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Ballistic SE [$1.99] and Fireball SE [$1.99] creator, Luke Schneider, has been porting another Xbox Live Indie Game to the iPhone and iPad. Inferno+, which features newer high resolution assets for retina screens, is coming later this month or earlier next. Luke dropped us a really awesome slow-motion teaser trailer that shows off a smidgen of the game’s creative twin-stick action, which seeks to combine elements of Geometry Wars (!) with the structure of Gauntlet (!!).

Luke describes the trailer in his latest blog post, shedding some light on what he’s trying to shoot for:

While the launch trailer will cover a lot more of what’s in Inferno+, for the teaser video above I only wanted to show a single quick sequence to give a taste of the game. Obviously it’s in slow motion, and zoomed in a bit, so I cheated a little, but I think that’s OK.

We’ve been pretty impressed with what Luke has released so far, so count us in for a day one download. Whenever we get a final build, we’ll shoot you a review. Hah. Get it? It’s a twin-stick shooter. We’re going to shoot our thoughts at you… like you’d fire bullets in a shooter. We crack us up.

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How many games does it take before you can call a developer a sure bet? Radiangames has been bringing its games to iOS like clockwork lately, and we’ve been impressed. Super Crossfire HD [ $2.99 ] and Fireball SE [ $1.99 ] are both excellent games that iterate on arcade classics, and the newest entry, Ballistic SE [ $1.99 ], also returns to a popular well: the twin-stick shooter. Like its predecessors, though, it’s a thoughtful take on the semi-stale genre. It makes up for familiarity with a heck of a lot of fun.

Ballistic SE has two big things going for it. It has a system of enhancements that let you customize your game every time you play (not unlike the Jetpack Joyride update that just landed), and it has ballistic mode, which is pretty much bullet time. Every time you fill up your ballistic meter, a button is primed. Everything slows down when you hit it: your ship, enemy orbs, even the music. As panic buttons go, it’s impressive and stylish.

The game also has a lot of amber. The color is everywhere: menus, interface elements, your ship, explosions, you name it. At the risk of dating myself, I used to play games on a monitor that looked like that; I don’t miss it. But there’s a method to this monochromatic madness. The amber is safe, your eyes drift over it. Every other color stands out, and those colors universally identify your enemies.

The enemy color coding is important enough that colorblind players might be at a disadvantage. The enemies are just orbs—some come in different sizes, but they all have the same general shape. But if you know what a given color does, you know whether an enemy is flying toward you or moving at random, whether it will dissolve before your guns or stand up to all fire. A firm grasp of the enemy colors is a good shortcut to survival.

Whether you’re playing Waves or Challenges, you’ve gotta survive. Waves pits you against ever-increasing waves of enemies, grinding you down over time. Challenges are a more vicious sort of play, with your choice of five pre-set combos of enemy types designed to take you out in short order. The one thing that can help stave off the inevitable? Your selection of enhancements.

Enhancements pretty much make the game. That’s not to say it isn’t good otherwise, but throw in enhancements and you essentially have a leveling mechanic that opens up a huge variety of play styles. You can speed up your ship, drop bombs in your wake, alter your shots, or speed up your ballistic meter. You can even pump points into your score multiplier if your confident that you don’t need any other boost more. It’s a fantastic little system.

Both modes give you access to enhancements, but they differ in how they present them. When playing a challenge you can pick ten enhancements right off the bat, and you’ll live or die by your choices from then on. In Waves mode you’re given a single enhancement point each time you hit a new level milestone. You power up over time based on your picks.

In practice, Ballistic SE plays out pretty simply. You have two sticks (with customizable positioning). One aims your guns, the other aims your ship. Standard twin-stick stuff. Aside from your ship there are three things on the field: enemies, of course, that come at you in waves, immovable bombs that destroy enemies when you hit them, and starbursts that increase your score multiplier. Deciding when it’s best to fly through the bombs is almost as important as learning to avoid and shoot down the enemy orbs. Knowing when to trigger your ballistic meter is another vital skill for long-term survival.

Long-term survival is, in fact, the name of the game. You get extra lives for hitting score milestones, so playing better means living longer and longer. The waves get ridiculous pretty quickly, but there’s salvation to be had with checkpoints that unlock after ever-increasing numbers of waves. You can restart from these checkpoints, but there’s a catch: the further in you start, the more your score will suffer. If you want to remain competitive on the Game Center leaderboards, you’ve gotta start from scratch.

None of these things are revolutionary; Ballistic SE doesn’t rewrite the twin stick shooter or bring us a brand new perspective on the genre. Instead, it’s an incredibly solid, well-balanced game that makes up in entertainment for what it skips in flash. Radiangames is carving out quite the niche on the App Store, and Ballistic SE does it proud.

TouchArcade Rating:

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If there’s anything that could completely wreck my plans and productivity, it would be a Super Crate Box [$1.99] RPG. I’d say a quick prayer of thanks to Vlambeer for not going forward with that idea, but it’s too late. FireFruitForge and Everplay Interactive have something against letting me work in peace, I guess, because Spellsword [$0.99] is that perfect storm of quick, one-more-try gameplay and RPG mechanics I can completely lose myself in.

Spellsword isn’t a clone of Super Crate Box (thankfully—Vlambeer really could use a break), but it has a similar starting point. It’s an arena game that’s designed around rapidly collecting weapon spawns to kill baddies. But where Super Crate Box focuses tightly on that mechanic to the exclusion of everything else, Spellsword takes a more expansive road. Along that road you’re going to find levelling, loot, and a lot of new ways to play.

As a result, it’s not quite as clean as Super Crate Box’s more minimalistic approach allows. It has a few problems, and things get sloppy from time to time. I’m not saying you shouldn’t play it, though. It’s crazy-fun, and you really shouldn’t miss out.

You start out as a quippy hero with a spellsword. It’s not worth much on its own, but it can be enhanced with cards that litter the arena. Each one powers up the sword in some way—with fire, ice or poison damage, for starters—and each one also sets off some sort of effect. The ice card sends out wheels of ice, the fire card launches fireballs, and the poison card poisons every enemy on screen. And that’s just the start.

So while you can certainly run around killing things with your sword, it’s dangerous. Better to collect every card you can, and lean on those one-time effects to do the killing for you. This is where the game feels most like Super Crate Box, dodging enemies to get to the next card and never stopping to rest. Still, the differences are pretty huge.

For one thing, enemies drop rupees. In fact, the whole game is pretty much built around the rupee economy. Play well to earn more rupees, which you can use to level up your cards, your sword, and even your rupee drop rate. You can also use them to buy gear that adds to those same skills. And before you ask, no—there isn’t any IAP.

Mission mode is another big difference. Each of the three current arenas come with 20 missions. These ask you to do a bunch of different things. You might need to survive some waves, kill some baddies or collect some cards. In exchange you’re given big payouts of rupees, new cards and the occasional piece of gear.

Endless mode is more familiar, with nonstop waves of baddies until you burn through all your hearts. There are three difficulty tiers of endless mode for each arena. In them you’ll grind rupees, and you’ll also find the leaderboard competition.

When it comes to the little things, Spellsword goes the distance. The look is great, very much like Terra Noctis [$0.99], FireFruitForge’s other big title. The sound is no slouch, but it doesn’t really stand out. Love it or hate it, the real flavor rests in the hero’s quips. There’s one for every mission, and nearly ever single one is a reference to a show, game, or movie. They run the gamut from modern and obvious to old and seriously obscure. Me, I find ‘em charming.

As I mentioned, there are also some problems. The controls aren’t great, and on iPad they’re worse. There’s already a fix incoming for that—along with adding new control types, it will let you reposition the iPad controls. There’s also some clumsiness in the arena design. It’s easy to get caught on edges, or mess up platforms. There are also ways to abuse positioning and let enemies wander off to their own deaths. These things aren’t remotely dealbreakers, but they can be irritating.

Overall, though, the game is outstanding. The RPG mechanics add a whole new layer of compulsion to an already inviting sort of game. It’s not easy to call it quits, especially when there’s one more level to earn, or one more piece of gear you can almost afford. Those things make it less of a pure skill game—you’ll need to put in a bit of a grind to cap out— but they also add a bit of strategy. There is real value in carefully choosing your gear and putting your rupees to good use when leveling.

With some elbow grease and a good once over, Spellsword could easily earn a permanent spot on my iPhone. It’s really that good. And Everplay Interactive seems dedicated to hitting those heights, if the developer’s comments in our discussion thread are anything to go by. I don’t see how you could possibly go wrong here. This a game that’s fun, full-featured and ridiculously cheap, with a developer that’s working hard to keep fixes and content coming. Looks like a winner from here.

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Late last week Capcom surprised everybody by announcing an iOS port of their classic arcade fighter Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 [ $2.99 ]. In all honesty, I suspect this was a cleverly timed release to casually tie in with ‘The Avengers’ movie coming out next week, but whatever the motivation I’m not complaining. Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 is one of the most beloved fighting games in history, and prior to the downloadable rerelease on XBL and PSN in 2009 it could be kind of a difficult game to play unless you owned the Dreamcast or the somewhat rare PS2 or Xbox versions.

With that said it’s fairly mind blowing then that today you can download the entire original game onto a device that fits snugly in your pocket (or to your iPad if you’d rather, since the game is Universal, though it’s extra snug trying to jam that in your pocket). The iOS version of Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 is really cool for what it is, basically a cheap nostalgic trip, but it’s plagued with several major problems that drag the experience down, making it feel more like a novelty rather than another solid iOS fighter.

The major sticking points in Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 are that it’s difficult to control compared to the other top iOS fighters, the 12 year old visuals have not aged gracefully, and the overall performance leaves a lot to be desired. However, the virtual control setup that Capcom has come up with for the game is pretty clever, and just having a classic like Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 in my pocket is worth putting up with its shortcomings. It’s just a shame because with a little more care I think this port could have been a whole lot better.

Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 features a whopping 56 playable characters, 28 from the Marvel camp and 28 from Capcom. Only 24 are available from the start, with the rest being unlocked from an in-game store using coins earned through play, or for performing certain tasks like completing the arcade mode with different characters.

In the XBL and PSN versions of the game, all characters are unlocked from the start, but I far prefer having to unlock them on my own as it gives you a sense of progress and some goals to shoot for while playing. However, if you’re dying to download the iOS version and bust out some local Bluetooth multiplayer with a buddy (sadly there is no online) right out of the gate, then you might find it annoying to have to spend significant time earning enough coins to unlock your favorite characters. Surprisingly, there is no sort of in-app purchase option to unlock everything.

Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 is all about 3-on-3 tag team matches where characters can be swapped in and out at will, there’s a crazy emphasis on battles in the air, and the combos and special moves are all outrageous and over the top. Unfortunately, the iOS version runs so sluggishly that much of those fun moments are turned to frustration. The framerate can be a bit choppy and the virtual controls don’t seem to respond as well as even other Capcom fighters available on the App Store. This makes pulling off elaborate combos and air battling nearly impossible.

Despite the controls being sometimes unreliable, the default controls that Capcom implemented to simplify the experience are pretty nifty. There’s just a single button each for punch and kick, then there is a special button for controlling teammates and another for special moves. Besides just tapping these special buttons, each one can also be flicked in 4 different directions in order to perform additional moves. For example you can simply tap the special move button to shoot out a hadoken (fireball), but if you flick it to the side instead you can instantly launch into a shoryuken (dragon punch).

It’s a really cool idea and when it works well it’s brilliant, but for some reason much of the time it feels like the special buttons don’t respond to many of your flicks. There is the option to go with the original arcade game controls, which means no flicking for special moves, and I found that this option is much more reliable but does require more work on your part.

The visuals in Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 are also a pretty big letdown. I expect a 12 year old game to look dated, but for some reason the iOS version looks worse than any previous version. Sprites are noticeably jagged and pixelated, something that is accentuated on the iPad’s bigger screen. On the bright side, the fully 3D animated backgrounds are intact here and actually look quite good, especially when you consider the boring static backgrounds used in Street Fighter IV Volt on iOS.

So, Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 has a lot of issues, but nothing that renders the game completely unplayable. The controls work well enough but are far from as good as other iOS fighters, and definitely not good enough to fully pull off some of the game’s more complicated techniques. If you’re a fan of the game on other platforms and can accept the problems it has on iOS for the sake of having it in your pocket, then I think it’s definitely worth the $3 price of admission (or $5 when the intro sale ends). Personally, I’m having a ton of fun playing through the game again, even with the inherent frustrations.

If you don’t have any particular affinity for the original game but are just looking for a new iOS fighter, then Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 is a tougher sell. The controls are passable, but nowhere near the likes of Street Fighter IV Volt [ $6.99 ], King of Fighters-i [ $6.99 ], or SoulCalibur [ $11.99 ] on iOS. It’s frustrating because those examples prove that Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 could have been such a better port, and it may be in the future after some updating, but if nostalgia isn’t playing a big role in your desire for having this game on iPhone then I’d suggest waiting to see how things shake out down the line.

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This week on The TouchArcade Show, we battle through discussion about staph infections, broken necks, and other off-topic stuff to bring you the latest, hottest, and best in iOS news, reviews, and commentary. At the top, we do a new iPad check-in just to see if everyone is still digging Apple’s New Thing. Later, we dive into discussions on Swordigo, Hunger Games: Girl On Fire and Angry Birds Space. Of course, we also get to your user questions.

If you’d like to listen, feel free to do so via the links below. Additionally, you can subscribe to our weekly radio show via Zune and iTunes. It’s the easiest way to get our stuff the second its uploaded to the Internet, so consider your options!

iTunes Link: The TouchArcade Show
Zune Marketplace: TouchArcade.com Podcasts
RSS Feed: The TouchArcade Show
Direct Link: TouchArcadeShow-044.mp3, 42.7MB

And now your show notes:

GAMES

• Angry Birds Space [$.99 / HD]
• Hunger Games: Girl On Fire [Free]
• Sky Gamblers: Aerial Supremacy [$4.99]
• Fireball: SE[$.99 / HD]
• Swordigo [$1.99]

JARED’S KITTY KORNER

• Nyan Cat Adventure [$.99 / Free]

FRONT PAGE

• Zynga buys ‘Draw Something’ Devs
• Mobile ‘WOW’ Could Still Happen

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In its brief time on iOS, Radiangames has shown great skill at finding the spark of potential in games that are getting on in years. Late last year we looked at Super Crossfire [$0.99 / HD], a powered-up take on Space Invaders. Now we have Fireball SE [$0.99], a game partly inspired by Geometry Wars II and its Pacifism mode.

In Fireball SE, as in Pacifism, you fly around dodging huge waves of enemies in a top-down arena. Trouble is, you can’t shoot. Instead you lead your foes to their deaths, through bombs here, or gates in Geometry Wars. But where one was a tiny afterthought of an avoidance mode in a much bigger arcade game, here it’s been fleshed out with new rules, stages, achievements and scoring mechanics, and it’s so much better for it. It’s sort of like Tilt to Live [$2.99 / HD] without the tilt, but let’s put comparisons aside—this game is seriously fun on its own.

Fireball SE is broken down into three modes, but all three share the same fundamental mechanics. Using a truly responsive (and adjustable) virtual joystick, you pilot a fireball around the arena. Enemies spawn, starting in the corners and spreading out from there. Bombs appear. You skim by them to set them off on a short timer, or slam into them to blow them apart. If the action gets too fast, you can jam your other thumb down to activate Meltdown, which slows everything down for a few seconds while you get back in control.

The scoring is particularly intricate. Killing enemies is worth points, and killing them in combos is worth a lot more. It’s more than a linear increase, so it’s really worthwhile to string along as many enemies as you can before smashing through a bomb. When they die they drop sparks. Collecting those is worth points too, so you’ve gotta go back into your trail on a regular basis. Fireball rewards the daring.

Of course, you only have one life. Did I mention that? One little mistake and you’re dead. Waves mode counteracts this by letting you start from any wave you’ve reached, so hitting all eight isn’t obscenely hard. But your score will suffer—it carries over between waves you survive, and starts fresh when you do.

Survival and Countdown are two sides of another coin: Survival counts your time up, and Countdown counts it, uh, down. But Radiangames has done something interesting here. Both modes are split into five stages each, and each stage has a different feel. The speed is a little different, enemy spawn patterns vary, bombs appear more or less often. Part of this is about letting you find your groove, but another part is ripping you out of your comfort zone. The Game Center leaderboards for these modes track your total score across all five stages, so getting in a rut hurts.

Otherwise Fireball SE is comfortably familiar. There’s a good beat in the background and art that’s stylish in a very blue and orange sort of way. There’s a whack of achievements to earn. There’s even an easy mode that accounts for its lowered difficulty with similarly lowered scores. The package is nothing all that special, but what’s inside is quite cool.

In a time where we spend a lot of energy weeding out clones and lousy rip-offs, it’s great to see a game that lands on the good side of imitation. Fireball SE has a lot in common with other titles, but it builds on that foundation. We end up with a game that captures something fun that has been left fallow elsewhere, one that turns a small spark of inspiration into a solid, well-rounded new form. So give it some love, and swing by our forums to share what you’d like to see from it next.

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.

iTunes Link: The TouchArcade Show
Zune Marketplace: TouchArcade.com Podcasts
RSS Feed: The TouchArcade Show
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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Out at GDC 2012 I sat down with publisher Ayopa Games and, in the time of an hour, ran through seven different titles in a sort of marathon session. It was a lot to take in, but there are some real stand-outs here.

Some are new, some are updates. Let’s have a look.

MacGuffin’s Curse

Created by Brawsome and Green Stripe Snake, MacGuffin’s Curse is a game that falls under the category of Werewolf Comedy Puzzle Adventures. It is the tale of out-of-work magician and (hence) not-so-cunning thief Lucas MacGuffin who attempts to rob a museum to pay the rent, and finds himself bound to a magical amulet with the power to turn him into a werewolf (and back again).

The game consists of 150 different rooms across 11 different environments, such as junkyards, parks, mansions, museums, etc. Each room is its own grid-based puzzle that must be solved using Lucas in either human or werewolf form — or both (walking into a beam of moonlight triggers the transformation). In addition to the 150 core puzzles are around 100 secondary features / quests that serve to add variety and keep Lucas especially busy at all times. In the end, the ultimate goal is just to get the cursed amulet off of poor Lucas.

In a nice touch that retro gamers will enjoy, the soundtrack is available in chiptune format, sampled from a real SID-based C64, and can be accessed via an in-game home computer setup.

MacGuffin’s Curse won the Best Writing award at the 2012 Freeplay Independent Games Festival and will be available on April 19th as a universal iOS app as well as on Mac and PC.

Escape from Age of Monsters

In the fall of last year, Massive Joe released Age of Monsters, as sort of ultimate rock-paper-scissors game, to high praise. The studio’s upcoming Escape from Age of Monsters is a follow-up title in the form of a side-scrolling, endless run-and-jumper. The game sets you, poor Gizzard, and a group of orphans on the run from a horde of hideous creatures from all corners of the multiverse. You must tun through crumbling buildings, punch through walls with your magic gloves (and perfect timing, if you have it), jump from building to building, collect bonuses and power-ups, and battle bosses. With any misstep, the monster get closer and snatch up an orphan. Once all the orphans are gone, the next mistake is your neck.

As mentioned, there are walls to smash. There are also fireballs to whack, and both of these actions are color-specific; one glove is red, one glove is blue, and the right glove must be used at the right moment. The whole thing has something of a rhythm component to it, and in some sense Guitar Hero is brought to mind. The music in the game is provided by the Okai Sisters (nee The Binges).

Escape from Age of Monsters will be released as a universal app towards the end of April, with price as yet undetermined.

Pocket Heroes

At last year’s E3, our own Eli took a look at F5 Games’ Pocket Heroes and said “whoa, now that’s really cool.” And he was a hardcore D&D player. After checking out the title, here eight months later, I can tell you things have only gotten better.

Pocket Heroes is basically “Quest With Friends,” a Words With Friends-style RPG. It’s multiplayer-only and allows up to four players to share an asynchronous adventure within a push-powered fantasy world laden with steampunk detailing. There are 20 different types of enemies (spiders, skeletons, ogres, etc.), six character classes (human paladin, dwarven mechie, elf rogue, and the like) with more to come in the future, and 10 different character levels. The whole thing has a pixellated, retro look to it (it takes place in the world of Altair, after all…) and is arranged something like the early Zelda titles.

Pocket Heroes is set to arrive at the end of April and is being discussed in our forums.

Patchwork Battles

Coming this summer from Patchwork Games is a rather unique RPG strategy title known as Patchwork Battles. The game puts you in control of “mimics,” which are on-screen characters made of a patchwork of various materials — cloth, tinfoil, and leather. You, the player, take the role of a young man that is part of a family of Animators, magicians able to breathe life into the inanimate mimics. After finding an ancient tome in his attic, he reads through the story of his forefathers and begins reenacting the battles of past ages with his mimics.

Within the game, there are eight classes of four characters, in all, rendered of different physical material. Each mimic consists of a heart or core, along with five surrounding body parts. Parts can be exchanged between characters to push their abilities in a certain direction. Each part can also be imbued with spells to enhance capabilities.

The version I saw demonstrated was obviously in the early stages of development, but what’s there so far is intriguing. Patchwork Battles will release as a universal iOS app, and eventually make its way to Android, Mac, and PC.

Mailmen

From Sandstorm Interactive comes the iPad-only stealth puzzle game Mailman [App Store], which challenges you to get the mail delivered on time in the face of adversity. And, in Mailmen, adversity comes in the form of neighborhoods full of vicious, roving dogs — the mailman’s bane.

The game sets three mailmen, Johnny, Charlie, and Dave — each with their own special abilities — to pick up mail, deliver it to various marked destinations, and get back to the base without being torn to shreds by the aforementioned dogs. Why are the dogs in this town so vicious? It’s to do with the enraged, psychotic ex-mailman Newman (get it?), who controls the dogs in a bid to make life near impossible for the poor letter carriers.

In order to succeed, teamwork must be used to combine the various abilities of the three mailmen in question, in order to overcome the carnivorous canines. Dogs can be tied up, deceived with fire-hydrant costumes, and left puzzled by a quick up-the-tree getaway. A sort of achievement system that’s really more of a “collectibles” arrangement rewards skillful play and a benevolent hint pigeon can be called upon to aid when things seems hopeless.

Mailmen launched a few days back as a universal app and is available at an introductory price of $0.99.

W.E.L.D.E.R.

Back in November, we reviewed word-creation puzzler W.E.L.D.E.R. [App Store] from Highline Games and were impressed. W.E.L.D.E.R. (Word Examination Laboratory for Dynamic Extraction and Reassessment) is a game that can perhaps most easily be described as Scrabble meets Tetris. The game features an 8×8 grid which is full of letter tiles. The idea is to form words with four or more letters, by moving letter tiles around in various ways. The “Basic Swap” involves tapping any two neighboring letters (horizontally, vertically or diagonally adjoining) so they swap positions. The words must be written from left-to-right or top-to-bottom, much like a crossword puzzle. There’s no time limits, although a certain number of words must be formed to complete each level. When you form a word, the involved letter tiles disappear and any letters above cascade down to fill the gap, including new, off-screen letters.

Britt Meyers of Highline demonstrated an update to the game that recently landed, adding Gigawatt tiles for super scoring, new optional in-app purchasable items, overall balancing tweaks, an Undo button (iPad only), and various other improvements.

W.E.L.D.E.R. has known the distinction of iPhone Game of the Week and was the top selling iPad paid game, near its release.

Dungeon Crawlers

Early this year, Drowning Monkey released their aptly titled dungeon crawler Dungeon Crawlers [App Store]. The game is a visually well-done strategy role playing game that’s filled with witty humor, such as numerous Ghostbusters references (the main characters are Roy, Aegon, and Payter…) and the like.

Your band roams through the game’s various chapters and levels, encountering characters of all sorts, doing turn-based combat, amassing fortune, and leveling up. We reviewed Dungeon Crawlers shortly after its release, and really liked it, but felt that things moved along a bit too slowly for many players. The turn-based battle sequences tend to drag on in a fashion that may lead to frustration.

Drowning Monkey has recently released a v1.1 update to the game that brings a new chapter with three new levels, making for 5 chapters and 15 levels in all. A major addition is an in-game store where gold found in the dungeons, gained in battle, or purchased through IAP can be used to buy weapons, armor, and power-ups. The store offers over 250 items, in all. Additionally, a new “Select Level” option has been added so that players can easily go back and re-play a level with ease.

A v1.2 update that will bring online leader boards and an Arena Mode is already in development.

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