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If you pay attention to the world of iOS game music, you might already know Whitaker Trebella’s work. He has composed themes for games that include Super Stickman Golf [$0.99], Tilt to Live [$2.99] and Velocispider [$1.99]. But now he’s taken on the role of game developer. Trebella’s first game, Polymer, is due to hit the App Store soon, and we’ve had a chance to play with a recent build. It’s a strategic shape-creating game, in Trebella’s words, enhanced with a great soundtrack.

A polymer, in the parlance of the game, is a complete shape, one with no unfinished edges. You achieve this by sliding rows and columns back and forth to move pieces into place. A skilled player might be able to use every piece on the board, but each piece you move takes six or nine others with it. Larger creations become exponentially more difficult to make without disruption, but they’re oh so satisfying to reach for. It’s almost a shame to destroy them, but that’s where the points come in.

Like so many developers, Trebella came to iOS with no prior programming experience. But his time composing for big names of the indie scene convinced him that he needed to make a game of his own. A little study, a little elbow grease, and a year and a half later we (almost) have Polymer. But playing the game, you can see how much Trebella picked up in his time spent on the periphery of iOS development. It’s ridiculously savvy to the realities of both touch screen gaming and the iOS market, things most first-time developers struggle with.

It should come as no surprise that Trebella brought his musical talents to bear on Polymer. It isn’t a music game, but it can be quite musical. Each of the game’s three modes has its own soundtrack. You enhance that soundtrack while you play, destroying polymers that chime out musical tones. Each track is in a different key, and the sound effects, notes in the chromatic scale, are designed to fit within the key of the current track. In laymen’s terms, let’s just say the sound blends beautifully with the music.

Polymer’s three modes give you a lot to play with. One lets you race for the highest score you can hit in two minutes, and it’s polar opposite is a mode that requires you make the best single polymer you can in any length of time. The third ratchets up the tension in a sort of survival situation: you must destroy ticking time bombs by incorporating them into polymers. They come faster and faster until you eventually explode. The game also has a nifty unlockable system that introduces you to each element of the game piece by piece.

We don’t have a release date quite yet, but Polymer has been submitted to Apple for approval so it’s just a matter of time. Stay tuned—we’ll take a closer look on release and give you our final verdict. An educated guess in the meantime: it looks like Polymer is destined to eat a lot of the hours of thoughtful gamers.

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As you may know, the App store is drenched with cutesy looking physics puzzlers that all start to look the same after a while. They may seem like overload, but when it comes to the stark difference between them and a game like Crow [$2.99], they simply make it stand out even more than it already does, like a rainbow standing behind a horseman of the apocalypse. Everyone loves their cute time wasters, but watch out with this one, because you’re about to get a distinctly gothic change of pace.

Right out of the gate, Crow has something to it when it comes to atmosphere. The game’s saturated color palette brought up memories of Cyan’s Myst series, which I will take basically any excuse to mention in conversation, gaming-related or otherwise. Suffice to say I felt comforted the moment I fired up Crow. The adventure title puts you in the role of the black winged bird, gliding soundlessly over the skies of a foreign land. You’ll soon learn that a creature called The Scarecrow poses a threat, and it must be cursed by you in order for you to gain its power. If you can vanquish it, other foes will surely follow.

To accomplish this, you’ll play in two separate gameplay sections. In the first, you’ll fly over a patch of land searching for story points and trinkets (the latter which will earn you skill points to buff up your powers).To control the crow, you use your finger to drag it in the direction you want it to fly in. I was not crazy about the controls as I felt like my finger was in the way of the action more than half the time, but I adjusted to it as I found the world very interesting. Once I had collected enough story points, I had the opportunity to challenge The Scarecrow, which takes you to the game’s second mode.

In these boss fights, you fly around with your foe on rails and choose certain options, such as to scratch it with your claws or to shield yourself. Each foe will react to different types of tactics, but the most interesting part of this battle comes at the end, where the player is given a choice to “curse” or “spare” the opponent. Each choice affects what direction the crow develops in, and he can end up very good or very bad. This will also affect your scores after you finish the game.

Crow also has leaderboards and achievements for you to play with, and you can also unlock Challenge Levels using your current skill set (based on what part of the game you are in). These take you back to the on rails gameplay and have you basically collect stuff and rack up points.

Crow’s good looks have to be shook off a bit before you can reasonably decide whether it is fun — because it is VERY pretty. It also feels like a flying version of Infinity Blade at times. I’d say the attractive atmosphere and music buff down the fact that it could have used more fine tuning. The missions where you collect trinkets feel a little boring, for instance, but I really enjoyed the on-rails fights. With a game that presents such a rich-looking world, it almost felt weird to be merely collecting things in it — I wanted to learn more about it, but I wasn’t really given the opportunity.

I think it’s safe to say Crow is a mixed bag, but is still worth picking up because it so much uniqueness to offer. Because it does look so stellar, you can’t help but wish those little design flaws (like trading a d-pad for your finger being in the middle of the screen at all times) weren’t there. Still, developer Sunside shows that their in-house platform (called Radiance) has guts, and I can’t help but wonder what they’ll do with it from here on out.

TouchArcade Rating:

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I’ll be the first to admit, when the discussion first started on giving Zach Gage’s SpellTower [ $0.99 ] five stars in our review last year, I distinctly remember raising an eyebrow and saying, “Guys, it’s a word game.” Truth be told, until then I hadn’t spent much time with SpellTower, but once I did… I was hooked. So hooked that this simple looking word game wound up as an honorable mention for our game of the year.

Nissa explains what the game is all about:

SpellTower isn’t bogged down with complicated rules or conditional abilities. The tutorial is only a handful of screens expressing a handful of simple rules. You can make a word as long as it’s in the game’s dictionary and it’s at least three letters long. Words that are five letters or longer clear letters all around them. You can’t make the same word twice, and if a letter has a number on it, it needs to be used in a word of at least that length. Finally, uncommon letters like Z, J, Q and X clear their rows if they’re used in a word.

Those rules will carry you through SpellTower’s four game modes, which change up how the board is presented. Tower mode gives you 150 letters to earn the best score you can. Puzzle mode adds a row to the board each time you make a word, and if any column hits the top your game will end. Extreme Puzzle mode follows the same rules, but requires longer words faster and more often. Rush mode adds new rows over time, putting you on the clock.

A fifth game mode was added in a recent update, introducing local multiplayer. It shouldn’t be much of a surprise, but, spoilers, it’s even more fun than just playing SpellTower by your lonesome. This update has also revitalized my love for this game, and I’ve spent the past week absolutely engrossed in SpellTower.

Since the update landed, SpellTower has been rocketing up the iPad charts, and to attempt to push the game over the edge and take on Angry Birds and Draw Something, its price is being slashed to 99¢. If you’re even vaguely interested in word games, you need to pick up SpellTower. Heck, if your mom has an iPhone, tell her to get SpellTower, I bet she’d love it, and maybe love you a little more in the process for recommending an awesome video game.

Tell her TouchArcade sent you.

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One of the all-time best platformers on iOS would have to be Acne Play’s Pizza Boy [ $1.99 ]. Released back in September of 2010, Pizza Boy absolutely nailed the virtual controls thing on the touchscreen, and almost more importantly they totally got the “feel” right – that is, the weight and movement of your character as he ran and jumped through the world felt perfectly tuned, like a classic 2D Mario game.

We thought Pizza Boy was great when it hit, though it was a bit on the short side, something that was rectified a few months later. Now, after all this time since Pizza Boy’s release, Acne Play, in conjunction with NCSoft, has announced their newest game for iOS and Android called My Little Hero with the following teaser trailer.

The problem with this teaser trailer is, well, that it’s just one big tease. There’s no gameplay shown and we’re really left wondering what kind of game My Little Hero is. I guess that is the point of a teaser, right? At the very least our interest is piqued.

The only other information we’ve been able to glean from our forums is that My Little Hero is an action adventure title and we should be hearing more on the game in the way of screens and videos soon. Given how awesome Pizza Boy is, consider us excited for whatever My Little Hero turns out to be.

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Being a fan of Diablo-style loot grinds, I was pretty excited to try DevilDark: The Fallen Kingdom [$0.99], Triniti Interactive’s take on the classic dungeon hack and slash. For the most part, DevilDark actually does a good job recreating the experience with nice visuals and a decent amount of weapons and armor. Unfortunately, simplistic gameplay combined with some general miscues hold the title back from stardom.

DevilDark follows the story of a wandering (and clueless) adventurer that sets out on a journey to save the world from being ravaged by an evil demon, who had been unleashed by a power-hungry king years beforehand. You’ll slowly accomplish this by doing a bunch of quests that involve fetching items and taking down hordes of baddies. An occasional boss battle permeates the monotony, but for the most part, DevilDark stays close to its dungeon crawling roots. While I realize that narrative may not be the priority in such a game, I would have liked something more than the intro cutscene and what little I can glean from quest texts.

One of the keys to a successful dungeon hack and slash is a robust inventory. While DevilDark doesn’t provide the limitless customization of say a Diablo, there’s more than enough loot to keep you occupied. Additional features such as bonuses for wearing groups of armor as well as elemental infusion do a great job adding some much-needed customization. The inclusion of a slot machine that has the potential to toss out some high-leveled gear is a nice touch, as well. However, I wasn’t a fan of the fact that some weapons and armor required currency that could only be purchased via IAP. Suffice to say, these special items aren’t required to complete the game – just expect to grind a lot more to pick up the normal currency items.

DevilDark’s visual engine is another standout feature in the game. The cell-shaded style looks great on Retina-enabled iOS devices. While Retina Display compatibility extends to the new iPad, please note that there’s currently a UI bug that’s been identified and should be fixed relatively soon. It’s also nice that items equipped on your character change his appearance. The music and character design do a decent job reflecting the overall tongue-in-cheek presentation, although the music does get a bit repetitive as you begin playing the same maps continuously.

Speaking of repetition, gameplay is quite simplistic, even for a dungeon hack and slash. There’s little in terms of additional abilities (which are tied to which weapon you wield) beyond simply attacking. In addition, DevilDark has a few quirks that, while hardly significant, still detract from the experience. For example, there are a lot of reused maps and assets which quickly become boring with the amount of grinding you’ll have to do. Navigation is also done via a static overworld map, which feels a bit disjointed.

Another annoyance is the fact that the game doesn’t warn you when you accidentally exit a map (and thus end the mission). Considering the camera angles can occasionally block the ‘world portal’ I had a few instances where I wandered into the exit and lost all of my mission progress. The lack of iCloud support is disappointing as well.

The pacing also feels a bit off. ‘Story-based’ missions seem to drastically jump in difficulty with the completion of each previous objective. While DevilDark offers plenty of optional missions to earn coin and experience in order to prepare for said story missions, I’m not a fan of the sheer amount of grinding necessary.

It seems silly complaining about excessive grinding when the goal of games such as DevilDark are to, well, grind. However, there’s a lot of ways to implement the grind that keep it interesting without messing with the core formula. If DevilDark had a more cohesive story accompanied by randomized maps and a little more complex battle system, it would be at the top of my list on iOS. As it currently stands, the visual engine and sense of progression are enough to merit a recommendation, but there is potential for it to be much more.

TouchArcade Rating:

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The very first post on TouchArcade was over four years ago now, which, for those of you playing along at home, was before the iOS App Store even launched. (Heck, back then it wasn’t even iOS yet, and wouldn’t even be iOS for another two years.) We’ve been hard at work on our own app with the help of Flexibits and Bartelme Design for what seems like forever, and with it being unleashed to the world next week, I figured now was a great time to lay out the features and functionality of the app.

First off, the main screen (seen below and to the left) is what you see when you launch the app. It has a featured story, which usually will be whatever our last review was, or any other story that deserves some kind of special attention. To the right of that is the “Hot Games” list, which is a killer feature of the app. What you’re looking at here is a realtime display of the games that have generated the most interest in our community.

There’s a whole bunch of behind the scenes wizardry taking place to compute this list, utilizing tons of different data points to create a surprisingly accurate display of what the hottest games at the time are. The cool thing about this is that the list is constantly being updated. If you want to know what the most popular games amongst our community are at this exact moment, look no further than the hot games list.

The other views of the app share a similar look, and you’re able to really drill down on reviews for all the games we’ve looked at via a set of drop downs. So, for instance, if you wanted to see reviews of free action games posted in the last month. Totally doable. The “News & Reviews” function gives you a quick glance at all the content on the site. Oh, and if you decide to, you can even get push alerts when we post a new story.

Our forums are (obviously) huge for our community, so we’ve included forum integration in the app. Each thread display also features all the information you’d need about a game at a glance, with ratings from both the actual App Store as well as amongst our own users. You can even assign your own ratings just like you can on your browser. See the little slider with the binoculars? Things with the app get even better.

The watch list, much like the wish list in the AppShopper App [ Free ] is my favorite feature. By flipping the toggle switch seen above, you can add any game, regardless of whether or not it’s released. From there, you can see any stories that have been posted about that specific game. Also, if the push alerts for everything we post is a little too much for you, you can set the app to only send you alerts when articles that pertain directly to your watch list are posted.

So, if we post a preview for a game that interests you, all you’ve got to do is add it to your watch list, and you’ll get alerts for when it’s released, when we post a review, and potentially even if it ever gets updates or a price drop and we cover it.

The app also has tons of information about all the games on the App Store. Once you get into the actual details page of any game (which is accessible by numerous methods within the app) you’ll see our own review scores as well as the rating from out community, and you’ll be able to jump into any forum thread that pertains to the game. Also, obviously, any associated trailers or screenshots are there along with the iTunes text and anything we’ve posted about the game.

We’ve put a ton of work into the TouchArcade app, and we’re all really proud of what we’re about to release. There’s a number of other little features and settings that you’ll discover as you’re using it, but this is the core functionality of the app. We’ve been using it for months now to discover games to cover on the site, and we’re confident that it’ll become your go to app to find the latest and greatest games the App Store has to offer.

If everything goes as planned, it will be available for free, globally, next week.

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Do you remember the Bullet Time Wars of the early ’00s? Every game had to have it, and not one of them got it right. We lost a lot of good games during that time; lost to the unnecessary addition of a dumb movie gimmick.

But then Max Payne [ $2.99 ] was released, and overnight the war ended. There was no disputing that, finally, a game had gotten bullet time right. That day was almost 11 years ago, and since then the world has changed. Games still implement bullet time, most of them successfully, but they all owe it to Max Payne.

For those of you who somehow missed out on it the first go around, Max Payne is revenge story wrapped in a noir coat that is so thick that the game occasionally comments on how warm it is. It serves as almost a noir for dummies book. Can’t sit through Chinatown? Max Payne will teach you all there is to know about noir.

But, for as silly as the writing occasionally is, it is still a good story. You will run into some truly gut-wrenching moments before you hit the 5 minute mark. But I wouldn’t dare spoil an 11 year old game, so I’ll stop right there. If you want to know more… Well, I assume you know what to do.

There is little sense in reviewing an 11 year old game that won nearly every award it could when it was first released. It’s well established that Max Payne is a fantastic game, but it is also ELEVEN years old. That means it comes with all the baggage that an 11 year old game has earned. So, rather than focusing on Max Payne the game, lets talk about Max Payne the iOS port instead.

This is the absolute best this game has ever looked. On the new iPad, the game sees resolutions and clarity that were pipe dreams when it first came out. Granted, the textures are low resolution, but they still look pretty good rendered on the iPad’s Retina Display. The between level “comic book” sequences are not Retina resolution, but it’s not a great mystery as to why.

I doubt anyone at Remedy envisioned people wanting to play the game at ridiculous resolutions, so it’s likely that they never created super high-resolution assets for anything. But, thanks to how well everything upscales, they still look pretty good. While it didn’t age as well as Grand Theft Auto 3 [ $4.99 ] did visually, it is still a great looking game. Bonus points if you can make it through the whole game without giggling at Max’s facial texture.

Controls are about what you would expect from virtual joysticks. Max feels a bit floaty when he moves, and looking around can be a pain, but the game is still very playable, thanks in part to a pretty competent auto aiming system. I know a lot of folks scoff at the idea of auto-aim, but it really does make the experience more cinematic and fun. When I turned off auto-aim, the results were decidedly less than fun (and often borderline frustrating), but your mileage may vary.

The real problem with the default virtual control layout is that the hit zones for buttons are too close to each other. Because you are aiming at a nondescript part of the screen, rather than a button, you will often find yourself jumping when you want to enter bullet time. A minor problem once or twice, but growing in annoyance significantly over the course of an 8 hour game. Like GTA3, you can move the buttons around on screen in the options, but you never really shake the feeling that this is a game made for a controller (or keyboard and mouse).

(Original E3 2011 trailer for PC version.)

Playing Max Payne to completion takes anywhere from 7 to 10 hours. If you intend to make that journey, please be sure to manage your own save files. Yes, Max Payne offers an auto-save, but I found it to be unreliable at best, and downright abusive at it’s worst. Unfortunately, games ported from PCs seem to bring more quirks than if they were ported from a console. Max Payne is from a time where we didn’t trust the game to save for us, so we took that responsibility upon ourselves. Max Payne for iOS has ported that feature spectacularly, so make sure you adjust your habits accordingly.

I’ll be the first to admit that I was super stoked about Max Payne coming to iOS. It was a game I loved on the PC 11 years ago, and I wanted to see how rose the colored glasses were. The answer is, surprisingly, not that rose. While it looks old, and has virtual joysticks, Max Payne is every bit the great game it was 11 years ago. I wish Rockstar had put more love into the port, but for costing me 1/25th of the original game, I’ll cut them some budgetary slack.

Now if I could just get rid of these war flashbacks, I’d be in business.

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Shaun Inman’s The Last Rocket [ $2.99 ] is a game that you can tell is going to be special inside of about 30 seconds of playing it. We absolutely loved it in our review, and with the various tweaks and fixes the game has seen since release (including Retina iPad support), it’s an even greater effortless recommendation. Gameplay in a nutshell consists of piloting a rocket through 64 rooms filled with all sorts of obstacles. It sounds simple, and it is, but the best part about The Last Rocket is that it doesn’t just use chip tunes and pixel art for the sake of having a “retro” feel. Instead, the entire game, from top to bottom, is just as much at home on the screen of your iPhone as it would’ve been on your NES in the mid-80’s.

The eBook is available direct from Shaun Inman’s site for $9.99. It’s a DRM-free iBooks-friendly ePub which features an exhaustive account of the game’s development including notes, drawings, screenshots, and much, much more. Fair warning though, the eBook is chock full of spoilers, so make sure you’ve played the game first. If you’re the kind of person who loves behind the scenes looks at game development, this isn’t something you should miss.

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This afternoon, Aquaria [$2.99] joined the growing list of iPad apps that support the new iPad’s high resolution screen. And in celebration, publisher Semi-Secret Software is offering it for $2.99 instead of its usual $4.99 price point. Semi-Secret is thinking that this is the first time Aquaria has supported 2048 x 1536, so scribble another note in your “Perks To Owning Aquaria on iPad” column if you’re playing along at home.

Here’s what it looks like now, by the way:

This sale ends this coming Sunday, so you’ve got some time to act before it ends. We suggest you fill this extra time by playing Aquaria so… maybe you should just jump on this now. Or something.

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It’s not easy to make a unique platformer. You either have to be trusty with your design skills and make a game look out of this world and startlingly unique, or you have to have some sort of wizard when it comes to your level design skills. Luckily, the people behind Gunman Clive [$1.99] have a little of both, and it makes for one of the best platformers I’ve played for years, on iOS or any other platformer.

Gunman Clive comes out of the gate shooting with an incredible look, which has a hand-drawn feel and makes you feel as if you are playing a game on the page of a tea-stained sketchbook. As Gunman Clive, you play the rough-and-tough Western hero on a mission to save the mayor’s daughter from wild bandits. Not that any of that matters, because as soon as you get an eyeful of this game you’ll drool a bit and forget any of the storyline in favor of sucking up the pretty graphics with your face.

Controls are pretty simple in Gunman Clive — a directional pad on your bottom left and a shoot and jump button set on your right. I wasn’t nuts about the floaty directional pad at first — it felt like my thumb was spending too much time in the middle of the screen — but eventually I adjusted. It’s handy to know you can jump into the menu and change the size of the d-pad or choose to make it static. For me, these small changes made the game much easier to play.

If you have ever played a classic platformer from the NES era, especially Mega Man, you will feel the echoes of them in this game. I giggled the first time I got a weapon drop too — it was a spread gun. If you people are trying to make me relive all those fine old days spent perfecting my Contra runs, it’s working.

You can also expect excellent level design here, which goes far beyond the basic jumps of most iOS games these days. Physics also come into play, but in a unique way that leaves most of those physics-based titles out there in the dust. And later in the game, you get to ride an actual rocket. Quite the contrast to the good old “Oh, an ice stage… a fire stage … a forest stage” boredom that so many of us are sick of. You won’t be bored with these levels as Gunman Clive keeps it fresh throughout.

One thing you might find, however, is that you may experience some frustration while playing Gunman Clive. That is because it actually is quite challenging. The level bosses in particular will take you some time to get used to. They have that bombastic feel that you don’t get often enough as well — I feel like I’ve played against too many end level bosses these days that don’t feel dynamic at all.

These bosses are hulking mammoths ten times your size, which I personally like. As far as challenge goes, though, I found myself wishing that the checkpoints would come a bit sooner after playing through several particularly difficult parts over and over. Or perhaps, an easy mode? Maybe I’m just out of shape from my NES days.

If you love platformers, you have to pick this beauty up. It really is a standout in all categories. The only possible turn off I can see is the difficulty, but maybe that’s just a fine excuse to bone up on your skills. Get that itchy trigger finger ready and come out of the gate with guns blazing, and you should do just fine.

TouchArcade Rating:

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