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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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I have to admit, I wasn’t sure what to think about Picnic Wars [$0.99 / HD], a castle crusher showcasing the epic feud between vegetables and fruits (which somehow takes place during a picnic). Yet, despite the absurd story, what follows is a decent take on the genre with a good amount of gameplay variety that unfortunately suffers from a lack of content.

In Picnic Wars, you take the role of either fruits or veggies as they seek to destroy the fortresses of the other. You accomplish this by flinging various units at the castles, causing as much mayhem and destruction as possible. Truthfully, I have no idea what picnics have to do with the story, but seeing how zany the concept is I didn’t bother thinking about it.

Gameplay is a bit more complicated than simply tossing fruits or veggies at the opposition. Players take control of up to five different launchers on an isometric grid by moving them up and down the grid to aim. Each launcher can also be upgraded, with some units being more effective when fired from a certain launcher. Meanwhile, the opposition is throwing utensils at your launchers which can damage and eventually destroy your weapons. Combine this with a countdown on each mission, and gameplay in Picnic Wars becomes a bit more fast-paced than other similar games.

However, before you can throw your units, they must first be grown with seeds. Each unit takes a certain amount of seeds and time to grow depending on its strength. In addition, you start with a limited amount of seeds but can obtain more by aiming your allies at scattered seed bags located within the enemy castle.  Plant projectiles have lots of different strengths and attributes, such as the garlic that turns into a group of mini garlic grenades to the cabbage that acts as a delayed grenade. Players are scored based on speed, item collection, and total destruction.

I thought Picnic Wars did a good job creating a fun, varied gamplay foundation. There are a ton of different fruits and veggies to grow, and almost all of them are viable through the majority of the campaign. I also really enjoyed the isometric view which provides a bit of strategy as to where you want to launch seeing as how you may not be able to see some enemies until you take out certain sections. Controls, however, can be a pain as the same isometric view also leads to situations where you have to move some launchers just to tap on others, wasting precious time.

A hard mode is also available, which allows you to play through all the levels again with different units. Hard mode also increases the likelihood of catapult destruction and also removes the targeting sights, making it a bit tougher to accurately aim your shots. I personally loved hard mode, as it provided the perfect amount of difficulty that was missing from the easy mode.

Visually, Picnic Wars boasts a colorful, cartoony style that works well for the content. The game looks great on retina-iPhones, but not so much on the new iPad yet. The music also reflects the quirky feel of the game, although I wasn’t a fan of most of the sound effects (too annoying for my tastes). Strangely enough, the game also had load times between levels that, while not excessive, were still long enough for me to notice.

While Picnic Wars touts a total of 64 levels, in reality you’re getting two campaigns of the same 32-levels with the only difference being that you play as fruits in one campaign and veggies in the other. Each campaign has its share of different units, but the actual maps are the same, offering little in variety to players that have already completed one of the campaigns. Considering how swiftly you can get through the ‘easy’ campaign, you’ll be hurting for more rather quickly.

I’m a bit disappointed at how little there actually is. When you take into account the decent gameplay mechanics and visuals, Picnic Wars ends up feeling like wasted potential. If you’re willing to check it out I have no doubt that it should provide some enjoyment. However, be advised that enjoyment will be short-lived.

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Alright, I’ll come clean. When I saw OMGPOP’s Draw Something [99¢ / Free] glued to the #1 positions on both the free and paid charts I assumed it was yet another flavor of the week flash in the pan freemium game. Then I tried it, and wow is this game good. I’m not quite sure how they did it, but Draw Something is a perfect witch’s brew of Facebook integration, word scrambling, and asynchronous two-player Pictionary.

It works a little something like this- You start a game with someone (I’ve found games with people you actually know via Facebook seem to be the most fun.) and are given the choice of three words of varying difficulty. You choose one, do your best to draw it, and hit submit. Your friend gets a push alert, sees your drawing, and is given a array of scrambled letters to spell the word with. If they guess correctly you’re awarded between one and three coins, they take their turn, and the process repeats.

The free to play mechanic is actually sort of neat, as you can play the free version for eternity with ads and a limited set of colors to draw with. Alternatively, you can spring for the 99¢ ad-free version. The coins you earn are used to either buy bombs which nuke some of the letter tiles which don’t go to the word you’re supposed to guess or buy more colors to paint with. Sure, you can just do your drawings in the few colors that everyone gets, but to really tweak out your illustrations you need at least a few more paint sets.

The rub of the coin system is that actually earning enough coins by playing to buy bombs and unlock paint sets takes forever, which means you basically have to buy them unless you’re way more patient than I am. But, at the end of the day, I’m having a really hard time getting that worked up over the IAP as the game is worth every penny worth of the $4.99 bucket of coins I bought to unlock a bunch of paint (and the 99¢ I dropped to get the ad-free version).

Recently, the game was updated with additional words, and complete support for the Retina Display of the new iPad. In fact, my original intention of this post was just a quick news article on that fact, but I just can’t help but gush all over this game. Everyone I know is playing it, and recently taking my turns in Draw Something is both among the last things I do before I go to bed and the first things I do when I wake up every day.

So, I’m tagging this as a review, giving Draw Something five stars, and telling you again: Download this game.

TouchArcade Rating:

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At an event that was supposed to revolve around World of Warcraft’s upcoming expansion, Mists of Pandaria, Blizzard producer John Lagrave revealed that the studio is flirting with the idea of taking the still-popular MMO to iPhone. “We won’t do it until we think it’s decent,” Lagrave told Eurogamer in an interview. “But it’s interesting and the world is evolving towards that little handheld device.” He added that Blizzard would be foolish not to consider a port.

Lagrave pointed out a few key reasons why we haven’t seen WOW mobile yet, the main one being that it doesn’t have a good idea for it at the moment. As far as fundamental problems are concerned, that strikes us as a pretty big one. Still, it’s nice to know that Blizzard is thinking about us phone-shackled folk. If this ever happens, hopefully Blizzard sticks to its guns and offers up with something much more clever than these guys, who put the entire game on iOS via Vollee.

[via Eurogamer]

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Turn-based strategy can get a little fiddly. It’s all position this, attack that. Depending on your point of view, Rune Raiders [$0.99], the first release from Retro64, could be the genre’s lowest common denominator, or a delightfully straightforward distillation. I’d put my money on the latter.

Rune Raiders couldn’t be much more simple. You take a small party of adventurers—six at the most—each with a single ability and a unique attack pattern. Then you run them straight down a hallway, one grid square at a time. Orcs and minotaurs attack, orcs and minotaurs die. Simple, right? But in that simplicity there hide enough layers of complexity to keep things interesting.

The first layer holds the twelve heroes. For creatures confined to square tiles they’ve rather rich personalities, or archetypes at least. The elf, an archer, is arrogant and image-obsessed. The healer is quite the feminist when it suits her. They’re two of the first, unlocked early on. More come with time.

The elf shoots in a wide circle, a dead-zone all around him. The healer heals things immediately adjacent to her square. Each hero has one ability and a certain range, and the ability triggers at the start of any turn something is in range. Like chess, all you need to do is put the pieces in the right place. It’s just that there’s an awful lot of strategy involved in that simple task.

Layer two is the force you’re up against. There are 15 enemy unit types, and all of them have unique attack patterns. Here’s what you do: you figure out where to put your heroes so you can attack them and they can’t kill you. Each time you move you start a new turn, whether you’re moving your entire team forward or repositioning one hero. And there’s no going back.

As you progress through the game’s 15 levels the enemy formations get more and more complex. But your team also gets stronger. Occasionally an enemy will drop an item that lets you apply a perk to a hero of your choice. Those perks can change the game drastically. They can make a weak hero one of the strongest, or make a tank pull double duty as your best healer. Strategy isn’t something you can simply settle in to, it has to evolve with your team. Let’s call that layer three.

Then there’s the matter of economy. You pick up gold for each enemy you kill, but each hero you bring with you has a cost each time you bring them out. Later heroes cost a mint. Want to assemble a dream team of all your best units? You’ll have to pay for it. Early on you’ll need to learn to do more with less, and that can pay off well in the long run too. You can grind old levels for more gold, and go back stronger to max out your star ratings. That’s where things fall apart, just a little.

Rune Raider’s balance is a bit off. Eventually you can narrow your strategy down to just a few heroes that are the best for every circumstance, and they’ll carry you through any situation you get thrown into. Maxing out their perks is quick work when you focus and with enough gold you can bring them out whenever you want. There are three difficulty modes to play with, but eventually you hit three stars in all 15 levels and that’s that. That, and a strangely scored Survival mode.

So it’s a little rough around the edges. The sound effects are bland, there’s some choppiness when Game Center is enabled, and there’s an outstanding crash that hits when it’s not (a fix is already en route). You can break the game for yourself, so you might end up needing to throw challenges in your own path by restricting your team size. Not ideal in a strategy game, which really ought to hold up to min/maxing on some level. But for a few hours of casual fun? It will certainly do.

Rune Raiders is simple, but it isn’t mindless. It packs several layers of strategy into a casual frame. More than that, it’s rather charming, with characters and quips to make you smile. This is light fare, maybe too light for the serious strategy nut. But it’s also fun and engaging, and just challenging enough to keep its hooks in you till it’s done. Give it a shot, and stop by our forums to share your thoughts.

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Depending on how much you relish your DotA (If the acronym made you raise a puzzled eyebrow, don’t worry. We’ll get into all that shortly), you may either find Plants War [Free] an unexpected treat or a moderately competent RTS. It could go either way. Best described as a heavily diluted, single-player version of the world’s favorite Warcraft III mod, Plants War will have you leading Dryad Forest’s local vegetation in a struggle against some encroaching… animals? Global warming definitely screwed up the environment here.

Gameplay-wise, Plants War – Gamevil’s latest freemium title – works something like this. Before you begin each stage, you’ll be asked to elect an upgradable hero (the first you get for free, the others you’ll have to earn through extensive grinding or buy as an in-app purchase). After that, you’ll be at liberty to select the troops you want to deploy in the upcoming onslaught. Yet again, only the first one comes free.

To unlock the other units, you’re going to have to amass a fortune in gold or green leaves. A fair warning, however – the number of horticultural soldiers that you can utilize is limited by the number of slots and plants points you have available. In order to exceed the quota, you’re going to have to (you guessed it!) make a few choice purchases.

Once you’re done with all those decisions, the action begins. The objective here is to blow up the enemy’s base before they can do the same to yours. At regular intervals, both bases will spawn pre-determined units that will barrel towards their opponent with all the suicidal fortitude you would expect of NPC shock troopers. Needless to say, death is their only inhibition. Though you’re significantly more powerful than the ground troops, you’re not omnipotent. In order to succeed in your mission, you’re going to have to make efficient usage of your unsuspecting meat shields.

You will also have to make full usage of the four different skills available to the Leafy that you’re using. Initially, you’re only going to be able to invest a point in one skill. However, as you gain in level (acquire the last hit on an enemy to gain the maximum amount of experience points possible), you will be able to pour more points into your skills. Alternatively, you can choose to increase your mana pool. The choice is yours. Anything goes so long as it ensures certain victory.

(For those of you who do play DotA, Plants War can be summed up as ‘Middle-lane only DotA with no river, items or neutral camps.’)

And that’s pretty much the whole game in a nutshell. It doesn’t get more complex than that. However, the details are what make Plants War work. Each stage will impose a new challenge to your talent for picking the most suitable troops. Are you facing off against highly aggressive mice with a penchant for gnawing through shrubbery? Be sure to bring along a Tree Protector and a grim-faced Potato Blower. Are you up against some sturdy bears? Try some Seed Shooters.

Though certain combinations work better than others, it’s not impossible to be creative with things. As you progress through the game, you’re also going to have to battle with a variety of enemy heroes, each more difficult than the last. While you can bring a different hero to the conflict (assuming you’ve already purchased them, of course), you can also attempt to make do with the first Leafy you use. How do you bait a fast-moving tiger into being mounted onto a wall? Can you kite a hard-hitting bear around in circles while slowly pepper spraying him into submission? Once again, it’s entirely up to your own discretion.

The controls in Plants War are responsive and extremely simple to learn. To move, you tap on the screen. To attack, you tap on the screen. To use an ability, you – you get the picture. In order to zoom in and zoom out, you’re going to have to alternately pinch and unpinch the screen. My only complaint here is the fact that targeting can be extremely difficult at times when the hero is clumped up with their troops.

With three levels of difficulty associated with each stage, twenty-four achievements to unlock, a multitude of rewards to collect and a menagerie of units to discover, there’s not much to dislike about this stream-lined little title. Unfortunately, there’s also not much to it. Once you’ve beaten the first few levels, things can grow rather repetitive. You can only do so much with the same set of faces. If you want new minions to abuse, you’re going to have to either spend an inordinate amount of time grinding for gold coins or cough up the greens.

All said and done, however, it isn’t too bad given the non-existent price of admission. The problem here is whether or not you like this style of play. If you enjoy this sort of experience, you will probably lose occasional hours to the game. If not, you will probably lose interest after the first three games. It’s all rather binary.

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Nowadays there is a veritable smorgasbord of excellent iOS platformers, but it wasn’t always this way. Virtual controls have always been a sticking point with platformers on a touch screen, rarely offering the type of precision needed in such a game. One of the games that managed to nail the control problem early on, back in October of 2009 to be exact, was Touch Foo’s Soosiz [$1.99/HD].

Soosiz was a bright and colorful 2D platformer built around an interesting gravity mechanic and levels made up of tiny planet-like platforms not totally dissimilar from the Super Mario Galaxy titles. Soosiz was pretty well-loved by gamers and critics alike, and served as an early benchmark for how virtual controls should work in a platformer.

Since Soosiz, however, Touch Foo has been quiet on the App Store front, and I’ve caught myself wondering just what the team might be up to for their follow-up release. Last week, they announced in our forums what that follow-up title is, and they’ve sent word today that we won’t be waiting long to try out the game for ourselves as it will be launching this Thursday.

The game is called Swordigo, and it’s another platforming game but looks to be quite a departure from Soosiz. It’s a 2.5D game, meaning the visuals are made of 3D graphics but the gameplay itself is strictly classic 2D. There is a bigger focus on action and battling enemies this time around, and there will be RPG elements that let you level up your character, weapons, spells, and items.

Check out the awesome trailer below to get a good idea of what’s in store for Swordigo:

Swing back by later this week when we do our weekly roundup of new releases to get your own hands on the game, which will be launching as a Universal app at the $1.99 price point, and we’ll put Swordigo through its paces once it’s released and bring you a full review soon too.

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Flight Control Rocket [$.99] is beautiful. The art is pyrotechnic: the groovy colors are sharp and detailed, betraying no fuzz, gloom, or jagged edges on the new iPad. Even the menus have flair. Created intricately to reflect the swinging sci-fi themes that the rest of the game is so gleefully entrenched in, they’re a pleasure to plumb. The on-screen antics feel just as good, as Firemint has iterated on the core design in really fresh ways. But, it’s a shame that all of this is wrapped in the stench of corporate influence. Some of the most interesting additions to the core play model are rendered meaningless courtesy clumsily handled free-to-play functionality.

The sci-fi influence, outside of the slicker and more vibrant visual appeal, is just a fun contrivance to push the series’ usual conceit: take a ship, plot a course, and then repeat until the screen is so full of ships, that it becomes impossible to not avoid a mid-space collision. New features include a fascinating variety of ships with abilities, all of which refreshingly change up the pacing. There’s 15 new ships in total, including a snake-like series of ships that coils as you move it, a ship that splits into two, and even a new drop-ship type that spits out smaller ships into the playing area.

The new ships also feel like stopgaps, designed specifically to keep you from developing a rhythm or from zoning out. Flight Control is usually just an effort in concentration; but with these, it is becoming a much more viable strategy game. There’s enough content on a micro-level now to warrant focus, forethought, and tactics.

To its credit, the action stays manageable despite the varying seeds, sizes, and the abilities of certain ship classes. In part, this is because the action feels a hair or two slower, but there’s also a new health component that allows for a couple of hiccups along the way, whereas the previous game just ended after one collision. It also doesn’t hurt that this series remains a breeze to play: tap and trace, that’s it.

A not-so-clever IAP system sours all of the good vibes these parts of the experience can offer. As you play across the game’s two modes, endless and a time-based survival mode, you’ll earn pieces of optionally purchasable in-game gold. You can use this, in turn, to buy robitic avatars that grant specific bonuses during play. The starter robot randomly ratchets up the score of a landed ship, for example, while others bump up gold earned or grant you extra lives. These sound neat in theory, and they would be totally fun adds if (a) they weren’t saddled by egregious IAP loops, and (b) weren’t laughably expensive.

In order to use a robot more than three or so times, you need to spend in-game gold on the batteries to power them. IAP loops consistently strike me as beyond tacky, and in this situation, they’re rigged in the game’s favor. Also, my mental math says it’ll take me at least a dozen hours to obtain one of the top-tier robots without spending any dough, which is especially silly considering this game costs real money to begin with. It’s sad. The robots idea is a casualty of a crazy business model that is too aggressive, too Facebook-y to take seriously. It’s a big, black eye instead.

Minus the free-to-play shenanigans, Flight Control Rocket is easily the best entry in the series so far, as it sports a lot of fresh and fun ideas, as well as a groovy new theme that Firemint fleshes out splendidly throughout. It’s also one of the best looking new iPad games. But, the free-to-play components do exist, and they keep the experience from feeling like a cohesive whole. This game is split into parts, as a result, and the bad has a habit of putting a damper on the good.

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It takes a lot to make a match three stand out these days. If anyone has what it takes, though, it’s the dream team of Launching Pad Games and PikPok. Monster Flip [$0.99] is developed by the former and published by the latter, and that pedigree shows. It’s a slow burner, but invest a little time and you’ll start to see why it deserves your love.

Monster Flip isn’t the same ol’ gem swapping game. The clue is in the title: these little dudes need to flip. Swipe your finger over a line of three or more and they’ll flip over and swap positions. If this happens to line up at least three matching monsters, then score. It’s a bit of a trick to wrap your head around the flipping, but that’s just the challenge of the first few minutes. Once you have that under control you can start to pay attention to the little things. Like how quickly your score gets out of hand when you chain a few matches in a row. Or how steaming mad monsters are more than just a hassle.

Sometimes the monsters get angry, you see. It happens more and more as you progress deeper down the rabbit hole. Six turns after spawning a mad monster will throw a game-ending tantrum, so you have to stay on top of matching and clearing them. But here’s the rub: the longer you leave them, the more they’re worth. Want to truly dominate the leaderboards? Clear mad monsters on their sixth and final turn as often as you can. It’s a huge risk, but the rewards are astronomical.

Classic mode is chill; you can take all the time you want to strategize and plan your attack. You can see the next row of colors that will drop, so triggering upcoming chains is one varsity-level strategy. If you’re not into relaxed, thoughtful experiences you can check out Countdown, which pits you against a two-minute timer.

But the real fun is Sequence mode. There, you’re given the exact same board as everyone in the world and 50 moves to make the most of it. Theoretically, there should be a perfect game out there to be played, and if you’re really, really good, you could be the one to play it. That’s the bit that gets my motor running.

If that’s not enough, you can play a whole other way in Puzzle mode, striking out to clear each of 60 boards with increasingly more complicated layouts. Launching Pad has been generous with the unlocks so you should never get stuck—if you do, there’s IAP available to unlock them all.

So with all that we have a matching game that’s clever and surprisingly strategic, one that has a lot of content to work through and several ways to play. But that alone wouldn’t make this game. What makes it is the positively adorable art and soundtrack. Jeramiah “Module” Ross is responsible for the music. You might remember his work from Monsters Ate my Condo, and he hits it out of the park here too (albeit in a slightly calmer way). In fact, all of the game’s sounds are great. I keep poking the monsters just to hear ‘em squeal.

When you get right down to it, Monster Flip is yet another matching game. If there’s absolutely no room in your life for yet another one of those, you’re not going to swoon over this one. But if there’s any part of you that craves those drop and match combo chains and the increasingly ecstatic chirps and score-splashes that accompany them, this is where you’ll want to look. Not convinced? Swing by our forums and share in the lovefest.

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It was just this past Friday that we took an in-depth look at Digital Tales’ Battleloot Adventure, a new action-focused RPG, and really enjoyed what we saw in our preview copy. The game had been submitted to Apple and we were hopeful that the final version of the game would be available sometime this week. Well, the Apple approval gods must have been shining down on Digital Tales, as literally the very next day Battleloot Adventure [99¢/HD] appeared in the App Store.

Our preview of Battleloot Adventure should give you a pretty good idea of what to expect based on our limited time with the game, but we’ll definitely be curious to see how the experience holds up through the entire game. We’ll be putting Battleloot Adventure through the ringer to test out that very thing, but all signs seem to point to a quality offering with a stellar art style and presentation, wonderfully simple combat mechanics, and the usual character leveling elements that come with an RPG. You can grab Battleloot Adventure from the links below, or check in on our forums for even more impressions.

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