iPhone games - page 14

With this latest Halloween-flavored update, Kingdom Rush: Frontiers is bringing vampires and werewolves to its acclaimed tower defense gameplay in a new update, entitled Shadowmoon.

You’ll get three brand spankin’ new levels to defend your base against nine new enemy types, including scary vampires and vicious werewolves (oh my!). The update will go live on All Hallow’s Eve itself, so get ready for some Halloween fun after you fill your pillow cases full of loot from your local neighborhood.

Here’s the brand new trailer to whet your appetite.

Old people like me grew up with Choose Your Own Adventure books. This occasionally ridiculous series introduced an entire generation of children to both the importance of choice and the oddball nuances of second-person narrative.

Following in that tradition is the Gamebook Adventures franchise, which adds a dice-driven, role-playing-style combat system to its branching fantasy storyline. The eighth entry, Curse of the Assassin, is out now; it’s a slow-paced, text-heavy, epic beast of an experience.

So basically, it’s everything people love about those books.

There are a bunch of apps out on iOS for kids, from educational apps to sports apps and more. Sure, you can get reviews of these games by adults, sometimes even from parents of kids who use them.

We thought it’d be fun, though, to ask the kids themselves.

Welcome to Kid APProved, a series of videos in which we ask our own children what they think of apps on the App Store that they’re using.

This week, it’s Halloween-themed Costume Quest from Double Fine Productions. Here’s what our Kid APProved reporter thinks.

Wondering what Spacetime Games is up to these days? After a successful launch of free-to-play Battle Dragons this past August, the team has turned its attention to a new combat strategy game with the same branding: Battle Command!

In this new game, you’ll take command of a small group of soldiers and try and shape them into a crack team of military force. You’ll collect resources, construct bases, recruit troops, form alliances, and fight on the battlefield (obviously). Battle Command! will have a bunch of single player missions to help hone your skills, and then some serious global multiplayer, something Spacetime has been getting right for years.

If there’s one thing we all need more of, it’s Angry Birds, am I right? No?

Well, either way, it doesn’t matter: you’re getting more of them. Rovio just announced the pending release of Angry Birds: Go!, a kart racing iOS game set to go live on the App Store December 11, 2013, which is–not too coincidentally–the Finnish studio’s fourth birthday birdday.

Some games just aren’t meant for touch screens, and it’s very unfortunate that The Cave is one of them. In developer Double Fine’s dark look at inner desires and magical caves, you guide three of the seven available “heroes” through a labyrinthian network of tunnels that slowly unveil each character’s inner corruption.

Its fantastic-yet-eerie atmosphere and stellar narration definitely translates well to portable screens, but the lack of physical controls or even on-screen button prompts is a serious issue.

In a world overrun with endless runners, it’s nice to see a cheery little beat-em-up among their number. Nakama is the delightfully colorful quest of a ninja rescuing his friends from bad guys then teaming up with them to take on even bigger, badder dudes ahead.

Nakama is yet another faux-retro style brawler, complete with pixel graphics. The use of color sets it apart from most, however. Splashes of brilliant greens and vibrant pinks set a whimsical tone as you slash through hordes of baddies. When you fall in battle, you can even ride a cloud back to your last location, Dragon Ball-style.

Waking up, looking at your clock, and seeing that you’re late for work or class is one of the worst feelings in the world. In that heart-stopping instant, you feel your control over your life drop into your stomach, and all you can think about is how annoyed or mad or disappointed the people waiting on you are going to be. It’s an adrenaline-drenched nightmare of a moment in which you realize just how quickly you can put your pants on and brush your teeth, and as you bolt out the door to face your fate, you wonder why you can’t always get ready that quickly.

Gary, the hero of developer Noego’s Level 22, is caught in that situation, and the really bad news is that he’s been late to work so many times that if anyone sees him this morning, he will lose his job. So on top of the already stressful situation of being late, he has to sneak his way up to the 22nd floor without anyone seeing him.

That’s right: This is a stealth game about going to work. And it’s every bit as silly and fun as that sounds.

I can really appreciate an app that values my time, so I’m going to just throw this in here at the start: SpellGrid, an anagram/crossword game out now for iPhone and iPad, will have you playing within five seconds of opening it. That doesn’t affect my review, but I’ve seen enough startup loading screens to think this is worth mentioning.

Alright, now about the game:

In SpellGrid, you start with a word which contains no repeating letters (e.g. smelting). Then, you have a set amount of time to see how many more words you can form, crossword-style, from those letters. The amount of time depends on the length of the starting word; it can be seven, eight, or nine letters long, and you’ll have one, two, or three minutes, respectively, to play your round.

Every once in a while, an alien threat arises that is so malevolent and so heinous that the only thing to do is send a one-man ship out into space to take them all on singlehandedly.

Alright, so that’s never happened in the history of ever, but in video games, it’s been going on at least since Space Invaders in 1978. And it is in this fine tradition of lonely, foolish heroism that we have Space Qube, a new shooter for the iPhone and iPad. If you’ve played any “One ship vs. all aliens” game before, you know what to expect here: The ship goes back and forth; the aliens fly in distinct patterns and shoot at you; you pick up powerups; and every once in a while, you fight a boss.

And if that’s all it did, I would say that Space Qube is very capable and leave it at that. But it has one extra feature that makes it stand out.

Video games are all about solving problems and helping people. Sometimes, the problem is “too many monsters” and the people are the ones who made all those monsters in the first place.

So it is with Link the Slug, a puzzle game from developer OX Play, which is about a hapless scientist who accidentally creates a new species of colorful slugs and immediately decides that they must all die horribly. And that’s where you come in.

To destroy the slugs — who I will remind you have done nothing wrong — you must “link” them by tapping on two slugs of the same color. This will cause electricity to arc between the two targets, killing them both. Electricity can turn either left or right once so you want to link slugs around corners, but it can’t pass through obstacles or other slugs.

Everyone loves feeding cute little animals, and mobile-game developers are no different. Games like Cut the Rope and Cat on a Diet are all about bringing food to adorable, tiny faces, and Drop That Candy continues the tradition.

In this colorful puzzle game, you are tasked with clearing all of the candy in a series of boxes in order to drop them into the waiting mouth of Gizmo, a woodland creature of indeterminate species. You do this by tapping on the candy, and you can clear multiple pieces of the same color with a single tap if they are touching.

It’s an odd setup, but it all adds up to a game that is equally cute, clever, and fun.

You know what people love? Cats. Just look at the Internet: It has cats everywhere.

You know what else people love? Breaking stuff. Just look at Angry Birds.

And a third thing people love? Taking two things and jamming them together. So now we have Cat on a Diet, a game about breaking stuff. Plus, it has a cat. And the cat is overweight. So that’s like a hat trick. Best game ever.

Well … it’s alright.

The Bitizens are back, and this time, it’s all about trains! Who doesn’t like trains?

Fresh off their hit Snake re-imagining Nimble Quest, NimbleBit has turned in a lovely little game that looks and plays a lot like last year’s hit Pocket Planes, with retro pixel art style and transit-themed, schedule-based gameplay. There’s a lot to like in this new iteration, as well, including streamlined mechanics, refined strategies, and updated graphics.

Let’s take a look.

The endless runner genre might be in a bit of a rut. You run, run some more, kick that thing, avoid that other thing, jump over that third thing … it’s all getting a little predictable.

Luckily, we have games like Boson X to mix things up a bit. Its developer bills it as a “rotational runner,” and it takes an interesting approach to adding to the genre: subtraction. Boson X doesn’t add new features like lasers or parkour like, for example, Runbot; it’s actually very minimal. And therein lies its strength.

Have you ever realized just how much random chance is involved in your favorite video games?

Consider dashing through Diablo III dungeons, mashing buttons and watching your little avatar cut through swathes of demon enemies. Each of those hits is managed by a vast mathematical model in the background, deciding how many hit points each swing of your sword or blast of your magic will take off of each monster in your path.

Tower of Fortune 2, like it’s predecessor, seems like an indie meditation on the RPG genre itself by exposing the mechanics in the background of typical RPGs with the biggest symbol of luck ever: the slot machine.

Strata, a puzzle game by developer Graveck, has been out for a few months now, but I only recently stumbled across it. Like FlowDoku, which I reviewed a couple of weeks ago, it’s a deceptively clever title that uses a couple quick rules to create complex tasks for players to solve.

The rules of Strata are simple: You receive a square grid between 2×2 and 6×6 boxes in size, and you have to place colored ribbons across every row and column. Some boxes have colored squares in them, and the top ribbon on that square must be the same color. That sounds way more complicated than it is, but it makes sense once you’re looking at it.

And you should look at it because it’s really, really pretty.

You know how it goes: You’re the king, you have prestige and power and piles of riches all around you … and then some goblin shows up and steals your pants.

Alright, maybe none of that has ever happened to me, ever, but it is the premise of Trouserheart, a new hack-and-slash action game out today by developer 10tons (makers of the Joining Hands puzzle series).

Given the “epic quest to rescue kidnapped pants” premise, you’d expect Trouserheart to be a pretty light affair. And it is, but it’s also a solid, satisfying experience.

iOS 7 provides two new features under the hood that will blow the lid off mobile gaming: game controllers and a sprite animation and particle physics engine. While these may not sound super sexy, they have the potential to revolutionize the way we play games on our mobile devices. The first is a recognition that many games really need physical buttons to provide high-end gaming experiences, while the second is a step toward supporting game developers in the way that development engines like Unreal and Unity already do, but built right in to the operating system. Together, these two developments are nothing less than—forgive the pun—complete game changers. Mobile gaming is already a big business for game developers, publishers, and Apple. And while Apple has never put gaming front and center before, that’s going to change with iOS 7. Gaming is already huge; now it’s going to get even bigger.

Sometimes, mindless dungeon crawling, at least within a video game, is good. I’ve never actually crawled a real dungeon, to be honest.

While I love deep, story-based games, sometimes I just want to roll around pixel-based catacombs, corridors, and rooms, bashing or blasting hordes of baddies as they converge upon my location.

Developer OrangePixel (Gunslugs, Meganoid) has figured out how to perfectly encapsulate the dungeon crawling experience within a pixel-perfect arcade eye-candy shell.

I’m really not a fan of trivia games. Any time someone drags out Trivial Pursuit at a party, I’m the first to come up with an excuse not to play. But You Don’t Know Jack was always different. It’s a trivia game with attitude, a sense of humor, and a weird bald mascot. What’s not to like?

The original game launched in 1995, and now it’s on iOS with a new title: You Don’t Know Jack Party. This is a new, live multiplayer version of the trivia game that lets you connect up to four different iOS devices to one Apple TV and play together in the same room on the big screen, via a secondary, free JackPad controller app.

Sure, there’s also a single player experience, but it won’t be as much fun.

There are a bunch of video games out on iOS for kids, from educational games to adventure games and more. Sure, you can get reviews of these games by adults, sometimes even from parents of kids who use them.

We thought it’d be fun, though, to ask the kids themselves.

Welcome to Kid APProved, a series of videos in which we ask our own children what they think of video games on the App Store that they’re playing.

This week, it’s endless faller, Daddy Was A Thief, from indie dev Cezary Rajkowski. It’s available in the App Store for $1.99 now.

I’m going to get right to it here: The Room, an escape game by developer Fireproof Studios, is the best mobile title I’ve ever played. You can read the rest of the review if you want, but it’s basically going to be versions of that.

I know “best ever” is a bold statement, though, so let me back it up: The Room, which is available for both iPad and iPhone–the latter as The Room Pocket, I assume because it fits in your pocket and not because it’s about a pocket in which someone stores rooms–has beautiful graphics, clever puzzles, and simple, responsive touch controls that actually work.

Yeah, that Call of Duty.

Activision today announced the exclusive to iOS launch of Call of Duty: Strike Team.

This is the first time Activision has released a mobile title in the incredibly popular and well-selling military first-person shooter franchise that breaks all kinds of records on consoles, Mac, and PC.

You’ll be able to play with a squad of four in the new iOS game, customizing the loadouts and skills of each team member, then switch between first-person action to a top-down, third-person viewpoint, giving you a more strategic take on the battles. Here’s a great video that explains more.

SEATTLE, PAX 2013 – We spoke a bit with indie studio, Gaijin Games, at the Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) this weekend in Seattle, about the upcoming release of Runner 2 to iOS (and Sony’s PS Vita). Runner2, aka Bit.Trip Presents Runner2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien, is a side-scrolling platform game with heavy rhythm elements that’s already out on console and Steam for Mac.

The team wanted to publish Runner2 on iOS on its own, in contrast to the console versions, which were published by Aksys Games. The Bit.Trip series has been a critical and consumer success, selling well on a variety of platforms since it began with Bit.Trip Beat in 2009.