iPhone games - page 12

We got a sneak peek at Codename Cygnus, a Kickstarter-funded interactive radio drama game for iOS, at PAX this last fall. Developer Reactive studios has just updated the app with more than 20 Game Center achievements, improved voice recognition, VoiceOver features, and a redesigned iOS 7 friendly interface.

Oh, and it’s cheaper, too.

Let’s take a minute to address the fact that I’m not really sure how to pronounce the title of this game. Is it “B-ombs,” or is it, “Buh-buh-buh-bombs”? My money’s on the second one, and now that we’ve sorted that out, the review can begin.

‘Bombs’ with Too Many Letters is a puzzle-ish game that tasks you with clearing a ridiculous lab of the now-sentient explosives that are now buzzing around all willy-nilly. You do this with plain, stupid, regular bombs. You get three blast per level, and you can set up chain reactions to clear a bunch of what science hath wrought in one shot.

Meanwhile, this game is hilarious.

Fans of word games are always looking out for new apps that will let them arrange letters and clear blocks or cross things or whatever else people do when they’re using text as game pieces. Here’s another game that lets you do that.

It’s called Alpha 9, and it’s basically Boggle plus Tetris. Your goal is to form words of at least three letters in order to clear lines from a board to keep the letter blocks dropping from the ceiling from piling up to the top of the screen.

That’s Wall Mode, anyway. It has another game type, but they’re both pretty average.

If you’re used to games taking time to explain what they are and how you play them, then Simian Interface may not be for you.

But you should play it anyway, wuss, because you don’t need that much instruction to understand this one. The game leaves it up to you to figure out what it wants and how to do it, but it’s really not that hard to figure out.

And if you put the time in and go along for the short time it takes to play through it, you’ll get a unique, entirely satisfying experience.

Apparently, I’m a sucker for minimalist puzzle games.

You can find a lot of them in the App Store, and I’ve reviewed more than a few since I’ve been here. I like the simplicity, the clean interface, the solid blocks of color … it’s all very relaxing. And then I play something like Lyne, a new puzzler that looks like those other zen games, but then you start playing it and realize that beneath its sparsely populated surface is a relentless battle for your sanity.

In a good way. Mostly.

It’s been a little while since I reviewed a tank game, so I picked up Battle Supremacy, a new tread-and-turret action title from the developers of Sky Gamblers out today for iOS devices.

Battle Supremacy takes place during World War II and features authentic vehicles and locations. It’ll have you participating in campaigns in both the European and Pacific Theaters. If you can stop firing long enough to look around, you’ll see birds in the sky and fish in the water. And you can run over absolutely anything that gets in your way. It’s an action-packed, detailed game with incredible graphics.

And honestly, I thought it was kind of boring and clunky.

LAS VEGAS — We’ve been SteelSeries fans for quite a while now, what with their stellar line up of headphones and gaming peripherals for both Mac and iOS.

The Chicago-based company just released what they’re calling the first Bluetooth-enabled official iOS 7 gaming controller, the Stratus.

We hung out with the team a bit at CES, and what we saw looks pretty damn sweet. Check it out.

Episode One of developer Sunside’s six-part, hybrid adventure series is out now in the App Store, and it’s a promising start.

Abducted pulls from a variety of genres to build its sci-fi world and mechanics, including point-and-click (and text!) adventures, role-playing games, and even survival horror. It’s also a really good-looking game with an intriguing setting and enough mysteries to keep you moving on to see what’s next.

And if you have a device that can play it, you’ll enjoy it quite a lot.

If you played the original Feed Me Oil a couple years ago, you probably fell in love with its surreal graphics and fun, physics-based puzzles. If you didn’t, the name is probably confusing the hell out of you. Because you really shouldn’t feed anything oil, right? That’s super gross.

Don’t get stuck on that, though, because Feed Me Oil 2 is out now, and it features the same addictive gameplay with shinier graphics and some new tools to get that oil where it needs to go.

And where it needs to go is, like, right into the mouth of a weird, animal-like hill or something. But again, don’t dwell on that because if you do, you’re missing out on a great game.

Interactive zombie film series The Hunting is back with its third installment, which has you continuing to make life-threatening choices and furiously tapping on your screen to run and fight off crazed undead who want to put the nom on you.

It’s another creepy, high-tension experience that will quickly make you regret playing it with headphones and/or in the dark, both of which I did because I clearly don’t know what’s good for me.

But while the game is still completely scary and harrowing as ever, it fails to build on Part 2’s impressive shotgun blast of terror and what-the-hell-ery.

Okay, so you’ve mastered Super Crate Box, and you’re so good at Super Hexagon that you can’t play it anymore without yawning. And maybe you’ve also bested a Sasquatch at arm-wrestling, and you’re the King of the Oompa-Loompas because those two things are just as likely.

But if you like those other games and are looking for something “inspired by” them, you’d do well to check out Atomic+, a recently released arcade/twitch/minimal title that puts you in the position of an electron that can leap between atomic orbits and has a lot of stuff flying at it constantly.

So maybe not quite like an actual electron, but you get my point.

Look, gaming is a big thing, right? You can’t swing a dead cat in an ugly holiday sweater without hitting someone who’s busily involved in some kind of gaming screen these days, and iOS has the clear advantage with the hundreds of thousands of games on offer, all of which are fairly inexpensive or free to play.

We’ve taken some of the effort out of finding the best games of the past year, with this mega-list of over 20 iOS games (in no particular order) that you really should check out right away. Except where noted, all these games will work on your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad. Because, really, there’s no excuse for not making a game work universally these days.

The Colossatron is a mysterious, robotic dragon-thing that drops out of space specifically to destroy cities. Nobody knows what it is or where it came from; all we know is that it must be destroyed before it destroys us.

Nobody even knows how to control it, and that includes anyone playing the game.

Colossatron: Massive World Threat is the latest from Jetpack Joyride developer Halfbrick, and it’s the studio’s most esoteric title yet. And this is the team that also made a game about chopping fruit while avoiding bombs that, while possessing fuses, apparently only explode if they get cut.

So, yeah. It’s even weirder than that.

That headline isn’t hyperbole. I’ve started this review three times, but I kept thinking of things I should “check out” in the game so that I could make sure I was writing the thing properly. But mainly, I just wanted to keep playing the new Adventure Time version of Ski Safari.

If you haven’t played the original, it’s a twist on the endless runner genre: The endless skier. The hapless hero has to give it all he has to outrun an avalanche that is barreling down the hill behind him. He can do backflips for points and can hitch rides on the local wildlife for speed boosts, and all the while, he’s collecting as many coins as he can.

Ski Safari: Adventure Time is the same thing only with 100 percent fewer skis and way more characters from Pendleton Ward’s awesome cartoon series. So basically, it’s better in every way.

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 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.

Square Enix announced Tuesday the release of the very first Tomb Raider, the initial game in a long-running franchise that has spawned sequels across console platforms, PC, the Mac, and even a couple of movies.

The release today to the iPhone and iPad is a direct port of the original game, complete with charming old school graphics and gameplay. And buttons. Lots of crappy virtual onscreen buttons.

Even though there are a ton of games out there that have refined this type of gameplay that you can get for a similar price, you’ll surely get to see where this popular genre got its start.

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

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.

Making your own beer is hard work. It’s a series of intensive scientific processes, and a mistake at any one of them can ruin hours of work and possibly poison someone. But if you get it right, it’s a middle finger right to the face of Big Beer.

Is “Big Beer” a thing? I’ve lost track of which corporations are evil.

Fiz is an independent management game about independent brewing, and it tasks you with building up your own brand from the garage up. And that’s every bit as complicated as it sounds. More so, actually, because numbers are also involved.

Assassin’s Creed IV launched on consoles this fall and offered all the ship-on-ship action gamers required. Developer Ubisoft, not one to let a good idea go un-reused, has now released Assassin’s Creed Pirates, a sidestory about one man’s rise from prisoner to fearsome buccaneer captain. It ditches the main series’ free-running in favor of a completely seaborne experience.

Does Pirates rake in the booty, or does it walk the plank to plunge the briny deep to Davy Jones’ Locker? Could that last sentence have been any more forced?

You’ll find the answers to these questions and more after the break.

I’ve played digital card games on my iPad before, including some heavy hitters like Might And Magic: Duel Of Champions and Magic 2014.

I’ve played some real-time battle arena games, like Raid Leader or Skulls of the Shogun, and enjoyed them as well.

But I’ve never, until now, played such an engaging mashup of the two gaming genres. What Singapore-based Spicy Horse has done here is create nothing less than a sublime, well-balanced, purely addictive combination of collectible card game, arena-based real-time strategy, and a training/leveling up system that just begs for exploration and mastery.

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I’m old, so I remember playing the original Double Dragon on a decrepit arcade cabinet at Showbiz Pizza while the Rock-afire Explosion played and lurched in its creeepy, mechanical way in the next room and I just paid attention to the game because I knew that if I thought about the musical robots coming to life and murdering everyone, they would. And that’s how I predicted The Secret.

Anyway, I was never good at Double Dragon. The enemies punched too fast or too hard, or I couldn’t line up my hits correctly, and I swear that stupid machine was broken because it was impossible. Now, we have Double Dragon Trilogy, an iOS port of the brawler series that includes remixed music and some new modes.

And I know this is a good port because I’m still really bad at it.

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 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.

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.

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.

I almost wrote off Numerity.

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.

The Inner World is one of those “throwback, but in a good way” titles that reminds us of how good we have it nowadays. That sounds harsh, but remember that a time existed in which point-and-click adventures were everywhere. Very few of them gave you any help or hints, and all of them required you to play Amateur Psychic with the developers.

This is what I’m saying (slight spoiler, but it’s the first puzzle): I have no reason to believe that a drunken worm would make for a good slingshot.

And it’s a good thing that The Inner World is so cute and sympathetic to its players or that would really annoy me.