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Azkend [Free / HD] took me by surprise—a gem matching/hidden object game that devoured my hours and my phone’s battery until I’d burned through everything it had to offer. After that, Azkend 2: The World Beneath [$2.99 / Universal] shouldn’t have been much of a surprise, but it was.

Trouble is, the surprise wasn’t good. The bones of the game are still there, and it’s prettier than ever with Retina graphics. But where the original sucked me in so hard I forgot to put my phone down until it was done, I keep dropping the sequel in frustration.

All the elements are in place. This game, like its predecessor, is split into two parts. The first is a matching puzzle where you chain identical icons together to flip a hex grid board. The second is a hidden-object style puzzle where you match small segments of an image to their positions in a larger landscape. The two intertwine in a sweet and simple adventure story.

In Azkend, the matching game was a blast. The chaining mechanics allowed players to set up and execute outrageously long chains, something I found super satisfying. Powerups were unlocked bit by bit and expanded your capabilities like crazy. The powerups made it back into Azkend 2, but the satisfaction is gone. The board layouts are painfully constricted. Long chains aren’t usually possible, no matter how carefully you set them up. In fact, there comes a point when you’re lucky if you can make chains at all.

No joke, about a quarter of the way through the game I began to run into levels where the board would shuffle with no moves left, I’d make a single move, and it would shuffle again. This kept happening. At first I thought I’d forgotten how to play effectively, but when there’s only enough room on the board for one or two matches in a row you just have to accept that something’s gone terribly wrong.

As a result, most levels are an exercise in tedium. You rarely get to set up great chains or plan ahead to set off tesla coil explosions. You hunt down the single match that’s hiding on the board and pray that when it shuffles you’ll be blessed with a setup that works. There’s simply no room to strategize.

This doesn’t mesh well with the new goals that have been scattered throughout the Adventure mode levels. Each of these goals requires you match things in unusual ways. Fog and fire can be cleared by matching adjacent tiles (and fire spreads if you don’t succeed), bugs get hurt by matches and lightning, flowers need to be matched before they lose their petals, and everything is on a tight time limit. That would all be great if there were room for strategy, but instead it just makes survival even more of a struggle.

The hidden object sections are lovelier than ever, with pretty, animated vistas, a robust soundtrack and passable voiceovers. And there are other ways to play. The Time Challenge mode is super fun—it’s a race against the clock to clear wide-open boards over and over until the timer runs down. It reminds me of the good old days. You can also play through the game’s levels a second time for timed awards in the Medals Challenge mode.

It’s hard to recommend Azkend 2 in its current state. The board layouts are too frustrating, and the game never opens up enough to make the struggle worthwhile. It’s a simple problem in a game that would otherwise be excellent, but it’s also an insidious one. It’s hard to get past levels that just aren’t any fun, you know?

TouchArcade Rating:

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On this week’s episode of The TouchArcade Show, we return to our respective caves in order to deliver you the hottest and best in iOS… but not before we discuss the fun we had at GDC 2012. When the train gets on the tracks a little later, we bust out some good and, hey, maybe even thoughtful conversations about Mass Effect: Infiltrator, the Dark Meadow drama, and the new iPad.

Listening is easy: just click on one of the links below. If you’d like to subscribe so you can get our latest shows the second they hit the Internet, you can totally do so via iTunes and Zune Marketplace. This is, by far, the best way to listen to us.

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Direct Link: TouchArcadeShow-043.mp3, 37.3MB

Here are your show notes:

GAMES

• Mass Effect Infiltrator [$6.99]
• Super Lemonade Factory [$.99]
• Final Freeway 2R [$.99]
• Azkend 2 [$2.99 / UHD]

JARED’S KITTY KORNER

• iCatch Cats [$.99]

FRONT PAGE

• ‘Dark Meadow’ To Remain Paid App, F2P Version Now Happening
• New iPad Benchmarks Points To Double Performance
• Double Fine Adventure Funding Drive Closes

Fireball SE, $0.99 Smooth controls, explosive action, and thrilling escapes. Fireball Special Edition is an intense object-avoidance game from Radiangames, creator of the award-winning Super Crossfire. Dodge huge swarms of enemies across 3 modes and 18 unique stages. Use Meltdown mode to slow down the action and create your own near-death experiences.

Fireball Special Edition, for iPhone and iPad, is available right now in the App Store for a special introductory price of $.99 through March 22 and for $1.99 after that.

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In another world during another time, roving bands of mercenaries die with staffs and swords clutched in grimy, blood-stained hands on epic quests to seek out fame, fortune, glory and honor. Also, tax relief — precious, precious tax relief. Kameloot’s king has pumped up the tax on gold to unbelievable levels, but he’s offering a way for cities to opt-out. It’s called the “Grand Gossip Notoriety Prize,” and the competition in the kingdom is getting stiff as heroes of all shapes and sizes, as well as bandits, monsters, and other various bump-in-the-night stuff, vie for the break.

It’s this not-so-subtle lighthearted edge that gives Digital Tales‘ Battleloot Adventures its legs. It has all the usual tropes, including the classes, items, and structure, of a 16-bit era RPG, but it put a lot of weight behind them. It knows that swords, zombies, wolves, claymores, and magic are as tired as the M4 is becoming, so it focuses on the fun inherent in playing a fantasy game instead. Things like loot, combat mechanics, and art design are what it leverages.

This easygoing attitude is sinuous, as it winds and curves and penetrates into basically every aspect of the experience. The world of Kameloot feels playful; cities and castles are bubbly and inviting, while backdrops are sketchy and bright. Even the weapons and armor and the characters of this world reject straight lines and sober tones. Everything is goofy — even if that thing is trying to squash your head into bite-sized pieces. Check out that screen and you’ll see what I mean.

Having your head squashed is an unfortunate side effect of not taking battle seriously, by the way. At its core, this is a strategy RPG that, like others in the genre, isn’t afraid to be punitive when you make a bad choice. Damage in combat is largely dictated by a rock, paper, scissors style of balancing. Pit rock against paper and you’ll feel a bump or two a couple of turns down the line, guaranteed.

Parties consist of three fantasy warriors, each of which has a specific color and class. Battles are fought in instanced zones freely picked from the world map. Generally, you’ll be fighting against three or four others. Some battles have multiple phases, and there aren’t stat refreshes between them.

Digital Tales subscribes to the Keep It Simple philosophy. Tap on an enemy to attack. Touch a UI element to activate an item or special power. Tap on yourself to defend. It’s a miraculously simple setup, but that doesn’t make the strategy simple. What looks to be this game’s greatest accomplishment is how much has been streamlined into the background. Stats like strength and dexterity still guide a character’s abilities and there’s some degree of dice-rolling when it comes to negative spells, but you never really have to interact with this stuff. There’s also a lot of automation in battle. Healers, for example, automatically heal at a turn’s start, while rogues automatically throw accuracy decreasing potions.

“We wanted to move away from the typical, number-crunching world of core RPGs and reach for players who would still enjoy the pleasure of managing their party of adventurers without worrying about hit chance percent or armor coefficients,” Digital Tales’ Andrea De Siena says. “We tried to make combat more about choices than maths by streamlining such elements as stats, damages and special skills.”

“We wanted to entice both casual gamers and RPG aficionados alike with a simple yet strategic combat system, where you’re free to focus on what you like most: if you’re a newbie, you will easily jump in but you won’t be able to simply button-bash your way to the top; if you’re a seasoned RPG veteran, you will enjoy some well-deserved gameplay depth, mastering the edge system, energy management and talent and equipment choices.”

“Do you think that’s an ambitious mission statement? It probably is, but we’re not afraid: we have robot chickens, pumpkin-men and sheep-bombarding gryphons under our belt,” it jokes. I’ve seen a robot chicken and I can confirm that it is glorious.

Defending has an interesting price: it lowers an energy bar. Energy guides the action-y components. With energy, for example, you can attack enemies with several party members at the same time. Energy usage also closely ties into the “star” system. If you pull off a big combination attack, you’ll be rewarded with a star that can then, in turn, be used to activate big-time class-specific abilities.

The combat doesn’t feel as fluid as Digital would like. It’s still turn-based, so there’s a degree of sluggishness inherent with this kind of design. But battle does operate rather without any hassle on your end. The fighting in general, actually, seems as sweet as a chocolate, and it keeps me playing more so than the loot component, which in most RPGs that stress gear and new items like this one does, always ends up providing the actual fuel. It’s nice to see combat take the front stage for once.

Speaking of loot, expect to get plenty along the way. As you level up, more and more items that match your level unlock. Winning fights earns you coins, and you can spend this change buying these unlocked items. Special “guild” missions unlock new items as well. Rich swathes of UI and tons of equipment, like rings, swords, armor, and shields, as well as hates, should keep the collector busy. This is also tied to an IAP system, but I get the impression that it’s just there for people who don’t care for grinding.

Most of the world navigation is just cut-and-dried, task-focused stuff. Find an open zone, jump into battle, and then repeat. Later in the game, after a hefty tutorial, you get introduced to a more political component: guilds. When with a guild, you get certain bonuses, and you can freely switch between them as the story unfolds and the fights get nastier and nastier. In my short time with the game, I didn’t get to experience this as much as I’d like. I’ll be stoked to see it in action when the retail version hits.

In all, actually, there seems to be a lot to like here. Most fantasy games get so into themselves, so muddled in their own goop, that it can be hard to see what separates them from the rest of the pack. Battleloot is different. It wears everything on its gleeful, not doubt dapper, sleeves. It’s funny, it’s cute, it has a lot of depth to offer, and above all, it appears to be fun.

My total time has been short, so expect some additional coverage down the line. You can keep an eye on the game’s progress via this message board thread, or hey, give it a try yourself next week if the Apple approval process goes well.

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One of the best and brightest, and unreleased, games we saw at GDC now has two clones on the App Store, according to the game’s creator. A false version of IGF-nominated student project, One and One Story, popped up earlier this afternoon to an appropriate amount of Twitter backlash. Its source code presumably draws from the Flash version of the game.

One and One Story’s actual creator, Mattia Traverso, has since contacted Apple and filed a DMCA complaint. “Yep, but these are clones,” Traverso said on Twitter. “They are other games. This is my game, without even a single change!”

When Traverso showed us the legitimate iOS version at GDC, it was very much a work in progress. He was in the process of tightening the controls and figuring out if he wanted to go with a different visual style that featured actual characters instead of silhouettes. Obviously, we don’t advise that you download this version.

One and One Story, by the way, looks to be a gripping platformer, as it tries to combine the Limbo look with Braid-like puzzles. The premise revolves around the relationship of the game’s two protagonists, and you need to control both interchangeably in a multitude of fascinating ways.

We look forward to digging in when it’s actually released.

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Jordan Mechner and Smoking Car Productions’ adventure game, The Last Express, has been slated for an iPad and iPhone release. Mechner just announced the port over on his blog, and carefully avoiding the kind of details we want to know, like, say, what new features it will support. He did, however, reveal that the folks over at DotEmu are behind the port. DotEmu recently handled the iOS version of Another World [$4.99], and did a masterful job.

The Last Express Facebook page appears to be the place to look for new drips of information at this point in the marketing cycle. It’s sporting a few nifty pieces of art, as well as some production-phase images, all of which may or may not be from the original version of the game. We’re investigating.

We’ll definitely be keeping our eyes on this, so stay aboard. We’re like a train. With seats that you, the reader, can sit in. This joke totally made sense at one point.

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It’s been a long week (Well, a little more than a week.) of waiting since the new iPad was announced. But, if you were in the initial batch of preorders or are ambitious enough to head to an Apple Store today, you should have a new iPad in your hot little hands right now. I just got done unboxing and syncing mine, and I’m sort of at a loss as to what to post about it, as I really think the new iPad is what everyone expected it to be.

The screen is incredible, and inspires that same sense of awe the first time you see it that the original Retina Display of the iPhone 4 did. No photos, screenshots, or videos will do the display of the new iPad justice. You simply must see it for yourself to truly appreciate just how ridiculously high resolution it is.

I’ve run through the list of the few games that are Retina-ready, and am totally impressed that the new iPad can actually pull off running all these games with performance levels that seem on par with the iPad 2, only at double the resolution. The GPU Apple packed in this thing doesn’t mess around.

Remember how non-Retina apps on the iPhone 4 looked like total trash comparatively during that awkward transition where not very much was Retina-ready? Well, oddly enough, non-Retina apps and games on the new iPad actually don’t look all that bad at all. There’s obviously a huge contrast between things running at 1024×768 and 2048×1536, but it doesn’t seem to induce that same jarring “Oh wow, this looks bad” that non-Retina iPhone apps did. Maybe it’s just me.

Just like the iPhone 4 to the iPhone 4S, the new iPad is a solid upgrade over the iPad 2. In my opinion, the screen is worth the cost of admission alone, but again, like the iPhone 4 to the 4S, the iPad 2 still is as capable of a device as it ever was. What I’m anxious to see is what sort of apps and games developers are going to start churning out developed from the ground up specifically with the new iPad in mind instead of just resolution-boosting updates.

But enough of my rambling, those of you who braved the Apple store or waited for FedEx to show up today, tell us your first impressions of the new iPad in the comments here. Is it everything you wanted and more? A worthy upgrade? A little disappointing? Let’s have it!

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Arguably the biggest addition to this year’s version of the iPad (or at least, the most immediately noticeable one) is the inclusion of a Retina Display screen that ups the resolution to a monstrous 2048 x 1536. As anybody who has upgraded from an older device to an iPhone 4 or an iPhone 4S, you know that the Retina Display screen is a stunning upgrade in person and makes all other mobile device screens look inferior in comparison. Such is the case with the new iPad’s fancy screen, it really needs to be seen to be believed.

For anybody upgrading to a new iPad today, or if this is your first foray into the world of the iPad, then chances are you’re interested in having the games that can show off the new screen as you gloat to your friends. Here we’ve compiled a list of games that have been updated for the iPad Retina Display:

• Infinity Blade II, $6.99
• Sky Gamblers: Air Supremacy, $4.99
• Galaxy on Fire 2 HD, $9.99
• Mass Effect Infiltrator, $6.99
• Flight Control Rocket, 99¢
• Real Racing 2 HD, $2.99
• Foosball HD, $2.99
• Touchgrind BMX, $4.99
• Labyrinth 2 HD, $7.99 / Lite Version
• Joining Hands, $2.99
• Woodroid HD+, Free
• Letris Power, Free
• Monsters Ate My Condo, 99¢
• Save the Pencil HD, 99¢ / Lite Version
• Tractor Beam, 99¢
• FMX Riders, $2.99
• Lab Solitaire, 99¢
• Parlour Solitaire, Free

There is a thread in our forums that’s constantly being updated keeping track of compatible games or ones that will be compatible soon. If you’re a developer with an iPad Retina Display update coming out, make sure to post it in that thread or post in the comments below and we’ll try to keep that thread as well as this article updated as new games hit. Also, Apple is currently featuring a selection of games and apps in the App Store that are new iPad ready.

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Cave has basically cornered the market on iOS bullet hell shooters with a slew of solid ports from their vast library of beloved titles. As fantastic as the gameplay is in Cave’s shooters, the fact that they’re ports of arcade titles has typically meant that features like Retina Display graphics and iPad support have required to much additional work to implement into the iOS releases.

Last October, Cave bucked this trend by releasing Espgaluda II HD [$10.99/Lite] for the iPad 2. The game featured a selection of graphics that were redone in high resolution and native support for the iPad’s larger screen. Not everything was HD’d out, though, but it still made a pretty big difference in the visual quality of Espgaluda II, and the nice big screen of the iPad proved phenomenal for navigating a hail of onscreen bullets.

This week, Cave once again is dipping their toes into native iPad support. This time, however, they’re going full stop and have released Dodonpachi Resurrection HD [$10.99/Lite] as a Universal app so that it works with the iPad as well as compatible iPhone and iPod touch models. Not only that, but they’ve gone and updated Espgaluda II HD with the same Universal support, giving both titles new life in high resolution on the smaller iOS device screens.

Example of original screen (left) and updated HD screen with redrawn ship sprite (right) from Dodonpachi Resurrection HD (click to enlarge):

I won’t go into too much detail about either title – you can read our full review of Dodonpachi Resurrection or the review for Espgaluda II if you’re curious to learn more about the game mechanics – but what I will say is that the partial high definition treatment given to each game makes an even bigger difference on the small screen than it does on the iPad.

Both games look gorgeous on an iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S, and you can see that Cave has actually gone and redrawn many of the sprites in the game, as well as given the menus a visual overhaul. Some elements, like backgrounds and other hand-drawn artwork, aren’t technically as high resolution as they could be, but everything in the game has a much cleaner, crisper look than it did previously.

I imagine many of you have already bought either Dodonpachi Resurrection or Espgaluda II before the HD versions hit, so really it’s going to be up to you whether or not some increased graphical fidelity is worth the additional purchase price. To help you decide, there are lite versions of each, and in the case of Espgaluda II HD you can even buy each of the game’s modes as separate apps, Arcade Mode [$6.99] and Smartphone Mode [$6.99], which have also been updated to be Universal.

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Two games were featured in the recent Apple keynote, and as of a few moments ago, one of them is now available. We’re still on the lookout for Infinity Blade: Dungeons, but right now Sky Gamblers: Air Supremacy [$4.99] is a quick mash of the “Buy App” button away from being in your hot little hands.

We’re downloading it now, but I feel like for the true experience we’re going to have to wait for FedEx to drop off our new iPads tomorrow. I’ve already bartered a deal with my FedEx delivery dude, and I should have mine bright and early.

If you want to chat Sky Gamblers on our forums, guess what, we’ve got a thread for that.

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It was just last week at GDC that we checked out a host of new titles from EA and their subsidiaries, and one of the ones that impressed me the most was the sequel to Firemint’s successful line-drawing game Flight Control called Flight Control Rocket. As of today, Flight Control Rocket [99¢] is now available in the App Store.

What I really enjoyed about my time with Flight Control Rocket at GDC was just how well Firemint has been able to expand on the base mechanics of the fairly simplistic original game, while still being able to keep things grounded enough that it feels like a true sequel. The sheer variety of new ship types adds a ton of new strategy to the Flight Control formula, and everything is wrapped up in a nice retro sic-fi art style. The presentation aspect of Flight Control Rocket is through the roof, that’s for sure.

The one thing I’m not so sure about yet is just how well the business model for Flight Control Rocket will go over. The game is 99¢ to download, but there is an in-game store filled with additional things to purchase. There are several types of in-game currency which you can slowly earn through play or purchase in various packs for real money.

The rate at which you earn this currency through play seems alright, but I’m not sure how I feel about being able to buy a continuation of your game or items that augment the scores you’re able to earn. I generally like high scoring focused games like this to remain pure, or at the very least have separate leaderboards for those who use these types of items and those who don’t.

It’s going to take some more time to really feel out how well the in-app purchase system has been implemented in Flight Control Rocket, but the one thing I do know is that I love the direction that the series has evolved from a gameplay standpoint. Hopefully this is able to shine through beyond the IAP system, but if you were a fan of the first game I still think you’ll at least get your dollar’s worth of enjoyment out of checking out this new entry in the series.

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