any updates for any of them, so don’t expect any Retina iPad enhancements, or tweaks/bug fixes if future iOS upgrades break the apps.

We’ve yet to hear when the licensing agreement actually expires, but needless to say, you should jump on these sooner rather than later if you want them.

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