You don’t have to be an app hipster to be a little affronted when your favorite app hits the big time and everyone starts playing it. Really, are there many things more annoying than logging into Facebook only to see that your 11th grade lab partner has posted five hundred achievements from what was previously your favorite game? Instead of making passive aggressive comments on their status updates (“Wow, at least being unemployed gives you the opportunity to really master Angry Birds!”), channel that righteous anger into downloading Princess Punt [Free], a game that you are certain to be the first (and perhaps last) person on the block to be playing.
Before getting into the game itself, a warning is in order. There are plenty of things you will hate about this game. Endless popups after every level urging you to post every inane achievement to Facebook and Twitter, the out-of-place slot machine minigame that’s basically an in-app purchase cash grab, the agonizingly long loading times. Oh, and the eleven (eleven!!) in-game updates that have to download before you can begin (lord help you poor saps using a 3G connection to download them; wi-fi is definitely recommended!). Also, the default language is Japanese, so keep an eye out for the language options after installation—not that it really matters, because the loading screen text and tutorials don’t make any sense in English, either.
Long story short(ish): It’s confusing and difficult to get into. Why, then, is it worthy of a review?
If you don't own an iPad 2 and you're about to skim past this post, let me interrupt you for a second. You can play most of Rebuild [$2.99] right now for free, as the Flash game Rebuild 2. And you really should. While the iPad 2 version comes with a few extra bells and whistles and plays gorgeously on a touch screen, this is a game that everyone should play whether they have the newest, shiniest gadget or not. Just be prepared to lose a few hours of your life to it when you do.
I don't wave around non-words like "unputdownable" often, but Rebuild deserves it. Though it's not an especially deep strategy game, it has the perfect mix of exploration, danger and difficulty to hook anyone for at least an hour or two, and maybe much longer. And yes, yes, we're up to our necks in zombie games, but this is a zombie/strategy/city builder and that's not something you see every day.
Tower defense games are a dime a dozen these days and Wild Defense [99¢/$1.99], in spite of its zesty-fresh tropical flavor, doesn't bring anything really new to the table. Still, that doesn't stop it being a moderately entertaining affair. Less a game for the casual enthusiast and more for the hardcore fan, this one is for those who just have to have another tower defense game on their phones.
Functionality-wise, Wild Defense will be rather cut and dry for tower defense aficionados. Your objective is a simple one: protect your fortress from the enemy waves. To accomplish this, you'll have to drag and drop your units onto strategic locations in the map, all the while trying to maintain a proper composition of troops to ensure that you can deal with the various enemy types. In addition, you'll also have to do things like purchase weapons for your army, work with bombs, cast spells, defeat bosses and occasionally play the Wild Defense equivalent of Russian Roulette.
I've seen a few strange hybrids in my day. Many of them have been described in sentences that end with "... meets Angry Birds," but I'm not complaining. Some of the most interesting games on the App Store have taken unusual inspirations and combined them. Still, I'm not sure what inspired developer Phil Hassey to create a version of Galcon [$1.99 / Lite], his 2008 galactic strategy game, that replaces the planets and ships with chickens and nests. A joke that went a bit too far, maybe?
But while Chickon [Free] may have started as a joke, it has ended up as an interesting alternative to Galcon. It isn't a game for big Galcon fans -- you'll probably find it far too simple if you've already spent time with its older sibling -- but for folks who like freemium games, barnyard animals and a bit of light strategy, it's not a bad choice.
Thunder Game Works' Trenches [99¢/Free/HD] was originally released on Christmas Eve of 2009. It had all the core components of a solid side-scrolling field battling game, though the challenge was a bit out of balance and the campaign was a little too short. Over the next year or so, Trenches received an insane amount of update love, adding new modes, additional campaign elements and length, and robust cooperative and competitive online multiplayer modes through Game Center. What started as a good core concept that lacked finesse blossomed into a feature-rich strategy game with a near-cult following.
Over this past summer, Bungie had everybody guessing as to just what exactly they were up to by trademarking both the "Crimson" and "Bungie Aerospace" monikers. In late August, we learned that Crimson was actually Crimson: Steam Pirates [Free], a new strategy game developed by Harebrained Schemes in conjunction with Bungie. Bungie Aerospace would actually be the name used for publishing the title on the App Store, and we would assume, future titles as well.
With that mystery finally solved, Crimson: Steam Pirates launched for the iPad on September 1st. It turned out to be a pretty decent strategy game too, if not a bit too linear in its progression. It came with a very generous 8 levels as part of the free download, with an additional 8 levels in a Chapter 2 expansion available as an in-app purchase.
Yesterday, Bungie Aerospace launched Crimson: Steam Pirates for iPhone [99¢], a smaller-sized version of the iPad game. The game appears to be identical to the one on the iPad, but the pricing is structured a bit differently. It's 99¢ for the initial download, but it includes both the original Chapter 1 levels and the expansion Chapter 2 levels for the price, which is half of what it initially cost on the iPad. Additionally, a brand new Chapter 3 has launched with the iPhone version, and can be purchased from within the app for another 99¢. Chapter 3 is now available within the iPad version too, also priced at 99¢.
If you are sans iPad and have been interested in Crimson: Steam Pirates, or you're just looking to have a more portable version for your iPhone or iPod touch, then now is a good time to check out the newly released Crimson: Steam Pirates for iPhone.
Fresh off the heels of releases on XBLA and PC, Robot Entertainment is turning to iOS for its next release. Earlier this afternoon, Robot announced Hero Academy, a "head-to-head tactics" game that has you, and hopefully a pal, moving fantasy characters primed with spells, stabby things, and countermeasures across a virtual board in an attempt to destroy each other's home base crystals.
Hero Academy's core play will be asynchronous like, say, Words With Friends, and launch with all sorts of fun features, including Push notifications, in-game chat, and down the road, IAP options for "heroic teams, avatars, and add-ons." Oh! It also looks cute, too.
Generally speaking, most people are pretty pleased with Robot Entertainment's Orcs Must Die and Age of Empires Online, so we're pretty stoked to see what it has up its sleeves for us. The wait won't be too long, either: Hero Academy is set for a "winter" release.
It's the little things that matter. You know what I'm talking about, right? It's not the bacon that he brings home, it's the breakfast he wakes you up with. It's not the fact that Ravenmark: Scourge of Estellion [$2.99] is probably going to be one of the definitive names in turn-based strategy for the iOS, it's the way the commanders bellow at their troops to merit their wings.
Food metaphors aside, there's a lot to like about Witching Hour's debut title. If you're anything like me and have spent some amount of time bemoaning the paper-thin worlds that populate the App Store, Ravenmark: Scourge of Estellion is going to make your heart beat faster. The setting is exhaustive. Every character has a detailed biography, every unit type a set of statistics and a matching description. There are social hierarchies, self-serving matriarchs and imperial ranks. There is history. There is substance.
The day is almost here, folks: game creator extraordinaire Phil Hassey's chicken-themed successor to his award-winning strategy game Galcon [$1.99] hits this November 16. Hassey shot us a kind note this morning confirming the release of Chickon and fleshing out what we know about the game. According to him it's "very much like" Galcon, but paradoxically "very different" and, as you'd assume, sillier.
As you'll see in the assets we have below, Chickon replaces Galcon's planets with nests, it's ammunition with chickens, and its enemies with, uh, robotic chickens. There's also a ton of special abilities you'll be to utilize in battle, including bombs and nuclear warheads. You'd think radioactivity and poultry don't go together, but stop by a KFC sometime. You'll learn things. Hard things.
There's something particularly apt about the timing of the iPad release of Greed Corp HD [$4.99]. While Occupiers around the world freeze and protest sociopathically greedy behavior by major corporations, Greed Corp explores the ultimate end of that behavior. What happens when you're so bent on profit that you'd destroy even the ground under your own feet to keep the other guy from getting it? Greed Corp has the answer.
It's a turn-based strategy game that encourages players to engage in something one step shy of mutually assured destruction. You destroy the lands you harvest, and firing on your enemies crumbles away the ground beneath them.You win as long as you have at least a single unit on a single hex and your enemies don't. This brutally aggressive game first made its debut on Xbox Live Arcade and the Playstation Network in the early months of 2010, but it's hardly aged in the time it's taken to arrive on iPad. It's also extremely well done for the most part, offering a natural touch interface and both single and multiplayer content.
This always happens! We've been hitting spacebar all morning, but didn't see this next-level move coming. Indie developer Mode 7 has announced plans to bring its deceptively clever simultaneous turn-based strategy game, Frozen Synapse, to the iPad in 2012. It hit the PC and Mac earlier this year to oodles of well deserved media praise.
No worries if you're unfamiliar with the title. It's an isometric, team-versus-team strategy game that plays similarly to an X-COM. It's hook is its simulation mechanic that allows players to see how their tactical moves will fare against each other. The catch is that you're free to change up your moves in-between these phases. All your careful planning and tweaking can nightmarishly go heads up whenever you hit "end turn."
“Despite my lumpen, sausage-like digits, I am particularly excited about Frozen Synapse coming to the iPad,” Mode 7 Joint Managing Director Paul Taylor said in a statement. “I look forward to flicking my little green men around the place with wanton abandon.”
Mode 7 says Frozen Synapse is currently enterting into a beta state on the iPad and final details, including price and firm release, will be announced next year. You can bet your right hand that we'll be going hands-on and speaking with the development team before release, so expect some news in the coming weeks. In the meantime, get comfy with this launch trailer of the computer version of the title.
Blosics [99¢ / HD] is a casual object-flinging game like Angry Birds, but this is no clone, as it feels fresh and unique with plenty of different features to unlock. FDG Entertainment, the makers of Cover Orange [99¢ / HD], advise that the online version of Blosics has been experienced by over 40 million players, which is quite a lot of people, but personally I prefer to play my games on iOS devices. Thankfully, that is now possible with the arrival of Blosics in the App Store.
The idea is to throw balls at unfriendly colored blocks, which are often stacked into piles or structures. The grumpy blocks have little faces which are always frowning as they mutter comments like: "Yada yada" , "Nom nom nom", "Watch it!", "Hey!" and my personal favorite quote: "Blurgh!" No wonder people throw balls at them.
Com2uS is certainly in the seasonal spirit. The publisher has added Halloween trimmings to a ton of its current line-up of titles, including Homerun Battle 3D [$.99 / HD], Tiny Farm [Free], World of Magic [Free], and even Piggy Adventure [$.99 / HD]. Starting now, you can deck out your farms with zombie horses and jack-o-lanterns, blow baseballs out of the yard while wearing a pumpkin on your head, use Warp Gates and pumpkins as pet in World of Magic, and enjoy 12 Halloween-themed levels and new musical tracks across Piggy Adventure.
In other related Halloween-ynews, Homerun Battle 3D is now just $.99, three dollars less than its standard, non-celebratory price. Piggy Adventure also sees a cut due to this event: it's now $.99 instead of its usual $2.99.
Now, I ask you to enjoy the funniest series of pictures from a video game ever. You can catch images of the other games mentioned in this post at Com2uS's blog.
Late in 2010, Semi Secret released SteamBirds [$1.99 / HD], a turn-based aerial dog-fighting game based on the Flash game of the same name, which we thought was "tons of fun". Apparently other people liked it too, as it's reportedly been played by 12 million people worldwide (including the online Flash version). Well, the original makers of the game, SpryFox, teamed up with HalfBrick to release a sequel – Steambirds: Survival [Free/HD]. And it's definitely worth checking out (again!)
It's a top-down dog-fighting game where you play a pilot with the Allies, fighting against the Axis powers, to protect the United Kingdom. But the cool twist is that it's also turn-based. Your aircraft has an arrow in front of it, which represents the distance and direction it will travel in the next turn. You can bend the line to control your plane's flight-path.
There has been a rush to get casual versions of more complex game-types onto the App Store since it launched, and in the case of BlowFish Studios' and Crescent Moon Games' Siegecraft [99¢], the goal seems to have been to create a casual RTS game with Angry Birds-esque physics.
You take control of one of two weapons throughout the campaign, a catapult and a crossbow. To shoot, you need to slide your finger to move and aim the crossbow, or touch and pull back to shoot the catapult. This works considerably better on an iPad than an iPhone since you have more room to pull back and aim. You'll have a set number of tasks to complete throughout the campaign, but most fall in two categories: attack and defend. That said, you'll always essentially be defending, since you can't move your weapons. Even the attack portions mostly just require you to kill off enemies so your soldiers, which you don't control, can get through.
You don’t have to be an app hipster to be a little affronted when your favorite app hits the big time and everyone starts playing it. Really, are there many things more annoying than logging into Facebook only to see that your 11th grade lab partner has posted five hundred achievements from what was previously your favorite game? Instead of making passive aggressive comments on their status updates (“Wow, at least being unemployed gives you the opportunity to really master Angry Birds!”), channel that righteous anger into downloading Princess Punt [Free], a game that you are certain to be the first (and perhaps last) person on the block to be playing.
Thunder Game Works
