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We’ve been waiting nearly three years for a follow-up to Defender Chronicles, the title that popularized the “vertical tower defense” style of gameplay and was one of the most beloved games from a still young iOS App Store back in 2009. Well, the time is finally upon us, as Defender Chronicles II: Heroes of Athelia [ $2.99 ] has just gone live in the US App Store.

Defender Chronicles II brings back all the things that made the original game such a hit, and improves upon them at practically every level. We took an in-depth look at the game in our preview from last week, and we’ll be bringing you a full review in the very near future. However, if you were a fan of the first game you more than likely will be all over this new release anyway, and as always there are early impressions and discussion of the game rolling into our forums.

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We’ve been hotly anticipating Nimblebit’s follow-up to their massively popular Tiny Tower [ Free ], called Pocket Planes, since it was first unveiled at GDC in March. We took a close look at its Flight Crew Challenges in a hands-on preview last month, and we dug deep into the Nimblebit way of making games free-to-play the right way in an in-depth article earlier this month. Finally, we talked about our early impressions of the game on our podcast a couple of weeks back. See? Told you we’re hotly anticipating it.

Today, Nimblebit has released the first trailer for Pocket Planes giving everybody their first glimpse at the game in action.

As you can see from the video, and what we’ve known for a while now, is that Pocket Planes is looking to be a fantastic follow-up to Tiny Tower. It’s really been the current obsession around the TouchArcade headquarters since we’ve had our hands all over early versions, and we can’t wait for everyone else to get their hands on the game too. Unfortunately, Pocket Planes still doesn’t have a firm release date but it’s certainly close on the horizon, and once we find out when it hits for sure we’ll be letting you know.

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When you truly adore a game, sequels can be a scary thing. Sure, it’s more of what you love—but what if they mess it up? What if they abandon all the things you love for the sake of novelty? Well, Defender Chronicles [$1.99 / $2.99 / $4.99 (HD)] fans, let us put your fears to rest. We’ve had a chance to spend some time with Defender Chronicles II, and it seems to have everything the original had to offer. And every little bit of it is bigger, better, and sexier.

I spent the summer of 2009 consumed by the original. I had a brand new 3GS and pages of games, but Defender Chronicles – Legend of the Desert King was the one that devoured my time. Its mix of vertical tower defense and RPG conventions was completely irrestistable, and Gimka Entertainment and Menara Games propped it up with massive updates that added to its already substantial content. Defender Chronicles II is looking like it will contain that same potential for time investment, so you might want to clear your schedule in advance.

This game is leagues beyond its predecessor in terms of visual appeal, and that’s an achievement—as we pointed out way back in our review, Defender Chronicles was a looker in its time. But now every unit is more detailed and every animation is more fluid. And crisp—Retina support is in for iPhone, though apparently not for iPad. The game lives up to the rose-colored vision you may have of the original, but it’s much more refined, more up-to-date.

The gameplay has been similarly preserved. You’ll still spend your time turning flags into guilds and upgrading them through tiers of units, archers to rangers, squires to cavaliers. Strategy seems more important than ever before, with enemy units that take advantage of every potential weakness in your defense. Height and range are the biggest considerations as you scroll around massive, multi-tiered 2D maps. There are quite a few of those this time around, and they hit an almost Escher-esque level of complexity pretty quickly.

There isn’t much that’s changed outright, really. Voice actor George Ledoux returns to impress us with his Sean Connery impression, though he also pulls off an impressive lizardman. Heroes Melwen and the General return, but this time they’re accompanied by two new friends: Lovell and Elwyn, an archer and priest. The brand-new story of the heroes and their defence of Athelia against the Orcs and Forsaken is told through gorgeous comic-book cutscenes once more.

From our brief time with the game, it really seems like you’re going to be able to put in a ludicrous numbers of hours. There’s so much here for the player that wants to go deep, with heroes to level up and customize, hundreds of artifacts to locate and five difficulty levels and game modes to work through. The difficulty curve also feels a bit steeper, so if you’re already familiar with the game you shouldn’t be underwhelmed. If you’re feeling particularly cocky, you’ll be able to challenge yourself with a huge list of Game Center achievements and leaderboards.

Ultimately, it seems like Defender Chronicles II will be the perfect sort of sequel. It updates already excellent gameplay for a new generation of devices, and brings in all sorts of improvements in the process. It’s hard to imagine any Defender Chronicles fans being disappointed, and folks that are new to the series should be in for a treat. We’ll be taking a closer look at the game over the next couple weeks, and we’ll be back with our review after it hits the App Store on May 24th. In the meantime, the developers are posting regular previews in our discussion thread, so take a peek if your appetite isn’t already whetted enough.

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Last week we updated you on the status of Defender Chronicles II, the long-awaited sequel to the hit 2009 strategy defense game Defender Chronicles [$1.99 / $4.99 (HD)]. Today, we’ve learned the release date for the new game and it’s set to hit in just a couple of weeks, on May 24th. In addition, a new trailer has been released.

We’ve been playing an early build of Defender Chronicles II and will have a hand-on preview for you shortly, but without spoiling too much if you were a fan of the original then we think you’ll be in for a treat. And if you missed out on Defender Chronicles the first time around, this new release will be a great time to jump on board.

Stick around for our preview of Defender Chronicles II and mark your calendars down for a May 24th release.

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We’ve been following F5 Games’ upcoming social RPG Pocket Heroes since we first saw it back at last year’s E3. The idea behind Pocket Heroes is to let players around the world build up a party online and play through an RPG-style game, taking turns asynchronously. For simplicity’s sake it’s been described as Dungeons & Dragons meets Words With Friends, which sounds like an exciting proposition.

In early April we got an update on the progress of Pocket Heroes which pegged the release date as May 10th for a price of $1.99. Well, in a new post on the developer’s website we get a bit of a good news/bad news scenario. The bad news is that Pocket Heroes won’t be hitting its intended May 10th launch date, but on the bright side the team feels confident that they will still see a release sometime during May or shortly after.

The good news is that the extra time has gone into making some significant improvements to where Pocket Heroes was previously at. First off is a huge overhaul of the UI, including getting rid of the placeholder font seen in the game’s preview trailer, which was a point of contention from some. As you can see in the following screens, the new UI is much more visually appealing while also allowing you to do more. It will also change dynamically to display the pertinent information to whatever you’re currently focused on.

Also seen in the screens above is the new chat interface in Pocket Heroes. It drives me nuts when online multiplayer games – especially turn-based ones – don’t have some sort of chat functionality. In an RPG however, discussing situations and strategizing with your party members will likely be a crucial component of success, so it’s nice to see it being handled well here.

Besides the new chat and UI work, the team has also been endlessly tweaking, balancing, and fleshing out the many details in Pocket Heroes to make sure it’s the best it can be. They sound confident that the game will be launching in May, and we look forward to checking out the full version then. Be sure to hit up our forums for even more discussion on Pocket Heroes.

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Ladies and Gentlemen, start your engines. As Nimblebit’s Pocket Planes continues to barrel through its beta period, we’ve had a chance to try out one of its new features. It’s been added since our GDC preview and we’re pretty sure you’re going to like it.

You know how Tiny Tower [Free] and Pocket Frogs [Free] have missions you can complete—stock this much of certain items, or breed certain colors and patterns of frogs? Pocket Planes is going to have missions, too, but they’re competitive. For these ones, you’re going to need a little help from your friends. Or rather, your flight crew.

A new Flight Crew challenge will be posted every so often—maybe twice a week. The challenges look to be pretty simple: deliver as many jobs (pieces of cargo and passengers) to a certain city somewhere in the world. You can’t just take any old thing, though. Everything in the game has a destination, and the destination needs to match the city for this to work.

Your Flight Crew can have as many or as few people as you can muster, but the more the better: the crews who manage to bring in the most jobs will win some very cool in-game prizes. Like, say, the bad boy below. Look familiar? Nimblebit is hard at work making up some very cool secret planes as we speak—here’s hoping for a good ol’ fashioned airship. And on top of the cosmetics, it sounds like there will be a Bux reward to boot.

Now Pocket Planes is still a work in progress, so none of this is set in stone. But currently, the only thing you need to join a Flight Crew is a Game Center account (which you don’t need to share with your crewmates) and a common Flight Crew name. If I were the sort of person who wanted to get a leg up on the competition, I might use that information to hit the forums and start drumming up a good team of people. While I was at it, I might try to recruit a few of the folks who have put 2323 pages of forum posts into trading frogs in Pocket Frogs. Those dudes seem like they might have the dedication for the job.

The rest of the game is coming along nicely, from what we’ve seen, and it looks like Zynga hasn’t caught on to it so far (fingers crossed!). Nimblebit isn’t ready to commit to a release window yet, but it can’t be too far over the horizon at this point. So stick around—we’ll have much more to show you as Pocket Planes gets ready to touch down.

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Remember early last month when we posted a gameplay video for Cyan’s upcoming RealMyst? Well, they’ve since gone and released a second video, which is equally impressive.

Take a look:

RealMyst, in case this is the first time you’ve heard of it, is a remake of the original Myst. Only, instead of the whole game being pre rendered, it’s rendered in real time, and allows you to have complete control over where you go and what you look at. This is especially crazy when you consider back when Myst was originally released, streaming the pre-rendered video off your CDROM drive was considered cutting edge. Now we’re just rendering all that in real time on your phone.

We’ve still yet to get a release date more specific than “Spring 2012.”

Thanks, @Vragal!

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Most puzzle games would have you believe that fun only lies under a pile of rigid rules. That doesn’t seem quite right, when kids have the most fun playing without any rules at all. Whitaker Trebella’s Polymer [ ] isn’t child’s play, but it only demands one thing: a shape can’t have unfinished edges, or it’s not a shape. Everything else is fair game, and that sure feels freeing.

To create shapes in Polymer, you slide rows of pieces back and forth, columns up and down. When you’ve found a stopping point and slid your last piece into place, tapping the shape destroys it. With that, poof, your hard work is gone. In its place you’ll find a fresh canvas and a big pile of points to soothe you.

Polymer’s first mode serves as a good introduction. Called “Two Minutes,” it gives you that much time to create anything you like. A hundred tiny shapes in a row, cascading into ever multiplying combos? Sure. A few carefully crafted behemoths? Go ahead. Quality generally scores over quantity, but your masterpiece won’t be worth much if you can’t finish it in time.

“One Polymer” mode does what you might expect: it gives you as long as you need to create the ultimate shape. Each piece that you manage to add to it rockets your final score to new heights, but there comes a moment when your shape is so large and complex that every move you make will damage the surrounding structure. The most important skill you can learn here is how best to delay that moment.

“Bombs,” the third and final mode, adds, well, bombs to the mix. These are pieces with timers and four unfinished edges. Working them into a shape doubles its score, but the game ends if a single timer runs down to zero. More and more bombs are introduced as the game progresses. Here you need to know your limitations—how complex of a shape can you make within each time limit?

You’ll begin playing Polymer with only the first mode and two kinds of pieces, a rounded corner piece with two free edges and another that caps ends. Reaching a certain accumulated score unlocks the next piece, and then the next mode. It’s a good system, ensuring that you fully understand how to play with what you have before things get more complicated.

Unfortunately, this same system might prove frustrating for some players. Since the scoring scales on a steep curve, players who can’t pull off large shapes will find themselves pecking away at unlocks for much longer than necessary. There are two ways out of that hole: improve, or pay your way out. Each unlockable can be bought if you don’t have the patience to earn it. It’s a little too easy to see this as a push to make extra purchases.

Better to put your wallet away, though. The game is more fun when you have something to work toward aside from achievements and leaderboards, and playing without pushing yourself won’t get you far. Not only that: it’s entirely possible to get ridiculously high scores without the unlockable pieces. At the highest tier of play, you’re probably going to need them. Before then, though, they can actually get in the way, making the board too complicated for beginners. If you find yourself in over your head, you can toggle the more complex pieces off for as long as you need.

As mentioned in our preview, music plays a big part in the Polymer experience. The mood of each mode is enhanced by its soundtrack, cheery, studious and tense in turn. The tones created when you destroy a shape are equally fitting. This is one of those games you’ll want to play with the sound on.

The visuals are somewhat less appealing, at least at first. The look is clean and minimalistic, but when the pieces are all strung together they start to look a little sausage-like. It’s not the most pleasant association. I forgot all about that slight distaste after making a few complex shapes. I’ve saved pictures of a few of my successes for later, and been tempted to tweet more than one. If waiting to acclimate to the look doesn’t work for you, try one of the unlockable color schemes. Some are quite striking.

The thing that keeps me coming back isn’t color or music, though. It’s not even the selection of game modes. The game draws me in because it lets me be creative. It’s freeing to play a puzzle game that lets the player decide when a piece is finished. It’s great to have the choice to create something pretty, or huge, or sophisticated. Polymer cuts away all but the most necessary of rules, and the game is all the better for that. Take a look, and share your best creations in our forum thread.

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Three upcoming games recently popped up on our radar, and while we don’t really have enough details on any of them yet, smashing all three games together sort of makes a story, so strap in for this.

Inotia 4: Assassin of Berkel – When it comes to Korean action RPGs, the App Store seems to have two main staples, Gamevil’s Zenonia, and Com2uS’s Inotia. Zenonia is up to four different games on the App Store, and this upcoming title will be the fourth installment in the Inotia family. The “party battle system” in Inotia 4 sounds pretty cool, and like previous entries in the series I’m sure we’ll see all sorts of incremental improvements that these yearly sequels always seem to have.

Alexandria Bloodshow – A strategic card-centric battle game from Sega. Gamezebo got a preview of it, and used games like Plants vs Zombies to describe how gameplay works. I’m not too familiar with the original Samurai Bloodshow, but I’m all about any strategic game with online multiplayer.

N.O.V.A. 3 – Gameloft is teasing quite a bit of their upcoming Halo-like first person shooter these days. We expect it to be pretty similar to the previous two installments in that it’ll likely come packed with an awesome online multiplayer component to compliment the single player campaign. If that is actual in-game footage we’re looking at in the above video, it should be pretty rad.

We’ll have more details on these games as soon as we get them. Unfortunately, the best we’ve got right now is they’re all coming to iOS devices, and they’re all coming “soon.”

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