iPhone games - page 11

The cosmos has a bunch of ways to kill you, and in Out There, one of them will probably succeed. And it’s just as well, really, because I have it from a reliable source that it’s lonely out in space.

But if you insist on surviving, you’re in for a challenge because this game is as cruel and random as life itself. You play the role of a lone astronaut who wakes up from cryosleep to discover that your circuit’s dead, and there’s something wrong. And now, you’re stuck in uncharted territory with limited resources.

It’s up to you to get the stranded hero across the map, but it’s not at all easy.

Wave Wave reminds me of the end of a story called “Blind Alleys” from an old Tales from the Crypt comic. It’s about the residents of a home for the blind seeking revenge on their unscrupulous caregiver by setting him loose in a maze lined with razor blades with a starving dog. He’s running from the beast, slashing himself to ribbons but still staying ahead, “And then some idiot turned out the lights.”

Why does this twitchy arcade game remind me of that sadistic story? Because it hates me in the same way, starting me out at a disadvantage and then continuing to throw in sudden changes until I lose.

It’s a random, cruel, mechanical bull of a game, and you should absolutely play it.

Mac game publisher Aspyr Media announced Thursday the release of the latest update of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, the iOS port of the classic role-playing game set in the Star Wars universe.

The update is free and includes much-asked for support for Made-For-iPhone (MFi) controllers like the Steel Series Stratus, Moga Ace Power Controller, or the Logitech PowerShell. In addition, the team has added iCloud saves and new supported languages including English, French, Italian, German and Spanish.

Mines of Mars is a fantastic mining and crafting game with a mysterious story, developed by WickeyWare and published by Crescent Moon Games. It’s along the lines of Super Motherload or SteamWorld Dig, in that you must manage your fuel and cargo space while you dig deep into the crust of the Martian planet to find ores, gems, and other secrets.

You’ll come up to the surface to fuel up, exchange ores for ingots, play some fun mini-games based on arcade classics like Berzerk.

It’s a game full of mystery and atmosphere, mostly due to the creepy storyline and amazingly atmospheric soundtrack by composer Evan Gipson. Check out the trailer below to see what it looks like.

You know how it goes: You’re up late, feeling a little peckish, and you don’t have anything in the fridge. What do you do?

I mean, I’d go to the store down the street and get some sour bears. And if you’re Draku, the star of Midnight Bite, you do the same thing. Except substitute “store down the street” with “village at the base of the mountain,” and substitute “sour bears” with “blood of the sleeping townsfolk.”

But he’s a little guy, and the humans are prejudiced against vampire children who stalk up in the night and murder them, so he has to be careful. And as the one controlling him, you also have to be careful because the controls are apparently also racist against the undead.

God of Light has a simple, fun concept. It has pretty graphics and some cool music by British electronica outfit Unkle. And it has realistic light physics. And all of these are great, but a lot of games look and sound good.

But God of Light is special because in addition to all of these good qualities, it also offers something else: a meditation on what puzzle games are, what they do, and how and why we play them.

And the best part is that the developer accomplishes this not by telling us, but by building all of these qualities into the gameplay and mechanics.

Primal Flame is one of those games that’s immediately impressive. Its brief loading screen at startup is gorgeous, and the title screen presents the obligatory social-networking links in its own cave-drawing aesthetic so that they fit in while still remaining recognizable.

But I’m not here just to talk about the title screen, luckily for you, and once you stop gawking at it and actually start Primal Flame up, it just keeps on being amazing.

You start with a black screen covered in specks with the sounds of a forest at night. Brighter lights start drifting down from the top, and you run your finger along the screen. Sparks fly and grow and burst into flame, and then you’re playing one of the most unique games I’ve ever seen.

Developer Pangea Software’s well-regarded Enigmo series of puzzle games has been around for a while, and they’ve turned over development of the latest installment, Enigmo: Explore to a new team, but the idea is the same: See that liquid dripping from a pipe over here? Get it into that jar over there.

The game gives you a suite of tools to accomplish this, including trampoline-like items that the drops bounce off of and little cannons that can send them even farther. It’s up to you to decide which items in which combinations to use to complete levels, which offers you a decent amount of freedom when you’re playing it.

But a couple other features work just as hard against you, and it’s kind of a shame.

When I was a kid at Showbiz Pizza (back in those carefree days before that upstart rat staged his coup), the Dragon’s Lair cabinet always fascinated me. People would step up, watch a cartoon for about three seconds, and then they’d put another quarter in. They’d watch the same cartoon, and then they’d put another quarter in. And so it went until they said some words that my parents didn’t want me using and went off to play Dig Dug.

I didn’t understand what Dragon’s Lair was until much later; all I knew was that it looked like a movie and annoyed people.

This week, the iOS port of its 1991 sequel, Time Warp, made its way to the App Store, and it’s pretty much here to ruin your day and make you hate your fingers and your slow, stupid brain.

So basically, the old-school experience is intact, and I love it.

Tengami has gathered a bit of a following during its development due to its beautiful, pop-up-book art style and zen-like demeanor. It has relaxing music, a dialogue-free narrative, and puzzles that are clever and occasionally very tricky.

The game is out now as a universal app for iOS devices, and it has a lot of expectations to live up to. Can it live up to the excitement?

It absolutely does, delivering an endlessly fascinating experience in one of the most beautiful packages you have ever seen.

What’s that, you say? You’ve been longing for a retro, old school, three dimensional dungeon crawler to take with you on your iPhone and iPad?

Look no further than Coldfire Keep, a brand new first person dungeon crawler from Steve Jarman and Crescent Moon Games. You’ll have to make your way through this beautifully rendered 3D dungeon, full of monsters, puzzles, hidden secrets and–natch–tons of loot.

It should be in the App Store tonight (February 19) by 11 pm Eastern time here in the US, if all goes according to plan, and it’s looking pretty sweet, if the video below is to be trusted.

Fans of Cartoon Network’s megahit Adventure Time are probably familiar with “Card Wars,” an episode in which heroes Finn and Jake square off in a ludicrously complicated collectible card game.

If your first thought after seeing that installment was “I have to play that crazy-ass game,” you’re in luck: It’s now available for your iPhone or iPad. While not quite as complicated as the on-screen version, Card Wars offers the same basic card-and-board gameplay with 3D monsters battling it out for fortune and glory.

And behind its zany exterior lies a deceptively deep experience with Floops galore.

The original Eliss wowed everyone back in 2009 with its multitouch controls, cool music, and increasingly frantic gameplay. Now, we have Eliss Infinity, which includes the original game and a few more modes to keep even veteran players interested.

Eliss is a puzzle/action/insanity game in which you have to manipulate the sizes of “planets” to make them fit inside of rings. You do this by combining smaller ones by dragging them into each other or splitting larger ones by pulling them apart with your thumbs. But differently colored planets can’t touch, or they’ll eat each other away.

That’s the basic idea. But Infinity has a lot more to offer.

We have no shortage of endless running/flying/floating/swimming games in the App Store. And here’s another one.

Avoid: Sensory Overload is a techno-skinned endless game in which you guide a ship through a perpetual series of obstacles and traps. All the while, the thumping music and neon-infused background light show do their very best to distract you.

It’s flashy, annoying, challenging, and ultimately a lot of fun.

The elusive developer behind the smash-hit app Flappy Bird has other games in the App Store that haven’t yet been pulled. Are they any good?

Take a look at Super Ball Juggling and see if it measures up to the hype and fame of Flappy Bird.

This is a Cult Of Mac video review of the iOS application “Super Ball Juggling” brought to you by Joshua Smith of “TechBytes W/Jsmith.”

This just in: Someone has made a game about zombies.

You probably weren’t expecting that, huh? A zombie game? It’s crazy on the face of it.

Now, look: I hate zombies as much as the next person. Maybe a bit more, even. Stupid shambling a****les. But that doesn’t mean I want to spend all of my gaming time killing them. I have a lot of other things to pretend to kill, like Nazis and Pokémon. So I’ll admit that I wasn’t immediately sold on Overlive, a new undead-themed gamebook with role-playing-game elements, even though it’s hard to go wrong with me once you start offering choices and stats.

Once I started playing it, though, Overlive won me over.

Here’s the thing about touch controls: You’re controlling the game with the same thing you’re using to see what you’re doing. This creates a problem when your dumb, clumsy fingers start blocking your view and lead to cheap and preventable deaths.

Some games prevent this by putting the control areas off to the side or in an otherwise unused place on the screen, leaving the view clear. Lego Star Wars: Microfighters, the latest in the synergetic juggernaut of a series, is not one of those titles.

It’s surprising that developers and publishers as experienced as Warner Bros. and Traveller’s Tales would allow such a clumsy and stupid thing to happen, but here it is.

It’s been, like, a whole day since I’ve reviewed an endless game, so it’s a good thing they come out so regularly. I don’t even know how to handle games that don’t constantly scroll anymore.

Marvel Run Jump Smash! features cartoon-styled versions of Marvel Cinematic Universe characters (and some other superpowered guests) who are perpetually sprint after Loki, the adopted brother of Thor and villain from The Avengers, to reclaim the Cosmic Cube, which is what I will always call it because “The Tesseract” makes me cringe, and all of this just makes me sound like a giant nerd, but the point is that it’s an endless runner with superheroes.

It’s not a great one, but hey. Marvel.

If you’ve ever played an older role-playing game, you know the feeling of reaching a point at which you realize that your characters are too weak to progress, which means that you have to take them back to previous areas and kill boars or something to earn the experience to level up and become strong enough to actually continue playing the game.

Loot Hero is a game that is all about that moment. It’s an action-RPG, kinda, that has you running back and forth like a crazy person, killing monsters to gain experience so that you can continue running back and forth like a slightly stronger crazy person. And once you hit a wall, you have to go back to older levels with easier enemies so you can run back and forth there to gain experience and money to make your character better equipped to run back and forth among stronger enemies.

It sounds like a drag, and it kind of is, but it’s also surprisingly engaging.

Obsorb is hard.

It’s not that it’s complicated or the enemies move too quickly or even that its controls are tricky. But it’s one of those games where you’ve lost as soon as it starts, and all you can do is delay the inevitable.

In theory, if you were good enough at it, you could play it indefinitely. But that’s not going to happen because it’s impossible.

I’m a sucker for two kinds of mobile games: ones featuring improbably cute characters (preferably animals because they are more cuddly) and those that promise to scare the crap out of me.

In Fear I Trust, a new horror title by developer Black Wing Foundation, falls under the second category, but this first bit is just the first two chapters of a longer story, so we can’t really write off cuddly animals completely yet. But it’s the story of a person who has survived insane and amoral experiments at the hands of crazy Russian scientists, so I’m not going to hold my breath.

So far, it’s a dark and gloomy experience with more puzzles than frights, but it still has a lot going for it.

We have no shortage of cute games about adorable characters who need your help to get home or something comparable, but here’s something a little different.

Kid Aviator is about a young carnival daredevil fired from a cannon who is trying to fly as high as he can to spite gravity. He has a cape. He has goggles. He is awesome.

The only problem is that the sky is full of all kinds of random crap that wants to ruin his affront to physics and Nature, and that’s where you come in.

Nobody likes to see a cute baby animal in danger. Sarah McLachlan has worked very hard to ensure that.

Lost Yeti is a cute game about an adorable baby yeti having a cuddly adventure. I never even knew an adventure could be cuddly, but this game taught me that it is not only possible, but preferable.

It’s also a smart, deceptively complicated puzzler that will keep you thinking, tapping, and swearing at those good-for-nothing monsters who pick on that poor little lost yeti for no reason other than that they are jerkfaces.

Crescent Moon Games and Dead Mage have created a great action platformer here with Shadow Blade, available now in the App Store for an affordable $1.99.

It comes with Game Center Achievements and iOS 7 controller support, and a touch screen capable control scheme that works fairly well. You can read our review of the game after you watch the video below.

1981’s Qix is one of those games that just won’t die. It’s come out in its original form no fewer than four times, most recently in the Nintendo 3DS handheld’s retro-game marketplace Virtual Console in 2011 (in Japan, anyway). I’ve also seen versions of it as minigames in titles like Bully. It’s a long-lived game with a lot of versions.

And here’s another one.

Line Knight Fortix is a new variation on the old territory-capturing game with a medieval skin including dragons, ogres, and castles. The same basic idea of carving out and capturing territory before enemies cross your path and kill you remains, but you can also unlock weapons and generally just run around being all knightly and cool.

It has a couple playability issues, but it’s mostly decent.