Games - page 9

Lyxo is an ultra-realistic game about bounced light. It’s also one of the most aesthetically beautiful games to arrive in the App Store for quite a while. And, yes, it’s possible to be both at once.

“I first had the idea while lying in bed one morning,” Tobias Sturn, the one-person development studio known as Emoak, told Cult of Mac. “I saw a beam of light falling beautifully into the room, and cutting through the shadows. Immediately, I thought of a game where the player uses mirrors to guide a beam of light through a completely dark room.”

Jump forward a little over a year, and this week Lyxo launched on iOS. Sturn took us through the game’s creation, including opening up his sketchbooks, and explained his crash course in physics to build the game engine.

Blast through waves of zombies in Survival Z, an action game that launched Friday on Apple Arcade. You’ll be facing different types of shambling undead and must destroy them with an array of weapons and traps.

Microsoft has already begun internal testing of a cloud-based version of Xbox Game Pass playable on an iPhone or iPad. Public beta test is scheduled to begin in the spring.

Lumen is a new vision in gaming. Literally. It invites players to solve a variety of puzzles by manipulating lights, lenses and mirrors.

The puzzler debuted Friday for a variety of platforms exclusively through Apple Arcade.

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, the “spiritual successor” to the excellent Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, just got a big update on iOS.

The game made its debut back in 2019. It’s a Metroidvania type video game, set in 18th century England during the time of the Industrial Revolution. It started life as crowdfunding venture led by Symphony of the Night assistant director, Koji “Iga” Igarashi.

Populus Run isn’t a typical running game. Players control a group of people, not a single runner. And, oh yeah, you have to evade gigantic fast food and engage in rap battles. Because games.

The title zoomed onto the Apple Arcade subscription service on Friday.

Brawl Stars, the multiplayer arena battle game, is the latest mobile game to pull in more than $1 billion in gross lifetime revenue, app analytics platform Sensor Tower reports.

This means that the title, made by Finnish developers Supercell, is now part of an exclusive club of Supercell titles that includes Clash of Clans, Clash Royale, and Hay Day.

Fan of Metroidvania games? Like mice and pixelart? Then you might want to check out Micetopia, a new game starring a “brave mouse who must fight, jump, and explore its way through a world of mystery.”

Micetopia, created by Russian developer NinjaRabbitStudio, is available now to download on iOS and iPadOS in the App Store. Check out the trailer below.

When Florian Mueller submitted his latest game to the App Store, he didn’t think it would end with him filing a complaint against Apple with the European Union, the U.S. Department of Justice and other antitrust authorities around the world.

But that’s exactly what happened after Apple rejected his Corona Control Game due to its COVID-19 theme. Google, which barred Mueller’s game from the Google Play store, is also named in his complaints.

Germany-based Mueller, who has another career as a blogger on legal issues, is not happy with how Apple and Google handled his game submission.

“When [Apple and Google] rejected the game at the beta-testing stage, I was indeed surprised that they took issue with it in such a fundamental way they wouldn’t even let us distribute it to testers,” Mueller, 51, told Cult of Mac.

Spire Blast, a physics-based match puzzler that debuted Friday on Apple Arcade, is one of those simple games that so many people find addictive.

Strategically use colored balls to knock down towers. It’s a casual game that’s easy to learn but with multiple levels to keep it challenging.

The squirrels are out there. And no one knows that they’re doing. It’s your job to find out in Nuts — A Surveillance Mystery, which debuted Friday on Apple Arcade as well as other platforms.

It’s a game for everyone who thinks they’d be a good spy. Just not a creepy one.

Edit: Like the creepy girls intoning the return of The Undertaker at Judgment Day 2000, “He’s here.” Or, at least, the game is. You can download it for free from the App Store, with in-app purchases.

There are plenty of subjects I’ll happily geek out about. But pro wrestling and Apple are both prominent players in the top tier. Imagine, then, my excitement when the two get brought together like some odd-couple tag team.

The latest example in this limited convergence genre? A new game called Wrestling Empire, which is set to superkick its way into the App Store soon. Check out the trailer.

December was a good month for Call of Duty: Mobile, which topped the iOS App Store list of most-downloaded games, according to a new report from app analytics platform Sensor Tower.

The App Store in China had its biggest single-day removal of apps ever — with a massive 39,000 games given the boot by Apple on Thursday alone. This is as a result of Chinese laws stating that all game publishers must obtain a special license in order to distribute their titles.

According to research firm Qimai, only 74 of the top 1,500 games in the App Store survived the massive app bloodbath. Major titles that vanished included the likes of Assassin’s Creed Identity and NBA 2K20.

Mario Kart Tour is so over 2020, and ready to take on the nothing-can-possibly-go-wrong utopia that is 2021.

With that subtext, the popular Nintendo racing game has released its last update of the year, kicking off the New Year’s 2021 Tour. This tour, which runs through January 12 or 13 (timezone depending), features a plethora of new tracks.

Check out the trailer below.

‘Tis the season to be jolly — or, it seems, to take your mortal enemies, tear their still-beating hearts from their chests, and then freeze said organ in your hand, all while laughing evilly. Or something similarly twisted.

That’s an around-about way of saying that Mortal Kombat for iOS has received an update. If you’re looking for a bit of gory fighting action to distract you from the impending holidays, it’s well worth checking out. Although why you’d have any built-up stress that needs excising after 2020 is beyond me…

Serious gaming on your iPad or iPhone gets better with an external Xbox or PlayStation controller instead of a touchscreen. And Apple recently improved the experience even more by allowing you to reconfigure the buttons on your game controller.

Here’s how to customize what those all-important buttons do.

Google followed through with a promise to make its Stadia cloud-gaming service available for iPhone and iPad. On Wednesday, the company starting the process of giving Apple mobile devices access to console-quality games, including Cyberpunk 2077.

But don’t look to the Stadia application in the App Store — the subscription service must be played through a web app.

The world may have struggled in 2020, but life’s been good on the App Store — and especially if you’re the makers of PUBG Mobile, Honor of Kings, Pokémon GO, Coin Master, and Roblox.

Those five mobile games all broke $1 billion in takings in 2020, across both iOS and Android. The first two, both made by Tencent, managed to break through the $2 billion barrier, claims a report from app analytics platform Sensor Tower.

Head off with a little girl as she wanders a Mediterranean island rescuing animals in Alba: A Wildlife Adventure. She’s supposed to be on vacation, but she’s ready to start an environmental movement instead!

The game, which hit Apple Arcade on Friday, is from Ustwo Games, the creator of the classic Monument Valley.

Dark forces are on the rise and your quest is the defeat them with the power of… pinball. OK, high fantasy this is not. Instead, Zombie Rollerz: Pinball Heroes fuses pinball and tower defense into a deliberately wacky game that launched Friday on Apple Arcade.

And the in-app purchases that plagued the original version are gone!

Genshin Impact is Apple’s pick for iPhone Game of the Year, despite only landing in the App Store at the end of September. That’s not its only impressive claim to fame, however. According to app analytics platform Sensor Tower, the open-world RPG generated close to $400 million in its first two months alone.

That averages more than $6 million a day across both iOS and Android — with Apple’s platform accounting for the majority of that spending.

As great as it is to see brand new games arrive in the App Store, it’s in some ways even better when a game you enjoyed as a fresh-faced young person, eyes shining excitedly at the prospect of life stretching ahead of you, gets ported to iOS. What better way to relive misspent youth?

The latest title set to receive this treatment is Square Enix’s SaGa Frontier, an RPG which found relative fame on the PlayStation (that’s right, young people: the first PlayStation) back in the late 1990s. Look for SaGa Frontier Remastered to arrive on iOS (alongside Android, PS4, Nintendo Switch, and PC) in summer 2021.

Check out the trailer.

An archer and her eagle are the centers of The Pathless, an open-world adventure that debuted Thursday for iPad, Mac, iPhone and other platforms. Players take on the role of the Hunter, who travels a mystical island with her feathered companion and dispel a curse of darkness. There are monsters to slay and puzzles to solve.

Apple Arcade subscribers can play this new title at a considerable savings over other platforms.

You can live your dream to become a space rockstar in Reigns: Beyond. Players will need to do everything from planning tour dates to fighting space pirates in this card-based game that launched Friday on Apple Arcade.