games - page 47

The Room Two launched today on the iTunes App Store. As the sequel to Apple’s 2012 Game Of The Year (The Room), it has a lot to live up to.

Our reviewer called it a “must download” game, and we picked the original locked box puzzle game as an iOS Game of the Week.

The Room Two promises more of the same, and that’s not a bad thing. Developer Fireproof Games found the perfect mix of eye candy, just-tough-enough puzzle solving, and a haunting soundtrack in the first game, so any more of that is extremely welcome.

Making your own beer is hard work. It’s a series of intensive scientific processes, and a mistake at any one of them can ruin hours of work and possibly poison someone. But if you get it right, it’s a middle finger right to the face of Big Beer.

Is “Big Beer” a thing? I’ve lost track of which corporations are evil.

Fiz is an independent management game about independent brewing, and it tasks you with building up your own brand from the garage up. And that’s every bit as complicated as it sounds. More so, actually, because numbers are also involved.

Prepare to take a trip to a dimpled, plastic galaxy far, far away. Warner Bros. has just released LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga to the iOS App Store. And even better, they finally figured out something to do with the Phantom Menace!

The first time I played Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was over ten years ago, and if you told me that one day, I would be able to play this massive 70+ hour open-ended carnage simulator, not on a bulky console, but a device thinner than a pack of cards I could fit into my pocket, I would have told you you were mad. Yet here we are, as Rockstar Games has released San Andreas to the iOS App Store.

Every time I think I’ve found my favorite pair of gaming headphones, Steelseries sends me another one to try out.

This time, it’s the H Wireless series, a fantastic, well-designed headset that connects via optical or analog inputs to provide stunningly good Dolby sound without wires. You can, of course, connect an iPhone or iPad to the box, as well, getting a quality sound to walk around the house with.

Seriously, these are my new favorites.

Developer Crytek, known for top-shelf console and PC games like Far Cry and Crysis, is coming to the mobile space with its first free-to-play game for Android and iOS, The Collectables. The game is published by mobile powerhouse DeNA, using its Mobage mobile games platform which allows the game to release on multiple mobile devices and systems.

The game is coming soon for free on Google Play and the iTunes App Store, and it’s based on Crytek’s proprietary CryEngine graphics technology, bringing a new level of visual performance to the mobile gaming space. The Collectables has both tactical and action-based mechanics, letting you lead a squad of unlikely heroes on missions around the globe.

The Elder Scrolls Online, from Bethesda Software, is coming April 4, 2014, and not to the hot new consoles, oh no. The hotly-anticipated online sequel to one of the hottest role-playing games of the past few years is coming to Mac and PC before releasing to the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 the following June.

Imagine that–a huge gaming title coming to your Mac before your console-loving friends can get their hands on it.

Assassin’s Creed IV launched on consoles this fall and offered all the ship-on-ship action gamers required. Developer Ubisoft, not one to let a good idea go un-reused, has now released Assassin’s Creed Pirates, a sidestory about one man’s rise from prisoner to fearsome buccaneer captain. It ditches the main series’ free-running in favor of a completely seaborne experience.

Does Pirates rake in the booty, or does it walk the plank to plunge the briny deep to Davy Jones’ Locker? Could that last sentence have been any more forced?

You’ll find the answers to these questions and more after the break.

I’ve played digital card games on my iPad before, including some heavy hitters like Might And Magic: Duel Of Champions and Magic 2014.

I’ve played some real-time battle arena games, like Raid Leader or Skulls of the Shogun, and enjoyed them as well.

But I’ve never, until now, played such an engaging mashup of the two gaming genres. What Singapore-based Spicy Horse has done here is create nothing less than a sublime, well-balanced, purely addictive combination of collectible card game, arena-based real-time strategy, and a training/leveling up system that just begs for exploration and mastery.

Whale Trail and Blip Blup developer Ustwo released a new trailer for its upcoming game Monument Valley, a stunningly beautiful game that looks to be influenced by the art of MC Escher, with gameplay that seems similar to hit indie game, Fez.

Aside from those obvious comparisons, what the trailer and accompanying screenshots show is a mind- and perspective-bending gameplay trip through various and brightly-colored worlds, guiding the silent princess protagonist through crazy architectural geometries.

Designer Ken Wong calls it “a beautiful, exploratory experience, somewhere between exploring a toy shop and reading The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.”

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I’m old, so I remember playing the original Double Dragon on a decrepit arcade cabinet at Showbiz Pizza while the Rock-afire Explosion played and lurched in its creeepy, mechanical way in the next room and I just paid attention to the game because I knew that if I thought about the musical robots coming to life and murdering everyone, they would. And that’s how I predicted The Secret.

Anyway, I was never good at Double Dragon. The enemies punched too fast or too hard, or I couldn’t line up my hits correctly, and I swear that stupid machine was broken because it was impossible. Now, we have Double Dragon Trilogy, an iOS port of the brawler series that includes remixed music and some new modes.

And I know this is a good port because I’m still really bad at it.

The latest game in the Adventure Time series of mobile games will go live on Google Play, the Amazon App Store, and in Apple’s own iTunes App Store this Thursday, according to Cartoon Network.

You’ll get to play as main characters Finn and Jake, along with several other supporting cast members, evading the crazy Ice King while skiing down an epic mountain. Mathematical!

Of course, you won’t use skis, but rather slide down the slope on your butt, true to the wacky television show on which the game is based.

We all aspire to be more than we are, to mold ourselves into our own perfect forms and escape the limits thrust upon us by circumstance or luck. But we can’t always do it on our own. Sometimes, we need someone to come along and nudge us in the right direction and help us achieve our full potential.

Division Cell is a metaphor for that. I think. I mean, it could be, I guess. It’s a minimalist puzzle game about helping unhappy shapes to become what they wish to be. See that rectangle? It really just wants to be a square. That irregular polygon over there? It looks at triangles with tears in its eyes and whispers “Why not me?” into the night.

Why wouldn’t you help them out? Jerk.

There are a bunch of apps out on iOS for kids, from educational apps to sports apps and more. Sure, you can get reviews of these games by adults, sometimes even from parents of kids who use them.

We thought it’d be fun, though, to ask the kids themselves.

Welcome to Kid APProved, a series of videos in which we ask our own children what they think of apps on the App Store that they’re using.

This week, it’s a game about an acrobatic hedgehog, Wide Sky from Marcus Eckert. Here’s what our Kid APProved reporter Nadine thinks.

The universe has a problem: It has all these planets lying around with no life on them. So obviously, the solution is some kind of forced cosmic osmosis to spread vitality throughout the void.

That’s the premise of Abductor Pro, anyway. It’s a new iOS title that puts players in the space boots of Antaris, a green alien tasked with grabbing humans from Earth for transplantation to other, less human-y planets. But the planets are picky, and possibly racist*, and they’re very particular about who gets to live on them.

Your job as Antaris is to make sure the right people get to the right place.

Spicy Horse Games (Akaneiro), the studio spearheaded by American McGee (American McGee’s Alice), and DeNA (owner of mobile games studios Mobage and ngmoco;), announced today that iOS game The Gate is now ready in the App Store for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.

Originally titled Hell Invaders, The Gate is an innovative mashup of a game that brings a digital collectible card game together with the fun of a real-time strategy (RTS) game into one beautiful package.

I almost wrote off Numerity.

After about 10 minutes with the hidden-number game, I thought it was ridiculously easy and almost insulting. All the game was doing was showing me numbers, and then I’d find them in the onscreen jumble and tap them until they formed a picture of Charlie Chaplin or Marilyn Monroe. It took about a minute for each puzzle, and I was ready to give it up then and there.

But then some weird things started happening.

One of the most popular series of games for home consoles is Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed, in which a 21st Century cyberpunk is tasked with recovering memories of his ancestors from the past. The plot doesn’t make a lot of sense, frankly, but it doesn’t have to: it’s just the framing mechanism that allows players to take on the role of a number of assassins throughout history, from 15th Century Florence to ancient Jerusalem and Colonial America.

The latest game in the Assassin’s Creed series, Black Flag, brings the backstabbing and throat-slitting to the high seas, but it’s only available on the Xbox and PlayStation. No fear, though, because a companion game called Assassin’s Creed: Pirates has just been released on the App Store for iPhone and iPad users.

The Inner World is one of those “throwback, but in a good way” titles that reminds us of how good we have it nowadays. That sounds harsh, but remember that a time existed in which point-and-click adventures were everywhere. Very few of them gave you any help or hints, and all of them required you to play Amateur Psychic with the developers.

This is what I’m saying (slight spoiler, but it’s the first puzzle): I have no reason to believe that a drunken worm would make for a good slingshot.

And it’s a good thing that The Inner World is so cute and sympathetic to its players or that would really annoy me.

Australian publisher Halfbrick (Jetpack Joyride, Fruit Ninja, Age of Zombies) announced Tuesday that its new free-to-play band simulator game Band Stars will release to the App Store on Thursday, December 5.

The game, developed in collaboration with Australia-based Six Foot Kid, has been in development for a while, with an early build available last March at the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco. Come this Thursday, you’ll be able to download the game for free onto your iOS device and start a band.

Dark and light should probably sit down someplace and talk. They’re always fighting.

Their senseless war continues in Darklings, a new endless survival game from developer MildMania. You play as Lum, a being of light going up against the Darklings, evil beings who have stolen all the stars from the sky in a plan to plunge the world into darkness. Because that’s how the dark operates in these things.

Lum is alone against endless waves of evil beings, and only your quick shape-drawing powers can help it prevail.

When we talk about Japanese games publisher Square-Enix bringing their games to iPhone, we’re usually talking about their popular Final Fantasy series: in the past few years alone, Square-Enix has brought a number of the games in its world famous CRPG series to the App Store.

The next game Square-Enix is bringing to iPhone isn’t a Final Fantasy game, though. Instead, it’s a title in their other popular RPG series (and a personal favorite game of mine): Dragon Quest VIII.

Developer Frogmind has just updated its award-winning iOS game, Badland. The update is the conclusion to the Day II story-based levels, with 10 new levels and 30 new missions to accomplish, along with seven new Game Center achievements.

The final tally, then, of levels in Badland is now 80, fully double what the game started with back in April.

Kiwi & Me is for girls.

The new free-to-play, match-three game from developer Beeline Interactive (the mobile arm of Capcom) has all the “swapping two things to form lines of other things” that you’ve seen in every other match-three title, but it’s all centered around an adorable little bird-thing named Kiwi who is looking for her lost mother.

Kiwi watches you solve the game’s puzzles, and every once in a while, you unlock a new accessory for her and dress her up. If you couldn’t tell, Capcom and Beeline are specifically targeting female casuals with this one, but that’s not to say that non-girl types can’t also appreciate it.

It’s cool. Nobody will judge you.

Look: We know that not every iOS game is perfect. They all have their little quirks and irregularities, and some are flat-out broken. But among those that are actually playable, some contain a core mechanic that stumbles somewhere along the way. And maybe it’s a cool idea, but it feels like it could just be executed a little better.

That’s where this series comes in. We round up games that are not necessarily bad but just fall short in some area, and we suggest other titles that do it better.