If you like dystopian science fiction novels, Blackbar is for you. If you like innovative gaming experiences with solid fiction writing and a simple yet engaging mechanic, Blackbar is also for you.
If, however, you prefer your gaming to have lots of explosions and tons of hoorah military sentiment, Blackbar might not be for you. But you should try it anyway.
There are a huge amount 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 Big Fish’s brilliant adventure/platforming game, Fetch – A Boy and his Dog.
The Penny Arcade Expo, or PAX, for the initiated, is an annual gaming conference held in Seattle. It was created in 2004 by the authors of the Penny Arcade webcomic, Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, who wanted to go to a gaming show that focused on their own passions: console games, computer games, and tabletop games.
PAX got big, fast. Billed as a celebration of gamer culture, PAX, and spin-off conference PAX East, is more of a giant nerd gathering, contrasting nicely with the hard-pounding media-fest of the Electronics Entertainment Expo (E3) or the academic and developer focus of the Games Developer Conference (GDC). PAX is for gamers, by gamers, of all stripe and affiliation.
If you’re a fan of famous action director John Woo, you’ll be as excited as we were when we heard that he’s working on an iOS game, Bloodstroke, in development with Moonshark Games (Stan Lee’s Verticus, Neil Gaiman’s Wayward Manor) and to be published by Chillingo.
AppAdvice reports that the game will be an on-rails top-down action game that tasks players with protecting and escorting their in-game employer through hazardous level after level.
This one caught me off guard this week as I played through the new offerings on the iOS app store, looking for choice games to show off to you.
Little Galaxy is surprisingly captivating, encouraging yet another try to beat my previous high scores, or–in a recent round of the game on the couch with my daughter–trying to beat each other’s score.
Needless to say, she won.
Gold Diggers is a new take on the endless runner theme, the vertical runner. In it, players are placed at the head of a three-car mining train that actually digs straight down into the earth, picking up gold nuggets and avoiding things like flaming platforms, giant sand worms, and the more run-of-the-mill rocks and walls.
Players move the endlessly descending drilling mine train back and forth across the screen by dragging a finger left or right along the bottom of the screen, where a virtual button sits. The action occurs primarily through avoiding obstacles and chasing down gold nuggets — which can be spent in the game’s store for upgrades and better equipment — as well as power ups that add extra time, distance, or guns to the front of the player’s mine train.
Champs Battlegrounds is an odd mashup of strategy board gaming and multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) mechanics. Quark Games has created something compelling, though, with this free-to-play iOS game, available on your iPad or iPhone.
Some of the folks behind Project Gotham Racing and Blur are bringing their racing game chops to iOS this fall with upcoming premium iOS game, 2K Drive. Developed by Lucid Games (Jacob Jones and the Bigfoot Mystery, Pixel Smash) and published by 2K Games (XCOM: Enemy Unknown, Borderlands Legends), 2K Drive aims to be everything a car-loving racing game fan could want, all on iPhone or iPad.
Take a moment and breathe. That’s what new, meditative space building sim rymdkapsel wants us to do. The concept here is to create and expand a space station (rymdkapsel means “space capsule” in Swedish), defending against waves of ever tougher alien spaceships. The goal is to survive as long as possible, reaching up to four monolith structures.
The game itself–originally released on Sony’s PlayStation Vita handheld–is hypnotic, slow-paced, and calming. There’s a strange sense of joy and peace that descends as players build their space station using Tetris-shaped block pieces, sending Pong-shaped minions to build new corridors, gather resources, research the monoliths, and take up arms to defend against the incoming waves of alien shooter ships.
Holy crap, right? Robert Suarez dropped this amazing video up on YouTube, showing him beating the entire tower in under three minutes (2:58, to be exact), a full 32 seconds faster than the game developer’s own Game Center achievement.
There are some slight spoilers in the video, as it shows the entirety of the tower, from the bottom to the top level, with some cool avatars, power ups and the final boss. If you don’t want to see these things, preferring to work your own way up to the top, don’t watch the video.
For the rest of us, who know we’ll never be as good as this guy, it offers an incentive to keep plugging away at the game, which we reviewed favorably here.
We’ve contacted Robert via Twitter to find out how he got to this feat of Knightmare Tower awesomeness, and will update as we hear more.
Via: TouchArcade
If you haven’t gotten to check out The World Ends With You: Solo Remix yet, it’s completely understandable. Publisher Square Enix has a reputation for charging much more than the typical iOS game when it releases its popular games onto Apple’s touchscreen platform. It totally makes sense you might not want to pick it up for $17.99 for your iPhone, let alone $19.99 for your iPad.
If I said that the game, originally released to the dual-screen Nintendo DS, is completely worth every penny of the asking price, would you pick it up? Probably not.
But what if I said that both versions are now much less expensive, with the iPhone version in the App Store at $9.99 and the iPad version at $10.99? If you love innovative, brilliant gaming on the go, you’ll go grab a copy right now. Who knows how long the sale will last?
One of the finer console ports to date, XCOM: Enemy Unknown has been raising expectations of mobile gamers since its release last month. It’s almost the exact same game as its Mac, PC, and console versions, bringing deep strategic gameplay and a brilliantly conceived science fictional world to the iOS platform.
Today, though, XCOM: Enemy Unknown got an update, and a bit of a price drop. It’s now $14.99, down from $19.99, and has a whole new way to play: Second Wave.
If you haven’t gotten enough zombie survival horror action on your iPhone or iPad, here’s some great news for you: 2013 Infected Wars is a new entry to the genre, and it uses Epic’s gorgeous Unreal Engine for mobile to bring you what looks to be a solid 3D third-person zombie shooter with all the trimmings.
In what may be a first for a mobile game, 2013 Infected Wars developer, Action Mobile Games, is promising co-op multiplayer for the full story campaign, which could be a great way to get with your sisters and bros and just mow down the reanimated undead.
Check out the gameplay trailer below to see what we mean.
This frantic, wacky 2D endless runner from Illinois-based development studio High Voltage Games (Zoombies, The Conduit HD) has just been chosen as the iTunes App Store’s Free App of the Week. To celebrate, Le Vamp is now completely free to download and try out for the next few days.
Hurry, though, the special offer only lasts through August 1 at 11 pm Central US time.
Auroch Digital just announced the development of a digital version of a classic Games Workshop board game from 1987, Chainsaw Warrior, coming to iPad and Android soon.
The original board game is one of the only single-player board games I know of, putting you in the role of the only hope for humanity as scary creatures come flooding through a dimensional rift in the heart of Manhattan, circa 2032. Of course, you’re the guy that must come out of retirement to battle the evil monsters, which have already destroyed the world’s bravest and brightest. It’s up to you to chainsaw your way through wave after wave the evil hordes. Wait, that sounds like a video game, doesn’t it?
An extreme departure from the look and feel of its first iOS game, Lili, BitMonster’s upcoming Gunner Z is a gritty, scary delight. The developer just released a launch trailer with a stunningly gorgeous bit of the old ultraviolence in this scifi-themed shooter, soon to release on iOS.
The trailer is dark, gritty, and full of awesome night vision battle scenes, showing off the amazing scenery, the scary undead armies, and a host of armored vehicles ready to take on the hordes.
Launched today into the App store, A Thug In Time promises dual-stick shooter action on the go across 65 levels, 35 weapon types, 20 unique enemies, and eight mini-bosses to blast through.
You’ll need to survive through various times in history, including the Wild West, 1930s Chicago, and the Viking Age, decapitating, freezing, burning, and riddling with bullets all who get in your way. There are in-game power ups, including the fire bomb, the freeze bomb, and the cutter blades to slice and dice the way to victory.
Classic video game series, Worms, is getting a new installment on iOS in Q3 of this year with Worms 3 set to blast its way to the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch in a couple of months.
Interestingly, Developer Team 17 has made this one as an iOS exclusive, skipping other platforms it’s been on since the first Worms came out in 1995, like the Mac, PC, PlayStation, Xbox, and various handheld gaming devices.
The new game follows up the 1997 Worms 2 game, making Worms 3 a hotly anticipated title for iOS, indeed, as there have only been a bunch of add-on and experimental 3D games in the series since then.
Typically, US iOS apps and games are released into the App Store on Thursdays each week, though some apps of late have been going live on odd days of the week, perhaps to beat the Thursday glut.
Either way, Square Enix’s first Deus Ex game to launch as a full experience on iOS has gone live today, one full day earlier than expected. Deus Ex: The Fall is the highly anticipated new chapter in the Deus Ex franchise, and it’s coming to iPhones and iPads, rather than consoles or computers. This alone makes it something to pay attention to, let alone the gorgeous visuals and brand new entry in the series.
Like an odd cross between Sudoku and a collectible card game, Star Trek Rivals, from Elephant Mouse Games, is out for iOS on the App Store to capture your attention today, on the release date of Star Trek: Into Darkness (have you gotten your tickets, yet?).
The game is free, has all your Star Trek reboot characters in it, and is pretty simple to learn, but hard to master. It plays asynchronously, and you can play a bunch of games at once. Did I mention it’s made out of Star Trek? What’s not to like?
Germany-based game studio, Fishlabs, today announced the development of Galaxy On Fire – Alliances, a continuation of the Galaxy On Fire brand, to be released in the third quarter of this year, 2013. The new game is meant as a spin-off from the premium Galaxy on Fire, Galaxy On Fire 2 and their expansion packs, and will use a free-to-play model that includes massively multiplayer capabilities like alliances, player-vs-player combat, and alliances.
Today, Imangi Studios announced that Temple Run 2–sequel to runaway hit mobile game, Temple Run–recorded an outrageous 20 million downloads in its first week on the iTunes App Store. The game shot up to the number one free app in only eight hours, and is now the number 2 top grossing app on the App Store charts. Pretty amazing for a free to download game, right?
DeNA, the social gaming company that now owns ngmoco, just launched a new, free, 8-bit retro role-playing game, D.O.T. Defender of Texel, to the iTunes App Store and the Google Play store.
Texel is a world made of dots, at the end of a wormhole, waiting for you to jump in and save the world. The battles are turn-based, and you choose who will fight each battle by swiping across a grid of characters to place your fighters on the battle field.
Move over, Mojang! The Blockheads, inspired by such open-world exploration games as Mojang’s certified hit, Minecraft, is the best implementation of the genre yet, out Minecrafting even the official Minecraft game released for iOS some time ago.
You start the game as either a single or 2 player experience. The two player game promises online multiplayer with voice chat via Game Center, while the single player is what I’ve spent my afternoon messing with on both my iPhone and iPad mini. It’s seriously sticky, with all the kinds of things that made me sink hundreds of hours into the Mac version of Minecraft a couple of years ago. There’s crafting and mining, day and night cycles, sleep, a huge open world to explore, and more.
Games Workshop announced today a Space Hulk game for Mac, iOS, and (yes) PC. It’s scheduled for release in 2013, and is based on the Warhammer 40,000 franchise board game of the same name. The current digital version is planned to be a 3D turn-based strategy game with both single player and co-op modes of play, not to mention cross-platform multiplayer across iOS, Mac, and PC.
