Feel like smashing some glass? How about throwing pinballs to do it?
Well, you can do both in this week’s pick: Smash Hit by Mediocre Games, a free-to-play glass-shattering endless run through some of the prettiest yet most fragile obstacle courses we’ve ever seen.
Here’s a quick video of our play through, along with our thoughts on the game.
The House That Mario Built isn’t any closer to bringing Zelda, Mario, Donkey Kong, and the others to iOS anytime soon, but what would Nintendo’s classic games look like if they were originally built for iOS?
Rather than waiting for Flappy Mario to hit the App Store, Red Bull decided to re imagine some of our favorite Nintendo games with a iOS twist that mashes up the likes of Donkey Kong with Angry Birds, Candy Crush Saga with Dr. Mario, and Nintendo’s own Temple Run knock-off starring Link.
Take a look:
I play a lot of games about getting one thing and maybe getting three other things along the way if I can (or feel like it). I just reviewed one Wednesday, in fact. But it’s a solid premise, and as long as getting all those things isn’t boring, developers can keep making them until everyone’s thumbs fall off.
Developer Klei Entertainment’s first mobile title, Eets Munchies, is another “one and maybe three” game, but it’s also a clever puzzle title that is equal parts Lemmings and Rube Goldberg. It’s the latest in Klei’s debut series, and it’s interesting to see the company go back to the cutes after its recent dalliances with hyperviolence in games like Shank and Mark of the Ninja.
Don’t let the adorable graphics fool you, though; once you really get into it, this game is to difficulty as cake is to delicious flavor.
New retro-styled JRPG puzzle game Block Legend made it to the App Store today — and it’s accompanied by the most entertaining game trailer we’ve seen in ages.
Inviting players to travel through a range of different lands fighting monsters and completing quests, Block Legend combines tile-breaking gameplay with a massive world populated by different characters.
Sometimes, you just gotta break something.
But you probably don’t want to break your own stuff, and people get mad when you smash up their things. This is where gaming often enters the picture: It’s an environment in which you can demolish the crap out of things with no consequences. And it’s even more satisfying when the things break realistically.
Smash Hit is a game about literally that, and it’s incredibly satisfying.
Mines of Mars is a fantastic mining and crafting game with a mysterious story, developed by WickeyWare and published by Crescent Moon Games. It’s along the lines of Super Motherload or SteamWorld Dig, in that you must manage your fuel and cargo space while you dig deep into the crust of the Martian planet to find ores, gems, and other secrets.
You’ll come up to the surface to fuel up, exchange ores for ingots, play some fun mini-games based on arcade classics like Berzerk.
It’s a game full of mystery and atmosphere, mostly due to the creepy storyline and amazingly atmospheric soundtrack by composer Evan Gipson. Check out the trailer below to see what it looks like.
I’ve had my eye on Celsius Game Studios since I first heard about their in-development space simulator game, Drifter, back in 2012. Since then, developer Colin Walsh has continued to pour on the awesomesauce to create a game that–while still in active beta–impresses on every level.
Drifter takes place in a procedurally-generated galaxy that contains 100,000 light years worth of star systems to explore (that’s a lot of star systems–tens of thousands). The soundtrack is by indie-darling composer Danny Baranowsky (Super Meat Boy, The Blinding of Isaac) and it will thrill you in all the right places. Take a look at the trailer below to get a sense of how it looks and sounds.
You know how it goes: You’re up late, feeling a little peckish, and you don’t have anything in the fridge. What do you do?
I mean, I’d go to the store down the street and get some sour bears. And if you’re Draku, the star of Midnight Bite, you do the same thing. Except substitute “store down the street” with “village at the base of the mountain,” and substitute “sour bears” with “blood of the sleeping townsfolk.”
But he’s a little guy, and the humans are prejudiced against vampire children who stalk up in the night and murder them, so he has to be careful. And as the one controlling him, you also have to be careful because the controls are apparently also racist against the undead.
God of Light has a simple, fun concept. It has pretty graphics and some cool music by British electronica outfit Unkle. And it has realistic light physics. And all of these are great, but a lot of games look and sound good.
But God of Light is special because in addition to all of these good qualities, it also offers something else: a meditation on what puzzle games are, what they do, and how and why we play them.
And the best part is that the developer accomplishes this not by telling us, but by building all of these qualities into the gameplay and mechanics.
Developers Tabasco Interactive have released the trailer to their new game Star Horizon.
A gorgeous on-rails shooter, with a $3.99 asking price and no IAP, Tabasco has submitted the game to Apple, and is hoping to launch it on March 20.
You play as John, a disenfranchised human pilot whose ship is controlled by Ellie, an Artificial Intelligence which is programmed to help pilots stay mentally strong throughout combat and and which cannot kill human beings. After being placed into hibernation for 1,000 years John must discover what has happened to the galaxy and try his best to save it.
Arguably the App Store needs another ninja game like it needs another Flappy Bird clone. So what does the boldly-titled Epic Ninja Game offer that you don’t get from, say, Clumsy Ninja or Ninja Chaos?
To start answering that, let me explain a bit about the retro-styled platformer that is Epic Ninja Game. You play an unnamed ninjitsu who, waking up in a mysterious laboratory stripped of his magical ninja powers (!), has to travel through multiple stages to regain them.
At your disposal from the start are jumps and an endless supply of shurikens, but as you make your way through the game this expands to include an unlikely assortment of jet packs, invincibility power-ups, and laser eyes.
Monkeys are cute.
They’re fuzzy, they make little noises, and they act like tiny people if you train them well enough. And they’re mostly cool to hang out with once you factor out bad seeds like that one in Raiders of the Lost Ark that was a Nazi. And the ones who attack humans. And those other ones who attack other monkeys and steal their food for no reason.
Actually, you know what? Monkeys are awful. Here’s Monkey Boots, a fun game about getting one killed repeatedly.
I think Mad Skills Motocross 2 saved my life.
It’s not because it taught me a valuable lesson about not mixing chemicals or that someone shot me, and I had Mad Skills Motocross 2 in my pocket, and it stopped the bullet. And it didn’t swim out and rescue me when I went beyond my depth in the grown-up pool.
No, Mad Skills Motocross 2 saved my life by teaching me that I should never, ever, attempt to ride a motocross bike. Because I will die.
I’m not very good at this game, is what I’m saying. But it’s still pretty good.
This week, Oasis Management founder Seth Fischer sent a letter to Nintendo president Satoru Iwata, once again demanding that the House That Mario Built release games for the iPhone, iPad and other mobiel platforms.
The folks behind the brilliant and sticky Tiny Death Star and Pocket Trains are back at it again, this time with another free-to-play title, Disco Zoo. This time, however, NimbleBit has the added talent of rock-star developer Owen Goss, a Canadian dude with a pedigree in gaming that reaches back to pre-iOS days (gasp).
Disco Zoo has the same Nimblebit retro bitizen look and feel, and the fun mechanics from Pocket Trains and Tiny Tower are out in force. You’ll take over running of the titular Zoo, adding animals and building habitats while earning in-game soft currency on a timed basis, as well as randomly on the zoo map screen.
The main part of the game involves rescuing animals from a variety of habitats–each requires the purchase of more and more expensive aircraft–and adding them to your zoo. The zoo animals will sleep after a time, which encourages you to keep checking back into the app to wake them up.
Primal Flame is one of those games that’s immediately impressive. Its brief loading screen at startup is gorgeous, and the title screen presents the obligatory social-networking links in its own cave-drawing aesthetic so that they fit in while still remaining recognizable.
But I’m not here just to talk about the title screen, luckily for you, and once you stop gawking at it and actually start Primal Flame up, it just keeps on being amazing.
You start with a black screen covered in specks with the sounds of a forest at night. Brighter lights start drifting down from the top, and you run your finger along the screen. Sparks fly and grow and burst into flame, and then you’re playing one of the most unique games I’ve ever seen.
The new light-based physics puzzle game from developers Playmous sure looks interesting!
Called God of Light, the game features 3 different game worlds, and 75 dozens of mind-expanding, puzzle-filled levels. Your mission is to join game mascot, Shiny, to save the universe from impending darkness — which means seeking out game objects that reflect, split, combine, paint, bend and teleport rays of light energy to activate the mythical “Sources of Life.”
If that sounds all a bit confusing, the above video may help shed some light (pun intended!) on what we’re talking about.
Nearly one third of all games released in the App Store in a 24-hour period are Flappy Bird clones.
That’s according to the Guardian newspaper’s Stuart Dredge, who used an RSS feed of the Appshopper site to get his hands on a list of every game released in the 24-hour period, ending 5am on February 27.
Of the 293 new iOS games, he discovered that 95 (just over 32%) were clones of the recently deceased Flappy Bird.
As its name suggests, Endless Surf is pretty much an endless runner with a whole lot more water involved. If you’re looking for a true to life surfing sim, complete with realistic board dynamics and the like, you’re going to be disappointed. But if you can look past that, Endless Surf is a giant wave of fun.
Like any endless runner, your goal is to keep going for as long as possible, while simultaneously notching up the highest score you can. In your path are various power-ups — in this case including one that turns the weather temporarily stormy, therefore increasing the size of your wave —as well as an array of obstacles to negotiate. These are mainly made up of buoys and menacing shark fins, but the real threat is the constantly advancing wall of water breaking behind you. Move too slowly and you’ll get swallowed up — leading to the inevitable “Wipe Out” screen. Move fast enough and, over time, you’ll be able to customize your character and complete the various stages the game has to offer.
Developer Pangea Software’s well-regarded Enigmo series of puzzle games has been around for a while, and they’ve turned over development of the latest installment, Enigmo: Explore to a new team, but the idea is the same: See that liquid dripping from a pipe over here? Get it into that jar over there.
The game gives you a suite of tools to accomplish this, including trampoline-like items that the drops bounce off of and little cannons that can send them even farther. It’s up to you to decide which items in which combinations to use to complete levels, which offers you a decent amount of freedom when you’re playing it.
But a couple other features work just as hard against you, and it’s kind of a shame.
The tale of Flappy Bird is almost unbelievable. A frustratingly simple iPhone game from an indie game dev in Vietnam with no prior notoriety becomes an overnight success. It dominates the App Store charts and starts making $50,000 per day in ad revenue. Then, out of the blue, the dev decides to pull it from the App Store at the height of its popularity.
It was a story too good to be true. Except that it was true.
In the wake of Flappy Birds’s removal, countless knockoffs have tried to fill the gap. “Flappy Bird being taken off the App Store has created this vacuum,” says Jeremy Olson, founder of the award-winning app studio Tapity. In an effort to make a worthy successor to Flappy Bird, Olson and his small team have created Buffalo Wings.
Instead of a bird, you guide a flying buffalo over and under walls by tapping the iPhone’s screen. Hit a wall at any point and you have to start over. The gameplay mechanics may be the same, but Tapity is hoping that Buffalo Wings has what it takes to capture lightning in a bottle twice.
I know we’ve talked about Flappy Bird a lot over the past month… but forget that stupid bird. You have a new god now. Meet Flapthulhu.
The Bureau: XCOM Declassified gets three new expansion packs for the Mac version of the game this week, available on the Mac App Store and Steam. The new packs–Hangar 6 R&D, CodeBreakers and the Light Plasma Pistol–bring new content and missions to the strategy title as in-app purchases.
The Bureau: XCOM Declassified is a tactical third-person shooter game set in the exciting XCOM universe, this time in the 1960s. You play as agent William Carter, helping your agency cover up and battle alien incursions on the planet.
I’m all about helping cute animals get home or get candy or whatever. Believe me, I am. But I’m also kind of a hypocrite because the most important word in that first sentence is “cute.” Give me a yeti or a little alien or whatever the hell Om Nom is in Cut the Rope, and I’ll give them whatever they want.
Show me something like the title characters in The Rainbowers, however … I mean, I’ll still do it. But I’ll look around first to see if any fuzzy bunnies need help gathering carrots or something.
But the game is fun, despite my terrible, terrible prejudice.
The iOS game controller market is growing at a pretty healthy pace, but there has yet to be a controller that really steals the limelight. We’ve gone hands on with several options, and they all seem to fall into the same boat: a decent upgrade from touch, but not console-level quality.
Demoed at Mobile World Congress this week in Barcelona, the Mad Catz C.T.R.L.i might be the new controller to beat.