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Just a smidge over a year ago, Epic announced that the Unreal Engine would be hitting iOS. We've seen a great game or two developed in the UDK since (Infinity Blade [$5.99] being the obvious example), but most studios outside of Epic seem to still be feeling the engine out. Those cautious, early days might finally be coming to an end, thanks in part to Gyro13 [$5.99].

This game is sexy, pulling out most of the bells and whistles we've come to expect from the Unreal Engine. Textures, lighting and shadows are all top notch. But we've seen that before, and slick visuals don't make the game. Luckily, Gyro13 follows through with outstanding gameplay, an original soundtrack and even a hint of a story.

You play a pilot of a gyrocopter, tasked with rescuing people in a mine that's filling with deadly gas. In each of the game's 24 levels you're told how many miners there are to save and how long you have to save them before the gas overtakes you. You can survive it, but your cargo hold is unprotected and your passengers will die.

Speed is of the essence, but so is safety. Your ship is fragile, so a few slight bumps against the wall will blow you apart. Thanks to a complicated set of controls, avoiding the walls and obstacles can be a serious challenge. Your ship moves on a central axis, controlled by an on-screen slider. Slide to the right to tip your nose down and left to raise it up. That covers the steering, and a separate button controls thrust. You can also tap the screen to pulse certain obstacles in front of your ship. It's complicated, but that difficulty is fundamental to the game's success. It takes quite a while to get the hang of it, but practice enough and it'll click. When it does, Gyro13 comes together beautifully.

Rescuing the trapped miners takes skill. The mines they're trapped in are filled with all kinds of old equipment, explosives, wind tunnels and poisonous gas clouds. And those are just the early obstacles. The time limit is generous in most levels, but only if you can get through cleanly. Crash your ship and you'll be sent back to the last checkpoint, but with 5 more seconds on your total time. As time gets tighter and tighter, landing on those platforms to pick up the miners becomes an exercise in cost/benefit analysis. Is it worth it to save the miner who's so badly injured he can only crawl slowly to the ship? It might cost the lives of the other eight miners in your hold, and you might not save him either. Could you make the hard call?

It's an elegant experience, one made even better by the accompanying soundtrack. Tense techno beats increase the anxiety of the last moments of breathable air slipping away. A few other bits and pieces help Gyro13 stand out, including unlockable skins for your ship. Each level's introduction is voiced, too — and while the voice acting isn't top of the line, I've certainly heard (much) worse.

Gyro13 isn't the most ambitious title we've seen built on UDK, but it is one of the best so far. I only have one major complaint: you can't see how much time you have left in a level, so if you've forgotten your time limit some of the hard choices become moot. Otherwise there's little left out — even the currently-absent Game Center support is planned for the first update.

Still, this is a challenging title, and it's one that requires players to commit to an unusual control scheme. I grew to love those controls, but if you're worried they're not your style you can always get a few more opinions in our discussion thread. For the daring, though, there are miners to be rescued, and it looks like you're the only one who can do the job.

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So, we got a build of Forever Drive and decided to put the pedal on the floor in order to bring you some early impressions. And, wow, guys, does this seem cool.

With Forever Drive, Supermono Studios is taking a smarter approach to user-created content design: instead of asking players to mold and shape entire experiences, it asks that they mold and torture a fraction of a blip on an infinitely expandable super-highway. By managing user expectations before people even begin creating, Supermono is freeing its users from failure and the game’s players from having to filter out tons of garbage. Most user-created content titles, including Media Molecule’s venerable series starring a boy made of sacks, do not practice any kind of control or creative constraint, which is what makes Forever Drive unique, and as we’ve been discovering, pretty fun.

You got to at least appreciate Supermono’s core design conceit. It’s shooting from the hip with Forever Drive — there are no curated races, no lifeless campaign, and no attempts at narrative. Through and through, this is a racing game about racing forever, and it’s built by you and everyone else. The basic idea behind this is simple. Supermono wants you to play a racing game about the journey instead of the destination. That's some next level stuff.

“What we've tried to create is a very streamlined experience — something a little different from the "load a track, do 3 laps, stop, repeat" gameplay that's become almost universal in driving games,” Supermono’s Dave Ferner told us earlier this year.

“We're trying to create something that feels more like an epic journey, with that feeling of discovery and wonder you get driving fast into an unfamiliar land…”

I recently gave the level editing portion of the title a go and I’ve been surprised by how deceptively simple it is and how graceful most of your projects tend to be, even if you’re just goofing around and attempting to make something phallic. You’ll probably never make a level on par with 1-1, but you’ll make something that works and fits with the game.

Basically, there are two parts to the creation process: track editing and environmental editing. The former editor lets you build a small swathe of track from one end of the editor to the other, while the latter gives you the power to add scenery. Other tools give you the power to raise or lower the track where you please, as well as make fine adjustments on the turns you may or may not choose to have.

It’s not rocket science and I think that’s important: execution on design concepts floating around on your head is about as hard as drawing your bedroom realistically from the picture you see when you close your eyes. By making the editor simple and keeping the bar low with the amount of content you’re responsible for, Supermono is constricting the scope of your ideas, but not their potential.

And while whatever you make will probably be gold, there are tricks to making a good track, as I’ve learned from Dave. He suggests paying attention to the actual curvature of tracks, how a straight benefits the overall design, other high-concept-y things. He also suggests checking out this article by Luke McMillan called A Rational Approach To Racing Game Track Design, which is crazy good read if you’re into design or production.

"One of the main barriers to mainstream acceptance of user-created tracks is the complexity of the editors — we didn't want a PC style professional tool with a million hotkeys, we wanted a super-streamlined editor which was fun to use," Ferner tells us. "We honestly spent months on that thing — it takes a lot of work to make something simple out of something complicated!

"And because our game relies on users to create the content, we aimed to create an editor that was almost a mini-game in itself — there's even some unlocks which you can only get by building popular tracks, and we may even put a highscore table for track creators… it's all a big experiment, but hey, you never know until you've tried it!"

If a section of track somehow manages to suck, you’ll be able to down-vote it. After enough, it’ll be removed from the rotation.

The track I made while farting around (after the no-no shaped one, that is) was a simple “S”-shaped joint. The game automatically integrates in spots where players can drift to earn XP (which is currency used to purchase upgrades, cars, and more stuff for the editor) and it also auto-scaled the height in order to accommodate some lackluster building placement. The actual placement was a simple as dragging and dropping or pinching to zoom to smooth out the rough spots. You’ll see a few images of it if you look around this write-up.

We still haven’t seen the full-full game — you know, the one with the potentially hundreds of thousands of user-created sections of tracks, so we haven’t really dug into the core of the experience. We’ll definitely do that when the game goes wide later this October.

On that note, this is definitely a game that’ll live and die by its audience. At the end of the day, it’s a title that is relying on a community and a vast one at that, so we’ll have to wait and see how people react it hits and how long they’ll stick with the user-creation component in a post-release environment. Provided there is an audience, Forever Drive has the potential to fulfill the promise of its insane conceit, and really, we can’t wait to see if it can manage.

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If there’s one genre that’s prolific on the App Store, it’s mini-game collections. It’s not particularly surprising considering the general appeal for games that can offer small doses of gameplay for gaming on the go. Flick Champions [$0.99 / HD] looks to expand the genre with its own collection of sports themed mini-games. While Flick Champions certainly succeeds at providing some much-needed diversity in its sports mini-games, the fact that a lot of the better games are locked at the onset may irritate potential players.

As its name implies, the mini-games in Flick Champions are all centered on simple flicks and swipes in order to play each of the eight included mini-games. For example, both Tennis and Hockey are played as glorified Pong simulators which have you swipe around the field of play in order to block the ball (or puck) from scoring points on you. Other games, such as Bowling and Basketball actually require precise flicks in order maximize your scores in harder difficulties. Each game also has a variety of options to tinker with, allowing you to customize certain rules and make the gameplay as long (or as short) as you want.

When it comes to actual gameplay, Flick Champions has some fun games, but not all of them are going to be particularly compelling. As mentioned above, Tennis and Hockey are incredibly simplistic and, while fun, aren’t going to win any awards. Soccer is a sort of turn-based magnetic foosball simulator, and can be frustrating since a lot of the game is dependent on missteps from the opposing AI. Bowling and Archery were my most favorite games, as they actually require enough timing and skill that your success is mostly dependent on you and not the AI. The same goes for mini-golf, which features a whole 18-hole course and would be a good casual game on its own if it had more courses.

Another thing Flick Champions does a good job with is its overall presentation. The game has a definite Olympic-style motif which is prevalent in everything from your initial selection of a country to represent to its round-robin tournament ‘Cup’ gameplay mode, which has you playing against other countries for trophies (and experience). Also, the entire game, from the playfields to even the menus has a striking visual appearance (at least on retina devices). Some folks may be turned off by the simplicity of the player models (they look similar to ‘Mii’ avatars), but overall Flick Champions nails its visual style.

My only complaint with Flick Champions is the fact that only half the games are unlocked when you first pick up the title. Even more frustrating, the four that must be unlocked (Bowling, Archery, Mini-golf and Football) are by far the most interesting (and deep) games that are available in Flick Champions. Considering that the primary way of unlocking games is by accumulating experience through playing games, you’re going to see a lot of the first four games (at least a few hours’ worth) before you start unlocking the other titles.  Of course, an IAP option exists to unlock all collectibles and games instantly, but it seems a bit odd to have to pay extra to unlock these other games when you’ve already paid for the initial app download. I understand the need to create 'hooks' in order to encourage your player base to return to your game, but it would have been nice to have one or two more games available at the onset.

Overall, if you’re a fan of mini-game collections and you’re looking for a new fix, Flick Champions does a solid job of satisfying that need. There are certainly enough different games (assuming you’ve unlocked them all) for variety, and the available options and collectibles (along with a harsh difficulty on ‘Hard’) means that you’ll have plenty of reasons to return. However, if you don’t care for simplistic gameplay (or if you’re not a fan of sports games), don’t expect Flick Champions to offer anything particularly captivating.

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Real Steel [$4.99] was released to the App Store this month by Indian developers, Jump Games as a tie-in to the boxing movie of the same name. The film is due to be released on October 7th, and as far as we can tell from trailers, combines Wolverine and Kate from Lost with an $80 million dollar budget and a likely drunken bet in the Hollywood production rings that they could get people to pay money to sit through a movie based on Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots.

If you don't generally follow upcoming releases of robot-centric movies with lots of explosions, this trailer will get you up to speed:

Shockingly enough, even though the premise of the movie couldn't possibly be more ridiculous, huge robots fighting other huge robots makes for a good video game. The core of the game revolves around tournaments where you choose one of four robots initially available, then fight against seven robots, one-by-one, with increasing difficulty. To win the tournament you must reach and defeat the final robot, Midas, the gold-blooded killer. But first you'll do battle with fighting machines like: Aquabot the diver robot, Six Shooter the electronic sheriff and Noisy Boy, the manga mangler. Each robot has it's own entry animation, fighting style and signature special moves. Low blows and knees to the robo-guts are acceptable.

Like most fighting games, if your health bar hits zero, your robot is defeated, although you can repeat a tournament level until you eventually win. Once victorious, you're awarded an upgrade token and can choose to upgrade your robots armor, power or speed attribute, ready for the next round in the tournament.

Robot upgrades sound pretty cool, but these are statistical attribute upgrades only, so unfortunately there's no visible hardware add-ons for the robots. Also, your robotic upgrades don't appear in sparring or practice modes and once you exit a tournament your upgrades are lost altogether. Basically, the upgrades are only good for the current tournament.

However, if you manage to win the entire tournament, four additional robots are unlocked (making eight in total) and "hard" difficulty mode appears, whereas initially only easy and medium difficulties are available.

In 'free sparring' mode, you select a robot for yourself and your opponent (device), choose one of four locations and select a difficulty mode. The venues include a parking lot, the zoo, a saloon and crash palace. After that, the fighting is the same as tournament mode. In 'practice mode', the opponent doesn't move or strike back, allowing you to beat up some unresponsive hardware without any risk of damage. I wanted to completely thrash this defenseless opponent, but you can't destroy the metallic practice-dummy as it's health always quickly auto-restores back to full strength.

The touch controls include a virtual pad, plus four action buttons for left and right punches, block and special move.  There's a couple of combo moves available, such as landing four sequential left punches for a jab combo or pressing [Punch, Special] for a special move. Some users have commented online that the controls are unresponsive and I experienced this myself, until the developers explained that the first punch in a special move must actually make contact before the special button is pressed. This isn't explained clearly in the game, but knowing this makes a big difference to your competitiveness and enjoyment.

Each time you attack, your power bar depletes, so you need to pace yourself and frequently block, so your power reserves can regenerate.  Each of the 13 attacking moves has a different point value, ranging from a basic jab (150 points) up to special moves (400 points). There's also points for the amount of health remaining at the end of the match, for ripping the opponents artificial head off or for completing a perfect round. Your scores are captured in six Game Center leader-boards and there's 24 achievements to nail.

When you're ready for the final kill-shot, the "special move" button is replaced with a red "RIP" button, for the finishing-move. Your opponents are always keen to do special moves on you too, such as Metro using his large sledge-hammer fists to decapitate my poor robot's head.

Movie tie-in's can sometimes be terrible games, rushed out to promote a movie, but this near-future robotic boxing game is reasonable– Mostly because robots fighting makes for a decent game. The robot animations are pretty good, even if the background graphics seem a bit lifeless. Real Steel is currently the same price as Fight Night Champion [$4.99 / Review] which is a regular boxing game with more features, but if you're excited for the movie and enjoy the idea of robot-on-robot combat, this is the only official game for the movie.

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I want to tell you about Do Do EGG! [$0.99], the newest title from PONOS. They're the studio behind Mr. AahH!! [$0.99 / Lite] and several other fine titles, and I'd hate for their newest to get ignored just because it happens to a bit like a match 3. I want to tell you how tangled and twisted my brain got trying to understand this game, where matching too many of the same color is a good way to lose. I want to tell you about the impressive amount of content Do Do EGG! has, with puzzles, an arcade mode and multiplayer right out of the gate.

Instead, though, I'm trying to get this bad taste out of my mouth.

You see, Do Do EGG! is a good game. And what you get for your $0.99 isn't too shabby: 20 puzzles, one arcade mode and both single-device and Game Center multiplayer. You also have the opportunity to unlock three more arcade modes through skilled play. If you look at it in that light, the value proposition is pretty darn good.

Or you can look at it another way. Despite paying for the game, you only get one out of four of the game's arcade modes. You only get one fifth of its puzzles. You can technically unlock three of the other modes through skilled play, but the high score barriers you need to hit are quite high. If you want the rest but can't hit those goals, you'll be paying a dollar more for each. If you want the other puzzles it's going to be another dollar. And an oddly persistent banner ad for PONOS's other games sticks around through most of those purchases. Eventually it starts to feel a bit like a shake down.

It's a shame, because Do Do EGG! deserves to be enjoyed. As much as it may look like one, it's hardly a match 3 at all. Your goal is, instead, to make combos that are as long as they possibly can be. Instead of matching one color of egg, you only need to match the colors of the first, the fourth, and every third egg after that. The pairs in between can be any colors at all. This will leave all your match-3 instincts screaming for a while, but once you get used to the change it's great fun, with all kinds of ridiculous combos to be made.

While you're doing all this, a clock ticks down. As you create incredibly long chains, you earn experience and level up. Each time you reach a new level the time on the clock resets. You have until you run it down to play, so you always need to make more chains and earn more points.

In Normal mode, which comes unlocked with your original purchase, that's all there is to it. You keep going until you can't. 1 Minute mode is the same, but you only get a single minute to play. Mission mode is something special — you only earn points for completing a random goal, which keeps changing up as you progress. There's also endless mode, which is as timer-free as it sounds.

There are also 100 puzzles available, and they're a great way to gain a better understanding of the game if you're still struggling with your match-3 instincts. They provide a slower-paced challenge and introduce players to trickier concepts like stake-outs, where your first egg is also your last.

Finally, there's multiplayer, which thankfully isn't kept behind an extra paywall. Score Attack is the standard way to play, but if you want to stay on one device there's also a quick and dirty turn-based mode where the board clears as you go and the winner is the last to be able to make a move.

If all of this had been included in one purchase I'd have no trouble recommending it. If Do Do EGG! were free up front, the piecemeal lockouts wouldn't be so frustrating. Instead, it's just about the worst combination: pay up front, then again and again — all while ads hang over the action. If you're up for the challenge of unlocking all the modes with their high-score barriers, then I'd say hop in. But if you just want to pay for the game and then play it freely, you'll find far too many dead ends here.

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After writing reviews for Feed Me Oil [99¢ / HD / review] and Sprinkle [99c / review] earlier this year, I was keen to check out the latest liquid-based game from Disney Mobile, the people behind Jelly Car 3 [Lite / 99c]. Their popular new game, Where's my Water? [99c] is based on 'Swampy the Alligator', who lives in the sewers and enjoys taking relaxing baths, but unfortunately the other alligators keep sabotaging his water supply, so he needs some help.

Our job is to guide the water to Swampy's bath, by swiping tunnels through the dirt, to direct the water's flow. Along the way the water can collect three rubber duckies to unlock subsequent worlds and levels. Your score is based on the time taken to full the bath, number of rubber ducks collected and a bonus for water overflow.

Where's my Water? is similar to Feed me Oil, as you need to ensure enough drops of water reach the destination (bathtub), but instead of positioning devices on the screen to divert the flow, you're digging out water-channels with your finger. The liquid physics are not quite as impressive as Sprinkle or Feed Me Oil, with the water looking pretty lumpy at times, especially at the surface or when the water separates, however it looks reasonably good and does flow where you'd expect.

There are 80 levels, split across four worlds, with new gameplay mechanisms regularly introduced.  The first forty levels are pretty straightforward, with the solution being immediately obvious. It's easy to score three ducks ("tri-duck") on the first two worlds without much thought. Fortunately, some harder levels pop up in the third and fourth worlds. If you make a mistake, or miss one of the three ducks, there's a handy restart button to quickly reset the level.

By collecting sets of hidden objects scattered around the levels – such as a lucky loofah and a toothbrush – you can unlock an additional 8 bonus levels. These feature different types of game-play, including some tilting to move the water.

Of course, there's various obstacles to overcome, such as noxious green algae which grows if it comes into contact with your water-stream, pools of acid which absorb your water and water-activated switches which cause other blocks to move. You'll also encounter yellow toxic ooze, which eats through the dirt and destroys Swampy's precious rubber ducks, forcing you to act quickly.

There are pipes which accept water (or acid) and squirt it out the other side, mines which explode and water/acid hoses to activate, so there's plenty to keep you entertained.  Sometimes you need to draw two tunnels at once, which involves swiping simultaneously with two fingers to split the flow. But be careful, or your precious water might  drain away, off the side of the screen. H2O isn't the only liquid you move around. You also swipe tunnels to shift or drain the acid. The powerful corrosive attributes of the acid are useful for destroying any algae which blocks your way.

Although this game is really enjoyable, the screen navigation is not perfect. Some levels are slightly larger than one screen, so a scroll-bar is provided for panning up and down, which seems a little old fashioned. The scroll bar is awkwardly positioned on the left side of the screen, forcing right-handers to reach across the screen to scroll, unless you use your thumbs, which is an odd design decision. Luckily you don't need to scroll too much. Regardless, I've had a ton of fun playing through Where's My Water, and I really hope Disney keeps the updates flowing.

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Super Mega Worm [$.99] is one of those games I secretly dislike (even though we love it). I totally recognize that any game starring a huge, brown worm who eats babies and bison and can knock over tanks has significant value, but I’ve never been able to get over its digital control pad and buttons. My worldview has changed courtesy of the iCade, and now Super Mega Worm has become one of my favorite iPad games because of the support it throws to the device.

This game is ridiculous-ancient by App Store standards, so I trust you know it. If you don’t, the Cliff Notes breakdown is this: in the game, you control a large brown worm with a literal appetite for destruction; by eating people, animals, and soldiers, you increase the size of your worm and unlock new powers for obliteration purposes, all the while earning a high score that your mother would be proud of.

With the iCade, Super Mega Worm becomes the lo-fi, high-intensity action game that I think the designers shot for when they first put it together. You control the worm with a flick or two of the joystick in any direction, and you can spit and shoot with two of the thing's auxiliary buttons.

The feedback and response on the buttons are there, but the joystick is the thing that really makes the game pop; it allows for some pretty fabulous maneuvers, as well as precision and a sense of fluidity that you can't get with the pre-existing virtual controls. Look at it this way: it's the difference between playing, say, Mortal Kombat on a controller versus playing it on an arcade cabinet. You just get a lot more out of Super Mega Worm with an iCade.

For me, it becomes stunningly entertaining with an iCade, as any proper arcade title should be. I’m playing longer, I’m racking up higher scores, and I’m digging it much more. I’m even getting into the little parts that I couldn’t appreciate before, including the dialogue, the audio, and the brilliant visuals. I suppose the reasoning here is that my fingers are now off the screen entirely, instead of obscuring it as I frantically move about.

It strikes me as odd that I’ve rediscovered a game from 2010 on the iPad, but hey, that is kinda what the iCade does best. You pick up old titles and play them in entirely new ways, and sometimes, you even get more out of them. I highly recommend you pick this up.

Previous games we’ve covered in this series: Mos Speedrun / HungryMaster / Match Panic. Check out our NEW list of iCade titles here.

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It's expensive to buy and maintain a real horse, but now you can download a virtual one instead from the App Store– What a world we live in. My Horse [Free] from NaturalMotion Games and MunkyFun is a realistic horse simulation game, which allows you to groom, feed and reward your very own horsey, without ever leaving the couch. Although the true cost of the virtual horse depends on whether you choose to invest in the optional in-app purchases.

The developers goal was to create a horse which is realistic enough for the player to form a bond with. And they've managed to successfully achieve this as the horse graphics and behavior is pretty realistic. It flicks it's tail, grazes, looks around, trots, bucks, walks backwards and neighs. There's no obvious repeated animation loops, or cartoon graphics. You're caring for a real-looking virtual horse.

After meeting and naming your beast (default name was "Beauty", but I chose "GluePot"), Dan the Stable-boy assigns you some tasks, such as "take a photo of your horse" using the in-game camera. Completing tasks or spending time with your horse earns experience (XP) points, which helps increase your overall level.

You can tap the ground to place two markers and the horse will go there, at it's own pace. If a circle appears, you can walk your horse over it to collect XP. However, most of your actions are initiated by opening your leather journal, which has separate tabs for activities, care tasks, work tasks, competing and a marketplace for shopping.

The "Activities" are interactive mini-games, based upon feeding, treating and grooming your horse and caring for the paddock. For example, to groom your horse you swipe dirt from it's body, while feeding it involves buying a recipe and measuring out the right ingredient ratios. You can also buy extra horses. There's eight breeds of horse to collect, but they are all the same generic horse frame (size, shape) with a different texture. You can't make a custom-made mean beast or Shetland pony. You can switch between your horses, but can only play one at a time.

The health and happiness of your animal decrease over time, so you have to complete care tasks to maintain your virtual pet. There's 32 different care tasks to unlock, ranging from mucking out the stall and re-fitting horse-shoes, to giving vaccinations and plaiting the mane and tail. Each task is unlocked by reaching the prerequisite level.

Once you press the button for a task, it counts down to completion, which can range from a couple of minutes to many hours, as done in games like Smurf Village [Free].  Once the countdown reaches zero, the task is completed and you receive XP, while the horse gains health and happiness points. You can use gems (acquired from IAP or from each level upgrade) to immediately complete a task without any delay.

You can assign your animal to 32 different work tasks, to earn the coins needed for care tasks and tack (horse equipment). For example, your nag can be used for riding lessons, television work, or rides at the fairground. Again, you don't actually complete these tasks on the screen, they are simply count-downs. If your horses energy-levels get too low, he won't be able to work, unless he rests or gets a yummy sugary treat.

There's a series of show jumping events to compete in, so you'll want your nag to be in good shape.  Each competition has "entry requirements" such as a certain health level and training. You can either train your horse by completing a mini-game, or pay a trainer if you're impatient. As your horse moves towards a jump, a line moves across the screen and you have to tap a button so the line stops in the right color. If you're successful, the horse clears the jump, but the more you miss the mark, the worse the jump and the lower your score. You can work your way right to the world championships.

There's a market where items like stirrups, reins, saddles and boots can be purchased using coins and/or gems. You're given a few gems (1 gem per level upgrade, 3 gems for rating the app), or you can buy gems as in-app purchases.  The problem is that many items such as the best colorful equipment can only be purchased with gems. Yet, It seems unlikely that players will earn enough gems, without paying for in-app purchases.

The game features a social component too, as you can visit your friends stables to look after their horses.  One of the early assigned tasks is to visit a friend in your friend list, which helps promote the game, but is annoying if you want to play alone. Fortunately, there's a TouchArcade Forum for people seeking My Horse friends.  Also, be warned, the + GameCenter icon doesn't invite just one friend, it adds all of your friends with My Horse from Game Center.

This universal game has two Game Center leader-boards (total XP and total coins). Unfortunately your progress doesn't sync across devices, so you can't play with your iPad horse on your iPod.

My Horse is a wonderful game for horse-lovers and is worth a free download just to check out the realistic horse.  But if you're planning on playing this game for a long time, be prepared to spend some real money on gems, or accept that you probably won't be able to buy the best looking equipment, no matter how many coins you earn.  But, I guess that's still cheaper than a real horse.

Hat tip to Clint.

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It’s not often that a game comes around that can be considered both a deep, strategy-heavy game, and a vertical-scroller. Yet, that’s exactly the sort of game that Elemites [Free] claims to be. Dubbed as a “Real-time Scrolling Strategy (RTSS),” Elemites combines the forced movement of a vertical-scroller with the inherent strategy of minion management and wraps it all together with a robust spell and upgrade system. It certainly sounds like an odd game, but Elemites manages to nail this combination and should definitely be on the list of any strategy fan.

In Elemites, you play as Relph, a wanna-be wizard that stumbles upon a magical book of summoning. In addition to teaching Relph how to summon Elemites, golem-like creatures that will attack anything in front of them, the book also convinces Relph to go on a rampage, destroying every village in the land.

So how exactly does a real-time scrolling strategy game play? Relph stays at the bottom of the screen, slowly moving forward (you can only control whether he goes left or right). Meanwhile, tapping anywhere on the screen conjures up Elemites at that location, which will slowly move forward attacking peasants, fences, buildings – anything in front of them. Summoning Elemites uses mana, however, which also doubles as Relph’s shield. Your goal, then, becomes to micromanage your mana by summoning Elemites at the right place and time, while recouping mana earned by downed foes and avoiding enemies gunning for Relph.

Relph also has access to a wide variety of spells that are progressively unlocked throughout the game. Spells range from damage boosts to your Elemites to life drains to chain lightning. In addition, each spell (as well as Relph and the Elemites) can be upgraded numerous times throughout the game by cashing in ‘Vengeance’ points, which are earned every time an enemy is killed or building is destroyed. Even though there are 16 total spells that are unlocked, you can only take five into battle, which means that choosing which spells to upgrade becomes that much harder.

The beauty of Elemites is that there are tons of different ways to play the game. Sure, summoning your minions is going to be a big part of your strategy regardless, but spell selection definitely affects the way you use them. Will you focus more on resource management and keep your active Elemites out there longer with healing and defense spells, or will you take matters more into your own hands with spells that directly affect your enemies? The upgrade system also opens up the door to a variety of strategies, as you’ll have to decide whether to make your spells more potent or invest more heavily in resource management upgrades.

Of course, variety wouldn’t mean much if the game didn’t play well. Thankfully, Elemites takes care of that as well. I appreciate the way that the developers have managed to boil the controls for what could be a complicated game down to simple touch-based mechanics. In fact, the controls may be too simple occasionally; if you don’t pay attention, you could easily exhaust your mana conjuring up Elemites. However, I’d rather the game be hyper-responsive than plagued with delayed input.

Another aspect I loved about Elemites was its overall presentation. The artwork in particular deserves a special mention, as everything from the menus and story illustrations to even the enemies are just well done. It’s obvious that a lot of effort was put into the overall visuals and it definitely shows. One minor complaint involved some strange graphic artifacting that would occasionally show up while playing, but it did little to detract from the gameplay. I even enjoyed the story writing, which does a good job of weaving the tale while not taking itself seriously. My only gripe is with the banner ad at the top of the screen that is present even while playing the game. Granted, the ad gets removed if you purchase the whole game (as a $0.99 IAP), but it still detracts from what is otherwise a great experience. I would have also liked a universal version of Elemites as well, as I think the gameplay would work well on the iPad.

Considering that Elemites is available for free with the first world unlocked, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be checking this out. It’s simply an entertaining game that manages to test both your reflexes and strategy IQ and offers enough diversity to distinguish itself from the pack.

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Cowboy Guns [$0.99 / Lite / HD / HD Lite] is probably the most generic name for a game that I’ve heard in a while. Thankfully, that faux pas is one of the worst that Chillingo’s latest offering commits. Sure, Cowboy Guns isn’t going to win any awards for innovative gameplay, and the general lack of variety accompanied by an uneven difficulty is somewhat annoying. However, Cowboy Guns does succeed at creating a decent dual-stick shooter supported by a single player story that takes you through the harsh domain of the Wild West.

Gameplay-wise, Cowboy Guns is a classic dual-stick shooter similar to Minigore. In fact, the visuals sort of have a Minigore motif as well, although the muted graphics of Cowboy Guns are not as detailed, regardless of whether you opt for the retina “HD” version or not. The main adventure mode in Cowboy Guns has you playing as “The Kid,” a former gang member turned law man that must take down his former posse when they threaten his town. Okay, the story isn’t going to turn any heads, but it’s nice to see a dual-stick shooter actually try and incorporate a full-fledged story into the game instead of the usual generic prompt accompanied by hours of mindless killing. If a cheesy narrative-based game mode isn’t for you, Cowboy Guns also has a quickplay mode that operates more like the traditional games you find in this genre (although you need to play through at least some of the adventure mode before you can unlock quick play).

Cowboy Guns also differentiates from most other dual-stick shooters in its pacing. There’s still a lot of shooting and killing, but the use of weapons with limited ammo as well as a reload mechanic means that you aren’t going to be killing all the time. In fact, as you get further into the game, you’re going to have to carefully plan your reloads and weapon selection carefully, as you can easily be taken down as you’re waiting for your gun to cool down or reload. There’s also a lot more exploring in Cowboy Guns, since in addition to having to visit countless locations to advance the story, there’s also a star collecting side quest that’s going to have you scour the corners of each map (the more stars collect, the more you can upgrade your weapons/armor which makes them very important).

Where Cowboy Guns starts to falter is in its lack of variety both in weapons and in enemies. There are only four different weapons that can be used, and while you can upgrade each one several times, all that really does is increase the damage and not much else. In addition, there are only three or four different enemy types that are introduced early on in the game and are constantly reused (with stat increases as the game progresses). Even the music started feeling reused and actually got somewhat annoying to me as I got further into the game.

I also wasn’t a fan of the difficulty curve.  Upgrades become essential in order to keep on par with the upgraded enemies, but you don’t ever seem to earn enough money to buy them all. Also, since collecting stars opens up the upgrades, folks that aren’t into the exploration/collection mechanic will be at a severe disadvantage later on. None of these issues are hardly game-breaking, but it just seems as if the developers didn’t take into account that Cowboy Guns is actually a bit longer than most dual-stick shooters and the adventure mode creates a higher expectation for content.

Regardless, Cowboy Guns does manage to succeed in its core gameplay mechanics. If you’re a fan of dual-stick shooters and you’re looking for something new to play, Cowboy Guns is certainly worth a try. However, newcomers to the genre or folks that can’t stand cheesy Western stories may not get as much satisfaction out of it.

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