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It was just last week at GDC that we checked out a host of new titles from EA and their subsidiaries, and one of the ones that impressed me the most was the sequel to Firemint’s successful line-drawing game Flight Control called Flight Control Rocket. As of today, Flight Control Rocket [99¢] is now available in the App Store.

What I really enjoyed about my time with Flight Control Rocket at GDC was just how well Firemint has been able to expand on the base mechanics of the fairly simplistic original game, while still being able to keep things grounded enough that it feels like a true sequel. The sheer variety of new ship types adds a ton of new strategy to the Flight Control formula, and everything is wrapped up in a nice retro sic-fi art style. The presentation aspect of Flight Control Rocket is through the roof, that’s for sure.

The one thing I’m not so sure about yet is just how well the business model for Flight Control Rocket will go over. The game is 99¢ to download, but there is an in-game store filled with additional things to purchase. There are several types of in-game currency which you can slowly earn through play or purchase in various packs for real money.

The rate at which you earn this currency through play seems alright, but I’m not sure how I feel about being able to buy a continuation of your game or items that augment the scores you’re able to earn. I generally like high scoring focused games like this to remain pure, or at the very least have separate leaderboards for those who use these types of items and those who don’t.

It’s going to take some more time to really feel out how well the in-app purchase system has been implemented in Flight Control Rocket, but the one thing I do know is that I love the direction that the series has evolved from a gameplay standpoint. Hopefully this is able to shine through beyond the IAP system, but if you were a fan of the first game I still think you’ll at least get your dollar’s worth of enjoyment out of checking out this new entry in the series.

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The description for Ziggurat [$.99] calls it “the end of a much longer story — a story which ends with The Last Human On Earth standing atop a stratosphere-high stone pyramid.” Incoboto [$3.99] could have been described similarly: “Incoboto is the end of a much longer story — a story which ends with The Last Human in the Galaxy trying to survive the heat death of the universe.”

It’s a uniquely lonely and melancholy game, and almost every visual and design tweak reinforces that. Inco, the protagonist and player-character, is tiny and feels insignificant next to the immense contraptions he has to manipulate to find new energy sources for his dying solar system; if you zoom the map out far enough, he disappears from sight completely.

Incoboto’s elegant one-finger touch controls keep developer Fluttermind from having to implement a cluttered user interface, keeping players’ focus on only a few things at a time. The relative abundance of inky black sky only reinforces the idea that Inco is thoroughly alone. In fact, the only communication he receives are from outdated corporate memos and the fragmented death rattles of the dead and dying inhabitants of the Milky Way.

Well … that’s not entirely true.

There’s a sentient star named Helios who chirps and bubbles his way through the galaxy  at Inco’s side, helping him solve puzzles and cannibalizing enough “starpieces” to reinvigorate the cosmos. Helios is consummately chipper, and puts Inco’s dire situation in sharp relief. The best science fiction makes the audience forget that the world is ending in favor of highlighting interpersonal relationships. It only takes a few minutes for Helios to become a charming and precious  sidekick, and Fluttermind achieve it with a few words of broken dialogue and a handful of facial animations. It also doesn’t hurt that cooperation with Helios is crucial to solving most of Incoboto’s puzzles. Utility breeds empathy.

Nevertheless, Fluttermind bring a sort of streamlined efficiency to the rest of their game as well. There’s not a stray piece of dialogue to be found, or a single puzzle or mechanic that doesn’t build upon, integrate, or recontextualize something that came before it.

Incoboto’s galaxy is comprised of a number of small clusters loaded up with machinery, contraptions, portals, force fields, and various other doo-dads designed to encumber Inco on his quest for starpieces. Each world or cluster introduces a new puzzle concept or piece of gear, usually accompanied by Tweet-able slogans or warnings from the cartoonishly evil, Cave-Johnson-era-Aperture-Science-esque Corporation. The worlds feel full and realized: as the Corporation spread, it makes sense that they’d leave defunct machinery in their wake, abandoned on planets slowly rotating about their axes.

The comparison to Portal doesn’t come lightly. A large portion of the puzzles Inco must solve are portal based, and the basics of momentum will be crucial to understanding the toughest ones. More generally, Incoboto falls well within the broad spectrum of physics puzzle games.

Each gameplay chunk is relatively short and discrete — gates to new worlds are unlocked as Helios eats more starpieces — and each new section introduces a new mechanic, giving Incoboto a feeling of constant forward progress. The real trick is how seamlessly each of Incoboto’s new lessons makes its way into the next series of puzzles, getting absorbed into an ever-expanding framework of mechanics and concepts. There are clear laws in Incoboto, but Fluttermind is at liberty to interpret them differently from world to world.

Each gameplay element — the puzzles, the bombs, the gravity beams — are relatively simple, but Fluttermind integrate them in such a way that the game never feels straightforward or boring. Incoboto’s complexity is matched by smart, efficient pacing. I often felt like I was mastering a complex system in a short amount of time. It also makes each section feel meaningful and genuine, giving Incoboto the feel of a much larger and fully-featured game.

In other words, when Incoboto is firing on all cylinders, it’s an empowering puzzle game that makes its players feel smart and successful, like the last gear in a Swiss watch.

When Incoboto stretches too far — when the puzzles seem impossible or, more often, when the touch controls don’t live up to the platforming required of them — it comes crashing to a halt. I spent three days firmly, mind-numbingly stuck in the KindWord system last week.

Finally figuring KindWord out was its own reward, but a single huge breakthrough isn’t quite the same feeling as the joy of sustained momentum, of watching Incoboto’s system gyrate in perfect harmony.  Incoboto is elegant and subdued, unafraid to juxtapose the vastness of the cosmos and the terror of inevitable burning out with the intimacy and charm of a small boy befriending a star. It’s tightly and efficiently designed and as much an experience as it is a game, one that I do hope you check out.

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If you’re anything like me, the idea of a remake of a game you dearly loved when it was originally released comes as very good news. As much as I adore new games, there’s just something about playing something tried and true. Add HD graphics into that mix, and you’re really tempting me… which really should have been the case with Prince of Persia Classic [$1.99/HD]. I was hoping to be having so much fun with this game that it’d be hard to put the phone down to write this review, but unfortunately, that was not quite the case.

Prince of Persia Classic is far from all bad. If you played the game in its original form as a downloadable console title a few years back (or heaven forbid, even further back on the Apple II), you’ll recall that it had its charming parts… and its annoying ones. Still, there’s no denying that some of us spent countless hours navigating the prince through death traps, spiked pits, and all those things that make a game a proper adventure.

For one thing, the game looks and sounds absolutely gorgeous. Ubisoft has carefully gone through and retooled this for the modern gamer, doing their best to retain the spirit of the original and do it proper justice. I’d say that part works, but once you start playing it, that’s where the trouble seems to come in.

As you or may not know, Prince of Persia Classic is a sidescroller which requires lots of running and jumping to keep the prince safe as you navigate your way forward. This would have been great fun if the controls that allow you to do so weren’t awkward, but unfortunately they are. They feel a bit stiff and take some getting used to as a whole, which is not ideal when it comes to a game you want to pick up and play. Your movement control is a left to right slide bar, which really could have benefitted from a bit more sensitivity. It’s easy to make the prince run when you mean for him to walk, and you’ll have to learn to keep tight control of him to not hurl him down a chasm by accident.

If you can get comfy with the controls though, there’s a lot more in store for you beyond that. You have Normal, Time Attack and Survival modes to try out (the latter which challenges you to navigate the castle and save the princess in one hour or less), and of course the usual Facebook connectivity. You’ve also got Game Center included so scoreboards and achievements ought to keep you going for a while.

As it was in its original incarnation, Prince of Persia Classic is also a game that you’ll need to play a lot and die in a lot before you get a handle on how to really progress. Checkpoints help to make this reasonable, but I recognized some of that same frustration I felt playing the first one, as well as other retro titles from the same era. You had to be really tenacious to beat some of these titles back in the day. I think old schoolers would keep trying, but some other gamers with less experience might give up. Of course, it’s hard to say if that’s the fault of the difficulty curve of older games, or how much easier newer ones have become.

The verdict? If you must have it portable, it’s not the worst choice But if you just love the game, there are fine versions of it on XBLA and PSN that are simply easier to maneuver. They’re a few bucks more, but it might be worth it to you if awkward controls are your idea of a platforming nightmare.

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Way back in October of 2010, Goodhustle Studios released Beast Boxing 3D [99¢/Lite], a first-person arcade style boxing game that we thoroughly enjoyed in our review. It utilized pretty simple boxing mechanics, but had intuitive controls and a fantastic art style. The campaign was a bit short, but this was rectified pretty well through an update the following December that added two additional characters and a survival style Endless Mode.

There hasn’t been much activity with Beast Boxing 3D since then, but a brand new update has just been released that addresses two of the biggest requests from users since the game came out: high resolution visuals and Universal iPad support. A lot of the artwork in Beast Boxing is hand drawn, so there isn’t a lot of impact on the Retina Display or the iPad screen, though it does look much cleaner. However, it makes a big difference in the text as well as the actual 3D character models, both of which are razor sharp now.

Check out the comparison screens of the non-HD visuals on the left and the updated screens on the right (click for full size):

There are some other minor fixes in this latest update too, like improved UI elements and issues related to Game Center achievements unlocking. Also, the characters themselves have been given additional sound effects and animations, giving them all a bit more distinction to their personalities.

Beast Boxing 3D has remained one of my favorite games since it came out, and I’m really happy to see such nice improvements so far beyond release. If you hadn’t checked it out before, the lite version has received the same Universal and HD treatment so you can see what you’re getting into without risk. If you like the lite, the full version is currently on sale for 99¢.

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Over the last few years, I’ve seen a great number of strange things done to George Romero’s slavering, brain-dead antagonists. They’ve been assaulted by botanical artillery, transmogrified into office workers, made into soccer players and stuffed into a pizzeria. I’m totally okay with that, by the way. Amorous zombies, on the other hand, I’m not so sure about. Google Warm Bodies. You’ll understand. Still, were it not for a certain major flaw (we’ll get into that), Akaoni Studio’s frenetic arcade style shooter Zombie Panic in Wonderland Plus [Free] could have made me into a convert.

Steeped in cherry blossoms and highly destructible architecture, Zombie Panic in Wonderland is the story of a rather troubled land. Once a tranquil environment populated by a mishmash of copyright-infringing characters, Wonderland is now the epicenter of a ghoulish infestation.

Curiously enough, the dude responsible for all this madness has rather little to do with the usual list of suspects (evil corporations, witchcraft, heavy metal – you know the drill). The culprit here is a self-centered prince with an affection for the spotlight. He made a perfume designed to enthrall the masses. As you might have guessed, that didn’t work too well. Consequently, it is now up to you, the heroic and extremely effeminate-looking Mamotaro, to save the day.

Trust me, it sounds easier than it really is. In spite of the unreasonably adorable visuals, Zombie Panic in Wonderland does not hold back the punches. While it starts off on a relatively easy note, the difficulty level ramps up exponentially with every passing stage. Before you know it, you’ll find yourself having dodging putrefied sumo wrestlers, shurikens, demonic energy blasts and an assortment of other projectiles. Along the way, you’re also going to have to gun down everything from desiccated high school children to undead ninja gnomes. As per the grand old tradition set by titles like Time Crisis and House of the Dead, one hit is all it takes to shave off a life from your tally.

Ordinarily, this wouldn’t really be a bad thing but Zombie Panic in Wonderland is infuriatingly tight-fisted with the whole giving lives thing. Unless you make some purchases, you’re only ever going to get a single life and a single continue. That’s it. Good luck. Use those up and you can kiss your progress goodbye. It’s back to the first square with you, my friend.

Fortunately, however, the game doesn’t leave you completely high and dry. Remember what I said about the local infrastructure? It comes down rather easily. While you can always make use of your arsenal, you can also choose to literally bring the house down on your opponents. You even get extra points depending on your aptitude for mass destruction. In addition, there are also a number of exploding figurines capable of assisting you in your quest for total annihilation.

Gameplay-wise, that’s all about it for Zombie Panic in Wonderland. It doesn’t try to be more than what it is really is: a deeply responsive iOS port of Akaoni Studio’s WiiWare title. You progress through levels by filling a meter with your acts of wanton violence. If you succeed, you get to move on. If you don’t, well, you fail. It’s as gloriously simple as that.

I’m going to take this moment to add that the controls are also rather exemplary. To move, you utilize the iPhone’s built-in accelerometer. To dodge enemies, you swipe with a finger. If you want to shoot a barrage of bullets at your foes, you hold a finger down on the screen. To lob grenades, you double tap.

With its eclectic soundtrack (the moderately eerie traditional-sounding Japanese songs are particularly nice), cutesy visuals and approachable gameplay, Zombie Panic in Wonderland should have been something great. It should have been one of those games you openly recommend to your friends. It should have worked in all the right ways. Unfortunately, it doesn’t. Why? The in-app purchase system.

To be blunt, I’m not happy about it. In fact, I’m downright vexed. While it is not uncommon for iPhone games to do their best to entice you into additional expenditure, I have problems stomaching the approach that Akaoni Studio took. $3.99 for the full campaign mode? A little steep but I can deal with it. $2.99 for unlimited continues? $0.99 for a single extra continue? No. Just no.

With but one life and one continue available for free, the message is clear: grow cat-like reflexes or purchase those elusive continues. Take your pick. In all fairness, though, Zombie Panic in Wonderland does offer an all-in-one pack that will bestow every currently available (note the presence of the word ‘current’) asset upon you, but really, all-important consumables should not be exploited in such a manner.

Then again, to abuse a well-worn writer’s trope, your personal mileage may vary. If you’re okay with the way they’ve approached the whole freemium thing, Zombie Panic in Wonderland will probably make you rather happy. If not, steer clear. At the very least it’s nice that there’s no barrier of entry to check out what really is a very cool title, and after playing the included free content you should have a good idea of how much money you’re willing to drop on IAP, if any at all. It’s just a shame to see such a nice game stripped down and sold piece by piece like this.

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Lately it feels like racing titles on iOS place a greater emphasis on realism (whether in visuals or controls) and less on simple, enjoyable gameplay. Retro Racing [$0.99] looks to rectify that with an emphasis on fun, fast gameplay that sacrifices depth for arcade basics. While Retro Racing suffers from being way too short, the experience it does offer does a good job taking you back to the days of classic top-down arcade racers.

As its name implies, Retro Racing harkens back to the old days of top-down pixelated racers. Each track is chock-full of turns, obstacles, and (most importantly) power-ups. Power-ups range from tires (which improve turning), to acceleration and top speed upgrades, to the standard nitro boost. While the goal of each track is to finish in third place or better in order to advance, you’ll find that later tracks essentially require you to focus on power-up collection (while navigating the tracks flawlessly) in order to have a chance at advancement. It plays like a simpler version of old-school console racers such as R.C. Pro-Am.

In this regard, I’m a fan of the gameplay in Retro Racing. There aren’t any deep elements such as a cash or parts system, but it does a good job recreating the classic racer experience, particularly with the limited randomness of the power-up system. The gameplay is fast and the controls are responsive, although they’re not exactly the easiest to maneuver with its limited schemes. Retro Racing is a portrait-only game which makes playing on an iPhone feel incredibly cramped, though it feels just fine on an iPad. It’s baffling that there isn’t support for playing in landscape mode, but hopefully that option can come in an update someday.

Another nice touch that Retro Racing offers is split screen same device multiplayer on the iPad. While I found the experience decent enough for the local play it offers, it’s (obviously) of limited use for gamers that primarily play with others via the internet. Still, it’s better than not including it at all.

Retro Racing comes with full leaderboard support. However, you’ll quickly find that in order to compete on the leaderboards, you’ll have to purchase the extra vehicles with increased stats (the game has three default cars with various attributes plus three souped up cars as a purchase). While the developer has stated that the game will eventually let you unlock them without IAP, the simple fact is if leaderboard chasing is your hobby, you need to shell out more cash.

Another complaint with Retro Racing lies in its longevity. To put it bluntly, Retro Racing is incredibly short. There’re only twelve total tracks, and each can be learned and completed in a short amount of time. Granted, there is some replayability even after completing all the tracks simply based on the aforementioned leaderboard competition. However, I don’t think it’s enough to sustain the game for very long. I really would have liked to have seen more tracks at launch, although features like online multiplayer or a track editor would have really vaulted the game into the spotlight.

At this point, Retro Racing is one of those games with a decent gameplay formula that could have been so much more. The developer has been pretty active in our forums and has stated that more tracks and possibly other wish list features will make it into subsequent updates. Meanwhile, Retro Racing is still worth checking out for fans of classic top-down racers, as long as you don’t mind a lack of substance and a tiny assortment of tracks.

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New iPads are popping up all over Asia, and aside from a variety of unboxing and comparison videos, it seems that the first set of GLBenchmark 2.1 [$4.99] results have come in.

MacRumors explains:

Benchmarking the graphics performance of the new iPad also showed significant improvement over the iPad 2, with benchmarking tests boosting performance from 90 frames per second (fps) to 140 fps in the GLBenchmark 2.1.1 Egypt offscreen test and from 146 fps to 250 fps in the GLBenchmark 2.1.1 Pro offscreen test. Similar data had previously been uploaded to GLBenchmark’s site, although its authenticity has not been confirmed.

If these results turn out to be true, the new iPad could be a absolute beast in the gaming department. Ever since the announcement of the new iPad, our community has been justifiably worried about the graphical performance. I really hope these benchmarks are real, because, wow.

Keep in mind, like most benchmarks, take these alleged results with a grain of salt. We’ll have to wait to get our iPads on Friday to see how the actual real-world on-screen performance actually is.

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On the Wind is an eye-catching game. The interplay between the light, floral art and the chunky pixelized interfaces just begs for attention. t’s hard to tell exactly how it plays from the trailer, but the gist is this: the screen scrolls by, getting faster and faster as you progress through the seasons. You control the gust of leaves with your fingertip, moving it around obstacles and through other leaves that scatter across the field. It feels a bit like a wire loop game with added speed and less sadism.

At first glance it’s easy to assume that thatgamecompany’s Flower is the obvious source of inspiration, but developer David Buttress says it didn’t much factor into his design. Instead, he looked to The Helicopter Game, a classic Flash-based cave flier with simple, one-touch controls and a rather brutal difficulty curve. The idea for the leaves and flowing motion came from a more esoteric source: a in-depth look into Boids, an early artificial life program that models flocking behavior. He was particularly fascinated by the idea that such complex and beautiful motion could be created from a few simple rules, and he is bringing that organic motion into play in On the Wind.

Buttress is new to the iOS development world, having just recently launched his one-man studio, Don’t Step On The Cracks. But he’s coming from a long background in game development at Rare. Working with the other creative-types at the studio was often inspiring, but he had few chances to work on the small, creative ideas that cropped up. As with so many other developers moving from the console space, he found that iOS offers a great opportunity to play around with the concepts that had been building up while he put his time into larger projects like Conker: Live and Reloaded and Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts.

Buttress reached far and wide for inspiration while developing On the Wind. The silhouettes that make up the environment were initially inspired by Limbo. Rather than taking a similarly dark and pensive approach, he built on the idea, letting in riotous color for the leaves, flowers and backdrops. The sparseness of the sound is another carefully considered choice, like the auditory atmosphere in Shadow of the Colossus, which was usually formed only by the sound of the wind and the hooves of your horse.

For now, On the Wind is a concise experience meant for on-the-go play, one that runs through the seasons in short order before ending. Buttress is considering an update with an endless mode and powerups in the future, but for now he’s happy to launch with a still-pure experience. Between the procedurally generated world, leaderboards and a series of clever achievements, though, fans should find plenty of reasons to keep going. We’re certainly looking forward to playing more, having had a taste of the game. We’ll be sure to let you know when it lands, hopefully in a handful of weeks.

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Lightopus [$2.99] by BulkyPix and Appxplore is an arcade-style title with an emphasis on beautiful environments, item collection, and indirect combat. More importantly, Lightopus does a great job succeeding on all these fronts, particularly in the visuals department.  This success allows players to overlook an otherwise shallow narrative to focus more on basic gameplay.

As the only adult lightopus left, your goal is to enter the abyss and rescue the remaining younglings of your race, also known as bulbies. Gameplay is divided into zones, and each zone has a minimum amount of bulbies that must be collected before moving on. You are free to collect more bulbies to increase your score, but the longer you stay in a zone, the more aggressive the baddies seem to become. Each zone also has optional stars which boost your total score for the zone. Collect enough of them and you can also travel to a special zone with unique battles in which you are on the offense.

While the collection gameplay of Lightopus is engaging enough, the combat serves as the star of the show. Your lightopus can’t attack anything head on, but the bulbies you collect form an army that continually follows you and attacks anything in its path. Combat becomes a perpetual dance of dodging enemies charging at you, and indirectly maneuvering your bulbies until they’re in the path of the baddies.

The more your bulbies attack, however, the more you of them you lose, forcing you to balance combat with collection (especially when you encounter bosses that love to quickly kill your poor bulbies). Various obstacles also alter the path of your followers, adding to the strategy of maneuvering. Power-ups are also available to strengthen the bulbies in different ways.

The combat may sound relatively simplistic, but Lightopus does a great job of transforming it into a mesmerizing play of quick movements and strategic planning. The framerate is very smooth, and the path AI of the bulbies just feels realistic. Gamers control the lightopus’ (and thus, bulbies) direction via virtual joystick or tap mechanics. Both work well-enough, although the controls weren’t as tight as I’d like. Still, I find it interesting how well-done combat works, considering that the majority of conflict can be avoided if desired.

Environment-wise, while the abyss may be cruel, it is also a beautiful.  The visuals in Lightopus are a stunning mix of neon colors and constantly moving backdrops that do a great job transporting you into a different world. Graphical flourishes on your lightopus and bulbies are a treat and add to the action. The same goes for the music which features tranquil compositions that can quickly turn dark when you encounter a boss enemy. Every feature adds to a superb overall presentation that just works.

Despite the gameplay and presentation, one area that Lightopus lacks is in its story. Besides the app description and a few cutscenes, there’s very little in terms of narrative. Of course, this hardly affects the actual gameplay, but it does turn Lightopus into more of an arcade-inspired score chaser than a game with an emphasis on plot. I would have liked to see more of a story-mode myself, as I think it would have done the rest of the game more justice.

Still, while the lack of a story may turn some folks off, it may not be that important. The more I played, the more I realized that Lightopus isn’t a game of destinations; it’s a game about journeys. Each play through is a new and somewhat unique adventure through this beautiful world. While some games offer the greatest satisfaction from completing it, others (like this one) are simply a joy to simply play. That’s not to say that I still would have preferred more narrative, but I believe it plays a secondary role to the journey. Regardless, check out Lightopus now, and I hope you enjoy that journey.

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