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While dwindling on consoles, RPGs of all shapes and sizes are flourishing on mobile devices. There have been some truly creative and unique RPGs released in the past few years, and perhaps none is capable of tugging at your heartstrings and pushing you to fight just one more battle than Game Stew Studio’s new iOS game, Tower of Fortune (ToF) [ $0.99 ].

Like Puzzle Quest and Sword & Poker before it, ToF infuses a basic role-playing game with mechanics drawn from a completely different genre entirely—in this case, slot machines.

The premise of ToF is pretty simple. You’re a hero. You’ve a lady to rescue. You need to gather coin, get loot, and defeat evil incarnate. A “game of the year”-winning story, this is not, but the simple framework provides enough context to the game to make it work.

Before you even get to the gameplay, though, you’ll be hard-pressed to ignore ToF’s eye-catching retro art style and ear-pleasing chip tunes. Both the game’s quirky, NES-era visuals and strong selection of catchy music make the game visually and aurally simplistic and yet undeniably charming, like the greatest Gameboy games of yore.

Presentation is all well and good, of course, but how does the game actually play? Surprisingly well. ToF succeeds in blending the requisite RPG features with the mechanics of a slot machine, albeit with only one truly noteworthy quirk.

Currency is central to ToF, and it’s what powers all of the game’s subsequent systems. To progress through the game’s world, you’ll need coin. To battle, you’ll need to spend (and potentially lose) coin. To upgrade your hero, you’ll need coin. To heal after battle, you’ll need coin. To buy items… you get the point.

There are two ways to earn coin in the game: through fairly nonintrusive microtransactions or by fighting monsters. Given that the combat is the star of the show, most will be content to get their hands dirty and earn money the hard way, and it’s not hard to do so willingly as prices aren’t as exorbitant as they are in similar games.

This is where the game’s slot system comes into play. When you enter combat, you’ll be greeted with a simple one-line, three-reel slot machine. The reels are filled with icons that represent doing damage, taking damage, gaining XP, and gaining coin. Whatever icon appears on the left-most reel determines what happens during the turn, and the more like icons matched, the more significant the effect. In addition, the effect is multiplied by repeat matches, so if you get XP one spin and XP again the next, you’ll get an XP bonus.

One more level of both gambling and depth is added to the battle system by way of a simple “Bet” button. Prior to a spin, you can bet your coin to enhance the effects of the spin. Every effect is doubled after a bet, so you’ll be crossing your fingers in hopes of avoiding taking damage icons and screaming in joy when you hit a full three-match of XP or coin. This becomes critical as bad guys get harder and have more health.

I’m not much of a gambler, and random elements in games tend to annoy me to no end—here’s looking at you, Crisis Core. But after hours of playing, I’ve found that ToF manages a fine balance between feeling cheated and feeling lucky, and hard battles are nail-biters as a result. As you begin to fight more difficult monsters, the high wrought by a good string of luck and the stomach-sinking disappointment wrought by a bad one make the game quite compelling.

In practice, the system works surprisingly well. This is largely thanks to the game’s simple loot and upgrade systems, which allow you to upgrade your character periodically with simple items and stat boosts, you can do a decent amount to prepare for battle and tip the tide in your favor.

If there are any complaints to be had, they would revolve around the game’s sense of progression. Progression is a critical component of any RPG: it’s what keeps the genre’s fans playing, even when everything else—from storyline to graphics and beyond—may falter. ToF struggles a little bit in this regard, as progression is too random and too fleeting to feel rewarding in the long run.

Moving through the game from area to area requires paying escalating “unlock” fees. This means that you’ll need to amass a substantial purse. This in-and-of-itself wouldn’t be that bad, but when combined with the game’s rougelike treatment of death, you can find yourself frustrated.

Should you die, you’ll lose all the equipment, levels, and upgrades you earned as you play—you keep only your unspent coin. As a result, some may beat the game in a day while others could theoretically play it indefinitely and never see the end.  This near-complete randomness makes it hard to feel any sustained, substantial, and satisfying feelings of progression.

In spite of this issue, though, the game never stops being fun to play. The game’s ability to produce such a wide spectrum of emotional highs and lows is no small feat for a game, and additional elements, like the game’s fun mini-quest system that introduces small objectives that reward XP when completed, do wonders at keeping things fresh.

Ultimately, Tower Of Fortune may not have the progression elements, compelling story, or depth of its meatier RPG brethren, but it has all the stats, levels, loot, triumph, and tragedy a RPG fan needs for on-the-go gaming.

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I’d argue that the only genre more saturated on the App Store than match-3’s has got to be casino style games. Whether you’re talking slot machines, card games, and other variations, there’s a bazillion of them. Well, the guys behind the United States Playing Card Company think they’ve got a compelling addition to the field, and that’s through their expertise of being the guys behind basically every brand of playing cards. Aviator, Bee, Bicycle, Tally-Ho, Congress, KEM, and PokerPeek are all their products, and the company has been around since 1867, so they definitely have some momentum behind them.

Anyway, the United States Playing Card Company have teamed up with the marketing firm Digi117 who themselves are behind widely recognizable brands like Morton, O’Reilly, and even Carfax. They’re partnering to form a company called Zeniz to throw their hat into the social gaming arena.

Who knows what will come of this, but if nothing else it’ll be interesting to see how the giant of physical playing cards transitions to the virtual space. Casino by Zeniz is on schedule to launch next week, so we won’t have to wait too long to watch this play out.

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Ah. Werewolves. One of the three components in the holy Hollywood trinity of monsters. They ordinarily come in two flavors: loud, ravenous and incapable of anything but wanton violence… or dark-eyed eye candy. The transmogrification-happy lupine of MacGuffin’s Curse [$3.99 / Free ], however, is neither of those.

Indie development studio Brawsome has MacGuffin’s Curse billed as a ‘comedy puzzle-adventure’, an appropriate description if there ever was one. Operating from a top-down perspective, MacGuffin’s Curse is rife with all the switch-flipping, block-moving, barrier-removing goodness that is standard of the genre and the silliness of a Terry Pratchett novel. Here, you play as the charming Lucas MacGuffin, a red-haired thief who dwells in a considerable destitution with his young child and elderly mother. He has something to say about pretty much anything and everyone, a peculiarity that may either have you rolling your eyes within the first ten minutes or chuckling away in appreciation. Take your pick. Either is applicable.

The game opens with Lucas on his latest heist. In order to pay the rent, you’re going to have to retrieve a certain amulet from the extremely lightly-guarded depths of the local museum. As you might have guessed already, one thing leads to another and you eventually find yourself bound to the cursed jewelry and gifted with the ability to transform into a powerful, red-maned werewolf whenever you choose to. No, I don’t know how this really is a curse either.

This, of course, is one of the game’s primary gimmicks. Each of your two forms has a different set of abilities and limitations. As a human, you’re capable of doing delicate things like operating doors and squeezing through windows. As a werewolf, you’ll be able to manhandle safes, blocks, enormous battery packs and dig for buried treasure. Most, if not all, of the puzzles will require you to make use of your dual set of talents.

Speaking of the puzzles, let me reassure those who have played through the lite version of one thing: they do get harder. While the game’s collection of mind-benders don’t really deviate from the standard ‘push this block here, activate that switch there’ formula, there is enough variety in the mix to keep you playing (even if you have to do it in chunks). I’m especially fond of one of the earlier ‘boss’ battles. Instead of doing the standard werewolf act where you charge headlong into your enemies and rip their hearts out, MacGuffin’s Curse will have you maneuvering from room to room as you attempt to close the distance by circumnavigating your enemy’s attempt to stall you.

Though best played by those who enjoy the idea of a combat-free Zelda, MacGuffin’s Curse is still something I would recommend to those who don’t. Well, if you enjoy the whole comedic narrative thing, at any rate. It’s true that MacGuffin’s Curse tries just a little too hard (it doesn’t so much nudge you in the ribs as it does grind them into a paste with its hypothetical elbow) but it does have heart. You see it in the details – in the way the comments change depending on the kind of skin you’re wearing, in the over-the-top characters, in how the game lets you slowly build up a half-decent apartment for Lucas’s family and the details of the setting. There’s a fair amount of side quests for you to indulge in as well, something that helps flesh out the Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere-esque undertones of the world that Brawsome constructed.

The only thing that I didn’t really like about McGuffin’s Curse is, perhaps, the controls. In order to move, you touch a finger on the screen and drag it in the direction you want Lucas to go. In order to push or pull blocks, you’ll have to use two fingers instead. Now, there’s nothing wrong with this and, for the most part, it works out decently well. Nonetheless, because of positioning, you sometimes find your fingertips blocking out vision, a phenomenon that makes me pine a little for a virtual d-pad.

Is MacGuffin’s Curse worth purchasing? Yes. Definitely. It may not extract the ‘Oh, god! This is ingenious!’ sort of reaction with its puzzles, but the relentless humor, intriguing setting, adequately-designed puzzles and faint Tim Burton vibe will make it a delicious addition to anyone’s collection of crate-puzzles.

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Trilobyte’s The 7th Guest [ Free ] was among the first full motion video-centric PC games released following the dawn of the CD-ROM drive era. I had a horrifically underpowered Mac at the time that just barely stuttered through the game, but doing so is a gaming memory I’ll never forget. Gameplay focuses around exploring the dark and mysterious puzzle-packed mansion of Henry Stauf. I don’t want to spoil too much of it, since the whole experience is so much better if you manage to go into it fresh.

If you’re already familiar with the game, you can check out our review where I get into some additional nitty gritty details. But, really, you should just skip all that noise and download the game anyway- Especially while it’s free. As an additional bonus, The 7th Guest [ Free ] is also free on the Mac App Store. If you get stuck in either version of the game, give the Book of Secrets [ Free ] a look.

In our original review of T7G, we were a little bummed that the notoriously difficult microscope puzzle was nowhere to be found. The good news is Trilobyte later released this puzzle as a standalone game called The 7th Guest: Infection [ Free (HD)] which is also free as part of this promotion. We posted some more details about Infection here.

Go go go! Grab these games now!

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A couple of weeks back we told you about Galcon [$1.99 / Free ] creator Phil Hassey’s latest project titled Dynamite Jack. You play as a captured Space Marine who is forced to work in a dangerous place known as Anathema Mines. Of course, being a bad ass you decide that working for “the man” against your will just isn’t for you, so you set out to escape from the depths of the mine.

In a recent blog post, Phil noted that a fellow developer suggested that the deaths in Dynamite Jack lacked a certain impact. So drawing inspiration from the awesome death sequences for Roget Wilco from the classic Space Quest series, Dynamite Jack now features plenty of awesome ways to die, as you can see in this new video.

Since death comes often during the course of playing Dynamite Jack, there will be an option to turn off the death animations if they grow tiresome, but they’ll be on by default. Part of the leaderboard tracking will include how many times you bite the dust as well. Dynamite Jack is scheduled for release on Mac and PC May 10th, and will be coming to the iPad within a couple of months after, hopefully around July 1st if all goes according to plan.

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If you’re the kind of person who loves turn based strategy games, likes lots of tanks, and might even have some fond memories of the 1994 MS-DOS game Panzer General, do I have the iPad game for you. Well, more accurately, it’s a PC game, but the developers are hard at work on an iPad port and I think it’ll be great with touch controls. Allow me to introduce you to Panzer Corps.

Currently rocking an 80 over on Metacritic, Panzer Corps sounds like it has depth on top of depth on top of depth. How much depth? Well, here’s the first bullet point in the feature list:

• 400 unit types, divided into 19 unit classes with 20 detailed parameters to indentify units abilities, 17 terrain types affecting gameplay in various way.

Better yet, the single player campaign actually has branching points at various stages, where the outcome of the game will be entirely different depending on the margin of victory (or defeat). Apparently all major and minor nations are represented in the game, and your core units move through the game with you, leveling up and gaining new abilities along the way.

But wait, there’s more: “Award winning” online multiplayer utilizing something the developers refer to as the “PBEM++ system” system. Sounds awesome, right? If you’re antsy, you could download the PC demo right now. Meanwhile, those of us iPad-owning Mac users will have to wait until the iOS release which is currently slated for the third quarter of this year.

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I like to think that Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead is an exploration of character and violence more than it is some grim zombie fairy tale. Its cast is as beastly as its undead. Action is sudden, terrifying, and distressing. Decisions are made in bursts of lust and blood, greed and anger, brains and preservation. This miasma is revealing: we’re not good people. This makes for interesting reading, as you get to glimpse into what makes us forget who we want to be, and become what we actually are.

The first episode of Telltale’s The Walking Dead plays like a celebration of the comic and its themes. It adheres to the Kirkman’s vision, showcasing the series’ violence and grit, choice and character. You’ll make painful decisions, interact with broken people, and participate in some of the most brutal, real-world action that’s ever been shown in a video game. In under an hour of play with a Mac build of the title, I have become one of The Walking Dead’s characters: a liar and a monster in the face of danger.

You’ll play through a vehicle named Lee, a loosely defined character with a mysterious history and an innocence about him. The opening takes place right before the world goes to hell. Lee is in the back of a police car, handcuffed, talking to the officer driving when, suddenly, the officer strikes a walker with his vehicle. The crash is a stomach-churning, and the action after is intense. Lee survives, but finds himself in a world where the dead shamble and the living sprint.

Lee goes on to meet a few characters, including a little girl who becomes something of a companion. As you progress, you’ll make choices that each character will “remember,” perhaps coloring the events in later episodes as you jump in and out of alliances with others, react calmly or violently, or lie. Thus far, I don’t have a great sense of how anything that I’m saying or doing will play out, and that’s perhaps The Walking Dead’s biggest upcoming challenge: these choices need to feel meaningful one way or another.

Mechanically, the game controls like a cross between Jurassic Park and Heavy Rain: you manually move Lee in very specific environments, searching for items and clues that will inevitably lead you to the next story point. The Walking Dead doesn’t rely on puzzles as a bridge. Instead, it leverages Lee’s confusion and desire: you find things for people or for Lee. Action segments challenge you to react fast, as you line up reticules or tap buttons to complete QTEs. The dialogue system, on the other hand, presents multiple flavors of response and a timer forces you to make snap judgements and decisions.

I appreciate the intensity of the writing. The Walking Dead invites you to explore a grim and violent world spotted with people who actually feel like people and react in extreme ways under the pressure of survival. Being able to lie to cover things up or get an “in” with a group of better equipped survivors, or save one person over another are the game’s strongest points of narrative design. I’ve been swaying between unnerved or moved as I progress, and this emotional connection is what appeals to me the most about the game as a whole.

We don’t know how the iPad (or iPhone) version of The Walking Dead will control, though the expectation is that it’ll work similarly to how Jurassic Park did with its basic and functional touch, tap, and swipe controls. We’re also not so sure when we’ll see this episode on our devices of choice. Rumor has it that the iOS versions have been delayed beyond its planned May launch. We’re checking on that.

Regardless, you’ll want to keep up with its progress. Provided Telltale will continue is trend of launching really, actually good ports of its games on iOS post-Jurassic Park, this is something I feel like could be required play material.

All of the assets in this article are from the PC, Mac, Xbox Live Arcade, or PSN version of the game. If it means anything to you, we played the Mac version with medium settings and it still looked fantastic. We expect this level of quality, at least, on the new iPad.

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One of my personal favorite games of 2011 was the quirky slot machine-meets-role-playing game King Cashing [$0.99 / Free ]. The slot machine battle system was a really different kind of idea that turned out to work great in practice, and the character leveling and upgradeable items drew you in to continue forging on through the campaign. We totally enjoyed King Cashing in our review, and about a month later a big update hit that added new weapons and a new kind of battle, making the whole game just that much better.

Yesterday the second major update hit for King Cashing, this one even bigger than the first. It adds an entire new Survival campaign where you face off against a string of enemies while utilizing the same pool of spin cherries. You can earn a small portion of cherries back by each time you defeat one of these enemies, but you can’t go back and replay levels to grind so efficient play is crucial if you’re going to last until the end of the campaign. It’s quite challenging and a great twist on the normal gameplay found in the original campaign mode.

Speaking of the original campaign this update also brings 3 new battles against “protected” bosses who are covered with shields which must be broken away before inflicting damage on the enemy itself. There’s 3 new weapons too, one for each class member, as well as some new bonus types and a myriad of other tweaks and fixes. The new Survival mode adds a great new way to experience King Cashing, and the other new goodies are all welcome additions as well. If you haven’t checked out King Cashing yet there’s a lite version to try and the full version is currently on sale for 99¢ to celebrate this new update.

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Keep crossing your fingers: an iPad or a handset version of Botanicula is still in the cards, Czech developer Amanita Design has told TouchArcade. But before it can go forward with this version, it needs to go back. “We are still fully focused on the PC and Mac version of Botanicula,” representative said. “First, we need to fix all of the bugs and update the game on all channels, and then we’ll start to port the game on tablets.” The updates are basically ready, we’re told, so work should begin soon.

We last heard about a possible port of the gorgeous new adventure game in October 2011, well before its release on other platforms. At the time, Amanita said it needed to be able to experiment before it could take an iPad or iPhone port seriously. That phase of the development appears to be just beginning.

“I’m sure there will be many technological challenges and we’ll have to adjust also the design at some places so the experience on the tablets is perfect, but we are definitely excited about this version because I believe tablets are ideal devices for this kind of game,” we’re told.

If you have a Mac or PC, definitely give Botanicula a spin. It’s a beautiful game with a well-realized world and a delicious premise. We’re thinking it has the potential to be the Next Big Thing on iOS, so here’s to some relatively smooth sailing as Amanita begins work on this version.

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One of the absolute finest games available on the App Store is 11 Bit Studios’ Anomaly Warzone Earth [ $1.99 ]. Don’t believe me? Well check out our glowing 5 star review of the game from when it launched on iPad last August, and then consider that we chose it as our runner up for Game of the Year 2011. It’s not just us, either, as Anomaly has received critical praise across the gaming universe as well as plenty of award consideration, including winning a prestigious Apple Design Award for the Mac version.

So yeah, Anomaly Warzone Earth is good. And today it gets even better, as 11 Bit has just released the latest update for the game which adds high resolution Retina Display support for the new iPad. Anomaly was a gorgeous game to begin with, and it held up pretty well even on the new iPad anyway, but the difference this update makes is quite dramatic. All the text and UI elements are razor sharp and the in-game visuals are as crisp as they’ve ever been, practically popping right off the screen.

Of course, while Anomaly Warzone Earth really sings on the iPad, it can also be played just as well on the smaller screens of the iPhone and iPod touch. The original iPad version became Universal late last year, and to celebrate the new update it is currently on sale for just $1.99. If iPads aren’t your thing, the iPhone/iPod touch only version is also on sale for 99¢ [Link]. Basically what I’m getting at is that no matter how you do it, you must experience Anomaly one way or the other, and with the new update and sale now is a fantastic time to dive in.

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