4/5 - page 3

You Are The Underdogbot In Endless Boss Fight [Review]

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Endless Boss Fight

Old people probably remember Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!, a game for the original Nintendo Entertainment System about Little Mac, a tiny boxer rising through the ranks by defeating opponents so much larger that they look like they could swallow Mac whole with very little difficulty.

Endless Boss Fight by White Milk Games
Category: iOS Games
Works With: iPhone, iPad
Price: Free

It’s an underdog story that owed a lot to films like Rocky and The Karate Kid — movies that helped to create that most honored of sports-story traditions: the training montage.

Endless Boss Fight, a new free-to-play game from developer White Milk Studios, is basically a perpetual game version of those montages.

AntiSquad Is Pretty Pro-Squad, Actually [Review]

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AntiSquad

Alright, so they’re the “AntiSquad” because they’re a ragtag bunch of misfits with little in common who still manage to pull together and get the job done when it counts. But sometimes headlines are hard.

AntiSquad by Bulkypix
Category: iOS Games
Works With: iPhone, iPad
Price: $2.99

AntiSquad is a new tactical game with a cartoonish art style and a whole lot of things to tap on. If you’ve played games like Breach & Clear or Final Fantasy Tactics, you get the general idea: Your group and the enemy take turns moving across a map trying to get into position to attack or outmaneuver each other. You have grids and buffs and cooldowns and all that other genre-standard stuff.

And other than its cool art, “genre-standard” is the best way I can think of to describe this game.

Galaxy Run Delights In Sending Its Homesick Astronaut Plunging To His Doom [Review]

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Galaxy Run

I don’t know why characters in endless runner games are always in such a big hurry.

Galaxy Run by Spiel Studios
Category: iOS Games
Works With: iPhone, iPad
Price: $0.99

Sure, Runbot was fleeing the secret lab that created him. And the guy in Temple Run has that whole “killer demon monkeys” thing going on, so he’s cool.

But Rez, the hero of the new endless runner Galaxy Run, is just headed home. Why’s he gotta be Mr. Perpetual Motion all the time? It just gets him killed a lot.

Tunnel Escape Is A Magic Carpet Ride Of Death [Review]

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Tunnel Escape 4

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 by Darryl Johnson
Category: iOS Games
Works With: iPhone, iPad
Price: Free

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.

Division Cell Wants You To Make Some Miserable Shapes Happy [Review]

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Division Cell

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 by Hyperspace Yard
Category: iOS Games
Works With: iPhone, iPad
Price: $1.99

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.

Abductor Pro: Boxy, But Good [Review]

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Abductor Pro

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.

Abductor Pro by Delicious Toys
Category: iOS Games
Works With: iPhone, iPad
Price: $2.99

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.

Experience The Thrill Of Rock Star Micromanagement In Band Stars [Review]

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Band Stars 1

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.

Band Stars by Halfbrick
Category: iOS Games
Works With: iPhone, iPad
Price: Free

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.

Numerity Is The Most Baffling Game I’ve Played In A While [Review]

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Numerity

I almost wrote off Numerity.

Numerity by Zedarus Games
Category: iOS Games
Works With: iPhone, iPad
Price: $0.99 (promotional price down from $1.99)

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.

Dapper Pufferfish Puffington Quests To Save A Lovely Lady Worm, Wot Wot [Review]

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Puffington 3

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 by Hojo Studio
Category: iOS Games
Works With: iPhone 5 (other devices soon)
Price: Free

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.

Don’t Shoot Yourself!: When You’re Ready, You Won’t Have To Dodge Bullets. But You’re Not Ready. [Review]

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Don't Shoot Yourself

I mentioned high-concept games with evocative titles earlier this week when I reviewed Tilt to Live 2, and here’s another one.

Don’t Shoot Yourself! by Ayopa Games
Category: iOS Games
Works With: iPhone, iPad
Price: $0.99

Don’t Shoot Yourself! is a quick, often frustrating little game in which the name says it all. You control a little ship (I guess) trapped inside of a series of shapes. Your main goal is to keep moving for until a number on the right side of the screen counts down to zero, and all the while your little guy is firing bullets all hither and thither. Your secondary goal is not to fly into any of those bullets.

If it sounds daunting, that’s because it is. But it’s still a game worth trying if only to see if you’re up to the challenge.

Flux Free: Painting The Line In Space [Review]

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Flux Free

The best puzzle games either have a single rule (Tetris: “Make lines.”) or a few basic rules based on things we know innately or intuitively (Where’s My Water?: “Dig holes, water goes down, steam goes up, poison is bad.”).

Flux Free by Zen Develop
Category: iOS Games
Works With: iPhone, iPad
Price: Free

Flux Free is a new iOS title which falls into the latter category. It’s a shape-matching game built on a few basic concepts like color theory that keep it from becoming obtuse even when all of its mechanics are in play.

That’s not to say that it’s incredibly easy, but you’ll never spend any time trying to remember how anything works. And it’s smart and fun, so that’s good, too.

Run Or Gun (If You’re Like Me) In Neon Shadow [Review]

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Neon Shadow

First-person shooters are tough to pull off in mobile. You have to manage two virtual joysticks if you want the flexibility of their console and PC cousins, and you also have to figure out how to make shooting work on a platform with no buttons. And thirdly, you have to compensate for the fact that the player’s thumbs must, by necessity, cover up part of the screen.

Neon Shadow by Tasty Poison Games
Category: iOS Games
Works With: iPhone, iPad
Price: $1.99

Neon Shadow is a new first-person shooter for iOS devices from developer Tasty Poison Games that aims to capture the bare-bones, “You are trapped in a cramped space with things that will kill you unless you kill them first” experience of classic FPSes, and it succeeds. It even does a callback to the original Doom games by having a picture of your character’s face that gets more bloodied and beat-up as you take damage.

Plus, you start with the shotgun, and the game gets an extra star just for that.

Stack Rabbit Is Cute, Silly, And Excellent At Balancing Fun and Microtransactions [Review]

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Stack Rabbit 4

Disney’s mobile gaming efforts are surprisingly good! Stack Rabbit joins Where’s My Mickey and Where’s My Water as another easy-to-use app designed for children, but with enough appeal that adults can find plenty to enjoy. In Stack Rabbit, you play as a kindly rabbit trying to take care of his sister’s children while she’s on vacation. To do this, you have to hastily stack veggies on your head and hop away before the snoozing guard dog wakes up.

Stack Rabbit by Disney Mobile
Category: iOS Games
Works With: iPad, iPhone
Price: Free

Each round you’re limited to a certain number of stacks and have to gather matching sets of vegetables to clear the level. The poor overworked rabbit can only carry so many vegetables at once so planning out your matches is a must unless you want to sacrifice time by dropping all the food you’ve collected.

Blocky Roads: Don’t Ask How Square Wheels Roll. Just Drive. [Review]

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Blocky Roads

Blocky Roads is kind of a weird game. It has block-based voxel graphics like Minecraft or the lesser-known Zelda clone 3D Dot Game Heroes, but rather than being an open-world construction title or a sword-and-shield adventure, it’s a game about driving cars in a 2.5D environment and picking up coins and treasure chests.

Blocky Roads by Dogbyte Games
Category: iOS Games
Works With: iPhone, iPad
Price: $1.99

And once you’ve picked up enough coins, you can upgrade your cars to get better at driving around the 2.5D environment and picking up coins and treasure chests. Or you can use those same coins to unlock a new level full of even more coins and treasure chests. And so on.

And all of this is to save your character’s farm.

No, really. It’s a weird game.

Step Into The Octagon And Prepare To Suck [Review]

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Octagon

I don’t need a game to constantly encourage me and tell me how well I’m doing or how good I am at playing it. I don’t need a game to take me by the hand and lead me along through its twists and turns. And I definitely don’t need a game to take pity on me if I’m not good at it right away.

Octagon by Lukas Korba
Category: iOS Games
Works With: iPhone, iPad
Price: $1.99

And that’s a good thing because Octagon, a new twitchy arcade title by (mean) developer Lukas Korba, isn’t interested in doing any of that. Octagon wants to hurt you. It wants you to feel terrible and incompetent, and I have reason to believe that it’s actively trying to get me to break my phone.

Don’t get me wrong; it’s still fun. But holy crap, is it difficult.

Learn To Conquer Friends Like A Virus In Pathogen [Review]

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Pathogen 3

If you’ve ever wanted to make viruses fight, Pathogen will help you realize your dreams. Pathogen is a board game that has you infecting tiles to eventually take over the entire playing field. You can play versus the computer in an increasingly difficult campaign mode or challenge your friends.

Pathogen by Gameblyr, LLC
Category: iOS Games
Works With: iPad, iPhone
Price: $2.99

Perhaps I’m not quite as good at “Go” as I thought I was, but Pathogen’s difficulty is undoubtedly the first thing you’ll notice. The computer in the campaign is prepared to take advantage of your mistakes at every turn.

I’ve frequently been so close to winning a match only to have the computer claim victory because I forgot to take over one of its pieces butting up against my wall of viruses.

Ooga Jump Around In A Prehistoric House Of Pain [Review]

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Ooga Jump

I’ve played and reviewed my share of endless runners, but Ooga Jump, a new game from Bolt Creative, takes endlessness to that other axis.

Pocket God: Ooga Jump by Bolt Creative
Category: iOS Games
Works With: iPhone, iPad
Price: $0.99

If you thought I was going to say “to new heights,” shame on you.

Ooga Jump is an “endless jumper” that was originally a minigame in Bolt’s earlier title, Pocket God. You control a Pygmy who for some reason or another is taking an infinite voyage upward via a series of platforms and collectible goodies. On his way, he encounters deadly statues, spiders, meteors, and wind, all of which want to cut his trip short by making him really, really dead.

Drei Teaches You About Friendship Through Physics! [Review]

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Drei 4

I’m a big fan of physics-based puzzles, but the trouble is most of them relate to altering an object’s trajectory as it falls rather than manipulating things.

Drei by Etter Studio GmbH
Category: iOS Games
Works With: iPad
Price: $2.99

Drei by Etter Studio GmbH does away with falling oranges and rolling balls and offers instead increasingly difficult building block puzzles that require you to balance objects, shapes, and negotiate with other players.

Name It! Relentlessly Tests Your Knowledge Of Things That Mean Stuff [Review]

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Name It!

If you fancy yourself an expert on abbreviations, acronyms, and symbols, you might want to have a go at Name It!, a new trivia game that focuses on those three things (known collectively — and somewhat awkwardly — as “AASs”). It’s a pretty niche subject, really, but the game covers a lot of ground, including such disparate topics as Presidential history (“POTUS”) and the term “YOLO,” which stands for “I have failed at life.”

Name It! by Brian Green
Category: iOS Games
Works With: iPhone, iPad
Price: Free

Name It! throws a startling number of questions at you across four rounds. And it’s all great fun until you get tired of it.

Adorably Charming Game Towncraft Gets The Job Done [Review]

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Towncraft

There’s nothing I like better than a game that charms from the get-go, and delightfully indie Towncraft is one of those games.

Towncraft by Flat Earth Games
Category: iOS Games
Works With: iPad
Price: $4.99

Developer Flat Earth Games has created a gentle yet deep crafting game that plays as equal parts Sim City and Minecraft, with hundreds of crafting recipes, super cute music, and adorable artwork.

What’s not to like?

Roll Them Bones – Digitally – With Bluetooth-Powered Dice+ [Review]

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DSC04953

Board games have enjoyed quite the resurgence on the iPad, with digital versions of just about any game folks can think of, including Monopoly, Risk, Ticket To Ride, and Small World, just to name a few.

Many of these games have excellent pass and play gameplay, which lets gamers play a turn and then hand the iPad over to a friend to take their turn. What’s been missing, though, from many of these games, is real-world dice. There’s something delightful about the randomness of the analog cube, used in all kinds of board games from Backgammon to Yahtzee.

Dice+, then, aims to remedy that with a big, lovely, bluetooth-powered die, ready with its own app full of dice games that will work with the plastic die. Suffice it to say that playing a digital game with a real-world die is, simply put, sublime.

I See Art Missing, And I Want To Paint It Back [Review]

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Paint It Back

Fans of Games Magazine will know the puzzles in developer Casual Labs’ Paint It Back as “Paint by Numbers.” Owners of the Nintendo DS portable system might recognize them as Picross, and giant puzzle nerds might know them as Nonograms for Non Ishida, the Japanese graphics editor who invented them.

Paint It Back by Casual Labs
Category: iOS Games
Works With: iPhone, iPad
Price: Free ($2.99 full-game unlock)

The point is that Paint It Black is not doing anything new; this puzzle type, in which solvers use logic to determine which squares in a grid to fill in to make a picture, is readily available a lot of places. But that’s not to say that this app is a boring rehash.

In fact, whether you’re a fan of Nonograms or picking them up for the first time, Paint It Black has a lot to offer.

Gamebook Adventures 8: Curse Of The Assassin Will Make You Nostalgic For The Scholastic Book Sale [Review]

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Gamebook Adventures 8

Old people like me grew up with Choose Your Own Adventure books. This occasionally ridiculous series introduced an entire generation of children to both the importance of choice and the oddball nuances of second-person narrative.

Gamebook Adventures 8: Curse of the Assassin by Tin Man Games
Category: iOS Games
Works With: iPhone, iPad
Price: $5.99

Following in that tradition is the Gamebook Adventures franchise, which adds a dice-driven, role-playing-style combat system to its branching fantasy storyline. The eighth entry, Curse of the Assassin, is out now; it’s a slow-paced, text-heavy, epic beast of an experience.

So basically, it’s everything people love about those books.

Disco Bees – Come For The Name, Stay For The Cuteness [Review]

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Disco Bees

The only reason I picked up Disco Bees to play today was the name. I’m really rather tired of the match-three dynamic, but I figured cute bees and disco music was a good combo to try, regardless.

Disco Bees by Space Inch
Category: iOS Games
Works With: iPhone
Price: Free

What I found was a compelling match-three game that does indeed have the same mechanics as many other free-to-play matching games, like Candy Crush or Dragon Academy. In addition, however, it’s got amazingly adorable dancing bees and a killer soundtrack that does fantastic justice to the disco genre without using licensed music.

Did I mention cute dancing bees? You really need more? Fine.

Nakama Has The Cutest Cloud-Riding Ninja You Ever Did See [Review]

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Nakama start

In a world overrun with endless runners, it’s nice to see a cheery little beat-em-up among their number. Nakama is the delightfully colorful quest of a ninja rescuing his friends from bad guys then teaming up with them to take on even bigger, badder dudes ahead.

Nakama by Crescent Moon Games
Category: iOS Games
Works With: iPhone, iPad
Price: $0.99

Nakama is yet another faux-retro style brawler, complete with pixel graphics. The use of color sets it apart from most, however. Splashes of brilliant greens and vibrant pinks set a whimsical tone as you slash through hordes of baddies. When you fall in battle, you can even ride a cloud back to your last location, Dragon Ball-style.