iPhone games - page 10

Cute animals are always in trouble.

They’re always lost or in danger, or they want to eat a crap-ton of candy but can’t without your help. They’re a burden on everyone they meet, and if it weren’t for us, they would all die cold and alone in the woods from an attack by a larger animal or scurvy or something.

But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t help them. Like the star of FreeDum, who has fallen into the clutches of a pint-sized Jigsaw Killer of animals. I think he’s worthy of aid, and you can do so in this fun little maze game.

Video games have always had some weird vendetta against bricks. That paddle in Breakout, Mario, Simon Belmont in Castlevania … they all busted up blocks like they caught them stealing their lunches.

To be fair, Simon Belmont often found entire hams and stuff hidden in the walls of Dracula’s castle, so maybe some food thievery had happened. I don’t know; you tell me how those hams got there.

Regardless, Shatter Alley wants to bring the blockpocalypse back, and it does so in frantic, retro fashion.

Taijitu is a game about balance and serenity. It will level you out, calm you down, and relax you … up, I guess.

I’m not sure which direction relaxation goes.

Anyway, the game. It’s laid-back, and you’ll like it. It has all the colors, and the music just made me nod off for like 20 minutes. But that’s good, really. Kinda the point.

I have a really random PlayStation 2 game on my shelf called Magic Pengel: The Quest for Color. It came out in North America in 2002, and it was basically a game in which you drew your own Pokémon and then made them fight.

Animal-abuse undertones aside, it was at least an interesting concept, and MonsterCrafter Pro follows in that same proud, if morally gray, tradition. But instead of drawing your murder-pets, you build them out of Minecraft blocks.

It’s a weird game for sure, but it has its charms.

I’m not usually a big fan of the whole “do it over and over until you get it right” genre of games typified by the Trials series of games, but this one has me hooked. Developed by RedLynx and now published by Ubisoft, the latest version of the game is also the first on mobile: Trials Frontier. You can grab it for free now for your iPad or iPhone.

Like all of the other installments in the series, Frontier is all about piloting a motorcycle with a rag-doll rider through increasingly intense tracks with jumps, loops and environmental hazards.

Here’s a quick gameplay video to show you how it works.

The robots are coming, you guys. And they want all of our ice cream. What are we going to do?

We could call in the military, or we could devise some kind of electromagnetic pulse. Or, what the heck, let’s just stand out in the street and throw bricks at them. None of these ideas will work. But here’s a fun new game that knows the correct answer.

Robots Love Ice Cream knows that all free people must be prepared to sacrifice everything to protect that freedom, and the same should be true of tasty desserts. So obviously the best course of action is to convert an ice-cream truck into a rolling tank that fires single-scoop cones with enough velocity to penetrate an invading robot’s cold, unfeeling metal hull.

I mean, duh.

I find the premise of Millie highly dubious.

It’s a puzzle game that uses the same basic concept as the classic Snake: You’re trying to lead a cute little millipede through a series of mazes, collecting pellets and shoes and navigating in such a way that she does not collide with herself. And the point of all of this is to get her to aviation school so that she can become a pilot.

That’s seriously what this game is about. It’s fun enough, but what?

Princess Ida needs to find herself, and she’s doing so with a quest across an unpredictable and shifting landscape that takes inspiration from perspective-bending Escher art and hit indie game Fez.

You’ll need to tap on the screen to get Ida moving to her end goal, swiping and rotating dozens of different mechanical gadgets to make sure she can continue on her way. The puzzles aren’t super difficult, but they do require a bit of thought, and plenty of them are downright ingenious. You’ll feel pretty darn intelligent when you finally get that “aha!” moment.

Check out our play-through video below to get a sense of how lush and calming Monument Valley really is.

15 Coins is hard. Alright, that was the shortest review I’ve ever written. I’ll be back Monday.

Apparently, my editor refuses to pay me for three sentences, so I guess I’ll elaborate.

15 Coins is an arcade avoidance game where you’re trying to collect the eponymous pick-ups before you run into a past version of yourself and explode. Probably because of a paradox or whatever happened to Ron Silver at the end of Timecop. Actually, I think the game calls your pursuers “drones,” but they look like you and follow the same path you did, so I’m just going to go ahead and call time travel on this one. The point is that it’s difficult.

Monument Valley is what would happen if Fez and The Room (the game, not the movie) took place inside of M.C. Escher’s sketchbook.

It has a vibrant, interesting world full of impossible geometry, mysterious accusers, and bothersome crows. It’s a puzzle game and a jumpless platformer, and it’s endlessly amazing and mind-boggling to behold.

It is also one of the easiest games I’ve ever played, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t check it out.

Evolution, just released on the App Store, is looking like a badass free-to-play science fiction role-playing game with real style.

Build your base to collect resources, battle with your character in real time, solve environmental puzzles, and upgrade everything–weapons, armor, special abilities–as you go.

All of this and free to boot, Evolution promises to meet your sci-fi combat gaming needs on your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad.

What are you doing?

You would tell yourself, “I am reading a review for Sometimes You Die.” You take it for granted that I am going somewhere with this. My opinion is just a shadow. A number.

Alright, I can’t keep that up, but before you leap into the Internet and punch me in the face, know two things: First, that was a taste of the narration for the oddball minimalist platformer Sometimes You Die. And second, I’m still recovering from my last face punch, so don’t be a jerk.

As for the game, it’s brilliant. You don’t even need to read the rest of this. Just go buy it and get it in your brain-hole.

Side-scrolling shoot-em-ups are typically exercises in excess. You have no shortage of enemies, power-ups, or ridiculously large bosses, and most importantly, you have all the bullets you’ll ever need. Just hit the button anytime, and bullets come out. That’s how it works.

“Oh, really?” says Exodite. “How about if it didn’t?” And that’s when things get a little weird.

By limiting your ammo, Exodite brazenly defies decades of tradition. And it’s kind of brilliant for that.

Any old physics puzzler can ask you to fling a ball into a goal with a bunch of springs or conveyer belts whatever. And most of them don’t care how you get the ball there, as long as it does.

But Lightlands thinks you can do better than that, and it encourages you to get the ball to its home along the most efficient route possible.

You can still go the “no pictures on scorecards” route and just get the thing to the other thing, but where’s the challenge in that?

Developer Parsec Productions’ PC horror title Slender: The Eight Pages was one of my favorite games of 2012. It packs an impressive amount of horror and suspense into a very simple idea — being lost in the woods while an unbeatable enemy relentlessly pursues you — and it was one of the few games I’ve ever played that really and truly terrified me.

It makes sense that others would want to get in on that action, and while you have plenty of Slender Man games to choose from in the App Store, Dead Room: The Dark One takes the same basic concept and puts its own creepy spin on it.

And as fairly overt copies go, it’s pretty good.

Finnish developer Supercell has a huge hit on its hands with Clash of Clans, and they’re releasing a brand new follow-up that looks surprisingly similar: Boom Beach.

In Clash of Clans, you build a base and defend it with your medieval warriors. You can also go out and attack other people’s bases.

In the trailer for Boom Beach, you might notice a familiar mechanic at work.

You know the drill: You’re up against an endless stream of foes moving toward you, and all you can do is move back and forth and shoot. They may be space invaders or enemy fighters or weird … animal things or something, but it’s always up to you and your single dimension of movement to stop them.

And then TriBlaster shows up and is all, “Pssssh, let’s double that.” So the developers added in a jump button, and suddenly things get completely different.

That’s right, people. Two dimensions. Welcome to the future.

SAN FRANCISCO — We’re gearing up for our weeklong foray into the world of video games at the Game Developers Conference here. Cult of Mac will bring you the best of the conference, from heartfelt chats with independent developers to wacky schwag we find on the expo floor.

Stay tuned as we add real-time posts to this liveblog all week.

I don’t own a whole lot of Lego at the moment, and that’s intentional because if I did, I’d just sit around building things all day, and none of these reviews would happen.

Building something from scratch is satisfying, and if it has a function to perform and succeeds, it’s even better. Loco Motors plays on this by letting you build your own vehicle and then use it to complete tasks on a test ramp. It’s essentially two puzzle games in one: one in which you build a car that will run, and another where you let it loose on the track to complete specific tracks.

And luckily, it has an interface that lets you do these things both easily and quickly.

You never know how many words you know until a game or puzzle calls upon you to pull them up.

And you also never realize how many words you forget until the same thing happens. A good word puzzle is neither too obvious nor too obscure. It makes you think of concepts in different ways. And it lets solvers surprise themselves with their mental gymnastics.

Bonza Word Puzzle does all of these things, and it’s worth a look.

I like endless runners as much as the next person (which works out well considering how many I review), but I’m not opposed to a developer trying something new with them.

Dark Guardians is one such attempt, adding rhythm-game elements and arcade twitch play to the well-trod genre. And it’s an experiment that pays off big, resulting in an exciting and all-around fun title.

It’s also smart and good-looking. And the music is excellent. Basically, I’m a fan.

Alright, so I don’t know for sure that it’s a colon, but you’re definitely inside something’s guts.

And you’ll never get out because Microtrip is an endless faller in which you guide a blob down into the bowels of the bowels of a creature. It’s more pleasant than you think, though, because everything’s all cute-ified and cartoonish.

It’s also a lot of fun, provided you don’t crave variety

I really like it when a game doesn’t treat me like an idiot. It makes me feel smart and respected not to have to sit through a tutorial that explains the most basic tenets of the game like one character on CSI explaining to another what DNA is.

But this appreciation has limits, especially when the developer doesn’t even bother telling me what the backstory is and why I’m fighting these people.

Puzzling Rush is one such game, and while I know that I don’t need much of a refresher on how match-threes work, it’s still mostly up to you to figure out how the hell to play it.

I have fond memories of waking up Saturday morning, pouring myself a bowl of Marshmallow Mateys (because Count Chocula was out of season), and plunking down on the couch to watch my favorite cartoons. And then, when the cereal was gone and the show was over, I opened my laptop and cranked out that review of Demolition Crush that went up Monday.

I am not an adult, is what I’m getting at here.

Glorkian Warrior: The Trials of Glork is a collaboration between developer Pixeljam and comic-book artist James Kochalka. It feels like a mashup between classic arcade shooter Galaga and Adventure Time, which means that it hits all the right notes for people whose favorite breakfasts still end in bowls full of chocolate milk.

Faif is a weird game.

It’s kind of like Bejeweled, only you’re not trying to match anything. And it’s kind of like a role-playing game, except you’re not really on a quest (or are you?). It’s sort of like gambling, but you don’t win anything, and it’s a smidge like a free-to-play game, but you don’t have to pay real money for the in-game currency.

All of these kindas and sortas add up to a unique experience that I think I enjoy, but I’m honestly not sure.