Reviews - page 104

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.

[contextly_auto_sidebar id=”c4QDtY5bnumkUotVrfsI2JnHavMhspa3″]

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.

When I saw Tunnel Escape in the App Store my first thought was that it looked a lot like the magic carpet sequence in the Super Nintendo version of Disney’s Aladdin (which is the best version, do not bring your Genesis fanboyism into this). What I wasn’t prepared for was it bringing back all the tension I felt as a kid trying to avoid swells of lava while soaring through increasingly narrow passages.

Tunnel Escape is decidedly much more relaxed than Aladdin as the only thing you’re fighting against is how long you tap the screen. Each tap raises the little cube higher in the world, and if you don’t tap, it’ll sink down on the bottom of the tunnel. Touching the walls, or top of the screen, means instant death, so you have to feather your taps to succeed.

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.

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.

I’ve tested lots of leather wallet cases for the iPhone, but the Wall St from id America is a lot different to the rest.

It’s not a folding case like Twelve South’s iconic BookBook, but rather a sleeve that your iPhone slips into that has a large hole in its front for your display, and a little pocket in its back for your credit cards.

It’s an ideal alternative for those who like to keep things simple and don’t want to have to deal with flappy front covers when using their smartphone. It makes everything easy to get to, and it doesn’t cover up any buttons, ports, or speakers.

The Wall St fits both iPhone 5 and iPhone 5s (there’s another version for iPhone 5c, too), and it’s available in a number of pretty colors, including brown, blue, orange, and red. It costs $34.95, so let’s find out whether it’s worth it.

Now that you’ve played a game about making games to death (Game Dev Story)why not move on to conquer the world of Rock and Roll? Band Stars is another in the long line of simulation/micromanagement games that boils the creation process down to statistics and creativity points. The difference here is that you’re running a band rather than a company.

If you’ve played any creation sim before, you’re likely familiar with Band Stars’ format. You start by creating your band from a basic set of characters then can hire more as you can afford them. Characters have unique stats that determine how useful they are in the recording process, and you can increase those stats through training.

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.

For the iPad I use at home, I want minimal bulk. I’m willing to sacrifice protection for that privilege, but I want to be able to use my iPad 3 in as close to the original form factor as possible.

For iPads I’ve used with kids in classrooms, or ones that might be used in hospitals or in the enterprise, I’d rather have more protection, even if it means a sacrifice of heavier, bulkier, proportions.

Otterbox has long been the industry standard super-high protection case, but this new entry into the field, the K Kuvs Klover iPad Case is a strong contender for just as much protection for half the price.

Steam Punks likes Mega Man, and hopes you do too. Even the description of the game on the App Store says it was inspired from games like Mega Man X. And, boy, does Steam Punks play like a Mega Man game!

You’ll jump, you’ll shoot, and you’ll take out curiously Capcom-like, steam-powered robots in your effort to save kidnapped scientist Professor Clout. You play as Dunns Callahan, an Elite Enforcer assigned to protect Clout. Clearly he doesn’t do a very good job of it as the Bowler Gang easily abducts the professor off a moving train.

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.

Legend of Equip Pants is an episodic adventure/role-playing game that revolved around the acquisition of pants. You play as Sir Pantsalot as he quests to find, well, pants to wear. You start out partially clothed in armor and generally terrorize the innocent populace with your lack of lower body covering.

Each episode is fairly brief and has only a handful of solutions. In the first episode, you must acquire a costume or pumpkin pants to enter a party. You can either get a pumpkin and take it to the pantsmith or borrow cursed “underwere” that turn you into an underwerewolf! League of Epic Pants hardly takes itself seriously, and these bite-sized levels don’t overstay their welcome. You really only need a few minutes to appreciate the concept of underwerewolves, and the game’s developer realizes this.

What’s this? A review of the Retina iPad mini almost a month after launch? That’s right. And although I haven’t been using my new mini for that long, I’ve been using for more than the two or three hours logged by most of the folks who “reviewed” it on launch.

So if you are wondering if the new mini is noticeably heavier than the old one, or if it takes all night to charge it, or whether an iPad even needs LTE, then read on.

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.

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.

Playing Icycle: On Thin Ice feels more like interacting with a movie than playing a game. You guide the hapless (and naked) Dennis through an increasingly treacherous frozen wasteland with nothing but a bicycle and a warm hat. The world will shift, crack, and crumble all around you, often sending Dennis up an ice flow or down into frozen lakes. The animation is so seamless that it’s almost like you’re watching a cutscene.

What is more game-like about Icycle is the emphasis on completing level objectives while performing dangerous jumps to collect ice chunks. Doing so will let you unlock new tools and eventually clothing for Dennis to use. I was worried when I started the game that Dennis would just stay naked, so I’m glad you have the option to clothe him. Of course, every time you careen into spikey ice, his clothes miraculously disappear, leaving Dennis to freeze to death on the ice–which is as charmingly animated as everything else in Icycle.

An Infinity Bravura Dash – Knights of the King is a very long name for a straight forward side-scrolling shooter. In I Bravura (the app store title for the game) you play as one of three knights that fire endlessly into an ever-flowing wave of slimes and goblins. One hit can kill you, so your goal is to take down as many baddies as you can while collecting potions and coins that fly toward you.

Beyond walking right and shooting, there’s not a lot to I Bravura, but that isn’t a bad thing. Your character can walk forward and back a little, which makes it much easier to avoid enemies while diving for collectibles. The simplicity behind I Bravura makes it a very relaxing game to play. Once you gain enough gold and unlock the other knights, your objective is really just to make it as far as you can without dying. You can pick the game up any time and just slaughter enemies to your heart’s content.

I grew up in the 80s, so I know how close we came to total nuclear annihilation when the WOPR computer became self-aware, as we saw in the 1983 documentary WarGames. The only thing that saved us back then was Tic Tac Toe, a game that became the savior of all humanity just by being stupid and largely unwinnable.

Tic Tactics aims to solve its predecessor’s “what the hell, we’re bored” factor by adding eight more boards and some much-needed lateral thinking.

And it succeeds admirably.

The holy grail of mobile devices like the iPad mini, in my opinion, is a bulk-free, cable-less charging system that can position Apple’s diminutive tablet in various ways.

The iPort Charge Case tries to make this dream come true, but it doesn’t quite hit the mark. While the iPort stand can indeed hold my iPad mini in both portrait and landscape orientation at a wide range of viewing angles, the need to place my gorgeously designed device into a bulky plastic case sort of kills the whole idea of “mini.”

The iPort Charge Case and Stand does indeed have some very valid uses in and around the home, but ultimately, due to the way it changes the use experience of the iPad mini, it isn’t quite the world-changer it hopes to be.

I’m usually turned off a game by overbearing mustache adoration, but Puffington appreciates much more than the very impressive mustache supported by the dapper protagonist. You play as Puffington, a sea gentleman who is dismayed when ruffians kidnap the lovely lady worm he’s set his eyes on. Like any love-stricken fish, Puffington sets out to rescue her by collecting coins and gizmos scattered through increasingly tricky levels.

Puffington is a platformer, and plays like the underwater levels in the Super Mario Bros. games. Tapping the screen makes Puffington inflate, which will make him rise up a bit. Tapping repeatedly will give you a burst of speed which is handy when you’re trying to outrun the edge of the perpetually scrolling level.

Baby Lava is on a rampage. He’ll fly as far as he can and burn whatever lies in his path, but won’t give a thought to how water spells his doom. Once you fire the lava blob out of the starting volcano, you must carefully guide him across tropical islands where he can burn up helpless vacationers and pineapples to keep his fire burning. If you run out of energy, or touch the water between the islands, your fire will go out and Baby Lava turns into a blackened hunk of rock.

Baby Lava Bounce plays a bit like Angry Birds crossed with endless flight games like Whale Trail. Your objective is to gather enough energy to collect various idols which you offer up to the volcano. The only control you have is tapping to crash the lava down against an island. If you land on a flat surface, tapping again will let you hop a short distance. If the lava lands on a slanted surface, he’ll shoot up into the air. This will give you much needed lift, but can also make it much more difficult to maintain your energy level.

Spoiler: Writing with ink on paper is still way better than stabbing at a hard glass screen with a soft rubbery tip. Double spoiler: writing with a ballpoint pen which records your every stroke for searching and editing on your iPad is amazing, and way better than taking photos of every page you finish just to feed into Evernote. Third spoiler: No matter how good the hardware and the AI behind the scenes, a crappy app lets everything down.

I only really have a Facebook account for work purposes, and I usually only go there when I want to feel bad about myself. So I typically have no idea what’s going on there.

Apparently, Alpha Zen, a quotation-focused new game by developer Large Animal Games, wants me to know what’s going on with my friends, so it includes a mode that makes their statuses into game pieces.

It’s a little weird, but let me explain how the game works.

If I have to put my new iPhone 5s in a case because I forgot to buy AppleCare+ during the first 30 days and I’m terrified I’ll drop it on its face, then I want that case to be sleek and simple and made of leather. The CalypsoCase Loop is all of those things.

Handcrafted by a team of skilled craftsmen in Ljubljana, Slovenia, the Loop is a beautiful slip-on sleeve made of only the finest leather that provides your iPhone with all the protection it needs when it’s not in use. It has laser-cut titanium foundations that retain its shape and offer impact protection, and a soft inner lining that lovingly caresses your iPhone’s aluminum without marking it.

The Loop is available in four colors, and it’s priced at €89 (approx. $120) with free shipping. Let me tell you why it’s worth that price tag.

The Shivah starts with a joke:

“A goy came up to Rabbi Moishe to ask, ‘Why do rabbis always answer with a question?’

To which Rabbi Moise replied, ‘Why not?'”

First released in 2006, The Shivah is a noirish, murder-mystery adventure game centered around a money-deficient New York synagogue. Its hero, Russell Stone, is not a hardbitten private investigator or a disgraced former police officer like the genre typically demands. He’s a cynical rabbi with a heavy conscience who stumbles into the investigation completely by accident. It sounds odd, and it is, but it also totally works.

Now, developer Wadjet Eye Games has released The Shivah: Kosher Edition, an updated iOS and PC version of the original game with all-new graphics and music. If you’ve never played the original and you’re a fan of adventure games and (well-meaning) Jewish humor, it’s a great take on the well-trod genre.