When it comes to iOS gaming, nothing tops the exhilarating feeling of beating your friends’ high scores. But with so many games and so many scores to keep track of, it can be a lot to handle. Luckily, Apple’s Game Center app can help you take down the competition.
In today’s video, we show you how to master the Game Center app and become the best of the best. Find the hottest trending games, challenge your gaming “foes” and more using this underrated stock app.
A whole roster of special power-ups keeps Dragon Raiders fresh and exciting.
I’m soaring through the air, dodging fallen trees and rocky overhangs, and evading plumes of sooty black smoke while trying to collect as many runes as I possibly can — and I’m loving it. Who would have thought being a dragon would be so cool?
In Dragon Raiders, an intriguing new iOS runner game, you’ll duck, dive and dodge your way through endless levels of entertaining fun to save the land of Landslandia from the meddling Megawobblins.
Booty as in treasure, you perv. Photo: Rob LeFebvre, Cult of Mac
Full disclosure: the publisher of the naughtily-named Age of Booty: Tactics sent Cult of Mac a really nice wooden treasure chest with some fun promotional stuff in it. This usually means that we’d give it a skip, as generally, the better the swag, the crappier the game. We were pleasantly surprised, then, when we found Age of Booty‘s first outing on iOS to be a pretty darn great free-to-play game, with only a few caveats for the novice player.
The original Age of Booty was a 2008 downloadable real-time strategy game for Xbox and PlayStation, developed by Certain Affinity and published by Capcom. This time around, Certain Affinity took the concept to iOS with Age of Booty: Tactics, which switches things up, adding some new mechanics to the strategy formula and putting it into an asynchronous multiplayer format.
The graphics are charming enough, the soundtrack is appropriately pirate-themed, and the sea and boat sounds are nicely atmospheric. It’s in the strategic gameplay, though, that Age of Booty: Tactics surely shines.
Death is inevitable as you battle your way through a labyrinth of dungeons in Hellraid: The Escape.
I’ve been trying to slip past demonic guards to escape magical chambers for the past few hours as I fight my way through the horrific world of Hellraid: The Escape. At its best, the game is gruesome, bloody and full of suspense, but it can also be painful and highly frustrating.
Because in this iOS game, death is no stranger: Die you will, over and over — that’s bloody guaranteed.
The Angry Birds are, ahem, transforming yet again in this new trailer from Rovio and Hasbro, released to coincide with San Diego Comic Con this week.
You’ve got the red bird cosplaying as a voice-less Optimus Prime, running his way through an island-style world, smashing through crates, and then finally facing a giant, laughing pig-bot Deceptihog. It doesn’t get much better than this. Check out the video below.
As someone who’s never witnessed any paranormal activity, I’d probably crap myself should I ever come across a ghost in real life. Luckily I’ve got the Blackwell adventure games to give me a tidy little taste of the supernatural.
The episodic game series introduces you to the spirit world through the eyes of Rosangela Blackwell, for whom dealing with specters comes as no surprise, thanks to her family’s long history of strange and unexplained happenings. Her story unfolds over five games that were originally released on PC (and ported to Mac). The first three games in the series, recently ported smoothly and successfully to iOS, introduce us to a brilliantly told story driven by dialogue and character interaction, with many problem-solving elements.
“You have no idea what loss is,” says Joel, the protagonist in the best game of 2013, The Last Of Us.
On July 28, you’ll be able to watch a live stream of the principal actors read select lines from Naughty Dog’s cinematic hit. Troy Baker, Ashley Johnson, Merle Dandridge, Hanna Hayes, and Annie Wersching — the main characters in the game — will take direction from none other than Neil Druckmann himself, the writer and director of The Last of Us. Academy Award-winning composer Gustavo Santaolalla will be on hand as well to play selections from his game score.
Check out the promo trailer below for more details.
I know that TwoDots, the followup to last year’s megahit Dots, has been out for a little while, but I have a pretty good excuse for not having reviewed it yet: I’ve been playing it this whole time.
It’s taken me so long to get to this article, in fact, that the developer has since released an update with a bunch more levels, and now this review is timely again. So take that, Time.
Anyway, TwoDots is a lot of fun. Provided you’re incredibly lucky.
When you’re dealing with a genre as tired as the endless runner (no pun intended), it can be difficult to do something new. That’s not the case with Fotonica, an upcoming iOS title.
By switching the genre to a first-person perspective (you even see your arms pumping back and forth at the edges of the screen) and adopting sparse vector art, the dynamic game looks like the kind of title we might have dreamed of owning back in the 1980s.
The Flappy Bird phenomenon will never die. Although the game has been pulled from the App Store, the addictive little Bird has spawned a million clones, and been ported to all manner of devices, including Android and Windows Phone smartphones, as well as the Mac.
But what you’re about to see might just be the ultimate Flappy Bird port. It’s Flappy Bird running on a vintage Apple IIc, at an astonishing 60 frames per second.
If you want to delve into the deep end with a massively online battle arena game, you can head on over to Riot Games’ League of Legends or Valve’s own Dota 2 with your computer, download a free copy of each game, and then dive in.
Or, you can grab a copy of Fates Forever, a surprisingly well-tuned and deep version of the popular game genre and eSports phenomenon. It’s been over a year in development by the team led by the founder of proto-Game Center Open Feint and one of the first hit game devs on the iOS platoform (Aurora Feint), Jason Citron.
When we spoke to Citron last summer, he was full of excitement about his promising game-in-development. The wait has been worth it, as Fates Forever puts on an impressive show, squeezing a fully-realized MOBA game complete with distinctive heroes and cunningly designed infrastructure that can encourage and include everyone, from those brand new to the genre to the more veteran MOBA players, all on the iPad.
This is a fantastic game, and you’ll want to check it out right now.
If you think that the conceit behind Ubisoft’s hacker-themed video game Watch Dogs isn’t real enough, be sure to take a look at this website.
Watch_Dogs We Are Data takes real world, publicly-accessible location-based data and parses it into a display ripped directly from the video game of the same name. You can visit Berlin, Paris, or London, and zoom on down into the various regions of each city to see where mobile phones are, read tweets originating from specific spots, and see icons that represent CCTV feeds, traffic lights, and more.
If this doesn’t freak you out even just a little, then more power to you.
The deep synth pad from M83’s “My Tears Are Becoming A Sea” fills the air with an ethereal sound in this new trailer (below) for an upcoming video game. We watch a strange winged creature land on the ground just in time for a lithe foot to strike nearby. It’s a elf-like warrior archer, and she’s running for her life.
Saved by a golden steampunk robot character, the archer gets up and re-takes her place in the battle against hordes of robotic enemies, alongside a bunch of other heroes, including a blood-red dual-sword-wielding elf-dude with long hair as well as a massive dude with a gigantic gatling gun, like something out of Team Fortress 2.
All of this takes place in cinematic-styled slow motion, with M83’s music as the perfect match to the trailer’s action. “This is something to take seriously,” the trailer seems to say. “This is a game you’ll want to play.”
This is Battleborn, the upcoming “hero-shooter” from 2K games and Gearbox Software, the publisher/developer team behind the highly-successful Borderlands series.
Arguably the most-anticipated game for the new generation of consoles, Destiny aims to be a sci-fi first-person shooter from the same folks who all but created the genre with Halo back in 2001.
Today, Bungie put out the call: pre-order the game now (which is set to launch to retail in September) and get early, exclusive access to the Destiny beta.
PlayStation 4 owners will get to play first, with a July 17th beta launch date, while Xbox One gamers will get to play just a week out on July 23rd. The beta itself will terminate on July 26, with a special event for all gamers who show up on the games servers before the end of the day.
Check out the trailer below for some gorgeous visuals along with a few details.
First-person shooter Borderlands 2 offers up a ton of guns and a huge, open-world map with more in-jokes and Easter eggs than you can shake a boom-stick at. With the help of our friends over at Aspyr (publisher of the Mac version of the game), we’re going to share with you four of the hardest-to-find secrets from within the post-apocalyptic sci-fi video game.
Plus, read till the end and you’ll get a special deal exclusively for Cult of Mac readers who want their own copy of the Game of the Year edition of Borderlands 2 (the one with all the DLC packs along with the basic game) at a heavily discounted price.
Imagine if you were actually a hunter of massive, dangerous creatures. You’d need to gear up, make sure you have all the weaponry and armor you’d need, enough ammo for your ranged weapons, and you’d have to be sure your giant swords are sharp enough to cut through touch monster hide.
You’d need to practice, for sure, and you’d probably get better over time, able to aim your sights at even more deadly monsters, because the bigger the baddie, the better the payoff.
Monster Hunter Freedom Unite is exactly this. While hunting monsters is a ton of stressful fun, full of dodging and attacking and slaying, the rest of the activities in-game — choosing weapons, farming, hiring chefs and companions, crafting and buying better weaponry and armor — are equally as satisfying.
And now? It’s on your iPhone (or iPad), with some really excellent touch controls and better visuals than ever.
Warhammer 40,0000 is nothing if not crazily over-the-top, as this new trailer for a first-person shooter set in the far-future setting of the game universe shows.
This is the first video captured exclusively within the game engine, Unreal Engine 4, showing off all the lighting and texture effects in great detail.
In this game from developer Streum On Studio, you’ll play as a Librarian of the Deathwing, an elite force of hugely-armored badasses from the future who are trapped in a Space Hulk, a massive derelict space ship drifting in the outer reaches of the galaxy. You’ll take on hordes of Genestealers, the Alien-like enemies who are out to, well, kill you dead.
Robert Topala created current App Store champ Geometry Dash on his MacBook Pro. Photo: Robert Topala
Back in August, a new game arrived in the iOS App Store and almost immediately vanished without a trace.
“I received a few great reviews from news sites, but not enough to have an impact,” says Robert Topala, founder of RobTop Games and developer of the disappearing game. “Since I had no marketing budget it quickly dropped in rankings after release.”
For most games that would have been it. And if the story stopped there, it wouldn’t have been a tale of total failure: Topala wasn’t a professional coder, and had only been making mobile games for a couple years at the time. Simply finishing a game, getting it in the App Store and picking up a few accolades would have been nice enough.
Alone in a booth with a headset on. Photo: Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac Photo: Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac
“Die, fish. Die! Die, shark!”
That’s what one goggled attendee shouts near the end of Sony’s new video (below) showing people’s reaction to its not-yet-released virtual reality headset, codenamed Project Morpheus, at the Electronic Entertainment Expo a couple weeks back in Los Angeles.
He and many other gamers got the chance to try out Sony’s answer to the Oculus Rift at the expo, and boy is it weird to watch them from the outside.
It’s hard to show what VR is really all about without, you know, actually having you wear the headsets. VR rigs like Oculus Rift and Project Morpheus have an uphill battle to convince the rank and file that VR is going to be compelling enough to shell out even more money for their gaming systems.
Sony opted to show us people from the outside, and I’m not sure it’s any more compelling than a 2D video of the VR games on offer right now.
With summertime here in the northern hemisphere, it’s definitely time to get outdoors and sample all that the world has to offer.
Of course, if Steam or GoG.com have anything to say about it, you’ll stay inside working on your pasty complexion playing all these amazing games for very little money.
Both gaming digital distribution platforms have their respective summer sales on right now, and you can grab some amazing games without emptying your wallet. All of the games below are playable on Mac or PC, so pick your poison.
The sequel to one of our favorite games is headed to iOS this July 2. Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution 2 will be a premium title for your iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, so get ready to strategize your way to victory with new leaders Churchill and Kennedy on the go.
This is the first Civ game developed especially for mobile devices with new gameplay and controls that work well on touch screens. You’ll get the same core strategic and tactical joy the series is known for, but with more user-friendly controls and interface. You’ll also get some new historical leaders — like Churchill and Kennedy — who will take their place alongside favorites Ghandi, Lincoln, and Napoleon.
A pair of games by DeNA prove you don't have to pay to play something great. Photo: Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac
LOS ANGELES — Free-to-play games don’t enjoy the same cache as games that cost money right out of the gate. Sure, they’re at the top of the “making money” charts, as gamers download freebies by the bucketful (and apparently purchase loads of virtual stuff from them), but ask any gamer what they think of them and they’ll typically give you a blank, slightly annoyed stare.
So I honestly didn’t hold out much hope that I’d see anything super-interesting at an Electronic Entertainment Expo luncheon sponsored by free-to-play mobile game maker DeNA last week.
However, the developer showed off a couple of pretty damn good games at the event. We saw the recently released Transformers tie-in game and several others, including Peter Molyneux’s latest effort, Godus. But what really stuck out for me were Royal Defenders and WARP.
The Atari Mindlink was never released, though it was supposed to come out in 1984 for the Atari 2600. It was developed to read your head muscles (not actually your mind) and move stuff in the games developed for it, Bionic Breakthrough and Mind Maze. The games never even came out, either. Test players got headaches, apparently, moving their eyebrows around to play these uninteresting games.
Grub has super solid tilt controls -- a rarity in iOS games. Photo: Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac
Every once in a while, it’s good to take a step back from the more intense flavors of gaming available on your iPhone or iPad and just play a game that’s pure fun.
Grub, sequel to the hit game from independent game studio Pixowl, Greedy Grub, is one of those purely fun experiences that just begs to be played.
Last week at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, I got a chance to try this delightful little Snake-style game out on the developer’s iPad, and was enchanted by the visuals right off the bat.
Take a look at the video below to see what I mean.
It was my job to stalk the surrounding map, eating smaller creatures in order to build up my armor and get evolution points, which would let me add and strengthen my special monstrous abilities.
I had to do this while being hunted by a team of four humans, each with their own specialty: the heavily armored, damage-dealing Assault class, the crafty Trapper with her energy-field dome to fence me in, the Support class, with a variety of ranged weapons, and the Medic, who kept healing those bastards as I hit them with my own smart bombs, electric attacks and sharp claws.
It was a heady, scary time, but I persevered. I flew up to the sky, hurling furious attacks upon their heads. I ran away, hiding behind huge rock columns to avoid their deadly assault. I ate and evolved.
Then, after about 20 minutes of furious action, I died, the victim of their unwarranted greed and violence.
I loved playing Evolve, and so will you. Check out the trailer below to see the Kraken, the second monster revealed for the upcoming console and PC game.
