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We’ve had our eye on Tweet Land [$1.99] from Why Ideas ever since we spotted it as a curious Kickstarter project back in April of last year. The project was more than sufficiently funded, and last month we were treated to a new trailer and news that Tweet Land would be hitting at the end of January. As expected, earlier this week the game finally went live in the App Store.

Tweet Land was intriguing due to its unique real-time usage of tweets drawn from Twitter that would trigger elements into the game. It reaches out into the vast ocean of Twitter and utilizes special keywords from real tweets to create things in the game. It’s a fantastic idea in theory, and Why Ideas did pull it off on a functional level just as they had promised. However, despite being really innovative, Tweet Land doesn’t hold up as well in the gameplay department, and there were a couple of unintended side effects of using live tweets that left a sour taste in my mouth.

First, let’s talk about the kind of gameplay that’s in Tweet Land. You control a car heading down the highway (Route 140 no less) and you must make it to the finish line while dodging tweet-driven hazards and other traffic on the road. You can veer into the other cars from the side to knock them off the road and score some points, and ramming multiple cars off the road at once will multiply the points you earn. If you hit cars from behind or run into road hazards, you lose a bit of life, which is represented by the visual damage on your car.

I really like Tweet Land’s retro style, and there is a lot of humor and personality in its pixel art visuals (though it’s kind of blurry on my iPhone 4S). But things start to fall apart when you actually start playing. The controls are very slippery, and it’s hard to be precise when trying to properly ram other cars or avoid hitting hazards. With practice you can get used to it, but it’s still really annoying when you’re trying to quickly react to something and the controls don’t afford you the kind of finesse that you need to get it done.

I think when you have games that are built on top of a very simple core gameplay concept, you have to get all the little details right. That’s why games like Jetpack Joyride or Angry Birds are often imitated but rarely duplicated. as they get the feel of the controls and the movement in the game so right. If you’re going to be doing the same action over and over again, you want that action to be fun. While Tweet Land has its share of fun moments, something about it just feels off, like it’s missing something but I can’t pinpoint what.

The game is broken into two environments with 12 levels each, with a spot for a third environment that’s said to be coming soon. With each new level, new tweet-driven elements are introduced and added to the current ones, so as you keep going the variety of things that can happen increases quite a bit. An example of a hazard would be if someone tweets the word “meteor” then a meteor will fly in from off screen and you’ll have to use the position of its shadow in order to avoid being crushed. There are helpful things that can be triggered in the game too, like health packs or a temporary spread shot for your vehicle.

One problem with the progression in Tweet Land is that it gets rather hard rather quickly, and if you get stuck on a level there’s no moving forward until you beat it. This got pretty frustrating since many of the times that I died it felt like it wasn’t actually my fault. When elements are brought in from Twitter, they are accompanied by a label with the Twitter handle of whoever tweeted that keyword. This is neat, but leads to an incredibly cluttered and distracting screen, especially when there are multiple things happening at once. Coupled with the floaty controls and the speed at which things are zooming by, and the odds are stacked against you.

Arrows indicate where things will be coming in from off screen, but they’re hard to notice amongst the busyness on the screen and often aren’t very helpful. Add in the fact that there’s usually a ton of traffic on the road with you, and making it to the finish line intact can require a healthy dose of luck just as much as skill. The levels tend to be a bit longish, and nothing is worse than seeing your cheap demise when you’re within a stone’s throw of the finish. The more I failed a level over and over, the less I felt compelled to go back and conquer it.

However, my biggest issue with Tweet Land is something that I didn’t really expect: the tweets that the game draws from can be much too somber for what is supposed to be a fun and lighthearted game. For example, if someone tweets about a “car crash” then cars will zoom in from offscreen and wreck into some of the other traffic on the road. When your run ends, you have the option of looking at a list of all the tweets that were used to bring things into the game.

To my horror, I found that in this particular instance “car crash” was pulled from a huge retweet campaign trying to raise money for a girl who had lost her parents in a car crash in Florida. I know Tweet Land has no way of telling the difference, but I couldn’t help but feel crass for playing a game that was fueled by somebody else’s tragedy. With some of the other keywords used in the game – like tsunami, terrorist, and death – I have no doubt that encountering a downer situation like that will occur often.

While I do still think the idea behind Tweet Land is incredibly clever, I just find the game too fundamentally flawed to be enjoyable. Don’t get me wrong, I want to like it and I did find myself having fun with the game at times, but those fun times are quickly diminished when you realize your game is possibly being powered by the tragic tweets of strangers. Beyond that, the gameplay is too average to warrant dealing with cheap deaths and an unpredictable difficulty.

With some tweaks to the controls and interface, and perhaps some sort of filter for what kind of keywords are utilized, then Tweet Land could end up being something pretty special. It feels like it’s just a couple notches off of being something great, and I hope it gets there someday. As it is now, though, it’s hard to recommend the game except to those who might be curious to check out its novel use of Twitter or are prepared to deal with its shortcomings.

TouchArcade Rating:

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After spending some quality time with a preview version of Int13’s new bullet hell shooter Shogun: Rise of the Renegade [Free] last week, we were eager to get our hands on the final version to see how it all came together. And sure enough, earlier this week Shogun quietly snuck into the App Store.

It was interesting that Int13 was departing from their typical augmented reality based games, like ARDefender [Free], and trying their hand at an established and nuanced genre like arcade-style manic shoot ‘em ups, especially with veteran shmup developer Cave basically cornering the market with their stable of high-quality ports. However, Int13 has surprised me with just how right they got Shogun, and while it might fail to totally impress the more discerning bullet hell enthusiast, fans of shmups in general will find a lot of action and fun brimming from the game.

The very first thing that pops out at you about Shogun are its graphics. The environments are done up in 3D and give off a great feeling of depth as you’re scrolling by in your ship. It’s also Retina Display ready, meaning it’s razor sharp. Enemies are your standard alien-type of spacecrafts, and there are some rather interestingly designed mid-boss and end-boss fights that will give you a run for your money in terms of challenge. On the whole, gameplay in Shogun doesn’t divert too far from your typical bullet-hell shooter formula, but it executes the components of that formula extremely well.

However, Shogun does show some more innovative signs in a couple of areas. One is the method in which you change your weapons. Your ship comes with 3 weapon types: spread shot, laser, and homing. Whenever you lift your finger off the screen, the game slows down bullet-time style and a small menu pops up above your ship that lets you choose from the 3 weapon types, as well as trigger a screen-clearing EMP or choose to add small wingman ships for added firepower. It’s nice that the action slows down to allow you to concentrate on what weapon you need to pick, but you can still take damage in this mode so you’ll still need to stay alert.

The other thing in Shogun that I found very interesting is the system for filling and using your shield meter. You have the ability to scrape bullets that pass you by, which basically means getting your ship extremely close to them without actually getting hit. With each consecutive bullet you scrape, you build a multiplier, and this adds to your shield meter above which can go past the 100% full mark. Every time you fill up your life meter completely, it fills one of the 6 reserve tanks above the meter.

Now, these reserve tanks can be used for various things, like setting off the aforementioned EMP blast or adding one or more sets of the satellite helper ships to your own ship (which VASTLY increases your firepower, I might add). Also, when you do get hit by enemy fire, the game will automatically clear the screen of bullets and shield you for a brief moment while giving you a refilled meter, but it will cost you one of your reserves.

The scraping and usage of reserve tanks aren’t totally new ideas in the shmup world, but they’re done well and add a ton of strategy to how you go about being the most effective in Shogun. It’s in your benefit to scrape as much as possible and always strive to keep your reserves well stocked for particularly challenging sections and boss battles. But, you can’t concentrate too hard on just scraping, as inevitably that will lead you to take damage if you aren’t paying enough attention to killing the enemies as well.

While the graphics are gorgeous and the underlying mechanics are sound, about the only thing I don’t like about Shogun is that it’s pretty short. Featuring just 4 levels to play through, it comes to an end pretty quickly, but it’s a satisfying and challenging ride while it lasts. The pay model is also pretty accommodating, allowing you to download and play through the entire first level for free. The remaining 3 levels are accessible as well, but you can only play them for a brief minute – just long enough to get a taste. Each full level is then unlockable separately for 99¢ each, or $1.99 to unlock them all at once.

As a big fan of Cave’s shooters, I find it hard to really get into most of the other shooters on the App Store. They really did set the bar that high. But Shogun is a game that instantly drew me in with its visuals, and then backed it up with a ton of solid action. It even Universal and has iCade support, to truly complete the arcade experience. As a free download, there’s really no reason not to give Shogun a try for yourself.

TouchArcade Rating:

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It’s safe to say that cave flyers have been around the block a few times, and that a few of you might just be sick of ‘em. Hey, that’s fair—I know my enduring love of endless runners and cave flyers isn’t shared by everyone. But do me a favor: take a look at Blot’s [$0.99] trailer before writing it off. Yeah, it’s just another cave flyer, but goodness, it’s gorgeous.

We’ve seen the control scheme and basic design a thousand times before, and there’s nothing new about collecting coins for upgrades, cosmetic or otherwise. Blot won’t win many points for fundamental originality. But it’s a solid, fun cave flier that also happens to be beautiful, with an underlying sense of humor that’s sure to please.

Screenshots don’t do it justice — a big part of Blot’s appeal is how lovely its parallax backgrounds look in motion. Someone at Majestic Software has taken time to sketch out all manner of things — trees, candies, wastelands, ponies, helicopters wielding swords and morningstars, you name it—which the game then combines and recombines to build new backdrops each time you play.

This is part of a broader vision. Blot himself is an ink spatter, flying outwards from a pen. He dodges pencils and seeks out paint cans and smudges. The artistic theme isn’t carried through as far as it could be—art and coin collection don’t exactly go hand in hand—but it gets very, very close.

For controls you’re looking at something a lot like Jetpack Joyride [Free], to name one recent and popular example. The titular Blot is bigger and a bit floatier than Barry Steakfries and his jetpack, but it has the same inputs—tap to rise, let go to fall. The arc of its movement might take a bit of getting used to, but there are no drastic changes.

And what would a modern cave flyer be without a collection mechanic or two? Aside from coins, you’ll also seek out boost buddies. Blot grows as it absorbs these cute little dudes, making it easier to grab coins but harder to dodge obstacles. Once you pick up four, you get a big boost of speed and temporary invincibility. There are also colorful paint cans and smudges to be found that mess with speed, direction and magnetism.

The coins you collect can be exchanged for upgrades. The selection is pretty cool—stuff that makes paint effects or boosts last longer, alerts you to upcoming boost buddies, makes you magnetic or doubles your income. Since you can only pick one to equip, you’ll have to consider whether you’re grinding for coins, going the distance or working on a Game Center achievement that requires a bit of extra assistance.

The game takes any chance to serve up pop-culture references. Little things, mostly, like how the buddy detector is called the “pip-blot 2000,” and the unlockable costumes play off things like Star Trek and the Ace Attorney series. There are also achievements for flying past wild reference in the background sketches, although you’ll probably die if you take the time to look for them. Best of all, none of this feels as forced or out of place as memes so often do when they pop up in games.

Some of the foreground elements are a bit abrasive against the terribly sexy backgrounds, but everything else is awesome. There’s lovely (if brief) music to fly to, and Blot is stupidly charming for something with only a few frames of animation (that little scrunchy face…!). And while there isn’t a plot or a complicated mission system to keep you motivated, the high score grind is made valuable with coin rewards and a grading system. Practice makes perfect, but getting an A+ will take skill.

One little warning – you can purchase coins with cash. Don’t bother unless you’re out to support the developers or stockpile a huge supply of portals—you’ll just rob yourself of the fun of actually playing. The grind isn’t painful at all unless you need the highest end items right away. My only quibble is that the IAP coins come a bit cheap – a single $2.99 purchase can give you most of what you’d ever need, so grinding starts to look like a bad value proposition.

It’s hard to complain, though. While it fails to distinguish itself on mechanics, Blot blows most of its competition out of the water with style alone. It’s delightful, plain and simple, and when given the choice between equally solid games, I’ll take the one that delights me any day. Who wouldn’t want a little more joy in their games, right? So take a good long look at Blot, and let us know if you like what you see.

TouchArcade Rating:

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Star Warfare: Alien Invasion [99¢] is a first-person arena-shooter from Freyr Games, which features wave after wave of relentless attacking alien creatures. The aliens emerge from holes in the wall and from underground, or come flying, bounding or waddling straight towards you from all sides. And once you’ve shot them, the next wave arrives immediately. It’s almost as if you don’t even need to explore, as the aliens will come straight for you.

The single player campaign includes five maps, each with six levels of increasing difficulty to unlock (30 levels in total). A progress bar indicates how many of the enemies have spawned and if you survive to the end, your reward is currency to spend in an in-game store. The sixth level of each map is a “survival” level.

In multiplayer mode, you can team with up to three players online (via Game Center) to engage in a co-op boss battle, or to play co-op on a map you’ve already unlocked. The incentive for fighting bosses is that you earn greater amounts of gold. Unfortunately, these bosses are not accessible in single player mode, although you can set-up a 1 player room online if you want. Playing co-op with teammates makes the boss battles easier, and so does upgrading via single player mode first since the gear you earn in single player mode is also available in multiplayer.

This is a dual stick shooter, with the left stick for movement, the right for aiming and shooting – and there’s no option to change this, although you can tweak sensitivity. The dual sticks are located one third of the way up the screen on each side and can’t be repositioned. To look around, or turn around, you swipe the background with your finger. You can also use the right (fire) stick to turn, but that’s slower and wastes bullets.

There are 26 weapons to unlock and purchase, including assault rifle, shotgun, laser gun and machine guns. The heavier weapons, like grenade launchers, decrease your speed while other powerful weapons like the RPG consume more energy. Each weapon has power, fire-rate and energy attributes and can be upgraded through 8 levels.

The catch is that some items are purchased with money earned in-game, but other weapons and bags (including the cooler ones) are purchased using a raw material named “mytheril” which seems to only be available through in-app purchases or for getting bonuses for playing online regularly. But aside from this premium currency, even the weapons sold for regular in-game currency get very expensive, making the weapon upgrading more difficult than it feels like it should be.

Also, If you run out of bullets, you end up running around the level unable to do anything as there’s currently no melee attack or ammo pick-ups. You just have to die or quit, having wasted the remainder of your bullets, which is frustrating, although the developers advise they may possibly introduce a weapon with no ammo cost. The in-game store also sells space suit parts (helmet, chest, hands and legs) which can improve your hit points, power and speed. Other available items include first aid items, forcefields and the ability to revive after death.

Star Warfare: Alien Invasion is a pretty good first-person shooter for a dollar, despite the expensive weapons, emphasis on IAP and need to buy bullets with in-game money. The developers are planning a minor update with new equipment and maps, and a major update with a brand new game mode. If they can also balance out the in-game currency systems in regards to weapon upgrading and ammunition usage, then Star Warfare might be able to extend beyond just being an average to above average shooter.

TouchArcade Rating:

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Buckle up; Adventure Bar Story appears to be pretty radical. I just spent a good chunk of time with a pre-release build of the PSP port, and while I do have a reservation or two about its virtual controls, I couldn’t be happier with the overall port job and its core play, which is satisfyingly genre-bending.

Imagine if your everyday 16-bit JRPG hooked up with a management sim. In Adventure Bar Story, you control a young girl attempting to save her bar from being stolen or bought out by a renowned and rival neighborhood restaurant. In order to prevent this, she’ll need to learn how to cook, buy or gather ingredients in RPG-like zones complimented by random battles, assemble the ingredients into a dish, and then profit.

Mechanically, there’s a lot going on. In order to cook food, for example, you need recipes and the right tools for the job — blenders, pans, and so forth. The Item Shop stocks new stuff every day, but you can also get recipes from talking to NPCs or even experimentation. The cooking UI has several layers, but they’re all straightforward.

Dungeon diving — and I’m using that loosely here since the first few zones are set in fields — has several components. There’s the turn-based battle system, which packs in all of your usual RPG trimmings such as special attacks and in-battle item usage. But there are also food drops littering the ground that you’ll want to pick up at the risk of random encounters, and a leveling system, that, in a weird turn, has nothing to do with battle. Eating what you make levels up each character. Battle just earns you battle skills. Progression to new areas seems to be contingent on in-game cooking goals.

The entire experience is split into days and months. A typical day goes a little like this: I run to the item store to stock up on curing potions, and then I travel to the latest dungeon in order to pick up all the free food. When I get out of the zone, I shoot over to the bar’s kitchen and start looking at what I can assemble. After I make the food, I take a gander at which ones will give me the most EXP and then I eat a few to power up my dudes. After that, I select the dishes I want to serve and open the bar.

There’s some nuance to everything. The ingredients that you pick up aren’t always main ingredients; rather, they’re just component parts of a single ingredient. Wheat, for example, has to be used with a blender to create flour. Flour and water make pizza dough, and so on and so forth. Customers also appear to like different things more on different days, so there’s a little more to becoming the next great bar.

I’m so high on this because it’s the best of every world. I’m not spending hours and hours senselessly grinding, and I’m not cooking fake food until my eyes bleed. The mix of action and simulation feels right. The pacing is good.

Also, if I didn’t know this was a PSP port, I wouldn’t have guessed. This game feels and looks good on iPhone. The team has added a lot of touch-centric stuff to the UI, which goes a long way in making it relatively friendly to the platform. The virtual d-pad is a tad too touchy for my tastes, but it’s not an end-of-the-world problem, and more than likely, it’ll get ironed out well before the game is released.

One thing that’ll ruffle some feathers is the IAP. You can buy in-game jewels with real money, and with them, you’ll be able to buy special “rare” or “import” weapons, recipes, or even ingredients. The IAP doesn’t feel necessary, and heck, it’s not even a part of the core experience — it’s a bolted on, iOS exclusive feature that compliments the full PSP offering.

We’ll get much more evaluative in our official review, but I definitely think this is a game you should keep your eye on. Tentatively, it should see a release on February 28th at $.99. The usual base price will be $2.99.

UPDATE: We got some word on the IAP, so we changed some wording around. The complete PSP game is all here without the need for IAPs, according to the developer. Neat!

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Are your time-management titles missing the hands-on charm of cooking sims, and your cooking sims missing too much restaurant management? If so, you’ll want to take a look at Order Up!! To Go [Free]. A combination between a time-management restaurant game and a touch-screen heavy cooking sim, Order Up is filled with great stuff: charming characters, varied locations, fun recipes and surprisingly decent voice acting, for starters.

Order Up!! was first released for Wii in 2008, and is due to come out soon for PS3 and 3DS at full retail price. I haven’t played the console version of the game, but it sounds as though To Go is essentially the same game. For the mobile outing, Supervillian Studios has added advertisements, removable with IAP, and taken away certain goals to encourage players to purchase currency. Aside from that, it looks like everything else is intact. Intact, and downright entertaining.

Just one catch: you’ve gotta like grinding. Every day you buy meals in preparation for your customers, and those you sell give you a small profit. That profit goes toward buying spices and special meals, cleaning your restaurants, unlocking new recipes and working your way into new locations. Eking out a living this way takes time, and nicer restaurants are pricey. Originally this was handled by letting players unlock new restaurants once they met certain goals. In this freemium version, you have to earn the cash – or buy it.

If you’re down with grinding, though, Order Up is great. It looks like Cooking Mama at a glance, and I’d be lying if I said there weren’t similarities. But Order Up goes deep, ending up with as much focus on the management elements than the chopping and stirring.

At the highest level, you’re responsible for caring for your restaurants. As I mentioned, this means, amongst other things, earning enough money to open them up and keep them running. Each day you pick out the menu based on a randomly selected special, a descending list of popularity and a daily customer total. Say you expect 14 customers in a day. 6 might order the special, 5 the most popular item, and 3 the second most popular. Or maybe 12 will order the special. You don’t have those numbers, so you have to balance buying enough stock to cover all your customers’ potential desires with your rather slim profit margin.

One you open up for the day the customers start to stream in. You send out your server to take their orders one table at a time, and she or he brings them back to you to cook up. Take too long and customers will start getting unhappy, which will cut into your profits. You’re given up to a handful of orders to handle at once, and you have to time your preparations to keep anything from getting cold, doing as much as you can at once to keep things moving but holding back some steps to send your orders back out piping hot.

Preparing food is very hands-on. To make a burger and fries, for example, you have to drop meat onto the grill, then gesture to flip it when it’s at the perfect temperature. You drag fries down into the oil and then up when they’re cooked. You pull the leaves off a head of lettuce by swiping, and chop a tomato by tapping at the moment its guidelines meet. As each part is finished you tap it onto the tray, and once everything is ready you hit a bell to send it off to the table. Each meal is ranked by how well you complete each of its steps, and your profits depend on that rank.

The game’s setting, Port Abello, has six restaurants currently, each with its own unique theme and a slew of recipes. You work your way through a greasy spoon to a Mexican joint, up to a slightly swankier Italian place, through Asian fusion and finally into fine dining. Each setting has thematic decor, recipes and servers, and each of those servers has several lines of dialog with which to compliment your work and butter up your customers.

Port Abello also has a few characters of its own that show up at your restaurants as special guests. They too have voiced dialog to express their spiciest seasoning desires. If you’ve purchased the right spices and figure out their hints in time to add the right one to their dish you’ll earn a hefty bonus, something every struggling restauranteur can appreciate.

Assuming you manage to keep on top of everything else, you can put your coins toward upgrading your kitchens. There are currently a few options available for faster food prep, but it looks like assistants and mini-games are en route as well. You’ll also want to keep your kitchens clean with regular payments to the cleaners. If you don’t, you’ll end up dealing with tedious mini-games like flicking away rat infestations or showing the health inspector that you can, in fact, wash lots of plates.

Other than its sheer grindiness, the only real problem with Order Up is that you’re going to be doing a heck of a lot of gesturing. Each recipe you pick up increases your daily customers, increasing the length and complexity of your day. By the time you’ve grilled your thousandth burger it starts to lose its charm, and days dragging on longer and longer doesn’t help. But that’s just a sign that it’s time to take a break. Give your wrist a rest, have some real food and come back refreshed and ready for another day at the grill. It’s hard to fault a game for having too much to do.

Really, it’s hard to fault Order Up!! To Go for much at all. It’s virtually free, though it would probably be hard to live with the ads for long. It’s filled to the brim with a variety of tasks and locales. If not for the damage done to the game’s pace by its freemium elements it would be a nearly flawless casual restaurant management title. It’s a shame that the best way to monetize the game was to make it frustratingly slow, because that will undoubtedly turn away many potential players. Don’t make their mistake. Slow and steady wins the restaurant race, so take it easy and cook up something nice.

TouchArcade Rating:

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The world of Jazz: Trump’s Journey [$2.99] is a lush throwback to 1920’s New Orleans, brought to life with watercolor backdrops and great tunes. You take the stage in parades and theaters, prisons and sewers, all the way to the French Quarter as you run through the history of Trump’s success. You rise from a boy with dreams of making beautiful music to a man at the top of his game.

The game you play over the course of that journey is a platformer, with all your standard platforming elements: running, jumping, collecting widgets, and so on. Trump’s music has the power to stop people in their tracks – literally freeze time – which opens the way for a few clever puzzles and challenges. But imprecise controls and terrible translation keep Jazz from reaching the heights it deserves.

The translation is the worst offense, completely mangling what may be a touching story or may be a heavy-handed lesson on racism. It’s hard to tell when it’s presented with phrases like this:

“To be honest. I got prepared to that, but even tough I didn’t lost my hope because I knew my music affected her.”

We can overlook a few misspellings or grammatical errors, but this translation is inexcusably bad. Oh, and the “daring parallel with the real story of Louis Armstrong,” as mentioned in the app description? Ignore that. It’s a cute story, but pretty banal, and beyond the setting, the jazz and the color of their skin, Trump and Satchmo don’t have much in common at all.

The controls aren’t nearly as bad as the grammar, but they need to be fine-tuned. They’re laid out with movement on the left side, action on the right, but movement is split up into two sections (back and forth, up and down) and action is laid out so you can’t really do more than one thing at a time. If you need to, say, climb a ladder and jump or push a box and freeze time, it’s a finger-twister. The game seems to delight in making you do those sorts of things from time to time. Throw in occasionally sketchy physics and strange inconsistencies in the properties of objects and you have yourself a recipe for serious frustration.

If those problems get fixed up, Jazz will be an absolute gem. Every bit of it is gorgeous. You can clamber over the menu and credits, laid out in an elegant theater. The levels, silent movie cut scenes, and animations look fantastic from start to finish. The game is accompanied by a lovely jazz soundtrack that gets better and better as you put your band together and move toward the climax. It’s all downright beautiful.

Aside from the frustratingly floaty controls (and the lack of consideration the level design gives them), the platforming is quite cool. The ability to freeze time opens up interesting possibilities for puzzles, allowing you to manipulation sections of your environment and the people around you. Objects that can be frozen are visually distinct from those that can’t, but that doesn’t make solutions immediately obvious.

For difficulty, I’d stick Jazz at a comfortable middle of the road. It stays too easy for just long enough to get worrisome, but things ramp up apace once they start moving. There are eleven long levels, broken up into several sections that are filled to checkpoints, so you’ll never have to replay much unless you want to go back for collectables. Within those tiny bits between checkpoints, however, there are occasionally big-time challenges. Usually these difficulty spikes come at a welcome moment, but every once in a while they’re phone-throwingly frustrating.

I can’t recommend Jazz: Trump’s Journey wholeheartedly. It sells itself as a game with a unique and engaging story, and that’s something it simply doesn’t have. Setting aside the translation, the message of the game is still iffy at best and you’ll only find parallels to Louis Armstrong if you squint really hard. But it is, for the most part, a solid, fun platformer. And can you argue with the looks, or the sound? Let’s settle on a cautious recommendation, with a side of hoping for a significant patch-up sooner than later. If you decide to take a look, swing by our discussion thread and let us know what you think.

TouchArcade Rating:

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Caylus [$4.99] is an outstanding game, consistently ranking in Board Game Geek’s top 10. It plays like Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth as you take on the role of a master builder tasked with winning the favor of a ruler and building something great. Your world revolves around struggles for resources, money, favor and opportunity. Big Daddy’s Creations, the folks behind Neuroshima Hex [$4.99 / Lite], have put together an equally outstanding port – as long as you’re prepared to play locally.

It’s becoming a bit of a running joke that Big Daddy’s Creations puts out great board game ports with shoddy (or no) multiplayer, and Caylus is no exception. You can’t play over Game Center, you can’t invite friends, and trying to play asynchronously will extend the game length to near-infinite. But if you’re down with fighting AI or playing locally against friends, this is a must-buy for any board game fan.

Here’s how a typical game of Caylus goes: there is a castle, there are buildings, there is a road. Each players has six workers, and takes turns each round placing them in the various buildings. The provost and bailiff (essentially progress markers) make their way down the road at the end of each round and each worker gets his due. Some buildings provide resources, others provide gold or change the turn order, and some let you trade your resources around.

The ultimate goal is to build up more favor from France’s King Philip the Fair than any of your competition. The king is generous with favor in a ‘you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’ sort of way. If you use your resources to help build up his castle, he’ll bestow favor upon you – especially if you’re the most productive builder of the round. If you collect resources, you can turn them in at the end of the game for more favor. Building monuments, shops and landmarks like churches will make you very popular, and sometimes you can ship off extra money or resources to earn a little extra mid-game. Though I wouldn’t say Caylus is incredibly strategically deep, these methods of building up points give players a few different tactics to use to defeat their foes.

Going deeper, there are a number of rules and strategies that can affect your success in a big way. For example, each worker you place costs you money. Generally, the further along the road you place a worker, the better the reward. If the provost hasn’t passed the building he’s in, though, it won’t be counted in the round’s final tally. You can pay the provost to move him back toward the castle or further along the road – but so can everyone else. So sending a worker to a far out shop can be a massive risk, especially if you’ve already earmarked unearned resources to help build the castle at the round’s end.

There are five different resources to manage and a huge list of buildings to erect. There are also a slew of conditional rules to keep track of. So here’s where I applaud Big Daddy’s Creations the most: Caylus’s tutorial is outstanding. With the tutorial messages on through my first playthrough, I figured out maybe three quarters of the game. After one more match to polish up on the details I understood nearly everything. I’m still working on strategy, but such a thorough and straightforward introduction is pretty impressive for a game with Caylus’s complexity.

I’ve run into one or two cases that weren’t explained by anything in the rules, and it’s possible they were bugs. A couple crash bugs have been found, as has a miscommunication with Apple about translations (the game is only available in English but lists several other languages in its App Store listing). Big Daddy’s Creations has covered their plans to solve these problems in a blog post already, so I’m confident any other issues that crop up should be handled in a timely fashion.

Otherwise, the big sticking point is multiplayer. Caylus is universal, so you can play with friends on an iPad or pass-and-play on smaller devices. But online play should be a big part of the game, and playing with random unranked strangers that you can’t chat with takes a lot of the fun out of it. Also, you really have to poke around the interface to quit a game once it’s done, or to leave one for another part way. The interface is mostly extremely usable, but that’s an unintuitive task. And there’s a serious lack of stat tracking.

But for pure entertainment dollar by dollar, I’ll take Caylus over most board games in the App Store. It’s an obscenely good game, which makes its flaws all the more frustrating. If you also want to gripe about that, there’s support to be found in our discussion thread. Me? I’ve said my piece, so now I can go back to playing. It will take more than awkward multiplayer to keep me from having this much fun.

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Games like Monkey Quest: Thunderbow [$0.99/HD] disrupt the feel-good media narrative we like to tell about the App Store. It’s a low-risk way to capitalize on experimental games like Sword & Sworcery [$4.99], a place where Andreas Illiger, the one-man dev team behind Tiny Wings [$0.99], can sell thousands of copies. It’s also where a giant corporation like Nickelodeon can sell us an Angry Birds [$0.99] clone to advertise its kid-friendly MMO, Monkey Quest.

It would be easier to find Thunderbow distasteful if it weren’t so radical, born out of the same  mid-90s fever dream that brought us anthropomorphic turtles who were also ninjas. The hero of the game is a nameless monkey who carries a bow-and-arrow. After you beat the 30 available levels — more are, supposedly, coming soon — you can play a few bonus rounds with a girl-monkey who shoots lightning bolts out of her electric guitar-bow. It’s incredible.

My favorite thing about Thunderbow (that name!) is how self-aware and understated it is (those aren’t adjectives people generally use to describe licensed games). Children’s media tends to be overblown and moralistic, full of uplifting melodramas or cautionary tales, but there’s not a word of dialogue or narrative in Thunderbow, only beautifully illustrated storyboards introducing its next enemies.

That same type of restraint carries over to the game design itself. Even the MMO overlay — after completing certain achievements, Monkey Quest players can collect new gear — is unintrusive, and Thunderbow seems fully-realized despite the ancillary tie-in. There are no frills here, just one monkey on a quest to squish scorpions with his thunderbow and physics-enabled exploding carrot-arrows.

Our primate protagonist accomplishes this by shooting a variety of ammunition — pineapples that explode like cluster bombs, bundle of mosquitoes that splinters into individual kamikaze dive-bombers, etc. — at exploding barrels and supporting structures. It’s all standard stuff for the physics-slingshot genre, but Thunderbow is so refined and enjoyable that it never feels stale.

More specifically, the levels feel smaller and more compact than the ones found in, say, Angry Birds — none of them are larger than one screen. With the smaller scope comes a focus on precision — lining up Monkey’s shots isn’t a matter of swiping as much as it is small, discrete adjustments, complemented by razor-sharp controls.

As a result, player intent is never compromised — you can see exactly what you need to do, and Thunderbow provides the necessary controls to pull it off. The game rewards patience, precision, and attention to detail, and the levels are compact enough that two or three well-placed arrows will bring the whole house of cards down. With top notch visual and aural feedback, the simple act of crushing a screen full of scorpions with boulders can be very satisfying.

The flipside of Thunderbow’s precision is that it skews toward being a little too easy. The tough part is finding the chink in each level’s armor, but the execution of your Rube-Goldbergian air-strike is generally straightforward. The levels were tough enough to give me pause — especially because players must collect bananas (three per level) to unlock content — but I never felt frustrated or stumped. It helps that Thunderbow is relatively short:  I plowed through the game in a few hours, before the mechanics and bright colors lost their luster.

During each level, light butt-rock is pumped through your speakers while a monster truck derby announcer growls catchphrases like, “Unstoppable!” and “Mass Destruction!” This isn’t a criticism as much as it is an example of the game’s aesthetic as a whole. It’s the type of game a nine-year-old on a Surge bender would design, but Thunderbow is vivid, imaginative, and well-executed, even if its conceits are well-established by now. It’s simultaneously childish and childlike, but it’s so pure in its vision that I couldn’t help but enjoy it.

TouchArcade Rating:

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So I made all kinds of resolutions for the New Year. Yes I am aware of how dumb that sounds, and I know what you’re thinking. “Oh, resolutions never work, you have to make gradual lifestyle changes” or “You make the same resolutions every year” or “Why would anyone need to resolve to not get arrested outside Jeff Goldblum’s apartment?” etc. etc. But hey, it’s my life and my dreams, OK?!

Besides, one of my resolutions, the one striving to reintroduce simplicity in my life, led me to discover a really charming puzzle game for your perusal. That game is Blockwick [Free] by Kieffer Bros. It’s my new favorite puzzle game, and it may just become yours, too.

Yes, that sounds like a big claim, but once you pick up Blockwick, you’ll understand. It’s beautifully, almost maddeningly, simple. There are no real instructions or explanations, just buttons. As you start out, the game directs you to connect the colored blocks in each puzzle until they touch, which completes the level. As you progress, there are different-sized obstacles to slide around and out of the path of the colored blocks. Simple, right?

Right! But also so, so wrong…because the puzzles in Blockwick get insane. I can’t tell you how many times I’d start a new puzzle and immediately think that it was impossible, only to work my way through it and feel like a super genius. And it’s strange how liberating working through the puzzles feels. Over time, I’ve grown accustomed to looking things up when I can’t quite figure out a puzzle in a game.

I’ll also usually make multiple saves so I always have a shot at a do-over in case I make a wrong decision. Blockwick offers none of that security. If I don’t understand a puzzle or get hopelessly lost, I just start it over. The weird thing? I’m totally OK with that, as the game makes starting over minimally frustrating.

Since it’s a free game, there are the inevitable in-app purchases. However, they’re not annoying or overpriced. The game gives you the first sixty levels for free; each additional set of sixty levels costs $.99 each (for a total of 240 puzzles). If you’re prodigiously gifted at figuring out puzzles, you may be disappointed, since the sixty levels you’re given for free are the least challenging.

The game also makes you work through the puzzles in order, which I was OK with. If you’re not down with that (or get stuck on one puzzle and are therefore unable to continue), you can buy the “Master Key” for $.99 which enables you to work through the puzzles in any order.

Even if you don’t make a single in-app purchase, Blockwick gives you more content for free than many paid games I’ve tried. The only downside is that the colored blocks look like gummy candies, therefore leading me to directly violate my resolution of “Stop eating the commercial-sized box of Mike and Ike’s before you pass out in a diabetic coma.” Um, there’s always next year, right?

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